Google

Yes, this includes you

Google’s instructions will only work if everything goes smoothly, and as someone with hundreds of hours in ADB from testing various Android versions, I will guess that it will probably not go smoothly.

Source: Google’s Pixel storage issue fix requires developer tools and a terminal | Ars Technica

People forget google hates the fact they exist, which means you’re a sweaty, dirty, bloody meaty thing handling their perfect hardware and their perfect software.

Yes, this includes you Read More »

This will make for even blurrier memories

Generative-AI tools will not wipe our memories or corrupt our sense of self, but the camera roll of the future could be missing the little bits of texture that allow us to recall certain moments as they really happened.

Source: AI Is About to Photoshop Your Memories – The Atlantic

Human memory is a fallible thing but having AI interpose itself between reality and memory is not a solution.

This will make for even blurrier memories Read More »

Smartly helping you break the law

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

Insert smart chips & building blocks in your Google Doc
Insert smart chips in your Google Doc to include information about:

Other users with Gmail or Workspace email addresses
Other Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides files
Dates or Google Calendar events
Places and map directions

Where there’s a smart chip in your document, you and other users can hover or click on a chip to get more information.

If you are dealing with confidential information you should stop using Google Sheets immediately.

  • There is no way to disable them.
  • Google will insist on forwarding or sharing the resource with people within the organization even if do not need access to it.
  • The changes are not reversible via Undo functionality. You have to revert to a previous version of the file (File -> Version History -> See Version History). Good luck to you if you’ve been working on the file for hours/days and google shits all over your file.
  • What happens when google kills the feature because no one is using it? The original data that was kept in those cells is gone.

This is particularly important if you’re dealing with FERPA or HIPAA data. Switch to excel, which is what you should’ve done from the beginning.

Smartly helping you break the law Read More »

Some on twitter have bragged about having sex with their fitbits on

For instance, Google kneecapped the Fitbit Versa 4 and Sense 2 by removing features like Google Assistant and third-party apps like Spotify and Starbucks. As a result, any longtime Fitbit user would be “upgrading” to products with fewer smart features than their predecessors — unless they chose to buy a Pixel Watch instead. And the decision to remove legacy Fitbit social features without offering an alternative threatens to chip away at one of Fitbit’s greatest strengths: its community.

Source: What is going on with Fitbit? – The Verge

A repeat of what Yahoo did to Flickr

And that was the problem. At the time, the Web was rapidly becoming more social, and Flickr was at the forefront of that movement. It was all about groups and comments and identifying people as contacts, friends or family. To Yahoo, it was just a fucking database.

All they’re trying to do is figure out how to make money off it. Fuck the people that came up with the devices, fuck the community built on those devices. To googke, fitbit is just a fucking database of lots of some of the most intimate and personal data they have: Their bodies themselves.

Some on twitter have bragged about having sex with their fitbits on Read More »

Being employed keeps me out of trouble. Keep me employed

“This is the beginning of the end,” Yoo said last week. “It’s already just a midsize business in San Antonio. This is not a company that’s on a trajectory of growth. They’re on a trajectory of death. It will not be around.”

Source: Rackspace ‘on trajectory of death,’ founder Richard Yoo says

I work at a small datacenter. We’re… having some issues with customer retention and customer acquisition cos everyone wants that cloud hotness, even if they’re going to pay through the nose for it. What are we to do??? If Rackspace, one of the first names you think of when you need colocation, what is a small datacenter business in Minnesota to do?

A lot of people keep saying to avoid the cloud and whatnot, but then they end up going with aws, google cloud, or azure. That’s not putting your money where your mouth is.

If they get hacked, you get hacked. This is proven. All of these platforms, in their efforts to make it easy to get onboarded make it super easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot with insecure defaults.

Right now they’re making money, sure… But what happens when they don’t? Looking at you, google. But the others aren’t that much better. Do your part and support small and local businesses that can, and will, lend you their expertise.

