Category Archives: IT

March 7, 2022 · 14:05

What we hope for

IP is a tricky thing, it is usually where we hope the people will be when it is ready, some are continuation of ideas and some are a wishful thinking approach to what might be, or become.

I understand this part. You cannot sell if people are never going to go into that direction. It is wishful thinking that they will get there. In all this, I am no different. I expect the world to evolve (or become extinct) towards the 5G stage that Neom city stages it to be. It might merely be Neom at first, but it will throw the bough of marketing into a different heading and my IP will be ready when they do. It was not rocket science. It was always going to change. There was no other way and no matter how many marketeers catch up, or try to turn the dial to THEIR advantage. It was always going to happen and the marketeers that were not ready for the shift, they merely seize to be. The market was always going to reroute because scammers, spammers and criminals stopped the current direction, 5G is enabling them more and more and we see this Wild West corral approach to ‘cyber safety’, doing whatever they can, the reality is that there will be no real relief until 2025, and that sets the stage even more to my advantage (yay me). Yet it is not about me, or my IP. It is about the stage that I set in motion. I am merely in the right place as will a few others. I foresaw a massive crash of Microsoft. Spin only get you so far, but they are so driven to Azure, Spin and ‘their’ great innovations, all whilst iteration is the best they can get. It opens up a drive in a few directions. As I personally see it Microsoft is about to lose the gaming platform to Sony, Nintendo and Amazon. They are losing more and more tablet grounds to Apple and Adobe could set the sails to take a huge chunk out of the Office market. All that and a global Azure outage. The last one might be really bad luck, but to go out globally is rattling the cages of too many and there lies the rub. GaaS and SaaS are setting a larger stage, a stage where people look to what they can TRUST, and there is my open IP connecting to a lot of it. (Yay me). Instead of looking for spin, looking for hype, the offices of GaaS and SaaS required updating and stabilising. So in this Microsoft is in a bad place. Even as we were given 3 weeks ago “Microsoft is in talks to acquire cybersecurity research and incident response company Mandiant, according to people familiar with the discussions, a deal that would bolster efforts to protect customers from hacks and breaches”, you see, it is not merely “bolster efforts to protect customers”, it is about preventing and protecting the customers you have and as we are seeing several Microsoft issues and close to none from the Amazon, IBM and Google area, Microsoft could lose this side as well making them a loser three times over, but no fear. They paid $68.7 billion for Blizzard and it will not be enough. Me (and my sense of humour) attacked that deal by handing out IP and gaming ideas as freeware for Sony and Amazon developers. It is my ‘subtle’ way of telling Microsoft to wake the fuck up. And that is merely the beginning. When my IP comes through to certain parties Amazon and Google will cut Microsoft game revenue in slices, not all mind you, but well over 30% and that is before I show them a new direction they ignored for a decade and they will lose acquiring more. I reckon that it is in the air where the SaaS will go, but IBM, Amazon and Google have equal chances. OK, Google has a better chance. But as I wrote earlier, not reality but a dream, I saw adobe evolve and take a massive chunk out of the Microsoft office population and that would hurt the most. And the Office issues in the last two years were not the greatest for Microsoft, so that field could open up and some are on the Apple trail, some prefer the Google trail and yet it is not enough, a player with the proven track record of Adobe in SaaS could overtake and shoot Microsoft to rubble. It sounds violent, but that is the SaaS field. And Microsoft has had too many issues in too many places at the same time and trying to hide behind Mandiant might not be enough this time around. I admit that I could be wrong, but I can wait to be proven right and those believing the Microsoft spin will end up with a larger mess than they are ready for, but that was the choice they made. With gaming and 5G IP I will hopefully be in a place to step in and at some point either Google or Amazon will have to reconsider the station of selling 50,000,000 consoles to a population that could be a lot more, could open a lot more and that bill fits Amazon better then Google, but Google needs to make choices at some point, with the SaaS and GaaS in such a volatile setting Google might not have a choice and losing more ground to Amazon is not in their best interest. 

Yes, it is all based on what we (read: I) hope for, but it also sets the choices we see now, the choices that some reporting channels ‘trivialise’ and that some ‘minimise’. The consumer at some point catches on and as such Microsoft is in a not so good place on several channels where they boast good times. Reality does not give them that pleasure and it will take more from them soon enough.

