Rubenerd

I haven’t given you an odd-one-out experiment to try for a while. See if you can guess which COVID-19 story quoted below is the fake.

First we head to the US state of Michigan, and some bright sparks who thought blocking a hospital would garner them sympathy and respect:

Hundreds of opponents of Michigan’s social distancing measures rallied in their cars in the state capital on Wednesday, snarling traffic and even blocking a hospital entrance in a protest against an executive order intended to halt the spread of the novel coronavirus in the state.

Think this is limited to those who want to deny people care? Here’s an athlete you’ve probably heard of:

“Personally I am opposed to vaccination and I wouldn’t want to be forced by someone to take a vaccine in order to be able to travel,” $TennisPlayer said.

Over in Singapore, a YouTube star has been busted:

Famous Singaporean vlogger $YouTubeHandle has landed himself in hot water for selling fake N95 masks on his online store. The polytechnic student from Bishan sparked controvery for saying plain cloth was as effective as medical-grade mask material.

And down under, this has spread to our largest city:

Anti-vaxxers have been targeting Sydneysiders by dropping leaflets in letterboxes that claim the novel coronavirus is a hoax and by spreading conspiracy theories online.

Did you pick it? It was the Singaporean YouTuber. The fact I had trouble thinking of something worse than those other stories, while still sounding believable, says it all.

The time to think conspiracy theorists of this ilk are harmless is long over. As long as fringes will take the words of a leaflet or a sportsball star over doctors and scientists, they’ll cost lives. Anyone who says otherwise is either lying or willfully ignorant; a distinction I’m slowly realising is one without a difference.

Sources: The Daily Beast, Reuters, Sydney Morning Herald.

It’s with a heavy heart that I saw this on the CD Baby store:

CD Baby retired our music store in March of 2020 in order to place our focus entirely on the tools and services that are most meaningful to musicians today and tomorrow.

I love marketing speak; what does the second half of the above sentence even mean? Surely artists being able to sell music would rank highly among meaningful tools for them. As photographers would say, you can’t eat exposure.

Most of the music I bought through Whole Wheat Radio came through CD Baby back in the day, though I was using them as of last year too. I’m switching to Bandcamp now for people who publish there, but it still feels like a shame.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

39:20 – Wandering around a deserted Chatswood late at night, peeking into the empty stores, and watching the regular stream of empty commuter and metro trains roll by. Discussing working from home, trying to reconnect with music, critiquing streaming services, and a rose tinted view of audio tape.

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released April 2020 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts; this one notwithstanding.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.

As financial tech becomes more of a thing, I’m concerned the media and consumer advocacy sites are not adequately addressing security concerns. Worse, they’re instilling false confidence, like my hat does when I join video conference calls.

Below is a quote from a large Australia financial comaprison site. They proudly state in their footer that they’ve been featured in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 and the Australian Anthill Smart 100:

Q: Is $NewFinancialCompany safe and secure?
A: Absolutely, $NewFinancialCompany uses encryption technology.

And here’s a quote from a well known, respected consumer advocacy site:

Is $NewFinancialCompany safe?
$NewFinancialCompany uses 128-bit Secure Socket Layer (SSL) data encryption to protect all your information and financial transactions. 128-bit SSL encryption is the same technology used by banks all over the world.

The above points are true, and meaningless. Okay the latter isn’t even true; the site uses TLS not SSL. The one technical detail they managed to include, with care taken to spell out the abbreviation, was wrong.

Leaving aside technical pedantry though, here’s just a few things answers like this didn’t address:

1. Where does it use this encryption technology? What is it? Is it only in transit, or it also at rest? Where is this encrypted data domiciled?

2. Do they ever share your personally-identifiable and financial information with third parties, for profit or otherwise? If so, why? How do they limit it? Is your consent solicited?

3. Do they provide two-factor authentication? Does it use SMS for it, or a fob, or a mobile application? How do you set it up? How easy is it to revoke?

4. What’s their policy on sharing credentials? Will they ever ask for them over the phone? Do they frown on password managers?

