Friday, February 22, 2019

Digital oddities

Okay, a weird couple of things happened recently.

To start with, I've in recent months been sort of behooved to start a secondary email account with GMail. That is, of course, a Google service. I already had a Google account, but had never used GMail. before. Long story slightly shorter, since I had to start a whole new Google account just for the mail, I figured I'd download another browser, which it never hurts to have anyway.

I'd been using Beaker for a couple of months, and then it just sort of stopped working. Digging further I found it wasn't really there anymore. The whole app just sort of erased itself and left a blank icon.

So now it's been replaced by Pale Moon, which looks pretty good and has a cool name. When I did log into GMail through that I got an email later on that someone had logged into my account on an unfamiliar device. When it was really my laptop, a very familiar device, just using a different browser. With this knowledge I could probably hack a few unscientific polls if I had the desire. But of course that's not surprising. It's one of the things that makes them unscientific.

2 comments:

susan said...

I'm happy enough with duckduckgo as a browser (safari as backup) but I don't tend to be very adventuresome with tech of any kind. All things considered that's not such a bad thing. We both have adblock and ghostery (make sure you 'trust' blogs you like or you can't post comments) checking things out and in the case of adblock making sure we aren't inundated by crap.

I never did sign up for g-mail either but I've been very happy with fastmail - a paid for email that isn't all that expensive that I don't worry is being spied upon by google or anybody.. hopefully (one can never be sure).

We have mail.com accounts too but use them only for registering an address at places you don't want spamming you. Hopefully you got my last note before you backed off the account. Maybe you'll send us your new edress next time.

As for polls being unscientific, it seems there's a lot of that going around. "I asked ten kids in my class if they liked chocolate chip cookies and all of them said 'yes'. Therefore all kids like chocolate chip cookies."

Ben said...

Well DuckDuckGo is a search engine rather than a browser. At least as far as I know. Ad I have reasons to like to have, say, three or four on my machine. Still don't really trust the rebranded Microsoft Explorer.

I still do have my mail.com address. And I like to use it. The thing is that due to getting a lot of low-value emails it's gotten out of hand and I need to prune it. So there's a good chance one of your emails got lost in the shuffle, sorry to say. I'll do a search for it before I purge.

As for GMail, that's for school, at least initially. There was a tutorial program we needed to register for, and the provider wasn't accepting my old email address, so I needed to register with a more mainstream provider. Also instructors trust the GMail provider more, rightly or wrongly.

The chocolate chip cookie analogy is good. It's also as if you're sitting under a sign that says "choc chip cookies yay or nay?"