A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the wrongheadedness of the Department of Justice’s antitrust witch hunt against Apple. One reason amongst the many deserves its own consideration.
The Department of Justice’s antitrust suit against Apple is one of the worst calamities to hit computer privacy in recent memory. If we want to understand where this could very well take us, we don’t need a hypothetical future horrible privacy mess, we need only look at Zoom video conferencing software.
You probably have never heard of Nick Shabazz. We seldom hear of people who make sense. Our attention is drawn instead to noisy malevolent clowns.
When you write about an ongoing project it’s always risky that it’ll go south afterward. My attempt to link my home and office together with Netmaker last week had such a southerly flow.
Thanks, Google! You have struck a blow for privacy! Okay, that overstates things slightly, but only slightly. And while the Google Pixel Tablet is anything but private as shipped, the enormous, generally evil company (who knows that you are looking at this article unless you did something to prevent tracking, which you probably didn’t) left the tablet open so people concerned with privacy and security can fix it.
I’ve been spoiled by the cloud. A decade and a half after I first used Dropbox, and years after iCloud made the dream of secure, seamless “login and forget” cloud sync a reality (most of the time), it seems obvious that all of my stuff should be available from every device I have whenever I need it. But what about content too big to keep on the cloud?
With freezing temperatures nearing, I started the annual pilgrimage of my plants. Armed with past success overwintering geraniums, peppers and various other non-hardy plants, I wanted to up my game. A little talked about Wyze accessory to add a smarts to a grow light is at the center of my plan.
Is it me or have they gotten more annoying? Those little puzzles to separate out the robots from humans that appear on web sites constantly?
We do so much online now. Unless we very much limit our internet activities, we make ourselves vulnerable to crooks so clever that they would have gotten rich if they were honest. But for whatever reason they aren’t honest, so we need to take precautions. If we don’t, given the portion of our lives that takes place online, we face catastrophes not far in effect from the house burning down.
My good friend and fellow OFB writer Dennis E. Powell and I met years ago on a group that championed Free/Open Source software, much for the same sorts of reasons he advocates for his new phone configuration over Apple’s offerings. OFB itself was founded, in fact, to promote such open software, especially Linux, so why would I defend locked down systems from Apple? That’s a story that started 19 years ago, before the iPhone even existed.