Re: Shame but..
What's the world coming to when taking steps to defeat the built-in spyware in too many things needs to be defended with "I'm not a luddite"?
No, you're not a luddite. Just sensible.
6652 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Dec 2009
Anybody can launch a weather balloon, sure. But something the size of a small car?
Maybe, instead of just blowing them out of the sky, try instead to get some cameras pointed at the thing), and if it's a big balloon, how about making a small hole so it can descend a little more gracefully for future recovery and analysis?
When you work in a company where the managers think they're a cross between Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and God, orders are handed down from on high and us little peons are expected to follow them.
So I do. I don't second guess, I don't try to interpret what they meant, I simply do as instructed. If the instructions were wrong, I was not the one who issued them.
Oh, and before anybody comments on the peons not using their brains and/or thinking for ourselves, we aren't paid to think and the few times that anybody does, if they were wrong and misjudged something, the shit splatters all over the place. We get reminded that managers manage, not us.
Well, they can't have it both ways, and the least potentially destructive to my job is to do what I'm told unless it is clearly unsafe/dangerous.
"The only way to ensure that private information is not used against you is for it not to be recorded to begin with."
This.
That one might think they're unimportant or not worth bothering about is missing the point.
Would you be happy to put a live running commentary of your movements on Twitter? Because your phone is quite likely doing so, only in a place you can't see. And you can't see because you'd probably be horrified about what sort of detail is being collected. Did you just quickly write a text when doing 36 in a 30 zone?
Oh, and just because you're nobody now doesn't mean you'll still be at some random point in the future. People have derailed careers because of some random offensive rubbish they wrote back when they were teenagers. Those digital wankstains? They stick around. Whether intentional (social media) or unintentional (app/phone tracking). Once it's out of your hands, it's out of your control. Just better hope it doesn't ever come back to haunt you.
I think people are worried about China because it's "the government" doing the spying, whereas in the west it's "just Corporate America", as if that's really somehow better.
Now shops are swapping loyalty cards for apps. Apps that want to know your location, run at startup, access device logs, phone identity, blah blah blah. They're being pushed quite hard these days, but you can't argue with the checkout girl as she's just following instructions from above and has no idea what app permissions are, never mind why I would be annoyed at the idea of granting all this access to some shitware cobbled together by a third party to offer me...uh...nothing I can't find on the place's regular website.
Problem is, everybody is so used to this, if you say "over my dead body am I going allow you to report my activity every time I touch my phone", I'm the weird one.
FFS.
I have a Xiaomi Mi 10T. I guess as part of the EU concessions, some of the bundled apps ask if they can pillage my data, to which I say "hell no". Whether or not they do anyway, I cannot say, but it's rather amusing how many Xiaomi apps ask first [1], and how many Google apps ask first [2].
1 - pretty much all of them
2 - exactly none of them
Oh, and I should add the magic word "polyvalent" in a contract which means "all sorts of other tasks at the whim of your manager", and if hours are not rigidly stated but has any vagaries, then it could turn into weekend work or night shift all while keeping to the wording of the contract.
There's no better way to screw an employee than vague wording.
Where I work, the new contracts are issued saying that you work for the company based at X, Y, and Z. My contract was from ages ago, so it says only X.
Here in France it's not that easy to get rid of a full time employee (as long as they don't do fireable things), so the ruse that companies have is to give you your legal notice (2 weeks?) that your position is moving to another of the sites. If you go, it will have broken up the social clique that was likely part of the problem. And if you don't go, it's a dismissal, your fault.
Just leaving school, I took a summer job as a cleaner while taking time to work out what to do next. I was sent a "contact" to sign and return. The non-compete clause was worded so vaguely that it would have prevented me from cleaning anything in any context for a period of three years. When that job ended, my immediate boss had the cheek to remind me that I can't leave for a competitor and the contract applied.
So I worked out how much I had worked for them, calculated what three years of that would be, and invoiced them saying I'll accept either full payment in 28 days, or monthly installments. But if they're going to have any influence on my future activities, I fully expect to be paid.
The company gave up on the idea. Probably took about as long as necessary to look through the filing cabinet to realise that I never signed and returned the contract (I binned it as the crap it obviously was), so they didn't even have any proof of such an "agreement".
Either it's broken, in which case they can't tell if you've used to much; or it works, in which case they can tell you when you're running into the extra pay zone.
If they can tell, but they won't tell you (the excuse is irrelevant), then how is that not a breach of contract? If you're relying upon that facility to control your expenditure, but it happens to conveniently not be functioning, whilst they're able to know your usage....come on, pull the other one.
No, not an opaque token. It'll be some piss poor idea that will get hacked and soon people will be hounded down for littering at the other side of the country.
Much simpler idea. Take a photo of the car and occupants and have some sort of colour laser jobbie that can print "souvenir bags" (let's call them that).
It's a bit like what the ferry companies used to do in the late 90s, they'd take a photo of every car as it entered, and all of the photos would be pinned up on a board, you could go and order a big size print of yours. It was passed off as a sort of on board souvenir of your voyage, but in reality it was photographic evidence of what cars boarded and who was in them (at least, the adults, they didn't tend to hassle children in the back seat).
Plus, if your mug (and licence plate) are clearly printed on the bag, you'd have to be a right twat to toss it into the ditch.
Classic or Classical? I would suggest a loop tape of something by Kylie Minogue, like Locomotion. A few times around of that ought to disperse the crowd...
