Web

Microsoft has sought to revive its ambitions of challenging Google’s search engine dominance in a deal with an artificial intelligence robot backed by Elon Musk.

The Silicon Valley company behind Windows and Office software is working with OpenAI, an AI company, on its ChatGPT software that has taken the technology world by storm.

The chatbot is able to provide human-like answers to questions and problems, akin to Amazon’s Alexa, presenting a potential rival to Google’s search tools.

Microsoft does seem to be making the same mistake again. Thinking that it’s the interface to search which is important, the manner of interrogation.

When, well for some users at least, it’s the answers themselves that matter, not the form of the delivery?

Prompted by a post by everyone’s favourite Portugal-based squirrel-torturing blogger, Tim Worstall, I thought I’d dive into the practical implications of all the (frankly, horrendous) technical, security and privacy problems that Twitter was identified as having before Elon Musk rocked up as owner and CEO.

Hmm.

However, this bloke is senior in the industry, knows his onions – must do, he used to drink in the right pub in Bath. What more can I say?

From a PR email:

Last month, Forbes members got a first look at our first-ever metaverse experience, an event in a multi-level space that blended the real with the virtual.
Now, we’re opening up the metaverse experience to all our loyal readers. Sign up for this one-of-a-kind experience, where you’ll get to:

Embark on a quest through our metaverse property, where you can find a DJ booth, a bar, a dance floor and more.

When it’s Forbes which is down wiv’ da kids and groovin’ to da new technological beat – yeah, it’s not gonna work.

Facebook faces the threat of being blocked across the European Union unless it radically overhauls how it handles data in Europe.

Irish regulators have provisionally ruled the social media site can no longer send European users’ data to the US, forcing it to either set up local data centres or stop operating until the issue is resolved.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has told Facebook its current set-up breaches GDPR rules, the EU laws governing how companies can use customer data. The decision is currently in draft status and Facebook now has four weeks to raise any protests.

This has all been going on for years of course and it’s always greatly puzzled me.

Why does anyone care? That’s something I’ve never really grapsed.

Historically, there have been three great peaks: in 1929, 2000, and a third that reached its high last December. For Jainz, that process of reversion is now well underway. Inflation causes interest rates to rise, which then wreck the delicate fiction of a young technology company’s discounted cash flow (DCF) model, on which its valuations are based. Rising interest rates mean future earnings don’t look quite so rosy.

It means that $100 in the future is worth even less today than it was with lower interest rates. It’s not that the projections look less rosy, it’s that they’re simply worth less.

Another of Son’s big bets, Klarna, now looks like the biggest potential casualty of the crash. To critics it is little more than a payday loans operation, only one tapping into a market of borrowers the credit market spurned, for the very good reason they make rather bad debtors: impulsive Gen Z-ers. Klarna is racing to an IPO as its valuation crumbles.

Well, yes, the grand secret of banking. There’s no shortage of money to lend, nor of people to lend money to. There’s a shortage of people it’s worth lending money to though…..

The world is facing a pivotal moment in the battle for online privacy as a scramble to collect users’ data risks making society “less innovative and less human”, the chief executive of Apple has said.

Tim Cook warned that tech firms and governments have a “profound responsibility” to protect users from “data-hungry companies” that are determined to take their information without permission.

He also urged regulators to halt attempts to let users sidestep Apple’s privacy and security rules by downloading third-party apps through a process known as “sideloading”.

Which is the appealing to common fashion, which the protection of business revenues? And why do both at the same time? To appeal to common fashion in order to protect business revenues, obviously.

So, new ad platform, sends me an email asking if I want to join up. I’d make €1,000 a month, I would!

Your site seems like a good match and has great trafic so I decided to reach out. Do you want to discuss it for wokingham.gov.uk?

That ad tech might need a little refining…..

Anyone got a pointer to a good primer on SEO? Some work I’m doing would definitely benefit from guidance on this. Something better than Google’s own “write good articles and they will come” stuff. How many times to repeat a keyword, where, all that? Possibly even something aimed at Google News, not just the main engine?

Oh, and obviously, it needs to be fairly up to date, a recent version of what the engine does today?

Apparently Chrome will now make a QR code of a page. I assume, but don’t know, that this means that taking a pic of the code then takes you to the page?

At which point, a QR code of goatse. To then plaster over the displayed QR codes of folks you don’t like.

Y/N?

OK, maybe not then. But that’s the sort of mischief which can’t possibly be original. So, where are those reports of folk littering fake QR codes around?

Britain will seek to regulate the rise of the metaverse popularised by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook under its flagship Online Safety Bill, the UK’s digital minister has confirmed.

Facebook, which rebranded as Meta in November, and dozens of other companies have claimed that breakthroughs in virtual reality mean that a seamless blending of the virtual world and the real world is just years away.

Chris Philp, the UK’s digital minister, said metaverse companies would fall under its plans to tackle online harms and bring regulation to Big Tech firms.

How could this not happen? After all, all those clever people can’t just be left to get on with it. They wouldn’t know what to do, would they?

Quite, quite, someone who knows absolutely nothing at all about the subject under discussion should tell them what to do.

The Government was anxious to identify a “heavyweight” from the private sector with experience in digital and data, in order to help the NHS make better use of novel technologies. At present, around 20 per cent of hospitals still rely on paper records.

