Category: Technology

Better Or Worse?

Lifestyle, Technology

I suppose enough time has passed since cell phones became cheap and therefore ubiquitous to ponder the question:  is life better with cell phones?  Denise Van Outen thinks not:

Denise Van Outen reckons smartphones have killed the fun of the hedonistic ’90s as revellers’ antics are now being recorded instead of remembered.

The 50-year-old actress and telly host made her name as one of the ballsiest women on TV more than a quarter of a century ago – partying with the likes of Sara Cox and Zoe Ball.

But the mum-of-one is now lamenting the loss of the ‘Cool Britannia’ decade – and blames the likes of Apple for sucking the joy out of life.She blasted: “We never had access to everything on our smartphone. So, you’d go out and you’d just be in the moment and really enjoy it. I remember going to the big festivals like Glastonbury and Reading and you wouldn’t have your phone with you, you wouldn’t be videoing anything.

“I think people are starting to see now that smartphones can be a hindrance and stop people actually enjoying themselves.”

“And I think we’re gradually getting to a stage where a lot of people… for example, if you’re going to a party – are putting on invites that it’s a ‘No phone policy’.

I dunno.  I find myself hopelessly conflicted about the whole cellular phone business.  Never mind an early adopter, I put off buying one of the things for years, until Connie actually forced me into getting one.  So I had a Nokia flip phone for years until my kids finally shamed me into getting a smartphone.

But maybe that’s just me.  As someone who guards his privacy fiercely (I know, this blog yadda yadda yadda), I don’t like being at someone else’s beck and call, and at least the advent of caller ID made things bearable because I could decide whether or not to take the call.

And cell phones — at least the smart ones — put in an appearance quite long after I’d semi-retired;  I cannot imagine having one in a workplace environment, and finding out that no matter where I happened to be, I was still in the office.

Ugh.

That said, there have been times that being connected to the outside world has had its advantages — a couple of emergencies, helping the kids out of a jam, etc. — so yes, there’s that.  And I can see that for some jobs (e.g. realtor) cell phones have been a tremendous help to productivity.  I remember going to the airport during the early 1990s (when I did most of my business travel) and feeling sorry for those souls who were glued to pay phones (remember them?), contacting clients, the office, family etc. in those few minutes before takeoff.  For them — the people whom Woody Allen in a rare moment of actual humor termed “connectivity assholes” — there’s no doubt that the cell phone has been a boon.

I remain unconvinced, however, that the conveeeenience of the cell phone has been that much of an improvement to society.  And I resent like hell the intrusiveness of the things, enabling the outside world to contact me whether or not I feel like being contacted at all, let alone by people I have no wish to communicate with (politicians, pollsters, scam artists etc.)

I’m not a Luddite by any stretch, by the way.  I embraced email, for example, with a vengeance and to this day I prefer to communicate by that method instead of a phone call.

But I’m a reluctant user of the phone — any phone, not just cell phones, mind you — so don’t expect me to sing its praises.

And the lovely Denise has that part right:  going out is a much better experience without a cell phone.  We all used to make fun of Japanese tourists who experienced their entire trip through the lens of their Pentax.

Now, of course, we are all Japanese, who have to record our every experience lest we forget it.

What bollocks.

Not That Unusual Anymore

Technology

Following the recent Crowdstrike/Microsoft debacle, we apparently now have this little problem:

Students in Singapore are scrambling after a security breach wiped notes and all other data from school-issued iPads and Chromebooks running the mobile device management app Mobile Guardian.

According to news reports, the mass wiping came as a shock to multiple students in Singapore, where the Mobile Guardian app has been the country’s official mobile device management provider for public schools since 2020. Singapore’s Ministry of Education said Monday that roughly 13,000 students from 26 secondary schools had their devices wiped remotely in the incident. The agency said it will remove the Mobile Guardian from all iPads and Chromebooks it issues.

Allow me to repeat the warning:  the more centralized the dissemination method, the greater the vulnerability becomes, and the more people will be affected.

I’m not all for going that far back to when lecturers and teachers handed out paper copies of material, and students took actual notes by writing them out during class — but you have to admit that this Singapore incident would never have happened under those circumstances.

Sometimes, conveeeenience comes with a high price tag — something I’ve also often said before.

Crowdstrike, Cloudburst

Business, Management, Technology

I remember having a discussion with one of my executive buddies a while back, talking about this whole business of shoving IT up into the “Cloud” and away from in-house (local) processing.  My buddy, (who is still very active in business) stated that he would never, ever do that because of control concerns;  I went even further and said that were I the CEO of a corporation and an executive even suggested such an action to me, I’d fire him on the turn.

