VPNs have long been essential online tools that provide security, freedom, and most importantly, privacy. Each day, hundreds of millions of internet users connect to a VPN to
prevent their online activities from being tracked and monitored so that they can privately access web resources. In other words, the very purpose of a VPN is to prevent the
type of surveillance that Google engages in on a massive and unprecedented scale.
Google knows this, and in their whitepaper discussing VPN by Google One, Google acknowledges that VPN usage is becoming mainstream and that “up to 25% of all internet users accessed a VPN
within the last month of 2019.” Increasing VPN usage unfortunately poses a significant problem for Google, by making it more difficult to track users across the internet, mine their
data, and target them with advertisements. In short, VPNs undermine Google’s power.
…
So yeah, it turns out that Google are launching a VPN service. I just checked,
and it’s not available to me anyway because it’s US-only (apparently nobody explained to Google the irony of having a VPN service that’s geofenced), but that’s pretty academic because I wasn’t going to touch it with a barge pole in the first place.
Is it 1 April already, Google?
Google already collect data on your browsing habits if you use their products. And I’m not just talking about Chrome, which of course continues to track you using your Google Account even after you log out and clear your cookies, and Google’s ubiquitous Web
tools, but also the tracking pixels hidden on every other website thanks to Google Analytics, AdWords, reCAPTCHA, Google Fonts, and the like. Sure, you can use e.g. uMatrix to stop all of these (although I’m in need of a
replacement), but that’s not a solution for, y’know, normal people. Container tabs help and you should
absolutely use them, but they don’t quite go far enough. It’s a challenge.
Switch to their VPN, though, and they’re suddenly able to track all of your browsing activity, in any browser on your
device. And probably many of the desktop applications you run, too, as most of them “phone home” for updates or functionality. And because it’s a paid-for VPN service, this data can be instantly linked to your real-world identity. By a company that’s demonstrated its willingness to misuse that data for their own benefit (or for the benefit of overreaching law enforcement agencies). Yeah: no deal,
Google.
Perhaps the only company I’d trust less to provide a VPN service would be Facebook, because you just know they’d be
doing so exclusively to undermine individual privacy. Oh wait;
that’s exactly what they did. Sigh.
On our first day‘s walking along the
Thames Path, Robin and I had trouble finding any evidence of water for some time. On our second day, we did not have this problem.
After weeks of sustained rain, the fields we walked over as we left Cricklade behind were extremely soggy. On our way out of town we passed Cricklade Millennium Wood, I took a
picture for the purpose of mocking it for being very small but later discovered it’s too small to appear on Google Maps and became oddly defensive of it – it’s trying, damn it, we
should at least acknowledge its existence.
…
Ruth and her brother Robin (of Challenge Robin/Challenge Robin II fame on this blog, among manyothercrazyadventures) have taken it upon themselves to walk the entirety of the Thames Path from the source of the river (or rather, one of
the many symbolic sources) to the sea, over the course of a series of separate one-day walks. I’ve mostly been acting as backup-driver so far, but I might join them for a leg or two
later on.
In any case, Ruth’s used it as a welcome excuse to dust off her blog and write about the experience, and it’s fun and delightful and you should follow along and give her a digital
cheer. The first part is here; the second part landed
yesterday.
For the sake of our own sanity, if nothing else, we wanted to take a minute to dig into the most wonderfully dumb song on the entire album—although technically it’s two songs, since
tracks 13 and 14, “Fredhammer” and “Limp Wicket,” both share a single unifying sound: Limp Bizkit’s ode to heartbreak, “Nookie”.
…
Together, these two tracks cover so much of what makes Cicierega so great, from the unexpected sample choices, to the step-stuttering repetition of lyrics, to the moment when you
realize he’s snuck the Seinfeld baseline into the middle of the song. There’s also the fact that the whole thing works irritatingly well, from Durst rapping over the
“Sledgehammer” horns, to the undeniably triumphant feel of the “Yub nubs” kicking in.
…
I confess to a genuine and unironic love of Mouth Moods (and, to a lesser extent, Neil Cicierega’s other Mouth* work). I
don’t know if I enjoy Mouth Dreams even more, but it’s certainly a close thing.
William Hughes succinctly describes what makes Mouth Dreams so good. I promise you that if you start down this rabbit hole you’ll soon be lost (what does it all mean? what
are the secret messages hidden in the spectrogram output? why, just why?), but in the most wonderful way. You can listen to the
entire album on Soundcloud.
