Fareham — Apr 9th 2016
John gave a presentation about the different ways that adverts could find their way onto your computer screen.
He started with spam emails, which could either be targeted to you, or just sent out randomly to millions of acquired email addresses.
He emphasised that when filling out on-line forms, you should always look for the 'marketing' tick box and check if the tick means yes or no.
The next category was adverts that are embedded into a webpage. These could either be sponsored and relevant to the subject material on that page or just random.
He explained that you could often eliminate these adverts by turning off JavaScript, but in doing so you could inadvertently hide other items that you might want to see on the web page.
The final category was pop-up adverts.
Interestingly, the person responsible for initially writing the code for displaying these, Ethan Zuckerman, later apologised for the unforeseen nuisance that pop-up adverts had evolved into!
There's various software and also browser plug-ins available to minimise the amount of adverts appearing, but some will still get through.
Finally, John mentioned Spyware and how difficult it was to detect, but there was software available to get rid of it.
After the break, Stuart showed us how to do some video editing using the QuickTime application on his MacBook.
Although this type of editing is basic, it still allows you to trim both ends of a movie and also remove a section of it.
Any movie that will run in QuickTime can be edited, however you would need a more sophisticated application such as Final Cut Pro to do accurate audio editing.
There were no specific Q&As this time, instead we had individual discussions between members.
The next meeting will be on Saturday 14th May at 10.30am.
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