You're not helping

We've all seen those hilariously bad scam emails that make you wonder what kind of idiot would be fooled by them. Of course, no real email would be spelled incorrectly or reference odd third-party domains, and they definitely wouldn't ever get my name wrong, would they...?

Erm... yeah, they do. A lot. And frankly they're just as much a part of the problem as the scams themselves. I've had random text messages from withheld numbers claiming to be from my bank, asking me to confirm some arbitrary piece of information so they can send me an important message, and after calling the bank from a different phone to report it, it turns out that the message was in fact completely genuine. I've had emails from companies with which I've had dealings, in which my name is not only spelled incorrectly, but completely wrong (Adam, anyone?) Some have even expected me to click a link within the email to a domain I've never visited before. Again, turned out to be completely genuine. My personal favourite was the email I received some years ago now which had no plain text section other than a message saying "please turn on Javascript to read this email". I've no idea if it was genuine or not, but I deleted it anyway.

Come on. As the internet continues its plummet into entropy, I'm pretty sure more than half of the world's email traffic consists of phishing scams these days. So, if you do happen to send genuine emails that you expect to be read, then the least you can do is take a bit of time to ensure your spelling and grammar are above average, the recipient's name is correct, and the email doesn't look like a scam. Don't forget, if you're sending an email to someone you don't know personally, then you should expect a smart person to assume your mail is a scam unless you can convince them otherwise. The whole point of training people in computer security is to ensure as many people as possible can tell a real email from a scam, and sending legitimate emails that fit the textbook definition of what a scam looks like actually makes it harder to do this, essentially aiding and abetting the scammers. We really can do better than this.

Nothing To Hide

"If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to worry about."

Pretty much every debate about online privacy or intrusive surveillance involves the sentence above at some point. And why would I argue? It's absolutely true. You genuinely do have nothing to worry about, if indeed you have nothing to hide.

But you have something to hide. Everyone does.

The implication, of course, is that people with something to hide are the bad guys. In many cases, this is true, but it's a very small minority. Allow me to ask some questions.

• Have you ever entered your PIN into a payment terminal in public?
• Have you ever written a private letter or email?
• Have you ever spoken in confidence to a doctor?
• Have you ever bought a surprise present for anyone?
• Have you ever closed the door of the cubicle when using a public toilet?

If you've answered yes to any of these questions, then congratulations! Like everyone else, you have something to hide. The point is: that's perfectly OK. Hiding things is completely normal human behaviour; there are some things we'd just rather not shout about, for any number of completely legitimate reasons.

So if you ever feel the need to fall back on the tried-and-tested argument that people with nothing to hide have nothing to worry about, maybe think about what you have to hide, and how you'd feel if someone were to try and take that right to privacy away from you. And the next time you close the door behind you when going into a toilet cubicle, try wondering to yourself if you'd feel more or less comfortable if there were a police officer stood watching you the whole time, just to make sure you're not doing anything against the law.

Let's ban social media for adults

Several countries have now banned (or rather, attempted to ban) social media use for children. The UK seems next in line to follow suit.

But the thing is, children get social media. They've grown up with it, it's like second nature. Adults, on the other hand, are less good at it. Look at the generally unhinged nature of your local Facebook group and you'll see that I'm right. Regularly we see moral panic in the press because adults have completely misunderstood something that kids get up to online, from the Momo Challenge to Six/Seven. Kids have always got up to seemingly nonsensical behaviour, they've just traditionally done it in playgrounds and school, rather than in front of their parents. The surveillance-based nature of most social networks has merely brought this behaviour to adults' attention, it didn't cause it.

OK, there's bad stuff online, I don't deny it. But the fact is that there's always been bad stuff online. As someone who grew up while the web was in its infancy, I know how it is. You just have to learn to ignore the crap and use the power of the web for good, it's actually quite easy. If, like the current generation of parents, you only started using the web when social media appeared, then of course you're going to be shocked when you see the toxic crap that makes up half the internet. But you can't get rid of it, any more than you can get rid of it from any other facet of life in western society, so don't give yourself a heart attack worrying about it, just teach your kids how to spot bad stuff, and trust them to leave it alone. Expecting the government to do something is just admitting you're a bad parent, frankly.

Also, as I alluded to in the first sentence of this article, don't forget that kids are smarter than you. You can try to ban them from doing stuff, but that just makes them want it more. I know how to get into blocked websites, and I'm sure most kids do too. Literally everyone that I know of my own age is more tech-savvy than their parents, and just the other day I felt very proud to be technologically outsmarted by my nine-year-old niece. If she hasn't used TOR by the time she's in secondary school, I'll have failed in my duty as an uncle.

So my proposal is this: let's just ban everyone over 30 from using social media. Every year, raise this age by a year, until we have a whole generation of adults who are 100% confident using it, because they've done so their whole lives. In the meantime, less bumping into people who just decided to stop in the street because they got a Whatsapp notification, fewer people crossing the road without looking because they're checking their Instagram, and fewer morons in the pub distributing unsolicited information that they incorrectly believe is true because someone on Facebook said so.

