Welcome again to DigitalCyber Security Month. For the entire month you will see Digital Citizens post tips that can help everyone improve their security practices online, on device and personally. Cyber Security isn't just about making sure you have an unbreakable password or the most secure firewall for your home network. Its a mental defensive posture you must take when dealing with all your interactions online and in real life (IRL). For better or for worse a large amount of our lives are on or interact with the Internet. So the more we know about protecting the accounts, data, and identity of ourselves as well as our friends and family the safer we all will be.
Check That Web Address (https only)
Everyone knows how to use a web browser. Terms like .com and www are reflexive as to how we associate companies, non profit organizations and services to the Internet. Unfortunately the early Internet was a lot more trusting than it is today. Almost everything was transferred in clear text. So if you were able to put a computer between two devices you could see everything that was being communicated between those parties. Usernames, passwords, emails, images, web pages, everything was open for anyone with enough determination and knowhow to see all your activity. So along with www and .com you should always keep https at the top of your mind.
“https” ensures that when you are using a web browser everything you receive from and send to a web server is secure and encrypted. And I can not emphasize this enough. EVERYTHING YOU PUT ON THE INTERNET SHOULD BE ENCRYPTED. Is all encrypted created equal? No. But if you are using https you can at least ensure that you are making a best effort at securing your data. So if you are logging into a web site or email, logging into your bank, viewing your kids grades at school, viewing your personal family photographs, when you look at the web browser address bar you should see https in frond of the address for the site or service you are using. It seems like a simple thing but it makes a ton of difference when it comes to protecting your personal data.
Continue to enjoy your Cyber Security Awareness Month and remember to pass on these and any other security tips to your fell Digital Citizens.
Happy Digital Security Month. For the entire month of October you will see tips and suggestions given out to help users safeguard their data (files, passwords, personal information). I mean lets face it. We live in a computer dominated society. It is very easy to take for granted the information we put about ourselves online can been seen by unintended parties. Information that can expose the location, financial information, user accounts of ourselves, family members and friends. So hopefully over the course of the next month you may see a tip or two that will help you protect your data more effectively.
Tip Number 1: Long Passwords
Passwords. We all have them. Many of us have short, easy to remember passwords because who wants to type in all those characters right? Furthermore many more reuse those short easy to remember passwords on more than one website. In the words of a famous TV Robot “Danger (insert name here) Danger”.
Short non complex passwords rank among the top reasons why people loose control of their user accounts and have their personal computers hacked into. So at bare minimum remember these three tips:
Long Passwords (Passphrase)
Have you ever used the name of your hamster or your mother's birthdate as your password. How would you ever forget that right? Well the problem with short easy to remember passwords is that modern computers can run through all the possible versions of a simple lowercase eight character password in less than a workday. Increase that password to 12 characters and it would take a modern computer hundreds of years to break. So make sure to make those passwords as long as possible. Fourteen to Sixteen characters is a good minimum to keep in mind.
Complexity
A simple password security tip a lot of users don't think about using is not making passwords only consist of alphabet characters. The password “mydogmax” takes about five hours to crack. Replacing a couple of those characters with capitals, numbers, and special characters will take the time it takes to crack that password to over ten years. So remember when creating passwords to always mix in capitals, digits, and special characters (i.e. !,@,#,$,%,&,*,(,)).
Never Use The Same Password Twice
Fight the urge to use a password regardless of how complex and clever it is on multiple sites. Websites and services are broken into everyday. And if you use your password on multiple sites and one of those sites is broken into those hackers will try the passwords they find on any of the major websites on the Internet. So as annoying as it may be use a different password for each site you use.
I love wrestling. Can tell you stories for days about being a kid and watching televised matches Saturday nights in New York with my grandfather on channel 9 I believe. To say the product is different now would be like saying Donald Trump is a different type of president. But I think the biggest problem can be summed up in one phrase. “Over Exposure”.
