General computing update - week 34, 2020.

 Since writing early July about about the need to replace the disks in mainpc I have finally progressed towards this stage by purchasing the first of two disks. As noted in the earlier post, this was prompted by an I/O failure of one of the disks that resulted in it dropping out of the RAID array. However I was eventually able to add it back into the array and it has worked properly ever since. The first disk has been added to the existing array which is currently a three disk mirror. As soon as mdadm has synced this disk completely, I can then remove one of the existing disks off the array and then take it out of the computer, as I need backup disks right now. As noted at previous article the disk array will be the same size as current. I am expecting to buy the second disk in about another month and install it in the same way so that when it is also installed, the old disks can be removed completely, and all without actually copying any files. Last time when I did an installation I manually copied the files, but that was mainly because I doubled the disks from 1 TB to 2 TB; this time I will be staying at 2 TB.

Another techical task I have been working on around the house is erecting a TV aerial on the outside of the house. This has meant installing a cable duct and two faceplates between the inside wall and the underside of the soffit to take the aerial cable. That was the hard part as running the cable through the duct was very simple as was putting the aerial itself up. The TV itself is wall mounted and the cable comes through directly behind it. As I am in a prime reception area, the aerial does not need actual line of sight to the transmitter – there is actually another house in the direct line, but the signal is so strong that there is enough signal to get a good picture on every channel.

A few weeks ago I had some problems with a new package-based version of Qgis that would crash every time I tried to run it, on more than one computer. I had to install a flatpak-based version of Qgis, although I could have also run it in a virtual machine. The project developers built a new release after several weeks and it started working again, as did the next edition. Due to the disruption, I have implemented an extra precaution of testing every new release on a VM before installing it onto a working computer.

Google has again heaped glory all over themselves by implementing an arbitrary and dictatorial change to the Youtube platform. As of last week, they stopped making it possible for Youtube to send out notification emails whenever a new video is uploaded or streamed onto a channel. This has left a lot of people, including me, very annoyed by the decision. It is similar to the nonsense of the new Blogger user interface that is badly broken and which has forced me to copy and paste all my posts from another editor like LibreOffice. As I am doing right now with this post. Contrast that with the approach taken by Wordpress.com with a new editor system introduced a few months back; it was pushed through, but they did a lot of consultation with their users. In this case, Google has just announced the changes, but if there are any issues, it’s a one way conversation filing a problem report, just like the way you cannot actually have a conversation with Facebook about bugs or problems on their platform most of the time.

Google Photos: The free photo service's automatic deduplication creates challenges

Yeah, we all know what Google Photos is. Another cloud based service from Google, and one that other cloud providers like Flickr find it difficult to compete with. I was quite keen on Flickr, but they have their own issues, like that people outside the US have no rights under the DMCA, anyone can send a takedown request for a photo and they will just delete the photo without notifying the account holder at all.

I don't think Google is better but they have marketed their service. It has far fewer options than Flickr, which actually had a very good user interface for the people who owned the photos and were publishing them online. One feature that Flickr lacks is automatic deduplication, like when you upload the same photo multiple times.

It turns out that Google Photos has automatic deduplication built in, which is actually a problem when you can't turn it off. There will be times when you want it on, and times when you don't. The biggest problem with it not being able to be selected off is that when you upload a newer version of a photo, the old one won't be deleted. Instead, Google Photos links to the old one. But that means if the old one gets deleted, it will also be deleted in the new photo album as well, or maybe Google will preserve the new link. But the problem is, replacing an older photo with a newer version is potentially problematic. Flickr makes it really easy to do this, but on Google Photos you have to track where the older photo is, and then delete it, before inserting the new one. This also causes the old photo to disappear from every photo album it appears in, and its replacement won't automatically be put into those albums either. So given that in most map sets there are three different albums - separate ones for diagrams and aerials, and a combined one - the map will have to be taken out of two albums simultaneously and then manually added to both of them

I discovered this when I started to create newer versions of maps online, and the information being changed in them is the filename and the file modification time. Google only works on the photographic data being compared, not the filename or modification time. So that meant that the sort order in the photo album was being dictated by the older copies of maps, not newer ones. So I have to delete older copies of maps out of albums in order to be able to use my local script that sequences file modification times to match filename sequences so that I can remove some of the older maps to insert extra ones, which has happened more than once when creating map sequences. I renumbered some of the existing maps to put more into the sequence than existed when it was first created, so the filenames changed and so did their modification times when a script was run across them.

