Category: Bad News

Horrible, unpleasant stuff

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.

Criminal Beliefs

Bad News, Freaks & Loonies

Oh, here’s a good one:

A couple who fed their daughter an extreme vegan diet have admitted causing her serious injury.
The mother and father, aged 32 and 34 respectively, who cannot be named for legal reasons fed the girl oats and rice milk.
The girl’s diet was so restricted that she developed rickets, a degenerative bone disease caused by malnourishment.
This diet resulted in severe deficiencies in nutrients across the board for the infant, including a lack of calcium, phosphate, vitamin B12, vitamin A, iron and zinc.
Her levels of vitamin D — which can cause bone disease if found to be too low — were ‘undetectable’.
The infant had fractures scattered throughout her tiny body and her bones were so brittle doctors believed they could have been broken by ‘normal handling’.
The treatment of the girl was only brought to the attention of doctors in March this year, when doctors attended to the infant after she suffered a seizure.
One doctor described her as ‘floppy’ and noted how the diminutive one-and-a-half year old didn’t crawl or talk during the month in care.

And here’s the best part:

The daughter and her two siblings have since been taken into foster care.

Under the reign of World-Emperor Kim, the parents would also receive daily floggings and an all-meat diet during their ten-year prison sentence.  And if these two fanatics were to starve themselves to death rather than eat that eeeevil meat, so much the better.

Fucking bullshit.

Dumbass

Bad News

Yeah, well…

Would-Be Missionary Gets The Full San Sebastian Treatment

Read the whole thing to get the full flavor of this man’s stupidity, naïveté and (dare I say) arrogance.  Darwin shakes his head, and says “I told you so.”

I guess they have a kind of Castle Doctrine on North Sentinel Island, too.  Good for them.

Update:  I just got an email from Reader Bart J. suggesting that we should implement the Sentinelese immigration control at our own southern border.  It’s moments like this that make me appreciate my Readers.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and clean the gin from my screen.

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).

Never Mind The Joke

Bad News, Health

So this asshole got some joke award for his charlatanry:

The man who published a widely-dismissed paper claiming the MMR vaccine could make children autistic has been ridiculed with an award for bad science. Andrew Wakefield, a former gastroenterologist who is now believed to be in a relationship with the model Elle Macpherson, has been awarded the ‘Rusty Razor’ award for pseudoscience by magazine The Skeptic.
Wakefield’s so-called research fueled the ‘anti-vaxx’ movement, by suggesting jabs could make children autistic, but his studies were fabricated.
Experts have called the paper, published in medical journal The Lancet in 1998, but retracted in 2010, ‘the most damaging medical hoax of the past 100 years’.

Never mind the Rusty Razor Award, someone should have used a rusty razor to cut this fucker’s head off.  Countless children have died and others fallen dangerously ill because of his “pseudo-scientific” study, and at least he should be in prison for life instead of dating a dim-bulb ex-supermodel.

I am not a vengeful man by nature, but if one day some bereaved parent were to shoot Wakefield in the face and I were in the jury at the parent’s trial, my vote would be an unshakable “Not Guilty”.