Wrestling fans have far more by-in than they ever use to before. Gone are the smoky arenas and banquet halls of yesterday. Now you have fifteen-thousand plus sports centers for weekly shows. On top of which you have millions of fans tuning in weekly, social media input in real-time, and YouTube commentators. Even dark matches (which are ways to test things out to a small audience) are reported on and circulated as soon as they happen. So if you are a big enough fan you always know what to expect. Then lets look at the sheer amount of content just based on WWE:
Monday Night Raw (3 Hours)
Smackdown (2 Hours)
NXT (1 Hours)
205 Live (1 Hour)
NXT UK (1 Hour)
Main Event ( Hulu Show)
That is not even counting Miz & Mrs., Total Divas, Total Divas, and all the original content on the WWE Network. So even if you are just a minor fan you are seeing 4+ hours of content. But I think bring back an old idea could sort things out again. Going regional.
NXT is so big because it feels like a completely separate brand from WWE. I think a regional system needs to be set up nationally. 4 separate regions need to be setup that are fed by indie talent and the performance center. They all should have their own streaming presence. They should never cross boarders. No invasions, no raiding of talent. They should be separate universes. Each region should have two or three set places to do shows so they could build dedicated fan bases that will fill small venues.
Biggest benefit I feel is to the NXT and WWE rosters if this happens. When you have a star that you want to repackage or give some time off they can be assigned to one of the regionals and have more freedom to work on their character. NXT is too big for someone to really hide away there now. The time away alone will freshen characters up to audiences that are tired of seeing them not do anything. Like take Bailey or Apollo Crews off air for a few months. Let them get a breather from all the travel and do some meaningful matches off the beaten path to gain some extra confidence. When they get brought back up they have a louder pop and some new stuff to show off.
I think I am out of touch. Like old man “Get off my lawn” out of touch. I see my kids in their room playing video games, talking on face time, listening to music on their Google Home. Which if I have to be honest I don't mind at all. But there is always something to do. I can't remember the last time I saw my kids left to their own devices. They are always in contact with one of their friends or peers. I mean I can remember whole weekends where I was stuck in my room trying to flip the score of Donkey Kong on my Colecovision.
I'm not saying being solitary is necessarily a great trait to have. Not that I had to survive 1800s frontier life. But for long periods of time I could depend on myself for entertainment. Reading a book, watching TV, trying to squint just right so I can try to make out shapes on scrambled adult channels, walking. Thinking back its amazing I didn't become a recluse.
My kids are completely different animals. They have more hours communicating with their friends than I think I did with anyone in life up to their age. They have had friends move away that they can keep in touch with via facetime, iMessage and X-box. I had friends move to another complex and never saw them again. I is just amazing that they have a peer group that is not dependent on locality. But does this prevent them from making new friends? I mean if Dunbar's Theory is true and you never loose a friend can you really be open to new relationships? Or will you be unwilling to meet new people? Can you really keep the friends you meet in elementary and middle school all though High School, college and beyond? Will be an interesting social experiment to watch.
It is a little sobering to see how much better friends my kids are with people they see once a month or less than I was with people I saw almost everyday. Although that might be a separate commentary on myself.
Farewell Quentin Coldwater.
I'm gonna need a minute with the whole Quentin thing on. #themagicians. I hard as I rolled with team Q&A I see the outrage about the writers teasing Quentin and Elliot. The outrage I've seen so far is AMAZING so it will be interesting to see how they address it this week and into season 5.
I'm more “thrown” because Quentin was my dude. Nerdy, quiet, no confidence, likes to escape reality. Even with four seasons of the writers beating into our heads how insignificant and cowardly Quentin was I loved the core of who Q was. His maturity and and growth was fun to watch. Even though Alice has the most potential, Margo is just the ultimate bad ass, Julia is powerful, Q fit in.
I'm gonna miss Q a lot on the show. I have some real motivation to finish the books now.
The Cloudpocalypse Will Not Be Televised... or on Youtube.
I was a HUGE Google Plus user. It was my blog, my Instant Messenger, my telephone. I used Plus and Hangouts for everything I did online. And if you weren't on it I didn't exist to you because I gave up everything else. Enter April 2019 and G+ is dead and buried. Nothing more than a blurry mashup of memories and dead URLs. So as to not have all my major memories from 2011 to 2018 completely vanish into the ether of Internet I decided to go to Google Takeout and download my archives. 40 GB later I was just stunned.
