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		<title>Basic computer concepts &lt;https://y.st./en/weblog/2016/08-August/11.xhtml&gt;</title>
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			<h1>Basic computer concepts</h1>
			<p>Day 00523: Thursday, 2016 August 11</p>
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<p>
	I&apos;ve been routing my mother&apos;s Internet traffic on their desktop machine through <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> on my mobile.
	The fact is, if I didn&apos;t route this traffic through my mobile, my mother&apos;s machine wouldn&apos;t have any Internet connection at all, as we&apos;re currently living without home Internet service.
	If my connection is being used, I&apos;m absolutely not going to expose my <abbr title="Internet Protocol">IP</abbr> address for it.
	It&apos;s not my job to do that.
	Anyway, my mother decided to pay a visit to craigslist.
	The first problem here is that craigslist maliciously discriminates against <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> users, so they were sending nothing but <abbr title="Hypertext Transfer Protocol">HTTP</abbr> 403 Forbidden response codes and error pages.
	The second issue is that my mother uses Internet Explorer.
	Internet Explorer has this fun little feature that causes it to avoid displaying error pages.
	Instead, it displays a &quot;possible causes&quot; message.
	Instead of allowing the user to hear directly from the server what the issue is, Internet Explorer wants to interject with mere <strong>*guesses*</strong>! In this case, Internet Explorer said that the most likely cause is that one must log in before viewing pages on that website.
	I swear, Internet Explorer is moronic.
	There was no value in explaining what I believe the cause of the problem was though, as it would be interpreted the wrong way.
	My mother would blame the proxy, but it&apos;s not the proxy&apos;s fault.
	The proxy isn&apos;t blocking the page.
	No, what my mother will likely always fail to grasp is that the problem is those that maliciously discriminate against proxies.
	In any case, as no real information on the issue was actually available, I didn&apos;t make such speculations out loud.
	Instead, I worked with the information provided.
	I said that clearly, craigslist was having issues at the moment, then convinced my mother to try a different website.
	I&apos;m surprised that they were willing to try something else, given their usual attitude, but they indeed did take their business elsewhere.
</p>
<p>
	Later that day, my mother wanted to go through their photographs and print out a couple hundred of them.
	They had me back the photographs up to their desktop machine earlier in the day, but then for some reason felt the need to upload them directly from the mobile to some Google service.
	Mother said that they were going to try to put the couple hundred that the wanted on a <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr>, so I said that I could burn photographs that are on the computer, not on Google, to the <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr> if they wanted help.
	They said that that would be great, but wanted to finish the Google upload that they were in the middle of first because if that was interrupted and the way I wanted to do it didn&apos;t work as expected (there&apos;s no reason that it wouldn&apos;t have), they&apos;d have to restart the upload to do it that way.
	I left, and when they called me back over, they&apos;d sorted the photographs that they wanted to keep <strong>*on Google*</strong> and expected me to save the files to the <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr>! There was no indication of how to download the photographs back to the desktop machine in the Google interface, so I did the only thing that I could: I attempted to find each photograph in my mother&apos;s offline collection that matched what was displayed in Google.
	My mother came over to check and see how I was doing and what was taking so long, so I explained the situation.
	I had never said that I could burn images to a <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr> from Google, only that I could do it from local files! I could of course save each thumbnail image, and burn those, but there would be a severe drop in image quality.
	My mother didn&apos;t seem to understand the difference between a file on a distant server that I don&apos;t have access to and a file on the local machine.
	They said that if I could only copy the ones from the local machine, I should just to that, so I explained that that is what I was doing; I was having to hunt down each photograph by hand from the local collection.
	So far I&apos;d located three and failed to find two.
	Uploading files to Google then expecting to somehow burn them to a <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr> had been a stupid plan, though I didn&apos;t say that part out loud.
	I think that because my mother could see all the thumbnails on the webpage, they thought that the actual photographs were within reach and could be saved directly to a <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr> or anything else.
</p>
<p>
	From there, my mother took over and started trying to make Google give them the photographs.
	I didn&apos;t think that it was necessarily possible, but the two of us worked together and covered each other&apos;s weaknesses.
	I couldn&apos;t fiddle with the account, as it wasn&apos;t my account and if I break anything, it&apos;d be my fault.
	I couldn&apos;t do anything that would make permanent changes.
	My mother on the other hand couldn&apos;t tell the difference between the interface provided by the webpage and the menu of the Web browser itself.
	They didn&apos;t get that they two had different contexts and were limited in different ways in what they could do.
	For that matter, they couldn&apos;t distinguish these contexts from the context of local applications.
	First, they wanted to use the &quot;save&quot; option in the Web browser menu to save the album in photograph form (as opposed to webpage form) to the local machine.
	Then they wanted to use the &quot;save&quot; option in the Web interface to safe the album to the local machine (as opposed to save the changes made online to the serve).
	I was able to guide my mother around those pitfalls while they navigated the website looking for a solution that I thought might not even exist, until I spotted the &quot;download&quot; option which was what we clearly needed.
</p>
<p>
	In retrospect, it seems rather obvious that Google would offer <strong>*some*</strong> way to download the photographs that one uploads, though they did make that option difficult to find and an &quot;album&quot; had to be created from the subset of photographs that my mother wanted first, while somehow the set that my mother had set up before was not considered to be an album.
	Mostly, I think that I didn&apos;t think that it was possible because I was still flabbergasted by the inefficiency of uploading files for sorting that you actually want to be stored locally.
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