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Computers

Watch out for Fake Amazon Email Malware

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Our truck-driving friend, Connie the Big-Rig Wrangler, reports that she received an email from Amazon saying some order she’d made had been sent. Since she orders a lot of stuff from Amazon, she thought it was routine and…yes! clicked on the attachment.

Her computer is at Best Buy now, supposedly to be returned in five days or a week or…whenever.

This is a current scam. The email appears blank but contains an attachment, either a zip file or a .docm file. If you open the attachment, the zip file unloads malware into your computer. The .docm file tries to trick you into installing a malicious macro. Some of these install ransomware, and others install malware that can steal data such as bank account and credit card numbers.

Amazon does not send out blank emails.  If you get anything like this, delete it immediately without clicking on any attachments.

Both Sides…of the Cloud?

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So here’s why I’m mighty glad that by temperament I’ve resisted the Cloud. Apple’s iCloud is having outages hither, thither, and yon, all over the world: L.A., San Francisco, all up and down the East Coast, around the Midwest, in England, Europe… Lovely.

Apple works to funnel users into iCloud, as Google would like to get all its users’ data into functions like the clunky GoogleDocs and Microsoft is forcing people to pay monthly to use Office on a subscription basis, extracting enormous amounts in excess of what its programs should cost. I’ve been clinging to my resident Word 2007 for Mac and will until there’s simply no other choice but to move to something else. When that happens, though, the “something else” may be Pages, at which point I probably will close down my editorial business.

We’re told that Pages will track changes in such a way as to make them visible in Wyrd, although as of 2012 (when the feature came out), it left something to be desired. I happen to prefer Wyrd’s “compare documents” feature, which ultimately produces the same result as “track changes” but without the instability and consistent crashes. With any luck, though, by the time my  copy of Wyrd has been disabled by planned superannuation, Pages will be functional for my purposes. If not: retirement!

In any event, I surely do not want my clients’ documents (or my own) stored in the Cloud. Anyone’s Cloud.

As we speak, Apple users complain of presentations locked up in the nonfunctional iCloud that they can’t use for upcoming events, about e-mail locking up in the classic Apple mode (you get a message that your password is invalid; changing your password causes all sorts of chaos for you).

Worse yet, people’s iPhones are affected: one guy “restored” his phone and, because the Cloud was (still is) down, lost everything he’d loaded into the gadget. Ooops!

Imagine what happens if Google’s cloud goes down. All those Google Documents are suddenly out of reach. Presumably Gmail is rendered incommunicado. And you are rendered…out of business.

My paranoia extends even further, to the point where I would just as soon not make it any easier for the Corporate Shadow Government to spy on me. Sooo…between my personal craziness and the fact that there are some practical reasons to want to keep your data on your local disk, I’m compelled to opt out of the Cloud.

The thing that’s weird is the folks complaining about data locked up and  programs not working…Apple Fanboys, I mean…who show no indication that their files are backed up in Time Machine, which acts like a sort of local Carbonite. Backs up your stuff pretty much as you type. Backs up all your applications, too. On your own external hard drive, not on someone else’s server.

Techno-Skeptic: What’s wrong with e-books & e-tunes

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Sappho, the Tenth MuseIf you’ve been reading here for any length of time, you’ve come to realize that Funny is a dyed-in-the-wool techno-skeptic. Yea verily, even a techno-troglodyte. Today from Bloomberg comes a report that confirms my suspicions: China, uncomfortable with the twin horrors that are freedom of thought and freedom of expression, has shut down iTunes and iBooks. Herein lies the problem with e-books and e-tunes: you don’t really own them. You may pay for them, but it’s altogether too easy for someone to block you from reading or listening to them.

We’ve seen this happen with Amazon: there was, for example, the 2009 flap that arose when Amazon remotely erased digital editions of George Orwell’s 1984 (amazing choice!) from consumers’ Kindle devices. More recently, a Norwegian woman discovered all her paid-for content had been erased from her Kindle; Amazon flat refused to give an explanation for its actions.

As Amazon states in its ToS,  you don’t buy a Kindle book — you rent it: “Kindle content is licensed, not sold.” So, with this wonderful magical mystery machine, any creative work you buy can be taken away from you without warning and without recourse.

Apple has a similar proviso hidden in its iTunes ToS: “The Apple Software enables access to Apple’s iBookstore which permits you to license digital content, such as books (the”Service”).”

If Amazon can take it away, so can a government. And what we’re seeing in the current election cycle provides exactly zero reason to believe that Americans will forever be ruled by a fair, just, and civil government. There are those, probably crackpots, who think it never has been. In the Kurt Vonnegut novel in which we all live, the crackpot view could win out, over the long run. It never pays to dismiss “crazy”ideas  out of hand.