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February 28, 2022 · 20:34

The new IP, the old stage

Yes, that is the station I found myself in this morning. It was not completely new to me, I did write about it in the past (too tired to find the exact article as I have written in excess of 2250 articles at present), but the stage is a little different now. Consider war (see the TV for specifics), we know it and it is now closer to many homes than it was months ago. But we nearly always played an EA or Ubisoft version with respawning NPC soldiers. What if the setting is staged finite and no spawning all over the place? What if the stage is London, Munich, Amsterdam or Paris? A stage where you get inserted into a random location and your war-zone is a 10 block radius from there. Google Maps has nearly every detail, so do other mapping solutions. And you could be defending, escorting local civilians and giving aid. You get no choice until you get to a certain rank. How long would YOU last? It is time to teach the gaming soldiers a little realism. And when you face that you think different on Call of Duty Beachhead with high realism. That is nothing! I think some people are catching on what it is like, somehow they take more notice on events in the Ukraine than they ever did in Yemen or Syria. I like games that have NEVER be done before. A lot of my IP is set to stages never done before and that is where we optionally see a side of gaming that is totally new and innovative. Others were there before you with other games (several examples in this year alone) and I believe that this is the way to go, whether it is a console or streaming system, innovation beats iteration EVERY. Time. 

And as these systems are more powerful, we get a setting where we can launch a game like that (or kart) in our own streets, redefining gaming realism acceptance on a few levels. I remember seeing Red Dawn, the Chris Hemsworth edition (I saw both editions) and when we see one of the kids state “We are living Call of duty and it sucks”, I heard someone giggle behind me stating that this would be cool. Yes, the response of a wannabe soldier. I however was in the Middle East, I saw what Hamas did, I saw the bodies. That wakes you up real fast and perhaps a game is not the worst setting to educate people. It has been done before and perhaps it is time to unite these elements. I don’t know, is it wisdom or folly to go that way? I honestly do not. On one side I am merely creating new IP, but I want something deeper in gaming IP, and amazing story (Horizons Forbidden West) is one way to go, when it goes to stories the game Portal (by Rob Swigart) is another direction and that can be equally fulfilling. Still there is a call, not one of duty, but one of fulfilment. We all have it, we want to plant our flag, set our footprint and leave some kind of legacy. When you are a dedicated gamer, we all want to be a Sid Meier, a Peter Molyneux or a Richard Garriott. Not everyone are driven to release mutant camels and that is fair, but where we will be going (streaming systems) and what is possible is almost at the touch and I personally think it is important to push Microsoft out of this market before there way remains the only gaming-less option.  The problem is that it would have been easier if Google had taken up some form of game creation department and with the fact that gaming revenue is predicted to be $138,000,000,000 by 2023 is something that seems overwhelmingly attractive, but that is me and for now my idea to sell 50,000,000+ systems remain under lock and key (on a cloud location far far from home). But it is merely one direction and there are plenty of other directions, the revenue speculation opens those doors and even as a large chunk is set to microtransactions, the people are seemingly fed up with the EA and Ubisoft stage of microtransactions. I also gave a few other options (go look for them) and they are largely set to streaming systems. So is there an upside to THIS IP I now mentioned? No, it is merely another road one could wander, and it is here because I cannot wander them all and I am handing my ideas for free use to Amazon and Sony developers. It is a choice I made as Google decided not to create games. The old stage is seemingly fading, or at least I think it is fading, and what is around the corner is almost within reach and it will be bright and exciting, that is what I think, you might think different and rely on great franchises (like Gran Turismo) to set your beaker of desire. That is fair, gaming is what YOU want it to be, I merely want there to be alternatives for you to consider trying.

That’s how I roll.

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February 27, 2022 · 17:06

The setting of what might be

I have always been a firm believer of the quote ‘Via ad sapientiam scientiam requirit’, which translates to ‘The way to wisdom requires knowledge’. It is something I have close to forever embraced. We can go into all directions on WHAT wisdom is but I have accepted that it is slightly different for every person. Yet without knowledge you will never find that place. Even blindly poking a map with a needle will never get you there. This is merely the stage of nearly everywhere.  Whilst people are focussing on what it happening between Russia and the Ukraine, whilst people are wondering if they are next (Bulgarians). I know that I know nothing on what is happening now, so it seemed wise to occupy my brain in different ways. And weirdly enough, I came up with new IP, military IP. My mind designed a new weapon system to incapacitate submarines. I have no idea if it works, but the setting is always nice to use in a story, a game or a movie. Where? I cannot tell, not yet. But the mind goes where it wants, sometime to places we desire and sometimes to places we cannot fathom. And for some reason, my mind went to the deep blue see, thanks for that granduncle! And I came up with a new submarine disabler. Now for the functionality I am all up in arms. I have several ideas on a few matters, but the targeting part is still a mystery (as I am not up to speed with submarines and torpedo’s) but I grasp the basics. The thingamajig (sonar) connects to the target and when distance becomes zero the whatchamacallit goes boom. But what happens when we decide not to go boom? And that is where my mind went and that is where the kraken torpedo becomes the reality of whatever story (or script) follows. 

