This is a blog from Steve!
I hope to highlight both the good and bad things that I see in the world. I am very critical of many things, and constantly think about how I would make things better. You know what they say “if you can’t do, critique” – or maybe it’s just me that says that. I think everyone does it, I’ve decided to do it publicly for the world to read.
Disclosure
If I review or get critical about a company, product or service that I have a financial interest in, I will try to remember to disclose that in post – however in order to have transparency and disclosure without me having to make a note about possible financial interests / conflicts – assume that I might have some financial things to gain or lose with certain products or businesses that I may mention – either now, in the past, or in the future. I will not have enough time to go back and review posts to see if I have gotten into any kind of situation in which I may profit from good or bad reviews of products / services / companies, etc.
In some cases I may discuss things that affect an associated product / service / business that does not have a direct influence on say stocks that I own, but do affect my business dealings on some way. For example if I offer some critique of wordpress and I don’t own stock in Automattic, I may still benefit from wordpress’s success or demise in other ways. There are some people who want to be informed about these kinds of conflicts, and there are certain agencies that require some kind of disclosure about these things.
If this is an issue for you, to make things on the safe side – assume that I do have some kind of financial position in the things I discuss, that you you can assume my thoughts / reviews are biased, and test any theories I have for yourself rather than depending on statements made by me to be some kind of gospel or scientific proof.
I am not an expert in anything, but more of a Jack of a few trades. I am not a doctor, or a lawyer, or any other kind of professional like that. Do not take anything you read here as medical advice, legal advice, or even advice about what to buy or not buy. I offer a biased and singular opinion about things, and my needs may vary from yours – things I like you may not, thing I don’t like may be perfect for you.
Privacy
At the launch of this site and for some time after there were no ads, but one day ads could be added. Assume that if ads are added, then the associated ad provider will be a third party that will suck away any and all privacy that you may think you had. They will record everything little thing you do, in some cases attempting to browser fingerprint you, or your device id – and even attempt to track your eye movements, how long you look at pieces of content. They will take whatever info they can gain from your very visit here, and combine that data with a bunch of other data points from around the internet and possibly with data about things you have done when not online – like you offline travel and purchasing.
If this kind of tracking bothers you, I highly suggest you research privacy with web browsing further, and invest in a VPN service like private-internet-access or disconnect VPN. Along with studying how to block and wipe cookies, third party trackers, and things like that.
This web site and others that I work with depend on code provided by third parties.
While I try to keep up with things security and privacy wise, I can not guarantee that these other bits of code do not break, or become infected with viruses / malware, or use methods to do things that would comprise your privacy and or security.
I had no idea this wordpress system added third party beacon type things like gravatar and google fonts that gave away my visitors and my own use of these pages to third party companies. I try to limit these things, however my ability to do so it limited to some degree. This is another reason I suggest using VPN services when accessing the web, and a web browser with plugins that can help to thwart some of these details about you being leaked to others.
Mozilla’s Firefox appears to take internet privacy seriously, as does the W3c – there are several plugins available to firefox that makes your web history even more secure. I suggest looking into those, reading not just the descriptions nut also reviews on the site and check third party sites for info as well. Some are better than others, some have conflicts of interest at heart.
When you visit this site our web server records certain data automatically, standard stuff almost every web server collects. Some of this data can be pretty easily used to be personally identifying. If you leave a comment or otherwise interact with this site, additional information about you will be logged and kept.
I wish I had the time and knowledge of how to deploy a totally private system here, and the ability to mod the server settings in a way that were more like how the EFF does it’s fuzzy logging. One of these days these things will hopefully be easier and more widespread. The future can be bright, even if there are many who would prefer that we keep things the way they are.
I wish it was not like this, hopefully one of my ideas about “Fair Block” systems will take hold in the future of things internet.
I welcome your comments, although will only moderate and approve comments about once a month – so have patience, I’m a busy guy! I do not intend to update this blog daily, I don’t want it to become a chore, only as things strike me and I get the time to share those thoughts.
Welcome to the Steve is Critical blog!