If you own a book made of paper and cardboard, yes, someone can take it away from you. Surely, they can throw it on a big bonfire and order you to stop thinking forbidden thoughts on pain of beheading. But they have to come into your home to take a hard-copy book away from you. They can’t just flick a switch somewhere and erase knowledge, opinion, and art.

A real book costs money. A real book takes up space. A real book collects dust. But a real book is yours.

IMHO, that’s worth it.

Falling Behind in Life

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Working my tail off; making progress in the profit-making department but going nowhere in the “get a life” department.

To end with (not to say, “to start with,” it’s all so damn effing circular!), the instant I sat down to write this post, the accursed computer hung. That was with a file open that I’d been working on since 7:30 this morning, pretty much nonstop all the way through until 9:00 p.m.

It’s now 20 til ten. Miraculously, I managed to save the two open Wyrd files and one Excel file to DropBox before being forced to shut down with the power-off button, supposedly a very bad thing to do to your Mac. It looks like the files were undamaged and the system is working again.

After 40 minutes of wrestling with the damn computer, my head is throbbing. By 5 p.m. the gut thing was feeling better, but I’m sure I’ll hear about this episode along about 3:30 this morning. Oh well. I’d already set a Zantac and a mug of water by the bed.

Holy sh!t. Wouldn’t you just know this damn thing would try to trash 13½ hours worth of work? I yelled so furiously Ruby tried to jump off the bed, a distance about five times her height. Poor little dog. She thinks it’s her fault every time the computer crashes. Since it goes down about every second or third day (the last emergency rescue of my Excel checkbook record was dated 3/30…), she must be filled with Good Catholic Guilt.

Right. The dog thinks the top of the bed is Purgatory.

Spent a fair amount of the day reading about Purgatory. Anglo-Saxon concepts thereof, that is. I’ve now read, marked up, and drafted index entries for all but two articles in this collection.

Weirdly, this is one of the better books in its category that I’ve read. It has some surprisingly interesting articles.

Take the one on wyrmas. Know what a wyrm is? Beowulf’s dragon was a wyrm. A wyrm can be a dragon, a serpent, or an ordinary invertebrate earthworm. Orrrrr….AN EARTHWORM ON STEROIDS THAT ATTACKS AND DISMEMBERS YOUR DEAD BODY AND TORTURES YOUR SOUL IN HELL!!!! Eeeeeeeeekkkkk! They have teeth of fire and they crawl about in an army under the command of a terrifying character named Gifer.

We are dooomed!

The Anglo-Saxons were pretty amazing. Did you know that a fair amount of their visual imagery was influenced by Near Eastern cultures? That included not just contemporary Arabic cultures, but ancient Egypt. They were redoubtable fighters (despite getting trounced, ultimately, by a bunch of Normans) and they left troves of beautifully worked gold and garnet artefacts.

I hope to be done with this project in a couple of days. It’s worth a grand, so as you can imagine I’m anxious to meet the deadline and also to do a decent job on it.

Thank God there was no choir this morning, after last week’s nonstop frenzy. This allowed an entire, uninterrupted day to devote to the project. Yesterday I took copy to a meeting that soaked up the afternoon…managed to get a little markup done but of course not as much as would’ve happened here in the Silence of the Tomb.

Meanwhile another project is going to pot. Am trying to hire someone to take up the slack; a new person who wants to work with me on editorial was approached; she and her hubby are sick and so that went nowhere. Tomorrow, though, is another day. Two other people are on the string…we’ll see what develops there.

Mean-meanwhile, bills have to be paid; gotta figure out someplace to dig up the money to pay the auto and homeowner’s insurance. After I scraped the paint on my co-religionist’s car, they jacked up not only the car but also the house insurance. So that will bite a couple grand out of this year’s budget.

Ugh.

And so, to bed…

wyrms 640px-Náströnd_by_Frølich

 

MacShafted

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Give me back my index cards and my typewriter, please! Granted, the Mac is better than the PC. That does seem to be so. But it’s still a computer and it still is designed to inject as many headaches and hassles into your life as possible.

I have to say, at least Apple has some customer service. With a PC, you’re on your own. Still…yesterday, two of the three CSRs who tried to solve the problem had no idea what they were talking about; a third figured it out — or rather, the two of us did, together — but only by sheer persistence. And during the course of that marathon hassle, I learned that if I update my OS to the latest Scenic Wonder, “El Capitan,” it probably will disable my Office for Mac programs.

Holy sh!t.

