Month: October 2020

Categories
Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity The Dark Forest of the Internet Wellness when Always-On

Different Time Bubbles

Recently I’d been dealing with some unexpected developments that required me to take a break from a few communities I was part of. When I returned I asked one community member what I’d missed. She remarked that everything I’d missed was “all captured in a different time bubble” that I could catch up on “at some point or the other”.

Beautiful.

But it’s also how I’ve thought of the many Alternate Realities we all inhabit online now. I described how I use Twitter Lists to privately follow different interests – space and astronomy, the Indian Forest Service, other wildlife, crypto, internet infrastructure, the Twitter handles of a community of startup founders I’m part of, and many others. I explicitly think of these as parallel universes running on their own time, universes I can teleport into and out of by simply toggling between list views. Ditto with Reddit’s many subreddits, Discords & Telegram groups.

Some timelines are slow, such as the small writing group I’m part of. You can return to it after a month and pretty easily connect what’s happening now with last time. Others are dizzyingly fast, like river rapids of content. A South East Asia tech community, and Crypto Twitter are like this – you can at best take in the latest snapshot, abandoning the rest for all time. Still other groups aren’t even timelines, like Wildlife Twitter. There’s no narrative. What you see before you at any point is also like what you’ve missed. They are the most peaceful and often the most rewarding to dip into.

I’m hugely excited by how inhabiting multiple personal universes, forming many lightweight and deep connections is now the norm, something we explored in our Alternate Reality series. But viewed another way, this extreme fragmentation is also cause for loneliness – it’s even harder for anyone to know the full you.

(Featured image photo credits: Christian Palmer/Unsplash)

Categories
Privacy and Anonymity

Trackers that link to other trackers

From a post on The Markup, “a nonprofit newsroom that investigates how powerful institutions are using technology to change our society”. The Markup worked with a site to evaluate its trackers. Their discoveries were disappointing but not surprising:

She said she only allowed three trackers on spartapride.org: cookies from Twitter and Facebook that accompany their “like” buttons on the site, and one from Disqus, a commenting platform she got through a prepackaged website theme she bought off the internet for $59 to build the site.

But when The Markup scanned spartapride.org using our new instant privacy inspector, Blacklight, we found 21 different ad-tech companies tracked visitors to the site, sending possible signals about people’s gender identities to advertisers—without the users’ knowledge or consent.

Among them were the marketing and advertising arms of Google, Amazon, and Oracle’s BlueKai consumer data division, which reported a massive data exposure this summer, leaving billions of records—including personally identifiable information—accessible to the open internet without a password. Oracle did not respond to questions about whether data gathered from spartapride.org’s users was included in the exposure.

The trackers loaded because Disqus sells ads on the free version of its commenting portal, and that ad space comes with third-party tracking. Disqus discloses those trackers on its own website, but the company wouldn’t comment about tracking SPART*A’s users.

The information asymmetry is so vast between people who set up websites, and those that provide those sites and tools for those sites that there can be no informed consent.

No-code is another major trend will very likely lead to privacy issues. With the ecosystem of easy-to-use, plug-and-play services that is organically emerging and expanding fast, people with no or little programming experience can create fairly complex experiences online – landing pages, commerce stores, information processing, even with AI capabilities. But because some of the most innovative services are from small companies who’re focused on execution, either they will take short-sighted data collection decisions, or will themselves build on top of infra that has poor data and tracking policies.

As we saw on our post on The New Middle (Part 1, Part 2), there will be an opportunity for a whole set of privacy-focused tools. Over the last week, Cloudflare announced a privacy-focused website analytics tool to rival Google Analytics. Over time, there will be enough general awareness that people will choose these over others that don’t make privacy and reasonable choice a priority. Through this site and its small set of readers, I hope to push a little to hasten this.

Categories
Privacy and Anonymity

Running pi-hole on Google Cloud for $0

I’ve spoken a number of times about pi-hole, the open-source ad-blocking software that I run on a Raspberry Pi machine at home. The Pi computer is so small it’s physically attached to my router with a piece of twine; the whole setup is tucked away out of sight.

I wasn’t kidding. This is a smaller than palm-sized. And invisible behind a couch.

Since all DNS queries from my router go to the Pi, all devices that connect to the house wifi are protected from ads and trackers by pi-hole – phones, tablets, laptops, my other Pi machine.

The big limitation is that this protection only applies as long as I am home and connected to wifi. If my ISP’s facing problems and I switch to 4G, or I’m simply out of the house and connected to another wifi, I’m out of luck. I have a backup [1], but it’s not as good as the Pi. I can’t have the Pi accessible from outside of the home network, even behind a firewall, because my ISP is a PPPOE connection behind a NAT. Setting up dynamic DNS for this has been impossible for me.

