COMPUTERS, THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

[Stanley]

I have found another small but significant problem. When I opened the sound menu before the disk change I had a choice of analogue or digital output and my speakers worked on analogue but not digital. I had no sound this morning on the BBC player and when I looked in the sounds menu I no longer have the option of analogue. I can't find a way of triggering the analogue output in the dialogue box. Any Ideas?
Cancel request! I had one last furtle and it's all Pluggy's fault!! The input plug for the sound was in the wrong socket, he must have disturbed it and shoved it back in the wrong hole. All is back to normal......
Later, breaking news about a surprising security breach in the Apple OS (LINK) All you have to do is a few simple keystrokes and no matter how complicated the password you are in and can edit the deepest functions. Oh Dear!!
Later.... One of the major items that had to be reinstated on the new version of the OS was Thunderbird and one segment was quite enormous because I hadn't deleted any mails since May, I've just been in there and weeded everything out before Nov 1st. Normally it takes quite a long time to delete 800 mails but this morning it was lightning fast. The speed advantage of the SSD shows up in surprising places!

[Stanley]

One thing I am finding is that I am having to remind Ubuntu of my preferences as it keeps reverting to what it thinks is the norm. For instance it switched back to digital input for the sound and I had to alter it again. It's also going to blank screen after a short interval of inactivity like going for a pee even though I have told it not to suspend! Mind you I have improved things by modifying the privacy setting and telling it I don't want a password to resume! Experience tells me that it will settle down shortly......

[Tizer]

Stanley, this is my setting in System Settings | Brightness and Lock. The screen will go black if I go to make a cup of tea but lights up when I move the cursor. That action doesn't seem to fit with the settings but it does what I want!

[Pluggy]

One thing I forgot to do when I reinstalled Stanley's computer. Setting the screen to 'Never' should do it as Tiz says.

I probably put the speakers plug in the blue socket rather than the green one, they look much the same when you're grovelling at the back of a computer

[PanBiker]

Aye, the wrong socket problem. It was even worse with first generation sound cards, they hadn't yet thought of colour coding them, all chrome and the same size.

[Stanley]

Thanks Tiz, that was the only bloody setting I hadn't looked at. I've set it to the same as yours. Counter-intuitive isn't it, I was looking at sensible things like suspend. I had already cracked the repeated password in other settings.
We're slowly setting in as it learns my preferences and the speed gain all round is brilliant......
You are forgiven for the plug misplacement Pluggy. Good brain exercise!
07:20. Thanks again Tiz. I left the screen turned off for over an hour and when I reactivated it I was straight back to where I left off. There's another benefit as well. When the display went into suspend and reactivated the 'Listen Again' function of the BBC R4 player kicked in again but at the point where it had switched off and not the current broadcast. That was bloody annoying!

[Stanley]

This is off piste, it's photography really but we discussed it as a computer problem.



The postman has been and delivered the new flash card for Mrs Nikon. I'd also ordered a USB card reader as well as they were only £4 and I still have a suspicion that the main fault is bad contacts in the computer's card reader. The new card didn't work in the camera until I had taken it out and re-inserted it a few times quite firmly. I have neglected Mrs Nikon of late, the Powersot is so handy and I think the contacts needed polishing a bit! Then the card wouldn't read in that slot but read perfectly in the new USB reader. So far so good!
Then, just for a laugh I tried the old card and when I put it in the new reader the light flashed and it didn't read. I don't think there's any doubt that the old card was a bum! Problem solved I think.

[Tizer]

Remember my problems with broadband and the engineer saying Plusnet should have given me a new router, which they eventually did? Well today I got this email from Plusnet:
"We recently sent an engineer to investigate a problem with your broadband service. We discussed the potential of a charge being applied to your account when you agreed to the engineer visit if the problem was found to be an issue within the boundaries of your property, you missed the appointment, cancel with less than 48 working hours' notice or the engineer finds there is no fault. Unfortunately, the engineer has since attended your property and has informed us that the visit was chargeable. A charge of £65 has been added to your account and will appear on your next bill from Plusnet."

I've replied telling them in detail how I'm losing my patience with Plusnet, object to being charged £65 especially after such bad treatment during the house move, and will change to a different provider when the next opportunity arises (they locked me into an 18-month contract when I asked them to move my account to the new house and it has extortionate cancellation fees).

[PanBiker]

Depends what they deem to be "boundaries of your property" Tiz. Open Reach are responsible for all infrastructure up to and including the Master Socket and the incoming pair termination in the back box. Faceplate although provided as standard can be construed as user side as you can legally extend from this as you wish. That's what I did to extend my incoming line to a new Master Socket in a more convenient place.

I can't remember the exact circumstance of your problem but I would challenge if it was anything related to the feed side.

[Stanley]

When the BT engineer replaced my master socket and put it right next to the FM3 he told me he was reporting it as a faulty MS and that I should watch EE because they often tried to levy the charge anyway. He told me to refer them to his report. The solution in future appears to be be nice to the engineer!

