Thirty days, thirty posts: I successfully completed Microblogvember! All my posts are tagged with ‘Microblogvember’ on my blog. All fiction (as far as I know, at least), all in the general SF/fantasy/horror spaces. This was a fun project!
Tech
Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.
Amazon’s Ring Considering Facial Recognition
Ring just gets creepier and creepier. While the basic home security idea isn’t bad, the implementation, especially when combined with the (existing or just discussed) partnerships with law enforcement, giving them unfettered access to the video captured by the cameras, is really, really disturbing.
(I have friends who have Ring cameras, some of whom have been very glad to have them when weird things have happened at their place. I don’t want to discount the benefits that these systems can provide. But for people who have been considering a Ring system, it’s worth thinking seriously about the potential wider concerns with the system and considering other options; for those who do have a Ring system, it might be worth reviewing the settings to see how much, if any, of the data sharing can be opted out of.)
In its public-relations efforts, Ring has maintained that only thieves and would-be criminals need to worry about the company’s surveillance network and the Neighbors app. From the way Ring’s products are designed to the way they’re marketed, the notion of “suspicion” remains front and center; Ring promises a future in which “suspicious” people up to “suspicious” things can be safely monitored and deterred from afar.
But “suspicious” is an entirely squishy concept with some very potentially dangerous interpretations, a byword of dog-whistling neighborhood racists who hope to drape garden-variety prejudice beneath the mantle of public safety. The fact remains that anyone moving past a home equipped with Ring cameras is unavoidably sucked into a tech company dragnet, potential fodder for overeager chatter among the suburban xenophobe set. To civil libertarians, privacy scholars, and anyone generally nervous about the prospect of their neighbors forming a collective, artificially intelligent video panopticon maintained by Amazon for unregulated use by police, Ring’s potential consequences for a community are clear.
A “proactive” approach to information sharing could mean flagging someone who happens to cross into a Ring video camera’s frame based on some cross-referenced list of “suspects,” however defined. Paired with the reference to a facial recognition watch list and Ring’s generally cozy relationship with local police departments across the country, it’s easy to imagine a system in which individuals are arbitrarily profiled, tracked, and silently reported upon based on a system owned and operated solely by Amazon, without legal recourse or any semblance of due process.
Me: 1, Apple Support: 0 (So far…)
Today’s morning entertainment: Stumping Apple support.
Long story short (if I can manage that…(spoiler: I can’t)):
Sometime in the early 2000s, I signed up for Apple’s then-new iTools service (later rebranded as .Mac, and then MobileMe), and was issued an @mac.com account and email address.
Over time, that service became what is now AppleID, and while I at some unremembered point stopped using my original @mac.com email address, it carried on as my AppleID account name.
I’ve noticed on and off for quite some time now (as in, years) that I haven’t been getting receipts from iTunes (or the iOS or Mac App Stores), and had a vague idea in my head that it might be because they were getting sent to the old @mac.com address instead of an actual active email address, but it was never important enough for me to be concerned about. Every so often I’d get curious and poke around in the settings on my hardware or the online tools, fail to find a way to fix it, and then get bored or distracted and decide to figure it out “later”.
Well, “later” apparently ended up being this morning (as I’m suspecting that there may be more communications from Apple that I’m not receiving), so I ended up on the phone with an Apple support tech for close to an hour as I explained what I was sure of and what I suspected, and as they dug around in their tools to see what they could figure out. End result: I’m probably right in my guess, but they’re stumped as to why they couldn’t find any way to fix it, or even be entirely sure that that was what was actually going on, in large part because all the @mac.com servers and systems have been offline for years.
So they’re going to write my case notes up, bump them up to the next level and the backend engineering team, and hope to be able to get back to me next week. Best case scenario, they’ll be able to make sure that all communications get sent to an active email address as they should. The more probable (and hopefully worst-case) scenario is that I’ll have to change my AppleID — which they think will fix the issue, because that old @mac.com address won’t be in the system even as an account name anymore, but would be a bit of a shame, since I’ve had that account name for close to two decades now, and it would be kind of a shame to lose it. But still, if it’s breaking things, I’d rather lose that than continue not receiving information I should be getting out of silly nostalgia.
