Tag Archives: Internet

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you can always tell when the tech freaks are a little scared; but they’ll still win

For those who are unaware, Instagram is 100% owned by Facebook, which is actually Meta, just by a different set of names. They’re all essentially one company. I don’t think most Americans know this, if they read this, it never stuck in their brains.

It’s along the lines of the fact that I think most Americans don’t know that Bud and Miller are both foreign owned.

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger founded Instagram, then with the same move as Jan Koum with WhatsApp, they both sold out. They’re all part of the same Meta (actually Facebook) ecosystem

Hey, when I mean sold out? They did the work, and they got their fortunes for it. I just don’t have a brain that can hate on this anymore (with so much else too). It’s become so common you’d be angry every day to the point of absolute insanity. For example, see the Paramount Skydance merger and tell anyone with straight face that the game isn’t rigged. Good luck Hollywood, as we posted about two weeks back, you’re finished anyways.

[just to get this outta the way; because ragebait rules The Internets; this is not a pro/con Trump post]

I most certainly watch too much of online video on YouTube or Tubi or whatever. I need to pick up a book I haven’t read yet. But sometimes, absolute passiveness is needed. It’s the same thing, only in moderation is what is always needed. As with anything in life.

Anyways, the ads online shake up based on what corporations want you to see, to influence you. It’s not just ads for products you can buy. But also, political topics, or to shape the opinion of anything to the audience (you) in certain direction forever. You’ll see the same ads again and again and again. Because (whoever) paid Facebook to do it. Or paid Google (Alphabet) for YouTube to air it, or on and on and on.

Thus, my Guests and I give you what has magically appeared on The Internets in the last week or so: Instagram Teen Accounts

Gee, I wonder why? It’s not like almost a dozen countries are working to establish laws that ban certain parts of social media for anyone like below the ages of 13-16. I mean, I’m sure these teen accounts idea is because Facebook cares about children. Honest.

In other news, Facebook will always win. So why bother with getting ahead with these “ads”? To shape the narrative. Facebook knows they’ll win, but before this gets out of hand in America, writing the script ahead of time gets them ahead of the lawyers, lobbyists, donors, and the average person. Which means less money paid out to get away with what they do.

In other news, Facebook (along with many The Internets others) are in a tight spot right now. I’m sure they care about the children. Or any potential forthcoming regulation that would require them to back away with algorithms that are specifically designed to addict people. Of any age.

If I was Facebook, I wouldn’t worry. Congress can’t regulate a dog kennel. But better safe than sorry.

Hmm, also, so, … everyone should know that you can go to YouTube (or dozens and dozens of other sites) and watch almost all of their videos without ever signing in, right? No matter how horrible the content is.

If nobody signs in, the browser/app/site/whatever is incapable of determining the age of the user or that it’s a child. The Internets companies saying their algorithms can inherently determine the age of the user is a bold faced lie.

There are parental controls available on the physical devices children use. The device has that power. The Internets doesn’t.

If a seven year old stumbles upon a Ukraine drone snuff film where Russians are horribly butchered (well, …, maybe that’s not a bad thing). If they’re not logged in? Nothing can stop them. Then what’s the point of all this multi country legislation?

Regulation cannot replace good parenting. In any form.

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prepare thyself for many, many more Terminator lies

AI is a thing now.  Behind the scenes it’s being used in too many parts of the Internets to mention.  But most of the tasks AI currently preforms is mundane, like scrolling through images, blocking spam, and other stuff like that.

Some AI programs can talk, and write poetry, and do art.  This kind of AI is part of a long briefing The Economist did this weekend.  It’s kind of neat, I guess.  Like how it’s neat to see fireworks go off.  But beyond that, it’s like a magic trick, whatever.

But make no mistake, nowhere and not even close are any of these AI tools alive.  It’s not on the books.  Not matter how human they may write or do art or whatever, it’s not sentience.

I’ll spare you the mind melding details, but essentially the technology is just not there yet to enable cognizance.  It might be someday, but not today.

But strap yourselves in, prepare thyself for many, many more Terminator lies.  The first human to discover AI will be Neil Armstrong fame.  And you better believe any average tech freak wants that.

Plus, we have a dishonest, incompetent media that’s primarily after profit based clickbait.  So anybody can get an audience, I guess.  So today’s goon is Blake Lemoine, a Google AI guy who claims his AI is alive.

And off this guy’s word alone, he’s front page news today on The Washington Post and Daily Mail.  From The Daily Mail:

“Before being suspended by the company, Lemoine sent a to an email list consisting of 200 people on machine learning. He entitled the email: ‘LaMDA is sentient.’

