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05 Dec 03:27

I Heart Cycling

by peter@rukavina.net (Peter Rukavina)

In one last mad attempt to prove my love, I rode my bicycle to City Cinema tonight, thinking that somehow all reports of the incompatibility of snow, ice, salt, and sand with cycling were exaggerated.

Alas, they were not: it was a slippery, sketchy, cold end to a May-to-December romance that had to end.

This was truly the year of cycling for me: my first ride of the year was on April 30, out Kensington Road to the PEI Brewing Company for an energy efficiency event. That was a hard slog, and I had to hop off and walk up the last hill.

It got better.

I started cycling to get the groceries every week. I rode out to Home Hardware when I needed nails or electrical tape. I rented an ebike and rode to York. I cycled to the airport for an early morning flight, and back from the airport after a late night arrival.

By far and away my happiest cycling moments of the season were with Oliver: with Herculean effort he willed himself to become a cyclist this summer, and after only a week we were cycling to the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market every week. There are few greater memories I have this year than of cycling along the Confederation Trail with Oliver, having a chat, and waving at the people we passed with a happy hello.

Somewhere in there something snapped in me, and I transitioned from “I’ll do this because it’s the only just thing to do in a climate crisis” to “I really (really) love this.” Cycling stopped being a chore and became a joy.

Which is why it was especially hard to lower my bicycle and its trailer into the basement tonight and close out the 2019 cycling season.

I’ll be counting the days to May 1, 2020.

05 Dec 03:27

✚ How to Draw Maps with Hatching Lines in R

by Nathan Yau

Fill areas with varying line density to give more or less visual attention. With geographic maps, the technique is especially useful to adjust for population density. Read More

05 Dec 03:27

Oxide

by Rui Carmo

I’m not quite sure what to expect from this (it has smatterings of a “post-cloud” backlash, if such a thing were possible), but Jessie Frazelle and other luminaries have ganged up to do hardware for on-premises deployments.

Having kept track of the Open Compute Project and the massive scale of global data center deployments for many years I can’t avoid being skeptical about this, but it promises to be interesting to keep track of for the people involved alone.

Here in Portugal, at least, most SMEs doing on-premises stuff can just rent out cheap blade servers and drop literally anything on them, so I just don’t see a profit angle.

But I’d love to see someone deliver power-efficient, modular ARM servers that ran a managed Kubernetes stack out of the box. I just don’t know how big the market for that kind of thing would be.


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05 Dec 03:24

Twitter Favorites: [counti8] Sambal olek > house chili oil > chili garlic > sriracha. Imho.

Karen Quinn Fung | 馮皓珍 @counti8
Sambal olek > house chili oil > chili garlic > sriracha. Imho.
05 Dec 03:23

[RIDGELINE] Do You Drink?

by Craig Mod
Do you drink? he asked. He was 70. Spoke haltingly, like he had maybe suffered a stroke, though drove confidently down the pitch black mountain roads. He was taking me back to his bed and breakfast after my day of walking and a pit stop at the local bath. Dinner was on his mind, and so: “Do … you drink?” “Not really,” I said. “Oh. Well, that’s … OK. We have … lots of beer.
05 Dec 03:23

News from Firefox on Mobile, Private Network and Desktop

by Marissa Wood

As the year comes to a close, we look back at what we’ve accomplished. As recently noted in the press, this year may be the mark of our privacy-renaissance. We’ve built additional privacy protections in the browser which included blocking third party tracking cookies and cryptomining by default and created an easy-to-view report which shows the trackers that follow you and collect your online browsing habits and interests. To date, we’ve blocked more than 1 Trillion tracking requests that attempt to follow you around the web! Privacy has always been part of our DNA. We’ve always believed our role is and has always been to help give people more control over their online lives.

1 Trillion tracking requests have been blocked with Enhanced Tracking Protection

Today, we’ve got something for everyone, for tech savvy folks who want to test-drive privacy-first features and products or those who love to multitask while on their desktop. We have a lot in store for the next year, and will continue to uphold our promise to create privacy-focused products and features. Before we roll anything out widely to consumers, we’ve still got some fine-tuning to do. So today we’re kicking off the next phase in our ongoing testing of our Firefox Private Network Beta, and the latest Firefox Preview app for Android powered by GeckoView. Although the year might be winding down, just like Santa’s elves, we’re working around the clock to deliver experiments and the latest versions of our Firefox browser for desktop and iOS.

Latest Firefox Private Network Beta test protects users just in time for the holidays

In September, we introduced the beta release of our Firefox Private Network (FPN), an extension which provides a secure, encrypted path to the web to protect your connection and personal information when you use the Firefox browser. Since then, we’ve received feedback from our beta testers on how they’re using FPN, its protections, and we learned about websites that weren’t compatible as well as connection issues. This allowed us to quickly identify and fix bugs, and ensure a stable product.

As we continue our beta testing, we are considering various ways to bring additional privacy protections to our users. Today we’re announcing an additional beta test for US-based Firefox account users who didn’t get a chance to get in the initial group, and are interested in testing FPN.

In the next phase of our beta, we are offering a limited-time free service that lets you encrypt your Firefox connections for up to 12 hours a month. With the holidays around the corner, the FPN couldn’t come at a more convenient time. We know people are traveling and might have to rely on an unsecured public Wi-Fi network, like the one at the airport, at your local coffee shop, or even at your doctor’s office. FPN provides encrypted internet traffic thus giving you peace of mind whenever you’re using our browser.

This limited-time free service is currently available in the US on the Firefox desktop browser and you’ll need a Firefox account to try the service. You can sign up directly from the extension which can be found here.

For those looking to extend their protection beyond the browser, you can now sign up to be one of the first to experience the newest member of the FPN family. This month, Firefox account holders can request invitations to experience device-level protection with our new full-device VPN (virtual private network). Join the waitlist and if you’re eligible, we’ll follow up with a link to access the VPN at an introductory price of $4.99 per month. Currently the VPN will be available for Windows 10 only, and like the rest of the FPN, it is only available to US-based Firefox account holders. Pricing and platform availability will continue to evolve and we look forward to hearing your feedback.

Attention mobile beta testers: Firefox Preview Beta release now available

This past summer we introduced Firefox Preview Beta, a publicly available test version of our Firefox browser for Android powered by GeckoView, Mozilla’s own high-performance mobile browser engine. It allows us to deliver a better, faster and more private online experience for Android users. Today, we have an update on our progress, including new features we’ve added since its initial beta release in June. To learn more visit the announcement here.

Picture-in-Picture available in today’s Firefox browser release

Let’s face it, we’re all guilty of multi-tasking whether it’s checking email in a meeting or online shopping and watching product videos before we press the buy button. We all have busy lives and want to get the most out of every minute. In today’s Firefox release we’re rolling out Picture-in-Picture available in all video sites.

Picture-in-Picture allows a video to be contained in a separate and small window, and still be viewable whether you switch from tab-to-tab or outside the Firefox browser. To see if Picture-in-Picture is available to you, hover your mouse over the video to see a small blue “Picture in Picture” option. Once you click the option, the video will pop into its own and will always stay as the top window, allowing you to continue to watch the video even if you switch tabs. Currently, Picture-in-Picture will only be available on Windows OS. It will be available to MacOS and Linux in our next browser release in January 2020.

Hover your mouse over the video to see a small blue “Picture in Picture” option

To see what else is new or what we’ve changed in today’s desktop and iOS release, you can check out our release notes.

Check out and download the latest version of Firefox available here.

