Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Here is the only API details in Android…
Of course without an app its not active… Manchester Futurists talked about this on the latest podcast btw.
I received an email the other day. It looked like a classic phishing attack, except there was no link to fix the problem…
Your account is in violation of our terms of service
Hello. This is ************* from SpiderOak’s support team. I’m writing to inform you that your account is in violation of our Terms of Service immediate action is needed on your part.
Because of the amount of data stored in your account or the type of data you are storing, your account is negatively affecting the accounts of other SpiderOak users. Because of this it will be necessary to close your current account.
We realize this is sudden and we want to do what we can to help you.
We have two options to offer to help you move forward:1. A 5 TB account at the same price as your existing account. If you choose this option a member of our support team will help you set up a new account, transfer your billing information, and place the new account on a 5 TB plan at the correct price.
2. Cancellation and a full refund of your most recent payment. If you choose this option our support team will set up a refund as soon as we hear from you.
If we don’t hear from you by the end of this week we will lock your account while retaining your data for a grace period of 14 days. At the end of the grace period if we still have not heard back from you your account will be canceled.
You can contact us by replying to this email, or by writing to support@spideroak.com. Please contact us as soon as possible so we can help you move to one of the options I mentioned.
Thanks,
**************
Customer Success
The first thing I did was check my account directly and then replied with this…
Hello ************* and support
To check this isn’t a phishing attack can you tell me the name of the device and how much data is currently stored?
I’m keen to resolve this but it strikes as a phishing attack.
It felt like a phishing attack and since I have seen a bunch of new data dumps, you could hardly blame me.
But once I could verify everything I suggested removing some of my older computer backups after seeing this. This fell on deaf ears.
Unfortunately that isn’t an option. Your account has been using excessive resources, which has caused issues for a number of other users on the same server cluster as you. Because of the No Knowledge nature of our product we can’t tell you exactly what is causing the issue. I’m sorry that I don’t have more details for you.
The two options I can offer you are moving to a new 5 TB account (at your current payment price, normally it is a $320 / year plan) or cancellation and a refund. You won’t be able to keep your current account.
Note in option 1, if I pay more money I could still upload the same files to Spideroak!!! Something is fishy here. Either theres a problem with my files or not. I get the zero-knowledge issue but something doesn’t add up.
Frankly I’m pretty peed off about this all. I’m not the only one either, a few searches later I found others who have had similar emails.
Spideroak a while ago stopped their unlimited option and it feels like this the nail in the coffin by removing all the unlimited users?!
I guess its been a good but I have been thinking about switching since Spideroak is American based, the change to the warranty canary and finally something which has always bugged me – No two factor auth!
Suggestions for places to store my backup data which is also zero-knowledge or I could client side encrypt it before uploading if needed.
This was a surprise…Motiv smart ring gets bought – and will stop selling to consumers
It seems the world of consumer wearables has lost Motiv – the smart ring company that’s been an underdog hit in the world of wearable technology.
The company isn’t dead – but it’s being bought by Proxy – a digital authentication start-up that sees potential in using Motiv’s technology in enterprise. As a result of the buyout, Motiv will cease selling its smart ring device through consumer channels, and there’s no word of how long devices will be supported.
Motiv started life back in 2017 as an activity tracking smart ring that put its focus on active minutes rather than simple step counting, with a heart rate sensor on board.
But its feature set widened over the years. In 2018 a second generation landed that put its focus on biometric security – and these are the features that will have interested Proxy.
Likely explains why they returned the full price of my ring a while?
Yesterday I was on a zoom call which was hijacked or zoombombed with something not just horrible but totally illegal. Because of this I have pretty much lost all trust in zoom.
This is of course very difficult as its what we use at work and of course being in the middle of the covid19 lockdown, makes things tricky. Because of this, I’m going to still use it but with much more caution and I’m going to be a lot more forceful about the hosting side of it.
Its clear war-dialers for public Zoom meetings is so easy and well used by inscrutable groups of people. Zoom could make sharable links much more difficult to war dial, similar to the way Google docs uses combinations of characters and numbers to make a much longer url, a lot harder to war-dial.
The defaults of Zoom, is setup for a semi trusted corporate environment. I understand the covid-19 pandemic changed everything but there has been many updates and only now is the defaults only just safe. Their share prices have rocketed but they are only now focused on security ahead of more features?
Their idea of end to end encryption is a total dump on top of the security findings saying some calls are being routed via China.. Today they announce you can choose your routing but you need to pay for it. More governments and companies are blocking zoom because they just don’t trust it.
Likewise neither do I… but I will use it… with caution.
I have been thinking about an equivalent, and thought about two.
If you are hosting a Zoom call, please do lock it down theres a number of guides to help including this one.
Its one of those things which I wasn’t happy about with my Pixel4. Who on earth over looked the fact you could use the face unlock without your eyes open! It doesn’t take a lot to think about the abuses including spouses with trust issues.
Finally over the last few days Google rolled out a fix which requires your eyes open if you enable it! Only 5 moths later
It was the first thing I did when I installed the update. Till that point I’ve been enabling lockdown mode when going through sensitive areas like airport security
Today my pebble 2 smartwatch broke while playing with the diabolo in the garden. The screen came straight out the frame. Not sure why but I did put it back but found the screen was dead.
As I thought my smartphone was still connected to the watch via bluetooth and was responding to the button presses and battery charge.
However without a screen I’m forced to use my very last pebble smartwatch. The Pebble time kindly donated from Ahmed, who got a Apple watch. This is why although I did say the previous pebble was my last, I luckily had this backup. However this is the last. Lets hope the hybrid smartwatches are better than Fossil’s attempt.
