The sharing economy is a buzzword which has gained enormous traction despite the fact that it remains misunderstood, in my opinion. The luddite politicians who have been vocal against it on the grounds that it’s a dishonest loophole for escaping regulatory frameworks have it obviously wrong, but I feel that even enthusiastic participants and users probably haven’t considered all it’s implications. It’s not just about creating internet marketplaces for everything. The true genius of the sharing economy is twofold.

Sometimes, life imitates shitposting. Under the guise of conducting research, I’ve come to join and like an absolutely inordinate amount of politically-inclined shitposting groups and pages. It’s bad, to the point where normie posts about meals, trips and life achievements have been completely drowned out in political compass memes and ancap smileys. Right around the time where radical centrist memes began making an appearance in my favourite meme group, I became aware of a piece by Hunter Maats which perfectly represents everything that’s wrong behind the idea that inspired the meme.

I’ve been putting off segmenting my network for a while now, but the recent IoT botnet powered DDoS has bumped the task up my list of priorities, and I finally got around to doing it. Generally, if your network is anything other than non-critical clients accessing the internet, that is to say if you have any sort of IoT devices or it you host any internet-facing services at home, it’s probably a smart thing to split up your network into segments. Doing so allows finer-grained control over which machines can talk to each other, thus enhancing security. A segmented network is usually also easier to survey and audit, because irregularities like “why the hell is there an Acer laptop in my server segment?” stand out more, and with the appropriate monitoring solutions you can more easily generate usage stats by just running queries for an entire segment.

Crowd-funding and the sharp drop in development costs for internet connected device has given us both an onslaught of useless gadgets, and the much overused buzzword “Internet of Things”, or IoT. The concept has been pushed way past the borders of absurdity, as highlighted by the likes of @InternetofShit. I’m only half surprised: personal computing has plateaued, with many of the “traditional” challenges posed by hardware such as transistor and storage density being more of less solved, what more is there to innovate in? To break the “sit down in front of a screen” paradigm of computing, the industry is shooting in all directions to find new ground. This spray-and-pray approach to innovation is surely finding new ways to do things, but in the frenzy of it, we are offered truly senseless gadgets, from cloud-connected candles to bluetooth kegel exercisers.

Il y a quelques semaines, une mystérieuse portion de la Commission jointe sur les actions de la communauté de renseignement avant et après les attaques terroristes du 11 septembre 2001 (en anglais, Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Actions Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of the September 11th, 2001), a été déclassifiée après deux ans de procédures de révision. Communément connues sous le nom de « 28 pages » (il y en a 29, mais le nom a resté), le document décrit les découvertes de la commission concernant des liens possible entre le Royaume de l’Arabie Saoudite et certains individus impliqués dans les attaques du 11 septembre.

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