Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Location Data Privacy

    I caught a post from Bruce Schneier that references an article about a company collecting location data from numerous apps (WSJ, AndroidAuthority). This is legal, though the company has ties to the US government. As expected, there are people upset with this tracking, and we don’t have a list of applications.

    Apparently a company, Anomaly Six, provides some tracking code to app developers, whom are paid to include this in their apps. I wonder if this for specific companies or contractors. The former is bad, but if the latter, do the clients know their contractor is including this code? I suspect many software development tools wouldn’t necessarily flag this, if a client even bothered to review the code they were provided.

    This does seem creepy, and disturbing to have someone tracking your code. However, the data is supposedly anonymized, meaning that they know a phone was moved through “these” locations, but they don’t know who knows the phone. I assume the government could actually get a warrant and track your phone if you were suspected of some crime, so is this bad?

    I can’t quite think of why I dislike this, but I do. Perhaps this is to perform some sort of traffic analysis? Either physical movement of individuals or maybe the correlation of cell phone location with other data? Maybe they look for how often phones come into contact with each other? There are likely lots of uses for this anonymous data that could be useful to planners, but I also think there could be lots of more open ways of getting this data, such as asking for it from mobile providers.

    This feels like yet another place where the US is woefully disrespectful of data about humans. We seem to be way behind other countries, and it’s distressing to me. I hope that we start to enact a framework of legislation to give people more rights over this data, but I’m not sure that I will see that happen anytime soon.

    Steve Jones

  • The Challenge of Audio Data

    I’ve worked remote from my co-workers for nearly 20 years. In that time, I’ve spent a lot of time on the phone, as well as in audio and video calls. Quality has often been an issue, both with seeing others and hearing them. Add in accents, speech patterns, and equipment quality, and I’ve often found myself frustrated and upset with calls. Over the years things have improved, and I have to say that the modern Zoom/Teams/Slack style of everyone working separately and being in their own environment has made it easier to communicate.

    However, it’s still not great. I was on a call a few hours before I wrote this, where someone was talking on a laptop microphone, and as they moved their head, the audio quality changed dramatically. They also raised and lowered their voice, depending on their interest in that part of the update, which had me constantly raising and lowering the volume on my side.

    There was an article recently that noted employees can struggle with bad audio as they try to work remotely with others. Stress, frustration, embarrassment, and more can affect employees. For a once a week hour-long meeting, this might not be an issue. For daily stand-ups or multiple meetings a day, this is likely going to be a long term problem.

    When I’m on a call, I don’t know how I sound, unless someone tells me that there is an issue. I sometimes use a headset and mic, but I also take meetings with my PC speakers and external mic. To b fair, I haven’t often reviewed my audio sounds on a recording, but I know that there are times I get annoyed by heavy breathing by others, typing on keyboards, or even echos from someone else’s laptop speaker.

    It’s not often, but it does happen regularly. I haven’t even mentioned the issues at the beginning of calls of getting people connected to audio on calls, which are frustrating and often waste five or more minutes at the start of the meeting. We’ve tolerated and dealt with a lot of issues across the last few months of this pandemic, and I’m glad that most organizations, in most situations, have done so.

    That doesn’t mean that continued issues will be as easy to handle over the long term. We will see stress and struggles go up if we can’t ensure that audio data has a high quality, as we expect from email, chat, and other written data. I’m going to try and ensure that I listen to some recordings of myself in meetings, and ensure my audio setup is good, not just for me, but for everyone. I hope others do the same.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Desktop or Laptop for Remote Work

    When I started working in a corporation, I was assigned a desktop. No choice of hardware and upgrades were extremely rare and limited. This was in the early 90s, and laptops were rare, and they were coveted by those that received them. I was lucky to get to use one when on call, to allow me to remotely dial in when we had issues. Yes, I dialed in after being paged.

    Over time, laptops became more common, and as I began traveling for work, I had one full time. The last few years, I’ve depended on laptops while working for Redgate. I even ask for advice periodically when I look for a new one. Today I have two active laptops that I carry when (and if) I travel.

    However, I also have a desktop. In fact, I’ve maintained a desktop all throughout my time at Redgate and use that for most of my daily work. I like the multiple screens, and I can’t beat the multi-TBs of storage, lots of cores, tons of RAM, and more. I like my desktop, and I prefer using it.

    This week I saw an article on the reasons why a desktop PC makes more sense than a laptop. With the move to more virtual, and solo work, does a laptop make sense? Certainly there is a tradeoff. Being able to move to a different room in your house if others are using the same space is helpful. Having kids pick up your laptop and leave it elsewhere is less helpful.

    These days, I wonder how many of you feel? Some of you have dedicated office space, some do not. Some like the more powerful desktops, some prefer to flexibility of laptops. Some want to control their hardware, some want to just have a pre-assembled package.

    This week, how do you feel? Do you like desktops or laptops more? Have you changed your mind through this pandemic? What about the future, will you change for your next machine?

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Attacks on Unsecured Databases

    Imagine that you’re a researcher doing some data analysis for your company. You run some queries or load some data and then go home. The next day, you come in and find that all of our data has been deleted. Perhaps you’re the victim of a Meow attack, where people look for unsecured databases and wipe them out. If you read the comments, many of them indicate this may be considered a public service.

    I think I agree with that, and here’s why. If you put up data about me in a system and don’t secure it. I’m not sure you should be trusted with the data. The article notes that UFO VPN was a victim. They got caught not only with an unsecured database, but one that had data that wasn’t supposed to be logged, including passwords. They moved their data to a new database, also unsecured, and a meow attack wiped it out.

    While I understand this might cause a company to fail and affect employees who hadn’t made the decision to store this data and ignore security, I’m don’t think that the world overall is worse off because their data is gone. I’m also not sure that the employees are worse off as I’d suspect fines or other legal action might have wiped the company out anyway.

    I know some university groups may lose data that is difficult or impossible to recover. I know some companies might be irreparably harmed. However, I also know that it’s 2020 and there is no reason to have an unsecured set of data available to the public. Whether a database, a file-share service, or anything else. Security needs to be provided for data.

    Like many of you, I do use some services in the cloud to share files. I also find it maddening that most public access has been revoked and I need to specifically invite people, set passwords, and more to easily share things. However, that’s what we need to do in an interconnected world where we have personally identifiable and sensitive data. We need to secure it.

    I’m glad SQL Server doesn’t allow blank passwords for sa, and I hope that no one allows simple, easy passwords on their systems. It is convenient, but the price your organization might pay for this convenience could put them out of business. It’s also a large price to ask someone whose data you have to pay if it impacts their life.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.