Deep Dives explores a topic in greater detail that a basic explanation. Digital devices, security, privacy, and policy are all fair game here.
Blacklight is a privacy inspector hosted at a website called The Markup.The Markup is a news organization that’s—well, quite different from other news organizations. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about it but I recommend if you want to know more about the site, go and read the About page. One…
Right after the first iPhone came out (so somewhere around a decade ago), the company issued me an iPod Touch at work. That way, I could have the experience of working with the phones that many of our users were getting. I didn’t need a company phone at that time. Podcasts were still in their…
There’s pain you can live with—or learn to live with—and then there’s nerve pain, and pain caused by nerve damage. Patients with pain caused by damage to the sciatic nerve often live with not being able to find a comfortable position to sit, stand, or lie down. Research into finding relief from this pain took…
image courtesy of Seattle Municipal Archives In the United States, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 325 million cellular devices in use (15), comprising phones, tablets, notebooks, hotspots, and, most recently, vehicles. We are generating a lot of data on these devices, and these devices are generating a lot of data—about us. At…
Unless you always save to your external drive or your mapped drive on your home server, you might consider disconnecting when not in use. The encrypting malware is getting really sophisticated and extends its reach to your mapped drives. That means if your offsite online backup solution operates as a mapped drive, your safety net…
I was reading one of my techie newsletters recently and the writer mentioned something of which I had never before heard: CubeSats. I know that there are a lot of things in space of which I have never before heard, but I thought I had heard of the big, important things. As it turns out,…
The term “net neutrality” refers to two different aspects, and the debate revolves around both of them. One part refers to priority treatment of some types of traffic over other types. Pure net neutrality would state and require that all traffic be treated equally. The other part involves access to all of the Internet regardless…
View image | gettyimages.com I listen to a lot of podcasts on various subjects, and recently I heard the hosts of the Digital Underground Podcast from Kaspersky Labs talking about a new web browser called Aviator. Built on Chromium, but designed for privacy, I figured I’d give it a try. I like Chrome, and I…
View image | gettyimages.com Under normal conditions, the human body has an astonishing capacity to self-regulate and heal itself. Unless weakened through misuse, environmental damage, or anomalies at the cellular level, to name just a few exceptions, we are largely capable of overcoming most illness and damage. Sometimes we have to help, like splinting or casting a…
In April of 2015, the Hubble Space Telescope will turn 25 years old, and in that quarter century, it has given scope to the imaginations of space geeks everywhere. Recently I saw a really neat photo that got me curious about the device, so I figured it’d make a great first space post here. I’ll…