Posts by Pat 11

Metaverse

Hopefully Neil Stephenson owns that.

uSewer

TimeZuck

Schizm

Polarize

Monochrome

Purgatory

Virus

Opensafely

No need for anyone new to get this most sensitive of data. Ben Goldacre has demonstrated that any legitimate analysis can be run within the data centre using public code.

https://opensafely.org/

Format of the "string of zeros"?

It's pretty simple to set your Ad Id to a new UUID:

NEWADID=$(cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid)

sed -ri "s/[0-9a-fA-F]{8}-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}-[0-9a-fA-F]{12}/$NEWADID" </data/data/com.google.android.gms/shared_prefs/adid_settings.xml

At a guess, it will be set to UUID format made of zeros. Might try setting it to that now.

Goldacre

So Hancock commissions Ben Goldacre to do a review of health data uses for research:

https://www.goldacrereview.org/

Goldacre is very much careful about who gets to use data for what - he made Opensafely, a perfectly secure platform for doing analysis of this same data:

https://www.opensafely.org/

Simultaneously Hancock oversees a massive insecure data grab of the most sensitive data any of us have, and spouts some bullshit about patients owning their data.

I think Hancock is full of shit.

Bit derivitive

Janelle Shane has been doing AI recipe stuff for yonks, eg https://aiweirdness.com/post/190721709472/ai-vintage-american-cooking-a-combination-that

This is fine

I support this idea, alongside a somewhat larger tax relief to reimburse my costs for equipment, office space, heat and light and extra tissues for all this wanking.

what evidence it would even work?

Sure, is a privacy nightmare, but there seems to be Ann assumption that it will work. Would it? Won't it be so full of errors (which will multiply) that is not worth doing?

How do these work?

So they plug their equipment in, can it extract data without the user saying ok? Most phones are encrypted nowadays, so the OS needs to be running. Surely they aren't so insecure as to allow an unauthorised device to read all the data?

Insecure by design

The risk of public shaming is a well-worn tool in the repressive toolbox. So the system will not guarantee anonymity.

Blackmail database

There will be some very motivated blackmailers working 24/7 to get hold of this data.

To know != to be

Shifting from something you know to something biometric is dumb as fuck. All the enemy need to do is wave your phone in front of your face and they're in. At least with a pin you have to consciously divulge something.

Excession?

Or a Contact GCU taking a look?

It only needs to semi automate the process

The task of automating this isn't as hard as folk are saying. You don't need the algo to make decisions, you just need it to constrain the candidates to a level where human judgement can be used.

who's the contractor

Who's building this, and what is their track record in delivering on time within budget?

User Moderation

The problem for FB etc is volume, their business model probably doesn't scale to employ enough moderators. The solution might be to incentivise users to moderate posts, perhaps in return for some kind of bonus like going ad-free. So you get a stream of random posts to check and in return for flagging up the odd thing for formal moderation, you get a nicer experience. Several mods would have to get the same material though so again it probably doesn't scale.

It doesn't have to actually work

Google have got a great way to monetise big data but it's entirely independent of whether it actually improves results. All they had to do was convince marketing execs that it might give them an edge. Maybe it does, or maybe it doesn't, it's all the same when you have captured the advertising industry.

When it comes to me important subjects like health, the evidence has to be a lot better, and nobody wants to be that guy who used an algorithm and killed a bunch of patients.

nice extremism and nasty extremism

May owes her right to vote to the actions of extremists. Under her mindset the Suffragettes would have been locked up. Gay men like Turing would still be imprisoned. Countless positive social changes have resulted from the actions of people who were initially classed as undesirable extremists. Nobody can argue in favour of "Islamist" terror, but how the hell is any of this going to restrict just them?

I wonder if there could be a framework where intrusive surveillance was enabled but that the target matter had to be legally constrained. Ie nobody cares about what you did on the internet unless it involves giving one to the great Satan.

Just give it native printer support and it will clean up

I am so sick of Google Cloud Print Sometimes.

Noise

I guess people who care will just stop using Chrome, but it might also increase the "load random urls in the background" noise generating technique.

Also, for Android, Adguard is great and can block https and app ads as well. And pi-hole for the LAN of course

Some people do hate all adverts, they're messing with our heads

Even unobtrusive advertising is trying to influence me against my will - in fact the less obvious they are the more sneaky I perceive them to be and hate them all the more for it. And as for their attempts to influence my kids, well they can fuck the fuck off.

90% of the web can die in a fire for all I care, and 100% of the advertising industry. Not the Reg of course, I'd happily pay for the pages I read via microtransactions.

confidence intervals

These kind of algorithms are using statistics to estimate parameters and make decisions. One way to make them more accountable without be to require all such processes to produce confidence intervals. For example, predicting recidivism - if the algorithm says X has a 68% chance of committing another crime, that sounds worrying, but if it also says that estimate has a 95% confidence interval of 26-81% then it looks much less certain. And if they can't generate confidence intervals, it's a shit algorithm that should not be trusted.

GDPR

Isn't it going to be hard to square all this data collection with the GDPR, which is very tight on consent?

Tandy

Tandy still exists! Who knew?

Great news

Linux users have found a browser hack to make onedrive perform acceptably in Windows?

Only negative ones?

Surely a rational thing to do is to bar all tweets positive or negative. Otherwise it looks like you support him. Surely the HO don't support him do they?

Slow hand clap for the ad industry

Dear Ad Industry,

You add nothing of value to the world. You are parasites, the worst expression of capitalist values. Your strident attempts to interfere with people's decision making is unwelcome on the web and in all other media. When you look back on your life, what will you have contributed to the human endeavour? Diddly fucking squat.

VPNs and TOR?

Really? A quick search suggests you can just install Kodi on phones and PCs and add pirate plugins without any jiggery or even pokery.

Cloud chasers, subohm

There's an aspect to this sad tale that hasn't been mentioned here. His device seems to have been a non-regulated unit firing a very low resistance coil. People do this to get denser vapor, it tastes better and looks cool when you blow out the clouds. I think this is a worrying trend aside from all the electrical danger. Vaping looks a lot safer than fags, but that density of vapor tastes nice because it is carrying a lot more of the flavorings. Of the ingredients in vapor, the flavors are the unknown and potentially dangerous ones. Thousands of compounds are used, and they are approved for food use on the basis that there isn't evidence to ban them. Nobody has much evidence at all what long term inhalation might do to the lung epithelium. My guess is that some will be harmful, and heating them may exacerbate this. So I would not be a sub-ohm cloud chaser, I stick to simple flavors like menthol and low wattage. Each to their own, but that's my take on it.

Other routers

I wonder if this is why my non-BT router keeps crashing.

It's not the ads per se, it's the trackers

I'd be happy to turn off blocking for sites I want to support, but only if the ads came without tracking cookies and beacons.

Until then,

pi-hole.net - lan wide ad block, possibly the best thing to do with a RPi

Adguard - add blocking for Android without root, including ads inside apps.

pi-hole

Network-level blocking on a pi!

PS4 remote play

Is the only reason for me, you can't do it in W7.

But the privacy problem. Is there any way to so it spying?

Admin

It's all just more admin init. It'll all keep needing tweaking, fixing, updating. Who can be arsed, it's bad enough keeping computers running, and they constantly want to monitor you. I'd pay a premium for reliable kit that minds its own business.