Category Archives: IT

June 20, 2021 · 00:16

The stage of what is

Yes, we all have that and I am no exclusion, ‘what is’ is the first part of a question that is dangerous. The answer that follows tends to be subjective and personal, as such it is loaded with bias, not that all bias is bad, but it defers from what actually is. This was the first stage when I saw ‘Lina Khan: The 32-year-old taking on Big Tech’. Then we get “when it comes to unfair competition, there is one sector that has been singled out by Democrats and Republicans alike: Big Tech”, this is the beginning of a discriminatory setting. There are two sides in this and let me begin that Big Tech is not innocent, so what is this about? Lets add ““What became clear is there had been a systemic trend across the US… markets had come to be controlled by a very small number of companies,” she said”, now we need to realise that there are two parts here too, in the first she is not lying and for the most, she is correct. 

So why do I oppose?

The US, most of the Commonwealth and the EU all have a massive failing, they have no clue what they are doing. I have seen that side for over 30 years and it is the beginning of a larger stage. You see the big tech part needs to be split in two elements big tech and those who ‘use’ (or abuse) the elements of big tech. Big tech was more than the FAANG group (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google), in the beginning there was Microsoft, IBM and Sun as well (there were a few more players but they were gobbled up or ended up being forgotten. When we see charts of technology and market capitalisation we see Microsoft in second place, so why is Microsoft left outside of the targeting of these people? Microsoft is many things, but it was never innocent or some goody two shoes, the same can be argued for IBM, IBM have been gobbling up all kinds of corporations in the last 20 years, so why is IBM disregarded so often? It it nice to target the companies with visibility towards consumers, but that puts Microsoft with more than one issue in the crosshairs, but they are ignored, why is that?

Then we get back to the BBC article (at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57501579) where we see “Her general criticism is that Big Tech is simply too big – that a handful of large US tech firms dominate the sector, at the expense of competition”, she is not incorrect, but there are more sides to that story. In 1997 I gave an idea to bosses (in a software firm) on consumers messaging each other and for a firm to be in the middle of that. Being a gateway and a director of messages and giving visibility to people of other matters (I never used the word advertising). It was founded on a missing part when Warner Brothers created (in partnership with Angelfire) a website hub. So fans of Babylon 5, Gilmore Girls and a few other series could Create their own webpage, they got 20MB for free and an address, like in Babylon 5 I was something like Section Red number 23 (I forgot, it was 25 years ago), the bosses stated that there would never be a use for that, it was not their business and there was no business need for something like that and 4 years later someone else created Facebook. Now I am no Facebook creator, what I had was in no way anywhere near that, but that is a side a lot of people forget, the IT people had no clue on what the digital era was bringing and what it looked like, so as they were unaware, politicians had even less of a clue. So when Google had its day (search and email) no one knew what was going on, they merely saw a free email account with 1GB of storage and everyone got on the freebee train, that is all well and good, but nothing is for free, it never ever is. 

As such a lot of companies remained inactive for close to half a decade, Google had created something unique and they are one of the founding fathers of the Digital age. Consider that Microsoft was clueless for close to a decade and when they started they were behind by a lot and there inaccurate overreaction of Bing, is merely laughable. Microsoft makes all these claims yet it was the creators of Google who came up with the search system and they got Stanford to make this for them, just look it up, a patent that is the foundation of Google and Microsoft was in the wind and blind to what would be coming. By the time they figured it out they were merely second tier junkyard vendors. And (as I personally see it) the bigger players in that time (IBM and Microsoft) were all ready to get rich whilst sleeping, they were looking into the SaaS world (diminishing cost to the larger degree), outsourcing as a cost saving and so on, as I see it players like Microsoft and IBM were about reducing cost and pocketing that difference, so as Google grew these players were close to a no-show and do not take my word for that, look at the history line of what was out there. In retrospect Apple saw what would be possible and got on the digital channel as fast as possible. Yet IBM and Microsoft were Big Tech, yet they are ignored in a lot of cases, why is that? When you ignore 2 out of 6 (I am not making Netflix part of this) we get the 2 out of part and that comes down to more than 30%, this is discrimination, it grows as Adobe has its own (well deserved) niche market, yet are they not big tech too? One source gives us “As of June 2021 Adobe has a market cap of $263.55 B. This makes Adobe the world’s 32th most valuable company by market cap according to our data”, which in theory makes them larger than IBM, really? Consider that part, for some reason Adobe is according to some a lot larger than IBM (they are 112th), so when we consider that, can we optionally argue that the setting is tainted? In a stage where there are multiple issues with the numbers and the descriptions we are given, the entire setting of Big Tech is needing a massive amount of scrutiny, and when I see Lina Khan giving us “markets had come to be controlled by a very small number of companies” I start to get issues. Especially when we see “there is one sector that has been singled out by Democrats and Republicans alike: Big Tech”. You see singling out is a form of discrimination, it is bias and that is where we are, a setting of bias and to some extent, we are all to blame, most of us are to blame because of what we were told and what was presented to us, yet no one is looking to close to the presenters themselves and it is there that I see the problem, This is about large firms being too large and the people who do not like these large firms are the people who for the most do not understand the markets they are facing. Just like the stage of media crying like little bitches because they lose revenue to Google (whilst ignoring Bing as it has less than 3% marketshare). 

The who? The what? Why?