Being employed keeps me out of trouble. Keep me employed Read More »

Trust google at your peril

It really is that simple: No one trusts Google. It has exhibited such poor understanding of what people want, need and will pay for that at this point, people are wary of investing in even its more popular products.

Source: Stadia died because no one trusts Google | TechCrunch

The wake-up call was when google killed google reader, but it was ignored by a lot of people cos it was a free service.

Then there was G Suite (Legacy Free). They got a lot of people to rely on google services and then proceeded to straight up betray them. People still didn’t care cos it was also “free service”.

But now with Stadia people will care cos the cost of this cancellation won’t be paid by google— they already wrote off the money. The cost will be borne by developers who trusted google with their games.

I’m somewhat safe as I do pay for some google services but I am looking for alternatives now. Microsoft is not a particularly viable option.

Trust google at your peril Read More »

Seriously Google, what the fuck

They are altering the agreement, pray they don’t alter it further.

Source: Google to free G Suite users: Pay up or lose your account | Ars Technica

Darth Vader: I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further

A few years ago I needed to add another domain to my Gsuite account, which led me to start paying for services there. Over time we started using it for more things but we remained leery of purchasing things from Google through Gsuite accounts or free Gmail accounts.

At some point we migrated our Google Voice number from our gmail account to the Gsuite account, and it remained there. When this migration was done Google moved everything through: contacts, text messages, call history, voicemails. Everything happened without issues or difficulties; all you had to do was unlink your carrier number from one account, migrate the GV number from Gmail to Gsuite, and re-link your carrier number.

But starting a couple of years ago Google disabled the ability to migrate from Gsuite to Gmail. Not without losing everything. We’ve been looking to migrate off Google’s infrastructure for email/calendar and everything else and it’s a non-started as long as they hold my main phone number hostage. And now Google is forcing people and companies who made the mistake of choosing Google for their services to pay up or lose everything:

oh fuck

I’ve been using this for my family since Google first introduced it as a way for Families to use vanity domains together. I have over a decade (almost 2?) of purchases tied to this account and the cost to migrate to their enterprise offering for my family is bonkers.

I don’t know what I’m going to do here as I can’t migrate my purchases out of this account and into a normal gmail account. uuuuuuuugh.

While self-hosting files and email and photos is doable, self-hosting your own mobile phone number is still complicated, and on top of that the available services still cannot compete with the simplicity of GV even as Google leaves the service to wither for years at a time. We’ve been looking at using services like https://jmp.chat/ but again, they are non-trivial:

  1. You must port your number from GV to their service.
  2. You lose everything: Contacts, text messages, call history, voicemails.
  3. You have to figure out what XMPP client to use on your devices depending on operating system, as most XMPP clients don’t support them all.
  4. You have to learn the quirks of texting people who aren’t in your contacts already.
  5. Jmp.chat itself is still marketed as Beta, and some features are still in alpha, like group messaging.

Google should offer the option to convert a Gworkspace (nee Gsuite) account to a free Gmail account, or to migrate the data from a Gworkspace account to a Gmail account. They can do it, they just choose not to because nobody can force them to do the right thing.

The current state of things is absolute bullshit.

Seriously Google, what the fuck Read More »

Blight upon you, Google, for fucking this up

So we took the upgrade onto Android 12 for my phone. It’s just nice, much has already been said about it so not going to repeat any of that. We do have one bone to pick and it is that the youtube app is now permanently installed onto the phone and it ignores any of the preferences you had set in Android 11. It just so happens we have NewPipe as my preferred app cos Reasons. Here’s my workaround for that.

Disable youtube app

  1. Go to SettingsAppsSee All Apps.
  2. Scroll to YouTube, tap it.
  3. Tap disable. Android will put up a warning to scare you.
    YouTube App Info on Android 12
  4. Tap Disable app.

Re-enable newpipe permissions and links

  1. Tap back out to All Apps.
  2. Scroll to NewPipe.
  3. Tap Open by default.
  4. Enable Open supported links.
  5. In the list of Links to open in this app, enable the ones you want. We got lazy so we just enabled everything.
    NewPipe supported links
  6. Exit out to your home screen.

