The NSA can read my hard drive

Posted on October 25, 2013 by Kevin

At least I think they can.

Through information recently leaked, we learned that Microsoft has partnered with the NSA to make Hotmail, Outlook and SkyDrive content available to the NSA without warrants.

The SkyDrive service when running on your local computer provides access to your local hard drives. For example, you can log into SkyDrive.com on the web and view the contents of your local hard drive. Presumably if you can do this, the NSA can too.

For me personally, the convenience of SkyDrive outweighs the privacy concerns because I don’t have or know anything that would interest the NSA that they don’t already have easy access to. Still it is a concern. Simply boycotting SkyDrive and using another service like DropBox isn’t a solution, since we have no way of knowing whether that is any more private than SkyDrive.

I think we need legislation.

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I love SkyDrive

Posted on October 17, 2013 by Kevin

Red heart There are various file sharing apps besides SkyDrive: there’s iCloud and DropBox too, but I’ve settled on SkyDrive because it integrates so nicely into the Windows file system, and the new Windows 8 tablet apps. It’s available for the iPhone and Android systems as well.

I’m going to have a meeting sometime in the next few days, and there are some papers I will need. Some are in an email attachment right now, some on my hard drive. I have a folder for the meeting on SkyDrive and I can integrate all the material I need for the meeting in that one convenient place and then have it when I need it, no matter what device I have with me at the minute.

I can put all those emergency credit card phone numbers in a file on the SkyDrive (encrypted by KeePass of course) and then if I am in some remote part of the world and my credit card is stolen, I can deal with it. I can keep copies of my Passport, my immunization card, my insurance cards and anything else I might just need someday somewhere.

The SkyDrive comes free with 7 GB of storage, but I’m not likely to use nearly that much.

This cloud stuff is really working for me.

Update

Twelve years later. It’s now called OneDrive and I have a terabyte of storage. Still loving it.

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PayPower Travel Card: Powerful bad idea

Posted on October 17, 2013 by Kevin

I thought it was a good idea, get a prepaid debit card for my trip overseas. If it’s lost, nobody can get a hook into my regular credit card accounts. I looked around and found one called the PayPower Travel Card.

I bought the card at a retailer, my local grocery store, for $3.95 and then gave them some cash (must be between $20 and $500). Assuming you put the maximum, you just lost .79% of your money. Next, travel overseas. They tell you there’s a 2% foreign transaction fee, but when you get your statement, you see that there’s additional 1% Visa Currency Fee they didn’t tell you about. So we’re approaching 4%. Now it can be a little hard spending your card down to exactly zero. They will send you a check for the balance, but there’s a fee for that ($5.95). In my case I got it almost down to zero and a month anniversary passed. Well, having the card into the second month wins you another $5.95 monthly fee.

Let’s say that that $5.95 charge puts you in the hole (I was  down $3.43). Can you just pay them what you owe? No. You have to buy a reload pack that costs another $3.95 with a minimum of $20 put on the card, which in this case means you have to spend down exactly $16.57 in your second month. Now you can’t just go to an ATM and get the money out. There’s a $1.95 ATM withdrawal fee ($3.95 overseas), but that is in addition to the ATM’s own fees and network fees which if you underestimate puts you back in the hole again and requires yet another $3.95 for another reload pack. Even a balance inquiry is $.50 on top of whatever the ATM charges ($3.95 internationally).

So let’s add up the cost of the $500 debit card, held for 32 days, and spent overseas:

  • Initial cost $3.95
  • International transaction fees $10
  • Secret international fees $5
  • Monthly fee $5.95
  • Reload Fee $3.95

Total: $28.85, or 5.77%

I consider that a rip off.

The scenario above is not exactly what happened to me because I actually have two PayPower cards and one of them didn’t go into the hole. I was able to transfer money between the cards at no fee and to avoid the reload. Closing a card is a time consuming task that you have to do over the phone, giving your card number and identifying information twice. They can’t actually cancel it, but “open a ticket” and then you are supposed to wait a couple of days and call back to make sure it was canceled. It takes several minutes for them to open the ticket.

The two things I guess that are the most unreasonable about the card is the excessive monthly maintenance fee (it costs less to buy a new card and keep it a month than it does to keep the same card for a month) and the inability to reload it without a significant additional fee. One would think that a “travel card” would have some advantages for foreign travel, but actually its foreign transaction fees when the secret Visa fee is added are not any better than other cards. Here is an article about better deals on pre-paid debit cards.

Seasoned travelers tell me to get a credit card (a Capital One card with no foreign transaction fees is most often mentioned) to use only for foreign travel. Take it and a debit card with you, leaving the debit card in the hotel safe unless needed. I think most travelers take a considerable amount of cash also, kept in the hotel safe except for a small amount to carry around. US dollars work with street vendors in many countries, and it’s usually not hard to exchange them for the local currency, bypassing ATM fees. Shops will likely take the credit cards. Discover Card doesn’t work in many countries and I suggest sticking with Visa.