Here’s the reason for my intransigence, and it’s a topic I’ve banged on about before:  the allure of “convenience” without caring about (or intentionally disregarding) the risk of vulnerability.  Here’s an example in a microcosm.

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s we still did a lot of paper printing, as email communication of large files and documents was beyond the ability of most systems to accomplish large-scale dissemination.  At the same time, though, systems were changing from stand-alone processing into networked systems, and the most obvious of these was in the area of shared printers (as opposed to each workstation having its own printer).

Of course, IT was all over the networked printing principle because, as one clueless IT person told me, “we only have to maintain and service one printer as opposed to dealing with several, so it’s more productive” — confusing, as I pointed out to him, their convenience with the user’s needs.

What, I asked him, was the point of sharing a single device when there’s a traffic jam of users waiting around the printer for their job to clear the queue?  How productive was that, in the corporate sense, when one service technician would save time while half a dozen other workers were doing nothing?  And even worse, of course, was the prospect of the printer failing altogether (for whatever reason), causing everybody to sit on their hands while the machine was being fixed or having its ink cartridge replaced;  how productive was that scenario?

As I was beating my head against a corporate brick wall, I did what I normally do in such circumstances:  I declared unilateral independence.  I bought myself one of those HP500 inkjet printers (and black-ink cartridges) out of my own pocket and remained outside the system altogether, to the consternation of IT.  (My boss, bless him, told them to go and fuck themselves — those exact words — when they asked him to strong-arm me into compliance.)

Then over the following six months I monitored the network printer activity and catalogued all the times it went down, then calculated the net cost to departmental productivity, and presented my findings to Management at our next inter-departmental meeting.  (Basically, if the five largest users of the printers in our department had each had their own HP500, the department would have saved literally thousands of dollars in lost productivity.  In fact, it would have been a zero-sum decision to equip each of those users with their own laser printer, never mind a cheapie HP500, and left “casual” printing — memos, etc. — on the network.)

I won the battle and lost the war, because IT took its revenge on me from then on by slow-walking all my projects — and I did a lot of those — through the system, using the “limited resources” argument because, I admit, my projects were resource intensive.

It did not help matters when personal computers came along.  Of course, I was the first one to get one (out of my own pocket, again), enabling me to do a huge amount of developmental work independently of IT.  The head of IT came into my office and asked me to give him a demonstration of my PC.  I agreed to do it, but only after inviting my boss to sit in.  Then I ran one of my routines on the PC and we sat for about ten minutes waiting for it to process.  Of course, the IT guy sneered at the pace of the process, saying that the mainframe could have done the same job in seconds.

I then pointed out to my boss that the last time I had submitted an identical job through IT, I’d eventually got the output some three days later.  (And yes, I had the documentation to substantiate it.)

My boss, bless him again, asked me if I could set up a PC for him because he too was sick of waiting for his jobs to get back to him.

A week later, Management received a proposal from IT to set up dumb terminals in all our offices so that we users would not have to become our own computer programmers.  It was accepted by all the department managers except mine, who had in the interim found room in the budget to buy PCs for all the account executives, and tasked me with developing and delivering the necessary training.  (I outsourced it to a buddy’s training company because I had things called “clients” who had greater need of my time.)

Anyway, I told you all that so I could talk about this.

You see, apart from any talk of productivity and convenience, the dirty little downside to Cloud-based single-source processing is that having a single source also means that there is an enormous risk when any bad actor or even incompetent actor (such as in the above case) gets to access the whole show.  Single source also means incredibly-dangerous universal failure scenarios.

Ask the airlines, banks and hospitals affected by the above.  And incidentally, state vehicle inspections in our area of north Texas were also affected in that their inspection equipment failed to operate — and the operators didn’t bother coming into work because why should they?  And even when the systems did start working again, there was still a delay while the operators came back from their absence — machines and systems working:  nobody to operate them.

As I discovered two days ago when I took my car in to be inspected, at two different locations hereabouts.

Now scroll back up and re-read the first paragraph of this post.

Just Like Guns, Eh Bill?

Technology

From Cloud-Cuckoo Land, where unicorns are a common sight:

Speaking in London this week, Bill Gates called AI a ‘wonderful’ technology that can save humans from climate change and disease.

But he warned that it needs to be used ‘by people with good intent’, as it could be used by criminals ‘engaged in cyber attacks or political interference’.

Yeah, for “A.I.” read guns — well, except that he’s a well-known gun control advocate (except when it comes to his security detail, probably).  And the parallel doesn’t end there:

Gates, one of the 10 richest humans in the world, said: ‘The defence has to be smarter than the offence.’

