DON'T USE POLi or Account2Account Payment Services they are bad news

These services are for people who do not use a debit or credit card to make a payment. Instead they are transferring funds directly from a bank account to a merchant. The idea of these services is they can make that type of payment as "easy" as a credit or debit card. However they are risky to use, the banks regard them as insecure and would prefer customers do not use them.

These services work by inserting a browser within a browser so that you do a logon into your internet banking in a virtual browser window inside the payment provider's website. Since this requires a secure (HTTPS) connection between you and the bank, the payment provider website must intercept this connection and decrypt the traffic occurring in your supposedly secure and private internet banking session. This is called a "man in the middle" interception and is a system that is used by hackers to steal information from HTTPS logons.

Man in the middle interception of HTTPS traffic is becoming increasingly common in a variety of contexts - not all of them good. The important point is that your supposedly secure and safe internet connection is intercepted somewhere along the way so that it is no longer secure. At the point where it is being transacted between your computer and the payment provider's website, or within the payment provider's website, there is a risk because it is no longer a secure transaction. The payment provider could be storing logon names and passwords, which if obtained by unauthorised parties, could then be used to access your internet banking and steal your money.

The answer is, if you are paying for goods online, don't use an internet banking transfer when a site like this asks you to log into Internet banking in a virtual browser window (where the logon looks like your internet banking logon but is actually within the payment provider's website). Don't provide internet banking credentials anywhere except when logging into the bank's own website. 

Use a debit card or credit card to make all online purchases. Debit cards simply access funds from a nominated account, so they are effectively the same as transferring funds from the account. If your payment website offers to save debit/credit card details against future payments, don't enable the option. You should not have saved any credentials (including debit/credit card numbers) on a third party website which can be insecure.

Although there is also a risk from debit card use, you can limit the amount of funds in the nominated account. This is safer than giving out internet banking credentials, which can be used to gain access to all of your funds,

• http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=11596037

Switching to Linux [4]

Continuing on my series of investigations into switching the most powerful of my computers to Linux.

There are now some important questions to be resolved in the area of running a software based RAID 1 array on a pair of disks (a mirror) as this is somewhat of an advanced area of knowledge and unlike a lot of other stuff a mastery of various command line tools and hardware concepts is needed. It will require further investigations and forum postings to determine.

In the short term I can break the RAID mirror on the existing pair of Windows disks and use one of them as a source for the other which will be the Linux data volume equivalent. In other words reading the Windows disk using ntfs-3g as I transfer data to the Linux ext4 volume. Later on once this process has been completed it should be possible to bring the second disk across into a RAID-1 array in the same way as the means by which I originally set up the Windows software disk array.

In the short term I expect one of my computers will stay on Windows as there are still a few software packages that are not going to be available on Linux. But which version of Windows it will be running is a moot point. I don't think Windows 10 is warranted and it may be reverted to 7. The issue is with the cameras and photo editing software such as IrfanView. It will take me some considerable time and investigation to find alternatives that are as good as these packages. However given the availability of ntfs-3g I haven't ruled out the possibility of being able to interface a Windows virtual machine to images. The main issue is to find some way of replicating the download of photos from a camera to a Linux computer in the way that the Canon software handles it.

So from here we can look at moving closer to an actual timeframe for migration but it is a process that will have to be scheduled for when I have more time as it is not as straightforward as migrating to a new version of Windows has been. However it is not too complex.

The steps I will be following for the migration are likely to be as follows:

• Back up all of the existing data on the PC
• Move some of it back to the study PC (the one where most of it used to be) - photos and the photo processing software packages
• Break the RAID mirror and check that both disks function independently
• Install MINT on the SSD
• Turn one of the mirror disks into a ext4 data volume and redirect the home / usr folders to it.
• Link the other mirror disk using ntfs-3g and migrate data structures across from it
• Reformat the second mirror disk and then create the new RAID-1 array in Linux

There is possibly more but that's the gist of it. My little AMD E350 box on which I am writing this has been doing a good job as a test bed but is stretched to its limits at times. With only 4 GB of RAM and its low power CPU then running some big stuff like Qgis along with several browsers is asking a lot of it. But I have spent as much time as possible using it and have been attempting to achieve as much as possible with it compared to the other computers in the house.

One of the things that is important is a second backup disk so that I can immediately start to make backups from the Linux system. This is on the basis of not relying on ntfs-3g for write support because we do not know how reliable their system really is, because it is unclear how they are going to guarantee bulletproof compatibility. In fact this is a really murky area. It seems the entire product has been captured by the commercial developer and is not embraced by the wider community. As such I do not see much merit in wanting to run any of my data long term on a NTFS volume using this system. For Linux therefore my data will be migrated to ext4 which is a native filesystem.

