have bought a Google-branded ASUS device. It’s nice, but also not nice, depending on how one assesses it. As a technology rights person, it spooks me. The device is a privacy bomb. Everyone here ought to know that I’m a huge Android proponent and I wrote thousands of articles about it, tweeted about it nearly 10,000 times, and owned some Android-based gear before. On three separate occasions Google also tried hiring me, so my attitude towards Google is everything but negative. When it comes to privacy, it’s another matter altogether.

Like the Creative kit I bought on the very same day, this tablet works perfectly well out of the box. No complaints about the packaging, the components, etc. I love the USB charger. the tablet’s materials, the speed (essential for the decent voice recognition), and the screen, even though it takes a while getting used to, having moved from tablets twice this size.

To precede this informal review with a few words, all my complaints are about lock-down and spying. “Good hardware, ultra-crap privacy” is how I would summarise it. And this is where Google pushes computing. Subsidized hardware in exchange for lock-in is the business model.

The good points about this tablet are numerous. Good camera, quad-core processor with a nice package that’s metallic and quite light overall are only some of the many selling points.

The bad points are that it is too small (I prefer my other tablet, a 10.1-inch tablet), too limited, and also not so perfectly put together. No camera application installed by default to utilise the camera, which is a massive mistake. Development options are not present in Settings. Rooting not welcomed or made simple, either. But these are side issues.

Privacy is a total nightmare, trying to grab hold of the user’s identity all the time. Identify is demanded from the user even when not required, e.g. when going to native E-mail and even when opening a browser or trying to watch the image/video gallery. The purpose of this device is merely to drive data, traffic, and money to Google, thus it must be subsidised accordingly. Fair enough, but at what cost? Sure, Google uses this as a business recruiter without much pretense. The privacy issue has no excuses though. The first thing the tablet tries to do when switched on is insist very strongly on finding a wireless connection. it’s hard to even start using the tablet without completing this stage.

Google Play’s insistence on having a GMail account it also noteworthy. Google is making it hard to supply fake details. A real name is needed, but fake one can be given if one tries hard enough to find anonymity. Many widgets that give away location and such stuff by default make it easier for Google to guess who’s who. The insistence on geo-tracking is scary, but not as scary as remote backup of all the data, even private stuff (history on the Web, bookmarks, geo-location upon surfing, etc.). It is much worse than in my 4.0 tablet where these settings were inside the browser where toggling off was still needed. Well, now the browser reports clicks over the address bar, to name just one issue. The platform does not provide privacy at all. It is a lesson in how to get it all wrong on privacy.

Every Google Nexus 7 review should focus on privacy issues because that is what subsidies the hardware. The Nexus 7 has amazing hardware, but it’s extremely locked down such that not even development is available in it. It’s just a Google absorption vehicle. Chromebook Pixel must be similar, but it can boot into Ubuntu and Linux Mint, just like a real laptop, at least giving the option to everyone, so I recommended it today to someone who had planned to buy a MacBook Pro.

To summary, let it be repeated. The Nexus7 is SHOCKINGLY privacy-infringing in every conceivable way (more than I could ever imagine). It is not for everyone. I mean, a Google Plus account, which has absolutely nothing to do with the process followed in setting up Google Play, is being almost force-fed. The Nexus 7 has grotesque behaviour of tying. Want to install new software? Must open a GMail account, pushed to open G+ account too. The Nexus 7 can hardly even be started (from boxed state) without a wireless connection. I had to opt out from 10+ spying features one by one. Want to issue a voice command in Nexus7 ? Google will record everything. Open Gallery? Linked to Google cloud by default. Google even insists on remotely-controlled backup of entire tablet, not just bookmarks, history, photos, addresses… which is just shocking.