 

The post News from Firefox on Mobile, Private Network and Desktop appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

05 Dec 03:23

Questions About .org

by Mark Surman

Last month, the Internet Society (ISOC) announced plans to sell the Public Interest Registry (PIR) — the organization that manages all the dot org domain names in the world — to a private equity firm named Ethos. This caught the attention of Mozilla and other public benefit orgs.

Many have called for the deal to be stopped. It’s not clear that this kind of sale is inherently bad. It is possible that with the right safeguards a private company could act as a good steward of the dot org ecosystem. However, it is clear that the stakes are high — and that anyone with the power to do so should urgently step in to slow things down and ask some hard questions.

For example: Is this deal a good thing for orgs that use these domains? Is it structured to ensure that dot org will retain its unique character as a home for non-commercial organizations online? What accountability measures will be put in place?

In a letter to ISOC, the EFF and others summarize why the stakes are high. Whoever runs the dot org registry has the power to: set (and raise) prices; define rights protection rules; and suspend or take down domains that are unlawful, a standard that varies widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. It is critical that whoever runs the dot org registry is a reliable steward who can be held accountable for exercising these powers fairly and effectively.

ISOC and Ethos put up a site last week called keypointsabout.org which argues that the newly privatized PIR will be just such a steward. Measures outlined on the site include the creation of a stewardship council, price caps, and the incorporation of the new PIR as a B Corp. These sound like good plans at first read, but they need much more scrutiny and detail given what is at stake.

ICANN and the ISOC board are both in a position to slow things down and offer greater scrutiny and public transparency. We urge them to step back and provide public answers to questions of interest to the public and the millions of orgs that have made dot org their home online for the last 15 years. Specific questions should include:

  1. Are the stewardship measures proposed for the new PIR sufficient to protect the interests of the dot org community? What is missing?
  2. What level of scope, authority and independence will the proposed Stewardship Council possess? Will dot org stakeholders have opportunities to weigh in on the selection of the Council and development of its bylaws and its relationship to PIR and Ethos?
  3. What assurances can the dot org community have that Ethos and PIR will keep their promises regarding price increases? Will there be any remedy if these promises are not kept?
  4. What mechanisms does PIR currently have in place to implement measures to protect free speech and other rights of domain holders under its revised contract, and will those mechanisms change in any way with the transfer of ownership and control? In particular, how will PIR handle requests from government actors?
  5. When is the planned incorporation of PIR as a B corp? Are there any repercussions for Ethos and/or PIR if this incorporation does not take place?
  6. What guarantees are in place to retain the unique character of the dot org as a home for non-commercial organizations, one of the important stewardship promises made by PIR when it was granted the registry?
  7. Did ISOC receive multiple bids for PIR? If yes, what criteria in addition to price were used to review the bids? Were the ICANN criteria originally applied to dot org bidders in 2002 considered? If no, would ISOC consider other bids should the current proposal be rejected?
  8. How long has Ethos committed to stay invested in PIR? Are there measures in place to ensure continued commitment to the answers above in the event of a resale?
  9. What changes to ICANN’s agreement with PIR should be made to ensure that dot org is maintained in a manner that serves the public interest, and that ICANN has recourse to act swiftly if it is not?

In terms of process, ICANN needs to approve or reject the transfer of control over the dot org contract. And, presumably, the ISOC board has the power to go back and ask further questions about the deal before it is finalized. We urge these groups to step up to ask questions like the ones above — and not finalize the deal until they and a broad cross section of the dot org community are satisfied with the answers. As they address these questions, we urge them to post their answers publicly.

Also, the state attorneys general of the relevant jurisdictions may be in a position to ask questions about the conversion of PIR into a for profit or about whether ISOCs sale of PIR represents fair market value. If they feel these questions are in their purview, we urge them to share the results of their findings publicly.

One of Mozilla’s principles is the idea that “a balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical” to maintaining a healthy internet. Yes, much of the internet is and should be commercial — but it is important that significant parts of the internet also remain dedicated to the public interest. The current dot org ecosystem is clearly one of these parts.

The organization that maintains the underpinnings of this ecosystem needs to be a fair and responsible steward. One way to ensure this is to entrust this role to a publicly accountable non-profit, as ICANN did when it picked ISOC as a steward in 2002. While it’s also possible that a for-profit company could effectively play this stewardship role, extra steps would need to be taken to ensure that the company is accountable to dot org stakeholders and not just investors, now and for the long run. It is urgent that we take such steps if the sale of PIR is to go through.

A small postscript: We have sent a letter to ICANN encouraging them to ask the questions above.

The post Questions About .org appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

05 Dec 03:23

Quoting Michael Lopp

Let’s agree that no matter what we call the situation that the humans who are elsewhere are at a professional disadvantage. There is a communication, culture, and context tax applied to the folks who are distributed. Your job as a leader to actively invest in reducing that tax.

Michael Lopp

05 Dec 03:23

Portability and Interoperability

by Ben Thompson

In Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s March 2019 op-ed in the Washington Post calling for federal regulation of technology, he included something that caught some observers by surprise:

Regulation should guarantee the principle of data portability. If you share data with one service, you should be able to move it to another. This gives people choice and enables developers to innovate and compete.

This is important for the Internet — and for creating services people want. It’s why we built our development platform. True data portability should look more like the way people use our platform to sign into an app than the existing ways you can download an archive of your information. But this requires clear rules about who’s responsible for protecting information when it moves between services.

This isn’t just talk: on Monday Facebook announced a new photo transfer tool. From the Facebook blog:

At Facebook, we believe that if you share data with one service, you should be able to move it to another. That’s the principle of data portability, which gives people control and choice while also encouraging innovation. Today, we’re releasing a tool1 that will enable Facebook users to transfer their Facebook photos and videos directly to other services, starting with Google Photos…

For almost a decade, we’ve enabled people to download their information from Facebook. The photo transfer tool we’re starting to roll out today is based on code developed through our participation in the open-source Data Transfer Project and will first be available to people in Ireland, with worldwide availability planned for the first half of 2020. People can access this new tool in Facebook settings within Your Facebook Information, the same place where you can download your information. We’ve kept privacy and security as top priorities, so all data transferred will be encrypted and people will be asked to enter their password before a transfer is initiated.

This initiative also helps satisfy Facebook’s requirements under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation. From Article 20:

The data subject shall have the right to receive the personal data concerning him or her, which he or she has provided to a controller, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and have the right to transmit those data to another controller without hindrance from the controller to which the personal data have been provided.

So all is well that ends well, right? Facebook follows the law in Europe and goes above and beyond in the United States, surely leading to new innovation and competition!

As you might suspect, I’m skeptical.

Data That Matters

Start with the obvious objection: why would Facebook, or the other companies that are a part of the Data Transfer Project (including Apple and Google) wish to increase competition? It seems reasonable to assume they would not.

It follows, then, that the data that is being made portable — in this case images and videos — must be a complement to Facebook’s core service. After all, making it easier to give that data away devalues it, and companies always seek to commoditize their complements.

The question that comes next is complement to what? For Facebook, the answer is easy: their social graph. Who you are friends with is the data that is much more valuable, and Facebook is not about to launch a network transfer tool.

There is plenty of evidence that this is the case. Back in the days of Facebook’s Open Graph initiative — which is at the root of controversy surrounding Cambridge Analytica — Facebook was giving away all of the data developers might want, the better to get developers on the Facebook platform. The company drew the line, though, when it came to other social networks.

