[Ed P]

Dave, it is not so much paranoia that triggered my decision to dump Kaspersky, but politics and my concerns for the terrible trauma that Russia is inflicting on Ukraine.

Eugene Kaspersky may have some little influence with Putin as exemplified by this Tass quote:

“”We have Kaspersky. I believe that he is really good in his line of business,” Putin said when asked whom Russia might offer up to be on par with Silicon Valley’s Elon Musk.”

I hope that by many people dumping Kaspersky and quoting Ukraine as a reason, that some message might get through to Putin that he needs to actively negotiate a settlement or risk crippling Russia’s long term tech interests.

[Ed P]

I know what you mean about Windows 11. I guess it is the modern trend to dumb-down PCs and make it much harder to get into areas where you might break them. Windows 11 versus earlier versions is a bit like Yanks versus Brits, it looks familiar and even nearly speaks the same language, but under the skin it is a very different animal.

Once you get use to it, there are some aspects that are quite nice – File Explorer for example has well placed  little *smart icons for common file actions that are often faster to use than the keyboard commands. The Settings menu is also much better though I still find myself reverting to the Control Panel for the more nuclear options such as program removal. Win11 does however have a surprisingly long learning curve as a result of being similar but very different to earlier versions.

*smart, in so far as for example ‘paste’ only lights up if there is something in the copy buffer.

[Ed P]

Not all is sweet with Bitdefender, it is very ‘dumbed-down’ compared with Kaspersky and does not have a finely tuned set of exclusions. So far however it hasn’t broken anything, and its web protection appears good.

[Ed P]

The removal of Kaspersky was easy, and gave me a political opportunity to inform Kaspersky that the could improve their product by telling Putin to stop his illegal war on Ukraine!

The one thing I really did not like about Bitdefender was their automatic renewal. This is something I always avoid as it is often higher than street price. So next February I need to remember to opt out of their auto renewal.

[Ed P]

Well I made my decision, Bitdefender it is (5 seats on Amazon for £19.99). Now to try and get rid of Kaspersky!

[Ed P]

@Jay Cee Dee, I noted you said you had TWO A/V programs running. Most ‘experts’ say it is bad practice to do that as it gains little and risks clashes/slowdowns. It might be an idea just to do a clean uninstall on the Kaspersky one.

[Ed P]

Having done a little more research the choice seems to me to be between F-Secure (Finland) and Bitdefender(Romania). The latter is edging it a little as it is on sale and includes a Child Protection module. (useful for visiting male grandchildren {9 coming on 19}!). I guess I’ll make my jump tomorrow so if anyone has input I’ll happily take it.

[Ed P]

Politics, and a thought that the Russians may be tempted to use Kaspersky as a botnet/DDOS point against UK interests.

[Ed P]

The West’s actions against Russia have thrown Russia into China’s orbit. China certainly would have a willing home for both oil and gas, and it looks like China could also be a route for any embargoed goods as Russia has parked a lot of its overseas assets in China.

“Bank of Russia could hold US$80 billion of yuan debt, while the National Wealth Fund is estimated to own US$60 billion, according to Australia & New Zealand Banking Group
The total represents almost a quarter of foreign ownership in China’s domestic bond market, according to their estimates” source — the South China Morning Post.

[Ed P]

Interesting Reuters article, that appears to be factual based on what we can see on the TV.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/what-happened-russias-air-force-us-officials-experts-stumped-2022-03-01/

Truth or propaganda – who knows!

I suspect that it is true, and that Russia does not want the West to get a chance to assess their air force’s true strengths and weaknesses against determined opposition.

[Ed P]

Russian oligarchs were among the main contributors to the Conservative party, and some say ‘Brexit’ as well. Dominic Cummings’ very strong Russian connections (Four years in Moscow) should also not be forgotten, while Jacob Rees Mogg’s large Somerset Capital investments in Russia must be looking pretty sick. 🙂

Cummings denies that Russia was a major contributor to the Brexit movement, but a weakening of the EU was certainly something they desired.

