cellphone
Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2016 23:12:42 +0000
On the subject of cars and wildlife, I will not swerve my car to avoid a squirrel. I might swerve my bike; if I run over a squirrel on a bike I might lose control. A squirrel will have minimal affect on a car, and a squirrel might be (lucky and) fine between the car's tires anyway. I could do damage to myself or to others swerving a car. (I have had a squirrel go between my bike's wheels. (This was easier for the squirrel to do on long-wheelbase bikes like my Vision R40 and R85 recumbents.))
A deer, I will try to avoid. A bear or moose, I will try very hard to avoid. I'm thinking it unlikely that I will hit other vehicles in areas with bears or moose. There might be other cars around deer. (There was an incident about 1.5mi from my house in which a car hit a deer and launched it; the deer landed on a 2nd car's windshield and killed that driver.) And I have nearly hit (or been hit by) a deer on a bike trail. The young ones in particular will bolt unpredictably.
My iPhone has been set up to get work email.
There's a lot of contacts set up, but they're just email addresses, probably scraped from my (work-)Outlook inbox. There's many names I don't recognize, and many I recognize but have no reason to contact. I don't see phone numbers for anyone, except for a couple of phone-text addresses - which for some reason were not converted to phone numbers for the contact. (Has anyone come up with a standard data-dump format for moving contacts between phones? Particularly, something brand independent? Not that I've got the data from my previous cellphone (and would be stale now anyway), but it was a Samsung.)
I'm told we'll be getting cases for the iPhones. If they want my phone accessible during my commute, the case will need to be sweat proof. Water tends to be bad for electronics, and salt water is even worse. [2018: still no phone case; I keep the phone in a sock in my pannier or knapsack. (The sock's getting dirty.)]
There's a lot of cool things this phone can do. There are also a lot of serious security and privacy issues associated with them. My work email on my phone? Neat, not that I want to be that available. My phone pinging me about calendar events? Nice. But this actually isn't my data, nor my device. My work email is mostly about a government agency's servers, applications, staff, and customers. The email is on the agency's servers. My work calendar is on the agency's servers. And this mobile device is owned by my employer, and configured/managed by the agency. I have choices about personalizing some of the config settings, but others are out of my control. It's much more about the agency's security than mine.
And some of these other cool things are interactions between the phone, other computers, tablets, and possibly home-automation systems and cars. Are these devices communicating amongst themselves? Are they sharing data securely? Do I have any say in what data they share? Or is this data going to "the cloud" someplace? Who operates the cloud? What are their motivations? What is their revenue steam? (Do I pay for it directly? Is it bundled in the cost of the phone? Or do they have customers who pay for information derived from my data, making me not the customer, but the product?) Is my data secure there? Is it being mined for marketing? Research? Will I have trouble getting health insurance in 10 years because I don't sleep enough or eat too much fat or sugar? Or there's too much alcohol consumption linked to my address? Will "location services" show me changing position in a way that indicates speeding, and affects my car insurance? Will all the insurers just raise my rate quotes, with none of them explaining why? (Do you ever hear why the quote is what it is? Are we supposed to believe it's just a number out of a savant/black box?)
Position tracking can locate the phone if I lose it. Or it can tell someone when to burglarize my home. (As can blogging/twittering about your upcoming vacation plans.)
I'm still paranoid about all this, and no one has given me any reason not to be. We all know some people will break the rules if they don't think they'll be caught (or worse, if the penalties (and possible bad publicity/karma) are not enough to discourage them), and we don't have any serious rules about data collecting/mining and sharing/selling to begin with. It's open season - on us.
A device for accessing the information uberworld any time, any place - sounds great. But I don't even want to talk to people that much, so I don't need a phone with me 24/7. I was glad when the prime and sub- contractors couldn't agree on which would provide the phones, and I ended up in (blissful) radio silence. It would be great to have a phone for emergencies, and my commute has some (blissfully) remote-ish segments, but so far I haven't had an urgent situation. I have on a few occasions used a work cellphone to call home (or get a taxi) to pick up me and my bike, but I'm generally self reliant. I don't need the phone. (My parents somehow got through life without cellphones, and even without the Internet.) Work wants us all on tap 24/7, and this is one (big) step toward that.
Of course, I think cars are largely evil too. You say without cars people couldn't live so far from their jobs, and we'd have to cram people closer together? I say we have way too many people. Any time I see someone with more than 2 kids running for office, I think "Do I want to vote for her/him? Isn't (s)he part of the problem?" And if (s)he doesn't even think along those lines, do I want her/him in office?
