Author: Sammy G

So I have to post you about two things — the outcry regarding FB privacy abuses, and the state’s political response in response to that outcry.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-facebooks-employees-crisis-is-no-big-deal-1523314648

I don’t understand. You put your info and personal intimacies on FB. For years. For 10 years. Everything about yourself. For free. You do all this for free, putting your life online for 10 years. And then you complain when the internet service provider you’ve been using for free harvests your information? Like all of a sudden your privacy has been violated?

While privacy is at the forefront of the issue, the underlying tenet to me is the value of self-information and the value of the transfer of self-information by which that privacy is being asserted.

If you and I were in a coffee shop, and we were trying to have a private conversation, and we noticed someone listening in and eavesdropping on our conversation…we’d kick their ass!!! But seriously, the coffee shop is a place where people barter exchange with the shop for food and drink. Except there’s something else going on. There’s space to sit and work and relax. There’s wifi. But you don’t have to buy something from the shop to use its internet connection or to sit or meet with others or to transact personal and private business. The coffee shop proprietor isn’t demanding you buy something to use its other various services.

So people in coffee shops all the time assemble in these private-public spaces and yammer away about sensitive personal details with everyone in ear’s distance hearing it. And this doesn’t even cover the supremely annoying people yammering away loudly on their phones.

FB is the internet’s coffee shop. And everyone is hanging out at this place a lot, A LOT, and yammering away about their personal lives, and accepting that since they’re not buying and have never bought anything from the food counter that the shop is making money by taking all that yammering, which is being given to it for free, and turning around and selling that yammering to advertisers.

When you give your data for free in exchange for service you assign an informational value of free to yourself. Your data and your privacy is worth free to you. That is what is implicit to me. The implicit statement is: my privacy and personal data is worth nothing because I am giving it freely to a service I am using while knowing that service makes money off of advertising from me giving my data and from me not asking anything in return from the service making money off my data.

That value exchange of self-information seems to me to be the same whether you stop in the shop one time or stop in one time a minute. The rate of exchange remains the same. The transfer volume of self-informational doesn’t alter the value of the self-information being zero.

So you’ve been going to this coffee shop for some time and had a general chat one day about how hard it is to get your foot in your shoes and the very next day you show up and at the table you’re sitting is an advert for shoehorns and other fine accessories. And this goes on for a while until related ads start showing up the minute after you mention a specific topic. At what point do you get up and leave the coffee shop and never come back? Especially when you aren’t being forced to use this shop and there are other shops which provide similar service?

A year ago it became widely known that foreign nations were scraping data from this shop and buying political ads to influence the presidential election. Last month it became widely known that companies were indeed harvesting data from this shop to service those political persuasion campaigns.

Guess what? No one is leaving the coffee shop. A free and non-coerced civic polity continues to give away their data for free.

When something is free then you are the product. And you have assigned your own self-information to be worth $0. So either leave the shop and never go back, or keep going to the shop and know what you are in for. Because it’s not called PrivacyBook.

So, again, this is what I don’t understand. People put personal intimacies on FB for years. For free. And all of a sudden their privacy has been violated?

But then…something far far FAR worse happens. The government decides it must intervene and assert authority. Overstepping its role by somehow protecting people from their own lack of self-awareness. The government is not our Mom and Dad. The American people are not teenagers. The same thing happened when various levels of government tried to block the rise of Uber and AirBnB. Not only is society using these services but society is defending its right to exist by using it without reservation. So let them do it. If people have a problem with privacy violations, and there is no illegal activity taking place, then let the people work it out.

(Side note: it just shocks me that politicians, particularly conservative ones, would inject themselves into the fray by attacking a corporate juggernaut and cornerstone of the American economy. While the privacy issue does seem in some ways a media hype job, per the above WSJ article, I’m surprised a conservative administration and legislative leadership is letting this attack happen. But that’s today’s world when all you care about is votes and not principle.)

The bottom line is that I miss the community on Barnson.org. I understand my sentiment may not just be old-fashioned but a fossil emotion in the hyper-now digital world that is instantaneous, widespread engagement. But I don’t care. If FB went away tomorrow I wouldn’t miss 90% of the people who are my tagged ‘friends’ at that coffee shop. I miss this coffee shop. I miss the people I know and care about, and the quasi-privacy of our thoughtful, considerate conversation and debate within the back corner of the bigger shop that is the internet.

