Hooptedoodle #86 – The World Is Getting Faster

This is not a rant. I state this right here, up front, so that I can refer back to it if I forget.

A gentleman on the radio this morning was waxing positive about how technology has speeded everything up, and how much better our lives are as a result. He may be correct. If he was on the radio, then it’s bound to be true, isn’t it?

I have expressed concerns here before about the risks to mental health and society if the entire population has too much information, most of it distorted by marketing and vested interests, too little imagination and judgement to make use of that information, and a compulsion to multitask between trivial, inconsequential, purely transactional exchanges. That was beginning to sound a bit rantish, so I’ll stop that paragraph.

The world according to my desktop is not getting faster. It is continuing to slow down. As I have mentioned before, I live out in the countryside, and my broadband is slow. This means that most of the cyber world is now specifically designed not to work properly for people like me. The charming little lady illustrated here is someone I see a great deal of. Since my internet provider is BT (British Telecom), and since they are sort of poor relations within the Yahoo edifice, I am unable to open any page in my email service until I have been provided with an advert for an American charity – they even have 800 toll-free numbers, which of course are meaningless outside the US. I can’t switch this feature off, and the ads take on average about 22.46 seconds a time to retrieve from some remote server. Every single mail item, every index page – everything – has to wait for an ad which I’ve seen before and is of no relevance. You can see that would begin to grate after a while.

As I type my mail, the browser is constantly jamming the buffer, trying to check what I am saying, so that it can target advertising at me which is relevant to what I’m writing about. I constantly have to retype bits where it got stuck, or where it dropped characters while it was distracted. I’ve started using WordPad to type my bigger mails, and pasting them into the browser – I hope the text interpreter gets very serious indigestion as a result of not being able to chew its food properly.

As I type anything into the input field for a search engine, the poor thing has a brave attempt to predict what I’m going to type, but always gets it wrong, since the time taken to realise that I am typing in the search field and call HQ results in its losing the 2^nd to 5^th characters – so its predictions are not worth the effort. Not helpful.

Well, I’m fighting back. We realised that, despite everything, my wife’s new laptop works much faster than my desktop does when it’s online, so we deduce that more modern designs cope better with all this friction and superfluous junk. I shall buy a new desktop machine next week, and set about the (estimated) 3 month project of transferring software and documents from the old one. I shall, however, keep the old computer – it is still of a high spec, although it is coming up for 7 years old now, and the processor and video components are fast and efficient, if left to themselves and not constantly interrupted.

I intend to strip back the old machine – remove Internet access, take off the virus checker – XP will no longer be supported very soon so a static OS should be OK. I shall remove everything I don’t need to be on it. Goodbye Google Toolbar. Goodbye RealPlayer. Goodbye DropBox. Goodbye Spotify. I shall use it for typing, and utility jobs like writing CDs, graphic and photographic work and desktop publishing. When I need to move files between the machines, I shall use USB memory sticks. The computers will share a printer, but it will be hard-wired so that there is no need for WiFi.

I can sense the beginnings of a smile playing around the corners of my mouth. With luck, my future sightings of the little Unicef girl will be instantaneous, since my new computer will be designed to cope with her as part of the mail service.

The broadband will still be slow, though.

Maybe it won’t work any better.

Hmmm. 

Hooptedoodle #54 - Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead

I have, in the past, made the occasional utterance about time lost to the antivirus software from McAfee which I pay for as part of my agreement with my Internet Service Provider.

Things have got so bad recently that I started having a look at a few of the support discussion threads for McAfee, and it seems that - though the originators swear it is now fixed - things went pear-shaped after an upgrade last September. All over the known world, McAfee's customers are becoming more and more stressed. At the start of this week, it took eight minutes for me to open a Word document which I had typed up and saved the previous day - McAfee was checking it. At various times in the day, even when I am not online, the desktop computer's fan has been switching on and - there it is - McAfee is suddenly using 90% of available CPU. No-one knows why, not even McAfee. On Tuesday we had a minor family problem and I had to find some things out and get stuff arranged quickly - no go. McAfee wouldn't let me do anything. It was busy.

The final straw was when I found a suggestion from a member of a support team on one of the discussion threads, which suggested that the person writing in with the problem should think about buying a more powerful computer, so they could live with the demands of their AV software.

