Kyle Rankin @kyle@librem.one

Brewing a double IPA today and opted to save money by buying grain in bulk. Didn't think about the fact that meant I had to crush 16# of barley by hand with my grain mill. #armday

@jameshjacksonjr I put my smartwatch in a drawer a few months ago and went back to an analog watch and it was amazing the effect the smartwatch had on my brain. I'm much more peaceful now, but it took a few weeks to fix all the impulses my smartwatch trained into me.

@leimon I did enjoy the first season! In particular I liked not only the pre-crime elements, but also the overall surveillance of mental and emotional state, and their plot device of linking police use of force with real-time mental and emotional state.

Yet an Entourage isn't just an assistant. They also *monitor* their human, warn them when their behavior falls outside of society norms, remind them of rules, and report them to the authorities.

So the Entourage is simultaneously a very helpful assistant *and* a tool of the state to keep a person in line. It's hard not to see parallels in Apple's client-side scanning of Photos, messages, and search queries for contraband.

While I don't watch much anime, I'm a sucker for anything in a cyberpunk universe. I'm rewatching Ergo Proxy and this week's Apple Child Safety news reminded me of a concept in the show.

There are androids called "autoreivs" in this dystopian future. One type is called an Entourage and it is assigned to a particular human. They are a personal assistant and follow the person around, chauffeur, and even act as a bodyguard.

“The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the crown. It may be frail – its roof may shake – the wind may blow through it – the storm may enter – the rain may enter – but the King of England cannot enter.” https://puri.sm/posts/your-phone-is-your-castle/

I wonder whether China will compel Apple to add hashes of "tank man" to their contraband database for iPhones sold within the country.

I was going to write something up about Apple's new child safety features, but the @EFF post on the subject covers what I would have wanted to say, better than I could say it. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/apples-plan-think-different-about-encryption-opens-backdoor-your-private-life

Apple protects residents' privacy by having robots strip search them first. Humans only do strip searches after the robot finds something suspicious.

iPhone users don't live in a walled garden, they live in a digital nursing home. They are well taken care of, but Apple controls the property, activities and visitors. Apple plans to search residents regularly for contraband. #privacy https://www.apple.com/child-safety/

Every time I work with Fedora's anaconda installer, Baby Got Back goes through my head. Every. Time.

If I were still writing for Linux Journal (or had an equivalent outlet today), I'd write a long form piece on why years ago, after a successful career as a sysadmin, I pivoted my career over to security. https://s.usenix.org/acton/media/2452/lisa-community-announcement

@ajmartinez Pun always intended.

Amazon will pay you $10 to join their palm pilot. You really have to hand it to them... #privacy
https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/02/amazon-credit-palm-biometrics/

Sending some love out to https://covid.com in what must have been a really tough year and a half.

@ajmartinez Possibly. I don't know the details except that we are continue to work on it. These keyboard features ended up being a lower priority than some of the power management stuff that took precedence, but now it looks like we are getting to it.

@ajmartinez Insert support is coming: https://source.puri.sm/firmware/librem-ec/-/commit/037613658dd880e267901dc774ea78d01ee92306

@dncn I also recently came back to RSS because Feeds is now adaptive so it works on my Librem 5. The mobile form factor has always made the most sense, for me, to consume news, but I had always been reluctant to set up news feeds on Android because I didn't want it tracking me. It's so nice to use RSS again.