Putting it all on the table
OUR MOBILE DEVICES CONTAIN A SIZABLE CHUNK OF OUR LIFES NOW, AND THEY LEAK LIKE A SIEVE. It’s your phone, your email reader, your connection to Facebook and Twitter, your camera, and so much more. The average smartphone user uses 25-30 apps, and has many more than that installed. Do you know what they all do, or who they share data with? And what happens if someone else gets your phone?
SURFING THE WEB EXPOSES A LOT OF INFORMATION ABOUT YOU. Even before you get a warning about a site wanting to access location information, or anything protected, your web browser is broadcasting a lot more information than you realize. Getting that under control is a step that anyone can do, regardless of how far down the path you want to go to anonymity, and will not take very much effort at all.
PASSWORDS SUCK, SO DON’T MAKE THEM WORSE. Remember the days when we used the same password for every site? Was it yesterday? It’s time to get serious about managing your access tokens for everything. This isn’t going to be as easy as typing your dog’s name into every password prompt, but it will give you peace of mind.
JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE PARANOID DOESN’T MEAN EVERYONE ISN’T OUT TO GET YOU. Nobody wants to be constantly looking over their shoulder, wondering if their kids are secretly informing on them to some three-letter agency. I’m not going to get into whether or not you should trust people, as I’m more interested here in not trusting computers. Being paranoid means being suspicious, examining systems and actions and getting creative about all the ways they can be used to keep tabs on us.
THE DEFINITION OF SURVEILLANCE IS “CLOSE OBSERVATION”. When you’re working with privacy and security, this is basically the thing you are trying to avoid – someone watching what you are doing. Before we get into the nuts and bolts of how to be more anonymous, we need to understand how surveillance works in a digital world.
WE’RE ABOUT TO MAKE ANOTHER HUGE CHANGE FOR OUR FAMILY. Many who know us know that we have had a contentious relationship with the public school system, and this has been the last time I will try to make it work. We always thought that we should make public school work, because both Marcy and I went to public school and we turned out fine. We always treated private schools as a second choice for when there was a serious problem. It has become clear now that public school is not what it was 25 years ago, and it still...
I’M NOT SURE WHAT I’M LOOKING FOR, BUT AT LEAST I’M CLOSER TO KNOWING WHAT IT IS NOT. I’ve often had a bit of a tortured relationship with my career. More so since I became a husband and father, I’ve been taking a more critical look at my life because some days I think it’s OK, but most of the time it seems like there’s something wrong. I know it’s not my wife, and it’s not my kids: those are things that are definitely right. It’s hard to put my finger on, because by most measurements I should be happy...
I RAN MY FIRST 5K RACE ON SATURDAY. There’s actually a lot more to this story than completing a race, but just like my PRs, I have to start somewhere. I came to the race expecting to run most of it and walk about 3 or 4 minutes in the middle, and left with a very different result that amazed me.
I BELIEVE IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM. I think it can succeed, educate our children, and be the best choice. But what we have now is just a political leftover: something they slice a little more off of whenever they need to reduce a budget number and something the affluent, which most of our politicians are, rarely remember is not a choice for most people. I was educated in a public school system, but my children will not be after this week.
