Month: January 2019

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.

By Its Real Name

Funny Stuff

Victor Davis Hanson calls it “pseudo-authenticity“;  I call it by its real name:  fake.

“It” of course refers to how people create fake or at best misleading backgrounds for themselves (VDH provides a list of the more modern ones) in order to make them more appealing to prospective employers, voters, whatever.

I’ve always joked that if someone hires me, they can check a whole slew of “desirable” boxes:  Kim = female, Du Toit = French-sounding, Africa-born = racial minority quota, etc.  Of course, instead of the Black French-speaking woman they expect, the company would get this employee:

…but that would just serve them right, wouldn’t it?

At least my pseudo-authenticity (and this post) is humorous;  that of “Beto” O’Rourke (fake Meskin), Elizabeth Warren (fake Injun) and Rachel Dolezal (fake nigra) is quite serious.

Unimaginable

Politics

Over at Reason magazine, Ryan Bourne does a scholarly debunking of Rep. Ocasio-Horseface’s suggestion of a top marginal rate of 70% on “the rich”.  Here’s an excerpt:

The idea that the value of rich people to the rest of society rests solely on their tax contributions… is bizarre. In fact, the risk that higher tax rates might deter entrepreneurial activity by reducing the future payoff to innovation should worry us greatly.

In language designed for ordinary citizens, that thesis actually leads to a question: what if rich people (and their expensive tax attorneys) resist the idea that they and their activities are simply money sheep waiting for the government to shear them?

And quite frankly, I have another, more relevant question.  Why the fuck are we even giving any credence or time to anything that this Commie ingenue says?

Dropping Standards

Military

It’s about time somebody took a stand — and it happened in Britishland, too:

Woman who failed frontline infantry fitness test given a ‘pass’ by the Army until furious male soldiers who HAD completed course staged rebellion

Corporal Daisy Dougherty was hoping to become one of the Army’s first female infantry instructors following the landmark decision last year to let women join combat units and Special Forces.
The first stage in the selection process required her to prove her fitness by completing an eight-mile march in under two hours over arduous terrain while carrying a heavy pack and a rifle.
Despite being a qualified personal fitness trainer and a member of the Army’s athletics squad, the 29-year-old took too long to finish the challenge. Under course rules, she should have been immediately ejected and sent back to her unit.
But Cpl Dougherty – the only woman on the course – and 14 others who also failed were told they could carry on, sparking a furious backlash among the 75 soldiers who passed the test.
The soldiers rounded on commanders at the Infantry Battle School in Brecon, Mid-Wales, accusing them of lowering standards to suit women. When top brass refused to back down, troops contacted The Mail on Sunday to expose what they claimed was ‘positive discrimination’.
Fearing a public backlash if they allowed her result to stand, commanders backed down and asked Cpl Dougherty and the other soldiers who failed the march to leave.

Read the whole article, because there’s some equally-good news about the Paras towards the end of it.  (Ex-Para Mr. Free Market, for one, is chortling into his morning gin even as we speak.)

I repeat, for the umpteenth time:  women have no place in combat units.  Period, end of statement, end of story.