Andre

Friends gave their children (11 & 3) a pc, loaded with daddy’s download tools, no (child) protection other than some hacked anti-virus and firewall but they expect the older kid to use the pc for studies. Furthermore, they expect the school to teach about how to use a computer – not only to turn it on but also to stay safe. Of course they also complain that the kids spend too much time playing online games – the 3year old can’t read yet but navigates around the web like an adult.

No matter if the schools offer appropriate computer teaching or not, the problem is the combination of parents’ lack of knowledge and/or interest about the relation of their kids with computers as well as the well too frequent lax attitude towards illegal copies. Asking for a 200HKD complete computer protection is already too much.

My experience of most parents’ lesson to their kids: “get cheap pc, don’t pay for software, download illegally, no need to protect, discover by yourself”. continue reading…

A thought about “followers” on Twitter versus “friends” on about most other social (network) services.

There is something seriously wrong with the usage of “friend” when people clean up their social lists by removing 100s of “unknown friends”. If those you follow on Twitter become real friends, it’s because you have learned something about them or have communicated with them first.

You “follow” people/services because you are interested in their updates. I personally don’t believe in the blind following out of courtesy. What I like about Twitter is that it is about “followers” and not like other sites where the whole world is your – often unknown – “friend”.

“Thx for follow” tweets can be annoying but when they are links to “thx for follow” pages with video and plenty of ads, it becomes terrible.

You can follow me on Twitter – and just maybe we might become friends.

Some people still don’t understand that there is no such thing as “public privacy”. Opening online banking accounts on a public terminal such as in coffee shops is NOT a good idea, despite the acces code generator (Security Device) required for logging in and executing transactions.