Trust

Within the last two weeks children have headed back to schools. As a consequence of this schools, towns, villages, and ‘states’ are banning mobile phones for children and teenagers. In theory this is a fantastic, and simple solution. In practice this is failing society.

Plenty of adults, from my generation, and younger, are media illiterate. They use computers for work, and used them for uni and for school, but they didn’t use them for pleasure. The result is that instead of learning, by trial and error, as technology progresses they remain ignorant, until a niche has become mature.

On Friday I cycled in to Geneva to drop off my bike for a quick check after I noticed that when I shifted gears in one direction it seemed to block. I could have hung around for three or four hours waiting for the bike to be ready but chose to leave it overnight, to be picked up at the same time as the group ride.

Walking with cycling clothes is not comfortable, especially over two kilometres. That’s why I exceptionally chose to take the bus. I arrived early, thinking that it was at 5 past, and 33 past. I then saw that the 5 past bus is only on week days, not weekends. As a result I had to wait fourty minutes for the bus.

Yesterday I drove an EV from Nyon to Boudry and back. The journey took about 40 percent charge for each direction for a total of 80 percent charge. Keep in mind that this is a fiat 500 with a small battery rather than a large one.

I routed the journey from Nyon to a 150w charging station and within 14 minutes I had gone from 56 percent or so to 86 percent. I then drove to the train station where the group was scheduled to meet and waited.

Tomorrow I have the opportunity to do another range test with the Fiat 500. I know that if I drive at 120 kilometres per hour the range is about 100 km but if I slow down to 100 kilometres per hour then the range is theoretically doubled. The drive I want to do is about 100 kilometres so if my optimism is well placed then I should make it there and back.

A few days ago I was waiting for friends to catch a train to go on a hike and I forgot to start easyride before the start of the train journey. As soon as I realised I started the app but when I arrived one stop away it was ignored. If the friends had been on time I would have started the tracking sooner.

To be clear it’s the SBB app that chose not to charge me for the journey I forgot to start tracking from the start. If it had looked at the time I started moving, and the train that started at the same time, then it could have extrapolated the ride I had tried to pay for.

Two evenings ago I played with setting a No-ip host, setup the Swisscom router to make a Pi available in the DMZ so that I could access the apache server and Nextcloud from the open web and it worked. I had it all done within 15-20 minutes. Now for those with the “But why nextcloud?” the answer is simple. It offers two factor authentication and it is trusted by various EU institutions and governments. It is also trusted by Geneva but I don’t remember by whom, at this point.

For all of those privacy advocates I’m on your side for this issue. With a lot of communitis you create a profile and friends can see it. What you give them are both your name and possibly phone number but no more. When you’re building a database of contacts you must ask for it. When you add friends to outlook, address and other applications you’ve done research and the users have given their consent. That’s not the same as harvesting them direct from facebook. No one said they wanted you to have their e-mail address. No one chose to give you those details. If you want them ask for them. Taking contact details from 5000 people is unethical and wrong. That’s very similar to spam behaviour. What makes this worse is that Plaxo is associated with this. I use Plaxo pulse and you can see it on the right side of this column.  I don’t mind their services but for people to harvest their friend’s data without prior consent will help increase this feeling of insecurity. We’ve had that debate on Seesmic, on Facebook and other online communities. If we want real communities transparency and trust are key. Stop abusing it.