Living in the Future

Category: Blog

  • SNC-Lavalin And Why It’s So Hard To Watch The News (For The Truth)

    I’ve noticed recently (maybe it’s just because I’m paying more attention to political news lately) this very annoying trend when it comes to news stories that get even a little bit of attention. This video by Vox is talking about the Green New Deal, but I feel like I feel the exact same way about the SNC-Lavalin incident, to name just one recent example.

    I’ve been feeling for the last year or three that whenever a big news story breaks where opinion could potentially break across political lines, all the news spends all of its airtime just talking about the political impact and outcomes of the story, and if the story still has traction in the days or weeks afterwards, you’ll hear endlessly about what other people are saying about it now.

    I really don’t like when this happens with the news, because it does nothing to inform the public about the actual issue at hand, it just applies a partisan lens to every news story.

    With the SNC-Lavalin ‘scandal’ news story, the Liberal government’s alleged pressure on the attorney general’s office to avoid prosecuting the company directly, we see a great example of this, in my opinion.

    How I have experienced news coverage of SNC-Lavalin

    When this story first came out, the narrative was that of a ‘scandal’ from the highest echelons of the federal Liberal government, with the office of the Prime Minister being accused of applying pressure to the attorney general in dealing with a bribery case with SNC-Lavalin and the Libyan government.

    From the time details started to come out, I was already looking to journalists and the news to understand what actually happened, to figure out if anything improper had taken place. However, what I found on the news, on Twitter, and from every pundit and opposition politician, is outrage that the Prime Minister would do something like this.

    Even the sparse details I put in the paragraph above were pieced together over a few days, and I still don’t feel like I really fully understand all that actually took place leading up to and after the events of the ‘scandal’. I am not of the opinion that absolutely nothing improper took place, or that an investigation should or shouldn’t happen (it probably should).

    I actually feel like I still don’t have enough details about the case to know whether I think deferred prosecution was the right call in the original case, much less whether anything unusual or improper took place afterwards. My main point in talking about all of this is that in spite of trying to stay up to date on the news surrounding this story, I feel woefully uninformed and end up hearing “Politician calls for Trudeau to resign” as the much bigger headline that “Here’s how deferred prosecution works, and the attorney general needs to remain independent”.

    I don’t know about you, but hearing that the head of the opposition thinks the current Prime Minister should step down (especially when it’s a conservative saying that about a liberal), is not a headline that should really exist (because he says it all the time). That’s a separate conversation altogether from considering what I would say is a more reasonable headline, which is “Should The PMO Get Involved In Federal Prosecution Cases?”, or something like that.

    What Can We Possibly Do About This?

    There’s no easy answer to this question. Staying informed is key, but it’s difficult to get partisanship on an issue out of your head once it wriggles its way in. The best thing I can think of to try is to be very careful when reading news to think about who is paying for it, how they are funded, whether the writer or editors might have a reason to be biased, and whether the objective facts are likely being described in the story.

    Using any social media to follow the news, whether you follow news organizations, or just friends and family, is very difficult, because many people are just there to push their preferred version of a story, or end up reinforcing biases and digging in even deeper on opinions and positions formed emotionally.

    Reading the news in general is easier than ever with the internet, but it’s also easier to write and publish anything you want, and otherwise legitimate news organizations can get caught up in this kind of bad journalism too from time to time. Nothing is black and white here, and pretending it is damages journalism and divides us in ways we don’t even consciously realize.

  • The Best Women

    The Best Women

    Ted and I are lucky we get to spend time with the best women! Never a dull moment in this house! ❤️❤️

  • The Case for Owning Your Digital Life

    I’ve spent most of my life on computers, and I would definitely consider myself a digital native (I’m typing this sentence on the iPad software keyboard, in case that helps you put me on a scale).

    My history with technology

    I love technology, and I first discovered its immense power for connecting people when I installed MSN Messenger on my parents’ computer back in junior high school (circa 2000, I’m going to say?). Going through puberty at the dawn of the public internet was quite an ordeal, but I think it was definitely more manageable doing so then than it is now. I really learned how to talk to people most intimately through MSN, and in that space, I formed the foundation of my experience in connecting with others.

    I certainly didn’t realize it at the time, but it’s really cool that MSN would store chat logs for all your conversations in easily accessible and well-presented formats on your computer. This meant that if you wanted to go and look back on your conversations (and you inevitably did), you could easily do so.

