Virus on page?

Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Tue, 19 Mar 2019 08:45:32 -0000, Chris wrote:

Commander Kinsey wrote:
Oh, Youtube changed to HTML5 4 years ago :-)
Surprising as I didn't think all browsers took up HTML5 for quite a while.

So how come a big company like Adobe made such a piece of crap, and didn't fix it?

They didn't make it, they bought it. I guess in the end it was too hard to
maintain and required a specific install for every os. Just like java which
is all also dying. HTML 5 is os agnostic by default. IOS not supporting it
was the killer blow.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash

Who uses IOS? I doubt the percentage is very high. Isn't that just small Apple devices?

Lots of people. At it's height about 60% of the market.

Now it's 23% of mobiles and 75%'of tablets
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-...bile/worldwide
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-...blet/worldwide

nospam
Tue, 19 Mar 2019
15:10:23 GMT in alt.computer.workshop, wrote:

In article , David in Devon
wrote:

| Funny how I've never been infected, yet both of AVG and MB
| have flagged up
things and removed them.
|

I suppose 2 condoms is better than one if you're
going to engage in risky behavior, and that approach
has worked for you. Hopefully they won't slip off.

it isn't, nor are two anti-virus utilities.

Malwarebytes is *NOT* an anti-virus utility

yes it is.

No, it isn't. There's absolutely nothing in the Malwarebytes exe
files, supporting dlls or the database file that has anything to do
with an actual exe/com file infector, mbr infector, etc etc etc.
Nothing whatsoever that deals with an actual self replicating
program, the requirement to be a virus. No code for detection, no
code for removal.

The only thing that seperates a malicious program from being a
trojan vs a virus is the self replication. If it does, it's a virus.
If it doesn't, it's a trojan. No exception, no middle ground, no
haggle room. Malwarebytes deals with one, doesn't touch the other.

They should be sued outright for dishonest advertising. They have
nothing under the hood that can handle a simple prepender, let alone
appender or cavity infector. Nor can they deal with poly or
oglymorphic viruses. They haven't got a damn thing to backup their
claims in the code or the database of the product you and I can
download or purchase in a store.

The reason is quite simple too. Hunting for and removing trojans
(which is what most/nearly all malware going around these days is) is
childs play. You find the bad exe files, you delete them. You scan
the registry and reverse unwanted changes the exe file was known to
make.

Hunting for a virus is a different game entirely and you'll require
actual low level programming knowledge and/or a team of people who
have such knowledge. You can't run an install watching program,
execute the viral sample and collect useful details. (Yes, that's
actually one standard malware analysis procedure Malwarebytes
employees use to compensate for their inability to load something
like, say, IDA pro and have a look around the exe file. IE: NON
CODERS are responsible for the protection offered via definition work
these days) you have to scan inside every single file present on the
machine. Going by a specific filename and/or location isn't going to
work. none of the Malware heuristics present in Malwarebytes knows
**** all about an actual virus and won't help them hunt for a single
one. A virus doesn't need it's own .exe file and doesn't need to make
a single registry change to infect you. It lives inside files already
present on your machine. And infects more as it spreads.

Once you find a file infected with the virus, you have to remove the
virus, without killing the host file. Simply opting to delete said
file and force the user to reinstall from backups or the app itself
isn't acceptable in all cases. And with Malwarebytes, that's the only
option you'd have. Delete all infected copies.

Here's where it gets even worse, and seperates the kiddies from the
men with AV/AM technologies. Viruses don't have to have a fixed
signature, unlike trojans. A cleverly written virus is able to
completely alter it's own code from an appearance aspect, while
retaining full functionality each time it infects a new file. It
could make millions of different combinations. Do you expect
Malwarebytes to retain millions of definitions to deal with one virus
varient? Even the advanced wildcard system I developed for
Malwarebytes couldn't deal with that.

Yes, I also consulted with Marcin and Bruce over several improvements
made to the program during the time I was working for them. When I
got there, the program was under the hood, a pathetic little thing.
They didn't even have string scanning technologies, and actually
wasted time scanning non executable files; as in mp3s and jpgs,
because they knew **** all about an exe file header. Oh, it's the
things that go on behind the scenes that most people don't know about
that makes you want to go... EWWW, that's a pile of **** under the
hood, simplistic as ****ing all hell, and quite sad. Yet, he could
pay my salary with it; doesn't say much for the general consumer.

