Showing 1 - 10 of 43
Someone, somewhere still uses IE
Life, James Hein, Published on 12/02/2020
» A Microsoft engineer, Eric Lawrence, who worked on moving the Edge browser to a Google-driven open source base code, has suggested that people need to stop using the more traditional version of Internet Explorer. His plea was a personal one on his own blog but Microsoft cybersecurity chief Chris Jackson expressed the same sentiment a year earlier. IE still has a couple of percent of people using it -- probably those who had it installed on their machines -- that have yet to be upgraded. The technology is old and full of security holes but a number of organisations demand that it still be used.
More data, more problems
Life, James Hein, Published on 01/01/2020
» It's time to make some predictions for 2020. A number were made by others a while back, most of which did not eventuate, like a Japanese base on the Moon, flying cars and a Beijing to London rail link. I'll try for a bit more realism.
Burning issues and great expectations
Life, James Hein, Published on 19/12/2018
» Another year almost gone, another year of IT improvements, advancements and lower prices. It was a year of missing graphics cards, where Bitcoin data miners snapped up the market for a while.
You can forget HAL 9000
Life, James Hein, Published on 05/12/2018
» It has been over five years and it was time for a new PC. It took a while to pull together, required an eclectic set of carefully chosen components, and I paid someone to put it together for me, having done that myself too many times in the past.
Privacy an artefact of times past
Life, James Hein, Published on 18/07/2018
» If you have learned nothing else from my many years of writing, it should be that unless extraordinary steps are taken, personal data privacy doesn't exist, except perhaps in the deluded minds of government officials. The only thing privacy laws do these days is stop you from returning someone's lost phone. In just one day in the news, I read reports about Huawei infiltrating Facebook, another Spectre CPU problem, political data harvesting in the UK, insecure military servers in the UK, Chinese hackers interested in Cambodia (and the rest of the world) along with other items about lost or hacked data. Yahoo and Google collect far more than the whole of the US spy agencies combined, though at least the latter doesn't deliberately spread it around or sell it to marketers.
A down vote for MS Skype
Life, James Hein, Published on 20/06/2018
» It has been a while since I've used Skype, and I had no idea just how much Microsoft has stuffed it up. Skype for the multi-device user is all but useless. I tried to find a way to allow someone to call into my PC's Skype but to no avail. I shut down Skype on my phone and was able to call out but not receive anything. This removed the possibility of using a good sound card and microphone for the mix, and all I could use in the end was my phone. BM -- or Before Microsoft -- Skype was usable and useful. PM -- Post-Microsoft -- you should look for any other alternative. Line seems to be most popular with those I know. This is not the first time Microsoft has taken over a product, and its usage has dropped dramatically. Of course that could have been the plan all along.
Words don't come easy to millennials
Life, James Hein, Published on 23/05/2018
» Next time you're in a restaurant or where people gather in small groups, sit and watch for a while. Note how many of the groups are silent, all doing something on their phones. When you find such a group, note how long they go without saying a word to each other. There is an interesting behavioural shift occurring in the phone-enabled world where casual conversation skills are being replaced by surfing, messaging and instant posting. It won't be too long before the best way to find out what the person next to you is thinking is to live feed their Facebook, send them an SMS or Line message, or heaven forbid a tweet.
Best to avoid FB's Onavo Protect VPN
Life, James Hein, Published on 28/02/2018
» If you use Facebook, you may have seen an option in the Settings menu under Protect to download the Onavo Protect app for Android and the iPhone. Don't. It is basically an app that allows Facebook to spy on you, even more than it already does. The app is a Virtual Private Network or VPN. In simplest terms this will encrypt and route all your network traffic through a server in addition to the one your ISP provides. This allows you to appear to be somewhere else, so you can watch, say, local content there for free and it will stop most agencies from spying on what you might be doing.
Help kids navigate the social media roller coaster
Life, James Hein, Published on 31/01/2018
» A study has come out recently, confirming what we already know. Children spending more than an hour a day engaged in social media can make them less happy. Take something like Facebook for example. You post something, people read it then they give it a like and sometimes make a comment. Now imagine you are a young impressionable child somewhere under 18. You post something and get 50 likes. Sometime later you post something else and get 65 likes and feel better. Then the third time you only get five likes and some comments about how lame it was. Now you feel worse. Multiply this by a few hundred times and the emotional roller coaster can have someone with a developing emotional platform spiralling into their first depression.
Looking into IT's crystal ball
Life, James Hein, Published on 03/01/2018
» So it is that time again when I try and gaze into the crystal ball and guess what 2018 will bring the IT world.