Category Archives: Issues

Apple Watch

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On September 9th, 2014 Apple unveiled their iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, Apple Pay and Apple Watch to the world. It was a really poorly kept secret that Apple was working on a wristwatch, so nobody was really surprised when Apple came out with their new designs. All we didn’t know what to what extent Apple was going to go with the technology.

They released more details on Apple Watch. The more I learned about the device the less I found myself thinking it was a good idea. There are so many places where this new watch is a problem.

Humans Have Limited Attention

We haven’t learned how to properly cope with the iPhone and now Apple is going to release an even more disruptive and attention-stealing device on the population. I’ve heard stories of crackdowns in Chicago where the police were pulling over people who were using their mobile devices while they should be driving their motor vehicles, and then learn that on the heels of the crackdown that the police recorded nearly everyone was breaking the law. Pulling over those people would have effectively shut down the entire highway! We just do not have the proper respect for all the technology in our lives, we cannot cope with these bright shiny attention-stealing devices while we are in command of an even larger device that requires our undivided attention at all times. So now Apple is going to put something even brighter and shinier on our wrists and we’re going to have what little attention that is left between our vehicles and our mobile devices divided again by this cleverness strapped to our wrists.

The tight integration between iPhones and Apple Watch will make our addictions to these devices even more challenging to master as well. Many people I know have a very hard time disconnecting from their devices anyways, now that there is an intimate extension of that device that we wear? I can only see this getting worse for those people who want others attention when we are all physically together. I’ve heard anecdotal stories where entire families sit in one room but nobody talks to anyone else because they are all besotted with their technology. What will this mean when the technology is always with us and on our wrists?

Haptics

The Apple Watch, a wearable device includes technology that includes haptics, or the sense of motion or vibration, both in the user interface with the light tap versus the deep press and the vibrating device buried deep into the watch itself. This will only worsen our abilities to control our attention and in itself is a place where we are going to have trouble. The watch can be paired to another watch and send heartbeats across the network, it’s Apple’s romantic notion of intimate communication. I can foresee a paired watch between a married couple and the husband feels his wifes pulse quicken, he worries that she’s having a stroke or a heart attack and rushes home to find a strange car in his driveway and a strange man in his bed. Cheating spouses is just the tip of the iceberg, this watch could be used to cheat in so many other places – cheat at the Casino with a complicated card-counting or odds-calculating routine piped into the players Apple Watch, or exam cheating by looking at the watch and seeing the letters for the answers appear as drawings on the Apple Watches screen.

How will these situations play out? For cheating spouses, there are the courts, so that’s rather a dull thing, but for the others I could see a new no-watch policy being extended to driving vehicles, entry into a casino, and standardized testing events like the SAT.

Nothing for the Sinister

The one thing that I noticed after discussing the Apple Watch with someone I know who is left-handed, that the device completely abandons functionality for the left-handed amongst us. It’s a hard choice Apple has made. Either you build a right-handed watch and a left-handed watch, or include handedness configurability in your design. It’s obvious after looking at the demo pieces that Apple has nothing set aside for the left-handed of us and have left a significant part of the population out in the cold. They could still use the device, but it will be much more awkward for them to actually use the device. I can see the detraction of non-handedness to be a compelling reason to not go ahead and purchase an Apple Watch.

Another Power Hungry Device

The Apple Watch is power hungry. It needs to charge nightly in order to continue to function. I find myself looking at the function of my wristwatch, a Seiko 5 Analog Automatic and immediately find what I have on the end of my arm, this watch, to be much more useful and compelling than this Apple Watch. My Seiko, if I care for it properly will never need winding as the mechanical automatic winder will never wear down or degrade or stop working. My motions feed the watch, and as long as I wear it every day, just living my life means that my watch will continue to count out seconds and sweep out the minutes and hours. My Seiko cannot do all the things that the Apple Watch can, but it can do the one thing a wristwatch should do very well and that is keep track of time. So far my Seiko has retained proper time for the few months I’ve had it. There is no technology in there that is synchronizing it to atomic time, and there is no need for that precision in my life. A watch that is bound to the power grid seems to be a risk to me, and since the most recent power outage, which for me was last night, the idea that my fancy Apple Watch could run down and just be a chunk of expensive metal and glass really concerns me.