As Descartes used to say at breakfast, "Un oeuf is enough". I am, as it happens, planning to upgrade my desktop machine in a month or two, but it certainly isn't going to be because McAfee forces me to do so. So I have uninstalled McAfee - it didn't go willingly, but it is gone. I am now paying for a licence which I am not using, but to hell with it. I have installed Microsoft Security Essentials, which is free, and which appears to work nicely and quietly in the background without drama. It did a full system scan yesterday in a little over 2 hours, which compares favourably with McAfee's recent record of 8 hours. When the new machine comes, I intend to put McA back in place, but I will remember that there is an alternative if I need it. In the meantime, I can get on with things and smile a little smug smile to myself.

There is a description of computer malware on one of the support sites I was reading, and part of it says:

"A virus's primary function is to take control of the computer's operating system and deny user access to communications and application software"

Seems strangely familiar - normally you don't have to pay for a licence for it, though. All together, now, please join in...

FaceBook - Lifestyle Concept

I was amused by this, a portrayal of FaceBook-style behaviour out of context. By the way, I had a cup of coffee an hour ago, and it wasn't great.

Hooptedoodle #42 - Working Definition of a Crock

The plan for this evening is to get on with assembling some more siege guns, while listening to the Wolves vs Liverpool football match. Because of the very strange contractual arrangements which exist in England for the broadcasting of football, the only way I can achieve this tonight is to take my little netbook computer through to the living room, set it up next to my workdesk and listen to the live audio commentary provided by Liverpool FC's own website. I have my earphones ready, so as not to disturb my lady wife's viewing of more mainstream TV entertainment. Neat plan, eh?

Only in theory. My netbook is a humble little thing, and it only gets used a couple of times a month, which means that, when it gets switched on, the first thing that happens is that a fortnight's backlog of Windows updates and McAfee antivirus updates and Adobe updates and Java upgrades all get jammed in the revolving door. Given the sparse broadband service we get here, this is all enough to prevent anything sensible being available online for quite a long time - sometimes longer than the battery capacity of the computer. Yes, yes - you are right - I should have set everything up an hour or two earlier, but - you know what? - in this age of supposed digital convenience it's kind of infuriating that I should have to do that. Anyway, I attempt to get the commentary for the game, and wait a very, very long time. A quick squint at Windows Task Manager shows me that Internet Explorer is getting no processor time at all, because it's behind McAfee in the bloody queue - a situation which persists for another 10 minutes, at which point I shut the stupid thing down.

Death by security. Muttering gently, I give up on the siege guns for tonight, and retire to the trusty desktop computer in my office to listen to the match online. I wonder, in my unfocused way, what kind of a cataclysmic virus attack would be required to waste more time and cause more annoyance in total than McAfee does, drip by drip, every single day. Yes, I have to be grateful that my internet service provider gives me free use of McAfee's wonderful product, but sometimes it's hard to remember what a blessing this is. The one bright note is that at least I don't have Norton any more.

Like riding a bicycle through porridge.

SPAM - everyone's favourite

Today I have removed the MSFoy email address from my Blogger profile, simply because the amount of spam is getting to be a problem. This is a shame, because I probably get more contacts through email than via the Comments facility.

I've been getting increasing numbers of emails from what appear to be genuine companies, saying how much they admire my blog (well, of course) and would I kindly put a permanent free advert for their products on the blog. First one was from a model shop, which sort of makes some sense, but since then I've had all sorts of rubbish - clothes shops, the inevitable viagra suppliers, a fast food chain (in the USA), even a firm of ambulance-chasing lawyers. It is obvious from the dumb wording of the emails that these things are computer generated. I've had about a dozen of them in the last week, and that is more than enough.

I don't do advertising on the blog, and if I did it would be for friends, or for money (or both!). If someone uses a robot to email me requesting a link, I'm fairly confident that hitting any link of theirs will get you into some referencing or portal scam site.

Speaking of which, if anyone browsing their Blogger stats notices they have hits from a URL domar.ru, do not click on it to see who/what it is, and do not ever enter this URL into your browser. If you do, you get onto a website for a referencing scam (which appears to be based in Texas), and some creep will tell you that he makes $600,000 a month doing nothing at all, and if you contact him you can make this kind of money and be a creep too. If you click on "No Thanks" you get a message which says "But you are missing the chance of a fortune" or similar, and you may then have to switch off the computer to get away from that screen, and get SpyBot fired up as soon as possible to get rid of the smell.

If you have had domar.ru featuring in your Traffic Sources, it doesn't mean that some unspeakable life form has been looking at your blog and your fave links and the pictures of your kids etc - domar.ru has just hacked into Google's Blogger stats server, and produced spurious hit records exactly so that you will click on it to see who it is.

