First: How to Safely Clean Your iPhone With Disinfecting Wipes (seems to work for Android, too)
Second: Keep Facebook Off Your Trail (a Firefox solution)
The previous post made mention of how an overnight wind and snow storm brought down our residential internet connection. Here, we see the repair team — a grizzled gray-hair and what appears to be a wet-behind-the-ears trainee — attack and resolve the problem, tracing the outage from our house to cabling extending across the street to a utility pole connection.
[rDay Seventeen-Hundred-Fifty-Eight]
Kashmir Hill, writing in today’s New York Times, tells us about the secret consumer score and how to (maybe) get yours.
Does this remind you at all of China’s social citizenship credit system?
Use an iPhone? Beware of Lightning cables that look legit but allow hackers to take over your computer. Read this.
Facebook and Instagram vulnerabilities and privacy flaws are revealed.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/private-instagram-posts-arent-exactly-private
This photograph accompanied a news article today on the formation of the U.S. Space Command. A familiar sight I readily recognized: the night launch of a missile or spacecraft launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base (near Lompoc, California). In an assignment during my early GAO investigative career, I spent a few months in 1965-1966 at Vandenberg, where such spectacles were frequent. Most of the test shots were aimed “down range” toward the Kwajalein atoll in the Pacific. Learn more about Vandenberg here.
Some reads of interest:
SLATE: “Why I Printed My Facebook”
NEW YORK TIMES: “I Visited 47 Sites. Hundreds
of Trackers Followed Me.”
Tonight’s NYT gives us a piece that can serve as a follow-on to our post earlier today. Read the article, “Ransomware Attacks Are Testing Resolve of Cities Across America“.
A useful new article was linked this morning in one of my tech newsletters. The writer says: “Ransomware is everything bad about humanity distilled into malware—maliciousness, greed, and casual incompetence.” Yes, ransomware is one of those modern scourges — along with climate change, trade wars, impending economic collapse, foolish and divisive political leaders, and more — that we need to add to our list of apocalyptic existential threats for which we must learn how to take mitigating and hopefully preventative measures.
2. And yet another Facebook connection: https://www.pbs.org/video/risky-bets-1565730682/
A little side note: I must confess that only one computer in our household is currently experimenting with some of the potentially more benign tools like the Brave browser and DuckDuckGo searches.