Welcome to the Apple Silo, Penthouse Level

The Apple Watch creates an entire new floor to the Apple lifestyle silo. People are usually drawn in with a consumer device, like an iPod Nano or an iPhone, and then they are buying Macs and now the Apple Watch. I have to admit that Apple has a very good compelling company story, and they are leveraging this story magnificently well. They know that one Apple device usually turns into another, and before you know it you are knee-deep in the Apple Digital Lifestyle. The watch requires the iPhone to function, this is a very bold and possibly hazardous step for Apple to take. All the rest of their devices are independent devices, but this one, this Watch, is utterly dependent on an iPhone to function. I think this is the first fundamental break with the legacy of Steve Jobs and represents a really dangerous case for Apple. They are betting sales on pre-existing devices. That is either very ballsy or really stupid. This will only reinforce the cultural divide between people who flaunt this luxury versus people who do not. If you have an Apple Watch, then you necessarily have an iPhone. I can see this becoming a new and really upsetting hazard in big cities. Before it was a mystery what was plugged into a pair of headphones, it could have been anything from a cheap transistor radio, to a cassette Walkman to an iPod or iPhone. Now it’s really something quite different. If you see someone with an Apple Watch, you know that their iPhone isn’t far away. You are advertising that you have an iPhone to everyone who notices your watch. In small communities where theft and robbery isn’t a problem this won’t even show up on the map, but I foresee in bigger cities like Chicago and New York, that this will take on a new life all its own. A new spate of “Apple Watch” theft events. People getting mugged because of what they have on their wrists marks them out as being ripe for the plucking.

Price

The Apple Watch comes in three editions. There is the plain edition, the sports edition, and the luxury edition. The different editions put an embarrassing irony to the features that the phones are sold around, the replaceable wristbands most specifically. Why couldn’t it have just been one watch with different bands for different editions? Make the initial purchase for the core device and then let people swap out wristbands for the luxury components of the deal, if you want a canvas strap, a rubber one or a gold one, let those be options. Instead of that, there are three distinct Apple Watch varieties.

Then there is the price. $349 for the Apple Watch! In our society, what middle-class person would dangle such an expensive bit of technology on their wrists? Again I’m drawn back to my Seiko 5. The comparison of prices for what I need in a watch is all the reason enough to turn my back on the Apple Watch. My Seiko 5 cost me $70, that’s five times cheaper than the Apple Watch for a device that will never run out of power for as long as I don’t run out of power! It blew my mind, when I saw the price tag on the Apple Watch. I figured this could have been a jubilee celebration from Apple, they have billions of dollars buried in their company treasury, they could have made the Apple Watch a loss-leader for their iPhones, priced it at $70 and it would fly out the doors. Apple would lose money on each unit, but they’d make it up on the back side with all the cultural silo’ing that comes with using a device like an Apple Watch which necessitates an iPhone to go along with it.

Apple is betting that their Apple Watch will play as much as their iPads and iPhones did, selling millions of units. It may sell, and it very well may sell well, but I don’t think that $349 is worth this sort of technology. If it could do more, or if it was independent of the iPhone that might have helped, but it’s expensive, hazardous, and risky. I can’t see it really shining in sales numbers like the other devices did. Apple should have set it’s very lofty estimates for sales of the Apple Watch much lower. It’ll likely have the same sales numbers as the iPod Touch or iPod Nano.

I won’t be buying the Apple Watch. I have everything that I need already. The iPhone I have is enough, and my Seiko 5 does a magnificent job and you can’t beat the features or the price. I can’t imagine anyone I know actually going ahead and buying this thing, but we will see how that all pans out next year when it’s available for sale. This is going to be a hurdle that Apple doesn’t jump over gracefully.

Comixology

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Just updated my Comixology app on my iPad and overhauled my password so I could login. I knew I wasn’t going to find the same app I remember, and I had issues with that one as well. So in we go, talk about a chop-job. I found all the comics I bought, 252 of them, yah, and then on a lark I went looking on how to buy a new comic book. No store that I could find, just a search panel. Searched for Marvel and found all of that, went looking for DC and couldn’t find them. Searched for New 52 and found some titles. So, no more shelf-appeal or browsing titles. Okay.

Then there is the lack of in-app purchasing. Yeah, they are. Owned by Amazon now, so no more of that. Have to go on Amazon to buy the comics. Nope. I don’t like Amazon and it’s a matter of monopoly aversion in my consumer psyche. I do not like Amazon any longer. They are too big, too invasive, and too damaging to people in general. How Amazon treats their workforce is a lot like how Walmart treats theirs. Once Costco opens up here in Kalamazoo, we won’t ever be going back to Sams Club. I won’t ever be going back to Amazon or Comixology.

