Category: Technology

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Isn’t that an Interesting Trend?

Over the past couple of days I’ve had something going on with my back. So I’ve been sitting in a straight backed chair or lying on the floor.

This has given me time to be both frustrated and happily doing some reading about upcoming computer stuff.

This led me to investigating various applications for my phone, iPad, and Computer. Some of the new apps look interesting, and some of the older recommended apps might be useful even if I have to pay for them.

Before I load, much less buy an app I look at the reviews. Usually on the Apple App Store the best reviews are presented first. It’s the date you have to pay attention to. That best review might actually be 2 years old.

I’ve found that if I sort the reviews by date an interesting bit of information is often revealed.

Many of the apps show a reduction in the number of stars in the reviews and growing customer dissatisfaction. Which is kind of useful, and also very strange. You’d expect the applications to improve over time.

Sure there might be some glitches and transient discontent when new features are added or when the OS changes. But you’d expect those issues to be really minimal. What I’m seeing instead is very consistent death spirals. It’s like a version of an app stumbles and the app never recovers.

Over time, the comments and ratings get worse and worse until no-one is rating or complaining. So the question is, has the app stopped selling? Are people simply not rating it anymore? Or some combination of both?

When I find an app that has no new ratings for a year or more I tend to pass.

What surprises me, is how many apps fit the criteria for me to pass.

Oh, I’ll check other sources too. If I’ve got my eye on something I’ll check other reviews from publications where the journalist is paid to walk through the application as long as they’re not getting any kickbacks for a good review I’ll tend to trust their evaluation.

I wonder why application quality seems to be dropping. I also am glad to find out that it’s not just me that’s seeing it. I know I’m critical and wonder sometimes if I’m too critical.

In this case perhaps I’m not. If other people are walking away from poorly constructed subscription models where the “Benefit” of regular updates degrades rather then improves an application then I’m right there with everyone else.

All this being said, I don’t have a lot of apps on my phone and when something no longer serves me, It’s gone. There’s a journaling app that I’ve been subscribed to for several years. I like it because it’s available on all my devices.

The Apple Journaling app is really very nice, but it’s only available on my phone and I don’t like typing on my phones keyboard. I’d hoped that Apple would bring the app to iPad and then I’d use the iPad keyboard. Had they done that, I’d have cancelled the subscription to the other journaling apps and figured out how to move my journal entries to the Apple native app.

Apple didn’t, but they have extended continuity to a point where I can interact with my phone using my Mac screen and keyboard. Essentially opening a terminal to my phone. This means that I can move all the journal entries into the Apple’s Journalling app on my phone without having to be limited to the little tiny screen and keyboard.

If this works like it appears it will, then I’ll cancel the subscription to the journaling app and move happily on without spending money I don’t need to.

In this case it’s not that the journaling app I pay for had degraded, it’s that it has become redundant. Day One is still quite nice and it’s syncing across devices is well done.

I suppose I was looking at the apps because with the new Apple operating systems being released in the next few months. I was investigating to see what subscriptions I could get rid of and then trying to determine if I wanted to get rid of those subscriptions.

Fantastical for example, is super nice. It unifies todo, and calendar, into a single application. IOS and Mac at one time did this but someone decided that these functions needed to be divided into two apps that both had to be open, in order to go about my day.

Fantastical stepped in and corrected what was clearly a screw up on Apple’s part. With the upcoming OS releases, they are reunifying ToDos and Calendar and Fantastical’s days may be limited on my systems. Honestly Fantastical’s subscription model is pricy. While I like the application itself, I’d prefer to have only one and the Apple Calendar / todo list would serve my needs jut fine.

Fantastical would still be relevant for all the folks who want their work calendar and personal calendars displayed on their all their devices correctly.

I suppose at heart I’m a computer minimalist.

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Hmm, Looks like California is going to allow Digital IDs

Apple Wallet California state ID hero_inline.jpg.large_2x.Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about this.

On the one hand, it sounds like it would be really neat if I was in my 20s and still likely to get carded in a bar. 