This part is a little more complex, to try to give my point, I need to go back to some Google page that gives me “What is Google’s position on this new law? We are not against being regulated by a Code and we are willing to pay to support journalism—we are doing that around the world through News Showcase. But several aspects of the current version of this law are just unworkable for the services you use and our business in Australia. The Code, as it’s written, would break the way Google Search works and the fundamental principle of the internet, by forcing us to pay to provide links to news businesses’ sites. There are two other serious problems remaining with the law, but at the heart of it, it comes down to this: the Code’s rules would undermine a free and open service that’s been built to serve everyone, and replace it with one where a law would give a handful of news businesses an advantage over everybody else.”

This is about that News bargaining setting. Here we get ‘by forcing us to pay to provide links to news businesses’ sites’, and I go ‘Why?’ A lot of them do not give us news, they give us filtered information, on addition to this is that if I am unwilling to buy a newspaper, why should I pay for their information? If they want to put it online it is up to them, they can just decide not to put it online, that I their right. In addition some sources for years pretty much EVERY article by the Courier Mail get me a sales page (see below), this is their choice and they are entitled to do so.

Yet this sales pitch is brought to us in the form of a link to a news article. It still happens today and it is not merely the Courier Mail, there are who list of newspapers that use the digital highway to connect to optional new customers. So why should they get paid to be online? In the digital stage the media has become second best, the stage that the politicians are eager to ignore is that a lot of the ‘news bringers’ are degraded to filtered information bringers. In the first why should I ever pay for that and in the second, why would I care whether they live or die? Do not think this is a harsh position, Consider the Daily Mail giving us two days ago ‘Police station is branded the ‘most sexist in Britain’ after investigations find officers moonlighted as prostitutes, shared pornography with the public and conducted affairs with each other on duty’, so how did they get to ‘most sexist in Britain’? What data do they have and hw many police stations did they investigate? There is nothing of that anywhere in the article, then we get to ‘after a series of scandals’, how many is a series of scandals? Over what time frame? Then we get to ‘Whatsapp and Facebook groups used to exchange explicit sexual messages and images have been shut down’, as such were the identities of the people there confirmed? How many were there? What evidence was there? All issues that the Daily Mail seems to skate around and ‘In the latest scandal, PC Steve Lodge, 39’ completes the picture. Who else was hauled to court and is ‘hauled’  a procedural setting in an arrest? When one rites to emphasise to capture the interest of the audience it becomes filtered information, it becomes inaccurate and therefor a lot of it becomes debatable. Well over a dozen additional questions come to mind of a half baked article on the internet, and they get paid for that? And as we consider ‘He was alleged to have’ we get the ‘alleged’ part so that the newspaper cannot be held liable, but how accurate was the article? That same setting transfers to Lina Khan.

The article gives us ‘or rather a perceived lack of competition’ as well as ‘markets had come to be controlled by a very small number of companies’, they are generalising statements, statements lacking direct focal point and specifications. In the first ‘perceived’ is a form of perception, biased and personal, ones perception is not another ones view of the matter. It is not wrong to state it like that, but when you go after people it is all about the specifics and all about data and evidence, as I see it evidence has been lacking all over the board.
And when we consider ‘markets had come to be controlled by a very small number of companies’ I could add “PetSmart has 1650 shops in the US, they could set the price for tabby’s on a national level, is that not a cartel foundation?” Yet these politicians are not interested in a price agreement of pets are they, it is about limiting the stage of certain people, but by doing so they will hurt themselves a lot more than they think. On November 14th 2020 I wrote the article ‘Tik..Tik..Tik..’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2020/11/14/tik-tik-tik/), where I wrote “if HarmonyOS catches on, Google will have a much larger problem for a much longer time. If it is about data Google will lose a lot, if it is about branding Google will lose a little, yet Huawei will gain a lot on the global stage and Apple? Apple can only lose to some extent, there is no way that they break even”, and a lot ignored the premise, but now as HarmonyOS has launched (a little late), the stage is here. When it is accepted as a real solution, Google stands to lose the Asian market to a much larger degree and all because a few utterly stupid politicians did not know what they were doing, more important Huawei still has options in the Middle East and in Europe. So the damage will add and add and increase to a much larger degree, especially if India goes that way, for Google a market that could shrink up to 20%, close to 2,000,000,000 consumers are per July 1st ill have an alternative that is not Apple or Google, that is what stupidity gets them. My IP will connect to HarmonyOS, so I am not worried, yet as I see it the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) better start getting its ships properly aligned, because if HarmonyOS is indeed a decent version from version 2 onwards the US tech market could shrink by a little over 22.4%, the US economy is in no way ready for such a hit, all because politicians decided to shout without evidence and knowhow of what they were doing, a nice mess, isn’t it?

The stage of ‘What is’ depends on reflection and comprehension and both were lacking in the US, I wonder what they will lose next. 

