Category: internet

Amazon confusion

There has been much already written in reaction to the big article about Amazon that ran in the NY Times over the weekend. I’ll admit that the article really bothered me. It seems like most of the news about the ways in which Amazon treats its employees, contractors, and suppliers over the last few years has been overwhelmingly negative. Enough that it almost seems immoral to continue doing business with them as a customer.

Some of the reaction to the article has been pretty funny, such as this tweet from Dr. Drang or this article by Andy Borowitz from the New Yorker.

The response from Jeff Bezos seems reasonable, and this second follow-up item from GeekWire gives a little more perspective from the employee level. So the truth is in there somewhere — it’s probably not all as bad as the NY Times piece makes it out to be, but there are likely some bad managers and bad teams at the company, and a culture that sometimes allows that kind of thing to grow and thrive.

So I think I can continue to order my Breathe-Right strips from Amazon without being too concerned that I’m propping up a company that’s completely morally bankrupt. Still, I’ve been thinking about Amazon alternatives for some time now. But there aren’t a lot of good ones, in certain areas.

For books, I was looking at Abe Books and Book Depository, but they’re both owned by Amazon, so that doesn’t really help. Barnes & Noble is an option, but I’m not sure they’re better than Amazon, just less successful. Powell’s is probably a good option, and not owned by Amazon, as far as I can tell.

For ebooks, the picture is even less clear. I’ve had a Kindle since the very first model, and I really like the things. About the only real competitor to the Kindle now is Kobo. They’ve got a pretty good product in the Glo HD, judging from some of the reviews I’ve read. In terms of actual ebooks, Kobo’s bookstore looks pretty good, but I’m guessing their selection likely isn’t nearly as large as Amazon’s.

For general merchandise, I could go to Walmart.com, but I sure can’t make a case for Walmart being a better choice, morally, than Amazon.

So, in a nutshell, I’m not dropping my Amazon Prime subscription just yet. But I am alarmed about how large they’ve gotten, and how little competition they seem to have left, in certain areas, like books and ebooks. I’m going to try to give more of my business to smaller retailers, when I can. And I’m going to continue to try to buy DRM-free ebooks when possible, so it’ll be easier for me to switch away from the Kindle ecosystem if I ever decide to do that.

VPN Services

When I deleted my PayPal account last week, I had thought that I was only using PayPal for an occasional eBay purchase. I had forgotten that I was also using it to pay for my VPN service, from IPredator. (I didn’t have a recurring payment set up. Rather, I was just paying for it manually, every three months.) IPredator is a fairly small VPN provider in Sweden. They don’t accept credit cards directly, so I’d been paying with PayPal. The only other payment method they accept that would work for me is Payza. I’m not too familiar with them; their terms of service seem to be a bit nicer than PayPal’s, but I’m really not that interested in signing up for a new payment service right now.

I’ve been pretty happy with IPredator, even though it’s a fairly limited service, but those limits, plus the payment issues, have finally gotten me to think more seriously about switching to a different VPN provider. (The main issue was that they only have servers in Sweden, so any time I’m connected to the VPN, it looks like I’m in Sweden.) There are a lot of VPN providers out there, and honestly some of them look a bit shady. After looking around at some reviews, I’ve decided to give Private Internet Access a shot. They only cost $40/year, and are well-supported on Mac, PC, and iOS. They’ve gotten good reviews from Tom’s Hardware and PC Mag. And Ars Technica ran an article about them a while back that makes them look pretty good. They’re pretty highly rated on Torrent Freak too.

So today, I decided to sign up for an account and give them a try. Sign up was simple and easy. They assign a user ID and password to the account and email them to you, in plain text. I think that’s a little iffy, but you can then log in and change the password, so I guess that’s OK.

They have their own client software, for PC, Mac, and iOS, but they also work with standard OpenVPN client software. I initially tried their standard software on my Mac, but it didn’t seem to be working right, and it was a bit ugly. So I installed Viscosity instead. Viscosity works fine, and was easy to set up. I imported two profiles, for US-East and London, and both work.

I then moved from my Mac on to my iOS devices. I skipped the PIA app and went with the OpenVPN app instead. Again, it was pretty easy to get this set up, though the interface for the app is a little weird and has some quirks. But it works.

For my PC, I went with the standard OpenVPN software. The Windows OpenVPN program isn’t quite as simple to use as the iOS app, but it’s easy enough to deal with. You have to manually copy the VPN files into a config folder, and you need to do a little text file editing if you want to save your user name and password, but none of that was a problem for me.

(I should also mention that, at some point, I of course figured out that I could have paid for iPredator through PayPal with a credit card directly, and that I didn’t really need an account. PayPal makes this less than obvious, but the option is there. But by that point I was well on my way to switching to PIA.)

I haven’t used PIA enough yet to comment on their reliability, but I’ll do that at some point after I’ve been using them a while.

done with PayPal

I’ve had a PayPal account since the year 2000, but I gave up and closed it yesterday after reading about their new terms of service, which basically say that they can robocall you and send SMS messages to you whenever they want, for any reason. They seem to be backpedaling on it a bit now, but not nearly enough. For the last few years, I’ve only been using PayPal to pay for eBay auctions. Now that PayPal and eBay are splitting up, I’m hoping eBay will make it easier to pay for stuff through alternate means.