Google taught me how deep a privacy intrusion can get. And Nexus is where it all happens. Now I just try to undo the damage Google has done to a ‘vanilla’ Android installation. At least the hardware was cheap for its worth!

ulian Assange engages with John Pilger in conversation regarding Wikileaks. The privatisation of censorship is one of the first subjects to be addressed. It’s how the West and capitalist societies suppress speech. (Source)

OMETIMES I get asked how much traffic my Web sites are getting. The only honest answer I can offer is that I don’t know. It depends a lot on how it’s measured, what measures it (if anything), when it is measured (peaks taken into account), and how spiders or spam traffic get culled out. Bot traffic is increasingly made more sophisticated, so it is hard to classify one thing as a bot viewer and another as a human viewer. In any event, by far the biggest site that I run is Techrights. It has almost 20,000 pages that I wrote over the past 6.5 years. Schestowitz.com, this one particular site, predates Techrights and has more pages in it than Techrights, but some of the content is not of high quality, e.g. my USENET posts. Then there is the site of my relative Harvey, who lives in Florida. I set up that site for him and have helped him maintain it since 2004. Recently, my friend Mark and I set up Medivasc.com, which also attracts a vast amount of traffic. Those are just 4 of my sites; there are about a dozen in total (an almost complete list of domains is here, but it is not complete). Techrights is believed to be dealing with millions of hits per week, based on Varnish logs. It is hard, however, to dissect those logs because they’re all routed through a cache proxy and therefore have the same IP address for almost all traffic. My second most-accessed site is Schestowitz.com and this month (so far) it is looking as follows:

Tobkes.othellomaster.com (subsite alone)

Medivasc.com looks like this

he title says it all. UPS brags about express services, but do not be shocked if it takes a month to merely get a service approved for dispatch. This is not a rant about prices but about bad service, bad procedural practices, and negligence. More recently their Web site turned out to have been dysfunctional due to bad programming. My latest correspondence with USP really covered much of what had happened, so I will paste it below and remove some sensitive details.

UPS:

[...]

Once you finish filling in all the empty boxes press the send button.

If you need any help please let me know and I will contact you to help you.

Roy:

I am Rianne’s husband.

Your Web site’s form does not work, neither with Chrome nor Firefox. It just jumps to the top when I press submit; I tried many times. My wife did too. It’s not that we don’t know how to use the site, we both have a degree in Computer Science. Our experience with UPS has been a *TOTAL* nightmare so far. Rather than express service my wife and I have wasted about 20 hours just trying to make a *VERY* simple import of a few pieces of paper.

I shall be writing about my bad experiences with UPS on my Web sites and I strongly urge you to get this service done ASAP.

UPS:

The form keeps on jumping to the top because you inserted ” ” in the contact person box. As it explains in the website you have to fill in the form without any signs or space- only letters. Also, the + sign at the beginning of the phone number should be deleted and then the request will be sent for sure.

Roy:

Hi,

I have just wasted yet more of my time. Your form is broken (see screenshot). Adjusting the values did not have any positive effect on submitting. The buttons don’t do anything, and it seems to be a result of bad programming at UPS. Maybe it’s some bad program who develops for only one Web browser; I don’t know and I don’t care as it’s sheer incompetence that will lose you many customers and waste you support hours.

Look, I have nothing against you personally, but USP ([your branch] at least) has turned out to be nothing but trouble. If someone was willing to really help ([anonymised] has been the ONLY person who really tried), then the import would have been done a month ago.

I am not willing to spend any more time on this. 20 hours by two people, lots of money spend faxing material which you then claim not to have received (what kind of business can call itself a business if it’s badly organised at the very basics).

My wife and I don’t lack the money for this service; we don’t lack the motivation to get done what needs to be done. We did everything that’s needed, but UPS is a procedural failure at many levels and I shall be expressing this sentiment online.

Thanks for wasting our time trying to get crucial documents. If you are willing and eager to really help, then you would assign this to someone who can just take the data and take responsibility for having this done. Having my wife sad and upset every other day for a month is not a possibility for me; I’ve got work to do here and I will spend no more time on it.

