Eric Klinker on the BitTorrent Sync blog:
> Today, Sync is moving over 20 gigabytes per person. And that’s a pretty powerful thing. Dropbox’s cloud-based platform stores less than 0.42 gigabytes per user.
Wow. It really is a fantastic service. I’d love to see more iOS developer support though.
Simply fantastic post from Andy Beaumont:
> The web has seemingly evolved into something that actively antagonises people — why would anyone in their right mind hide the content that visitors are there to see?
Lives up to the title.
Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani:
> The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.
Here’s the fun part:
> NSA Director Keith Alexander disclosed in Senate testimony in October that the NSA had run a pilot project in 2010 and 2011 to collect “samples” of U.S. cellphone location data. The data collected were never available for intelligence analysis purposes, and the project was discontinued because it had no “operational value,” he said.
Jon Brodkin:
> Newly anointed Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler said this week that it would be OK for Internet service providers to charge Netflix and other companies for a faster lane to consumers.
[If only we could have seen that coming](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/04/new-fcc-chairman-is-former-lobbyist-for-cable-and-wireless-industries/).
[Rather sensationalist headline on this post from Will Oremus][1]:
> Score one for the machines. On Tuesday, Applebee’s announced plans to install a tablet at every table in its 1,860 restaurants across the United States. Customers will be able to use the devices to order food, pay the bill, and ignore their dining companions by playing video games.
I am all for this, in fact I would pay more to not have to interact with servers — instead getting a tablet. Do you know why?
Because we waited 25 minutes the other night at Red Robin to place our order. That’s after placing a drink order and waiting 15 minutes for soda. Total time to order our food: 40 minutes. Anyone who has a kid knows how bad that is — then we had to wait for the food, which took forever.
Chain restaurants, the kind you take kids to, are massively under staffed. This under staffing leads to really shitty experiences and that drives me nuts. Bring on tablets, that or airline server call buttons. I’d take either.
[1]: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/12/03/tablets_at_restaurants_applebee_s_chili_s_race_to_eliminate_human_interaction.html
$39 a month, or $399 a year.
*Good luck with that.*
Since I decided to make the GR1 my full-time backpack from now on (hopefully this is it for me), I decided to also pick up a GR1 Field Pocket (I also grabbed a couple reverse flag patches, one for the GR1 and one for the Field Pocket). The field pocket I picked up is ‘Coyote’ colored, which I chose just to make the pocket visible inside the bag. Overall the color is just fine — I wouldn’t want my entire bag that color, but inside the bag it makes for a nice accent.
(more…)
Dr. Drang:
> So am I fooling myself, or is it possible that Touch ID’s recognition gets worse with time?
I’ve noticed that here too, there’s a substantial improvement to be had by re-adding your finger prints. My guess was that it was due to weather changes effecting the moisture in my fingers that shift the ‘look’ of my fingerprints slightly. I have no proof of that though.
Dan Goodin:
> The proof-of-concept software—or malicious trojans that adopt the same high-frequency communication methods—could prove especially adept in penetrating highly sensitive environments that routinely place an “air gap” between computers and the outside world. Using nothing more than the built-in microphones and speakers of standard computers, the researchers were able to transmit passwords and other small amounts of data from distances of almost 65 feet.
Ewen MacAskill, James Ball and Katharine Murphy:
> Australia’s surveillance agency offered to share information collected about ordinary Australian citizens with its major intelligence partners, according to a secret 2008 document leaked by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden.
> The document shows the partners discussing whether or not to share “medical, legal or religious information”, and increases concern that the agency could be operating outside its legal mandate, according to the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC.
*See*, it’s not *just* the United States acting all shady.
Angelica Leicht:
> What Linda is doing here is infuriating. There are people donating to her that don’t realize she’s full of shit. People who have good intentions and big hearts and are attempting to make a difference in the life of a person who, by the sound of it, is living in some pretty dire surroundings. But folks, these are made-up dire surroundings. Stop giving her money.
Martha Mendoza:
> Encryption isn’t meant to keep hackers out, but when it’s designed and implemented correctly, it alters the way messages look. Intruders who don’t have a decryption key see only gobbledygook.
Good overview of the often misunderstood encryption arms race.
At the end of my last post on bags I concluded:
If I had to pick only one of the bags that I currently own it would be the Smart Alec, which is a fantastic bag all around. The Smart Alec’s modular pockets make it exceedingly versatile and less likely to become obsolete when your tech-gear changes.
Given the choice of any bag on the market I would choose the Goruck SK26 (I might even choose the sand color).
I confidently made that statement, without ever trying the SK26 from Goruck, because I own the nearly identical GR1 (reviewed here). Still, it feels uncomfortable to recommend something I don’t own, or haven’t tried. But there are only so many $200-plus backpacks that one man can buy before he must start selling assets. ((And sleeping on the couch.))
Luckily, for me (and you), an incredibly generous reader decided that it didn’t sit well with him either, so he bought me an SK26 — no strings-attached. ((As far as I know this reader has nothing to do with Goruck at all, and confirmed to me that he uses Incase products at the moment.))
I received the SK26 shortly after writing the aforementioned review and have been testing it for almost six weeks straight (it would be longer but I needed to switch between bags a bit to confirm some of my conclusions).
In short: I was wrong.
The SK26 is not the best all-around bag. The Smart Alec is.
However, I’m not planning to use either the SK26, or the Smart Alec. I’m going with the GR1.
The problem here is that I was right (stick with me). The SK26 is, as advertised, the GR1 without military styling. What I failed to notice is that the GR1 without its military styling doesn’t actually have much style at all.
And that’s the problem with the SK26: It’s rather boring.