Of course, there would be no need to run these scripts if Google actually offered more sorting options than by file time, which is the only option provided for in the user interface. That is in fact part of the whole reason why maps are named with a three digit number - because many sorting algorithms that are pure ASCII based rather than numeric (natural sort) cannot do a proper name sort. But you can't do any kind of filename based sorting in Google Photos.

OverGrive seems to work again...for now.

OverGrive is a Google Drive client for Linux. It has been around for several years. I used (and licensed) an earlier version of the product, which I was forced to stop using last year because it stopped working (this quite often happens when Google updates their API to a new version which requires software changes). At that point with no apparent communication or updates from the developer, I switched to the free "grive" package, which however is command line only and lacks the GUI configuration interface, system tray icon and other features of OverGrive. However that also stopped working earlier this year, probably for similar reasons.

It so happened I was reading a Linux website today and saw an article on Tech Republic showcasing OverGrive, so I decided to try reinstalling it, and was surprised to find that it works. The version listed on their website is still the same version as I had installed before. It seems to work OK on Buster despite this (the free grive package had to have specific versions for each release of Ubuntu, which was a trial and error installation onto Debian because of course, Ubuntu uses a different release schedule).

I currently have two licenses for two different versions, on two different computers. One of these is for the NZ Rail Maps project and provides for a daily backup of the core project files and layers. It doesn't, of course, include all the aerial photo layers which would not fit into a 15 GB Google Drive cloud storage space. However at present these layers are stored on two different computers as well as being backed up on removable disk.

So with very minimal documentation on OverGrive it's hard to understand why it stopped working on my computer and whether there really has been an update to it. The homepage still links to the highly out of date GitHub and Launchpad repositories, without any explanation of why these areas have not been updated for several years. If this outfit actually still maintains their product and take an active interest in it, they haven't exactly made it obvious.

Tech giants need to be reigned in before they start ruling our lives

As if there wasn't enough bad PR already over Google and Facebook, here's an article about how some guy got a lifetime ban from AirBnB. He gets no right of appeal or anything. They do not have to explain or account to him or anything that would be considered fair (maybe he has recourse in the courts, or maybe not).

https://medium.com/@jacksoncunningham/digital-exile-how-i-got-banned-for-life-from-airbnb-615434c6eeba

Privacy concerns about Big Data well-founded

Since I wrote about escaping from Google's walled garden on my Android phone, I have made some effort to further implement this on my desktops as well. Geoffrey A Fowler is a columnist in the Washington Post and he has written a number of articles about these privacy concerns about Google's vast data mining efforts that they are making across a range of platforms. These columns have been carried on Stuff's website and the most recent one, just last week, took a hard look at the Chrome browser.

From my perspective, it's simple: I ditched the Chrome browser after I switched to Linux. It wasn't something I thought about immediately; Chrome is produced for the most common Linux platforms (Debian-based distros in particular) and I actually did use it for a time, but eventually I switched to Firefox, mostly at that time because of Mozilla's reputation for openness and privacy. The Mozilla platform has inspired a much larger community effort in the development of extensions, which offer much more customisation of the browser, and I've long been a fan of Firefox and Thunderbird in particular, although the latter is now developed by an independent community. Generally I have chosen to use Firefox Developer Edition and on each computer that I run it on, it is installed into my user profile (as is Thunderbird), which saves another step when reinstalling Linux.  It took a while before I felt that Firefox was good enough for me to replace Chrome completely but after a couple of false starts, I have stayed with Firefox and haven't looked back. It's only on the R-Pi that I have Chromium because they don't build Firefox for their platform. I hadn't actually thought much about privacy until quite recently, or that the Chrome browser itself could be spying on me, but it makes sense that this is probably what Google is using Chrome for.