Now. I had come across this guide on setting up a pi-hole on Google Cloud such that the usage would fall under the Google Cloud free tier, making it essentially free. I loved the idea. My concern was that the pi-hole instance would be open to the Internet. I’d have to set up my own firewall and VPN, and it always slipped down my todo list.

Recently I learnt that the author had updated the guide, in responses to concerns just like mine, with a script that installed the Wireguard VPN and pi-hole together. It also included instructions (rather simple) on how to set up firewall rules in the Google cloud virtual machine instance. It took me well under an hour to read through and set things up end to end: my Google Cloud account, setting up and configuring my VM, installing pi-hole and Wireguard on it, setting those up, and setting up my iPhone and iPad as Wireguard clients.

I now have a globally accessible but secure personal Pi-hole whose web interface I can access via a private address as long as I’m connected to the VPN. And because I’m on the VPN, my devices’ DNS queries are encrypted – all of these independent of the network I am on. It has nothing to do with my home wifi, or the pi-hole on my Raspberry Pi anymore.

This still hasn’t sunk in as I write this a couple of hours after I set it up. I’m looking at this new pi-hole’s web admin, and the VM’s terminal over SSH, and it’s weird that now, years after I began using the original pi-hole installation on my local network, I’ve just upgraded it to work anywhere in the world.

[1] I use the DNS sink Adblock on my iPhone and iPad, which are the two main devices I use.

Categories
The Next Computer

iPhone home screen, October 2020

Updated the phone to iOS 14 between the last Home Screen post and now, but that hasn’t made much of a change to the layout.

The Dock has remained constant for the third month running.

  • Drafts has become my most-used app. I use it as a scratchpad wherever possible: I’m typing this very post in it, after which I’ll copy it into WordPress. I’m not using many of even the free app’s features, such as tagging, or universal sharing, or the new iOS 14 widgets. All I use is the word counter at the top, the markdown formatting menu and preview, and search.
  • Todo is still in the menu but I’ve hit a plateau in its use. I want to use it as a general-purpose ‘checkout later’ tool, but I only use it for that sporadically. I think that has more to do with that I don’t have a process to revisit things I have captured, a weekly review.
  • The rest of the Dock has Safari and Launch Center Pro, the latter of which I use to launch my shortcuts, as we have seen every month.

My usage of Launch Center Pro has reduced this last month for two reasons:

  • One, Back Tap. In iOS 14, you can set your iPhone to perform preset actions – including Shortcuts – on tapping the back of your phone twice or thrice. I have set double-tap to launch my image-stitching shortcut, and triple tap for my expense-logging one. I’ve been using it for over a week and it still feels like magic.
  • Two, Shortcuts automation, which debuted in iOS 13 but I have only begun using now. Until now, I used Launch Center Pro to run my Shortcuts on a schedule. The Shortcuts app can also do this by itself. So I have set my headache-logging shortcut to run as usual at 9pm without LCP.

On the rest of the Home Screen, I have trimmed three rows of apps down to two by moving Settings, Files, Reeder and Overcast to the second screenful of apps. I don’t use Settings often enough for it to warrant a Home Screen location. Ditto with Files. Reeder and Overcast – I mostly read my RSS feeds on the iPad, and since I’ve begun working from home, I’ve barely listened to any podcasts. I know I enjoy them, but the context is missing – either a walk or a drive to/from the office.

I tried using iOS 14’s new home screen widgets, but they didn’t take. I found them adding too much clutter. I was intrigued by the Siri Shortcuts widget, which adds eight icons to your home screen seamlessly. Their positions adjust automatically based on usage, just like with the Siri Suggestions drawer. In any case, they added too many icons on the Home Screen:

I’m looking forward to trying out other widgets to see if any will stick.

Finally, on the dedicated widgets screen itself, I have replaced the old Fantastical widget with the new iOS 14-optimised one. It’s not a great improvement over the previous one, but I don’t lose any information either:

By and large, despite the big update to iOS 14, the home screen has changed little. In fact it has gotten even simpler. This is unequivocally good, because it means I’ve been using fewer apps but more deeply. I look forward to what November brings.

Categories
Audience as Capital Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Privacy and Anonymity Real-World Crypto RG.org The Dark Forest of the Internet The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

300

7th October marks three hundred days since I began writing daily on this website.