He may be one of the richest, but he sure as hell isn’t one of the smartest.  (Hell, he buys into the “climate change” bullshit — an infallible indicator of dumbassery right there.)

Stick to Windows, Bill.  Gawd knows it needs help.

As for defense:

Net Loss

Corporate Fuckery, Technology

The plan could not have been simpler.  I had just signed an extension to my AT&T wi-fi/Internet plan, at a really good rate (with the most advantageous bandwidth / channel compatibility / cost compromise*), so I just wanted to continue the plan at my new address.

“Switch the exact same plan from #2109 Old Town to #714 New Town,” was my description of my situation.
“No problem at all,” saith AT&T, “because the previous tenant at #714 was an AT&T customer, and we show all the necessary equipment is already in place.”
“So I need to cancel my existing account at #2109 for June 12, and schedule an installation appointment for my new service on June 13?”
“Precisely.  And you won’t need an installation appointment because the basic framework is already in place;  we’ll just send you your new equipment — it will arrive on June 12 — and all you’ll have to do is plug it in, turn it on, and your new service will begin at 2:00pm on June 13.”

How excellent, thinks I — but you may recall my words prior to the move:  “From long and bitter experience, I expect that despite all my careful planning, AT&T is somehow going to cock things up so I might be Internet-free for the next couple of days.”

Which they duly did. On June 11 I received a package from AT&T which contained only a power supply and two connecting cables.  No router, but “Aha!” thinks I, “I’ll just be able to use my existing router;  how convenient.”

So Thursday morning June 13 was spent moving the remaining furniture from #2109 to #714, which cost only a tad more than $500 because New Wife and I had already  moved almost everything across during the two prior weeks, leaving only the stuff we couldn’t physically move ourselves.  All was done long before midday, whereupon I set about plugging in the router and so on, to get wifi.  I even delayed it a couple of hours until the promised 2:00pm activation time.

Except that when I eventually found the connection box, it was in the bedroom closet (hidden behind the door), and the box bore absolutely no relation to any of the equipment AT&T said was necessary to plug anything into.

So I called AT&T Customer WiFi service, after going through the usual phone-tree “press 1 for this and press 6 for that” which I bypassed simply by screaming “OPERATOR!” whenever thus prompted.  Eventually I got though to a very nice young man named Kevin — a real Kevin from the Midwest and not some fake “Kevin” from Kolkata or Manila, which was nice.  He looked up my situation and insisted that I should have no problem just plugging everything in.  So I took photos of the existing box, and texted them to him.

For the first time, a crack started to show.

“Are you sure that’s the only box you have there?”
“Yup.  If you want, I can do a brief tour of the entire apartment, and take pics of every single power outlet or tech point.”
“No no, that won’t be necessary.  What router did we send you?”
“There wasn’t a router, any router,” and I showed him pics of not only the contents but also the package which had contained the cables.
“Oh, ummm it looks as though we’ll have to schedule an installation appointment for you.”
“For this afternoon?” I inquired casually.
“Ummm no, we have no available slots today,” but before I could begin the Bad Language, he added hastily, “but I can send you a technician tomorrow morning, between 8am and 12pm.”

Okay, I agreed to that, but warning him (remember, “This call may be monitored for training and quality control purposes” ) that if the techie didn’t show up, my next call would be to another provider, like Spectrum.

So Friday morning June 14 dawned, and precisely at 8:30am I got this call:

“Hi, this is the AT&T technician.  I’m at your apartment complex, but I can’t find your apartment.”
“No problem;  just drive around and I’ll wait outside to signal you in.”
“Okay, I’m outside Building 21” which was when I started to get a queasy feeling, because the new complex doesn’t have that many blocks.  Then he added, “Shouldn’t #2109 be in that building?”
AT&T had sent the techie to my OLD address, not to the NEW one.
So I pointed that out to him, we shared a merry laugh, and I told him just to drive the 20-odd minutes to the new place, and all would be well.
“Let me call you back to confirm…”  and the next call I got was:  “I can’t do your installation, because it’s in a different area and we can’t cross over.”

Which is when the Bad Language started to flow.

“Look,” I said eventually, “I understand that this isn’t your fault — someone at Scheduling fucked up, not you — but it is my fucking problem, that problem being that I don’t have the wifi service I’m paying for.  So tell me what comes next.”

Of course, I had to call some 800 number to get a new installation appointment, and by screaming (again) “OPERATOR!” as necessary, I got through to a Hispanic-sounding chap who was as helpful as could be, except that he was unable to simply cancel the wrong installation callout and substitute it with a new one, and could only create a new ticket with (of course) a much later installation time.

