At uni, got acquainted with a rich Saudi kid. Super nice guy. There was an event in a city 30 miles away. He offered a ride. Pulled up in a bright orange Corvette. Cool.
White-knuckle ride the whole way. Ridiculously fast. On the way back, he mentioned the car was his third. Somehow, he had managed to flip over and total the first two. Fell out of touch after that.
This story reminded me of him. Hope he survived college.
When it first came out, my first thought was privacy.
It's the single most immutable piece of information about a person. You can change your clothes, hair, face, address, phone number, driver's license, passport and SSN (a little harder, but doable), hell -- even your fingerprints if you really must.
But your DNA?
And you'd put it out on some webserver, voluntarily, as unprotected medical data?
I hadn't been there in a long while, but a friend sent a link to what he said was a funny tweet. It was, but the responses were just awful, and they all had blue checkmarks.
Every single inserted ad was for right-wing grifts (crypto, t-shirts, gold coins, etc) or awful right-wing politicians looking angry or posing with guns.
Noped right out.
I pointed it out to my wife, but she says the journalists she follows are still all there. 🤷🏻♂️
There was an appliance where the wifi chip was at the end of the power cable, embedded inside the plug. From the outside, you couldn't really tell. It was there so radiation inside the box couldn't affect the wireless signal as much.
I can imagine some genius thinking it's a good idea to run a server from inside a cable or a connected home appliance.
Ed is getting good at lobbing these darts at hype bubbles.
The thing that this writeup ignores is that the object isn't to show short-term revenue, but to put all competitors out of business, be the last one standing, and create a monopoly. Either that or get bought out so the investors can move on to the next thing. But at $150B valuation, only MSFT or Nvidia can afford to buy them outright.
Google, Meta, and Amazon burned through cash for years, but they eventually outran all competition and then monetized the users who had nowhere else to go.
Lot of people saying they don't give internet access to their TVs.
Fine, but that doesn't work for cord-cutters who opted out of cable to go with streaming. And if you keep your TV away from internet but have a cable box, it will be doing all the tracking in this paper (and worse) then sending it to the cable provider.
So short of sticking with DVD/Bluray (unconnected) or over-the-air broadcast TV, there's no way to stop from getting tracked.
The paper also lists domains where the data is being sent. You could always try blocking the destination addresses at the router level.
If you use github pages, you can create, deploy, and host static websites for free. Only cost, if you want your own URL, is for a custom DNS name.
You can use their default Jekyll static rendering engine, and create the content using Markdown. And with github actions, all you need to update the content is create markdown, then push the change to the same repo. After a few minutes, the new content shows up.
You can also find 'themes' to customize the look and feel of the site, specific to the site generation tool.
If you want a lot of extra features, Docusaurus is pretty much as good as it gets, and you can set it up to push out to GH pages: https://docusaurus.io/docs/deployment
Buying an election. Gotcha.