Sorry, but, if you can't code, or your coding skill is limited to an
HLL only (Malwarebytes when written by Marcin was a visual basic 6
compiled program. When the company got bigger, it was converted to
c++ for an expected speed increase; which didn't happen because the
langauge wasn't the issue, the ****ing database design is. And has
been the entire time. They opted NOT to fix it, years ago) then you
can't really do anything with a virus, and, you're not so hot with a
trojan analysis either. You'll miss things if you're just executing
samples to see what they do.

Full disclosu

I'm a former employee of Malwarebytes - Malware researcher/head of
antipiracy dept. As a Malware researcher, it was my job to reverse
engineer 0day malicious exe/com files and write up suitable
definitions for the engine present in Malwarebytes to use for seek
and destroy.

No actual viruses could be processed and added to the definitions for
the aforementioned reasons. We had to delete them and move on.
Malwarebytes was and still is, a fancy looking, trojan scanner. If
you had any programming skill and enough time to collect samples to
grow a definition set, you could write your own. I did.

Malwarebytes recruited me to come and work for them. I didn't apply
to work for them, I didn't even know a job opening was available. I
was recruited due to my known expertise in the subject of Malware,
along with other aspects of what's now lumped in as 'cyber security'
issues.

I'd love to discuss the finer details with you, and teach you about
all kinds of things related to Antivirus/antimalware you seem to know
nothing about, if you'd like for me to do so. I'd enjoy it.

--
'Happiness is a warm puppy', said the anaconda.

Diesel Wed,
20 Mar 2019 07:54:24 GMT in alt.computer.workshop, wrote:

The only thing that seperates a malicious program from being a
trojan vs a virus is the self replication. If it does, it's a
virus. If it doesn't, it's a trojan. No exception, no middle
ground, no haggle room. Malwarebytes deals with one, doesn't touch
the other.

For the purposes of clarification and additional disclosure I bring
up the following finer aspects. I didn't include this previously
because I wanted to keep things as simple as possible, realizing that
the majority of those who might read this have no clue what malware
actually is and don't know the differences between a trojan, a virus,
a worm, or a virus and worm combination. Or, the different types of
all four one can encounter.

In fairness to Malwarbytes, they can skate on very thin ice with the
virus detection claim by being able to detect worms. Which are a
subset of a virus. The difference being, one requires a host and the
other has it's own. A virus injects it's own code into already
existing programs, it has no home of it's own. It's not self
contained. A worm on the other hand does not infect already existing
programs. Instead, it's a completely seperate file, containing a
fully functional copy of itself.

Malwarebytes can detect worms because they can be treated just like a
trojan or non replicating malware, even though they are, typically
capable of replication in some way shape or form. Either additional
copies of themselves locally on the machine (as with the so called
companion virus), and/or network aware and attempting to pass along
copies that way.

A virus which works by inserting it's own code into other already
existing program executables is not the type of virus that
Malwarebytes can fully handle. By fully I mean, if the virus code is
static and never changes location or form to a point, a signature*
could be written that offered detection. If the virus code isn't
setup this way, or they don't feel comfortable creating a signature,
the virus will remain entirely unknown to Malwarebytes.

This is all pretty much a moot point though, because, as I stated
previously, they don't focus on self replicating malware. And there
isn't any actual virus signatures in the database and never has been.

Even having a signature offers you detection only, maybe, but the
only cure they can provide you is the deletion of any files found to
contain the matching signature. If the virus is a fast infector, like
say Irok, well, you'd be deleting almost every executable on your
machine in a short period of time after the initial infection took
place. Where as with a real antivirus, kaspersky, f-prot, etc, they
can disinfect the virus and you won't have to reload your system. In
this case, disinfect literally means removing the code the virus
added to your executable and restoring things as they originally
were, possibly with a little padding to offset for unknowns.

Viruses have various infection options and this causes some issues
with disinfection if the virus doesn't perform it's processes
correctly, or, the infection process is flawed.

*Now then, concerning signature creation. Since most of them aren't
low level coders, they aren't going to lock onto a good looking,
oddball piece of code with IDA pro and acquire the phsyical location
of said code inside the file on disk. Instead, they open a hex editor
and have a look for things they think will be unique or have a very
unlikely chance of being in the same place as a legitimate program.

