Forewarned Is Forearmed

October 12, 2011 by osteoderm | No comments

Have you ever left your car lights on, or noticed when someone else has? Just last week, I left my van lights outside the coffee-shop one morning, and was grateful that someone passing by both noticed and popped in to let me know. Likewise, I appreciate it when people remind me of the keys I might have left on the counter, or of the dropped item as I pass by. In turn, I try to do a good turn myself when the opportunity arises; plugging an expired meter from time to time, holding open a door, letting people into traffic, etc.

Lately, I’ve added another “act of kindness”, although it might ruffle some feathers. When I find open accounts on unsecured wireless networks, I login and leave a message to let the account-holder know that they really ought to be more careful. The most pointed example of this has got to be Facebook; I simply assume the open account, and change the holder’s status to something like: “(Name Here) has just realized how potentially dangerous it is to surf on an unsecured wireless account.”.

I don’t dig further. I record nothing, and if anything, do my best to avoid actually knowing who the account holder is. That’s none of my business. If I saw a car driving down the door with their gas-cap unscrewed and flapping in the wind, I’d signal them and point their attention to it, not wait for them to pull over and then siphon their gas.

Maybe a few of my readers are still hung up on the whole technical aspect of how this works. In this modern networked world, if you don’t know what a packet sniffer is or how it works, it’s just willful ignorance. Suffice it to say that if you are connected to an unsecured wireless network without engaging some other specific encryption and/or security protocols, then anyone within typical WiFi range, using pretty much any other wireless device (laptops, tablets, phones, and some portable game consoles) can have basically unrestricted access to whatever you are sending/receiving. Yes, that’s perhaps an oversimplified explanation, but it’s basically correct, if not technically robust.

It’s not my intent to be mocking, harsh, or harmful; I just want to make people a little more aware of the privacy they are freely (if unknowingly) giving up.

Love It Or Leave It: STFU About Facebook

September 23, 2011 by osteoderm | No comments

Another Facebook redesign, and another wave of hysteria. Good grief. The pattern has become too frequent, to predictable, and altogether too insignificant.

First, if it really sucks so bad, if it really harms your life, if you’re really afraid they’ll change the profit model and “force you to pay”, then just leave. Get out. Take off. I don’t know of any friends on Facebook who have actually voted with their feet on this one and actually left. Well, honestly, maybe I do, and just didn’t notice them leave; I don’t miss them on Facebook, and apparently they don’t miss me, at least enough to drop me an email (yes, email, that loathsome snailmail of the FB generation).

Secondly, this is the first redesign that actually seems focused on improving privacy and the control thereof. Personally, I’ve had all my FB settings on “Friends Only” since it first became an option, several iterations ago, and as such, this newest “upgrade” really changes very little for me. If anything, I do believe things are improved a little, in that I can now (partly) defeat the “smart feed” and actively pull more content from people I want to see more from.

Thirdly, these “services” are really products, bought and sold in a marketplace. You’re dumping almost everything about your life into private servers owned by private companies driven by strong private financial gain. Worried about paying for Facebook? Google? Hotmail? These companies are already profiting by mining your personal information. In return, they are offering you a “free” service, which you are under no obligation to make use of. Is this nefarious? Not at all. When Google reads my email in exchange for excellent “free” webmail service, I consider that a fair trade.

Lastly, and most importantly, you cannot lose what you have not got, and in this case the lacking item is an expectation of privacy in a glaringly public place. No, I’ll correct that: in a glaringly private space, albeit owned by someone else. Right now, someone somewhere is sitting at their laptop, on an unsecured and/or public wireless network, uploading some scathing and virulent critique of Facebook’s privacy abuses.

Those of you readers who plainly perceive the irony at play understand all too well, while those of you who don’t probably never will.

The Bacon of Vegetarianism

September 1, 2011 by osteoderm | 4 comments

It is a long-standing and well-accepted fact of life that everything is made better by bacon. Well, this at least holds true for foodstuffs, and for folks who consume bacon. Obviously, if you eat meat, and furthermore eat pork, then it is not entirely unreasonable to state that you are a fool for anything wrapped, infused, or otherwise doped with that sweet sweet salty sweet pig candy, bacon.

Still, there are those, even amongst my closest friends, who do not eat bacon. This leads me to ask: is there a vegetarian equivalent to bacon? Now let’s be very clear here: I’m not talking about veggie bacon, soy bacon crumbles, or other fakery. Real bacon is real bacon, and nothing else is close. No, what I’m after is the foodstuff that, for the vegetarian, has that same magical power to completely transform any/all other (vegetarian) foods to otherworldly greatness, in much the same manner as bacon is able to do for those of us with less herbivorian instincts.

Is there such a substance? An ingredient? Some magical vegetarian condiment with powers approaching those of mighty bacon?

Organic Junk Food

July 2, 2011 by osteoderm | No comments

On the way out of the “health food” store this morning, stranded in a long line, I succumbed and picked up a packaged cookie from the display by the register. Sitting down outside to nibble, I read the label more thoroughly. I should have learned by now to be less surprised by these things…

While it might prove too difficult for me, I support anyone else in a decision to go vegan or vegetarian. There’s many compelling reasons for either option, but I’m getting sick of the “health excuse”, especially coming from folks who go out of their way to consume organic vegan junk food.

Vegan junk food: that’s exactly what this cookie amounted to. Listen to this: the single cookie contained 12g of fat, 460mg of sodium, 32g of sugar, and topped out at 460 calories. The supposed benefits? No dairy, no eggs, no honey, no hydrogenated oils, no cholesterol, no preservatives, no refined sugar.

I can’t help but think that (next to no cookie at all) a better healthier choice would be some “carnivore” cookie made with fresh organic ingredients, at half the size. Butter, flour, eggs, and sugar, please, without the vegan-specified grain dextrins and non-hydrogenated soybean lecithins.

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