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Newsletter for 9th October 2020

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  • Newsletter for 9th October 2020

    For the latest news from Scotland see our ScotNews feed at:
    https://electricscotland.com/scotnews.htm

    Electric Scotland News

    What is a VPN and How Does it Increase Your Online Security and Privacy?
    The number of VPN users has grown considerably over the past few years. According to the report of Go-Globe, 25% of netizens worldwide have used a VPN at least once in the last 30 days. Recently, VPN usage has surged in many countries and its popularity may see VPN usage surpass the estimated profit of USD$27.10 billion by the end of 2020. The VPN global market only seems to increase as time goes by. So, why is that? What do VPNs provide that make them so attractive?

    What is a VPN?

    A VPN, or a Virtual Private Network, creates a secure communication “tunnel” from your computer to the internet. It encrypts your connection and prevents others from seeing the data you’re transferring. This keeps your data secure from any spying attempts—including from home over your wired connection, but particularly on public Wi-Fi networks, when you’re out and about in places such as coffee shops, restaurants, airports and hotels. It helps ensure that no one can steal your personal details, passwords, or credit card information.

    How does a VPN work and why you need a VPN service?

    Among other things, a VPN can conceal your IP address to make your online actions virtually untraceable and anonymous, providing greater privacy for everything you do. In fact, there are so many ways a VPN can protect your privacy and security, we need to take a deeper look at what other benefits a VPN can provide.

    Safeguard personal information

    This is the era of mobility and most transactions are being done by people on-the-go using their mobile devices to exchange data over public networks. From online shopping, to mobile banking or simply checking emails and social media accounts, these activities can expose your personal information and sensitive data to hackers and cybercriminals. This particularly applies to users relying on public Wi-Fi. Using a VPN will help to mitigate unwanted leakage or theft by securing data in transit to and from the systems that typically try to collect and store your private data.

    Access better streaming contents from other locations

    One of the main drivers for using a VPN is to access better streaming content and restricted websites from the region you’re accessing the internet from. This may be true in your own country, but when traveling abroad, there are also chances that you cannot visit a popular website or a social media platform from the country you’re visiting. While using a VPN, you can connect to an IP address in your country and have full access to your favorite media contents and avoid wasting membership fees that you will likely pay for this streaming service.

    Enhance browsing privacy

    Some retail apps, social media platforms, and search engines continuously collect and analyze results of your search history. They keep track of all your browsing activities such as items you viewed, contents you liked, and things you tapped and clicked, so they can provide you with more targeted contents and monetize these by showing the same information in your feed through ads.

    Note that, simply clearing your browsing history does not completely remove traces of these searches, and targeted ads can get annoying. This is where a VPN can help enhance your browsing privacy. The VPN hides your browser cached data and location from advertisers, which prevents them from serving up content based on your searches and location.

    Save cost on communicating with family and friends abroad

    Another motivating factor for the use of a VPN is to save on the cost of communicating with families and friends abroad. There are countries implementing restrictions on the use of certain messaging apps, banning their services. If you are planning to visit a country with such a restriction, a VPN can bypass this constraint, which allows you to make use of your trusted messaging app, eliminate the cost of long-distance calls to family and friends while abroad—and at the same time, maintain the level of security and encryption the messaging app provides.

    Escape content-based bandwidth-throttling

    The internet has evolved into streaming more content—videos, music, and more—and ISPs have responded by making higher data usage and higher throughput (bandwidth) pay-as-you-use-more services. But content is still at issue, particularly after the December 2017 FCC ruling. Potential ISP throttling based on content type, source, or destination (e.g., BitTorrent traffic), which could give priority to business over personal usage, is one of the reasons why everyday people are using VPN services, because a VPN provides more usage anonymity, preventing ISPs from potentially tracking your activities and limiting your bandwidth usage accordingly.

    Choosing the right VPN for you

    Now that you have some understanding of what a VPN is, and what benefits it can give you, it is also important to choose the right VPN for you.