    Fast-forward to now

    Things are VERY different now from what we had back then. Today, those of us who chat on Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, or Slack have little to no control over what we’ve said to one another once it’s been said. The canonical version of our ‘chat logs’ are all online, controlled by the creators of the apps we use to talk to one another. Because the services we use are mostly centered on our mobile devices (phones and, to a lesser extent, tablets), there isn’t a lot of space (or screen real-estate) to permanently store and/or display things we’ve said previously.

    Because of the way the internet has evolved over the last 10-15 years, ‘the cloud’ (servers located ‘elsewhere’ and controlled by corporations), is now the absolute truth when it comes to what we say to one another. In the case of Snapchat, the messages we send are deliberately short-lived by default, and that’s part of the reason why I have stopped using Snapchat.

    In today’s world, our memories are being stored outside our brains on an ever-increasing basis (rather than storing important information itself in our brains, we store the location where the important information is kept). However, when we split our communication between services like email, instant messaging apps, social media, reminder apps, to-do apps, and a whole bunch of others, it’s easy to lose track and forget where things are, even if they aren’t actually missing.

    I’d wager that most people in the their late 20s and 30s wouldn’t be able to list all the apps, services, and social networks they’re members of, even given an infinite amount of time (or maybe I just subscribe to and then forget about more things than most people). The problem with putting your time and energy in to an ever-changing and ever-increasing number of these kinds of apps means our life stories are being spread out over a huge area, with patches and sections disappearing on a regular basis.

    As I get older, I’m starting to see this pattern develop more and more, and it makes me worry a little bit that in 5 or 10 or 20 years, our generation will be missing most, if not all, of our written correspondence and things we’ve shared over the years. Now, one response to this is to say something like ‘we should be writing letters again’, but first of all, I don’t think those are any more likely to remain legible
    on a physical medium, or stay in one’s possession for that amount of time, and I’m also not interested in putting pencil to paper.

    There’s an easier way to maintain your relationships and keep track of our communications with others, and it brings up a concept most people my age have only recently become familiar with…paying for things you care about.

    Paying for (and with) what matters

    When you think about your preferred instant messaging/communication platform, what are the incentives of the company who created it, and how does it benefit them to have you use it? If you can’t answer that question, you may want to find out more about the company, and what their policies are. In many cases today, the incentive is that the company can make money off of information they can learn about you through your interaction with the service, whether directly or indirectly.

    Especially if you’re using a service that doesn’t cost you any money, the company isn’t running servers and using immense resources in order to let you connect better with the people around you, they’re doing it because it helps their bottom line in some way.

    Now, the average person doesn’t really have the ability to build an application that lets them have total control over systems they use to store information or communicate. If I had to guess what percentage of adults in North America own and operate a private server, whether locally or virtually, I would say it’s much less than 1%, and perhaps not even 0.5%. And I’m certainly not trying to say that maintaining your own server is something everybody should do, far from it. However, I do think there is value in having a place that you control on the internet where you can store digital information that is important to you or has some value.

    Virtual Private Servers and Their Use

    In case some of my readers don’t know what a virtual private server is, it’s really quite simple. A server, to put it as succinctly as possible, is a computer that is usually specially designed to run web services or applications efficiently and to be reliable in spite of running 24/7 basically without interruption and with little maintenance.

    Such a computer can sit in your basement, run programs like email, and get you in a lot of trouble with federal intelligence agencies (if you use it for government business). With the advent of things like Google Apps GSuite and OneDrive, though, the need for, and use of personal private servers has undoubtedly dropped quite precipitously (I do not have *any* data to back this up).

    Businesses like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and the aforementioned GSuite and OneDrive all run on massive parallelized private server banks owned by those companies, who use them to run all their web and cloud services, because running a server these days is very cheap and distributed computing is very much in vogue right now.

    However, if you’re a small-medium company, or somebody who wants the benefits of a server for their own purposes, there are big companies out there who run server farms and who rent out space on those servers for a monthly fee. The big benefit of this is that running these (virtual private servers) is that there is no physical space required on-site, and no expensive, specialized hardware to run (and power).

    For a very small fee (all things considered), anybody can run any software they want on a computer they rent and access through the internet, and if you have any interest in technology, you will hopefully see what an amazing opportunity this presents in terms of being able to run things like email, websites, IM, or file sharing without relying on big companies (or at least, your reliance on ‘big’ companies lets you set up your own security).

    What Does This All Mean?

    If you are looking for a stable, free, easy to use system to use email, instant message, web design, or file sharing, and you’re just going to use the basics, it’s very easy to trade your privacy rather than money to use these services. But for less money than you’d think, and if you’re willing to slightly leave the mainstream, you can get a server up and running for pennies a day (quite literally), and run whatever you want on it, without buying any hardware. The possibilities are, quite literally, endless.

