Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2016 May 3

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May 3

Physically, how resilient are SD-Cards?

Is it safe to carry one in the wallet all the time? Can you put several in a envelope where they will have contact with each other? --Llaanngg (talk) 02:10, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

Interesting question. However I would be more worried about the safety of the data on the card, which is likely more fragile than the card. A nylon, plastic or similar wallet would be inadvisable to to possibly static electricity which could damage the card. I could comment on USB flash drives, from personal experience, having put one through a washing machine, twice, and it seemed to come through physically undamaged and data intact. Ruggedised SD cards are available. [1] . If you have a card with vital data, apart from keeping backups, I would strongly recommend keeping the card in a case, that they sometimes come in, when not in a device. After market cases are also available. [2]. Some interesting commentary on cards (mostly orientated to data reliability) is here. 220 of ^Borg 11:57, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

• This article [3] mentions one apparent physical weakness of SD cards, the divider between the contacts 220 of ^Borg 12:06, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

The first SD-cards had a small printed circuit board with one or two flash memory chips and a controller on in in a plastic case, molten the two plastic shell parts. Bending caused a crack, pressure damaged the devices arrond the controller. The switch is a button only. Similar to 3.5" floppy disks, the drive or card reader has the write protect switch installed. Todays µSD-cards are the chip case itself. Tape it due getting pushed out of an envelope or similar container. Electrostatic discharge and current through the SD card can be a problem. --Hans Haase (有问题吗) 13:29, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

SD cards these days are dirt cheap. Why spend a bunch of time analyzing their resilience? Just buy them by the handful and toss them if they go bad. Having a hypothetical indestructible SD card still wouldn't protect the data on it from other things like accidental deletion or you losing the card, so SD cards' resilience does nothing to affect the need to back up data you care about in multiple places. --71.110.8.102 (talk) 20:55, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

Beside the quality of the flash memory, human interactions cause losts of data or make the data inaccessible. Cheap USB sticks are known to be built with a low quality of flash memory. SD cards still use a different interface. In cameras a higher performance is required to store the data in time. SSDs use flash specified with more write cycles before failure. --Hans Haase (有问题吗) 19:26, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

How do I "unrecommend" a news story on Facebook?

I was looking at some random news story accessed via news.google.com when a box appeared saying that I had "recommended the story on Facebook." I recall that the story display had been glitchy, with a video ad preceding it which hung up, and a box asking if I wanted to restart "shockwave" or some such program, which I had clicked. My clicking had somehow unintentionally "recommended" the story about some lurid crime. Googling "unrecommend on Facebook" advises to go to the story and "unrecommend." The story on the newspaper website now has a blue box at the top which has a checkmark to the left of "Recommend", and the number one in a box to the right of the Recommend box. If I hover over the blue Recommend box, a textbox appears below it which says "Undo recommendation." If I click on the Recommend box nothing changes.It still has a check by "Recommend." I cannot click on the "Unrecommend" word since it disappears if I move off Recommend. I would expect the status to toggle between Recommed and Unrecommend when I click on the Recommend box. How can I control the Recommend status? I would prefer to set Facebook status to "Never recommend anything," since I have no desire to tell people what I read,but I doubt that is possible. Where on Facebook can I determine if it is currently "Recommended?" Thanks for any good suggestions. Edison (talk) 14:09, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

In this case, "recommendation" is a euphemism for "promoted advertisement." Somebody paid money to the web host so that you would see that spammy web page. There is no user-accessible option to "turn off" that promoted content. You cannot directly "un-recommend" such content in any fashion that will make it appear differently on your screen. The "social network" businesses want you to believe you're getting real recommendations from real friends - but in fact, if you want real recommendations and disrecommendations, you actually have to devolve into real conversation with real humans to discern between their real- and insincere- recommendations!

Promoted content is designed to control what you see, not to actually match your "likes" and "interests." At best, the job of a "recommended link" is to drive advertisement revenue.

You can learn to use an ad blocker, and ratchet up the settings all the way to 11 - but in today's internet media environment, it's sometimes very difficult to determine whether any specific piece of content on your screen is "real" or if it is merely a robot-assisted-advertisement. After searching for technical solutions for many years, with various success, my solution has devolved into a much simpler one, of editorial control: I simply will not visit websites produced by content-creators who wish to abuse my trust by misportraying advertisement-content in this fashion. There are plenty of news websites that are 100% free of advertisement: for example, in the United States, we have www.voanews.com, the website of Voice of America (a federal news service); and they will never deliver commercial or promoted content. I'd rather be propagandized by the Feds than by the shady spammers who lurk on social-media-news-sites.

Don't look too deeply into it, but most of your favorite Silicon Valley Social-Web-3.0 start-ups are sitting in a shared Silicon Valley office building with a few folks who are probably in on the secret. Who do you think is really programming those algorithmic recommendations?)

