technology - Elixis Technology

VHS Tapes and Analog Horror

Elizabeth Technology December 12, 2023

What is it about the humble VHS tape that inspires such magnetism from the horror community?

Distortion

It’s no secret VHS tapes are prone to degrading over time. The tape inside loses its charge, and the plastic it’s made out of starts to dry-rot. If you’ve tried to replay a particularly old VHS movie, you might have gotten part of the way through it only to have it crumble on you, never to play again. Even the old-fashioned photo reel tape is not as fragile.

A number of strange effects can be pulled out of the tape and the machine just by treating it poorly, even fresh out of the box – if the tape is exposed to radiation, it develops a distinctive ‘snow’ to it; if it’s rewound or played too fast, the voices and visuals onscreen get weird, high-pitched, and anxiety-inducing. Colorful graphical glitches and brief audio cutouts are eerie, no matter what movie they happen to, and the classic abrupt cut, as though the tape inside has been cut and reunited minus a scene, can jerk anyone out of a Disney movie or war film alike. Tapping, dropping, or shaking the VHS player is an easy way to distort the viewing experience without necessarily breaking the tape or the machine, too, making it super easy for kids to get the funny colors they like to appear onscreen.

For the artists who can catch it juuust right, exactly how it used to happen to them, it’s really something to behold.

Irreplaceable

But you’d think the nostalgia of the casually-creepy VHS system would fade, the same way other trends in media do – Westerns dominated the film landscape for years before slowly sliding off the map, and slasher films are nowhere near as dominant a horror style as they used to be. In that vein, you’d think the sort of skips you see from CDs and other optical storage methods would be getting the attention that VHS glitches are getting from analog horror, a recent online trend in horror that’s only getting more mainstream. Analog horror gets its very name from the style of filming that came to define the genre. Popular projects like the Mandela Catalogue or Angel Hare are purposefully designed to look like they are recovered from VHS tapes and analog TV tech, helpfully uploaded to Youtube by someone trying to get answers. The glitching is used to great effect: when something too horrifying to look at on-screen is due to enter, the VHS tape glitches and clips over the horror, a clever way of hiding the monster from view while amplifying the terror of the unknown.

The corruption itself represents a strange flavor of nostalgia, an additional ingredient thrown into the horror of the scenario. After all, new VHS tapes are rare now. Old VHS tapes didn’t look creepy or monstrous when they were new. What the best analog horror projects capture with this stylistic choice are childhood memories of VHS tapes revisited as an adult, only to discover those tapes have been irrevocably changed by the passage of time. The ultimate premise of trying to share these tapes with the next generation only to have them rot away in one’s hands, blinking all sorts of strange colors and textures on-screen before it fails to warn them of the danger it’s trying to capture, is itself a powerful metaphor.

For millennials and the oldest members of Gen Z, the comfortable becomes a source of horror, a haunted childhood home. For the younger members who never had those VHS tapes, it’s an alien technology that behaves irrationally and unpredictably. The fuzz of a VHS video is not a comfort to kids who grew up with 1080p60 resolution videos. Modern videos don’t skip, either. Optical tech skipped for obvious reasons, like scratches on the disk. VHS tapes seem to choose arbitrarily when to skip.

In this way, VHS is a perfect medium for horror. Everyone around today is a little put off by it for a host of different reasons. When it flubbed up, it wasn’t always obvious why. It doesn’t age gracefully and it’s easy to cause problems within it on purpose. Even when it’s a little broken, the VHS player will still try to play it, where optical drives refuse if too much data is missing. When an optical drive stops, it just freezes on a frame, it doesn’t distort what it’s trying to play like VHS players sometimes do. Of course, all analog horror is just a recreation of the effects of old and damaged machinery. Some method-purists go out of their way to get ahold of real VHS tapes to do what they want to do, but in the end, it’s still getting uploaded to Youtube, an entirely digital platform. The mystique of the VHS haunts us today where CD players and digital files don’t because when the newer two corrupt, you’re spared the horror of the corrupted footage. VHS is the only one capable of the level of jank required to be horrific.