Back to the email situation - if for any reason anyone does wish to contact MSFoy without publishing a formal Comment, just send a Comment which includes a note that you don't want it published, and include your email address if you want me to get back to you. I'm sorry this is necessary, and it will mean that only people with valid Google accounts can make contact, but on the other hand it probably means that I won't hear from the profane Chuck or the life-threatening foxhole95 again.

In many ways, the world isn't really ready for civilisation yet, I'm afraid.

Antisocial Networking Sites - Moderate or Die

I like it - Nihilist approach to Social Networking - would this be more sustainable in the long term than what we have at present?

Another rant - probably a continuation of the same old rant. I guess I must feel strongly about it. Yesterday, someone passed me a link to a discussion thread on an English football (that's soccer) fan site. I am aware of what goes on in these cess-pits, but between visits I tend to forget how bad it is.

There are inspired worthies around who see merit in the Internet's role as a means of letting popular culture and mass opinion be seen and have their due effect. I have some very bad news for these people - whatever else it might be, the Internet is also a magnet for the uneducated, the antisocial and the peculiar, not to mention those who are not distracted by having something better to do. The haters and the abusers thrive in there, and the more extreme their behaviour gets, the more they frighten away the more normal folk who might have something worth saying, and who might balance things up a bit. Homophobia, racism, filth - these sites can be upsetting, evil places to visit - the prevailing atmosphere is hatred, pure and simple.

As a trivial, personal example, I cannot let my elderly mother or my son look at otherwise worthwhile items on YouTube or even Yahoo News because some zero-wits will have daubed obscenity all over them. Moron Rule is here to stay, it seems. I read a complaint from someone recently on some BBC forum or other that they were scared to let their children use the Internet freely, not because they might get coached or politically corrupted by some extremist site (or whatever the Daily Mail would claim), but because perfectly ordinary, valuable resources were defaced and spoilt by mass mindlessness. This in itself was hardly revolutionary, but I was appalled to see that one of the responses was from someone making the point that it was not up to a parent to censor what their children should see - instead the parent should ensure that their children were brought up to appreciate the damaging role which censorship has played throughout history. I realise that everyone is entitled to their opinion (are they? - isn't it also true that some people aren't fit to plead?), but do they actually have to tell us what it is? Personally, I would have given this person a kick up the backside, but that almost certainly offends against some human right or other.

All the above is a rather tired subject for debate in the pub. So what is the problem? - is there a graffitti instinct in people? Given anonymity, do people (and I mean most people) feel obliged to express themselves in extreme, provocative terms? Are they trying to present themselves as someone they admire, or aspire to be? As a rule of thumb, I reckon that if you say something anonymously which you would not say in a room full of the people you are addressing, then you should probably think carefully about what you are doing. In fact, the situation on discussion sites may be slightly worse than strict anonymity, since the contributors are able to cultivate some notoriety in their assumed identity. No need to look anyone in the eyes - no comeback - just let rip.

As ever, I am intrigued, somewhat offended, but have no real answers. However, there is a discernible paradox here. The sites which explain that the views expressed are those of their members, and do not represent the views of the site provider, are very happy to pocket the advertising revenue generated by site hits, yet they wish to duck any associated accountability.

Not good enough. Not nearly good enough.

Though the idea is attractive, the concept of having some defined standards and some kind of enforcer of Public Decency is impracticable - laughably so - the things that offend me probably won't offend you, and vice versa - it's far too subjective to make into a legal issue. However, there are a great many comments on public sites which really do offend against established law - racism being one of the more obvious. If some anonymous excrescence puts an illegal remark on a forum, then the forum should take full responsibility for moderation - a disclaimer is not sufficient. The contributors are invariably registered members of the site, so they are known to the site providers. If I rent the back room of the pub, and invite a bunch of crackpots in to have an unruly meeting, I would expect to be answerable if things got out of hand, or we offended or hurt someone. In my own interests, I might take it upon myself to keep my members in check, or I might expect to have the facility closed down. It's a no-brainer.

Here's my tuppence-worth - an idea which appeals to me: if a forum or message site is not properly moderated, then any illegal or offensive views expressed should be clearly the responsibility of the site provider, who should be directly accountable. If they cannot afford the work of moderation, yet cannot tolerate the risk of someone saying something illegal, then they should close the site. That should get rid of a few. OK, we might lose some things that we would rather have preserved, but something has to give - the situation we have is intolerable, and I don't think it can go on. A good many things, after all, are not worth saying - the fact that it would offend your grannie does not make it clever or apposite, however much it might amuse the lads.

