The figurehead of the Royal Mail is literally King Charles III.

"Father falls prey to scammers claiming to be his Son and needed urgent funds." "Of course I transferred the £400k, it was definitely my Son on the other end of the line. I'd know his voice anywhere."

Agreed. I fix and setup many home and business computer systems. For a while when asked "I just want to type letters, where do I get Microsoft Office", I would suggest OpenOffice.org and install that if the system owner agreed. I always call my clients back 4 weeks later to ensure that there are no outstanding issues with the work I carried out. I found that in most cases those people I had installed OpenOffice.org for had decided that it did not create letters how they needed it to, so had purchased and installed Microsoft Office instead. So, I started charging for OpenOffice.org instead at a cheaper cost to Microsoft Office (keeping within the GPL and making donations to various open source projects). I soon found that when I contacted those clients, the response when questioned about OpenOffice.org was more positive with phrases such as "oh yes it's wonderful, you saved us a good £70". Sell it, people need to feel they have something of worth. The quality of the software is great, it is the perception of the users that is influenced by the price they paid for it.

It seems that in a capitalist society, if a corporation is not making more profit than last year, they are deemed to have failed - making a profit is not good enough, it has to be more than last year! Otherwise management gets axed and heads roll.

As much as I hate subscription models, I think it is the only way a capitalist society can go in order to increase revenue and profit. If everyone who wants a new car this year goes out and buys one, that is it for the year. No more cash can be dragged out of those people and the corporation runs the risk of 'failing' its shareholders. So, along come subscriptions. Buy the product as normal and then subscribe the fuck out of things we would expect as included to force people into throwing regular payments at the corporation.

Once everyone has bought and subscribed, where will capitalism go next? Subscribe for licenses to be able to transport people in the rear seats? Subscribe to take more than the standard allotted weight of stuff in the boot (trunk)? I'm out. I've been out of software subscriptions for ever - never rented Microsoft Office 365 or Adobe Cloud. LibreOffice.org and The GIMP do me perfectly fine. The savings I make each year allow me to splash out on more stuff that I actually do want.

Perhaps I have got the wrong end of the stick? So Mr. Lloyds gripe is that there is an influx of workers with this particular religious belief? Everywhere I have worked, there happens to have been a predominantly Methodist workforce - I saw no need in taking offence at this. "The suit, which Mr. Lloyd filed in August in California Superior Court, accuses Google and ASG of violating a California employment law that protects workers against discrimination" - So he would prefer Google/ASG refuse to employ the members of this religious group, on the grounds of their religious beliefs - the exact opposite of what the law is supposed to protect?

He could open up a free Jitsi room and publicise that via social media, Facebook is not the be all and end all. https://meet.jit.si/

I have a range of different models put to different uses: 1x Raspberry Pi Model 2 B - Currently unused. 1x Raspberry Pi 3 Model B - Used as my boiler control server, connected to my combi boiler in the loft. Communicates with the lounge thermostat Pi and my Asterisk server for telephone control of heating system. 1x Raspberry Pi 3 Model B - Used as my thermostat in the lounge and communicates with the loft server Pi. 1x Raspberry Pi 3 Model B - Currently putting together as a security camera - I intend to have multiple Pi cameras in the end on the grounds and one as a bird next box camera. 1x Raspberry Pi 3 Model B - In the kitchen, has an SDR dongle attached and listens for doorbell presses. Also has a 433Mhz transmitter which schedules external lighting and lighting around the house to emulate a lived in house when I go away. 1x Raspberry Pi zero - A road near me gets clogged for up to 40 minutes, 3 times per day, everyday. So instead of going out for a quick errand and ending up sat for 40 minutes (wasting lots of time and fuel) I have a battery powered Pi Zero and Arduino in a strategic location. It reports live traffic status back to my calendar and Twitter. I have also just got a greenhouse setup, so I intend to have a Pi and Arduino system to maintain this and water the garden.

Does the school log access to websites? If so, the police could ask the It staff to check the logs.

At the school I worked in we logged all web access using a Squid Proxy Server. This would have allowed us to look up who on that day at that time had accessed both Googlemail and Apple iCloud.

Highly likely then to have the login name of the kid or staff member who did it. Unless their password was stolen too.

They may also be able to see what access point the phone was connected to. In fact, they may still see the MAC address of the phone as it wanders around the school between classes.

Now I am a user of LibreOffice and Linux but up until around 2004 I was quite happy using Microsoft Word 2.0, released in 1991. had it continued to work on newer Windows versions I would no doubt still be using it. Although, as it did not work it gave me the opportunity to find out what else was out there. That's when I discovered the world of Open Source and abandoned Windows entirely with Windows XP being the last version I used in production. My computing has been a lot less stress free since.

Discussed this with my partner, she likens L.O.L. Surprise! of the modern generation to the Kinder Eggs or football card packs that we grew up with - was cheaper to buy such crap back then though, not £50 for a random pop. Such gambling addition products seem to have been aimed at the kids for decades, we just did not notice.

