Here's a weird one. For a while now, I noticed that the GNOME panel sometimes (not always) shows a question mark where the wifi or network icon should be. Yet, my network connection was working fine. Instead of relying on wifi, I regularly use Ethernet to connect directly to my cable modem. Here is what it looks like:

After some searching around where I found a few suggestions that didn't truly solve the problem, what truly worked was editing the file /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf and setting managed=true (it was set to "false" by default). After that, a simple systemctl restart NetworkManager did the trick. {link to this entry}

A couple of news articles regarding privacy issues. First, we learn from the folks at Ars Technica that Google added a user-tracking ad platform feature directly into their browser. Oh, joy! The feature is conveniently hidden under the guise of an "ad privacy feature" that can be easily enabled by the user, but in reality "it will track the web pages you visit and generate a list of advertising topics that it will share with web pages whenever they ask". Nice. An "ad privacy feature", huh? Way to go, Google! So much for the "don't do evil" mantra.

Then, in a separate article, this time from The Verge, we learn that according to a study by the Mozilla Foundation, modern cars "are a privacy nightmare". Basically, the reviewed 25 different car brands, and discovered that all of them had "glaring privacy concerns, even compared to the makers of sex toys and mental health apps" which, incidentally, are considered to be the worst when it comes to privacy.

All 25 of the car brands that were researched for the report — including Ford, Toyota, Volkswagen, BMW, and Tesla — failed to meet the nonprofit organization’s minimum privacy standards and were found to collect more personal data from customers than necessary. The kind of information collected varies from personal information like medical data to how drivers are using the vehicle itself — such as how fast they drive, where they drive, and even the music they listen to. Both Nissan and Kia are noted to allow the collection of information regarding a user’s sex life. By contrast, Mozilla claims that 37 percent of mental health apps (which also have a poor reputation for data privacy) had better practices for collecting and using personal data.

Eighty-four percent of the reviewed car brands share personal user data with service providers, data brokers, and potentially sketchy businesses, according to the report, with 76 percent claiming the right to sell that personal data. Fifty-six percent are willing to share user information with the government and / or law enforcement if requested.

Tesla was the worst-ranked brand in the study, getting flagged in every privacy category — only the second time this happened. Tesla’s AI-powered autopilot was highlighted as “untrustworthy” following its involvement in numerous crashes and fatalities.

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Apple announced the release of their new iPhone 15 this week, and The New York Times published an article titled As Smartphone Industry Sputters, the iPhone Expands Its Dominance where we can read things like this:

In the United States, the iPhone’s popularity is expected to widen in the years ahead. Nearly 90 percent of teenagers own an iPhone, according to Piper Sandler, an investment bank.

For young people, iPhones equal inclusion. Many choose it over Android because Apple’s messaging service, iMessage, will turn the color of messages from its default blue to green if a non-iPhone user is in a messaging group. The stigma associated with having green text messages is so pronounced that when it came time for Dave Storrs’s 14-year-old son to get his first smartphone, the teenager told his father that he wanted an iPhone or no phone at all.

“It’s a status thing,” said Mr. Storrs, an Army retiree who lives in El Paso. “They don’t want to be treated differently.”

Mr. Storrs, who is 49, has been subjected to the same pressure. For more than a decade, he took pride in being what he called an “Android renegade.” He owned a series of LG and Motorola phones, even as his son and other family members pressed him to buy an iPhone. He gave in this year after his family gave him a $99 pair of Apple’s wireless AirPod earbuds.

Each time he wanted to use the AirPods on his Android phone, he had to manually sync them. The laborious process inspired him to buy an iPhone 13, which connects the AirPods instantaneously. After years of using a free Android phone, he now pays $11 a month for the iPhone. But he says that he’ll never go back to Android because he likes that he can wear AirPods and take phone calls while walking his Catahoula leopard dog, Teddy.

“It’s just convenient,” he said.

If anythying, I'm amazed by the fact that the journalist calls this "inclusion". If anything, it seems clear to me that the name of the game here is exclusion. They make those teenagers who don't use an Apple iPhone so bad, so discriminated against, that they feel the need to buy their expensive smartphone. Where is the "inclusion" in that? Would the journalist describe a similar behavior from other large corporations in the same terms? Because, mind you, this is something Apple itself has been actively promoting. In that sense, it's no different than the behavior of the tobacco companies in the past. We all know it. But Apple today, like the tobacco companies a few decades ago, is too powerful and cool to be criticized publicly, it seems. It looks as if that would make one "uncool". In any case, I can attest to all this. I've seen my own 12-year-old daughter succumb to this. It is a shameful, unethical practice.

As for Mr. Storr's predicament, it's, once again, something done by design. Apple intentionally designed the AirPods so that they are easier to sync with their own phones. Could it be done a different way? Of course! Could they use universal protocols? Of course! As a matter of fact, when forced to do so, as in the case of the cables being used to recharge the batteries on their phones, they do it. This is also a very old practice used to lock people in. However, for whatever reason, Apple can get away with murder among a certain segment of the US population. Just yesterday, my own daughter explained to me how a friend was really sad that they had to switch to a "normal" cable for their new smartphone model. In the end, it seems, the goal here is to be "different" no matter the cost. {link to this entry}

In my opinion, a clear sign of an excellent operating system is that even people who have been using it for decades discover new useful ways to do things. In this case, I'm referring to something as simple as the old date command in UNIX and Linux:

	$ date -d "2pm tomorrow CEST"
	Wed 13 Sep 2023 07:00:00 AM CDT

	$ date -d thu
	Thu 14 Sep 2023 12:00:00 AM CDT

	$ TZ=Europe/Prague date -d "3pm next Monday"
	Mon Sep 18 15:00:00 CEST 2023

	$ TZ=US/Eastern date -d "3pm next Monday CEST"
	Mon Sep 18 09:00:00 EDT 2023

	$ TZ=US/Central date -d "3pm next Monday CEST"
	Mon Sep 18 08:00:00 CDT 2023
	

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