Big Auto, Big Brother

Yesterday, I talked about wanting to own a pre-digital car — i.e. one that doesn’t fucking spy on your every move.

I often wonder what car or cars I’d get to replace the Tiguan, and what’s interesting is that I’m having precisely the same feelings that I have with guns and watches: nothing of recent manufacture at all — especially given that they’re all without exception loaded with electronic gizmos I don’t care for, or else gizmos that spy on you and/or could possibly be used to control your driving. In fact, the more I think about it, I’d probably have to go back to pre-1970s cars — fully resto-modded of course — to find a car that has not a single computer chip in its driving operation.

Here’s a business opportunity, because this is America.  (I don’t have the technical skills or capital to follow through on this but I’ll just throw it out there.)  Is it possible to turn your car into a mobile Faraday cage?  And would it be possible to turn the feature on and off?

I know, car companies and / or the godless insurance industry would probably use their lawyers and lobbyists to outlaw this, just as law enforcement tried to prevent speed-radar scanners, but it’s worth a shot.  With a switchable cage, the insurance companies couldn’t exactly deny you coverage or raise your rates if all the data showed was you doing trips to the supermarket once a week.

It’s time for us to fight back against this nonsense, and to borrow an expression:  rage against the machine — the machine, in this case, being Big Brother cars, the cunts who make them and sell your data, the even-bigger cunts who strip-mine your personal data, and and the last category of cunts who use your personal data against you.)

I feel a mega-rant coming on, but instead I’ll just go to the range.

And just to make you feel better, if my car was spying on me it could report said destination to… well, anyone who might be interested in such data.  Makes you think, dunnit?

Dust Settled

Okay, all that connectivity bullshit seems to have cleared up.  I won’t go into detail, but the past two days have been somewhat nerve-wracking because I kind of like keeping this here back porch of mine going, and because without an Internet connection in my house, I was going to have to go to places like Sta*buck$ or my apartment complex’s front office to use their free wi-fi.  And the rent had to be paid,yesterday — and there was no guarantee that I would be able to do it online.  (Not that I care that much;  my bank has a branch literally in the next block — actual walking distance, no kidding — so at worst I could get a cashier’s check cut in about five minutes.)

Also, my plagues & poxes episode finally seems to have cleared up — although New Wife is now showing some worrying symptoms of same — but at least I’m no longer hacking up bits of lung or whatever.

The downtime meant I had no time to assemble the Monday Funnies or News Roundup for their respective days, but that’s not important in the grand scheme of things, what with so many others putting out the same type of content anyway.  And to be quite frank, both involve quite a lot of work to put together (“curate”? I hate that fucking word), so I might just make the Roundup a weekly thing.

Anyway, normal service will now be resumed.

Assuming, of course, that in the general mood of whatthefuck that I described last week, that there’s anything I feel like ranting about or even giggling at.

Dislocation

Having reached the end of my tether with AT&T/DirecTv, I’m swapping Internet providers.  So please don’t be alarmed if there’s a shortage of posts over the next couple of days as I grapple with the promised “easy self-installation” promised by the new guys.

The last “easy self-installation” promised by AT&T ended up taking over four hours with a techie, as Loyal Readers may recall.

In the meantime, feast your eyes upon this:

…and go here to see the price.

Back soon, I hope.


Update:  Forget that shit.  Spectrum is worse than AT&T, so I just kept the status quo.

Better Or Worse?

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

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.