UPS:

Dear Roy,

I am sorry you feel this way but without this form sent to us via the website we cannot do anything about your request due to legal restrictions. There are still a few problems with your form and that is why it is not being sent

1. in the “Dimensions” box- take off the “cm” you wrote next to the numbers
2. in the “weight” box take off the “gr” next to the number
3. delete the 5$ declared value in the two boxes were you put it in
4. mark the “supplier” button where it asks you who should issue the invoice
5. at the last section “requested by”- please write your local number ([anonymised]) and not the international one

Once all of these will be fixed the form will be sent.

You have to understand that we not insisting on this just to make it harder for you- we cannot proceed with the request without this form filled in the correct way and sending it to us via the website.

I do not know what happened with this shipment before you sent us the request but once form will be sent to me I assure you that I will handle it today.

Roy:

My wife had filled it out correctly when she did but the form did nothing when she hit submit.

When I later did this in various Web browsers to replicate her problem I put some units in, but that did not in any way mean that the form got processed. When I hit “send” the page always jumps to the top again and does nothing.

I have made the amendments you suggested below, pressed “Send” and the outcome was precisely the same. No action, no feedback, just the page jumping to the top.

My guess is, someone did not develop this web form correctly.

I take your “assur[ance] you that I will handle it today,” but we are not there yet. Can someone at USP please fill this out? The form certainly does not work, not even with the validation of the data put in the boxes, and we’ve tried several browsers.

And here’s the screenshot I forgot to attach (form still doesn’t work).

UPS:

Hi,

I filled in the form for you and it sent it to our inbox- we are not usually allowed to do this but I am not sure what went wrong when you filled it in and there was no point to continue emailing about it
I will handle it now and send you the email with all the pickup and label details.

Roy:

Thank you, [anonymised], you are a good person and a good member of staff. I can see your sincerity in your response.

My comments about USP are addressed at a systemic issue; there is never, for example, a reason why my wife should leave the house and go to a place with a facsimile machine (fax) to send the same documents three times on three separate days. This take a huge toll, not just mentally but also on her job (which she needs to leave in order to do this). Imagine having to take some time off work three days only to discover that the recipient of the fax simply lost the paper, or being told on the phone that “they would phone back” and they always never do.

Regarding the form, it seems to me like whoever coded it is not a good programmer. I don’t know if it’s some Internet Explorer-only (and thus Microsoft Windows-only) form because I cannot check. My wife’s Android device and my computers just don’t work with that form; I filled it up from scratch three separate times.

I am telling you all this because I hope such information can be passed on and service can be improved so that future (prospective) UPS customers do not have to go through the same weeks-long nightmare that we have to go through.

I hope that from here onwards the papers will be processed with minimal burden on us.

With kind regards,

Roy

It should be noted that the above is just one ordeal among many. This latest one only wasted a couple of hours, but far more hours had been spent prior to that.

Update (3 hours later, same day): When UPS got threatened by bad publicity it finally took immediate action and the parcel was collected within hours, not weeks. The conclusion? Your time and your business as a customer don’t matter until it’s a matter of business risk (i.e. money) to UPS. I’ve made the following picture.

ast year I asked Dr. Stallman to comment on what Ubuntu/Canonical had done with regards to privacy and since then he has expressed his view very clearly, most recently in this video.

oday I wrote the following bash script (note: written for 16 cores although it can be modified for more or for less), which splits SQL operations, preceded by “ [NUMERIC WEIGHT] |“. This helps assure a nice distribution of load on the bare metal. This might be reusable, so I decided to post it on my site.