Varieties of Screens

Elizabeth Technology December 7, 2023

There are many different screens. From gigantic vacuum-tube TVs to the flattest of the flat home theater displays, TVs come in all shapes and sizes.

LCD: Liquid Crystal Display – Big Screen, Little Equipment

LCDs, or liquid crystal displays, are what they sound like: a material that has traits of both liquids and crystals is manipulated with an electric current, using a panel behind the crystal panel. Then, an LED panel behind that lights it up so the colors are visible. LCD displays don’t handle heat well, and they’re fragile. You can’t put them next to or above a fireplace, and you can’t clean them with most regular cleaners as a rule. You especially can’t drop them. Videos of people running into their TVs with an AR headset on or throwing a Wii remote into the TV during a virtual bowling game demonstrate the spiderweb effect even minor impacts can cause on-screen.

But the screens are getting massive. A more delicate device is a tradeoff many people are fine with making, if the trend of larger, sleeker smartphones is any indication. For example, a projection screen TV is probably the closest someone in the 1980’s could get to the modern flat screen TV. At 50 inches, and adjusted for inflation to today, it costed about $3,100.

An 82 inch TV from LG currently costs about $1,500 on Amazon. Technology!

LED: Light-Emitting Diodes

The Sphere in our local Las Vegas is currently the largest LED display in the world! LED displays are a common choice for external signs. They’re cheap and easy to manage outdoors, so they’re a great choice for light-up billboards – here in Las Vegas, most casinos on the Strip have one outside for their advertising. However, since the individual components making up each ‘pixel’ or each little square of colors are pretty large, they’re not usually the first choice for indoor, TV electronics – the gaps between each diode cluster are big enough to be visible, and they put out a lot of light.

OLEDs are becoming more popular as a screen choice because the gaps are eliminated, but if an image is going to be displayed on it long term, they can be prone to ‘burn in’ – where the image becomes permanently etched into the screen. As a result, LCD displays are more popular in cases like digital menus and airport queues.

LEDs don’t have many weaknesses that aren’t also shared by LCD screens – the major one is that screen burning, but for big displays like the Casino signs, that’s not an issue. Panels going out and creating wrong-colored squares in the middle of the board are, but thanks to the modular design of LED panels, minor problems don’t kill the entire screen.

Plasma Screen

A plasma screen TV works by exciting little pockets of ionized gas to create plasma, which makes colors. These were all the rage for a while, but they’re also sensitive to heat – and when LCDs caught up, they were cheaper to make and easier to dispose of, so plasma screens dipped in popularity. They’re still high-definition, they’re still sold in stores, so nowadays it comes down to a matter of preference, not price or size.

Rear Projection TV: Big Screen, Big Equipment

These screens were huge, and the speakers were built in to face the viewer at the bottom of the screen. Rear projection TVs were the intermediate step between CRTs and LCDs, and they worked by beaming light from the source of choice to the screen using a system of lenses, magnifying the image. CRTs had reached their max size, but LCD panels weren’t anywhere near large enough by themselves yet – the rear projection TV smoothed the transition between the two while also providing a larger screen than previous TVs. The one I grew up with was gigantic, even at the time we had it. Scratches in the fabric covering the speaker area were the only worry. The TV itself was nigh indestructible, and impossible to knock over.

Over time, the screen we had became outdated. It didn’t have enough ports for all the adaptors it would have taken to keep it in line with new plugins: VCRs and DVRs had different requirements, and so did the Xbox and the Xbox 360. Eventually a smaller (but much thinner) screen won out. Everything could just be directly plugged into the TV instead of screwing with the jack hydra the rear-projection required. The price of progress.

CRTs and Degaussing

With the development of iron ships, navigators discovered a problem – large quantities of iron could mess with the compass, and other tools relying on the Earth’s magnetic poles to function. Even worse, with WWII on the horizon, the magnetic signature of the ship meant that weapons could be designed around it. Underwater mines, specifically, were geared to detect the field and then go off. Degaussing was invented! De-magnetizing the ship meant mines could no longer rely on it as a trigger.