While I have written on and off on the site from late 2002, this is the longest publishing streak the site has had. The streak began in December 2019 as something I wanted to do for myself at a time I felt low. It has now become a habit. If I remember correctly, Seth Godin had said on Tim Ferriss’ podcast that at some point after he started writing regularly on his blog, his thinking changed from ‘should I write tomorrow?’ to ‘what should I write about tomorrow?’.

I’ve gotten somewhat comfortable with drafting, writing and scheduling posts for the week ahead. Now I plan to build a healthy information consumption habit. My reading is too scattered, both in subject and in time. It doesn’t leave me with enough time to absorb things and think them through. I plan to trim my reading sources and structure my week so there are distinct chunks for reading, thinking and writing.

Community
This site has always explored questions about how you and I deal with technology in our lives. Those questions are so much more important in 2020 than they were eighteen years ago. My framework to understand this are the Five Megatrends and Five Big Questions.

Ultimately I’d love for the readers of this site to be a community that discusses and helps each other navigate opportunities that tech brings to our lives, and the challenges we face to our mental and physical health and to our relationships: by being conscious that tech serves us instead of us serving tech, or serving those that control tech. About Living Well in the Always-On.

Interested in being an early community member? Get in touch: Email or Twitter.

(Featured image photo credit: Jeff Golenski)

Categories
Products and Design The Next Computer

More USB-C standards confusion

We have seen before how confusing USB-C can be: what cables and device support what capabilities. This article has more examples of confusion about the standard:

If you buy a USB-C charger that doesn’t support Power Delivery and try to use it with a Microsoft Surface, for example, the laptop will complain that it’s “not charging” despite receiving some power. Fixing this requires figuring out whether or not it’s the cable or wall charger that doesn’t support Power Delivery, and replacing it with something that does support it. There would be no way for a layperson to hold two USB-C chargers and know the difference between one that supports Power Delivery and one that doesn’t.

Furthering the confusion, some devices actually can’t be charged with chargers supporting Power Delivery, despite sporting a USB-C port — because they weren’t designed to negotiate the higher wattage being delivered by the Power Delivery standard. A pair of cheap Anker headphones I own, for example, refuse to charge when plugged into a MacBook charger. Other devices, like the Nintendo Switch, only partially support the standard, and some unsupported chargers have bricked devices, reportedly due to the Switch’s maximum voltage being exceeded.

If you need to use different ‘supported’ chargers and cables with different devices, how is that any better than a proprietary standard?

Categories
Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Wellness when Always-On

What’s something that’s easy for me to do but hard for others?

This newsletter, available on the web, about building ‘personal moats’:

The post as a whole is a great read. Here are three standout pieces, in addition to the title, which came from the post:

1 . If you were magically given 10,000 hours to be amazing at something, what would it be? The more clarity you have on this response, the better off you’ll be.

2. … it’s easy to lie to yourself & say that you’re a generalist when in reality you’ve tried a bunch of things and you’ve flaked out when things got hard and then tried something else. You want to be at least great at one thing, and then apply that lens or skill to other categories.

3. We talk a lot about “passive income,” but not as much about “passive social capital” or “passive knowledge gaining” — that’s what you gain if you build an asset that grows over time without intensive constant effort to sustain i

One of the five megatrends we explore on this site is that of Audience as Capital.

The benefits of having a large humber of people who have consciously decided to listen to what you have to say have so far been limited to people with political power, or who ran large economic or social institutions. Today it is available to everyone – perhaps the Internet’s greatest dividend.

Having something of value to offer people, a personal moat, is a prerequisite to amassing this following, which is a prerequisite for building audience capital.

Featured image: Lake Palace, Lake Pichola, Udaipur, taken in 2011

Categories
Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Making Money Online

Play Store and Fair Play

Google has recently begun enforcing its policy about using Google Play’s in-app billing for apps that sell virtual goods. The problem is the 30% cut that Google, like Apple, charges on such transactions.

This Economic Times article has reactions from some app makers in India, including references to new-age colonialism via a foreign player imposing lagaan.

In my view, Google’s policies on which goods need to use in-app billing and which don’t is pretty clear. It’s also not different from Apple’s App Store policies, which have always been enforced strictly. It only applies to digital goods (with some exceptions even there), so statements like this don’t hold water:

“How can a company survive after paying 30% Google tax and Apple tax… Most businesses don’t have such margins. If enforced, this will spell an end to the startup dreams of a lot of Indian entrepreneurs.”

But there are new restrictions on communicating the existence of alternative payment methods, similar to Apple’s. I think these are onerous:

Apps other than those described in 2(b) may not lead users to a payment method other than Google Play’s billing system. This prohibition includes, but is not limited to, leading users to other payment methods via:

  • An app’s listing in Google Play;
  • In-app promotions related to purchasable content;
  • In-app webviews, buttons, links, messaging, advertisements or other calls to action; and
  • In-app user interface flows, including account creation or sign-up flows, that lead users from an app to a payment method other than Google Play’s billing system as part of those flows.

