Category: Technology

Light, Tunnel At End Of?

Housekeeping, Technology

I know that many of you have had problems commenting on this website, and I’ve been unable to resolve the thing myself.  Ordinarily, Tech Support 2 would have addressed it, but he’s been unable to get to it because for some reason, he prefers to devote more of his time to earning a living to support his family than to take (unpaid) time to address my website’s issues.

Anyway, this is to announce that I have recruited a Brand New Tech Support (TS 3), who is a personal friend and who has very kindly offered to take on the (unpaid but very-much thanked-for) responsibility.  TS 2 will be handing him the keys to the kingdom at some point in the very near future (I hope).

There may be some dislocation involved, in that TS 3 may have to reset the password files, in which case you will have to re-register.  Sorry, but in my defense I can only say “WordPress”.

Then once again you will be free to vent your anger, snarl at the universe, shout at me and post your always-welcome corrections to my all-too frequent errors of fact.

Please be patient while all this comes to pass.

Future, By Subscription Only

Corporate Fuckery, Technology

Reader Stephen S. chimes in with this little piece of technological bastardy:

The rapidly approaching future of the Windows PC is no longer just about what’s on your desk, but what you’re permitted—by subscription—to access from the cloud. Microsoft promotes this as inevitable and, to some, the advantages are real. Yet for those uncomfortable with their digital world being defined and priced by a faraway corporation, alternatives remain.
What is worse is that Microsoft will have your data on their cloud (OneDrive) and you will need to continually pay to have access to it.   On the flip side, because it is on “their” computer systems (1970’s Supreme Court Decision), they will be able to scan it and use it for training their AI.  They will also be able to sell your data to 3rd parties, again because it is on “their” computers.  [Microsoft has already changed their EULA to reflect this]
How does the medical profession make sure the patients’s data is secure.  Although on a personal level, I’m sure Microsoft’s AI would love finding out about illness discussions, personal behavior, etc to be sold to 3rd parties.  That kind of info is what insurance companies would love to know, and the users would be paying Microsoft to provide it to them.
But a larger point occurs to me.  Microsoft would be getting the financial data for people and businesses smaller than the DOW 50, and that is a gold mine for them (Wall St spends millions to collect it).  Again, the users are paying Microsoft to provide their financials to Microsoft, and then Microsoft can then use it.

How nice.

It has taken me a Herculean effort to stop this OneDrive bullshit from imposing itself on my paltry online existence, and I’m not even sure that I’ve been that successful.  I get the occasional “warning” email that my OneCloud subscription has expired or my storage allocation is full, and that they can no longer store any more of my data — to which, of course, my unspoken response is:  I never wanted you to store my data anyway, so fuck off.

I have no idea how this is going to end, or if it ever will.

Old-Fashioned Security

Technology

One comment (on this article) got me thinking:

I’m speaking to my business’s IT people about getting a “cold storage” option, even just a hard drive sitting in a desk drawer we update once a week. I don’t know how much I trust our cloud based database now.

Back when I was running Grand Union’s customer management function, I was fearful to the extent of paranoia about protecting our customers’ data privacy.  So fearful was I that I made several changes (against massive resistance from IT) in our data storage process.

As with all such nascent programs of the time, when customers applied for a loyalty card, we collected their personal data (name and address) and applied a unique ID number embedded in the card’s magnetic strip (no chips back then).  Like everyone else, we delegated this task to our card provider, who included that service, plus a direct mail service in their product offering.  I wasn’t too comfortable about having our customers’ data in the hands of a third party, but you have to trust somebody sometimes, and I figured that they had more to lose in the mismanagement thereof, which would keep them honest.

Then I found out that our company’s IT department had ordered the provider to send them those customer files over to us, as a “backup” and “security” measure (of course).  I didn’t like having two sets of data out there, but being the new boy, I kept my trap shut.

Then I found out that Store Operations was in the process of setting up a little routine which would track our staff’s spending — all staff had cards issued to them (for the wrong reasons, by the way, but I’ll talk about that some other time).  So I blew up at the Ops VP — the first time I had exploded at a senior member of upper management, but by no means the last — and uttered the words that became quite legendary at Grand Union.

“Let me make one thing quite clear.  Just because we are housing the data, does not mean you can play with it.  You know who owns the data?  I DO.  And only I will dictate how the data is to be used from now on.”  (There were more words, calling them idiots for abusing our own staff when in fact we were getting free research from their behavior, but that too is a story for another time.)

