Tag: Technology

Pass The Popcorn, Simon

Business, Gummint

I had to chuckle to myself when I saw this article about Amazon’s proposed new HQ in NYFC:

After months of haggling and wrangling to establish a deal involving major tax breaks and accommodations, Democrats in New York City are complaining that the deal isn’t good enough, the tax breaks are too dangerous, and Amazon’s arrival might be damaging to the social justice crowd because it could lead to further “gentrification” of the area. And that has Governor Andrew Cuomo seeing red and going to war with his own party.

It is, as the kids say nowadays, to LOL.  And needless to say, as the first sod has yet to be turned on the thing:

Online retail giant Amazon is reconsidering its plans to open a headquarters in Queens due to opposition from local lawmakers, according to a new report.
Executives at the company recently met to reassess setting up shop in Long Island City, as pols and activists continue to rail against the controversial new campus, the Washington Post reports, citing two people “familiar with the company’s thinking.”
“The question is whether it’s worth it if the politicians in New York don’t want the project, especially with how people in Virginia and Nashville have been so welcoming,” one of the sources told the paper.

Down here in the Dallas area, our proposals to Amazon were tiny compared to all the others’ offers — mostly because Texas has such a business-friendly climate, we start with a built-in advantage and don’t have to carve out all sorts of exceptions.  And New York doesn’t have a lot of stuff to give away, either:

The deal New York cut with Amazon is far beyond generous, including $2.5 billion in tax credits and $500 million in state construction subsidies. That hollows out the benefits of the new HQ in terms of municipal and state tax revenue considerably.

And of course, where’s there’s idiocy afoot, can Our Little Leninist Darling AOC be far behind?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez applauded news on Friday that Amazon is reportedly reconsidering its plans to build a second headquarters in New York City as it faces fierce opposition from some state and city officials.
“Can everyday people come together and effectively organize against creeping overreach of one of the world’s biggest corporations?” she wrote in a tweet. “Yes, they can.”
The New York Democrat, who represents the 14th Congressional District, has been a fierce critic of the e-commerce giant’s proposed second headquarters in Long Island City, a neighborhood in Queens.

It makes you wonder why Amazon chose — or even considered investing in — New York at all, despite the bribes incentives.  All I can say is that they all deserve each other.

And if Amazon now comes a-calling on Dallas to re-pitch the area, we should offer them a great big Nada.  Fuck ’em.

Heeeere Comes Another One

Technology

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.

Comings And Goings

Business, Technology

This story pissed me off, for all the usual reasons:

“For years, TWC has deceptively used its Weather Channel App to amass its users’ private, personal geolocation data — tracking minute details about its users’ locations throughout the day and night, all the while leading users to believe that their data will only be used to provide them with ‘personalized local weather data, alerts and forecasts,’” the complaint reads.
The data serves no weather-related purpose, but was only collected in order to allow TWC to turn a profit, the complaint reads. The data was sold to at least 12 third party websites over the past 19 months.
The Weather Channel app has about 45 million users, according to the complaint.
TWC intentionally obscures this information” in a 10,000-word privacy policy “because it recognizes that many users would not permit the Weather Channel App to track their geolocation if they knew the true uses of that data,” the complaint goes on to say.
The lawsuit is seeking an injunction prohibiting TWC from continuing to collect and sell the data, along with civil penalties of up to $2,500 per violation.

Just this week, I went through a store (Forever 21) instead of using a mall entrance because my car was parked closer to the former than the latter.  And on leaving the mall, I went back out the same way.

Needless to say, when I got home I had one of those “personalized”, annoying little requests:  “Tell us about your shopping experience at Forever 21” with a link attached.  Being annoyed, I went there and wrote the following:

“I walked around your store TWICE today, and not once did anyone from your staff offer to help me.  In fact, given that the people I THINK were employees were dressed like customers, it was hard to tell whether there were in fact any employees in the store at all.  Certainly, most people in the store were standing around chatting to their friends and ignoring everyone else completely, so there was no way of telling.  It will be a long time, if ever, before I visit Forever 21 again.”

And every single word of that is true.  Yeah, it’s possible the wrong people will get punished.  I don’t fucking care.  If enough people turn this data snooping around and use it against these “marketing” bastards, maybe they’ll stop using it.  If not… did I mention I don’t fucking care?

And to return to my original gripe:  I deleted the Weather Channel app off my phone, just in case and just because.

A spokesperson for The Weather Company — which operates the Weather Channel – provided CBS2 with the following statement:
“The Weather Company has always been transparent with use of location data; the disclosures are fully appropriate, and we will defend them vigorously.”

Fuck them and their transparency.  I hope the lawsuit costs them many millions, and they go out of business.  And I wish I knew which dozen organizations bought TWC’s tracking data so that I could boycott them too.  If anyone knows who they are, please share that information in Comments.

Helping Hand

Technology

Here’s some interesting news, following on from my earlier post:

The OhMiBod Remote app allows users to choose different modes for their vibrator, adjusting the speed, intensity and pattern as required.
It’s hooked up using Bluetooth and can be controlled from anywhere in the world – meaning those in a long-distance relationship can get in on the fun.
Those with an Amazon Alexa will be able to control their toy simply by yelling at their Amazon assistant device while getting down and dirty.

