The dream of an open, transparent Internet that accepts all and their opinions is all but dead. The story starts on Jan 1, 1983, when the then ARPANET adopted the TCP/IP protocol and then really started to take off in 1990 after Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. It began like most things, simply, with topic driven bulletin boards and online forums, then it moved to personal websites and the first blogs. At the turn of the century this morphed into the Web 2.0 where social media platforms were developed and started to grow and opened up the world and different countries to each other at the personal level.
- This was also the start of the closing down of general access by countries like China, where by 2006 they had the early versions of the Great Firewall in place to restrict civilian access to the web, and the restrictions increased from there. During this period the social media giants started to grow and on the back of user generated content became the dominant information exchange platforms of the modern world. Starting from 2017, many of these gradually started to impose ideologically driven filtering that has only worsened in the lead up to the 2020 US presidential election. They also started to add country-based filtering to their platforms generating widespread criticism.
- One way to bypass some of these restrictions are by using a Virtual Private Network connection, or VPN. They create a private and typically secure connection between you and your target. They are banned in China because they can bypass the wall. Adoption of VPN's has increased dramatically in the past two years as regular users employ them to connect to websites that are location based. There have been times when I needed to connect to say the USA to be able to read a web page I was interested in.
- I rarely recommend anything on TV but I watched the Netflix story Social Dilemma recently and while I knew about some of it the presentation was a powerful one. If you have Gen Z children it is a mandatory watch. With input from a number of people influential in the social media platforms it lays out just how the platforms are manipulating people to react to that notification, or that story or that recommended video. It covers the psychology and potential medium-to-long-term results from allowing your children to have too much screen time. Everyone should watch this at least once.
- When did "fact-checking" sites turn political? Over the past few years once respected, go to sites like Snopes changed from the place to check, into some kind of alternative universe of information. On a growing number of subjects their "fact check" is now likely to be 100% wrong. It is also a lot easier to cross-check information and find the real facts, like a video of an event, that so-called fact checkers state never occurred. Once you lose trust it is very difficult to recover.
- I never thought I'd see this headline but Microsoft will release its Edge browser for Linux next month, initially for Debian and Ubuntu distribution but others will follow. To be fair, Microsoft has warmed to Linux in recent years and users will be able to get Edge through the browser's Dev preview channel.
- TikTok is up for grabs in the US once again. There have been all kinds of announcements and pronouncements but at the time of writing no one really knows what is going on in any detail. In the latest on again off again version, Oracle will partner with Walmart to look after US operations. There are 100 million users in the US and that is a tempting market for any company. As mentioned previously the Indian team that originally investigated TikTok raised serious security concerns over user data. Not sure where WeChat falls in this mess but that is also in the mix.
- The OnePlus phone is one of those that seems to be just outside most people's view. When the first models came out, they were of great interest to some in the IT crowd. The 8T, the next model, is being released on the Oct 14. It is 5G ready and is an incremental upgrade to the model 8. The latest series is aimed at the corporate market with three-five years of security upgrades within 90 days of Google. The specs will be similar to those in the 8 with a few tweaks.
- The week would not be complete without yet another data loss story. In this case it was 6.5TB of Bing search data that escaped via an unsecured Elastic server. There was no personal info but there was location data and device IDs so anyone with the right tools, like say Google, could put together some specifics there. There is an amusing twist here in that the server suffered two Meow attacks where data in unsecured databases are rewritten with the word Meow.
James Hein is an IT professional of over 30 years' standing. You can contact him at jclhein@gmail.com.
