Category: Technology

Most of the things have been plumbing related, which I hate.

The most recent breakdown came as a bit of a surprise. My primary NAS drive has decided to take a dump. 

We use this drive to serve up movies, and store important documents. It’s also used as a share point for things that I help the other half with, music, videos, web sites, etc.

I’ve been noticing little things lately when accessing the drive, but didn’t really think much about it. In retrospect the drive was telling me something was wrong.

As the issues and errors accumulated I started re-evaluating the entire storage method. After doing a lot of research, I’ve decided to go with a RAID array.

The unit i’ve settled on is relatively inexpensive, but seems to provide a lot of bang for the buck.

Configuring it will take some time and the unit may have a steep learning curve. The advantage is that I’ll have 16TB of storage when it’s fully configured and that storage provides 2 hot swappable drives.

That means that up to two drives could fail and the entire 16TB would still be recoverable.

My current situation is a single drive and I have no idea how much data I’ll be able to recover.

What I’m doing may be overkill but I’d like to not have to worry about it for the next 5 years.

I’m also leaning more toward doing gig work and having a ton of space to work with would be a big convenience.

I expect to be locked into some form of digital prison for at least the next week while I bring this puppy online.

The other half has an old Mac. The poor thing has been a trooper considering it’s age.

Looking at the newer machines, making a big purchase right now is out of the question.

So I started looking at upgrade options. Surprisingly I found that the hard disk could be replaced with an SSD and that the memory in the machine could be doubled for a couple hundred dollars. Between the drive and the memory, we should be able to get another few years out of this old workhorse.

With that in mind I placed the order and 2 days later the parts showed up.

This morning I pulled the old machine apart and had no trouble installing the new memory and new hard drive. As I was buttoning things up I thought, “That was easy!”

Uh huh, Jinxed myself!

After buttoning everything up I tried to access the nifty Mac network utility to reload the OS. I was able to get to the utility. After answering a couple of questions, the utility started, then told me that the OS wasn’t available. Gee THANKS APPLE!

Now I’ve got a computer that should be fast as hell and no OS. I booted the machine from a bootable memory stick that had the appropriate operating system on it. (Yeah, I tend to have some redundancy.) The system booted, I clicked on the installer, and it started just fine. Again I answered the questions and directed the installer to install the OS on the brand new 1TB internal hard disk.

The system takes off, executes a format of the internal HD then reboots as expected. Things went south from there. The reboot damaged the OS on the memory stick and in the process told me that the OS image (Downloaded from Apple about 2 years ago, and used several times to install the OS,) was invalid or possibly corrupt.

Great! I can’t even install from my rainy day backup.

Now what?

Uh, maybe I’ll just use the TimeCapsule backup.

Nope, Backups 1 – 5 are corrupt.

I do still have the original bootable disk in an external enclosure. The computer is still workable booting from that external disk. But a 1TB internal SSD isn’t being used.

I try booting to the recovery partition. It works, but I still can’t install the OS from Apple.

This leaves me two choices. Do a complete backup from the original disk to another USB disk, then restore from that backup. Or I can try to sequence through the other backups on the Timecapsule hoping to find one that works.

I choose the latter, and remarkably seem to have found a backup that is intact. So I start the restore process.

Currently the restore is reporting 32 hours remaining. Let’s hope it works Otherwise I’m down to only one option which will probably take just as much time. USB 2 is painfully slow, although even with the 1GB speeds of my internal network, apparently network restore is also painfully slow.

Sometimes, the most straightforward things with computers turn into the most complicated.

In this case I’d tell Apple that if you’re going to say in a dialog box that the computer will either install its original OS or the most current version of the OS that is available…

DO WHAT YOU SAY YOU’RE GOING TO DO!

Giving someone the illusion that you’re going to support a system, is worse than saying that you’re not going to support that system. In the first situation your user figures, “No Problem” in the other case the user can make alternate arrangements as long as you don’t as part of some bullshit “verification” process destroy the alternative.

I’m not amused that I’ve lost a whole day to a simple 15 minute job.

1 AM update. The restore from the Time Capsule backup failed about 8PM. Digging around on the internet gave me an interesting option. It seemed I could use Apple’s Disk Utility to clone the existing drive to the 1TB SSD.

Well, what the heck did I have to lose at this point?

Boot from the recovery partition on the 1 TB SSD. (Yeah, that got installed properly thank goodness) Pull up Disk Utility from the recovery partition. select the destination drive. Select “recover” from the edit menu, select the source and hit enter.

A few hours later… I’m awakened by a familiar ding. Click the “Done’ button, select the start disk and Eureka! There is now a bootable usable operating system on the new drive.

I’m going back to bed… this has been a royal pain in the ass. Next up, deleting the corrupted backup from the Time Capsule and replacing it with something usable.

But I’ll do that tomorrow, my brain won’t even allow more than the contemplation of such an exercise tonight.

There’ve been a lot of articles recently, about Google and Apple collaborating on a Coronavirus tracking application

At first glance, you think, “good,” that will make it easier for health officials to figure out how to stay ahead of outbreaks.

It would, but at a price to your privacy.