Since then, more recently having become aware of Google's practices and having switched my phone off standard Android (especially since it's a Google phone), I have switched to a different search engine in my browser (not Google). DuckDuckGo is an example that I have tested which is nearly as good as Google. I don't know if their reputation is any good. There are others, so I am not sure which is the best choice at the moment, but the issue is that most of them are commercial operations that have to have some interest in what you are putting through their sites and possibly still collecting data in some shape or form. It's interesting that some people claim Apple iOS is a better more private phone / handheld platform. Whilst Apple does take privacy more seriously than Google, they are still a business and there is still plenty of data mining happening on Apple devices. The key issue is that people should be able to completely opt out of having their data mined on any platform, and whilst Apple does give people more options, it's still hard for anyone to really have a free choice and full knowledge to be able to stop this happening on iOS.

The next step after a better browser is to start limiting web site tracking that a lot of sites do. For example Facebook and Google and a lot of other companies have web site trackers that tell them when you access certain sites. Firefox now comes with tracking protection built in, and I recently have set it to the strongest settings, and have noticed almost no impact on what I can do in Firefox. Secondly you may want to look at an ad blocker; I chose to use Adblock Plus. The issue is not that ads are annoying or intrusive, but that they are another way to gather tracking data about the sites you are visiting. There are a small number of sites I've experienced that block you from accessing content because you are using an ad blocker; with a scripting extension that I haven't yet tested, it is possible to block sites from detecting the ad blocker, but the number of sites that work this way is actually quite small (IIRC the Washington Post is one of the few).

Another useful idea is deleting cookies from a site when you close the site. Some news sites use cookies to limit the number of free articles you can view before they start blocking you. The technically astute can always configure the browser (perhaps with an extension) to delete the cookies when you close the site, and stop this particular level of tracking.

Firefox also has Facebook Containers and Multi Account Containers, which are extensions that you can use to manage the ability of different tabs in a browser session to access data from other tabs. Essentially these extensions group together either all Facebook tabs, or other tabs that you choose, into containers that don't have access to the data in other containers. Mostly I have found it useful to be able to log into multiple different Google sessions in the same browser. However for most of the time it is more useful to use separate Firefox user profiles and have a desktop menu shortcut that starts Firefox with each particular user profile in order to access the multiple accounts each in its own browser window. The main point of Facebook containers is to limit Facebook's ability to access the data outside the container (i.e. all the other websites you use) which is another privacy management technique.

It's also very important that you don't use your Facebook or Google (or Wordpress or any other site) credentials to log in to another site, because that gives that site access to your Facebook or Google profile and some of the data in it. Likewise, some apps that you install in Facebook can create this problem. In both types of situations, sites or apps can gather data from Facebook/Google and can even post spam on your Facebook or Google profile.

To finish off here's a few articles from the Stuff site addressing some of these issues.

