Tag: Modern Problems

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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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“One Size Fits Most”

“One Size Fits Most“

2000216232 402 P1.That was written in medium sized print on 2 boxes of Nitrile Gloves I was throwing away. I couldn’t help but laugh. Then I thought, “What a scam!”

I’m a medium sized man with what I’ve always thought of as small to medium sized hands. My motorcycle and winter gloves have always been “Medium” although this year I’m going to be in the market for new gloves and I suspect that I’m looking at the inevitable “OH NO! You’re wrong again you don’t wear Medium, you wear LARGE don’t you know that????“

 I’ve worn medium sized T-Shirts for years, now suddenly I wear large. You’d think it was because of the middle aged gut, that is a component, but that’s not the whole story.

Tight shirt men e1491380960466.If I grab a Medium T-Shirt from 8-10 years ago it fits great, even with the middle aged bulge. However a Medium T-Shirt I bought last month didn’t fit in the shoulders, sleeves, or gut. I might as well have been wearing a sausage casing. I exchanged that T-Shirt for a large and it fits. This has been a recurring theme of late.

Like the Nitrile gloves in the recycle bin. “One Size Fits Most” used to mean the item would fit me just fine. Not anymore!

The other half had purchased these particular gloves while I was doing some work on the house. He’d caught them on sale, and had purchased the same brand and size that I was already using comfortably. He’d even gone down into the garage to look at the box containing my dwindling supply.

Then we found another partially used box of gloves and I didn’t get around to opening these boxes until today. They’re over two years old, and were still sealed in their plastic overwrap.

I couldn’t put them on. Literally, they were so tight I couldn’t get my hands into them. If I’d just purchased them, I’d have exchanged them. Given their age… into the trash they went.

I’ve got some large and medium sized latex gloves that will serve the purpose right now. Since they’re Latex, they have a shelf life, so I should use them before they get so fragile as to be useless.

As I was running all this through my brain I came back to the “Scam” thought.

Follow this logic if you will.

If I’d ordered two boxes of the “One Size Fits Most” from Amazon at 1.98 a box, then figured out I couldn’t put my hands in them, I’d have written it off. I’d have ordered the next size up and given the boxes that were too small away. Or I’d have dumped them in the trash because they were too much trouble to box up and return to Amazon.

End result, the vendor sold the gloves, didn’t have to process a return, got to make up a review, and the boxes of gloves ended up in the trash unused. In other words. Scam! 

You could assume they’d been built somewhere in China and OneHungLow was having a bad day. Instead of tossing the poorly made product, these were sold cheap as seconds at a steep but still profitable discount. In the end, the shitty product still made it into an American landfill.

The manufacturer makes money, the Amazon vendor makes money, Amazon makes money, UPS makes money, but me, the consumer, ends up paying to be OneHungLow’s garbage man.

Then my mind turned over this question:

How often does this kind of thing happen? If it’s common then there’s a lot of waste. Even if people return badly made crap there’s the fuel expense of delivering and picking up. Plus all the packaging and labeling and the labor costs. No matter how you slice it bad standards of sizing must cost a fortune.

I’d gotten to the point where I tried on every single pair of Levis because even though they all said 34/30. Rarely were any two pair actually the same size. It’s not just Levis, Wrangler, Lee, and even the off brands from Tractor Supply or whoever. No two pair of pants fit the same. The same is true of shirts, and T-shirts, even underwear. 

I’m a pretty simple guy. I want to grab 4 pairs of jeans from a cubby. I’ll check that the sizes are what I need, then head to the register. I used to be able to do that. I could shop for clothes in 20 minutes. 15 minutes was spent in line and walking in the parking lot.

Same with shirts and underwear. Sizes made sense, they were consistent, and life was easy.

Now, I literally have to try on everything and when I don’t, I have a shirt that looks like I’m in a sausage casing. How the heck do clothing mail order houses stay in business?

But there’s something else to think about in all this.

Our whole society is based on “One Size Fits Most”.

There was a time when that meant something. There was a consistency that could be relied upon more often than not. Now days? Virtually nothing is consistent. Safety is not guaranteed (there was a weird ad in a newspaper titled “safety not guaranteed” it was a promotion for some movie about time travel I think.) 

Well, we’re in the future and safety is not guaranteed, nor is sizing, or building codes, or vehicle standards. Hell, Toyota just recalled 100,000 engines. 

Engine from car museum.Think about that! Complete engine replacement in 100,000 vehicles. These are standard internal combustion engines. You know, the kind we’ve been building for over 100 years. How do you go so horribly wrong in building one that you have to recall them instead of being able to replace the bad component?

Moreover, how did the design make it through testing and emissions certification and into full production with no one noticing a problem?

Could it be poor standards?

How many of our standards have been allowed to slide because we don’t want to hurt anyones feelings? How many ticking time bombs of failure do we have in our everyday lives because a supervisor or quality person couldn’t or wouldn’t say, “That is Wrong! What you’ve made doesn’t meet the specification.“

One Size no longer fits most.

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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.