Maybe a poll about what android version people are running?

It would be interesting to see how many people use phones/tablets with outdated android / iOS versions.

As a side note, is that the primary method that these embedded computers get updated? If I'm running Android 4.2, does that guarantee that I'm running a device that has outstanding vulnerabilities?

All cloud based infrastructure is susceptible to data breaches like this, so this should serve as an example that sensitive information should not be trusted to cloud providers.

There's no time like the present to become less dependent on the cloud. What would you do if your email provider stopped providing email? Most people who are dependent on it would lose not only the ability to send or receive email, but would lose years of emails. There are multiple ways to download all of your email from your email provider and let the email provider provide just the routing.

Another cloud provider is file storage websites whom scan and analyze files that you upload to them. I admit that I haven't found a drop in replacement that can handle how easy it is to sync files between tablet/phones and your computer, but an alternative would be to just limit how much data that you actually need to have everywhere. Maybe a portable 2TB hard drive?

The last most concerning trend is to trust advertising agencies such as Google with all of your contact details. For the low price of $0, millions of people have voluntarily given this advertising agency access to not only all of their contacts, but who their favorites are (I'm not sure if call metadata is included). Governments have spent thousands of dollars to make sophisticated tools to extract phone books for cell phones without the person knowing, yet now everyone has voluntarily submitted their phone address book to an advertising agency.

Since cloud based tools have become so popular, it is starting a trend where instead of having a copy of a program that's under your control, you merely access the web-based interface of the program in which access can be denied at any time (Google Reader, Office 365, etc...). By making it cloud based publishers have eliminated threats to piracy and has made their dependent users even more dependent on them (you subscribe to a service, rather than purchase a copy of the software). I ultimately believe that cloud based things are slowing the development of better offline open source tools.

There are quite a few wearable fitness gadgets (see http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/fitness-gadgets/, http://www.sporttechie.com/2014/03/11/bsx-insight-new-fitness-wearable-provides-athletes-with-real-time-training-feedback/ ), so it seems like the trend for these kind of gadgets is bubbling up.

Why is it happening now? I suspect that its due to having easy access to funding (through crowd sourcing) makes it so that small teams feel that they can deliver on their gadget. Now that the 'cloud' is accepted by so many people, everyone can just send their data to the cloud to be processed (which means they don't have to develop desktop applications which need to run on multiple platforms, or worry about the algorithm being disassembled from the application). They can jump from idea, to prototype, integrate it with their 'cloud', develop iOS and Android apps, then be ready for final production run.

I've been considering going to a ubuntu based distro, since there seem to be a lot of commercial packages that are supporting it. Xubuntu seems to be a nice alternative, I just need to take the time and figure out how easy everything will get along if I throw openbox and my crunchbang settings on it.

Thanks for posting this, your post has helped me finally get onto usenet for text posts.

Thanks for sharing your hard work Bryan. Does pipedot have a strategy for paying for hosting pipedot.org when it gets more popular?