You see people are all about destroying and I went in the other direction, the same as the weapon I designed in ‘The impact of insanity’, an article I wrote on January 20th 2019 (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2019/01/20/the-impact-of-insanity/) where I designed a stealth weapon that could disable the Iranian navy. If the big boys will not deal with them, I will. So I handed the idea to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and I left it to them to decide. It is after all their direct enemy and to some degree their problem. I also came up with the idea to melt down their nuclear reactor (see other articles) and that idea came to me via a snow-globe, so my brain is as wacky as it gets. I prefer IP in IT, gaming or entertainment yet I do not have a choice in the matter. My brain goes where it wants and I reckon that if it meets up with any of 5 certain ladies it will go in a very different direction again, which could lead to really hot IP, LOL.

The setting of what might be is to be treasured yet it almost never goes into expected directions. It might just be me, but there is every chance that the makers of the Aloy series saw where their track would lead them. We can see now (3 hours ago) all the bickering, the BS accusations and small stages. For example someone gives us “The game doesn’t have any game-breaking issues, but it does have some that are vexing players. For example, everyone hates Aloy’s hair.” Yet the problem is the use of ‘everyone’, and that cannot be, because I have not found any part that I hate and after 20 hours of actual playing I am somewhere between 15%-20%. Watching the environment is overwhelming and it is the SECOND TIME EVER that I used photo mode. The first time was Assassins Creed Origins. For the most I do not care about photo mode, it is nice and some like it yet not everyone cares. I do not, it is an extra and this time I cared. I merely took one snap to show just how perfect the game looks and when you can do that at an active point in the game, that makes the game amazing. And ever as Metacritic is at a mere 88% (Xbox players will be haters) I feel certain that it will get to the 90%-95% where it deserves to be. Now, I cannot tell if the people of guerrilla adhere to ‘Via ad sapientiam scientiam requirit’ but I am curious to find out. At some point someone dreamt up Aloy, someone dreamt up the robotics that wielded Zero Dawn and now what we see now. A true new gaming IP was created and for me that matters, because the game has shown me so much innovation in one game it is game changing and that matters, because innovation will always matter. Innovation is the game changer of ANY industry and we all got there through knowledge. It is a much longer debate to see if there is a relationship between innovation and wisdom (example Facebook) because wisdom is grown and it allows us to create a safe road, a silk road or a fast road, it is the application of wisdom that matters and it is not always a guaranteed given. We are all slaves to our thoughts, we are all driven to the creative mind. We can overanalyse, we can do so much, but can we understand it? I want to because just like nearly any other gamer I would like to come up with the golden idea for a game changing game. I think I have one that sells 50,000,000 Amazon Luna’s (Google does not design software for Stadia) but it is what it is. Beyond that I made several game IP freeware for Sony and Amazon developers. My mind will not stop designing and that is fine (but it makes me lose sleep). 

We can speculate on what might be, but I believe it to be a waste of time. I merely write down the IP (not all in this blog) and move on, it is the best I can do and whatever will be will be, what might be is a road to nowhere. So there is a 4th road, so am I at some crossroad?

I simply cannot tell at present.

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February 26, 2022 · 01:50

Web Web Web

My mind has been pounding on some new IP. Not really IP, more of a concept on what Ould become great IP. Yet will it be mine? I doubt it, there are plenty of takers, but for some reason I believe that Adobe has the inside track here. Whilst players like Microsoft make all the spin, make all the presentations, they deliver too little. Whilst they are all about Office365, we see a collection of bugs that still have not been resolved. And as they grow their product they also grow the traps and the pitfalls. 

So as we see (or recall) “The bug in Exchange Online, part of the Office 365 suite, could be exploited to gain “access to millions of corporate email accounts”, said Steven Seeley of the Qihoo 360 Vulcan Team in a blog post published yesterday (January 12 2021).” It would be come time before we could see “The Exchange Server flaw is one of 55 vulnerabilities fixed in Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday update. Microsoft is urging administrators to apply patches for a remote code execution vulnerability in Exchange Server, which is being exploited in the wild. (Nov 2021)” as I personally see it, Microsoft is digging its grave deeper and deeper, all whilst complaining to Congress about anti competition issues. How about fixing your bloody program? Optionally in less time it take a woman to get fucked, get pregnant and deliver a baby? Rude? You ain’t seen nothing yet! Microsoft complains wherever it can, against Apple, against Google and it takes over 36 weeks to get the Exchange flaw seemingly under control. I used seemingly as we also got this year ‘Microsoft kicks off 2022 with email blocking Exchange bug’ with the added “A coding mistake after a January 1 auto-update is causing the FIP-FS anti-malware service to crash with the 0x80004005 error code when it encounters 2022 dates”

Apart from the idea that kicking Microsoft should be regarded as a civil service there is actually a bigger fish to fry. 

