For suspicious email attachments, I deploy private proprietary bioware (me!) to analyze before opening.
IOW, "im smart enough to ignore common IT wisdom".
Run out of date software, pay the price. Ask the Debian guys whether using "private proprietary bioware" protected their OpenSSL keys-- clearly those updates dont matter THAT much, right?
Installing Windows 7 or 8 wouldn't make his job much easier or make his computer much more secure.
Yea, it sort of would. For one, he wouldnt be stuck with IE8. For another, hed have UAC which solves most of the rootkit threat that XP had to deal with. For a third, hed actually be getting security patches.
I have to wonder whether the folks touting how great XP is have done customer-facing IT support. Actually, I dont really wonder, because if they had theyd know well enough how much of the malware threat is mitigated just by upgrading to Win7 and updating your software.
Syncing solutions make it far to easy to change the "backup" copy. They are focused on syncing, not read-only backups. Backup solutions focus on immutable backups. The real issue is that you generally have far fewer assurances of data integrity with a syncing service, and if something nasty happens on the server (which is not impossible) you lose everything because the nastiness is pulled down. With a backup service that is not the case. This is also why rsync is a poor backup plan: its all to easy to wreck your backup with one bad sync.
You can use one to do the other much like you can use a screwdrive as a hammer (flip it upside down). And I've done both; that doesnt mean its the ideal way to do it.
It is possible either on purpose or accident to permenantly remove data from Google Drive and dropbox. Backup plans generally do not allow this, though with some it is possible (in Crashplan you CAN trigger data removal by changing your backup target).
Thats part of it, part of it is the fact that it syncs, which can cause unnecesary consequences.
colors of sound that only become apparent after months of use, she says. "I played the Avery Fisher Stradivarius for 6 years," she says, "and it took me 3 years just to get accustomed to it."
Sounds an awful lot like
Simply put these are very danceable cables. Music playing through them results in the proverbial foot-tapping scene with the need or desire to get up and move.
Elitists come in many shapes and sizes. That doesnt mean there universally substance behind their claims.
Syncing solutions are not backups, for many reasons, and they are not intended as backups. Its too easy to wipe a file out of dropbox, and that deletion gets synced. A proper backup system doesnt allow that.
Crashplan has the benefit that it by default grabs all data in the user's profile, it allows backing up to a local device (free) or a friend's computer (also free), and does versioning. It also will retain prior copies of a file. Dropbox etc may have versioning, but they might wipe out an older copy at some point, which can be an issue.
I might remark that all of the top tech companies are right here in the US. We have the best microprocessors, the best software companies, etc etc. Google, Intel, AMD, Microsoft, Apple-- all US companies. Surely that is saying something?
And while we arent rock solid financially right now, we're doing a heck of a lot better than just about anyone else.
Can America put men on the moon now?
We can, theres just not much point. I believe we just got done putting (another) rover on Mars, but I guess thats less impressive in your book.
America is a sad shadow of its former self, and even resembles Stalinist communist states like East Germany with its constant NSA surveillance and its ridiculously high prison population.
The NSA surveillance is a problem but that comparison is ridiculous. We dont arrest people for political opinions, something they STILL have trouble with in Russia. We also manage to have fair elections. Seriously, pull your head out of conspiracy websites, the NSA thing is a problem but its not even close to what we saw under Stalinist states.
I say to use chrome because the biggest threat to internet users is out-of-date web software--- the browser, and all of its plugins.
I am not familiar with Opera, so I cant comment on its auto-update process. I am familiar with Firefox, and it is better than it was, but it still doesnt natively handle flash updates. AFAIK Chrome is the only browser which handles flash updates on its own. Its also the first browser to have come out with a workable solution for automatically doing browser updates without triggering UAC.
I say this as a tech who has seen malware incidence drop to zero after switching a particular lobbying firm from firefox / IE over to chrome roughly 4 years ago. You can go into "use NoScript / AdBlock", but thats NOT simple advice and comes with about a dozen caveats.
Give actual advice that mitigates the most serious threats with the least posssible effort, in order to seek the widest possible compliance. Giving "effective but not practical" advice is unlikely to be helpful.
The real answer is that the person giving advice needs to be experienced both with tech and with customer interaction. Advice like "install Chrome, because it keeps your plugins up to date and mitigates the most serious flaws with no user interaction" is helpful. "Abandon windows for linux" is not helpful, nor is it helpful to think that you can give sufficient advice to make the asker an expert in technology.
In the example given, the proper answer of "what to do with new laptop" would have been:
1) Get Crashplan. It has sane defaults, and a cheap "backup to cloud" that requires no configuration and has encryption built in. Its literally set-it-and-forget-it.