IFS=$'\n'

CORE0LOAD=0
CORE1LOAD=0
CORE2LOAD=0
CORE3LOAD=0
CORE4LOAD=0
CORE5LOAD=0
CORE6LOAD=0
CORE7LOAD=0
CORE8LOAD=0
CORE9LOAD=0
CORE10LOAD=0
CORE11LOAD=0
CORE12LOAD=0
CORE13LOAD=0
CORE14LOAD=0
CORE15LOAD=0

WEIGHT=0;

echo Starting...

for line in $(cat ~/Desktop/input)
# while read line < ~/Desktop/input
# for line in `cat ~/Desktop/input`
do
# echo -e line="$line"
# $line="$line"
# echo $line
# exit
	if [ $CORE0LOAD -lt $CORE15LOAD ]
	then
# echo $line
		echo $line > current_line
		cut -b 1-13 current_line > current_number
		read SCORE < current_number
		echo $(($CORE0LOAD+$SCORE)) > total
		read SCORETOTAL < total
# echo $SCORETOTAL
		CORE0LOAD=$((SCORETOTAL))
		cut -b 16-10000 current_line >> core0.sh



	elif [ $CORE1LOAD -lt $CORE2LOAD ]
	then
		echo $line > current_line
		cut -b 1-13 current_line > current_number
		read SCORE < current_number
		echo $(($CORE1LOAD+$SCORE)) > total
		read SCORETOTAL < total
		CORE1LOAD=$((SCORETOTAL))
		cut -b 16-10000 current_line  >> core1.sh
	elif [ $CORE2LOAD -lt $CORE3LOAD ]
	then
		echo $line > current_line
		cut -b 1-13 current_line > current_number
		read SCORE < current_number
		echo $(($CORE2LOAD+$SCORE)) > total
		read SCORETOTAL < total
		CORE2LOAD=$((SCORETOTAL))
		cut -b 16-10000 current_line  >> core2.sh
	elif [ $CORE3LOAD -lt $CORE4LOAD ]
	then
		echo $line > current_line
		cut -b 1-13 current_line > current_number
		read SCORE < current_number
		echo $(($CORE3LOAD+$SCORE)) > total
		read SCORETOTAL < total
		CORE3LOAD=$((SCORETOTAL))
		cut -b 16-10000 current_line  >> core3.sh
	elif [ $CORE4LOAD -lt $CORE5LOAD ]
	then
		echo $line > current_line
		cut -b 1-13 current_line > current_number
		read SCORE < current_number
		echo $(($CORE4LOAD+$SCORE)) > total
		read SCORETOTAL < total
		CORE4LOAD=$((SCORETOTAL))
		cut -b 16-10000 current_line  >> core4.sh
	elif [ $CORE5LOAD -lt $CORE6LOAD ]
	then
		echo $line > current_line
		cut -b 1-13 current_line > current_number
		read SCORE < current_number
		echo $(($CORE5LOAD+$SCORE)) > total
		read SCORETOTAL < total
		CORE5LOAD=$((SCORETOTAL))
		cut -b 16-10000 current_line  >> core5.sh
	elif [ $CORE6LOAD -lt $CORE7LOAD ]
	then
		echo $line > current_line
		cut -b 1-13 current_line > current_number
		read SCORE < current_number
		echo $(($CORE6LOAD+$SCORE)) > total
		read SCORETOTAL < total
		CORE6LOAD=$((SCORETOTAL))
		cut -b 16-10000 current_line  >> core6.sh
	elif [ $CORE7LOAD -lt $CORE8LOAD ]
	then
		echo $line > current_line
		cut -b 1-13 current_line > current_number
		read SCORE < current_number
		echo $(($CORE7LOAD+$SCORE)) > total
		read SCORETOTAL < total
		CORE7LOAD=$((SCORETOTAL))
		cut -b 16-10000 current_line  >> core7.sh
	elif [ $CORE8LOAD -lt $CORE9LOAD ]
	then
		echo $line > current_line
		cut -b 1-13 current_line > current_number
		read SCORE < current_number
		echo $(($CORE8LOAD+$SCORE)) > total
		read SCORETOTAL < total
		CORE8LOAD=$((SCORETOTAL))
		cut -b 16-10000 current_line  >> core8.sh
	elif [ $CORE9LOAD -lt $CORE10LOAD ]
	then
		echo $line > current_line
		cut -b 1-13 current_line > current_number
		read SCORE < current_number
		echo $(($CORE9LOAD+$SCORE)) > total
		read SCORETOTAL < total
		CORE9LOAD=$((SCORETOTAL))
		cut -b 16-10000 current_line  >> core9.sh
	elif [ $CORE10LOAD -lt $CORE11LOAD ]
	then
		echo $line > current_line
		cut -b 1-13 current_line > current_number
		read SCORE < current_number
		echo $(($CORE10LOAD+$SCORE)) > total
		read SCORETOTAL < total
		CORE10LOAD=$((SCORETOTAL))
		cut -b 16-10000 current_line  >> core10.sh
	elif [ $CORE11LOAD -lt $CORE12LOAD ]
	then
		echo $line > current_line
		cut -b 1-13 current_line > current_number
		read SCORE < current_number
		echo $(($CORE11LOAD+$SCORE)) > total
		read SCORETOTAL < total
		CORE11LOAD=$((SCORETOTAL))
		cut -b 16-10000 current_line  >> core11.sh
	elif [ $CORE12LOAD -lt $CORE13LOAD ]
	then
		echo $line > current_line
		cut -b 1-13 current_line > current_number
		read SCORE < current_number
		echo $(($CORE12LOAD+$SCORE)) > total
		read SCORETOTAL < total
		CORE12LOAD=$((SCORETOTAL))
		cut -b 16-10000 current_line  >> core12.sh
	elif [ $CORE13LOAD -lt $CORE14LOAD ]
	then
		echo $line > current_line
		cut -b 1-13 current_line > current_number
		read SCORE < current_number
		echo $(($CORE13LOAD+$SCORE)) > total
		read SCORETOTAL < total
		CORE13LOAD=$((SCORETOTAL))
		cut -b 16-10000 current_line  >> core13.sh
	elif [ $CORE14LOAD -lt $CORE15LOAD ]
	then
		echo $line > current_line
		cut -b 1-13 current_line > current_number
		read SCORE < current_number
		echo $(($CORE14LOAD+$SCORE)) > total
		read SCORETOTAL < total
		CORE14LOAD=$((SCORETOTAL))
		cut -b 16-10000 current_line  >> core14.sh
	else
# echo $line
		echo $line > current_line
		cut -b 1-13 current_line > current_number
		read SCORE < current_number
		echo $(($CORE15LOAD+$SCORE)) > total
		read SCORETOTAL < total
		CORE15LOAD=$((SCORETOTAL))
		cut -b 16-10000 current_line >> core15.sh
	fi
done
echo Ended...
 

