30 Apr 2021

Using Social Fixer To Fix Facebook Frustrations

Facebook is simultaneously one of the most useful features on the internet, and one of the most infuriating. The ability to keep in touch with friends and family is always welcome and sometimes it has been indispensable. But Facebook's lethargic or nonexistent efforts to curb scammers is exasperating.

Fortunately, those who interact with Facebook on a computer via a browser can rely on Social Fixer to eliminate some of the annoyances, and maybe the developer will be able to create companion apps for IOS and Android devices.

One of Social Fixer's most essential features is the ability to eliminate sponsored posts. I fully understand that Facebook needs to monetize the service. Anyone who thinks Facebook is free is a fool. So I'm not philosophically opposed to advertisements on Facebook, but I am opposed to sponsored posts from scammers, from purveyors of disinformation, and from people who offer something that interests me not at all. When I'm using Facebook on an Android phone or an IOS tablet, these are inescapable.

It's not uncommon to see a "product" being offered by someone who is clearly a scammer. The product may not be possible given current technology or it might be priced impossibly low. The ad might be for a "giveaway" for which nothing will ever be given away. If Facebook had some sort of advertising clearance operation that reviewed ads before they were shown, I'd be less tempted to simply block all ads.

Facebook knows who I am, knows what I'm interested in, knows more or less where I live, and knows what my political leanings are. And yet Facebook repeatedly tries to show me ads for products or services I would never buy and for politicians, products, and services that disgust me. If Facebook had policies in place that refused to allow advertisers to specify targets as broadly as "someone who lives in the United States", I would be less tempted to simply block all ads.

That's just one of the features that Social Fixer provides, but let's start with the overall appearance.

Facebook adds features that they seem to assume everyone will like, even though that is thoroughly illogical. Some people simply detest change. Others see no use for certain features. Good development procedure calls for giving users a way to adjust the application.

The latest version of Facebook has five buttons at the top of the screen: Home, Pages, Watch, Marketplace, and Groups. The Stories feature is below the buttons. Advertisements are located at the top of the right column. Social Fixer allows users to hide features they don't want.

The image shows Social Fixer in the "Hide/Show Parts of the Page" function at the top. Green components will be allowed; pink components will be blocked.

Everybody needs the Home button. I keep the Pages button because I have a personal page and a TechByter page, but this is useless for those who have a single page. I would consider retaining the Watch button if Facebook would eliminate scams and disinformation videos. Because they don't, I turn this button off. I also turn off the Marketplace button because I don't plan to use Facebook to find something to buy. I do leave the Groups button because I belong to several groups.

But it's the Stories section that I detest because it takes up far too much screen real estate. I don't belong to Instagram, and don't care to view Facebook's Instagram-wannabee Stories.

Facebook is much more usable when all that junk is gone, and what's even better is that Social Fixer allows each user to determine what's junk and what's not junk even if Facebook's developers don't allow users to do this.

When Facebook started pushing out the new interface, a lot of people expressed dismay and wanted to retain the old look. That wasn't possible of course because Facebook knows best. Developer Matt Kruse created a browser plug-in that attempted to replicate the old look, but it depended on using services that Facebook has taken out of service.

Instead, Krause rewrote Social Fixer from scratch in an attempt to restore all of the features that users value in Facebook's new format. Most of the features are available now, including the ability to hide sponsored posts, automatically switch the news feed to most recent posts, hide political posts, filter the news feed based on factors the user selects, find out when a friend changes their name or unfriends you, create a tabbed news feed for better organization, and hide posts once you've read them. Those are in addition to the ability to hide some parts of the page.

Why do we need to automatically switch to recent posts? That's because Facebook has a nasty habit of switching users to the "Top Stories" view of the news feed even when the user repeatedly switches to "Most Recent" view. Social Fixer will automatically switch you back to the Most Recent view when Facebook switches the view without asking.

