Bookmarks for a Web privacy tune-up

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I talked at length about privacy when I spoke this morning at the Washington Apple Pi user group’s general meeting–but I realized halfway through that I was keeping too much documentation to myself. As in, I hadn’t remembered to put together a set of links for the privacy settings I discussed.

That’s where this post comes in.

Ad preferences: If you don’t want giant Web platforms to target you with ads based on your browsing history–or if you want to correct some inaccurate targeting–these settings will let you do that.

  • At Amazon, selecting “Do Not Personalize Ads from Amazon for this Internet Browser” will stop the retailer from retargeting you across the Web with reminders of things you searched for. But you’ll have to remember to adjust this in every browser in which you shop at Amazon.
  • Facebook provides more control, allowing you to set “Ads based on data from partners” and “Ads based on your activity on Facebook Company Products that you see elsewhere” to “Not allowed.” You can also see what interests Facebook thinks you have and check which advertisers and businesses have targeted you on the social network with their own uploaded contact lists.
  • At Google, you can see what interests the Web giant has discerned in you and opt out of its ad personalization; taking that step will reward you with the image of the sleeping robot shown above.

Tracking protection: If you use Apple’s Safari, you’re already protected from ad networks’ attempts to follow you around the Web to build a model of your interests. New installs of Mozilla Firefox include a comparable level of default tracking protection, as I wrote at USA Today two weeks ago, but you may need to change these settings yourself. Select “Content Blocking” from the menu, click “Custom” and set it to block trackers “Only in Private Windows” and block only cookies identified as “Third-party trackers.”

You may also want to install the Facebook Container extension to shut down Facebook’s attempts to track you on other sites, although I’m not totally clear on what this adds over the newest tracking protection.

Limit Google’s memory: While Google’s ability to remind you of where you’ve been can be useful, that doesn’t mean it should have unrestricted access to that information. Fortunately, you can now set Google to automatically erase your Web and app activity after three or 18 months. You can also take advantage of the lesser-known of option of setting a sync passphrase for your copies of Google Chrome that will encrypt your browsing history, leaving Google unable to use that data in building a profile of your interests.

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Weekly output: Sudan Internet shutdown, 5G and smart cities, net neutrality, Facebook marketing itself

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If you’ll have next Saturday morning free and a commute to George Mason University’s Fairfax campus wouldn’t be too bothersome, you can see me talk about privacy, security and other tech topics (while handing out random tech-event swag) at Washington Apple Pi’s general meeting. If this Apple user group’s schedule sticks to pattern, my spot will come up around 11 a.m.

6/12/2019: Sudan Internet shutdown, Al Jazeera

I made a Skype appearance on the Arabic-language news channel to talk about a frequent hobby of totalitarian governments: cutting off their citizens’ Internet access.

6/12/2019: Smart Cities Council—5G Networks: The Keys to Smart City Growth, CE Week

As the one person on this panel not working in the 5G or smart-cities spaces (as opposed to the Smart Cities Council’s Jason Nelson, Aero Wireless Group CEO Jim Lockwood, and Verizon 5G Labs manager Joshua Ness), I tried to ask the questions average customers and citizens might have about the advent of low-latency sensor networks in urban areas.

6/12/2019: The FCC said repealing net-neutrality rules would help consumers: It hasn’t, Yahoo Finance

I’ve had this piece on my to-do list since not long after the Federal Communications Commission’s 2015 net-neutrality rules expired last June. I didn’t get a reply out of every small Internet provider that FCC chair Ajit Pai had cited as a victim of net neutrality, but the responses I did receive did not confirm the upsides Pai forecast when leading the drive to kill the old rules.

6/15/2019: Facebook’s new promotional push, Al Jazeera

Asked to comment on a Wall Street Journal report that Facebook would step up its please-trust-us marketing efforts, I reminded viewers of its previous efforts to do just that. Did they convince you that the company had turned a corner? I didn’t think so.

Ballparks I’ve visited: 17 and counting

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Spending Monday through Friday in New York to attend a couple of conferences brought a couple of benefits a little afield of work: catching up with old friends and crossing another ballpark off my list.