    I would gladly delete my Facebook Messenger account (I already rid myself of Facebook) if I could get my friends and family off of it, and I do think that social media is ultimately a bubble that is bound to fall back down eventually, and personal websites will come back in to prominence as people seek to stand out and customize the way they present posts and photos/videos to the world. I think it’s only a matter of time before some *massive* privacy scandal makes most people realize they are far too trusting of Facebook with their information, and a backlash sees the service fade in to a historical footnote over time.

    Rob, What Do You Do?

    The service I use to host my server is called DigitalOcean, but there are many other companies who will allow you to set this up. I’m told that if this is something you’re interested in trying out, you can get up to $100 in credit over your first 60 days if you use my referral link (I don’t get anything for referring you unless you ultimately keep running a server, so don’t start anything for my benefit). I’ve been a customer for over 3 years, and the system is great with hourly billing so you can get something running to try it out, and if you don’t like it, you can just delete it and you’ll only be charged a few cents an hour while it was running.

  • WordPress block support is coming to mobile!

    WordPress block support is coming to mobile!

    I’ve been waiting for this for months, since I heard that WordPress was working towards a better editor that let you really customize what you want your posts to look like.

    For the time being, you need to be on the WordPress mobile beta, but the feature will be released publicly in a little over a week (March 13, apparently). It’s really easy to get on the beta, and you can try it out for yourself!

    Here’s how you turn it on!

    Support for the time being will be limited to entering paragraphs, headings, images, and page breaks, but new blocks will be added over time! It’s gonna be great!

  • ‘Drop the Soap’ Jokes are SO Weird

    While the YouTube video is being reinstated (read more here), here’s the Archive.org version.

    I may as well just post every single time Pop Culture Detective puts out a video, because I’m right there with them shouting my support every time a new one is posted.

    This time, the subject is the treatment of males who are sexually assaulted, and their portrayal in pop culture. It is truly unbelievable how pervasive this ‘joke’ trope is, and to me it is equally bizarre how this trope persists even today.

    It seems like today for the most part, sexual assault of women is a pretty clear taboo, especially to be played for laughs. However, the same cannot be said of men who are subjected to the same kinds of assaults. The range of types of media where this is pervasive is truly one of the most shocking parts, ranging from children’s shows all the way to adult police dramas.

    I think what is happening here is that the ‘joke’ is so played out at this point, that (surely male) writers don’t really think through the implications of what they’re implying is occurring. At least, that’s my hope, because if they are thinking it through, that’s even more horrifying. The idea that if you’ve done something wrong in your life, that you deserve physical punishment is something that I find abhorrent, and it’s a central tenet of this trope.

    Nobody ‘deserves’ abuse of any kind, especially in the context of somebody already serving a prison sentence, and anybody could become a victim of this kind of assault. This type of situation is certainly not deserving of a laugh in TV or movies, and it should certainly be something we continue to see less of until it hopefully disappears completely.

  • FaceTime is fixed!

    Update is out. iOS 12.1.4 fixes the bug as well as another security issue that Apple found while auditing the code for FaceTime. Group FaceTime has now been turned back on (for those on 12.1.4 or higher).

  • Easy GIF support in WordPress

    FINALLY! 🎉🎉

  • FaceTime Isn’t Broken

    FaceTime Isn’t Broken

    Update: Update is out. iOS 12.1.4 addresses this bug as well as another security issue that Apple found while auditing the code for FaceTime.

    On Monday night (January 28), talk of a serious Group FaceTime bug hit the internet in a big way.

    New in iOS 12: Group FaceTime

    If a would-be attacker used a specific set of steps that were not typical for a regular FaceTime call, they could activate the call recipient’s microphone on their iPhone (or, presumably, iPad) without them answering the call. There was an extra privacy concern that if the recipient of the call declined the request, their camera was mistakenly activated as well, even if the phone looked like it was asleep.

    There is no indication this bug was exploited maliciously, and it appears to have been reported to Apple at least a week and a half before the explosion of attention on January 28. Moving quickly once this story went public, Apple shut off Group FaceTime (a new feature that was introduced with iOS 12 this fall), effectively blocking this exploit from being used. In all, the bug was active for about 2-3 hours with a large audience, as Apple presumably scrambled to find a way to quickly fix it.

    Immediately, Apple put out a press release saying that a permanent fix for this bug would be coming later this week, and shutting off Group FaceTime has mitigated the problems associated with the bug until the fix is released.

