Web & Tech Services by Dustin Dauncey

Something to be aware of, LastPass users on Android phones.

I made an investment in more powerful servers this month, allowing for room to grow the business further, while improving performance all around for my existing clients. Be sure to read more at https://www.d19.ca//more-performance-improvements-februar/.

A very interesting behaviour unfolding by Google, and earlier Facebook - both companies notorious for collecting way too much user data and selling it. From the article: Google has not pushed updates to their flagship apps including Gmail and Google Maps since before a Dec. 8 deadline, imposed by Apple, that mandated all app updates include new privacy labels. The nutrition labels describe to users all the ways developers collect data about them, which has been awkward f...or companies like Facebook, whose business model relies on the company knowing as much about its users as possible. Tweets have gone viral for simply scrolling through the long privacy label section for apps like Facebook. It must be noted that in the past 6 weeks, Facebook’s rivals (especially Signal and Telegram) have had success thanks to users’ privacy concerns, at an unprecedented scale. Other companies hoping to avoid such shame have allegedly misled users about their collection practices. Alphabet/Google has taken a third approach, which is to indefinitely stall on pushing updates to its iOS apps. But the company itself tried to downplay this popular theory. On Jan. 5, it claimed it would add Apple’s privacy labels to its apps this week or the next week. As Macrumors noted, some of its apps like YouTube have quietly received updates, but not Chrome, Maps, Photos, Drive, Calendar, or Gmail, which is unusual. While Google stalls on pushing updates to its apps, it’s notable that its rivals like Apple Maps, are continuing to innovate with new features in their apps. Google has also been facing rivals that, like Facebook’s rivals, have been having unprecedented levels of success over privacy issues, namely DuckDuckGo, which surpassed 100M daily search queries for the first time on Jan. 11. Privacy is in these days.

I have improved my Status Page (https://d19.instatus.com) today with improved accuracy of reporting/monitoring using a new webhooks implementation, and tweaked the components listed as well. Please be sure to subscribe to the status page so you're aware of any active outages as they happen, as well as a heads up on any maintenance windows coming up.

An interesting read on the ClearView privacy debacle, as declared by our Canadian government. https://www.theverge.com//clearview-facial-recognition-ill

Are you using Signal yet? Curious about it and how it compares to WhatsApp? Lots of resources out there but feel to get in touch if you’re interested in switching from other messaging apps to something like Signal.

Slack had some major service issues on the first business day of 2021 for most people.

Happy New Year's! I hope everyone has had a safe holiday celebration in December, can't believe it's already 2021! I've been proud of the many service improvements I was able to accomplish this year for my clients, and am eager to see what more I can do in 2021. Stay tuned for what's in store!

You’ll want to consider changing your Spotify passwords once again, after a third data breach in just a few months.

Some information on the Egregor attack on TransLink’s systems the other week, for those curious.

An interesting short documentary on how Microsoft put one person behind bars for 15 months simply because they distributed software that was free, however used their logo in the process which counted as illegal distribution. The man doing this was simply trying to reduce electronic waste in the world and so he made copies and distributed the Windows restore disks (before they were all included in a partition of the hard disk on most computers). I found it quite interesting, not just the story of him going to prison but the bigger idea of what he wanted to do and how large companies tend to restrict the right to repair, much like Microsoft, Apple, and plenty of other players tend to do.

Continuing with more service improvements - this time to your DNS records. Support for CAA record types has been introduced and already setup for all clients' domains that I manage. I'll use Wikipedia's definition of CAA records: "DNS Certification Authority Authorization (CAA) is an Internet security policy mechanism which allows domain name holders to indicate to certificate authorities whether they are authorized to issue digital certificates for a particular domain name." You can learn more on this security improvement here: https://www.d19.ca//caa-record-support-securing-your-doma/

Always working on new stuff to improve the services I offer. The latest improvement... faster website loading times! Performance has been significantly improved after introducing a caching mechanism across all websites I host and manage. This went into effect last week. Check out your own website hosted by me to see the amazing speed increase! And if you're not already hosting with me, definitely reach out and we can make it happen. In many cases, client websites now loads tw...ice as fast - and it was already respectfully fast previously (performance has always been a focus point). In some cases, your website may load in less than 1 second now! Learn more on the blog here: https://www.d19.ca//announcing-improved-loading-speed-cli/

Hosting private information like your email is no task taken lightly by me! And I'm proud of what I've achieved in order to keep my client data private. I've built my server in such a way to hide the contents of emails (including subject lines) sent or received by you from anyone but yourself as it is all stored encrypted on disk and accessibly only by you. I only have access to non-private data in order to troubleshoot email issues that may occur (such as emails not being received, not sending, etc.). You can learn more here where I go into more detail and even provide a log snippet to show what I see. https://www.d19.ca//transparency-email-privacy-troublesho/

Be careful when using Excel to manage your country's COVID-19 exposures. ;-) From the article: "A day after the UK government announced its highest number of new coronavirus cases in England, the reason behind the drastic rise has reportedly been revealed. According to reports from Daily Mail, The Independent and Evening Standard, a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing laboratory results reached its maximum size, meaning that as many as 15,841 cases between September 25th and October 2nd were not uploaded to the UK government’s COVID-19 dashboard."

Looking for support for any d19 services? I have revamped the Client Support page to include support articles on various topics such as email and account management. More to come! www.d19.ca/support