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Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view
One of the banks we use brought in a very complicated online security system a year or so ago. They sent us what looks like a little number pad with the left and right bottom buttons being yellow and green respectively. There's a tiny screen. When you go to the bank's site now, you have to first put in your code number - one we've had for a few years already. This takes you to a screen where you're required to put in the answer to a question only you should know, and having done that you then go to the bottom of the screen. Here you have to put in yet another number, this one given to you by the little number pad. It's a different number every time you use it. You press down the green key, put in your four digit pin number, and then receive a six-figure number which you transfer onto the computer screen. Finally you get into your account...if you haven't done something stupid in the process.
The potential for this little number pad to get lost or damaged seems considerable to me. So far we've been fortunate that it's stayed in the same place in my computer drawer, but I can see the day coming when I go to find it and someone's decided it's a worthless piece of junk because it doesn't do anything like a calculator should, and has tossed it out.
While I appreciate the security measures, I must say that this particular process seems extreme. Three numbers and an answer are required. My other bank requires a username and code, which I can put in via my RoboForm program. And then you have to put in two letters out of an answer to one of three questions: when I think about this, it's also rather extreme, though it's nowhere near as fiddly to do as the measures required by the first bank.
The other problem with the first bank's measures is that if you're accessing your bank info from your phone or iPad, then it's very possible you won't have the little number pad device with you. And that makes it impossible to get into your account. The second bank has an app for accessing the account on iPhones and iPads, but the security measure on that is surprisingly weak compared to their online version.
It seems that PayPal is sick to death of passwords and security words and numbers and is heading in the direction of no such things being needed at all. Quite what they're going to replace them with isn't yet quite so clear. They have some possibilities in mind - fingerprints or eye scans - neither of which grab me as essentially more secure (I mean, we've all seen Minority Report, haven't we?)
I'm sure someone can come up with a better approach than either straight passwords, numbers or the daunting security measures these two banks use. We need simplification rather than complexity when we're trying to access information that's ours in the first place. PayPal has started the conversation, certainly, but I'm not sure that they have the means to complete it as yet.
Backing up your computer has become a much bigger issue than it was in the past. I can remember a time when we backed up nothing (way back in our Amiga days), and it never seemed to matter. Computers didn't crash the way they're prone to these days (often from being overloaded with stuff, or from having endless updates confusing various programmes), and there weren't hackers around doing nasty things to private computers. The only thing was that we discovered, after we'd onsold the Amiga, that there was stuff we no longer had access to. One important story I'd written went into oblivion as a result. But you can live with the loss of one short story.
It's strange to hear that people still don't back up material in any consistent way. Backing it up to your own computer is a process that's dead in the water, as an editor acquaintance who had his lap-top stolen recently discovered. And not backing files up at all is extraordinary. Hard drives have a habit of dying when you least expect it, as an author found when his hard drive became corrupted and his entire novel, which was due at the publisher's within days, vanished. He was fortunate that an able technician managed to find the files in the corrupted hard drive. Otherwise he would have been starting from scratch.
I'm not as obsessive about backing up as the writer of the ezine, The Passive Voice is - he and his wife back up everything continually to about a half a dozen different places, and sync things left, right and centre. But I'm certainly more conscious of it than in the past. These days I use JustCloud as my offline, cloud backup system. Overall they've been very satisfactory, although once or twice I've noticed that some particular file just refuses to back up in the normal daily run. That may be an issue with my computer rather than JustCloud. We also have at least two external hard-drives that we back up to fairly regularly, though certianly not as regularly as the Passive Guy does.
And I use Evernote to keep hold of the hundreds (actually, thousands) of articles, notes, pictures and other such that I once would have put on the computer itself. Evernote is superb, very searchable, syncs every few minutes or so, and keeps everything off my computer as well as on, so I don't have a problem with worrying about whether I'll lose all those things I've saved...for some rainy day.
So there are ways to avoid losing your entire month's edits of your magazine, or your entire novel (or even your long-lost story). Whatever you do, don't rely on fate to keep you safe from loss of precious files!
