Tag: Technology

Keeping Up With The Times

Surveillance Society, Technology

I have often been accused of being an old fuddy-duddy, very set in my ways and against the concept of “change”.

Mostly, I would plead guilty to such charges — and proudly, at that.

However, I am very open to change in one circumstance, that being on the issue of this godless system known as “flocking” — you know, those seemingly-ubiquitous cameras installed to spy on people’s cars and movements thereof.  I proudly created this little picture, in fact (and feel free to copy or pass on, as the mood inspires):

I purposely used the word “grex” (Latin word for flock) because as a generic collective term for sheep, it doesn’t refer to any company or individual.  Also, I’m a cultural snob (likewise by self-admission) and have an abiding fondness for classical allusions.

Anyway.

So great is my hostility to these fucking things that I may once even have suggested a DIY method for their de-installation:

Of course, as any fule kno, this was merely a tongue-in-cheek suggestion because counter-surveillance (cameras spying on cameras — does it ever end?) makes such an action foolish, even though as a curmudgeonly man of the elder demographic, using something as old-fashioned as a shotgun to take down something so horrible and offensively-modern would give me great pleasure.

But no, we should move with the times, methinks, especially when contemplating the “delenda” part of the above suggestion.  So how about something like a “loitering munition“?  (I love that particular euphemism, by the way.)

Now, this is also a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, because it’s easy to see that objects like this are waaayyyy overkill — there’s no need for a loiter function, for example, and given the typical fragility of a small camera device, there’s no need for any munitions, per se.  Even a kamikaze drone (as used by the military) would be overkill, for the same reasons — and in both cases, too spendy for Mr. Average Citizen to use.

So looking at the matter from a clinical perspective, there’s no need for such things.

But blessed as we are by living in the U.S. of A., there are always other options, such as this one, at only $40 per pop (so to speak):


(link in pic)

I would imagine that an accidental collision between a flocking camera and a drone controlled by a fumbling amateur first-time user might indeed compromise the camera’s operation somewhat.

If you see what I mean.

Progress:  not always a Bad Thing, no?

Keeping It To Yourself

Technology

Via Insty, I see this interesting report:

Nine PBS in St. Louis had a rolling annual contract with Open Source Storage (OSS), a cloud storage provider, but when the station went to renew the deal earlier this year, OSS didn’t respond.

On the day the contract expired, Nine PBS suddenly lost access to its data without any warning. That’s when staff there realized that OSS’s website was inactive and the state of Colorado listed the company as delinquent.

The station lost access to 50 terabytes of archival materials, which included all of its footage of historical events that have taken place in St. Louis.

Nine PBS sued OSS but paused the lawsuit after it was contacted by a managing partner of a group that had acquired OSS’s assets and revealed that the station’s archive was being held at the Iron Mountain Data Center in Colorado.

After the managing partner stopped replying, Nine PBS contacted Iron Mountain, which initially suggested that it would return the data, until it reversed course and refused to do so because OSS owned “the physical services housing the data.”

….translated, that means, “Unless you pay us jillions of razzbuckniks, we’re going to keep all that lovely data”.

Of course, I think that the amoral assholes who bought Iron Mountain (LOL) and are holding Nine PBS hostage should be impaled on stakes, but that’s neither here nor there.

More interesting is the followup from Driscoll which points out that on the same page there is this article about a 16TB storage unit (cost:  about $3 grand), and that with three (okay four) of those, Nine CBS could just have stored all the data themselves.  I’m willing to bet that the $12 thousand outlay is considerably less than their lawyers’ bill.

Idiots.

But we can learn from idiots, can’t we?

Lesson learned:  Forego the fucking Cloud, and keep your personal data to yourself.  Storage is cheap, your data is irreplaceable.

Which reminds me:  I need to back up my hard drive.  Tonight’s the night, baby.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD, Technology

From Steven Miller:

“Data centers being built isn’t the problem, the data in those data centers is.”

It has always been my major concern about this whole business.  It started way back, when I found out that Google was suppressing search results for my old Nation Of Rifleman website.  Even keying in whole sentences or blocks of text from a specific post didn’t bring up the post, or even the website itself.

