vivweb01blog

  Introduction We all interact with the ‘net’ daily in one way or another, whether it’s via our smartphone, on a laptop or desktop pc, or just at 'arms length' when using a service that involves internet data transmission of some kind.  Many of our more recently acquired household devices now interface with the internet in some way (e.g doorbells, home heating systems, etc..).  We are now almost totally dependent on the internet's continued function to fulfil our increasingly complex everyday lives - our society just wouldn't work properly without it nowadays. One of the down sides to all this is that it makes us highly vulnerable to cyber-attacks, or indeed any natural event which interferes with the net's infrastructure - for anyone who would like to find out more about this aspect of our vulnearbility as a society, check out my recent blog on modern warfare How many of us really understand how the net really works ? And do we really need to ? It is, of cour...

  This post was first released in October 2022 as a response to the political 'crises' of the time. Note the more recent updates at the end of the main text - nothing really changes, does it..... As a bit of light relief from the momentous events of recent weeks in politics, I thought I’d take a wry and admittedly somewhat irreverent look at what motivates our politicians….if Radio 4’s ‘News Quiz’ can get away with it each week, despite the BBC’s draconian rules on all things pc, then so can I… In seemingly perpetual 'crisis' situations like this one,   as individuals we only really have two options - either to laugh or cry; I prefer to err on the side of laughter – for now, at least. Recent upsets at the top of the political tree, and the almost obsessive speculation about the outcome of yet another leadership race in the media, prompted me last week to ask myself the question:  “Why on earth would anyone actually want to be PM at a time like this ?” The role is...

  Microsoft (MS) withdrew support for Windows 7 way back in 2014 in line with their general policy of planned version obsolescence. By all accounts, there are still a considerable number of older pcs running Win 7; their owners have either simply not been able to afford the cost of an upgrade, or have heard of the obstacles to upgrading, and are quite reasonably reluctant to risk trying to upgrade an older pc with a new OS that it may not be able to cope with. For anyone actually brave enough to try upgrading a Win 7 pc,   MS have thrown an additional spanner in the works by no longer offering   downloads for Win 10 or Win 11 installation on pcs they detect are still running Windows 7 or XP. Users are therefore effectively   prevented by MS from using either of the more recent OS versions......the very versions that MS were originally prepared to let you upgrade to for free. This is an obvious ploy to force users to upgrade their old (but still serviceable) pcs to...

AI development has continued apace since this blog was first published in June 2024, with little sign of a slowdown. Herewith an update for 2025.....   Introduction There has been much discussion, and not a little concern, voiced in the press and on social media recently about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the dangers it might pose for humanity.. How dangerous is it really, and what if anything can, or indeed should, we do about it ? First, let’s try to pin down what we mean by the term ‘AI’. The OED dictionary definition is: “.. the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. ” This rather narrow definition focuses on the use of AI as a tool, to be used to enhance what we as humans already accomplish, rather than considering what a new ‘cohort of intelligent machines’ might do themselves in the future. Apocal...