Georgia bans Lenovo?

As a retired University employee, I got a notice the other day that the University of Georgia, as a branch of the state government, can no longer buy Lenovo computers. But it doesn't have to cancel orders already placed or stop using computers already on hand.

Well... I no longer work for the state, so I wasn't able to access their full explanation, but in our house we have three Lenovo laptops in active use. They are exceptionally well-built and competitively priced. So should I be worried?

It turns out that the issue is Lenovo's ties to the government of China (let's not forget that China still calls itself Communist), together with some past security incidents involving software preinstalled by Lenovo. The seriousness of these is uncertain.

I'm going to keep my ears open. I'd expect the risk to be greatest with computers that have just arrived from Lenovo and haven't received any Windows Updates or anything else subsequently.

It sounds like Georgia is concerned about spyware Lenovo might install in the future, not currently existing hazards. Note that U.S.-China relations are deteriorating.

I note also that we're not just talking about passwords or confidential data. Large-scale spying could focus on where the computers are (broadly), how much they are used, etc., to track such things as troop movements.

Of course, the whole computer security community is on the alert now, and when I hear about any actual vulnerabilities that are discovered, I'll take appropriate action. I expect Microsoft's built-in antivirus software to keep up with this, so I'm not buying any additional antivirus software.

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Our divided nation: Winner-stomp-on-all

Congress has just passed Trump's controversial and clumsy budget package by an extremely slim majority. Somehow, that has triggered rejoicing, as if some kind of enemy has been defeated.

Don't its supporters realize that a slim majority is vulnerable? If one Congressman changes his mind, it might all come tumbling down.

This isn't a football game, where a score of 51 to 49 makes one team the winner and the other the loser. The whole of Congress is still there and accountable to the whole country.

Nearly 50 years ago, my British friends asked me, "Why are your two American political parties so much alike?" and I could truthfully answer, "Because they are trying to get the same people to vote for them." Not any more.

What needs to be vanquished is this destructive idea that losers have no rights — that if 51% of the voters or of Congress want to stomp on the other 49%, they have a perfect right to.

Maybe Americans are having trouble distinguishing sports from the real world.

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Do not type https:// at the beginning of a web address

Handy hint: Do not type https:// or http:// at the beginning of a web address. Let your browser sort it out.

The reason is that HTTPS does not work with web addresses that are redirections, such as my www.eeyounglearners.com and www.dslrbook.com. Those are sites for which I pay Redirection.NET to register the names and direct them to pages on the Covington Innovations site. (Try it!) Of course, you get a secure HTTPS connection when you land at the destination.

What's worse, if you mistakenly type https:// where you shouldn't, your browser may remember and auto-fill it afterward, until you type the address with http:// or delete your browsing history. So it was that one of browsers lost the ability to get to www.eeyounglearners.com and I thought the site was down.

That auto-fill can make perfectly good web sites inaccessible!

The rest of the story: The page that was giving me trouble actually had an incorrect canonical link that gave the redirection URL but with https:// in front of it. I think the browswer was picking that up and storing it. I am not seeing the auto-fill after correcting that — but I don't know the browser designers' intentions, so the problem could resurface.

When putting links into web pages or documents, you may have to include https:// or http://. In that case, make sure you have the right one. Preferably, go to the actual site and copy its address from your browser's address bar.

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New "Endure" fonts from Amazon

Have you noticed that over the years, as printers have gotten sharper, fonts have gotten thinner (lighter)? The original LaTeX fonts, for instance, were very readable on 300 dpi printers but are a bit spidery at 1200 dpi.

My usual font these days is Georgia, distributed free with Windows, designed by Matthew Carter. In the 1990s, with different software, I regularly used his earlier font, Charter.

When typesetting my next book (yes, there's another book coming out soon!), I was going to use Georgia but found myself wishing for something heavier, to hold up better at high-resolution printing. Amazon has delivered. Their new "Endure" font family is very much in the Carter (Charter) tradition, though actually designed by someone else (2K/Denmark).

It is specifically designed to be readable at 9-point size, so that paperback books can save paper. However, it will take more than that to get me to use 9-point. It is very readable at 10.5-point, and that's how I like it.

Compared to earlier fonts, it's heavier. That's the main change, and a welcome one.

(And no, I don't know why bold, in Word, is not as heavy as semibold. Unsolved mysteries of the universe...)

You can download Endure free from Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). Look for it on this page: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201834230.

Although they promote it directly only to KDP authors, Amazon has assured me that there are no restrictions on its use (assuming of course you don't re-sell the font). They do advise telling Word and PDF creators to embed the font, since most people viewing your document will not have it.

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