I just donated to the National Popular Vote campaign. The idea is that if enough states pass enabling legislation they will all throw their electoral college votes behind the popular vote winner. Electoral college neatly short-circuited without any constitutional amendment needed. California is already signed up for this. You can check your state here.

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Inverted tiny planet rendering of an unusually red sunrise in San Francisco.

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Rain falling through trees at Lands End, San Francisco (Golden Gate National Recreation Area).

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Photo of a multi-plane camera at the Walt Disney Family Museum.

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We Need to Raise Taxes for Shareholders and Cut Them for Companies

Yes - totally agree with this.

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Long exposure of trick or treating on Wawona street in West Portal, San Francisco.

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The Hurricane by Hugh Howey

4/5

Affecting story of a boy (and family) who are forced to disconnect thanks to a category five storm. First non sci-fi Howey that I've read and it's one of his best.

 

Presence by Richard MacManus

2/5

Plodding retread of VR tropes.

 

How It Went Down by Kekla Magoon

3/5

 

The Elephant in the Room by Jon Ronson

3/5

Jon Ronson visits with the Alt Right. It's good but not a revelation.

 

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman

3/5

Everything is getting more complicated. This book suggests we abandon the physics based approach of trying to understand systems in a reductionist way and switch to biological thinking - sample, study the ecology, embrace a glimpse of understanding and forget knowing everything. Gulp.

 

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We can’t trust manufactures to build secure connected devices and so routers need to be updated to solve this problem once per network.

The distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on Friday, October 21 was apparently caused by dodgy webcams. But next time it will be Nest or Alexa or Hue - not picking on Google, Amazon or Philips specifically here, those just happen to be the IOT devices currently plugged into my home network. My washing machine and drier would be as well but fortunately LG’s dismal app has saved me from myself by not working for toffee. Oh, I have some DropCams too. And my car is connected. The next attack will probably just come from me.

My fix: update routers to sandbox these devices. A Nest thermostat can only talk to nest.com. If it wants to DDOS Reddit too bad, no connection allowed no matter how badly the device is compromised.

When a new device is connected the router looks it up (MAC address registry?) and then puts it in the appropriate sandbox.

If Nest needs to connect to weather.gov to check the forecast then Google would need to proxy this via nest.com. If the device goes bad it’s only got one domain to attack (so there’s a pretty good incentive for the manufacturer to make sure it doesn’t).

The only downside is new routers or new router firmware. Given the current state of IOT I’d buy one.

As usual if any of my billionaire investor readers are interested get in touch.

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As much as I’m looking forward to Daydream VR and trying to train my Google Assistant to swear there is one big problem left with Android that Mountain View should tackle first.

Where the fuck did my icon go Android?

Every so often when I update apps an icon is missing from my home screen. It’s one of sixteen apps that I use frequently enough to have pinned there but I can’t remember what it was until my muscle memory sends my finger flying to the empty square an hour or day later. Until then I’m distracted and can’t focus and scroll helplessly through the recently updated list in Google Play trying to figure out which of the updates is the culprit.

It’s not the first time I’ve been through this so I took a screenshot of my home screen just so I could not go through this again. But Google Photos backed it up and deleted it to save space so it’s somewhere in Drive that I can’t find doing me no good at all. When I figure this out I’m going to borrow my daughter’s instax and keep a hard copy in my wallet.

Google booking me a restaurant and a babysitter at a whim won’t save the time I lose to hunting down missing apps.

It might be fixed in Nougat but I can’t update for an unknown number of months because of device/carrier/manufacturer fragmentation so that’s still Google’s fault.

I have been a HTC loyalist so maybe it’s Sense and not Android in which case sorry Google, I should get mad at HTC instead.

I’m pretty sure it was Goodreads.

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