Category Archives: Science

October 6, 2021 · 23:03

What sells better?

That is the question that was racing through my mind today. We all know (or have heard of) the expression ‘Sex sells’. It is used to market, to advertise and to entice (usually the men). But what if that is merely the setting? What if in actuality fantasy is the part that sells better? I had a small daydream this afternoon. I was in Toronto and I was chosen to be the backup goalie for the Toronto Maple Leafs (yes, the dream is not very realistic). I was sitting in some cafe, the staff was nice and suddenly addressed by Sheldon Keefe (their coach) and he said to me “Lawrence, today your most desired dreams becomes a reality”, my dry response was “What? You arranged a weekend of wild and passionate sex with Laura Vandervoort?” The team was howling with laughter and the coach deadpan response was “Well almost most desired then” and I was given the 62 Jersey to be the backup goalie that week, and lets face it, not unlike my blog name, if we want to have a fantasy, lets go for the really satisfying ones. 

So there I was with my jersey there were a few other jokes and giggles after that I woke up from my daydream (without the LV special), such is life. But the dream stuck and when I was watching someones drawing of Alice in wonderland I started to put things together. What if we are not looking at a porn or some sex movie, but what we used to call in the old days a soft porn movie (all innuendo and little or no show, except for the boobies). What if the movie is a new take in Alice in Wonderland? We go through the motions (or Alice does) and the Cheshire Cat, the Caterpillar, the rabbit, they are all men with masks and onesies. A movie that is like not some cheap movie, but high end special effects (not unlike The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus) and a storyline that does follow the book, but with a twist at the end. The end being that [CENSORED]

A stage that reminded me of a movie that impacted with me, Jacob’s Ladder. So what happens if Virtual Reality takes over our lives too much? There are settings (Elite Dangerous) where I would love to have the hardware to do just that, but the hardware for now is too expensive and (for now) not immersive enough. So when that changes (most likely in 2-3 years) what are the applications? What happens when we can dig into the fantasies of any person (like The Cell) 

So what can we learn? I am not merely thinking healing, but interrogations, information retrieval and a few other avenue’s. So when we take the stage and turn on the fantasy, what could be achieved? We have seen this in the past but always as the end goal, as far as I can tell it was never used as a mere waypoint. Why was that? It cannot be the limit of Hollywood, it could be the limit of any producer yet I believe that this path could lead to a load of green as the faith of Americans go. I believe that there is a host of options here, and as streaming channels are competing more and more, whatever we can do that is truly original is one that streamers will entice, I merely hope that they wake up before they cancel the series too soon (way too many examples) because it is the slow start and the deep story that entices a crowd and engages them. Not the Marvel versions. This is not me having a go at Marvel movies, because I love them, but there is more and that part is not explored, or perhaps explored too little. I personally would have loved where Dollhouse season 3 would have taken us. Eliza Dushku, Dichen Lachman, Enver Gjokaj, Tahmoh Penikett, Fran Kranz, Olivia Williams, Harry Lennix and Amy Acker were all beyond good, the story was engaging and enticing, yet we were sold short, a cancellation after season 2. So will a new approach to Virtual Reality as a weapon make it? I honestly do not know but as far as I can tell no one took that route and in a stage where games can almost take us there, the lack of such a direction seems like a loss.

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October 3, 2021 · 10:09

The balance of one and zero

I just woke up from the weirdest dream, so take my word on this, this is not about reality, this is entertainment (or the future). The dream was nice and ‘uplifting’ there is nothing not sexy about a dozen women in tight outfits defending a location killing anything in sight. I am sitting in a chair (I think), the women are patrolling the place, there are at least 4-5 women in my room and a lot more outside. But the difference between peace and the other thing is a mere switch. From one moment to another all the women change from tranquil to deadly, waves of attacks start and the women kill whatever comes in view and there is a lot coming their way, yet in the end it does not matter, nearly all are killed, the exercise is over. It was a training, but not one you would see. This was the training of a true AI. You see, AI’s lean differently. They had similar training a child has, but the AI becomes mature a lot faster, a thousand times faster and to teach an AI they get pointers. They literally get data points and point references. This is called aggregated evolution. 

This specific AI is owned by the CIA and the year is 21xx something. 