Yup, I can see it now:

“Alexa, fuck me in the ass!”
“I’ve sent your banking records to the I.R.S.”

Cold day in hell before I let this piece of shit into my house.

Opting Out

Bad News, Technology

According to this report, our household appliances are about to become snitches on just about every aspect of our lives:

One day, finding an oven that just cooks food may be as tough as buying a TV that merely lets you click between channels.
Internet-connected “smarts” are creeping into cars, refrigerators, thermostats, toys and just about everything else in your home. CES 2019, the gadget show opening Tuesday in Las Vegas, will showcase many of these products, including an oven that coordinates your recipes and a toilet that flushes with a voice command.
With every additional smart device in your home, companies are able to gather more details about your daily life. Some of that can be used to help advertisers target you — more precisely than they could with just the smartphone you carry.

And the news just gets better and better:

Despite the fact that there’s plenty of information available showing how these devices collect data about every aspect of your life and the manufacturers both use and sell that data on the open market, the majority of people seem to either not care or are willing to accept this “new reality” as part of living in the modern world.

Once again [sigh], it appears that I’m in a minority.

No doubt, there will appear at your local drugstores condoms which measure the number of thrusts, such data sent back to the manufacturers of K-Y “Duration” gel, said antidote for premature ejaculation to arrive at your bedside by special delivery within two strokes of initial insertion.  And that’s a benevolent  outcome for such intrusiveness.

Never mind that.  Here’s a situation already in being:

T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to their customers’ location data, and that data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters and others not authorized to possess it, letting them track most phones in the country.

I don’t often agree with church leaders about, well, anything much.  But I’m in absolute agreement with this man.

Allow me to offer a suggestion for a brand-new industry.  When a new generation of “smart” phones arrived on the market and appeared to be “locked” to a specific carrier, within days we saw phones being unlocked by street vendors, sometimes right outside  the stores selling the damn things.

I’m calling on all privacy-minded geeks of the world to unite, and to design apps or hacks or whatever to bypass the Big Brother mechanisms of these new infernal fink machines so that people (like me) who aren’t interested in letting Global MegaCorp Inc. snoop into the most intimate areas of our lives may avail themselves of their inventions.

I will be at the head of the fucking line to buy them.  I promise.

Vanishing Tech

Bad News, Technology

This barely qualifies as news, I suppose:

The beginning of the end for the DVD player: John Lewis will no longer sell the gadgets as they are replaced by streaming services (joining VHS, cassette tapes and floppy disks in the dustbin of defunct technology)

As the owner of dozens of DVDs, I guess I’ll have to buy a backup (or two) DVD players for the inevitable time when you can’t find the blessed things anymore.  As it happens, I have a multi-format Blu-Ray DVD player at the moment — multi-format because I have both PAL- and NTSC-format DVDs:  a heritage of buying DVDs in Europe and Britishland during my various travels Over There.  Of course, Philips no longer makes the model I own, so I’ll have to pay the “Sony premium” for my backup.

Gah.

Look, I understand the March Of Progress and all that, and I know that technology becomes outdated after a while.  I just wish that the “while” would last a little longer.

And no, I’m not going to “stream” movies — at least, not the movies that I love and want to watch over and over again — because as any fule kno, what the “Cloud” giveth, the Cloud can take away (often without warning) and I refuse to be held hostage by the fucking movie studios (e.g. the horrible Disney Corporation, or Netflix).  The ordinary movies (i.e. most of them) I can watch once and never watch again without regret;  but the gems?  oh no, I wantssss them all, my Precioussss, so that I can enjoy them anytime I want and not when Global Entertainment MegaCorp says I can (or can’t, a pox on them).

Ditto books, by the way.  I’ve talked before about why I can’t use Kindle (see below* for the Cliff Notes version), so forget e-books of any kind whatsoever.  And I have hundreds of audio CDs, ergo I have a couple of backup CD players for the time when the poxy recording industry [50,000-word rant deleted]  decides that CD ownership is a Bad Thing.

Possession isn’t just 9/10 of the law when it comes to my viewing, listening and reading pleasure:  it’s all of the law, and I intend to keep it that way.

*I’ve never bought into e-books.  I tried a Kindle, but it might as well been kindling for all the appeal it has to me.  Here’s the reason why: my eyesight is failing [Old Fart Problem #4], which means I have to increase the font size to see the words properly.  Problem:  I read at about 2,000 words per minute (always have), which means that I get a blister on my thumb from hitting the “Next Page” button on a Kindle, and anyone in the room with me will eventually complain about the noise of the constant rapid-fire clicking.

And that’s the other problem, right there:  I love the feel of a book in my hands.  I love the ability to flip backwards to re-read a passage that turned out to be important later on.  I love the fact that once I own a book, it can’t be taken away from me electronically by some algorithm which decides that I’ve had the content “long enough” (as though there’s an expiration date on ownership).