Senators proposed the EARN IT act in March 2020. It’s supposed to be about protecting children from abuse, rape and exploitation. Instead, though, it’s a crippling attack on encryption on the internet. It just passed the senate judiciary committee.
Simply put, the EARN IT bill is the US government’s plan to scan every message online.
Society is increasingly aware of how seemingly innocent data points can be used in unintended ways. Some of those ways are useful, such as letting you know that you came close to a Covid-19 carrier without knowing it. Others are not so innocent, such as paying more for an airline ticket because an algorithm thinks that you’re rich.
Maybe you’re one of the millions of people who took an online personality quiz, just for fun, and years later find that you’ve contributed data to Facebook, who then granted access to Cambridge Analytica, who in turn used it to influence Brexit, the 2016 USA election and who knows what else. Perhaps it bothers you to be “part of the problem.”
A drum I’ve been banging on for a long time is to make sure you’re properly securing your accounts: don’t share passwords between different services, and enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) anywhere you can.
At the 2019 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple introduced Sign In with Apple for iOS 13. It’s a great service offering centralized authentication without reducing privacy for users, but it’s not without some drawbacks.
I’ve been thinking about how I read the web. I like when people don’t just share a link but spend the time to write something about it. You learn a lot about people that way, and you get to see a lot of different perspectives. If people just share links, it ends up being the same links repeated on every site you visit. There’s no point to that except to never miss a link. What about insight? What about personal stories? Aren’t those important?
I have a perspective, too. I frequently write about links, but I want to do more on this and collect everything in one place instead of having most of it lost in the comments on others’ sites. I have close friends, too, who I think have a good perspective on technology and have great stories to tell. This site is going to include them, too, as they’re willing to write.
Our main area of coverage is going to be Apple-related news, as we’re all Mac and iPhone users who work in technology. But we’re also going to talk about technology in general. That includes privacy and security, though we will try not to be too depressing by focusing too much on the evils of various technology corporations.
We’re not going to try to cover everything here, just the things we think we have something to say about.
One last note, on comments: No, at least for now. We’ll probably add support via Disqus at a later date.