Even the best initial protection is not proof against bad decisions. My mother owns a business, and runs it off her PC. She needed to make a decision which was more important -- installing a bunch of cute but useless and potentially harmful crapware, or run her business. It's a decision that any business has to make, and I think you know the answer. If you don't, I don't want to work wherever you're working.
It didn't take more than one major outage (when she had to ship the computer to me) to make her understand that her PC is an integral part of her business and she needs to stop screwing around with it.
Mother-in-law uses her computer to do email, process photos, some video conferencing, and light bookkeeping. These things are important to her. What is important to her is important to me. Having the grandkid (who is in his early twenties) playing torrented games on her work machine is not acceptable. If he's bored during his visits, his parents can damned well get him a laptop. And pay for support, because I won't touch it.
And finally, I'm doing this for free, and if they make it too hard on me, I will have no choice but to cut them loose. I have a real job, and I'd like to have some free time once in awhile. If that makes me an ass, great. I can live with that.
I provide support for several family members and a few friends through the free version of Logmein. There's even an Android version which allows me to log in and do simple things from my phone.
I try to set rules up front. If you expect me to provide long distance support, you must practice some minimal amount of safe computing. Avoid clicking on popups, avoid online games, don't install certain apps, don't install stuff just because it's cute.
My mom's machine got so hammered I couldn't log in remotely. She shipped it to me and I found the thing took twenty minutes to boot and the tray was half the task bar. Spent a couple days identifying and uninstalling the Reader's Digest Daily Quote, the Daily Scripture, Weatherbug, a whole bunch of coupon apps and a bunch of other trash, plus a good antivirus scrubbing and a baseline run with Spybot. I sent it back to her and said if it ever gets in that condition again, she's on her own.
Mother-in-law practices safe computing, but she sometimes has a grandson living with her, and he fell for a fake antivirus trojan. That had to be dealt with in person (she's a couple hundred miles away) and took forever to scrub off. I told her that I'm still willing to be her support but she has to keep the grandkids away from the machine.
One thing I have been thinking of doing is run the family member's Windows instance virtually, and include a backup copy of the working instance on disk, which would allow easily recreating the instance if necessary. The complicated part is to figure out what media needs to be kept.
In my experience, official documentation tends to fall in two categories:
Category A, the features manual. You can do this, you can do that. You can manage things like this and this. You can setup this to do that automatically. But no word on how to accomplish any of these things, or even what specific named feature to use.
Category B, the reference manual. This feature has these options. This other feature has these other options. This third feature has these options. Each entry is usually accompanied by a description a third grader could have written: "The blerbfrobinator command is used to frobinate blerbs." Oh, thanks. That made things so much clearer.
It's not just a lack of examples, although examples do help. It's (a) the missing connection between capabilities and individual named features, and (b) some holistic idea of how the product is intended to be used. Best Practices helps in this area, if they are well enough written.
Interpretation of error messages are often completely unhelpful. Explanations are usually just a rephrase of the error message that add no insight. This is where forums come in. Whatever problem you've run into, some group of people have probably had the same problem, and some subset of that user base has written about it somewhere. The trick is to find it.
Parenthetically, Fudd help you if you try to get help from official sources and your problem is not officially recognized as a problem by the vendor. In that case, even when a fix exists, the official techs may be forbidden to give it to you. There again, forums can provide help that you can't get anywhere else.
And finally, the search engines on vendor support sites so often SUCK. When I worked for a very large company, I was responsible for best practices documentation, and I couldn't find a damned thing with the company's own search engine. I had better luck putting the same entry in Google and looking for hits from my company's website.
That's the last of our problems- we'd all be dead within 72 hours or so. CO2 is required to make the human respiration system work, the breathing reflex is triggered by too much CO2, not by a lack of oxygen, this is why hyperventilating before holding your breath can make you pass out, you scrub lots of CO2 out of your system and then run out of O2 before your brain forces you to inhale. This is also the mechanism behind Cheyne Stokes respiration, where high altitude climbers don't breath enough while they sleep.
Erradicate all CO2 and you have to consciously breath, on purpose - if you forget, or fall asleep, you're dead.
I thought I remembered this from high school biology also, and looked up the wiki entry for breathing to confirm. The wiki seems to say that hyperventilating (for instance) drastically reduces CO2 levels which paradoxically causes reduced oxygen to the organs including the brain, but on the other hand, the atmosphere in space suits is pure oxygen, which seems a contradiction. Do astronauts really have to remember to breathe during EVA?
> In general, I don't see why anyone should procreate, when there are an over abundance of kids out there that need a home now.
After we bought the house, we looked into adopting a child, but the process was unbelievably long, intrusive, and expensive. It was by far quicker and less expensive to have our own child; there were fewer forms to fill out, and we didn't have to pass an inspection first.
That's messed up.
But going along with your premise, you get into a situation where irresponsible people are the only ones who procreate, with the responsible ones caring for the offspring. (One could argue that this is what's happening now.) I wonder if this is one of the steps that leads to Idiocracy?