The best way to describe the look of the SK26 is to compare it to one of those free SWAG bags that get handed out conferences — a bag you use to stuff full of shitty conference sponsor brochures and not cry about leaving behind.
Keep in mind that the SK26’s plainness is exactly the point. But It’s too boring for my taste.
I don’t need my bag screaming for attention but I also don’t want it looking like a cheap-o conference bag when I walk into a meeting to discuss the purchase of a multi-million dollar piece of real estate. And so, after weeks of using the SK26, I have decided that it’s just not the bag for me and also not a bag I would recommend to most others. ((I qualify that because there are very niche uses where this bag would be good. Military applications for sure. Outside of that, avid fans of the GR1 would love the bag if traveling to international destinations that are not in love with the U.S. military — E.g. any other nation.))
I stand by my statement: If you have to choose just one backpack, for almost all uses, the Smart Alec from Tom Bihn is the best choice.
Here’s why:
Those four reasons helped the Smart Alec take the top spot. It’s important to keep those in mind as we discuss the reason I’m moving on from the Smart Alec.
I have spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about this subject, and since I would have thought about it anyways, I am going to share my reasons for switching away from the excellent Smart Alec to the equally great Goruck GR1.
For me the Smart Alec falls short because I prefer to choose not to load my bag from the top. While I quite miss the handy side pockets on the Smart Alec, I miss them a lot less than I do the top-load nature of the pack. The Goruck bags are designed to fully unzip and lay flat when open. That’s amazingly helpful for packing in a lot of gear — and I can indeed fit much more, less wrinkled, into my Goruck than I can my Smart Alec. ((They are identically sized, at 26 liters.))
I have to take into consideration my use case scenarios and not the general scenarios that we just talked about. I don’t travel internationally much (except to Canada, but that can’t really be considered international travel) so the military inspired design of the GR1 is of very little concern to me. I also like to day-hike, which I specifically left out of my last post about the best all around bag, because it’s here that the Smart Alec trips up.
For me the Goruck will be better for traveling in the U.S. because it’s easier to pack and unpack. The Goruck will be better to hike with because it has Molle webbing for lashing stuff to. The Goruck also feels robustly constructed, which makes me feel safer taking it out on the trail. ((I have little doubt that for most people both the Goruck and Smart Alec will last a lifetime.))
One important thing to note about traveling with the Smart Alec is that, unlike the Goruck, you must unpack the bag everywhere you go. The Goruck can zip all the way open and act like a traditional suitcase, from which I can cherry pick the items I need. The Smart Alec isn’t like that — you need to unpack it to get anything out of it, well I do at least, and that becomes very tiresome on short trips.
There will certainly be times when the SK26 will prove useful, but at the end of the day I just don’t want my backpack to look as boring as the SK26.
There is one other key difference between the GR1 and SK26 that I did not expect: The straps on the GR1 are better because of the Molle webbing, which takes out some of the rigidity. The SK26 doesn’t have that, so the straps feel far more rigid.
The SK26 is really best suited (for non-military users) as an international travel pack for diehard Goruck lovers. Outside of that I really can’t think of a good reason to get the SK26.
When I wrote the last post about bags my goal was to convince myself that I only needed one bag and to get rid of the rest. Just before writing this article I started to purge. I sold my revision 2 Smart Alec and its companion Brain Cells. I tried to sell the Smart Alec revision 1 and the Flat Pack, but neither have attracted a buyer.
Right now I still have two bags that I could use on a daily basis. So if you want a Flat Pack, or a Smart Alec revision 1 please email me — they are all in excellent condition.
Given the ever changing backpack market I suspect to find something “better” than the GR1 in six months or less. Until then I don’t see any reason to hang on to other bags that I have already decided are not the best for me.
This ‘research’ is expensive.
Charles Arthur:
> But many geeks who do change defaults forget that the majority of people don’t. Those people assume – reasonably – that the device they bought for umpty hundred pounds should already have the ideal setup. Changing defaults isn’t unreasonable. But nor should it be necessary.
With all the NSA revelations that are coming out, and that likely will continue to come out, one of the most important debates is surrounding what privacy we are due. The easiest, and laziest, argument is that privacy only matters to those with things to hide. That’s not only false, but incredibly short-sighted — It is a dismissing argument that people should be ashamed to make.
It’s hard to define exactly why privacy, and strong privacy at that, is of paramount importance.
[Marko Polojärvi has the best article](https://markopolojarvi.com/privacy.html) on the importance of privacy that I have seen thus far.
You should read the entire article, but just in case you don’t, be sure to take note of these quotes from his post.
If you run a website:
> It’s important to understand that Google’s dragnet tracking is not limited to your searches on Google.com. Google offers various “free” services to webmasters like Google Analytics. The webmaster installs a piece of code on the website and that code sends your unique tracking data to Google every time you visit that website.
[…]
> As a webmaster by using these services you’re literally selling out your visitors (and for zero profit) and contributing to the problem.
And the how this can effect everything when lawmakers are not kept in check:
> The British police used data obtained from “internet communications” to arrest around 50 potential royal wedding protestors based on predictions that they might cause annoyance. As I’m writing this there’s also new legislation being passed in the UK that makes any behaviour perceived as potentially ’cause nuisance or annoyance’ a criminal offence.
Well worth your time today to read up.
Shane Cole:
> For every $1.00 in app download revenue earned by iOS developers, their Android counterparts earn just $0.19, according to data compiled by Business Insider. The gap for up-front and in-app purchases is slightly narrower, with Android bringing in $0.43 for every $1.00 on iOS, while advertising revenue is the closest at $0.77 on the dollar.
The source is, erm, *questionable* — but that’s a huge disparity even if the data is only close.