Photos from the stands of Fenway Park, Safeco Field, Dodger Stadium, Rogers Centre, Wrigley Field, Citi Field and Jacobs FieldWith Thursday’s visit to Citi Field, I’m now up to 11 current ballparks, plus six defunct stadiums. The ones still in use, sorted by how often I’ve been there and, for the places I’ve visited only once, oldest to most recent attendance:

  • Nationals Park: In three words, my baseball home. It’s not the best looking ballpark, but it works well. And it’s been amazing to see the neighborhood grow up around this place. Now if I could just be in the stands to watch the Nats win a postseason series instead of lose one…
  • Camden Yards: I don’t know exactly how often I’ve been to Orioles games here–I don’t have dates for the visits in the ’90s before I kept a digital calendar. Anyway, it’s a great ballpark, aside from having concourses without a view of the field.
  • Fenway Park: Seeing the Red Sox beat the Yankees here in 2002 remains one of my better baseball memories, and that experience also finally got me to start paying attention to standings and box scores.
  • Pac Bell Park: No, I’m not calling it “Oracle Park.” Three renamings in 16 years is weak, and Oracle’s abuse of intellectual-property law is grotesque. Aside from that, lovely place.
  • Wrigley Field: My wife and I saw the Nats beat the Cubs 5-4 here in 12 innings during the magical first half of the 2005 inaugural season.
  • Progressive Field: My uncle got some amazing seats for an Indians-Yankees game in 2007–so good that my friend Robert Schlesinger, watching at home, noticed somebody wearing a Nats cap behind first base and then recognized me. Thanks, Uncle Jim.
  • Dodger Stadium: We were in the stands here in 2012 for Bryce Harper’s second game as a Nat.
  • Coors Field: On the first day of Free Press’s National Conference on Media Reform, I decided to ditch the afternoon events and scalp tickets so I could see my second home opener in a week.
  • T-Mobile Park: My wife and I caught a game at the then Safeco Field in June of 2013. Good job on the ballpark, Seattle.
  • Rogers Centre: I had a ballgame-sized hole in my schedule the day I arrived in Toronto for the Collision conference last month, so I bought a ticket and saw the Red Sox thump the Blue Jays 12-2. Sadly, the long security lines outside prevented me from getting in before the first pitch and hearing two national anthems.
  • Citi Field: This is another good retro ballpark, but the absence of development nearby makes it an outlier among ballparks.

And here are the defunct ballparks I’ve visited, listed in the same order:

  • RFK Stadium: My fondest memory of this concrete donut will always be watching the Nats bring baseball back to D.C. in 2005.
  • Veterans Stadium: The first major-league baseball game I ever attended was at the Vet, which probably explains why the baseball gene didn’t activate until years after that childhood outing to Philly.
  • Astrodome: This should come with an asterisk, as I definitely remember going to the Astrodome during the year my family lived in Houston but can’t swear under oath that it wasn’t a rodeo.
  • Three Rivers Stadium: My brother and I saw Barry Bonds play for the Pirates here in the summer of 1991. As I recall, the Pirates lost.
  • Yankee Stadium: I wore a Red Sox cap in the bleachers in 2005. Let’s just say I felt like quite the minority at this Yanks-Jays game.
  • Shea Stadium: I saw the Nats edge the Mets here in 2007 and kept thinking of how much the place reminded me of RFK, but with a lot more air traffic overhead.

As for ballparks I haven’t visited, PNC Park tops the list by a considerable margin. (Anybody know any tech conferences in Pittsburgh?) Petco Park probably comes next; I could have crossed that off the list last summer had I flown into San Diego two days before a family wedding there instead of one. After that? I’ll leave that up to where travel takes me and if it leaves ballgame-sized gaps in my calendar.

Weekly output: Microsoft, Kleos, finding exoplanets, Firefox tracking protection, Hollywood-style storytelling, fighting wildfires, NRO, Kitware, NSA, NGA

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This week’s list has a pronounced military-industrial-complex look, thanks to the four days I spent covering the Geoint 2019 conference in San Antonio on a contract gig for my occasional client the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation. I now know much more about the business of geospatial intelligence, which can only help the next time I write about topics like location privacy for a consumer audience.

