It’s a universal modern-life experience to talk about something and immediately see an ad that seems like it must be a result of that conversation. Maybe you tell someone you’re planning a vacation and then start seeing advertisements for flights and hotels. Maybe you talk about how you want to take up running and find yourself bombarded by banners hawking sneakers. Perhaps you open up about how tough it is to be single and notice a series of sponsored posts about dating apps. When this happens, you might suspect your phone is “listening to your conversations.”

This belief is false and paranoid. We do not live in some tech dystopia in which our smartphones clandestinely use their mics to pick up every word we say and then feed us commercial messages based on them. The truth is simpler and not at all alarming: your phone only seems to be listening to you because it’s collecting data about every word you type, every website you visit, and, through GPS tracking, everywhere you go in the physical world.

The hysterical tinfoil-hat crowd urges you to turn off your phone whenever you’re going to discuss something private—like your political opinions, religious beliefs, or medical conditions—as if the phone is somehow going to “hear” them and tech companies will use that info against you. In reality, they already know all those things because they know what news sources you read, the contents of your emails, what WebMD pages you’ve visited, and how long you’ve spent at which church, synagogue, mosque, or ethical humanist center. So don’t even worry about it. It’s not like there are hacks every day, and there will be more and more as time progresses, and some amoral lunatic on the dark web will eventually see a transcript of every in-person conversation you’ve ever had. They’ll be too busy looking at a list of who you’ve spoken to, at what time, and for how many seconds.

Plus, you don’t need to use a phone or even a computer to have your privacy invaded. Did you know that credit-card companies can legally sell data about your purchases to third parties? It’s true! And I bet if you decide to try to evade that by shopping exclusively with paper money, you’ll probably be flagged by your bank as some kind of a weirdo who’s taking out way too much cash and must be up to something shady. Better to just surrender. Feel free to have an in-person conversation with your most privacy-conscious friend about how resistance is futile. Your iPhone or Android won’t be picking it up, and, honestly, like what you’re saying is so interesting. Be realistic, buddy. No one cares about you.

There are a lot of benefits to our advanced information technology, many of which come from the customization you get when companies know your preferences. You can’t change the world we live in, so the best thing you can do is relax and enjoy what’s good about the twenty-first century. And while it may be unsettling to confront the dirt corporations have on you, you can at least take solace in the fact that your voice-to-voice chats remain inviolable and, no matter how uncanny the ads you’re served seem, your phone is not eavesdropping on you.

Also, there’s been a software update, and your phone is now listening to your conversations.

So here’s a fun fact that you probably don’t know about Krissy: She likes to go camping. She and her family used to do a lot of it when she was younger, and she will still do it occasionally with friends. But she doesn’t get to do as much of it as she likes to, because it’s hard to carve out the time, and also she wants to be able to camp with Charlie, our dog, and it’s difficult to find a place for that near us.

Or was. Not anymore, because for Krissy’s birthday, I bought her a campground.

(A wild Fictional Interlocutor crashes through the underbrush) You did what now?

I bought Krissy a campground.

A campground.

Yes.

How?!?

In this particular case, by going onto Zillow and discovering it was for sale. Specifically, a couple miles up the road for us, a heavily wooded 6.51 acre plot of land went up for sale. It is almost entirely on the banks of the Stillwater River, and because it is technically in a flood plain, and the river occasionally rises, no permanent structures can be built on it. It can be used basically for two purposes: for camping, and as a private nature preserve.

And, well. As it turns out, Krissy wants to camp with her friends, and I’m down with keeping as much of the land as possible in a natural state to encourage local flora and fauna to flourish. So this was a pretty great piece of land for us to pick up.

So you’re saying you just bought a bunch of land so you could vibe with nature.

Yup, basically. There are animal trails all over the site, so we know deer and other creatures wander through it, and I’ve already spotted a bunch of different bird species there. The river burbles and meanders along — it’s called the Stillwater for a reason — and while it’s just off a rural road, that road gets almost no traffic. And since it’s only a couple of miles from the house, when we’re done vibing with nature, we can come back to indoor plumbing and critter-free spaces. It’s kind of perfect for what both of us want out of it.

Okay, but the words “flood plain” were mentioned a little while back.

Indeed they were. The land abuts an actual river, and while the river is mostly lazy and well-behaved, from time to time there is heavy rain and suddenly the river channels a lot more water, and that water will come up on the property. Very recently, in fact, we had some torrential rains and flooding and the results are visible on the property; there’s a fair amount of flotsam that got shoved into various corners.

How do we feel about this? Well, in a very real sense it doesn’t matter how we feel about it; the river is gonna do what it does whether we have an opinion about it or not. More practically, however, we are buying this bit of property with the understanding that, rarely, the river is going to come up on it and make its presence known. Again, we’re not planning any permanent structures on the land, and we couldn’t get permits (or insurance!) even if we did. We’re content with working with the nature of the land here, not trying to fight it. We’re going to let the river and the land do what they do, and enjoy what it affords us the rest of the time.

So you’re not going to try to mow it all down and make it, like, a field of grass?

