Computer Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread II

[Samson]

What is going on with my parents BT internet?

It makes no sense to me. They have:

• ADSL internet over BT landline, copper I think
• BT supplied and branded router providing wifi and wired internet
• BT supplied lineline "walkabout" phone and base station

If they keep the phone at the other end on the house from the router it works fine. If they bring the phone near the router while they are using it it breaks their internet for about 5 or 10 minutes. It breaks even the wired connection, that has not been transmitted over RF at any point.

My only solution is to get a wired phone, but there must be a way to fix it.

 

[The_J]

The spectrum certain cordless phones send on can interfere also with weakly insulated cables (and other non-cable based transmissions).
So either you need better cables, or a new phone.
Or the ghostbusters, IDK, but the phone is indeed most likely the culprit.

 

[Samson]

Can someone explain this. Windows 10, searching a directory of old civ saves. If I search for "azte" it finds "Montezuma of the Aztecs, 1225 ADgoodScoreIfFinish.SAV" because it contains the substring "azte" (case insensitive because windows). If I search "good" it does not find it, but it does find two other files with those characters surrounded by _ and/or .?

Spoiler Evidence as screenshots :

 

[cardgame]

I'm afraid that's just a common symptom of Windows. It sucks.

 

[Quintillus]

Can someone explain this. Windows 10, searching a directory of old civ saves. If I search for "azte" it finds "Montezuma of the Aztecs, 1225 ADgoodScoreIfFinish.SAV" because it contains the substring "azte" (case insensitive because windows). If I search "good" it does not find it, but it does find two other files with those characters surrounded by _ and/or .?

Spoiler Evidence as screenshots :

The default search behavior changed some time around Windows Vista. From then forward, the search only matches on parts of the name separated by spaces or underscores. "azte" is the start of a word in that file, but "good" is not; it's part of the word "ADgoodScoreIfFinish". A human can tell that is actually five words, but the default search on Windows only looks at the start (and end?) of a word, and misses it.

In XP and earlier, it did what you would intuitively expect, and simply would look for "good" anywhere in the name. My guess is the change was an optimization to speed up search, but I agree, I prefer the earlier behavior even if it meant search took a bit longer.

Thankfully, there's a way around this. If you search for "name:~=good", it will find what you're looking for. This is the "name is approximately equal to" search.

Despite having searched for this answer many times over the past 15 years, I didn't actually find the answer until trying one more time based on your question, so thank you for asking it. The winning query is "windows search based on full file name" on DuckDuckGo, third result, credit going to this page.

Results tested on Windows 10. Accuracy of answer not guaranteed for Windows 11.

 

[r16]

in XP it would have looked into the e-books and would have given you 500 or 5000 goods . When ı got the laptop with Windows 8 ı was most unsatistified with the search thing .

 

[Birdjaguar]

Chrome starts the countdown to the end of tracking cookies​

Posted: December 15, 2023 by Pieter Arntz

Google has announced that it will start rolling its Chrome web browser’s new Tracking Protection feature from January of 2024. Tracking Protection is part of Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative to phase out third-party cookies. The Tracking Protection feature aims to disable third-party cookies completely in the second half of 2024. Third-party cookies, often referred to as non-essential cookies, can be used to track visitors as they move from one website to another, with the purpose of creating profiles for personalized ads. But other website features, like authentication and fraud prevention can also depend on them.

Starting January 4, Google says it will select one percent of Chrome users on desktop and Android at random, and that group will get the option to use the Tracking Protection feature. The chosen users will receive a notification about it when they open Chrome.
The selected Chrome users can do some testing to establish the impact of blocking third-party cookies on their browsing experience. For example, when Tracking Protection is enabled, some websites may not load correctly, so users will also have the option to temporarily re-enable third-party cookies for that specific website.

One significant difference with the existing (largely useless) “Do Not Track” feature is that websites do not have a choice about whether to cooperate with Tracking Protection. Do Not Track is a signal sent by the browser that asks websites to play nicely and not track it. It isn’t effective and there is no way to determine if it’s having the desired effect or not. Other initiatives by Google in this direction include hiding your IP address. An IP address is the next best thing for tracking users across the internet. Although the IP address is often not limited to one system, they are very often bound to one household. Google’s IP Protection proposal wants to use proxies to hide users’ IP addresses.

