shinyhappyrainbows

In 1909, 116 years ago, E. M. Forster published the science fiction novella, "The Machine Stops." It tells the story of a future that, having had the story read to me, ironically by a Youtube content producer, is terrifying and already here. It's scarily the most broadly accurate dystopia! While it very much simplifies the world to a single machine that houses and connects humanity, yet runs with little or no human intervention, the priciple of the story is very much the world in which we live in. Lecturers (Youtube content creators and other social media influencers) and their audience of students (fans/followers/tweeps) communicate via what we in the 21st would immediately recognise as "Zoom" calls, live in isolation in single rooms, deep underground. All their food and other needs are shipped to them by the Machine and person to person contact is considered common, even coarse. The Lecturers deliver their "ideas" to their audiences or work on lectu...

Watch this video. I'll wait, but you need to watch it... OK, The Spectacle is this world of manipulative media. Stochastic terrorism, where a "freely speaking" celebrity, with millions of fans, wishes a type of people dead, out loud on TikTok. Distraction, where a minor public figure is shamed to hide the atrocities of a national leader. An ugly court case, hearing domestic violence accusations, becomes a public trial, shaming the victim/accuser and praising the purpetrator. We take sides, we hold opinions, yet we have barely even a parasocial connection to the respondents. Meanwhile, something crawled out of the slime of a dark Scottish Loch next to a golf course and becomes president of the self appointed "most powerful nation" on earth, while his idiot grin offsider wants to take us all to Mars. This was all predicted in 1967. Not literally, but Debord is screaming, "I TOLD YOU SO!" from his grave. We the people are asleep at the wheel. "Oh,...

Modern doorbells are badly engineered, over complicated and many are an info-sec problem due to being hackable. Hackable in ways where you will never know until you come home and find your place burgled because the theives were told you were out. The available products range from simple, cheap and unreliable to overly complex, expensive, unreliable and a way for people to know you're not at home. then there are all the doorbells that use batteries. Expensive disposable battteries. Cue U2's " Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For ." But wait, what?! There is a solution!!! Wireless doorbell set with batteryless button. There's a thing in electrical engineering called piezo-electric effect. If you apply a bending pressure to a quartz crystal, it generates an electric charge across its opposite faces that are perpendicular to the bending force. These devices are used as contact microphones, wind energy harvesters for remote microelectronic sensors intende...

Overnight I let my iPhone upgrade, from iOS 18.1 to 18.2, and I was sweating it. I'd checked, when upgrading from 17 to 18, if Apple Intelligence was going to be forced on me. Couldn't get a clear answer, but it seemed not, and turned out to not yet work on my very basic iPhone SE gen 3. Last night, Apple snuck inbox filtering into mail but gave me an elipsis menu switch back to my uninterfered with inbox. Fortunately, as I'd hoped, Apple Intelligence is setup to respect my Siri settings, so GPT was completely turned off. I've been messing around with tech since the mid 1970s, using tech for learning since the dawn of the internet in Australia in 1995 and making my own tech in the mid 70s and since 2007, when I gained more financial freedom after leaving a loveless marriage. I don't need AI and I can find knowledge and learn stuff better than it can. This is not greyhaired Mr. Grumpy-Curmugeon, I have done extensive experiments with a number of AIs. I embrace tech ...

As I understand it, and please do correct me if I'm wrong, Threads is connected to the ActivityPub protocol. Nor can I reliably and firsthand speak to whether threads is two-way or just a "data hoover," sucking in whatever it can from public Activity-Pub feeds, but even two-way connections between Threads and the Fediverse is a problem, because Meta use reaction data from online human interactions to target advertising and political manipulation. In August, 2023, I downloaded the entirety of my Facebook data, deleted it completely from Facebook (not that I trust that deletion, I'm sure they have it squirrelled away somewhere) and shut down my Facebook account. It was a hard call to make. Some of the best people I've ever known, and Facebook was my only possible connection to them, are/were there. Have tried to maintain email contact with some, but that has dwindled. I have some limited activity on YouTube but, after a brief period on Mastodon, I stopped taking my...

Today, I opened up YouTube on my phone over breakfast and was presented with this video. Feel free to watch it, I'll wait... Now, I follow media law a little, I used to be one of the production team in two of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's capital city newsrooms. I handled audio technical production alongside the bulletin producer (a journalist) for ABC Radio's main bulletins on the hour in the two cities I worked this gig. Although I wasn't a journalist, I was frequently included in editorial discussions surrounding stories because the understanding that editorial policy was a requirement for my technical oversight of audios edits and live crosses. I learned a good smattering of broadcasting and copyright law in my 27 years with "Aunty." The standout takeaway, relevant to this topic - only a human can hold copyrights. A dog can't, a monkey or an ape can't. A computer system, sure as shit , can't hold copyright. As per Arts Law Austral...