After this crackdown Facebook “clarified” its position in a blog post:

For the vast majority of developers building social apps and games, keep doing what you’re doing. Our goal is to provide a platform that gives people an easy way to login to your apps, create personalized and social experiences, and easily share what they’re doing in your apps with people on Facebook. This is how our platform has been used by the most popular categories of apps, such as games, music, fitness, news and general lifestyle apps.

For a much smaller number of apps that are using Facebook to either replicate our functionality or bootstrap their growth in a way that creates little value for people on Facebook, such as not providing users an easy way to share back to Facebook, we’ve had policies against this that we are further clarifying today.

This is about as concise a distillation of the “commoditize your complements” approach as you will see, at least as far as data is concerned: if you make Facebook better, you can have it all; if you don’t, or are remotely competitive, you are cut off.

The Privacy Angle

Facebook, for obvious reasons, has come to regret the entire Open Graph 1.0 era, in large part because of attention paid to privacy issues. In fact, the company had started restricting the data it shared with the release of Graph 2.0 in 2014; now 3rd-party developers could only see a user’s friends if those friends also used the same app, much like the Twitter Facebook app of old.

The restrictions in GDPR are even tighter; the last part of Section 20, providing for data portability, states:

The right referred to in paragraph 1 [excerpted above] shall not adversely affect the rights and freedoms of others.

In other words, you can get your personal data out, but no data about your friends, because they didn’t give permission. This does, in a privacy context, make perfect sense. At the same time, it is ground zero for how privacy regulation can often be at odds with encouraging competition: it’s all well and good to get your old photos and videos, but its telling that the most likely first place to put those is in a photo storage app that serves a very different purpose than Facebook; a Facebook competitor would be better served with access to a user’s list of friends.

The Interoperability Contrast

A far more impactful outcome would be if Facebook’s friend data were interoperable. Suppose you created a new app that could, once you authorized yourself, incorporate access to Facebook’s graph in a way that let you connect with friends that also use the app, kind of like the Twitter Facebook app of old.


Update 12/12/19: In fact, Facebook does allow this with the User Friends API, and a spokesperson assured me that Twitter or Snapchat or any other social network is, after a policy change last year, free to implement said API. Of course, that entails using the Facebook Login, and all of the data sharing that follows. It’s also not nearly as compelling as being able to recruit friends to the new app in the first place (which is what I should have focused on). Regardless, I didn’t have this quite right, so consider this a correction.


In this model, the 3rd party developer doesn’t actually get data from Facebook. Facebook, rather, exposes its data in a way that the user can leverage the company’s social graph to bootstrap their experience. This both significantly increases the potential for competition while also leaving the user in charge, not only of their own data but also the data about who their friends are.

The problem with this approach is obvious: Facebook would have to implement it, and it has zero reasons to do so, both because of competitive reasons, and also because regulatory zeal for privacy gives the company cover to not give out any friend data at all. The reason to write this Article, though, is to show why data portability like the sort Facebook announced is such a red herring: it has the trappings of increasing competition, the better to avoid antitrust regulation, but it doesn’t really do anything of the sort, particularly relative to far more impactful interoperability.

Interoperability and the Tech Giants

This idea of comparing and contrasting portability with interoperability is another lens to understand what are the commoditizable complements versus highly differentiated core of the largest tech companies.

Consider Google, another frequent target of regulators. The company has no problem giving you your data, or letting you wipe it out. What the company won’t do is make the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) interoperable. Interoperability would mean 3rd-parties being able to populate some portion of the results, or being able to use the results while providing their own ads; neither is happening anytime soon.

In the case of Amazon, interoperability would mean making the company’s logistics service available as a service to any merchant selling through any storefront; in reality, it is only available to merchants selling on Amazon.com. [This is incorrect. Amazon actually offers exactly this. My apologies for the error.]

For Apple, interoperability could happen at two levels: there could be a way to install apps on your iPhone independent of the App Store, or the App Store could allow apps that incorporate their own payment processors (or simply link to a web page to complete a purchase).

I am not arguing, at least in this piece, that any of these should happen. The only one I feel strongly about is Apple, simply because there is no alternative for developers or customers to the App Store (there are other ways to sell to or reach end users than Amazon or Google, and other ways to find your friends than use Facebook). What is notable, though, is how interoperability for all of these companies cuts to the core of how they extract profit from their respective value chains.

Portability AND Interoperability

To be very clear, I’m pretty excited about Facebook’s announcement. Data portability is absolutely consumer friendly, and I’m glad that Facebook is making it easy to move photos and videos that have been lost to time to applications that are better suited for long-term storage.

At the same time, we shouldn’t kid ourselves that this has any sort of impact on competition. It is interoperability that cuts to the core of these companies’ moats, and to the extent regulators see it worthwhile to act, interoperability should be the priority.

  1. This link only works in Ireland
05 Dec 03:23

I finally got a chance to spend some quality ti...

I finally got a chance to spend some quality time with one of the new Apple 16" MacBook Pros. The new keyboard is good.

I like it. I think I like it a lot.

05 Dec 03:22

What Not to Do on Your Work Computer

by Thorin Klosowski
What Not to Do on Your Work Computer

If you use a work-issued laptop or desktop computer, you’ve likely been tempted to check your personal email, store private files on the company’s Google Drive, or avoid work entirely by diving into a research rabbit hole that has absolutely nothing to do with your job. You probably shouldn’t do any of this on a computer provided by your employer.

Employers can install software to monitor what you do on your work-issued laptop or desktop. In the most watchful of workplaces, this may include keyloggers that can see everything you type or screenshot tools that track your productivity. What type of surveillance and security software is installed on your company computer is often based on two factors: how large the company is (and what resources it has to dedicate to this) and what type of information you deal with in your role. If you work with sensitive materials, such as health records, financial data, or government contracts, you can count on your employer keeping a careful eye on what you do.

For most of us, the fear of being heavily surveilled at work is unwarranted. Jesse Krembs, senior information security analyst at The New York Times, said, “Without supporting evidence, at scale this is pretty rare. It tends to generate a lot of useless data, rope the employer into liability issues, and generally make the team that monitors these surveillance systems miserable. That being said, almost all large companies have a targeted program for doing this, especially for dealing with suspected insider threat or fraud.”

Even if your every move isn’t being watched, it’s still best to assume your work computer is monitored and act accordingly. Here are some less obvious tasks you should be mindful of.

Don’t store personal files on your work-issued laptop or phone

Every security expert I spoke with mentioned one no-no: storing personal files on an employer-issued phone or computer. If you’re fired, your laptop is usually the first thing it’ll take from you, and if your company ends up in a lawsuit, any files on your laptop or desktop are fair game. Tracy Maleeff, an information security analyst at The New York Times, pointed to security concerns as well: “From the employer's perspective, it just adds to the threat model of potential infected documents.”

Isaac Blum, director of applications and system services at logistics real estate company Prologis, added that even if you feel like you have job security, you might not have data security, depending on the security tools your company uses. “Some of these tools, if they detect a breach, they’ll start wiping files,” Blum said. If your computer gets infected with malware, the security measures taken to try to get rid of problems might clear out your personal files, too.

Don’t use Google Docs, Slack, or similar tools for anything you don’t want your employer to see

Since it’s online and not software installed on our computers, it’s easy to think of G Suite, which includes services like Gmail, Google Docs, and Sheets, as private productivity software. But the Freedom of the Press Foundation notes several reasons why you shouldn’t use a company-issued Google account to store your private data.

