Gordon Woolf's Blog

How easily things can go wrong

(or how a simple OS update lost both sound and email!)

My problems started because I decided to install the Windows 7 service pack and is a typical mess caused by not realising all that was going wrong and getting in an increasing mess as more things went wrong as a result.

Because installing SP1 left me with speakers that were not working I got into a situation where I could not get my email. As ridiculous as that may seem, it was quite logical at the time... Here's the sequence:

1. Install SP1 via Windows Update. All appears to go well.
2. Open a YouTube video and can hear no sound. Check speakers and though Windows tell me they are working and green bars go up and down on the test in Control Panel, no sound comes out. Check that I have not set the speakers to mute.
3. I have a cloned hard disk that I made only the previous weekend so I decide to pull out the faulty drive and slot in the previous, pre-SP1 drive. Before I do that I realize I must copy the important constantly updated files to a USB stick: MozBackup copies the necessary files for Firefox and Thunderbird; I copy the data file for KeePass and the couple of text files I was working on.
4. I boot to my desktop as it was a week ago and all looks good, and I restore the files from the USB stick.
5. Thunderbird tells me it can't connect to my main mail server and as I look down the left-hand panel I realise it has gone back in time; there's mail for a domain I let expire six months ago, and some mail addresses I set up several months ago are not there.
6. I find via Google where Thunderbird keeps its profiles and go into my Acronis backup to copy the files from that backup. But when started Thunderbird shows the same ancient setup.
7. I sleep on the problem and next morning do some more Googling. It seems that Thunderbird profiles can be in two places under Win7 and this has been causing confusion for some users. I'm now among those. The profile in Vista was usually under the User folder tree going into the Local branch. But in Windows 7 it can be found in both the Local branch and the Roaming branch.
8. MozBackup had copied and restored the wrong Profiles folder. So I copied the Acronis backup files for both and at last Thunderbird opened with the right look. But missing the mail I downloaded after doing that backup. Of course immediately I opened Thunderbird it started downloading the overnight mail, quite a lot of it.
9. Fortunately I remembered to add an ".old" to the profiles folder before restoring the right one, and I can remember a couple of the emails lost in the interregnum so there is a good change they are in the ".old" folder somewhere and Thunderbird does store its mail in text files so all is not lost, just well hidden.
10. I still have not reinstalled SP1, so the job which started all this has still not been done. But I have found that there is an updated version of MozBackup. Mine dates to before the latest release version 1.4.10 from December 13, 2009, (which added support for Thunderbird 3) and there is a beta version of 1.5 dated March 7, 2011.

I have also found that MozBackup files are just Zip files, so, if you change the extension to Zip, you can look inside them and be selective. It may seem paranoid but I have also started to back up the mail files (now I know which are the right ones to back up) every four hours.

Lesson learned: no matter how well prepared you think you are, you can still get caught.

Is the future in The Cloud?

It was only a few years ago that Bill Gates and others were promoting the always-connected theme and even formed an always-on association to promote the idea of never turning your computer off; computer manufacturers were encouraged to not have a power switch, just a button which could leave the computer able to wake up on a call from the local or wide area network.

At the time I was not only sceptical but wrote articles pointing out the cost to the economy of wasted power usage and dangers from hackers having that always-on access to millions of computers.

They trashed the always-on promotion in response to pressure worldwide and most computers got their on/off switch back. But what they forecast has happened.

I still switch my computers off overnight, but the modem/router stays connected so we can still make and receive VOIP calls and the PCs immediately reconnect to the Internet when they are switched on.

A recent trip reminded me that there are large areas of this country where there are no Internet connections (nor mobile or cell phone coverage) because there are so few people, and where it exists outside capital cities and so the idea of working in the cloud is impossible.

I was wrong the first time. Maybe not this time as I've changed sides. We need better connections outside major cities before it can happen, and probably need a better and smaller way of satellite connection so mobile country connections can be usable and affordable for travellers (a permanent outback resident can opt for a satellite connection now and most large farms/cattle stations etc, even some communities, already have them).

The cloud does make sense, but to be usable outside of city centres it needs technological advances that, in my view, put it at least 3 to 5 years away.

