Digital Infinity

Photo by Philipp Birmes Americans who believe that our rights are unalienable would be surprised to learn how limited in scope they are at their place of employment. At work, our liberties are second to the need for business to monitor their assets, including their greatest asset, their people. While it is not unreasonable for businesses to be secure, they must tread carefully to avoid violating the rights of their employees. The story of Theranos, the now defunct blood testing company which has since been revealed to be a total fraud, is not new, but many new details are now emerging. Theranos was a silicon valley wunderkind because it was poised to revolutionize the blood testing industry under the leadership of its charismatic leader, Elizabeth Holmes. Holmes made many unethical business decisions, but how was this massive fraud initially discovered? One detail about Theranos that has recently emerged is how paranoid senior leadership was. Holmes had made a connection to a f...

Photo by Oliver Sjostrom Life has changed dramatically since the start of the personal computer revolution in the late 1970s. We have seen computing go from the realm of military to industry, then to the home and now to the pocket of our pants. Connected computers have followed the same path, as the Internet has forever changed the landscape of computing, including how people interact with it. Along the way, we've seen computing go from being rather anti-social to being a completely mainstream component of popular culture. Let's pause for a moment and examine how technology migrated into being chic. In the late 1970s there was a lot of optimism around what computing technology could someday do for us and while many people were eager to learn, that number was still small. Computers were essentially souped up calculators and most people weren't eager to learn an arcane programming language or spend their free time noodling around with calculations. One pivotal use ca...

Location data is a valuable commodity, both to consumers and to businesses as they connect with each other. Location services have become an integral part of the smartphone experience, but the other edge of the sword is how location services can track users. The major carriers long ago realized the value of this data and have been selling it, even as calls for a federal investigation mount. We aren't even touching on the subject of what the government could do with this data either. The value provided by location services to consumers can not be overlooked though. A large part of the power of having a computer in your pocket comes from that computer knowing where you are and where you go, this helps in navigation you and in making meaningful suggestions for you. Turning off location services entirely definitely cripples the user experience. First, in iOS, location services uses what they call Significant Locations, which allows for useful information in Maps, Photos and Cal...

Google is an advertising company first and foremost, lest we forget. They want to create ads people want to see, they say, but I find it hard to trust their motives. It comes as little surprise they want to clamp down on browser extension based adblockers as Ars recently covered. Fortunately, there are other ways to block ads which are more effective anyway. Every OS has a hosts file, which is simply a plain text file that can route internet traffic from one host to another. In Linux and Mac OS X the hosts file is in /etc/hosts and in Windows it is in C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts and editing it will require sudo or Administrator rights. Once you have your hosts file open, we are going to add a bunch of entries to it that will take traffic from many thousand known ad-serving domains and route it to 0.0.0.0 which is equivalent to a digital trash can. There are options for host file ad blocking. Personally, I use the list from mvps.org  but the list from Steven B...