I recently went backpacking on the Appalachian Trail in Massachusetts.
One of the reasons I go out is to “get away”, to go “off the grid”, to
enjoy nature and get away from adds, trackers, social media, etc.
But a funny thing happened at my last campsite. There was a camera
strapped to a tree taking my picture every time I put my food in or
out of the “bear box”. The sign on the camera, in addition to asking
us not disturb the camera (duct tape, anyone ?) assured us that they
were only using the images to track bear activity at the campsite and
the images would be destroyed after being used for their intended
purpose. Right. They would not be fed to facial recognition
software, and the results would not be passed to law enforcement.
Right.
In this world where Big Internet firms track you to sell you stuff
(and to sell YOU), big Government tracks you because, well, they can,
and where I found myself on a motion activated camera when backpacking
alone in the “backcountry” in an attempt to “get away from it all”,
I’ve spend some time thinking about privacy.
Life is short. I could spend a lot of time registering domain names,
managing certificates, running my own mail server, de-googling,
convincing my friends and family to use nifty new security and privacy
apps, and generally fighting the privacy fight as an individual
against entire well-funded industries and governments. Or I could
just live my life secure in the knowledge that Google and Amazon know
what I’m thinking of purchasing even before I do.
1500 miles down, 700 to go to finish section hiking the Appalachian
Trail with 215 miles completed this year in 3 trips.
Of course, I have some of the hardest miles left: the Smokies,
Mt. Washington, the Whites, the Presidentials, the Bigelows, but with
persistence, luck, health, constant gear tweaks (and some HARD hiking)
I should finish in a few years.
When talking about Internet assets we often confuse “What is it?”, “Is
it bad?” and “What should I do about it?”. This write-up intends to
show why it is important to keep those questions and answers to them
separate.
Below I show an editing session that uses basic /bin/ed commands.
/bin/ed is the standard Unix Editor
ed was written round 1969. It’s still here. grep comes from
/bin/ed: g/re/p works as an ed command to search *g*lobally for a
*re*gular expression and *p*rint the matching lines. ed commands
will be familiar to users of sed, as sed is the “stream editor”
with a very similar set of commands. ed commands will be familiar to
vi users. If you type “:” in vi, you get, basically, an ed prompt.
You can type ed commands (see below) and they work. “vi” is the
“visual interface” to ed (or one of it’s successors). Though I am a
die hard emacs user, often when I just want to do a quick edit or take
some note I just fire up /bin/ed and go….
1 Videns autem Jesus turbas, ascendit in montem...
or, roughly (my translation):
Jesus, however, seeing the crowd/mob/political disturbance went up on
the mountain...
The word “turba” per my paper dictionary tends towards a crowd that is
politically disturbed. It can also mean an eddy (water) or a child’s
spinning top. Per https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/turba#Latin it means…
It’s got a thing where you can pop in a sentence (say, one form Cicro
or random #Latin conversations on twitter (yes, they exist)), and you
can click on the words (yellow above), it shows you all the possible
words that particular inflected word might be and then offers to build
flash cards for you…complete with citations/examples from the
literature….I know what my Latin reading tool is from here on out.
I’ve been listening to “The History of Rome” podcast recently. There
is nothing new under the sun: Plagues (er, “pandemics”), riots,
xenophobia, wars, greed, ambition, and political factions.
It’s filling in a lot of gaps and details for me. I would recommend
if you’re interested in history. Today’s basic problems are not new.
Figure 1: Life-Size Lego Roman Soldier, Lego Store, Rome, 2019