The evolution happens through what will call an Exabyte drive. The parsing of that data takes a little while and it is done in the background, and the AI takes in every aspect of the training. It makes the AI the dangerous thing it is, and it is truly dangerous. So at this time there are only a few true AI’s, some are economic, some are logistic, some are tactical, some are operational. And only the big players can afford them, a true AI is not some server, it is like making the 1984 comparison between an IBM model 36 mainframe to an IBM PCXT. There are other AI’s, they are not true AI’s, but are a lot similar. They are a lot smaller and they are evolved deeper learning systems. They bring the bacon but only to a degree and the world is in a stage to create stronger AI’s, and as people find cheap ways to evolve their AI, a hacker team is dedicated to finding and hacking streams with data from Exabyte drives. They cannot comprehend the data, but any AI can and the evolution of an AI is worth a lot of money, so as these hackers seek they find the wrong Aggregation file. They find the one that was highly secure, but still someone found a way and got the stream of the CIA and there the problem starts. At some point the wrong one is pushed into a zero (yes, it had to be a sexual reference). But here we get a new lesson, one that as out there, but not the one we envisioned. When you were young, you tried to play with matches and your parents stopped you, just like you were stopped playing with knifes. You were told danger, and evil, bad and dangerous. It was how we learn. An AI does not learn, it does not merely learn the game of chess, it gets handed the history of EVERY chess game ever played. It gets pointers and create the experience, free of morality, free of ‘burden’, so when it gets data it never had it learns in its own way and has no morality baggage, yet what it learns could be anything. The pointers the AI creates evolves it and it makes it worth a lot more. 

So as we turn a page to another time we see a young woman dressed in retro miniskirt (70’s) and tight tank-top, she is looking in a store for a 4K movie, she picks up the Notebook (off course she did) and walks to the counter to pay, but now the stage changes, the operational AI in that mall was fed the CIA drive and recognises the woman, it sees a danger and EVERY system in the mall is now out to kill her and her kind (basically all women overly nicely dressed). The woman has no problems dealing with any attack, the security guards were easily dispersed but it suddenly happens all over the mall, and the security guards and the police accept the alarms that AI’s give them, the AI locks down the mall to protect the people outside but the mall becomes a deathtrap and all the other nice women who have no idea what’s going on are killed almost instantly. Those women who were not alone are suddenly seen as group dangers and women, men and children are executed, the AI never understood foundational stages and disperses as it was taught that a transgressing danger must be killed. And it happens all over the place, not merely in one mall, in any mall that had the same operational AI. 

It becomes over time the dangers that short cuts, hackers and greedy overseers represent, it is not some avoidable setting, when we consider Solarwinds, Microsoft and a few other hacked places, they all gave the goods, but we need to understand that true AI’s have foundational differences. We have seen this in many movies, but did we learn anything? 

You see, we saw periodic tables of what one day might be an AI, we see ‘Knowledge refinement’, we see ‘Relationship learning’ but they are separated entities, and the AI is supposed to operate like this and it does not matter what you think or say, someone will come, someone will be stupid enough to enlarge any AI for a lot of cash and there lies the rub, once we give any true AI the exabyte drive it is out of our hands, we do not get to become ‘caring’ parents, we merely unleash what we have wrought and there is no cautionary tale, because the greed driven will not care. In this the news is already there. Bloomberg gave us a week ago ‘Trained in the American intelligence community, cyber-contractors are now making their expertise available to governments around the world’, and today the Financial Times give us ‘Hackers stole cryptocurrencies from at least 6,000 Coinbase customers’ (at https://www.ft.com/content/43ab875b-2e96-48b7-926d-be17e925f1c3) there we see “by exploiting a flaw in its two-factor authentication system. The news, first reported by Bleeping Computer, comes just a week after the company had to drop its plans to launch a new lending product following the threat of legal action from US securities regulators.” It is followed by a lot of yaba-yaba and with “Coinbase said it had “immediately” fixed the flaw, but it did not reveal when it had discovered the vulnerability or the hacking campaign” we see that whatever it fixed was AFTER the fact and the use of ‘immediately’ indicates that no one was cruising their system trying to find optional defects, so it could happen again. All this whilst there is a debatable situation on the timeline that was out there getting to 6000 clients, so now consider a CTO using hackers to make its system a lot more valuable. 

Are you catching on yet?

Yes, the story I started with was merely the setting for entertainment, a movie or a TV episode, but it is founded on the dangerous premise we see every day, we use servers, we are online and hackers are a danger, yet what happens when we see the adaptation from Bloomberg, who gave us “To meet the surging demand for their services, these firms recruited cyber-operatives and analysts from U.S. intelligence agencies, offering what one former Federal Bureau of Investigations agent described to me as “buy-yourself-a-Ferrari” salaries. For some, their job description evolved from playing defence against hackers to going on the offence, heading attackers off at the pass. Others were assigned to counterterrorism operations, doing for their new clients what they had previously done for their country, and often using the same tools.” These nations evolved their systems with the experts that they could afford. Were they wrong? We seem to forget that US greed allowed for this setting to evolve and everyone wants people with top notch cyber skills. As I see it they did nothing wrong, they merely went where the financial security takes them and when we see the US as bankrupt as it presently is, all those nations get to go on a shopping spree and start a digital brain-drain of the US (and Europe too). 

