Tuesday Sweep: 6 March 2018

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…)

(Post on Repo)
New on Repo: A pretty short book list that focuses on Forrest Views.

Jump in Here

• Welcome. If you haven’t been following along, it’s okay. You’re not behind, you’re just where you are.
• The coach tool at the Crash Override Network has a great step by step break down that makes it really easy to start.
• If that site doesn’t fit your needs or you want more, that’s okay, there are more recommendations under Start Here on the repo.
• Feeling more ambitious? Review the list of OneThing articles and pick one to catch up on.

Sweep

The basics slightly revised and with a printable checklist.

• 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, 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?
• Stored WiFi networks can be used to profile your computer and find out places you’ve been. Weed them out.
• 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.

Learn

Where do you scan for news?

If I had more time I could make this list shorter…

• I AM SO EXCITED! Ars Technica now has two different subscription models. They’re offering $25/year for no advertising scripts and $50/year for similar and a YubiKey. I put their articles in the sweep all the time. They do great work and am really happy to help wean them off an advertising based business model.  Consider me subscribed!
• GitHub shrugs off the largest recorded DDoS attack 
• Late last year Playboy sued BoingBoing for just providing a link to some copyright infringing content.
• Thankfully that court case was thrown out. Even thrown-out court cases have a cost, though. So give give give to organizations like the EFF who fight to prevent such shenanigans.
• Speaking of BoingBoing, I actually really liked the positive spin in Cory Doctorow essay on how to use lessons from Science Fiction to be a better critic of Big Tech.  The best way to fight the bad is to imagine good!
• Speaking of EFF, they’ve got their Surveillance Survival guide redesigned and in a ton of languages.
• In a “don’t be Playboy” move the Newberry Library has put 1.7 million digital images online for reuse.
• How to Grow as an Engineer while Working Remotely.
• This… this is cool and will require some college level+ math to read, but it’s an exploit of a machine learning system that can “can wiggle into the space between our mental models of a system and how they actually work” via @xor
  • “We construct targeted audio adversarial examples on automatic speech recognition. Given any audio waveform, we can produce another that is over 99.9% similar, but transcribes as any phrase we choose (at a rate of up to 50 characters per second). We apply our white-box iterative optimization-based attack to Mozilla’s implementation DeepSpeech end-to-end, and show it has a 100% success rate. The feasibility of this attack introduce a new domain to study adversarial examples.”
• Equifax. Again. But you can’t be an “internet hermit” – Wired Security has a nice video of things to do.
• Were you unclear on how YubiKeys worked? Nothing better than a review of a hack to make things clearer.
• The Charles Proxy to see all your traffic
• Sigh, sigh, and double sigh.
• Be a bureaucracy hacker.
• Not enough FOMO in your life? Follow #DevSummit for the next 3 days to see chatter from the Esri DevSummit or #lfosls for the Open Source Leadership Summit 
• In 3D printing: Use openSCAD to make enclosures or just repair something you have.
• Advanced knitware using crazy materials at a factory in Shenzhen I didn’t even know existed.
• Big data art exploring New York City. What could we do with California or Los Angles data?
• Beautiful PCBs

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.

•  Did you learn something cool in your sweep? Make something? Share it!
• Speak up
• Give (New!! The Signal Foundation)
• Like going to conferences? Maybe one is coming up!
• Show up at CRASH Space tonight!

Relax

Fast tip, turning off retweets might save your sanity.  For the longer haul, meditation has science backing it up to help with all sorts of issues. Here in LA, almost no location is more a stones throw away from a Yoga studio that offers free meditation, but Yoga studios don’t do it for everyone. You can try this free course or YouTube Channel of Palouse Mindfulness teaching the clinically researched Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction style techniques. UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center also offers both online and in person resources of a similar secular approach. If you want something in Culver City, Peak Brain Institute will be hosting a 6 week MAPs I session starting next week… sadly on Tuesdays. PBI does have free classes on Monday, Wednesday and Sundays.