I'm just playing devil's advocate here, but it sounds like you are going on "what would a reasonable person believe?" which I personally think is a very good test. However, looking at the quality of the typical lawsuit, the test appears to be "what would a slightly retarded irish setter believe?" (Apologies to irish setters.) This lowering of the bar of the acumen ("do not use this hair dryer while taking a shower") normally annoys the hell out of me. But I wonder if in this case we could make it work in our favor.
> 3) they might not do MITM attacks on http requests, but instead DNS requests. So you look up *anything*, and it gives you the address of their server that gives these notices. That will break *everything* until you click on it, not just http requests. (Thought it would work if you didn't rely on DNS requests going out for whatever reason.)
...Ok, but Minority Report is also a work of fiction. The point, in both cases, is that "futuristic" interfaces can be based on premises that don't work on a fundamental level.
> Notice there are still hardware controls for the really essential features - mute, volume up and down, off.
...which are the things you're most likely to do without looking. I think we're talking here about the intrusion of non-tactile interfaces in areas where they are a poor fit, because of the erroneous belief that they're "advanced". Cars have a lot of electronics in them these days, and even multifunctional displays, but controls are still individual, and of a certain non-ambiguous shape.
Star Trek is actually a great illustration of this, there were times in the original series where the actors had their hands on controls but attention focused on the action for dramatic effect, they didn't need to constantly look down as in the Next Generation.
Exactly. In the old series, the controls may have been in weird shapes and not labeled unless the audience needed them to be, but they were physical controls, and the odd shapes could actually help the operator manipulate them by feel. All that is lost in modern-looking interfaces.
The biggest problem as I see it is that you can't feel the controls. Like all the interfaces in ST:TNG, there is too much dependence on having to look where your hands are. I think that's a distraction at a very basic level that we haven't fully noticed yet, let alone dealt with in any meaningful way.
Think of your old-school cell phone. You could make a call, even text, without looking at it. (Or, I could. Your mileage may vary, I guess.) Can you do that with your glass-smooth smartphone now?
And yeah, I know. "Siri, Call Police!" "Calling Portobello. When would you like reservations?"
As I see it, the big difference between physical controls and colors and text on a touchscreen is that you can manipulate physical controls while looking elsewhere. There are times when that may be kinda important.
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Even the best initial protection is not proof against bad decisions. My mother owns a business, and runs it off her PC. She needed to make a decision which was more important -- installing a bunch of cute but useless and potentially harmful crapware, or run her business. It's a decision that any business has to make, and I think you know the answer. If you don't, I don't want to work wherever you're working.
It didn't take more than one major outage (when she had to ship the computer to me) to make her understand that her PC is an integral part of her business and she needs to stop screwing around with it.
Mother-in-law uses her computer to do email, process photos, some video conferencing, and light bookkeeping. These things are important to her. What is important to her is important to me. Having the grandkid (who is in his early twenties) playing torrented games on her work machine is not acceptable. If he's bored during his visits, his parents can damned well get him a laptop. And pay for support, because I won't touch it.
And finally, I'm doing this for free, and if they make it too hard on me, I will have no choice but to cut them loose. I have a real job, and I'd like to have some free time once in awhile. If that makes me an ass, great. I can live with that.
I provide support for several family members and a few friends through the free version of Logmein. There's even an Android version which allows me to log in and do simple things from my phone.
I try to set rules up front. If you expect me to provide long distance support, you must practice some minimal amount of safe computing. Avoid clicking on popups, avoid online games, don't install certain apps, don't install stuff just because it's cute.
My mom's machine got so hammered I couldn't log in remotely. She shipped it to me and I found the thing took twenty minutes to boot and the tray was half the task bar. Spent a couple days identifying and uninstalling the Reader's Digest Daily Quote, the Daily Scripture, Weatherbug, a whole bunch of coupon apps and a bunch of other trash, plus a good antivirus scrubbing and a baseline run with Spybot. I sent it back to her and said if it ever gets in that condition again, she's on her own.
Mother-in-law practices safe computing, but she sometimes has a grandson living with her, and he fell for a fake antivirus trojan. That had to be dealt with in person (she's a couple hundred miles away) and took forever to scrub off. I told her that I'm still willing to be her support but she has to keep the grandkids away from the machine.
One thing I have been thinking of doing is run the family member's Windows instance virtually, and include a backup copy of the working instance on disk, which would allow easily recreating the instance if necessary. The complicated part is to figure out what media needs to be kept.
In my experience, official documentation tends to fall in two categories:
Category A, the features manual. You can do this, you can do that. You can manage things like this and this. You can setup this to do that automatically. But no word on how to accomplish any of these things, or even what specific named feature to use.
Category B, the reference manual. This feature has these options. This other feature has these other options. This third feature has these options. Each entry is usually accompanied by a description a third grader could have written: "The blerbfrobinator command is used to frobinate blerbs." Oh, thanks. That made things so much clearer.
