QNEWS for September 22nd 2024

Q-News AR News from Queensland

Hello, I’m Geoff Emery, VK4ZPP, and I’ve been thinking.
I had an event in the past week that made me consider the importance of diversity.
What I mean is that for my video watching I basically depend on YouTube which is a subsidiary of the megalith we remember as Google.
I had accumulated a number of amateur radio videos that I kept for reference on various subjects and it was handy to have this library of a few dozen items when I wanted to review my understanding of different subject. Then I turned on the TV, pressed the button on the remote to be greeted by a message that I was no longer signed in. Don’t you love the power of the tech giants to control our
activities?
I left the matter ride for a few hours and the following day had the same result so I concluded it wasn’t an issue with the TV firmware or the router of the NBN service. I located the correct password and logged in to find that my library had been removed as well as my favourite channels. Thus became a period of wasted time
finding and restoring as much of the lost material as I could find.
The whims and fancies of many of these services that people use on the internet are often fraught with issues. Remember the famous actor who wanted to will his
streaming music collection to his offspring? He found out that despite all the subscription fees that he had paid and the belief that he was paying to own the material he was in fact only buying the rights to play that music during his
lifetime. Similar stories exist concerning operating systems for computers. It is really a Catch 22 situation that you need the OS to run your computer but the
developers claim ownership.
If they decide that they will not provide backward compatibility you can find that your gear is vulnerable to cyber attacks or obsolescence in the future. I have some
gear that uses Windows 10 and doesn’t meet the requirements for the next iteration of the future one that is on the drawing boards. Sadly some of my needs
won’t be met by reverting to a Windows 7 commercial version so like many others, I have the choice to make of upgrading or risking the viability of those systems.
There are no doubt numerous examples of similar plans of big business to extract more of the folding stuff from us. It is important to the private user and possibly
more important to clubs who have to maintain records and keep access for defined times. There have been attacks on cloud services and magnetic media has a
certain period that it remains viable.
We older people can remember the entry of the personal computer into our lives and its adoption into the field of amateur radio. The cussedness of those early
machines, particularly the IBM clones was something that people said would drive a teetotaller to drink. The reliability of our systems is so much better but our dependency on monopolistic supply chains can still prevent total security for the user.
I’m Geoff Emery VK4ZPP and that’s what I think….how about you?