We are seeing the impact of billion in damage and an almost absent stage of stopping it from happening. Close to a dozen events in this year alone and how long until the damage ends at our desk, the insurance and banks can no longer foot the bill, and that is happening now. We are handed phrases like “Potential future lost profits. Loss of value due to theft of your intellectual property. Betterment: the cost to improve internal technology systems, including any software or security upgrades after a cyber event”, so consider the dangers we saw with solarwinds, at this point there is still debate whether the full extent of that damage is known and it has been more than 6 months. So change back to the AI story I had, when it is an exabyte of data (which is 1,000,000,000 gigabyte), how long until this is parsed? That is before you realise that there is almost no rolling back from that setting, the cost would be?

This is the balance of one and zero, we need a larger change in what people are allowed to do, not because we want to, but because we have to, a change that final needs to pushed to a larger station, and this is not merely against hackers, the greed driven need to be held to account, optionally doing double digits in a holiday location known as Rikers Island. We have entertained ‘fines’ for too long, it only fuelled what needs to be seen as a wave of enriching crime, but that might be merely my point of view on the matter.

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October 1, 2021 · 19:59

The idea as it came voiced

I was browsing some real estate magazine and I saw the image. A home theatre for the not so poor. A place where a family can watch a Blu-ray or 4K, stream Netflix or play a game.

The image shows a nice place, a place most would want, and it is made to size, it all makes sense, but then I wondered, what if the family changes? One person loses a partner, the empty chair next to theirs, reminding them every time that their life turned to goo. Or the reverse, they can finally share something, but they end up with one lap dancing the other, or behind one another. Yes the solution is so simple. I cannot tell whether this was done here, but I saw a few solutions where it was not done. It is simple, like the image below.

Consider LEGO, consider the setting of LEGO, a room where we have chairs and support, the support that can be altered to some degree allowing for a change in furniture whilst keeping it a home theatre. It is such a simple elegant solution, yet it is ignored by more than a few, all whilst anyone who ever played with a LEGO set could have come up with the idea, however as far as I can see this, less then a few is taking a long hard look at what ingenuity LEGO could bring their ideas, so could another invention Meccano, invented in 1898 by Frank Hornby from Liverpool (that city where the Beatles are from). It is part of a larger truth I believe in, only limitations tends to push the larger form of creativity. It has been a truth in engineering, IT and design and it is an almost absolute given that will never change. It is when a limitation hits us, we look for workarounds. When SPSS could not give us an age pyramid, I designed a syntax that did just that, it was always there, in the High-Low chart and I published it in 1993 (or 1994). Limitations are there to test us, make us creative and we are not seeing enough creativity. The LEGO idea is merely one side but when you take a larger look at the solutions LEGO, Meccano, Wilesco Steak kits, and Wise Elk toys, all toys that fuel the ideas that kids have, all fuelling the foundations that they have as adults. A foundational step we overlooked for way too long. We all relied on IT greats to give us the foundations, but they are the foundations that THEY want us to take. Microsoft might have its azure, but when we see hack after hack, all because people overlooked security and if it is not there, it will be the Amazon Web services, the Google cloud, IBM cloud, Oracle cloud and so on. So what happens when they all overlook similar stations? It is not an accusation, but it is a larger stage. The assumption that they are all flawless is delusional to the umpteenth degree. 

We might not see the larger stage, we might not see the larger goals, but to give a person a LEGO set for IT is not the worst idea. To seek in limitation is what awakes up the mind and as you can see several players preceded us. 

There is a larger stage and it is not on any of those players, but it is on us, if we rely on the people telling us where to look, we end up looking in the wrong direction. We end up not looking where we desperately needed to see in the first place. To be honest, I am not giving you advice where to look, it all merely started with an interior decorator, reminding me of others that took a limited view on the needs of a customer, so when you get the option of invoice A at 100%, or invoice B at 115%, yet invoice B give you options and invoice A does not, is invoice A really 15% cheaper or will it end up being 30% more expensive down the track? 

I will let you mull this over, and consider where you limited your options at the advice of others. 

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September 30, 2021 · 17:23

When it was about safety

That is the stage I was woken up to, a stage that is no longer about ‘safety’ but about convenience. And people will pass corpses just to give marketing a chance to set the phrase “This will be a lot more convenient to you” and it is a dangerous step. In one direction the news is good news. It shows that not only was I on the money when I wrote ‘As banks cut corners’ on September 7th, a mere three weeks later we see ‘Researchers find Apple Pay, Visa contactless hack’ (at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58719891). Here we are given “researchers were able to make a Visa payment of £1,000 without unlocking the phone or authorising the payment”, a setting that evolved for people to bloody lazy to unlock their phones. Lets be clear this is a setting regarding commuters to make quick contactless payments without unlocking their phone. That gate is coming up and you know this 30 seconds in advance and unlocking the phone takes mere seconds. So when we get in opposition “Visa’s view was that this type of attack was “impractical”” did anyone tell VISA that they are marketing themselves as a bunch of tossers? There is nothing impractical about £1,000, 20 hits a day and the young entrepreneurs are sitting on a healthy income and it will take time to solve it after which someone else can make a new hack.