• https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/103165837/the-spotlights-on-facebook-but-google-is-also-in-the-privacy-hot-seat
• https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/113653726/new-technology-for-text-after-a-decade - a big concern if Google wants to take over from texting because they can collect every message. In no way should you be handing over your private communications to a data miner like Google.
• https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/103021108/facebook-not-the-only-company-using-kiwis-data - this one highlights some of the above, as well as things like loyalty schemes. The supermarkets using their OneCard or ClubCard etc are a big concern because these cards will enable them to record every single purchase you make and it can be linked online via the email address in your profile. Since these cards only give quite small and specific discounts on purchases there is not much to lose from shunning them.
• https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/apps/102929604/how-to-stop-haemorrhaging-data-on-facebook - it's a bit scary how much we use Facebook and potentially how much data they can collect on us. Since I changed my phone to remove social media apps, I've also had a policy of limiting the number of personal posts I make on my social media timelines. Most of the time I only use social media for interests like the various areas covered by the blogs I post and the church ministries I engage with. This does mean some data is being collected about me but it is limited to only specific areas and not all of my personal life.
• https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/102524553/firefox-maker-mozilla-to-stop-facebook-advertising-because-of-data-scandal
• https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/world/107355983/google-quietly-started-logging-people-into-chrome-without-their-consent - this is a pretty serious privacy intrusion, and one of the things Google can make happen with Chrome. On a Chromebook, you are always logged into the browser without being given the extra step that you used to get on the desktop edition. Another reason to avoid Google as much as possible - they are just not trustworthy.
• https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/09/23/why-im-leaving-chrome/ - this one is actually from the source, it's a data mining technology expert saying why he is ditching Chrome. Pretty much adds to the article I quoted at the top of this post.
• https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/world/113082499/while-youre-asleep-data-companies-probe-your-iphone - highlights the data collection happening on iOS by apps, and that Apple doesn't do all they could to stop it.
• https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/99505534/apple-is-sharing-your-face-with-apps-thats-a-new-privacy-worry - highlights that Apple is sharing FaceID data on your device with apps and the concerns this creates.
• https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/102619580/android-should-share-the-blame-with-facebook-for-tracking-calls-and-texts - highlights concerns about the amount of access Facebook has had to call and text data on the Android platform. Apparently, this has been blocked by an update to the Android API, but it basically highlights that a key problem on phone platforms is that apps have the ability to siphon a whole lot of data behind the user's back.
• https://qz.com/1131515/google-collects-android-users-locations-even-when-location-services-are-disabled/ - highlights how you can't even trust Google to respect user's choice of settings to try and stop data from being collected on them.
• https://www.infoworld.com/article/2993308/app-privacy-ios-vs-android.html - highlights how even in later versions of Android, users can still be limited in their ability to set permissions. One of the key issues I did find was trying to block apps like "Google" (the app that amongst other things forces you to use the voice recognition feature) and "Google Play Services" from having access to the phone's microphone - even if I had no desire to use these features, Google would try any way they could to stop me from turning those permissions off. The latest war on the one phone I have that still runs regular Android is getting Google to let me disable the Google app and uninstall the update that it forced onto my phone without asking permission - the much larger latest version of the app that turns on the Assistant and makes it very difficult to disable this feature. I would keep uninstalling the app and Google will keep reinstalling the newest version, making it impossible to trust Google is not going to keep forcing new data hoovering techniques onto my phone.
• https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-state-of-mobile-device-security-android-vs-ios/ - highlights some key differences between the two main mobile platforms, including Apple's much stronger use of encryption by default on their platform.
• https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/98173405/why-you-should-use-incognito-mode-when-browsing-online - highlights browser data tracking issues and suggests using incognito mode. Personally, I think that turning on the tracker protection measures in Firefox that I have mentioned up above is good enough to use the regular browsing mode. I haven't looked at deleting cookies - this is another idea that might be worth considering, but not for all sites.

Escaping Google's walled garden on handhelds [3]: Using Lineage OS - 1

So last time I wrote about the installation experience for Lineage, now it is time to have a look at early impressions of using it. Along the way I discovered some stuff about the Nexus 5X. It turns out that it was first shipped with Android and the final official release of Android for it was 8.1. Also that the last time Google sent a security update package for it was last December. So as far as Google is concerned they no longer feel a need to continue updating Android on this phone.

On the other hand the version of Lineage I was able to flash to it is 15.1 corresponding to Android 8.1 and they are currently working on a release called 16.0 which will be Android 9 so it is possible I could get a later version of Android for this phone that what Google is prepared to support, provided the developers are able to produce an Android 9 release for the "bullhead".

Although I am not using it as a full replacement for the Nexus running Google Android just yet, as I haven't yet switched back to using it as my day to day phone, initial impressions of Lineage are pretty good. It doesn't come with many apps of its own, but one can choose to install one's own from various sources. Of course you have to be sure the sources are reputable and are not going to contain spyware or malware or whatever. I was able to access a site called apkmirror to get first of all the Youversion Bible app and install that. I then didn't install any more apps for a while.

I am currently planning to install the F-Droid app to be able to access their app store (and possibly the Amazon app store as well, although I will be carefully considering that option since I want to steer clear of apps from big multinationals that could do unwanted things on the phone). For further security certain things that are built into Lineage will be activated and the app store apps will be disabled when they are not actually being used. In addition the phone will not be rooted as this is not really necessary as I only plan to use regular apps on it, not ones that need root permissions. All of these measures mean hopefully no security issues with apps from outside the Play Store. However there are many apps that use Google Play Services, and those simply will not run on Lineage.

