Emrys Davies wrote:

You amuse me quite a lot with your goings on about possible trollers, but I
am surprised that you cannot distinguish between a real troll and someone
who is not very computer literate, which is what I am. I was quite good at
it (not trolling) some twenty years ago but now, in 89th year, I find that
I have forgotten so much of what I learned on various courses.

A disguised troll behaves just like a noob. That's what makes them
often indistinguishable. A troll that uses profanity, insults, or other
peurile behavior is obvious. Some like to hide they are trolling
thereby waste your time. Of course, they are wasting their time, too,
but that's the game they enjoy. It takes several exposures to a
disguised troll to realize they are trolling. It's like toilet paper:
you get a new brand but may not know if you like it until after a few
wipes. By the time you might suspect a disguised troll, they nymshift
whereupon they have some more time before getting suspected and then
detected as a disguised troll under the new nym. You can only hope in
time they devolve into peurile trolls (often the case) to be easily
recognizable.

Now, back to Javascript and me thinking that mine was not working. I am
quite sure now that for some reason my Javascript 'enable' setting in
security was jumping out into 'disabled' although I c. Apply and the
necessary OK,s. The same happened with the Avast signature. Now both are
working fine hence my clock test which shows:
http://notstupid.us/clox/clockie.html.

Repeating the URL to the test site still does not show anyone /here/
what you /saw/. You repetively and deliberately ignore that fact. You
need to save a screenshot, upload THAT, and give the URL to THAT pic to
show to /others/. We cannot see your screen to see at what you are
pointing or what you are seeing. No one here is using remote access
software (e.g., TeamViewer, mikigo, LogMeIn, or some variant of VNC) to
see what you see on your screen.

Glad to know you got Javascript working. Some users disable it because
they are paranoid about how it can be abused at malicious sites or used
for tracking them during their web surfing (yet they're oblivious to how
WebRTC can be used for tracking and leave it enabled). However,
Javascript has become pervasive in the Web as a means of providing
dynamic content and an interactive site. Many sites are unreadable or
unusable without Javascript enabled.

Rather than a simple on-off switch for Javascript, a better alternative
would be a graduated feature set option that lets you decide just how
much of Javascript or how invasive its functions would be allowed
globally by default but with a whitelist of exceptions. Just because I
want to allow some Javascript doesn't mean I want all of it enabled but
it's currently an all or nothing option. I'd like to see its functions
categorized and give the user the choice of which categories of
functions to allow. This is similar to permissions in Android: you can
globally block all permssions, or allow them but choose which
permissions an app can have.

So now if I think that my Javascript is not working or that Avast is
showing its signature I will check to see whether they have jumped
out of their respective 'enabled' or 'disabled' boxes.

Jumping out of their previous setting means something does that and why
I wondered if you have other software that is altering those settings.
The programs themselves (IE and Avast) don't alter their user
configuration. You have to go in and do that. Some possibilities of
other sources (than you or the programs themselves) making changes to
those settings are tweakers (but you have to run those) and security
software (beyond just the anti-virus portion of an AV program, or some
other anti-malware security program), or state restorers (restore to a
prior state of the drive upon OS restart). The list is rather long and
I'm sure that I'll forget some types of software that could step on the
settings. If I set an option a specific way and found later it got
changed without me being involved, I'd start hunting around to see what
was running on my computer as something is behaving maliciously (which
could be malware or just some interferring software with an unwanted
"feature" or you configured it wrong).

If you uninstall the Mail Shield module in Avast, nothing (you, malware,
the program itself, an update, a tweaker, etc) can reenable the spam
signature - because that module would be present to be altering your
messages (e-mail or newsgroups). That module affords no more protection
than does the on-demand (real-time) scanner. The Mail Shield scanner
uses the on-demand scanner but designed to interrogate the content of
e-mail traffic upon arrival. Only when you extract an attachment which
creates a file can the decoded text string in a MIME part be possibly
executable. Yet when a file gets created, the on-demand scanner will
scan that new file. All the Mail Shield does is change /when/ a
malicious attachment in e-mail gets detected. Instead of waiting for
you to later decode the MIME part in an e-mail (extract the attachment)
into a new file and then see if it was malicious using the on-demand
scanner, the Mail Shield does the same check using the on-demand scanner
but at the time the e-mail traffic arrives. Detection coverage hasn't
changed or been improved, only when it gets performed. However, e-mail
interrogation can cause problems. The client issues a send for a new
outbound e-mail but the AV's proxy intercepts the e-mail traffic to
inspect it. That adds delay between when the client tells the servere
it is sending a new message to when the mail server gets and ends
receiving the new message. That added delay can cause an timeout error
in the client or server having to wait too long. For short text-only
messages, the delay is miniscule. For huge-sized e-mails where you
write a tomb of text or have a big attachment or lots of them, it takes
time to scan all that content, so the delay gets longer. The same
timeout can occur when receiving e-mail: the client waits for the server
to finish but times out waiting for the AV's e-mail scanner to finish
inspecting the message. The AV's proxy adds another link in the chain,
and the longer the chain the more fragile it becomes. If the AV's proxy
becomes unresponsive (dead), you can't send or receive e-mail. There is
no advantage in their Mail Shield, or the equivalent in other AVs. It's
bloat to make their product have a larger feature set but with no added
malware detection coverage.