Ads are hidden using Social Fixer's Filters panel. Start by (1) enabling "Hide Sponsored and Suggested Posts", which is a subscription. There's no cost. "Subscription" just means that the filter will be updated as needed. If some ads slip through the basic filter, users can (2) add their own filter and then (3) define the conditions required for something to be hidden.

When the user chooses to hide ads, there are two options: Make the ads vanish without a trace or replace the ad with a small message that displays the name of the advertiser. Facebook does occasionally display a useful ad that isn't a scam and this makes it easy to view the ad if you want to see it. Just click the line of text and the ad will appear.

Social Fixer includes several display tweaks, including a new one that highlights a comment that's linked from the Notifications panel. It's not uncommon for users to click a notification, which then opens the comments section of a post, and then be unable to quickly spot the referenced comment.

When this feature is enabled, the comment will be displayed with a light blue background and a dashed outline. Those who don't like the color or the outline can edit the function's settings to choose a different color or no color and to change the outline or remove it.

Another welcome feature is called "Fix Enter in Comments, Replies, & Chat". In a lengthy comment or chat, many people like to create paragraph breaks. The problem is that Facebook submits comments when the user presses Enter. To create just a line break without submitting the comment, Facebook's default is Ctrl-Enter. This seems exactly backwards to many users, including me.

Enabling "Fix Enter in Comments, Replies, & Chat" makes it so that Enter just creates a new line and submitting a comment is accomplished with Ctrl-Enter.

The latest version of Social Fixer is still a work in progress, and not all of the old features are yet in place. Additionally, Krause updates the code frequently when Facebook does something that breaks a feature. The application is free, but donations are encouraged.

Krause recently used some of the donations to hire an app developer to create a codebase that he hopes to be able to use in creating Social Fixer for IOS and Android devices. That is probably the single most requested feature from people who like the clean, ordered interface of Facebook with Social Fixer on a computer and find Facebook's heavy-handed manner on mobile devices annoying.

Social Fixer is available from the website as well as from the add-on or extension service for most browsers.

 Eliminate Facebook Annoyances The Easy Way

Even if you don't mind the fraudulent ads, Facebook can still be improved dramatically by Social Fixer. Although Social Fixer is free, donating regularly allows Matt Krause to put more effort into development. It's him and a few volunteers who provide support against the massive group of developers at Facebook.
Additional details are available on the Social Fixer website.
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Short Circuits

Fabulous Speed Increase?

Have you seen a flurry of recent articles that promise big speed increases if you edit the Windows Registry to change a default setting? I'll start with the spoiler: Don't expect much change. But let's take a look at what happened when I gave it a try.

What's odd is that I found nearly half a dozen articles that all appeared to have come from a single source. So did a bunch of tech writers each copy an article of questionable value without testing it, or did I miss something? The claim is that users can increase network speed in Windows 10 by increasing IRP Stack size, which is the number of stack locations in I/O request packets (IRPs). Each stack uses 36 bytes of memory and by default there are 15 stacks. The recommendation is to increase the number to 32, which is 20 in hexadecimal notation.

OK. So let's give that a try. The standard warning applies: Making an error while editing the Registry file is can make the computer inoperable, so it's always wise to back up the registry and to create a restore point before doing any Registry editing.

Press the Windows button and type regedit. Then select Registry Editor, start with (1) HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, and drill down to (2) SYSTEM, (3) CurrentControlSet, and (4) Services. Scroll down to (5) LanmanServer and select (6) Parameters.

Right-click (6) Parameters and select (7) New from the context menu, then (8) DWORD (32-bit) Value. Name the new value IRPStackSize and fill in a value of 20 (hexadecimal) or change the value to decimal and enter 32. When you're done, back out of the Registry and restart the computer.

Now let's see how much network speed has improved.

I tested the network speed before making the registry change (left panel): Ping took 10 milliseconds, jitter was reported a 4 milliseconds, download was 147Mbps, and upload was 11Mbps. Following the Registry change and the system reboot, the ping speed dropped slightly to 9 milliseconds and jitter increased to 6 milliseconds. The download speed was slightly higher at 152Mbps and the uplink speed was still 11Mbps. That not exactly a "substantial increase" is it? It's about a 3% improvement and is well within the range that could be expected based on varying network speeds. Additional tests over the next week indicated that speeds were about what I've come to expect.