The who now?
You see this is in part about Web3, it was one of the stopping points that my mind entertained towards some of the software that I saw in ‘Pristine and weird’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2022/02/24/pristine-and-weird/), I gave additional views in ‘The hardware perimeter’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2022/02/25/the-hardware-perimeter/). I still believe that in some respects Adobe might become the salvation. In 15 years of Adobe I have crashed less than half a dozen times, Adobe, or as I tend to call them (with a giggle) Macromedia Plus. You see, Adobe is a union (OK, they bought the other place) of Adobe and Macromedia. You might think that this is not a big deal, but it is. The union of two great innovators in their field. I truly wonder if Microsoft understands what an actual innovator is, they spun it so often in so many area’s that I truly believe they forgot what true innovation is. But consider Adobe and Apple, what if Adobe gets the sources of Pages, Numbers and Keynote? They would be close to ready. They still need a good database to stage the next scene but there are all kinds of solutions in that direction. 

The hardest part (for them) would be the web in a web stage.
This is not some fictive side, it will be the connection side of collections of blockchains (finance, documentation, hardware foundations and document tallies. The example you saw earlier is something I saw somewhere and it fitted the bill as closely as I envision it (I do not have the right software to make my own) that might get the closest to what is required, as well as a new need for checking the integrity of blockchain based connections. The need to check the integrity becomes overwhelmingly essential and when it comes to integrity checking, there is every indication that Microsoft is not really on board with that need, or its board of directors might be filtering out anything negative until AFTER it launches. In that setting a player like Adobe (or Google) is a much safer bet and that matters.

You see, I saw as early as 2009 that the borders between hardware and software were overlapping in some grey area. The initial stage of brand of hardware would be overshadowed by the software controlling it and there is the rub, the court cases where we get some version of ‘She said versus She said’ will overwhelm courts and the law is nowhere near ready on such cases, because the rules of evidence are not ready to process what gets to court. You see, to some extent Web3 might be a solution, the blockchain need will govern the desire, but there is also the larger case. We are given settings like “the idea of decentralisation” as well as “a possible solution to concerns about the over-centralisation”, but the borders of what we see to what is centralisation and decentralisation is becoming blurry. We see voices like Kevin Werbach, author of The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust making mentions on the lack of decentralisation, some give us issues on scalability. But what is scalability? It is a serious question. You see Microsoft, Google and Apple have their own ’version’ on what constitutes scalability, but always towards THEIR OWN design and I get it, that is one point of view, but when did you see a clear presentation where the CONSUMER is shown a presentation to see scalability towards their organisation and another organisation? An accountant compared to KPMG? A consultant compared to Deloitte? You think it does not matter but it does and the cloud brought it a lot closer than anyone realises. The booklet version is “scaling is the process of adding or removing compute, storage, and network services to meet the demands a workload makes for resources in order to maintain availability and performance as utilisation increases”, but as I tend to say, cloud computing is computing on someone else’s server. The term of scalability ‘adjusted’ from home processing to cloud processing. It is there that you see the larger stage of bilateral processing. The workstation (like I described earlier) with a thick client and local stages, often connected with a secure server that protects its settings and a cloud environment. A sort of 2 stage security in place and that is the larger danger. Microsoft (et al) want you to trust them, all whilst they screwed up your life with 36 weeks+ Exchange online dangers and they cannot change, they are too much involved with their board of directors and THEIR needs of the story as it needs to be. And as I rudely stated at the beginning with every chance of getting screwed over and their ‘spin’ impregnating you, but the turnaround? There is none! And what do you think their liability is when you see that your IP is gone? So whilst the news gives you “Vulnerabilities are being exploited by Hafnium”, how long until a message from the cloud provider is given to you that due to configuration errors detected we do not consider any liability against us to be valid? And let’s be clear, Microsoft Office is Exchange, Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access. They have had 25 years to clean it up, but the waves of iterations (new options) have given rise to issue after issue. Is it such a surprise that this stage might start flowing towards a player like Adobe who will add a near universe of new options and all that arranged in some next generation skin that incorporates some version of Web3? 

There are other players (Amazon, IBM) but in what I saw in ‘Pristine and weird’ Adobe fits the bill better and more complete. Even as I saw additional parts, I saw a stage where hardware is more interchangeable with software and Adobe has proven the field there. You see, as hardware from Cisco, Dell, Huawei and Juniper become more generic, software will have a much larger impact and the hardware will merely open doors to WHAT is possible and how fast the new options could be. A different setting but not merely due to the cloud, but because the one man show technologies are on the way out, pretty much like Microsoft already is. A stage that has now become too unreliable to consider trusting. And where will Apple and Google be? Apple will most likely have a larger niche, Google has been accomodating on several levels, so they both have larger fields and for them it matters in the long run. Other players will need to push for their niche, a cooperative niche or they will become obsolete, almost as much as Microsoft soon will be. But that is merely my point of view on the matter and my point of view on where we are going. Feel free to oppose my side, but do not forget to check all the facts, for now they are on my side of the equation.