At the same time I deliberately chose not to have social media apps on my phone and only one email account that is being checked regularly because I simply decided I don't need to have access to social media when away from home. This means apart from the phone and text messaging, the main thing the phone would be used for when not actually at home is reading my Bible or possibly listening to music (it depends on how well the battery lasts). Any time I was away from home for any period of time I can take my tablet with me and use all these apps on it but for regular day to day stuff I won't need any social media apps on my phone. Also I intend to use an Open Street Maps app instead of Google Maps.

So yes it is possible if one is willing to make a few sacrifices about what apps are really essential, to escape the "rat race" of having your phone taken over by gigantic multi national corporations to make enormous profits and just get back to the basics of the convenience of having a phone you can carry with you and which can perform a small number of additional functions.

One of the bonuses so far which is partly because Lineage gives control of the ability to run an app in the background is very much increased battery life. Although I haven't used my phone much in the last couple of days, it is currently 37 hours since the last charge and the battery capacity is 73% which is absolutely unheard of for this phone. If I used it I could expect it to go down a bit faster, but I am still going to get heaps more use out of the battery than I have before. So this phone will probably last a lot longer. Then I suppose I will have to work out what I can replace it with.

I am also planning to install the Android Studio app developer software and maybe some other F/OSS app developers to see what I can do with them, and whether I can develop an app to replace the Auto DND app that I use. But ultimately the replacement for a lot of apps is to use a web browser instead.

Escaping Google's walled garden on handhelds [2]: Installing Lineage OS

So after further investigation I decided Lineage OS would be the most straightforward means of getting my Nexus 5X off Google. This is quite a lengthy process that involves replacing the installed Google bloatware on the phone with the LineageOS installation images.

LineageOS provides guides, which are pretty good except that like me, you can get some steps wrong the first time. And of course the instructions differ depending on your version of Android.

The most important points found are as follows:

• When you install adb you will need to install the udev rules on Debian. Using the instructions for Ubuntu are what worked for me. But of course because Buster won't let us run all the commands in a bash shell, as usual we have to go out to a full screen terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F1) to do some of it, and then come back into KDE (Ctrl-Alt-F7) to finish things off.
• When you go into recovery mode, the Lineage instructions have missed out a step or two. The steps you need to follow to boot into recovery mode are
• Power off the Nexus
• Hold down Volume Down and Power to boot into recovery mode
• According to Lineage the next screen gives you "Recovery mode". This is not so. You actually have to press Volume Down button to get to Recovery Mode. By default it just comes up with "Start".
• Then you see a Android icon tipped on its side with a exclamation point hovering over it. 
• At that point you have to hold Power and then press and release Volume Up to get into recovery mode.
• The recovery environment install is tricky because if you don't reboot properly, it seems that Google will conveniently replace the TWRP recovery environment with its own (Android Recovery). How you know this has happened is if recovery comes up to TWRP it is a graphical touchscreen environment. But Android Recovery is all text based and using the volume up/down keys to select options and the listed options do not match the ones for TWRP at all.
• So you have to make sure you reboot properly to use TWRP to run the commands you need because Android Recovery will not let you flash anything into the system. So you can't use it to install.
• So after you have flashed TWRP into the system then reboot properly.
• On the recovery options DON'T CHOOSE REBOOT. Choose POWER OFF
• Once the Nexus is off then turn it on by pressing Volume Down and Power together.
• This will get you into TWRP with its graphical touchscreen and then you can get on with flashing Lineage and any other packages onto the phone.

I have chosen to flash only Lineage and the rooting package. I am no way absolutely never verboten from my cold dead hands etc NOT INSTALLING THE GOOGLE APPS PACKAGE. This means unfortunately not being able to use any app from the Play Store and anything that will rely on Google Play Services if from another source. However that is why I have other devices running regular Android but these devices are not a phone or do not have a cellular services SIM card installed or can be turned off when I am not using them thus preserving my privacy. 

After I had done the flashing I told TWRP to reboot the system. The most annoying thing at that stage was TWRP telling me that I had no OS installed and was I sure I wanted to reboot.  After rebooting you are going to see "Google" and then instead of the animated boot icon for regular Android you will see the Lineage one instead. Then there is a slightly scary moment when the whole screen is black and the system doesn't respond to pressing any buttons. Fortunately after a few more seconds your computer will pop up and tell you it recognises the Nexus (assuming the USB cable is still plugged in) and at that point checking the Nexus shows us that LineageOS boot screen has come up.

