Uncle Al wrote: ↑Thu Apr 16, 2020 8:16 pmSo, stay safe my friends - both health and cyber security
Indeed! It's too soon to let the guard down. In my little corner of the world I've finally automated the daily gather of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' tally of infected souls, and until today was pleased to note a subtle decline in the number of
new infections. However, today shattered that, and we're back to where we were a week ago. The signal is too weak to readily detect. In the coming days I'll be working into the mix a derivation to show the number of hypothetically immune (i.e. those who have successfully recovered from the disease) for plotting as a percentage of the overall population; but that's a way off yet. Early results, however, are very discouraging; a test of the hypothesis and numbers yielded a population percentage resistant to the virus at well under one-half of one percent at present.
On "cybersecurity" (I detest that term for a large number of reasons), Robert Heinlein's 1966 usage of the already extant notion, "TANSTAAFL" ("There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch") holds. Software -- and "apps" (another term I detest) especially -- that's offered to the masses for "free" virtually always comes at a price in privacy, mainly in the realm of "targeted advertising" which yields an astonishingly profound look into the way that the average human mind works, and in some cases may be almost as good as a fingerprint as a personal identifier. Scary stuff. Mobile devices leak your physical location like sieves for the simple reason that those data are valuable commodities, and folks want to -- and do -- sell to the high bidder.
I'm not saying that we should turn into on-line hermits, but merely to behave in wise and prudent ways. Know who you're dealing with -- and what your level of trust in them is. Sometimes you have no choice: work can dictate the use of a particular platform and particular "apps", and fighting that may put you at risk for getting canned. In that case, keep your personal life strictly out of those fora.
Back on the actual matter of staying physically healthy, heed what the medical profession is calling for -- especially when it conflicts with what the politicians are calling for. As is the case with any complex issue, seek out multiple sources of data and include some you might not necessarily trust as simple counterpoint. The basic facts are out there, we just need to be careful in how we arrive at what they actually
are rather than what somebody else wants us to
believe they are. Use common sense as well. If something sounds implausible, it quite probably is.
Stay well lads!