So, online comics are back to the Stone Age. I’m glad that there are long boxes downstairs with copies of all the comics now lost to me on Comixology. When I have money again, it’s back to the Comic Book Store with me. Comixology’s sell-out was the kiss of death. Amazon won’t be and can’t be controlled. They need to be shunned. If not by everyone, at least this household. There are more considerations on where you buy something beyond the “low price leader”, especially if that leader is a morally and ethically bankrupt monopolistic ravening monster.

The Future is Forsaken

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A few days ago, a brand new MacBook Pro 15″ laptop arrived. It is meant for one of my coworkers and I thought I had everything set up to rock and roll. Well, so much fail came to roost today on my shoulders. First, the MacBook, a big beautiful machine requires Windows 7 64-bit to be present to be able to set it up in Bootcamp on this machine, d’oh! I have Windows 7 32-bit on memory stick. Fnord.

As I was fiddling with the unit, and the fact that this didn’t occur to me at all is a testament to how pervasive wifi is in my life, I noticed that this laptop doesn’t have an Ethernet port on it. Apple sacrificed the Ethernet port in the aim to make this sleek slim metal box of sexy technology happen. It’s the 21st century and if someone buys a MacBook, then the logic that I can work out for myself is that Wifi is assumed. Except for when it isn’t. There’s an adapter that will make it work, and frankly I can’t be really shocked that Apple would dump Ethernet especially when there is Ethernet to Thunderbolt adapters for sale, as Thunderbolt can easily carry gigabit data rates and the port is supa-teeny.

So here I sit, this laptop will be starving for Wifi soon, and I need an adapter. After some investigation it appears that the best solution is USB Ethernet adapters as the Thunderbolt adapter (as far as I can tell) fails to understand sleep/wake cycles and that’s a deal-breaker for me. I don’t need gigabit speeds so it all works out to be the same in the end.

It’s interesting to me to witness all the technology that is no longer around by default. COM ports are gone, long ago. CD/DVD drives are gone, which is constant source of surprise to me, and now Ethernet ports are all being shuffled off. All of these things can be adapted to USB, and some of them to Thunderbolt, but these bold choices are surprising me. I find myself agreeing with them, for the sake of the form factor and how USB and Thunderbolt can do so much, it does make sense to me.

God help people who are used to certain historical technologies, they may find themselves on the sacrificial stone block to the gods of progress.

Whither Water

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I read this article about restaurants and their corkage fees. Mostly out of dull curiosity I found myself satisfied that I don't agree and there are delightful ways to avoid this entire argument.

But to the vex, paying a corkage fee is a custom where diners who supply their own wine pay the establishment money for the privilege. You have a choice, either pay the insane markup (feels a lot like a mugging) on restaurant wine or pay to bring your own. Either way you'll pay. The linked article even goes so far to comment that bringing your own wine is shaming the sommelier, because you don't like his offerings. So, you quibble with the quality of truncheon that you are mugged with. Ah. I suppose I've never found a use for a sommelier, and that's likely because it's a class warfare thing, sommeliers are great if you're a 17th century royal, otherwise be your own sommelier. Anyhow, the word indicates the servant who ran ahead and prepared a meal. In the United States, nobody runs ahead, unless it's a mugger waiting for you in an alley. So, sommelier, great. The article states that if you really want to be nice you should offer the sommelier a taste. This is amazing. The guy who marks up his swill 1000% gets honor? How about chased out with torches and pitchforks?

Yeah yeah yeah. Be nice. Don't be so grumpy. But why should a meal out spiral out of control and cost you way more than the “food” you are purchasing? The experience is usually the answer. You pay for the experience. So when it comes to wine, you are paying to “enjoy the services of a fine sommelier” or, really, paying for the opportunity to be screwed on price for a bottle of swill and think it's honorable – and defensible.

Partially this comes down to palate. You are paying a sommelier, and his palate to guide you. Because each palate is unique, like a fingerprint, what if you've paid 300 dollars for wine you detest? Instead you've brought a 3 dollar bottle of wine that you love. The sommelier is angry. They charge you a 85 dollar corkage fee as a matter of revenge for not being able to tear the alimentary canal out of the sommelier and staple it to your central nervous system. I mean really, this screams palate bigotry.

So the way out? Water. Fuck you and your worthless overpriced swilly “wines”. No corkage fee, no mugging, no obnoxious useless mugger behaving like a chimpy King Louis XIV court fop being all pretentious and galling over reprehensible palate bigotry. I never asked anyone to run ahead. So, screw off.

