Amazon | Faith & Tech

Chapter 1

Big Tech Goes to Washington

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/11/antitrust-legislation-curbs-silicon-valley/

So are Big Tech companies like the monopolies of old? The House is looking at five different bills in hopes of regulating Tech companies.

These bills while not naming specific tech companies would attempt to enact several requirements:

A company can’t recommend their products above their competitors. Example: Google couldn’t on purposely suggest their Google Cloud storage over say Dropbox or another cloud storage competitor. Or Amazon suggesting their Amazon Basics brand batteries over Duracell. Also Apple would not be able to force developers to use their App store. It would also potentially force Microsoft to allow other options besides Teams be tied into the Office platform so Zoom or Slack could have one click options inside of Office
They could set the bar higher on mergers. Meaning if Google wanted to buy say Twitter, Google would have to offer a lot more evidence that buying Twitter wouldn’t harm consumers.
It would allow people to download and delete their data so they can do whatever they want. You can already download your content and even delete it but are you really deleted?
It may also mean that Facebook and What’sApp have to break out, Google and YouTube, and Amazon’s store and their Cloud Services.

All of these things have positives and negatives but would majorly disrupt our Internet lives. Are these tech companies too big? Yes but they also provide a lot of benefits.

The winner in all of this, my vote, The Lobbyists. Tech Companies during the 2020 Election spent $124 million in lobbying and campaign contributions. Tech companies spent more than oil companies ( a group that has been the biggest spenders in the past). Last year Facebook and Amazon were the biggest spenders.

Chapter 2

The Big Resignation

https://www.axios.com/resignations-companies-e279fcfc-c8e7-4955-8a9b-47562490ee55.html

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/remote-workers-burnout-covid-microsoft-survey/

Surveys are claiming between 25 and 40% of workers say they will quit their current jobs if their current employers require them to return to the office full time. While a survey is well a survey and it shows perhaps what people hope or wish for, do you think people will really leave their jobs if it requires them to return to work? You would think people trapped at home for the last year would be tired of seeing their loved ones day in and day out but it has a lot of people thinking about work-life balance which until the pandemic sent a lot of us home we didn’t know it was a real thing. In fact we thought it was as rare as a Bigfoot sighting. So what do you think? If you were lucky or unlucky enough to be able to work from home, do you want to stay there? What about those folks who had to go into work day in and day out because there wasn’t any other choice, work, get paid, feed your family. Some companies are looking at this as a win-win (I love those business phrases like that) as they shrink their office spaces and sell open space for top dollar in this overheated real estate market. And folks are finding they don’t have to stay in the same old city to work if they can work remote. I know a guy who is living in Germany because the job can be done from practically anywhere. But it also means employers can find job candidates who are just about anywhere so you don’t even have to be geographically close to apply for a job.

Chapter 3

Choose your own adventure

Do you want to hear about Twitter’s subscription service or Microsoft Windows 10 Support going away?

Twitter Blue subscription service coming soon

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/03/twitter-blue-paid-subscription-service-launches-with-special-features.html

So for approximately $3.99 a month you will be able to subscribe to Twitter Blue. It will let you Undo a Tweet. Wow, we could have used that during the last presidency, manage Bookmarked content, and change your Twitter icon. Plus you will get some support from Twitter’s support team.

Microsoft has announced in 2025 they will no longer support Windows 10.

https://beebom.com/windows-10-sun-valley-21h2-update/

Why? Because Windows 11 is coming soon okay, since you are my friends I can tell you. It comes out October 2021. June 24 Microsoft will officially announce Windows 11 (which is technically Windows 10 21H2 but who’s counting) also aka Windows Sunvalley as opposed to Stardew Valley. The next version the interface gets rounded corners (actually just go look at MacOS Big Sur and well a lot of what Apple already does Microsoft is playing catch up with). Also we will get a floating start menu because well, why not. And it gets easier to reach settings from the tray for Sound and Network so you don’t have to fiddle around so much. All good things right?

That is this week’s show. If you would please Like and Subscribe. Hit that bell so you will know when I am causing trouble online.

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Chapter 1

Internet Assistance Program aka Emergency Broadband Benefit,

Did you experience financial difficulties last year during covid such as unemployment or furloughs? Or maybe your children qualify for free or reduced lunch? If you live in the United States, there is a government program to give you Internet fees assistance of up to $50 a month. So say you qualify and you have lower speed Internet, this is a chance to upgrade to a higher speed plan perhaps? Or maybe you are struggling and you just need help to maintain the Internet you have. I will have a link in the show notes. You should go and see if you qualify. This program won’t last forever so the biggest downside is if you upgrade your Internet you may have to downgrade to a more affordable plan when the program stops. In the meantime many states are trying their best to lobby and create plans to help rural areas who do not have what the FCC classifies as broadband which is 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload. Hopefully we will eventually treat the Internet as a necessity since so many of us use it for everything we do.

Chapter 2

How many times have you said to yourself? Hey Self, would you like to share your Internet with your neighbors? NO! You don’t want to do that. Your neighbor may be into stuff you aren’t into. Amazon announced several months back that “Sidewalk” their connectivity feature for helping their Alexa and other smart devices connect more quickly to the Internet would be turned on by default on all of their devices. They have also partnered with Tile, the Bluetooth device for helping find things that is shaking in their boots thanks to Apple’s AirTags (which feels like a blatant rip off of Tile’s technology). So Tile and Amazon have partnered to compete with AirTags. But what does this mean? Well basically Sidewalk will slice out a small portion of your Internet bandwidth to dedicate to traffic between Amazon smart devices, roughly 80k per second. So if you have 1.5 meg internet, that might hurt some but if you have 25 meg or more (the FCC’s definition of broadband) you may not even notice or miss it. And Amazon says the traffic will be encrypted and your privacy will be protected. Of course, this is from the same company whose Alexa devices seem to go off randomly and think a lot of what I say must be its key word. If you are paranoid and you have the Alexa app on a smart device, you can turn off Sidewalk. But the potential is eventually IoT (Internet of Things) devices may use this approach to talk rather than having to use Zigbee and other proprietary methods of communication or instead of using your Wifi in a not all that secure manner. So it could be a good thing or a bad thing. Time will tell. If you aren’t paranoid enough to NOT have Alexa devices but you are paranoid enough to be worried, you can opt out of Sidewalk inside the Alexa app by going to Settings, Account Settings, Sidewalk and toggle “Enabled” to Disabled.

Chapter 3

Google learns we may want privacy? Oh, and better protection.

So I mentioned features of Google’s Password Manager in Chrome browser as mentioned during Google I/O. Well, we didn’t talk about it but Google is making TSA aka Two Step Authentication the default going forward and will eventually convince you to turn it on. I highly recommend it. While it is not bulletproof, having to have both the password to your account and then having a code texted to you or using Google Authenticator means it will be extra challenging for hackers to get into your gmail and other Google products. And you will have greater control over your privacy. You can password protect your search history in your browser. That’s right. So you can prevent others from seeing your search history in Google accounts. You will also get more options to delete past history in Chrome. Say, you want your history deleted after three months. Bam, you can easily set it. What it to expire in 24 hours? Sure. Want to protect via a password where you surf on the Internet? You can.

How to tell Google to delete your history automatically

Watch the Live version of this on YouTube. Be sure to Like and Subscribe if you drop by. https://youtu.be/J0LRV3FdHUc

Faith & Tech

Sometimes about Technology Sometimes about Faith

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Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

S3E12: How to apply for Internet Assistance program | Amazon Sidewalk | and Google Privacy?

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3