All in all, it’s an entertaining situation, the tech was friendly and competent (and entertainingly confused), and this obviously isn’t a high-priority issue for me, so I’m content to wait to see what information they come up with.
Plus, the way I look at it, I bought my first personal Mac in 1991, and after almost three decades of Mac geeking, if I’m going to get to the point of calling Apple support, it’s going to be for a damn good reason. :)
BHOF, not BOFH
Odd/amusing side effect of having been interested in geeky things for decades, and also having a number of friends and acquaintances in the local burlesque scene:
Though greatly separated both temporally and contextually, about half the time I see someone post about the BHOF (Burlesque Hall of Fame), my brain first sees BOFH (Bastard Operator From Hell) and takes a brief moment to recalibrate.
Hear what a genderless AI voice sounds like—and consider why it matters. This is really neat, both in the science of how it was created, and in its potential for broader applicability if the companies behind voice assistants adopt it.
It seems it came out a few months ago, but I just found out that Affinity Designer, Serif’s alternative to Adobe InDesign, is now in free beta status. I’m already a fan of Affinity Photo and Designer (alternatives to Photoshop and Illlustrator), so this is a nice find.
A thought I’ve had on occasion, and has resurfaced thanks to India’s anti-satellite test threatening the ISS: What if the reason we’ve never heard from an alien race is that they all ended up with so much orbital junk that they can’t safely leave their planet anymore?
A map of the entire internet from May 1973, the month I was born. Originally posted by David Newbury, who found it in old papers acquired from his dad.
Kottke points out that those circles and squares “represent individual computers and routers, not universities or cities.”
Still in the very early stages, but in an effort to combat the website ennui I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve started playing with building a new personal site at a URL so clever I wish I’d picked it up years ago: michaelhans.com. Not much there, but a new playground is nice!
Website (not blogging) Ennui
I’m not really happy with my website — I’m tired of WordPress, and ‘view source’ just makes me cringe at all the junk, cruft, and JavaScript bogging down what could and should be relatively simple, clean, HTML/CSS — but I don’t know how to reinvigorate it in a way I like.
I don’t want to entirely stop blogging, nor do I want to lose all the stuff that’s here already, or break existing URLs.
I’ve been looking into various flat-file or static CMS backends, and though grav is the one that most caught my eye, it (as far as I can tell) would mean losing the ability to post through micro.blog or any other third-party app that uses the MetaWeblog API, which would make spur-of-the-moment posts more difficult.
Even if I did resign myself to only adding posts through the admin UI (or by FTPing in to manually build the folder/file structure that grav uses), if I figured out how to import all my past entries from WordPress (this might do it), I haven’t been able to find a way to tweak the URL structure, which means I’d probably have to figure out how to generate a huge .htaccess file to handle the 5,170 or so redirects so I didn’t break any existing URLs. I may not get linked to a lot, but it happens occasionally, and I’d prefer not to 404 those.
(Plus, as I was playing with grav, I kept getting blank screens where I should have been getting post entry or edit screens, which…well, not sure if that’s a grav issue, a Safari browser issue, or some other issue, but it didn’t bode well.)
Other backends either looked too complex for my current needs/skills/available time (I just don’t have the time or impetus to try to learn Jekyll, which kept popping up), or didn’t fully support Markdown at all or enough, or had one or another thing that made them feel “not right” for me.
Really, what I’d kind of like to do is go back to hand-coding my site, so I have full control over the HTML/CSS (even if it looks like crap, it’ll look like my crap…so to speak), only to still be able to blog easily using micro.blog or Ulysses or other such tools. Not sure that’s really a possibility, though.
In the end, this isn’t much more than a bit of whinging and trying to figure out what exactly I’m looking for. But if anyone actually 1) reads this, and 2) has a magical solution for all my woes, I’d be happy to hear it!