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February 25, 2022 · 07:35

The hardware perimeter

It started yesterday, I wrote about it in the article ‘Pristine and weird’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2022/02/24/pristine-and-weird/). My mind started to pound on that again today, but this time it wasn’t a dream. I was pondering a few hardware sides. You see, the software thoughts (now filed away for Adobe eyes only) are one thing and I am not going on about it, just to avoid giving Microsoft good ideas, they can pay for those (and through the nose). It is the hardware. The display a Sony display (could be something else). The PC on the stand is something I found hours later. It was a lot like the OptiPlex 3090 Ultra Desktop. But there was more to it. It connected directly to the telephone and internet. More importantly there seemed to be a smooth interaction of both, phone calls could be registered and more important could be created as a new blockchain or added to a blockchain. Like the PC was registered with Processor to a blockchain, as was the location of the PC. The PC has 256GB DDR5 RAM, had a 2TB SSD and was running something I had not seen before. It was not Windows or MAC. A setting where we see PC’s having forensically secure connections. And these systems went to the cloud as well kept a connection to the local server. Blockchains kept a track of all that needed to be kept. Who created the document, who called who and so on, kept in files and logs. I reckon that will be the future of office requirements, but not a normal office. High end offices like law firms and accountants would use these cloud driven systems so that they could show what was done, when it was done and where it was done. The last part is one most tend to forget, but anyone who served in technical support on a larger scale can tell you that WHERE information comes from is rather important, more important than most realise, as such blockchains can be useful in many ways. Even now some are in denial, but 5G will force the need of a larger comprehension of the Byzantine fault to the front of many international players and the need for forensic records will then be pushed to the front. To get such a system there will be many contenders and those who can link together will become the system of choice, the old 90’s setting with DELL, ASUS and IBM is over, if they cannot work together they will end up being cast out. As such Dell and ASUS will have an edge, but IBM has plenty to offer too, especially with the cloud they have. This field will be rich of options soon enough, it will drive companies into larger fields and larger updates, yet the stage is not completely shaped and as nations become completely 5G, that need grows more and more. The stage of PwC with its Tesco failings are over. There will be a setting and those who cannot produce these blockchain references will end up becoming redundant. I do not believe it will be soon, but we will see such setting rise more and more from 2024 onwards. The hardware perimeter will shift and it will shift not fast, but it will shift more drastic than ever before. And governments will push for it, their budgets have become that volatile. We have seen all kinds of optional evidence in the last three months alone and it will only get worse, so the drastic shift seems clear, but that is based on views and there is a stage of presumption there. We can enforce the educated guess, we can deny it or we can prepare for it. Whatever you do, when it does come, there will not be some 3-5 year option, it will hit, it will hit hard and it will hit everywhere. That is what I speculate and it is speculation. 

But see the news today and the shifts we see are all staging change, change in every direction everywhere and the cry for larger blockchain implementations will start sooner, just how soon remains the question. 

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February 25, 2022 · 05:23

Relaunch or remaster?

It was 04:00 (local time) and I needed to seek out some address in London, the address did not matter, but the stage did. In the first there was Lancaster Gate station, it now holds a dearly departed sign, it is closed (apparently). For some reason seeing the map of the underground again made my mind wander. It went back to the days of the Commodore 64. I reviewed a rather fun game for the younger players. It was called ‘Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego’, it was fun because of two elements. Instead of dealing with copy protection, they merely wanted a word from a line in a page in a book, the book was however an Almanac with 900 pages.

I think I still have that book somewhere. It was fun because it had an educational side, it had an exploration side and it was fun to play. Now consider that a lot of this info is in apps, consider that the Switch could hold that info, so consider a game where the location you currently are (and offline containing the old mode) you can play a game that has at least two modes, it might not be that possible on the Switch, but both Android and iOS can contain all the elements needed. An enhanced stage with optional local added information that is added to the bookshelves of the app. We can look on any map in any location, so why not use that to a larger playing stage? Racing, wandering, sleuthing and a whole range more. The Almanac was essential in those days, but now we have equal options online and perhaps the makers have the rights to that almanac. Consider that in the old game we could go to 4 locations and from there to three buildings. Now we have the entire map, we can go anywhere, we can up the ante on several levels and even as we start with a number of locations, we can add and add as the game is released, making 200 locations, 5000 locations, making 3 buildings, 150 buildings. Making the dozen or so facts hundreds of facts. A playful app with educational sides and its educational sides could remain growing for a long time. We can add complexities with airlines, busses, ferries and subways. We can add photo’s as part of the investigation, we can do more with currencies and make credit cards a larger stage in the game (it was none in those days). All additional sides that give a much larger stage to the game and this game could resurface in a refurbished coat. In that case as it evolves into streaming systems we see a game that is for the younger players and when you count the games for younger gamers on a non-Nintendo system, how many do you find? 

Just a small idea before I am having my first coffee (05:23 now).

