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Going into this New Year, I'd like to share how I'm working to counteract the negative influences I see in the world today.

A lot of people look at society & government and apply their ideals and life experience to thinking of how they would replace it with something they see as better. Historically, this usually takes the form of revolution and turmoil.

For a brief period of time in human history, the concept of democracy has allowed a slight reduction in the ferocity of that churn. In many cases, long traditions of violent and unpleasant regime change have been replaced by peaceful elections.

But what if I told you that democracy could work in areas outside of government, too?

Enter: The Co-Op.

To quote the International Cooperative Alliance, a cooperative is:

"an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise."

A democratic Enterprise. Not even Star Trek has envisioned that. (sorry, disregard that, moving on ...)

Listen, Bill, you don't know me, but I used to be a big fan. That ended some time ago, of course, but it's still something I used to be.

I will admit that I haven't read your latest piece about your new approach to climate change, but I want to you know that some fascist idiots have been using it as justification to slag Harrison Ford.

Have some shame. You've earned it.

Sincerely,

Kevin.

PS: if you could toss a couple million dollars my way, I'd appreciate it.

"To keep your face expressionless was not difficult, and even your breathing could be controlled, with an effort: but you could not control the beating of your heart, and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up." -- Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell (June 8, 1949)

To be absolutely clear: your smart devices are spying on you. Your thermostat, your television, your robot vacuum, your smartphone, everything. It's in their nature. They have microphones, they have cameras, they have touchscreens, they have other sensors. They know what you're writing, watching, doing. They know who you're sleeping with. They know the location of the secret military base you work at.

In and of itself, this isn't a bad thing.

They say that your servers should be cattle, not pets, but I've never truly subscribed to that theory. Sure, nameless autoscaling behemoths are a great technical achievement. Probably safer and more resilient, too. But it would be tremendous overkill for my hobby projects.

One such project has a database server that's been chugging along happily for many years.

Tonight, on a whim, I tried SSHing to it to check something (I forget what - probably the uptime), and was surprised to have my connection rejected.

Permission Denied.

What could cause that, I wondered? And of course, I quietly panicked. Had it been compromised? Could it have been corrupted in some way?