    Due to regulatory requirements and laws governing data privacy and securing personal information online, the demand for VPNs is growing. In response, there are a large number of VPN providers in the market today. So how do you choose a reliable VPN? Here are some criteria to help you pick one that best suits your needs:

    Faster and more data is better. Using a VPN can often decrease the speed of your internet connection, so you should pick a provider that has a good number of servers and locations and doesn’t pre-throttle your bandwidth. Some also have data limits, so you should opt for those with a higher data limit per month

    Provides the best encryption. Look for a VPN providing sophisticated ciphers such as 256-bit AES end-to-end encryption.
    Ensures safe browsing. Look for VPN that can filter and block malicious websites, online fraud, and internet scams and automatically safeguard your internet connection.
    Provides full anonymity. It is crucial that a VPN vendor has a clear privacy policy. Trusted VPNs will not track the user’s websites, payment information, or online transactions, and do not keep logs.
    Supports simultaneous devices. Select a VPN that is compatible with your devices and operating systems and can provide you a good number of simultaneous connections on your devices.
    Cost versus use case. Heavier business usage should be contrasted with everyday consumer use. To pay less for the service (VPNs typically cost from $5 to $12 per month per device, though multi-device bundles are less), you might accept some data limits, if your use case is lighter; sacrifice some speed, if you’re not streaming movies when you’re out and about, (unlikely during the coronavirus lockdown); or some cross-regional server-selection capability, if you’re not travelling in content-restricted regions (since out-of-country travel is also being hampered by the pandemic).

    Scottish News from this weeks newspapers
    Note that this is a selection and more can be read in our ScotNews feed on our index page where we list news from the past 1-2 weeks. I am partly doing this to build an archive of modern news from and about Scotland as world news stories that can affect Scotland and all the newsletters are archived and also indexed on Google and other search engines. I might also add that in a number of newspapers you will find many comments which can be just as interesting as the news story itself and of course you can also add your own comments if you wish which I do myself from time to time.

    CANZUK: Live Video Conference 2020
    Spectator TV and The Adam Smith Institute bring you CANZUK: A Bolder, Bigger & Better Union. This live video conference features Erin O'Toole MP (Canada), Alicia Kearns MP (UK) and Senator James Paterson (Australia) discussing what CANZUK is all about and why reciprocal free movement, trade and foreign policy coordination would benefit each of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

    View this at:
    https://www.change.org/p/parliaments...dom/u/27818499

    Obituary: Sir Malcolm Innes, heraldic expert
    Sir Malcolm Innes of Edingight, Modernist Lord Lyon who brought Scots heraldry into the 21st century. Born: 25 May 1938 in Edinburgh; Died: 20 September 2020, in Edinburgh, aged 82.

    Read more at:
    https://www.scotsman.com/news/people...expert-2985821

    The road to Tobha Mòr 2
    The existence of a university on the Atlantic edge of Scotland in the first millennium challenges concepts of civilisation and periphery. That challenge was crystallised for me on a visit to An Tobha Mòr in South Uist in 1984.

    Read more at:
    https://sceptical.scot/2020/10/the-road-to-tobha-mor-2/

    The Union survives the war and evolves: 1918-1939
    IF SCOTLAND’S MILITARY contribution to victory in the First World War had been outstanding, so too had been her industrial one. The heavy industries of the West of Scotland played a primary role in sustaining the war machine and shipbuilding and engineering were expanded, streamlined and perhaps even over-extended.

    Read more at:
    https://www.thinkscotland.org/todays...ead_full=14282

    Italexit? Italy named as favourite to quit EU next as bombshell new report released
    ITALY is now the bookmakers' favourite to be the next country to quit the European Union as an explosive new report predicted the possible implosion of the Eurozone in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

    Read more at:
    https://www.express.co.uk/news/polit...-latest-brexit

    Nicola Sturgeon sparks backlash as another coronavirus lockdown branded unacceptable
    Pubs and licensed restaurants in Greater Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Ayrshire and Arran, Forth Valley, and Lothian health board areas will close as of 6pm on Friday for 16 days.