There, you can now enjoy youtube videos in Android 12 without youtube trying to ram any of its paid options down your throat every other video.

Blight upon you, Google, for fucking this up Read More »

Import basic contact information into Google Contacts quickly

I just fucken spent a fucken hour and a half trying to import some fucken data into fucken Google Contacts cos it’s a piece of pigshit.

There are multiple guides on the web on how to import data into it and most are fucken failures. This is what you need:

Google Contacts CSV columns

In text form, as a CSV:

Given Name,Family Name,E-mail 1 - Value,Phone 1 - Type,Phone 1 - Value,Organization 1 - Type,Organization 1 - Name
First Name,Last Name,mailbox@domain.tld,Mobile,1-000-0000000,unknown,Company Name

In a nice tabulated table. It’s in code cos my fucken markdown plugin doesn’t understand markdown tables

|Given Name|Family Name|E-mail 1 - Value  |Phone 1 - Type|Phone 1 - Value|Organization 1 - Type|Organization 1 - Name|
|First Name|Last Name  |mailbox@domain.tld|Mobile        |1-000-0000000  |unknown              |Company Name         |

And here’s an actual CSV file you can download so you can plug your data into it: google-contact-quickstart.csv: Google Contacts Quickstart CSV.

They should use their much-vaunted AI might and quantum supremacy to fix one of the most basic things companies need to do all over the fucken planet instead of trying to figure out how yoke everyone into their FLoC pigshit without having to threaten ultraviolence on them.

I’d probably have spent less time importing contacts one by one but at least now I know how to do it in bulk and have it work.

Seriously google, get fucked.

Import basic contact information into Google Contacts quickly Read More »

Locked out? Good luck

Let’s build and configure a minimal SSH bastion host (jump box) from scratch, using Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Source: DIY SSH Bastion Host

This is all well and good except for the bit where the author is clearly invested in using the cloud (i.e. other people’s computers) to run your own infrastructure.

What happens when google locks you out? Or when amazon decides to do the same. Same concern goes for Azure, or any other cloud provider.

Good luck fixing any of that without having to tear down a lot of your own work just to be able to be useful again. I get it, from a developer point of view setting it like this means it’s easy to plug into projects, but from a sysadmin point of view it means you’re going to shoot yourself in the foot sooner rather than later, specially if you missed a little onfiguration detail that lets your server wide open for takeover.

Locked out? Good luck Read More »

Thinking Tools: July 2020

It’s been a long while since that last post I did and my setup has changed a lot:

Web services

  • This site, which I’m trying to update more often with links and blog posts I find interesting. It’s going much better after I installed the WP Editor.md plugin to enhance the plain editor. The gutenberg editor sucks ass.
  • Nextcloud. I’m running my own instance to replace Dropbox, which I didn’t like the last time. Got the desktop client installed and it’s working quite nicely.
  • Twitter is still my social media network of choice. I’m using tweetdeck on the desktop
  • Feedly is still my RSS reader of choice but I’m looking around for a replacement that works across all my devices and it’s pretty to look at. Now that people are starting to move away from centralized social networks again there should be some movement in this space.
  • I’m running my own wiki using Wiki.js, which I’ve blogged about. This will probably merit another couple blog posts of their own specially now that I found vimwiki which could potentially run inside my Nextcloud instance.

Actual applications installed on my desktops and laptops

  • For messaging I’m now using Ferdi, a fork of Franz, to run most of my instant messaging needs. The great exceptions are Slack, Discord, and Signal; I discovered I work better when they have their own app instances running but when Signal offers a web interface I’ll probably fold it into Franz.
  • Spotify. Thinking of replacing it with a self-hosted option. I miss my graded playlists.
  • KeePass is still my password manager of choice.
  • Firefox. Mozilla keeps trying its best to kill all low-level functionality. This is easily the program I fuck around with the most, going from extensions to custom userChrome files.
  • Windows Subsystem for Linux. Much less of a pain in the ass than running a VirtualBox VM depending on what you’re doing. Using wsltty as its terminal.

