07 May 2007

hit me with your best shot

As is his wont, Ross Gittins nails it perfectly today as he labels the politics behind SerfChoices (dunno where I stole that from but it's good) as a return to class warfare that John Howard thinks he can win. The public memory may not be short but it is certainly a bit selective, and Howard is still playing on the race memory of union activism from 30 years.

Gittins concludes by wondering why more of the commentariat don't see Howard's ploy for the "try-on" that it is. Maybe it's because the media is not as "leftist"-dominated as we incessantly are told?

Chateau VVB is currently in the grip of computeritis. We had been using Macafee as our security program, having ditched Norton some years ago. However it was becoming increasingly evident that we were still being infiltrated by nasties. Mrs VVB, who does most of our computer fixing (because she has far more patience than me), had downloaded another major security package on a trial basis, on the basis of a recommendation from a shop.

It seems to be blocking more stuff - well, it seems to be doing more stuff - but we're getting constant messages advising us of things that may or may not have happened.

It strikes me as a real demonstration of "how we live now" that you have to be extremely expert in highly technical stuff to run a home computer. If your car breaks down it's unlikely that you could fix it yourself, but at least cars don't break down regularly any more. Computing on the other hand seems to throw up problems on an alarmingly regular basis and you've got to have a fair knowledge of what's going on, otherwise you'd be paying squillions to get someone in, it seems to me. How do you folk who run home-based businesses fare?

However, one benefit is that we can once again access our online banking from the main downstairs computer: we simply failed at setting up Macafee to allow the cookies running the bank's security to let us in. We had the networked upstairs computer on a different security package, so that's where we did the banking. Now, we can't link to the upstairs computer...

We are also getting the odd porn site getting through the new firewall. Makes for interesting conversation.

4 comments:

JahTeh said...

Ron at Bibliobillabong does all my computer stuff from the Blue Mountains and gave me three free sites for security. He'll help. The latest is a problem with the browsers sneaking in 'zombies' which is bypassing the security systems. I don't know what I'd do without New Scientist.

phil said...

In the space of a day we've changed security packages yet again. This one seems to be working better but we've lost access to the bank again, which is a real pain. I had a fiddle with the variables but no luck.

Mark Lawrence said...

Get a Mac. :)

phil said...

Too late, Mark. The softwaritis was followed by a 'fatal' hardware malfunction. Hung the Vietnamese computer bloke has been, we now have offspring no 2's Dell hooked up and she uses her new Mac notebook. Simple, really. All it takes is the GDP of Lichtenstein.

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