The setup steps are practically the same as for regular Android except you don't get asked to do any of the Google apps stuff but I was quite pleased to see it work with the fingerprint reader and allow me to enrol fingerprints just the same as before. After this it went into the home screen of Lineage and at that point was ready to go. I'll leave it there for this post and I am not going to do any more stuff on it right now, that will be covered in my next post after I have had plenty of time to play with Lineage and see what I can do with it. I will be using it initially with my tablet share SIM, which can make phone calls and send and receive texts but can't receive phone calls, until such a time as I might be ready to switch over to it becoming my regular phone again.

Escaping Google's walled garden on handhelds [1]: Intro

I've owned smartphones since 2012 when I was given one as part of a new employment role. It (HTC) was running Windows Phone 7. It was followed by a couple of Nokias running Windows Phone 8 (the later one since updated to 10) and then a low-end Motorola Moto E running Android 4. The next thing was a Samsung Galaxy J2 running Android 5 and a Galaxy Tab A 8" tablet also running 'Droid. My latest phone is a Nexus 5X which is currently on Android 8.

What has become particularly noticeable in handheld operating systems apart from Apple's (in a class of its own) in recent years is the extent to which vendors have sought to take ownership of the user's device and data. MS first did this with Windows 10 and went to extraordinary and obnoxious efforts to push users of older versions into upgrading to 10. 

Google has been sneaking upgrades into Android over the past few years, particularly in the "Google" app which in Android 5.1 has gone from 13 MB to 209 MB in size without any explanation or choice on the user's part as to the justification for installing this massive bloatware. But what we do know about Google's recent efforts is that voice recognition and the obnoxious Google assistant are now enabled by default with every new Android phone or upgrade and are very hard to disable. The assistant in particular is listening to everything that the microphone can pick up and transmitting it back to Google. In addition, it is becoming known that in Android 8, Google screen scrapes data from every app installed in the system, and that it tracks every location that the device travels to.

So we have entered an era where more than ever, operating system vendors are forcing updates onto systems to increase their ability to grab every possible piece of information they can collect on the device owners and transmit it back to the mothership so that it can be used to make increasingly bigger profits. And we are supposed to trust these gigantic multinational corporations that they have a benign intent and really are going to use our data to give us better products and services? LOL! 

So in much the same way as I have been through a journey of giving Windows the boot and installing open source software on my PCs, I am going to be doing the same sort of process with my handhelds. First of all, I will be switching my phone back to the Galaxy J2 with only a limited set of apps, and then the Nexus will be reinstalled with something else. At the moment, Lineage looks good, but I need to delve deeper into its architecture before making a final decision. The Galaxy Tab A will be left as is. If Lineage is what I want then it should be capable of becoming my day to day thing on the Nexus. Of course, it won't be running any of the Google apps or the Google Play Services. 

More to come...

Ubuntu Touch may step in where Firefox OS finished....maybe?

We certainly have a strong case for an alternative to Android because we should get a choice to be free of Google's massive data collection infrastructure that is tracking everything we do and everywhere we go with our phones. Revelations for example that Android 8 screen scrapes every app in the system are mind boggling. I have by choice switched my PCs to Firefox Aurora as the main browser and regular Firefox as a secondary, dropping Chrome for nearly everything, but I still use a lot of Google accounts on my computers. On the Android platform the scope is there for a much more universal collection of data by Google even as the European Union looks at more stringent penalties and regulations to force Google to cut back the scope of its data mining.

Ubuntu Touch is these days more of a community effort compared to when it was officially funded by Canonical. Firefox OS looked good for a while and it's a shame it was dropped. UT does look like it is gaining ground but of course is limited by the degree to which it can be adapted to a very large number of different hardware specifications. So far not many pieces of hardware are supported.

Or of course one can go back to the "dumb" or feature phone I guess....

OpenID sidelined for FB/Google identity lockin

OpenID is a great concept: to help you create a single identity that works across a range of Internet sites. However, it has been falling out of favour in the past few years because both Facebook and Google have provided their own replacements for it.  The reasons for these are supposedly for user convenience. However, the fact is that this convenience comes at a cost. It enables Facebook or Google to collect more information about you for their commercial purposes. It also has the downside that it gives information about you to the third party website, and in some cases a rogue site can use it to post to your social media account without your permission.