Being able to wave my phone at a doorman’s phone, or reader and share only my valid age is cool and safer than handing my drivers license to a doorman where he may or may not be taking a picture of all the information on the front of my license.

Back in the day the technology wasn’t there for someone to surreptitiously photograph that kind of information. The doorman or bouncer had a flashlight, could do the math, and decided if you could get in to the place, or not.

Now… holy crap! With the little lit up stations for reading an ID in some bars a camera could easily be embedded in the lamp itself. You might not be safe at all, especially if you’re a woman worried about attracting a stalker.

Having the ability to wave my phone at the TSA guy might also be cool… If I traveled via Air or Train. Typically, I don’t travel in venues that are TSA controlled.

So, for me maybe this isn’t the greatest thing since sliced bread. I’d also like being able to store my Passport data in the Secure Enclave inside my phone.

Again, I don’t do a lot of traveling but, that would be very cool and my passport already has the data encoded somehow within it. I think it would be fairly easy to transfer that data to my phone and negate my having to carry a passport if I went to Mexico or Canada.

Come to think of it I should check the countries that my passport card is valid to use. There are some countries that need the big book and others that accept just the card.

I haven’t heard anything about the State Department looking into digital IDs on phones.

Anyway.

I was thinking about Voter ID too. If you think about it, your phone with Touch ID or with Facial recognition is essentially a portable biometric scanner.

Imagine setting up an authentication scanner at a polling place where you wave your phone at a scanner, the biometrics engage, your ID is confirmed with the State or even the Federal databases. Then you’re directed to the line where you get your ballot.

Talk about security! Automatic cross checks could be run to see if anyone else has attempted to vote on your behalf, with the Biometric data being the authoritative source. 

Part of the set up process requires that you take pictures of the front and back of your driver license. Then you’re instructed to move your head around and send a picture to the DMV. I’m sure they’re collecting multiple facial recognition reference points by requiring that the person move their head around.

So there’s the security part.

AND

It’s also unfortunately, capable of providing advanced facial recognition data to the State which increases their surveillance capabilities.

If the government could be trusted, that wouldn’t be an issue. But the government has demonstrated time and again, especially in recent years that they absolutely can not be trusted to use data, secure data, or destroy data in any responsible way.

California screwed up a few years ago and leaked all the concealed carry applications they’d received. Both approved and not approved. The approval issue wasn’t the big deal, it was that every single application had the individuals address, and occupation. It’s a safe bet these folks had guns in their homes otherwise they wouldn’t have applied for concealed carry.

California painted a target on every single one of these people, with criminals.

I’m not sure that I want to give any government entity more ability to monitor my movements. Further, having my State ID plugged into my phone, creates a direct 1-1 association between my phone and government issued ID.

That could be misused to track me not just via my phone number, but literally all of the identifying numbers contained in the phone.

IMEI, IP, Phone Number, Serial Number, MAC address, you name it, all can be used to precisely track an individual phone.

Knowing that, I’m ambivalent if adding my digital ID is really changing the balance of privacy in any way. All the above information is literally already available. Does the ID really matter?

I suppose it’s going to come down to how / if having the digital ID on my phone helps me. I didn’t activate the COVID-19 exposure tracking function on my phone for two reasons. 1) There wasn’t anyplace that I could or needed to go. 2) It didn’t benefit me.

I was also concerned that it would add government intrusiveness into my life via a machine that I’d purchased. If they wanted that kind of information, then they could pay me monthly for the privilege.

I’m interested in this kind of thing. But I also respect there are a lot of ways to misuse benign data beyond what sharing the information was originally intended to allow.

I think I’ll keep doing research. This rollout isn’t going to happen for probably a few weeks and even then I don’t have to load my ID. I’m curious about it though. 

At this point ya still have to carry your physical ID because in the pilot programs only the TSA might use it, and perhaps a few forward thinking bars & restaurants. It’s not like you can flash your phone at a police officer yet.

I’m not to the point of wearing a tin foil hat but I’ve got a roll of heavy duty foil in the drawer.