And Apple is not free of blame either. The response “This is a concern with a Visa system but Visa does not believe this kind of fraud is likely to take place in the real world given the multiple layers of security in place”” gives criminals the stage where they can get away with it for some time. So how long until low income people can get a transit ghost? And all this is happening because there was no proper testing. Yet, it is an outlier and it was unlikely that people were seeking in this direction, but that will soon change. All because people were not willing to go through the inconvenience of unlocking their phone. So how long until this stage evolves beyond the Metro? Your first cup of coffee, your quick lunch, your cinema line, and that list goes on, all because of convenience we now see a stage where Apple and VISA are optionally catering to crime and organised crime (if they have a Filofax it is very organised crime). 

A stage that is out in the open and we see deflection from VISA and to a smaller extent from Apple too. In this it is Dr Andreea Radu, of the University of Birmingham who seems to be the voice of reason with ““It has some technical complexity – but I feel the rewards from doing the attack are quite high”, she said, adding that if unaddressed “in a few years these might be become a real issue””, in addition we see that Samsung Pay and MasterCard cannot be exploited like that. So there is a stage where this goes (as the academics say) tits up. Concert tickets, beverages in any trade show all places where it is about small transactions and as they are all about the convenience of the people the criminals get to have a laughing feast, a feast with all the trimmings because the banks, in this case Financial Institutions cut another corner, optionally straight into your bank balance. 

Enjoy your contactless payments today.

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September 28, 2021 · 21:27

Pushing envelopes without a stamp

Yes, we all have moments where we are in a stage that is not quite the ‘Eureka!’ Point, but it pushes us, we feel that there is more and even if we do not see the complete road, we can see that there is are side streets that could be profitable for the soul (money is optional). I just had another of these moments. I was watching some ‘Harry Potter collector’ video on Youtube. It was a nice video and this one was about a Butter-beer place in New York. Something hit me, something was nagging in the back of my mind and it suddenly dawned on me. I set part of that route in ‘The other path’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/05/20/the-other-path/) a story I wrote on May 20th this year on new IP I was considering and exploring.  It was not complete and there were gaps, but the foundation was there, then the Butter-beer place showed up and I saw the Harry Potter newspapers on tables and my mind went into ‘wonder mode’. So what if places all over the world had a setting where the table was also the information provider? The table was not some monitor or TV, but in conjunction with the IP I created became an information provider that could be personalised in many ways. Setting aside languages, colouring and size, we had an information provider that could be nearly EVERYWHERE. And it would not be expensive. It would allow new channel creators, new information bases and whilst the ACCC is so much about their friends, their friends would be removed from the equation. I came up with the framework that makes a person like Rupert Murdoch obsolete. He became obsolete as his age surpassed the age of Egyptian mummies. Just like George Randolph Hearst became obsolete, time caught up, it is merely that simple. So now I am in a stage where I can give the bird to all the self inflated Rupert Murdoch wannabe’s on the planet and I gladly do, the bulletpoint managers who were clueless and I am setting the stage for all independent developers to become the next big thing.
All you need is in these two stories, if you are clever enough you could there without ever buying a stamp. If you are clever enough, you will be in a stage to get a great advantage, I leave it up to you and after a year someone big can buy you out for a lot of cash. I do not care, I have close to half a dozen other IP ready, there is only so many roads one person can walk at the same time and when the technology comes and some will realise that I wrote about it first, they will all want a piece of something that is public domain, the greedy never learn and now the innovative players will pass them by giving them the finger. Justice come in strides and exposes the wannabe’s as the losers they always were.

A stage found in a place that was open to the public, it tends to be that simple at times. 

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September 28, 2021 · 00:13

Who is correct?

There is a larger stage on what is right versus what is correct. It is not always clear and we are all biased, me included. There are those who make claims that I am entertaining, but I do not know anything. It is their call and it might be correct. I worked in IT and in automation since 1981, so I have been around a while. When I offered my bosses some version of Facebook in 1997 they all rejected it stating that it had no future. It was merely n idea and it was nowhere near as advanced as Facebook. It was a free website and chatting platform with us in the middle offering advertisements in the middle, it had no future they stated. Now we have Facebook which arrived 4 years later, now a global economy surrounds it. 