And I still don't have my work laptop back.
Thursday 12:03
I finally got the iPhone to connect to my home WiFi. I must have tried 20 times last night. I didn't do anything different just now. I did check the router's config again to make sure I was using the right settings (WEP, not WPA, because there were still some old devices that did not support WPA and would not connect with the router supporting both; and the proper key for WEP). I'm also using MAC filtering (to block access by unknown devices), but I added the iPhone's MAC to the list first thing, and rechecked it several times. The WiFi signal strength may be marginal for the iPhone in my bedroom; the laptops have always reported that it's pretty low.
I got my Bluetooth keyboard paired to the iPhone pretty easily. That made it much easier to type passphrases on the phone (which I was doing over and over). I think on-screen keyboards suck, and this is my smallest screen yet, so it sucks even worse. Granted, the real keyboard is huge next to the phone, and most people won't want to carry such a thing. I don't think I'll ever find a keyboard that's smaller than my hand suitable. (You may recall that I found the keyboard and the Kindle together quite satisfactory for making evening notes at Pennsic, although I find a real laptop with a real OS more convenient for combining info from multiple sources.)
I think at this point we probably could switch our WiFi from WEP to WPA.
The router's MAC list is limited to 32 devices, and with 3 people here we're just about maxed out. I, for example, have:
Annie's laptop seems to be giving her problems after less than a year. She damaged the screen before she even started using it. Her previous laptop (now my web server) has screen weirdness that I've never seen anywhere else. She cracked an iBook screen. Perhaps she needs to use a desktop rather than a laptop, and stay put. I tried the tablet-with-keyboard route, hoping that something that weighed less, smaller and easier to carry, would survive better, but she somehow destroyed the socket for charging it. (It does not look repairable. ☹)
[This entry was originally posted as https://syntonic-comma.dreamwidth.org/831369.html on Dreamwidth (where there are
comments).]
On the subject of cars and wildlife, I will not swerve my car to avoid a squirrel. I might swerve my bike; if I run over a squirrel on a bike I might lose control. A squirrel will have minimal affect on a car, and a squirrel might be (lucky and) fine between the car's tires anyway. I could do damage to myself or to others swerving a car. (I have had a squirrel go between my bike's wheels. (This was easier for the squirrel to do on long-wheelbase bikes like my Vision R40 and R85 recumbents.))
A deer, I will try to avoid. A bear or moose, I will try very hard to avoid. I'm thinking it unlikely that I will hit other vehicles in areas with bears or moose. There might be other cars around deer. (There was an incident about 1.5mi from my house in which a car hit a deer and launched it; the deer landed on a 2nd car's windshield and killed that driver.) And I have nearly hit (or been hit by) a deer on a bike trail. The young ones in particular will bolt unpredictably.
My iPhone has been set up to get work email.
There's a lot of contacts set up, but they're just email addresses, probably scraped from my (work-)Outlook inbox. There's many names I don't recognize, and many I recognize but have no reason to contact. I don't see phone numbers for anyone, except for a couple of phone-text addresses - which for some reason were not converted to phone numbers for the contact. (Has anyone come up with a standard data-dump format for moving contacts between phones? Particularly, something brand independent? Not that I've got the data from my previous cellphone (and would be stale now anyway), but it was a Samsung.)
I'm told we'll be getting cases for the iPhones. If they want my phone accessible during my commute, the case will need to be sweat proof. Water tends to be bad for electronics, and salt water is even worse. [2018: still no phone case; I keep the phone in a sock in my pannier or knapsack. (The sock's getting dirty.)]
There's a lot of cool things this phone can do. There are also a lot of serious security and privacy issues associated with them. My work email on my phone? Neat, not that I want to be that available. My phone pinging me about calendar events? Nice. But this actually isn't my data, nor my device. My work email is mostly about a government agency's servers, applications, staff, and customers. The email is on the agency's servers. My work calendar is on the agency's servers. And this mobile device is owned by my employer, and configured/managed by the agency. I have choices about personalizing some of the config settings, but others are out of my control. It's much more about the agency's security than mine.
