Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2018 February 10

= February 10 =

The Grass Mud Horse Lexicon via the Wayback Machine
The article Grass Mud Horse refers to, and links to, the Grass Mud Horse Lexicon (GMHL): " *China Digital Times' Grass-mud Horse Lexicon ". (The lexicon itself was or is important: see for example Victor Mair's comment here.) Click on the link to this (in the list of external links), and you arrive at a blank page. (By "you", I mean me. I am not in China. However, I am in Japan, whose government is careful not to offend the Chinese government -- as long as the Chinese nationalist agenda doesn't conflict with the Japanese nationalist agenda.)

The Wayback Machine offers a lot of scrapes of this page. All the recent ones are of mere redirects, and these redirects don't point to GMHL elsewhere.

However, clicking on http://web.archive.org/web/20160304065139/http://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/Grass-Mud_Horse_Lexicon (4 March 2016) actually brings the top page of a little Mediawiki encyclopedia of these terms. And here's where it gets strange. When I look at the source code using WDG's HTML checker, I see a page with the wanted content, not a redirect. However, on my computer I see the expected content -- but at the unexpectedly simplified address http://web.archive.org/space/Grass-Mud_Horse_Lexicon:_Browse_by_Topic. Yet when I ask my browser to go to the latter URL, I get a 404 error message.

Am I perhaps viewing http://web.archive.org/web/20160304065139/http://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/Grass-Mud_Horse_Lexicon while some JavaScript within it is instructing the browser to lie about the URL? (Unfortunately I don't understand JavaScript at all.) -- Hoary (talk) 06:15, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

I accidentally to someone's unsecured Wi-Fi, is it bad?
assuming the owner is malicious (the SSID was " Hotspot", but it's a residential area, no restaurants or anything), what could they do? I didn't check mail while on that Wi-Fi or anything and disconnected as soon as I noticed 78.53.109.99 (talk) 11:52, 10 February 2018 (UTC)
 * If their wi-fi isn't secured, they can't really complain when other users connect to it. Most hotspots are designed to be accessible by anyone, as a public service. Wymspen (talk) 18:24, 10 February 2018 (UTC)
 * There's lots of information on the Internet about the dangers of public wifi. Basically, your device can be more open than usual to direct exploits, and unless fully encrypted your traffic (which you may not always be aware of) can be read, rewritten or redirected without your knowledge. This allows all sorts of bad stuff. -- zzuuzz (talk) 18:54, 10 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Some ISPs do provide hotspots. However usually you would have to provide credentials on a secure web page to use it. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 23:15, 10 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Indeed there are millions of these legitimate hotspots, but equally there is nothing preventing someone spoofing one and stealing your ISP credentials, in addition to the above. It's quite unlikely so I don't want to worry the OP, but they did ask what could happen. -- zzuuzz (talk) 07:17, 11 February 2018 (UTC)
 * If we assume "you" (more on that later) did not attempt to connect to anything... There are probably "Mallory-style" attacks (see Alice_and_Bob) where the router would send malicious packets in order to exploit a vulnerability in your phone, but those sound unlikely (this needs time and effort, plus a vulnerability to use). So the worse that can happen in an "Eve-style" attack is that the wifi's operator knows a couple of technical things about your phone (the MAC address, for instance), from whatever info it sends during a connection attempt.
 * However, if any of the applications you had on the phone when connecting is configured to check for updates / synchronize / etc. then "you" did make some number of connections, and all bets are off, depending on how securely each of those apps connects to their "home". Tigraan Click here to contact me 10:26, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

Why there is no any options to create a Mobile Hotspot in windows 10 pro?
I have Windows 10 pro running on Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-4005U CPU @ 1.70 Ghz processor and previously I had Windows 10 Home in the same laptop and at that time I could create Mobile Hotspot and there was an option too for it. But since I have clean installed this version of Windows, there is no any options to create a Mobile Hotspot. Please help me solve this problem. Thank you😊 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sahil shrestha (talk • contribs) 13:04, 10 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Have you seen https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/help/4027762/windows-use-your-pc-as-a-mobile-hotspot . Are you connected to a Domain controller? If so could there be restrictions placed on your machine by another administrator? Are you even loggged on as an administrator? Does your laptop have any kind of network connection that you can share? Graeme Bartlett (talk) 23:33, 10 February 2018 (UTC)