Mark this day down in your calendars.
“I preferred life before smartphones.” — Madonna
And to the surprise of exactly no one, I agree with her.
Update: Errrrr wait a moment. I just realized that my inadvertent choice of title leads to a dire visual.
Damn. Now I need to get a checkup for STDs.
A little while ago, Reader Sam D. had this thought about Amazon’s Alexa:
“Why would anyone WANT his own personal Stasi agent in his home, AND be paying for it?”
Indeed. Somebody remind me again why I’m not wired into the Internet Of Things:
If you’re a Google user, you probably noticed some trouble last night when trying to access Google-owned services. Last night, Google reported several issues with its Cloud Platform, which made several Google sites slow or inoperable. Because of this, many of Google’s sites and services–including Gmail, G Suite, and YouTube–were slow or completely down for users in the U.S. and Europe.
However, the Google Cloud outage also affected third-party apps and services that use Google Cloud space for hosting. Affected third-party apps and services include Discord, Snapchat, and even Apple’s iCloud services.
But an especially annoying side effect of Google Cloud’s downtime was that Nest-branded smart home products for some users just failed to work. According to reports from Twitter, many people were unable to use their Nest thermostats, Nest smart locks, and Nest cameras during the downtime. This essentially meant that because of a cloud storage outage, people were prevented from getting inside their homes, using their AC, and monitoring their babies.
Don’t think you can escape this bullshit by jumping in your car and getting out of town, either:
Governments are collecting lots of data on the people using roads, trains and buses, and without proper oversight, that information could easily be misused.
(I’ve often wondered, by the way, if my movements are being studied by way of my phone location software. As I drive for Uber, I bet it’s interesting reading: “He goes to the airport three or four times a day and never seems to drive back… WTF?”) And speaking of which:
I wonder why they bother to warn us anymore.
And then there’s this:
Sleep Number, one company that makes beds that can track heart rate, respiration and movement, said it collects more than 8 billion biometric data points every night, gathered each second and sent via an app through the internet to the company’s servers.
“This gives us the intelligence to be able to continue to feed our algorithms,” CEO Shelly Ibach told attendees at a Fortune Brainstorm Health conference in San Diego last month.
Analyzing all that personal data, Ibach continued, not only helps consumers learn more about their health, but also aids the company’s efforts to make a better product.
Still, consumer privacy advocates are increasingly raising concerns about the fate of personal health information — which is potentially valuable to companies that collect and sell it — gathered through a growing number of internet-connected devices.
What I’d like to do is hack into this system, and publish a Wanking Hard Incidence Ranking Report (WHIRR!) for every member of Congress.
Maybe then someone would take this loss of privacy thing seriously.
Let’s hear it for the companies who are spying on us:
The only Alexa I’d ever let into my house is a wonderful lady friend thus named. The electronic snooper and spy? Well, I guess somebody could put one into my house at some point, but the recordings would be kinda boring, because I’d be dead.
Bloody hell, it’s bad enough that the bastard government alphabet agencies might want to climb up my ass on a 24/7 basis, simply because I once wrote that I wanted to beat Ted “Swimmer” Kennedy to death with a lead pipe; and that ever since the fat prick died, I’ve wanted to pour a bottle of Glenmorangie 10-year-old over his grave (after first passing the stuff through my kidneys).
Now the post-adolescent techno-weenies want their turn at my asshole, just because I buy books and deodorant from their poxy company? Fuck ’em.
Somebody remind me again how this “self-drive car” thing is supposed to help us, save lives, end Glueball Wormening and bring Peace To Mankind, etc. etc. etc.? Especially when we have crap like this happening to these “A.I.” systems?
The investigation into a fatal plane crash in Ethiopia has zeroed in on suspicion that a faulty sensor triggered an automated anti-stall system, sending the plane into a dive.
The Federal Aviation Administration received black box flight data from Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on Thursday, indicating that the MCAS anti-stall system was activated shortly before the crash.