Nimur (talk) 14:56, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

This was not a "clickbait," but a legitmate AP news story which was also carried by all major newspapers. I looked at a different story on that same paper's site, and the Facebook "Recommend" box was unchecked on the other stories. I restarted the computer to clear out the glitch and accessed the story again, and it still has a check next to the blue "Recommend." Could it be one of those cases where I need to "clear the stack cache" or some such? I do not see the story on my own Facebook page, nor does it show up on someone else's Facebook account, so apparently it is no longer actually "Recommended" or perhaps never was. Maybe it is a stale indicator of recommendation on the one newspaper's site. or just poor programming by Facebook. An unintended and irreversible "Recommendation" might be a problem for someone if the material advocated something socially unacceptable to one's friends or to the government. Many people sometimes read a news story about something they would not want to or publicly advocate.Edison (talk) 15:17, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

I am not a representative of any social media corporation - I'm just a lone nut on the internet - but if you'll take my word for it, clicking "recommend," has exactly zero technical influence on how the media conglomerate's web servers treat that content, or how it portrays that content to people in your circle of friends. It is unlikely that they will even waste the effort to process your click in a "big data analysis." The role of that "recommendation" user-interface is to produce an atmosphere in which you feel that your user experience is interactive, rather than passive; its role is not in any way to actually participate in the promotion or recommendation of content. Not even in the statistical aggregate. Nimur (talk) 15:23, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

I had assumed that "recommending" a news story would cause it to appear on Facebook to my "friends" similarly to if I had written something and hit "save." I oftn see news or webpages somehow posted by others in Facebook. How do they get posted other than via "recommend?" Edison (talk) 15:29, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

On Google Chrome I clicked the tool box ( a rectangle filled with horizontal stripes) at the top right of the screen, then I clicked "more tools," and the "clear browsing data." That caused the news story's blue "Recommend" box to display without a checkmark, which was my goal Thanks for the help , or at least for the thoughtful comments. Edison (talk) 15:33, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

Are you still logged in to Facebook? "Clear browsing data" will by default remove cookies. The normal time is 1 hour but if you changes it to be longer, or if you just logged in to Facebook recently, it's unlikely you were still logged in to Facebook. If you weren't logged on to Facebook, it has no way of knowing what you recommended, so it's not surprising if the recommend cleared even though you've still recommended the page. Also would you be willing to share the news site you're referring to? Nil Einne (talk) 18:53, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

Anyway speaking generally, you should always force refresh a page (control F5 on most browsers) if having problems like where the unrecommend didn't work. If you force refresh a page and you're still logged in to the website you recommended and there's no longer any sign of it, it probably means your recommendation is mostly removed. If you think something happened on Facebook, it pays to check out your activity log [4] Nil Einne (talk) 19:48, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

If you don't want to tell other people what you read, you need to install an ad blocker, tell your browser not to send third-party referers, and do some cookie management. As is, your browser is telling Facebook and the ad networks what you're looking at any time you load a page with their stuff on it. All your clickbox-checking is doing is giving more information to Facebook's algorithms to help them tailor the ads they show you. --71.110.8.102 (talk) 21:00, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

Sure, but doing those steps only adds a tiny bit of extra work for the companies who want to track you. The efficacy of blocking their ads or their cookies is pretty close to zero, in terms of the degree of additional anonymity it provides. As this famous article from Electronic Frontier Foundation makes clear - even if you enable no cookies, you are very trackable - part of a three-part series on the erosion of anonymity. That article series was based on the state of affairs five or six years ago - and since then, there have been even more advances in user-tracking. Nowadays, major web providers use server-side tracking, server-side data-sharing, and business collusion between content-providers and advertising affiliate conglomerates. This means that even with an anonymized browser, for most users, simply accessing the website provides the trackers with enough information to uniquely and personally identify you. The only solution - if you really really wish to dissuade trackers - is total avoidance of their content and services. Even then, it's foolish to assume that you have a completely stealthy and untraceable digital trail - all you've got is a signature that's a little bit harder to follow than the average.

Nimur (talk) 21:41, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

For those who are curious: go to panopticlick.eff.org, do the test, and then click on the orange "fingerprinting"-hyperlink. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 00:30, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

Hey QP and Nimur: the panopticlick is cool. I'd been there before, but forgot the results, so I clicked again... and the test won't complete. I'm assuming that's because very few fancy things on the internet work for me without special effort, because I use NoScript with fairly paranoid settings. Any comment on my relative anonymity/traceability if the EFF's scanning report can't even finish? I mean, I could allow them to run the scripts, but then that would be a report on the aspects of less-safe mode, not my default safe mode. SemanticMantis (talk) 22:05, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

QP is my rap name. I think that that makes you even more traceable, because it means you are more unique. Imagine if you visit my website. I can see in my logs that you are the only visitor who doesn't access files that are loaded via JS. I can also see your useragent string is not empty, and if you actually use my site I can see that you are human and not a bot. That makes it very very easy to identify you, because you behave differently than the average user. It would be interesting to know what setup (browser+plugins+configuration) is most frequently used, and to create an experimental browser that emulates it. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 22:42, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

NoScript is a great and powerful tool - but I strongly agree: you are more uniquely identifiable simply because you're not running scripts. You have become a statistical anomaly, whose configuration differs from the median by a detectable measure.

