ReasonTV
Published on 18 Jun 2018Eric Lundgren got 15 months in prison for selling pirated Microsoft software that the tech giant gives away for free. His case cuts to the heart of a major battle going on in the tech industry today: Companies are trying to preserve aspects of U.S. copyright law that give them enormous power over the products we own.
Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
June 20, 2018
Do You Have a Right To Repair Your Phone? The Fight Between Big Tech and Consumers
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Kids might interact more with the real world if parents weren’t so afraid to let them engage with it
Frank Furedi on the unintended consequences of too much parental protection from the real world:
Every summer, parents are confronted with new threats to their children to obsess about. We used to worry about our children being outdoors and being abducted. This year, we’re told that keeping them indoors will mean they become addicted to the internet.
In recent months, children’s digital activities have become a key focus of adult anxiety. Last month a Pew survey on the ‘silent addiction’ found that 45 per cent of American teenagers admit to using the internet ‘almost constantly’. In the UK, the idea of internet addiction has also become mainstream. Stories of kids becoming addicted to videogames, especially to a hugely popular online shoot-em-up called Fortnite, are everywhere.
[…]
My research has led me to the conclusion that the compulsive attachment of children to their online worlds is down to the fact that adult society has made it very difficult for them to engage with the offline world. Risk-averse child-rearing has created a climate in which children are constantly discouraged from experiencing life outdoors. During the past three decades, a culture of fear has enveloped childhood. Alarmist accounts of stranger danger, bullying or the likelihood of traffic accidents have made parents reluctant to allow their children to go out and explore.
Today, parents frequently accompany children on their way to school. They hover over them when they play in the park. Many children are actively discouraged from playing on their own outdoors. Schools forbid pupils from playing conkers or having snowball fights. No wonder that the simple delights of climbing trees and building dens have been replaced by hours spent in front of screens.
Surveys indicate that young children would rather be playing with their mates outdoors than cooped up in their digital bedrooms. But children are inventive creatures, who will take any opportunity to create their own world and try to establish a measure of independence from parental control. Young people are highly motivated to construct their own space where they can engage with their peers and develop their personality. Indeed, one of the reasons Fortnite has become so popular is that it allows children to join groups and talk live to one another, thus offering the illusion of forging relationships with other gamers – a sense of community.
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Tank Chats #31 Mark IX | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 3 Feb 2017The thirty first in a series of short films about some of the vehicles in our collection, presented by The Tank Museum’s historian David Fletcher MBE. The First World War Mark IX, the first armoured personnel carrier, was designed to solve the problem of moving infantry across the battlefield with the fighting tanks.
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June 10, 2018
QotD: Typing with a foreign accent
To sound generally foreign, omit elisions and contractions normally used by native speakers. Type “I do not think I have the time” rather than “I don’t think I have time”.
To sound German, put commas in places that do not correspond to speech pauses in English. “I do not know, how he could have believed that.”
To sound Russian, omit definite or indefinite articles. “No, you cannot have cheeseburger.”
To sound like a speaker of Hindi or Urdu or one of the related languages, emit wordy run-on sentences that begin with “Esteemed sir”, like: “Esteemed sir, I would be grateful if you could direct me towards a good book on Python because I am attempting to learn programming.”
Understand, none of these errors actually interferes with comprehension. I’ve found that these second-language speakers are often more worried about the quality of their English than they need to be.
Eric S. Raymond, “How to Type with a Foreign Accent”, Armed and Dangerous, 2009-06-12.
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June 8, 2018
QotD: The cult of Steve Jobs
Have you noticed how programs and apps and websites have taken to “improving” by taking away functions you liked and used every day?
Now, everybody thinks they know what you want better than you do. With the extra added side benefit of “molding” your actions to conform to what they think is preferable.
Again, Jobs was very, very good at actually determining what people really wanted, versus what they held onto simply because it was familiar. He killed the floppy disk drive. He veered away from power-on buttons. He got lots of changes through that seemed huge at the time, but in hindsight are natural.
And because of his precedent, in addition to (at least) fifty-plus years of marketing “wisdom” that treats customers as mindless sheep, everybody now treats you, the user, as a “moist robot” who does not think, but merely needs the proper stimulus to behave the way they want you to.
Steve Jobs was the outlyingest outlier there is: He was a jerk, but he actually was a genius, and he actually did want to change the world, and he actually was very good at figuring out what people would want before they even knew they wanted it.
