Tag Archives: PII

Weekly output: making your offline self harder to find online, Mark Vena podcast

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This week brought one involved project to a published state and saw another project reach the invoiced state, which is also good.

Screengrab of the story as seen in Safari for iPad.6/8/2021: How to make your offline self harder to find online, The Verge

This how-to on reducing your privacy attack surface turned me from a long-time reader Verge reader to a first-time writer. Researching it also helped me realize a few ways I’d left my own coordinates more exposed than necessary.

6/10/2021: Apple WWDC 21 Special Edition: SmartTechCheck Podcast (6-10-21), Mark Vena

This week’s edition of my industry-analyst pal’s podcast (also available in video form) featured a new guest: former Houston Chronicle tech columnist and now Forbes tech writer Dwight Silverman, whom I somehow seem to have failed to meet in person despite all the hours I’ve spent connecting through his city’s intercontinental airport. We discussed Apple’s WWDC announcements–and what it did not reveal at its developer conference, which was my excuse to rant once again about the continued absence of a kid’s mode in iOS and iPadOS. That defect was irritating enough two years ago and is now outright enraging after a year and change of pandemic life.

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Sparring with a 3-million-plus-follower Twitter account

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I expected angry feedback to Wednesday’s post about WikiLeaks and its increasing recklessness, but I didn’t know how that would play out. The @WikiLeaks Twitter account has 3.33 million followers and a history of jabbing at critics, and the story of WikiLeaks posting a trove of Democratic National Committee e-mails–with zero attempt to blank out personal data like Social Security numbers–intersected with the angst of Bernie Sanders fans who are themselves not known for social-media silence.

WikiLeaks Twitter interactionThe WikiLeaks account quickly took exception to my post (and supportive tweets) in responses ranging from boastful–“The Hill, Gawker and others published alleged DNC docouments months ago. Only WikiLeaks had impact.”–to dorm-room BS–“Sure. Anyone who exposes the estabishment by telling you the truth is not your friend. We got it.”

Many of those three-million-plus followers then started liking and retweeting those tweets. I’m not used to seeing my notifications fill left-to-right from so many people clicking on the same tweet.

My new interlocutors came from different places. Some were hardcore WikiLeaks defenders. Some backed Donald Trump and so were in favor of anything making Democrats’ lives more difficult. Some were Bernie Sanders fans convinced that the DNC had stolen the election from him, despite the absence of proof.

(Sorry, Bernie fans: The Democratic Party–especially the woefully-mismanaged DNC–is nowhere near organized to pull that off. Also, you might want to think about where your militant confusion of a party bureaucracy’s dislike of your candidate with “rigging an election” might end up taking you.)

I tried to reply to the tweets directed at me but soon lost count, leading to me feeling I was reliving Seinfeld’s “jerk store” episode when I saw rebuttal-worthy material half a day too late.

But I did not have to answer any hateful crap attacking my gender, race, ethnicity or religion. Every time that happens, I think I’m playing this game with a WHT PRVLG cheat code.

After a day of this amusement, it was nice to see Edward Snowden come to the same basic conclusion as me and then get his own moralizing response.

Weekly output: net neutrality (x2), Nexus 6, connected-car privacy, Nexus lineup, Comcast fees

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If only I could look this productive every week… note that all this happened with two travel days and a conference eating up my schedule, and that I filed another piece on Friday that hasn’t run yet.

11/11/2014: 5 Things to Know About Obama’s Net-Neutrality Push, Yahoo Tech

I enjoyed taking the close-up photo of an Ethernet cable that illustrates this post, and then I was pleasantly relieved not to see the comments immediately overrun with denunciations of net neutrality based on it being something President Obama supports.

11/11/2014: Beyond Email: 3 Innovative Communication Tools for Your Team, CyberCoders

My friend Andrea Smith quoted me a few times in this piece about collaborative apps used by geographically distributed workers to coordinate their work; appropriately enough, HipChat is one tab away from her story in my browser as I type this.

11/12/2014: Net neutrality, The Bill Press Show

An 8:30 am. East Coast radio interview was no problem the day after I flew to San Francisco, since jet lag had me awake around 4:30 a.m. local time. (Time-zone disruption was a bigger problem than usual on this trip; even Saturday morning, when I was thoroughly worn down from the week, I still found myself awake before 7 a.m. Ugh.)

11/12/2014: Nexus 6 review: Stop the screen-specs madness, VentureBeat

This phone bothered me more than I thought it would. Both the enormous screen and its beyond-human-vision pixel density strike me as the tech industry at its worst, chasing specs with inadequate attention to their real-world benefits.

11/12/2014: Privacy on the Road: A Conversation about Connected Cars, Privacy Identity Innovation

My interview with Catherine McCullough, executive director of the Intelligent Car Coalition, was scheduled for one of the trickier timeslots at a conference: immediately before the reception. I think we did okay; when they post video of this, you can judge for yourself 12/14/2014: see for yourself.

Boing Boing Nexus 2014 review11/13/2014: The new Nexus lineup is weak, Boing Boing

I enjoyed getting a chance to review the same devices for a different site and a different audience. Check out the comments for some detailed back-and-forth about this year’s crop of Nexus devices.

11/16/2014: Comcast changes tune on ‘change of service’ fee, USA Today

I was scrounging around for a suitable column topic when a reader’s tweet about getting hit with a fee by Comcast for the privilege of canceling his service solved that problem for me. I hope, in turn, that my spotlighting this issue helps solve my reader’s problem.

Updated 11:57 p.m. to include Andrea Smith’s piece about collaboration tools. I knew I was leaving something out the first time around…