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February 24, 2022 · 20:36

Pristine and weird

There are times when the dream is nice, really really nice. But nice does not cut it, it was also confusing. I was in some kind of mansion, not a normal mansion. The mansion seems to be in the UK, the gardens around the mansion had a British feel to it. It was the inside. At the very centre of the ground floor was a kitchen, or perhaps better a kitchen combination. Around that kitchen was a collection of cells. Each cell had an entrance part, that would link to reception areas. These would connect to some form of living room which connected to 3-4 smaller rooms. One was for some kind of office manager as well as business executives. It was some kind of consultancy firm, but it all was extremely high end, like the Rolls-Royce of consultancy firms, for the really really wealthy or important ones v(so it looked at least), but that was not what was weird. It was the software that the office managers looked. Its foundation was like a blend of Norton Commander and Norton Utilities, but like it was given to Adobe and they went to town on it. The front page, and everything connected could be edited and maintained to their own pleasure. Headers could be personalised, front screens were adjusted, and all subsequent screens were matched to a personal version. They seemingly all connected to some cloud setting. One manager started with some version of Calendar and a ToDo list. The left side connected to applications that this office manager needed. Different managers hd different profiles. The first one had a green setting, another was blue based, but that level of personalisation is one I have never seen before. It was like Adobe combined its colour abilities in an office setting, complete with dashboarding, database and some kind of presentation software. I saw glimpses of the presentation software, there were Powerpoint/Keynote elements, it had Prezi elements and it was free-flowing. Almost like any part could interact with Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator and substance. It was weird and at times confusing, but everyone had its own true free and personalising side. It then dawned on me that most software is all about ‘the company view’, no one allows for TRUE FREEDOM AND PERSONALISATION. Cloud software should allow for this and such a system would be high end, and I reckoned that is why it would be an Adobe setting. On this foot, there is off course the rewarding idea that Microsoft could lose another slice of business, short sightedness and non evolved.  A side that niche players like Adobe with its Subscription software could optionally become a much larger opposition to other cloud system subscription players. A setting of such personalisation has other impacts too. But that is not the exercise of today. I saw files with two part headers, files with a blockchain part, a descriptive part and some time part. It as more than just time opened and time edited part. It had the last 5 edit times, timezone mentions. Localisation points, Computer GPS info, with linked map location (what office). This what I saw was all real next level shit and more important, it was the first time I saw a system that was designed for THE USER, not the propagation of a company. It was really nice, to adjust ANY part to the need of the office Assistant or business unit. An approach I never seen before to this degree, is this where we are going in the cloud? All files a much larger stage of interaction, with block-chaining on every part, an almost forensically secure system. 

Did I glimpse into what could come, what was possible, or did I not look into the right direction? I cannot tell. The mansion was overwhelming. Every business lounge was like a business lounge you see as a sitting room for the rich and famous. It was a confusing setting, but in all this the computers came back. I do remember that one office had an Apple setup, the others had some kind of Sony display, with some kind of super-slim computer attached to the display foot. I had never seen it before but it was no wider then the display foot, I initially didn’t even see it was a separate computer. The 32” Sony display looked amazing. I cannot tell what was more build to impress, the computer or the software both were amazing. And then I woke up.

An interesting sidestep in office software on a new level, a level office software never contemplated before and in this Adobe might have a large inside track, a track players like Microsoft are unable to tread, their ego stands in the way on too many points in such a track, as such, a player like Adobe could win a good chunk of that business. 

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February 24, 2022 · 06:29

The stage I cannot see

If you have seen my articles, you see that there is very little, basically almost none on the Bitcoin. I do not know Bitcoin, I do not trust bitcoin and when it collapses you lose everything you invested. It is not secured by Gold, not supported by banks and that list goes on. From November 8th 2021 the price was $91,150, on January 22nd 2022 the price was $48,800. As such over a period of less then 3 months its price was reduced by 46%, optionally wiping out the retirement funds of all these wealth seekers. This is not negatively meant. Some do it because they are desperate, their retirement funds were already diminished, driven by speed marketing on social media, after all the media advertisement making the weak approach “If you bought 10 bitcoin in 2010 you would have made $500K by now, how much could you make over the next 10 years?”, mind you nothing illegal is done here, it is merely the application of imaginary wealth appealing to the desperate. 

