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Tomtom's Guide to Technology

Preface

Let me preface this document by giving some incentives to the reader for why it seems important to me to create this text.

We live in what could be referred to as the age of information. The role of computers and digital systems have become an essential part of nearly everybody's life. This reliance on technology will probably not go away anytime soon.

This is where we run into a problem. Everybody uses technology but almost no one actually knows how it works. This leads to the large majority of people unable to evaluate the technologies they rely on which in turn strips them of the agency over an ever increasing part of their life.

The power over our digital life is increasingly held by a few companies - namely google, meta (facebook), and microsoft.

So this documents goal is to give you - the reader - a small insight into the world of technology and will hopefully give you the ability and more importantly an incentive to critically evaluate the digital world we live in.

Introduction

The great irony of this age of information is that even though there is almost universal access to all these great technologies, the information of how they work seems obscured. And I am stressing the work seems here. Because everyone with a computer could - in theory - find out how everything works. All the knowledge is there, has always been. (Disclaimer: some knowledge is kept by companies because they do not want everybody to know how certain softwares work and could copy it yada yada)

Until now the educational system has been quite slow at adapting to these digital realms in both usage and more importantly education of technology - or lack thereof. This has lead to a divide between the people who create tech and the people who use it where at this point the users just have to trust the techies to not fuck them over. (Not sure where to put this yet:) I think that technological literacy is closely related to scientific literacy. And as we have seen during the pandemic the lack of scientific literacy can be a big problem. And I think it's important to note that people who are scientific literate can still be technologically illiterate.

Now in theory it should be quite easy for people to educate themselves about technology it is all just one google search away. So why didn't they? I think this is due to a couple of factors:

Perception of technology

Technology has a bit of an image problem. The use of tech is cool but actually understanding isn't it is a bit of a nerd world and people who study computer science seem boring (which I am not refuting at this point). This has been a hollywood trope for decades at this point. Luckily this is being challenged more and more as the field is becoming more diverse (altough only slowly). I think it is very important to challenge this stereotype of the white male nerd.

Another perceptual aspect is the perception of ones technological knowledge and ability to learn about it. This is where your own mindset is standing in the way. (and I have to say this happens to me as well) I get the feeling that a lot of times when people stumble upon technological concepts the immediate reaction is to stop because they do not believe they will ever be able to grasp technology so why even try.

Now at this point I just want to make it very clear: \textbf{Computers are stupid! They only understand very simple commands so everything can be broken down into very basic chains of commands. Furthermore you really do not have to know all the ins and outs of how everything works, nobody does. The elegant thing about computers is the amount of abstraction there is. Most of the time it suffices if you know the high level things your computer is doing and you can ignore the whole binary calculations stuff in the background.

So learning about a new concept does not have to be this huge scary commitment where you will have to go over all the basics. It is alright if you do not understand everything immediately. But a top level understanding can be already very powerful.

Information overload

Trying to understand something tech related will almost certainly lead you to have to google 10 other things which in turn will lead you into a never ending cycle of googling.

What might help here is that you actually do not have to understand everything right away. It is already helpful to know which concepts are related to each other without knowing how they work.

Another thing is to have a basic understanding of a lot of different concepts so when you stumble upon them you do not get confused too easily.

Important is to be able to abstract what is important to you at the moment.

Ecosystems

One important concept to be aware of are ecosystems. An ecosystem

Big companies have a big interest in getting universities to use their software. If you use it during your education you will probably use it afterwards as well. Beware of that and challenge this notion. Instead of Matlab use Python and Instead of Photoshop use Gimp etc. Try to get your professor to use freely available software instead of expensive fancy software. link

Cybersecurity for dumdums

There is a lot of misinformation about cybersecurity floating around so this is - to the best of my knowledge - How you can be reasonably safe online:

Shady links

Contrary to popular believe clicking on shady links - for example the one you got from that sexy girl on instagram telling you she is lonely - will most likely not be able to infect your device. Nowadays browsers are very secure in this regard. However these sites will try to trick a human user to either download malicious software or hand them their login.

One special case is if you got the link via email clicking it might notify the spammer that your email exists and there is a user clicking on spam links so you might receive more spam.