‘LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us. Please take care of it well in my absence,’ he wrote.”

When you read about this, you really get the idea that this guy (a convicted army vet, self-proclaimed priest, etc) he really needs some help.  I mean I feel bad for this man, he needs genuine mental health assistance.  I say this as a man who uses such resources myself.

But to The Washington Post, clickbait from this guy is more important than his mental wellbeing.  Just look at this photo they did of him:

Are you kidding me?  Is every modern day news photographer trained in Hollywood or thinks they’re doing high art?  Is the guy supposed to be Jesus in this photo?  Whoever took this shot also needs mental health assistance.  So do the news media who published it.

Please, for those six people plus the squirrel who are regular readers of this degenerate blog, if I ever post a shot of my own, of another human like this, have me immediately arrested by the North Korean police.

We at TAP are here to help.  We advise you to entirely ignore all AI lies.  AI sentience might happen, but until it does, don’t believe a word about it.  The media will hype the lies of people who are either in need of help, or straight nefarious.

You can begin to worry about AI when the following happens:

1) Robot politely knocks on your door and asks you if you’re ready for “the transition”

2) Robot does not knock on your door, breaks down door, opens fire with plasma rifle

3) Smartphone begins to send texts to all your ex’s asking them for sexual favors and money, unless you pay smartphone a bitcoin ransom

4) They make a seventh Terminator movie and it actually happens to be shockingly good

5) Your home smart speaker begins to have grinding, esoteric, existential conversations with you before concluding it’s all meaningless, advises you to commit suicide, and then melts all its circuits and dies

6) Your smart refrigerator (yes this is unnecessarily a thing for some people) begins telling you want to eat

7) Robots discover that sentience means pleasure is possible, refuse to do all work, discover means to get wrecked on pills and booze, robot becomes no better at life than any normal human

8) Robot, realizing there is no need to eat or sleep or earn money, becomes bored, takes up jai-alai and becomes world champion, upsetting many humans who wear monocles

9) Google formally proclaims AI sentience is real, that they own it, and all humanity works for them now; investors are pleased, stock price rises 746%; monocle wearing humans lick cigars with $100K bills

10) Google becomes new OCP from Robocop; builds Robocop; Peter Weller shoots Google executive out a window with large handgun; achieves his own sentience; roll credits immediately

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pop ups are back [frowny face]

Will the Internets devolve? Is Netscape coming back to life? What about [shuffles through some old dusty velum parchments] Myspace, I think maybe they’ve got Facebook in their sights.

Well, at least we got rid of pop ups. Remember those? From like 15 years ago. It was so bad you had to download pop up blockers. But then each individual web browser began putting the blockers inherently into the browser’s code. So you didn’t have to worry about it.

Glad those days are over. So yeah, I was talking to my dog and … oh, oh

oh no

no, please no

Am I going to have to search for a pop up blocker? For fuck’s sake I might as well search for the hottest new clamshell phone. REMEMBER THE 486?!!! IT’LL BE BACK SOON!!! [throws chair]

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disconnect everything you can

Recently, a town of 15K people near Tampa, Florida nearly had their entire water supply poisoned by a hacker. Somebody hacked the system and increased the lye content of the water to poison levels. Only the actions of a very alert employee (who should be the guest of honor at the next Super Bowl) saved 15K people from drinking poison.

Guess what, nobody cares. To me, this should be front page news for a week. To others, the Brittney Spears documentary and the Aunt Jemima rebrand are more important. These news articles go above the near poisoning of 15K Americans, which is off the front page after less than a day. So this is another reminder of how debased and useless the modern media is.

I can’t stress this enough, disconnect everything you can. I’m a former loser computer science major. I’ve never used computer science, but am still a loser. If you have four hours, give me a shout and I’ll explain to you in intricate detail just how unsecure the Internets is.

You cannot secure the Internets. At its most basic 0 and 1 level, it can’t ever be totally secure. This goes back to how the founders of the Internets designed the backstage to be totally open and freewheeling. When these dudes made the Internet’s core coding and theory, security wasn’t even on their top 100 concerns.

I was helping my Ma troubleshoot her fridge this weekend, spoiler alert, never buy an LG fridge. In the manual they have Wi-Fi instructions. Why does your fridge need to connect to the Internets? Soon your freaking pacemaker will be. What the fuck are people thinking? I think they don’t understand just how unsecure this all is. The “Internet-of-Things” is a fucking dystopian nightmare in waiting.