Could I be wrong?
Absolutely! That does not mean that I will trust the Bitcoin (ever), and if consultancy is paid in bitcoin, I would transfer it to normal currency immediately. So as Reuters gives us ‘Bitcoin’s true colours shine in stampede to safety’ (at https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/bitcoins-true-colours-shine-stampede-safety-2022-02-23/) we see “as the Russia-Ukraine crisis deepened on Tuesday read more , the price of bitcoin fell as much as 5% from last week’s close, to around $36,348. The decline marks a notable contrast to the rally triggered in traditional safe havens like U.S. and German government bonds, or gold, whose price on Tuesday hit its highest since June 2021”, this makes sense to me. Gold is something we can touch, German bonds less so, but Germany has a massive manufacturing and resource options. So it makes sense to me. As such the statement “Volatility can therefore bring big rewards when the cryptocurrency rises. It also means outsized losses when it falls”, yes that makes sense, marketing sets the view to the positive whilst trivialising, or not mentioning the dangers and at present I personally believe that dangers are seen that remind me of the great depression (1929-1939), now one event does not make for a nuclear winter, neither does two or three, yet the stag is getting more and more like the stage that drove the great depression. Unfair trade events, connected triggers like we see in “The Eurekahedge Crypto-Currency Hedge Fund Index, for example, which tracks fund managers focused on decentralised digital money, fell about a fifth in January, its biggest decline since November 2018. It was a tough month for hedge funds in general, but a broader industry benchmark declined only about 1% during the same month”, this seems to reflect on events that we saw in the great depression, but you would be wrong, I would be wrong too. In the great depression there was a large shift, but it was based on a few local events. This time around the events are global and they trigger global events, the impact could be a hell of a lot larger and the impact could be felt a lot longer, but that would be pure speculation from my side and a side that has NO ECONOMIC degrees. I create stories and I create IP, the critical mind is required in all three fields as is creativity. It allows me to see past the normal view.

As I always saw it the bitcoin is not a sanctuary, more often it is not even a shelter, or a simple rain shield, that being said, it could be one hell of a ride for thrill seekers and I get that. 5 years ago the Bitcoin was $1,650, today it is $52,260. If you could invest 5 years ago and you are willing to consider 100% loss it would be a thrill ride that made you a winner. But the other way around? It is not out of consideration, what was $90,000 in 2021, will that be higher or lower in 2026? There is no way to tell and some thrill seekers are willing to make that bet and that is their right, but there should be better protection for the desperate. You see, I accept that no one broke laws, the ‘investment seekers’ are allowed to do what they do, I get that. But what is next? Take a chance on being a drug mule? Transporting a box for a party? That is the dangers a lot of places are facing and in this time and age, that is too big a danger. Exploitation is seen everywhere, there is a sucker born every minute. It is their own fault to a larger degree, but does that mean we should remain inactive? 

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February 23, 2022 · 05:35

Salad with that?

It has been a while since I wrote about gaming IP, and I am not sure if it is really IP, but it is something the Sony and Luna developers might like. Even as I haven’t written about making games since January 25th when I wrote ‘daemonis more’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2022/01/25/daemonis-more/), an idea came to mind. I was watching ‘First we feast’ in this case the episode with Tom Holland and an idea came to me. You see, food has been in gaming for the longest of time, but we never set the bar of necessity there. Yes, most of us made at least one setting of Elsweyr Fondue (I always play a Khajiit), but it was not until Monster Hunter when I saw that there was a massive upside to having a meal before fighting. We forgot the sustenance setting and even as that is a mere copy, I thought it would be an idea if we add to that. 

So as an adventurer, you get the option to buy recipes, you can find and buy books with forgotten recipes and more important you can offer them to the local tavern where you live. So we can set a new set of elements to flourish a town. There are all kinds of side quests you can gain there. More important, we can set like the impact of a bard (which I discussed earlier) the impact of food. In the beginning there is one main meal, but as the tavern progresses which it does as the town progresses, it can do more and in each stage the recipe is either replaced or added as more recipes are only for a larger tavern, a larger tavern with a cook and as that escalates the town flourishes in other ways too. You see, you can be the centre of the universe, but that is not how the universe works (it only works for me this way, LOL), it is directed by all kinds of cogs and as we are able to grow cogs, replace cogs we see a much more interesting place, a place that grows different almost every time we play it, which adds to RPG games in no small way. So if writings become increasingly more important we will see that only the larger towns will have a bookshop and that also iterates a new set of options.

This is now possible because streaming and the PS5 are now of such size that we can add to the complexity of an RPG (and even more, but that is at present for Amazon eyes only). 

We can add to all businesses in all kinds of ways, but the clever part is not doing it, but setting the stage where it can grow and it can maze YOU the gamer into a setting where the game becomes at times a surprise. Think back to Elder Scrolls Oblivion, consider Chorrel, it was always the same (as were other places), but what happens when the change is not something you control, what if tomorrow you go into your RPG town and suddenly a store is upgraded and another store is added? In a game you are the antagonist, but what is the wonder of the game when at times you are merely the spectator? Not a cut scene, but the evolving nature of the town through the game and the game play you in part brought? It makes for a new (and very old) version of RPG gaming and that is where you will find the gamers. In a place where they never expected to be, where they are a force to be reckoned with, but not the stage master. We see some of the elements in the latest RPG games like Horizon2: Forbidden West, but it can go further and over the next 5 years it will, it will be a new standard of gaming because the PS5 allows for it and streaming consoles like the Google Stadia and the Amazon Luna allows for it. That is where optionally gaming will go and the first one with a real original and captivating game will get a nice slice of a cake that is expected to grow to $25 billion by then, should you doubt me, that is fair, but consider the people going nuts and tweeting all over the place on HFW on nearly all social media channels, originality accounts for that and Guerrilla delivered. Yet in this world there is space for more than one player and as Bethesda sold itself to Microsoft the market for close to 120 million PS4 players and 15 million ps5 players is now wide open. They said that the next elder scrolls is not coming to Sony, fair enough, but will happily become competitors, for several software houses the idea of servicing up to 135,000,000 gamers is appealing. I do not know what the streamers do in numbers, but Amazon (if they accept my terms) will grow by well over 50,000,000 consoles. So there is a market and whoever becomes the most innovative game designer will laugh all the way to the bank, every day for the rest of their live they go to the bank. And Microsoft? Who cares, they made their bed, now see how it pans out for them.