And some of these other cool things are interactions between the phone, other computers, tablets, and possibly home-automation systems and cars. Are these devices communicating amongst themselves? Are they sharing data securely? Do I have any say in what data they share? Or is this data going to "the cloud" someplace? Who operates the cloud? What are their motivations? What is their revenue steam? (Do I pay for it directly? Is it bundled in the cost of the phone? Or do they have customers who pay for information derived from my data, making me not the customer, but the product?) Is my data secure there? Is it being mined for marketing? Research? Will I have trouble getting health insurance in 10 years because I don't sleep enough or eat too much fat or sugar? Or there's too much alcohol consumption linked to my address? Will "location services" show me changing position in a way that indicates speeding, and affects my car insurance? Will all the insurers just raise my rate quotes, with none of them explaining why? (Do you ever hear why the quote is what it is? Are we supposed to believe it's just a number out of a savant/black box?)
Position tracking can locate the phone if I lose it. Or it can tell someone when to burglarize my home. (As can blogging/twittering about your upcoming vacation plans.)
I'm still paranoid about all this, and no one has given me any reason not to be. We all know some people will break the rules if they don't think they'll be caught (or worse, if the penalties (and possible bad publicity/karma) are not enough to discourage them), and we don't have any serious rules about data collecting/mining and sharing/selling to begin with. It's open season - on us.
A device for accessing the information uberworld any time, any place - sounds great. But I don't even want to talk to people that much, so I don't need a phone with me 24/7. I was glad when the prime and sub- contractors couldn't agree on which would provide the phones, and I ended up in (blissful) radio silence. It would be great to have a phone for emergencies, and my commute has some (blissfully) remote-ish segments, but so far I haven't had an urgent situation. I have on a few occasions used a work cellphone to call home (or get a taxi) to pick up me and my bike, but I'm generally self reliant. I don't need the phone. (My parents somehow got through life without cellphones, and even without the Internet.) Work wants us all on tap 24/7, and this is one (big) step toward that.
Of course, I think cars are largely evil too. You say without cars people couldn't live so far from their jobs, and we'd have to cram people closer together? I say we have way too many people. Any time I see someone with more than 2 kids running for office, I think "Do I want to vote for her/him? Isn't (s)he part of the problem?" And if (s)he doesn't even think along those lines, do I want her/him in office?
And I still don't have my work laptop back.
Thursday 12:03
I finally got the iPhone to connect to my home WiFi. I must have tried 20 times last night. I didn't do anything different just now. I did check the router's config again to make sure I was using the right settings (WEP, not WPA, because there were still some old devices that did not support WPA and would not connect with the router supporting both; and the proper key for WEP). I'm also using MAC filtering (to block access by unknown devices), but I added the iPhone's MAC to the list first thing, and rechecked it several times. The WiFi signal strength may be marginal for the iPhone in my bedroom; the laptops have always reported that it's pretty low.
I got my Bluetooth keyboard paired to the iPhone pretty easily. That made it much easier to type passphrases on the phone (which I was doing over and over). I think on-screen keyboards suck, and this is my smallest screen yet, so it sucks even worse. Granted, the real keyboard is huge next to the phone, and most people won't want to carry such a thing. I don't think I'll ever find a keyboard that's smaller than my hand suitable. (You may recall that I found the keyboard and the Kindle together quite satisfactory for making evening notes at Pennsic, although I find a real laptop with a real OS more convenient for combining info from multiple sources.)
I think at this point we probably could switch our WiFi from WEP to WPA.
The router's MAC list is limited to 32 devices, and with 3 people here we're just about maxed out. I, for example, have:
- my new laptop (Thinkpad + 1TB disk, Linux) - 2 MACs, Ethernet + WiFi
- Andrea's very old laptop (Thinkpad, Linux) as my bchivers.name web server - 2 MACs, Ethernet + WiFi
- work laptop (Dell) - 2 MACs, Ethernet + WiFi
- my old laptop (Acer, Linux); wired connection never worked under Linux!
- Kindle Fire HD
- Panasonic DMC-ZS40 camera
- 2nd Android tablet (Sungale) to run Panasonic remote-control app (not available from the walled-garden Kindle AppStore ☹)
- iPhone 6 (from work)
- MythTV server (Compaq Presario)
- HD Homerun TV tuner (MythTV)
Annie's laptop seems to be giving her problems after less than a year. She damaged the screen before she even started using it. Her previous laptop (now my web server) has screen weirdness that I've never seen anywhere else. She cracked an iBook screen. Perhaps she needs to use a desktop rather than a laptop, and stay put. I tried the tablet-with-keyboard route, hoping that something that weighed less, smaller and easier to carry, would survive better, but she somehow destroyed the socket for charging it. (It does not look repairable. ☹)
[This entry was originally posted as https://syntonic-comma.dreamwidth.org/831369.html on Dreamwidth (where there are
comments).]