So now I’m supposed to trust artificial “intellgence”, when I have no idea what the search criteria are, or what sources were accessed to produce those “intelligent” results?

I don’t fucking think so, Simon.

Flock Off

Surveillance Society, Technology

And then we have this little collection of reindeer games:

A quiet battle is happening across the US right between towns working to adopt Flock Safety systems and those trying to ban them entirely. From major cities like Los Angeles canceling its Flock contract to towns wrapping Flock AI cams in plastic bags because Flock won’t take them down, it’s a wild time for surveillance and questions about government accountability.

But what happens when you start seeing Flock’s now-recognizable solar panels and AI cameras going up in your neighborhood? What happens when they start to recognize your car or even individual people?

I don’t want to say what I really feel, at this point, because I may get into trouble.  Still, being who I am, I can’t help thinking of this kind of solution:

Then, purely in the spirit of scientific inquiry, I’m wondering if this might work:

Curious, that’s me.  But if you’re going to test the stuff, you may want to get some soon before it mysteriously starts to vanish off the shelves at Home Depot, or from Amazon’s warehouses.

Quote Of The Day

Business, QOTD, Technology

“A prospective employee today saying that they don’t use A.I. is the equivalent of a prospective secretary in 1995 saying that she doesn’t use a PC.” — Scott Galloway

I hadn’t thought of it that way before — being preternaturally suspicious of A.I. as I am — but the more I read and speak to people, the more I’m starting to see why the above is true.

I’m just glad I’m not part of today’s prospective employee group.

Forced Participation

Retailing

Of late, there’s been a lot of what I’ve come to call “forced participation” in that after almost every retail transaction, it seems, one has to respond to a follow-up questionnaire on said transaction.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t mind, but the problem is that this is becoming increasingly tiresome.  FFS, the transaction took at most a minute, which is what one would expect from a routine transaction, and now I have to take three minutes to say the thing was worth 5 stars?  Frankly, given that the transaction was unexceptional — I paid my money, got the item, all pretty normal — in the normal scheme of things I’d just give it three stars and away we go.

Except that’s not how it works these days, is it? because now Management uses these “service metrics” as a performance indicator for the staff member in question, and (I’m told) anything less than 5 stars has (bad) consequences for the employee come salary review time, or bonus time for that matter.

So now one is more or less compelled to give 5 stars regardless (unless the service was crap, in which case the reduced star count is or should be unexpected).

And here’s the problem.  If five stars is de rigeur, then how do we describe or reward outstanding service?  Like so much grading nowadays, if everyone gets an A, then what is the worth of an A?

I remember once awarding a single star (because I couldn’t give 0 or a negative) for a truly horrendous experience.  The problem was, as I explained to the drone who actually called me to see what had happened (!), that the problem was not with the customer service rep — who had been truly excellent, by the way — but with the corporation’s stupid policy, something over which the poor girl had no control.  But what was I supposed to do?  Give five stars for a monumental clusterfuck?  How does that help?

The situation didn’t improve when I asked the supervisor if I was going to get a survey on his service call, because he hadn’t helped the situation either.  At the end of it, I simply told the supervisor that the outcome was that I was never going to do business with his company ever again, given their shitty policy and terrible backup.  (And I never have.)

As with so many of he little technologies that have injected themselves into our lives of late, this one is being misused (even abused) by people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing and don’t know how to set up or manage information streams.

A plague on all their houses.

Oh, and there will be a followup post on a related matter, all about how I stopped doing business with a longtime service provider precisely because they’ve started abusing the data that I’ve been exchanging with them.  I have to allow a little time to pass before I do because if I rant about what I really think at the moment, there could be lawyers (theirs, of course).

Watch this space.

Update:  Got another one just this morning.

“You recently made contact with Tina at our Customer Service Center. As one of Tina’s customers, we believe you are the most relevant and credible expert to offer advice to help Tina continue to improve. Tina would love your help and it should only take two minutes. Click on the button below to take the survey.”

Yeah, “Tina would love your help” — like she’ll ever see my input other than if I call her service (which was outstanding, by the way) terrible.

Assholes.