These are actual questions & answers asked by members and answered by me on these WhatsApp groups TechHelp-Basic and TechHelp-Advanced and are captured here in a single place to refer to later if anyone interested to read. I have chosen only the ones that are general that is applicable to most users.
Date: Feb 1, 2023
Group: TechHelp-Basic
Question: I need to get my younger one a phone. Though he's 15, but I'll definitely want to keep him safe and also restrict access to some stuff. Nothing fancy either. Any suggestions? Also, any safety apps I can install?
Answer: I don’t have lot of expertise in kid proofing of cell phones but did do some stuff years ago when my kids were young 😀 but things were very different back then. Having said that, I can give you some advice, but it all depends on at what level you want to restrict i.e., restrict to just phone? Or just text message? Or restrict social media? Or restrict games? … etc. and how much effort and money you want to put in. I can think of 3 options.
- Buy a phone and/or service like https://www.bark.us although this may not be available for Oman as it appears US only but there should be something similar you can look here for any options https://www.safewise.com/resources/best-phones-kids. I don’t know how any of these services work so I can’t tell you which is better but bark.us seem very good and provides highly granular level of restrictions.
- Buy a google pixel 6a (last year model which is super cheap now ~$250) and add parental control with Google Playstore app which is built-in android and allows you to restrict app installs. If you choke app installs, you pretty much control the phone although there are ways to install apps by sideloading which you can talk to your kid and manage with education. In addition, pixel phones as opposed to other android phones get regular monthly security updates and does not contain bloatware.
- Buy any second-hand android phone, and “root” it (in English, get admin access) at which point you pretty much control everything under the sun. This requires lot of technical knowledge that may be impractical for anyone here, but I can help if you want to take this route but prepare to put in a lot of time.
So, my recommendation is #2 as you don’t have to pay for parental control service and a powerful and awesome phone at very cheap price! Your son would love it 😀
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Date: Jan 13, 2023
Group: TechHelp-Basic
Question: What does ‘VPN- Virtual Private Network’ service provide? If we are traveling and using public wifi- does VPN bring any protection? For personal use - how do we get/but the VPN service?
Answer: VPN is one of the most misunderstood technologies among non-technical people, actually, I have come across even technical people with complete and total misunderstanding of what VPN is and is not, so you are asking the right question 😄. Simply put, VPN service allows you to hide yourself from your ISP (and others along the path until you reach your target website) from tracking you on which sites you visit and most importantly where you are located. It is this aspect that allows journalists to hide from governments that watch everything they do, allows people who want to get access to services that are "geo fenced" (i.e., not allowed from certain countries due to regulation etc.) and of course, cyber criminals leverage it to hide where they are attacking from. That is pretty much it in a nutshell. It does not protect you from cybercriminals or viruses or spam or adware or identity theft etc. As per your question on public Wi-Fi usage, as long as you ensure you are using https protocol (check your browser address bar to see if it shows https or shows a lock icon) then you are fine to use public Wi-Fi, but I would not do banking transactions there for sure. Good news is, these days pretty much everything is over https anyways so VPN adds little value, as a matter of fact, it would significantly reduce your bandwidth speed. About 15 years back when https was not widely in place and the only way to send your data encrypted is with VPN at least up to the point where VPN ends but it is no longer the case today as every website is protected by secure connectivity end-to-end. With or w/ out VPN, there are inherently problems associated w/ using public Wi-Fi which I won't go into details. Unless your laptop/device runs on a secure OS like Linux, or Apple/macOS (not iPhone) it is always a possibility that your device could be compromised on public Wi-Fi especially if you are on windows OS which has so many holes that it is possible someone can be sitting next to you in a coffee shop and hack your device. Not trying to scare you but it is reality.
Lastly, if you do want to use VPN for added security and other benefits I mentioned earlier, I can give you a recommendation for VPNSecure (https://www.vpnsecure.me/) which I use personally on my laptop and phone but for phone I recently switched to google VPN which is much faster than VPNSecure. There is also a NordVPN (https://nordvpn.com/) which I know is pretty good as well. Hope this helps.
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Date: Jan 13, 2023
Group: TechHelp-Basic
Question: 25 years ago I studied Unix .. is it long gone?
Answer: No. Unix has been there all along in various incarnations; Linux, a branch of Unix started originally for Intel chipset but now runs literally on any silicon chip ever made. As a matter of fact, MacOS (runs all Apple laptop/desktop) is under the hood built with BSD (Berkeley Standard Distribution) Unix codebase. Apple users use it every day without knowing what it is. Here is a timeline of various branches of UNIX
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Date: Jan 12, 2023
Group: TechHelp-Basic
Question: Linux is faster than windows?
Answer: The short answer is yes. A more technical explanation is well beyond the scope of this basic group, but I will give a simple/toned down long answer here that anyone can understand.