But then there is the setting too. “Fine Dining” is a euphemism for “Food Poisoning”, so in many ways that too is just so much of a waste of time and valuable resources. These self-puffed joints get grumpy and bent if you bring your own wine and so either pay their mugger to sulk in the corner or get your food to go and enjoy it at home with your own wine. Alas, you'll need a roll of TP too, so it's not like there is a win condition here anyways.

At least the water is chlorinated, so you at least have that basic thing to go on… Always remember to tip the angry sulking mugger too. He really wanted to bash your brains out and rifle through your pockets for loose change.

I'm honestly surprised they don't have a $50 charge for a glass of water. Seems like they've followed a theme and left out a gloriously glaring exception. After all, this is Fine Dining! LOL.

One Ring

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Today had a simple plan. The first step was to shake the lake effect snow off the Christmas-themed lawn ornaments in the front yard. A five minute job, easy peasy.

So off I went. Got all the snow off the ornaments and as I was shaking my hands to get the snow off them I felt something slip and I heard a bright metallic tink sound. My partnership ring, one of my most prized possessions slipped off my ring finger and tinked off my shoe and went piff right into a snowbank. The ring isn’t elaborate or expensive, it’s just a simple silver band that goes around my right ring finger. Right instead of left, because I am not like everyone else. I’ve had this ring for almost as long as I’ve been partnered. The ring itself isn’t worth much as a ring, it’s just a simple silver ring, but the meaning and significance is exceptional, at least to me.

So of course I look all around me for little ring-sized holes in the snow, checking each one and having to run inside because I can’t feel my hands with trying to paddle through about six inches of snow across the field of my front yard. I started to think of possible ways to get my ring back – heat lamps, vodka in a spray bottle, anything that might quickly reduce the snowpack and show off where my shiny ring is resting. Nothing. I shoveled and raked the snow, I hopped from one likely indentation in the snowpack to another trying to see if there was a silver ring somewhere just under the surface. Nothing. At all. At 4:55pm I called the local Rentalex, which is a tool rental shop. I asked the proprietor if he happened to have a metal detector, and he did. I rocketed out of my place and down to the Rentalex. They are located on Gull Road, so it was just a few hundred yards away as the crow flies, to get there before they close at 5pm. I was able to get the metal detector, a wee bit of training on it, and cashed out for $16. I got back home, and of course at this point the daylight is dying and I am facing having to scan my yard in the dimness of the lights mounted in the windows of my home and the streetlamp which is about 100 yards down the road.

I got out of the car, grabbed the metal detector and started to scan. I fiddled with the sensitivity and pushed it to the max. I swept and found about 8 different metal-signals all over the place. I think the detector found various bits and pieces, most specifically the sewer line and the septic tank. Many years before I bought my house, the previous owners signed up for the townships sewer system to be attached and I think they just left the septic tank in place and forgot about it. I only say that because there is a green square of grass that really does well in the spring and summer time and I think the grass is feeding off the now elderly and (probably leaking) septic tank. Anyways, the detector found lots of metal signals and I ended up scrabbling away, in vain.

So I decided that the best thing for me to do was use the detector and see if the snowbank had any signal in it, and if it did, shovel it all up into a bin and take it inside and rinse the snow with blazing hot water, melting the snow. The idea was, my ring was somewhere in the three-dimensional matrix of the snowbank. The detector could tell me where a metal signal was in two dimensions but since my shoveling panic, I had mounded snow up into a four foot high pile. I ran all over the yard, in places my ring couldn’t have been because you can’t say you checked everywhere if the missing object is still missing. I had abandoned hope that I would see a metal glint as the sun mocked me by setting right after I got home, about 5:30pm or so.