There are some single-purpose utilities I’ve discovered in the interim that are extremely useful for working in Windows 10.

Mobile applications (Android)

  • The usual instant messaging slash social networking suspects minus TikTok, which is spyware.
  • Firefox mobile. Firefox needs to do better at syncing preferences into it.
  • Fenix twitter client. Twitter Co keeps fucking around with their API and preventing third party clients from achieving the excellence they used to have years ago.
  • Nextcloud mobile client for my Nextcloud instance. Needs a lot of work to compare with Dropbox, but it does its job well.
  • Moon+ Reader for ebooks. This one took me a long while to find, most ebook readers have utterly crazy skeuomorphic defaults.
  • Photoshop Express. This one was annoying but you’d be surprised how many image editors are missing features you’d consider basic (like cropping and image resizing), opting instead to overload with photo filters you’ll never use. This one has all the filters but at least lets you crop and resize. It replaced Snapseed. I’ve still to wade through open source editors but my hopes are dim on that front.

There are some things that underpin all of these applications but I think I’ll leave it as-is. It’s pretty fun to see how my workflow changes over time.

Thinking Tools: July 2020 Read More »

Oh Google

I guess Google’s reputation is going down the drain.

Today there was this: Google employee’s anti-diversity manifesto goes “internally viral” at the company . The twitter comments for that Motherboard post on twitter are quite something.

I won’t link to any reddit posts. They’re always a toxic dumpster as it is.

Then today browsing my RSS feeds I found this: Google Introduces “Invisible” Gmail Messages!. I’ve noticed this myself.

So now in addition to being misogynists, they’re ableists (I hate using this term, but it’s true) and if a white male developer in his 20s thinks it’s not worth his time to fix these things… they’ll never be fixed.

Oh Google Read More »

The new corporate overreach normal

Today I have four stories that are the start of a trend that is quite worrisome.

First we have the story of a composer who says Apple Music destroyed his music collection. This is a case of a company messing around with your livelihood.

Then we have the story of Amazon disabling internet access for Kindle devices. This is a case of a company messing with your entertainment.

Next up is Google Nest disabling the Revolv smart hub because the company doesn’t consider it worth updating anymore. This is a case of a company messing with your convenience for its own profit.

At the last we have this new story of Microsoft disallowing Administrators from disabling the Windows Store in Windows systems. This is a case of a company messing with your ability to do work.

If it had been only one company, that specific product might have been shunned and the company could have corrected its course. But now here we have four of the biggest companies around deciding unilaterally what they think is best for you. Doesn’t matter if you don’t use the specific product talked about. This applies to the entirety of the company.

This is quite on purpose. They want to set the social precedent that it is okay to do this. A legal precedent might not be set since their EULAs usually include arbitration agreements; contracted and paid for by these same companies to make sure customers always lose and prevent the justice system from being able to intervene.

The government is quite unconcerned itself since most of these companies proclaim to support encryption, yet all of them are jumping on the Internet of Things bandwagon. The power of IoT is on its ability to eavesdrop and surveil your life ostensibly for your benefit as an user. The data gets sent to the companies… but must travel through connections that have always been monitored. So the government doesn’t care as long as they can do surveillance.

I’ll only mention Facebook in that their way of functioning precludes them from disabling access to products. Otherwise how can they obtain more information on what you do and who you are?

As it is, Open Source can provide a viable alternative only if we find a way to make sure that the developers of the software we depend on are rewarded for their efforts (remember OpenSSL having no money?) otherwise things like Heartbleed will happen again and again. Companies will provide funds only for things that will directly benefit them and/or their bottom line; never for useful software that competes with theirs.

For myself I know I won’t really use Apple products at this point. I do use Windows but I know I’ll switch back to Linux eventually. I use Google Apps but will brush up on keeping my own mailservers. I like Amazon Prime but I won’t buy a Kindle or an Echo device.

These are conscious decisions about how I interact with the business giants of our age. We all need to do that, lest we risk being stepped on.

The new corporate overreach normal Read More »