We have only Apple and Google’s assurances that the information won’t be misused. Implicit in this software solution is the belief that when the Coronavirus emergency is over that the tracking information, indeed the application itself will be of no further use. The assumption is that the application can be deleted and tracking will by default, be turned off. How do we know that & how can we verify that this is true?

I could see an application such as Google and Apple are working on, morphing into a general “Health” application wherein a wide variety of diseases are tracked. As I understand the Coronavirus aspect if you test positive for Coronavirus and enter your diagnosis into the application, then your movements are plotted. Local health officials can then watch the spread of Coronavirus throughout a community presumably because other people will also be entering their diagnosis too.

This raises some questions for me. If one person whose positive, visits an area and other people get sick is that person liable? Could they be prosecuted or sued? Should they be? I’m sure that due to the fear promulgated by media, politicians, and rumor. The initial response would be YES!!!

But let’s step back a bit. Would the answer be the same if the application was tracking hepatitis, syphilis, gonorrhea, Influenza, herpes, HIV, measles, or chicken-pox? These diseases present health departments with challenges to tracking and treatment. In fact these diseases are more of a health hazard than Coronavirus may prove to be.

Even if you think this is a good idea, what happens as the application evolves? Do you really want your phone telling the health department or law enforcement that you not only have the clap, but that you visited a particular massage parlor? How about your phone automatically warning others around you that you’re a pariah, because you’ve got the flu or that one of your kids has chicken-pox?

In an extreme scenario; do you want to have to verify and report to authorities that you’re going to have sex with an individual?

The application could in fact give that kind of power to an authoritarian regime. Phone A was in close proximity to Phone B for 43 minutes in a hotel that rents by the hour on this date. This was an unauthorized sexual event, warrants have been issued for the participants arrest.

Oh we say that could never happen. Yet, we have evidence of widespread surveillance by departments within our own government, of average people.

We’ve seen maps of cell phone data showing that people en-mass can be tracked going about their daily business. There is evidence to suggest that specific individuals can be isolated from the mass of data without too much effort or specialized tools.

During this pandemic, we’ve seen cell phone maps used by the New York Times to paint some areas of the country as “Non compliant in the lockdown” because the cell phones were traveling more than X miles from their point of origin.

The fact that the area of the country the New York Times called out, was a rural area and the nearest grocery stores were 15 to 20 miles away was conveniently omitted from that article when it first appeared. The Times, isn’t a government entity, nor are they involved in public health, but it demonstrates just how easily data can be misused.

This got me wondering… Just how much information is my phone, my smart watch, my computer, my ipad, even my car sending and to whom? The next question is, “If I turn these systems off, how much do I degrade the operation of my devices?

I was shocked when I pulled up the privacy setting in my phone.

Almost every application is requesting access to location data.

Some of these applications make sense, Maps, Workout, AAA, and Airline applications. 

Others, such as time tracking applications that will automatically start running when you get to work make sense. The apple wallet application asking for location data makes sense so that it can lookup and associate your charges.

Other Applications don’t make as much sense. Why does my bluetooth enabled thermometer application need to know where I was when I took my temperature? Why does an insurance application want to know where I am when I’m accessing it? Who cares where I was when I made a voice memo? Why does Wallgreens want to know where I am?  These applications I can deny access on. But am I really prohibiting them from getting that information?.

There are dating applications that say they won’t operate at all unless they have access to location data. This is to narrow the search parameters to local parties. Okay, then why do I get hit on from people 6000 miles away? Suppose I don’t want to use the cruising part of the app? 

But it gets even more interesting when you dig deeper into system services, and significant locations. Yeah, I hadn’t told the system not to track my location. On the one hand the benefit is that your phone will keep track of where you parked your car. But does that data go anywhere? Or is that data simply used locally on the phone? 

Answers to these questions are ambiguous. Obviously the phone itself is transmitting it’s unique ID to the cellular provider. But what of the other data? 

I can tell the applications that they are denied cellular data services but does that mean that when the phone re-connects to the internet via WiFi at my home these application will send what they’ve recorded as a long data burst? Does denying cellular data access actually protect me from being tracked?

I’m suspicious of any government agency having easy access to my location. At the same time I recognize that the convenience afforded me by my cell phone is very cloying and that there’s a trade-off for convenience versus privacy.

There’s a cellular service called Patriotmobile.com part of their pitch is that they’ll help support Patriotic things and that they don’t sell your data. Okay fine, but if I have applications that are giving the data away, their service really doesn’t help.

That leaves using a VPN all the time. This solution is okay but I’ve had more than one situation where the VPN interfered with connectivity and created a less than convenient user experience. This is particularly true when the application updates.

I’ve got two VPN applications, One is part of my antivirus solution and the other is one that owns all their servers. I prefer the second one since the data isn’t just flowing through whatever server may be available.

After a while, I’d done all I could and opted to just turn off all the devices for a while. It’s clear that all of our technology has gotten away from us and significantly eroded our privacy. 

Unfortunately, I can’t come up with any solution about regaining my privacy short of a VPN solution all the time. But even then, while using a VPN you’re not actually in very much control of what Apps running on your phone may be doing. They could still send the actual location data via the VPN.  I’m going to have to think about this some more.

I can say I’m not going to opt in to the Apple/Google contact tracking application. The potential for abuse of that data is simply too big for my tastes.