Moving around is what we do as creatures, and for that we need horizons. COVID-19 has erased many of the spatial and temporal horizons we rely on, even if we don’t notice them very
often. We don’t know how the economy will look, how social life will go on, how our home routines will be changed, how work will be organized, how universities or the arts or local
commerce will survive.
What unsettles us is not only fear of change. It’s that, if we can no longer trust in the future, many things become irrelevant, retrospectively pointless. And by that we mean from
the perspective of a future whose basic shape we can no longer take for granted. This fundamentally disrupts how we weigh the value of what we are doing right now. It becomes
especially hard under these conditions to hold on to the value in activities that, by their very nature, are future-directed, such as education or institution-building.
That’s what many of us are feeling. That’s today’s acedia.
…
In a blog post far from his usual topics, Schneier shares a word – albeit an arguably-archaic one! – that captures the feeling of listlessness that many of us are experiencing as the
coronavirus pandemic continues to unfold.
Hiking vlogger Dave shares his expedition around the Snowdon Horseshoe back in March. It’s a fantastic ridge walk that I’ve taken a few times myself. But on this particular expedition,
hampered by strong winds and thick cloud cover, a serious accident (very similar to the one that killed my father) occurred. Because Dave
was wearing his GoPro we’ve got amazing first-hand footage of the work he and the other climbers on the hill that day did to stabilise the casualty until mountain rescue could come and
assist. The whole thing’s pretty epic.
Speaking of which, did you see the jet-suits that are being tested by the Great North Air Ambulance Service? That’d
have made getting to my dad faster (though possibly not to any benefit)! Still: immensely cool idea to have jet-propelled paramedics zipping up Lake District slopes; I love it.
I’m sure that the graveyard of over-optimism is littered with the corpses of parents who planned to help their children learn self-moderation by showing them the wonders of nature,
but who realized too late that fields of wheat don’t stand a chance against Rocket League. I’m hoping that we can agree that computer games are good, but other things are good too,
cf fields of wheat. I don’t want to have to sneak in my own gaming time after my son has gone to bed. I also don’t want to be a hypocrite; at least, I don’t want Oscar to know that
I’m a hypocrite. Maybe we can play together and use it as father-son bonding time. This might work until he’s ten and after he’s twenty-five.
…
Robert Heaton, of Programming Projects for Advanced Beginners fame and reverse-engineering device drivers that spy on you (which I’ve talked about
before), has also been blogging lately about his experience of Dadding, with the same dry/sarcastic tone you might be used to. This long post is a great example of the meandering
thoughts of a (techie) parent in these (interesting) times, and it’s good enough for that alone. But it’s the raw, genuine “honesty and dark thoughts” section towards the end of the
article that really makes it stand out.
The most important feature of Sublime Text is that it doesn’t change. In the modern world, everything changes at a crazy pace. We get new OSes and new phones every year, Google opens and closes its products monthly, many physical devices get announced, produced, and disappear in an interval
shorter than the Sublime Text release cycle. I have two problems with that.
…
I love Sublime Text. It was the editor for which I finally broke my long, long emacs habit
(another editor that “doesn’t change”). Like emacs, Sublime is simple but powerful. Unlike Atom, it doesn’t eat all the RAM in the
universe. And unlike VS Code, I can rely on it being fundamentally the same today, tomorrow, and next year.
Everything you see when you use “Inspect Element” was already downloaded to your computer, you just hadn’t asked Chrome to show it to you yet. Just like how the cogs were already in
the watch, you just hadn’t opened it up to look.
But let us dispense with frivolous cog talk. Cheap tricks such as “Inspect Element” are used by programmers to try and understand how the website works. This is ultimately futile:
Nobody can understand how websites work. Unfortunately, it kinda looks like hacking the first time you see it.
…while I practice, I have to simultaneously read, listen, think, translate. Every synapse of my brain is so utterly overwhelmed, there is no capacity left to think about the world
out there.
…
When Christoph Niemann published this piece about learning to play the piano during the most-lockdown-y parts of the Coronavirus lockdown, it rang a chord with me (hah!). I, too, have
experimented with learning to play the piano this spring/summer, and found a similar kind of Zen-like focussed calm emerge out of the frustration of staring at a piece of sheet music
and wondering why I couldn’t for the life of me get me fingers to remember to do when they got to that point.