Administrative users with G Suite Enterprise can search for specific phrases in an employee’s emails and documents, just like you can in your own account. Employers can set up audits to be notified of suspicious behaviour and create custom scripts for retaining data.

For example, an employer could establish a process by which your email drafts are saved even if they’re never sent. If you’ve ever considered drafting a resignation email calling your boss a jerk, do so elsewhere.

As for non-Gmail employee email accounts, you can safely assume they’re being monitored too. Blum told me, “We can see people’s emails. There’s only a select few people, but nothing is technically not viewable.” Due to the risk of sharing insider information, the number of individuals who have access to employee emails is usually small.

The same goes for chat software, including Slack. Admins have access to private messages, and Slack saves messages on its servers.

You should avoid signing in to other personal messaging apps, like Apple Messages or Google Hangouts. Not only would your employer potentially have access to those messages, but you also make yourself susceptible to embarrassing moments, like receiving a private message when you’re screen sharing. If you want to trash-talk your co-workers or your company, do it over a third-party app (like Signal) on your personal phone.

Assume your Internet traffic is monitored

Your employer almost certainly monitors your Internet traffic. But beyond watching out for the obvious stuff, this probably isn’t as nefarious as you think. Blum said it’d be aware of “basic web traffic” only. Though, if you’re routinely not getting your work done, don’t be surprised if a boss rolls out data on how much time you spend scrolling Facebook.

If you think you can use a VPN to hide what you do, think again. “We deploy endpoint protection,” Blum said. “Even in the event you install a local VPN on a laptop, we can still see the DNS traffic. We have an agent so when it connects back up, it’ll shoot over whatever history was there. But while you’re connected to the VPN, it’ll still be anonymized by the VPN you’re using.”

Even if your employer doesn’t care much about your browsing habits, it’s still best to avoid doing any personal business—like side hustles or hobbies—on your work computer. But you don’t have to be paranoid about everything. “You can pay all your bills,” Blum noted. “That’s not the kind of thing people should be concerned with.” Joanna Grama, senior consultant at Vantage Technology Consulting Group, suggested, “Use your smartphone when you want to access your personal social media.”

Be more careful with your computer when you’re in public

You should treat your work computer with the same care as you would your personal computer. That means being secure on public Wi-Fi and using common sense. Maleeff suggested using a VPN for public Wi-Fi (Wirecutter recommends using TunnelBear).

Maleeff also suggested locking your computer when you step away from it. “I have a great story of a U.S. government employee traveling next to me on Amtrak [who] left his laptop open and unlocked while he left his seat,” Maleeff said. “Without even touching the computer, I was able to determine a lot of information.” If you’re at a coffee shop, on an airplane or train, or anywhere else in public, log out or shut your laptop.

How to see what’s running on your computer

When you use employer-owned equipment, it’s good to remember you don’t have a right to privacy—but that doesn’t mean your employer shouldn’t also clearly state what kind of monitoring it does and how. Grama noted that your employee handbook is a good place to look to find out what software may be running on your computer. “Probably anybody who works in HR will say that yes, this type of information must be in an employee handbook,” she said. “It’s a really good practice and would engender good feeling about your employer if you knew that type of monitoring was taking place.”

If your handbook doesn’t have details but you’re still curious about which monitoring software your computer has, the information is usually easy to find. Blum said, “[Such software] may not launch on a task bar, but many are still located in add/remove programs. On a Mac, they’ll show as an application or service.” A quick Google search should reveal the software’s capabilities. As weird as it can feel to have your employer monitor you, everyone I spoke with recommended against deleting the software, which will call attention to you.

Most employers include screen-sharing software, like VNC or TeamViewer, which gives your IT department access to your computer remotely. If you’ve ever been freaked out because an IT worker “took control” of your mouse to fix your computer, this is what they used. It’s usually obvious when this software is running, so don’t fret about your IT department watching you mistype emails all day long.

The central tenet of this advice is to avoid saying or doing anything on a work-issued computer or account that you don’t want your employer to see. It’s probably fine to pay a bill now and again—or to create a lineup for your office’s fantasy football league—but avoid doing anything personal or unprofessional.

05 Dec 03:21

Amazon Braket – Get Started with Quantum Computing

Jeff Barr, Amazon Web Services, Dec 03, 2019
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Quantum computing may seem like the far-away future, but if this article from Amazon is to be believed, you can start working with it today. Mind you, claims of 'quantum supremacy' (that is, a quantum computer that performs a function that a traditional computer cannot) have yet to be proven. Still, "This new service is designed to let you get some hands-on experience with qubits and quantum circuits. You can build and test your circuits in a simulated environment and then run them on an actual quantum computer."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]
05 Dec 03:21

The Manifesto

Michael Allen, Julie Dirksen, Clark Quinn, Will Thalheimer, Serious eLearning Manifesto, Dec 03, 2019
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This was cited on LinkedIn over the weekend; I missed it when it came out earlier this year. It's another entry to the heap of manifestos. This one comes from toe corporate perspective and reflects it (it feels like reading TQM): "Through continuous assessment of learner performance, the elearning experience can optimize use of the learner’s time, individualize the experience for full engagement, address needs, optimize practice, and prepare for transfer of learning to performance proficiency."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]
05 Dec 03:21

We’re not planning a meeting, we’re planning a harvest.

by Chris Corrigan

One of my mantras that helps keep me focused when I’m designing a process is “I’m not planning a meeting, I’m planning a harvest.” This helps me focus on need and purpose and helps me choose or create processes that make good use of our time together.

Facilitators can be guilty of the sin of falling in love with their methods and tools. Especially when we learn a new thing, we are desperate to try it out, sharing our zeal for this fresh thing we’ve discovered. In my own experience, many times that results in the meeting being about my needs and not the needs of the group. If I design a session based solely on the method – even if it is ostensibly in services of outcomes – I can find myself suffering from intentional unawareness and missing what the group wants or needs.

Because I am a process geek and love my tools and methods, I have found it necessary to disrupt the tendency to suggest a structure before fully fleshing out what is needed. This is why I organized the planning tool I use, the chaordic stepping stones, in a way that saves final decisions about structure until the very end of the planning process.

While it is essential to start the design with need and purpose, equally important is having a strong sense of the outputs, or the harvest of a process. In participatory work, outputs are not merely the tangible record and artifacts of the meeting. They are also intangible. Another design principle I use is “leave more community than you found” which demands that whatever we are doing, we build relationships and social connections in a group as much as possible and at the very least do no harm to social relationships. Building relationships is essential if the outputs of group work are to be sustained after the meeting is over.

Keeping these principles straight is aided by this handy framework I helped develop years ago, inspired by Ken Wilber’s integral theory. It recognizes that every meeting produces outputs that are both tangible and intangible, as well as individual and collective.

Drawing by Avril Orloff, from our Beehive Productions course on
Harvesting and Collective Sensemaking

Tangible collective outputs include meeting artifacts, such as data, reports, visible shared purpose, decisions action plans, structure and organization, and records of the event. Intangible collective outputs include social relationships, collective learning, and social cohesion.

Tangible individual outputs can be skills, personal takeaways, a clear personal workplan, or a knowledge of one’s role and responsibilities. Intangible individual outputs can include belonging, encouragement, clarity of purpose, enjoyment, and a sense of purpose.

All facilitators spend time working on the tangible collective outputs of a meeting, but sometimes we give the other three quadrants short shrift. If we don’t pay attention to these things, especially the intangible outputs, we can often create good artifacts but at the expense of relationships or trust. How many times have you been a part of the process where the facilitator delivered on the work, but everyone felt worse afterwards? Harvesting needs to be reciprocal, not extractive.

