Month: June 2013

Reactions like this are pretty typical among geeks. Good crypto is a necessity both online and local. All of my hardware uses full-disk encryption and I use secure communication whenever I can. Problem is, the NSA isn’t just looking at the global stream or taking snapshots. They’re collecting and storing everything. The problem is, crypto that’s good enough, or even excellent today, will be laughably inadequate and trivially breakable in the future.

There’s a reason why you don’t hear about the NSA doing things like this. It’s because they don’t have to. That’s why this whole thing is such a problem. A free and democratic society cannot survive such pervasive and overarching surveillance.

This was an excellent series on the state of TV and what it would take to really disrupt it. There was one thing that I at first disagreed with, and then decided it’s actually another use case. I don’t have cable, but watch TV using an HD antenna. In fact, I have never had cable. My parents have cable, my university offered cable, but I have never paid a cent for cable TV and am unlikely to start. I am definitely one of the zero-TV households, but can’t be considered to be a cord cutter, because I never hooked it up in the first place.

I’m now wondering if that’s the real threat to the current TV model: not a consumer rebellion, but a population shift that doesn’t care about TV? My reason for not having cable is very simple: I don’t think there’s enough content to justify the cost.¹ Granted, I also don’t care too much about sports, so the lack of ESPN and CSN doesn’t affect me and I’m perfectly willing to accept that I’m an outlier.²

The question for me is, how big is my particular outlier group, and is it growing or shrinking? How many people are not leaving the fold, but for whatever reason are simply not joining it in the first place?