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Yup, and thanks again for nudging me to ditch my AV years ago. I remember I had to pry Avast off my system because it refused to uninstall properly even using their tool. Had to manually delete all Avast registry entries, delete files manually etc… that was, what, like three years ago now? No problems.
They really don’t do anything. Using browser extensions (uBlock, uMatrix), a host file or DNS server to blacklist questionable sites, not clicking on weird stuff in emails and just not being silly about what you download and install on your system mitigates most of the risk really. It is better to prevent things from getting in in the first place. Couldn’t be happier. I occasionally run a MWB scan and nothing ever turns up. Defender never finds anything, either. Nothing gets in. I am very satisfied with my security setup which will soon include a Pi Hole to replace my current DNS blacklisting solution.
All my AV ever did was get in my way and annoy me. Good riddance. Of course, people should do whatever they feel is right for them, but this idea that you “need” an AV is bogus. I am reminded of a quote I once heard: “Nonsense is still nonsense even when spoken by world-famous scientists” .. the same holds true for tech experts that insist you need an AV. They are wrong, I prove it every single day now for three years running.
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Actually, you can get a Windows XP VM for free using completely legal means and you don’t even need a license key.
If you download the Windows XP Mode installer from the MS website, you can find a VM in there. Open the exe in 7-Zip, go into the “sources” folder and double-click “xpm” to extract it. In there, you’ll find a file with the name “VirtualXPVHD” which is your VM. Simply change the filename to VirtualXP.VHD and it immediately turns into a virtual machine which you can load and install into VirtualBox.
This VM has a temporary license of 30 days, so once you get it installed and working with any programs you want on there, take a snapshot and just reload the snapshot when the trial runs out for a new trial which you should be able to do indefinitely. Of course, this should not be used to store data in long term since you’d just lose it all when you refreshed the snapshot when the trial runs out.
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A few examples of highly regarded VPN’s outside of those jurisdictions:
- CyberghostVPN (Romania)
- ProtonVPN (Switzerland)
- NordVPN (Panama)
- ExpressVPN (Virgin Islands)
You are still right, though. It does leave a lot of the world out, but it’s disturbing that so much of the world has to be excluded in order to have any hope of staying out of the 14 eyes line of sight. Quite depressing really.
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The thing about VPN’s is that it’s kind of important what country the VPN is operated out of. What is known as the “Five Eyes” consist of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. There is an intelligence sharing agreement between these five countries, so if any of them gain access to your personal data, you can be sure they will share it with the others.
Then, there are two other international alliances (Nine Eyes: Five Eyes + Denmark, France, Holland and Norway / Fourteen Eyes: Nine Eyes + Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Spain and Italy) which also share your data. Japan, Israel, South Korea and Singapore could also be involved, but not confirmed.
Therefore, a VPN based in any of those countries is not a good idea for anyone who cares about their online privacy. Of course, there’s always risk no matter what, but the above mentioned countries are involved in global surveillance and share people’s data with each other regularly and Snowden is a big reason why we’re aware of this now. VPN’s based outside of those jurisdictions are better choices for privacy than ones that are in it.
I will certainly keep routers with built-in VPN’s in mind next time I am set to purchase a new modem.
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There are many reasons Pale Moon does not use multiprocessing such as security, resource use and efficiency. It’s gone into in detail here.
FWIW, I didn’t notice any difference in this regard (aside from the occasional stuttering which was easily fixed) in any kind of general way when I switched from Chrome/Chromium to PM. If I scroll now, it’s very responsive and smooth. Of course, I can understand something little like that driving you crazy as the same thing happens to me sometimes as well with other stuff.
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FWIW, I don’t get much of the stuttering or “jankiness” when scrolling in Pale Moon and I’ve been using it for like two years now as a daily driver. I do recall times in the past when something like that would occasionally pop up if I’ve had it open for a very long time (as in weeks), but simply restarting it cleared the issue up.
However, I can’t remember the last time that occurred. I never got to trying Waterfox because I was pleased with Pale Moon enough that I never felt the urge to, but I have heard mostly good things about it.
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Dark mode does relieve eyestrain for plenty of people, though. I’ve actually seen this particular feature being asked for by users in several programs (Facebook Messenger for Desktop, Viber etc..) and there are several browser skins that have darker themes. It makes my eyes hurt looking at white backgrounds at night (if I’m chatting especially, Dark mode is much easier on the eyes) when I’m already tired and it’s terrible for the eyes to stare at a bright white screen (computer monitor, cell phone, TV) in a dark room because it causes eye strain. In those cases, it’s definitely better to lower brightness levels of whatever you’re looking at. It’s even worse if you’re wearing minus lenses to look at things six inches in front of your face.