I use this framework by asking my clients to choose two or three desired outputs in each quadrant. These are things we want to happen as a result of the meeting and they become constraints for choosing our tools and designing a flow for the process.

Recently I helped design a meeting process for the First Nations Technology Council to invite First Nations social development managers to come together and work on an investment strategy to improve the use of technology in their work of providing income assistance to individuals in their communities. It would be easy to make this an extractive consultation, but my client was clear that we needed to build community between these people, encourage learning and peer coaching and ensure that going forward the work was supported and stewarded by the participants themselves..

When I came on to the project, we had a good draft agenda that was tailored towards getting information from the participants to include in an investment strategy being prepared for the federal government. But in checking against the intended intangible outputs, we realized that the process was too dependant on the facilitator and presentations from the front of the room. We made some significant changes to build more community, more peer support, and more ownership of the work. These included:

  • Changing an environmental scan to a world cafe in which participants shared their stories about their work and the way they were able to provide services in spite of the technological challenges they faced.
  • Moving from a sterile user profile process to a peer process in which participants interviewed each other on the steps that each manager goes through in meeting, processing and reporting on income assistance. We made a process timeline and participants coded their work to show where they used technology, where frustration existed in the system and where the process was bottlenecked. These became key points for the investment strategy.
  • Instead of the FNTC writing the strategy themselves, each of the five consultations will appoint two participants to be a part of a sense-making group whose job is to review the work of the entire process and design the investment strategy alongside the Technology Council. This group of ten will convene to produce the final product, and hopefully deliver it to Ottawa, preserving the voice of participants in the work.

The meeting took participants by surprise and many were thrilled to be engaged in a participatory way and have their knowledge honoured. Because these people don’t often get a chance to meeting others in the same job, they were hungry for network building and sharing solutions with each other. Supporting this community will be an important part of the work going forward.

Focusing on the harvest in all of its aspects helps to create a set of enabling constraints that helps me to be a better process designer and provide a better overall experience for participants. Give the tool a try and let me know how it changes your practice.

05 Dec 03:21

The World’s Most Blessed Agnostic

by Dave Pollard

I’ve said before that I believe we’re all suffering, and all healing, from what I’ve called Civilization Disease — the combination of mental and physical illnesses that results from the relentless stress of horrifically overpopulated industrial society and the global nutritional poverty of the now-ubiquitous industrial food system.

I thought it might be interesting to look at Civilization Disease from a non-dual perspective. Radical non-duality says that there is no real you (that the separate ‘you’ is an illusion), and that since there is no space and time, just an eternal and infinite field of possibilities, nothing is actually real (or unreal) — everything is just an ‘appearance’, without reason or purpose.

As I’ve argued before, as crazy as that sounds, it is entirely consistent with new discoveries and theories in astrophysics, cosmology, quantum science, philosophy and cognitive science. So, while there are thoughts and feelings, they aren’t anyone’s thoughts and feelings; they just arise, as appearances, for no reason. It is the illusory self that claims that thoughts and feelings are its thoughts and feelings, and that they are real and pervasive and meaningful, and cause for action.

As a passionate fan of Gaia theory and evolution, it’s hard to square this with the sense that Gaia (ie all life on earth and its ecologies, as a single staggeringly-complex ‘organic’ system) seems to be co-evolving life on earth in a logical, consistent and ‘biophilial’ way. But Stephen Jay Gould (in Full House and elsewhere) has argued that while there is pattern in all of this, there is no intention, no direction, no ‘intelligence’ to evolution. It is just (apparently, if you’re a non-dualist) a playing out of a possibility, a game full of randomness, without purpose or ‘progress’.

But if we try to at least understand the apparent ’rules’ of the game of evolution, it seems that at some point brains evolved, and have been creating havoc ever since. Stewart and Cohen in Figments of Reality argue the evolution of brains happened because the creatures* that make up organisms experimented with a centralized ‘feature-detection system’ as a means of protection for the body’s component creatures, and, as this seemed to be an evolutionarily successful development brains are now standard equipment in most (but not all) animal species.

The brain may have evolved to detect ‘features’ (mostly food and predators), but its complexity allowed the development of intricate ‘predictive’ models (‘figments’) of reality, including, at least in humans, the recursive invention of the ‘conscious self’ as the centre of the model.

There is increasing evidence that this invention was an evolutionary misstep, since, according to radical non-duality and recent neuroscience, the ‘self’ is completely unnecessary to the success and survival of the brain-equipped character*. We would be better off without a self, since it is “a useless appendage” that comes with a ton of undesirable side-effects; most notably it ‘suffers’ from the illusion that it has free will, choice, agency, responsibility, and control of the apparent character that it presumes to inhabit.

This suffering is to no avail, since it changes nothing — the character that the suffering self struggles fruitlessly to try to control and understand is completely indifferent and oblivious to the existence of the illusory self.

One of the largest causes of the self’s suffering is its (mis-)identification with and claim of ownership of, emotions (feelings). You’ll have a hard time explaining this to health professionals, however, since the worldview of radical non-duality and that of psychology are so utterly different. But let’s see if it’s possible to reconcile these worldviews.

One of the best-known taxonomies of feelings is that of Karla McLaren. She identifies 17 key emotions in three main clusters, which I’ve depicted (as I understand them) in the chart above. Karla believes there are no ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ emotions — that they are all messages from the body to advise ‘us’ of appropriate actions to take for our well-being. She doesn’t list depression as an emotion, describing it instead as a ‘shutting-down’ coping mechanism that arises when facing a situation that is just too much to handle.

Like most psychologists she’s a believer in CBT and MM, the fanciful and hopeful idea that we can master our feelings and change ourselves by how we think about them and react to them. Tragically, people are so desperate to believe that there must be a way to deal with depression, anger, addiction, sadness and fear, that they’re prepared to ignore the overwhelming evidence that CBT and MM don’t actually work.

Non-duality would explain this quite simply: these therapies can’t work because there is no ‘you’ to undergo them, and because the illusory self has no free will or choice, no control or agency over the character* it presumes to inhabit or indeed over its (the self’s) own (claimed) feelings or thoughts.

Although it’s perilous to try to explain the evolutionary ‘purpose’ of claimed emotions (non-duality, after all, asserts there is no purpose for anything), it’s irresistible to the pattern- and sense-making self to at least try, so let’s have a go at it.

Let’s start with the three principal reactions of most apparent living creatures in response to existential threat: fight, flight and freeze. These map rather obviously to Karla’s three major categories of emotion — anger/hatred, fear/anxiety and sorrow/grief (perhaps including depression when the sorrow is deep, chronic and relentless). The chemicals that drive these responses to threats are evidently the same as those that register the corresponding emotions.

Assuming you accept that non-human creatures feel emotions, let’s take a look at Karla’s emotion taxonomy from the perspective of a squirrel. If the squirrel’s young are threatened, the squirrel will react with rage and risk all to protect them. If the squirrel sees a cat, it will react with fear, and most likely ‘choose’ to flee. If it is surrounded by cats, so that flight is not an option, it will likely freeze, play dead, and then, when the danger has passed, furiously ‘shake off’ the dreadful frozen feeling and get on with its life.

