COMPUTERS, THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

[Tizer]

Yes, it seems to have met with Pluggy's approval. Looks like it'll get a new life under Ubuntu! Thanks for the help Pluggy.

[Stanley]

How can Twitter be worth $18billion and have a share price of $26 when it has never made a profit? We live in a wonderful world! (LINK)

[Tizer]

Wonderful, as in Alice in Wonderland! But then most of our money doesn't really exist other than as squiggles on shiny disks inside computers. Alice would find our modern world stranger than ever!

[Stanley]

Reports that share price has gone up 90% on NY market opening.... Mad!
It looks as though the lads have given me a new OS. 70mb of updates and a restart..... Wonderful service!

[Stanley]

I don't know what was in this morning's upgrades but 12.04 is acting as though it's on steroids! I've never had a problem with speed but I'm sure it's even faster now.

[PanBiker]

Memory is poorly on our main tower machine, lad is sorting me out there and I could inherit another machine for the radio shack. I might put it alongside what I already have and have a go with Ubuntu. I had a look at the offerings yesterday and some nice person has put together a release which comes with a raft of Linux based amateur radio applications built into the deployment package. Worth messing about with I think.

[Stanley]

Go for it Ian. If I were you I'd have a word with Pluggy. I have nothing but praise for the way he guided me when I went into Linux cold turkey, never regretted it. Use your 50% of Ebay proceeds to stick as much memory in as you can afford!

[Tizer]

A friend, similar age to me, has recently bought her first computer (running Windows 8) and is getting to grips with computing and the Internet. This morning I received an email titled `Hey' (a word she would never write) and containing only a URL made up of the domain `bestwiigames' and random letters/digits. It was sent at 2.30am. The To and From addresses are her own email address although I know it's not from her. It was addressed to other people too but fortunately she hasn't done much email yet and there are only a few names in her address book. I presume this means her computer has been compromised as I can't see any other way an email could be sent out to myself and several of her other contacts (other than an intruder in the house using her PC) - but she's married and both she and her husband are very sensible and security conscious.

[Stanley]

That proves one thing at least Tiz. Tinternetwebthingy is a minefield and it's disturbing that, whatever the cause, the attack has come so soon after entering the fray!

[hartley353]

Touch wood my £1.00 a week security system keeps me safe, stops all spam material, and unwanted Malware.

[Tizer]

I'd left messages for my friend about their email problem (see above) and finally managed to contact her last night. She confirms the message sent to me and several of her contacts wasn't sent by her and that no-one had access to her computer. She says the Win8 and antivirus is all up to date. She's on BTInternet and logged in to look at her account - the message I received isn't shown in her Sent folder. It's all a bit puzzling. BT had problems last March when large numbers of its customers had their account passwords stolen and their contacts spammed but, as I understand it, the spam messages would have shown in their Sent folder. She's going to ask her computer man to look at the problem.

[Pluggy]

It needn't have been sent by the apparent sender, its dead easy to make an email to appear to be from anywhere you like. There little or no security in email. Its even possible that it wasn't their address book that was compromised, if another member of the family has a similar address list on their machine.

[Stanley]

A long time ago in my Windows days my Freeserve address was compromised and for a time my mails were banned by many systems as being from a large scale spammer. At first I tried to get this rectified but in the end gave up and eventually it all fell back into place again. I see that Msoft are advertising Outlook Express as 'private' email service. On what basis? I work on the assumption that no electronic communication is private.

[Stanley]

It struck me this morning that many people will be applauding David Cameron this morning for 'stopping' searches on the web for terms associated with child abuse. Of course we all know that it will do nothing of the sort, all it will do, and this may do some good, is to stop newcomers to the subject getting easy access to less hard-core images. The real miscreants will be doing business as usual on private peer to peer file sharing services. Give Google and Microsoft their due, they made this quite clear but I wonder how many people heard them and understood.

[Nolic]

Access to inappropriate web content and on-line/phone bullying are the two major problems facing children today. They may not be as immediately damaging as child abuse or insidious as neglect but they affect far moire children and we do not yet know the long term effects. Nolic

[Tizer]

We're not able to stop kids getting access to fags and booze so it'll never work with stuff on the Internet. It's not what you do with the fags, booze and Internet, it's what you do with the kids that makes the difference.