2) Get Avast AV. Its free, and has been well regarded for many years.
3) Use Google docs, or Sky Drive. Pick one, and stick with it. It is recommended to pick one "ecosystem" in the cloud, and stick with it. If you go Google, you probably want an android as well. If you go Sky Drive, you probably want WinPhone. If you want iDevices, just get a Mac because iTunes sucks on windows and you dont want "worlds colliding" (Seinfield had it right!).
4) Use Chrome. It still has the best auto-update scheme out there and is still regarded as one of the most secure browsers; using it generally removes the biggest malware vectors (out of date java / flash / adobe). If you truly care about privacy concerns, they can be addressed in the settings menu: Google it.
Pretty simple stuff, avoids common pitfalls of being a relentless fanboy, and addresses the most pressing concerns users will face.
Ubuntu LTS has support for 5 years. XP is being supported long after Linux 2.4 was EOL'd. Theres really no comparison. XP came out back when 2.2 was still around.
Really dont like calling people out but youre pretty full of BS. By your own admission you do LED work growing Cannabis, which hardly relegates you to being an OSI expert, and when I google your name (initials: A. M.Q.) + OSI or RFC, nothing at all comes up.
According to your google+, you graduated HS around the same time I did, which means you were in middle school when the OSI model was formalized. It would be mightily impressive if you "wrote Layer 6" before entering high school.
Slashdot Mirror
Im not clear why the distinction is important. I had understood the outrage over the donation was because it indicated what Elrich believed.
It'd probably attract crowds, as well, as I believe li-ion batteries tend to behave "interestingly" when strongly jostled.
This is the belief that a group of people should be second class to another group of people.
Why the double standard? He made the donation in 2004, when Obama was also against gay marriage.
Why no crys for Obama to step down?
If it were Tesla Motors, the NHTSA would be starting an investigation.
The majority of the folks on slahdot also overestimate their own savvy and ability to keep an unpatched system pristine out on the internet.
Good luck with that by the way.
8 years ago would be 2006, when Vista was still in development.
So why doesnt Linux 2.4 EOL (2002-2011) count as "planned obsolescence" in your book?
Some security problems you get in webpages are due to native OS components. IE, jpeg handling exploits.
Using chrome / firefox mitigates a lot of the threat, but youre fooling yourself if you think that means everything will remain peachy.
For suspicious email attachments, I deploy private proprietary bioware (me!) to analyze before opening.
IOW, "im smart enough to ignore common IT wisdom".
Run out of date software, pay the price. Ask the Debian guys whether using "private proprietary bioware" protected their OpenSSL keys-- clearly those updates dont matter THAT much, right?
Installing Windows 7 or 8 wouldn't make his job much easier or make his computer much more secure.
Yea, it sort of would. For one, he wouldnt be stuck with IE8. For another, hed have UAC which solves most of the rootkit threat that XP had to deal with. For a third, hed actually be getting security patches.
I have to wonder whether the folks touting how great XP is have done customer-facing IT support. Actually, I dont really wonder, because if they had theyd know well enough how much of the malware threat is mitigated just by upgrading to Win7 and updating your software.
Syncing solutions make it far to easy to change the "backup" copy. They are focused on syncing, not read-only backups. Backup solutions focus on immutable backups. The real issue is that you generally have far fewer assurances of data integrity with a syncing service, and if something nasty happens on the server (which is not impossible) you lose everything because the nastiness is pulled down. With a backup service that is not the case. This is also why rsync is a poor backup plan: its all to easy to wreck your backup with one bad sync.
You can use one to do the other much like you can use a screwdrive as a hammer (flip it upside down). And I've done both; that doesnt mean its the ideal way to do it.
It is possible either on purpose or accident to permenantly remove data from Google Drive and dropbox. Backup plans generally do not allow this, though with some it is possible (in Crashplan you CAN trigger data removal by changing your backup target).
Thats part of it, part of it is the fact that it syncs, which can cause unnecesary consequences.
Forgive me, but
colors of sound that only become apparent after months of use, she says. "I played the Avery Fisher Stradivarius for 6 years," she says, "and it took me 3 years just to get accustomed to it."
Sounds an awful lot like
Simply put these are very danceable cables. Music playing through them results in the proverbial foot-tapping scene with the need or desire to get up and move.
Elitists come in many shapes and sizes. That doesnt mean there universally substance behind their claims.
Syncing solutions are not backups, for many reasons, and they are not intended as backups. Its too easy to wipe a file out of dropbox, and that deletion gets synced. A proper backup system doesnt allow that.