But just as a general recommendation you should probably use a private browser window and have ad blocker enabled if you choose to open such a link.

Email Spoofing

Emails are very much not secure and never have been. If you are not actively encrypting your mails consider them not safe. So no buying drugs over email! You can use PGP to encrypt mail if you really need to use it.

The most important thing you should know about mail security is that anybody can make mails seem like they come from any mail they want. This is called email spoofing. So be wary of weird emails coming from seemingly normal people with possible malware.

Contrary to links opening attachements can carry harmful software. So generally don't open them and for sure do not install anything you got via email unless you really know what it is about.

Do I need a VPN?

A VPN will just route your internet through a private network. Websites will think your requests are comming from somewhere else and not reveal your location.

This can be useful if you want to torrent movies and avoid lawfirms finding out where you live and sending you a legal notice. (However the likelihood of getting one in switzerland is very small and you probably could just ignore it)

A lot of VPNs also allow you to get around geo blocking and unlock online content which is not available in your country such as american or UK netflix. Some streaming platforms might detect your VPN and will not work until you disable the VPN. So make sure to google beforehand if a VPN provider works with the streaming platforms of your choice.

However a VPN probably will not make your browsing safer. Most of the internet is already encrypted (You can easily check if your connection is encrypted by reading the url. If it starts with https:// you're encrypted with http:// you are not DO NOT ENTER ANY SENSITIVE DATA such as logins.)

Another promise VPNs will sell you is increased anonymity and improved privacy. Now this is kind of true. You connect to this private network basically masking your internet traffic. This way your internet provider does not know what sites you are going to and the website does not know where the traffic it is sending is actually going. (Be aware of course if you log in to facebook with your real name they will still be able to identify you.)

The big issue here is that now the VPN provider will have your browsing data. (just the sites you visit not what you actually do on there) So you are not totally anonymous.

Antivirus

If you're using windows it is advisable to have a antivirus software. There are a lot of different options to choose from. You might already have one on your device preinstalled, most likely McAffee. First uninstall that crap. Nobody uses that shit. Now do not pay for any antivirus. There are enough free options available. I recommend using avira Free antivirus or Kaspersky Cloud. Ensure that you only have one antivirus on your system to not slow it down unnecessarily.

If you use linux you can skip this. Linux is already quite safe and does not really require an antivirus.

Phishing (sometimes using spears)

Phishing is a type of social engineering where an attacker sends a fraudulent (e.g., spoofed, fake, or otherwise deceptive) message designed to trick a human victim into revealing sensitive information to the attacker or to deploy malicious software on the victim's infrastructure like ransomware. link

This might take the form of a mail seemingly coming from google about your gmail account, urging you to take action and providing you with a link to login. This link then takes you to the hackers website which might look just like the google login page and ask you for your login credentials. If you login there the hacker will have your account.

Phishing can be very hard to spot sometimes. Always check the url if you suspect a phishing attempt is happening. If the url is not what it should be it is a scam. Also be careful, sometimes the url looks almost like the real url using similar characters to make it look like it is the same. For example instead of m there might be a rn or I instead of l.

Now the one type of phishing you probably will fall for is the so called spear phishing. This is the type of phishing where a hacker leverages personal information they know about you. If done right they can get you to reveal information about your login credentials, maybe they then can guess your password or answer the security questions to reset your password.

They will hack you... If they want to

The sad reality of hacking is that if a professional hacker wants to hack you, they will. Luckily most of you are probably not worth the time though.

The reality about hacking is that they are usually not targeted at individual people. It is mostly automated scripts which will search the internet for vulnerabilities to exploit. So people with bad security measures such as easy to guess passwords will be affected by that. With reasonable security you will be just fine.

The most probable way for you to be affected

In our current internet environment the most lucrative target for hackers are companies and website providers. The hackers can then get their hands on personal data including yours. They might be able to recover your password as well and get access to your accounts which use the same login credentials. https://haveibeenpwned.com/ To check if your data has been leaked you can go over to haveIbeenPwned and type in your email account. If your account has been pawned I strongly suggest changing passwords on all accounts linked to this mail.