Cathode Ray Tubes displays (or CRT displays for short) are easily disturbed by magnets. The colors turn funny shades when you hold a magnet too close. The same technology used to protect ships was then used to degauss the CRT display and return it to its former full color glory. Eventually, degaussing coils were included within the device, which causes that “Thunk” and then hum when the screen is flipped on. It resets every time the device is turned on, which keeps the image from gradually degrading if it’s kept near other devices with magnetic fields as well.

That doesn’t mean CRTs are immune to breakage: flicking the switch on and off repeatedly and too quickly may break the mechanism that does the degaussing, and you’re back to using an external degausser.

Sources: https://www.doncio.navy.mil/Chips/ArticleDetails.aspx?ID=3031

https://computer.howstuffworks.com/monitor5.htm

http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/80selectrical.html

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/worlds-largest-single-video-screen-illuminates-fremont-street-experience-with-fully-immersive-content-301017215.html

https://www.pcmag.com/news/led-vs-plasma-which-hdtv-type-is-best

What Is Short-Circuiting?

Elizabeth Technology December 5, 2023

What’s a Short Circuit?

A short circuit is when something comes into contact with an electric current, and unintentionally gives it a shorter path. For example, sticking a fork into an active toaster will result in the fork redirecting the electricity through the fork, because it’s an easier path. Fun fact: the reason the coils inside the toaster get hot is because the path the electricity travels through has a lot of resistance. The fork is a much shorter path, but the other end is usually connected to a human body – which doesn’t handle electricity running through it very well. Old fashioned Incandescent lightbulbs work in the same way, but they’re juiced up so much that they produce both heat and light.

So why does this break things inside the computer? Well, not everything in the computer is meant to run off of 120V of pure outlet-supplied house power. If that flow of electricity comes into contact with a piece of hardware not made to handle it, the hardware fails, sometimes irreparably.

Static shock on the very delicate parts can short circuit them too. Be sure you’re grounded and charge-free before touching the computer’s insides!

What’s a Hardware Failure?

The difference between hardware and software is the difference between the machine and the things it does, basically. The CD tray is hardware, but the disk it’s holding contains software. A video game is software, the controller you use to interact with it is hardware! Music files on your computer? Software. Speakers to listen to it? Hardware! Hardware failure can be anything from the Wi-Fi receiver getting bent out of shape, to the CD tray getting stuck, or pins/solder coming loose inside the machine, and while software failure can be caused by hardware trouble, it can also happen spontaneously. If the computer blue screens? That’s a software failure. If the fan starts to sound like it’s hitting something repeatedly? Hardware!

The really fun issues are the ones that could be both: is your screen showing funny colors because a cord is pinched, or because something important in the software for the display was deleted?

What’s a Kernel Failure?

A kernel failure is when things happen to confuse the kernel, the essential bit of software that keeps programs from trying to pull the same file all at once. If you’ve ever worked with Microsoft Word, you might’ve experienced trying (and being unable) to move a file in the file selector while the document is still open. The kernel doesn’t control that, but it’s a similar principle. The file selector won’t move the doc as long as it’s open because you’re also using it – more specifically, Word is using it and can’t share. You have to close the document to let the file selector ‘use’ it to move it.

The kernel operates on similar principles: when one thing is using essential software, the kernel keeps other things from using that software until the first program is done with it. It keeps a schedule of what programs get to use which assets and when. While that might make it sound like it’s a software thing, both hardware and software can cause kernel panics. Incompatible driver extensions and incompatible or corrupted RAM are two of the most common causes.

What’s a Blue Screen Error, and What’s a Crash?

If you’ve ever owned or worked long-term on a Windows computer, you might have seen this one before :The Blue Screen of Death. A blue-screen happens when an illegal operation confuses the computer and causes it to shut down. For example, if a program’s permissions are read only, but another program tries to write on it, the computer may bluescreen and restart. If a program tries to use a piece of software reserved only for the operating system, the computer blue-screens and restarts. Permissions violations, and illegal operations both cause blue-screening, but hardware failure is sometimes a cause too.

