Upon2020 (archive)
-
Articulating the cost of the “feudal” big internet company model
The internet has turned into warring fiefdoms of new feudal overlords: Facebook, Google, Microsoft etc. There are advantages of this new feudal model: free products. No system administration hassles. Higher security etc. I’m trying to articulate the costs and downsides. Less “control” for the individual is not a downside in itself. What are the things…
-
Doc on Freedom vs. Tracking
As usual, he nails it: I am a customer. I am not data. I do not wish to yield personal data, even if anonymized, to anybody other than those with whom I have a fully consenting, non-coercive and respectful relationship. I do not wish to receive offers as a matter of course, even if machines…
-
Comparing Raspberry PI, BeagleBone, Mirabox and Wandboard
Came across this post about using the Unix command-line calculator as a quick way to do a CPU benchmark. So I ran it to calculate Pi to 500 digits on various devices I had lying around the house. Take the results with several grains of salt, this was a one-off, and not very scientific at…
-
My WiFi scale messages me: “we machines are ready to take over”
Got this e-mail yesterday: Hi Johannes.Ernst, Your Aria battery level is low. Replace your batteries as soon as possible. Your Aria scale is powered by 4 standard 1.5V AA batteries. This type of battery can be found wherever batteries are sold. To replace the batteries in your Aria… It took me a little while to…
-
X.509 certs are less secure than you might think
This post is prompted by T.Rob’s recent post “We’re gonna need a bigger crowd” where, among other things, he talks about X.509 certificate security. I agree with the core point of his post – crowd-sourcing is ineffective for highly specialized subjects – but this X.509 subject keeps coming up. It is one of the rare…