Tag Archives: technology

No, Alexa, No!

28 Tuesday Dec 2021

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One would have to be utterly retarded to allow a homicidal AI spy bot into one’s home. Especially a home with children in it.

The girl’s mother posted a tweet on Monday describing how her daughter had been doing some cold-weather indoor challenges set by a phys. ed. teacher on YouTube and was seeking another one. To the woman’s shock, Alexa suggested a “simple” task it had found on the web, whereby the participant “plug[s] in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch[es] a penny to the exposed prongs.”

It has it all – a tweetz, Youboob, and AI Alexa the evil robot. The real surprise here is that a modern student was exercising. Might I suggest the old hammer-Alexa-to-pieces challenge?

Today’s Tech Rating

07 Thursday Oct 2021

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A quarter of a century ago, I had a primitive computer connected via the telephone line to the primitive internet. I did not have a cellular phone. All of that was faster, more reliable, and better than the whiz-bang bullshit I have today, and by “today” I literally mean on this very Thursday, 10/7/21, here in my rapidly declining third-world swamp that I am really starting to hate.

Rating: 0.5.

A New Rating System

25 Sunday Jul 2021

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If I really cared, I might devise a 0-10 tracking scale for daily internet/technology failure. “0” would be the stone age; “10,” Star Trek. Today would be about a “2,” vaguely there but essentially unusable. If you’re successfully reading this, then we may have moved up to a “3.”

In related news, in the coming weeks or years, I will convert this blog into a subscription pigeon service whereby the birds deliver daily scribblings on small scrolls. Go ahead and line your window sill with newspaper.

Press “1” For Cancer

08 Thursday Jul 2021

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Just how “smart” are those phones again?

Researchers took a comprehensive look at statistical findings from 46 different studies around the globe and found that the use of a cell phone for more than 1,000 hours, or about 17 minutes a day over a ten year period, increased the risk of tumors by 60 percent.

Averaging about one-tenth of the study average use time, I’m in no way worried. Soon, in a couple of years, I plan to cut phone time to zero minutes per day, year, and life. Is this price worth paying, for any of you, for babbling to some idiot about nothing? The whole post-modern world is beginning to resemble a death cult. Dial it back.

The “Key” to Technology

23 Sunday Aug 2020

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I’m supposed to finally get a new dumb phone soon. This story makes me want to scrap the technology altogether.

Every time you unlock your front door, your key whispers a small, but audible, secret. Hackers finally learned how to listen.

Researchers at the National University of Singapore published a paper earlier this year detailing how, using only a smartphone microphone and a program they designed, a hacker can clone your key. What’s more, if a thief was able to install malware on your smartphone, smartwatch, or smart doorbell to record the audio from afar, they wouldn’t even need to be physically nearby to pull off the attack.

The key (ahem) to the attack, dubbed SpiKey, is the sound made by the lock pins as they move over a typical key’s ridges.

“When a victim inserts a key into the door lock, an attacker walking by records the sound with a smartphone microphone,” describes the paper written by Soundarya Ramesh, Harini Ramprasad, and Jun Han.

Smartphones can (and should) be shielded. Smartwatches are just ridiculous. And, the new doorbells are about as appealing as those cameras and 1984 microphones people are rushing to add to their homes. Again, I am really starting to suspect that electricity, not the AI thing, was the mistake. You might want to … lock that down.

It Was Already Slowing Down

26 Thursday Mar 2020

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Much like the economy, the internet was already dragging along at 2000 levels of performance before the Chinese virus hoax surfaced. It has made things noticeable worse.

And last week, as a wave of stay-at-home orders rolled out across the United States, the average time it took to download videos, emails and documents increased as broadband speeds declined 4.9 percent from the previous week, according to Ookla, a broadband speed testing service. Median download speeds dropped 38 percent in San Jose, Calif., and 24 percent in New York, according to Broadband Now, a consumer broadband research site.

So, 5G will look even better when it’s rolled out. 2018 video streaming speeds will seem like great comfort to the home population while the primary uses facilitate the next phase. Got it.

Why Would Any Sane Homeowner Install This Stuff?

29 Wednesday Jan 2020

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People use to value privacy. Now they pay to get rid of it. Ring clandestinely sells out users to Farcebook.

Amazon’s Ring smart doorbell surveillance product has been caught sending user data to Facebook and other companies without making Ring users aware their data was being shared. That’s according to an investigation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). What’s even more alarming is Ring users are having their data sent to Facebook even if they themselves don’t have Facebook accounts.

The EFF examined Ring’s latest Android app and found that it had four unlisted trackers sending Ring user data back to four websites including branch.io, mixpanel.com, appsflyer.com, and facebook.com. This is despite Ring’s privacy policy, which purports to list all the trackers being used in its software. That privacy policy was last updated over a year and a half ago and doesn’t list three of the four new trackers discovered.

And, why would anyone do business with the big tech companies that… Oh, yeah. Monopolies and all. Maybe low tech (or no tech) is the way of the sane future. Otherwise, is it One Ring to report them all?