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June 16, 2021 · 04:46

Speculation towards words of passing

As I was looking into some IP evolutions, and as I was considering a few alternative new plans to hardware, The Wall Street Journal (about an hour ago) gave me ‘Alibaba Falls Victim to Chinese Web Crawler in Large Data Leak’, some will go ‘so what?’, and it gave me ideas on new apps, some might already exist but that as not the point, it was “Software developer scrapes 1.1 billion pieces of user data, including IDs and phone numbers, over eight months”, as well as “The software developer began using web-crawling software he designed on Taobao’s site starting in November 2019, gathering information including user IDs, mobile-phone numbers and customer comments, according to a verdict released this month by a district court in China’s central Henan province” that got my mind thinking. What if it was not about the data available now? What if that software designer had designed a predictive algorithm that could see and anticipate passwords? We have seen over the last few months well over a dozen breaches. From healthcare, to restaurants. Security magazine gives us “For example, cybercriminals could send phishing emails to individuals whose contact details were breached, asking them to click a link to update their username and password in the wake of the incident, in order to harvest credentials and gain access to data and systems. In a more advanced attack, the cybercriminal could use the knowledge that the contact has a business email relationship with McDonald’s and impersonate the brand to create further legitimacy to the attack. With people’s phone numbers being exposed too, cybercriminals could make their social engineering campaigns even more convincing by following up their email with a voice phishing — vishing — call”, but what if that is not the end goal? What if the people on half a dozen retail and health care places are showing to have similar or identical passwords? The predictive analytics might allow for a lot more. The article (at https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/95404-mcdonalds-corp-suffers-data-breach) gives us more. I am not saying that Richard Blech is wrong, I agree with him, especially with “This is where large enterprises and government entities are significantly lacking in their efforts to ensure that they have, across the board, trained all staff and employees of, what should be a required job function, of the best practices and rules of conduct when operating within the network or infrastructure”, yet he was not looking towards ‘the Chinese software developer’, more important, if the Chinese developer was doing that, you can be certain that there are American, Russian and Indian developers doing EXACTLY the same thing and now we have a problem, now we have the setting for a predictive password algorithm, one that predicts the passwords of users. We are ALL a little lazy when it comes to passwords. The group of people relying on ‘qwerty’ and ‘abc123’ is shrinking, but it still exists to some degree and some use the same password on EVERY account, which is really not a good idea. So when these data breaches show identical passwords for the same email address, the panic button is really flashing and the problems are merely beginning. Yes, we can all see that the quality of passwords is increasing, and nearly all of you have seen the message “Please use upper and lower case characters, use at least one numeric and one special character to create your password”, with some sources claiming “It would take a computer about 3 thousand YEARS to crack your password”, yes that might be true, but if your password is “1Wishtofcuk#U69” on all the sites you retail frequent, the predictive password model will find you a lot sooner than you think it will and the setting changes from your account being your vested connection to the tool of organised crime. And as I see it there is not too much happening into that investigation. That is not a fault of the media, they react to what is, not what might be (glossy magazines do, but usually it is about predictive shagging information from unnamed sources regarding celebrities or famous married people). 

So whilst we get back to the Wall Street Journal giving us “Chinese legal experts say a data leak involving mobile-phone numbers would have more far-reaching consequences in China than in other parts of the world. In China, where people are required to register with real name identification before obtaining a mobile phone number, such numbers are considered by law to be personal information, said Annie Xue, a Beijing-based lawyer at GEN law firm”, we tend to forget that plenty of nations have a few places where they rely on license numbers, date of birth and tax number, and there are all kinds of long term damage you face and that is merely the beginning. So when that predictive password algorithm is out there your goose (or Peking duck) will be cooked and it will be well done.

I did come up with an optional solution, one that is managed by YOU (I am too lazy and not a programmer), where the user can store and export passwords in their mobile, but it is depending on two passwords that are part of the encryption and not saved anywhere. So you forget those words, the passwords are gone. This is a setup using Two-square cipher, also called double Playfair, and it can be easily made, there was always one drawback ‘the two-square cipher can be easily cracked if there is enough text’ and we accept that, but passwords are not text, they are one word and not always clear ones, as such decrypting is a lot harder, especially if the developer does not make some backdoor. You can export the encryption to an email (to yourself) or perhaps a file on a laptop or cloud. The two words (for example ‘MaryPoppins’ and ‘SandraDee’) are words you must remember or write down somewhere SAFE and not linked to the exported list and should not relate to you or your person in any way and should never be reused anywhere.  At that point the hackers return to a 3,000 years per website account and optionally the predictive password algorithm will soon be a nightmare of the past.

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June 13, 2021 · 19:03

Perceived stupidity

Yes, hard to see that is it? It is perceived, perceived by me, by you, by people who are clueless and by people who are basically mindless. Perception is a dangerous thing, but the US is trying to get a handle on it. This issue starts with that I am not making any claims, I am not stating or implying that I am wiser than the US House Judiciary Committee (wiser is not the same as more intelligent). Yet the US House Judiciary Committee (via Al Jazeera) is giving us “if passed, would bar Amazon from selling its own branded products, Amazon Basics, for example, or Apple from offering Apple Music, or Google from providing specialised search services in travel, local businesses and shopping”, In addition we see “The proposal could also threaten Google’s $23 billion display-advertising business. Google runs an exchange for ad transactions and provides the technology used by website publishers and advertisers to buy and sell digital advertising, but it also competes in the marketplace as a buyer and a seller”. As such this article was aired two days ago, which I initially missed, but when I read it (about three hours ago), I fell over laughing and I did not stop laughing for an hour. The absolute irony of the issue is that my IP avoids all that and in addition creates new waves too. So, not only am I feeling great, there is every chance that Google and Amazon will be vying for my affection (Apple is not a consideration at present). So not only is my IP valuable, it now in addition optionally negates the $23,000,000,000 Google business giving it another avenue of release and that one is one the US House Judiciary Committee cannot attack, my setting was founded on decentralisation. 

