Status-Q

I love these nihilistic security questions from Soheil Rezayazdi...

Thanks to Rory C-J for the link.

The Associated Press has finally decided that we don't need to capitalise 'internet' any more, something I suggested here over six years ago in accordance with Quentin's Law of Technological Pervasiveness.

(Oh, and that came five years after Quentin's Second Law, just FYI.)

Brian McCullough hosts the rather splendid Internet History Podcast, and a few days ago he asked me to talk about some of the stuff I'd been involved in over the years.

You can find the interview here if you're curious. You have been warned - it's just over an hour long, and it's something of a monologue, for which I apologise, but Brian encourages that; he's a great listener and many of the episodes have a similar format.

It was great fun - my thanks to Brian for letting me natter away.

Today I was composing a tweet. I hit the 140-character limit and started that editing process with which we've all become familiar. You know, where you gradually omit and abbreviate words, one by one, while still hoping to convey the spirit of the original meaning...

And then I thought, "Why bother?", and just posted to Facebook instead.

I never thought it would come to this. I really dislike so much about Facebook. But it's a place for discussion, where Twitter, though it occasionally carries occasional useful bits of news, is more a place for sporadic broadcasts and emotional outbursts.

I've been tweeting for nearly 8 years, but overall it seems less and less useful to me, and I wonder if I'll still bother by the end of 2016. We'll see...

Marco Arment writes about why he's reducing his use of Google products:

...the reason I choose to minimize Google's access to me is that my balance of utility versus ethical comfort is different. Both companies do have flaws, but they're different flaws, and I tolerate them differently:

• Apple is always arrogant, controlling, and inflexible, and sometimes stingy.
• Google is always creepy, entitled, and overreaching, and sometimes oblivious.

How you feel about these companies depends on how much utility you get out of their respective products and how much you care about their flaws.

Simply put, Apple's benefits are usually worth their flaws to me, and Google's usually aren't.

I'm a fan of both companies, though if I had to choose between them for some reason, I too would pick Apple, both for the quality of the product and the cleanliness of the business plan. (My favourite Google product, though, which nobody else can yet match, is Street View.)

Back when Gmail was the hot new thing, and because it was free(!), I started using it as a backup for my email. I never actually use the web interface, but my other accounts forward incoming messages there, where they get filed immediately into the archive. This guards against losing too much in the event of the complete annihilation of whatever other email provider I'm actually using at the time. (Like Marco, I'm a very happy user of Fastmail.) I set up this system 11 years ago, and really haven't had to think about it since: it's probably the most painless backup solution available!

It does mean that Google have over 100,000 of my recent messages with which to analyse everything about me, though, and I wonder whether that trade-off is worthwhile now that my entire email archive - of which they only have half - would fit happily on a small USB stick....

I think this is great. Not long ago we would have thought internet-connected cars somewhat futuristic. Internet-connected bicycles would surely be next. But how far can you push that idea? Well, how about instrumenting your cycling using a pedal which has its own 3G connection and is self-powered?

More information about Connected Cycle here and on their web site.

How to add a marker to a Google Map so that you can tell people, "It's here!"

John Naughton, interviewed by Tim Garton-Ash at the European Studies Centre in Oxford.

Thanks to Jon Green for this:

I still (often) have doubts about whether Twitter is a valuable medium, but I see, looking at my archive, that I've now been tweeting for nearly seven years. Gosh. So it is at least a long-lasting one.

I'm far from a heavy user, though: over that period I've only averaged 1.3 tweets a day, with an average length of about 89 characters. Mind you, that's still well over 40,000 words...