General Computer Thread

[Santaman]

There have been thousands of bugs, leaks, vulnarebilities found in hard and software in 2017 alone, some FAR worse than meltdown/spectre, these two just had the flashy names for the press to pick up and blow it out of proportion, not even a 8088 or 8080 CPU is free of bugs despite being very simple CPU's same with software, it is just that in the past it didn't matter, my XT didn't hang on the 'net 24/7 my Windows 95 machine had access for like 30 minutes a day, hacking a machine and taking it over didn't happen because most of the time the damn thing wasn't connected to the internet anyway and then only through a 56K modem..

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Worst case scenario? When the maliciously minded equip themselves with deep neural networks teamed with genetic algorithms and apply these tools to the tasks of cracking any available attack vector and deploying worms to propagate the attack, I expect the number of potential exploits to become exponential and perhaps bring down everything on the Internet permanently. Some people just want to see the world burn. Is AlphaZero open source? I hope not. Best defence would be to set up AI monitoring, tracking and destroying antibodies right away.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I'm having fun with an Acer Aspire 3 A315-21 It came with a 500gig mechanical hard drive and I tore that out and put in an SSD of the same size. The default drive it came with was audible. Now it's nice and quite and a little bit faster.

Installed Windows 10 and it worked first time, except for a couple of the built in apps that won't uninstall. I have had that happen before so I will get to it later as it's not getting in the way of things. The other smaller one I had is 2 months out of warranty and now the touch screen has stopped responding.

 

[Stephen!]

^ Do you find that Windows 10 always tries to install it's updates at the most inopportune moments?

 

[Santaman]

Worst case scenario? When the maliciously minded equip themselves with deep neural networks teamed with genetic algorithms and apply these tools to the tasks of cracking any available attack vector and deploying worms to propagate the attack, I expect the number of potential exploits to become exponential and perhaps bring down everything on the Internet permanently. Some people just want to see the world burn. Is AlphaZero open source? I hope not. Best defence would be to set up AI monitoring, tracking and destroying antibodies right away.

Mweh, then it will be back to offline life, for me personally not that much of a problem..

 

[Marc]

^ Do you find that Windows 10 always tries to install it's updates at the most inopportune moments?

It goes to install the updates when they once they are downloaded - that's why you adjust the "quiet time" settings that tell the OS when it can do update installations

 

[Marc]

There have been thousands of bugs, leaks, vulnarebilities found in hard and software in 2017 alone, some FAR worse than meltdown/spectre, these two just had the flashy names for the press to pick up and blow it out of proportion, not even a 8088 or 8080 CPU is free of bugs despite being very simple CPU's same with software, it is just that in the past it didn't matter, my XT didn't hang on the 'net 24/7 my Windows 95 machine had access for like 30 minutes a day, hacking a machine and taking it over didn't happen because most of the time the damn thing wasn't connected to the internet anyway and then only through a 56K modem..

At the end of the day though the biggest security risk is still the person behind the keyboard.

While an operating system or even hardware will have a bug that can be exploited in many cases they require access to the system that they can't have if people engage in good security practices. Hell forgot good security practices, just think common sense.

 

[Santaman]

I hear ya, agreed and double agreed... not all that many people are computer savvy though, that is a problem.. for cars, machines etc you need a licence, for a phone/computer etc which contains about every aspect of yer entire life you don't need diddly squat..

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Mweh, then it will be back to offline life, for me personally not that much of a problem..

Good luck with that for all of us if all the day-to-day informational infrastructure on which we depend for survival via food, fuel, power delivery etc. gets flushed down the shitter.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

^ Do you find that Windows 10 always tries to install it's updates at the most inopportune moments?

Yeah but doesn't everyone?

I just left the laptop sit there doing its thing while I did other things. So far so good fingers crossed.

 

[Santaman]

Good luck with that for all of us if all the day-to-day informational infrastructure on which we depend for survival via food, fuel, power delivery etc. gets flushed down the shitter.