I knew I used Plus a lot. But 40 GBs? That seemed a lot. A whole lot. I mean sure I can find thumb drives bigger than that. But that is just Plus. Looking around the net at all my social accounts, pictures, storage and etc. I probably have somewhere between 750 and 800 GB of data floating around in various clouds. That is a lot of data. Data that I am use to not being responsible for until some service shutdown. Even more, if you look at TV shows, movies, music and books then I have multiple TBs of media and posts out there. If I had to backup all that data:
I would have no where near enough space at home to store all that data.
I would have no backup plan to make sure I could keep 3:2:1 backup of all that data (3 backups, 2 different types of media, 1 off site copy).
The act of simply downloading all that data to my own systems would blow though my current datacap multiple times over.
So here I stand. Totally dependent on external cloud storage because I have neither the resources nor a plan to handle all the data that I own, lease, have associated with my various accounts online. It sometimes feels like I met some cool dude at a party that offered me a cigarette and then BANG I'm hooked on PCP. It is becoming clear that I need cloud rehab.
So what do I mean when I say cloud rehab. First of all I need storage. A crap ton of spinning, solid state, pretty high speed storage. And I need all of that data to be redundant. RAID 3 or 5 or something at least. So when a disk failure does happen I am prepared. Second I need to stop depending only on streaming services. Sure most TV shows can live on my six to nine months cloud DVR through my favorite cord cutting service. But for my movies and favorite TV shows I want to watch ad nauseam I need to start caving those on my own network. The data cap savings alone would be worth it.
Putting it short this is a scary undertaking. I've personally gotten so use to a steady diet of streaming services where at the mercy of good account settings and ISP network saturation and latency to view what I want or virtually own. Its strange you have to almost be a network architect just to run your home network.
The good thing about the streaming service content wars is a lot of shows are getting made that would not ever see the light of day ten years ago. Not even no HBO or Showtime. And being a comic book and Science Fiction fan this is like heaven to me. So of course I had to binge The Umbrella Academy in three days. So let me start of saying that I really really liked the series. The take on a super hero team that is raised for children to defend humanity and the trauma that must face as they grow into adulthood is very interesting. Even though we are only giving a glimpse into events that happened in their past we see enough to understand why the team is so damaged. I have thoughts though. Maybe even questions.
The Horror
I've seen some online reviews that state number 6 is much more present in the series than the comic. Which is cool. I'm still dying to see what his fate was that lead him to his current state. It seems to have been a defining moment for the whole team. So I hope is it addressed at some point. At least let it be an animated short.
Cha Cha and Hazel
I need Cha Cha and Hazel to have their own spin-off. So much of their backstory is left unsaid. But the little bit they show is so entertaining. And just when you think one has come humanity and compassion BANG, more murder.
The Doughnut Lady
It is strange for a super hero series to not have many real good guys. Most characters are flawed, damaged or both in The Umbrella Academy. But no one is as good or pure as Agnes. I actually found myself cheering for Hazel to not be a super strong murderous monster and make Agnes happy. I do hope they find a way to fit their story into the sequel series.
Michael Cohen Wikipedia Picture circa 2011
Supporting racist wasn't enough.
Making money while “letting” foreign countries buy rooms in his hotels like girl scout cookies wasn't enough.
Calling economic refugees murders and rapists wasn't enough.
Tearing apart those refugees families apart and creating a boarder crisis wasn't enough.
Personally withholding details from his own adminstration and state department about talks he had with “hostile” foreign leaders wasn't enough.
Closing down the government so he can get his foot in the door for a perpetual sweetheart construction deal wasn't enough.
So I'll believe this is the smoking gun when I see it.
UPDATE
Mastodon instance size limitation so I vented on my blog. Long and short is I will believe Trump telling Cohen to lie is a big thing if something actually cones of it. Otherwise it is business as usual. He will probably call Pelosi ugly tomorrow and have a change.org petition up about that by Monday in time for the new news cycle.
I'm way less social than I use to be. At least online I am. I'm a complete introvert so I've never been a social person in real life. But my God throw a social network at me and watch out. I mean I was you Yahoo! 360, Plurk, Friendfeed. I tried just about anything (Google Buzz). But times are changing. Call it my advanced age or the fact that online just is not the utopia we grey hairs once thought it was. I just don't feel like telling high single digit numbers of people why I didn't tie my shoes today.