The foundation on which the Cult of Jobs was built was, wonder of wonders, actually pretty solid.
I would bet that not one single emulator of his has the same solid basis on which to stand. They all learned how to imitate him, to give the impression of integrity as it is currently misunderstood, thanks in part to Jobs’s antics. But I would be surprised if any copied his substance. Because genius cannot be faked. Only the appearance of it can.
D. Jason Fleming, “The Steve Jobs Myth”, According to Hoyt, 2016-09-12.
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June 5, 2018
The Internet-of-Things as “Moore’s Revenge”
El Reg‘s Mark Pesce on the end of Moore’s Law and the start of Moore’s Revenge:
… the cost of making a device “smart” – whether that means, aware, intelligent, connected, or something else altogether – is now trivial. We’re therefore quickly transitioning from the Death of Moore’s Law into the era of Moore’s Revenge – where pretty much every manufactured object has a chip in it.
This is going to change the whole world, and it’s going to begin with a fundamental reorientation of IT, away from the “pinnacle” desktops and servers, toward the “smart dust” everywhere in the world: collecting data, providing services – and offering up a near infinity of attack surfaces. Dumb is often harder to hack than smart, but – as we saw last month in the Z-Wave attack that impacted hundreds of millions of devices – once you’ve got a way in, enormous damage can result.
The focus on security will produce new costs for businesses – and it will be on IT to ensure those costs don’t exceed the benefits of this massively chipped-and-connected world. It’ll be a close-run thing.
It’s also likely to be a world where nothing works precisely as planned. With so much autonomy embedded in our environment, the likelihood of unintended consequences amplifying into something unexpected becomes nearly guaranteed.
We may think the world is weird today, but once hundreds of billions of marginally intelligent and minimally autonomous systems start to have a go, that weirdness will begin to arc upwards exponentially.
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June 2, 2018
A Safer Berth – HMS Victory
NMRNPortsmouth
Published on Aug 21, 2017An 18-month programme to re-support the world’s most famous warship HMS Victory sagging under her own weight is now underway.
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May 27, 2018
May 24, 2018
Tank Chats #30 M3 Grant | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 27 Jan 2017The thirtieth in a series of short films about some of the vehicles in our collection presented by The Tank Museum’s historian David Fletcher MBE.
Tanks of this type were first used in Western Desert in 1942. The M3’s were mechanically reliable, but soon superseded by Sherman.
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May 23, 2018
Why The Netherlands Isn’t Under Water
Real Engineering
Published on 31 Oct 2017
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May 21, 2018
Work in high tech? You’ll instantly recognize this office
Alistair Dabbs on the utterly interchangeable (except for the bogs) modern high tech office suite:
As an itinerant freelancer, my work takes me to a variety of tech-savvy business premises. And while small companies each have their own style of office layout, every larger organisation from mid-size to corporate looks almost exactly the same as another.
Except for the toilets. You can learn a lot about a business by its bogs.
So as I turn up for an on-site booking and sit for a short while in a reception space that has been arranged identically to those depicted in every business furniture catalogue ever printed, later to stride through yet another open-plan office of the same old rows of grey desks and the same old blue carpet tiles, I am overwhelmed by the tedium of déjà vu.
So on arriving at the designated meeting room – always featuring a frosted glass wall, a boardroom-style table with a faux teak effect surface and luxury adjustable chairs that refuse to be adjusted unless you violently bounce up and down on them like an over-excited child on a Space Hopper – I drop my things in the corner furthest from the door and enquire about using the washroom facilities.
As I am given verbal directions for the nearest toilet, I make a cursory check under the table which has been designed for up to 20 persons and confirm, yes, there are just TWO power sockets, as per usual, and no extension cable of any description. A quick glance behind the massively undersized TV at the end of the room reveals another six wall sockets that are, as I confidently expected, all occupied by plugs already – one for the TV and the other five for various components of the impossibly complicated video conferencing system that no one knows how to use, least of all the IT department that had lobbied strongly against its purchase in the first place.
So far, so identical. Now let’s find out what this place is really like.
[…]
Unlike this particular unfortunate, I return from the grunting rooms this day refreshed and with a spring in my step. My face smarts invigoratingly with aftershave and creamy odours waft from my gesticulating soft palms – vanilla from the left, coconut from the right.
