I wrote in the post above about all of the ways that I use technology in my life. Just from the things I could come up with, off the top of my head, I was amazed – and, more than a little concerned.
In the future, I will be backing up more carefully, and more often. I will be either receiving hard copies of statements and medical reports, or printing them out. Even saving them to a flash drive or other backup technology is vulnerable to attack. One of the things I will be looking at is setting up an air-gapped computer, preferably one that can be updated without directly connecting to the web.
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Because the wife’s car is in the shop, we have a loaner from the dealership.
It’s one of those keyless fob-start things. But sitting in it I was looking for the gearshift lever. Gone. Instead, it’s PUSH BUTTON to shift gears.
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I had to stop driving my Tiburon (6-speed, some electronics, but is able to be bypassed), due to knee problems. I’m currently driving my husband’s 2003 Lincoln, and it’s chock-filled with electronic sensors, a high-tech key without which the car won’t start, and other cr@p I don’t need.
If, as I suspect, the supply chain for electronics stays stopped up for long, there are going to be a LOT of people who will not be able to drive their cars. Just ONE malfunctioning electronic part will potentially ‘brick’ that car.
A few days ago, a neighbor I hadn’t seen in a long time stopped to talk to me while I was in the yard doing some fall cleanup. Later that day my next door neighbor came over and asked if I’d sent her a weird text. After looking at it, it was clearly a garbled transcription of my earlier conversation. Yikes! It seems that Siri had listened in and then sent the text message. Siri is now completely disabled on my iPhone. Big tech is out of control.
A solution, that I’ve embraced, is a Network Area Storage (NAS) on my local network. I have a Synology and think highly of them. This is my second unit over the last 12 years. Only due to an upgrade in the CPU for video handling.
The advantages are many. Your local clients (computers, etc) can back up to it, it can be completely isolated and firewalled from outside orcs, and they offer a cloud service to sync. So you can have 3 copies of just about anything at all times. I don’t use the cloud sync. I’m too paranoid.
On top of that, our NAS hosts home movies, feature movies and tv (I use an app called Plex), my ripped music collection, library of ePubs (via Calibre), and other documents and data that the family needs access to. Give it a look.
Walmart started contacting me by email asking me to submit a survey of what I bought just recently using a credit union debit card. They have done this three times so far. I have contacted walter world and told them to desist this practice,that I had not given them my email address and did not appreciate my privacy being used for surveys. I now stop at the said credit union and withdraw the money I think I need for purchases. Technology sure has gotten invasive to the point I am very close to chucking every electronic device into a shredder and become a Luddite…
I got a loaner car while the wife’s was getting fixed. Not just a keyless dongle fob ignition, but… all push-button gear shifting.
Between the supply chain, a possible EMP, and just everything getting more electronic why do I hear those immortal words from Scotty in Star Trek 5: “The more they overtake the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the drain”?