So I have to post you. I’m no Trump supporter but I did happen to hit the WP yesterday when the headline “Donald Trump suggests President Obama was involved with Orlando shooting” was live.

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSKCN0YZ2DA

I was way shocked. I couldn’t believe that to be true. So I went to view Trump’s speech and nowhere did Trump say, at all, that Obama was involved with the Orlando shooting.

Of course I don’t condone revoking press credentials. But I do observe how for the past several months the WP has been unusually harsh and increasingly biased towards and against Trump. The WP has gone from reporting the news to reporting their bias. My guess is the WP is doing this out of some internal crusade to protect journalism and defy those who would curtail a free press.

But that’s not the point of my posting you. The point is that I feel neither WP nor the Trump campaign realize how this continued siege of negative reporting HELPS Trump. I feel there are many people out there, the DC-dislikers, who consider the negative reporting to be coming from a source representative of a congressional institution they want to change. To these DC-dislikers, the WP is mainstream and legacy media feeding their enmity. The more negative the reports against Trump the more the DC-dislikers dig their heels into their minds and become more aligned with Trump. It’s a strange and warped psychological situation.

And basically I see two mistakes. I see the editorial mistake of the WP failing to report activity and static detail, almost allowing the aggressive virility of the late Hunter Thompson to seep into their writing. And I see the tactical mistake of the Trump campaign assessing a negative coercion power legacy media believes it still wields.

I’m wondering about solutions available to block incoming telemarketer calls, particularly technology solutions.

I am currently a Comcast residential subscriber (phone/internet/cable) receiving at least two inbound calls a day from telemarketers.

I registered with the National Do Not Call Registry. I ask the inbound telemarketers to remove us from their call list, but they laugh, and then keep calling. Asking nicely and depending on governmental non-enforcement doesn’t work.

I got in touch with Comcast to find out about technology solutions available to block incoming calls, since we only use the home phone for outgoing calls, as everyone in the house uses their cell as primary phone. My goal was to have Comcast activate a block for ALL incoming calls EXCEPT for a few specific numbers I could personally add to a safe list.

Comcast said this wasn’t possible.

Comcast’s best available solution was to initiate an Anonymous Call Rejection (block all anonymous calls), use a Selective Call Rejection (for up to 12 discreet numbers), and to revisit the National Do Not Call Registry.

Gee, thanks so much, Comcast. 12 numbers? Really? There’s one college telemarketer which calls from random numbers each time, varying up its number so that it can’t be blocked. And Anonymous Call Rejection won’t do the trick because I can see most of these inbound marketing calls have particular identities and are not simply ‘out of area’.

Wondering if anyone in the Barnson circle has another solution?

In years past we’ve kicked off summer by scribing our armchair methods for saving gas. Now that 100% of us remaining Barnsonites are child-rearing, Republican-fearing, SUV-wheeling road warriors, please allow me to inaugurate the 2011 summer season with a friendly list of ways to save on gas.

http://tinyurl.com/43eweet

This list is reportedly brought to us by the non-profit Consumer Federation of America, but when I read this list I can’t help but think it was ushered into the media by the very for-profit Auto Manufacturers Association. Especially the brake people.

Look, I don’t want to be the a*s*ole here, but I just wanted to review the facts and make sure I understand what I believe to be a misconstrued misplacement of national attention.

Last week, at Rutgers, a college freshman surreptitiously filmed his gay roommate on video making out with another guy and streamed the video online. Several days later the gay subject of the filming committed suicide. Charges were brought against the filming roommate for tampering of privacy.

Unless I missed something, I haven’t seen anything that gives the definitive reason this kid committed suicide. It could have been for any reason. It sure could have been for being ‘outed’ by his roommate in an embarrassing manner. It could have also been for unrequited love. It could have been because he was depressed. The national reaction has been a wave of ‘gay suicide’ rants; pleas about how teasing gay people leads to gay suicide. Hey USA: suicide is a matter for all teens. What is the annual number of gay teens committing suicide compared to the number of teens committing suicide? How many other teens commit suicide for being teased, regardless of their sexuality, eating disorder, etc.?