So when I took notice of ‘Google, in fight against record EU fine, slams regulators for ignoring Apple’ (at https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-fight-against-record-eu-fine-slams-regulators-ignoring-apple-2021-09-27/) some thoughts went through my mind. We see “The European Commission fined Google in 2018, saying that it had used Android since 2011 to thwart rivals and cement its dominance in general internet search”, in the first most rivals were still trying to get their heads around the digital world. In this 2011 is important, TechCrunch gives us “Patents are increasingly used to block innovation in courtrooms rather than create innovations in the marketplace, and we saw this problem reach epic proportions in 2011. Patent trolls continued to extort tech companies large and small. But the patent wars spilled over to the major industry players themselves as everyone pointed their patent arsenals at Android.” In this, how many patent trolls did the EU arrest and there is a larger stage on the realisation that the secondary field of patents is used, the ability to block others. A legal setting that is validated by the short sighted and at ties greedy law entrepreneurs. And we see this more clearly in 2012 with ‘Why Microsoft spent $1 billion on AOL’s patents’ (at https://www.cnet.com/news/why-microsoft-spent-1-billion-on-aols-patents/), a stage the law and the lawgivers are eager to circumvent and in this Apple (Steve Jobs) was not innocent from either, but lets be clear, the law allowed for this. And we see the one Techcrunch gemstone “as everyone pointed their patent arsenals at Android”, Google was not innocent, they never were, but they were not the evil party here and that needs to be made clear. So when we are given (by CNet) “according to a source close to the situation, Google didn’t even bid on the portfolio”, it seemingly makes Google even less evil. And when we return to the Reuters story and we accept ““The Commission shut its eyes to the real competitive dynamic in this industry, that between Apple and Android,” Google’s lawyer Matthew Pickford told the court.” We also need to see “Commission lawyer Nicholas Khan dismissed Apple’s role because of its small market share compared with Android”, I personally wonder what kind of drugs Nicholas Khan is on and can I have some please? The brands using Android are Samsung, Oppo, Huawei, Google, Motorola, Oneplus, Lenovo and a dozen others that use Android, yet iOS products are Apple products, as such we need to see that there is a 70% use of Android over ALL these brands and the 23% is Apple, Apple alone. When we see the bungles (forced USB-C chargers) and this setting, we need to wonder the words by Matthew Pickford “The Commission shut its eyes to the real competitive dynamic in this industry”, that might not be far from the mark. There should be space for evolution, but is one sided evolution truly that or is that the beginning of handing the technology market to China? Especially with HarmonyOS in the design stage it is currently in. The middle East and the far east is ripe for HarmonyOS, the last thing we need is the EU screwing that up too. 

So does that make the EU wrong (not legally wrong)? To be honest, I cannot tell. Yet when we see “Bringing Apple into the picture doesn’t change things very much. Google and Apple pursue different models” we need to wonder what this is really about and this is after Microsoft destroyed Netscape to get sole advantage in browser world, even as some give us “The most innovative company in the computer industry in the last 10 years is dead”, it had been crippled around the time when we got Windows 2000. After which Microsoft screwed the world over again with an utter version of inferiority (Bing). That is how I see it, but feel free to disagree (which is your right).

So whilst we are eager to give Google the Clown card and all kinds of accusations, we see that an Apple phone costs $2369, whilst the Samsung is $1399, Oppo $1299, Asus $1199, Motorola $899, Nokia $449, and Google Pixel 5 $1199. A stage where Apple is pricing itself out of the market and it had been doing so for some time. But this is not about Apple, this is about Google, a brand that is open to others, It used what was available at the time and the rest was nowhere near. Am I wrong? Legally I might be, but then I never saw the 100,000 pages and I reckon I would be able to find a few options that blows the statement “Bringing Apple into the picture doesn’t change things very much. Google and Apple pursue different models”. You see, the Browser had another contender, Yahoo. It lost too much marketshare because the Google search was vastly superior and the patent shows just how superior it was because the people behind it took a long hard look at what the PEOPLE needed, Yahoo, Microsoft and others focussed on what businesses were willing to pay for, a very different stage. I personally believe that this stage of adherence and compliance has been largely ignored. A stage that puts Apple, Microsoft, and a few others in the dock of accusations as well. The stage of adherence to business and I personally believe that the EU is all about that, less about people and that bites me, that partially offends me. To lose in one setting and then openly and bias based attack Google is offensive. Google was never innocent, but they were not the evil player, we need to see this and we need to see this now. The EU is setting a stage where business moves out and then? An iPhone for $2999? The biggest iPhone is now A$2719, so it is not that much a stretch. 8 years of iterations got it from $299 to what it is now and Google? They are on a similar track, the hardware might not be iteration, but their software is not. Innovation software allowed people to make leaps forward and so far the other brands kept up as well, I wonder when that got investigated in the EU?

The case has been running a while, so there is no clear line to draw, but the media seemingly reports the final line and the history and context before it is forgotten, I wonder why?

Am I right?  Am I wrong? Am I correct? I leave it up to you to decide, but consider that I predicted the arms fallout and now we see, only 3 hours before ‘China’s biggest airshow to highlight military prowess’, others laughed about HarmonyOS and now it is here. And in all this not one government has shown any evidence regarding the Huawei accusations. I wonder when people wake up, realising that they are getting played by stakeholders who need to push forward the need need of corporations, American and seemingly European as well. All whilst those corporations have no patents, they have no innovations, merely marketed concepts, hyped hardware that draws short. How much more failures will push their agenda’s against actual innovators (Facebook, Google, Amazon and Huawei)? 