I got to scanning the entire yard, finding all the signal spots, and made a educated guess that if my ring was going to be “around” that it would be there in the high and packed snowbank from my earlier panic. I scanned up and down the mound, turning the sensitivity as high as it would possibly go, hoping that my ring would be close enough to the detector for something, for anything. The detector had two modes, a chirp mode and a squeal mode. I felt a little awkward in my yard with a metal detector sweeping over the yard as I walked like a waddling penguin. I started at one end of the snow pile and set the detector to maximum and to squeal. Very tight motions and very slowly, making a hell of a racket as it went along. I got halfway along and the detector went bonkers, huge wailing squeals in a very small spot. I got a big plastic tub and shoveled the entire snowbank, about two feet of it into the bin. I dragged the bin inside the house and parceled out sinkfuls of snow and leaves and debris into my kitchen sink and turned on the hottest water and used the sprayer. As the hot water tank caught up with my humor the water started to melt the snow. The first two trips to the sink from the bin were worthless, except that I had a sink full of rotting dead oak leaves and tiny little twigs. I emptied out the sink, making sure to feel each batch of goopy leaves for anything hard, as I figured my ring, if it was in the snow, and later on trapped in a pile of dead leaves would resist any hand-based squeezing. Nothing. I got to the end of the bin, tipped the rest into the sink and figured if the detector wasn’t going to help that I would end up simply shoveling the entirety of the front yard into the bin and melting it in my sink. I would win by sheer labor and attrition. So as I stood there, melting the snow and rooting around in the dead oak leaves I saw my ring. It was there. Hallelujah!

I grabbed it, rinsed it off, and cleaned up the rest of the snow, the bin, the sink, the leaves, and tossed the bag of leaves I was collecting into the garbage. I put all my other silly contrivances away and packed the metal detector up for it’s return tomorrow morning back to the rental company. Alls well that ends well. Of course the front of my yard looks like a disaster struck it, there isn’t any beautiful snowpack left, it looks all messy – but at least my ring is back where it belongs, on my finger. There is a new rule, if I am going outside to futz with the ornaments I will wear gloves! That way if I shake my hands, my ring has nowhere to go.

There was no sound more unwanted and seemingly mockingly final than the “tink” sound the ring made as it bounced off of my shoes on it’s random course into the snowbank. I couldn’t have done it, at least not this quickly or conveniently without Rentalex. The price was great, the detector was top-notch, and I’m a much happier fellow now that I have my ring back.

Of course, with all the tramping around I unintentionally made the snowbank into snowpack and I fell a handful of times. Now my legs and hips and back ache. Nothing worth mentioning, except that the heating pad I’m resting on has caught a certain cats notice and I am now sandwiched between a blazing hot heating pad and a rattling boat-motor-purring feline. I look at my ring, and I smile. It was worth it.

Tomorrow morning I have to remember to get up extra early and drop off the detector. It’s a neat device, but I’m glad it’s rentable, as it’s the kind of thing you need very dearly once or twice and spending a huge wad on it seems like such a waste. Hooray for tool libraries and tool rental shops like Rentalex! They saved my day! 🙂

OSX Mavericks Possible Data Corruption Bug

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Over the past two weeks there has been much upheaval in my life. Involved with this upheaval has been one of the most unwanted activities any IT professional has to do as part of their professional lives and that is bowing out gracefully. Sometimes IT professionals can actually achieve this state of grace, however most of the time fear overwhelms grace and trust. The morality I will leave to another blog post to come.

In rescuing data from a computing device a few days ago I discovered that the act of using a USB external hard drive with a Macintosh MacBook Pro with OSX Mavericks may have a nasty bug lying in tall grass. I had about 212GB of data that needed to be moved to another medium, and I elected to use a Western Digital external hard drive using USB 2. This drive had never before shown any signs of failure however after copying the data onto the drive using OSX Mavericks, the HFS filesystem on the drive suffered some mystery damage that I’ve never witnessed before. Thankfully the volume was mountable and I could rescue the data from the errant drive and copy it to another drive and effectively save my bacon. The error concerned a failure in the node structure when fsck was asked to diagnose the HFS Journaled filesystem present on the suspect drive. Now I can’t say for sure that OSX Mavericks caused this failure, but the proximity of it and an earlier email from Western Digital stating that there might be drive problems with OSX Mavericks also rang in my mind as a potential problem that points to this particular possible bug. Now the Western Digital warning was just for their drives that used the extended WD software to mount the drives to the Macintosh file system, I suspect that the bug is indeed deeper than even WD knows, or Apple perhaps.

If you are using WD, or perhaps any other external hard drive or memory-stick technology with OSX Mavericks the smart money is on frequent backup and sync to multiple locations. Really smart administrators will backup over the network to some other computing platform with it’s own independent drive technology. If you are using Macintosh OSX Mavericks, I would say it’s better to be safe than sorry and for the love of all that is cute and fuzzy, make your backups!

iOS 7 and Logitech Ultra-Thin Keyboard Cover

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I’ve run into a very curious issue with my Logitech Ultra-thin keyboard cover for my iPad 3 running iOS 7.0.2. Here’s the problem:

1) If you are in any application when you start all of this with the application ready to accept text, the iOS virtual keyboard appears. So for example, I start Drafts and start to type on my iPad.