    Read more at:
    https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/p...close-22807639

    Trudeau government survives key confidence vote
    The Liberals survived the vote with the support of the opposition NDP, avoiding a possible snap election.

    Read more at:
    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54443694

    Don't give a Shnittke about cancel culture? Read on
    But now those who profess to govern us, thwarted over Brexit, are determined to rub the belligerent peasants’ noses in it with a new morality and code so far removed from our understanding of the western tradition as to render it almost meaningless.

    Read more at:
    https://www.thinkscotland.org/thinkc...ead_full=14284

    Are wildfires the end of the Californian dream?
    As unprecedented wildfires rage across the Golden State, Californians have been bearing the brunt. Faced with an uncertain future, some are rethinking their life choices.

    Read more at:
    https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-54455636

    US election poll
    BEATING Biden despite being hospitalised with Covid

    Read more at:
    https://www.express.co.uk/news/world...lusive-polling

    Electric Canadian

    Industry and humanity
    A study in the principles underlying industrial reconstruction by William Lyon Mackenzie King (1918) (pdf)

    You can read this at:
    http://www.electriccanadian.com/make...ryhumanity.pdf

    John Turner, PM
    And Liberal leader who battled free trade with U.S.

    You can read about him at:
    https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/joh...uary-1.5731229

    Canadian History Notes
    The object of this little book is to awaken an interest in Canadian History, Published by the Educational Publishing Company (pdf)

    You can read this at:
    http://www.electriccanadian.com/hist...storynotes.pdf

    Canadian Indian
    Volume 1, October 1890 (pdf)

    You can read this at:
    http://www.electriccanadian.com/hist...anindian01.pdf

    Thoughts on a Sunday morning - 4th October 2020
    By Rev. Nola Crewe

    You can watch this at:
    http://www.electricscotland.org/show...h-October-2020

    Electric Scotland

    Robert Burns Lives! Chapter 268
    Visiting Ellisland Farm By Gerry Carruthers

    You can read this and watch a video presentation at:
    https://electricscotland.com/familyt...s_lives268.htm

    Scottish Society of Louisville
    Got in the October 2020 newsletter which you can read at:
    https://electricscotland.com/familyt...ille/index.htm

    Hylton Newsletter
    Got in the October 2020 edition, Lockdown in Scotland, which you can read at:
    https://electricscotland.com/familyt...lton/index.htm

    2020 Highland Games Tribute
    Due to the virus most events were cancelled this year and so I thought it only right to feature this tribute to them and hope you enjoy it.

    You can watch this at:
    http://www.electricscotland.org/show...-Games-Tribute

    Clan Lennox
    Did an update of our Clan Lennox page which you can get to at:
    https://electricscotland.com/webclans/htol/lennox.html

    The Conquest of Scinde
    With some Introductory Passages in the Life of Major-General Sir Charles James Napier dedicated to the British People by Major-General W. F. P. Napier (second edition) (1845) (pdf)

    You can read this at: https://electricscotland.com/history...stofscinde.pdf

    The Life and Correspondence of Admiral Sir Charles Napier K.C.B.
    From Personal Recollections, Letters, and Official Documents by Major-General Elers Napier in two volumes (1862) (pdf)

    Vol. 1 at: https://electricscotland.com/history...es-Napier1.pdf

    Vol. 2 at: https://electricscotland.com/history...es-Napier2.pdf

    Strathendrick and its Inhabitants from Early Times
    By J. Guthrie Smith (1896), gives a very detailed account of Buchanan relationships. In general it is the same as the family bible and old family tree, but gives much more detailed information and historical sources, from the 13th. century until about 1730. (pdf)

    You can read this at: https://electricscotland.com/history...athendrick.pdf

    Story

    Catawba Valley Scottish Society, Inc.