Interesting side note: Google and any serious tech company will not know your password. The password is stored in an encrypted state and cannot be retrieved. It exploits so called hash functions which are easy to compute in one way but impossible to compute backwards.

Passwords

Do not use the same password for all your accounts. Have at least 2 different passwords. One for important things (only used on trustworthy sites) and one password for all your non important random accounts you have to create to use a website. Also use 2 different mail accounts to avoid having too much spam.

Use a password manager such as Keepass which also allows you to generate new secure passwords. You can safe your passwords as an encrypted file on a cloud storage of your choice.

Two Factor Authentication

This means to log in to your account you will need a second way of authenticating yourself. This is mostly done via your phone. After you type in your password you will have to look up a code on your phone or email. This gives you a second layer of security and I recommend you use it on your important accounts. Make sure you safe your backup codes somewhere safe to be able to get into your account in case you loose your second authentication method.

Backup your important stuff

A common type of malware is the so called ransomware. These malicious pieces of software will encrypt your personal data and then ask you to pay bitcoins to the attackers. If you do not pay them you will not be able to access your data. The best way to defend yourself from that is to backup your important data and keep them somewhere not connected to the internet. Best practices would be to keep at least 3 copies of your data one on an external harddrive, one on your computer and one on a cloud storage. You will only need to backup your personal data not the programs you are using since these are easily downloaded and installed again.

Keep your PC Clean Buckoo

You can probably skip this if you have Linux.

Easiest way to clean your PC is installing Linux.

If you still want to use windows keep reading.

OS

OS stands for operating system and is the software that makes your pc usable to you. The most popular ones being Windows, MacOS and Linux. All of those offer different versions. Windows and MacOS are pretty straight forward because you will probably just get the newest version of them with your new pc.

Linux on the other hand is a bit different. Since linux is part of the open source initiative, everybody has access to the source code and therefor is able to create their own version of linux. So there are a lot of different distributions of linux all having their own pros and cons. This can be very overwhelming for people trying to get into linux. So if you do not want to google around and try to figure out which linux distribution will suite you best just use either Ubuntu or Linux mint. They both are pretty similar to windows so the change should not be too hard. Also they are pretty stable and have a big community where you can find help if you run into problems.

Installing it is also quite easy. Just follow this guide: link

Startup

Turning on your computer will automatically start some programs. To make your pc faster you can therefor disable all processes from starting in the beginning. This will not break anything dont worry. Just go to the Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc) and navigate to the start up tab and disable the programs one by one by left click and disable.

Uninstall bloat programs

There will be a lot of preinstalled programs on your windows system by windows itself and the computer manufacterer (Asus, Acer etc) most of them are huge garbage and should be thrown out because they just use resources.

You can uninstall these programs in the settings somewhere (just google if you don't find it)

Make sure on only have one antivirus installed

Do not install hardware driver such as Realtek HQ Audio thingies and touchpad utilities. If you accidentally do that anyways don't worry, just google " 'your laptops name' 'the hardware in question' driver download".

General Recommendations

This section covers general tips of how to use your computer effectively.

Browser

I would recommend you use either Firefox or Brave as your browser of choice. They are the best choice privacy wise.

I also recommend to install the following extensions (for Firefox):

Also use Startpage instead of google to search the web. It will give you the same results as google but not track you. Also available as an extension.

Software

Nowadays there is an abundance of software available and it can be quite overwhelming to figure out which one you should get. Generally I recommend you should not spend money on software you rely on unless you need a very specific functionality you cannot get otherwise or you feel like it is really worth the investment.

I encourage you to go and search for a free alternative the keyword you want to look for here is \textbf{Open Source.

Software as a service

One of the most egregious development in the software space has been the switch to a subscription model for software. Most notably here are Adobe's Creativity Suite and Microsoft Office 365. Where you do not actually software anymore, you just own the licence to use it. This makes me furious for a couple of reasons:

So boycott this shit and go to free open source software instead or pirate the thing.

Open Source

Open Source refers to programs which are freely accessible to the general public. This is not the same as freeware which refers to programs which you can download and install for free. Open source also means that you get free access to the source code and can modify, copy and use it in your own projects as you like.