Totally agree with this. I buy a game and then never spend a further penny on it unless I know exactly what I am getting for my cash - such as extra levels. Discussed this with my partner, she likens L.O.L. Surprise! of the modern generation to the Kinder Eggs or football card packs that we grew up with - was cheaper to buy such crap back then though, not £50 for a random pop.

I work for myself offering the local area end user IT support services., both business and domestic, I am in my late 30s. I attend a site and get sat down in front of the troublesome PC. The owner explains the issue they are having and walks me through the problems on screen. This process usually ends with the end user asking "Do you know how to fix that?". I usually tell them "No", they look worried. The first few moments of my discussion with the end user is usually to explain that I have never even heard of the software product they have shown me, let alone even used it before. I explain that back when I started repairing PCs and providing user support - 13 years old at my secondary school - supporting the staff (I was presented with the key to the server room and left to maintain the Novell Netware system), the number of products installed on the PCs totalled around 4 including Microsoft DOS, Microsoft Windows 3.1, Microsoft Works. I explain that over the course of a week I was able to read the entire manuals so I knew the products inside out. I then explain that whilst talking, multiple new software products have been released which will likely have updates released before I leave their site.

There is no way to keep fully up to date. I explain that the job is now more of a research role, being able to find the answer and call upon previous experience as needed, rather than a knowing role. I tell the client to give me 20 minutes and I will likely have resolved their issue.

End user support is stressful, especially when going it alone. I used to work all hours under the sun, holiday? What's a holiday? I then started taking note when I started taking on more and more clients who when asked "What happened to your last IT provider?" would reply with phrases such as "Oh they had a breakdown", "they are no longer with us, keeled over at a keyboard, only 45", "went on holiday, decided not to return".

So, now I make sure I take dedicated holiday time off, falling inline with my partners allocation. I no longer take any business related IT equipment with me and and have found people locally who can cover me and vice versa when we are away - but they tend to take their business phone and laptop away with them too, so they are never really turning off and having a true break to recuperate.

Some clients are a little put off when I state I will not be contactable for 1 week and to instead call XYZ. I explain much like I have above and state that I can either be contactable all year round (minus my holiday breaks) for the next 30 years, or I can be contactable 24/7 for the next few years until I have my own overwork related health issues.

They tend to understand, if they don't they are free to go elsewhere.

Being of the generation who started using computers when every 'bit' mattered, I still use modern technology in the same way.

I frequently cleanup and delete stuff I do not foresee needing (after taking multiple backups to offline media of course), I always turn off mobile data when I am connected to wifi or when I will not require it, I even turn off wifi on my phones and tablets when not in use to save the battery, such as at night or when driving.

Such habits allow my devices to run for longer without a recharge when out and about plus it seems, have saved me countless well earned £££ by not becoming one of the people impacted by this software bug and others we may not know about.

Unfortunately today, most people would not even dream of turning off data when not actively using it, as they may miss a Facebook post of their mate making a cuppa.

When I attended college, 100MB (not Gigabytes, Megabytes) of storage served me perfectly well for 3 years as I had gotten used to formatting my digital photos and scans to acceptable quality and filesizes due to having grown up with 1.44MB 3.5 inch floppy disks.

By the time I worked in the IT department at the same college 4 years later, students would arrive at the support department door in an endless stream on day 1 of their course, complaining that they have run out of space, having only saved 1 digital photo (why did their tutors not educate them on file size reduction? Don't get me started on the state of teaching!). Often they and their tutors demanded 100GB of storage space so they could save their photos and scans, which were to be used in Microsoft Word documents and presented on printed page at the size of a postage stamp, even though the saved file size would if laid out flat could easily be seen from space.

What I am getting at here is that having grown up in the age of 'digital rationing', I had to learn how to manage my storage space/bandwidth cost effectively and with the end product in mind.

Nowadays, people feel they don't have to bother, most probably don't even know that they can reduce the size of a photo taken by their digital camera or post process it in the GIMP or whatever to reduce the physical and file size. After all, they have a huge hard drive and cloud storage.

Learning how to manage the space/bandwidth as effectively as they would a physical filing cabinet, would go a long way to reducing the risk they are exposed to from such Google bugs.

Having played around with an Atari and Commodore 64, I first got my hands on an IBM PC compatible in 1993 when I started at secondary school. Back then I was able to read the entire manuals for the 3 pieces of software installed on them over the course of a week or so: MSDOS, Microsoft Windows 3.1 and Microsoft Works. Now I work in IT support. If I had a printed manual for Microsoft Windows 10, I would need to obtain a new one every time an update was released as the layout of Settings and other screens changes as features are removed and added. When repairing or servicing a clients computer, I often get asked how I keep up with all the changes. I explain to my clients that for me the industry is no longer about knowing the software inside and out (as I was able to achieve back in 1993). Instead, it has evolved into a research role - I have had to hone my research skills to locate the details for the specific piece of software I have been lumbered with fixing on that particular hour of the day. In the few hours I have been at a clients property, countless new pieces of software have been released online which I may be expected to now support.

I for one, welcome out new bacterial overlords.