That becomes the signature. And yes, as you might have guessed, this
has led to false positives which has resulted in some cases,
requiring customers to take their computers into a shop for
servicing, or, if they're knowledgeable enough, repair it themselves
by replacing the deleted files that shouldn't have been.

Upto and including official MS runtimes, etc. HLL languages have
things in common, certain tell tales; never a good idea to use any of
that section of the executable for the creation of a signature.
You're bound to snag innnocent programs because they were written and
compiled in the same language as the malware sample you're examining.

Their own forums still have posts of users complaining about legit
files getting whacked and needing help restoring them. If you're a
newbie and Malwarebytes messes up, you could find yourself in quite a
pickle fast. It can be as bad as a faulty MS update.

Luckily I suppose for Malwarebytes, An actual virus or worm is rare.
So they don't have to be too concerned with providing any real
protection against them. I haven't seen one in the wild on any
machines I've serviced in years.

Malwarebytes also culls their database from time to time. That is,
they remove signatures to malware that they think has gone extinct
and no longer poses any threat to people. That opens your system up
to becoming infected by the malware which is no longer known by
Malwarebytes. I know of no other antivirus/antimalware company which
removes definitions to known malware.

The reason Malwarebytes has to do this from time to time isn't
because they're being more efficient than the competition (they'd
like you to believe that though), it's because the database design
has a serious, design flaw problem which has remained since v1.x
series of the program. In raw form, the database is a monster. A
monster that has to be loaded and processed in memory, entirely, for
the Malwarebytes program to be able to use it.

The powers that be refused to take steps, years ago, to correct this
evil, poorly thought out, badly designed monster. A few hundred
thousand entries later, it's really become a mess. It's responsible
for slow scan times, excessive memory consumption, and the memory
leaks they still haven't fixed. The program would be alot more
responsive, even on older machines, if they'd fix that database
issue.

The database is designed to be human friendly readable in raw form,
for non coder orientated persons. It's not converted to some binary
database of sorts prior to being final processed. The same human
friendly raw form is the one the malwarebytes engine has to load
entirely into memory and parse as needed. It's loading megabytes of
trash that it doesn't need, just to please the human counter parts
responsible for the definitions present. All because they're
unwilling to write a simple, midway conversion to take the human
friendly version, strip it to engine friendly, and final process it.

The engine doesn't need to waste time loading english sentences and
parsing them to get the information it actually needs to scan for and
detect the sample. But that's exactly what it has to do in it's
present state. The same state it's suffered in since v1.0.

They can't even develop a useful, functional database that can avoid
being trimmed back down to a manageable size. Do you really think
they can replace antivirus such as f-prot, kaspersky, etc? C'mon now.



In closing, in any av/am configuration you go for, you're still being
provided a false sense of security. As for the most part, they can
only detect what they already know about. Little if any protection is
offered or even claimed (if they're being honest about this) for
malware which exists that isn't known to the product yet, for various
reasons. Malware samples are generated by the millions each day, many
server side style. It's just not possible for any av/am company to
realistically keep up with them all on a daily basis. There's always
going to be something out there that isn't known to your av/avm of
choice yet.

It won't be, until someone affiliated with the company runs across a
viable sample, or, someone (even you), gets infected and is able to
reach out to support and follow instructions for collecting a sample
of it and sending it along to them, if at all possible.

This is how it works in the antivirus and antimalware world. All
advertising claims aside.



--
A radioactive cat has eighteen half-lives.

nospam
Tue, 19 Mar 2019
15:10:23 GMT in alt.computer.workshop, wrote:

In article , David in Devon
wrote:

| Funny how I've never been infected, yet both of AVG and MB
| have flagged up
things and removed them.
|

I suppose 2 condoms is better than one if you're
going to engage in risky behavior, and that approach
has worked for you. Hopefully they won't slip off.

it isn't, nor are two anti-virus utilities.

Malwarebytes is *NOT* an anti-virus utility

yes it is.

Follow up to my original reply:

Diesel Wed,
20 Mar 2019 07:54:24 GMT in alt.computer.workshop, wrote:

The only thing that seperates a malicious program from being a
trojan vs a virus is the self replication. If it does, it's a
virus. If it doesn't, it's a trojan. No exception, no middle
ground, no haggle room. Malwarebytes deals with one, doesn't touch
the other.

