Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

Will my vote matter?

Previously, I created a flowchart for use in voting in Canadian elections. It occurred to me today that it could be interesting to elaborate the concept into a website.

The site would allow people to enter their riding and rank their preferences for either local candidates or parties. It could then estimate the odds that their vote will make a difference they care about. For instance, if someone strongly prefers Party X to Party Y, and both candidates have a shot at winning in that person’s riding, then their vote is relatively likely to matter. By contrast, if someone hates both Party A and Party B equally, and one of their candidates is basically certain to win, then that person’s vote is relatively unlikely to matter.

There are different possible methodologies for the site. For instance, it could be based entirely on past election results, entirely on polling data, or on some combination of the two.

In circumstances where a person is told that their vote is unlikely to matter – for instance, if they prefer a party with minority support in every riding – the website could direct the person to more information on electoral reform and alternative electoral systems like the various kinds of proportional representation.

Unsurprisingly, this is one of those ideas that falls into the “things that may be interesting to discuss, but which I do not have the time to actually do” category.

The iPhone’s ‘airplane mode’

‘Airplane mode’ is definitely one of the nicest features of the iPhone. By swiping one easily accessible control, you can disable incoming calls and texts. By default, it also turns off WiFi.

This is useful for two major reasons. For one thing, it allows you to always have an iPhone with you without always being open to random contact at any moment of the day. It is nice to enjoy a walk, film, or conversation without periodic email or text message updates.

It is also useful because the battery life of the iPhone 4 really isn’t great. Even when it was brand new, I found that it could not last from 9:00am until 5:00pm with moderate use (some web browsing, some app use, some texts). It is the kind of phone where you really need a charger both at work and at home, and where you can get caught out without power if something unexpected happens.

Locksport

Locksport is the practice of studying and learning to defeat locking systems, primarily mechanical locks such as pin and tumbler locks. As I understand it, it is driven by curiosity and the desire to understand how things work, rather than any desire to circumvent real-world locks. Practitioners are people who puzzle their way to inside information about an industry that tends to be close-knit and secretive, not unlike the people who watch classified satellite launches in the U.S. and track the orbits of mysterious secret satellites.

The Dutch blog blackbag is a good source of information on locksport, including picking, bump keys, and impressioning. The Open Organization Of Lockpickers is a group for locksport affectionados. Theoretically, they have a chapter in Ottawa, but it doesn’t seem to be active.

I think it’s worth trying one’s hand at picking locks, if only to get a sense of how secure they really are. I found that with a few minutes of work and no professional instruction, I could open the locks and deadbolts in my old apartment using a tension wrench and simple pick. The same goes for padlocks – both the omnipresent cheap Master Lock variety and higher security versions with security pins.

The legality of tools for manipulating locks varies by jurisdiction. In the United States, it varies from state to state. In Canada, lock picking tools (except for key duplication tools) are legal and treated just like any other tool.

Two questions for data management

1) How bad would it be to lose it?

If the answer is ‘bad’ then you absolutely must have at least two copies.

If the answer is ‘terrible’ then at least three copies is wise. At least one should be in a safe place off site. Incremental backups are better than basic ones, since files do get corrupted and vanish.

Ideally, you want both up to date incremental backups and complete snapshots taken at regular intervals and checked periodically for integrity.

2) How bad would it be if it ended up all over the internet?

If this would be a problem at all, there is a whole universe of precautions to consider:

Hardware: firewalls, built in encryption, air gapped systems and storage, networking hardware (including WiFi), etc

Software: cryptography, operating systems, malware risks (including pirated software), intrusion detection systems, etc

Behaviour: physical access control, data retention and destruction, passwords and secret questions, backup processes

Digital data is the sort of thing where not only can the cat get out of the bag, but it can get out, get copied a billion times, and become your name’s top Google hit for the rest of your life.