One, absolutely not, and two, even if we wanted to it wouldn’t really be possible, much of the land is essentially steep riverbank that not suited for domestication. There is one large field area that has ground cover on it that we’ll keep covered with local plants and flowers and such, and we may plant local trees and bushes as well, as much for functionality as anything else (our land is much less likely to wash away if there’s, you know, a good root system in it). We want to have our land here be friendly to all sorts of plants and animals, including pollinators and fireflies.

That said, we are going to have some part of it reserved for a camp site, and generally there’s work to be done to clear out flood debris and otherwise deal with mud patches and such. There will be some work involved! But the end result will be nature-facing, not lots of bluegrass or whatever.

Do I even want to know how much this cost?

It cost less than the church but more than a used car; turns out acreage in rural Ohio is not all that expensive.

It’s still kind of a bougie thing to buy your spouse recreational acreage.

Sure. That said, this is going to be a space that has the potential to give us, family and friends a lot of joy over the years, and by owning it we keep a long stretch of the Stillwater River accessible to wildlife with no concern that it will be developed. We’ll have deer and foxes and wild turkeys and turtles and fish here as long as we have it. All of that feels like a reasonably good investment.

And I get to make Krissy happy, too. That’s a bonus.

What are you going to call it?

“Camp Krissy,” of course.

So what are you going to get her next year?

Probably just a card.

What if people have other questions?

They can ask them in the comments, of course.

— JS

Personally, I use a solid color background. It was the default in Windows 95,¹ and I’ve stuck with that bluish-green background color ever since. It’s sort of like my comfort food.

Imagine my surprise when someone pointed me to a support article titled “The Welcome screen may be displayed for 30 seconds during the logon process after you set a solid color as the desktop background in Windows 7 or in Windows Server 2008 R2.” Why is logon slower with a solid background?

After your logon has been authenticated, Windows sets up your desktop. There are a lot of things going on. The taskbar gets created. The components that are responsible for various system services are loaded and initialized. The desktop window is created and filled with icons. And the desktop background window loads up the desktop wallpaper and paints it to the screen.

The logon system waits for all of these pieces to report that they are ready, and when the all-clear signal is received from everybody, or when 30 seconds have elapsed, the logon system switches away from the Welcome screen.

Given that design, you can imagine the reason for the 30-second delay: It means that one of the pieces failed to report. Perhaps it was written like this:

InitializeWallpaper()
{
    if (wallpaper bitmap defined)
    {
        LoadWallpaperBitmap();
    }
}

LoadWallpaperBitmap()
{
    locate the bitmap on disk
    load it into memory
    paint it on screen
    Report(WallpaperReady);
}

The code to report that the wallpaper is ready was inside the wallpaper bitmap code, which means that if you don’t have a wallpaper bitmap, the report is never made, and the logon system waits in vain for a report that will never arrive.

Later in the article, it notes a related article that calls out that if you have the “Hide desktop icons” group policy enabled, then you might also suffer from the 30-second delay.

Group policies are susceptible to this problem because they tend to be bolted on after the main code is written. When you have to add a group policy, you find the code that does the thing, and you put a giant “if policy allows” around it.

// Original code
InitializeDesktopIcons()
{
    bind to the desktop folder
    enumerate the icons
    add them to the screen
    Report(DesktopIconsReady);
}

// Updated with group policy support

InitializeDesktopIcons()
{
    if (desktop icons allowed by policy)
    {                                   
        bind to the desktop folder
        enumerate the icons
        add them to the screen
        Report(DesktopIconsReady);
    }                                   
}

Oops, the scope of the “if” block extended past the report call, so if the policy is enabled, the icons are never reported as ready, and the logon system stays on the Welcome screen for the full 30 seconds.

Note that in both of these cases, it’s not that the logon is extended by 30 seconds. Rather, the Welcome screen stays on for the full 30 seconds rather than the actual time it took for all systems to report ready (which could be 5 seconds, or it could be 25 seconds, depending on your system’s performance).

If you look at the timestamps on the articles, you can see that the problem was fixed in November 2009, just a few months after Windows 7 was released in July 2009.

¹ Originally, I avoided bitmap backgrounds because they took up a lot of memory, and when you had only 4 or 8 megabytes of memory, eating three quarters of a megabyte of memory just for wallpaper was not a good return on investment.

Also, I tend to stick with default configurations because it makes bug filing easier. If the repro instructions are “install a system from scratch, then perform these steps”, you’re more likely to get traction than if you say “install a system from scratch, change these 50 settings from their defaults, and then perform these additional steps.” It’s much easier to justify a bug fix that affects the default configuration than a bug fix that requires that the user have changed settings from the default, particularly if those settings are obscure.

The post Why did Windows 7, for a few months, log on slower if you have a solid color background? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

“I think we essentially have become a kleptocracy that would make Putin blush. I mean, keep in mind that in the first three months, the Trump family has become $3 billion wealthier, so that’s a billion dollars a month.”

— Business school professor Scott Galloway, quoted by the New Republic.