INDEX	September 26, 2022
A while ago I was advised that what I needed to do was put my files online. In that way I could side step the hackers who make my life a misery. I regarded this idea with some disdain. I make videos and some of my files, for example the Final Cut Pro bundles (Apple's editing system), can be more than 1tb, so uploading them is difficult and time consuming. And costly. I have at least 20tb of important files. However, I have been trying to give it a go. But the hackers make it as difficult as possible, in practice completely impossible, for me to actually do this. I mainly use a Chromebook because there is precious little software on it, so not much to hack. Recently I got fed up with the hacking so I decided to change the password. In the past this has been a ridiculously difficult business but not this time. I only had to push a single button and enter the new password. Magic. Or maybe not. For some reason Google doesn't accept your new passsword unless you use a different wifi to the one you had before. I think this is because the Chromebook, like almost all technology, isn't really off when you think it's off. To really switch it off and so enable the new password, I went to the library. At the library, using the Cumbria wifi I had no problem entering the new password but when the system asked me for the old password so I could rescue my old files (everything I had been working on) the keyboard froze. I might have been able to plug in a usb keyboard if I had been at home, but not at the library. Foolishly I ploughed on and lost everything. So I thought this is an opportunity. I will put everything on my Google drive. So I began the extraordinarily laborious process of uploading to my Google drive. This was at first impossible because the hackers managed to remove all the checking systems (the read outs that tell you the size of the file, or the number of files in a directory) so I did a Powerwash. This is a way of re-setting a Chromebook to the way it was when it was brand new. Now I could get file sizes. But for whatever reason it was impossible to upload from a remote drive so I had to first copy the files I was trying to get on the Google drive, onto my home drive. This drive is quite small so I am now doing the equivalent of emptying an ocean using a thimble. But that wasn't enough for the hackers. The uploads mysteriously stop when they are two thirds through and I get a message from a mysterious app called Files (I wish I could get rid of that) constantly saying my files are being Synced. I understand Synced to mean that old versions of files on the Google drive are replaced by new versions from the computers attached to the drive. The files had not changed. If Synced means the missing files are being uploaded, it wasn't working because the size of the directories remained static. So I gave up on that and zipped a section of the directories I am trying to upload, with the intention of uploading that instead. Now Files runs to the exclusion of everything else and I can not run anything. I close down the Chromebook and re-start, but as soon as Files starts running I am frozen out of everything else. Now some will say that I am incompetent; I don't understand computers; I am confused; I use knackered old machines (in fact one of my Chromebooks I bought last week, the other earlier this year). But the truth is that it is easier to believe the world is essentially a benign place and if you behave sensibly, everything will work out OK. And those of us, for whom the world is not like that, can safely be ignored as paranoid cranks.
INDEX Jonathan Brind		September 26, 2022