3 Apr 2017

3rd April 2017 Distance exercising on The Internet of Things.

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Monday 3rd 37-50F, 3-10C, bright, calm and clear with an overnight frost [or heavy dew] on the grass. The BBC announces that 20 billion Britons are not getting enough exercise to remain healthy. That's not only statistically significant but sounds downright deliberate to me. Luckily I am doing enough for several of them so that's a dent in the right direction. I just hope they are grateful! All remote sweat donations to charity, please.

Right, I'm off to harass the birds again. The first anticlockwise loop through the forest in quite a while and back by the other way.  I started with a gorgeous plover gyrating madly around the sky in its black and white plumage. Fortunately it quickly became tired of its gymnastics and settled on the roughly ploughed prairie at a safe distance to watch my progress. A deer was grazing at a distance too but too far away to capture with my camera. Unless you like pictures of fuzzy, dark blobs in grassy meadows?

The forest is showing signs of pink fluffiness from afar as this year's fresh leaf buds appear. Later on, a pair of hares dashed through the growing crops towards the marsh. It must be standing room only in there what with all the wildlife concealing itself in the daytime. If the farmers don't send the lawnmowers out soon the straggly grass will get away from them! It will end up looking like a council estate. Meanwhile assorted skylarks rose at intervals to practice their songs. Just a short ride today. 7 miles in bright sunshine. My upper chest pains continuing unabated. The Chief Medical Officer refused "excused [MTB] boots" due to a poverty of organic milk.

Tuesday 4th 33-53F, 1-12C, white frost but bright and clear with hardly any wind again. I was out on the lawn until 11pm last night [in another life] and can personally confirm it was chilly. My recent rants on speeding and security cameras seem to have stirred up a hornet's nest. It seems that people's private security cameras are streaming their private lives and that of their children online without their knowledge. The problem, apart from the online perverts and voyeurs, of course, is the lack of password protection. Now the most basic logic [duh?] suggests that NO system should be allowed to be connected too "t'Internet of things" without a password.

But that would assume that laziness, greed and perversion do not exist. The manufacturer's are in a far off land and unlikely be persuaded to have a password system which demands some simple change before connection is even possible. I'm not talking about a password which people don't know they need to change. But a password system which, by default, MUST be changed from the protective default before the camera, fridge or toaster will function.®

An internal random number generator makes sense. With enough digits and letters to make the pervert's work very much harder. Perhaps the answer is a complete import ban on anything which avoids such obvious protection? If your smart toaster starts getting spam from its sales outlet don't come running to me in tears because some pervert, business or thief, finds you, or your children's private lives, rather more interesting than you do.

Why does the smart device owner even need to know the 'rolling' password? The smart device can go on producing random numbers and letters every half hour, or five minutes or seconds, for all it matters to the owner.® If that makes the NSA's life more difficult then boo sucks! Or whatever the expression is in the pervert nerd's professional circles these days. Who's watching the watchers? Saint Edward?

Just a short walk to see several hares lolloping about on distant fields. The breeze is building slowly. Rest day. Not for the farmers though. First day of stinking pig's muck spreading above 6.5 on the Richter scale for this year. Cue repeated choruses of: "Takes my breath aw-ay." Why is it that I may not walk on their land but they have complete freedom to pollute and trespass in my home and garden. Spreading their cocktails of deadly toxins and a foul stench, at will? Farming is not a public service. It is private enterprise with the sometimes grandiose intention of making a profit. Are they not subject to the same pollution rules as factories? Much of their activity is factory farming. Factories do not usually get fat, taxpayer subsidies to mass produce antibiotic-resistant bacteria for public consumption.

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