We did so in the past, a little more hassle, but quite doable, computers make things easier, sure, faster, yup but we can do without them.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Well let's hope we don't have to experience it. The loss of power and water supplies alone would cause massive chaos. Too many things of strategic importance are connected to the Internet. Even systems that use supposedly secure tunnelling over IPv6 might be at risk. Do service providers have fallback measures in depth to cope? I suspect most don't.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Well how did the world function in the 60s and 70s before the internet?

 

[Santaman]

Well let's hope we don't have to experience it. The loss of power and water supplies alone would cause massive chaos. Too many things of strategic importance are connected to the Internet. Even systems that use supposedly secure tunnelling over IPv6 might be at risk. Do service providers have fallback measures in depth to cope? I suspect most don't.

Yeah.. too much stuff is connectd to the 'net that shouldn't be connected to it.. as for going back to the way it was, of course that isn't going to be convenient or easy but if it HAS to be done then it should still be possible, I'm all for having powerplants off the 'net and having oldskool backup systems.

 

[Santaman]

Someone created a unofficial service pack for Windows XP, this contains every update M$ has made for XP so if you have an old rig that you would like to have running on XP for nostalgic gaming or so then you can use it to get all the bells and whistles that a fully updated XP machine has, so if you ever have to reinstall then this is the way to also ahve it fully patched again.
http://ryanvm.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10321&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

As usual, run at your own risk, it still doesn't make XP safe for the internet again, I am going to install it on a freshly installed XP machine, see what it does.

 

[Marc]

Someone created a unofficial service pack for Windows XP, this contains every update M$ has made for XP so if you have an old rig that you would like to have running on XP for nostalgic gaming or so then you can use it to get all the bells and whistles that a fully updated XP machine has, so if you ever have to reinstall then this is the way to also ahve it fully patched again.
http://ryanvm.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10321&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

As usual, run at your own risk, it still doesn't make XP safe for the internet again, I am going to install it on a freshly installed XP machine, see what it does.

Not sure what this nostagia for XP is though. Win 8.x and 10 might not be perfect but I have zero interest in every going back to XP.

If you want to go back, 7 is probably the best option. None of the headaches from 8..x but more advanced features than XP (can you say abiltiy to swap users without login out - something that would be a Godsend in retail environment that I occasional work it where it takes 3 - 5mins to open up the dam POS software)

 

[Santaman]

Some stuff just doesn't work on anything beyond XP, I have computers running everything from DOS 5.0 Win 3.xx, 95, 98 SE, Win2K and so on, I have had occasions where I had to run something and it would not work on 8.1 or 7 so I had to resort to using a XP machine, the last one I used was a fully patched machine which now is stored in parts so not accesible, I have another old rig that is perfect to run XP on however, patching up that thing would be quite a hassle, with that service pack it should be done in one go.

As for the nostalgia bit, at first I hated XP, but after they killed off Win2K I had to switch and over time I got to like it, used it well into the 7 era on a LOT of machines, most of them can run 7 but slower than they run XP, most of them are on Linux but I want to have a few XP machines around.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I don't know if this is still possible here in Australia but I remember when I was with Optus you used to be able to send a text message from your PC to your mobile phone using just a standard email program. I don't know if they still support that now here, but anyone tried this sort of thing?

 

[Shatinator]

Hey .. whom here has experience with Chromebooks? I recently replaced my computer after a unplanned execution via Window 10. I have slowly learned how to get a reasonably satisfactory experience out of Chrome OS.

But a recent update has my account sign on to Yahoo mail looping the sign on page. I would enter user and pass and it would come back to enter user info again. Interestingly, my companion who has a similar chromebook as well as a Dell standard laptop shows no issues when I try to log on to this account.

I have tried to research this, but "problems logging on to Yahoo" is a very lengthy inquiry ..

Technical: My chromebook is Acer Chromebook 15 running Version 65.0.3325.184 (Official Build) (64-bit).

Any clues?

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Could try clearing all your cookies and your cache..

Aren't Chromebooks just for web browsing so no actual operating system to do stuff offline?

Anyway I'd suggest clearing your browser cache and cookies.