Mambo Taxi

Right to Repair is big news. Change is finally coming this July, and I'm sure more changes will follow.

This is a good podcast (and transcript!) interview with the founder of iFixit. I really want to see electronic repair shops everywhere, and a hell of a lot fewer electronics with only minor problems shipped off to to be broken down to base components!

First Person Podcast interviews the CEO of iFixit

"Governor Kathy Hochul of New York signed the country’s first broad right to repair bill into law. What will that law change for me as an average consumer?

"The New York law says that starting in July of 2023, all new products have to have those fundamentals — service information, parts and tools available. So if a manufacturer has a repair network for a product — if Apple is running Genius Bar repairs, if Samsung has a repair network for their devices — then they have to make available that same parts, tools and information to the rest of us.

"The environmental impact of manufacturing the things that we have is significant. The phone that’s in your pocket, which weighs like eight ounces, took over 250 pounds of raw material dug out of the ground to make. If every American were to use their phone just a year longer, it would be the equivalent of taking 700,000 cars off the road. And so to have a world that is disposable — like, you’re talking about literal mountains dug out of the ground every year just to keep up with our gadget habit.

"What if we could just save the world through sheer laziness? It is actually a lot of work to get a new phone and transfer your contacts and your apps over and everything else. If you could just — like, if you drop in a new battery in your current phone, it will feel like a new phone. So that’s my counter. It’s like, let’s spend our time doing other things rather than configuring new technology all the time.

"And so let me be clear, the right to repair does not mean that you have to fix all of your own stuff. It means that it should be possible for you to get it fixed somehow, whether you have a friend who is tech savvy or excited about opening things up and wants to do it, or if you want to take it down to a neighborhood repair shop. You think about — what is the nexus of a small town America? You have a gas station, you have a grocery store, and a car repair shop.

You should probably also have an electronics repair shop. So I think we have an opportunity to create the neighborhood that we want to live in. And so I would encourage people, whether you fix something yourself or not, think about spending a little bit more money on repairs and less on buying new things."

I received a phishing email at work from my bank (TD) which used a url-redirector at THE REAL BANK'S WEBSITE to get to the fake site.

That is: www.tdcanadatrust·com/servlet/infosite.servlet.OutBoundServlet?RequestedPage=phishing·url/urgent_verifying/update.inf

Thunderbird didn't think it was phishing. The destination URL originally went to a copy of the bank's site; two hours later, it was deactivated by the host, and Firefox warns it is a phishing attempt.

The bank hasn't deactivated the redirector. I'm curious how long it will stay active. They should be pretty embarrassed; this isn't rocket-science, and there's no reason you should be able to pull crap like this.

Security breach at Monster likely involves sophisticated personalized attacks on hundreds of thousands of customers, now likely millions. (Yesterday's Reuters article). The scary part of this is that the Ukranian thieves of Monster user data apparently weren't performing identity theft using that data; they were grabbing user info in order to custom-craft recruiter emails, which, if the job-seeker clicked on the links, would install malware on their computer (which would then perform identity theft).

So- if you've ever been associated with Monster, be very careful about any recruiter emails, even if they don't say they're from Monster; make sure your email reader won't run executable programs from links in the email.

I'm grumpy about how stupid this is, that thieves were able to get all this information; and expect they could go and do more fishy things with the data, besides sending these fake recruiter emails.

Of course I'm also grumpy about this since I do have a Monster account, but the particular scam seems less likely to cause problems for me since I did use a unique email address for Monster, and I also read Monster email in a non-GUI non-windows mail-reader.

Ugh.

RYANAIR CALLS NEW UK SECURITY MEASURES NONSENSICAL AND INEFFECTIVE

Ryanair sues government over delays

NEW AIRPORT SECURITY PROCEDURES
PUT FUN BACK INT0 FLYING [NSFW]

Yes folks, that's on their site.

(Found via crucially)

This morning, driving to work, I caught part of an interview with Jim Loney on The Current, along with his partner, Dan Hunt. He spoke eloquently about the need for continued peace work, though he was firm that he would not be going back to Iraq himself. It was a fairly good interview. [I've gone back and listened to the beginning; he talks about more of the captivity; will probably be in tomorrow's paper.]

Tonight, I went to the monthly Prayer Vigil for Peace, held at the Working Centre. I showed up early; people were working on a banner to carry in an upcoming march in Ottawa (June 13-15) to call for justice for five Muslem men who have been held by Canadian Security for between four and six years without charges. They are being held on Security Certificates, which suspend the right to trial and allow indefinite detention of non-citizens and permanant residents. Amnesty International has a good writeup on them and the Security Certificate process.

Now, I have no idea whether these men are at all connected to terrorist activities; but it seems clear that they are in a position remarkably similar to the hundreds in Guantanamo Bay, in a weird legal limbo with no recourse, and it isn't clear whether the Canadian Government plans to deport them to countries where they face torture, as Amnesty says they might.

It's not a simple situation, and I wish I had more clarity on what should be done. At least I can say in principle I don't think people should be held indefinitely with no contact with families or lawyers, for five years.

Back to tonight: the man in charge of putting together this banner, Andy Macpherson, lives around the corner from the Quaker Meeting House. I believe he's come to Meeting a while back. He's involved with Catholic Worker as well as local Menonnite groups. The reason I bring him up is that I discovered that he was responsible for the design of a ( beautiful poster ) which I saw at the Working Centre five years ago, when I first moved here. The other designer was Jim Loney. It's a small world.

The prayer vigil was... oddly relaxing. It was a small group; I knew most of them (at least by face); and the prayers were tremendously similar to the ones you might hear in a Quaker Meeting (if one happened to be in a Meeting where prayers were read from the Bible).

I say "oddly relaxing" because there was a band playing electric bass upstairs, people cleaning kitchen equipment in the same room, and a stream of fire-sirens over the course of the first 30 minutes. Also, the ritualized prayers still felt weird to me as a Quaker; though I felt the sentiment behind the words was familiar.

We also sang; particularly pretty and simple was "Ubilate Deo" (not Jubilate; I would like to find out the origin of Ubilate, whether it's the same latin word with a different spelling; google doesn't seem to help much).

Hm. I learned a few other things; one's neat but not public knowledge, so I'll keep my lips buttoned for now.