Motivational Quote of the Day
“I’ve seen the future and it stinks. It smells of toe bacteria and rotten cheese. I don’t like it.” - Lord Hambersham, DDS
Cereal of the Day
If you had your own cereal in the 1980s and you were an actual human person, then you were at the top of the popularity pyramid. Manufactured by Quaker Oats from 1984 to 1993, Mr. T Cereal was a corn and oats based bowl of literal ‘T’ shapes. Mr. T pitied the fool who didn’t eat his cereal, but if you were a child of the 80s then at some point you ate Mr. T cereal. Often it came with stickers. There was also a comic strip on the back of the box in which Mr. T stopped some criminals from ruining breakfast, then put some random kids in a headlock and forced them to consume his cereal. Teaming up with Mr. T was easy if your mom saw that the cereal was made by Quaker Oats, tricking her out of her no sugared cereal rule. Even though Mr. T cereal wasn’t really considered a sugared cereal (say, like Lucky Charms), it had a cartoon face on it and that’s all mom needed to say no.
Your most memorable memory of Mr. T cereal might not be the cereal itself, but its appearance in the 1985 classic, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. While mimicking Mr. T, Pee Wee poured a large serving of Mr. T cereal over his pancakes and eggs, took a bite, then lost his damn bike. Mr. T himself was busy softening his image from his Rocky and A-Team days by appearing on shows like Silver Spoons, Diff'rent Stokes, and Alvin and the Chipmunks. Mr. T was a product of an era that no longer exists, as was his cereal. But it’s an era that is continuously ripe for a reboot as the nostalgia is strong. Mr. T cereal could very well find a place on today’s cereal shelves, pitying the fool who doesn’t buy it.
News From Earth
Another day, another data breach. It took two months for T-Mobile to notice that it’s servers had been hacked, which was too little too late. While it immediately informed the SEC of the breach, that makes little difference now. T-Mobile said that “an unidentified malicious intruder breached its network in late November and stole data on 37 million customers, including addresses, phone numbers and dates of birth.” Fucking awesome. If you are a T-Mobile customer and have been getting a shit ton of spam calls lately, this is likely why. That data gets sold and spread around like a STD at a frat house. At least this hack didn’t reveal any sensitive information like passwords, PINs, Social Security numbers, bank account or credit card information. Unlike the last one, in which T-Mobile was on the hook for a $350 million payment to affected customers.
Ironically, part of that earlier settlement was an agreement to spend $150 million upgrading its security in 2022 and 2023. Either T-Mobile hasn’t gotten to it yet, or it did a really shitty job. T-Mobile is the largest cellular phone carrier (after its purchase of Sprint) and boasts 102 million customers. And it can’t protect their data. Super news. Even before the $350 million settlement, there were breaches in January 2021, November 2019 and August 2018. Look, data breaches are kind of expected these days, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it. Sure, this current breach amounts to making photocopies of the Yellow Pages, but it still lessens our faith in a company in control of the thing we use the most in this world.
Sandwich of the Day
From the proprietary sandwich generation tool:
Lox & Crowley With Canadian Bacon On Pashti Bread.
Ephemeral Erosion
The only data that we can be assured will not be lost to random thieves is the non-tangible data stored in our brains. This data is not compiled, not organized and currently not accessible. It’s also not very useful at the moment. It’s not things like phone numbers and addresses, it’s more like a stream of information slapping against the shore. Plucking a molecule of water from the stream is a futile effort. At least we have that serenity, that some part of us will always be protected by our inability to compartmentalize data. It’s just running loose in a stream. In our brains. Often someone is peeing in the stream, hence the inherent warmth we feel when accessing our memories. It’s just taking the piss.
Data is a strange thing, even stranger our attachment to its perceived ownership. The conversation about who owns data is a not a new one in the digital age, but how we continue to disseminate that information is a conversation that never seems to end. Packets of information, terabytes of our lives, stored in physical spaces outside our flesh containers. Are we simply the whole of our stored data or are we something more? Can we become more than a set of numbers and encrypted data points? Though, it doesn’t really matter. Our existence in this universe is parallel to our existence on the server, just a speck of dust on an endless beach. Plus, someone pissed in the data stream.