So am am I perceived to be stupid, or are they (Not judging)? Consider what we see (at https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/6/11/us-tech-titans-would-have-to-exit-key-businesses-under-house-plan), the text “Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and other U.S. technology giants would have to sell or exit key businesses under sweeping antitrust legislation proposed by House lawmakers”, is this anything less than the US government trying to take control of a business they have no business being in? They will call it something like “Let the little fish grow”, yet the flaw is that any business is entitled to go where it wants and now we suddenly see the larger stage where Canada and the UK could reap massive rewards, just because some people were discriminatory against the FAANG group. Consider laws and bills to discriminate against 5 players. I stated yesterday that this would not go well, and I believe I am correct (we all believe we are correct), but in a stage where not only am I proven correct, the stage soon becomes that my IP will flourish even more than I had ever thought possible. 

Granny in sights

So, even though the bear is not killed yet, someone gave me an Accuracy International .50 sniper rifle (with 3 rounds) and I get to take down my target from 100 metres, and if I hit that target I will become a multi millionaire, so yes, that granny with her walker will not have a chance to cross the road alive. I reckon one bullet is quite enough.  And there I was thinking that I would end up with a paint-gun with metal pallets. 

So the old setting of “prohibit tech companies from owning a business that competes with other products or services on their platforms, among other measures”, a stage that players like Microsoft and IBM enjoyed for decades is out of the way. Yet it also muddies the water. Consider that Microsoft bought Bethesda ($8.5B) and Minecraft ($2.2B), which was their way of giving Sony the finger, now we will see a very different stage and that might work, but it also means that these player will hire all the talent out of other software houses and dim the lights in other ways. Did they even consider the impact of their plan and if they can do it, players like Chengdu Nibirutech Inc, Augegame Network Technology Co., Ltd., GamesUnion Technology Co.,Ltd and several others, so when they start tinkering on the other fence, what happens then? Too many people lost faith in players like Ubisoft, they might give nice presentations, but so far too many of their products are bug ridden, the gamer have had enough and in that stage we see that the US government is tying the hands of big tech as they compete with China and Russia. How was that ever a good idea? Oh and that is before independent developers consider an upgraded Neom as a place of development. Especially as Fierce Wireless 2 days ago gave us “Users on Verizon’s 5G network in mature deployment areas don’t yet notice much difference in performance than 4G users, according to new analysis from Tutela”, in a stage where Saudi Arabia has a 5G that is 700% faster than the US, is this really the time to have a pissing contest when one is lagging on a technology field, a economic field and a manufacturing and project field? But that is all good news for places like Canada and the UK, as such the economic field will adjust and it will take the sails out of Wall Street as I personally see it, but in that regard I might be wrong. These elements matter, If you think of it Amazon was a book seller, so is all to be sold off? In this how much more expensive will your lives end up being? Google might be in a better place, but when we see “Google runs an exchange for ad transactions and provides the technology used by website publishers and advertisers to buy and sell digital advertising”, when that goes into the air, do you think the scam and phishing era is gone? No, it will go from one a week to several a day and you will not block them all, more important, if you see places like Twitter, we already get the issue there, advertisers trying to call in the ‘click bitches’ hoping to get revenue of dozens of pages, all whilst that EVERY PAGE there is a trojan danger by people they never knew, but the advertisement money os too appealing, especially if they get a dime a page per person. Do you think that these advertisers are doing it out of the goodness of their hearts and matters will go from bad to worse and that same US House Judiciary Committee is clueless how to stop what comes next, they never explored the dangers there. 

So when we get to David Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat, who was so about the power of big-tech, yet the Boston Globe (at https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/06/11/metro/unemployment-fraud-hit-one-rhode-islands-congressmen/) gives us “In March, the Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training (DLT) reported that 43 percent of claims turned out to be suspected and confirmed fraud during the pandemic, and about $37.6 million was paid out to confirmed fraudulent claims. Another $209.6 million was paid out to suspected fraudulent claims. The good news is that it could have been much worse. The state believes it stopped at least $3.2 billion in payments to suspected fraudulent claims between March 2020 and March 2021.” The article also gives us that 15 Rhode Island residents were charged in a nationwide unemployment scheme, yet do you think that these 15 were responsible for the $209 million, or the alleged thwarted $3,200,000,000? I personally believe that he has no clue what is about to hit the US when these big tech bills becomes a reality. And as I said it yesterday, a tax overhaul is decades late.

I saw the fake tunnel in the distance in 1998, that is almost a quarter of a century ago, it has been that long that US politics decided to remain inactive and now they are making matters worse by overreacting, but that will works out nicely for other nations, so if Amazon and others relocate to Toronto (CAN) or Ipswich (UK) the US will have done it to themselves.

 

In some cases I say ‘Time will tell’ yet here the phrase ‘Surprise, surprise. Time is here!’ seems more apt.

We will all know soon enough.

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June 10, 2021 · 17:49

European Union Reka

Yes, this is me being slightly too clever fr my own good, but the waves started yesterday afternoon and they subsided somewhere during the day. At first I saw an advertisement, it does not matter which one, it remains beside the point, yet it instilled a thought that took me back to the early 90’s. As thoughts started to mash, I ended up thinking of a few items as I discussed them in ‘The other path’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/05/20/the-other-path/). As thoughts mashed together, I suddenly had a few additional settings that would make the device a lot more all round and some of the thoughts towards the central and transferable unit looking something like below got an additional lease on life and livelihood. The stage goes beyond mere adaptation. I considered a few items like lego blocks to click and unite them making not five singular items, but three parts making one connected solution. 

