Interesting reads, 2 July 2018

Interesting things I read on the Internet this week

• Frequently Asked Questions about the GNU Licenses — My favourite line: “If you hope some day to look back on your career and feel that it has contributed to the growth of a good and free society, you need to make your software free.“

• We’re Baking Have I Been Pwned into Firefox and 1Password — Lovely to see Troy’s useful service reaching more people.

• Thermostats, Locks and Lights: Digital Tools of Domestic Abuse — Smart devices are starting to be used against victims of domestic abuse.

• Why nobody ever wins the car at the mall — Eye-opening dig into the personal data abuses of fake competitions. Glad we live in the GDPR-protected EU.

• Car alarms and smoke alarms: the tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity — Interesting technical piece about false positives and negaives.

• Apple Engineers Its Own Downfall With the Macbook Pro Keyboard — I hadn’t realised just how bad the manufacturing decisions are — they keyboard is glued to the battery, making it incredibly expensive to replace.

• HP EliteBook: A Friend to the User — In contrast, here’s a laptop that’s rated ¹⁰⁄₁₀ for ease of repair.

• How to Make Everything Ourselves: Open Modular Hardware — I love the concept of open source, modular building systems.

• Home Office publishes biometrics strategy 28 June 2018 20:36 GMT — “Starting with fingerprints, the Home Office Biometrics programme is integrating various databases onto a single platform.” What we do not want is a single megadatabase of biometrics, that’s terrifying.

• Protecting customers from the Ticketmaster breach: Monzo’s story This story makes Monzo look extremely look, and Ticketmaster extremely bad.