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That’s interesting! Since the global CrowdStrike meltdown I havent received SPAM emails

Digital manufacturing.Coincidence? 

It’s probably something like bunch of compromised servers were acting as routing agents and now that those links have been broken.

The IT professionals are looking closely at their systems and questioning all the excessive traffic. They’ve probably throttled it and are waiting to see who complains.

Since so many corporate desktop computers were affected, I’d bet a lot of the worm/phishing/bot software lurking on them has been purged as part of the cleanup.

CrowdStrike was supposed to be protecting corporate computer systems. Maybe this screwup has uncovered that CrowdStrike wasn’t performing exactly as advertised.

It wouldn’t be the first time vaporware was sold to Corporate America. Remember the DOT Com boom/bust? With few exceptions, there was nothing real, but venture capitalists spent billions on smoke & mirrors.

Maybe Corporate America and IT professionals should re-examine CrowdStrike and not be so single sourced? They’ll never listen to someone like me.

I don’t have 100K in student debt forgiven by President Poopy Pants. I also don’t have the right letters after my name, I could say, “The sky is blue,” and they’d dispute or ignore my observation.

A week later one of them would publish a paper on the likelihood that the sky is definitively blue. The byline would have the requisite A.A. B.S. Phd. Maybe there’d be an “et al” too.

For SPAM to drop 99% like it has in my case, suggests something other than CrowdStrike failing. Sure CrowdStrike is the overarching issue and the cleanup is long and tedious.

The question is, will enough people in the right positions ask questions about other functions that have suddenly changed? If SPAM/Phishing emails are being routed by corporate servers then the questions becomes how much of the corporation equipment and bandwidth is being consumed and effectively used for free?

The monetization of SPAM / Phishing is akin to Mining Bitcoin.

No corporation would allow their servers or systems to be used for Bitcoin mining for free. I’ve worked at companies that denied SETI’s distributed computing application from running on their equipment.

The SETI software was at one time a benign screen saver application that used idle computer resources for analysis of radio signals from space. The application itself was slick. It got out of your way when you needed to work. But if you were in a meeting, or at lunch, or home with your family, the system used your desktop CPU cycles to do work that SETI didn’t have the computing resources to do themselves. 

The result: SETI analyzed way more of the sky than they would have been able to in a reasonably short time. Signals of interest got to the right people and sophisticated analysis programs in weeks rather than being buried for years. All it cost was nothing more than leaving computers on, which Corporate America does so that the machines can be updated 24/7 anyway.

But some corporations wouldn’t give SETI anything for “Free”.

So why are these corporations giving SPAMMERS valuable resources for free?

The IT folks don’t pay attention to anything that is “working”. It’s a human trait, “if it works, don’t fix it.”  But that doesn’t mean you’re not supposed to be monitoring the systems, specifically network traffic.

The math is pretty straight forward. How much email is sent within the company. It’s logical to assume most corporate email would be internal. If you notice that your external mail packets are greater than your internal email packets and you’re not engaged in sending customer contact and retention emails then you probably need to track down who’s sending all that mail.

Sometimes it’s an employee, making a few extra bucks on the side. I busted some guys who were looking at and sending/selling porn from my testing lab network. I saw a weird spike in traffic and it was regular enough that I got curious.

Sometimes, the network traffic can’t be tracked to a specific computer or lab. Then you’ve got a more serious problem. 

I’m hoping that the IT folks worldwide, in the process of fixing the CrowdStrike problem are also fixing the SPAM problem.

In the mean time I’m going to enjoy my SPAM free life. I’ll be expecting my SPAM filters to blow up as soon as the CrowdStrike problem is resolved and everyone goes back to business as usual.

Later that day…

Ahhh, there we go, the SPAM is restarting. I’m sure it will be up to its normally annoying level in no time. Oh well it was really nice while it lasted.

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Down a different kind of rabbit hole

Don’t worry, this one is kind of fun and interesting.

I’ve been getting a Passwords Compromised notice in my browser for months. I’ve ignored it, as I suspect most people do.