Moderate or die.

Hooptedoodle #33 – OMG, Austria's just the same

Preamble: Even I am beginning to realize that yet another rant on the subject of smart phones is getting preciously close to boring. What follows is primarily intended to be humorous, and – naturally – I hope that any readers will take it in good spirit. A few preliminary notes may help set the context here.

(1) However it may appear, I am not opposed to Apple, or their very impressive products, nor the people who buy and use them. I am, in truth, something of a technology fan myself. If you have an iPhone and find it useful for making telephone calls, sending messages, taking pictures and entertaining yourself then that is excellent. My problem is the addictive, life-smothering hold which the device has over the susceptible young.

(2) My concerns are real and well-intentioned; friends and former associates of mine, seeking to recruit good quality school leavers in Britain, have growing concerns about the ability of supposedly bright kids to spell, write a sentence, actually (like) speak to people, even to form relationships in the shadow of the uncontrollable growth of communication technology.

(3) Doctors, social workers and educators are confronted by new kinds of nervous and mental disorders in the young which may be attributed to excessive exposure to the Internet, video games and the smart phone.

(4) At a personal level, I am a bit saddened, spending my vacation in an unfamiliar country, to observe that the situation looks to be similar here.

(5) I have difficulty imagining someone writing in to claim that he/she is obsessed with a shiny electronic device which they carry around in their pocket, and thus that they are wounded by my perceived hostility. Since I am clearly a madman, given to spasms of ridiculous intemperance, it seems unlikely that anyone is going to be sufficiently bothered by my views to take offence (though, of course, there may be some helpful souls who just cannot help themselves from putting me straight).

Enough with the preamble, already – let’s get on with the rant.

On my train journey back from Innsbruck the other day, a young man sat opposite me for about 8 minutes or so, as the train took him from one suburban station to the next. From his clothing, I guess he was a plasterer, possibly a bricklayer - a working man, anyway, and he was going home from work. Good for him. During the 8 minutes (no, I was not staring) he listened to music on his iPhone, and looked - every 15 seconds or so, I would estimate - to see if he had any messages on this same device. Then he was gone, and I was left to wonder idly at the extent to which the iPhone and its close equivalents have altered the lives of a complete generation across all nations. Pavlov's dogs had nothing on this.

Yesterday I was in the town of Landeck for a few hours. At the bus station, there was a group of completely decent teenage girls, chatting, emitting forced laughter, like teenage girls throughout Europe, chewing gum and - inescapably - constantly checking their iPhones for incoming text.

Apple is now the biggest company on the planet. A vast, sad, worldwide cohort of young people who believe themselves to be some kind of technology-enabled quantum leap for Evolution spend a depressing amount of their time on non-communication. I realise that it is a stupid generalisation to dismiss all messages passed on smart phones as dross, but I strongly suspect that the meaningful stuff is completely swamped by the amount of subtransactional excrement about what Tracy said Fiona said about Emma's boyfriend, and what a bitch she is anyway. Technology my backside.

My good, if profane, friend Mr Crick tells me that recently he read with surprise that some magazine or other had conducted a survey of iPhone users to learn what was their favourite position for sex. He says he deliberately did not check the results, since it might have damaged his (totally unreasonable) belief that, in general, iPhone users prefer their sex unaccompanied. [Anyone who is offended by this should have read Mr Crick’s original version.]

Apple now owns all our souls because advertising and mass idiocy have convinced vast numbers of kids that they are compelled to belong to something trendy. I have no doubt that in a year or so I too will have such a device, and probably I shall depend upon it. If it happens, it will be because it is no longer possible to park your car, use internet banking or book cinema tickets if you don't have one. I am also confident that my spelling, word power and imagination will have declined dramatically, along with everyone else's.

I wonder what the next big leap will be? What invention will make iPhone dwellers realise that they no longer have total control of the Universe, that they really need to move on to the Next Big Thing? Somehow, I find this article strangely comforting - though the source is the dreaded Daily Wail, a newspaper whose ideological alignment is usually some way from my own.

Maybe it isn't just me, then, though I have to admit that if it's just me and the Daily Wail then I may consider suicide more seriously.

