While the "lost year" figure is chucked around with gay abandon on the web, it is a bit hard to pin down the exact scientific source of the estimate, discounting the usual dodgy, publicity-seeking surveys by insurance firms.
Most fingers seem to point toward the US author James Gleick's book "Faster - the Acceleration of Just About Everything".
Gleick explored what he called "hurry sickness", the breaking down of time in modern society into nanoseconds. The faster you go, the more things you lose.
He wrote it in 1999, and while society might have seemed hurried back then, it looks positively relaxed and comfortable compared to today. After all, we were still happy to stand by a fax machine waiting for a document to chug out with that doonk, doonk, doonk sound back in 1999. We still used dial-up modems in 1999, waiting patiently for the squeal of static that signalled they had connected with the internet. We still read paper books back in 1999.
Even allowing for a bad dose of hurry sickness, it still seems ridiculous for anyone to claim we lose a whole year of our life looking for lost possessions. Or does it?
Gleick reckoned the average person spent 16 minutes a day looking for lost stuff - car keys, lip balm, the baby's dummy, your coffee mug, the secateurs you swear you placed on top of the green bin. Sixteen minutes is a believable estimate.
On my calculation, 16 minutes a day equals 5840 minutes a year. The average life span in Australia is 79.7 years for a man and 84.2 years for a woman.
Eighty times 5840 minutes equals 467,200 minutes. A year has 525,949 minutes. So Gleick's guesstimate of 16 minutes a day places us perilously close to a full year over an average lifetime.
Add to this the frustration of looking for lost items, which is physically and mentally draining. It probably takes years off your life.
Last week I spent the best part of an hour on my hands and knees in the office looking for a micro SIM card that had arrived in the post. A SIM card is a small square of chip card, with gold contacts, that you insert into a mobile phone or tablet to enable you to make telephone calls or get mobile broadband internet access. Who knows how they work, they just do. It is magic.
AsEmails sent across the Web are like postcards. In some cases, they're readable by anyone standing between you and its recipient. That can include your webmail company, your Internet service provider and whoever is tapped into the fiber optic cable passing your message around the globe - not to mention a parallel set of observers on the recipient's side of the world.
Experts recommend encryption, which scrambles messages in transit, so they're unreadable to anyone trying to intercept them. Techniques vary, but a popular one is called PGP, short for "Pretty Good Privacy." PGP is effective enough that the U.S. government tried to block its export in the mid-1990s, arguing that it was so powerful it should be classed as a weapon.devices have got smaller, the cards have shrunk too, so that a micro SIM is about the size of the fingernail on your pinky finger.
This SIM card came encased in a credit card-sized piece of plastic. When I pressed it with my thumb it pinged out, ricocheted off my shirt and vanished into thin air.
For the next hour I crawled around and under my desk, dragged filing cabinets to one side, emptied my satchel at least three times, and repeatedly turned all my pockets inside out. Workmates joined me on the floor and the boss even got down on his hands and knees to help with the search. I prayed to St Anthony, of course.
Eventually I sat back down and tried to recreate the moment the card vanished. I traced the trajectory down my shirt. I then looked down the side of the arms of the chair and there, at the point where the metal frame curves under the seat, was just the slightest edge of the SIM card, resting where it had landed.
Like emails, your travels around the Internet can easily be tracked by anyone standing between you and the site you're trying to reach. TOR, short for "The Onion Router," helps make your traffic anonymous by bouncing it through a network of routers before spitting it back out on the other side. Each trip through a router provides another layer of protection, thus the onion reference.
Originally developed by the U.S. military, TOR is believed to work pretty well if you want to hide your traffic from, let's say, eavesdropping by your local Internet service provider. And criminals' use of TOR has so frustrated Japanese police that experts there recently recommended restricting its use. But it's worth noting that TOR may be ineffective against governments equipped with the powers of global surveillance.
Your everyday cellphone has all kinds of privacy problems. In Britain, cellphone safety was so poor that crooked journalists made a cottage industry out of eavesdropping on their victims' voicemails. In general, proprietary software, lousy encryption, hard-to-delete data and other security issues make a cellphone a bad bet for storing information you'd rather not share.
An even bigger issue is that cellphones almost always follow their owners around, carefully logging the location of every call, something which could effectively give governments a daily digest of your everyday life. Security researcher Jacob Appelbaum has described cellphones as tracking devices that also happen to make phone calls. If you're not happy with the idea of an intelligence agency following your footsteps across town, leave the phone at home.
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