So they’re bringing the ex-Chairman of the TSB? Britain’s banking software being well known as entirely up to date and modern.

What does an x-ray look like in Cobol?

“Partial correlation analyses show that media multi-tasking specifically was mostly correlated with negative mental health, while playing video games was associated with faster responding and better mental health.”

Looking at Tik Tok and also listening to the radio is worse than playing a game.

But this is entirely and wholly correlation – these people aren’t even trying, are they?

On this subject of a tablet for SWMBO.

For boring reasons we need to use ethernet to connect it. But most tablets don’t have ethernet slot.

One suggestion online is an ethernet to USB adaptor. Eh? You can feed internet in through a USB port? Rilly?

The household – for which read she who rules it – desires a tablet. Android.

OK, so, go for the Amazon Fire 10 HD? Sadly, while that’s on sale in US and GB it ain’t here and we’ve a customs border now.

Or go for the €30 euro cheaper no name that also includes stand, keyboard, mouse etc?

??

Parts of Portugal are so far west that there’s a reasonable case for it not being on London time but another time zone over – the Azores one. OK, not all that strong a case, being two hours out from Spain would be odd etc.

However, using one of the major appointment reminder services (no names, no packdrill, but from a company that provides both search and email) you end up getting reminded of appointments on Azores time, not Portuguese. Some investigation (a bloke who used to drink in the same pub now works at HQ) and I find out that this time zone allocation is not in fact from that major company. It’s a step – at least – further back into the system. Some significant part of the world now has this error coded into it.

It’s not there yet but there could actually come a time when it would be sensible for Portugal to move to Azores time rather than trying to fix the coding.

Maybe.

Well, go get the spanner then:

The company said its systems were designed to audit commands to prevent mistakes, but the audit tool had encountered a bug and had failed to stop the command that caused the outage. The outage had knocked out tools that engineers would normally use to investigate and repair such outages, making the task even more difficult.

It’s me spanner that’s broke Guv’.

Facebook’s controversial encryption plans ‘won’t give users real privacy’, MPs have been told as they were warned it will ‘cripple’ child abuse blocking software.

A leading expert has said the company’s proposals to encrypt its Messenger service will still hand it a ‘trove of information’ on users.

The comments come as Facebook has justified its contentious plans, which mean even it won’t be able to see what its users are uploading to the platform, on the grounds it will enhance people’s privacy.

The social media giant is facing mounting criticism over encryption plans that will make it harder to detect terrorist activity and child abuse material,

So the authorities won’t be able to track your blow stuff up and kiddie fiddling ways. And yet this is not an increase in privacy?

Sure, it may not be the type of privacy we’re delighted in on national security grounds but it is privacy. For it is important to ask, well, privacy from whom?

Many people dream of having a consistent, lucrative passive income. I mean, who doesn’t want a little more money, right? Cash back apps, coupons, credit card rewards, these all offer a little bit of $$$, but times are changing. Monetizing your personal data could well become the most lucrative source of passive income for people.

XXX is on a mission to help people take back control of their data while making money from it.

It isn’t going to work, is it?

Two reasons.

1) The data’s not worth much. A few dollars per month per person. Because that’s the revenue that Fbook and Google get, a few dollars per month per person.

2) The individual data is worth even less than this. Because it’s the database that’s worth money. Therefore considerable amounts of the revenue flow to the people who collate, not the owners of each individual datum.

Let’s talk about social media functionality and how its current, virulently diseased business model might be amputated.
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It’s simply implicit that social media can do good work if cut free of the abusive, predatory, American firms who use it as the lure for an adtech economy unmoored from real value or social purpose.
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Social media as currently construed is terrible in truly nonlinear ways, acting as both metaphor and amplifier for the worst of late capitalism.
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Just as TMFTF doesn’t have much to say about how hard-right, populist authoritarianism is deliberately wrecking intra-national capacity for the regional and global coordination needed to address climate crisis, it doesn’t seem to get how the vicious circle of hard right plus social media is hollowing out the capacity of states to fulfil the social contract that makes democracy possible.

That’s why we need to destroy Big Tech, not just because doing so might provide an (anti)-business model for emergent forms of technology-amplified cooperation. US social media companies’ business model is directly preventing people from understanding the climate crisis, and from forming the coalitions needed to work on it. It’s destroying the necessary structures of feeling and political institutions we need to get civilization through the eye of the needle that is this century. That is the problem statement. Understanding what we’re up against provides the necessary urgency and will to act radically to destroy how we currently ‘Internet’.

I know tech policy pretty well,
….
This work is urgent. Tech policy, like everything else, needs to serve and enable our direct responses to climate crisis. Time and again, the toxic predation of winner-takes-all monopolies, founded and run by tech bros, enable, amplify and are fundamentally conjoined with individual acts of male predation and abuse. Code is law, and that code is misogyny. We won’t get the non-patriarchal responses that TMFTF rightly describes as essential, if we permit another decade of violent regression on gender. All the people that would have the ideas, develop the projects and form the networks that our species needs are being driven out, now. We don’t have decades more of human potential to burn.

Umm, yeah.

Sorry, but social media is more damaging than TV – whatever the research may say
Lax regulation of social platforms has allowed many to become a digital Wild West of racism, sexual harassment, and pornography

So, human beings aren’t quite as polite as some thought. And?

This isn’t the platforms at fault, it’s the folks.