It's not just a lack of examples, although examples do help. It's (a) the missing connection between capabilities and individual named features, and (b) some holistic idea of how the product is intended to be used. Best Practices helps in this area, if they are well enough written.
Interpretation of error messages are often completely unhelpful. Explanations are usually just a rephrase of the error message that add no insight. This is where forums come in. Whatever problem you've run into, some group of people have probably had the same problem, and some subset of that user base has written about it somewhere. The trick is to find it.
Parenthetically, Fudd help you if you try to get help from official sources and your problem is not officially recognized as a problem by the vendor. In that case, even when a fix exists, the official techs may be forbidden to give it to you. There again, forums can provide help that you can't get anywhere else.
And finally, the search engines on vendor support sites so often SUCK. When I worked for a very large company, I was responsible for best practices documentation, and I couldn't find a damned thing with the company's own search engine. I had better luck putting the same entry in Google and looking for hits from my company's website.
Ok, thanks. Sounds like the wiki entry could use some clarification. And yes, I do remember Apollo 1.
Eradicating all CO2 is a little like that community that decided to completely ban Chlorine. Um, really?
I blame public schools...
That's the last of our problems- we'd all be dead within 72 hours or so. CO2 is required to make the human respiration system work, the breathing reflex is triggered by too much CO2, not by a lack of oxygen, this is why hyperventilating before holding your breath can make you pass out, you scrub lots of CO2 out of your system and then run out of O2 before your brain forces you to inhale. This is also the mechanism behind Cheyne Stokes respiration, where high altitude climbers don't breath enough while they sleep.
Erradicate all CO2 and you have to consciously breath, on purpose - if you forget, or fall asleep, you're dead.
I thought I remembered this from high school biology also, and looked up the wiki entry for breathing to confirm. The wiki seems to say that hyperventilating (for instance) drastically reduces CO2 levels which paradoxically causes reduced oxygen to the organs including the brain, but on the other hand, the atmosphere in space suits is pure oxygen, which seems a contradiction. Do astronauts really have to remember to breathe during EVA?
> In general, I don't see why anyone should procreate, when there are an over abundance of kids out there that need a home now.
After we bought the house, we looked into adopting a child, but the process was unbelievably long, intrusive, and expensive. It was by far quicker and less expensive to have our own child; there were fewer forms to fill out, and we didn't have to pass an inspection first.
That's messed up.
But going along with your premise, you get into a situation where irresponsible people are the only ones who procreate, with the responsible ones caring for the offspring. (One could argue that this is what's happening now.) I wonder if this is one of the steps that leads to Idiocracy?
When someone suggests this, they almost always don't want to be first.
> ...and prohibit them from ever criticizing Prenda again...
Challenge accepted!
Any relation to Hank Johnson?
This.
> In an ideal world, we would be able to eliminate CO2 from our atmosphere completely
This is almost as silly as what Orcutt said. With no CO2, what would the trees breathe? Don't they teach biology in high school anymore?
I'm just playing devil's advocate here, but it sounds like you are going on "what would a reasonable person believe?" which I personally think is a very good test. However, looking at the quality of the typical lawsuit, the test appears to be "what would a slightly retarded irish setter believe?" (Apologies to irish setters.) This lowering of the bar of the acumen ("do not use this hair dryer while taking a shower") normally annoys the hell out of me. But I wonder if in this case we could make it work in our favor.
I thought the whole point of intercepting and altering DNS requests is trying to pass something off as something else.
> 3) they might not do MITM attacks on http requests, but instead DNS requests. So you look up *anything*, and it gives you the address of their server that gives these notices. That will break *everything* until you click on it, not just http requests. (Thought it would work if you didn't rely on DNS requests going out for whatever reason.)
> Think about what it would take to get you to shift from Google to Bing.
A gun to my head and my family held hostage.
You're not getting it, and that's fine. It's not required.
> Notice there are still hardware controls for the really essential features - mute, volume up and down, off.
Star Trek is actually a great illustration of this, there were times in the original series where the actors had their hands on controls but attention focused on the action for dramatic effect, they didn't need to constantly look down as in the Next Generation.
Exactly. In the old series, the controls may have been in weird shapes and not labeled unless the audience needed them to be, but they were physical controls, and the odd shapes could actually help the operator manipulate them by feel. All that is lost in modern-looking interfaces.
The biggest problem as I see it is that you can't feel the controls. Like all the interfaces in ST:TNG, there is too much dependence on having to look where your hands are. I think that's a distraction at a very basic level that we haven't fully noticed yet, let alone dealt with in any meaningful way.
Think of your old-school cell phone. You could make a call, even text, without looking at it. (Or, I could. Your mileage may vary, I guess.) Can you do that with your glass-smooth smartphone now?
And yeah, I know. "Siri, Call Police!" "Calling Portobello. When would you like reservations?"
As I see it, the big difference between physical controls and colors and text on a touchscreen is that you can manipulate physical controls while looking elsewhere. There are times when that may be kinda important.
"empty sparrow carcass".