Kyle Rankin @kyle@librem.one

So please be careful out there, whatever your politics.

Following #COVID-19 medical advice is a partisan issue in the US now. The virus is non-partisan, but if one party engages in riskier behavior resulting in more deaths among its members, recent elections have been close enough that it could impact the outcome in November.

To the best of our knowledge, the #Librem5 is the only smartphone around with a OpenPGP smart card reader. In this post I talk about why that's such a big deal: https://puri.sm/posts/your-own-personal-enclave-the-smart-card-reader-on-the-librem-5/

Twitter led the migration of tech orgs from the rest of the Bay Area north into SF. I suspect many will follow their lead to a distributed workforce w/o SF's high cost of living. Big implications for SF economy mid-term.

Surveillance vendor NSO Group pitched hacking tools to US police forces that would "turn your target's smartphone into an intelligence gold mine" #privacy #infosec https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8899nz/nso-group-pitched-phone-hacking-tech-american-police

It doesn't have to be this way. Messaging isn't complicated. We solved this more than a decade ago. You have five incompatible messaging apps on your phone because greed drives companies to ignore compatibility and optimize for vendor lock-in. https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/lessons-vendor-lock-messaging

Internet messaging is so broken that FB alone owns 3 incompatible apps. Google has *6*, not counting the ones they canceled: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/google-unifies-messenger-teams-plans-more-coherent-vision/

How many more cloud-connected devices have to turn into bricks before people realize they don't own the hardware, they only rent it? https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/05/wink-smart-hub-users-get-one-weeks-notice-to-pay-up-or-lose-access/

So @Sonic's gigabit fiber is so fast that I couldn't perform an accurate speed test in Qubes because Xen network virtualization overhead capped my speeds. ~250Mbps in a dispvm, ~500 in sys-net, ~980 on a different Linux computer.

Update: I'm 400 pages in and it's quite the page turner! I never heard people say that about War and Peace, so either most read it when they are too young to appreciate it, or all the Gibbon and Durant has changed my threshold for "page turner" #whynotboth #itsreallygoodtho

My brain is weird. I walk past a bowl of soup on the kitchen table and immediately a soup-based parody of Salt-n-Pepa's Shoop enters my head. ("Girls what's my weakness?" "Ramen!" "OK then")

Sourdough schmourdough.

This kind of patronizing remote control isn't limited to IT and management. Many tech companies, in the name of security, exercise the same kind of remote control over your computers without your permission. I wrote about the phenomenon here: https://puri.sm/posts/consent-matters-when-tech-takes-remote-control-without-your-permission/

Managers who could only measure productivity by butts-in-seats are turning to surveillance software and always-on webcams to measure butts-in-seats at home. If you don't trust your employees and can't measure their productivity, maybe you are the problem. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/30/work-from-home-surveillance/

Well that's pretty encouraging. It looks like when people are better informed about #privacy trade-offs and must opt-in, instead of being forced to opt-out, many prefer the privacy-preserving option. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/half-of-americans-wont-trust-contact-tracing-apps-new-poll-finds/

Here's one in likely many #IoT startups that go out of business from #COVID-19, leaving customers with bricked hardware. Vendor lock-in from cloud-dependent devices using proprietary APIs causes so much e-waste when those services eventually go away. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/after-prolonged-service-outage-petnet-shuts-down-citing-coronavirus/

Many of the #infosec arguments in the encryption backdoor debate (life-or-death, manpower vs automation, tech ineffectiveness, #privacy + freedom vs benefit, govt. + big tech power) apply to #COVID-19 app tracking debate, but with many ppl changing sides.

As an update to this, @purism published a video to demonstrate how hardware kill switches work in practice to enable your webcam and microphone only during meetings, not the rest of the time your laptop is aimed at your living room or bedroom. https://youtu.be/gw1M9c3x4uQ