The result of all this was that I took all the personal customer data off the mainframe, leaving only the unique IDs behind, and stored that data not on our department’s terminal — which of course was linked to IT — but on a stand-alone PC in my techie Kenny’s office, on which resided only the customer data (and IDs of course), and the necessary tools to manage it (I used Paradox as the database manager and query tool, and Quattro Pro as the spreadsheet program).  Incidentally, the only way I got funding for the PC was by threatening to just buy one with my own money if I got turned down.  The only way to get data off that PC was by diskette (remember them) and Jaz cassettes (once again, the best mass offline storage media at the time);  and I had the only other Jaz drive in the company (and also the only other Quattro Pro software, but that was by choice because MS Excel was and still is an inferior product).

And absolutely everything was password-protected — only Kenny and I had admin privileges.  It was unwieldy, and often frustrating, and time-consuming;  but our data was secure, which was all that mattered to me.  So when we were doing a direct-mail promotion to our customer-cardholders, Kenny and I would do the analysis, then send the promotional offer and list of customer IDs to our card provider to create the mail shot.  (The “sending” of the promo details involved handing a Jaz cassette to our account executive to take back to their IT department:  also unwieldy and time-consuming, but irrelevant to me.  And the head of their IT department was a great friend of mine, so I trusted him to safeguard the data.)

And all that was in the mid-1990s, when data snooping was rudimentary, crude and easily blocked.  Now?  Fuggedabahtit.

I do know that had anyone in my department even suggested to me that I back up our data on some Internet-based “cloud” (for the usual “convenience” reasons), I would probably have fired them, for forgetting that when it comes to data — most especially private data — security matters more than ease or convenience.  I eve refused to back up our customer data on the company’s own mainframe, so protective did I feel about the issue.

And I think that people need to feel more like that today, because in today’s world data security is more, not less fragile and indeed vulnerable.

So Much For Privacy

Big Brother, Government Thugs, Technology

Here’s one guaranteed to make us all feel better:

Dubai police snooped on a private WhatsApp group to snare an airline worker who shared images of a building damaged in the Middle East crisis.

Authorities accessed a closed chat between colleagues, downloaded evidence and then lured the man to a meeting and arrested him.

He is in custody facing charges including publishing information deemed harmful to state interests which carries a maximum sentence of two years.

Radha Stirling, chief executive of Detained in Dubai, said: ‘Dubai Police have now explicitly confirmed they are conducting electronic surveillance operations capable of detecting private WhatsApp messages.

‘Individuals are being tracked, identified, and arrested not for public statements, but for private exchanges between colleagues.

‘Companies like WhatsApp must answer urgent questions about user privacy.

‘If private communications can be detected and used as the basis for arrest by overreaching or hypersensitive states, users worldwide need clarity on how their data is being accessed.’

According to the police report, authorities stated the clip was detected ‘through electronic monitoring operations’.

So much for “privacy” and “end-to-end encryption”.  The question — now that the cat’s out of the bag — is quite simple:  did the Dubai feds hack into WhatsApp, or did WhatsApp just hand the encryption key over to them?

We all know that in Arab nations, personal freedoms have about as much permanence (and relevance) as an ice cube in the desert when it comes to their governments.

But lest we get all smug and complacent, I’m willing to bet that a similar situation is in place pretty much everywhere — and the United States is no exception.

Shared Concerns

Technology, Watermelons

For once, there’s an article worth reading at National Review, and for once, I find myself somewhat in agreement with the rabid Leftoids (albeit for different reasons).

[T]here’s a consistent and surprisingly effective effort to convince you that the biggest threat to your community is the plans for a new AI data center on the other side of town. Read on.
Democrats’ Data Center Obsession

Back in 2024, I observed that when some of America’s biggest tech companies realized that they needed significantly more electrical power to run their data centers in the decades to come, they decided that restarting decommissioned nuclear plants was the best, most cost-effective, and most reliable option. And with the seeming snap of their fingers, a slew of those closed nuclear plants were scheduled to start operating again in the coming years.

And it wasn’t just Republican governors like Glenn Youngkin of Virginia eager to re-embrace nuclear power; Democrats like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Washington Governor Jay Inslee, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and Virginia Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine all jumped on board. It was a case of the right policy finally being enacted after decades of foot-dragging and fearmongering, but more than a little frustrating that years of conservatives winning the policy argument and being right on the facts didn’t move the needle on the issue; it was Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and other big companies simply saying, “We want this.”

We should have known that eventually the progressive wing of the Democratic Party would wake up and galvanize opposition; now an increasingly loud swath of Americans, mostly on the left, seem to hate data centers the way they used to hate your SUV, your Big Mac, and, well, you.

Of course, the reason the Watermelons are being stirred to violence is because electricity is eeeevil, as is nuuuuclear powerrrr etc. etc.

I don’t care about any of that.

What concerns me about A.I. is more of a philosophical nature because while I can see many benefits of having computing power save humans a lot of grunt work and so on, I am profoundly disturbed by the implications of letting A.I. run things — and more especially, run the activities and affairs of humans.  As long as it’s a tool, therefore, I think I can get behind it;  but as a management system, I remain deeply skeptical.