In other words, it wasn't really worth the time spent editing the Registry.

The Oldest And Most Dangerous Internet Technology Is 50 Years Old

Email has been with us for 50 years. As the most common vector for malware and spam, it is a constant irritant but email continues to be useful even if it's not always welcome. There's nothing in sight that's likely to replace email.

Unlike early internet protocols such as archie, gopher, veronica, and jughead, email has persisted. Many current internet users have never heard of those other four because they've all been replaced by the web.

The gopher protocol was designed to distribute documents over internet protocol networks. Archie was used to index FTP archives and is considered the first internet search engine. Veronica was a search engine system for the gopher protocol. It was a constantly updated database of menu items on thousands of gopher servers. Jughead was another search engine system for the gopher protocol, but it was able to search only one server at a time. The world wide web banished them all to oblivion, but email continued.

In 1971, software engineer Ray Tomlinson introduced the @ symbol to indicate the address of a target server on ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet. It's still in use and every day about 300 million email messages transverse the internet.

There have been attempts to kill email. Instant messages are popular, but have many limitations. Email is likely to be with us for quite some time yet, so perhaps you'd enjoy a brief look at how we got here.

IBM introduced networking with a system known as the Administrative Terminal System in 1962. This allowed users to view information on remote computers.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), made up of military and university locations, created ARPANET in 1969, and the first email message was sent between computers in October. The SENDMAIL protocol didn't yet exist. In 1971 ARPA became DARPA because the name had been changed to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

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In 1971, programmer Ray Tomlinson thought of using the @ sign between the recipient's name and the identification of the the computer where the recipient's mailbox was located within the ARPANET system. For that reason, Tomlinson is considered to be the inventor of network email.

Image provided by CloudHQ.

DARPA worked to standardize email operations in the 1970s, with the first standardized features being written in 1973, These included specification for "to" and "from" fields. By 1977, most of the functionality we use today had been created, but the simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) wasn't introduced until 1981.

SMTP has been updated several times since then and now includes functions for authentication, encryption, and binary data transfer. SMTP servers still use port 25 for plain text messages, but port 587 has been added for encrypted communications.

One of the biggest changes in email came in 1989 when CompuServe launched the first email program designed for home users. CompuServe users could exchange messages with other CompuServe users, but not yet with the rest of the world.

Image provided by CloudHQ.

The America On Line made a huge change. Founded in 1985, AOL gave users access to internet email in 1991 by offering free email addresses for users. Email and the internet would never be the same. AOL introduced the phrase "You've got mail" that became so well known that it became the title of a motion picture that starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

Then came Hotmail. In 1996, Hotmail gave anyone who signed up for internet access a free email account. Microsoft now owns Hotmail. Yahoo offered free email in 1997.

Even Gmail has been around for so long that anyone younger than their early 20s won't be able to remember a time when it didn't exist. Google's free email service offered users 1GB of storage, far more than any other provider. In the 17 years since April 1, 2004, that has increased to 15GB for free.

Instant messaging was supposed to kill email. So were Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. But email usage continues to increase.

CloudHQ, which offers productivity tools designed to work with Gmail for business users, says the average employee sends 40 emails per day and receives 121. About 1.6 billion people around the globe use Gmail, almost one person out of five. In businesses, chat applications have reduced the number of email messages, but email remains the leader for those who want to have a permanent record of messages that can be easily searched. It's also the superior way to send and receive attachments.

Attachments can be dangerous, and they're one of the two ways that email is used to distribute malware. For that reason, an attachment in any email message should be considered potentially dangerous. It should be obvious that opening an attachment in a message from someone you don't know is risky, and even attachments from people you do know should generally be sniffed by whatever protective application is installed on your computer before you open it.