Facebook's site originally supported OpenID, but some time ago they replaced it with Facebook Connect, the API that allows you to sign in with Facebook credentials on third party sites. This is good for Facebook that they can drive people to get a Facebook account that they can also use to log into sites. However people have found they are giving too much information and in some cases security privileges to the sites that receive the oAuth token from Facebook.

I wrote this post when I learned that Blogger had dropped support for OpenID. I have never used OpenID for anything at all, but now there won't be much point in using it if all these sites are going to drop it.

The primary concern I have with using Facebook or Google credentials to log into a site is that it represents the same concerns about using a single username and password to log into a lot of sites. Most of the time this will not be an issue, but if there is a problem with your Facebook or Google login, you may find that your access to third party sites is restricted or blocked. 

My own experience is of inappropriate misuse of information released from a social media profile. I remember signing up to the Stuff website with my Facebook credentials. Nek minnit the Stuff website was using my Facebook profile photo and some other details that I didn't want appearing on comments. At that point I deleted the Stuff profile and created another one using a local login.

About the only good thing about using FB or Google credentials to log in is their security is very good and there is less likelihood of your username or password being stolen.

Why I hate the Google Nexus 5X

Well when I got this thing I thought it was going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, a Google Nexus phone, with stock standard Android, a lot of available updates from Google, great spec and performance etc. Great hardware, well made quality product. Such a shame about the software though.

Unfortunately over time I have grown to hate the Nexus 5X because of some glaring design bugs in the version of Android shipped with it that Google have failed to remedy. In a respect that is what you get dealing with the likes of Google, Apple. Microsoft and the other majors like Facebook these days. These companies are so big and powerful they can just trample all over their customers by ignoring complaints and failing to fix issues. Because of the experience I will never pay more than $400 for a phone ever again. As it happens this one was just over $400 but Google is screwing their customers big time by charging Iphone-like prices for it's replacement the Pixel. Well I could choose from the Nokia or Moto models this time, probably go for Moto because our family debacle over the reissued 3310 has convinced me Nokia is not much or any better than some of these other outfits. 

So here are my pet hates about the Nexus 5X and why (apart from the huge price) I do not believe anyone should buy a Pixel as I doubt Android will be any better on it, it's not going to be a different interface than on the Nexus. About the only good thing about the Nexus is getting the regular Android updates. But one day Google will stop sending them, or else the battery will go down, and then it's time to throw the thing away and buy a new one. And my guess is that will happen by the end of this year.

Here are my pet hates about the Nexus 5X:

1. The Do Not Disturb feature is extremely poorly designed as you have to click a Done button to save changes to the settings. If you forget to do this then the default is the timer doesn't click in to turn the phone back on after a certain time. So, because of a poorly designed user interface that is different from every other part of the phone (and from other Google products like Chrome) I have on many occasions accidentally left the phone on silent for days at a time without realising it.
2. there is no way (unlike my old Nokia dumbphones) that you can put in a catch all timer to turn off DND after a certain time frame, just in case you forget. I have a timer that puts on DND automatically at night so that only phone calls and alarms work. But if DND is already one, this doesn't turn it off at the end of the timer period, even though it would normally if the DND function was previously off.
3. On one occasion when the phone was set to total silence, an alarm went off on the clock and the phone sounded the alarm even though it was set to total silence.
4. Sometimes even when you use the fingerprint sensor the phone makes you put the pin number in.
5. If you restart the phone, when it comes back up, it will not start Android until you enter the Pin number. This is totally unlike every other phone I have ever had, where the phone comes back up to the lock screen. Again I have been caught out many times by this, not realising that Android had not started and therefore no calls or messages could be received.
6. There is no SD card slot, so you are stuck with the 32 GB of internal memory. I would rather use that for apps and have an SD card for music and pictures so I don't have to worry about using all the internal memory.
7. Even with the sophistication of Android there can be some app that for some reason is hogging all the CPU usage to 100% even when the thing is allegedly on standby in your pocket, and with it sucking your battery dry in a matter of hours, this has caused the phone to go dead without warning on occasions.
8. It uses a USB-C cable which means I had to buy extra cables and can't rely on being able to connect a regular charger or computer cable to it.
9. The battery drains very quickly if you are taking a lot of photos for example, there have been times I was using the camera to take photos of a whole lot of different things and the battery ran down really quickly so I had to switch to a separate camera.
10. There are next to no accessories available for it. Although admittedly that is true of nearly any phone that isn't an Iphone or a Galaxy S, and buying it from someone other than Vodafone doesn't help.
11. Contacts is a disaster, it keeps losing contacts especially new ones. I now expect to be doing a lot of contact editing in Gmail as I have many duplicates and old contacts as well as attempting to fix up this contact loss issue. It may be the contact sync on Thunderbird is causing some issues but it never created any problems before.