Don't worry. Although they're able to track you, you're probably too uninteresting to really pay attention to: if the Government really surveillanced everybody, "...we would get a great quantity of useless information and very little useful information. How would we sort through all of this? ... We don't want secrets on just anything! We have our priorities..."

Of course, all those web-advertisers are in the private sector! All those mobile social Google-Maps-location-based-advertisements have a plausible and profitable explanation! They're not ... spooky CIA technology! Couldn't be!

Nimur (talk) 02:08, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Disabling Javascript doesn't make you more uniquely identifiable. Browser fingerprinting techniques put you in a bucket with everyone else who has the same fingerprint. With Javascript enabled, you can often uniquely identify the machine running the browser, with a combination of canvas fingerprinting, the list of installed fonts, etc. With Firefox and NoScript and no cookies, you are likely to be in the same bucket as everyone else who runs Firefox with NoScript and no cookies. That's a small fraction of web users, but it's much larger than 1, so you're probably better off.

They indeed don't have time to watch everyone, but you don't know whether you're one of the people they're watching, and that in itself is a problem. See chilling effect and telescreen and this recent research and this satirical news article. -- BenRG (talk) 03:50, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

@The Quixotic Potato, Nimur, and BenRG: thanks! I take the point that running NoScript makes me more distinct than many users. I also take the point that there is more than one person like me using FF and NoScript. I am not ignorant of security and surveillance, but I had not previously seen so clearly that the goals of untraceability and security can interfere so strongly with each other. Then again, it should be obvious: I can disguise my appearance to look like a yuppie so that my presence is less distinct when I go to the upscale mall, or I can wear protective body armour to protect me from harm, but it's rather difficult to do both! I'm more concerned about security than being traced at the moment, so I think I will stick to the status quo, but I will keep my eye out for anything that does QP's suggestion of masking my browser as the most common setup. SemanticMantis (talk) 14:57, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Best way to quickly italicize all uses of [i]this[/i] in a document?

I've got a 137-page document (~52,800 words) written on my Alphasmart. Alphasmarts don't have italics, so whenever I wanted to italicize something I just used [i]forum code.[/i] Now I could use Find to locate them one-by-one, but is there some quicker way? Any forums with absolutely no word limit on pasting things into a WYSIWYG box? --Aabicus (talk) 22:18, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

Is there a quicker way ... to do what? You're not being very clear about what your mission is, nor even if the text remains on the Alphasmart or has been removed to another machine. --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:27, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, the text has been transferred to my computer, and is in a Google document. Let me try to be clearer. I have over a hundred pages on my computer that read like this:

Character runs up and says "blah blah [i]blah blah blah[/i] blah blah!" And then [i]this[/i] happened and then a few minutes later something occurs [i]right[/i] here and now, and then something [i]else[/i] is italicized..."

Etcetera. Just like that, the words aren't italicized, they just have the code around them because it was written on a device that doesn't do italics. So now I want to know if there's a faster way to take everything surrounded by [i]these[/i] and make them italics. For example, I could paste the text into a forum box that automatically translates the code into italics, but I know of no forum that would accept a text this large. --Aabicus (talk) 22:33, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

....And you desire to convert this plaintext into an output document? You will need to specify the type of output document you want... rich text format? docx format? HTML? Whatever hypertext representation is used internally by the Google Documents service? Something else?

Perhaps the easiest way to treat this problem is to use a simple "find/replace" or some text tool (like sed or perl) to convert forum markup into HTML markup.

Then, load the document into a web browser, and let the web browser render the document as HTML. You can copy and paste that text out of your web browser (on most operating systems); and when you paste it back into an advanced word-processor like Microsoft Office, the text formatting will persist. Nimur (talk) 22:42, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

Oooh good idea! I converted to HMTL code and got what I needed instantly. Thanks you two! --Aabicus (talk) 22:48, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

You could also fix it within OpenOffice using Find&Replace ... it allows you to use regular expressions to find strings demarcated by your start & end italic marks, and render them as italics whilst removing the tags. Other WPs probably support regex ... not sure about Google. --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:55, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

If you think you will be doing a lot of this sort of thing in the future, I highly recommend spending a day or two learning the ins and outs of Libre Office and Vim. A little time spent now will same boatloads of time and effort in the years to come. --Guy Macon (talk) 16:49, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

This irrelevantly brings up memories of WordPerfect 5.x. WordPerfect allows searching for format tags. To replace underlines with italics, I'd change </u> to <i></u></i>, then change <u> to <i>; in the second step the original </u> disappeared, and the new <i> swallowed the first pass's <i>. But this failed on WordPerfect 6; I have forgotten exactly how. —Tamfang (talk) 21:24, 4 May 2016 (UTC)