Oolite Bulletins

Unfortunately, that DDoS attack on Dyn also affected GitHub for a while.

Smivs wrote:

Cody wrote:

The only good kettle is one without a water gauge!

that sits on the cooker and whistles when it boils!

Funny enough, If you have a gas cooker, your using about a quarter the power. Average kettle runs about 2Kw. One of the biggest users in the house. That's the same as the heater we had growing up. Heated a 22Sq Yard living room in winter easily.
But I love my electric cordless with level gauge. about 10 quid from Kmart. Only coz there's no gas in the building. No phone lines either, all optic. Not as good as you might think.

For yous not old enough to remember rolling black outs, the old phone system still worked and if you had gas you still had a hot meal.

So what's the priority? a talking kettle or a hot meal and chinwag on the phone under candle light?

IoT + Location Based Services + Big Data Analytics + AI + Quantum Computing + Robotics + Cash Less Economy

Actually, the tremendous power, given by this combination, concentrated in the hands of a few, does not leave much space to my thinking, to see what good must be done in order to balance with the lost privacy.
Two decades ago, we were concerned about μ$ spying on our data.
Some 7 years ago we've learned that Google is sniffing our WiFi.
Even in this community, pushed by our natural human urge to feel as much close as possible to each other, we are pinpointing our home (pause... I repeat ... home) on a pretty much public map.
Needless to speak about the combined personal information shared over the "social" media.

I am not talking about any conspiracies here. I just wonder about how will a human society be, without private information.

I'm scared for all that will be done for me without me.
(lyrics Andreas Pantazis, music Yannis Zouganelis, singer Vasilis Papakonstantinou)

...but then again, what do I know?
I'm just an old creepy penguin, still trying to find his niche in life, making wine at home, toying around with 80's games and having a heck of a time watching... Trolls!

I thought I'd found my niche in life years ago - but stuff happened and I fell out of it.
Now, I'm just old and nicheless, like the poor penguin above - old and in the way!

Getafix wrote: ↑Fri Mar 31, 2017 2:34 pm

IoT + Location Based Services + Big Data Analytics + Quantum Computing + Robotics + Cash Less Economy

Don't forget AI

We do have an interesting time in front of us when all these technologies mature and to some degree converge. Is it going to be good? Your guess is as good as mine. But I trust that we have the ability to make it good.

When you hear that Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, IBM and Apple have made a partnership on AI there's absolutely no doubt what it is going to be used for: profile and predict users, in order to sell those data to other companies or for their own benefit.

Remember when Facebook helped with a little study that involved showing certain contents to some users in order to see if their mood could be altered? The next step after profile and predict is to influence.

maik wrote: ↑Fri Mar 31, 2017 5:12 pm

Don't forget AI

Edited my post accordingly... AI was lost somewhere between edits!

Astrobe wrote: ↑Fri Mar 31, 2017 6:03 pm

The next step after profile and predict is to influence.

This step is already here. It is called Filter Bubble.

Want to learn more about how you are being censored? Check out the following TED talk by Eli Parsier:
https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_b ... anguage=en

I wouldn't call it "censorship". Halon's razor could be used here; those filter bubble seem to be unintended effects of sorting and selecting algorithms. In his first example, I think that if one includes 10 pages of Google search results both people get roughly the same links. However I agree that in practice since people tend to focus on the top results the first page and therefore the way the results are sorted makes a huge difference. So that's a half-step only.

But the funny thing is that nobody can tell if those biases are intentional or not. Except maybe those who wrote and tuned the algorithms. If I was running an evil company though, I'd make sure that I have one group of people for making easily tunable algorithms, and an other group for actually tuning them...

FWIW I began to use DuckDuckGo - an alternative search service - a long time ago because it had nice features that Google didn't have (aside from privacy protection). Google has caught up since but I'm still using it for privacy and to avoid this filter bubble effect.

I believe that privacy is the fight of the decade and probably the next one; not because of some 1933 scenario, but because of what private companies could do with these data. Unlike powers in democracies, there is very little control on what they do with them. I'm pretty sure a big scandal about that waits ahead.

Unless the war is over before that. Windows 10 was a huge defeat, even though a significant number of people stayed with Windows 7 or moved to Linux (which is my case: still running W7, but my next OS will be a Linux - and I would add certainly not Ubuntu: too many partnerships already with the companies I've listed previously). That's the only practical way to "vote against" abusive EULAs.