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!
Where to start? Interesting show as usual, even if the guests weren’t as effervesent as the regulars, their input made up for it.
Threads
Threads is still not available, here in the EU. It is a privacy nightmare and it seems Meta wasn’t willing to miss out on the revenue in other parts of the world, by restricting their data munching to fit within the law… Which might damage its uptake in the EU long term, if it ever does turn up, as it is already tainted more than Facebook & Insta. That said, it doesn’t bother me, FB, Insta & WhatsApp, as well as another 2,500 or so Meta tracking domains, are DNS blocked, here at Chez David.
I am still on Twitter, but mainly for some cybersecurity friends and some parods & memorabilia (C64, Amiga etc.) accounts & some cyclists. I prefer Mastodon, but don’t tend to post that much, yet… I certainly wouldn’t go over to Threads in place of Twitter, that seems to be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire’s of hell…
Ring
Such cameras are a pain to use, here in Germany. You can’t show the driveway or the road in front of the house, if you live in a block of flats, you can’t use it on the main door & on the flat (apartment) door, you cannot show passers-by in the corridor. That makes positioning the camera very difficult.
I suspect that many people who do use them aren’t aware of the restrictions and could end up with fines or a court date, if somebody who cares about their privacy spots them…
Robotaxi
Some people went off on one on Twitter over this. One Secops poster said it was a physical hack, and the robocar lovers came out to claim they were causing the cars to break the law, because they were then driving with partially blocked vision. It took a long time until they were convinced that the cars were following the law (and stopping until the obstacle was removed) and not driving blindly through the neighbourhood…
It is always so funny seeing the fanboys come out in droves to defend the indefensible, and even if they can be proven wrong, they will sink with their ship and not accept they got something wrong.
I had a similar chat with somebody over the new UK data protection bill, which wants to put backdoors into encryption. It went on for 2 days, with people pointing out to one person, that if the encryption on WhatsApp & Co. was broken, essentially everybody who wanted it would be able to view messages after a short period of time, before the backdoor broke into the open.
She kept trying to say this is a good thing, and “think of the children”, she claimed to be a teacher & had found a pupil had been abused, and how much simpler that would have been, if the authorities had been monitoring everybody’s messages… And that they were “professionals”.
Pointing out, that criminals would simply take the math elsewhere and use their own illegal networks went straight over her head for a long time. She seemed to believe that if encryption was broken for Signal, then the encryption the criminals would use would be broken as well. It took ages until she realised that was not the case.
Then I asked her about intimate pictures, and whether she would be happy for Mrs Miggins, the village gossip to be looking at them and spreading them around the village… Didn’t bother her, because she doesn’t do such things. Some people really can’t think abstractly in metaphores. Then I tried her address, appointments etc. Yes, but she already sent them out to people, so they knew where to meet here.
When I pointed out that criminals would also be able to see that information, she said, well, apart from criminals, of course, we won’t let them look… Which is when I said, “but you have been arguing the exact opposite for the last 2 days…” Since then, she has been silent. 
Evernote
I disovered Evernote through TWiT in 2009. I used it, with subscription, in my, then, new job as IT manager. I went around all the sites, photographing the assets we had (there was no database, I was the first IT person in the company in over 150 years!) into Evernote with my iPhone, then calling it up on the web on my PC to transfer the serial numbers, designations etc. into an asset register.
It was a brilliant tool, but when I left the company, I stopped my subscription, because I no longer needed the excessive number of entries/notes that I had been taking before and local OneNote was simpler & enough - I used it for meetings and typing up the minutes afterwards, but apart from that, I hardly used it at all. In the last 7 years, I probably have used OneNote about twice a years, up to Corona times, in the last 2 years, I don’t think I’ve even opened it. (And I don’t use anything else.)
Sphere
I find it gawdy, like the rest of Las Vegas. There are already too many artificial lights on the strip, it really isn’t my thing, so it won’t be an additional attraction to try and lure me to go there, it is yet another thing to help keep me away from the place.
I’m more the open-air theatre and concert type. Over where my brother-in-law lives, there is a forest theatre, an amphitheatre in the middle of a forest, you sit on grass banks and watch the stage. I find that much more intimate & relaxing than a huge, gawdy venue.
It’s available in the UK, my wife is using it on her iPhone, she’s also an Instagram user. Threads has much fewer data permissions than Instagram though. I assume permission will be added as she uses features. People keep saying it accesses health data - but there isn’t a health permission to add?
It is what Meta itself says in the App Store about the app, they want to have all the data they can get:
- Health & Fitness
- Financial Info
- Contact Info
- User Content
- Usage Data
- Diagnostics
- Purchases
- Location
- Contacts
- Search History
- Identifiers
- Sensitive Info
- Other Data
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Understood But if iOS doesn’t allow access to health data, you’re OK? Unless you start writing about your health in Threads I guess
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Theoretically, you must give access to the data, before the App can get access.
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That was my conclusion. I was a bit concerned when she said she’d started using it, but I then checked and it has very few permissions. Plus Apple makes a point of saying health data is protected in the HealthKit database, encrypted, and even they can’t see your health data.
So not sure what health data Meta are talking about.
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Maybe other health related apps, like Komoot, Strava, Fitbit, Garmin etc.? Third party scales and other stuff like that
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Looks like Brexit was useful for something then - Threads works in the UK 
Not sure that is a positive… 
It will be the last one standing for normal people, Twitter will implode, Mastodon is to complicated for normal people and BlueSky is so full of its own importance, it will never grow big enough for success
Paul Smith-Keitley
Adobe Creative Educator