I would argue that envy/jealousy is also a characteristic emotion of squirrels just as it is in humans, and that this feeling is related in part to fear (fear of not having enough if another squirrel hoards more than its share) and in part to anger. I would also argue that squirrels fall in love, in the sense that their behaviour in certain circumstances is totally driven by a rush of chemicals that lead it to mate and bond with another. And I would also argue that squirrels, in the absence of any of these ‘negative’ (sorry Karla) emotions, feel something akin to happiness, pleasure, contentment and joy, or at least equanimity.

I’m not so sure the other two groupings of emotions — boredom/apathy and guilt/shame/loneliness — are felt by squirrels. These are particularly complex emotions, and what is interesting to me is that they are the only emotions on Karla’s list that I am not personally familiar or experienced with. In fact, I don’t understand them at all. I am astonished when someone says they’re so bored they want to gouge their eyes out. I have had some fleeting experiences of guilt and shame (though since I no longer believe in free will I am quick to ‘forgive’ myself for whatever has caused these feelings, so they rarely last). And I can’t relate to feelings of loneliness at all.

This is a bit distressing because I know and care about people who suffer terribly from loneliness (and sometimes boredom as well), and I have no basis of experience to fathom it and hence empathize with it. I have simply never been bored, or lonely, even in the darkest depths of depression, or when afflicted with the ‘winter blues’, or feeling bereft from the loss of a loved one. Perhaps I’m more like a squirrel than a typical human.

Let’s suppose that our emotional squirrel is not afflicted with a self like we poor humans. How does it ‘feel’ these emotions? My sense, from personal observation and from discussion with non-dualists who appear not to have a ‘self’, is that without a self to take ownership of these emotions and dwell upon them, feelings simply arise as a manifestation of the body’s chemistry, and act upon the conditioned creature to provoke an appropriate fight/flight/freeze response, and then they quickly dissipate. The squirrel does not ‘stay’ angry, sad or fearful, because it has no self (or need of a self) to continue to feel and think about the event that gave rise to these feelings. That is not to say that there isn’t great anguish in the moment — it may well be that without an intervening self, these intense feelings are felt even more strongly than they are in humans, and that likewise the physical manifestations (pain and distress) are felt more acutely by them than by humans.

But in creatures not afflicted with selves, there is (to use Eckhart Tolle’s terms) no reinforcing cycle of egoic-mind thoughts and pain-body emotional reactions to preoccupy and distress them once the immediate source of the distress has passed.

(A side-note: I confess I’m uncertain about what happens in non-human creatures that face chronic stress — those in factory farms, zoos, laboratories, abusive homes, and areas under relentless human or other encroachment and threats. Such situations are anomalous and symptomatic of collapse situations, and not sustainable. That’s a subject for another article, so chime in and stay tuned if this is a subject that interests you.)

So in the absence of chronic stress, it seems to me that while pain is real and inevitable (and sometimes intense) for all creatures, suffering is not. Suffering requires a self.

I think that may be why squirrels probably don’t feel lonely, ashamed, guilty, apathetic or bored. These emotions require a judgement that the situation is unfair and that someone or something (possibly the creature itself) is to blame. I doubt that such thoughts and feelings preoccupy squirrels the way they (uselessly) do human selves. I share the view of radical non-duality that no one is to blame, not even one’s self, so perhaps that’s why I am seemingly not prone to these emotions either.

Loneliness may be even more complex to understand. Gabor Maté has a hypothesis that most chronic mental and physical illnesses arise as a maladaptation to the failure of the young child to get two essential needs fulfilled: attachment (to its mother and then to others and to its community; a sense of comfortable and supported belonging), and authenticity (the capacity and freedom to be one’s true evolving self, rather than living a lie based on others’ demands and expectations). Some of the emotions on the chart might not arise in those who’ve grown up with a strong sense of attachment and the freedom to be authentic. Loneliness in particular seems to entail a feeling of social alienation that may stem from the kind of early-life physical and psychological abandonment that is endemic in our fractured and disconnected industrial civilization culture. Similarly, boredom, the desperate feeling of emptiness and the need to fill one’s life with distracting activity, might stem from the acedia that is bred in the absence of a sense of attachment to the world and a sense of oneself as worthy and authentic.

I don’t think I would ascribe all emotional suffering to lack of attachment and authenticity though. Much of it, I think, is a reaction to the ghastly and relentless stresses of our massively overpopulated, crowded, disconnected and dangerous civilized world — ie Civilization Disease. We all have it, but those who also have suffered the absence of early-childhood attachment or authenticity probably have it worse. Or, to be more precise, their selves have it worse.

There is no help for Civilization Disease. The illusory self is the embodied, incessant reaction to this chronic disease, and it can’t overcome itself, or think or wish itself away. That’s the CBT/MM myth.

But I have not given up (no self can) wondering if by simply being more aware of the self’s tragic plight, and where we seem to be moment-to-moment on the feeling path between the self’s dark emotional circles and the joyful equanimous space shown in white on the chart above, our selves might lessen the intensity and duration of their reactivity and hence the extent of their suffering.

It seems ludicrous to think that an illusion can do that (or can do anything), but as I slowly become a little more self-aware, and learn more about the ideas of radical non-duality, it seems to me that suffering is gradually losing its hold on me. I am still angered and saddened by the same things, but not as intensely or enduringly. I am still driven by fear, and have no control over that, but the realization that it is usually ungrounded or disproportional does seem to lesson its charge a bit. And I’m guessing that my continuing struggle to deal with anxiety has a lot to do with getting less and less practice at it, as my life becomes less and less stressful, so that when something stressful does happen it hits me harder than it once would. But I’m not sure. This may be just wishful thinking on my inconsolable self’s part. I probably need to explore this further too.

So when I say I’m the world’s most blessed agnostic, I’m being ironic, but not entirely. I did grow up, it seems, with a healthy sense of attachment and the freedom to be authentically myself, and although that early-childhood health was severely tested by the subsequent shock of encountering and dealing with our brutal educational system and work world, and by the astonishing insensitivity and savagery of those most severely afflicted by Civilization Disease, as well as by decades of recurring deep depression, I seem to have survived these tests, and now live an astonishingly healthy and blessed life. And my life is relatively free of the stresses — financial, social, and cultural — that bedevil the vast majority of humans, so in that sense I am truly blessed.

Life should not be so hard, and it actually isn’t. “The dark and gathering sameness of the world” that Civilization and its Disease have wrought may seem awful, but it is only so to the selves that cannot help but judge it. To the characters we presume to inhabit, it is all unreal, a wondrous appearance of everything out of nothing, outside of space and time, a magic show. But although we may know it’s all sleight of mind, our selves can still, somehow, feel the bite of the magician’s ghastly saw, as it separates us from everything.

______

* This is mind-boggling stuff to absorb, so I am continuing to use the term ‘character’ to describe the (actually plural) complicity (the term Stewart and Cohen use) of (apparently) living creatures that their shared brain serves. As Richard Lewontin has explained (in The Triple Helix and elsewhere), evolutionary biologists now understand that there is no real border that separates one apparent creature from another, or indeed one creature from its apparent environment. Gaia really is just one, and trying to analyze it by separating it into discrete parts is dangerous and ultimately futile. Radical non-dualists would, I think, appreciate why this is true. So though I would prefer to describe the apparent creatures that arise, wondrously and for no reason out of the ‘one nothing’, as complicities, to convey their plurality, I will continue to use the terms characters, or creatures, depending on context, to describe the apparent bags of water-filled organs we call people, as it’s more familiar and easier to fathom.

