INDEX	Monday June 13, 2022
How hackers opt for the slow lane It is surprising that people hardly ever (well, never, if you want to know!) ask me how you can tell the difference between a common or garden computer foul up and a hack. Yet there are things to look out for and when you have been a victim as long as I have, you learn to pick up on them. Hackers, at least the ones who hack me, are like naughty children: they are mainly interested in causing disruption and inconvenience. So if I try to copy a quart into a pint pot (or to put it another way a 4gb file onto a drive that only has 1gb of space) the software packages I use tell me right away, up front, that I have a problem. You are trying to copy a file onto a drive that lacks the space. Do you want to continue? Well no, thank you very much. That would be a waste of time. If however, my system is being hacked and the hackers want to convince me that I do not have the required permission to access, say, a zip file it will grind on remorselessly until it gets almost to the end of the process and then say something like you do not have permission to access this file. The only way to deal with this problem is to wait a few days and then try again, probably at a different time of day when the hacker is not on shift. Then, very often, permission is not an issue and suddenly the file magically appears. This time wasting applies to many activities pursued by the hackers. From time to time they will destroy my computers. That happens far too often and causes me a lot of pain, forcing me to shell out money I do not have on new hardware. But mostly it's time wasting and they love permissions since they seem to be able to come up with all sorts of scenarios in which I can not access my own files because they are off limits. Strangely the Linux crowd are quite proud of permissions and believe they have stolen a march on Windows and Mac by making permissions ubiquitous. Personally, I couldn't care less about permissions. My ambition is to stop interlopers getting into my computer, not to prevent them from accessing files once they are in. But it seems like this is a forlorn hope. Another favourite of the hackers is the script. Somehow they manage to run these, particularly in browsers, causing my system to slow to a crawl or even to stop working completely. Scripts don't damage your computer. At least I don't think they do; but they are very annoying. Hackers also try to cut down communication between computers. If you are using exterior HDDs you will find that it is annoyingly difficult to get one that will be readable in both a Mac and Linux environment. The hackers are fully aware of this difficulty and add to it by turning off your USB ports. So when you plug in a connection from an exterior drive, it looks like you can't mount it. Your system won't recognise it. This is a hard one but it seems as if when you use a multi usb connector (a device with perhaps four USB slots) it is harder to shut down the USB port. You don't need to use several USB devices; just fill one slot and you will probably get access to your data. A crazy way to have to use a computer and these hackers are unquestionably crazy people; though they are employed by governments and think of themselves as spies.
INDEX Posted by Jonathan Brind.		Monday June 13, 2022