So a lot of steps and a lot of time. I am not sure what the timeframe for making it all happen will be. It may be that it is as much as two months away. I am making the most use I can of my test system and trying out various things on it but I am really champing at the bit to be able to move quickly to my main system running Linux. So I hope with a bit of juggling it will come together soon, maybe over the Easter holiday weekend, perhaps sooner if I have more time. 

Switching to Linux [3]

Running Qgis 2.12.3 with one of my map projects.

Switching to Linux [2]

Since my last posting I have made some progress in developing my case for switching one of my home computers to Linux. The other home computer will probably stay at Windows for the time being, but with the maximum amount of privacy configured on it. This computer will run a few packages I haven't yet discovered how to substitute in Linux.

One of the killer Windows packages for my line of work has been RD Tabs which provides a tabbed interface to Remote Desktop sessions. As it happens there are several RDP clients in Linux but Remmina is the tabbed equivalent you have to have for remote session management. The version that came in my distro was an old version and needed to be updated. The instructions here at askubuntu.com turned out to be straightforward and exactly what was needed to get an update to version 1.1.1 of Remmina:

• http://askubuntu.com/questions/567039/how-to-upgrade-to-a-later-version-of-remmina-than-is-in-repository

These involved opening a terminal session and typing in several commandlines. After screeds of hieroglyphics had scrolled past the commands completed successfully and the installation was able to be tested, and works just as it should. To summarise, the commands required to be executed were:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:remmina-ppa-team/remmina-master
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install remmina remmina-plugin-rdp

So there is Remmina. Another solution that is helping me to progress a migration process that still has a few steps needed to bring it to implementation stage.

Another thing I have been looking at is ntfs-3g. This is supposedly a very reliable read and write NTFS driver that I can use to access NTFS disks on a Linux computer. It will have value when I need to migrate data from the computer, that is backed up on a NTFS disk, onto Linux's file system. I have not yet worked out whether I can do a RAID-1 array with the Logical Volume Manager easily as yet. But I do not expect that ntfs-3g is going to support a NFTS RAID-1 software array with LVM, it will be better to switch the disks to a native Linux filesystem whatever is the best option and put the RAID onto that.

Attempting to update QGIS to the current development release 2.12.x has not been quite so straightforward. My reference instructions came from this Qgis page:

• https://www.qgis.org/en/site/forusers/alldownloads.html

Going to the Debian/Ubuntu section and looking at ubuntugis requirement.

The problem is we end up with public key errors and even after following the instructions in relation to the keyserver I am still getting this error message:

• W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net trusty InRelease: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 089EBE08314DF160

That error had me stumped last night. However I  managed to lookup the precise message today and ended up back at askubuntu.com where I found this thread:

• http://askubuntu.com/questions/13065/how-do-i-fix-the-gpg-error-no-pubkey

Then I executed this command:

• sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys  089EBE08314DF160

Then I updated the cache.

Update Manager then was found to have qgis 2.12.3 listed as an update package and I installed the update along with a number of others. I therefore now have the latest version of Qgis. The next step will be to play with it with an existing Qgis project to see if it is as easy to use as the Windows version.

Switching to Linux

In my previous posts I wrote about the MS greed machine that is driving the deployment of Windows 10 and how MS now believes they own the hardware it runs on. I have now taken the first step towards shifting my personal machines onto Linux. These computers are homebuilt and have never had Windows licenses anyway so I would have had to consider buying licenses to make them legal if I had stayed with Windows.

The test computer is the one I built from a Gigabyte GA-E350 mainboard which after being in an old desktop case, I installed into an Antec ISK110 small PC chassis as seen here. That was a year ago and it's hardly been used since. So it makes a great test platform for Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa. I picked Mint because it has this nice green look. Seriously, I picked it because it is based on Ubuntu, and Cinnamon has better ratings than Ubiquity. Apart from MS Office it looks like nearly everything I use will be available but a few killer apps like Irfanview and Cobian Backup could take some time to find replacements for. It's possible I may keep one PC still running Windows or look at running some stuff in a VM as a short term solution until I find useful replacements, it is always tricky changing a platform when some apps are not available on the target, it may be that Iview works under Wine or something. Another is the Google Drive client, which I use to sync data automatically from my PC, and which is not available for Linux at present. There are some third party clients available however which I will take a look at.

So I have installed the Chromium and Opera browsers for testing and Qgis as well, this post is being written in Opera on that computer so the installation and putting stuff in has gone pretty well so far. Thunderbird is installed by default too. The backup is the most pressing issue to resolve because it works across two PCs and the different HDD format will make things tricky if both PCs aren't updated to Linux at the same time. That and some of the other tricky things like the software RAID array and transferring data across from the old disks. I haven't set a timeframe for the switch as it is time dependent but I would much rather switch than keep using Windows with all the rubbish MS has put into Windows 10.