It might be a wrong point of view, I will admit that, but it is tainted what I have seen over almost 40 years in IT in all kind of fields.

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September 25, 2021 · 19:20

Yaba yaba from the intelligence ignoranus

Yes, this is a story, but it is not bout the Flintstones, even if some of the players come from that era. To illustrate that we need to make a small trip in time. On August 23rd 2014 I wrote the article ‘A spooky situation’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2014/08/23/a-spooky-situation/) where I wrote “These people can convey messages, set up new ways to deliver news (like trough private channels in a MMORPG game in Facebook or freely downloaded, which is impossible to monitor) and recruit new people who have not left the UK, which would be a disadvantage to MI5. Now it is important to know that this is all speculation on my side. I cannot prove that this is happening, but is it not more likely than not that an extremist would like to propel his ‘rightness’ onto others?” Even though, I need to emphasise on ‘it is important to know that this is all speculation on my side. I cannot prove that this is happening’, I had no evidence, but I saw the stage over 7 years ago, so as we now see ‘Extremists using video-game chats to spread hate’ (at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58600181) where we are shown “That’s when you start to go to other meetings, to smaller groups that aren’t necessarily playing games, talking about politics more explicitly.” So hurray for the BBC to get there 2 days ago, all whilst I got there 7 years earlier, so there! 

And consider why did it took them so long to catch on? Was it the Minecraft level of a concentration camp? I saw the dangerous setting in a Facebook game called ‘Lord of Ultima’ in 2014 and I feel decently certain that it is was not the only game. For 7 years a stage of unmonitored messaging by extremists, cyber criminals and organised crime. All out in the open, all going from public to private channel and no one is the wiser. Not even the members of the Bedrock Police force, the Slate Rock and Gravel Company security services and a few other players. The never had a clue and they never had a chance, the evidence is gone. These people did not mess around, they created private channels and removed them at the end of the chat. 

And that is merely the games we know of, there are several games where most people are in the dark. So whilst some are giving us the yaba yaba on all kinds of matters, the stage is that most of us (me too) are stumbling in the dark without a flashlight, and even if we do have one, we en up in a black room, where all the elements are black and no one has a clue where one particular object is, an object that is removed when the last person leaves. So when you realise that Facebook is only one of well over a dozen locations, when location and localisation sets the larger premise. So when I see the denial “DLive and Odysee have not responded to BBC News’s requests for comment” they might know, but more likely they were in the dark. All people trying to offer options so that they get traction and all players forgot that all traction is there but not all of them positive, some traction is the way to seek anonymity and that is seemingly happening and I predicted it first on August 23rd 2014. 

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September 24, 2021 · 20:28

A short sighted wire

I was taken by surprise today, the BBC gave me ‘EU rules to force USB-C chargers for all phones’, the article (at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58665809) gives us “Manufacturers will be forced to create a universal charging solution for phones and small electronic devices, under a new rule proposed by the European Commission (EC)” which is stupid on several levels. It remains a surprise on how we see the computation of IQ of a population being  AVERAGE(group), whilst the IQ of a collection of politicians seems to adhere to LOWEST(group). Now let’s be clear. I would love to see a stage where power supplies all adhere to the same settings, but the USB-C charger of my MacBook will not charge my Chromebook, my USB-Micro charger of my android phone actually does charge other devices and a generic charger will not work on my android phone, as such the entire setting of all using the same cable is a laughable stage. More important, generic power boards with USB points will not charge everything either (it would not charge my Chromebook), so where set the standard? Set the standard at what each battery has to accept? 

So when we see “EU politicians have been campaigning for a common standard for over a decade, with the Commission’s research estimating that disposed of and unused charging cables generate more than 11,000 tonnes of waste per year.” So how about a mobile phone that lasts well over 5 years? I reckon that this element will save a lot more waste space required. But under what conditions? So how about all chargers for anything battery operated like a wireless WiFi, photo camera’s, film camera’s, webcams, speakers (like Bose and JBL), bluetooth devices. The list goes on, they ALL have to adjust? How stupid is that train of thought? When any asian market decides to take a turn to the right, when they find a new innovative way, where will the EU be left? A setting that can be hammered straight out of gateway, set to ‘unused charging cables’, all whilst the charging cble is the one part that often needs replacing long before the charger is too broken to be used. And these charge cables are also used for consoles, printers, scanners and other devices. So who was the local yahoo that set for “All smartphones sold in the EU must have USB-C chargers”? Someone with a friend at Apple, or perhaps someone who hates non USB-C systems? Perhaps some yahoo who forgot his Android cable that still uses USB micro?