Here is a simplified view of what a computer does for your everyday use
1. computation (CPU)
2. memory read/write (RAM)
3. file read/write (Hard Disk)
4. display read/write (Video/display)
5. network read/write (network, wired/wifi layer)
While #1, #2 are mostly governed by how good your hardware is i.e. size, speed, # of CPU etc; most operating systems (OS) like Linux, macOS, Windows etc can't do anything special (although Linux indeed does) for performance and they are on-par most of the time. However, Linux shines on #3,4,5 and does extremely well compared to Windows. Most of all, Linux has a very small footprint compared to Windows which too big/fat to run on reasonable hardware and often gets sluggish with patches and updates over time and requires more and more hardware resources.
To give you a real example the picture below is my raspberry PI computer (pink box on the left) which is slightly larger than a size of a match box w/ just 4G RAM and low power CPU (4 core); not only runs a full desktop (you can see it on the monitor) but also serves as proxy service for all my home devices, laptop, servers etc that make 100 &1000s of calls/minute to this PI computer that runs, you guessed it, Linux :) For daily use, this $35 device has plenty of power w/ Linux even for me.
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Date: Jan 9, 2023
Group: TechHelp-Basic
Question: How to block unwanted promotional WhatsApp texts?
Answer: Very good question. Unfortunately, WhatsApp does not provide a built-in way to block anything automatically. You can only block/report after it arrives so the specific spammer can no longer send you spam but other spammers can continue to send. WhatsApp has become a cesspool of spam source both from actual spammers/fraudsters and also from ordinary people who just don't understand internet etiquette. I considered other platforms like signal or telegram for this techhelp group but chose WhatsApp as it is more popular and used by pretty much everyone. Having said that, you can do a few things to minimize the spam with WhatsApp settings if you haven't already done so. Follow the screenshots below and setup, it should help to minimize.
Go to " Settings/Groups" option and match it as shown on this screenshot
Go to "Settings/Privacy/Last seen and online" option and match it as shown on this screenshot
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Date: Dec 21, 2022
Group: TechHelp-Basic
Question: What does one do when it's difficult to remember passwords? Is it safe to 'remember' them in Google? My brain says 'no' but my laziness prevails.... and I compromise to 'remember' passwords in virtual space. Do you have any safe suggestions for keeping/changing passwords?
Answer: Excellent question👌... and you came to the right guy as I practice, preach, and teach cybersecurity hygiene to IT professionals when I was working and still do at times when someone reaches out to me.
Is it safe to store your password in Chrome's password manager? Yes & No. Just like any other password manager, Chrome by default uploads passwords to cloud (bad) so you uncheck password "sync" on your chrome settings (let me know if you don't know where it is) so it doesn't. The downside is, your saved password is not available to all your devices inside your google echo system. The good part is your passwords are saved on your device and don't go outside; that doesn't mean 100% safe as they are accessible to a malware if your device happens to be infected, in that case all bets are off anyway. If you have a good virus scanner and be cautious on your online use of email, links etc you should be good. If/when you stop synching chrome password, in order to be effective, you really have to change all your passwords to start fresh as all your current passwords are on GCP (google cloud platform). Basically, I don't advocate using any password managers like lastpass, 1password, dashlane etc because they store your passwords on cloud and often victim of breach (just google "lastpass breach" you will see how bad it is) so if your master password is cracked crooks have access to all your online accounts instantly. The best password manager is the one that does not store passwords at all. One would ask how can this be? you have to store it somewhere right? Well there is a way, I wrote an app that does just that, yes absolutely nothing is stored. I was planning on productizing but never got around that ... I may do it now that I have time at hand. Anyway, you are welcome to use it at link below.
Direct Link to webapp: https://mypassword.us/
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Date: Dec 21, 2023
Group: TechHelp-Basic
Question: How do I wipe the internet? Meaning how do I remove all kinds of crazy things a crazy kid might post on social media platforms? Asking for the future
Answer: Interesting question 😄. The short answer is No. The stuff posted on websites, social media platforms are permanent and can't be erased unless they are of the type PII (personally identifiable information) like your ssn, bank account etc which by law, the websites must to take down when requested. Other data such as public info, opinions, things you share voluntarily, and "crazy things" etc, you can ask to remove but it will be ignored 100%. The "Internet" (search and social media platforms, websites etc) business model is to make money and profit on your data and that is here to stay. As a matter of fact, it's only going to get worse with morons like Elon "man child" Musk. I say this often--- if you post anything online consider it stays forever. So best thing is to teach crazy kid not to post things as they are going to be there forever. On a related topic, I wrote a blog while back if interested, read it at the link below which explains type of data about you out there and how easy it is anyone to get it.
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