Score One for the Rats/Mice
More on Green Tech...
Getting back to it...
Blogging has taken a back seat for the last few months as life has kept me quite occupied. Now that the winter rainy season has set in, I have a bit more time to penning some thoughts.
More fun with images
WARNING, If you are on a slow connection, go enjoy a cup of coffee because it will take a few minutes for the animated images to load.
Oil in West Texas, but can it be economically extracted??
The timing is very interesting regarding the draw down of troops in Syria and Afghanistan and the USGS report on the untapped reserves of oil and natural gas in the Permian Basin area.
Security Breaches Galore
It has come to the point now that data security breaches have become an almost daily event. A quick perusal here reveals how serious the issue has become. Also see here:
source:https://www.statista.com/statistics/273550/data-breaches-recorded-in-the-united-states-by-number-of-breaches-and-records-exposed/
And, of course not included in the trend line is the latest Marriot breach...*sigh*
So, what to do? I have given serious thought to abandoning the idea of conducting any transactions online and going retro with writing a check and sticking it in an envelope and mailing it. Even that is risky since the check would have my name and account number, which means that I have to purchase money orders instead of using checks. Either way, that would require some measure of up front work to turn off autopay with the various institutions I do business with and have them send monthly statements which goes totally contrary to the nudging that most of these institutions have been performing with their customers. The harsh reality is data security as well as data privacy is a pipe dream. I'm still on the fence as to how to proceed, but in the mean time, I have taken extra measures to strengthen my passwords and employ two factor authorization when available. I installed Password-Gorilla password manager and reset the passwords on critical sites with (hopefully) very strong randomly generated passwords. Along with that, I performed a fresh install of Lubuntu 16.04. Not a permanent solution, but until I can come a decision on how to proceed, it should at least help. My credit reports have been frozen since the Equifax debacle.
Circling back to the internet and it's corresponding energy footprint, in light of the increasing frequency of security breaches, it seems that data security measures most likely will be taking an increasingly larger piece of the energy pie.
source:https://aceee.org/files/proceedings/2012/data/papers/0193-000409.pdf
Here is an interesting read regarding energy use of the internet. Although not reflected in the pie chart, I suspect energy consumption in every slice of chart is going to have some energy usage percentage of data security. What is not taken into account in the energy footprint of the internet is the energy inputs required to manufacture components and maintain the infrastructure. After all the smoke clears what we have is a colossal amount of energy consumption. For the moment, most of these costs are being footed by cheap debt and venture capital investors. Energy consumption aside, the internet (as we know it currently) is not economically viable even though some of the big guns are cutting their energy footprint by using renewable sources. John Michael Greer's article: The Death of the Internet: A Pre-Mortem is worth the read. His argument about the economic unsustainability of the internet is sound and the latest onslaught of data breaches may be the proverbial straw. He makes an interesting point that may signal what is yet to come:
Now of course the world of the future isn’t going to consist of a single community surrounded by desolate wasteland. That’s one of the reasons why the demise of the internet won’t happen all at once. Telecommunications companies serving some of the more impoverished parts of rural America are already letting their networks in those areas degrade, since income from customers doesn’t cover the costs of maintenance. To my mind, that’s a harbinger of the internet’s future -- a future of uneven decline punctuated by local and regional breakdowns, some of which will be fixed for a while.
Hmm...I think I'll put envelopes on my shopping list.
Tags: computing, energy, data-security