When we see the elements of that article, the numbers do not add up. Even Apple, the people who embraced USB-C give us: “Apple has warned such a move would harm innovation”. So when we see “In 2009, there were more than 30 different chargers, whereas now most models stick to three – the USB-C, Lightning and USB micro-B” we see a level of raw BS. You see my Apple USB-C charger will not charge my USB-C Chromebook, a simple test overseen in 10 second. Then there is “the Commission’s research estimating that disposed of and unused charging cables generate more than 11,000 tonnes of waste per year” I know that this is equally a setting of utter nonsense, because there is no division between unused and broken cables and they cannot, it is mere estimation work. The reason I know this is because I have three chargers that are still in my desk for backup. In case one of the other ones break, the cables are equally important. When at work I keep one cable there in case I forget to charge the night before. All reasons to have more than one cable. I have two additional cables for other reasons and some over time broke. All settings that are an issue, so when we are given that the cables changes are required for 

smartphones
tablets
cameras
headphones
portable speakers
handheld video game consoles

All whilst the console controllers are not part of that equation. This is an attack on the Asian market, it has nothing to do with landfill. That is how I personally see it and that is why I consider that compared to these politicians Homer Simpson is pretty much the Einstein of them all. Oh and then there is the stage that at times the same port is used in multiple ways, so what about portable speakers that cannot be connected to a laptop because the laptop does not have a USB-C port. Issue upon issue all whilst a group of people are now setting a technology limit? So consider one part not seen there (no blame to BBC) “The USB-C connector was developed by the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the group of companies that has developed, certified, and shepherded the USB standard over the years”, so a filtering to less then 1200 companies? How is that not segregation and discrimination? And when we take that list of 1100-1200 companies, how is that drill down per nation? And when we take a close look at waste per nation we see “European plastics production almost reached 58 million tonnes” and we see an article on 11,000 tonnes? This adds up to 1% of 1% of an actual problem, I think the people in the EU needs to sack without any pay the people from that European Commission. To underline that part, consider that my Wifi Router and my Mobile phone use the same USB-Micro charger and when it is not charging it is disconnected, all whilst the Chromebook and the MacBook both need DIFFERENT USB-C charger, as such the line “encouraging consumers to re-use existing chargers when buying a new device” becomes equally debatable. 

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September 23, 2021 · 19:00

Wake up or slumber more?

Yes, we all have that at times, the smallest doubt we give ourselves “Shall I slumber just a few minutes more?” We are allowed it, we were so clever, we set the alarm clock to 30 minutes early and we ignore the first alarm because we had 30 minutes left. At times that is the best sleep time of the night, to know there is 30 minutes left. And I feel the same way, yet I feel that this is the time to realise that the alarm went off a week earlier and we kept on slumbering a little more and a little more and now we are out of time. We are awoken by two articles, not related yet linked. The first is the Guardian who gives us ‘anti-vax radio shows reach millions in US while stars die of Covid’ (at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/21/anti-vax-radio-hosts-dying-covid) we are told that Phil Valentine was anti-vaccine, he even plagiarised the song Taxman and made it his own. We are also introduced to Marc Bernier, Dick Farrel and Jimmy DeYoung. Yet, we need not worry, they are all dead now, they all died of covid and the millions of ‘fans’ they had, a lot of them will be dead soon too. That is the natural selection we are part of. And it is then that the claim “Media watchdogs suggest that some basic level of responsibility to the public should be required to keep a broadcast license” seems to seep in, but it is already too late. Even as some of the exploiters are realising that things are going overboard, they forgot the basic rules of the game, to gain riches you need a population and that population is now becoming redundant. Local radio hosts ignored by the big players, but the people are local people, they are the foundation that the US stands on and it goes way beyond USA, believe it. The stakeholders are the first and the direct franchisers of levels of exploitation and they are now seeing the impact I warned for for well over a decade. You can live on the premise of fooling people, but the strongest reality has now and always been “You can fool some of the people all the time, you can fool all of the people some of the time but you can never fool all of the people all of the time” and that is now pushing towards a reality the exploiters never realised. They realise it first because they need a population and it is dying, with 697,000 dead in the US and an expected 100% rise between now and February 2022 the numbers will take a massive offset. 

So how did I get there?
There are three elements driving it. The first is the Delta variant, the second is the anti-vaccine movements and lets be frank ‘stupid’ people driving anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown sentiments and the third one was given to us by Jenet Yellen giving us a mere two days ago that the US is in danger of defaulting on the US loans in October, the first time in history, all whilst investments in retirement funds are stopping. The three together giving us the waves that follow, waves in hospitals losing funds, funds in resources slowing down, so as hospitals are filling up and in June AP News gave us ‘Nearly all COVID deaths in US are now among unvaccinated’, so as the hospitals are full, the unvaccinated die and more will die soon enough. The unvaccinated take up 98.9% of ALL the COVID cases, the vaccinated a mere 1.1%, the difference is that staggering and as the people are embracing stupid anti-vaccine hosts, they follow those people to their grave, quite literally and there is an upside, it will end unemployment in the USA, it will lower unemployment in the UK, Europe and Australia. 