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Upgrading to Windows 8.1 on Microsoft Surface RT

Posted on October 17, 2013 by Kevin

I’ve been anxiously awaiting the final version of Windows 8.1 for my Surface RT. I had the Windows 8.1 Preview, but it has some bugs. So at 7:00 AM sharp this morning I was trying to get the new version from the Microsoft web site.

Here’s what I had to do. First make sure you have all your Windows Updates installed: Charms | Settings | Change PC Settings | Update and Recovery | Windows Update | Check Now. Once that is done, click on this link ON YOUR SURFACE:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/update-from-preview

That will open the Store on your device ready do download the 2+ GB update. The device will restart a few times and you’ll be informed that you must re-install your applications. After that, you have to sign in with your Microsoft ID, select the background color, select a network and authenticate with it, and finally you’re running.

You do have to re-install all your apps, but it’s made simple for you. Your tablet shows the apps you already have just as they were before, only with a small down arrow symbol in the lower right corner, to indicate that they aren’t installed. Just click on the app to download it. You can tap, tap, tap all the icons and it will queue them up for download. That’s the easy part. If the app, such as Netflix, requires a sign on, you’ll have to do that again.

The most important question after the upgrade is whether Microsoft Solitaire Collection is fixed. It had some problems after the 8.1 Preview installation. It’s partly fixed, but partly broken. The part about a message overlaying the tableau and not clearing is fixed. However, the problem with the program locking up, and erratic card movement is not fixed. There is an additional problem with hints not finding possible moves and the game shutting down with “No more moves” when there are still moves that will improve your score. The cumulative scoring is all crazy too, zooming erratically around sometimes. It still starts slow, but even with all the problems, it is the prettiest of the Solitaire versions available.

Things fixed:

  • Keying into certain edit boxes using the on-screen keyboard and Internet Explorer 11 Preview.

Things broken:

  • Microsoft Solitaire Collection

Things look pretty much the same as before. The new Facebook app is marvelous.

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Bizarre “product review” of Kindle Fire at gutenberg.org

Posted on August 28, 2013 by Kevin

For some time now, the popular public domain eBook site gutenberg.org has had prominently displayed on its home page something labeled: “New Kindle Fire Review Before you buy: Read our Webmaster’s review of the new Kindle Fire.” The summary of this “product review” is:

Don’t buy a Kindle Fire, buy a Nexus 7 instead.

The details don’t read like a product review, but rather like somebody got pissed off and wanted to say everything bad they could, whether it was true or not.

Disingenuous disclaimer

The review starts with a disclaimer:

A Review of the Kindle Fire by our webmaster. This review is not an official position or advice from Project Gutenberg or the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.

If it not an official position from Project Gutenberg, then why is it the most prominent thing on the home page of their web site? I can’t answer that, but I can say why this so-called review is bunk and has no place on the web site of an otherwise-well-respected organization.

False or misleading information

The review makes a number of false or misleading statements. Let’s examine some:

Statement: You can get free ebooks to the Fire too, but the process is so cumbersome that it isn’t worth the trouble given the alternative of buying a Nexus 7, which handles free ebooks with ease.

This is simply false. If you want to read free eBooks on the Kindle Fire with no trouble at all, just install a free App like Overdrive Media Console (free at the Kindle store). Then with the Kindle’s built in web browser, go to a web site, click on the epub version of the book, and it’s downloaded onto the Kindle. Then open Overdrive to select the downloaded book you want to read and read it. How is that different from what you do on any other platform? Later on, the review admits that the statement isn’t really true when it allows that you can: “install a third party EPUB reader and download free EPUB books instead of free Kindle books, but that implies learning and using two different apps to read books on the same device.” Learning a book reader app isn’t rocket science, so why is this a make or break factor in deciding which tablet to buy?

Statement: Use a PC to send your files to the Kindle Fire, but that will work only near your PC

That’s not true either. Amazon provides a “Send to Kindle” app that will send a downloaded eBook from your PC to your Kindle Fire over the Internet, anywhere it’s connected.

Statement: …install a third party app called a file manager and manually move every book you downloaded into the right folder, but that makes every download of a new book into a dozen-clicks affair

This is the fictionally-difficult description of a workaround to the non-existent problem described above. It’s wrong in several ways. The Kindle Fire does have a folder for documents and a separate one for books. It doesn’t take a dozen clicks to drag a file into the right folder. But the more important error is that the difficulty is not in which folder the file is stored, but rather with the Kindle formatted eBooks from Project Gutenberg: They are tagged internally as documents instead of books. If you want to easily read Kindle books from Gutenberg, you have to fix them with something like the free PC application, Calibre.

Calibre is a neat program because it makes sense of the myriad eBook formats, reading and converting between them. It will automatically deal with managing your eBook library both on the PC and on the Kindle Fire. It allows you to add Cover Art and do all the things to make eBooks from Gutenberg into attractive and usable books. All of this is stuff Gutenberg ought to do one time for each book instead of making each downloader do it for each book.

