This blog was meant for technology topics, not politics. However, I watched what happened in Charlottesville, VA on 8/12/2017. I actually saw people saluting and carrying Nazi flags. I was shocked that our president didn’t immediately denounce racial hatred and bigotry. We cannot condone or allow racism, and we cannot allow our leaders to support it - especially if those leaders also lie to us. Citizens must demand truth, honesty and integrity from our leaders, or suffer the consequences of our own ignorance and apathy.

One particular aspect of the Holocaust remains puzzling. How do you actually go about killing eleven million people? Why for month after month and year after year, did millions of intelligent human beings—guarded by a relatively few Nazi soldiers—willingly load their families into tens of thousands of cattle cars to be transported by rail to one of the many death camps scattered across Europe?

The answer is simple – you lie to them.

I thought the Internet would make people smarter and more informed via better access to information. Instead, in many ways the opposite happened. Ignorant people just polluted the Internet with false information.

Using my personal laptop from any coffee shop, I can:

• Access my bank account(s)
• Access my retirement and brokerage accounts
• Use my credit card to buy things
• Review my medical test results
• Send love notes to my wife

These are the most sensitive and private things I can imagine, and I can do these things securely from any untrusted network anywhere in the world.

So why do corporate networks still exist?

Most companies still have a separate corporate network, protected by firewalls, intrusion prevention/detection, dedicated administrators, VPNs, etc. Why is it that I can access information which is the most important, private, and precious to me, from any computer, via any network, without all that extra cost, complexity, overhead, and effort?

Dick Nixon understood that getting the smart, popular kids to vote for you didn’t matter. He called the popular kids “Franklins” and he called his kind the “Orthogonians”. Nixon discovered that being hated by the “Franklins” was no impediment to political success.

Today google released a new tool to test how mobile friendly your website is. Since I recently rebuilt this site and been using a variety of tools to test it I was excited to see how well the site scored. The UI is very nice but you have to opt-in to email to get your detailed report. I am definitely not a fan of that “dark pattern”.

Usually my go-to benchmark is the the venerable Google PageSpeed Insights. PageSpeed Insights is very clear about delivering actionable steps you can take to improve overall speed and performance. Not too long ago Google also added a mobile section to give you insight about your mobile page performance as well.

However I recently adopted Google’s Lighthouse tool and found that to be exceptionally useful, particularly since it is service worker aware. As a result this site will now run even when the network connection is severed on your mobile device. (Service workers should be a separate article)