I started out with – after following some random links off the back of finishing the last bit of work for my recent masters degree –
a free course in music theory by the OU, because I figured that coming in from a theoretical perspective would help with the way my brain thinks about this kind of thing. I supplemented that with a
book we got for the kids to use to learn to play, and now I’ve now graduated to very gradually hunt-and-pecking my way through Disney’s back catalogue. I can play Go The
Distance, Colors of the Wind and most of Can You Feel The Love Tonight barely well enough that I don’t feel the need to tear my own ears off, so I guess I’m
making progress, though I still fall over my own hands every time I try to play any bloody thing from Moana. 20 minutes at a time, here and there, and I’m getting there. I
don’t expect to ever be good at it, but I’m enjoying it nonetheless.
But anyway: this piece in the NYT Magazine really spoke to me, and to hear that somebody with far more music experience than me can
struggle with all the same things I do when getting started with the piano was really reassuring.
Oh my god I’m so excited. I’m afraid they might fuck up the story even more than David Lynch did in 1984 (not that I don’t
love that film, too, but in a very different way than the books). I mean: I’d have hoped a modern adaptation would have a bigger part for Chani than it clearly does. And I know nothing at all about the lead,
Timothée Chalamet. If only there was something I could do about these fears?
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it
has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Yeah, that’s the kind of thing.
The supporting cast look excellent. I think Josh Brolin will make an awesome Gurney Halleck, Jason Momoa will rock Duncan Idaho, and I’m looking forward to seeing Stephen
McKinley Henderson play Thufir Hawat. But if there’s just one thing you should watch the trailer for… it’s to listen to fragments of Hans Zimmer’s haunting, simplistic choral
adaptation of Pink Floyd’s Eclipse.
What this now does is instead of saying “add margin to the left”, it says “regardless of direction, put margin on the starting side”. If the language of the document was
right to left, like Arabic, that margin would be on the right hand side.
…
This is clever. If you use e.g. margin-left on every list element after the first to put space “between” them, the spacing isn’t quite right when the order of the elements
is reversed, for example because your page has been automatically translated into a language that reads in the opposite direction (e.g. right-to-left, rather than left-to-right). When
you use margin-left in this way you’re imposing a language-direction-centric bias on your content, and there’s no need: margin-inline-start and its friends
are widely-supported and says what you mean: “place a margin before this element”. I’ll be trying to remember to
use this where it’s appropriate from now on.
This is incredibly cool. Using (mostly) common household tools and chemicals and a significant amount of effort, Ben (who already built himself a home electron microscope, as you do) demonstrates how you can etch a hologram directly into chocolate, resulting in a
completely edible hologram. I’d never even thought before about the fact that a hologram could be embossed into almost any opaque surface before, so this blew my mind. In
hindsight it makes perfect sense, but it still looks like magic to see it done.
Hi. My name is Ethan Zuckerman. From 2011-2020, I enjoyed working in this office. I led a research group at the Media Lab called the Center for Civic Media, and I taught here and in
Comparative Media Studies and Writing. I resigned in the summer of 2019, but stayed at the lab to help my students graduate and find jobs and to wind down our grants. When COVID-19
hit in March 2020, I left campus and came back on August 14 to clean out my office and to leave you this note.
I’m leaving the note because the previous occupant left me a note of sorts. I was working here late one night. I looked up above my desk and saw a visegrip pliers attached to part
of the HVAC system. I climbed up to investigate and found a brief note telling the MIT facilities department that the air conditioning had been disabled (using the vice grips, I
presume) as part of a research project and that one should contact him with any questions.
That helped explain one of the peculiarities of the office. When I moved in, attached to the window was a contraption that swallowed the window handle and could be operated with red
or green buttons attached to a small circuitboard. Press the green button and the window would open very, very slowly. Red would close it equally slowly. I wondered whether the
mysterious researcher might be able to remove it and reattach the window handle. So I emailed him.
…
I’m reminded of that time eleven years ago that I looked up the person who’d gotten my (recycled) university username and emailed
them. Except Ethan’s note, passed on to the next person to occupy his former office at MIT, is much cooler.
And not just because it speaks so eloquently to the quirky and bizarre culture of the place (Aber’s got its own weird culture too, y’know!) but because it passes on a slice of
engineering history that its previous owner lived with, but perhaps never truly understood. A fun read.
