Terminal Tidbits: LS Command

History books of the future will refer to the mid-90s to early 2000s as the golden age of the internet. Why do they they think that? Well for starters, before I sat down to write this I googled “how to write a good tech article” and over 6 million results were found. Truly a marvelous time! However, it seems these days there is always something in the news about a hacking scandal or somebody getting their identity stolen, a bank account hacked, etc. With how open and cavalier some folks can be with their online activity and digital footprint, it’s no surprise there are so many instances of privacy crimes and security breaches taking place over the internet.

If you’re like me, you probably enjoy being able to venture freely across the digital serengeti that is the inter-webs, all the while remaining protected and anonymous to anyone who may be lurking in binary-coded shadows.

So how can you stay protected?

The answer is VPN. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network and it is many things, but above all else, it provides safe and anonymous access to the Internet. When you are connected to your wifi through a dedicated VPN, all of your traffic and activity becomes encrypted and impossible to be read and understood, essentially “scrambling” your IP address and redirecting its “origin” elsewhere, thus granting you total anonymity to anyone who may be looking. Thus, even if your communication is eavesdropped by malicious persons, they would be unable to decipher what site you are connecting to or what information you are exchanging. Acquiring a VPN is just as easy as a few clicks. I personally use Private Internet Access (PIA), which requires a monthly or yearly subscription to use the VPN service. Now, as far as setup goes, think of a VPN as just another application. It requires a download, a brief registration process, and that’s it! Once it’s downloaded and you’ve registered with the service, open it up and start surfing freely and privately. Keep in mind, a true, dedicated VPN runs in the background on your computer and is non-invasive, thus you shouldn’t even notice it doing its job. Remember this if you are setting out on the hunt for a reliable VPN service. Most importantly, do the research! There are dozens upon dozens of VPN services out there, free and subscription based, so take the time to make sure the one you go with is suited to your needs and desires. 

If you’re the type of individual who doesn’t do much online business and/or banking, you may have no need for a VPN, but of course it never hurts to add that extra level of security and peace of mind!

It’s hard to believe that May is already half over! I’m a life-long Vermonter and I always feel indifferent about winter, but this spring is proving that a good solid winter of steady snowfall is just what Mother Nature needed. Last year we didn’t get much snow and I’m not sure it was as rainy in the spring which I feel made for a delay in the mountains and fields returning to life. Increased snow melt and plenty of rainy spring days has lead to intense greens and colorful flowers popping up daily. It was nice for once to mow my lawn without having to dodge raindrops last night and there have been just enough dry days this spring to allow for several springtime projects to hit completion before the busy summer hits. I’m looking forward to the upper 80 degree temperatures later this week.

Besides being graced with some beautiful spring weather and temperatures this week we’ve also had some incredible news around the Small Dog offices. We’re now an Apple Premier Partner! This means in addition to being able to sell additional Apple accessories like the Watch, we’ve also had our annual service contract renewal which, combined with our Premier Partner status, means we now have some increased service offerings. We can now provide warranty service for Beats headphones, Apple TV and iOS devices like the iPad. The service team has been hard at work this week to make sure everyone is familiar with our new warranty offerings and how to service these products. The weekly service e-mail and meeting was abuzz with new information and excitement!

Thank you for reading!

Emily Dolloff
“emily@smalldog.com”:mailto:emily@smalldog.com

Since the start of the internet age, we humans, along with the technology we use everyday generate an enormous amount of data every day–upwards of 3 exabytes every day in 2017. That’s 250,000 libraries of congress. Internet-enabled devices, including smartphones, have been or are becoming universally adopted and are essential to life “**even in the developing world**”:http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/11/22/africa-on-the-vergeofinternetboom.html . EMC estimates worldwide data generation in 2020 to be “**44 zettabytes**”:https://www.emc.com/leadership/digital-universe/2014iview/executive-summary.htm, or 44 trillion gigabytes.

Because the conveniences provided by this ubiquitous data access, internet services such as Facebook, Twitter and Google have become a staple of our day to day lives. We’ve become accustomed to accessing all of this for free rather than paying for it. It isn’t really free though; we’re paying for these services with our data. In return for offering these services to us, these companies get to use the data they collect, which they may choose to sell or tailor their own marketing in order to get us to spend our money.

7 years ago at a tech conference panel, Google’s CEO “**announced**”:https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/07/quote-of-the-day-google-ceo-compares-data-across-millennia/344989/ that, “Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of man up until 2003.” That’s a staggering statistic, and one that Google has clearly taken to heart. Google’s holding company, Alphabet, is in the business of acquiring smaller companies and integrating them into its vast network. What’s even more ironic is that Google can use the very data it collects to predict which companies to target for assimilation.

All of this leads to what we call “big data”. Conclusions drawn from this data are not like normal statistical analysis. While it’s true that big data is about prediction, it’s about prediction from a different angle. Because of the depth, variety and scope of the data we create, corporations from every single industry on the planet can use that data to make predictions about nearly anything. Consumer buying habits, oil futures, voting results, airline tickets and even tracking earthquakes and the spread of viruses like bird flu.

Since the range of data is so wide and it can be used by whoever chooses to purchase it. All data is valuable to someone. In 2014, the Federal Trade Commission “**conducted a study**”:https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/05/ftc-recommends-congress-require-data-broker-industry-be-more of some of the world’s biggest data brokers and observed that they had data on 1.4 billion online transactions and had that data broken into 700 billion data elements. Those elements can include things like your gender, income level, what kind of car you drive, all the way down to your favorite color and how often you floss your teeth.

Online privacy isn’t about the big things like how much you share on Facebook, what you buy on Amazon or which political candidate you choose to retweet. Even the tiniest data points are being amalgamated and forming an profile of data that you have no, or at least very little, control over.

This isn’t all bad though. Parts can actually be useful. Those multi-zettabytes of data and the over 640 million websites on the internet would be so vast and useless on their own. This data allows the information you want to be filtered down to you. Allergic to shellfish? Well, you probably won’t be seeing the advertisement for the new seafood restaurant near your vacation spot and the thief who got ahold of your credit card won’t be able to order those new $400 sneakers because your closet full of sensible pumps suggests that would be very unlike you.

We live in an age of data and like it or not, it’s not going away. It’s also worth noting that a lot of data that we generate as a species is repetitive or simply junk and/or dog memes so take the above statistics with a grain of salt.