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February 22, 2022 · 02:20

Paranoia helps

This is a case, you might be paranoid, that does not mean that people are not out to hack your life. We seem to forget that, and the second part we forget is that big corporations do not care, it is the cost of doing business and that is what insurance is for. But the stage is growing and with full national 5G insurance companies will not take that stance, they would want assurances and that is when the consumer gets to pay for it all. One small slip up, one error and the consumer pays. That is where we are heading. 

This all started when I saw ‘Walmart ships fraudulent order to hacker’s address then leaves customer to recoup cost’ (at https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/walmart-fraudulent-order-online-account-hacked-1.6353016). The story gives us all kinds of information and in some cases the consumer made the easy choice, the ‘this is so much easier’ path and hackers tend to rely on that. But it is not all bad news (well mostly it is), so let’s start.

Item one ‘fraudsters were using it and his credit card on file’. This is with the consumer. Yes it is easy and most e-commerce sites use the same good encryption. Yet as I see it there are two issues. It is easy to order when the credit card is on file, so DO NOT DO THIS! Consider what you are doing every time you use your credit card. More important, when it is on file anything can happen as this consumer found out. I have two instances where a credit card is on file. One is a monthly payment of less than $10 a month, the other is even less. I enter my credit card information with every purchase. Commerce like people with credit cards on file, it is easier to make them buy, but consider that your budget is limiting and when you still have a week to go at the end of your credit card, life gets worse really fast.

Item two are two items, and they are on WalMart. We see ‘Walmart had cancelled the first three orders on its own, but Tomlinson noticed the last one for an Apple TV had just been shipped.’ In the first part why did three stop and one did not? If they are based on the same data, there is a flaw in the system, there is close to no other option. In addition we are given ‘he was not able to access the address and Walmart wouldn’t provide details’, this is clearly on Walmart. In addition, it should be in these systems that there is a permanent record of the last 10 addresses that are not linked to the credit card that paid for it, 10 is an arbitrary number, but it happens that a family member pays for another members item, or something like that. 

Now we get to the rather nasty stuff, we are given “In 2021, e-commerce retailers surveyed said they prevented about 4,860 attacks, but failed to stop about 4,800 others. The survey also suggests online and mobile fraud attacks on retailers appear to be rising since the pandemic started, up 45 per cent in Canada from 2020 to 2021.” In a full 5G network this number can go up by a 600% to 19500%, consider that 93,600 fraud cases are not stopped under 5G, do you really think that the insurances are going to sit back and let the numbers rise from 4,800 to 93,600? You have got to be kidding me and those who do will do so at horrendous premiums and the consumer gets passed on that bill. A setting I have foretold for years and people are still not waking up to Common Cyber Sense. Not all of it is the consumer. Yet look in your own home, how many use passwords like ‘QWERTY’, or something that simple? I thought I was clever in the 80’s when my password was ‘password’ and I learned quickly that there is more to safety and security. Then there are those who use the SAME password in all places and those people also have all their passwords on file. How long until deeper machine learning can make the jump from where we are, to what we are and how lazy we are? The algorithm is already out there, with 5G it gets the speed to really rake in the dollars. So whilst some might ry for big business when they give us “While Walmart says Tomlinson’s problem was caused by compromised credentials — not a cyber attack — Sutherland says companies across the board are dealing with such attacks on a regular basis.” And when we hear the sob story of covid made it worse, we need to consider that I saw issues like this in 2015, a massive overhaul of the e-commerce system is becoming essential and most of them do not want the cost, but the issue of fraud is happily passed on to the consumer. We need to accept that this is not merely Walmart, it hits e-commerce in Europe, US, and Asia. This is a much larger problem and a better system is required. Consider that we blame the NSO group for many hacks, but the basic issue is not merely the NSO group, they merely ‘Exploit Security Flaws in Phones’ Operating Systems’, so when this gets to e-commerce in the same way, we get a flaw exploiting a flaw and our goose is cooked. Hundreds of hackers hope to find that ‘Zero-Click’ flaw that makes the hacker rich whilst the hacker is sleeping and in a 5G world that will happen more often. It is not paranoia when they are all out to get your money, and there are many who want to do just that.

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