What Is Spam

Back when Facebook was still quite new, and 95% of my "friends" were fellow students, one of them, someone I'd not spoken to for several years but with whom I went to college and felt obliged to remain "Facebook Friends", began posting adverts for a local business. I ignored them. A few weeks later the same person posted an advert for a different business, one I'd not heard of. I did what I considered to be the right thing, and messaged her, outside of Facebook, to say "Hi, this is Ash, I think your Facebook account has been hacked, I've seen two adverts supposedly from you appear on my timeline in the last fortnight." A few hours later she replied to tell me that she'd posted those adverts and was surprised (and, I guessed from the tone of her email, a bit offended) that I'd mistaken her "legitimate" posts for advertising spam sent from a hacked account.

But this is one of the biggest non-technical problems with spam - not everything is spam, to everyone.

There has been a shift over time. When I started using the internet in the 90s, all online advertising was a cardinal sin. Bandwidth was limited, and expensive, and anyone posting an advert to a newsgroup or web forum was treated with utter contempt, and with good reason. These days, most companies we refer to as 'tech companies' make most of their money from advertising, and would probably not be pleased if the majority attitude towards online advertising were to revert to its previous state. Even the 'best practice' for dealing with spam seems to have changed since those early days. Clicking the 'unsubscribe' link used to be the worst thing you could possibly do, as it tells the spammer that their email had been received and read. Now we're told to click unsubscribe, as if no advertiser has ever been caught doing anything sneaky.

Call me old-fashioned, but I personally still see online advertising the same way I did in the 90s. I use an ad-blocker in my browser, as well as a network-level ad-blocker on my router. I have never clicked an unsubscribe link, I choose instead to report all advertising emails to my ISP as spam, before blocking the sender. I don't accept IMs from unknown contacts and my phone blocks all calls with no caller ID. I don't use social media at all. My email client doesn't load remote images, meaning senders can't tell if I've received their email or not, and Javascript is disabled in my browser for all domains that I haven't explicitly whitelisted, meaning that most code in web pages designed to track my activity and serve adverts doesn't run.

There will be people who agree with my stance, and people who disagree, probably quite strongly. But whatever your opinion, the fact remains that I have been mercilessly blocking adverts for over 20 years ...and the web is still here.

Digital ID scrapped for now

Obviously I think this is great news...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3385zrrx73o

It seems like every time a Labour government gets in they try to introduce some kind of mandatory ID system, using whatever is currently in the news as a justification, which at the moment is... (looks at news) ...immigration. So I'm happy that they've changed their mind, at least for now.

But why the subsequent pile-on? This is a good thing. It's not a "U-turn", it's a sensible decision. If you try something, it doesn't work, you change your mind and try something else, that's how things get better. Why are we all so keen to paint changing your mind as a sign of weakness these days?

2025

Warning: statistics ahead.

As various services either encourage users to write a year review, or in some cases just do it for you, here is the summary output of my lifelogging for the last 12 months.

Travel

I'm not a big fan of travel, particularly by air, so until this year I'd not actually left the UK since 2020. Somehow I ended up taking two long multi-stop trips which meant I visited four countries - one of which I'd never been to before - in the space of a year, which for me is a lot. I also left the northern hemisphere for the first time in my life when I travelled to Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands.

Countries visited: Portugal, Spain, Netherlands and Ecuador
Longest journey: 6309.39 miles, flight from Amsterdam to Quito
Times equator crossed: 8
Time spent in southern hemisphere: 8 days, 17:09:41
Distance driven with no MOT or insurance: 103 miles

Health

I'm not particularly fit, but I try to log when I'm doing healthy things. I've had a bit of a lull in my cycling distance since the pandemic, so to log over 500 miles this year was a pleasant surprise.

Cycling distance: 501.87 miles
Walking distance: 430.71 miles
Total steps: 2,111,988
Steps per day: 5786 (mean)
Parkruns attended: 5
Parkruns actually run: 0

Communication

Phone Calls: 63 (33 made / 30 received)
SMS messages: 642 (228 sent / 414 received)
Phones: 4

Music

Tracks played: 3922 (1554 unique tracks)
Artists played: 354 (27 artists discovered)
Albums played: 577 (31 albums discovered)
Most played artist: Battle Beast
Most played song: Вогні by Go_A
Gigs as sound engineer: 4
Gigs as keyboard player: 1

Movies

My cinema trips this year were limited mainly due to my own laziness and the fact that movies are on streaming services somewhere in the world at the same time, if not before, their UK cinema release date these days.

Movies seen: 25
Best movie seen: Train to Busan
Movies seen in a cinema: 2

Misc

Transformers bought: 2
Hedgehog House visits: 26
Rats in Hedgehog House: 6
Dead cats found on driveway: 1
Hedgehog fights: 1

PSA: For those who use Edge and don't like the new sidebar that seems to have appeared whether you want it to or not, in the registry key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Edge, set DWORD value HubsSidebarEnabled to 0 (zero). Go to edge://policy and click 'Reload' to apply changes

Conference organisers: if you need to point out that your conference is "prestigious" in the spam emails you send to random uninterested people like myself, then I'm going to assume you don't know what the word "prestigious" actually means.

Today's achievement: solving a rubik's cube using only one hand. Which marginally beats yesterday's putting up a shelf.

This article mirrors my experience of ChatGPT (and current AI/ML in general); sometimes correct, often very confidently wrong https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/dont-believe-chatgpt