Ignoring a host of possible considerations in selecting a tablet (things like what the screen looks like), the review mentions only three other items: the Nexus is less expensive, the Kindle Fire has an ad on the startup screen and the Kindle Fire doesn’t include a wall charger. That’s it. And since the price of the Kindle Fire has come down to just $159, the Nexus isn’t less expensive anyhow. The startup screen is whisked away in less than a second. Yes, it doesn’t come with an AC charger, but it comes with a charger that you can use with your computer’s USB port, and who doesn’t already have a drawer full of USB chargers anyway?

So, in the spirit of the Gutenberg Kindle Fire Review, I offer these instructions:

If you want a good review of the Kindle Fire:

  1. Don’t read the Project Gutenberg review, but one of the over 10,000 other product reviews of the Kindle Fire.
  2. If you find yourself reading the Project Gutenberg review, stop and go read one of the over 10,000 other product reviews of the Kindle Fire.
  3. If you read the whole review, download a good book on critical thinking and read that to cleanse your brain.

Project Gutenberg has no business endorsing products, and if this is just the ranting of a rogue webmaster, then they need a new webmaster.

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Olive Tree Bible Software

Posted on July 17, 2013 by Kevin

I’ve used Olive Tree Bible Software for a long time, longer than I can remember exactly. What I want to emphasize about this company is that they have been consistently there to meet my needs. Every time I come up with some new device, they support it, and all I have to do is to type in my ID and password, and all the purchased content is there.

It’s perhaps no surprise that there is a version for iOS (iPhone, iPad), and no surprise that there’s an Android version (Kindle Fire, Nexus…). But what surprised me was that there was a Windows RT version at the Microsoft store, and a free download installed this attractive app on my Microsoft Surface.

The software itself is pretty basic: you can go to a Bible verse conveniently and you can search for words across multiple Bible versions installed. You can view footnotes and change the font size. Copy and paste works consistent with Windows RT. The software comes with two Bible translations for free (ESV and KJV).

Sometimes I feel like I rent software, having to pay upgrade fees to keep things working, instead of owning something for my investment. Olive Tree Bible Software is free, and they provide excellent support and upgrades for free. You just pay for the extra Bibles, and the content works on any platform you want to see it on.

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Lunarpages web hosting: avoid

Posted on July 17, 2013 by Kevin

I’ve been a customer of Lunarpages for a very long time, so long that I can’t really say how long. I know it’s been since 2006 because of date stamps on some files, but I think it’s really since the late 90’s. We’ve had our ups and downs, extended outages, billing mistakes, customer service hassles—like other hosting companies. Indeed over the years, I’ve moved most of my hosting elsewhere and primarily used Lunarpages for email. I kept my email there because they had a good implantation of SpamAssassin, a spam-fighting tool. Some hosts have a crippled version of SpamAssassin, but Lunarpages had a good one, or at least they used to.

SpamAssassin works well when all of its pieces are working, namely:

  • Standard filtering rules
  • Custom filtering rules and blacklists
  • Real-time block list (RBL) checking
  • Bayesian filtering

After hundreds of spam messages had arrived with inexplicably low spam scores, I started investigating. One of the things I found was that some of the messages came from senders on the RBL. So 17 days ago, I opened a ticket with Lunarpages, asking if they had RBL working? And with that I went down the rabbit hole into Alice’s Wonderland.

It’s a long and sorry story, but basically the support representatives gave me bad information. I proved them wrong. They escalated to a higher-level support representative and this repeated. I ended up 4 levels high in the support structure. As my ticket escalated, response became slower and slower. What started with half-day response turned into 2-3 days.

At every level, the support person, administrator or supervisor tried to tell me that it was my fault, not theirs or that nothing was wrong. I had to search Internet forums, essentially doing their job, to find out what part of their system was broken. And each one of them eventually admitted I was right, fixed something (but not the actual problem) and declared victory.

They went in and trashed my SpamAssassin configuration and then told me it was wrong (what they did). They told me that the diagnostic information was not being displayed because my rules were wrong (they weren’t working because of a server-wide configuration). They told me that spam was getting through because I had some unspecified error in the rules (actually a firewall was blocking all spam filtering on the server). Finally they said that my domain was blocked at the RBL (it was the entire shared server, not my domain). They showed a culture of trying to close tickets rather than solve problems, and making their problems my problem. Rather than responding faster as the weeks drew on, they became slower at response. Finally, someone representing himself as a System Administrator Supervisor told me basically that I was right, RBL checking was not working, and they had no plans to fix it. They came up with all sorts of excuses over a total of 17 days evading the issue, but finally said:

You are right as URIBL has a specific blocklist notification rule specifically for Spam Assassin. It also seems that URIBL is adding their own limit the amount of emails they are willing to filter (as your account is running on a shared environment you are not the only one that is trying to use this RBL), and there are only a small number of companies that are doing this when it comes to SpamAssassin….

At this point I am not aware of any plans to purchase a datafeed from URIBL

The RBL provider has limits on how many queries they will perform for free. Lunarpages won’t set up their own mirror, and they won’t pay for the service, so the server where my account resides just doesn’t get spam RBL filtering and without it, most spam gets through. They offered to sell me a more expensive account, or to move me to another server where they can’t promise I won’t have the same problem.

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