    Reception Honoring the Receipt of Letters Patent
    Granting a Coat of Arms to the
    CATAWBA VALLEY SCOTTISH SOCIETY

    Historic Rural Hill Farm
    Center of Scottish Heritage
    4431 Neck Road, Huntersville, NC 28078
    www.ruralhillfarm.org

    Thursday, June 8, 2006, 10:30 AM

    On Thursday morning, June 8, 2006 the Catawba Valley Scottish Society, Inc. of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina was presented with a Letters Patent Document granting a Coat of Arms to The Catawba Valley Scottish Society, Inc. from Robin Orr Blair, Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order, Writer to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth IIs Signet, Lord Lyon King of Arms.

    This public unveiling was made at Historic Rural Hill Farm, the home of Revolutionary War patriot, Major John Davidson. Romilly Squire of Rubislaw, O.St.J., D.A., FSA Scot., F.R.S.A., S.H.A., Baron Bailie of Plean and Rathdown, Acting Secretary of the Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs, and Chairman of the Heraldry Society of Scotland, traveled from Scotland to make this special presentation to the local historical organization.

    Receiving the Letters of Patent Document for The Catawba Valley Scottish Society, Inc. were Richard Hembree Taylor, President Emeritus, Keets Farquhar Taylor, Executive Director of Rural Hill Farm-Center of Scottish Heritage, Bob Deaton, Chairman and Founding Director of the Catawba Valley Scottish Society.

    Romilly Squire noted that this is the First and Only Coat of Arms granted to a Non-Profit Corporation involved in presenting a Scottish Highland Games anywhere in the World.

    Scottish Games are held throughout the world to include Scotland, the United States, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, and even in Indonesia.

    The Letters Patent note that the Catawba Valley Scottish Society, Inc. is a duly registered non-profit corporation in the State of North Carolina, and that the objects of said Society are to promote projects and activities providing education on the culture and heritage of the Scots and Scots-Irish peoples and their contribution to the cultural development of the United States of America and, in particular, to provide venues for such activities.

    The Letters of Patent Document concludes with:

    KNOW YE THEREFORE that We have Devised, and Do by These Presents Assign, Ratify and Confirm unto the Petitioners the following Ensigns Armorial … upon the 105th page of the 81st Volume of Our Public Register of All Arms and Bearings in Scotland, and by demonstration of which Ensigns Armorial the Incorporation is, amongst all Nobles and in all Places of Honour, to be taken, numbered, and accounted as an Incorporation Noble in the Noblesse of Scotland.

    Those in attendance were Jenny Michael, representing United States Senator, Elizabeth Dole, Mayor Kim Phillips of Huntersville, Chairman of the Mecklenburg County Commissioners, Parks Helms, and Brad Pearce, Mecklenburg County Parks and Recreation Commission, along with 50-60 guests and visitors.

    Support groups that were represented were the Loch Norman Pipe Band, the Scottish American Military Society, the Second South Carolina Continental Line, American Revolutionary War reenactment unit, the 78th Highlander Regiment reenactment unit, the American Legion Post 86, and the hospitality staff of the volunteers of the Catawba Valley Scottish Society.

    Pictures of the event can be viewed at:
    https://electricscotland.com/history...es/catawba.htm

    END.

    And that's it for this week and hope you all have a great weekend and mind and keep your distance, wash your hands and stay safe. Don't be stupid or selfish and instead be considerate of others and wear a mask if going shopping or into a crowded place and consider whether you should indeed go into a crowded space in the first place.

    Also there are no free lunches. While we are spending billions on this pandemic it will need to be paid back by the tax payer in the years ahead.

    Alastair

  • #2
    Re: Newsletter for 9th October 2020

    Happy Thanksgiving Alastair!

    Comment


    • #3
      Re: Newsletter for 9th October 2020

      Thanks Rick and to you also.

      Alastair

      Comment

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