JorgeA

Thanks for the update! +1 --JorgeA

Glad to see I got my sponsor's badge back. Thanks, @dencorso! And attachments are working again! Finally, I get to upload the following clipping from last week's ad for my favorite office-supplies retailer. I never thought I would get to see this advertised there again: --JorgeA

In light of the recent revelations of official data theft, check this out: [emphasis in original]Ixquick has a nice feature where you can choose to connect to the pages returned in your search results via a proxy server. Beyond this, the Ixquick/StartPage folks are putting together what they describe as "the world's most private e-mail" service, which they are calling StartMail. --JorgeA

Amen to that!! If the cloud data doesn't exist, it can't be stolen. --JorgeA

And now for another Windows 8 annoyance, courtesy of Microsoft. The purchaser of a new computer that came with a free trial of Norton Internet Security could not get the Norton Toolbar to show up on his desktop IE10. In reply, a Symantec (Norton) employee reports that What reason could there possibly be for this request?! As an aside, I wonder if the same applies to other security suites. --JorgeA

One way to approach this is to treat the situation like you would against a common criminal: no home alarm or security system, no matter how good it is, will stop a burglar who's determined to get into your home, but in most cases it will persuade a burglar looking to score to go find a softer target. In the case of official snoops, as you point out they can probably throw tons of highly advanced processors at a single file or hard drive and crack it a lot faster than anybody thinks is possible. But it would take some significant portion of their resources to deal with a single target that way. If a million, ten million, a hundred million users harden their PC security, they simply won't have enough resources to deal with everybody's Skype calls and e-mail attachments. Naturally, we don't need to help matters by putting an Xbox One in the family room... --JorgeA

Another angle on the topic, with some interesting history as a bonus: USA to legalize rootkits, spyware, ransomware and trojans to combat piracy? --JorgeA

One more thing. About the spooks getting into your Dropbox: it's a good argument for encrypting the files that you store in the cloud. Before uploading, encrypt them yourself on top of whatever password protection Dropbox or similar services place on your stuff. --JorgeA

Fantastic roundup of articles, thank you. Took me all morning to get through them, but it was time well spent. Here's the most perceptive comment I've seen, from a techie perspective, about the NSA snooping program: The comment would make me laugh if it didn't make me cry. Too many of us would willingly accept that deal -- those who think they're too insignificant for the government to care about, or who think that "I've got nothing to hide." A classic description of the concept of selling your birthright for a mess of pottage... --JorgeA

An interesting analysis of the Start Button fiasco here -- see post 13 from someone who clearly has a sense of the history. I'm not sure that I agree with everything he says, especially the final paragraph in the post, but it's certainly provocative and worth thinking about. --JorgeA

Tying together a theme we've been touching on in this thread, with a topic that's been in the news this week: New Xbox by NSA partner Microsoft will watch you 24/7 [emphasis added] :angrym: --JorgeA

We never see the audience or the whole stage. How do we know that there isn't a neon sign above the stage, directing the audience to clap or cheer at certain times? Who makes up the audience, anyway? Could well be a rent-a-crowd, for all we know. Even so, the clapping didn't sound all that enthusiastic to me. Terrible production values, BTW -- not only could I hardly make out what the guy was saying, but it was the sort of video I'd expect from a movie surreptitiously taped off the screen at a theater showing. --JorgeA

You got it. Thanks! --JorgeA

Sure. I'll see that it gets fixed. Your Supreme Sponsor donation I remember well, because we exchanged posts about it. Any other Sponsor donnor who lost the badge please PM me. Rest assured it may take some days, but it'll be fixed. Wonderful, thanks! --JorgeA

There's still work to be done: Thread subscriptions are still not working (I'm not getting notices of new replies). I still cannot upload image attachments. The "Click To Attach Files" button reports that I have used "4.14MB of your 1000K global upload quota (Max. single file size: 64MB)" --JorgeA

This is a test of these several functions in Pale Moon. This is a test for text formatting. This is a test for link insertion. It shows up fine in Pale Moon. Sadly, though, the Norton Toolbar is not supported in Pale Moon, although it is supported in Firefox. Assuming that these functions also work well in standard FF, may have to switch to it as the default browser for the Win7 system, but I'd hate to lose the functional Status Bar or deal with the constant upgrades. --JorgeA

link insertionNow testing in IE9 x64. This is a test of text formatting. This is a test of link insertion. The link is still shooting up to the start of the post. --JorgeA

link insertion functionThis is a test after the MSFN reset. This is a test of placing formatting tags around selected text. Formatting tags are showing up where intended. This is a test of the link insertion function. Links are still shooting up to the beginning of the post, rather than around the intended, selected text. --JorgeA EDIT: Tests performed in IE9, Windows 7 Home Premium

Still can't upload an image attachment. --JorgeA

The only luck I had was with posts that I happened to reply to, when I was able to go into the browser history and retrieve the quoted post in the reply box (see a couple of examples just above) but of course my comments weren't included. --JorgeA

Just a small quibble with this. (I had replied to this at the time. My original reply is one of the missing posts.) I just booted up my Developer Preview to verify: the Start Menu was already gone in the DP, but it does have a Start Button that takes you to the Start Screen. So in effect, what Microsoft has done with Windows 8.1 is to return to the way they had things in the DP -- it works in exactly the same way as the revived Start Button in 8.1. --JorgeA

I wish that I had any evidence to contradict or disprove what you said, Formfiller. --JorgeA

Glad to see that MSFN is back , but we seem to have lost a bunch of posts since June 3. Among the missing posts are some where I reported having renewed by MSFN sponsorship AND also making a small donation on top of that. For a while my name was back in gold, but now I see that it's in blue once again, as if I hadn't renewed. I will be happy to PM or otherwise communicate with the Powers That Be in order to prove that I did renew my sponsorship and then separately made a donation. I expect that anybody who donated or subscribed to MSFN this week may be affected. Will go back to the IE9 on Windows 7 and see if the posting issue that got this thread started, has been fixed. --JorgeA

I've been getting most of those same error messages, and in addition I haven't been able to upload images since Friday. (Just tried again today, the upload failed yet again.) Switching to the basic uploader doesn't work, either, and there are no troubleshooting suggestions offered when the error message appears. --JorgeA

Yup, today I still can't upload the JPG. Wonder what the heck is going on. --JorgeA