MS demands users waive their rights to sue...LEGAL UNDER US LAW

Anyone who thinks Windows 10 is a great operating system or any product MS makes is great should stop right now.

There has been a big furore about a lot of stuff in Windows 10 like forced updates and as a result it is not at all surprising that people are talking about suing Microsoft over the behaviour of their new operating system. 

Softpedia has, in fact, stated in an article dated November 2015 that a class action lawsuit was being considered against MS for poor system performance. This was based on a claim of "thousands of computers made useless by Windows 10". It is not hard to find references to other legal action being considered at all.

It now turns out that MS has been bullying users of its operating systems and online services (including Windows) with service agreements that specifically forbids class action lawsuits or the like. Here is the services agreement to read online.

Now that agreement doesn't cover Windows, but it turns out, in fact, that similar agreements were introduced for Windows 8 back in 2012, with MS quick to exploit a Supreme Court ruling of the previous year. If the US Government permits corporations to bully their customers with terms such as these that remove such rights then America is a far more corrupt country than I had thought previously. But unfortunately, it turns out that in 2011, the US Supreme Court actually released a judgment allowing for such agreements to be legal. US lawmakers have had four years to fix this monumental injustice and have apparently made no effort to address it. California's Supreme Court, at least, in 2005 ruled that such waivers were unconstitutional, but it turned out that some states already permitted them. 

The Microsoft Windows 10 Rort - How MS Sees Windows 10 as a license to print money

Today I am going to write about how Microsoft wants to take over everyone's Windows PC with Windows 10, and I am writing from the perspective of an IT industry professional with many years' experience of Windows and other Microsoft software. As we all know, MS has been pushing Windows 10 very hard as a free upgrade to older version of Windows. In fact, they have been pushing it so hard that they have been downloading the upgrade files to people's PCs without asking them, and repackaging Windows 10 as a regular update on PCs. They even tried for a short time to make the upgrade automatically install on computers so that people did not have a choice, but that setting was quickly removed after complaints.

So the first problem is we have the so called "free" Windows 10 upgrade being pushed as blatantly as possible onto people - and other typical pressure techniques being used by stating the upgrade would only be free for a limited time. The second problem is what happens when Windows 10 does get onto your computer. Let's be frank that you aren't getting the Pro or Enterprise edition of Windows onto your PC with this free download. You are getting the Home edition and you are locked into even more obnoxious behaviour on MS's part, in relation to the automatic updates system. 

Now let us be clear, automatic updates have been around since Windows 2000 and generally the idea is a good one. However it's become more clear in the later versions of Windows since 7 that MS has become a lot more pushy about getting people to install the updates on their PCs. But this has reached a new low in Windows 10. Out of the box, regardless of situation or usage, every edition of Windows 10 will automatically install updates and version upgrades at any time, regardless of what you are doing with your PC, and will simply force all running applications to close without warning and without saving your data. And it doesn't do it in the middle of the night when your PC is not being used; it does it during the day, and multiple times in a single day. I have seen every computer I have installed with 10, suddenly restart itself in the middle of whatever work I was doing with it. I have seen people turn their computers on to be faced with a forced upgrade (equivalent to a service pack) to a new edition which can take several hours to complete during which the computer is unusable of course. I have seen cases where this upgrade got stuck at a certain percentage for an hour and then rolled back when the PC was restarted. 

Now, on Pro, Enterprise and Educational editions you can bring back the old options for automatic updates by using gpedit.msc to change the settings in the local group policy. Note, these settings are still hidden from view in the Control Panel gui, but MS had to give way to its corporate customer base as they have on many other occasions. (Remember when Vista came out with the disabling of Windows if it wasn't activated? MS had to cave in with 7 because of the huge furore from their corporate customers over this behaviour and as a result 7 will not stop functioning if it doesn't get activated.) So on these corporate type editions of 10, a group policy or Windows Updates server can control this behaviour, but MS still nags the user to install the updates. However these options are not available on Home Edition and anyone who wants to upgrade to the retail edition of Pro will have to pay an eye-watering $300 plus in NZ to fix this problem. And I guess MS hopes they will and the bucketloads of money will roll into their coffers.

Given MS has been so blatant and obnoxious I would expect to see legal action in the US and possibly in the EU where they have fined Microsoft hundreds of millions of euros on a number of occasions (the total is probably well over a billion euros to date). It gets worse because not only can MS dictate your update and upgrade timetable, but the license agreement also allow MS to decide to remove any feature of Windows they want from your computer at their choice. Thus it is entirely feasible that MS could extend their license to print money by removing formerly free features of Windows 10 from your PC and rolling them into paid apps. In fact, I think this is very likely to happen in future.

If you are buying a new Windows 10 computer I strongly recommend you get Pro edition rather than Home if you expect to be able to do any reasonable amount of work with it. I am seriously considering switching to Ubuntu and am quite pleased that I changed my phone over to Android.