For the purposes of clarification and additional disclosure I bring
up the following finer aspects. I didn't include this previously
because I wanted to keep things as simple as possible, realizing that
the majority of those who might read this have no clue what malware
actually is and don't know the differences between a trojan, a virus,
a worm, or a virus and worm combination. Or, the different types of
all four one can encounter.

In fairness to Malwarbytes, they can skate on very thin ice with the
virus detection claim by being able to detect worms. Which are a
subset of a virus. The difference being, one requires a host and the
other has it's own. A virus injects it's own code into already
existing programs, it has no home of it's own. It's not self
contained. A worm on the other hand does not infect already existing
programs. Instead, it's a completely seperate file, containing a
fully functional copy of itself.

Malwarebytes can detect worms because they can be treated just like a
trojan or non replicating malware, even though they are, typically
capable of replication in some way shape or form. Either additional
copies of themselves locally on the machine (as with the so called
companion virus), and/or network aware and attempting to pass along
copies that way.

A virus which works by inserting it's own code into other already
existing program executables is not the type of virus that
Malwarebytes can fully handle. By fully I mean, if the virus code is
static and never changes location or form to a point, a signature*
could be written that offered detection. If the virus code isn't
setup this way, or they don't feel comfortable creating a signature,
the virus will remain entirely unknown to Malwarebytes.

This is all pretty much a moot point though, because, as I stated
previously, they don't focus on self replicating malware. And there
isn't any actual virus signatures in the database and never has been.

Even having a signature offers you detection only, maybe, but the
only cure they can provide you is the deletion of any files found to
contain the matching signature. If the virus is a fast infector, like
say Irok, well, you'd be deleting almost every executable on your
machine in a short period of time after the initial infection took
place. Where as with a real antivirus, kaspersky, f-prot, etc, they
can disinfect the virus and you won't have to reload your system. In
this case, disinfect literally means removing the code the virus
added to your executable and restoring things as they originally
were, possibly with a little padding to offset for unknowns.

Viruses have various infection options and this causes some issues
with disinfection if the virus doesn't perform it's processes
correctly, or, the infection process is flawed.

*Now then, concerning signature creation. Since most of them aren't
low level coders, they aren't going to lock onto a good looking,
oddball piece of code with IDA pro and acquire the phsyical location
of said code inside the file on disk. Instead, they open a hex editor
and have a look for things they think will be unique or have a very
unlikely chance of being in the same place as a legitimate program.

That becomes the signature. And yes, as you might have guessed, this
has led to false positives which has resulted in some cases,
requiring customers to take their computers into a shop for
servicing, or, if they're knowledgeable enough, repair it themselves
by replacing the deleted files that shouldn't have been.

Upto and including official MS runtimes, etc. HLL languages have
things in common, certain tell tales; never a good idea to use any of
that section of the executable for the creation of a signature.
You're bound to snag innnocent programs because they were written and
compiled in the same language as the malware sample you're examining.

Their own forums still have posts of users complaining about legit
files getting whacked and needing help restoring them. If you're a
newbie and Malwarebytes messes up, you could find yourself in quite a
pickle fast. It can be as bad as a faulty MS update.

Luckily I suppose for Malwarebytes, An actual virus or worm is rare.
So they don't have to be too concerned with providing any real
protection against them. I haven't seen one in the wild on any
machines I've serviced in years.

Malwarebytes also culls their database from time to time. That is,
they remove signatures to malware that they think has gone extinct
and no longer poses any threat to people. That opens your system up
to becoming infected by the malware which is no longer known by
Malwarebytes. I know of no other antivirus/antimalware company which
removes definitions to known malware.

The reason Malwarebytes has to do this from time to time isn't
because they're being more efficient than the competition (they'd
like you to believe that though), it's because the database design
has a serious, design flaw problem which has remained since v1.x
series of the program. In raw form, the database is a monster. A
monster that has to be loaded and processed in memory, entirely, for
the Malwarebytes program to be able to use it.

The powers that be refused to take steps, years ago, to correct this
evil, poorly thought out, badly designed monster. A few hundred
thousand entries later, it's really become a mess. It's responsible
for slow scan times, excessive memory consumption, and the memory
leaks they still haven't fixed. The program would be alot more
responsive, even on older machines, if they'd fix that database
issue.