Let’s face it, with every website demanding that you create an account, and so many of those websites being hacked almost instantly, you just stop paying attention.

For some reason, perhaps it’s that I’m cranky, this morning I decided to explore the websites that were compromised and change passwords or delete accounts.

I’m heavily favoring the latter over the former.

Anyhoo… 

I was surprised to note that on a lot of the “compromised websites”, my passwords were obscenities.

I know how most of these obscenities came to be my passwords. It’s about frustration and annoyance. In most situations, I was trying to take care of something completely unrelated to passwords and the website in question decided to force a password change.

Thus derailing my intent and turning what should have been a 90 second interaction into a tour de force of guessing what combination of letter, symbols, number, and special characters would please the website, allowing me to do what I’d accessed the website to do to begin with. That is, if I remembered what I’d gone to the site for in the first place.

Apparently “FuckYou96&yourmother^$#” Is commonly used. Who Knew?

“BlowMECocksuckers!-2021” and “LickMyFilthyhole-Asshole!9000” are also common.

This suggests that I’m not the only person who has become sick and tired of Websites, Their demanding that accounts be created, and “Secure” passwords.

Of the 36 websites whose passwords were compromised in various data leaks, I now have 16 left.

I’ve deleted the others. Honestly, do I really need a password and an account to confirm a haircut appointment? Uh, NOPE!

Since I canceled Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu. There was no need for their residual threads to be stored in my browser, so I deleted them. The same with T-Mobile.

I was looking at a credit card login that used to work really well, then the rights to the card were purchased by another company and the new company website has never worked.

There’s no reason for me to maintain that login… Or that credit card account for that matter. I haven’t closed the account yet, but that day is coming and I’m looking forward to it.

The last stored password for that website is embarrassingly filthy! Which speaks to my frustration with the site, the creditor, and their offshore “customer service”.

Oh, that embarrassingly filthy password? It’s on the list of passwords that have appeared in various data breaches. Again, apparently I’m not alone in losing my temper trying to reset passwords.

Then there are those passwords that have been “Reused”. Except they’re not. Some of the banking sites are a conglomeration of websites with different domain names but who all use the same initial login.

These poorly designed banking sites trip the security settings because you have no choice but to reuse passwords due to the way the sites work. 

I would argue that these sites create a laissez-faire attitude because they cause end users to be endlessly warned about something they have no control over. Which results in the users being far more likely to ignore all warnings about passwords that their browser may present.

This is how someone like me ends up with 36 warnings that have gone ignored for months, years, decades?

Don’t get me started about cookies. More precisely, don’t get me started about the cookie notifications or the sites that feel it’s necessary to give you cookie notifications daily, monthly or anytime something changes on the site. (Yes, I know this site does that. Thank the EU!)

It looks like I’m not going to be able to delete these other sites for a while, so I’ll have to continue ignoring the warnings, or actually waste a ton of time changing the passwords. Ugh! That means I’ll be using the automatic password generator a lot.

You’d think that would make it easier but it doesn’t because it seems that the website designers create obstacles designed to prevent password generators from working.

I suppose I need to decide if I’m cranky enough that I don’t want to do anything else but mess with websites and passwords, or ignore the whole mess and do something else that I’d prefer to do.

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I really used to like Nest Products. Then came the Google…

Nest Learning Thermostat 3rd Generation product.Google I might add hasn’t substantially changed, improved, or added, to the Nest line of products since they took over. 

Google has however used the Nest products that I own as a gateway to insinuating themselves into my life. (For my own good, of course…)

It’s been hotter than Hell up in my little mountain town for the past week or so, and it will continue to be hotter than Hell for the next week or so. This heat wave isn’t abnormal except that it’s about 2 months early.

This means that I’m running the A/C and while I hate to use A/C I’m not opposed to turning it on when we get above 90°

Google logo hd.Every single year, when I start running the A/C and again when I start running the Heat, Google in their infinite wisdom dicks with my settings.