    Unfortunately, because the news is effectively entertainment now, the following evening (Tuesday), local news, all the way up to late-night comedy shows, all talked breathlessly about the story, and at least from what I heard, none mentioned that the offending problem has been completely disabled until a proper fix is in place. In other words, the window when anybody at any scale could have been harmed by this was exceptionally small, only a few hours at most.

    Now, though, the viral story of ‘Turn Off FaceTime’ will circulate for years, even though in my opinion it’s probably one of the very best ways for a group of Apple device users to communicate with audio/video, and even when the feature is fixed, there will be no news stories saying ‘You Can Turn FaceTime Back On Now’, even though after Monday evening, there was no need to turn it off.

    There are a few big lessons I take away from this:

    1. Basically every news story is as well-researched as the one you know the intimate details about beforehand (not at all well-researched). Take them with a grain of salt.
    2. Every piece of software has bugs and flaws at some point in its development cycle. Obviously, big flashy bugs like this are a BIG deal, but it’s a reality of software that they will come up. The best thing you can do as a developer is to put systems in place to be able to deal with them quickly, and in my opinion, Apple’s ability to pull the plug on Group FaceTime without taking the entire system down is an example of good design.
    3. Don’t take your privacy for granted. People are going to see this story and turn off FaceTime because this was a huge privacy issue. However, I promise you that there are much bigger and more severe privacy violations going on at huge companies around the world right now, and because it is status quo, we all kind of just give them a pass. You should ‘audit’ the programs you use from time to time, and if you’re able, do some research on the privacy over-reaches of companies like Facebook. You’d be surprised the kinds of things they are caught doing on an ongoing basis, but it’s not a news story for some reason.

    So, I didn’t turn FaceTime off, and unless something changes, I don’t think you need to either (if you didn’t already). If you’re paranoid about being watched/heard in your home, FaceTime is far from your biggest concern (this bug is no longer a risk as it stands today).

    Humans are flawed, so it stands to reason that the software we create isn’t always perfect either. But writing off technology because of one viral news story is harmful to all of us, because the news can’t, and doesn’t, cover everything.

    Please, don’t turn off FaceTime and vow never to trust it again because of this story. Your privacy is, and always will be, at risk, but that doesn’t make this particular piece of software the problem.

  • Things I’ve Learned in 5 Years as a Public Servant

    At the start of 2018, I celebrated my fifth year of service as a federal government employee. I’m a *very* different person than I was back in January of 2013 when I first started working at NSERC, and a big part of these changes relate directly to things I’ve learned working in government.

    A part of me thinks it would be really nice if growing up, people had to spend (at least) a few weeks working in bureaucracy (just like how everybody would behave better in restaurants if they had to spend a few weeks waiting tables and washing dishes).

    It seems (to me) like pretty much everybody complains about how long things take in government, and I’m definitely not saying that bureaucracy is as efficient and streamlined as it can possibly be. However, I do think that these things move slowly for a reason, and that learning to take your time and consider multiple viewpoints while completing work that affects people’s lives and livelihoods would keep everyone a little humbler and more honest.

    I’ve had the privilege of working on many different teams and projects in my time in the public service, and I definitely approach things now with far more consideration and patience than I used to. Work in government also gives some insight in to just how complicated issues surrounding politics tend to be, and specifically how almost nothing is as simple as someone might tend to assume from the outside.

    Politics has become extremely divisive in the last few years, and I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that people are used to hearing only one side of a story, as opposed to looking at the bigger picture from an objective perspective, and making up their own minds. There is also a sharp increase in personal attacks in politics, as opposed to ideological differences being respectfully debated.

    Another piece of what I believe makes work as a public servant complicated is the changing ways we communicate and share information with each other. Through the news and social media, we’re all exposed to a pre-existing point of view on every possible issue, and these are not always presented objectively (this depends very highly on your preferred sources of news).

    The effect of this, at least for the purposes of this line of thinking, is that we think we’re forming objective thoughts and opinions, but they’re often just internalizing biased talking points that don’t look at the whole story. We’re all guilty of this, and not just when we’re laughing along as late-night talk show hosts bash the current US President. One of the really handy things public service has taught me is to recognize where these biases are and to not get caught up in ridiculing the little things that go on in every social group (US executive administrations included).

    It’s hard to say for sure whether I’ll spend the rest of my career in the public service, but I’ve loved the lessons I’ve learned so far, and the skills I’ve gained, and I’ve been able to manage my cynicism so far. One things that helps with that aspect in particular is to focus your personal efforts to improve your workplace to the things that you can control, and realize that you won’t be happy with every single decision that gets made around you, but to pick your battles and limit the energy you exert on things that feel important but don’t actually serve any particularly useful improvement to the way things are.

