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Bulletproof Tool For Golden Age Browsing?
An anonymous reader writes "I work in a retirement/assisted living home. Many of the residents had never used the Internet but really find it fascinating once they are given a little training. However, I've stopped introducing it to them because of the drain it puts on me. There are a million and one things that a computer novice can screw up, and I don't have time to solve all of them. These folks don't need any sophistication. and they need only the most basic options. Adjustable text size would be nice, but otherwise — no email, no word processing or editing, no printing — just Internet browsing. This may not seem like a big market, but it's getting bigger every day! Is there an absolutely fool-proof device that can provide this without requiring virus scanners and constant attention?"
It's called a Nintendo Wii. Turn it on, browse awhile, zoom in, zoom out and turn it off.
Try Opera on Linux. You get full resizing (of both text and images) with single buttons (plus and minus, no modifiers needed). With Linux you can put work into locking down everything else, so e.g. you can only have a single, full-screen version of Opera running.
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
I believe this is one feature of the One Laptop Per Child project. (See also Wikipedia article.)
--
Metagovernment - Government by ALL of the people.
Sorry for being blatantly off-topic, but just wanted to let you know...
Yes, someone did just put your sig through 5 rounds of base 64 decoding...
LAME!
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
Thank heavens for Leet Key, just select, right-click, and select leetkey->text transformers->base64 decode... several times.
- Move "Sig". For great justice!
Cybercafes in China install a device-driver that prevents disk-writes actually writing to the disk.
So, when you reboot the computer, it's completely clean, just as before.
You can still install patches, upgrades etc, by entering a password to take it to a special maintenance mode.
Example of the effect of the special driver:
- you plug in a usb key, and can read your files
- you make changes to the files, save them, reopen them, it looks like you changed the files
- you take the usb out and plug it into another computer. Whoa, thats wierd, the files are just like they were before you changed them!
It's an awesome system. Chinese cybercafes are decently free of adware.
Aside from the large text size requirement, this sounds really similar to something that Jamie Zawinski (http://jwz.org) did for the DNA Lounge kiosks -- a set of diskless linux systems that all network boot from a central NFS server, and are easily resettable. (Sounds like quite a weekend to set up, though.)
http://www.sandboxie.com/
Sometimes I help the elderly learn about computers. One thing that never fails to amaze them is Wikipedia.
Sifting the signal from the noise in a typical google search is just too complex for people that are computer novices as well as internet novices. But show them the Wikipedia plugin, where they can just search on whatever they're curious about and immediately get a single response that probably answers their question, and they'll immediately grasp just how cool the internet can be and they'll want to learn more.
I usually set windows to large or extra-large fonts, too. Just ask them which setting they find most comfortable while they are in front of the computer.
- Disable quit
NO! Don't do this!
Quitting is by far the easiest way to ensure that cookies and current login sessions and whatnot are wiped.
You want to set it up so that when your browser is exited, it is automatically restarted. U Wisconsin has public kiosks around campus that work this way.
(I don't think you want to make them log in and out and such. Just make it so you walk up, and the browser is there running.)
Javascript is a type safe language. A language is "type safe" if every operation allowed by the type system has a well-defined runtime behavior. C type casts are not safe; for example, the type system allows you to cast an integer to a pointer and then deference that pointer, even though at run time it may point to garbage. Javascript's implicit casts, while arguably a bad idea, have well defined run time behavior. Javascript is a type safe language.
See here and here, or even better, read Pierce's excellent book "Types and Programming Languages".
Just disable Javascript and whitelist pages that are reasonably safe.
Perhaps you could use a browser on some TV box thing, e.g. a Wii or PS3, those have less that can be messed up.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Same here, my mother is using debian, firefox, google mail and openoffice allows her MS compatible document exchange for her charity work; the box is behind a firewall and the setup works flawlessly. People who claim linux isn't ready for this kind of setup are clueless, it is windows which cannot function properly in this setup; my mothers friends all operate spyware and virus infested zombie spam mail systems and I am glad I don't know enough about windows to help them out. Windows + office also costs a bundle.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
You've sort of bracketed the right answer there. Almost all malware attacks today are aimed at Windows users. Using Windows pretty much mandates using a virus checker that will need to be attended to. And a firewall and/or NAT router is pretty much mandatory with Windows. The specifications say minimal maintenance. So Windows is probably the wrong OS for this application.
So -- Linux or Mac -- whichever the guy who is setting things up with is more comfortable with. I've never found Macs to be especially easy, natural, or intuitive despite undending claims to the contrary. So, I'd probably go with Linux -- probably using Xfce which seems to be evolving as simpler but adequate user interface alternative to GNOME and KDE. Someone who is Mac compatible would probably go with a Mac.
Browser? They are all baffling to the uninitiated.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Same here with the sole difference of Yahoo Mail instead of Google Mail.
I will also add the following trick to this. You can safely test any improvements, configs, desktop settings, locks etc with a 5 year old prior to deployment. If it works and he does not break it, you can safely roll it out onto the unsuspecting golden age population.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Wouldn't Youtube be the ones in violation of the patent then? Seems to me that if the patent covers the plug-in automatically starting, then whoever is facilitating that would be in violation of the patent.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
No.
The OAP has the possibility to elevate his privileges to install an applications and has the instructions on how to do it.
Based on experience the OAPs never ever uses that. He/She always coopts visiting grandchildren to do that. While you can create them an account as well it always ends up being done from the OAP account as well so no need to do that./
In the meantime he/she has 0 privileges on the machine and keeps on using it and it does not break.
By the way - these are simple practical observations on a number of Linux installs done by me or some of my friends for the parents. While they may seem weird, that is the way it turns out to be in real life.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Oh god no. Install a locked down kiosk setup of puppy linux. Boots in 30 seconds if you set it right and have it run from RAM only. Who cares if it get bonkered, give them a big red button that says "FIX IT" on it and it will work perfectly. let it have javascript and all the cookies it wants. if they figure out how to close firefox, make firefox respawn on close. perfect solution.
I even removed the hard drives, boots from a old useless 256 meg CF card (80X card) stuck in a $2.00 adapter in the IDE port on the motherboard. works great and the church has not needed me to even touch it for almost 4 years now.
Flash and firefox is out of date on it but who cares, we don't need elderly going to albinoblacksheep.com or happy tree friends now do we, and security holes are a non-issue when you run from ram and have no mounted writable drives.
Don't make it complex, make it a diskless kiosk that runs from ramdisk, no fuss, no work, just call it done. and certainly don't make it windows based that would be way more work to do the same thing as well as cost a lot more for the copy of embedded XP.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.