If we want to use this awful, particular circumstance to refocus the light on the heinous, perennial nature of teen suicide, then I hope the light delivers a harsh unveiling on a subject under-discussed in our daily stream of dialog. But given the lack of facts above, people are jumping to a conclusion to fit the en vogue nature of the gay culture issue, and micro-focusing that light only on a subset of teen troubles. It’s unfortunate because we’re talking about teen suicide.

Friends of the netherweb,

I’m looking for tried-and-true processes for enabling a new potential tech vendor access to my website without providing access at the web server level.

In the past, whenever getting first acquainted with a potential vendor, the need always arises for the potential vendor to actually look at the website before committing to a price or workload schedule. Also, a vendor is interested in seeing the site to ensure that they are familiar with the current systems and that their skill set is capable of executing the work.

Historically, I’ve given the vendor ‘root command’ access to the webserver. Once they’ve gone in and grabbed what they needed I’ve changed the primary password. Finally, when the vendor and I agree on terms and I feel comfortable with that particular vendor, I give them the new password. This is kind of silly on multiple levels.

Thus, I’m looking for process suggestions for how to get the website, in its entirety, to a potential vendor’s possession without opening up the full mothership treasure chest at the webserver host level.

Gracias Muchas.

In case anybody is interested, I have the solution to the health care problem. It’s not a new solution. I’ve touted my idea before on the site. But here it is again, in a more succinct delivery, for anyone willing to put the solution in action.

The problem with the current range of health care solutions getting proposed by government is that it is based on the current system. This system is broken. If something is broken why try to refocus a cracked lens? Stop trying to build a solution out of a broken system and approach from anew.

My solution is born from the recognition that the issue isn’t about care. The issue is about health. I finally saw a stat today from the Minnesota Blue Cross CEO who wrote in an opinion piece that ‘most’ of the costs of health care come from preventable conditions. He gave a dollar amount in the billions to quantify ‘most’. This isn’t new. But it again demonstrates how health care is riddled by costs arising from personal choice – smoking and obesity.

My solution for health care is to change the nature of the proverbial carrot and stick. Right now, the stick in this country is a progressive tax system. You want to fix health care? Make health the stick.

Everybody gets public health care in this country. Unless you smoke. Then you don’t get health care. If you are obese by choice then you don’t get health care. You want to reduce the costs of health care and make it fair and accessible for everyone? Stop making tax benefits and tax breaks the stick and make health care the stick. Then institute the flat tax. With those two moves we change the entire landscape of government incentive away from ridiculous loopholes and bloated waste in a 9M word tax code and focus on a health society.

Last week I started using Google Voice. Way cool. I’m having some early successes with the ease of the interface and the smoothness of releasing a single 10-digit sequence to reach me. All the phones are ringing and I’m starting to group incoming calls.

I’m feeling like I’m not taking full advantage of the service. When I tried to find a user group through google’s site I came up empty. So, anybody out there willing to share some tricks of the trade top optimize experience and facility with Google Voice?

This marks the 10th anniversary of my leaving DC. 10 years ago I moved from the DC area to Nashville, TN to start grad school. Except I didn’t make the trek alone. Because the total amount of my personal belongings out-sized the carrying space of the car, which was another in a series of outdated Oldsmobiles that I drove around in my youth, getting all my stuff down to Nashville required two drivers.

Weed volunteered to take off work, and drive down with me, caravan-style, to Nashville. I led the way in a rented truck and Weed followed behind in the clunker. It’s not a short drive to Nashville, about 10 hours. We left early in the morning from Fairfax, VA and got to downtown Nashville by sundown.

I wanted to thank Weed, 10 years later, and let him know that his act of generosity is not forgotten. Like most guys, I don’t do thank you cards, we just post on the net.

Help!!! I contracted a virus on my PC. Here’s how I know. A couple days ago I thought Microsoft’s website was down. Then my co-worker told me he received a file from me via physical thumb drive in which his virus protection software alerted that w32/conflicker.worm!nf virus was found on the flashdrive. Then I noticed I couldn’t get to any website on my PC that had to do with antivirus software.

Yikes! I was able to load on AVG antivirus 8.5.287, but since the virus is blocking access to the website, I can’t get updates from AVG.

All my data has been backed up, and otherwise the PC system is running as normal, although I know that under the hood all my passwords are getting stolen.

What can I do???