...and us crusties can be like "eh, that was chart topping stuff once upon a time, kids today, don't know they're born, etc etc".
July 2009, France, Loire Atlantique. A friend and I were in a McDo and thought we'd try out the free WiFi, see what it's like.
We quickly discovered that any attempt to connect to an SMTP server is answered with McDo's own one, that will happily allow you in, though it's really slow at relaying messages (we made up some ridiculous headers and sent a rude message about the eatery to a spam drop address). We abandoned any further investigation because to silently hijack an entire port like that (and do what with the messages sent?)....Fuck right off, then die, then fuck off some more.
Didn't downvote you, but... really? This shouldn't ever be "normal".
"to those of us who have to pay close attention for where the current drive-by shooting hot spots are"
You're right that I'm from a country where this sort of thing isn't a risk. But I'd have to disagree with you and say that it is the availability and access to guns that is the problem. Every country has its share of nutjobs, the United States isn't any different in that respect, but around these parts it's usually knife crime (which is a problem) simply because access to firearms is that much more restricted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzW3G-XUFHw
Ah, that brings back memories. They only went and put one right in the middle of Sandhurst school, didn't they?
It's gone now (decommissioned them), but here's a look from Google's Street View a few years ago - https://maps.app.goo.gl/cxd1qk6oA2Z5q1pH8
I don't know how accurate the site is, but https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/ would suggest that if one broadcast an alert every time, the alert would likely be disabled (or, ironically, shot at until it malfunctioned) due to never shutting up.
Since we're talking about sirens and tones, I have a question to ask.
When I was at boarding school (85-90), the fire alarm was like fwee-wee-wee, high pitched and the sort of annoying that rattles around in your head.
At work (nowadays), the fire alarm is more like ooh-laa-ooh-laa-ooh-laa, a much lower pitch and not so much annoying as just loud.
Is there a technical reason for the difference (like lower sounds carrying better), or is it just that they picked a different sort of siren?
Or, maybe, the higher pitch is better at waking children in the middle of the night?
It's been MANY years, so I don't remember the precise time, but when I was young I could hear the weekly test of the Broadmoor sirens. I think it was at eleven am on a Monday (don't quote me on it), followed about ten or so minutes later by a different siren (the all clear).
One day, the sirens sounded on time. And a little while later they sounded again, not the expected all clear signal. I remember thinking to myself that finally somebody was smart enough to try to get out during the regular testing.
Well, I can see from these posts that the system is being abused - from too many (irrelevant?) messages to messages sent at stupid o'clock, if it's pissing off people to the point where they deactivate it, then it's failing in its purpose.
"Couldn't some form of planning be done to avoid the last minute rush and panic?"
When I was younger, I used to like to sit in a little cafe at the top of a shopping centre on the 24th of December and watch all the little panicked ants scurrying around, as for some, it seemed that Christmas snuck up on them without warning.
Just to balance the scales, I've dealt with a number of neuro-normies who had no idea about technology. To them the internet was the 'e' icon, they refused antivirus products because "it's a machine, it won't catch the flu" and attempts to explain went nowhere. So, I feel this has less to do with a person's internal wiring and more to do with their exposure to technology. After all, it took me fixing a start-up blue screen three sodding times (all praise Hirren's boot CD) before they understood that yanking the plug out of the wall was not an acceptable way to turn the thing off, it's not like a fancy typewriter...! But I did have to make a shortcut to shutdown.exe because they just were not getting the idea of clicking on the thing marked Start in order to Stop.
That somebody like Dorries was the DCMS minister says all you need to know about the government's attitude and competence with anything that has a plug attached.
Given the calibre of the current Cabinet, I rather imagine the PM has a mate or some distant relation (in India?) fishing for a cushy contract at the taxpayer's expense.
Poor wages = more profit.
Horrible public services - healthcare isn't provided by the company = more profit.
World's highest taxes - for the little people maybe, for the rich... = more profit.
Claustrophobic housing - not that different to parts of other countries, and better than some.
The way things are, the crypto fraud will likely hurt more than the distribution of personal information.
I long for a day when an arsehole that does something like this gets a more reasonable fine, like at least €100 per person (convertible, if he's broke, into one day behind bars per person).
My take on this is that she used an AI as a tool, as opposed to that other guy who wants to get the AI itself as the copyright holder.
If it's a tool, then how is this that different to a word processor? A pen? A set of large dice with plot relevant actions on them (roll your own story), etc etc? The AI didn't think of what to do for making the end product, there would have been a fair amount of human interaction to get the AI to output that which was wanted (and having played around with Dall-E, easier said than done!), plus the plotting, scenario, and how it all fits together.
The AI doesn't deserve copyright any more than Bic does it one writes something with a biro. But she should, as the AI was a tool she used.
It's 12ths of an hour because an hour contains sixty minutes (we inherited that from the Babylonians) and using five minute intervals (which coincides with the positions of the hours) works.
There's no such thing as a metric clock, it would be utterly alien to the entire world.
However it's worth noting that smaller units of time measurement are metric/base 10. Centiseconds - 100ths of a second. Milliseconds - 1000th. Microseconds, Nanoseconds, and so on.
Yup, Americans have quarter inch pipes. I know this because we have them at work. For some bizzare and Byzantine reason, it's cheaper to get plumbing shipped over from the US than to get it brought in from a depot thirty miles fifty kilometres away. Though I suspect the recent changes to EU import duty might have put a small dent in that plan.