Today’s geeky triumph: Figuring out how to use Automator to create a service that pipes selected text through pandoc to speed up converting old posts on my blog to proper markdown format from the current HTML/markdown hodepodge.
Tech
Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.
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!
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!