Hooptedoodle #30 - Broadband & Bloodpressure

Not another rant, surely? You betcha. I live in the country, maybe 7 miles from the telephone exchange, maybe 4 miles from the nearest fibre-optic cable. We get (i.e. pay for) a half-meg broadband service, which on the face of it is not so bad, considering everything, and my little publishing enterprise is based very heavily on email and electronic data transfer. The service used to be fine, but, sadly, in effective terms, our broadband here is getting slower. It is slower than it was 5 years ago - much slower. This is not because the cables are rotting, or the technology degrading in some way - it is because of commercial strategies and some astonishingly dumb assumptions made by the service providers and the life-sucking advertising schmucks who cling to their softer parts.

I am only a fringe technician, but I've worked with computers, the internet and general communication issues for enough years to have a good grasp of what goes on. The recent (and continuing) problems with Blogger have been a reminder of the situation - I have no wish to pick on Google as a prime baddie here, they are only one among many, but anyone who has a high profile is sort of inviting a whack on the head, so let's pick on Google for a start.

Some of our local difficulties seem to come from the fact that ISPs and website designers assume everyone has fast broadband, and so jam up the bandwidth with adverts and unnecessary ornamentation - cute videos and suchlike - but also we appear to have problems caused by what seems to me like unnecessary interactivity. Example - when using Google search, I start entering a search string, and by the time I've typed in 4 characters it has already started listing search results on what I've typed so far. The bad thing about this is that it has missed 2 of the characters I typed because the computer's attention was distracted, waiting for buffered responses from elsewhere. I don't need the stupid thing to predict what I'm going to ask for, it isn't clever or helpful - well, it's probably clever, but mostly it's just an irritant.

Similar thing using Google's email service (which I do all the time for my publishing stuff) - I keep having to retype missed characters and the typing falls behind with buffering, because the idiot program is checking what I've typed to see if it can identify, and supply, an unsolicited ad for "sunshine holidays in Prestonpans" or similar based on the words it finds there - this seems to be a continuous monitoring, requiring a hefty dialogue with the ISP's server which causes delay and screws everything up. Google again: Blogger seems to provide continuous update of pages, which is not necessary at all, and just causes problems and delay (and my CPU fan to come on!) if the traffic rates are too slow to cope with this. If a blog page is open as a background tab on the browser, it appears to hold things up in the foreground while Blogger searches for updates. Not necessary. Dumb.

It's not just Google, of course, the same symptoms are found elsewhere - I have to check all typed input when the Internet is running slow, since stuff goes missing. I was quite happy in the days when you had to hit F5 to get a page refresh - basically, if I want an advert for perfume to be updated continuously I'll ask for it - most things in life, apart from the occasional sports commentary or streaming material, don't need to be in real time (or failed real time, which is what we get). I'm currently in discussion with my friendly techie internet expert to see if there is some option setting on the browser which amounts to "only update the bloody page when I ask for it", and some setting for Google Search which means "don't interrupt me with stupid guesses, it's rude - I'll hit Enter when I'm finished".

It's a joke, at best. YouTube, and news video clips, have become unuseable here because the overhead generated by the advertising material that comes with them is getting in the way. At times such as my main monthly publishing week, the response speed causes real stress. My ISP's email browser does not help. If I decide that I don't want some particular new window that the browser has just opened for me, and I try to get rid of it, I have to wait until it has finished downloading all 17 graphic ads (many of them movies) which it has been showing me all week, before it will pay attention to my request to close the window.

I guess that, in general, broadband is getting faster and better and is a real boon to us all, but - inevitably - greed is jamming things up. The service providers and the marketing weasels are filling the available bandwidth with crud which makes the received service slower and slower. Some days it's easier and quicker to phone somebody than to try and send an email, and that cannot be right. I've tried switching off the ads through my ISP's provided filter settings (Customer Preferences - hah!), but that is a scam - you have to identify each actual ad you want to suppress, and there are myriads of them.

If you email someone today, mention the word "Mississippi" at some point. If the recipient gets a little ad on his/her mail browser advertising holidays in New Orleans, then you have just measured the level of stupidity the world has reached - and people are making money out of this inconvenience.

Here's an open message to ISPs, politicians, providers of phone lines, cable companies, Google and anyone else involved. Some of us do not have the infrastructure to support fast broadband - it isn't there (I'm not going too quickly here, am I?). Ironically, people in remote locations are among those who rely most on communication technology, but I realise this is a matter of money, so fair enough. As the available bandwidth gets clogged with more and more penny-generating irrelevances, the Internet is grinding to a halt for those whose broadband connection only has the capacity to cope with what they actually want. THE SERVICE IS GETTING WORSE - WAKE UP.