A Letter From Gary Larson | TheFarSide.com | TheFarSide.com

Gary Larson has finally arrived online and the promise of new The Far Side cartoons is in the air, yet I don’t know how I feel about this. I will always love The Far Side but I cringe at the thought of the new stuff not measuring up to old stuff. I also miss seeing the cartoon nestled in the comics pages of an actual newspaper. And, truth be told, Larson’s hero status fell in my eyes when he aggressively chased his cartoons off the Internet.

Twelve years after I wrote that I still feel the same way. Now that Larson wants to join the party is he still welcome? Does The Far Side belong on the Internet at all, even if it’s Larson’s own doing? Or should it ride off into the sunset along with the newspaper industry?

I kinda wish I hadn’t had to ponder this question.

Truthfully, I still have some ambivalence about officially entering the online world — I previously equated it to a rabbit hole, although “black hole” sometimes seems more apropos — but my change of heart on this has been due not only to some evolution in my own thinking, but also in two areas I’ve always cared about when it comes to this computer/Internet “stuff”: security and graphics.

Source: A Letter From Gary Larson | TheFarSide.com | TheFarSide.com

Families Don’t Use Landlines Anymore – The Atlantic

The early telephone’s bulky size and fixed location in the home made a phone call an occasion—often referred to in early advertisements as a “visit” by the person initiating the call. (One woman quoted in Once Upon a Telephone recalls the phone as having the “stature of a Shinto shrine” in her childhood home.) There was phone furniture—wooden vanities that housed phones in hallways of homes, and benches built for the speaker to sit on so they could give their full attention to the call. Even as people were defying time and space by speaking with someone miles away, they were firmly grounded in the space of the home, where the phone was attached to the wall.

Over the course of the 20th century, phones grew smaller, easier to use, and therefore less mystical and remarkable in their household presence. And with the spread of cordless phones in the 1980s, calls became more private. But even then, when making a call to another household’s landline, you never knew who would pick up. For those of us who grew up with a shared family phone, calling friends usually meant first speaking with their parents, and answering calls meant speaking with any number of our parents’ acquaintances on a regular basis. With practice, I was capable of addressing everyone from a telemarketer to my mother’s boss to my older brother’s friend—not to mention any relative who happened to call. Beyond developing conversational skills, the family phone asked its users to be patient and participate in one another’s lives.

Source: Families Don’t Use Landlines Anymore – The Atlantic

Facebook audio snooping almost certainly prompted targeted ad

A story in July’s Consumer Reports discussed the possibility of our social media apps secretly listening to us:

Well, it’s technically possible for phones and apps to secretly record what you say. And lots of people sure seem to think they do.

According to a nationally representative phone survey of 1,006 U.S. adults conducted by Consumer Reports in May 2019, 43 percent of Americans who own a smartphone believe their phone is recording conversations without their permission.

But, to date, researchers have failed to find any evidence of such snooping.

While there might not be any fire yet, there sure as hell is smoke.
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