Kyle Rankin @kyle@librem.one

It's fun to be a dad, you get to give your kid the toys you wish you got on your own birthday.

I recently sat down with Brent Gervais for his Brunch with Brent show. We covered topics ranging from my history with @linuxjournal and @purism, safety razors, how #FOSS ideals shape how I approach #infosec, and the current culture clash in the Linux community.

https://extras.show/73

With Twitter and now Facebook legitimizing permanent remote work I suspect we'll see others follow suit with a strong impact on Bay Area economics. So much highly-paid talent only moved here because a tech job required it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/21/facebook-permanent-remote-work/

I can't believe it's already been six months since we announced our anti-interdiction services! This service has been full of surprises and in this post I talk about some of the things I've learned while painting laptops with glitter nail polish.
https://puri.sm/posts/anti-interdiction-update-six-month-retrospective/

Interesting #privacy conflict: some governments and health officials are upset with Google and Apple because they won't share the location data their contract tracing apps collect. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/15/app-apple-google-virus/

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")