[Tizer]

I'm still waiting for a response from Plusnet. They are so slow to respond these days that I assume they've either got lots more complaints or they're under-staffed.

We knew about ransoms being paid by British businesses to hackers but it's getting to silly levels as shown by the article on the front page of today's copy of `The Times'. When I was working for a publishing company in the early 1990s I was in an office next door to the one used by the team publishing computer security newsletters for industry. One of my publications was on safety and security in the food industry, dealing with malicious contamination, extortion etc. I often had discussions with the computer people and compared incidents. We agreed that one of the biggest problems was the companies that paid up against demands by fraudsters, extortionists etc. It only leads to more attacks because the bad guys realise it works. It also results in better companies getting attacked because the stupid ones have paid up. And this was 25 years ago. Do they never learn!

`Russian hackers hold UK to ransom' LINK
"Thousands of British businesses have paid ransoms to Russian hackers who are launching hundreds of attacks every day and demanding up to £100,000 to release files. Experts said that the “epidemic” of ransomware was the biggest cyberthreat facing the country, and was far more pervasive than the Wannacry attack that paralysed the IT systems of scores of NHS trusts in May."

[Pluggy]

But what if the options are

1 You pay the ransom.

2 You go out of business.

?

If you've got a recent offline backup. No problem you just restore it. But most will have online backups, and they'll almost certainly be encrypted as well.

Yes paying the bad guys is counter productive, but calling somebody stupid for paying is a very broad and unfair generalisation. Most of them will have explored the options before they pay up.

[Stanley]

Surely the answer is to have a mirror image of the site backed up daily to an isolated system unconnected to the web and to do daily security updates? I remember when Janet installed a new system for the WA police she insisted on a complete physical backup and total physical destruction of the old system. Expensive but she said it was the only way to ensure a clean new system.

[chinatyke]

Surely the answer is to have a mirror image of the site backed up daily to an isolated system unconnected to the web and to do daily security updates?

But if you got infected wouldn't the infected data be transferred to the "isolated system" also, regardless of whether it was connected to the web?

[Stanley]

If it was dormant, yes. But these ransom attacks appear to be immediate.
Ubuntu gave us 70mb of Linux system this morning and whatever was in it, my g Thumb image search is perhaps twice as fast and it was a swift kiddy before!

[Tizer]

Yes paying the bad guys is counter productive, but calling somebody stupid for paying is a very broad and unfair generalisation. Most of them will have explored the options before they pay up.

OK, calling them stupid might be a bit strong but those people are the reason that the police don't seem to be interested and nothing much was done about the problems for many years. The victims paid up and didn't report the incident to the police, therefore the police didn't know there was such a big hidden problem and were reluctant to believe the few who did report the extortionists. Meanwhile the criminals were finding it dead easy to rake in money from all those who were paying up and saying nowt.

[chinatyke]

If it was dormant, yes. But these ransom attacks appear to be immediate.

I see, thanks. Must get my back-ups arranged, something I haven't done since I started using this computer in June. Doesn't time fly?

[Stanley]

Dead easy China. I don't use any proprietary programmes or other people's storage like The Cloud. I have two external hard drives that I only connect to the FM3 by USB when I want to copy data across. The rest of the time they are disconnected and not powered. I do my backup twice a year.... Never let me down yet and under my control.
Talking about people not reporting ransom attacks reminds me of another fraud we don't know the extent of, internal fraud and data theft at banks and other providers which is kept quiet so as not to damage business confidence. We hear of odd cases but I am convinced these are the tip of a very large iceberg.

[Tizer]

It's not helped by the fact that if you tell the police that you believe your bank account has been used fraudulently by a member of the bank's staff they won't do anything about it unless they are contacted by the bank directly.

[Stanley]

The Lords of the Universe have us stitched up nicely don't they..... Overweening arrogance!

[chinatyke]

My Firefox browser crashes every time I try to download an attachment from Hotmail. I'm on a Beta version and crash reports are sent back to Firefox automatically. It also updates automatically. It may be because it is a beta version but it also says it is a stable version. I've put up with it doing this all month but spit out the dummy this morning and uninstalled it and much to my chagrin I'm now using Edge browser. One more step towards "going Ubuntu" ...

[Stanley]

You'll come round to it in the end China. Sorry to hear you are having problems.....

[Tizer]

`HP laptops found to have hidden keylogger' LINK

[chinatyke]

My Firefox browser crashes every time I try to download an attachment from Hotmail. I'm on a Beta version and crash reports are sent back to Firefox automatically. It also updates automatically. It may be because it is a beta version but it also says it is a stable version. I've put up with it doing this all month but spit out the dummy this morning and uninstalled it and much to my chagrin I'm now using Edge browser. One more step towards "going Ubuntu" ...

I got more trouble with Edge browser, it was worse than the faulty Firefox Beta version so I've just done a clean install of Firefox v57.0.2 (normal release version) and all is OK but I haven't loaded any Add-ons yet.

[Stanley]

I don't even know what Firefox add-ons are China. I work on the KISS principle.... Seems to work....
Question..... Do you really need them?