What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
Books, & links to all kinds of stuff I found interesting
Fred Wilson predicts that we’ll see more QR (Quick Response) code-based applications springing up, with COVID speeding up the process.
Coincidentally, for the first time today, I noticed a website I was on, a QR icon on the address bar. I’m going to be looking out for this now.
Read this post by Wendy Grossman:
It also reminds that when people’s decisions seem inexplicable “the convenience” is often an important part of their reasoning. It’s certainly part of why a lot of security breaches happen. Most people’s job is not in security but in payroll or design or manufacturing, and their need to get their actual jobs done takes precedence. Faced with a dilemma, they will do the quickest and easiest thing, and those who design attacks know and exploit this very human tendency. The smart security person will, as Angela Sasse has been saying for 20 years, design security policies so they’re the easiest path to follow.
Reasons to be Cheerful is one of my favourite places to go to when I feel a little grumpy.
Why does homelessness end up becoming such an unsolved problem in a rich country like Australia or the US? And what are some of the ways individuals are trying to tackle it?
Unlike the possibly fictional “The Starfish Story“, this is a real-life, heartwarming one.
Ralph McTell’s “Streets of London” is a song that came to mind while I was reading this.
Doc Searls is a radio fan, like me, & shares some thoughts to a Quora question “how can the radio industry stay relevant in the age of streaming music and protocols?”:
It already is, if you consider streaming music and podcasting evolutionary forms of radio.
.. Deep Change (in our real lives as well as in fiction) happens not in clamorous, action-filled moments but in quiet, pensive beats when the human heart, at the finish of a protracted, often unconscious, process of evolution concludes and cements its transformation.
Steven Pressfield, in a blog post on The Power of a Private Moment.
Little breaks are easy to ignore and thus are wasted.
Even the big consulting firms are posting more about stress, with fancy graphs & charts!
At the core of this challenge for many people is a misguided view of stress itself, which contributes to our inability to recognize and manage it. Many executives view stress as an unalloyed negative, something to fight through or minimize.2 As a result, they may manage it ineffectively.
Ryan Halliday on the reality of life:
..we will fall short. We all will. The important thing is that we pick ourselves back up when we do. As one Japanese proverb says: fall down seven times, get up eight. Marcus (Aurelius) said it too. “When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances,” he wrote, “revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of the harmony if you keep on going back to it.” You’re going to have an impulse to give in. Your temper is going to get the best of you. Fear will get the best of you. Ambition might lead you astray. But you always have the ability to realize that that is not who you want to be, that is not what you were put here to do, that is not who your philosophy wants you to be.
Kaiser Fung opines, in the context of all the analysis re CoVID-19 vaccines :
The key lesson is if you don’t have experimental data, the data analysis gets a lot more complex (more stimulating, but also fraught with risk). The analyst must release full details of the analysis; otherwise, it’s impossible to evaluate its merit.
In the hands of law enforcement, this data could be evidence. But at every other moment, the location data is reviewed by hedge funds, financial institutions and marketers, in an attempt to learn more about where we shop and how we live.
This new data set offers proof that not only is there more interest in location data than before, but it is also easier to deanonymize. It gets easier by the day. As the data from Jan. 6 eerily demonstrates, it does not discriminate. It harvests from the phones of MAGA rioters, police officers, lawmakers and passers-by. There is no evidence, from the past or current day, that the power this data collection offers will be used only to good ends. There is no evidence that if we allow it to continue to happen, the country will be safer or fairer.
Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson show , in this NYTimes Opinion piece, how insidiously apps leak information, whether users know it or not