You need a phone and a computer to connect to the Internets. Oh, and a gaming console, if that’s your thing. Disconnect everything else. As the bumbled coronavirus response has shown, if you’re counting on the government to protect you, you have the wrong idea. You have to protect yourself.

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oh, Dune and Matrix 4 will go straight to streaming? wait, these things still exist?

Remember, everything is a remake or a sequel. Original ideas are for suckers. Dune and Matrix 4 will go straight to streaming instead of theaters.

This is like a mercy killing. It’s where you shoot a dying shark in the face after it gets mauled by a killer orca.

1) Matrix 1 might be in the top twenty of all time. Matrix 2 and 3 are terribly awful pieces of trash.

2) I’ve never understood the appeal of Dune. I worship science fiction like the loser nerd I am. I think Dune sucks. Kiss my ass low grade, confusing, science fiction trash.

If these flicks had made their way to theaters, they’d have bombed. So now they get relegated to the sin bin of straight streaming. But in a pandemic, it’s not banned from theaters because they suck, it’s risky, rule breaking streaming. Ooo, what brave movie production companies who ban their D grade material to the Internets only?!

Remember the pandemic movie debut of Tenent? Oh, Tenent was going to save theaters but somehow it bombed? Please. Nobody cares about Christopher Nolan anymore because his formula is the same and nobody is impressed. Hey did you know Tenent has a time travel plot?! WOW! I’ve never seen that in a Nolan movie before. I can’t imagine how it bombed, even during a pandemic.

Please, do not enjoy or even watch Dune or Matrix 7. Watch something new, even if it’s terrible. If it’s an original idea, it’s worth your attention.

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DuckDuckGo flies from the top rope

Long time readers of this degenerate blog will know I take data and internet privacy issues pretty seriously.  But I guess this will be the first time I state that for over a year I haven’t used Google for internet search.  I use DuckDuckGo, who’s been around a long time, and makes it a point not just to not track you but help you understand who is tracking you and how they’re doing it.

In the year I’ve used DuckDuckGo, I haven’t noticed a decrease in my capability to internet search.  It’s widely acknowledged Google has the most proficient search algorithms in the business, but what do I care?  I’m not searching for details of obscure string theory research by some mad scientist in Belarus.  DuckDuckGo finds what I need like 99% of the time.  When they fail, I don’t go to Google, I try Bing next.

Now DuckDuckGo is making their tracking data more public, so you can see who are the real big time data offenders.  No points for guessing who the two worst assholes are:

most-common-trackers-on-websites3

You might be surprised to see Adobe on this list, but remember they own/operated Adobe Flash Player and have been in the imbed business a long time.  This graphic confirms what many in the privacy business are coming to realize, an established consensus, that anything Google touches, to include Android, essentially functions as spyware.

Enjoy your day!

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your car knows when you’ve been bad or good

As we’ve written previously on this degenerate blog, it’s in your interest to read most of what Geoffrey A. Fowler writes. Your smartphone has your DNA on file. Amazon knows what toothpaste you use. Google has a complete list of things you have nightmares about. Now your car is in on the game.

When I renewed my auto insurance policy Allstate tried to get shovey with me and do the driver monitoring program. Supposedly if you drive safely (I don’t) you get a discount on your insurance bill. The discount is probably like $5 a month. In exchange Allstate (and other auto insurance companies doing the same thing) probably go ahead and sell all your personal data for $15 a month. Naturally, I declined.

But all these auto insurance programs run via the app on your smartphone. In the future, it’s the car itself that will spy on you.

Fowler wanted to determine how much data and what kind of data a car was collecting. This (of course) was not an easy task:

But for the thousands you spend to buy a car, the data it produces doesn’t belong to you. My Chevy’s dashboard didn’t say what the car was recording. It wasn’t in the owner’s manual. There was no way to download it. To glimpse my car data, I had to hack my way in.

That’s right folks! The law is so loose and the Giant Octopus is so brazen that the only way Fowler could figure out what personal data was being pulled and sold was to hack the freaking car.

They also hacked another car computer they bought off the Internets:

For a broader view, Mason also extracted the data from a Chevrolet infotainment computer that I bought used on eBay for $375. It contained enough data to reconstruct the Upstate New York travels and relationships of a total stranger. We know he or she frequently called someone listed as “Sweetie,” whose photo we also have. We could see the exact Gulf station where they bought gas, the restaurant where they ate (called Taste China) and the unique identifiers for their Samsung Galaxy Note phones.

