Category: Tech and Coding
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Toward a social contract for social media
Last week, I led a “strike,” or boycott, associated with the hashtag #SocialMediaStrike, directed at the giant, centralized social media services. Though throttled by Twitter and no doubt by others, the brief campaign led to massive use of the hashtag, many people carrying out the strike, as well as dozens of news stories from around…
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How to write an app (that respects privacy and supports security)
Some difficult-to-meet requirements Be open source. Don’t make users have to trust your black box. I don’t want to have to trust you. I don’t know you. Don’t just release your in-house source code. Develop in public; practice outreach to OSS developers to loop in others; make distributed code reviews a standard practice. Be fully…
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Why your company should consider getting a NAS
What’s a NAS again? “NAS” means “network-attached storage,” but this buzzphrase has come to mean more than just a backup drive for your local network. It’s also, and maybe more importantly, an easy-to-set-up personal cloud server. You use it for document storage and sync a la Dropbox; to sync your calendar, contacts, notes, and password…
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How I got rid of Google calendar
It was about 2013 that my friend Terrence Yang told me I should be using Google Calendar, because everybody was using Google Calendar. So I did. And he was right: almost everyone else was using it, as far as I could tell. There was a period between approximately 2015 and 2017 when I was getting…
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How I securely sync my passwords (and why you should, too)
With a uber-geeky bonus: How I synced my Enpass passwords over my Synology NAS using WebDAV You need a password manager that syncs Let’s begin with what I hope will be a useful review. You should be using a password manager. What’s that, and why? A password manager simply holds all your passwords and makes…
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The NAS revolution: Get your data out of the cloud
It turns out the cloud is kind of evil. We blithely put all our data online, right in the hands of giant corporations (and by extension, hackers and governments) who only too happily control, sell, datamine, steal, and spy on it. But you can take control of your data. Now. Here’s how. When most people…
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Vendors must start adding physical on/off switches to devices that can spy on us
Update (May 15, 2019): This post was linked and its author quoted as a source in this Fast Company article on the same subject. Where’s my webcam’s off switch? Have you ever noticed that your webcam doesn’t have an “off” switch? I looked on Amazon, and I couldn’t find any webcams for sale that had…
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How I chose a NAS
A network-attached storage (NAS) device is your own Internet server—your very own “cloud”! I decided to get one for my own reasons. But which, and configured how, exactly? Here’s what I came up with for myself. After dropping Dropbox, and then ditching Resilio Sync, I decided to get a NAS. To pull this off, it…
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Cloud smackdown: NAS vs. Resilio Sync vs. Zero-Knowledge Cloud!
In my ongoing effort to lock down my cyber-life, I jettisoned Dropbox three weeks ago, and I’m quite happy I did. But I’m not done with the reconfiguration. So, if you have the patience and credulity, you may listen in while an amateur deliberates about the choices… People more expert about this stuff than I…
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How I replaced Dropbox
Updated April 2 at bottom. My main beef with Dropbox is that it’s not secure, not adequately encrypted, and there’s been a little too much indication that Dropbox is spying on user data. Ever since I decided to lock down my cyber-life, I had Dropbox in my sights. It was going to be a pain…