The Computer Thread

Now I have the urge to read Ubik.

Quick question: I have a pair of bluetooth headphones I use for my laptop. I use a monitor I keep next to my laptop for my PS 4.

Is there a way I can use the headphones for my PS 4's sound (and possibly voicechat) as well as my laptop's (not necessarily at the same time) without having to disable my laptop's bluetooth to stop it connecting to the headset?

Well, Google still seems to be doing everything in its power to make You Tube as unusable as humanly possible.

I've been using the YouTube Flash Player Firefox extension to force You Tube to use Flash instead of HTML5, so that Flashblock will stop the video from playing until I click on it, because I don't want videos to automatically play as soon as the page opens. However, just now I noticed that the site's behavior seems to have changed, in that it will load and play sound using HTML5 but the actual picture is still behind Flashblock. I tried disabling You Tube Flash Player and deleting my cookies, but the behavior remains the same. I could disable Flashblock entirely for You Tube, but that would just result in every video playing as soon as the page opens.

Maybe there are account settings that can fix all this, but I don't want to watch videos while logged in, because Google in its infinite wisdom has decided that if you log onto You Tube, you should be simultaneously logged onto every other Google service as well, which is unacceptable (especially since logging out doesn't even work half the time). I want to be able to watch videos, without logging in, and without the video starting automatically. Given the current circumstances of You Tube's clientside technology, what's the best way to get this done?

edited 15th Sep '15 11:11:17 AM by Meklar

Give this add on a try. I did a quick search for you, though I don't use Firefox myself.

That one didn't work very well.

I did find that Flashblock had a setting turned on 'block HTML5 video too'. Turned that off, then downloaded this extension. It's not ideal, insofar as it automatically starts playing a video when I switch to that tab (even if I manually paused it before), but it seems to be a lot better than nothing.

edited 15th Sep '15 3:29:47 PM by Meklar

Ever since I updated to Windows 10 Firefox hasn't worked for me. I have the latest version that's supposed to be compatible with Windows 10 but every time I open a different window the window for it turns white and I can't do anything in Firefox. Has anyone else had this problem and learned how to fix it?

Uninstall Windows 10 is the best fix actually (unless you started with it already there). There's a lot of problems with Windows 10 itself. Your video card driver, your internet browser, your games, your email client, your USB cable (for the phone) driver, etc. which had no problems in Windows 7 or 8.1 suddenly got problems with the newer OS.

edited 16th Sep '15 6:44:29 PM by entropy13

Firefox 40: Firefox Brings Fresh new Look to Windows 10 and Makes Add-ons Safer

So just now they're saying on Reddit that AVG now intends to collect and sell browsing data from free users. I've been using AVG for years, but maybe it's time to switch.

Does anyone have any detailed information on MSE or the free versions of Avira and Bitdefender? A lot of people seem to recommend MSE, but on AV-Test it's ranked lowest for protection; Avira and Bitdefender are ranked highly on all criteria, but I don't know exactly what features are missing from their free versions, or whether they're just time-limited trials.

I've been using Lavasoft's Ad-Aware for the past few years, and it's been splendid. Antivirus and antispyware in one package... for free!

edited 17th Sep '15 11:48:57 AM by MarqFJA

I uninstalled AVG and installed Avira. Seemed to go okay, I restarted my machine because AVG said it would take a restart to fully uninstall.

After the restart, when I click on the Avira tray icon or the desktop shortcut the launcher appears but 'free antivirus' is grayed out and says 'install' (whereas before it was colored in), and if I click on it nothing happens, and if I click on 'manage devices' the launcher becomes unresponsive and I have to kill it and restart it from the Task Manager. If I right-click on the tray icon and click 'manage antivirus', nothing happens (whereas before it would bring up the main settings window). Thing is, clicking its icon in the Control Panel brings up the main settings window normally and from there everything looks hunky-dory. Can I assume it's running properly as far as security is concerned?

I've been using Avast for a while, I stopped using Avira due to its annoying messages.

So far as long as you aren't an idiot any AV will do, but Avast if free and easy to use and install.

I'm still using MSE, it still gets critical updates anyway (what it doesn't get are the quick day-to-day updates other anti-virus have that may or may not produce false positives). And I have Malwarebyte's Anti-Malware. And Firefox has No Script that blacklists by default.

Skype appears to be down worldwide. Microsoft is on the problem but no word on a resolution yet.

I was wondering if it was just me.

Weird.

Skype is back in the U.S., at least for me, and apparently in the UK as well, but not all regions are up.

Skype is still down for me and i'm on the east coast

Samsies

Seems to be bouncing around a lot. Up some, down some.

I think a server got fried, and it can no longer handle the load.

At least thats what it sounds like to me.

I mean look at the chart from sevral hours ago, the british were down during peak biritsh comunications time.

Now its the east cost during peak east cost time.

It's the login process that is messed up. Once you are online, it works fine.

That still reuquires servers to handle, and normaly a diffrent set then the actual service.

True, but in my experience as a customer of many, many online services, the systems that handle authentication are the ones most vulnerable to disruption due to the potential for extremely uneven load. Right now, even if they bring everything back to normal capacity, you'll have hundreds of millions of users all trying to connect at once, creating a de facto DDoS condition.

edited 21st Sep '15 1:07:17 PM by Fighteer

I think some intern spilled coffee on something

I think we are agreeing then and not realizing it.

I am saying it sounds like an issue with a server, in this case an authentication one.

Which yea, even once it is fixed this can happen.