This coming week will also have me out of town, this time to NYC to speak on a panel about 5G and smart cities at the CE Week conference, attend a one-day event about 8K television, and meet up with a few friends. And that should put a cap on my work travel until at least early July, maybe all the way to early August.

6/3/2019: Better Tools for ISR Management, Trajectory Magazine

As part of the work USGIF paid for, I wrote a series of profiles of Geoint 2019 exhibitors. This one covered a software firm in Redmond, Wash., that you may have heard of before.

6/3/2019: ISR for Maritime Security, Trajectory Magazine

This exhibitor profile covered a far smaller company, Luxembourg-based Kleos Space.

6/3/2019: The Search for Exoplanets, Trajectory Magazine

I wrote up an interesting talk by SETI Institute data scientist Jeffrey R. Smith about the challenges involved in processing the imagery collected by the exoplanet-detecting satellite TESS.

6/4/2019: Firefox browser blocks sites and advertisers from tracking you online by default, USA Today

Mozilla gave me an advance on the Tuesday-morning introduction of a version of the Firefox browser with tracking-protection capabilities on a par with those in Apple’s Safari. Note that if you’re upgrading from an existing installation, you may not have this new default active; to change that, adjust your settings as I outlined in a tweet.

6/4/2019: What the Intelligence Community Can Learn from Hollywood, Trajectory Magazine

This panel got closer to a CES keynote than anything else I saw in San Antonio, thanks to a presentation by The Third Floor CEO Chris Edwards about how that virtualization studio uses 3D-rendering tools and augmented-reality interfaces to create worlds for movie and TV productions. The takeaway: The intelligence community needs to learn these techniques too, not least because our adversaries will use them against us.

6/4/2019: The Power of Real-Time Data for Firefighting, Trajectory Magazine

This otherwise-fascinating panel about using geospatial data to fight wildfires such as last year’s Camp Fire in California featured a glaring example of failed clock management: CalFire research data scientist Rachael Brody and Clark University graduate student Jaclyn Guz didn’t get to speak at all.

6/4/2019: Government Pavilion Stage Highlights, Trajectory Magazine

My part in this roundup was a recap of a talk by Troy Meink, geospatial intelligence systems acquisition director at the National Reconnaissance Office, about that black-budget agency’s increasing openness to working with smaller private-sector companies.

6/5/2019: From Sensors to Answers, Trajectory Magazine

My last exhibitor profile covered the imagery-analysis firm Kitware.

6/5/2019: Teamwork and a Talent Pipeline are Key to NSA’s Future, Trajectory Magazine

I didn’t know before this week that the National Security Agency helps run cybersecurity camps for K-12 students, but this talk by U.S. Cyber Command executive director David Luber got me up to speed on that.

6/5/2019: Government Pavilion Stage Highlights, Trajectory Magazine

My coverage wrapped up with a recap of a panel featuring National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency associate directors Jennifer Daniels and Maj. Gen. Charles Cleveland. My lesson learned from writing this: If you’re going to record audio of a panel, don’t do that from halfway back in the audience.

iTunes (2001-2019-ish)

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With Monday’s news that Apple is finally retiring the Mac version of iTunes, there’s been a lot of “good riddance” chatter about the impending demise of this music/video/download-store/backup/kitchen-sink app.

I get it. For years, iTunes has been a glaring example of Apple forgetting one of Steve Jobs’ rules about the importance of saying no to things. But I also have a long history with this program–I’ve been using it continuously for as long as I have any app, maybe longer. And it hasn’t been all bad.

It’s easy to forget today how bad the music-player landscape was before iTunes, full of apps deliberately limited in features and larded with upsells. If you wanted something decent, you had to pay for it upfront–the app that became iTunes, Casady & Greene’s SoundJamp MP, was a $40 download.