05 Dec 03:21

Here’s hoping our Age of Ageism is a brief one

by Doc Searls

A few days ago a Twitter exchange contained an “OK Boomer” response to one of my tweets. At the time I laughed it off, tweeting back a pointer to Report: Burying, Cremating Baby Boomers To Generate $200 Trillion In GDP, which ran five years ago in The Onion.

But it got me thinking that “OK Boomer” might be more—and worse—than a mere meme. Still, I wasn’t moved to say anything, because I had better stuff to do.

Then today I followed a link to Not So OK, Boomers, on Pulp. Illustrated by Goya’s horrifying Saturn Devouring His Son, it ends with this:

Goya’s Saturn does not swallow his children whole, but has taken chunks out of the body, chewing off the head and the limbs.

The cannibalism Boomers are inflicting on us appears to be closer to Goya’s vision: deranged, irreversible, and violent. Unwilling to accept a world that goes on without them, they are gluttonously consuming resources.

Their own lives have been extended, but without any appreciable gains in quality of life, and so in their rage, their confusion, they poison the air and water, they raise our cortisol levels.

What do we do with the knowledge that our parents are actively trying to harm us but are incapable of accepting the suffering they’re inflicting?

Our response is going to have to be better than depression memes and the odd glib, ‘OK Boomer,’ if we’re going to survive.

That got 2,200 claps. So far.

So this time I responded, with this:

I like Pulp, perhaps because I’ve been young a long time. But this piece is worse than wrong. It’s cruel and inflammatory.

To see how, answer this: Is there moral difference between prejudice against a race, a gender, an ethnicity, a nationality—and a demographic? If there is, it’s one of degree, not one of kind.

As soon as you otherize any human category as a them vs. an us, you’re practicing the same kind of prejudice—and, at its worst, bigotry.

Try substituting the words “women” or “blacks” for the word “Boomers” in this piece, and you get the point.

Ageism may not be worse than sexism or racism, but it’s still an ism, good only for amplifying itself, which seems to be the purpose of this piece.

Read the closing paragraphs again and ask what kind of action the author calls for that would be proportional to the cannibalism he accuses Boomers of inflicting on his generation.

And then hope it doesn’t happen.

That got 10 claps. So far.

But what the hell, I’ll continue.

If young people want to understand old people (which Boomers are, or soon will be) I suggest this: imagine that if a fifth, then a quarter, then a third, then half, and then most of the people you grew up or worked with in your life—friends, cousins, co-workers, classmates—are now dead. And that meanwhile you’re putting your useful experience and wisdom to work as best you can while you’re still able, knowing that, too soon at any age, you’ll be gone too.

There’s no shit you can give a person like that, sitting on the short end of life’s death row, that can measure up to their intimate familiarity with mortality, and with the work they still face, most of which they’ll never finish. So an “OK Boomer” put-down isn’t going to bother most of them.

But it’s still shit. Or worse.

We can all do better than that.

 

 

05 Dec 03:20

Twitter Favorites: [SarahC_Toronto] Wear reflective clothes and make eye contact with drivers, but also look straight up whenever you're around tall bu… https://t.co/KZIx3Yooiv

Sarah Climenhaga @SarahC_Toronto
Wear reflective clothes and make eye contact with drivers, but also look straight up whenever you're around tall bu… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
05 Dec 03:20

Twitter Favorites: [EFF] Celebrating Certbot 1.0 -- the app that's helping encrypt the web is out of beta and ready to improve your Internet… https://t.co/4MdMHqHxN9

EFF @EFF
Celebrating Certbot 1.0 -- the app that's helping encrypt the web is out of beta and ready to improve your Internet… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
05 Dec 03:20

Twitter Favorites: [megan_gamble] If you haven’t cried in public lately, I can recommend the 1998 Esquire article that is the basis of the new Mr. Ro… https://t.co/vKz8W0HCC4

Megan Gamble @megan_gamble
If you haven’t cried in public lately, I can recommend the 1998 Esquire article that is the basis of the new Mr. Ro… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
05 Dec 03:19

Updates on Firefox Private Network

by Rizki Kelimutu

Hi SUMO Community,

Following up on our previous announcement about Firefox Private Network, today marks another milestone for Firefox. We are so excited to expand Firefox Private Network into two different offerings.

Browser-level protection (Extension for any desktop running the Firefox browser)

We are continuing our beta testing of the Firefox Private Network extension that we released earlier this year. The extension hides your Firefox browsing activity and location. This prevents eavesdroppers on public Wi-Fi from spying on the actions you take online by masking your IP address and routing your traffic through our partner’s secure servers. It also protects you from internet service providers collecting or selling data on your browsing activity. And it hides your locations from websites and data collectors that profile you to target ads.

There will be no changes for test pilots who have already started using the extension by logging in with their Firefox account. For those who are not yet using the extension, we invite you to join the Test Pilot program and try it out. When you sign up or log in with a Firefox account and become one of our beta testers, you’ll get 12 hours of protected browsing for free this month. We are continuing to explore the best way to deliver browser-level protection to our users and we welcome your feedback and input each step of the way.

Get extra security by using full-device protection (Windows 10)

If you are looking for unlimited private internet connection that goes beyond the Firefox browser, we are also offering full-device protection with Firefox Private Network. Firefox Private Network full-device protection is a device-level VPN that provides an encrypted tunnel to the web from any software or app on your Windows 10 device.That means your connection is secure and private regardless of which browser or application you are using.

Private Network’s full-device protection is currently available for beta testers in the United States with Windows 10 devices, but it will be available on other platforms soon. You can join the waitlist for the VPN beta here. Selected users will receive an invitation to subscribe for 4.99 USD per month with a U.S. credit card during the beta period.

How can I help as a SUMO contributor?

For the SUMO community, it’s important to understand that we now have two separate products for both services in the Kitsune platform. In addition to that, we also offer another level of support for the paying customers of the Firefox Private Network device-level protection that will be delivered through a ticketing system called Zendesk. As such, both the forums and also Zendesk will be managed by our designated staff member, Brady. However, as with the previous beta phase, we will also welcome any help you may provide for the users in the forum. We are also working on an escalation process from the community to the designated staff member, so expect more updates on that.

We are enthusiastic about this new opportunity and hope that you’ll support us along the way. To get the best out of Firefox experience, sign up for a Firefox Account and join our fight to keep the internet open and accessible to all!

05 Dec 03:19

Why I Listen to Podcasts at 1x Speed

On my microblog I mentioned that I always listen to podcasts at 1x speed.

Here’s why:

We’re in danger, I think, of treating everything as if it’s some measure of our productivity. Number of steps taken, emails replied-to, articles read, podcasts listened-to.

While accomplishing things — or just plain getting our work done — is important, it’s also important that not everything go in that bucket. The life where everything is measured is not really a full life: we need room for the un-measured, the not-obsessed-about, the casual, the fun-for-fun’s sake.

So I’m in no hurry. I will never, ever be caught up on all the podcasts I’d like to listen to. So, instead, I just play whatever I feel like whenever I feel like listening.

I’ll miss things, and that’s totally fine. But, in the meantime, I get to listen to the human voice somewhat close to realistically, with its the natural human pauses, with its rhythms and flows relatively unmediated and natural. Its warmth and music means so much more to me than being caught up.

But, again — I’m not saying this is right for you. But I would remind people that we have choices about what falls under productivity and what doesn’t.

05 Dec 03:19

The government paid me $23.00 to register my car...

by peter@rukavina.net (Peter Rukavina)

I took the new Kia Soul EV to Access PEI to register it and I left with a new plate sticker, a new registration slip, and $23.00.