2) Turning on my Logitech keyboard makes the virtual keyboard drop down off the screen, as usual, and I can type using the keyboard. Everything is all regular up to this point.

3) If you turn off the keyboard, the expected behavior is for the virtual keyboard to reappear. It does not, at least not on my iPad 3. I can open any other application that features text insertion, like Notes or Email (with an open new email) and the virtual keyboard will not appear.

4) So far I’ve found two ways to fix this. The first is the inglorious kung-fu grip of holding down power and the home button at the same time to reboot the device and the other solution, which is more acceptable but still annoying is to start the Logitech keyboard, open an app that uses text insertion functions and press FN-F3, which should make the virtual keyboard appear. Then turn off the Logitech keyboard and you should be good to go from that point forward.

If anyone has noticed this problem and knows of a fix, please leave a comment!

Thanks!

EDIT: As it appears, the keyboard is not reliable so it seems that I’ll be resetting my iPad after all. Blah!

Did You Get That Thing I Sent Ya?

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Museum of Communications

This video, adapted from a character on Cartoon Network’s Harvey Birdman animated series. Asks the most fundamental question that exists and is at the center of my issues with workplace communications.

“Did you get that thing, that thing, THAT THING, … that… I sent ya?”

It happens a lot, I do it, and a lot of other people do it too and it’s so annoying, irritating, and upsetting. You send a message to someone else and if it’s email, it can be like it flew into a black hole. You don’t know if they got it, if they read it, if they don’t care. Did they file it? Did they laugh when they got it? Dunno. When will whatever it is get attention? Dunno.

It’s the not knowing that irks me. We used to use GroupWise which made this particular issue somewhat of a non-event because it would record the fate of the message and you could get read receipts automatically sent back to you. Generally, this isn’t a problem either with SupportPress as we get emailed when a ticket comes in and the system enforces a receipt structure whenever we get tickets and manipulate them. It’s just, well, everything else. And it’s not something you want to include with every email because it should be a matter of common courtesy to acknowledge that you got a message and that you are working on it, or whatever is really going on with it.

Then again, my experience is that much like verbal arguments, nobody is really listening. In email, nobody is really reading. Time and time again I notice people who only pick out keywords from a cursory scan of what I send and reply to the things they feel they want to reply with, ignoring the actual message itself.

When asked, “What is the biggest stumbling block for you professionally?” The answer can be only this: Basic human communication and the lack of it. How can anyone get anything accomplished if we aren’t listening or reading or even paying attention to each other? Thank god for cognitive dissonance. It’s an absurd life if it is this way and obviously it isn’t because things get done, somehow, so it can’t be that bad, not really. But I think it is bad and I fear that it’s just getting worse.

If you get an email, maybe it’s a good idea to form a new habit and immediately reply telling the other party that you got it. At least when everyone knows, it’s one less little chunk of mystery floating out there.

photo by: Cargo Cult

WIL WHEATON dot TUMBLR, So any journalist passing through London’s Heathrow has now been warned: do not take any documents with you. Britain is now a police state when it comes to journalists, just like Russia is.

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WIL WHEATON dot TUMBLR, So any journalist passing through London’s Heathrow has now been warned: do not take any documents with you. Britain is now a police state when it comes to journalists, just like Russia is..

This post by Wil Wheaton is a really great reminder that when you are traveling, and I wouldn’t necessarily just put this as international to Britain but even when visiting the next town or crossing state lines even. Rights are being trampled everywhere you go, wether it be from a out-of-control cop, a bloodthirsty Sheriffs deputy or even a sticky-fingered TSA agent there is no lack of potential thugs, enemies, and thieves in your midst.

There are ways to secure your data and keep it handy as well. Store everything in an encrypted disk image or TrueCrypt archive on a cloud service like Dropbox or Google Drive and duplicate the same things in your memory sticks. If the thugs take your devices then you can rest assured that all you lost was the material itself, but no content.

I’m surprised that journalists and people who know journalists don’t all use GPG to secure their communications. I would think that if you were a whistleblower or had contact with a whistleblower that these little checkboxes would be foremost on your mind and already checked off.

You can’t trust any government, any cop, or any Vampire to keep their word. This goes for everyone as well, including your carrier and service providers. What should Verizon know? Shit. How about Dropbox? The same. Trust nobody and you’ll be safer than someone who trusted someone else. Trust is earned and right now, very very few people have it.