A stage overlooked, yet I merely had to look at the past and considering that these people never considered what I saw, the options for innovation patents are opening up. Not merely singular, but a larger plural setting. And when I combine the ideas I had, I see a much larger setting of growth in the EU, how sweet is that?

Yet, here I am in a stage where some are really eager to play their games, so I go the path they do not anticipate, their spoken claims of ‘I’ll do right by you’ and ‘trust me’, thrown aside like the BS it always was. Now, I might not end up with anything, but that was always their thoughts to begin with, so making it all public domain is a path these greedy little shitheads never contemplated. Their failures stick and no matter how my failures are seen, the public domain that is brought to the front will be smitten by my articles there and a few 4chan and RSS sites that they cannot touch showing all readers that I was there first. 

Yes, it might be my only legacy, but it will count, it will be seen and they can boast all they like, but I got there first. There are times when being first counts for ones self. No matter what others claim and make fun off, when you can show you were the first, you grow the pride in yourself and at times others will finally realise what the boasters never anticipated, to be regarded as a joke, their ultimate nightmare. 

So as I am making additional designs (in slightly better software), two additional ideas come to mind, I am a machine today! So as I take more looks at the initial stage of new display technology, actually old technology reinvented. I see that other stages are coming to mind too. In this I will claim victory and have another sandwich, I have earned my sandwich and my soup today.

Perhaps one day soon a roast, with oven baked potatoes and Yorkshire pudding and thick gravy. Rome, London, Amsterdam, New York and Neom City; none of them were build in a day, were they?

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June 8, 2021 · 20:40

It started with pride

Yup, pride was mine. As I was considering what to do at the end of season 3, I had a brainwave. Of course I will not give it away here, as it might give me an added value to a player like Amazon (Prime), the setting I have not high hope on, but with all the sources want new and unique stories, my story could be a hit, so as I was looking at a map I remembered something and that helped me to set an additional side to the cliffhanger of season 3. It is a side and a direction I had not considered, and that what makes it fun. I had no plans as I was designing season one, now in the water I see the stage of season 3 entering season 4. A direction that until today was not considered. I wonder if other TV series makers have the same events that led to breakthroughs in thinking, plotting and planning. 

And it is the plotting and planning that was central, especially when you see ‘ANOM: Hundreds arrested in massive global crime sting using messaging app’, it comes with “conceived by Australia and the FBI, saw devices with the ANOM app secretly distributed among criminals, allowing police to monitor their chats about drug smuggling, money laundering and even murder plots” with the additional “This included eight tons of cocaine, 250 guns and more than $48m (£34m) in various worldwide currencies and cryptocurrencies”. There we see a new method of a trojan horse, a concept that comes from the age of Homer, a story that is well over 3,000 years old. But someone found a new adaptation of it. It feels like I am in synch with other people, or it merely seems to be the case. When you consider the headline ‘More than 800 suspected criminals have been arrested worldwide’, it seems that this was an operation that was months, if not well over a year in the planning and execution. And when I see “being tricked into using an FBI-run encrypted messaging app”, I get the idea that those on the dark side of the law, decided to trust the wrong person. And all this in the same day, no wonder I feel hyped and eager to continue my idea for Keno Diastima, a stage in play that I never considered a stage that goes beyond the oceans, beyond normal data. Yes, it is true that some see dots and wisdom, some see a unicorn and some see a dragon, but in the end they are merely plot points.

Yet the idea that some see a an image of a man, others see something different, it is about perception and that got me thinking of a different stage towards the new horizon, what happens next is up to my imagination. But I feel good about the options and I feel ready to take my imagination to new heights, like taking 5 left turns on a square and selling it to the readers as a circle. We all have our moments, yet today, it seems to be the case that 800 criminals are not having theirs. 

For them it all started with pride to trust the wrong application, and those offering that application. 

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June 5, 2021 · 14:38

The evolution of god

Yup that was more than a mouthful. Peter Molyneux was ahead of his time, and in all this he was not limited by imagination, he was limited by hardware, as was Sid Meier, as was Richard Garriott, as was David Braben. They made gaming great and their ideas live on, even though in at least one stage it was corrupted by a greed driven corporation hoping that micro transactions would safe them. But what if the next generation consoles and cloud generation gaming is the foundation of new games, what happens when we take the original concept and make it into something serious in a sandbox environment? If we think back to the ‘original’ gods, what happens when we can revisit the age of Hades, Poseidon and Zeus? What if we have the ability to become a god? What if it starts small? What if the game evolves through us, not that WE evolve in a set game?

