Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2014 November 6

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November 6

Egerin Kurdish Keyboard

How to open Kurdish keyboard in egerin? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jarry jon (talk • contribs) 14:59, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

According to [1] you click the icon and a keyboard will pop up with various options for typing Kurdish. KonveyorBelt 18:59, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

Obscure Windows filesystem feature

I'm trying to remember the name of a certain feature of Windows or NTFS that I learned about a while ago. It's normally accessed with the command line and it involves creating files that are attached as tags to other files. They don't show up in Explorer. Anyone know what this feature is? — Melab±1 ☎ 16:19, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Alternate Data Streams. Tevildo (talk) 16:36, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Kindle region restriction

I've taken the liberty of moving this from WP:RD/S. Wnt (talk) 20:43, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

I am thinking of buying an Amazon Kindle eReader, but am a bit confused about the various regional restrictions. I am living in Poland (no amazon Poland and no kindle in shops) and would buy the device in a shop in Germany. Amazon is telling me the following (via chat)... In order to buy/download ebooks from amazon.de (or any other amazon except for amazon.com), I need to: 1. have an address and payment method in the respective country (Germany for amazon.de); AND 2. have to be present in the respective country (Germany) when buying/downloading the ebook. Can somebody confirm this, particularly the second point? My second concern is about the device itself: Is there any difference between kindle sold in a shop in Germany, online via amazon.com, a shop in France, etc? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.69.64.44 (talk) 20:16, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Why not install the Kindle app onto your internet connected device that you are currently using and see if you can download stuff. I suspect that you'll be able to download content in any country (I certainly have in several), I suspect that it is the /purchasing/ that is restricted by region. Greglocock (talk) 01:22, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

The customer service agent appears to be wrong, per Amazon's own info. For the Kindle store, Amazon.de allows a few other neigbouring countries with German speaking populations to use them [2]. As can be seen from that list, that applies to several of the international marketplaces, although many of them are fairly small countries. Poland is not on any of the lists.

AFAIK, the only differences between the Kindle sold in different places (barring the fact that different models are available and Amazon has a tendency to sometimes only sell their latest model in the US for a while until they have enough stock or whatever), is that if it does come with a power adapter (I don't think they all do), it may come with the wrong pinout. The adapter itself is always a universal/travel adapter 100-240V AFAIK. Also the ad-supported variant isn't sold everywhere, for example amazon.com ships to a number of places possibly including Poland, but they only sell the ad supported one to the US from the .com site AFAIK. (I think it's also sold on amazon.co.uk.)

Note in particular, that AFAIK, it doesn't matter where you purcase your Kindle in terms of geographical restrictions on Kindle content. That will depend on the account the Kindle is set up to use, and while I think Amazon offers to set up the account before delivery if you buy it from them, it's not compulsory AFAIK (think gifts and stuff). I'm also fairly sure you could change account later.

In terms of the geographical restrictions, it sounds like amazon.com is the only official option for you. You can probably test this by trying to buy Kindle content on an Amazon account. You don't have to actual buy, I'm pretty sure it will fail beforehand. As mentioned earlier, it seems Amazon.com does support Poland, see this link [3] for purchasing a Kindle which means they must also sell content. Note that amazon.com will still limit the content, and offer different prices depending on your region. You won't get all the stuff you get in the US. (You may get some stuff not sold in the US, but I expect not much.)

Unless Amazon is sending people to personally visit you before purchase, and they obviously aren't, they clearly can't know whether you are in German (or wherever), and this applicies to pretty much anything like that. In other words, anyone who tells you have have to be physically present somewhere, when it's obvious they have no way of actually knowing that is either telling you their official policy only or misleading you.

Geographical restrictions for digital content is usually enforced by one or more of checking any address details, payment details and your IP. (It could also be enforced by GPS location data, but most devices allow you to prevent apps from knowing that.) In other words, if your account is registered to a non supported address, or your payment is from a non supported country or your IP geolocates to a non supported country, they may reject your purchase.

Now I've never been a great fan of Amazon's Kindles considering their forcing you to use their formats and not liking their exclusive book policies (and unlike in the US, the prices on books is often just the same or worse as other providers), but I have looked in to it before and AFAIK, Amazon's Kindle georestrictions only limits purchases not downloads (although you should really test or look more in to this before hand, and you'll need to rely on people besides Amazon), again think travel and all that. And it's possible in some cases they may limit downloads, particularly if the publisher is strict about it or there are censorship reasons even if it's not the norm. I know Amazon definitely checks IP geolocation (it's why they give me crap prices in NZ), and I think they also check address data. I know they check payment origin in some cases, but I'm not sure they do it for Kindle content since I've heard of people for who it wasn't a problem before, but this was a while ago and also for the US version of the .com site.

(Although to be honest, the Kindle store seems to be fairly tied to the Android app store, and they both don't seem that strict. While I've never bought anything, when fooling around with the Android app store I've found that you you just need to update the registered country and 1 click address and have a suitable IP and even Tor is fine. They don't seem to care if you do this multiple times.)

Note that the country of origin for credit cards and PayPal and bank payments can usually be checked, so this means you'll generally need a gift card if you were to attempt to bypass such georestrictions. And I'm not sure they'll send you a .de gift card in Poland (and even if they did, I'm not sure if they mark it as a restricted gift card), although AFAIK this doesn't happen in the US. You'll also need to get around IP geoblocking via a proxy, VPN or similar and one that isn't blocked. This may be a bit harder if you want to use the Kindle directly to access content (you'll need to make sure your wifi AP is set up to route all traffic from the Kindle through whatever), and if you get the 3G variant, the 3G may be useless if they do ever decide to limit downloads by location.

In any case, there's a lot of info out there about bypassing georestrictions although it tends to be about purchasing from the US version of amazon.com since they generally have the best prices and best availability for English content so many, even from Australia and New Zealand where amazon.com definitely sells to (and where high prices and poor availability and the general belief it's legal mean bypassing georestrictions isn't uncommon) want to use the US version. Thinks may be a bit more complicated when it comes to Poland since it'll also mean you're bypassing VAT.

Having said all that, I'm not sure why you would want to buy content on Amazon.de anyway, unless you prefer German books as they may have a better range there. If you don't have a good region to want to purchase content on amazon.de, it's probably better to stick with Amazon.com without attempting any georestriction bypass when you don't know what you're doing. (Actually I'm not sure why you'd want a Kindle when there are arguably better options, but perhaps that's a bit too offtopic.)

Nil Einne (talk) 12:34, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

P.S. I was reminded by [4] (see Calvin's post at Posted on Dec 5, 2012 2:32:19 PM PST ) that Amazon is known for asking for verification at some stage if they do decide you are bypassing their restrictions. I don't think anyone knows precisely why it occurs, but downloading content with the wrong IP, or using the wrong country payment provider or continually changing your registered country are various reasons it may occur even if it's not an instant problem. Another reason I would suggest to think carefully before trying to do so. I think most commonly people who want to do this use a special account which they are careful to never do anything that Amazon may flag, i.e. only login from behind a VPN or proxy (there's still a risk the VPN/proxy may be flagged as such), only ever use a payment method that appears to be from the correct country, make sure only the right country address is ever entered and it's registered to that country etc. In the case of eBooks, this is complicated by the fact that they usually have DRM so you either have to strip the DRM (which is illegal in some places), or get the content on the device without your location being revealed. Nil Einne (talk) 13:03, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

Wow! Thanks a lot Nil Einne. 95.160.59.253 (talk) 09:43, 9 November 2014 (UTC)