I have to admit that with the above and various glaring standout problems in that list that have made the phone unavailable for days at a time that I haven't noticed, because at home I can use PCs to do most of the stuff I would use the phone for apart from calls or texts, it has been a less than happy experience with this phone and I would think twice about buying another one again for sure.

UPDATE: Issues 1 and 2 were overcome by installing an app (Auto Do Not Disturb) which makes the whole experience much smoother and easier.  The contacts issue has not been completely resolved but I did discover that there was an all contacts view which makes the whole experience easier, although there doesn't seem to be any way to make it the default. But at the moment I am coping with using the phone every day as I expect it to have some more years of life left in it yet.

Switching Google accounts

Just to make my life more complex (hopefully simpler in future) I have decided all my email accounts will consist of three Google accounts, classified as low, medium and high priority. This involves two completely new gmail accounts and one existing one. At the moment I am working on switching over my default email account to one of the new ones (the low priority one) that is the catch-all account for all sorts of web site signups. It is quite a big process switching over Google accounts. The fact this blog is going up under one of my new accounts is part of the completion which has involved changing all the blogs over to two of the new accounts (I always have two author accounts on each blog). 

Some of the big steps undertaken have been transferring and deleting email, and downloading all the Google photos. Google does provide an email and contacts transfer functionality in Gmail that I used to transfer multiple accounts with, including my soon-to-disappear Microsoft accounts. As content has been moved, old content has been removed. The next step was to download 16 GB worth of photos from Google Photos. The reason there was so much stuff in there was that it included all my old Picasa photo albums, long since forgotten about, which evidently were migrated to Google Photos some time back. I currently use Flickr to host these photos and have not done anything with the Picasa stuff for a long long time. Consequently there are many duplicates of Flickr albums and these will not be going back up on the Google Photos of my new account, only the photos taken on the phone are planned for at this stage.

I had to use Takeout to get the photos (there seems to be nearly 100,000 of them) and use a download manager to pull down the nine zip files totalling over 16 GB. Apart from Picasa I also did briefly trial the Google photo uploader to backup my photos from my PC, this was abandoned when I realised it was just a backup tool for backing up photos from a PC, not a sync tool for public albums like Picasa was. I will have to find the phone photos and download them back onto the phone because resetting it (see below) has wiped them out. The biggest potential problem from downloading these photos is whether they will have an impact on old blogs, because Google stores blog illustrations on Google Photos, so if I delete my old account it does have the potential to remove the photos including possibly the ones that were used in blogs.

Next steps including migrating calendars and the Chrome profile and this will take some investigating and testing. I have also factory reset my phone to force it to use one of my new accounts so I have had to reinstall all the apps on it. There is still a lot of account migration work to do and it will be some time before I actually delete anything. But I did delete a very old Microsoft account going back about five years and it may well be the case there are still some very old Google accounts forwarding occasional emails that will come to light as this project progresses.

How to stop Chrome from offering to save credit card information

If you use Chrome you'll hopefully know there are settings that can control the information that it stores and syncs. I always turn off the offer to sync passwords - and also credit card details. But although you can stop syncing your credit card details, Chrome will still popup a message each time you enter a credit card number to ask if you want to save those details in the browser - and it doesn't provide an option to turn this off.

However, the following undocumented settings might be able to turn off the credit card details save prompt.

• Type chrome://flags into the address bar of the browser
• Search on the resulting page for "Google Payments card saving checkbox"
• Change the setting to Disabled

I am not sure that this works because I was still prompted to save when I put in a credit card number the other day.