Geek Stuff category archive
Seeing the Light 0
Highway engineering for the iJunk Generation:
Rows of red LEDs have been embedded in the pavement after a 15-year-old girl was killed when she stepped in front of a tram while looking at her smartphone and listening to music. Two other people have been seriously injured in separate but similar incidents.
The Courage of Their Carryings-On 0
Forty-two plaintiffs, seeking to represent users of the website who had their information compromised, had proceeded anonymously against Ashley Madison’s Toronto-based parent company Avid Life Media, the ruling released on 6 April showed.
Plaintiffs leading a lawsuit against online dating website Ashley Madison over a security breach that exposed the personal data of customers must publicly identify themselves to proceed with the case, a US judge has ruled.I really can’t find it in me to have much sympathy for the plaintiffs.
Really, the chutzpah just leaves me sputtering.
The Snaring Economy, Have Cake Eat It Too Dept. 0
This should be interesting:
According to the story, in its response, Uber claims that it’s all about competition and fair shakes.
Twits on Twitter 0
Afterthought:
Be very clear. There’s more to this than just decoding de code. There’s a presumption that if you use encryption, you must have something to hide, an assertion that a desire for privacy is inherently suspicious. (In some ways, this point of view is eerily similar to the philosophy of the Zuckerborg.)
In a snail mail world, what the cops (and the NSA and GHCQ and the FBI and their like) want would be to steam open all your envelopes and read all your mail and all your everything else without showing cause (not that lots of them aren’t already doing that just because they can).
Facebook Frolics 0
Facebook is concerned that you’re not nekkid “sharing” enough.”
In The Guardian, Anna Lauren Hoffmann reports that the Zuckerborg is blaming “context collapse” (that sounds to me like one of those terms that academicians coin to fool you into thinking they have come up with something new, rather than just demonstrating a flair for the obvious, but that’s another rant). Apparently, persons are “sharing” too many cat videos and not enough secrets. Here’s a snippet:
For users confronting collapsed contexts on Facebook, the withholding of personal anecdotes and information isn’t a problem – it is a solution.
For years, Facebook’s strategy has caused regular controversies around user privacy and ethics – blunders that got people exposed, outed and emotionally manipulated along the way. Users seem to have combated the problem by taking Facebook’s own advice, as shared by Facebook’s president of communications and public policy, Elliot Schrage, in 2010: “If you’re not comfortable sharing, don’t.”
In related news, Google seems to be in a snit.
The Snaring Economy 0
When “sharing” is a business, it’s not “sharing.”
It’s a business.
(snip)
A change of the law voted through parliament in January has obliged tenants to get permission from their landlords before putting their flat on Airbnb.
But according to reports in France, it’s the first time a tenant has been ordered to compensate the landlord.
Authorities in Paris, which is the world’s number one city for Airbnb rentals, have long tried to crack down on illegal rentals on the home-sharing site.
If I were a landlord, I’d want to know when a tenant was running a business out of my property also. I don’t know anything about French insurance practices, but I got a dollar to a croissant that the insurance company would want to know that you’ve turned your home into a boarding house.
“If You Can’t Google It, It Must Not Be” 0
Remember the University of California at Davis campus cop who egregiously pepper-sprayed a group of peaceful Occupy Wall Street protestors a couple of years ago?
Well, UC-Davis doesn’t want you to, so it tried to make it go away. The Sacramento Bee has the documents:
The payments were made as the university was trying to boost its image online and were among several contracts issued following the pepper-spray incident.
Some payments were made in hopes of improving the results computer users obtained when searching for information about the university or Katehi, results that one consultant labeled “venomous rhetoric about UC Davis and the chancellor.”
Much more at the link.
By the by, if you follow the link in the first sentence, the money does not appear to have been well-spent.
Asides:
Because I pay attention to stuff like this, I know that the most common technique used by the outfits that promise to cleanse your on-line reputation is not to make bad stuff go away, because they can’t. It’s to fabricate promulgate a bunch of good stuff, hoping that it pushes the bad stuff off the first page of search results, because most persons don’t look beyond the first page.
Also, remember that, with rhetoric, “venomous” and “accurate” are independent variables.
Tax Relief 0
My tax returns are done and mailed and I won’t have to use MS Windows again for another year.*
Afterthought:
If Microsoft succeeds in foisting Windows 10, Spyware Edition, on me, I’m buying a Mac just to do my taxes.
__________________
*Commercial manufacturers of tax return software support only Windows and MacOS. Excellent FOSS accounting software exists, but not tax prep software.
The Snaring Economy 0
In an article about Uber imitators is buried this nugget, alsmost as an aside.
Under the guise of “sharing,” the snaring economy is facilitating monopoly (emphasis added).
Follow the link for the rest of the article.
The Walking Braindead 0
Meet the “smombies”:
Stockholm had by far the worst smartphone abusers with 23.6 percent, or nearly a quarter of people on foot distracted by their phones while crossing through traffic.
Amsterdam on the other hand had the lowest number of “smombies” (smartphone zombies) at 8.3 percent of pedestrians, while Berlin fell somewhere in the middle at 14.9 percent.
When I ride my bicycle around my neighborhood, I fear the smombies much more than the car drivers, and I fear a car driving smombie most of all.
It’s the Algorithm, Stupid 0
I think the notion of an overt Google-Clinton conspiracy theory is a bit over the top, but it is true that search engines filter the results of your searches according to their conclusions about what you would like based on your search history. Accordingly, I think this is worth a listen for the larger message.
Afterthought:
I have noticed that, as the Democratic Convention gets closer and Sanders is not gaining (despite the results of this week’s primaries–look at the numbers), some Sanders fans are joining the hysterical party. I say this as someone who would quite happily support Sanders, were he to be the nominee.