Evil and non-evil Facebook buttons

Many websites now include Facebook buttons and widgets of various sorts. As a user, it is worth knowing that if you are logged into Facebook, many of those buttons and widgets can be used by Facebook to track your web use and  link it to your real identity. 

This site has a Facebook button, as well, but it is a graphic that loads from my own server. It does not allow Facebook to add to their trove of data.

That said, Google has its own massive data pile, which this site contributes to in obvious ways like content being indexed and less obvious ways like Google Analytics visitor tracking.

Flex your rights: anonymity

Being able to speak anonymously on the internet is an important right, in this age of increasingly constant surveillance. Because of organizations like the NSA, GCHQ, and Canada’s CSE, we can never know when our private conversations are actually being intercepted.

One tiny way to push back is to continue to be bold in asserting the importance of freedom of speech, even what circumstances compel that right to be used anonymously.

To leave anonymous comments on this site, just use whatever made-up name you like, including ‘anonymous’. If you use anon@sindark.com as your email address, you will get an anonymous logo beside your comment.

None of this is intended as an endorsement of the amorphous group ‘Anonymous‘.

2010 blog finances

For most people who put content on the internet, the deal provided by one company or another is this: you provide the content, we will put ads beside it, and we will pay for the servers and bandwidth necessary for hosting a website. More sneakily, sites like Facebook make their money by selling the personal information of users, in addition to selling targeted advertising (which is increasingly the same thing).

Some sites do all this earning and paying indirectly, with the people running the site outside the advertising/hosting cost loop. Alternatively, it is possible to do both yourself: sell ads and pay for hosting.

Lately, this site has followed the latter model. I pay for hosting and I have revenue from automatically-generated Google AdSense ads. The costs largely balance out. Between 1 January 2010 and 1 January 2011, this site and BuryCoal.com collectively received C$296.38 in advertising revenue. During the same span, I paid US$249.70 collectively to DreamHost and Flickr.

Would people feel more comfortable if this site was hosted by a third party that kept the advertising revenue, rather than self-funding in this way? One consideration is scaling hosting to demand. With a third party they would handle it, but I couldn’t choose to pay for performance improvements. For instance, moving to a private VPS account on DreamHost would cost US$15 per month, but would probably make the site quicker and more reliable.

[Update: 11:36pm] I have always encouraged readers who disliked the ads to use Firefox with the AdBlock Plus plugin.

On sindark.com

sindark.com might seem like a rather random URL for this site, which consists of a mixture of posts on climate change, photography, Ottawa, and other general subjects of interest to me. The genesis of the name is a long one. Back when I was an undergraduate at UBC, a friend of mine exposed me to the James Joyce poem “Nightpiece” which contains the sonorous line: “Night’s sindark nave.” I chose that as the title for my blog at the time, which was still produced and hosted using Google’s Blogger service.

The site underwent several evolutions – moving to a private hosting company and eventually to being managed through WordPress. It also got a major update after I finished at UBC. Along with that update came the new name: “a sibilant intake of breath”. As such, the current name has nothing to do with the current URL, except insofar as both are taken from literature.

The address of the site is potentially problematic, insofar as it contains misleading theological overtones. It may communicate something a bit useful, in that this site is pretty anti-religious, but that is hardly the most important thing to highlight. As such, it is probably a good idea to eventually migrate to a new address, probably leaving all the old content where it is now.

The new address should ideally be something short and memorable, which is certainly challenging in a crowded internet landscape. I would strongly prefer for it to be .com, rather than .org or .net or anything like that. That preference isn’t driven by the view that .com sites are commercial. Rather, I just see .com as the default and easier for users to remember and use than any of the alternatives. It also offers the most flexibility, since the content of the site is not partly linked to the name.

Something like milanilnyckyj.com or ilnyckyj.com would be possible, but both are impossible to spell and less memorable than a more common word or combination of words. Perhaps I should dig back through some of my favourite pieces of writing to find a snippet of text that passes the tests of being concise, sticking in the mind of the reader, and being available with a ‘.com’ appended to the end.