Apologies: Sue, Jeanne, Mike, Jenny, Renee, Fred, Yvonne – apologies from me if I’ve forgotten anyone.
I gave an update on Paul – having visited him recently. We all hope that he, and David Hughes might be able to rejoin us in person sometime soon. [We did have a Zoom meeting on the 20th April at which Fred and Renee joined Paul, David and me.]
News: I quickly ran through the recent items I’d highlighted in the Flipboard magazine. These mainly being comments from WhatsApp about the changes to data territory and how they (like Signal) would be forced to exit the UK if the proposed legislation were to go ahead – of course we’d all get VPNs then, wouldn’t we?! Also an item from Jonathan on Windows 11 settings you might chose to change, and a variety of posts from Appleand about OpenAI (ChatGPT and DALL-E). We then also looked at a couple of items that had first appeared in the Signal group – the scamming of a journalist in the US’ credit card – unusual in that involved theft of the card within the US postal service and then working back towards the SIM swap; also the rather scare-mongering advice from Australia about a WiFi scanning device called a “pineapple” which omits to mention that deploying a VPN is a sufficient defence against possible intrusion; and finally the item on voice-cloning which was a bit frightening really. Again however, unless we’ve left a huge amount of our spoken voice on the internet, we should not be too alarmed – but it is amazing what technology can now do. I’ve put details of these on the Forums for you to refer to. We also discussed the reverse phone lookup sites that allow you to see whether a phone call from a number is likely to be a threat, or not – Who called me? and (confusingly, but different) Who called me.
I then quickly referred to the ChatGPT session we’d had previously and again there was a fair amount of comment, and also mentioned that I’d written an article on Google Photos which had been sparked by the group and my realisation that I didn’t fully understand some aspects of the synchronisation process and the difference between iCloud and Google’s cloud storage approaches. [As an update, I’ve subsequently realised there’s more for me to assimilate still, and I’m working on another post on deletion of photos from Google Photos and Apple photos – hopefully that’ll appear very shortly.]
I forgot to mention in the meeting that with the closing-down of the public Thought grazing site, I was now copying (with appropriate edits) some of the posts from this site to Just thoughts – my personal website.
Members raised the following issues (others not mentioned, did not have specific issues):
Jim commented that he’d been trying to get to the bottom of how short videos (called “hot shots” I believe) which enable you (on the Android) to select the best image from a short clip, do not appear to be retained in the cloud after an edit. [Subsequent to the meeting Jim did some more investigation and this, reported on Signal, has been transcribed into a Forum.]
Ian noted that the credit cxard replacement process {ref. US scam above} has changed and the verification process is now much better. It did mean that for some non-IT-savvy older folk, it might now involve a visit to the bank to complete the process.
John continues his learning pathway on Google Photos and using his iPhone. The discussion that followed led me to the realisation that I probably don’t need Google Photos (as an app) on my iPhone, and this in turn led me to consider writing another post (see above).
Ralph reported that he’d been experiencing messages from his ISP (through his WiFi connection) that he wasn’t online – when he most definitely was, or should have been. This quickly rectified itself in a few moments. I ventured the thought that this was the ISP disconnecting the router (employing dynamic IP-addressing) to either save allocation of scarce Cat4 IP-addresses, or alternatively to save bandwidth being allocated for polling the router to see if it was awake, and connected, or not. One way to test both would be to examine the IP-address being allocated to the router, and see if it was changing. With my VM ISP I appear to have a static IP-address – which is great. It never changes. This would allow me to run a server across the internet as the DNS would never change.
Stella had been alarmed by a message that appeared in her email that she felt was trying to make her download something that she hadn’t requested, and didn’t feel she needed. We went over the standard things that one should investigate in situations like this – looking at the URL, seeing if it’s https:// (SSL), and calling back independently from the message. All things we’ll cover again in the forthcoming Security session.
Anne had climbed out of another black hole (her words, not mine) having had a series of problems with a printer, buying a replacement, finding that the printer drivers were probably corrupted, and finding also that she quite probably hadn’t needed a new printer at all. The advice from PC World (imho) had not been good. The standard approach when you have a printer problem is to re-install the printer drivers – NOT install McAffee AV protection and say she had a virus problem!!!