Tuesday Sweep: 31 October 2017
Your weekly reminder to back up your data, update software and otherwise pay attention to your digital environment. (Oh, and to go to the CRASH Space meeting…)
On Halloween, a holiday traceable to the Gaelic holiday Samhain, we dress up as the ghosts and goblins slipping into the world at a liminal time. Maybe if we look like them we can pass on by, returning safe to our homes. Civilizations grow and harvest evolving rituals to help make sense of an uncertain world. Halloween 2017 has become one of the most uncertain I’ve lived through, but I’m taking comfort in thinking of the instability as a necessary purging before humanity turns a corner to something better. Perhaps the increase in things that seem horrible isn’t the world getting worse, but our standards getting higher. That can’t be bad.
So tonight’s the night to open the door and invite the monsters in for a cup of tea, to look them in the eye. If you don’t have other plans (cough, go to CRASH Space), consider doing a little threat modeling. Say hello to your goblins. They’re less scary when called out by name.
Jump in Here
- Welcome. If you haven’t been following along, it’s okay. You’re not behind, you’re just where you are.
- I highly recommend the coach tool at the Crash Override Network has a great step by step break down for many of the same introductory steps we did here.
- Feeling more ambitious? Review the list of OneThing articles and pick one to catch up on.
Sweep
The basics.
- Updated software recently? Pick a new device to check on today.
- Backups still up and running? When was the last time you made a clean disk image? Here’s a new great article on how to design a backup system.
- App and Password Gardening: Delete a low quality app from your phone or delete an account that you don’t need that doesn’t make you happy. Digital cruft builds up. Delete it. If you’re keeping it, can you move the password to your password manager (delete it from everywhere else) and add two factor authentication?
- Move to offline archive & delete your histories where you can find them.
- Double check privacy settings on your phone, social media accounts. The folks running the companies can change the TOS and add “features” before you notice them.
- Have you frozen your credit yet?
Learn
Where do you scan for news?
- Image: Pumpkin Piano promise a GourdTime (Hack-a-Day)
- OMG!!! LANDMINE RATS!! I’m such a fangirl. Come to CRASH Space November 11 @ 5pm
- If you need to design a costume to fool an AI, just one pixel will do. (via BoingBoing)
- A Bug in Bug tracker, kinda hilarious… and window in Google’s own fears? Is the bug tracker a git repo’s nightmare journal? This definitely triggered my Halloween-theme radar.
- From @todbot: “Why do programmers get Christmas and Halloween confused? Because OCT 31 = DEC 25”
- I’m keeping an eye on the “The Cyber Shield Act” co-sponsored in the house by LA-County rep (District CA-33), Ted Lieu. It’s meant to create standards for security for IoT devices, the poltergeist of the digital era for sure. It certainly sounds… interesting? hopeful? to see IoT security conversations happening outside of tech circles. We’ll see.
- Check out more Halloween themed info from the Library of Congress.
Reflect
Feeling dumb or stupid about how not-l33t you are? Angsting over some silly thing you “know better than to do.” Stop. That isn’t useful. Regret is only of use if it prompts an actual change in behavior. Maybe it’s NOT you that sucks. Could be it’s the technology and you could come up with a fix that would help lots of people. Look forward and make a plan.
Engage
We are a community. You are a welcome part of it.