Because Apple enforces this policy, you can see the difference in Netflix’s signup instructions on iOS and Android. Once Google’s new policy comes into effect, I expect these to look similar:

What if the Play Store billing was completely optional in India, but a much better experience than any other method? The opportunity cost is low: an estimate of Google’s Play Store revenue in India for this year so far is USD 50 million. Its global 2nd quarter revenue was over USD 38 billion. The India business is a drop in terms of revenue, but led to 17 billion downloads.

In other words, the question Google should discuss is when app makers start designing workarounds for your policy, do you start plugging loopholes, putting you at odds with app makers, or so you change your policy, perhaps radically, so app makers welcome it?

Categories
Products and Design The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Sustainability and the ‘joy of fixing things’

From this short, beautiful piece on the joy of fixing things:

Watch a story about the owner of a priceless collectible car or wristwatch, and you’ll notice that they often state that they aren’t the owner of that object, but instead the steward who is keeping it till it moves on to the next owner.

It’s that same feeling that I have about all the objects in my possession. Whether it’s a vacuum cleaner, a knife, or tape measure, when I look at it, I think about the people that brought it to fruition. I think of the people who designed it, assembled it, shipped it across continents, and placed it on a store shelf. When it breaks, I think of its possible future in a landfill somewhere, all of that effort then forgotten. No object deserves that future.

As readers of this site know, I feel strongly about this.

And using well-constructed hand-me-downs has also forced me to become at least somewhat proficient at repair and maintenance, meaning I get to know these things better, which in turn teaches me what about them makes them great in the first place.

Finally, adopting a mindset of being okay using such tools has over time helped me get better at identifying new items that are likely to last long, perpetuating the cycle.

Categories
Uncategorized

The opportunity for tech in agriculture

In the context of the new agriculture reform bills recently passed by India’s parliament, I came across this article on the need and opportunity for technology in Indian agriculture. The whole article, end to end, is a gold-mine. For anyone with any interest in building a business in the agricultural space after these reforms, this is a great read.

[A farmer looks for] answers to three basic questions—what crop to sow, how to grow it, and where to sell it… To be specific, there are three infirmities in the current agriculture extension system—insufficient knowledge creation, poor delivery of information, and an absent grassroots capability. We need to reimagine the agricultural R&D and the extension system by creating knowledge, disseminating personalized information through technology, and decentralizing knowledge delivery by empowering local channels.

On knowledge creation:

An extension officer visiting Kamlakant’s farm is often swiftly surrounded by a crowd of farmers waiting to get their query answered. To really address farmers’ knowledge gap, we have to create a knowledge bonanza… agriculture universities and institutes need to create open access online agriculture courses (like courses on Udemy, a popular online learning platform) on horticulture, soil science, nutrient management, crop protection, greenhouse cultivation, post-harvest management and cold supply chain.

This is an enormous opportunity because

Currently, over 94% of India’s 138 million farm landholdings do not receive information through the agriculture extension system due to which smallholder farmers continue to be far less productive than what’s possible.

On information delivery:

Smartphone for all can be a real gamechanger as it would solve for all the three questions that Kamlakant and his ilk usually have at the beginning of every cropping season…. Recently, during the lockdown, tomato prices plunged, causing tomato cultivation to decline. If Kamlakant can find out that there are fewer tomato growers in the same way Google Maps informs us about the route which has less traffic (past trends would indicate that less cultivation could result in a price rise 2 months down the line), he would plant tomatoes. Data can help farmers make safer bets and get better prices.

On grassroots capability:

With cheaply available online courses, young graduates and even progressive farmers can self-train as extension officers and fuel on-farm innovation… When every farmer uses a smartphone, it becomes easy to develop mass contact farmer-to-farmer data sharing as well as individual contact with farmers. Armed with individualized information, farmers make independent data-driven decisions and mitigate harmful herd behaviour. Smartphones help gather large amounts of data quickly, contributing to better policymaking.

Hugely inspirational. At the same time, I balance excitement with experience of how slowly things move. Back in 2006, I had written a guest post on a website I cannot remember, on the (Indian) state’s excessive interfering in business – a subset of that ended up becoming a post on this site. I remember that guest post had references to what could be possible with information delivered over SMS and focused radio stations accessed via phone calls, all over hardy Nokia dumbphones. A decade and a half later, after the mobile revolution we’re talking about smartphones for all farmers, but the information gap remains.