A crash is a pretty broad term. Anything that brings the computer to a stop can be a crash. Overloading it? Crash. Blue screen? Considered a crash. It shuts off randomly, and the tech can’t tell what caused it? Crash!

Sources: http://thexlab.com/faqs/kernelpanics.html

What is a short circuit?

https://www.explainthatstuff.com/electrictoasters.html

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/sbs/windows/troubleshoot-blue-screen-errors-5c62726c-6489-52da-a372-3f73142c14ad?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

(original page no longer available – web archiving service is fundraising as of December 2020, you have been warned) https://web.archive.org/web/20030823202532/http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=150314

What Is A V-Tuber Concert?

Elizabeth Technology November 28, 2023

A V-Tuber is the colloquial name for a virtual entertainer puppeted by a real person. A digital character onscreen blinks, moves their hands, looks around, and opens their mouth to talk at the same time as the person controlling them behind the scenes does. The software to do this is quite complex – the program controlling the model often works through a camera pointed at the real user (although some people do use things like pedals and controllers to control the model’s actions). A one-to-one real-time movement-matching simulation like the kind V-Tubers use are no easy feat, and they’re always getting better. The more recent ones are good enough to dance live with!

Why Have Concerts With These Things?

There are a couple of reasons. Firstly, the V-Tuber’s onscreen model can do things humans just can’t! The model can wear outfits that defy gravity, it can jump off cliffs or up through clouds, it can jump through sparklers and fireworks onscreen without ever risking anyone being burned, and it can do all this while still tethered to its owner and dancing in time. Speaking of which, while pre-recorded routines are possible, the singer is often still singing and dancing live offstage as well, although the complexity and mix of the routine can vary from show to show. It’s still live!

Secondly, a V-Tuber is mainly recognized through their model – not their own face. This grants them anonymity that many pop stars and internet celebrities don’t have, as well as a break from a cutthroat pop industry that insists singers be young, size 0, and pretty for as long as possible even at the expense of their health, both long and short term. The V-Tuber model does not suffer to meet these nightmarish standards, and the singer behind the model can focus harder on their voice and dancing.

Even for the ones who focus on video games and livestreaming instead of dancing and singing, the anonymity of their V-Tuber model is a serious plus. While it doesn’t eliminate the risk of being doxxed, it makes existing in public a lot easier! Walking around a Twitch or gaming convention anonymously is just not possible for YouTubers who show themselves on-screen. For V-Tubers, it’s the default.

A Matter of Movement

With the pros out of the way, there are cons: namely that if they started out on a platform like YouTube, they may not be ready for a concert. A performance at a Cosplay Arts Festival in July of 2023 went viral on TikTok because the person on screen, the V-Tuber Dacapo, wasn’t dancing. The most movement came when the character model’s bangs were swept out of his eyes during an intense part of the song, which made his many fans in the crowd go absolutely nuts, and even that didn’t come with an animation. While the person behind Dacapo did sing the cover of the song themselves, the model wasn’t rigged for anything more intense than looking around and moving side-to-side – the most movement he could do live was sway. One arm was frozen in place holding a cigarette as a stylistic choice, and this was not changed for the concert. Neither was the framing of the character, who is normally only seen from the chest up. This culminated in a performance with some very technically impressive singing paired with the sort of setup you see from livestreamers, but blown up twenty feet tall. (He has a replay on his official channel, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2FNn8d5o4A&ab_channel=DacapoCh.%E3%80%90ARP%E3%80%91)

It could hardly be called a waste of money, because the concert itself was free with the purchase of a ticket to the cosplay con it was hosted at, but it felt stiff. That model is part of a group of V-Tubers pulled together by the Thailand-based Algorhythm Project, which put Dacapo into a boy group with a couple of other singers. He debuted under that project – he was the fastest-growing member of it. This guy didn’t get famous by accident. For them to not have an alternate model for concerts, or at least modify the current one so it could move more freely, feels like an oversight! Especially when other V-Tubers prove it can be done.