Consider that energy grows, so consider that we start with accumulating via a bees, wasps, hornets, ants, or termite colony? We get one choice and we still have to find the right colony. Now we can spend time trying to find that colony or we can take a gamble, and as one colony grows the power within us and we row by directing the colony, we get a larger stage, because the colony is merely a first step. From the colony we can grow towards larger herds, towards singular animals and they too provide energy, they provide power and optionally evolve us in other ways too. You see in the old games it was about one person, one setting you and your antagonist, but in this day and age it is outdated, computers have grown more powerful, have grown towards multi creatures, and in all this we merely think of the old god the three, then we get Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Apollo, Artemis. But what if these templates are merely that, mere templates and you get to decide what kind of a god you become? We think back to (the good old days and) a game like Black and White, which was awesome but what happens when our power is depending on how we grow the initial power base? We can rely on the biggest termite foundation ever, but life is a setting of checks, balances and equilibrium, because without  stage of equilibrium you always end up with nothing. So far no game ever went there. We might consider that before the PS4 it as not possible and you might be right, but now in the PS5 era, we see that games like Elite Dangerous become larger than the original creator thought was possible on a BBC Micro B. That is no longer the case and even as I would love to play Populous 2 again, time moves on and we need to push games forward too. As far as I can tell, no one has made a clear push forward in setting a new stage of the god games and in light of the options within cloud gaming that is slightly weird. Cloud gaming is by default the stage where these games can evolve, so what I stopping game developers from going there? A lack of creativity maybe? It took me a moment to pause nd a little of pondering to set a new stage, and if I can do it, those wannabe great software houses should be ahead of me by a lot, so why aren’t they?

And all this is before you consider Neil Gaiman with American Gods, where the new gods get their energy and power from a very different stage, so what is keeping game makers from evolving as well? 

And all this is set to a stage of western gods, I haven’t even considered what a place like India could add to the mix. And I got this far on only one coffee.

Have a great weekend

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June 4, 2021 · 22:33

The left corner

Yup, we have all heard it on TV, in movies. In the left corner weighing ……. Yada, yada, yada. The beginning of a match. You heard it, but did you realise it? It hit me today, I was thinking back to the good old days (Google Plus), it had a side others ignored and they are still ignoring it. I joined Facebook in 2004, or was it 2003? The setting was that I was travelling the globe, most of the direct family (when they were still alive) had a travelling bug. As such Facebook was part of a solution, yet it turned out that Google Plus was a much better fit. Reality shows that I have 2 best friends, I have a number of ‘sort of friends’ and I have relatives. Apart from the relative members I would happily shoot with an M-24, I did try to stay in touch with those I had no need to shoot and then time caught up with them and they died. 

Family solution

Time is the eternal equaliser and it will claim me too at some point (once). Yet today I considered how the need for greed of Facebook is leaving an untapped side to social media. They were all about boasting that everyone wants to know everything (better for advertisement), yet the foundation of Google plus was that you decided to give to certain circles, and family is its own circle. Facebook forgot about that part and the others that followed Facebook is overlooking that too (as far as I can tell). You see, the world is not interested in the desk you bought (unless it comes with a naked lady) and then they are merely interested in how visible the nudity of the lady is. But family members are different, they are interested in your new desk, your new quilt cover, especially when there is more than an hour of travel time involved. Some are a lot further away and they want to see the birthday pics of your little one, the rest of the world has no business to see those. So why did social media evolve into an advertisement space where we see all no matter how trivial, or how convoluted the message? 

And as far as I could tell there was no one, at least that was the case, former Facebook employees caught on and created Cocoon. It is not free, it will cost you $39.99 USD per year, yet as they say (at cocoon.com) “Thirty days after you create a Cocoon, one person in the group will need to sponsor it on everyone’s behalf to keep it going. You don’t need to decide upfront whether to pay for Cocoon, only after you reach the end of your trial period. A Cocoon costs $5.99 USD per month or $39.99 USD per year for the entire group”, so one family member pays the amount of slightly less than $40 a year to keep it going and only ONE member needs to pay. That is a very different story and it is one that could take off. So as we get “The app itself does not cost money to download. Pricing is per Cocoon, not per person, and you can be in as many Cocoons as you would like”, it is actually brilliant, to get back to the true foundations of social media, of true socialising and I am amazed that others had not caught on here. Consider a family with nieces, nephews and other riffraff (read: family members) and one price per family. I am decently amazed that they have not cornered that industry yet, because as I see it that setup could grow far and fast over the next three years. As Google lost its Plus side, Cocoon might be all that remains for a lot of people who are sick of the 17 advertisements an hour and the nobodies who have something not so nice to say about your niece’s new dress or your nephew’s new bike. Yes we all make fun of family, yet that is the right of a family member, to say to auntie bertha that her hat went out of fashion when Black and White TV’s did. 

I am equally aware that Cocoon is not advertising, which is debatable as a choice, because there are globally millions who have had enough of Facebook in some regard. I am not totally against Facebook, it has its space and its function when it is about schools, friends that are not family members. And with Google Plus out of the equation Cocoon has a much larger stage to play on. And as they end their sales pitch with “You can be in as many Cocoons as you’d like, but they’ll remain separate from each other and you can navigate between them using the Cocoon switcher. Your nickname, picture, and colour are distinct in each, and contents from one Cocoon can’t be shared or forwarded into another.” We can clearly see that they are on the right track, they are heading into a direction where Social media should have headed in to a much larger degree than it has been doing. If there is one downside it will be the case that I can have it on my iPad, but not on a MacBook. At times I prefer to do my socialising on something with a decent keyboard, I am just wired that way, but that is me, some will find the iPad, android phone and/or iPhone sufficient. I also believe there are a few flaws in the initial stage, but that might be me (I don’t think so though), as such it is a great setting and it does have a real future on a stage where people are being drowned on advertisement and personalised information mining. Yet cocoon is new and fresh, just like the 1985 movie which was all about family as well. 

When you have a family that you do not want to shoot at a moment’s notice, Cocoon is a bright choice in a field where most choices are smitten with some level of darkness.