    Here’s to the next five years!

  • The ‘Time is Money’ Continuum

    When you’re a kid first getting their allowance, you would spend literally all the time you had in order to get literally any money. I would clean my room, mow the lawn and do yard work for a couple of hours in order to get a pittance (maybe $5). I had all the time in the world, and no money, so I would work as long and hard as I needed to in order to acquire even the smallest amount of money.

    At 15, I started working at McDonalds. I was in school of course, but it was no problem working 8 hours each day on the weekend and 2-3 nights a week. The only things I had to plan around were the occasional soccer practice/game, and spending time with friends (which I mostly did at school anyhow). I would work a ton because I barely had any money, but I still had lots of time and could use every extra dollar earned.

    By the time I hit 23 years old and finished school, I was working 40 hours a week, and trying to grow as a person, in order to gain experience and get a good, comfortable job. I was trying to pay off student loans, so I was working ‘full-time’, but I still had quite a bit of time on my hands, so I would do whatever I needed to in order to spend little to no money to do things.

    This meant that when I built a website, I did it on a free platform, even if that meant putting a TON of time and effort in to making it do what I needed it to. When I wanted to watch a TV show or movie(s), I would find them online and watch, even if doing all that required a precarious, legally dubious setup that took months to get working just right.

    When I was finding music or looking at online storage solutions, I used the free tier and navigated around in order to stay under every cap that would have required me to pay for anything.

    Fast forward a little bit to about 2 years ago. I’m now married, starting to build a career where I’m happy at work and doing things I love. The time/money balance is starting to shift more towards money. I’m making a comfortable living and helping to pay down a mortgage, and I’m not worrying about where my next paycheck or my next 20 paychecks are coming from.

    I’m still enjoying hobbies that are effectively free, but I’m starting to realize that the trade-offs I’d made when I was 23 just don’t really make sense any more. I am gradually coming to terms with the fact that I don’t have as much spare time as I used to, and it might make more sense to pay for some things to have them done now, rather than working for hours or days or weeks to have them done for ‘free’. Throwing money at a problem could make it go away, and would free up my time to spend with my wife, family, and the other people I care about.

    When it comes to making a decision at this time, I’ll spend $20-30 here or there, I’ll subscribe to a $10 a month service if it’s something I use. The time I save by spending that money is well worth it.

    This brings us up to today. I’m married, about 20% of the way through my career (probably), and I have an 8-month old daughter and a dog at home to take care of. Outside of sleep, commute, eating, work, making sure the baby has everything she needs, and things like making sure bills are paid, I get about 2-3 hours a day where I can even think about taking time for myself, or to potentially spend on hobbies (realistically, it’s more like 1-2 hours a day over an average week, not including weekends).

    I make a comfortable living, which I’m extremely grateful for, and more than ever before, I find myself inclined to pay money to get time back for myself and my family. For me, that means signing up for a meal plan to get food sent to my door to reduce grocery trips, or subscribing to cable TV and Amazon Prime to watch TV and movies without thinking about where they’re coming from, or buying a virtual private server to host my website so that I have control over it as opposed to being ruled by and wrestling with the free hosting solutions I had previously been using.

    On the time/money continuum, I have enough money that it’s worth it for me to spend it to get my time back in many situations, and I think a lot of people can take the time something takes for granted when thinking about how busy they are or what is most important to them. If the ultimate goal is retirement, is it really worth spending the most active 30+ years of your life constantly worrying if you’ll have enough money to make it through? I’m not sure everyone is truly considering the costs of that stress on their bodies when they make those calculations for themselves.

    I’ve spoken before (a LOT) about the concept of basic income, and how everybody should have the luxury of not worrying where their money for basic necessities should come from. The other side of basic income is that it would let families where parents have to work 2 jobs buy some of their time back, rather than spending it all earning just barely enough to survive in poverty.

    Giving every adult enough money to ‘need’ to work less would be a huge boon to the mental health and well-being of everyone in our society, and it would allow those of us who don’t have enough time to actually live their lives a little more flexibility to decide where they want to spend their time, and how they would like to spend their money.

    I know if anybody in my family was struggling to make ends meet, I would feel an obligation to help them out, and I think it would do all of us a great deal of good to think of the people around us in our cities as family, and supporting anybody who has fallen on hard times by giving them money with no strings attached, just like you would a family member.

    Everybody deserves to choose how they spend at least some of their time, and that requires money.