That is not to say I don't want to share at all. I just think my thinking about what I share and with who has evolved. I have friends I like to share random thoughts with to bounce things off of. I have close friends I want to share experiences and media with. But I do not like the idea anymore of sharing everything on a platform that I have not control of and can disappear at any time. That is part of my recent love of Mastodon and other federated services. I think by the end of the year I'm going to spin up an instance of Mastodon and maybe PixelFed to run my online social presence. Under my own domain and everything. I'll try to get a few people to buy in so I'm not just speaking to myself. Even though the little bit of research I've done on mastodon administration is intimidating. I really want to give it a try.
But Why???
Well for one, I am not famous. I've accepted it. I've come to terms with it. I think I am able to crank out a funny zinger every six to eight months that might get twelve or more people to view and actually repost. But any ideas I had that I could be a trend setter or online philosopher are long over. So I don't really need a platform like Facebook or Twitter to push my thoughts when I can find three to eight people on a federated service that is dedicated to interests like mine to give me meaningful input on how profound or ass backwards my posts are.
Secondly I love family but I do not need to see what they are doing all the time. I mean send me a like to a photo archive during the holidays or when Tasha makes honor roll. But I don't need SMS notifications of their daily timeline. I mean I love Google Photos for just that reason. I load up pics of the boys, sort them into an album and push them to the couple people who are interested. No need to flood a social network with 65 pics of my kids looking happy and me looking fat and balding that only and few people are even going to look at.
Last reason is sadly and I've eluded to in the first two, I'm not that interesting. So I'm not looking for the post that is going to make me viral. I'm just looking to say some stupid stuff at times. So I'll keep my Twitter account because more news is on there than anything. But in 2019 I'm going open and federated.
Now if only group chat was just a federated.
...To Be Continued
Village Voice Cover circa 1992
It would be nice if I could stand up and say straight faced and with conviction “I've always been an ally”. That something as simple as the gender of the person someone loves and chooses to make love to never bothered me. I would also like to say I have always been financially responsible and studied my hardest in school as well. But all those statements would be false. When I think of the person I was thirty (30) odd years ago it is hard to feel anything but shame. My world view was so narrow and shaped by antiquated ideas about manhood and religion. And even with good intentions I see how I looked down on people because they were different. That's how I was taught to be so that is obviously the right way to be right?
FUCK NO THAT AIN'T RIGHT
I can remember in fact a day when I was in high school where my mom asked if I wanted to go to Greenwich Village in New York City and I declined because of “the gays”. Man it is embarrassing to admit that. What is worse is that mindset was considered normal. No one really looked at me as wrong or narrow minded for feeling that way. I had homosexual family members in my life but I didn't relate to them where that side of their life would come up. And why would they. Why would a grown man or woman want to risk being judged by some stupid teenager? And if I had peers my age that were gay why would they risk outing themselves and deal with the social stigma of being gay in 1990s urban New York City. Not that safest of spaces in the history of human kind. Plus it is not a homosexual person's job to explain what it is to be gay to a heterosexual person. It is the responsibility of a human to recognize the humanity of another human and understand that our difference are arbitrary and have not bearing on us as people.
Now it took me a long time to come to that understanding. What I didn't do is retreat into a cadre orthodox heterosexuals. I had to find the courage to open up my mind and welcome the friendships of people from different backgrounds and interests and even sexual identities. I had to see from piratical experience that all white people were not devils, all jew did not want to steal my money, that foreigners were not backwards and stuff in the Middle Ages and that homosexuals no matter how attractive I though I was were not interested in jumping my bones in the least. Humbling but necessary to get over myself and see that at the end of the day good people and assholes come in all shapes, sizes and background.
Diversity is such an important aspect of life I've learned. Without the influx of new and different ideas and world views people become stagnant and feeble minded. They lean on ideas like magic and feeling instead of science and facts. The unknown becomes feared and hated. And we stop learning and evolving. And now I'm rambling.
Long and short, homosexuality, Islam, black skin, and liberalism are not commutable. Although I wish intelligence was.
(The Umbrella Academy image from Wikipedia)[
Michael Cohen Wikipedia Picture circa 2011
Hiding
Village Voice Cover circa 1992