What's green and what isn't? Paper v online

The paperless society has not happened and is unlikely to happen. The danger is that companies who supplied us with printed reports, especially to shareholders, and other organisations, to members and supporters, are still using the "greening" of communications to tell us that they want to send things electronically.

As a first point, and despite all the times I have criticised the post office for late communications, they have very seldom lost anything. On the other hand, how many email communications go astray? While this might be partly due to user settings on spam filters etc I would still suggest that paper delivered by the postie on his motorbike is an inherently more reliable means of communication than email.

Paper is greener than many people think, and electronic communications are not as green as people think. Paper is renewable, and much of the energy that paper mills use is carbon neutral, or at least renewable: bark, lignin, wind, hydro. On the other side, according to the EPA, computer servers use 1.5% of all electricity in the US, and more than 2.2 million tonnes of electronic waste were generated in 2007. Of this, 1.8 million tonnes went to landfills, up 7.7% annually since 2000.

You might consider answering on those lines when you next find an organisation trying to get you to "go green" by accepting online communication instead of paper. It may be mainly an attempt, not to save costs, but to transfer them, from them to you.

Email: the world will know

One of this country's senior politicians has just found that emails may not be what they seem. In particular a forwarded email may be changed easily before it is forwarded. That should be a warning to everyone who uses email.

To start from the basics: There's a simple Law of Email, which states "Never send anything that you wouldn't want the whole world to know".

They are easy to copy, easy to change, easy to get out of even secure offices since the introduction of USB sticks, which has led some companies to disable the USB ports on their computers, a method which causes more problems than it solves.

Encryption should be used if you are sending confidential information by email, but encryption does not assure security since it has to be decrypted at some stage ("Decryption" rather than the unencryption which I've seen many times). Emails may be decrypted on the main mail server which offers little security within an office.

There are better ways, one of the simplest being to create a PDF of a document, encrypt that and sign it digitally. Warning: simply requiring a password to open a PDF is not securing it; a Google search will reveal programs that will ger around that (which I've needed to do to get an ad into a magazine that was secured by a foolish designer).

If you have this kind of material then you'll need to study the Acrobat help files. There are also some examples of commercial software programs that will make it a simpler task.

On the other hand, there are authors and others who are so scared of someone stealing a single copy of their ebook that they make access difficult for the people who have paid for the file. I would quote from my own experience when running a milk bar/convenience store. If you put a box of lollies on the counter they will sell, but a proportion will be stolen -- move them to the back or anywhere where the customer cannot easily pick them up and they stop selling. There will be a point at which theft is too great but it will always be worth losing a few.

It can also reflect on the trust between a business owner and his customers. In my book Success in Store there are two examples of the relationship between my wife and some local high school students who came regularly for fish and chips. In the first, they left wrappers and cans by the seats on the footpath until one of them saw my wife go out to clean up their mess as they left. "Do you have to do that?" one asked. No one else will do it, she said, and from that day there was no more mess; everything went in the bins.

Similarly, a sheepish youngster returned to hold out a confectionary packet, saying he'd forgotten to pay. Next day one of the other students asked if he'd returned to pay. "He told us on the way back to school and we said 'you don't do that there'."

Fair dealing will do a lot to reduce problems of theft but that does not help with the general continued availability of email and its likelihood to spread far beyond its original intended use.

A recent search for my name in Google, and going far beyond the first two or three pages where most of us stop searching, came up with an email I wrote in 1996 which is 13 years ago, long before the Internet was anything like it is today, and in the earliest days of the web when many exagerated claims were being made about "hits" on web sites. If you are interested, that email is at http://open4success.net/Olnews/mbox2/282.html

That was not the start of email for me as I'd already been using it for the best part of a decade; at that time the problem was that there were not many people you could send emails to but I did use an email-to-telex service to submit articles to some publishers.

In all that time, there have been regular warnings that normal email is the least secure communications system of all. At least with phone recordings you can be fairly sure that what is heard is what you said, and there are legal safeguards on what can be used. With email, forgery is simple, and preservation and distribution is even more simple.