I used to use Google Reader a lot at my last job, where I was required to find material to pass onto various readers of our own blog. The Reader was integrated with Outlook in some way, which meant I didn't have to go to Google Reader at all, but could just get emails sent to me telling me what was going on. Anything I was interested in I could link through to from Outlook.
When I retired, I stopped using the Reader approach, because I didn't need to chase up the material anymore, and because I just didn't have time to spend the day catching up on everything that came through. These days I get most updates of information via Twitter, or, less often, from Facebook.
And plainly I'm not alone in gradually abandoning Google Reader, since Google has decided to close the system down from the 1st of July this year. Of course there will be a lot of people who still use it, and there will be a lot of backlash, but it's unlikely that Google will be deterred: if they feel that the thing isn't paying its way then it will definitely close. They're nothing if not pragmatic, and they've even ditched ideas that had a good deal less time to get up and running than the Reader, which began back in 2005. Remember that funny all-in-one browser idea they proposed a while back? It barely got off the ground, even though there was some enthusiasm for it initially. It had such a short life span I can't even remember its name anymore.
My mother played cricket. She was even in the provincial women's cricket team way back in the thirties. I don't play cricket. My try-out with the school team resulted in hitting nothing and being sent home again. Very disheartening at the time.
On the other hand, I've never been hit by a cricket ball (unlike the poor English spectator who got hit on the head yesterday when Rutherfod hit a six. I've never had a cricket ball leap up and nobble me in the groin, nor have I ever had cramp after striking a ball - as Mark Richardson did once when playing. It's on You Tube
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Everybody's had that experience when using the predictive text on a mobile phone where you send off a message and realise straight afterwards that it has a very wrong word in it. My two sons used to send each other texts done predictively: they always left whatever the phone suggested as the correct word. Then the recipient had to guess what the sender had intended to say...
I just read about an Andoid app called SwiftKey Keyboard which is so good at guessing what you intend to write that it almost invariably gets the message correct the first time
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You may have been a recipient of one of those emails in which a friend of yours writes, 'Help, I'm in London/New York/Timbuktu and my wallet's been stolen, and I have to pay some bills. Send me money please, and quickly.'
And no doubt, you've emailed the person in question and said, 'What? Didn't I see you down the street just the other day? When did you go to London/New York/Timbukt?' And they reply: 'What? What made you think I was in London/New York/Timbuktu?' and so the muddle is sorted out and you both realise the email accounts been hacked and they have to do some reshuffling of passwords or whatever
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One of my daughters is doing her Commerce degree (majoring in Accounting) almost completely on campus (a few quizzes are done online). Another daughter is doing all of her Marketing degree by distance. I've done two University papers in recent years, both of them by distance - even though the University is only ten minutes drive away - and only one of them required me to actually appear on campus. Even then it was only on four occasions, for discussions by phone with other students (I could in fact have done this at home, too, as many of the students did).
Distance learning with Universities has become a norm, with thousands of students preferring to do much of their work this way
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Over the last couple of weeks I've had more reason to listen to books than read them. On one occasion we got through what must have been an abridged version of My Cousin Rachel while doing a long road trip, and this week, laid low with a heavy cold, I've been listening to Ian Rankin's The Naming of the Dead.
Which kind of reminded me that back in August I'd come came across an article in the English paper, The Guardian, on Bardowl, which is an app that allows you to download and listen to a range of books mostly in the self-help, business, motivational range. No fiction at this point, however, which shows which market they're aiming at
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In a strange story from Italy, six scientists and a government official have been sentenced to six years in prison for issuing falsely reassuring statements ahead of a deadly 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila. One of the defendants said: "I thought I would have been acquitted. I still don't understand what I was convicted of."
There are some concerns now that scientists might become wary of predicting anything in the future if it's going to mean they could be wrong, and then convicted for being wrong. But it also means, perhaps, that they'll be more concerned to get their facts right
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Well, that is a question. Once again I've neglected this poor blog while working on others and once again Orble is telling me that other people will take it over if I don't look after it. Which I guess is fair enough; if you have a pet and don't look after it, better than someone who cares about it does.
But what happens to all the posts that I have put on here over the years. I presume they'll just sit in the great sinkhole that is the Internet until one day it collapses like a dark star into a black hole. By which time I probably won't care
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347 Posts dating from January 2007
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