And even after iTunes arrived, competitors didn’t take the hint. Typical headline, from a 2006 review of Microsoft’s Windows Media Player 11: “Nice Features, But It’s No iTunes.” So when I finally set aside time to rip every CD I owned, iTunes did the job. And it was through iTunes that I bought the vast majority of my music downloads–and then paid $25 for iTunes Match to get legit copies of the MP3s I’d downloaded off Usenet newsgroups and file-sharing apps in the days before paying $1 a song was an option.

Most of two decades since my introduction to this app, I no longer use one of its original flagship features, easy music sync. I don’t own an iPhone, and since Apple has held fast to ignoring other mobile devices in this app, I copy the songs I want to store on my Android phone via the Finder.

The new Music app that will replace iTunes may be just as good at the core tasks of music organization and playback, but I won’t know for a while. The iMac on which I’m typing this–kept in service largely because I replaced its sluggish hard drive with a solid-state drive last year–can’t even run the current Mojave edition, much less the upcoming Catalina.

And iTunes for Windows will remain–but that app looks like such a stranger in Windows 10, I can’t deal with it. Instead, it looks like I’m stuck with two other choices with their own issues: Microsoft’s Groove Music, effectively retired after a series of feature removals, and the privacy-hostile Spotify. It looks like Apple isn’t the only large tech company that needs to reboot its desktop music-player strategy.

Weekly output: Apple Pay and Google Pay are still NFC, Planet Labs, William Hurley on quantum computing

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SAN ANTONIO–An unusual business arrangement brought me here. A few months ago, the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation asked if I’d be interested in covering their  Geoint 2019 Symposium for their magazine. They’d cover my travel costs and pay me a flat fee to file a couple of posts a day. That differs from my usual article deals–it’s more like I’m simulating being a staff writer for a week–but USGIF is a good client and offered a good rate. So hello again, Texas.

5/31/2019: Clearing up confusion on payments: If a retailer takes Apple Pay it also takes Google Pay, USA Today

The long-anticipated arrival of NFC mobile payments on a few NYC bus and subway lines gave me my latest reason to remind readers that headlines only mentioning Apple Pay or Google Pay wrongly suggest a proprietary exclusivity. Unfortunately, NFC is a vague and lifeless abbreviation. On reflection, my friend Ed Bott’s suggestion of “tap to pay” would be an excellent substitute.

6/1/2019: Daily Imagery for Analytic Insight, Trajectory Magazine

My Geoint 2019 coverage started with some short profiles of exhibitors that I filed in advance–the first being the satellite-imagery firm Planet Labs.

6/2/2019: Quantum Computing Will Change Everything, but Not Without Your Help and Patience, Trajectory Magazine

Strangeworks founder and CEO William Hurley (aka “whurley”) talked about quantum computing Sunday morning and gave a refreshingly unhyped take on the technology’s perspective.

First impressions of 1Password

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After several years using the same password-manager service–and then paying for its premium version–I’ve spent the last few weeks trying an alternative.

I can credit a sales pitch that included the italicized phrase “completely free” for this departure: 1Password’s offer of a free membership to journalists, in celebration of World Press Freedom Day this May 3. But I was also overdue to spend some time in a password manager besides LastPass.

So far, I’m impressed by the elegance of the interface but a little put off by how persnickety 1Password can be to set up. You don’t just create a username and password, you also have to type in a complex and random secret key to get going.

Having read this Toronto-based firm’s documentation of how this extra step helps ensure that a successful guess of your password still won’t compromise your account, I get where they’re coming from. But I’m not sure I’d recommend it to just anybody, especially not when LastPass’s free version suffices for many casual users.

Further time with 1Password’s Mac, Windows and Android apps has revealed other things I like:

This time has also surfaced one thing I don’t like: an incomplete approach to two-step verification that seems to require choosing between running an authenticator app on your smartphone or employing a weird Yubikey implementation that requires running a separate app instead of just plugging a standard USB security key. That’s no better than LastPass’s inflexible notion of two-step verification.

I’d like to see 1Password improve that and support the WebAuthn standard for security-key confirmation. But I’m prepared to give them some time, based on everything else I’ve seen so far.