That said, the next concert will probably be better – no performer has a flawless first stage show, no matter what their tech looks like.

Sources: https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/vtuber-dacapo-receives-support-from-ironmouse-after-concert-sparks-backlash-2206437/

Public Internet Access Terminals

Elizabeth Technology November 21, 2023

In the early days of the internet, the average computer was still bulky and often pretty pricey. Most electronics were! Some people still have the brick phones or old CRT monitor computers they used before the size of transistors and chips shrank, and finding those old models in movies or on eBay isn’t hard.

Bringing the internet out of designated places (colleges, libraries, the home, etc.) into other spots it might be useful was difficult. One of the wackier ideas of the time, the Public Internet Access Terminal, foresaw a world where computers would be like payphones, in 2003.

American Terminal Public Internet Access Portal

Sources on this company are incredibly limited. One Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DASfwrCjICg&t=5s&ab_channel=RicDatzman pops up when the exact name of the kiosk is searched. One very old commercial proves the existence of the internet’s first tendrils encroaching into public space.

The commercial itself is a perfect snapshot of how people viewed the web in its early days. You might need it on the go. It might be like a payphone someday. The computer inside the terminal will make you money and won’t need to be replaced by the next more powerful model anytime soon because it’s good enough as it is (as a reminder, Moore’s Law stated that the number of transistors on a circuit would double about every two years, and up until recently ). People in the comments remember using them to check online game accounts and send last-minute emails before hopping onto planes or busses.

And yet, no other source aside from this commercial seems to exist! Despite their confidence in their product, they weren’t confident enough to build a website for prospective franchisees.

I Just Need To Send An Email

Internet usage at the time was limited – Amazon was still selling primarily books, computers were still pretty large, and while things like email were much more convenient than snail mail or phone calls for their traceable, info-dense nature, not everyone had an email address. For the lighter users of the internet, stopping by the library to check their digital mailboxes was a cheap and easy way of keeping up with the times without committing to a fullblown computer. After all, the dot com crash ruined the internet’s most aggressive investors. If it somehow didn’t pan out, they wouldn’t be out too much money.

The problem was that while that crash was disastrous, the internet still had plenty of use! And people who didn’t want to invest in the equipment were being pulled further and further into it either by work or for recreation.

In the midst of this, a particularly enterprising company thought to put together internet terminals that could be put in places like airports, and controlled by outside franchisees like vending machines often are. To the people trying to sell these products, the age of computers was slowing down post-crash, and while they may have anticipated that these computers would be fully depreciated by the time the owner paid back the investment and maintenance costs (just like any free money scheme, if this was actually as low risk as they advertise, they would have kept it to themselves), they likely didn’t picture a world where the very thought of one of these things existing freely, unmonitored, in public, paid for by the minute and not the GB, would seem outdated. Like a payphone.

Nintendo Just Kind of Banned Gaming Tournaments

Elizabeth Technology November 16, 2023

With little exception, having age-appropriate gaming tournaments is a good thing for a game (and the company behind it). Big communities getting together to play their one-on-one games means people bringing guests who might be interested enough to buy a set of cards or minifigs after and play in the next get-together.

Some companies even make guides for tournament hosters, partially as an investment in the community, partially so any tournaments hosted using that pack won’t reflect poorly on the parent company. Others go even further and sponsor tournaments themselves, like Capcom with its Street Fighter tournaments. Copyright permissions are handled differently by different companies in different mediums, but generally the tournament event can use their game’s imagery and names to advertise for-profit events as long as the event follows rules established by the company.

If done right, the players have a fun and exciting time, the game company gets a bunch of free (or subsidized) advertising, and everybody wins.

Nintendo’s decision to ban large tournaments in this environment is nothing short of bizarre!