The other common vector for malware is an email that contains a link to a rogue website. These may be even more dangerous than attachments because it's difficult to preview the website cautiously. Being aware of the potential danger means that careful users will avoid clicking links whenever possible and instead use other means to confirm information provided in the email.

So despite challenges over the years and the potential hazards we face today, we probably shouldn't expect email to be supplanted anytime soon.

Spare Parts

Microsoft Will Acquire Nuance

Microsoft will pay about $20 billion to acquire Nuance. Nuance had already acquired Dragon Dictate and just about every other company that provided speech or text recognition. Underneath all that technology is a lot of artificial intelligence, and that's probably what Microsoft wants.

The deal is Microsoft's second largest acquisition ever. The only larger deal was the acquisition of LinkedIn for $24 billion in 2016.

What does Microsoft need with voice recognition? The company already has Cortana, but Nuance was instrumental in the development of Apple's Siri. It's more about Microsoft's desire to get into health care offices. Instead of writing notes (do doctors still do that?) or typing them into computers, the new way will have doctors speak their notes to computers.

Returning To School With Anxiety

A poll conducted in March shows that slightly more than half of teens (54%) say they are unprepared to deal with the anxiety of returning to school and do not believe schools are equipped to respond effectively to emergency incidents or mental health needs.

The Navigate360 and Zogby Strategies "Safety and Wellbeing Poll" consisted of sampling a small number of 16- and 17-year-olds nationwide on March 25, 2021, with parental permission. The small sample size (just over 300 participants) resulted in a sampling error of ±5.7 percentage points. A larger poll of 1000 students conducted on the same day has a lower sampling error, ±3.2 percentage points.

Despite reported increases of anxiety and stress, only 23% of teens believed that their school is prepared to handle mental health issues. Slightly more than a third of students were confident that their classmates knew what to do in an emergency or that their school's leadership knew how to respond to ensure minimal casualties and loss of life.

The poll was the third installment of the Safety and Wellbeing Index conducted by Navigate360 and John Zogby Strategies. One poll focused on adults, and the companion poll captured the attitudes and beliefs of teenagers aged 16-17. The results show that recent incidents of violence are increasing feelings of fear and anxiety among American teens and taking a toll on their mental health.

Key statistics of the Q2 2021 poll include:

• Only 38% of teens are confident that school officials can create an atmosphere of physical and social-emotional safety in the classroom.
• Half of the teens (49%) and parents (51%) surveyed are aware of a classmate or student who was bullied because of their race, sexual orientation, or income level.
• Only 42% of teens know where and how to report a threat or risk.
• Three in five teens (59%) say they know someone who has considered self-harm or suicide, up three points from the previous poll done in January.

Full poll details are available on the Navgate360 website.

Twenty Years Ago: Toronto's Naked News Was On The Air

Naked News had been in operation for two years when I noticed it in 2001. "Want a little Canadian news?" I wrote. "Maybe the Canadian weather? US and other North American news, world news, sports, and entertainment news? If you don't mind watching a newscaster who's wearing no clothes deliver the news, there's Canada's Naked News."

I noted that Naked News features women who read the news and remove their clothes as the stories progress. Normally microphones are clipped on to the talent's shirt, blouse, or jacket. Since those aren't available, I pondered this deeply: "The engineers have no doubt worked diligently to find a way to attach the microphones directly to the ladies." The answer, of course, was obvious and I was just being snide: They used boom mics.

Naked News produced six new 22-minute news episodes a week. In 2001 some of the newscasts were apparently available without cost because I wrote "This isn't the BBC, but the news reports are relatively current and factual. It's one of the few places you can get Canadian weather reports because nearly all US weather maps end at the border. (Ever notice that? Except for when the forecast calls for a blast of cold Canadian air, nobody ever mentions the land up north!) Naked News offers the forecast and conditions for both sides of the border."

Today's broadcasts (in every sense of the word) differ from earlier days: Hard news has been replaced by soft feature stories and movie reviews. Even the weather is missing, and viewing requires a $100/year subscription.