Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
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WeChat is THE most active social media app AND e-commerce “platform” in China. Don’t confuse big (like Aliexpress) with often used. A lot of things are bought/sold on WeChat via P2P (no Website or Online Shop involved). They send a PDF or link to pictures and you order eg. food from the store at the corner (for 2 Persons, soup, fish, noodles, dumplings and desert incl. delivery ~ EUR 6,50).
WeChat has around 700 Million ACTIVE users per month (total over 1,1 Billion afaik).
There is no one in our (extended) family how knows a person, that doesn’t have WeChat. And that includes Ant’s that are over 76 years old 
I could easily spend 2 hours a day just watching all the pictures that are sent within our family 
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Curious that it would be that way in Austria. In Australia we have a lot of students, expats etc. from China, and honestly, the only place I’ve seen WeChat offered as a method of payment/contact is in a few Asian restaurants. Most of them don’t even offer it. I tried installing it on my phone out of interest but it was a large app that consumed lots of memory and I never used it, so eventually I removed it again. I live in Melbourne, one of Australia’s largest cities.
Do you know of elsewhere where WeChat is commonly used outside of China?
Had to laugh: “If your refrigerator is talking to your door knob it needs to be quarantined.”
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The chain of Asian-style bakeries (I think founder was from Hong Kong) around Australia take WeChat and AliPay. At least the one down King William Street in Adelaide does anyway.
Pretty funny 
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I think @Leo misunderstood the fact that in the EU the IP address is personally identifiable information. He said that is silly, that is “public”.
So is your name, your telephone number (usually in the phonebook), address etc. It isn’t that the information might be publicly available, it is the fact that it can identify you (IP address, even with DHCP lease + time = a location or device). If the IP address belongs to a wi-fi hotspot, that isn’t PII, if it belongs to a private premises, then it is.
As you cannot tell, whether the IP address is a single device, a residential location, a business or a public access point, the IP address has to be treated as PII. That means that you can’t store it without permission - this also means that even the log files on the web server, for example, have to anonymise the IP address! I think there is a get-out, that the IP address is needed for data forensics, so that if you have a data breach or are under attack, you can store the IP address, but in general logs, as soon as the data is no longer actual (E.g. the log is rotated at the end of the day), it needs to be anonymised.
There are methods of only logging the first 2 octets of an IP address that visits the site or to anonymise on rotation. There is still some discussion about it being needed for forensics, if a site is attacked. But it is still covered by the general rule - collect the minimum amount of information you need, you keep it only as long as you absolutely need it and you cannot pass it on to anyone else, without the “identified person’s” explicit permission (written opt-in).
This also makes trackers on websites illegal, because the “fingerprint” they generate identifies the visitor and allows them to be tracked from site to site. If the visitor to the site does not explicitly opt-in to the tracking from that company, the tracker cannot be used! A lot of site now have the option to disable all tracking when you visit the site, others allow you to switch the tracking on and off for individual trackers. Unfortunately some of them still opt to set them all to active and you have to turn them all off (one site had over 130 trackers, all individually set to on, I did start to set them to off, but after 2 pages, I gave up and went to find a more user-friendly site).
Sites that don’t offer an opt-in to tracking are breaking GDPR.
There is one caveat to the Cookies and tracking laws, you can keep session cookies to keep the location in the site or the current shopping basket, for example and a cookie to say that the visitor doesn’t want to be tracked can also be set.
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I wanted to pick up on something @Leo said. One way you might be able to use the three dumb router thing would be to have a separate, sub £200, smartphone on the IoT network.
Another thing would be InterVLAN routing. I’m not sure if the Edge Router X supports it but the Cisco Layer 3 switches do so you might be able to find a cheap L3 switch, set up InterVLAN routing, and then set up an Access Control List to only allow access from your phone.
It just bugged me to say that it is not possible to cross VLANs although I know that you can’t by default
I have the Unifi Security Gateway and you can definitely set up rules for inter-VLAN with that.
You could give the smartphone(s) on the main network a dedicated IP address, via DHCP reservation, then allow just those addresses to see the IoT network - and only specific ports, but not let anything on the IoT network see the internal network.
I currently have Management, LAN, Wi-Fi, Guest Wi-Fi and IoT VLANS on my network and it works pretty well, the guest and IoT networks can’t see anything, but the Wi-Fi and LAN networks can see each other and Management has its own restrictions.
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According to @ohthatflo on AAA you can now use AliPay here in America. They allow you to load money from either bank account numbers or debit cards - I can’t remember which she said.
I googled this McAdenville Christmastown in NC and oh boy, it’s straight out of 1998!
A Perl CGI style site counter and tables-a-palooza! Someone needs to introduce them to the flexbox!
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yeah, that lil’ town is interesting. Great shooting there for a photographer. Great eats there. But DEFINITELY a blast from the past in a sense.
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I will say that I think the lights are overrated now. It doesn’t have the same effort behind it like it did a decade ago. The town residence get credits on your energy bill during the holiday lights season, so everyone participates. But, the level of participation is a bit off these days.
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Yeah man. Lots of time in my IT days trying to make sure the calcs were correct for each jurisdiction. We used to lean on Vertex Inc for tax tables. I HATED year-end.
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I’ve been in the payroll trenches for over 25 years. It sucks.
I also pity the poor fools who have to code income tax software.
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