Now, each file contains operations to be run on one core, without conflict (order or load imbalance).

OR ALMOST a month now BT has been throttling speeds on its exchange, thus crippling/impeding connections, breaking what was previously working without issues. Interlacing and full capacity, they appear to have decided, can just arbitrary be disabled, disconnecting people with all their lives sessions at any time. When phoning BT — as I have done for about 3 hours over the past month (in total) — they acknowledge the issue, although their technical staff seems unable to even recognise the problem or communicate it properly (among peers), which leaves them having to issue pathetic compensation (also requires hours on the line) while continuing to throttle the connections. This is a technical issue at their end — one that they can address and resolve remotely, but why do they knowingly break their systems in the first place? They make a lot of verbal promises — hence not legally binding — only to break those promises and leave people like me wasting a dozen or so hours, incapable of doing proper work or even keep good temper.

BT are failing because their own traffic management systems are defective by design. Calling this inevitable error is like saying that accidents are OK because you feel like committing traffic violations. This was not the case in prior years. Why is BT crippling its own infrastructure at cost to the clients? Why are they abusing their monopoly on landlines? Maybe it’s time to really break this monopoly rather than hide it behind the fake impression of “choice”. They know that people cannot cease reliance on landline (bar mobile networks), so they continue to throttle connections to the point where people get none of what they paid for. They just get a sporadic connection and a headache.