McDonald's: are you allowed to have a sense of humour with that?

Large corporations are not known for having a sense of humour. A joke is such a fragile thing, all it takes in one spoilsport to kick up a fuss and no one finds it funny any more. So I was more than a little surprised to see this gem in my mailbox here in Ottawa, Canada:
It says "McDonald's World Famous Fries are always a delicious choice. Served perfecty golden, our fries promise a one-of-a-kind taste because they're made from the finest potatoes picked from Canadian farms. Mmmm.... of course you want fries with that!"

Now, I don't know whether you've noticed, but "do you want fries with that" is a teasing reflection on the level of education required to successfully hold a career in fast food service, and I've no doubt, not something McDonalds are happy about. I remember reading that the corporation were unhappy about the tag "McJob", so the chances that they approve of the "do you want fries with that" line are pretty small.

So how did that little piece of self deprecation come about? The clue may be in the "Canadian farms". This is probably issued by the Canadian division of McDonalds. I have to wonder if anyone got rapped knuckles over that 'free smile'. That's if they noticed.

Basic guidelines for avoiding email viruses and phishing

Email scams come in various forms, most notable of which are:

• Trojan downloaders in attachments
• Diversion to a scam, or virus laden website
• Phishing (diversion to a fake website set up to steal your login)
• The Nigerian Letter, Inheritance or UK Lottery

Don't be tricked into opening or clicking on something by fear, greed or lust. Your account is not about to be suspended, you have not won millions of pounds on the UK lottery, and there are no nice Russian brides waiting to give you a nice time.

Politely inform anyone who sends you an email greetings card which requires following a link, that you have been told this is not safe.

If you weren't expecting it, then it's probably bad. The only time that you would want to click on a link in an email is if it's something you requested. Perhaps Uncle Fred wants you to join his photo sharing site, or you've signed up for a forum and they need to verify your email address; in these cases, you can be fairly sure that the link is genuine. If a stranger tells you to watch this video because you look really stupid in it, then it's a fear-based trick. If you are able, look at the link to see what overall site it's located at. You need the last two elements before the first forward slash. For example:
www.paypal.com.securelogin.scamsite.info/login?auth=2348273462
in this case it has been made to look like a paypal site, but it's actually scamsite.info.

If you get an attachment, don't open it as such, or run it. Save it to your desktop, and then open the program you want to use, and then open the document with it. This way, you get control over what program reads the file, not the alleged virus. Seriously, if you get a PDF as an attachment, don't be tempted to just double-click it; find your acrobat reader and open that first, even if it takes a little effort.

If you get an attachment which is a zip file, then it's statistically more likely to be a virus. Photos and video clips don't benefit from being zipped, so people don't do it. If the zip file has been encrypted and needs a password that is quoted in the email, it's virtually guaranteed that it's a virus - they do that to stop virus scanners doing their job. To be sure, upload the file to a virus scanning site such as http://virusscan.jotti.org/en-gb because they will run multiple scanners on it.

If your bank, paypal, ebay, facebook, or indeed any site asks you to login via an email link: don't. Go to the regular site, and search for what you need.

Finally, don't think that you've suddenly become rich, or that an international company needs you to accept payments on their behalf. Beware, they've become rather skilled at making you think that just this once, it's for real.

How to host and blog camera videos with eSnips.

Country Mamma asked about blogging digital camera movies. Here's an example that I took a couple of summers ago. I've been meaning to rant at CH-A-Troll for it... but that can wait. Here is the video (no, nothing happens, it's just a girl riding a bike on an Ottawa cyclepath).

Are DVDs done as a backup medium?

The floppy disk had a great run. From the day they replaced paper tape and magnetic tape, they wowed users with their random access and huge capacity; through successive reductions in size and doublings of capacity, they became such a symbol of storage that they live on as the menu icon representing "save".

Of course, the floppy disk is dead and gone, you knew that. To illustrate: the current standard for digital cameras is 10 megapixels. Just ONE photo from this kind of camera will not fit on a standard 1.44M floppy. There is no problem left for which a floppy disk is the best answer.

I postulate that DVDs are nearly dead in the same way. Although they're the largest storage medium around at a reasonable price (Blu-ray is still premium rated as I write this) hard disks are so cheap and easy to use, that there's no real saving in using DVDs.

Hard disks have come a long way. The first could store 5 or 10 MEGAbytes. The increase has been so rapid that people still talk about 500 MEGAbyte drives, when they mean 500GIGAbyte drives. The latest 1TERAbyte drives are 100,000 times bigger than the first ones; a 1.5Tb drive is a million times larger than a floppy disk.

Imagine you have a few hundred megabytes to store, and compare the task of storing it on DVD's or an external USB pluggable disk drive. The disk drive is still more expensive. As I write this, perhaps $100 (CAD/USD) for 1 Terabyte. If you buy two, you can alternate your backups, and get a really good level of security, beyond those scratchable DVDs. And it's easy... you just plug it in, and copy!

Compare a stack of DVDs. True, they're cheap. A stack of 100 could be $25 to $40, and would store around 400Gb. But look at the effort involved in swapping out all those DVDs: how much is that trouble worth? And how long does it take? And how many times are you going to back up? I think the DVD is dead.

You might point out that DVDs will still live on as a way to play movies. But we're now in the age of the media player. I have a box that will simply play a movie from a flash drive or USB hard disk to my TV. I don't need DVDs any more. And a friend has a Playstation that can play media over a wireless network. No, the DVD is dead. Goodbye!

Freaky security issue

Two security issues that everyone should be aware of. First, some context: I don't know about you, but I have so many username/password combinations, that I tend to use the same one(s) for several purposes. Also, we have some expectation that when we type in a password, it's kept secret, and only checked by a program.

It's true that ethically written programs such as blog and forum software that are commonly available do not reveal users' passwords to the people running the software. But we should all be mindful that there is NO guarantee that this is going to be the case on an unscrupulous site. Register at a site with your email address, and use the same password as that email account, and you're totally asking for trouble. Don't assume that your password is kept secret just because it appears as "********" on your screen. Remember, getting access to your email account is key to getting more passwords, even if they're different, using the "forgot password" feature.

Secondly, be aware that even with ethically written software, if you type your password into the wrong place, it may become visible to the operators. I have been aware of an instance where a user entered his username and password, but failed to click correctly on the password field. It was listed as a failed login attempt, with "usernamepassword" as the user who had attempted the login. Obviously, since the username and password were typed concatenated into the username field, even the ethical software I was using, showed me both the username, and his password.

Humyo broken?

OK, I don't know why the Humyo things are not appearing... if they stay absent, I'll take a look at it.

2009-03-29 Practical Computing

This is a reduced version of the podcast; it should be streamable for those on dialup. Please comment on OttawaForums.com