This is because registration for electric vehicles is free, and I’d already paid up for a year’s worth of non-electric registration expiring in April.

So the government paid me to register my car.

(Okay, they actually refunded me $23.00 I’d previously paid them…).

There was a small panic at the counter when my helpful clerk, who’d never encountered this odd situation before, worried that it would throw her ability to balance her daily accounts out of whack, but she was assured all would be okay.

$23.00

05 Dec 03:15

flk: A LISP that runs wherever Bash is

flk: A LISP that runs wherever Bash is

This is a heck of a project: an implementation of LISP written entirely in Bash, meaning you can run it as a script on any machine that has a Bash installation.

Via Hacker News

05 Dec 03:14

The Filter And The Fountain

by Richard Millington

Your community should filter out all but the essential topic news and save everyone time.

A single roundup of new product information, major announcements, and key events can do this well. Members can submit news, but you filter it to just the essential.

You’re not sharing anything new, you’re just making it easier for everyone to digest. That’s valuable.

But while your community should be a filter for the topic, it should be a fountain for the sector.

It should be the single source of news about who’s rising in the field, the latest successes of members, and what’s new or popular at any given time.

Your community should be the single best place for your members to find what people like themselves are doing. Heck, it will usually be the only place for this kind of content and information.

Call for more case studies, more field reports from members, and as many updates of what people in your field are doing as possible. You can have a people on the move section, milestones achieved area, call for blog posts, and even a gossip section.

Filter news about the topic and become a fountain of news about the sector.

05 Dec 03:13

"Roam Research" -- New web-based personal wiki - tightbeam

Really ought to point out that NotePlan is Mac-only.

MadaboutDana wrote:
It’s worth mentioning, incidentally, that the exceptionally
>brilliant NotePlan supports wiki-style links and gives you a smart
>dropdown list of links as soon as you type your double-brackets. This
>combines with the automatic dropdown list of tags that appears as soon
>as you type a hashtag. Oh, and Eduard has just introduced smart folders
>(well, saved smart searches - effectively the same thing). The
>combination is awesomely powerful.
>
>Eduard has also promised folding in the near future. He’s a gem!
>
>For my personal task management, I’m a total convert to NotePlan.
>I mean I haven’t even been tempted by anything else for months!
>
>Not least because you can edit NotePlan’s markdown notes (in both
>the Calendar and Notes categories) using any Markdown editor. So if
>you’re caught short without NotePlan, but have access to iCloud,
>you can change things directly. It also means all data is easily
>transferable elsewhere in the exceptionally unfortunate event that
>NotePlan suddenly ceases to exist.
>
>Cheers!
>Bill
05 Dec 03:13

Apple News Debuts Daily Email Newsletter

by Ryan Christoffel

Benjamin Mayo, reporting for 9to5Mac:

Apple News is expanding its mail notifications with a new ‘Good Morning’ daily newsletter. Previously, users could opt in to receive email alerts from Apple News about select featured stories. The company appears to be formalizing that into a regular daily newsletter.

If you were already signed up to receive emails from Apple News, you’ll now receive this new daily newsletter; personally, I never cared for the previous emails focusing on featured stories, but this newsletter looks more suited to my interests, so I’ve just signed up. Here’s how the first new email describes itself:

Welcome to the new Apple News email, now coming to your inbox every morning with top news, smart analysis, and fascinating features. We’ll bring you the best stories from the most trusted sources — everything you need to be informed (and entertained) as you start your day. Enjoy!

Apple News used to have a digest section where, at different times during the day, you could get a quick overview of several important stories of the day in a similar curated fashion to what this newsletter represents. The digest disappeared following the debut of Apple News+, which is a shame because it was one of my favorite features of the app. I’m hopeful this newsletter will serve as an adequate replacement, despite not being quite as convenient as the in-app digest.

If you’d like to start receiving the newsletter, or you’re already subscribed but don’t like the idea of a daily email, you can visit appleid.apple.com and adjust your email subscriptions from the ‘Messages from Apple’ page.

→ Source: 9to5mac.com

05 Dec 03:12

CBS shows Mark Zuckerberg is a human. Does that matter?

by Josh Bernoff

CBS This Morning did a profile taking viewers inside the home of Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan. It was a big wet smooch. Will this help Zuckerberg and Facebook? Sure. Now we know that rather than being a robot with an evil product, he’s a human. Every CEO has an image, and tech … Continued

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05 Dec 03:08

Huawei to move research centre from U.S. to Canada

by Shruti Shekar

Huawei is planning to move its research centre from the U.S. to Canada, the company’s founder said in an interview with the Globe and Mail.

Ren Zhengfei said the company’s “centre for research and development will be moved out of the United States. And that will be relocated to Canada.”

He also added that some mobile network equipment will be manufactured out of China.

Reuters recently reported that the U.S. government might use its power to stop foreign shipments of U.S. products to Huawei.

Citing two anonymous sources, the article indicated that the government intends to extend these rules even though the Trump Administration recently agreed to grant some licences to U.S.-based companies. Microsoft confirmed it was among hundreds that applied and was approved.

U.S. President Donald Trump placed Huawei on an Entity List in May, banning the company from working with any U.S.-based companies. In June, the Commerce Department indicated that it would issue conditional licences.

If rules are now changed again, it would mean that the U.S. would be able to regulate sales of non-sensitive items, Reuters noted. That could include standard cell phone chips that are made outside of the U.S. but are made by U.S.-based companies.

Reuters noted that the U.S. intends to look at the De minimis Rule, which determines whether or not the U.S. government can control exports of products that are made outside of the U.S. but by U.S.-based companies.

The U.S. might also be looking at expanding content in the Direct Product Rule, which requires companies that make technology based on U.S. technology to follow U.S. regulations.

Source: Globe and Mail, Reuters

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05 Dec 03:07

Motorola says it will re-enter the premium smartphone market

by Bradly Shankar

Motorola has confirmed that it will once again develop premium smartphones.

The company made the announcement at the Qualcomm Snapdragon Tech Summit in Maui. In recent years, the Lenovo-owned company has shifted to making more affordable mid-range phones, such as the G6, G7 and One Vision.

“Motorola will continue leading the 5G era with our expanded lineup of 5G solutions in 2020 — driven by the high-performing Snapdragon 765 and 865 Mobile Platforms, reinvigorating our place in the premium flagship space,” said Motorola president Sergio Buniac at the summit.

The 765 and 865 were revealed earlier at the summit, with the former confirmed to feature 5G connectivity and advanced AI processing, while the latter is set to power the next “next generation of flagship devices.” Motorola’s upcoming high-end smartphones will use the 865, but otherwise, nothing else is currently known about the devices.

MobileSyrup will have more from the Qualcomm Snapdragon Tech Summit later this week.

Via: 9t05Google

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05 Dec 03:07

Firefox now has picture-in-picture video support on Windows

by Aisha Malik

Mozilla has released support for picture-in-picture video viewing on Firefox for Windows with the launch of Firefox 71.

Picture-in-picture allows users to keep watching a video while browsing through different tabs. When you’re watching a video, you now just have to hover your mouse over the video and a blue-coloured “Picture-in-Picture” option will appear.

“Picture-in-Picture allows a video to be contained in a separate and small window, and still be viewable whether you switch from tab-to-tab or outside the Firefox browser,” Mozilla wrote in a blog post.

The feature is currently only available on Windows OS. Mozilla says picture-in-picture support will be available on macOS and Linux in January 2020.

Image credit: Mozilla

Source: Mozilla 

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