The Announcement

Nintendo’s announcement regarding tournaments using their games boils down to: no huge events (200 spectators or less IRL, 300 or less online), no use of Nintendo copyright properties to advertise (including game names), no merchandise, food or drink sold in-person at the events, and no profit (ticket prices and winning pools are capped to ensure this). Organizers also can’t raise the prize money from ticket sales or use modified versions of the game, either, and must obtain a special license from Nintendo before the event takes place. While Nintendo is legally well within their rights to do this, why would they? Capcom enjoys a huge amount of positive publicity thanks to it’s 2D fighter tournaments. Magic: The Gathering is known for drawing large crowds to events, and Wizards of the Coast, its owner company, is pleased to see it. Nintendo was not.

As you may guess, this severely handicaps future tournaments! Smash tournaments, one of the cornerstones of the early online competitive gaming communities, have just been slashed pretty hard. For context, Smash Summit has had final winning pools in the five-digit range since 2016. Smash Ultimate Summit has hit the six figure range. Smash tournaments have been running since the last decade. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of players have passed through these tournaments hoping to win, and the spectator count is magnitudes higher. Nintendo may not have set out to make tournament-ready games, but by golly they did, and now they want to take it back.

What Now?

Playing a game competitively is very, very different from playing it for fun. People dedicate huge chunks of their life to trimming off inefficiencies and practicing. For many, it is literally a second job, during which they may stream their practice to make some money off of all of the hours they’re investing into learning. The people viewing those streams then go on to watch them in the tournament, bringing money in for the tournament host, too.

Nintendo effectively just crushed an entire industry. Rather than work with the fans and try to spin their tournaments into advertising the way many other companies do, they instead decided that the current tournament fanbase was unreconcilable with their goals and simply cut them off. Already, Smash tournament organizers (often retired tournament winners themselves) are promising they’re going to keep going until they personally receive a cease and desist from Nintendo. They don’t really have another choice – players aren’t typically interested in switching games and losing all their practiced skill to switch over to Street Fighter or any other 2-D fighting game.

Who knows what happens next. Nintendo owns the intellectual property that this industry is built off of, but rug-pulling it like that has generated a lot of backlash from adult fans, even ones who weren’t watching tournaments before. It echoes the move that Unity just made, and before that, Adobe. The average consumer is getting sick of companies squeezing them out of stuff they already spent their money on. Nintendo may have underestimated the negative press from this announcement, but whether or not they’ll walk it back remains to be seen.

Sources: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/fun-sponge-nintendo-places-strict-094104104.html

https://kotaku.com/smash-bros-ultimate-switch-nintendo-tournaments-1850955614 (warning – link contains foul language sourced from tournament competitors’ tweets in direct citation)

Using Biometrics: Is It Really Better?

Elizabeth Technology November 9, 2023

Some phones allow users to use their biometric data as 2FA, or as a password by itself – how does it measure up to PINs?

Cons

1) Your Face Looks Like Your Family’s

Every single service using face unlock handles this a different way – they all use different programs, and those different programs handle similarities differently. Apple, which uses state-of-the-art hardware and code to see faces, still sometimes mixes it up. For Apple, the program that reads your features and unscrambles this information is constantly updating itself and adding to its library of what you look like. If it didn’t, a sunburn or a new eyeliner shape would trip it up and lock you out for looking different.

The problem is that it’s allegedly doing that by looking at the person holding the device when it’s unlocked (using a passcode or otherwise), which is usually you but sometimes isn’t. People who look similar enough and who may be holding your phone enough (like family) can sometimes trick FaceID into opening for them by accident. While this is getting better, there’s no way to rule out a twin unlocking your phone without also sometimes locking you out too.

2) Law Enforcement

Most police forces have the right to collect some of your biometric data if you are ever arrested – your face and fingerprints go into their records. The legality of using that to unlock your mobile device pre-subpoena varies from state to state; some states will allow you total freedom to decline an un-subpoena’d unlock request no matter how your device is secured, while others won’t let you decline at all, but some states depend on the type of lock. Certain biometric data is not legally protected in the same way passcodes or PINs are. Look it up for your state!

3) Nefarious Children

A much more common unwanted-unlock scenario is a child getting hold of your phone during a nap and holding it up to your face to buy Robux. While face-unlock adapted, and many smartphones don’t let you attempt an unlock with closed eyes anymore, fingerprints stay the same even if you’re asleep. Still pictures of the target tend to trick older Face ID as well, although that is improving with each new generation of phones.