It sucked FIVE HOURS out of a day burdened with a huge editorial project (with two others in the wings) to learn that the reason my e-mail program was crashing random incoming mails is that MacMail was not deleting messages consigned to “Trash,” as it was supposedly programmed to do.

A few years ago, I set MacMail to delete items in the “Trash” folder once a month. Then, as they came in, I flagged spam messages and Twaddle, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest notifications to go direct to “Trash.” In theory, all of these attention-distracters were being disappeared automatically.

In reality? Not so much.

After an interminable exchange over the phone with one of Apple’s factotums, we discovered that something over three thousand messages had accrued somewhere in the accursed Cloud. And because all Apple computers now function to some degree in the Cloud even if you haven’t bought into the idea that you should store all your data there, all this stuff was building up like dental plaque somewhere in the Cloud.

Fixing this entailed a trip to the Apple store, explaining to a “Genius” what was going on, listening to his theory, discovering that it was wrong, being told it was something on the Cloud that he wasn’t allowed to mess with, making an appointment to talk by phone with someone somewhere in the bowels of Apple Corp, (is that Core?), jawing with her for quite a while, thinking she’d figured out how to fix it, discovering she hadn’t; calling back, hassling to get another person on the phone, explaining the whole mess over AGAIN, and then hanging on the phone for two hours while we tried to figure out the problem.

Ultimately we figured out that something over THREE THOUSAND junk messages were hiding in Computer Hell.

They could not be killed off by highlighting all and deleting all. It looked like I was going to have to delete them one at a time, guaranteeing a permanent case of carpal tunnel syndrome.

Finally we figured out that I could highlight & delete about a dozen at a time. So it took all afternoon to clean all these out. This was after I’d sunk god only knows how much time, a few days earlier, disabling and deleting all my “Rules.” At one point, the Cloud was cloning deleted messages and re-saving 21 iterations of each. It took FOREVER to get rid of them.

It looks like MacMail is probably working again. You can tell by the volume of spam and junk pouring into the inbox… Lovely.

The guy on the phone suggested waiting two or three days to be sure all messages are getting through before trying to reinstate anti-spam “Rules.” So now my Inbox is filling up with junk faster than I can kill it off.

What. a. NIGHTMARE. hassle.

Meanwhile, the gigantic task of indexing 350 pages of Anglo-Saxon art history got put on hold.

Yesterday I intended to enter another marked-up chapter’s worth of index entries in Wyrd. Instead, I carried an unread article to the Apple store so I could start marking it up. Despite making an appointment with their “Geniuses,”  you still end up sitting around a noisy, crowded store for quite a while before you get service. Conveniently, though, they let you sit at a table while you wait, making it possible to cram in some work. In between episodes, I continued to mark up page proofs.

And these are some page proofs. This particular author finds himself fascinated with a specific Old English word-suffix combination, from which he believes he can deduce any number of enlightenments about monastic culture and theo-political thinking during the Benedictine Reform. At one point, the guy surveyed existing literature and counted 137 occurrences of this linguistic combination.

Holy sh!t. Can you even imagine how OCD you’d have to be to do that?

On my end, speaking of OCD, I have have found Word for Mac’s keyboard commands for the letter eth (ð) and the letter thorne (þ) to be somewhat wanting. For the eth, Wyrd’s keyboard command creates a thing that looks like an italic version without the crossbar; for the thorne, it creates…nothing. It does, however, do a nice job with Æ and æ. That’s something. I guess.

Fortunately, WordPress has these characters, which can be copied and pasted into a Wyrd file, thereby making it possible to do the job without begging the client to replace substitute symbols out of his specialized software.

And speaking of Wyrd…the guy who was helping me on the phone remarked that my system needs to be updated to the latest operating system, cutely named El Capitan. I said that I had not updated to the newer Big Cats or to the latest Scenic Delight because I had lost the use of a key program in an earlier update and I do not wish to lose the use of any more programs. He allowed as to how El Capitan could disable Wyrd 2008 for Mac. This would require me to update to Wyrd 2013 (or, more simply, to close down my business altogether…). I hate, hate, HATE  the fucking “Ribbon,” and I have exactly zero desire to work with my own and my clients’ files in Microsoft’s “Cloud,” nor am I going to end up paying far, far more than the program’s real value by being forced to buy a monthly subscription.

When you look it up, you find that issues with Wyrd 2008 are mixed: some people say the program still works, others say it’s broken. There’s not much you can do about this, since Microsoft stopped supporting 2008 some time back, partly by way of herding its sheep customers into the Cloud Corral. Eventually you learn that the program will work if it was already resident on the upgraded machine, but you can’t install it anew under El Capitan:

Users report that they cannot install Microsoft Office 2008 (out of date) on El Capitan. If Office 2008 was already installed on Yosemite and you upgrade to El Capitan, it will work.

