Brief items

Scanning your computer for malware viruses is important to keep it running smoothly. This also is true for your QLED TV if it's connected to Wi-Fi!

Prevent malicious software attacks on your TV by scanning for viruses on your TV every few weeks.

Many important research, business, and social questions can be answered by combining data sets from independent parties where each party holds their own information about a set of shared identifiers (e.g. email addresses), some of which are common. But when you're working with sensitive data, how can one party gain aggregated insights about the other party's data without either of them learning any information about individuals in the datasets? That's the exact challenge that Private Join and Compute helps solve.

Using this cryptographic protocol, two parties can encrypt their identifiers and associated data, and then join them. They can then do certain types of calculations on the overlapping set of data to draw useful information from both datasets in aggregate. All inputs (identifiers and their associated data) remain fully encrypted and unreadable throughout the process. Neither party ever reveals their raw data, but they can still answer the questions at hand using the output of the computation. This end result is the only thing that's decrypted and shared in the form of aggregated statistics. For example, this could be a count, sum, or average of the data in both sets.

No two companies have done more to drag private life into the algorithmic eye than Google and Facebook. Together, they operate the world's most sophisticated dragnet surveillance operation, a duopoly that rakes in nearly two thirds of the money spent on online ads. You'll find their tracking scripts on nearly every web page you visit. They can no more function without surveillance than Exxon Mobil could function without pumping oil from the ground.

So why have the gravediggers of online privacy suddenly grown so worried about the health of the patient?

When I say "stop working" I really mean "will go to my line manager", so send patches there at your peril because they may reply with roadmaps and spreadsheets. You have been warned.

The weight of these possibilities did not occur to me immediately, instead slowly becoming evident over time. Today, this cycle is almost muscle memory. Pulling down source, grepping for files related to an itch I need to scratch, compiling and installing the modified version, and sending my work upstream - it’s become second nature to me. These days, on the rare occasion that I run into some proprietary software, this all grinds to a halt. It’s like miscounting the number of steps on your staircase in the dark. These moments drive the truth home: Free software is good. It’s starkly better than the alternative. And copyleft defends it. Now that I’ve had a taste, you bet your ass I’m not going to give it up.