There is no objective answer to this. Dark mode reduces eye strain for some and not for others. I am all for giving people the option to choose which they want and against enforcing either one as an unchangeable feature.
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just the opposite, they are lined and readily available. You are not getting ALL posts from all threads in a temporally linear presentation just from the thread yo are viewing, or am I getting this totally wrong??
They are lined up out-of-order and perhaps on another page. It’s not all posts from all threads, just this thread. I would rather your reply to my post be right underneath my post in the conversation they are a part of as opposed to being somewhere else. That is linear, having them all out of order isn’t. I do use other forums without nesting and it works for those sites while others do have nesting.
A site like Youtube, for example, without nested replies would be impossible to follow a conversation. I think Disqus uses nesting as well as many other sites I view or participate in. I find nesting to be easier to follow separate conversations in a sea of conversations. Never does anyone have to ask “who are you replying to?” or is anyone required to quote because the posts appear right below the one that is being replied to. It’s just easier.
So, I can’t really relate to people who say it’s so hard. If scrolling is uncomfortable, just use the arrow keys or the page down/up keys. Nesting just works better overall for this site IMO just like it does for many others. More traditional message boards (not blogs) work better without nesting while sites like this (and YT) are much better with it. I don’t think I would like nesting on a traditional message board such as a support board for a piece of software or a sports-related message forum.
I’m not sure why that is exactly. Maybe it’s because topics discussed here tends to spawn diverse conversations that branch off into multiple different conversations unrelated to each other within the same discussion whereas on a message board, that doesn’t seem to happen as often making nesting unnecessary. The conversations there flow better naturally and tend to be shorter lived with a focus that is more narrow and specific whereas here, you’ve got discussions going in all sorts of different directions and keeping them grouped together makes them much easier to follow.
Getting the whole conversation right there to read one after the other without having to wade through messages from unrelated conversations you’re not interested in is a much easier experience on a site like this one. It can’t really be helped since many topics discussed here have tendrils in other topics which usually get brought up and go off in a different direction. I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all, though. To me, that’s when things tend to get interesting.
*edit: except for this post which appears at the bottom of the page for some reason. Is it because I clicked quote instead of reply? I think quoting someone’s post should have the same effect as hitting reply in that it still appears nested.
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This is one of my biggest issues with removing nesting. Instead of having all the replies to a specific post lined up for you to read one after the other, they are instead scattered throughout a sea of disorganized posts which makes it much harder to follow a linear conversation.
It’s like having five people talk to you all at once and trying to keep track of anything. Perhaps that conversation is the only one you care about, but now you have to wade through a bunch of stuff you’re not interested in searching for the replies you want to see which are now scattered in the sea of disorganization. I just don’t think it works for this particular site.
As far as lost posts, if I am interested in any discussions going on, all I have to remember is what topic it’s in. Maybe I’ll give a Thanks to a post or two in that discussion and just do a Ctrl-F for my name. I can easily read back a few posts if I need to be refreshed since they are all in one place. However, I’ll usually just scroll down through everything looking for “New” tags on recent posts. I much prefer discussions to be all in one place on the page which also means quoting isn’t necessary in order to know who the person is talking to.
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There was a time in the not-so-distant past where I would be excited to see new Windows Updates coming down the chute. I’d install those suckers right away, mostly referring to my XP and prior days, and didn’t have any major problems for a long time. I also wasn’t much of a power user though not a complete amateur, either. Everything I learned about PC’s and Windows, I learned myself just poking around and having to figure out and fix stuff myself. To be fair, having to do that did benefit me a lot as I learned quite a bit over the years.
In the second half of my XP days, I started running into issues with updates and I only ever used Windows Update, so no manual patch installing. I had WU corrupt my Windows Update folder on two occasions, had updates corrupt my MBR on multiple occasions including times where I did a fresh install of XP and was just letting WU do it’s thing as well as produce other mostly minor (but noticeable) issues I had to spend time fixing. All by itself, WU cost me a lot of time trying to fix what it messed up all on it’s own. It turned out to be great when XP reached EOL because I no longer had to deal with this and it was refreshing. It was so refreshing that I was content using XP two and a half years after EOL with no major issues at all.
