Posts by davenewman

Hack the politicians?

The only thing that will persuade the congressmen and senators to vote for better election security is to find their own sites have been hacked.

Buy at the cinema

You don't have to buy your cinema tickets through a website. You can turn up and hand over some cash.

OK, the blockbusters will be sold out, so you end up seeing a higher quality film.

Monasteries had it right centuries ago

Small rooms to work in undistracted, cloisters to meet people serendipitously, and big rooms to gather together.

For electric trains how about IP over the power lines?

Handreds of useful apps are held in a queue

At the moment, many apps used by thousands of people around the world have their access to Facebook's API suspended while Facebook manually verifies them one by one.

For example, NationBuilder.com can no longer link a campaign group's event to the even they put on their Facebook page. It used to be possible to promote the event on both places and come up with a consolidated RSVP list for people to check on the door. NationBuilder is used by hundreds of thousands of campainging groups, charities and political parties around the world to manage their volunteers.

Add all the home office civil servants to the biometric database

And let them personally experience the problems of having your face in big database.

I bet then they will find a way to remove them.

The court needs a technical advisor

Since the litigrants may try to bamboozle the court with technical inaccuracies, the court should employ a technical advisor - Max Schrems, of course.

How can we do canvassing if we cannot record political opinions

The normal way to campaign is to knock on your door and ask who you are considering to vote for. Then on polling day we remind our potential voters that it is polling day, have you voted yet?

That is a fundamental part of democracy in our voting systems. The purpose of political parties is to persuade people to vote for their candidate and then get people voting rather than staying at home. To do that, the small band of unpaid volunteers knocking on doors needs to know who is persuadable and who doesn't want to waste their time or that of the volunteers.

So a promise not to collect data on political preferences is pointless. It is fundamental to party politics and democratic voting systems.

Child molestation?

Has anyone thought about applying child protection laws to the Nova Scotia minister, the police and the Unisys administrators?

Voting is a public duty

Because of that, candidates have the right to communicate with voters as a matter of public policy. To do that they need data on all voters, so they get the full electoral register, not the edited version used in commercial marketing. Voting isn't compulsory, but voters have a duty to read, consider and decide whether to vote (and who for), so they cannot opt out of getting political leaflets.

That is what makes it different from commercial marketing.

The problem isn't collecting the data, but using it to spread different lies to different people. We need a law to make professional lying an imprisonable offence.

Why discriminate against people whose mothers gave birth in a different country?

Why should your place of birth be an employment qualification at all? It isn't one of your achievements, it is an achievement of your mother.

What is the economic or ethical justification for nationality to be used in determining who gets a job? We are all humans (or AIs) in one world. All humans are equal, nationality is an artificial distinction brought in to recruit soldiers to fight wars. It should have nothing to do with employability.

Re: He made one mistake

Officials scared of Trump will do anything to prevent imports from Mexico.

I have just got 6 Chinese phablets for £90 each to use in a training session. They are pretty fast, do 5 GHz WiFi and 4G mobile phones. Only problem is they all have the same serial number, so mobile device management software thinks they are all the same device.

Couldn't Adam and Eve it

Since the Eve equivalent is half the price.

Open Democracy has been investigating this

Read http://www.opendemocracy.net/dup-dark-money and other articles to find out more about the shenanigans of laundering money to pay for data manipulation.

I got a software update on a Chinese phone

I ordered a 4G Android 7.0 phone from a Chinese company on eBay for £80 (a THL). After turning it on, I found they had a software bug fix available to download, only 8 months after the phone was made.

Now that Chinese suppliers have warehouses in the UK, I order everything from them.

Looks like the USAC is trying to get bribes. Need an undercover police investigation.

Uber is one company that has objective data on performance. So why not use it?

Why is Google being fined for contempt of court when they have a pending appeal? Normally appeals put a stay on all decisions until the matter is finally settled?

DVB-T2

Why not just use DVB-T2, like in most of Europe? Why does the USA have to be different?

Looking at Metro and Handelsbank.

Many of these rural areas are full of Republican voters. So this plan will get support from rural Republican congressmen.

In 2013 I compared Google and Bing's geolocation of thousands of house addresses in Oxford. Bing couldn't locate half of them, Google got all but 3%. So I got NationBuilder to change its default search and geolocation engine for the UK.

If you really liked to see us, you wouldn't charge so much.

We need bad bomb-making information on the Internet

So that people make dud bombs that just burn instead of explode because they couldn't calculate the stoichiometric mixture (plus a bit extra oxidiser) that any 3rd former chemistry pupil could work out, or many people in Northern Ireland pubs.

It was just an example

They could have picked any group that people hate. But having found one that targeted thousands of people they used that as an example, set up a small targeted Facebook post and wrote about it.

A thorough research project would have compared the number of people who self-identify as haters of someone. But to prove there is a problem with Facebook, you just need one example.

So the only reason to object to the choice of example is when the objector also hates that group.

As for search terms in Facebook employer fields, take a look at the number of people who type search queries in to the Google Android App Facebook page. There is even a video singing about those search terms.

So what has the state of California got against rail freight? Locked containers on a train are safer than cars.

Use Insync instead

Some time ago I switched to using Insync to synchronise selected folders on my PC to Google Drive. It works much better than the rudimentary downloadable client that Google supplies. And Insync works under Windows, OSX and Linux.

Then there is professional lying

as in South Africa, where a British PR company has been caught disseminating fake news to reracialise politics in South Africa.

Let's make professional lying (by PR flacks, journalists and politicians) an imprisonable offence.

People have been trained in Machine Learning since the 1980s

It was part of my M.Sc. at Kingston Polytechnic in 1988. Even then it wasn't new. By the 1990s there were simple systems to apply ID3 to your data. One of my students built a system to diagnose congenital dislocation of the hip in two days.

It is doing it at a large scale, and with more neural network layers, that is new.

Sea Shepherd submarine

Sea Shepherd should buy a submarine to shadow the whaling boats. Disguise it as a whale.

ISIRTA

Still a way to go to match the I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again fish puns sketch.