There are good reasons to be anonymous online. And yet most people assume that anonymity is just a license to be a jerk. The fact is that some people will be jerks online whether they’re anonymous or not.
Sadly, some less-well-informed people have decided that anonymity is somehow the root of all evil on the net, and think that forcing people to use their real names online will magically make everyone nice. This kind of thinking has even pervaded some very high profile companies, including Google and Facebook, both of which have pushed hard to make people use their real names.
Anonymity is a frequent topic of discussion over at Techdirt, where the comments section is open to the public and allows anonymity. Because the Techdirt staff actually engage with commenters (jerks and otherwise), the debate rarely gets out of hand, and some of the most interesting comments are posted by anonymous users.
In a recent Windows Weekly podcast, Microsoft’s Chief Marketing Officer Chris Capossela didn’t quite apologize for the company’s heavy-handed efforts to get people to upgrade to Windows 10.
Capossela did say that Microsoft heard the criticism, and tried to find the ‘right balance’, but he only seems to actually regret one particularly nasty ploy, in which closing an upgrade dialog caused the upgrade to start for many users.
Of course the Windows 10 push is long over, and the bad feelings it generated have started to fade. Unfortunately, even with the bad publicity, I suspect that Microsoft views the operation as a success, which means that they may be tempted to use the same tactics in the future.
Opera 42.0.2393.94 fixes a couple of crashing issues, and updates the Chromium browser engine to version 55.0.2883.87. The full change log provides additional details.
This week I once again encountered an old nemesis, the infinite ‘Checking for updates…’ Windows Update screen. Not this again! It happened when I was attempting to install the December 2016 updates on my main Windows 8.1 machine.
Is it working? How can you tell?
I tried the usual troubleshooting steps: rebooting, stopping all non-essential processes, the Windows Update troubleshooter, and so on. Nothing helped.
What makes this problem really annoying is that even when Windows Update is working properly, there are long pauses during which nothing appears to be happening. Even looking deeply into the running processes sometimes shows a complete lack of activity. Since a hung Windows Update often looks exactly like Windows Update actually doing something, all you can do is watch helplessly, in growing frustration, until you finally can’t stand it any more and stop the Windows Update process.
After banging my head against this problem for a while, it occurred to me that since most Windows updates are now available in ‘rollup’ form (i.e. packaged together in one update), I could install the appropriate ones manually, which would at least get my computer up to date, and could conceivably also fix Windows Update.
After rebooting, I tried Windows Update, and ‘Checking for updates’ took about a minute to find December’s Patch Tuesday updates. Yay! I installed those updates and the computer is now fully patched.
It’s difficult to know for sure why this Windows Update problem happens, but it’s depressingly common, as are the sometimes wacky solutions users have proposed. The rollup solution that worked for me may work for others, but there are no guarantees. It’s Windows, after all.
Anyone who operates a web site based on the Joomla CMS (Content Management System) should drop what they’re doing and update Joomla to the new version, 3.6.5.
Joomla 3.6.5 addresses three security vulnerabilities, adds miscellaneous security hardening and includes three additional bug fixes. The release announcement provides additional details.
Perennial also-ran and ugly duckling web browser Vivaldi gets some much-needed improvements in its newest incarnation, version 1.6.
Bookmark, address bar, and link handling have all been improved. For example, hovering over a bookmark now (finally) shows the bookmark’s URL in the status bar. The oddball bookmark editor is still with us, but at least it doesn’t take up so much space in the sidebar. There’s a new option for opening search results in a new tab. Middle-clicking links and bookmarks to open them in a new tab seems finally to be working consistently. And clicking on a URL in the address bar (again, finally) highlights the URL.
It’s nice to see progress on this potentially useful browser, but there’s still work to do. Bookmarks in the bookmark toolbar can be right-clicked and edited or deleted – unless they’re in a folder. There’s still no option to switch to newly-opened tabs.
I continue to use Vivaldi for social media sites, but not as my main browser. Maybe some day Vivaldi really will supplant Firefox, but it isn’t there yet.
It almost goes without saying that there was no proper announcement from Mozilla for this new version, despite the fact that it includes fixes for critical security issues.
currency converter: highlight an amount of money on any web page to see the amount in your local currency
faster startup times
improvements to the built-in newsreader
Opera remains a solid alternative to the big three browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome), although it still doesn’t have a proper bookmark sidebar.
Details are sketchy, but apparently a recent Windows 10 update caused major problems for some users. Affected users were suddenly unable to access the Internet. December’s Patch Tuesday (earlier this week) included an update that addresses this problem.
This issue once again raises the question of whether Microsoft can be trusted not to push flawed Windows updates, especially now that updates are essentially mandatory and unavoidable.
Update 2016Dec16: Many of the Knowledge Base pages on the Microsoft support site now include this message at the top: “If you are experiencing issues connecting to the internet we recommend you restart your PC by going to Start, clicking the Power button, then choosing Restart (not Shut down).” No further explanation is provided.
Rants and musings on topics of interest. Sometimes about Windows, Linux, security and cool software.
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