5. Do their financial integrations require you to share your credentials with your banks or other financial accounts? Do they adequately explain the risks in doing so? How do they store those credentials? What technical measures and internal policies do they have to ensure access is limited?

6. What happens if you lose access to your account? How do you verify your identity? Is verification processed by a third party? If so, refer to point 2.

7. What security certifications do they have? Are they compliant with the latest financial services legislation? Have they been independently vetted or audited? Is that information publicly accessible?

8. Have they ever had a data breach before? We’re all human, so if so, how did they rectify it?

To the layperson, the encryption technology answers above sound confident and complete. I’d go as far as to say they’re more dangerous than not addressing the issue at at all.

Some of my questions above do enter the nitty-gritty side of security, but it’s the entire job of journalists and consumer advocacy groups to make these topics approachable, understandable, and underscore their importance.

I can’t think of a single other issue beyond financial literacy that would be as important to know about when choosing a new financial service as security and data privacy. Leaked or improperly-stored financial data could be some of the most damaging things to recover from, not to mention the short and long term risks posed from identity theft. It floors me these sites didn’t think such concerns warranted a mention; they can and must do better.

I went for a long walk outside for the first time in weeks. The NSW government has classified exercise as an acceptable excuse to leave the home, provided you maintain social distancing. It was so good to stretch my legs.

It felt weird wandering around the empty streets and witnessing the regular running of ghostly, empty commuter trains. I love that I shot that silly photo by mistake: it summed up my weird mood pretty well.

I’ve been taking a Twitter sabbatical, but I made the mistake of absentmindedly launching TweetBot on my phone this afternoon. How’s that for some well-established neural pathways?

As always, @Techconnectify had an interesting perspective on something I’ve been mulling for a while:

In my opinion, we should see a change in opinion or tact as a good thing. It means someone is responding to a changing situation.

I think it’s the best way to measure competence.

Yet a large percentage of people equate competence with steadfastness

I empathise with people who want to keep things the way they are. It worked in the past, or we wouldn’t be here. It was proven, demonstrated, argued, and refined. But the tense is key; it’s not rational to expect something to continue working if its operating environment changes.

His tweets were referring to a large-scale health situation we’re dealing with right now, but could easily apply to so many other things. Treating environmental damage as an economic externality. Citing cable TV as a reason against mandatory net neutrality. Using a children’s toothbrush.

Change for change’s sake is bad, as is jumping headfirst into untested ideas. But when something is demonstrably no longer working, change is the only honest and acceptable action.

I ran into a fun mental exercise and promptly apologised. What if you had a $100 million but could only procure goods and services that share your name’s starting letter? It’s difficult to think of a contract, will, or prize upon which such a condition would be stipulated, but then again that sum of money is equally unlikely.

(As an aside, remember when these hypothetical started with a million dollars? That would barely cover the cost of most houses in Australia).

Let’s call out the loopholes first, which I will not employ:

• Using a generic descriptor, such as a red house or a ravishing hat. I’d just include my wishlist here prepended with really awesome.

• Increasing liquidity by converting the money into ringgit. Aside from rendering the entire exercise pointless, Malaysia places strict controls on its forex anyway. Maybe rupiah, rials, or rubles.

So here’s my list, in descending order of importance:

1. Research of a medical nature. Either opening a not-for-profit lab, or continuing to provide guaranteed funding for existing researchers.

2. Rural Railways that are shutting down. I’d convert them into tourist trains, or keep them viable for communities that need them.

3. Radio, shortwave or national FM/AM, to compete with the rubbish that’s current talkback radio. With a web stream too. Would basically be a front to funnel money into journalism with an evidence-based, scientific perspective (aka: facts) to counter Murdoch, and some good independent music. And I know just who I’d want to run it.

4. Residences for Clara and myself. A small apartment in Sydney and Singapore would be lovely. Naturally the places I like the most have some of the most overpriced real estate in the world.

5. Retirement, so I could spend my time contributing to open source software, independent media, and travelling. If I make the mistake of finding work I enjoy again, this would just be a nice nest egg.