The database is designed to be human friendly readable in raw form,
for non coder orientated persons. It's not converted to some binary
database of sorts prior to being final processed. The same human
friendly raw form is the one the malwarebytes engine has to load
entirely into memory and parse as needed. It's loading megabytes of
trash that it doesn't need, just to please the human counter parts
responsible for the definitions present. All because they're
unwilling to write a simple, midway conversion to take the human
friendly version, strip it to engine friendly, and final process it.

The engine doesn't need to waste time loading english sentences and
parsing them to get the information it actually needs to scan for and
detect the sample. But that's exactly what it has to do in it's
present state. The same state it's suffered in since v1.0.

They can't even develop a useful, functional database that can avoid
being trimmed back down to a manageable size. Do you really think
they can replace antivirus such as f-prot, kaspersky, etc? C'mon now.

In closing, in any av/am configuration you go for, you're still being
provided a false sense of security. As for the most part, they can
only detect what they already know about. Little if any protection is
offered or even claimed (if they're being honest about this) for
malware which exists that isn't known to the product yet, for various
reasons. Malware samples are generated by the millions each day, many
server side style. It's just not possible for any av/am company to
realistically keep up with them all on a daily basis. There's always
going to be something out there that isn't known to your av/avm of
choice yet.

It won't be, until someone affiliated with the company runs across a
viable sample, or, someone (even you), gets infected and is able to
reach out to support and follow instructions for collecting a sample
of it and sending it along to them, if at all possible.

This is how it works in the antivirus and antimalware world. All
advertising claims aside.

--
'If we do not succeed, we run the risk of failure.' -- Dan Quayle

"Carlos E.R."
Tue, 19 Mar 2019 11:20:34 GMT
in alt.computer.workshop, wrote:

On 19/03/2019 00.17, nospam wrote:
In article , Carlos E.R.
wrote:

| Technically yes, but the PDF is displayed in my browser and
| has links to
click just like a webpage.
|
Not to nag, but you might also consider not allowing PDFs
to load in your browser. They're a common attack method.
They're not webpages. They only load at all because Adobe
has been trying, for many years, to find a way to hijack
the Internet. (Flash, PDF, AIR.)

adobe isn't trying to hijack anything, certainly not with pdf,
which isn't even owned by them.

This is inexact.

it is not.

There is a published PDF standard, which they no longer own.

i said that.

But they
can add, and do add, additional features that only them support
properly (because they don't publish).

as can others, however, content creators are not required to use
them, and it would be foolish to do so. it's rare that a pdf on a
web site is anything fancy.

On the contrary. Most government forms and complex forms I have
seen use them.

I've seen the same.

the point is that a user can click on a pdf and read it directly
in the browser just as they do with any other web page. it's just
another link. if the pdf is interesting enough to keep, click
another button to save it, otherwise, close the window (or click
the back button) and it's gone.

which just copies the file from temporary directory to final
directory.

Depending on the size of the pdf and browser internal programming, it
might not. If it's small enough, the browser might be storing and
rendering it entirely in memory. And only making an actual physical
copy if you ask it to do so, either by saving as a file someplace, or
a print job (and that depends on print manager settings too) which
will be deleted once the printer no longer needs it, or later on
during maintenance/cleanup. it's treated as a temporary file. And
that depends on your print manager settings/printer que setup, etc.
You might opt to send directly to printer right away, don't
que/spool. No temporary files will be created unless the print job is
too big to send at one time. And, again that depends on your setup.
It may que them in memory and not use temp files at all.




--
If your message arrives late...please keep the tagline as a free
gift!

Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Tue, 19 Mar 2019 11:23:13 -0000, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 19/03/2019 00.16, Commander Kinsey wrote:.

You'd be hard pressed to develop anything worse than Adobe's Acrobat
Reader. Just try printing something from it, you won't get anything
remotely like what's on the screen. I often have to screengrab it and
print it from Paintshop Pro.

Huh? I never had any such problem printing from adobe reader reliably.

I have, I never get the size I expect. Easier to put it into a photo
editor with a screengrab, then you can fit to page etc.

Pdfs are vector formats and by definition can be scaled to any size without
losing resolution*. A pdf print dialogue box always has a "shrink to fit"
and/or "scale to page" option.

By taking a screenshot your rasterising the page and losing the benefit of
the pdf.

* Unless it had been saved as raster format. But that's dumb so not common
these days.


Anything should be able to print properly. PDF doesn't help here.

Actually it does. That's the whole point of the format. It is completely
device agnostic so it doesn't matter what you're viewing it on or printing
it with it should print as the author designed it. You often see forms as
word files and they never print or render properly.