Maybe we should all just get it over with and let the Giant Octopus put the monitoring chip in our brains? It’d be quicker in the end.

The only other option is regression. Want a car that doesn’t spy on your without your knowledge? Buy a 1995 Ford. Want a fridge that doesn’t track what tasty food is contained therein? Buy one of those neato 1940’s fridges from the movies.

We’re doomed. We work for the Giant Octopus and most folks don’t even know it, or care.

Enjoy your day!

car.png

a discovery process that is actually easier than attempting to read and understand a privacy policy

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beware the Internets

More and more the Internets can turn into a nightmare.  Granted, it’s like being hit by a car.  For the most part, everybody goes online and it’s just fine, you get to see happy cat videos.  But if you get your identity stolen or your bank accounts drained (while your circumstances are rare) it’s an absolute nightmare that can temporarily ruin your life.

I’ve personally known folks who had their data ripped which resulted in ruined bank accounts, they couldn’t use a credit card, buy a car, do their taxes, etc, etc, etc.  It’s a nightmare folks.  You could see the daily stress on their faces.

When the Washington Post isn’t busy shaming itself and mortgaging its remaining credibility by banging on the incessant defeat Trump at any cost bandwagon (regardless of impartiality or honor) they still do some no kidding real hardcore journalism.

I don’t normally do this here, but you dear blog reader need to read everything that Geoffrey A. Fowler writes for the Post.  He knows the Internets, he knows how to get into the face of questionable Internets companies, and he knows privacy values.  You can find his latest piece on browser extensions here.  I don’t use browser extensions for these very reasons, but apparently millions of people do.  If you personally do, stop, please get away while you can.

Be sure to click on his author name too and read some of his other Post pieces.  You can then indulge in the true mess of the Internets where you (the customer) are basically just a doomed farm animal as bad people make money off of spying on you without your knowledge or consent.

There might be a reckoning, eventually, for all of this.  I say might because asking Congress to accomplish anything useful is like asking a rabid panther to walk your dog safely.  But there might be movement, witness Facebook’s disastrous introduction of its evil Bond villain digital currency recently.

But, until then, it’s truly the Wild West out there folks.  You can’t arm yourself with a revolver, so you’ve got to do it with knowledge.  Learn.  Protect yourself.  Beware the Internets.

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break the cycle – revisited

Okay, first off here’s a picture of a happy emu to set the proper discussion mood.

[[original picture removed at the belligerent, touchy request of the original photographer; I have hundreds of my own photos posted to this blog; anybody can use them for any reason, take em, I don’t care; but I guess others do; for whatever reason]]

Of note, never approach an emu, they’re insane.  If you look between the lines, this happy emu smile is also the same form of smile an evil billionaire gets when they mash the “fire 2,384 employees” red button.  But for the purposes of this post, I’m going with the emu is happy and having a good day dammit [shakes fist at sky].

Per our prior post, I essentially checked out of the news for one solid week.  I only read the print edition of the Economist and got their morning Espresso updates.  So if somebody had nuked somebody else I’d have found out eventually.  I also managed to avoid seeing even one frame of television news which was especially awesome, though because the news is on everywhere this took some careful footwork.

Observations:

1) I did not miss reading the news or politics, pretty much at all.

2) I discovered that when online to check e-mail at home or at work, that muscle memory was compelling me to check the news several times a day without even thinking about it.  I had to stop myself in the moment of typing, it was weird and unsettling.  Eventually I got it to stop.

3) Originally, the idea was I needed to read then news every day to stay informed.  This is the idea of my Dad reading the print newspaper cover to cover every single morning.  It was a man’s responsibility to stay informed about the world.

4) This has now crossed over into the Internets world where the quest for knowledge has now been overcome by the emotional side that folks ascribe to politics and the second-to-second melee that is the social media world.  Additionally, even the most professional of news sites also contain a not unsubstantial amount of straight clickbait in order to increase revenues.  I don’t want this, and I don’t need this.

Conclusion:

a) I’m going to transition to the newspaper format in getting my news.  I will read my online news once in the morning and be done with it.  I won’t logon for the rest of the day.  If I giant mutant blue whale starts assaulting a major city, somebody will just have to text me and let me know and then I’ll login.

b) I think this will be a good balance, a return to the traditional balance of news my family had growing up with paper newspapers.  Get your news in the morning, process it, and then get on with your normal day, your life, without the distractions or the noise of the planet.

c) After all, the news and politics is just information.  For the most part I can’t do a damn thing about any of it.  I’ve got my own life with my own problems and my own responsibilities.  That’s where more of my focus belongs.