Pros

1) When Done Right, It’s Really Tough to Beat

Barring the similarity issues above, when biometric data is used correctly, it’s pretty darn good at keeping unwanted people out. Collecting fingerprints to unlock a device or account is often more difficult than it’s worth, and deters bad actors from trying. Strangers will generally not have photos of the phone’s owner good enough to unlock it on-hand – more recent phones use infrared too, so pictures don’t even work on new phones anymore. Cracking biometric locks takes a lot of coincidences or a lot of effort, not just a computer stuffing passwords.

You also can’t write down your face and lose it somewhere like you might for a password, and (at least for phones) you can’t have it breached in the same way as a written password.

2) When Done Right, It’s Faster

You’d need to wait for a sent 2FA code, but you don’t need to wait for a fingerprint or a face unlock.

3) As Long As Policies Stay the Same, The Data Doesn’t Leave The Phone

As of the writing of this article, Pixel and Apple devices state that the mathematical representation of your face which the phone uses to unlock will not leave the device it’s being used on. Apple even goes a step further and separates the computer that handles facial recognition from the computer that does everything else inside the phone!

The caveat of course is if those policies stay the same – companies make promises and then go back on them all the time. American privacy laws are fairly lax compared to other countries, so any privacy policy not written into law needs an eye kept on it for changes.

How Does A Hacker Use Public WiFi?

Elizabeth Technology October 26, 2023

Ads for VPNs give their two biggest benefits as often as they can: that you can watch shows blocked in your home country using one, and that hackers using the same public WiFi network can’t steal your data as long as you’re encrypting it with a VPN.

The first one is relatively easy to understand, but how does the second trick work?

1) Simply Saying They Are Something Else

One of the easier methods of tricking a connection is to simply create a hotspot near a public wifi source, and name it the same thing as the legitimate source. If there are two ‘Starbucks Café 9812’ Wifi channels available, the duplicate may catch out users. After that, the hotspot’s creator can intercept any data sent over the connection.

2) Using Specialty Tools

Unsecured Wifi is dangerous in multiple ways – loose, unencrypted packets of data travelling over the Wifi connection can be caught by a hacker and decoded into readable information using something called a WiFi sniffer. Information that your computer will not pick up by default can be found this way, and with it, data sent over that unsecured connection.

Using a WiFi channel with a password is generally good enough to prevent that from happening, however.

3) Hoping For Poor Security Practices

If a public spot’s router is not set up correctly, it might be possible for a bad actor to get into it as an administrator, with all of the permissions that entails. If the router is still using a default dictionary password, a dictionary attack might crack it, and give the bad actor those admin privileges that way. And, if a bad actor got onto the network legitimately, they may be able to execute a man-in-the-middle attack where they trick the target computer and the router into sending potentially sensitive data through them first.

VPNs

VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks, add an extra layer of security via encryption to information as it passes from the user’s computer, to the router, to the VPN’s server where it is unencrypted, to the website where the request was directed, back to the VPN’s server so it can be re-encrypted, and then back to the router and ultimately the device, where the information is unencrypted.

That’s good for protecting the user from many of the security issues associated with Public Wifi, but it’s not the be-all end-all of security – you must pick a VPN carefully if you intend to use one, because using a VPN means putting all of that data in their hands instead.

Google Monopoly: What Does It Mean?

Elizabeth Technology October 24, 2023

Proving something or someone has a monopoly in today’s era of technology is difficult – but not impossible. The Department of Justice alleges that Google is hogging advertising space and overcharging for it as a result, as well as illegally (allegedly) incentivizing popular phone brands to use Google products as their default.