On Wed, 20 Mar 2019 07:50:23 -0000, Chris wrote:

Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Tue, 19 Mar 2019 08:45:32 -0000, Chris wrote:

Commander Kinsey wrote:
Oh, Youtube changed to HTML5 4 years ago :-)
Surprising as I didn't think all browsers took up HTML5 for quite a while.

So how come a big company like Adobe made such a piece of crap, and didn't fix it?

They didn't make it, they bought it. I guess in the end it was too hard to
maintain and required a specific install for every os. Just like java which
is all also dying. HTML 5 is os agnostic by default. IOS not supporting it
was the killer blow.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash

Who uses IOS? I doubt the percentage is very high. Isn't that just small Apple devices?

Lots of people. At it's height about 60% of the market.

Now it's 23% of mobiles and 75%'of tablets
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-...bile/worldwide
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-...blet/worldwide

What market are you referring to? Why are you omitting real computers - laptops and desktops?

As for your percentages, it's certainly not true around here (in Scotland where people watch their money). I know of about 15 tablets owned by friends and neighbours, and not one is Apple. I know of about 30 phones, and only 1 is Apple.

On Wed, 20 Mar 2019 07:47:53 -0000, Chris wrote:

Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Tue, 19 Mar 2019 08:36:47 -0000, Chris wrote:

Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 18/03/2019 13.40, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Mon, 18 Mar 2019 03:26:19 -0000, Carlos E.R.
wrote:

On 18/03/2019 00.15, Commander Kinsey wrote:
WARNING! Do not click the misspelt link below (between asterisks)
unless you know your computer is protected.

On Stirling Council's parking page
https://my.stirling.gov.uk/media/442...park-guide.pdf
There is a link to the thistle centre car park, which they have misspelt
as **** http://www.thethsitles.com/ **** instead of
http://www.thethistles.com/

Question 1) Is this a virus? It just bleeps very loudly through the
speakers and asks me to click to update something.
Question 2) Can this be reported to someone? The company they rent the
domain name from perhaps?

(I've already advised Stirling Council to correct their spelling error)

The first page is a PDF, not a web page

Technically yes, but the PDF is displayed in my browser and has links to
click just like a webpage.

Depends on the local configuration - in my machine it doesn't :-)

and looking at the properties
it was generated on 2014. It is possible that the link is outdated and
now points to somewhere else than intended, because of a typing error or
no maintenance of the site.

It must be a typing error, it would never have been spelt thsitle.

Anyway hopefully they will update it now I've warned them. I'm
surprised nobody else came across it before, parking in Stirling is so
bad you have to research first! Even if you pay, hardly anywhere allows
more than a 2 hour stay.

Wow. I have never seen something like that here

To be fair there's not a lot to do in Stirling so 2 hours is plenty

There is the rather magnificent Stirling Castle, nearby, and there's plenty
of parking. Some of it free IIRC
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_Castle

I'm doing jury duty (which could be for the whole day), and has no car
park. Everything should have a car park and not expect you to find somewhere else!

Ah, yeah. That's a pain in the arse. Does the court have any suggestions?

I found two nearby streets with all day parking for £4. Maybe the court insisted on it? No other streets allow over 2 hours stay, even if you pay.

Good luck with the jury duty.

Apart from them paying me **** all to do it, I'm quite looking forward to it - I've always wanted to have a go.

In article , Commander Kinsey
wrote:


Who uses IOS? I doubt the percentage is very high. Isn't that just small
Apple devices?

Lots of people. At it's height about 60% of the market.

Now it's 23% of mobiles and 75%'of tablets
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-...bile/worldwide
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-...blet/worldwide

What market are you referring to? Why are you omitting real computers -
laptops and desktops?

you asked about ios, and mobile devices are real computers, and more
capable than laptops and desktops for some tasks.

As for your percentages, it's certainly not true around here (in Scotland
where people watch their money). I know of about 15 tablets owned by friends
and neighbours, and not one is Apple. I know of about 30 phones, and only 1 is Apple.

ios share in the uk and ireland is almost 60%:
https://deviceatlas.com/blog/android-v-ios-market-share#uk
https://deviceatlas.com/blog/android-v-ios-market-share#ireland

nothing listed for scotland, but it's not going to be significantly
different.