It remains to be seen how fruitful these initiatives will be. A few years ago (March 2021), Google ran some tests with a program called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) which was also intended to replace third-party cookies. But the technology was criticized on privacy grounds and on January 25, 2022, Google officially announced it had ended development of FLoC technologies. FLoC was replaced by the Topics API, another Privacy Sandbox mechanism designed to preserve privacy while allowing a browser to share information with third parties about a user’s interests.

Meanwhile, regulators are monitoring the tech giant’s initiatives to ensure they don’t give the company an unfair advantage in selling its own ads.

Chrome starts the countdown to the end of tracking cookies | Malwarebytes

Google will soon roll out its Tracking Protection feature to some randomly chosen users in order to prepare for a full deployment.

www.malwarebytes.com

 

[Samson]

One significant difference with the existing (largely useless) “Do Not Track” feature is that websites do not have a choice about whether to cooperate with Tracking Protection. Do Not Track is a signal sent by the browser that asks websites to play nicely and not track it. It isn’t effective and there is no way to determine if it’s having the desired effect or not.

It is a bit weird to mention “Do Not Track” but not mention that you can turn off third party cookies and it should have no worse effect on your browsing experience than Topics API.

 

[leif erikson]

The real question is what they are replacing tracking cookies with? No way they are going to cease tracking.

 

[Birdjaguar]

The real question is what they are replacing tracking cookies with? No way they are going to cease tracking.

Google only tracking?

 

[Samson]

With WhatsApp can other people delete messages from your device?

I avoid Zuckerberg data collection applications, so I do not know. I was shocked by this story:

Penny Mordaunt has told the Covid inquiry that a series of WhatsApp messages with Boris Johnson mysteriously disappeared from her phone, and that Johnson’s then chief of staff ignored 14 attempts by her to arrange a meeting to discuss the matter.

In a further twist to the saga of 5,000 WhatsApp messages lost by Johnson, Mordaunt said she was told by Cabinet Office officials it would cost about £40,000 to examine her phone to determine what had happened.​

It seems that either the top levels of government are using a communication system which explicitly gives a third party access to the data on their devices or the top levels of government have compromised communication devices and they are penny pinching about investigating it. I am not sure which is worse.

 

[r16]

the very essence of this smart devices revolution is giving full access to third parties so that one will be part of good old 1984 , willing or not . Any future documentary on the subject will of course now run that utterly famous 1984 Apple advert with the woman with the hammer . Naturally , it is just the spies and whatnot most of the time but with Boris Johnson you can bet it is something he promised but didn't deliver .

 

[Plotinus]

It seems that either the top levels of government are using a communication system which explicitly gives a third party access to the data on their devices or the top levels of government have compromised communication devices and they are penny pinching about investigating it. I am not sure which is worse.

…or Penny Mordaunt and Boris Johnson aren’t telling the truth. Barely conceivable, I know.

 

[Zelig]

With WhatsApp can other people delete messages from your device?

Most modern messaging solutions that people use allow other people to delete messages from your device to some degree. WhatsApp details their policies: https://faq.whatsapp.com/1370476507114859/?cms_platform=web

 

[Ita Bear]

Hi folks,
sometimes when booting up my computer, it loads into a very low resolution. It remains so for about 5-10 seconds, then the screen goes black, and then displays the correct resolution. Sometimes it forces a reset of the computer but other times it loads absolutely fine into the correct resolution, no problem. What's going on? It's definitely not the graphics card, as I've replaced it since and the problem persists. It's not the monitor or HDMI cable for the same reason and I doubt these would force a reset. Drivers are up to date. All I can think of is that the computer sometimes has difficulty detecting the drivers or there's an issue with the motherboard. This has been going on years now, though. It's not a major problem, just an irritation. Any idea what it could be?

 

[Samson]

I am not going to be much use in solving the problem, but it sounds a little like what happens when I boot up. If what you are talking about is something like that, or completely different as I suspect, that may help identify the problem.

Every time I reboot my computer it starts in very low resolution, because the bios is sending old style text. Once the OS starts properly this changes to normal resolution. My newish big monitor detects this change, and goes blank for a few seconds while it trys to do something clever, then displays the correct resolution. It always comes back, and does not effect the OS at all. I am sure it is a feature of the monitor not the computer.

 

[Brian Boru]

my computer, it loads into a very low resolution

Have a look in Setup during boot. It's possible there's a setting in there which encourages the PC to sometimes start with the Integrated graphics on the CPU, rather than going straight to the GPU.