On Devices

Most mobile smart devices come with a built-in browser. Even when that browser isn’t Google Chrome, the browser itself uses Google for searches until a different default search engine is set. Opening Firefox or Safari and just typing a query directly into the URL bar will almost always (unless a different default is set by the user beforehand) search that query using Google. Many android devices come pre-installed with Google products like Google Maps. Users can ultimately change their defaults, but it would be difficult with the sheer number of apps that are pre-installed. Sometimes, uninstalling an app isn’t actually an option, either, as many frustrated Android users discovered when trying to uninstall apps like Google TV or YT Music. You can download other apps that do these things, but you can never be rid of the Google version without jailbreaking the phone, which takes a bit of technical know-how and often voids warranties or violates carrier contracts. This could just be because Google is huge and its big web of services are convenient… or, as the suit alleges, it could be that Google is illegally paying phone manufacturers to never try the competition, like Bing or DuckDuckGo.

On Ads

The Department of Justice alleges that since Google has shut out rivals in the search engine game, it’s also shut out any rivals that could compete with it in advertising spaces. Since most people use Google, Google ads cost consumers more to buy them. It’s (alleged) excessive control of search prevents users from using or seeing ad serving competitors, creating a self-sustaining cycle where they are always the more valuable search engine.

Google denies this – they say that Google’s chokehold on internet searching is because Google is the superior product, not because it has shut other products out.

Stifling Competition

Google has a lot of money. It uses this money to further its own existence, a result of a shareholder system that insists the shareholders must see some new growth, or else the CEO gets kicked. It’s the natural gravitational pull of such a system in a world where money can buy or smooth over nearly anything. When a business loses control of its motives, it loses control of itself. Did Google behave unethically? Probably – it doesn’t take a trial to suggest such a system encourages unethical behavior, whether legal or not. Did Google behave illegally? That is to be determined in the DoJ’s trial.

Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-monopoly-trial-sundar-pichai-larry-page/

Why Won’t My Bluetooth Devices Link Up?

Elizabeth Technology October 19, 2023

1) How far away is your other item?

Headphones, speakers, and keyboards generally aren’t going to have a range over 30 feet – some can’t even hit that. Generally speaking, devices don’t go over 30 feet because they don’t need to, and making them powerful enough to do so makes the battery drain faster. If your device is far away, it may not connect, or keep disconnecting and re-connecting.

2) Are you trying to connect to the right thing?

Many devices have bizarre serial number names that you can only find in your user’s manual, especially if the device is not a name brand like Microsoft or Apple. When you start trying to connect your phone to your new Bluetooth headphones or speaker, make sure you know what its real name is!

3) Are you following the pairing instructions?

Many devices have light indicators on them somewhere to signal whether or not they are connected. Blinking lights usually mean a device is looking for another Bluetooth device to pair with, but not always. Sometimes things blink just to indicate that they aren’t connected. Follow your user’s manual!

Along with that, are both devices seeking a connection? Bluetooth can be on and open, but if the device isn’t in search mode, it might not connect where it’s supposed to until one or both devices are told via their Bluetooth menu that they’re supposed to work with each other.

4) Is the battery charged?

Bluetooth takes a fair amount of power to broadcast, and the signal may get weaker before the device is fully dead. If you notice your speaker suddenly wants you to be closer to make it work, it might be time to charge it, or change the batteries.

5) Has it been on for a long time, with no breaks?

You can also try turning both devices off and back on again. Any device with RAM can have things clog it up, and turning a device off usually fixes it and gives it a fresh start.

6) How old is your other item?

Bluetooth is backwards compatible, so it’s rare to find two Bluetooth compatible devices that won’t work together. It’s rare, but not impossible! Some older and simpler devices have a hard time overcoming the barriers between each successive Bluetooth upgrade. Which device has the newer version of Bluetooth seems to matter as well – my phone will connect to an older Bluetooth car radio transmitter, but my MP3 player will not. A new car radio transmitter will connect to the MP3 player and the phone just fine.

Footnote – Security

It’s not a good idea to leave Bluetooth on when it’s not in use! When you’re done using it, turn it off. Bluetooth can be tricked into connecting to strange devices a number of ways, and be used to take data off of your device. The good news is that most devices only ever expect to connect to one other thing at a time, so as long as your phone is tied to your speaker, another device won’t be able to connect via Bluetooth.

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