Crashplan has the benefit that it by default grabs all data in the user's profile, it allows backing up to a local device (free) or a friend's computer (also free), and does versioning. It also will retain prior copies of a file. Dropbox etc may have versioning, but they might wipe out an older copy at some point, which can be an issue.
I might remark that all of the top tech companies are right here in the US. We have the best microprocessors, the best software companies, etc etc. Google, Intel, AMD, Microsoft, Apple-- all US companies. Surely that is saying something?
And while we arent rock solid financially right now, we're doing a heck of a lot better than just about anyone else.
Can America put men on the moon now?
We can, theres just not much point. I believe we just got done putting (another) rover on Mars, but I guess thats less impressive in your book.
America is a sad shadow of its former self, and even resembles Stalinist communist states like East Germany with its constant NSA surveillance and its ridiculously high prison population.
The NSA surveillance is a problem but that comparison is ridiculous. We dont arrest people for political opinions, something they STILL have trouble with in Russia. We also manage to have fair elections. Seriously, pull your head out of conspiracy websites, the NSA thing is a problem but its not even close to what we saw under Stalinist states.
I say to use chrome because the biggest threat to internet users is out-of-date web software--- the browser, and all of its plugins.
I am not familiar with Opera, so I cant comment on its auto-update process. I am familiar with Firefox, and it is better than it was, but it still doesnt natively handle flash updates. AFAIK Chrome is the only browser which handles flash updates on its own. Its also the first browser to have come out with a workable solution for automatically doing browser updates without triggering UAC.
I say this as a tech who has seen malware incidence drop to zero after switching a particular lobbying firm from firefox / IE over to chrome roughly 4 years ago. You can go into "use NoScript / AdBlock", but thats NOT simple advice and comes with about a dozen caveats.
Give actual advice that mitigates the most serious threats with the least posssible effort, in order to seek the widest possible compliance. Giving "effective but not practical" advice is unlikely to be helpful.
The real answer is that the person giving advice needs to be experienced both with tech and with customer interaction. Advice like "install Chrome, because it keeps your plugins up to date and mitigates the most serious flaws with no user interaction" is helpful. "Abandon windows for linux" is not helpful, nor is it helpful to think that you can give sufficient advice to make the asker an expert in technology.
In the example given, the proper answer of "what to do with new laptop" would have been:
1) Get Crashplan. It has sane defaults, and a cheap "backup to cloud" that requires no configuration and has encryption built in. Its literally set-it-and-forget-it.
2) Get Avast AV. Its free, and has been well regarded for many years.
3) Use Google docs, or Sky Drive. Pick one, and stick with it. It is recommended to pick one "ecosystem" in the cloud, and stick with it. If you go Google, you probably want an android as well. If you go Sky Drive, you probably want WinPhone. If you want iDevices, just get a Mac because iTunes sucks on windows and you dont want "worlds colliding" (Seinfield had it right!).
4) Use Chrome. It still has the best auto-update scheme out there and is still regarded as one of the most secure browsers; using it generally removes the biggest malware vectors (out of date java / flash / adobe). If you truly care about privacy concerns, they can be addressed in the settings menu: Google it.
Pretty simple stuff, avoids common pitfalls of being a relentless fanboy, and addresses the most pressing concerns users will face.
Right on! Except when youre dealing with graphics cards. Or modems. Or proprietary DRM dongles. Or wifi.
Anyone who claims that Linux doesnt have driver problems is drinking some serious kool-aid.
ReactOS has been in alpha for at least the last 9 years, since I first heard about it.
iTunes doesnt even work on XP, and you have it working in wine? Truly impressive.
Windows 2000 / XP are completely different and ground-up rewrites compared to 3.11. 2000 is based on the NT kernel, 3.11 is not.
That's a ridiculous statement. Russia were the first ones to space.
And we were the first ones to the moon. We also managed to do that without starving entire nations.
Keep touting the glories of communism, just dont come running when you're relegated to starve in squalor so that they can get another world first.
Ubuntu LTS has support for 5 years. XP is being supported long after Linux 2.4 was EOL'd. Theres really no comparison. XP came out back when 2.2 was still around.
Really dont like calling people out but youre pretty full of BS. By your own admission you do LED work growing Cannabis, which hardly relegates you to being an OSI expert, and when I google your name (initials: A. M.Q.) + OSI or RFC, nothing at all comes up.
According to your google+, you graduated HS around the same time I did, which means you were in middle school when the OSI model was formalized. It would be mightily impressive if you "wrote Layer 6" before entering high school.
Please, cut the BS.
personally im a huge fan of the way powershell does it--
* Comparison: $num1 -eq $num2
* Assignment: $num1 = $num2