March 2019 marks thirty years since the publication of an academic proposal that led directly to the extraordinary growth of online wizardry that surrounds us today. Tim Berners-Lee was 33; he had read physics at Oxford and was working at CERN, the Swiss research organisation. They had an unwieldy network of computers holding all their data, and he proposed a means of making the information available in a way that made it easy both to find and retreive. He created the Word Wide Web, which makes sense of the Internet.
Please accept my good wishes for 2019 and my thanks for your continued support of this modest enterprise; we plan some developments in 2019 which I hope will appeal.
I therefore send you into you into the new year with no more than an uplifting video.
I am always pleased to hear from readers for any reason but in particular I’m happy to try to resolve any computer or internet related headaches you may have. If I can’t help, I may be able to point you in the right direction.
Click on the button below to ask me anything.
Such is the relentless flow of data leaks and pilfering of our personal information from companies that ought to have kept it safer, I’m tempted to bring out a regular appendix to this column entitled ‘breach of the week’. It would list the mess-ups, muddles and successful data thefts that have been reported by some of the organisations who claim to ‘take the security of your data seriously'.
It wouldn’t be a riveting read, but there would be no shortage of material. The juiciest two of the current crop are from Facebook and the Tory party.
An eye-opener. All the information available in this video was obtained from the children’s public profiles in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Whatsapp. Think before you post and protect your privacy on social networks.
I recently wrote about the poor placing of one of those green Broadband cabinets that are popping up all over the place; in our village, it has been installed in a spot that is not only unsightly but dangerous, as it obscures the view for drivers at a junction.
As ever, my readers have come up trumps, and I have received this excellent guide to fighting the problem. Not for the faint-hearted, but worth a try.
Is this really a perpetual motion machine?
The Government launched a Green Paper on the future of the BBC - and they wanted to hear your views.
And I don't even like Honda cars.
Although the Wifi in my office was registering nearly at full strength, I’d been finding that it was regularly cutting out, or drastically dropping in download speed. My router is two rooms and three walls away. The solution is to use what are known as Homeplugs; I’ve written about these before, but devolo, one of the bigger brands, has just sent me their latest model to try.