Does this make me sound old? I don’t really care. The U.S. TikTok ban is spot on and the Brazilian X ban is not. No “back in my day” speech required.
It was such a cute gadget. A tiny computer, brushed aluminum on the outside, with a decent keyboard (albeit with chicklet keys), a Thinkpad-ish pointing stick that would even take a grippy Thinkpad “cat’s tongue” insert. A fairly fast X86 Intel processor, enough storage, and 8 gigs of memory. And now it was on sale at a low price.
As a friend battled viruses on his brand-new Windows computer this week, I thought again about just how spoiled Apple users are by better security and better privacy than Android and Windows folks live with. Long adept at bringing such advantages to the masses that will never try (much less secure) Linux, Apple has one vulnerability is tech prowess cannot overcome: China.
Though we hardly ever call it by name, the “World Wide Web” is fantastic metaphor for what the Internet is meant to be: a vast, interconnected realm free of central government. In the social media era, unfortunately, we have willingly ceded that freedom to our detriment. It is time we reconsider the Faustian bargain we have made.