Then, I get a powerful gaming PC with Windows 7 on it and had become a competent power user. Once again, while I am just letting WU do it’s thing with my new PC, again I start running into errors. WU can’t install updates correctly and something gets corrupted though it wasn’t a show stopper, but I had to spend awhile trying to figure it out and had a very helpful fellow on a W7 message board help me manually undo what was done. Here we go again, right? It was during this time that I discovered this site and became even more knowledgeable because of it.
I was already missing XP and the endless days of use without having to deal with this nonsense from a so-called competent tech giant that used to know what they were doing when it came to patching. I already knew I wasn’t going to reward MS by going to Windows 10 especially after what they pulled with GWX and the direction it was going. However, I continued trying to patch but now SO only, firmly in Group B. I only did that for a few months and then comes the processor blocking patch requiring that I learn to make batch files to install patches using DISM.
Hyseteria built, patching problems were on the increase (and have continued in that direction) and I was really getting annoyed with how far this process had fallen. MS lost all credibility with me and all this scaremongering with every threat that comes out is also annoying. There’s also the whole “sneaking stuff into SO updates” thing which was a concern I was vocal about when I decided Group W was the only safe answer to patching for me. Firing their QA didn’t help either and it seems the crowd-testing strategy isn’t working out too well for them. I’m shocked, SHOCKED, I tell ya!
Just the fact that MS is asking why people aren’t patching tells me that all their talk about “listening to customers” were about as empty as a vegan’s stomach at a steakhouse. If they do listen, they don’t take what they hear seriously enough if at all.
I would remind these at Redmond wondering why people aren’t patching that the April 2017 patches for Windows 7 & 8.1 actually BLOCKS people from updating their PC’s if they have next-gen processors in them which many do. Gee, I wonder why people would stop patching after that especially folks who aren’t knowledgeable tech people? Big mystery there. They block people from applying updates, then wonder aloud why more people aren’t applying recent patches.
To me, it just demonstrates how wide the gap of disconnect is here between Redmond and the typical PC user. It’s not wide enough to know how to trick people into installing Windows 10, though. This patch was a hard push to get people to switch over to that abomination and just another reason why I will NEVER make the jump. It’s insanity, really, that they really have to wonder why the patching climate is what it is now. They’ve created this with their own actions and yet casually play dumb when it comes to knowing how we got here as if they weren’t actually in the room when these decisions were pushed on their customers. I don’t think they were even in the same galaxy because the customers don’t really matter anymore, not really anyway.
My next OS is Linux, but I am very happy to be Group W for over two and a half years continuing on the XP strategy that was so wonderful and uneventful. What do you know, no major problems. I have figured out other ways VIA security layers and regular backups to protect my PC and data and they’ve worked wonderfully. When I use Linux Mint in a VM, I love updating there. Never a problem and doesn’t even require a reboot, so there’s no disruption at all to what I’m doing. Just wonderful. That’s my future, but I really do love Windows 7 so long as I don’t let MS touch it anymore. I don’t trust ’em! These out-loud ramblings from MS showing just how out of touch and full of S they are just solidify the conclusions I’ve come to which are already pretty solid. Thanks, MS. They, IMO, have nowhere to go but down.
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As far as your comments about deciding whether or not to give Linux a try, it made me use a VM for the very first time which was VirtualBox. Much easier than I expected to use and figure out. Linux Mint is really good. Some things took some extra learning, but nothing was difficult to the point of being frustrating. I was able to get browsers installed + addons, WINE up and working with a few programs installed and working fine, several other programs installed (VLC etc..) and customized my desktop pretty nicely without much hassle. I am pretty sure I could get everything running on there including game emulators and recording software without much trouble, but that stuff can’t be tested on a VM and really needs to be on a hard drive of it’s own for that.
In short, I would give it a try. Mint is good.
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* Downloading Youtube videos
FWIW, you can absolutely download YT videos in Linux quite easily. There are two methods:
1. Use the Slimjet (Chromium) browser which has a YT downloader built in to it. It appears as a “Download Video” link under every YT video. Very easy to use and reliable.
2. Download Youtube-DLG and install it. It takes a few steps, but also very reliable and I did it as a beginner. I use it exclusively in Windows 7 for this purpose. If for some reason it doesn’t work, I have Slimjet as a backup which always works.
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