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May 26, 2021 · 12:01

Treason, by Apple

Yup, this is not some kind of aftershave, it is what I see as treason. Apple (not unlike Microsoft) is about pushing people into the direction where they WANT us to go, not where we want to go, but they seemingly do not care, it is about their long term goal, so a push here and there is perfectly OK to them (I reckon). And this is not some anti-Apple bias, I have been with apple since the Performa 630, I still have the old G5 Powermac, as well as an iPad.

MacPro

The evidence? Well, go to the Apple site, look at the new iMac, in all kinds of colours, there is also the Mac Pro, not even the most powerful one will set you back an almost hefty £22,299.00. One would think that this would be as complete as possible, but you would be wrong. You see, one part is missing, in both the new iMac and the Mac pro. It is a Apple (USB) SuperDrive, the accessories pages do not show one, the hardware does not offer one, you need to seek it out via Google search to find one, yes, OUTSIDE of the Apple site you need to find it and it is in one silver colour only, so the embracement of all these colours is a little bogus. I went to two Apple stores in Sydney to find one for a MacBook, but they didn’t have them. Is that not weird? And also consider that the design of the MacPro started some time ago, as such there is a larger stage of pushing CD’s and DVD’s, as medium for all directions, including data was left out in the open for well over 2 years.

I know people with disk backups that go back a decade, there are people with over a thousand CD albums, now they cannot listen to them on their AirPods, or AirPods max. The list goes on, but you feel the drift here, it is what I personally would see as an act of treason by Apple to its consumers. So whilst we see that in 2020 31.6 million CD albums were sold in the United States alone, we see the stage where millions of users are knowingly left in the cold, I myself have a fair share of Albums, I have up to a 100 cd’s with photo-archive backups, and a similar amount of data, yet what happens when a £22,299.00 will not allow me to read that data? And that is merely one person, will Apple tell us that the millions of users, looking for an Apple IT product, none of them would need a superdrive, or a drive built in? Can anyone explain the insanity of that thought? I get the need to have it external in these air products, but these air products are not used by airheads and they need access to legacy data, a fair amount of them consultants they need to rely on a GB sized email with the data instead of getting mailed a disc leaving both parties open to more dangers. So whilst we take a gander towards the Epic case on their stores, perhaps a seemingly exploitative firm named Epic might have an optional case?

We accept that the superdrive is an addition to some products, but should it be to a £22,299.00 system that is priced without a display? You merely need to look at the design to see that the disc format was erased from consideration, as it was with the iMac where all things (including mouse) come in all colours, but not the superdrive, I could not even find a way to order that one in THEIR store. So, you tell me, is it treason to the consumers, or is it the most stupid form of intentional reckless neglect of their customers? I will let you ponder that part of the equation by yourself.

Well, back to the larger consideration in a new stage in my Fibretech adventure, and before there was colour, there was touchscreen, so here I go pondering away again, have a great day.

P.S. I did get a new handle on the option of interacting with consumer staged Domotics, but that is for another time.

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May 26, 2021 · 02:00

On the Plus side

My mind has been busy on a few levels. The first is that the new system that I name ‘Fibretech’ is currently standing still, It is partially by me, it is partially by the ned to connect two elements, it is both hardware and software, not sure how to see the solution yet, but I am in no hurry, my initial focus is now and remains the 5G parts. The three devices (one now Public Domain) is in a stage where I want to add another device, or another system. I see loads of POS (Point of Sale) advertisements, but they are all in a stage of previous tech, basically setting a stage of 30 days free and then no longer free. I am not against the capitalistic view, but it is based on what was and that no longer suffices. As I was thinking things through, I remembered that I had these thoughts before, in another stage and yes, on November 25th 2020 I wrote ‘An idea is born’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2020/11/25/an-idea-is-born/), the idea went in a different direction, yet the foundation was the same. What happens when we do not carry a shopping basket, but what happens when WE are the shopping basket? It is a different key system, a system that recognises what we bought in rollover settings (weekly, monthly, quarterly, bi-annual and annual), that systems has a check in a locked stage, only accessible by YOU to set a stage of creating internal awareness towards what MIGHT interest you.

As such, you get to alter and edit the list, I for one am NUTS about liquorice, especially K&H currency liquorice, not sure why, I merely am. We have all kinds of needs, cravings and interests. The problem is that most people under 4G are all about centralising knowledge, it made Facebook superrich, so what happens when we set a stage where we take it away on one end and give the people that stage? Consider that you are now directly advertised with 90% relevant advertisers, no matter how many push advertisements to everyone, it will never reach you. Is that not what you wanted all along? If Domotics is making the house smart, what if we make the user the people smart? What if your wearable, your mobile or your personal smart drive gets a filter direction from a tag on perhaps your keychain that filters? 

It might also be an evolutionary stage to limit, or at least diminish to some degree skimming. We cannot stop all events, but as the key is highly encrypted, we get a setting where the POS systems is facing two levels of encryption, more important, it might not decode one, but it can register one, the skimmer will merely try to capture the Credit Card details (its limited), and as such we will be able to see a larger stage of where and who is getting skimmed, optionally where it got skimmed too. It is a side effect, but a nice one. 