The same system was implicated in the crash of another Boeing 737 Max in October in Indonesia, Lion Air Flight 610.
The MCAS is designed to push the nose of the plane down when sensors indicate that the ‘angle of attack’ is too steep, and the plane in in danger of stalling – but investigators are now probing whether a faulty sensor activated the system during a normal climb, sources say.
This, and especially after we hear that a.) the “safety” feature (i.e. pilot override) was available as an (expensive) option on the system, and b.) the pilots of said doomed airliners appear not to have had, shall we say, adequate training on the system.
Don’t even get me started on cock-ups like the faulty reservation systems, which have been in place since at least the 1970s, are one of the simplest programs in existence, and they still fall over occasionally. (Adding features which screw paying customers over*, however, doesn’t seem to have been a problem at all.)
Color me skeptical on all this stuff. Hell, I don’t even care for automatic gearboxes, let alone “self-drive” systems. “Faulty sensor”, my pale African-American ass.
*British Airways, among others, has a cute little sub-routine when you book two or more tickets at a time that automatically ensures that none of your booked seats are next to each other. So guess what? You have to go back into the system and pay extra for that “privilege” of sitting next to your wife or kids. That automatic program, I’ll wager, works perfectly every time.
I am totally unsurprised by this situation:
Robocallers and spam callers are getting quite good at masking their identify. They do this partly by “spoofing” local numbers, making it seem like a legitimate local number is calling to increase the likelihood that you’ll answer. That’s the reason, according to Hiya, that around 9 percent of spam calls a month actually get answered by phone owners even though they don’t recognize the number calling.
Nine percent might not sound like much, until you consider the fact that 26.3 billion robocalls were made to American phones in 2018.
Result:
The nearly 50 percent of phone calls that go unanswered jumps way up to 76 percent of calls left unanswered — a little more than three out of every four — when the call comes from an unidentified or unfamiliar number.
In my case, that would be 100 percent. I never answer a call if the caller is unidentified (i.e. isn’t among my saved contacts). As a result, I always tell people to email their phone numbers to me first so I can add them to my contact list. Otherwise, their calls will be met with indifference.
Sucks, but that’s what happens when people use technology indiscriminately and unprompted.
It seems that every day I have to rant about technology and its nefarious outcomes for us ordinary folks. Here’s the latest:
If you own a Ring doorbell camera system, we’ve got some bad news. The smart home company owned by Amazon, which the internet retail giant shelled out more than $1 billion to acquire, has apparently been violating its customers’ privacy in a pretty shocking way.
A new report from The Intercept quotes unnamed sources who confirm that engineers and executives at Ring have “highly privileged access” to live customer camera feeds, utilizing both Ring’s doorbells as well as its in-home cameras. All that’s apparently required to tap into the live feeds is a customer’s email address. Meaning the company has been so egregiously lax when it comes to security and privacy that even people outside the company could have potentially done this, using merely an email address to begin spying on customers, according to the report.
Within the company, a team that was supposed to have been focused on helping Ring get better at object recognition in videos caught customers in videos doing everything from kissing to firing guns and stealing.
This news, we should add, also comes less than a month after Ring was in the news for a different potential privacy flap. As BGR reported, a new patent application has begun to spur fears that Amazon would use Ring as a tool for creepy surveillance.
I have a suggestion: don’t buy any electronic device made by Amazon. This would include the Alexa spy system, the Ring spy system and any other so-called “efficent” things that purport to make your life easier, but in fact only make it easier for others to spy on you.
If I had one of these horrible things, the last video it would ever record is me firing a gun… at the camera.
And I find offerings by the other tech companies (e.g. Google Home, Apple Siri) equally disgusting. As Pop Mech says:
Companies like Google, and Amazon, and Facebook let us down, but they were always going to. Absent significant changes to the nature of the tech industry or wide-ranging regulation, they always will. The problems arise when we act as though they won’t.
The only way to win is not to play. And I won’t, unless I can dictate the rules.