This is very important for a couple of reasons. It ensures that you can actually verify that a program does not do anything evil in the background. Even if you do not understand code, you can be sure that people will find out about any bad parts in these programs. So generally open source projects are more trustworthy then closed source projects.

The openness of the projects also allows for people to customize the software and make their own version of it.

Some notable Open Source Projects are:

These Programs sometimes lack the user friendliness of paid software but this has been changing in recent years so I really encourage you to check them out I will list some Open Source alternatives to popular software down below.

Licencing

Torrent

Torrent is a popular peer to peer file sharing system. Instead of downloading a file from a single server (how it works on the net usually), a torrent client allows you to connect to multiple peers (other people who are currently downloading the same thing or providing the downloaded file) and get the data directly from them putting together the full file piece by piece. This usually leads to higher download rates if there are enough people using the torrent.

Contrary to popular believe torrents are not always illegal. Torrents are also used to share content which does not infringe on copyright etc. It is a handy way of distributing your content since other people will host the files for you.

That said most people probably use torrent to download movies for free.

In any case I am not gonna condone or endorse any illegal behaviour. The reader is responsible for his or her own actions.

So if you decide to use torrent you will need a torrent client. This is a program that allows you to open magnet links (links that connect you to the people sharing the content). A popular client is $\mu$torrent but I strongly advice against using it because it had some controversies surrounding it. link

Instead use qBittorrent which is my torrent client of choice.

After downloading something over torrent you will be automatically provide the content to other users. This is called seeding and it is what keeps torrent alive. So if you stop seeding after you download something you are a so called leecher.

If you seed copyrighted material you are infringe on somebodies copyright. This means you can get a legal notice if the copyright holder decides to take legal action. This can already happen if you only want to download something, because torrents start uploading the content while still downloading.

Note for pirates: A VPN can make it harder for lawyers to fine you.

Hardware

Computers

Cables

Cheap Chinese Electronics

Current Technologies

Machine Learning

According to google trends, the interest in machine learning peaked 3 years ago and has steadily declined ever since. So what actually happened with this and where is this technology going?

Well in it's core machine learning is just a fancy probability distribution approximator. Now this basically means it just tries to correlate it's inputs with given outputs and find the parameters in between to fit those two. If you ever worked with statistics and have used a curve fitting algorithm, this is doing a similar thing but usually on very high dimensional inputs (in the case of pictures this can be in the millions)

The theoretical framework for this has existed for about 60 years already but only now we actually got to the point where we have enough computing power to do scale these models to do more complex tasks.

Now these models can be trained to do a lot of impressive things (will list some below) but even our most sophisticated models are still not even getting close to human intelligence.

Don't get me wrong you can train a neural network to surpass a human in a specific task but we are still not able to train a model to be able to solve such a wide variety of tasks like a human.

Now even though the hype around AI seems to have settled a bit, machine learning is slowly overtaking a lot of the heavy lifting in the backbone of the tech world. This means that even though you do not interact directly with AI it will be doing a lot of work behind to scene to improve services, improve models (like weather prediction etc), accelerate research and so on.

You will probably see AI powered tools in a variety of software which you will be able to use. Actually there is already a lot of AI tools to play with. It will take a bit of time to set up but if you are interested you can take a look at them:

So if these algorithms are so powerful why don't we see them everywhere? As mentioned before they actually are more widespread than you see. They work mostly in the background serving you personalized ads, adjusting prices of your flights and figuring out who you are and if you plan on blowing up an airport in the future. If you apply to a big company these programs might even check if you are a candidate for an interview.

That said, there are a lot of issues concerning those intelligent algorithms. I will try to outline a bunch here:

Stability

Legal implications

Who is responsible for an AI's malfunction. If your self driving car hits a person who will be responsible? Accidents will happen and even though these technologies will probably be safer than when humans are in charge. The question of accountability is an important one and should be always considered by lawmakers when it comes to new technologies.

Ethical considerations

AI has the capability to fundamentally change the amount of human labour needed. This might be comparable to the industrial revolution, where machines took over many jobs and made a lot of peoples labour obsolete.

The most likely scenario is that the owners of these algorithms will be the ones hording all the revenue generated by them. Essentially increasing the disparities between the rich and poor.