6. Retreats, like a little hidey hole in Kyoto I can introvert in for a couple of weeks of the year.

7. Retro Computers. Okay that’s a bit of a cheat, but “retro computer” is a specific and discrete thing. Yes.

It’s Music Monday time, that day of the week when I etc and so forth. Today I share a song from my favourite singer-songwriter Michael Franks, and a lyric I’ve misheard for years:

Increasingly, I start to see why
Spring ain’t here
I can’t demote my overcoat ‘cause
Spring ain’t here
I still am seen in MLB ‘cause
Spring ain’t here
Turn up the song and don’t be long
Make spring… be… here

(I wrote this in Markdown and all the lines ran together because I forgot to put the invisible spaces at the end. I’m starting to think all the weird edge cases and unfriendly things like that make it not worth using. But I digress).

This is from the song “Why Spring Ain’t Here” from his 1999 album Barefoot on the Beach. Since I was a kid I’ve always thought that line about MLB was weird: what does it stand for, and why would him being in it have to do with it not yet being spring?

I checked the liner notes from the CD and the line is L.L.Bean. A web search retured it as an American retailer. I’d tell you more about them, but they had newsletter popup spam so I had to close the tab.

As a side node, you can tell most lyric sites pilfer off each other given the same typo appeared everywhere:

I still am seem in L.L.Bean cause

Time to chill from more music from that album, me thinks.

I’ve been lucky that I’ve often worked remote for my job. A colleague and I regularly travel interstate in Australia and work from coffee shops between client meetings. In 2018 I worked out of our San Francisco office for a few months, some of which was spent in the cafe downstairs and near my boss’s house. And last year I café-hopped around Singapore working Australian hours for a nostalgic work holiday.

But it’s starting to set in for me now that we’ll be doing this for months from home, possibly half a year or more. My boss preemptively sent us to work remote long before it became serious, and my hunch is he’ll want us to stay home until this has all settled back down and everyone has been back for a few weeks. We’re in this for the long haul.

We’re also lucky in that working in cloud infrastructure has put us in a much better position than most. The most any of us need is an SSH or RDP session, chat client, web browser, office suite, webcam, and a pair of decent headphones. The boss just posted:

Feels like we’ve got a good pace/cadence going - our team is pretty used to working remote, so it wasn’t too hard

From a business sense this is true, though it’s exposed for me just how much I’d come to rely upon three things:

1. Routine
2. Distance
3. Coffee shops

Consistently getting up, commuting, and rocking up to an office or coffee shop gave me mental time to prepare and maintain that home/work firewall. I’ve rarely had a problem working remote beyond typical Australian connectivity issues, but I’ve always found it challenging to stay focused when working from home; my brain associates it with rest and personal projects. Doubly-so now that we live in a studio apartment where the bedroom is also the kitchen and workspace.

I also just miss working from cafés. The fresh air and being around other people without an obligation to talk beyond a happy chat with a barista is somehow the perfect environment for mental stimulation. Most of this blog has been written at cafes over the years, and many posts and episodes have been spent exploring why.

Fortunately for Clara and I, we bought a some small outdoor furniture set, so we’ve managed to turn our studio apartment balcony into a cafe of sorts. Getting fresh air, sunlight, and a home-made coffee first thing in the morning has helped tremendously.

I hope you’re going okay.

Update 2020-04-03: The timestamp on this post was seeminly an insufficient indication of how seiously this post should be taken! Though I’m curious that once again those digusting cookies generated the most surprise.

Being stuck at home with my thoughs and a well-worn coffee mug has given me a chance to reflect on things that don’t merely exist in mirrors. That was a top shelf joke. I’m now willing to concede my reservations with the following were either somewhat or entirely misplaced:

• Socks with artificial fibres
• btrfs
• Oreos and Oreo-flavoured snacks
• OpenStack
• USB-C connectors
• Bagels with sweet toppings
• HTML email and Electron applications
• Tenuous blog lists

This was originally going to be a tweet, but I’ve someone returned to a sabbatical on that platform after a day of activity again.