Back in the meeting room, I am soon brought back to Earth and my surroundings merge into the amorphous generic semblance of every other office building in the western world.
A large cupboard that does not match the rest of the furniture has been installed in the most awkward place to squeeze past; it is locked but almost certainly contains nothing but a layer of dust, a torn corner from a Post-It note and a single paperclip. The aircon has just two settings: Arctic or Sahara. Everyone is forced to use a Guest Wi-Fi login whose permissions have been devised by a recent graduate of a free Cyber Security MOOC to prevent access to personal emails, cloud drives and the internet in general. A ceiling light flickers every two minutes. Halfway into the meeting, the room begins to vibrate to the intense scream of a workman’s drill on the other side of a wall, and continues for the next six hours.
I could be anywhere.
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May 16, 2018
“Congrats, you have trained me to ignore Emergency Alerts”
The national emergency alert system for mobile phones just went online, and it’s already training people to ignore them:
When the siren-like sounds from an Amber Alert rang out on cellular phones across Ontario on Monday, it sparked a bit of a backlash against Canada’s new mobile emergency alert system.
The Ontario Provincial Police had issued the alert for a missing eight-year-old boy in the Thunder Bay region. (The boy has since been found safe.)
But gripes about the system soon began to pour in. Kingston police said they received “several complaints” regarding the Amber Alert notice. On social media, people startled by the alerts complained about the number of alerts they received and that they had received separate alerts in English and French.
“Sooo, is that emergency alert going to happen at like 4 a.m. with sleep mode enabled? Just asking for my heart health,” tweeted James G.
Meanwhile, others who were located far from the incident felt that receiving the alert was pointless.
“I’ve received two Amber Alerts today for Thunder Bay, which is 15 hours away from Toronto by car,” tweeted Molly Sauter. “Congrats, you have trained me to ignore Emergency Alerts.”
Mark Blevis, an Ottawa-based digital public affairs analyst, said he understands the importance of Amber Alerts, but system managers risk alienating cellphone users at some point if these types of alarms go off regularly.
“If they’re going to send out multiple alerts on the same thing, you need to find a way to streamline it so they don’t breed that apathy that causes the whole system to break down,” Blevis said.
At the very least, they should be able to figure out how to avoid the duplication of English and French alerts, he said.
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Crusader Tank | Animated History
The Armchair Historian
Published on 25 Jun 2016
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May 12, 2018
Cryptocurrency scammers
A high proportion of initial coin offerings are nothing but scammers doing what scammers do best, says Nouriel Roubini:
Initial coin offerings have become the most common way to finance cryptocurrency ventures, of which there are now nearly 1,600 and rising. In exchange for your dollars, pounds, euros, or other currency, an ICO issues digital “tokens,” or “coins,” that may or may not be used to purchase some specified good or service in the future.
Thus it is little wonder that, according to the ICO advisory firm Satis Group, 81% of ICOs are scams created by con artists, charlatans, and swindlers looking to take your money and run. It is also little wonder that only 8% of cryptocurrencies end up being traded on an exchange, meaning that 92% of them fail. It would appear that ICOs serve little purpose other than to skirt securities laws that exist to protect investors from being cheated.
If you invest in a conventional (non-crypto) business, you are afforded a variety of legal rights – to dividends if you are a shareholder, to interest if you are a lender, and to a share of the enterprise’s assets should it default or become insolvent. Such rights are enforceable because securities and their issuers must be registered with the state.
Moreover, in legitimate investment transactions, issuers are required to disclose accurate financial information, business plans, and potential risks. There are restrictions limiting the sale of certain kinds of high-risk securities to qualified investors only. And there are anti-money-laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) regulations to prevent tax evasion, concealment of ill-gotten gains, and other criminal activities such as the financing of terrorism.
In the Wild West of ICOs, most cryptocurrencies are issued in breach of these laws and regulations, under the pretense that they are not securities at all. Hence, most ICOs deny investors any legal rights whatsoever. They are generally accompanied by vaporous “white papers” instead of concrete business plans. Their issuers are often anonymous and untraceable. And they skirt all AML and KYC regulations, leaving the door open to any criminal investor.
Of course, for a significant number of people, not having the state involved in their investment is an attraction rather than a drawback. And not just criminals, but people who live in jurisdictions with uncertain reliance on the rule of law (not to mention Russia by name), where property rights are not so much “rights” as “privileges to the right sort of people”.
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