For example, this morning as the temperature crossed the 80° mark, I closed the doors and windows to the house and set the thermostat to “Cool”.

The Thermostat responded by telling me “Cooling set to 82°” uh nope! That’s not what you’re set to do They/Them Thermostat. (I figured I’d have some fun since my thermostat is now behaving like an asshole.) You’re set to Cool the house to 79° regardless of time, or day. 

I know this because I personally lobotomized your schedules the last time we did this dance, and I turned off your settings to accept changes to my schedules from Google. 

So I try to get to www.nest.com to verify that the web hasn’t pushed some kind of software change to the thermostat. Oh, but that URL now redirects me to a google shopping site and logs me in using a google account created to use Google voice, and does not present me with the website that allowed me to inspect and modify the schedules using a full screen and real keyboard.

Instead I’m presented with all the various google products that I can purchase, however Nest products are not listed prominently. They’re buried under smart home and because Google has logged me in using the Voice account, and I haven’t wanted to link, or create, or whatever other bullshit Google wanted me to do with my nice functional Nest.com login I can’t get to the UI that I want to get to.

One of the reasons I freaking HATE GOOGLE! I swear these people could Un-fuck a wet dream (yeah, think about that one…)

I shift over to the Nest app running on my phone. I’m able to see the schedule and indeed Google, in some software update, reset the switch that tells the thermostat “DO NOT ACCEPT GOOGLE INPUT” for schedules back to “off”.

Of course I want a multibillion dollar company monitoring my coming and going and controlling how I choose to spend my money on my local environment in my own home.

I’ll tell you what Google, when you start writing the checks for the mortgage and the utilities then you’ll have some input. Until then, in the words of Elon Musk, “Go Fuck Yourself!“

After another frustrating half hour undoing their scheduling via the phone app, where at least 1/2 the buttons don’t work as expected and none of them light up, change color or give any indication that they’ve been pressed. Plus because the app is running on an iPhone instead of an android phone, Google refuses to have all of the controls on the visible screen.

Which is why I use, or rather, used to use, the nest.com interface.

Old Thermostat.The dog, sensing my frustration sat next to me and gently made me lower the arm I was holding the phone with. It was, in his opinion time for me to look up, and he was right.

5 or 10 minutes of cuddling and his laughing face did wonders for my outlook.

During the playtime I realized, this is probably the last time I’ll have to fight with Google altering the temperature schedule in my house.

This is a true statement because regardless of my keeping or selling this house the nest devices are due for replacement and they will not be replaced with more nest devices.

The nest protects will reach end of life next year and if I replace them with another manufacturers products there will be no need to keep the Nest Thermostat either.

Intelligent house.

Before Google bought Nest. I’d standardized on the Thermostat and Protect fire alarms because in the event of fire, the Protects can shut the air handler down via the thermostat to prevent the system from spreading smoke throughout the house.

I also like that the Protects have a nightlight feature and use color coded light signals to indicate their operational status. Mostly, I liked being able to shut them up if they warned they were about to go  off because of smoke from the kitchen.

Then Google bought Nest and honestly… they haven’t done shit to enhance the products.

I look forward to the day when I can reset the Nest Products and delete the Nest app from my phone. On that day I’ll delete any remaining Google logins and do my level best to never use their crap again.

Heck, I might go find myself an old Honeywell lever thermostat with mercury bulbs inside, and eschew all this smart home nonsense entirely.

I’ve tried it, I’ve got the T-Shirt and while there are a lot of aspects I really like, the level of complexity and flaky behavior might just outweigh the benefits.

I suspect if/when I sell this house, and while I’m living someplace I’m renting that I’ll be able to make a reasonable evaluation on the benefits of smart home versus dumb home. 

Maybe I’ll choose a “Low IQ” home. Where nothing important can be controlled by any outside force.

(Then my home and I would match. I’m apparently a Low IQ voter, since I didn’t vote for Hillary. I’ll probably be living in a flyover state too. From a marketing perspective, political parties, and in particular, the Democrat party really need to re-evaluate their merchandising to the masses. Just saying…)