[NBLUG/talk] Summary of the August 2022 NBLUG meeting

[Brad Morrison]

Hi all,

I spent the majority of my time at the August NBLUG meeting this week 
focused on 2 topics, both led by Kyle, whom I met for the first time:

1. Purism (https://puri.sm/) is the company the Kyle works for and they 
are an open source software and hardware company that focuses on making 
products for security and privacy oriented customers. The lengths that 
Kyle described that Purism goes to both to seek out security and privacy 
options that do not exist anywhere else as well as to support the 
existing open source technology community were pretty impressive to me. 
If you, or anyone you know, is an investigative journalist doing 
politically or economically threatening work, I would highly suggest 
checking out Purism's products. Another niche that Kyle mentioned was 
significant among Purism's customer base is the exes of people that have 
significant technology skills and have experienced forms of digital 
domestic stalking and harassment or are concerned about the possibility 
of it. I do remember Edward Snowden describing the common practice of 
'loveint' that took place at the NSA. With the Supreme Court's recent 
Dobbs ruling on abortion, there could be more opportunities for privacy 
and security technology concerns to become more relevant for many 
American women living in states where abortion is now illegal and their 
travel could be tracked. While I'm sure the legal situation will 
continue to evolve, I was surprised when I recently read about a 
pregnant woman in Texas appealing her carpool lane violation ticket by 
saying that there were 2 people in her vehicle 
(https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/09/texas-woman-ticket-abortion-roe-v-wade). 
Maybe parents who are expecting a child will be eligible for the federal 
Child Tax Credit soon too...?

There are other companies in the open source hardware space, including 
System 76 (https://system76.com/), Fairphone 
(https://www.fairphone.com/en/), Turris routers and network devices 
(https://www.turris.com/en/), and several others. I have thought about 
upgrading my laptop recently as it seems to be working harder than it 
used to. I bought my Dell E7440 laptop 
(https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/product-support/product/latitude-e7440-ultrabook/overview) 
used on eBay in 2015 for about $460 and it has served me pretty well 
ever since. I dual booted Linux Mint and Windows 7 for the first year or 
so and then switched exclusively to Linux Mint. I assume that a new 
laptop would bring increased battery life, better performance, better 
energy efficiency, etc. but I don't use my personal computer for 
anything too intense or strenuous, so it works well enough for me, 
hasn't broken, and it is pretty cheap to run. As far as my phone, I 
bought the OnePlus 6T I own in December 2018 for about $600 from the 
T-Mobile store in Santa Rosa. In May 2022, I installed LineageOS and no 
longer have the Google Play Store (although I have not deleted my Google 
account yet). Unfortunately, the modest social work that I do doesn't 
seem to have drawn enough attention from threatened corporate or 
government interests, so Purism's products seem a like a bit of security 
and privacy overkill for my situation. Still, when I do buy new 
technology products, I will definitely consider Purism's options. Purism 
struck me as the Sonic of hardware. Thanks Kyle for your work!

As far as service, I split my household's Sonic fiber bill with my 3 
roommates and I pay $15 a month to T-Mobile for unlimited talk and text 
+ 2 GB of data monthly. I'm pretty minimalist when it comes to usage. I 
share this as I have not met most of the approximately 236 people on the 
NBLUG talk list, so there may be plenty of other people in various 
technology hardware situations that I am not in.

2. Mechanical and electro-mechanical adding machines: the precursors to 
modern calculators and computers. Kyle has been collecting such devices 
for about 3 years now and like many collectors was very interested to 
share his knowledge and passion on the subject. There was a pretty 
lively discussion with lots of memories shared among the 7 people that 
showed up on Tuesday night. I was born in 1984, so I just tried to soak 
it up and ask questions.

Hopefully everyone had a good month and that all the Santa Rosa NBLUG 
residents were not too disrupted by the major Comcast outage this week - 
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/service-outages-reported-by-xfinity-verizon-customers-in-santa-rosa/ 
There were several (6-8) posts on NextDoor Santa Rosa about the 
Comcast/Xfinity outage and I saw the mayor of Santa Rosa post about it 
on FaceBook 
(https://www.facebook.com/ChrisRogersCA/posts/pfbid02RRT898Qpmn7EQcnifW3K6GFewYmcYbehaJ386KekLdNYA4ovEn4aWdcnMSDKgmWQl). 
Although I didn't realize it at the time, I was somewhat glad for the 
conversation we had at the July NBLUG meeting on Comcast's service as I 
was surprised that several NBLUG people used Comcast for reasons I had 
not thought of (Comcast offers a fixed IP address option, while Sonic 
does not).

Congratulations to Matt on the new job, I hope it goes well! Thanks to 
Derek for helping me a bit with my LineageOS questions.

Over and out,

Brad
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