And in the unholy hassle department, here’s what we’re told you have to waste time doing to “get ready” for El Capitan:

  • Use Software Update to keep all Apple software up to date, including the OS.
  • Apply all free updates to other software you use.
  • Set up an external hard drive and use Time Machine.
  • Add more RAM if you can.
  • Fix damaged and duplicate fonts.
  • Use Disk Utility to repair permissions on your hard drive. (This is safe to do, and quick.)
  • If you are running a version of Mac OS X earlier than Snow Leopard, you will have to install Snow Leopard first. You can buy an installer disc for Snow Leopard from Apple’s web site for $20.

Read on, and you learn the thing disables any number of programs, including anything that’s called a “Power PC” program (whatever that is). And of course, it assassinates yet another expensive Adobe program.

Mac is hardly alone in blithely robbing consumers of programs they need through “recommended” or “required” upgrades of its operating systems. Microsoft’s 2010 Office upgrade, for example, would delete all of an upgrading user’s Access and Outlook files, without asking permission to do so.

Y’know…if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! What the frack is the point of these endless time-consuming upgrades that don’t do much except complicate people’s lives?

Truly. This is the sort of thing that makes me crave — more and more often! — to go back to my IBM Selectric and my Smith-Corona. At least they couldn’t be “upgraded” by some arrogant corporation.

Trust no one.

Work, non diminuendo

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So after the day before yesterday’s MS Word fiasco, which as of yesterday morning I thought would be relatively easy to clean up, I spent the entire day wrestling with the damn file!!!!

Copying the 325 pages out of the corrupted file and pasting it into an identical Wyrd template caused the copy to lose its styling. The format looked right: 20 point Alegreya bold level 2 heading, 0 points before, 30 points after…but Wyrd would not read it so! Word, in effect, could not “see” the styles for chapter headings, paragraphs, font format, etc.

It converted all the small-caps first-graf leaders into all caps. Normally you can search > format > all caps and replace with format > small caps. But in this file, Wyrd would not do that. Because, as it developed, the program “thought” the all-caps were small-caps. So I had to go through the entire file, paragraph by paragraph, and manually change every set of all caps to small caps.  This took hours of mindless pointing and clicking and pointing and clicking and pointing and…. God DAMN but I hate it that Apple negated all of Word’s keyboard commands!!!!

The “format paintbrush” didn’t work for the purpose. So, no. There was no way out of the endless point-and-click torture.

Lines wrapped slightly differently in the new file, so I had to go through the entire document again (each of these stages happens one at a time) to fix a whole new raft of widows, orphans, and loose lines. Hours of farting around.

And of course, because rewrapped lines changed the pagination, I had to go through the entire document and replace every page break (each of which was placed where it worked) with a section break/odd page, with baleful ramifications.

Changing the page breaks to section breaks re-fucked up the pagination. So I had to wrestle with the program some more to persuade it to start the roman-numeral pagination on page one, not to put a page number on chapter and section opening pages, and not to give me two roman-numeral sections each starting on page i.

Because Wyrd blocks the view of a blank page after a section break/odd when you’re in View > Print Layout, I can’t get AT the verso side of those pages to hide the running header, so when the damn thing is printed, it will (once again) look like some lady with a typewriter on her kitchen table composed it. I In “Draft,” you can’t see the  headers & footers, so obviously you can’t get into them to fool with covering up the ones you don’t want to print.

T0 fix this, I’ll have to go through every section and change the section breaks to page breaks, fix the headers, and change the page breaks back to section breaks. Then I’ll have to go through all 325 pages, one at a time, and reformat all the sections to the custom format I had to make to create a PDF that tells the printer to print it on 8.5 x 9.5 stock.

Because Wyrd couldn’t read the heading style, it wouldn’t generate a new table of contents. So I had to go through, identify page numbers for every chapter, and create a new TofC. That sounds easy, but it wasn’t, because of the native squirreliness of Word tables. It was, as a matter of fact, an endless effing nightmare.

So I’m not done with a project that should’ve been done a week ago. And I hate Word. I’m beginning to hate Word enough that it just might be worth trying, for the fourth time, to learn how to use InDesign.

No, wait: I see the workaround: Enter a page break before the section break. This will push the section break to the verso side, preserving the section’s formatting. Obscure the running header at the top of the blank page and then delete the page break.

Why should I have to dream up stuff like this? Why should I have to waste my time like this to get what ought to be a simple job done?