This is as much to keep the link handy for the next time someone asks as anything else but moneysavingexpert has an article on free anti-virus and anti-spyware software, and firewalls.
Category Archives: geek
Preserve public spaces on the net
“The services we are all using and increasingly dependent on, like Flickr and YouTube and FaceBook, are not there to make our lives better or enhance the quality of public participation. They are there to make money for their founders and owners.
Just as the purpose of commercial television is not to make good TV programmes but simply to deliver an aggregated audience to advertisers, so the real point of social networks is not to transform our ways of life but to find new contexts within which we can be exposed to approved commercial messages.
…
However, in the process of privatisation we have given up an important third space, somewhere between the university network and YouTube, a space which we can all use equally and which is dedicated to the public good.
We have lost the online equivalent of parks and roads and shopping streets, where the limits on what we can reasonably say and do are set by society as a whole and not by the commercial interests of one company.” BBC
Google Maps is showing New Orleans as it was before Hurricane Katrina, not as it is now. Much weirdness.
Wi-fi buses drive rural web use
“Buses equipped with wi-fi are being used to deliver web content to remote rural villages in the developing world.
In rural India and parts of Rwanda, Cambodia and Paraguay, the vehicles offer web content to computers with no internet connection.”
“Computer giant Dell will start to sell PCs preinstalled with open source Linux operating systems, the firm has said.
…
Dell has not released details of which versions of Linux it will use or which computers it will run on, but promised an update in the coming weeks.
…
Big business and governments, particularly in the developing world, are also starting to exploit the flexibility of open source code.
The UK Cabinet Office recently evaluated the operating system and approved it as a viable alternative to proprietary systems.” BBC
I was talking with a workmate about our first computers, and admittedly my experience was different because Dad brought home an old machine from work (a CP/M?) with a magazine of code that you typed in to make games, but generally it was just a conversation about computers… until she said, “wow! that sounds like the 80s” as if we were talking about the 1940s. It was the 80s but I’ve never before felt like it was so long ago.
Still, it’s made me laugh for half an hour so it’s not that bad.
Flickr sucks a bit now
A quick geek whinge about the Flickr/Yahoo! linked login thing. I use Flickr a lot less these days because of it, which is a shame.
Before, I would stay logged into Flickr all the time, which was lovely because I could see all my and my friends private photos and leave comments whenever the whim took me. Now I only log in to do specific things, and I log out again afterwards. It’s partly because it’s a pain being stuck with a particularly linked Yahoo! ID whenever I’m active in Flickr, and partly because I don’t see why Yahoo should get my data for free when I paid for a Flickr Pro account.
And the login process is really annoying – there’s a link saying ‘Old skool members, please sign in here’ but it doesn’t work if you’ve linked your Yahoo! account already.
BBC: Privacy bodies have welcomed Google’s decision to anonymise personal data it receives from users’ web searches.
“By anonymising our server logs after 18 to 24 months, we think we’re striking the right balance between two goals: continuing to improve Google’s services for you, while providing more transparency and certainty about our retention practices,” a statement from the search giant said.
It added: “Unless we’re legally required to retain log data for longer, we will anonymise our server logs after a limited period of time.”