bruceb news

These are the rules for being safe using a Windows computer in 2012. Memorize them, forward them to your friends, post them on Facebook, alert the troops, sound the alarm, and walk from door to door passing them out to your neighbors!

If a web site brings something up on your screen that might be malware, turn your computer off with the power button. Get your hands off the mouse and do not click on “OK,” “Cancel,” or the X in the upper right corner! Anything that you click might lower the defenses on the computer and install malware.

Antivirus software & UAC will not always protect you against malware if you click OK at the wrong time. […] continued

Noted science fiction author and Boing Boing curator Cory Doctorow delivered an important speech last month in London, explaining why attempts by copyright owners to lock down computers and web sites inevitably lead to surveillance and censorship, and how the copyright battles presage bigger fights to come over the very future of general-purpose computers. It’s fascinating and convincing – a must-read for anyone interested in the policy arguments about copyrights, Internet freedom, and how poor decisions now might affect us later. It’s been posted as an article here and deserves to be read and discussed and shared.

We don’t know how to build a general-purpose computer that is capable of running any program except for some programs that we don’t like, are prohibited by law, or which loses us money.

[…] continued

Reddit has become one of the most popular sites on the Internet. It didn’t happen overnight – Reddit has been around for five years – but 2011 is when it came into its own and became a social force.

It is a firehose of posts submitted by its users, loosely organized into “subreddits” in bewildering complexity. You’ll have to spend some time figuring out its structure and getting a start on organizing the homepage that you see when you visit the site so that it displays things that interest you. It’s messy and disorganized and overwhelming, but more and more people are using it as their launching pad to kill time and find interesting things online. […] continued

The request was deceptively simple:

Six very small offices want to share a single Internet connection. Each office wants to have a secure network for its own computers, not shared with the other offices. The offices want to share a single big Toshiba eStudio printer/scanner.

That shouldn’t be so hard, right?

It is remarkable how quickly networking becomes complicated. I don’t have any special instructions today, just a couple of anecdotes to help you understand why you might need help with your home or small office network.

Most people have simple needs: a single Internet connection for a single office; a router to let all the computers share the connection and connect to each other. […] continued

The Favorites Bar in Internet Explorer deserves some attention. It’s a simple concept that might turn out to be a good friend.

The Favorites Bar extends across the top of the browser window. It is intended to hold links to 6-8 websites that you visit most frequently.

Many of you have the Favorites Bar turned off. If you’re not going to use it, leave it turned off.

You can turn it on by right-clicking on an empty area at the top of Internet Explorer and clicking to put a checkmark in front of “Favorites bar.”

The important thing is to remember the difference between “Favorites” and the “Favorites Bar.”

• Your “Favorites” are under the star in the upper right corner of Internet Explorer 9.

[…] continued

WordPress is everywhere.

A few days ago, WordPress announced rather startling statistics:

• WordPress is now powering 14.7% of the top million websites in the world.
• 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress.

Those are big numbers.

If you’re not familiar with WordPress, I’ll give you a very brief overview.

WordPress is a collection of tools to help you create a web site.

• There’s a standard dashboard and standard administration screens that are always the same regardless of where you run WordPress. Behind the scenes is a standardized database.
• You can freely choose from countless themes that change the way the web site looks, switching between them with a single click.

[…] continued

I have a story about web hosting.

When you visit brucebnews.com, all the pages pop into place instantly. Do a search or click on a link and you’ll see the result right away. That’s what you expect from a web site, right?

Until last week, that’s not what you got from my news page. It would almost always take a few seconds for a page to appear. In the middle of the day, pages might take 10-20 seconds to appear – an eternity.

There is an interesting story about what changed.

Bruceb News is built on WordPress, the publishing platform that powers a huge percentage of the blogs in the world. […] continued

Eli Pariser gave a fascinating talk at TED this year with some new information about online searches. It’s well worth nine minutes of your time. Here’s the link to the video if it doesn’t appear above.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook – all of them are working very hard to show you things that are precisely designed for you. What you don’t know is just how far that’s progressed. It’s already gotten to the point that a page of Google search results for you might be completely different than the results for someone else who searches for exactly the same thing at the same time. […] continued

Previously:
Whining About Wireless

I’ll tell you a story about my own experience. You won’t learn anything and there’s not a happy ending, but perhaps it will give you a little perspective on why I’m not urging you to ditch your wires and set up wireless everywhere.

I’ve had a wireless access point at the global headquarters of Bruceb Consulting for a long time. When my wife and I got our matching Vostro V13 laptops last year, we started to rely on wireless more than ever, so maybe we just began to notice a problem that had existed for a long time. […] continued

Previously:
Battle Of The Browser Updates
Comparing The New Internet Browsers
Syncing Bookmarks And Favorites With Firefox 4 And Chrome 10
Syncing Bookmarks And Favorites With Internet Explorer 9

Windows 7 and Vista users are also likely to be seeing prompts to install Internet Explorer 9. Like Windows 7 Service Pack 1, IE9 will not be installed automatically by Windows or by my monitoring service.

Although theoretically Internet Explorer 9 is optional, you should install it when you’re ready. It’s safer and faster than previous versions of Internet Explorer, and it supports new technology that will slowly come to be used on the web sites you visit. […] continued