So as domotics and personal shopping identification tags evolve we see a new stage, a stage where the people ONLY (or at least mostly) get relevant advertisements, decentralisation is key there, centralisation has not worked, not for some time and the new 4G systems are merely making matters worse. Why? Because they were set up that way, iterative thinkers trying a new jacket all whilst the couture of the jacket went out of fashion half a decade ago. It is not all bad news, these POS systems are still evolving and they will also evolve in the 5G era, I am merely considering a few options to get ahead of the game. I have awareness creation of the user, recognition and awareness levels of the shops, especially in a stage where the shops is in control, so as domotics is in the frame of too many makers, the personal tag made sense. Especially in malls and larger cities. Consider the average Westfield Mall, we know that JB Hifi and EB Games sell games, but there are plenty of cases where others do too (small shops, Target, etc), the tag will create a situation where the interest in PS5 games is detected (in an encrypted way) and that tag will allow for the arrival of advertisement, even as the advertiser has no clue who they were reaching, the person would have been made aware of the other shops, more importantly a stage of special PS5 deals would be visible, if there were any. The consumer is kept informed. 

The stage of recognition and awareness creation will be key in 5G, as 4G was all about ‘Wherever I am’, 5G will push ‘Whenever I want it’ and the consumer always wants it now. The setting makes sense, but in this age, it will be more powerful in a decentralised setting, give the shopkeepers the power back, and those who do not care? They will miss out on all kinds of revenue, I believe it is time for lazy people to feel that pain. Whenever I see some shopkeeper be active 12 hours a day to get a larger chunk of the revenue pile  I see a need to cater to that whilst not stocking up on more and more work, but a workflow that makes sense and shows to be its own reward. Even as some might say that Google Lightbox Advertisements were the answer, it was, but it could go so much further and that is what I aimed for, and so far I reckon I am on the right train, yet in this I wonder will Google or Amazon make the larger steps to head the technology drive? In this there is a larger debate going on, it is no longer merely whether Google Stadia or Amazon Luna will occupy the third position in gaming, there is every chance that Netflix is pushing to become a contender too. You see, when we consider IGN with ‘Xbox Series X DRM Makes It Near Impossible to Play Games Offline’, Microsoft is till playing its games, and now it will hurt them massively. What happens when the weather is taking its toll on landlines in Australia, UK, US and parts of the EU? If you cannot be online, what then? That is the shortsighted view of Microsoft. Now, let’s face it, when that is down cloud gaming is also not an option, but in all this, there are a lot of players that would have their cloud system next to a Switch, or a Sony and that is when Microsoft falls away. It is currently losing to Sony in a 2:1 stage, I personally reckon that it is 2:2:1 (Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft), as such it will not take long for the ‘most powerful system in the world’ to become player number 5, or perhaps even 6. These pushes all matter, it is last decade thinking ‘always online’ and it is not always possible with ransomware and hackers making life hard on too many systems, there is a larger need to decentralise and those who can will be around, those who cannot will slowly perish. 

In that stage I see tagging systems evolve, not because we are online, but because we should not always be online. It is a failing that is getting more and more exposure and those making the claim that this is essential and it will always be, those are the one relying on 10 year old technologies trying to fuel their needs a little longer. In that stage we see the media, all dressed up and ready to make digital claims, all whilst they weren’t even relevant, Google and Amazon made sure of that, so whilst the media was chasing a path that was not realistic, I was considering a path that gave the power back to the people. And I think I am on the right track, or perhaps better stated ‘I am personally and speculatively considering a different path that might work’, will I be correct? I hope so, but I cannot vouch for that. No person can, time will prove me right (or not).

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May 20, 2021 · 10:08

The other path

It started in the early morning (around 03:30) my mind was racing and I suddenly remembered an idea I had two years ago to solve some NHS issues. I kept in the middle on the name whether it would be the Apple iTome, or the Google Tome, the idea was laced with a different approach towards solving some of the NHS issues. That kept slapping the back of my brain when I suddenly remembered something else. It was from my early years, it was a Sharp PC-7000.

Sharp PC-7000

You might think it is too old to be useful, but you would be wrong. You see, Sharp tried something different and even as some surpassed them, we need to consider the impact that VHS had, yes, it did beat Sony Betamax, yet technologically speaking Betamax was superior, it was one of the few cases where marketing decided future paths and now that we are at crossroads, it is time to look back to some old ideas. It got me thinking about a new kind of display, a setting for displaying RAW graphics and using RAW as a standard format , not merely in software, but in hardware too. It got my mind racing on a new display that is the thickness and size of 10 A-4 pages, but laminated. In addition, there is a different approach when we start doing this to displays that are A6, optionally A5. A different approach to how and what we display, and more important how we go about its use, because that too is under scrutiny. We tend to follow a pack of greed driven wolves hoping to get a share and we forgot to look at the innovations of the past and how we can redirect them in today’s markets. 

In this there are options that can be captured now with innovation patents and even as that time is a lot shorter, it allows some to get ahead of the curve. The second part is how displays get their information, we go about the same route as everyone else, but we forget that there is a reason why a player like Hasselblad is pretty much the only player with a medium format video option in 4K, why do you think that is? Because they followed Canon, Nikon, Fujitsu and Minolta, or is that because they had a really good idea and stuck to their guns? It brought them more than anyone ever bargained for and they are about to cash in.

When technology and not marketing decides the future, you end up with better solutions, not pronounced innovations, but actual innovations. A lot of people forgot about that side of the equation. I decided to remember that part and set up a stage (this blog) where I can make some of these idea’s public domain and let the thinking innovators become real winners, not merely winners through the eyes of their presenting marketing pack.

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