Which was when the Bad Language really started to flow.  I refused to get off the line, and told him to get me a replacement techie, and if that techie arrived anytime after midday that day, I would be calling Spectrum and to hell with AT&T, their contract and their whole fucking inefficient operation.

One hour later, the techie arrived.  She was a short, tough-looking lesbian named Christie with heavy boots, multiple tattoos and piercings, and she took charge of the whole situation.

Turns out that I was absolutely not at fault;  everything AT&T had said about the installation was wrong, she’d need to install a whole new system in the closet (including a shelf to hold the router and controller), there were also some technical issues which would take a little extra time, but she’d take care of everything and I wasn’t to worry.  I could sit down, have a cup of coffee and put the explosives away.

And for the first time in this whole encounter with AT&T, she was exactly right.  Not only did she do all that stuff, she worked some magic whereby I could use my old router (same wifi address and password even), which also meant I didn’t have to send it back to AT&T.

And speaking of AT&T, they always send over a “customer service” guy towards the end of any service call, whose nominal job is to make sure everything has gone okay, but who “reviews” your account and tries to get you to change your phone provider / purchase a more comprehensive set of AT&T products.

This guy (David) took one look at what had happened (after I’d explained it all — minus the bad language, but with a great deal of clarity — and told him I had absolutely no intention of ending my 20-year+ relationship with T-Mobile).

He recommended that I downgrade my service package to one closer to my needs (see below) which would taraaa! save us $30 a month.

Which, I don’t have to tell you, means free milk and bread per month (at Bidenprices) for New Wife and myself.  It all helps.

So AT&T earned some redemption from me, at least.  But I still hate them.

*I use very little bandwidth, relatively speaking, and watch only a few channels on TV — EPL football and F1 Grand Prix, major golf tournaments and occasionally an oldie on Turner Classic Movies, plus the usual dreck on Amazon Prime, Netflix and sometimes a series on one of the other channels like Discovery+.  As I have no interest in being “current”, I’m happy to wait until the New Hot Show gets old and withered, and can be had for free on one of the above, failing which I let it go without giving a damn.

I am a man of very simple needs, technologically speaking

As If I Needed Another

Technology

…reason not to install the latest “upgrade” from Windoze:  here it is.

Microsoft will soon begin pushing adverts into the Start Menu of Windows 11 with the inclusion of ‘recommended’ apps.

And why not?  It’s where users are at their most vulnerable, so to speak:  right at the beginning of the process.  It’s like starting your car, but before the engine fires, you first have to listen to a 15-second advert for “recommended” tires, Bud Lite or windshield washer fluid.  But of course, it’s being pushed as a helpful benefit:

Microsoft says the ads are aimed to enable users to find ‘some of the great apps that are available’.

That’s Microsoft all over:  just trying to be helpful, as is someone who will pass you a bucket of lighter fluid instead of water when you’re trying to put out a house fire.

Although the update [KB5036980] is currently optional, it will soon roll out to all Windows devices within the coming weeks.

Of course it will — coercion is one of Microsoft’s major strengths.  But:

Luckily, there is an easy way to turn off the pesky adverts with a simple change to your device settings.

Luckily.  Until that feature too is disabled in future “updates”, depending on how much blast-back Microsoft gets from customers — not that they’ve ever paid much heed to that in the past, unless the storm of protest was overwhelming.

I have generally made it my personal policy to skip generations of Windows OS — I never used Win 9, for example, going from 8 to 10, and then only because someone I trusted not only chided me but actually forced me to make that change, having to do it himself because I flatly refused to do so.  (Thanks, Dan.)  And I was only able to have him do that because I was a house guest at the time.  Unfortunately, he lives about two states away from me so I won’t be able to do that again this time.

And in any event, I’m going to get this fucking “feature” when I get my replacement PC* later in the year.  Let’s hope there really is an “easy way” to turn the thing off, or else the laptop’s durability will be sorely tested as it slams into the opposite wall.  (My new apartment doesn’t overlook the pool this time, so the laptop’s waterproofing will not be called upon.)

*In response to my earlier woes, several Readers sent me their older laptops to try to help me out — and thank you, every one — but I was never able to make them work for me, even with considerable input from Daughter, who is a pro at this kind of thing.  Sadly, it’s a new one I’ll be getting, or else I’ll just go back to using my older Dell which, although slower than a carthorse on downers, is at least still capable of closing without needing engineering manipulation of the Rubik Cube degree.