Honeypot.net

AG Bonta reminds 23andMe customers of right to delete data:

California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued a consumer alert Friday urgently warning the public that 23andMe is in financial distress and instructing customers on how to delete their data.

That’s good enough for me. I used 23andMe when it launched and love the promise of gaining medical insights from my own genetic data. That’s a powerful vision I still support. But given the lack of federal privacy protections on this most sensitive and personal of all data, I’d rather delete it than let some creep buy it in a fire sale.

I didn’t need a new calculator. I have an HP 50g on my desk I hardly use. I work on a full-sized computer capable of unimaginably fast and intricate math. And yet, from the moment I saw a SwissMicros DM42, I had to have one. Then they recently released the updated DM42n version, which clinched it. I ordered.

It arrived today.

When I opened the small, heavy parcel, an owl greeted me. I don’t know why. It’s a fine-looking owl, though.

Beneath the owl, there’s a meticulous little cardboard box. Ah, we’re so close now!

Nope! Inside that box is another wrapper, with directions on how to open it.

An Easter egg: behind the inner wrapper, there’s a nice picture of the Matterhorn.

The inner wrapper is also persnickety in all the right ways. I followed the diagram to carefully pull apart the sine wave-shaped flaps without tearing them.

Now we’re down to the textured leather-like case.

And inside that is the beautiful little tool I’ve been drooling over for many months. That stainless steel obelisk is surprisingly heavy for its size. This isn’t a plasticky TI.

For completeness, the back. It feels “soft” in a way I wouldn’t expect a steel case to, it’s assembled with beefy screws, and it has large rubber feet.

It’s a beautiful device, luxuriously wrapped like a piece of jewelry, but with the heart and mind of one of HP’s best-ever RPN calculators, except improved. This is a happy day.

I am “hurt my back playing video games” years old.

Some friends and I got a pack of Orbic mobile hotspots so we can install the EFF’s Rayhunter software on them to detect “StingRay” IMSI-catchers. This is what one looks like.

In Memoriam: Mark Klein, AT&T Whistleblower Who Revealed NSA Mass Spying

I moved in down the block from Mark when we first came to the Bay Area. One day he saw me getting out of my car and noticed my EFF hat. He asked if I worked for them, and I said I’m just a happy supporter. He told me they once helped him out of a bind and said I should look him up.

Mark was a super nice guy. He also had the world’s most aggressive golden retrievers that would bark at me as I walked down the block. One day I found a “sewer cleaning” van parked on the parallel street behind his house, but to this day I wonder what it really was. They drove off right after I took a picture of it.

Of the security stuff I do for friends, nothing less excites me than financial compliance. If the task has “PCI” anywhere near it, you owe me a nice dinner.

I bought a case for my Meshtastic radio. It came with a couple of buttons and switches that reminded me that I’m only so-so at soldering. I still like how it came out, and everything works like it’s supposed to.

Happy Day of the Dude on this first day of Carpet Diem.

May you mark all strikes, no gutters.

We just finished “Shogun”, and it’s going to take me a day or two to decide what I think about that ending.

A Case for Turning Tulsa Into the Next Big Tech Hub | WIRED

Requirements OK will never meet:

• Better politics. Techies are largely for individual rights. The Midwest largely isn’t.
• Better worker protections. Great tech jobs aren’t usually in right to work states.
• Employees own their ideas. In CA, for example, you can launch your own startup while still working for someone else. In the places in the Midwest I’ve lived, your employer generally owns things you create while working for them.

If you don’t build those, they won’t come.