Category: Tech

Technology

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The Future of AI

As AI progresses companies will be able to have lower skilled employees successfully pull off work that required much more expensive skilled workers. This will allow companies to reduce their overall payroll, making the rich and poor richer and the middle class poorer.

This prediction is based on personal experience of technology impacts on my co-workers during my 40+ year career and the one fixed rule of capitalism. The rule is best expressed by the mom on Malcolm in the Middle, Lois Nolastname.

Lois: “I’ll tell you what they’re going to pay you, they’re going to pay you what all jobs pay, less than you’re worth and just enough to keep you crawling back for more.”

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Why WordPress Hosting Sucks

Unless you are willing to pay way too much money, $300/year, you are stuck with these very crappy limitations and non-competitive pricing.

  • You are stuck with the horribly inefficient Gutenberg block editor with no way to avoid it.
  • The price for domain names is way too high, double or more than other providers. At least with this feature I can move my custom domain away from WordPress before the next renewal.
  • You are stuck with their crappy Jetpack statistics instead of the free excellent Google Analytics

The main reason I switched was for the timely, accurate, security updates. This is needed since the underlying software is so riddled with security problems. If you don’t monitor your site for updates and breaches on daily basis you’ll soon be hacked.

Before the next renewal I’m going to have to research newer hosting services to see if any are as good from a monitoring/update perspective. Otherwise I’ll just have to renew for another year and put up with the stupid block editor and Jetpack analytics for another year while I finish migrating all my stuff to ultra secure static sites built with Hugo.

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Review Geek’s Wise Response to the Wyze and eufy Security Failings with their Cameras

The article’s closing is spot on:

And frankly, every company is “one bad day” away from the same situation. It all depends on how they handle disclosure. For now, in all transparency, I can only tell you that I own Wyze cameras, and they are still plugged in. I know the risks, and I’m willing to take them.

But that’s not the same thing as recommending them to anyone else. No recommendation should start with, “this is a good option, but first, you should know some things.” And that would be a requirement. The only safe bet you can take is to not place security cameras in your home at all.

Emphasis mine, Source: Why Review Geek Can’t Recommend Wyze or eufy Cameras Anymore – Review Geek

Go read the whole thing if you’re interest in a great summary of the details. Another great article from Josh Hendrickson, Editor in Chief of Review Geek.

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Re-configuring Email for Modern Authentication and MFA

I slowly lost some of my email functionality over the past year and just didn’t have time to fix the problems until now.

The first problem was no longer being able to use Thunderbird for updating my offline Mbox format email archives for my job. I handle all current email, work and personal, via web clients. But for long term storage and future readability nothing beats Mbox, my archive goes back to 1997. My client of choice for my Mbox archives is Thunderbird.

Over time as the security for Office 365 tightened I stopped being able to connect and move current mail to the archives. I’d searched a bit for solutions but all I found either didn’t work or was too insecure for me. Today I looked again and found these great instructions. Configure Thunderbird for Modern Authentication and MFA

The other problem was with my first custom IoT device, a monitor for the basement dehumidifier. My cable ISP provided an IP secured SMTP server since the beginning but over the last year it slowly has been changed. This meant the daily status, and water collection tray full, emails were no longer working.

I’ve settled on the App Password solution for my custom Python code as described here: G-Mail and less secure sign-in technology – Raspberry Pi Forums. I would like a more secure solution but so far I haven’t found one that’s free.