And my skepticism stems from two sources.

Firstly, I think it’s all too easy (through laziness or indifference) to hand over the reins to outside control — we just have to see how cars are being thus transformed as an example — and as far as I’m concerned, the jury is still out (way far out) on whether this is a good, bad or evil thing.

My second concern stems from the basic premise of A.I., as I’ve said before, in that the collective [sic] wisdom can form a secure foundation for intelligence.  As someone who has often used and manipulated data myself, I am intimately familiar with how this process can be affected by, let’s call it malevolent forces.  And whereas in the past one could rely on some kind of human element to be a firewall on this issue, we are now faced with the prospect of A.I.-driven bots to not only speed up the process massively, but also to conceal what’s actually going on.

I’m not going to do anything stupid like bomb some data center, of course, nor would I ever support the assholes that do this kind of thing.  If they do something vile like this, or even plan to do something like this and get caught, then by all means hang them, bury them under a prison or stick them in some deep dark jail cell forever.

I do think that we aren’t being careful enough with the drive to A.I., because the guys who are building it are obsessed with performance / generation.  As with all science, though, we need to continuously ask ourselves the question:  “Just because we can, are we sure that we should?”

And I see very few people asking that question of A.I. — which means that the field of resistance is being left open for the loony Leftoids.

Owning, Or Being Owned?

Corporate Fuckery, Drive Time, Technology

Several Readers (thankee) have pointed me to this article at American Thinker:

There was a time — not very long ago — when the automobile represented one of the clearest expressions of individual choice in a free society. Limited only by fuel, roads, and imagination, a person could choose where to go, when to go, and how to get there. The car was not merely a machine. It was mobility made personal — an extension of autonomy and freedom.

Sadly, that is no longer the case. Increasingly, this same instrument, once a tool to facilitate individual independence, has been repurposed into a system of monitoring and control. Though advertised as safety measures for the consumer, these measures were clearly designed to empower the state.

Modern vehicles are no longer just mechanical devices; they are computers on wheels. Embedded sensors track speed, braking patterns, seatbelt usage, location, and even driver attention. Event Data Recorders — commonly referred to as “black boxes” — have been standard in most new vehicles for years. Originally justified as instruments to reconstruct accidents, these devices record data in the moments before a crash. Few object to understanding the causes of collisions. But it is worth noting that once data exists, its use rarely remains confined to its original purpose.

Insurance companies now seek access to driving data to adjust premiums. Law enforcement agencies have used vehicle data in criminal investigations. Courts have admitted such data as evidence. Each of these developments can be justified in isolation. Together, they represent a quiet but unmistakable shift: the automobile is no longer simply your property — it is a source of information about you.

More recently, legislative developments have accelerated this trend. The federal infrastructure legislation passed in 2021 includes a mandate for advanced impaired driving prevention technology to be installed in all new vehicles within the coming years. While often described in benign terms — systems that passively detect intoxication or driver impairment — the practical reality is that these systems must continuously monitor driver behavior in order to function. Monitoring creates data. And data, once created, rarely remains unused. It takes on a life of its own.

Proposals and discussions around remote vehicle disablement — popularly referred to as “kill switches” — have raised further concerns. While proponents argue that such features could prevent high-speed chases or stop stolen vehicles, the existence of remote-control capabilities introduces a fundamentally different relationship between the individual and the machine. A car that can be disabled remotely is clearly not under the control of its owner.

I’ve ranted about this little bit of rampant evil on many occasion, and the gist of all my screeds has been all around this concept:  giving up control — to anyone, for even the most laudable purposes — will, inevitably, end your freedom.

I’m unlikely ever to buy a new car, and certainly not a “modern” car which would contain all the electronic snoopery and filth as discussed above, and most especially at today’s bloated and excessive prices.  But if I were ever to be forced into buying a replacement for the Tiguan or the Fiat, and given that no matter what I buy, it would carry a horrible price tag withal, then why would I just not get a much older car that while expensive, at least allows me the freedom that cars of yore gave me?  Something like this one, for instance:

I know, fifty-odd grand for what is in essence a gift-wrapped VW 2300cc engine may seem excessive to some;  but I don’t need much more than 145hp (especially on that featherweight chassis), and it least it doesn’t look like every other car on the road (#WindTunnel).  But most of all:

…please note the refreshing absence of all the modern electronic geegaws which bedevil today’s automotive offerings.  The only thing missing (which I’d add with alacrity) is air conditioning. (#TexasSummer)

For the faint of heart, let me point out that a new VW Tiguan base model will set you back close to $40,000, and a Jetta (with a stick shift!) only five grand less.  And you can bet your ass that both the VWs will come equipped with all the latest in snoop-‘n-control electronics.

Sorry, but no.  To hell with all that.  I want simple, and I want freedom.