[Nolic]

2 simple ways of a meaningful step towards E Safety. Effectively ban all under 18's from Facebook et all and ban mobile phones from schools. Restrict access to booze and fags and few kids would be harmed. Nolic

[Gloria]

A friend of ours on BT was "got" earlier this month. BT had been updating/altering their system and she was asked to verify certain details, a few times, which she did, but one of them was the wrong thing to click on. BT did manage to get all her contacts back for her which she thought were lost.
She uses Norton.

[Stanley]

Glo, as I say ad nauseam, it's a minefield out there. Thank God I found Ubuntu, they don't seem to target it.
Comrade, I can see the logic in your post. There are so many arguments against banning phones in school that I doubt if it could ever be enforced. However, what about a loop like the ones for hearing aids that blocks connections by interfering with the signal? I remember back in 2004 being amazed at the amount of bullying there was on the existing Barnoldswick.com site. This was before the modern 'social' networks of course. This was one of the main reasons Doc set up Oneguy, he didn't see why a local site should be cluttered up by bad mannered kids! Apart from being bad mannered it is of course also dangerous. I'm sure you could give examples of suicides that have been linked to this behaviour. More than one life ruined of course, the bully/bullies as well as the victim because they know what they've done and have to carry that all their lives. So sad.....

[Pluggy]

Its too small a target to be economically viable to pay someone to write malware to compromise Linux. At the end of the day it has to show a profit to the 'business' (no matter how warped,deprived and illegal it appears to be) controlling it. Its depressing to watch Android going the same way that Windows did, many years ago. There's hundred's of millions them out there, often with no AV giving anything resembling protection.

[Tizer]

Effectively ban all under 18's from Facebook et all and ban mobile phones from schools.

I agree that would help...but I think it's impossible to `ban all under 18's from Facebook et al'. Such Internet companies can set up anywhere in the world, under quite different and lax jurisdiction to that of the UK, and yet be accessed from the UK - unless we become like China and censor Internet access. Banning mobile phones from school would be sensible in my view but it still wouldn't stop many kids from taking them in and lots of mummies would complain because they then couldn't phone little Billy to check he's OK!

[PanBiker]

Previously illegal to operate (but not to own) in the UK. Mobile phone jamming equipment was licensed for use in prisons in the UK in 2012. Units are capable of blocking signals over an area of about the size of a football pitch, that would be suitable for most school premises. Would solve a lot of problems if the licence was expanded to include educational establishments. Beggar what mummy would say, it makes you wonder how we ever managed when there were only land lines!

[Stanley]

I agree entirely Ian. Kids in school should be concentrating on learning, not being distracted by mobile devices. Is tracking your children more important than education?
Those nice people at Canonical gave me a new version of Firefox this morning. It seems to be a shade faster..... Mind you the connection is running faster at the moment, makes you wonder if they speed it up for the online shopping....

[Stanley]

Did anyone watch the ITV 'Tonight' programme on very young children and tech devices? Children as young as two years old being given tablets etc. They did an experiment comparing the behaviour of kids playing with traditional toys, they reacted with each other, and kids using tablets, they completely ignored each other and didn't have any personal interaction. Very simplistic of course but it raises serious concerns about how we can perhaps be damaging personal development in the vital early years of life.

[Steven Chorkley]

I have to participate in the mobile phone debate... As I am well, in college.

My High School (boarding) banned camera phones. So every smartphone was out of the question. To compensate, the school handed out loan phones during the week. These were Samsung dumb phones.
Granted, I'm far from perfect and even now text all the time in class. But that system worked. Everyone (including me) took their phones into school anyway, but the school is authorised to remove the phone out of your possession for a term if they find you using them (being a boarding school searches were regular, in case of drugs ect...). Therefore no-one dared use their phones in class and no-one ever used the dumb phones. We only used them on the dorms and in private areas where the chances of being caught were slim. I hated the system, but now I thank them for it.