#internet!

The satellite internet works amazingly well! Oh, thank goodness. No more counting megabytes to be sure we don’t incur huge overage fees. And I can text chat without the internet failing every other message, because the new router is not failing like the old one was! What a relief.

Whenever there’s an abandoned unit auction you never know if someone’s gonna find something lost for decades, and you’ll also never know how much was destroyed because the buyer didn’t consider it valuable enough to resell.

And then communication. For a while you had your old standards of BBS and IRC and then the dot com bubble happened and there was an explosion of different competing services. Few people remembers John McAfee’s racist Wigwam app (he fetishized First Nations people and also called people who partook in his mini plane hobby “sky g*psies). We wouldn’t know how deeply disturbed he was for a while, and McAfee Virus Scan was bundled as part of Windows bloatware for years.

Mumble, Teamspeak, ICQ, IRC, Skype… there were more, but it already sounds like Bart’s chant in Little Treehouse of Horror III.

We traded ftps for the cloud, which still leaves you relying on someone else’s computer to keep your files safe. I don’t want to think about how much data I’ve lost over the years. After Douglas Adam’s death, they found he owned every type of Apple computer released until his death, all of them full of fragments of unfinished stories. I’ll always have mixed feelings on preserving works when creators specifically asked for them to be burned upon their passing.

So there’s my bit of middle-aged navel gazing for now.

tl;dr: make multiple copies of shit you wanna preserve, and at least one better be physical.

TikTok to spend $500 million on first EU data center in Ireland

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By Vlad Savov TikTok, the embattled video-sharing app that’s found itself at the center of Washington-Beijing tensions, is setting up its first data center in Europe with a 420 million euros ($500 million) investment in Ireland, the company announced.

Promising to create hundreds of jobs, improve “the safeguarding and protection of TikTok user data” and shorten loading times for users in…