Computer Handyman

I have had two brushes with Vietnam during my life: one was serving in the Army artillery in Vietnam during the war, the second was overseeing databases of Vietnamese who wanted to go to the United States after the war.  When I was in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970, I had very little interaction with the Vietnamese. I was in a heavy artillery battery that supported American Army soldiers on the ground.   Most of the time we were stationed at firebases in the middle of nowhere, with no Vietnamese around.   A few times we had Vietnamese units on the same firebase, but we did not interact.   They supported Vietnamese units and we supported American units.   We were in northern South Vietnam, which the Army called I Corps.   Occasionally I would ride into town with supply trucks; so, I occasionally saw Hue and Quang Tri. At Firebase Barbara, on a lonely mountaintop not too far south of Khe Sanh on the Laotian border, all of our resupply was done by helicopter. ...

Cybercurrencies are here to stay.  Maybe Bitcoin is too, but not at the levels it currently holds.  Tulips are still here, but the tulip mania of the 1630s has passed.  Bitcoin was originally intended to be a medium of exchange that would be insulated from almost all external control.  This anonymity made it an excellent means of exchange for illegal activities, most recently illustrated by the fact that most of the ransomware attacks on private data have demanded payment in Bitcoin.  Bitcoin transactions are recorded by blockchain, which is like an old accounting ledger.   It contains every Bitcoin transaction, although looking at blockchain from the outside, you can tell that a transaction is verified, but you cannot tell who the parties were or how much Bitcoin was involved.   As one of the parties to the transaction, however, you can pull out the specific information.   So, if Elon Musk for example says you never paid him for your Tesla, y...

I am trying to install GoogleAdSense on my Computer Handyman website , but all I get is a blank, blue space where the ad should go. I guess the problem has something to do with the way my CSS is set up, but AdSense says it may take 48 hours to start working properly. So, I will give it some more time.

  GoDaddy’s ftp connection for their websites does not work like most ftp connections do.   For most ftp connections, the address starts with ftp, as in ftp.website.com , but GoDaddy wants you to leave off the ftp prefix.   I could not connect by ftp to my GoDaddy website , it-handy.com .   I tried for a long time to figure out what was wrong – my password, my user id, etc.   Nothing was wrong except the address of the ftp connection.  

The media is overly excited about the Russian hacking using the SolarWinds update process.  First, was it Russia?   It seems likely that it was Russia, but not certain.   Anyone who is good enough to develop the SolarWinds hack would be smart enough to cover his tracks.   He may not have covered them perfectly, and we may be able to track down the hacker, but he may also have successfully covered his tracks.   He could be a Chinese hacker who copied the trademark signatures of the Russian hackers and who routed his hacks through Russian servers or websites.   It could be a hacker anywhere who did the same thing.   It requires computer expertise, but there are a lot of computer geniuses out there, including in the Middle East and Latin America.   I am surprised that no one has mentioned Edward Snowden in connection with the hacking.   He is a computer genius living in Russia who knows American computer security extremely well.   Is it p...

The 5G upgrade still has a long way to go.  This Wired article explains that 5G operates in three different radio frequency ranges, basically low, medium, and high.  The real, revolutionary changes expected from 5G really come from use of the high frequency ranges, in the millimeter band.  The higher the frequency, the higher the rate of data transmission, and 5G is all about fast data.  The problem is that shorter wavelengths have shorter ranges and cannot penetrate much of anything, like walls.   To get the higher speeds, there would have to be cell towers very close together, many more than we have now, and very close to the people using their phones.   According to the Wall Street Journal , the new cell towers are already running into resistance as they are installed across the US.   The Journal also reports that in one of the countries most wired for 5G, South Korea, it doesn’t work that well.   One place 5G is supposed to be available is ...