In article , Chris
wrote:

Oh, Youtube changed to HTML5 4 years ago :-)
Surprising as I didn't think all browsers took up HTML5 for quite a while.

So how come a big company like Adobe made such a piece of crap, and
didn't fix it?

They didn't make it, they bought it. I guess in the end it was too hard to
maintain and required a specific install for every os. Just like java which
is all also dying. HTML 5 is os agnostic by default. IOS not supporting it
was the killer blow.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash

Who uses IOS? I doubt the percentage is very high. Isn't that just small
Apple devices?

Lots of people. At it's height about 60% of the market.

Now it's 23% of mobiles and 75%'of tablets
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-...bile/worldwide
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-...blet/worldwide

that's overall, and market share numbers are very misleading anyway.

nevertheless, broken down by region, it's very different, with ios
dominant in many places, including usa, uk and australia.
https://deviceatlas.com/blog/android-v-ios-market-share

not that the number matters all that much.

both ios and android are the two dominant mobile oses. some people
prefer one, some prefer the other, some use both and some don't care at
all.

On 20/03/2019 19:00, Commander Kinsey wrote:

Apart from them paying me **** all to do it, I'm quite looking forward
to it - I've always wanted to have a go.

FYI
***

If you’re self-employed, you’ll need to ask for a Certificate of Loss of
Earnings for Self-employed Jurors form.

You’ll then get compensation from the court. The amounts start at £32.47
per day if you’re at court for four hours or less, and then £64.95 per
day if you’re at court for longer. If you need to serve for more than 10
days, you’ll get a higher rate.

https://www.moneyadviceservice.org.u...t-jury-service

HTH

--
David B.
Devon, UK

On Wed, 20 Mar 2019 19:52:48 -0000, David in Devon wrote:

On 20/03/2019 19:00, Commander Kinsey wrote:

Apart from them paying me **** all to do it, I'm quite looking forward
to it - I've always wanted to have a go.

FYI
***

If you’re self-employed, you’ll need to ask for a Certificate of Loss of
Earnings for Self-employed Jurors form.

You’ll then get compensation from the court. The amounts start at £32.47
per day if you’re at court for four hours or less, and then £64.95 per
day if you’re at court for longer. If you need to serve for more than 10
days, you’ll get a higher rate.

https://www.moneyadviceservice.org.u...t-jury-service

HTH

I know, they pay according to your last income tax return :-)

On Wed, 20 Mar 2019 18:56:24 -0000, Chris wrote:

Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Tue, 19 Mar 2019 11:23:13 -0000, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 19/03/2019 00.16, Commander Kinsey wrote:.

You'd be hard pressed to develop anything worse than Adobe's Acrobat
Reader. Just try printing something from it, you won't get anything
remotely like what's on the screen. I often have to screengrab it and
print it from Paintshop Pro.

Huh? I never had any such problem printing from adobe reader reliably.

I have, I never get the size I expect. Easier to put it into a photo
editor with a screengrab, then you can fit to page etc.

Pdfs are vector formats and by definition can be scaled to any size without
losing resolution*. A pdf print dialogue box always has a "shrink to fit"
and/or "scale to page" option.

By taking a screenshot your rasterising the page and losing the benefit of
the pdf.

* Unless it had been saved as raster format. But that's dumb so not common
these days.

I think the last thing I tried to print was a calendar - I'd found a website that generates calendars for any month and year in pdf format. I wanted to print most of the page, cutting off the borders, but acrobat reader was unable to, so I just screengrabbed. I got the resolution of the monitor, which is fine.

Anything should be able to print properly. PDF doesn't help here.

Actually it does. That's the whole point of the format. It is completely
device agnostic so it doesn't matter what you're viewing it on or printing
it with it should print as the author designed it. You often see forms as
word files and they never print or render properly.

But what about how I want it?

On 19/03/2019 16.13, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Tue, 19 Mar 2019 11:17:03 -0000, Carlos E.R.
wrote:

On 18/03/2019 23.49, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Mon, 18 Mar 2019 22:39:59 -0000, Carlos E.R.
wrote:

On 18/03/2019 14.31, Paul wrote:
Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Mon, 18 Mar 2019 03:26:19 -0000, Carlos E.R.
wrote:

Possibly one of those adds you get triggered the blast (maybe from
your
antivirus?). I have heard that blast on a friend's laptop once, and
scared me ****less. I must say that you guys on Windows get more fun
that us poor lads on Linux :-P

I've never had a bleep like that before.Â* It sounds like the BBC2
test
signal.