I always expected an increase in my plex server usage from my friends as the UK enter the Covid-19 lockdown. Especially when I heard all the streaming services dropping back to SD To be fair its not been as big a demand as I expected but its noticeable compared to last few months of 2019.
The most popular clients seem to be Chrome & Chromecasts (not sure if Chromecasts sometimes report themselves as Chrome). Thankfully the Xbox has dropped because that client requires everything to be transcoded unlike Tizen which will happily if theres enough bandwidth send the original file and not require any transcoding.
I have however hit 3 concurrent streams again, keeping an eye out to see if I can hit 4 or even more. No idea what it would do to my AMD based Plex server? I do have the Intel Xeon based HP Z800 which I recently bought a Nvida Quadro K620 GPU hoping to get hardware accelerated streaming finally working on the HP Z800.
Thats a task for Easter maybe…
Update 13/4/2020
I noticed my plex server finally reached the 4 concurrent users over the last weekend.
I have a bit of history with note taking apps, having started with Evernote back when I had a Windows Pocket PC and moving to a bunch of different apps till I finally settled on Standard Notes.
Its really good and been using the listed feature for a my gratitude diary. However I checked out Joplin recently and quite like some of the features.
Evernote import works perfectly, meaning I get my rich evernotes back complete with attachments, Actually the way it handles attachments is a lot closer to Evernote. Syncing is done in a number of different ways including Dropbox, Webdav, etc and all done with encryption meaning its using the service as a file container like how I use keepass right now.I had tried to setup a standard notes sync server in the past but didn’t really put the effort in.
Standard note uses markdown which is good and quick but I like Joplin’s hybrid of markdown and html. This pushed further with web clippers in Firefox and Chrome. Making Joplin extremely useful for capturing online resources.
I like both but will find it tricky to use both although I noticed for example Joplin is really painful to use on my ereader, while standardnotes is super smooth. They are build for different purposes but working what do with each is a bit of a dilemma right now. Currently I have my evernote backup and standardnotes in Joplin thanks to export/import. Of course theres lots of duplicate notes which I really need to go through and delete, as I already imported my evernote into standard notes previously.
I was quite impressed with the /e/OS project. I hadn’t really heard of it before but as I’m considering the balanced of google service and data in my life; especially with the plans to move UK citizens data/accounts outside the EU.
Taking the AOSP Android Open Source project and removing all the google parts is quite impressive. A real testament to the power of open source.
The interview with itsfoss is a good read, starting off with the question of what and why
Why did you create this Eelo or /e/ project in the first place?
Gael: In 2017, I realized that using Android and iPhone, Google and many mobile apps was not compatible with my personal privacy.
A later study by a US University confirmed this: using an iPhone or and Android phone sends between 6 to 12 MB of personal data to Google servers, daily! And this doesn’t count mobile apps.
So I looked for reasonable alternatives to iPhone and Android phones but didn’t find any. Either I found options for hobbyists, like Ubuntu Touch, that were not compatible with existing apps and not fully unGoogled either. Or there were alternative ROMs with all the Google fat inside, and no associated basic online services that could be used without tweaking the system.
Therefore, an idea came to mind: why not fork Android, remove all the Google features, even low level, such as connectivity check, DNS…, replace default apps with more virtuous apps, add basic online services, and integrate all this into a consistent form that could be used by Mum and Dad and any people without tech or expert knowledge?
I’d be interesting in what apps run on the operating system, as Google really have embedded Play services into everything now. When I first got my recent e-reader, it came with its own app store till you enable play services. That store was super small but it doesn’t have to be that way if you look at F-droid for example.
If I still had my Nexus 5x, I would likely give /e/os a try. I could run it on my Nexus 5 I guess but the screen is maybe too broken.
I have been thinking, following my use of Firefox multiple account containers use. Maybe something of a mashup of Blackberry’s Android profiles (anyone remember this?) and Firefox containers.
This certainly feels like a design challenge which could be massively beneficial to many, and showcase the beauty of opensource
I won’t lie, I’m pretty impressed again with Google when it comes to text to speech and speech to text. Like Robby, my use of Google Assistant may also sky rocket.
My regular, daily use of the Google Assistant is likely to skyrocket with this new feature that was just rolled out: the ability to read any web page aloud. Whether or not this sounds awesome to you in this moment, just go with me for a second as we unpack what is going on here and why it will likely be incredibly useful for many.
At its most basic, this new feature does exactly what you expect. It allows the Google Assistant to simply read web pages aloud to you in a natural-sounding voice with a nice cadence. Pauses for commas and periods are dictated the way you’d expect and the decidedly-digital voice sounds very natural. The Assistant reads off the title, the author, and then begins to read through the entire article, highlighting each word spoken along the way.
But it gets better. Way better. When you start a reading session, the entire thing happens in a dedicated media player that gives you options to play/pause, skip ahead or back, and change the playback speed from 0.5x all the way up to 3x. On top of that, the player behaves just like any other media player in that it provides the ability to continue playing when the screen is locked and gives you a rich notification with playback controls as well. This allows you to start up the reader for a long article and go about doing something else while the Assistant reads the entire thing to you. I will 100% start using this for my daily walks or when driving to ingest news that I would otherwise put off in hopes of finding time to read later.
Even better is the fact that websites don’t need anything special in place to take part in all this. No extra code, no tags, no meta data: the Assistant can read any web page unless the web developer for that site has included the proper meta tag that disallows this. I’m sure there are fringe cases where this would be needed, but I’d assume most sites you visit will be readable by the Google Assistant out of the box.
Its very impressive, and my only issues are not being able to read text out of other apps like wallabag or tiny tiny rss. Not being able to playlist a number of pages for reading. Also using Chrome is a bit of a pain (I tried to do this in Firefox for example)