[Ed P]

It is rare that I agree with the adjectives that Richard uses, but Putin’s actions in Ukraine have been totally odious. He totally miscalculated and failed to have his military just walk into a compliant state to establish a Russian buffer zone. Even if he now ‘wins’ his criminal actions will instead have turned his ‘buffer zone’ into an Afghanistan of resistance that will bleed Russia dry in both economic and military terms.

There are however historic lessons for the West. We need to be careful about economic sanctions in the longer term as such sanctions directly caused Japan to go to war, and it is arguable that German hyperinflation of the 1920s led directly to the rise of the Nazi party and the Holocaust. Any future positive changes in Russian attitudes will need to be ‘rewarded’, in contrast to the way the West treated Russia in the 90s.

[Ed P]

As Dave said, if you do not do a clean install then whether or not you encrypt the drive is up to you. I turned on TPM but left Bitlocker well alone as I could see problems with having an encrypted drive. However, the following Dell ‘how-to’ shows that my fears MAY have been ill-founded.

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-uk/000125409/how-to-enable-or-disable-bitlocker-with-tpm-in-windows

[Ed P]

Some recent data from the ONS:

“The latest CIS antibody data show that in the week beginning 10 January 2022, the percentage of children aged 12 to 15 years who would have tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies ranged from 90.2% to 93.3% The percentage of children aged 8 to 11 years old that would have tested positive ranged from 63.3% to 72.7% in the same week. ”

I have always said that school children are a mass of bugs, bacteria and viruses. This ONS survey demonstrates that kids are just mobile petri dishes!

[Ed P]

Not that you care atm, but the 11357G is Win 11 compatible so you should not fall into the Intel i5 trap.

Apparent list of compatible Intel processors:-

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/553587/windows-11-intel-core-i5-processor-support.html

[Ed P]

While I do not disagree with your cartoon portrayal of either Trump or Putin, it must not be forgotten that US State Dept as usual have totally failed to anticipate the consequence of their actions (so too Putin). The former Iron Curtain countries play a similar historic role in the Russian psyche (1795+) as do the Caribbean and Latin America countries to the US.

Not a totally fair comparison I’ll admit, but it was not that long ago (in Thatchers time) that the US invaded and killed people in the Crown Colony of Granada. They invaded using over-whelming force on the pretext that their democratically elected Marxist Government posed a threat to US interests and lives.

The West also shoulders some blame in encouraging Ukraine to think about both EU and NATO membership as a deterrent to Russian aggression  — that really worked out well for them.

[Ed P]

Unfortunately the ‘hopefully’ result did not play out. Brinkmanship in negotiations often does not turn out well, and both sides have played it to the full. Ukraine refused to fully implement the Minsk peace accord, and Russia refused to back down on its demands for demilitarized buffer states.  Destruction and war is now in progress. We just have to hope that Russia constrains its geographical aspirations to the Donbas region or the whole of Europe and Russia could be in the deep poo.

Be prepared for both gas and petrol shortages and price hikes.

[Ed P]

For balance, Democrat media such as the NYT say that the Durham report is based on pure speculation e.g. DNS logs cannot show that a person actually went to a web site. Biden’s son never actually admitted ownership to the incriminating Mac. etc.

Unfortunately all the NYT/Democrat media seems to be paywalled so I cannot provide links.

 

[Ed P]

Apparently Docker’s TOR excludes running Dockers within a VM!

Personally this seems to be a strange exclusion, in that I cannot see why Docker needs this, other than it may perform very slowly compared with running on a host.

[Ed P]

Judging by the complaints on the VMWare forum it would appear that the Windows 11 restrictions apply to VM clients of the server, so while it may well be true that a server host can run vms within a vm, this does not seem to apply to the server’s  guests.

I guess if this is a real problem for Corporates then M$ has some work to do. As M$ has a joint development objective with VM that will be where any changes take place.

With respect to running a Docker within a vm guest, it appears that it may well be possible to do this on a Linux guest, but people seem less sure of doing this within a Windows 11 guest.

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