I’ve noticed that a lot of sites that take PayPal now also accept payments through Amazon, which is something I’m much more comfortable with.

two-factor authentication and other worries

After reading this article earlier today, I panicked a little, since I couldn’t remember ever having seen a “recovery key” associated with my Apple account, nor could I find one in KeePass, 1Password, or Evernote. But, when I got home from work, I checked, and it turns out I’ve never enabled two-factor auth on my Apple account. And I do still know the answer to my security questions, though I’d never copied them over from KeePass to 1Password for some reason. (I’ve done that now.)

I was going to go ahead and enable two-factor authentication on my Apple account tonight, but I couldn’t quite make up my mind as to whether it would be a help or a hindrance. I need to think about it some more.

This also made me think about my Google account, and one particular thing I’d been meaning to do for a long time: make a local backup of my GMail data. About a year ago, I read about a tool called Gmvault, and made a note to install it on my desktop PC and start using it. But I never got around to it. Well, now that I’m on a bit of a GTD kick, I went ahead and made a new note about that and put it in my Evernote ‘inbox’. So now I’ve got gmvault installed on my PC, and I’m letting it run. It was easy enough to set up; it’s a pretty simple command-line tool. It looks like it’ll take a couple of hours to run. After the initial sync, it can apparently do incremental syncs, so if I can manage to remember to run it occasionally, I should be in good shape.

Occasionally, you read horror stories about someone losing access to their Apple account or their Google account for one reason or another, and getting caught up in the bureaucracy at those companies and not being able to get their account back. It’s kind of scary, how much of our data we trust to these guys. I try to keep track of everything I’d ever need to restore my access, if I ever get locked out, and I try to keep important stuff backed up locally, whenever I can. But there’s only so much you can do.

fun with IE 8

2014-06-18_8-40-40-blog-ie8

We’re still on IE 8 at work. (Yes, I know.) Just for fun, I checked to see what this blog would look like in IE 8. Holy cow. Not even close, huh? I use Firefox for all of my web browsing at work, except for when I need to do stuff on our intranet, so I didn’t realize how far gone modern web pages look in IE 8.

Ten Years of Gmail

Things you notice, while spelunking through ten-year-old blog posts:

I’ve had my Gmail account for almost exactly ten years. I’m mostly OK with Gmail, but I’ve been thinking about moving off it recently, due mostly to the standard privacy concerns that everyone seems to have now, plus maybe just because I like changing things around every ten years.

I set up an account on Proton Mail a couple of weeks ago, but haven’t done much with it. I like the general idea, but I don’t think I could use their web interface for all of my day-to-day email. I’ve also considered FastMail, and I think that’s the most likely candidate if I do decide to switch. They have a good reputation, from what I’ve been able to tell, and they’ve got a really nice interface, and reasonable pricing. I’ve also considered getting a hosted Exchange account with these guys, or maybe trying out MyKolab. Probably the next time we get a rainy weekend, and I have nothing else to do, I’ll get serious about this.

The ephemeral internet

In moving my blog to WordPress, I’ve accidentally created a little side-job (or mild obsession?) for myself: cleaning up old blog entries. I have over 1500 entries in this blog, so I can keep myself (pointlessly) busy for quite some time, just combing through old entries and cleaning them up a bit.

First, I have a lot of old entries that don’t have any categories assigned. This bothers me for some reason. So I’m going through those, a few at a time, and categorizing them. And the really old entries don’t have titles, because Blogger didn’t initially support post titles. So I’m adding titles to some of those. And I’m cleaning up random embeds, YouTube links, and the like.

Once thing I’m noticing is how many of the links on older posts are dead now. In particular, music-related links seem to be the most ephemeral. Links to old band websites are often dead, the bands in question apparently disbanded, the members having moved on to other bands, or living quiet lives with nine-to-five jobs, or whatever people do when their bands dissolve.

Many old domains are now in the hands of some fairly iffy companies that hoard domain names, and just put up ads on them, and/or offer to sell them for exorbitant prices. My brother Patrick’s old domain, for instance, can be bought for just $1995. Geez.

There are some really odd changes too. An old domain that used to be associated with The Pixies is now being used for a blog related to DIY home repair. I’m not sure if it’s a real blog, or a test site, or part of a scam, or what. Weird though.

I’ve found myself using the Wayback Machine site to look up some older stuff. Not everything can be found with that, but a lot of stuff can.

I’m also finding myself a little dismayed about how my brother Pat’s footprint is disappearing from the internet. I just went ahead and saved to PDF a couple of pages honoring him, just in case they disappear. I’ll probably upload them here, at some point. No point in getting too deeply into this right now, but it’s something that’s been on my mind lately. I know that dwelling too much on the past isn’t healthy, and I’m trying not to do that, but I can’t stop myself from engaging in a certain amount of nostalgia.

SSL for WordPress

After reading a little about Reset The Net, I got to thinking that it might not be a bad idea to order an SSL certificate for this site, and put, at least, the admin stuff behind SSL. (I never really thought about it much with Blogger, but of course the blogger.com admin interface was always behind SSL.)

So I went ahead and ordered a cert from my host, 1&1. They charge $30 for the first year, and $50 per year after that. So it’s not the best price, but it’s not horrible. It looks like I don’t need to do anything special to set it up, just click a few buttons and wait (then click a few more buttons).

For WordPress, I will likely try this plugin to manage what’s behind SSL and what’s not. Or maybe I should read this page at wordpress.org.