History of computing comes to mind...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_speaker

If the sound system is down (driver is not working),
OSes are allowed to use "PCBeep". PCBeep is considered
to be the "backup notification system". If the sound
card goes missing, software is allowed to abuse that.

On my desktop machine, the beeper is tiny and hardly heard. I could not
find a bigger unit.

Most desktops don't even have one.Â* This one is unusual.

Mine originally had nothing. No beeper, nor the wire connected to the
audio card (IIRC the card doesn't have the connector, either). When I
bought it online I forgot to add the internal speaker/beeper component,
I did not see it.Â* So years later I bought a bag of 10 or 20 from Amazon
for a puny price...

On laptops, the pc beeper is usually routed via the sound card, and it
can go at top volume by default :-/

I didn't know there was still a beeper function unless you were using
DOS!

Even in Linux. It is a standard.

But it's outdated, everyone has real speakers.

Sure. But you need them to analyze some bios problems.


I have the vague recollection that some keyboards had one inside :-?

Never known one in a keyboard.

I don't remember where. It might have been a terminal/keyboard combo on
a shared computer.



The BIOS beeper/speaker has also been tied in the
past, to games. The motherboard speaker can be
used as a 1-bit DAC, and game soundtracks can be
played through it. (A certain era of Macintosh gaming
did this too, and there were probably 200 games
that did the 1-bit DAC thing... The fidelity is
surprisingly good. 1-bit DACs have also been
used in expensive stereo equipment, in case
you thought that nobody would dare try that :-)
To make that work, just crank up the clock rate,
and the 1 bit DAC does a damn good job. The DAC
needs to be followed by a reconstruction filter,
which is what makes it work.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Abad%C3%ADa_del_Crimen

«The music played in the game corresponds to the Minuet in G major and
the sonata for flute BWV 1033 from Bach, and Crystal Palace from
Gwendal. The original PC version also featured the "Ave Maria" from
Schubert, in a short chorus recording that played through the speaker
when the player went to the church.

There is a form of copy protection on the PC version: if an illegal
copy
of the game was created, in the church area, instead of "Ave Maria", a
voice crying "Pirate! Pirate! Pirate!" several times will be heard
instead, and after that the game will crash.»

Copyright sux.

Oh, yes, but in this case it was funny.

There was at the time a "copyright" program that would copy most
original 5¼ floppies. This game worked just fine, IIRC.

My first recollection of being naughty was using a stereo with two tape
decks to duplicate ZX Spectrum games at double speed.Â* All that trouble
they went to with unusual baud rates to stop programs copying the tapes,
I just used a simple stereo.

:-)

I heard it did not always work.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 19/03/2019 14.27, Mayayana wrote:
"Carlos E.R." wrote

| the point is that a user can click on a pdf and read it directly in the
| browser just as they do with any other web page. it's just another
| link. if the pdf is interesting enough to keep, click another button to
| save it, otherwise, close the window (or click the back button) and
| it's gone.
|
| which just copies the file from temporary directory to final directory.
|
|
| the workflow mayayana describes is to always save a pdf in a separate
| file, then switch to a different app to read it, and if it's not worth
| keeping, switch to explorer to trash it. that's a lot less efficient.
|

In case you weren't aware, nospam argues as a hobby.
It never ends. Anything you say is just the raw material
for more adversarial zeal.

I know.

Sometimes the things he says make sense, but others are absurd and he
keeps them even after proved wrong. So even if he knows about whatever
stuff (and he does know a lot of stuff), I can't trust what he says, not
knowing when he... I can't find the word. When he is not reliable.

So at some point in the discussion I stop reading or writing back.


I've also come to be wary of people who talk about
"workflow". (I assume you're a Spanish speaker but you seem
to be fully English-fluent.)

Yep. Oh, I make my errors :-D
Sometimes subtle, some times obvious.

I don't know where the
word developed, but it seems to be mostly a marketing
device used by software companies to make the use of
their software sound very technical and professional:

"In terms of breakfast productivity, I've added a spatula
to my workflow on days when I'm leveraging egg content.
I've been seeing greatly improved outcomes and a 200%
increase in outcome options, since I can now fry OR scramble."

ROTFL!


The Internet is full of important people going in circles
with tremendous efficiency.

:-)


--
Cheers, Carlos.