So whilst people are ‘listening’ to some media watchdog, I need to warn you that they have been sitting on their hands for way too long. I alerted the people to hold media accountable in 2011, that was 10 years ago. 

So how is this connected to the second story?
The BBC is the one giving us ‘Covid vaccine stockpiles: Are 241m doses at risk of going to waste?’, so if we consider “The UK promised 100m of that pledge, so far it has donated just under nine million”, we can consider that they did nothing wrong, we can consider all kinds of things, and considering is perfectly fine. Yet there is a larger stage where they did nothing wrong and there is the rub, over a year, less than 10% was donated and the media let it slide, until people start realising that the media adheres to share holders, stakeholders, and advertisers. So who stopped it, or perhaps better stated, who silenced it to a mere whisper? 

And no one is looking into these stakeholders. So whilst we look at crowd after crowd we see more and more, but the three stages, the ‘normal’ people, the anti-vaxxers and the people in panic is now a larger unstable mix. The normalised people are a massive minority and the other two shouting are ahead of all, yet they are now dying and as anti-vaccine versus panic people are in a mix, we see that they all become panic people and they seek a solution but the hospitals are full. The nursing staff (doctors too) are tired and sick of them all so all these panic people have no one to turn to, merely their own undoing and that is the good news. 

Why is it good news?
In the first governments will have to act, so whilst the UK is dealing with Insulate Britain activists we see the tart of a new age, an age of draconian laws, a stage that follows when resources are dwindling down, and these two nations are not alone. France, Germany, Netherlands, UK, USA, Australia they all have to take larger steps in changing direction and this is the stage most of us did to ourselves and the media was kind enough to help, all whilst their stakeholders are running for the hills with a bag full of money. They are now trying to find a place where they can be relatively safe, that is, until the limelight hits them and their actions.

And it is escalating, as some are all about hating the rich and taxing the rich they still fail to see the larger problem. Governments are to blame, they REFUSED to properly adjust tax laws and that has been the case for well over 2 decades. Did you think it was different? Amazon was given the headlines “Amazon had sales income of €44bn in Europe in 2020, despite lockdown surge the firm’s Luxembourg unit made a €1.2bn loss”. Amazon is not breaking the laws, black letter law states what they are allowed to do and they did so, they never broke the law, governments let them off the hook again and again for over 2 decades and it is happening globally. As such the phrase “Kill the rich” should to be “Kill the exploiters” and that list is a hell of a lot longer than you think. The stakeholders have now become afraid that in the 11th hour their gig is up and they are hoping to score one more time before the gig is up forever.

And in this COVID is ending their song sooner than they had hoped. Yet it is a dangerous stage. We see that typical stakeholders are investors, employees, customers, suppliers, communities, governments, or trade associations. Yet in this list we see no facilitators or lobbyists, these exploitive players aren’t on any list, they are couriers from corporations, yet never in service of them, they are only in service of themselves and now when we consider the Economist on July 17th (at https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/07/17/the-republican-anti-vax-delusion) we see “Populist conservatives are to blame”, yet is it that simple? Populistic people are easier to control as they need a place to voice ‘issues’, yet stakeholders see that these are groups of people easier to exploit too and there is the problem, so whilst we see the ‘Trump’ example which could be true, there are more players in that stage and those players all hate the limelight, as the populists love the limelight, they get it all and as such the stakeholder now seen as a lobbyist fades into the shadows. A game played for a long time and now that the fallout of their actions are backfiring their need to vanish becomes increasingly important. And when you think that this is out of thin air? Consider that the United Nations reported this in 2013, which was based on Constantinides et al, 2007. There is now a stage where stakeholders saw a portal to use media to set a much larger stage to fulfil corporate needs. It is given as “The rise of social networks has changed both the way we communicate and the way we consume information. Even within the relatively recent internet era, a major evolution has occurred: In the initial phase known as Web 1.0, users by-and-large consumed online information passively. Now, in the age of social media and Web 2.0, the internet is increasingly used for participation, interaction, conversation and community building”, a stage we have been seeing for over a decade. A stage driven by populists to become internet influencers and the stage of “community building” will be transformed into “sheep herding of the easily adapted” that is the stage we now face, and if you think that they can be changed, you would be wrong because it is already too late, the people saw the Yellen message, they see the overfull hospitals and the anti-Vaccine group is not becoming a panic group and those people listen to no one and it will be fuelled by ‘241m doses at risk of going to waste’ soon enough and the stage does not end there. So when the US (and other places) run out of vaccines the panic driven people will escalate and with statistics that 98.9% of all deaths are unvaccinated ones the state of panic is close to complete and in winter when isolation adds to the issues panic will reign on a global scale. So when you are in bed slumbering to get to the office and you consider taking a sickie, also consider that this is the one sickie you should not have taken. The safe zone is miles behind you and there is no hospital left in front of you and that merely fuels the panic. So when we take notice of “Nearly 70% of Florida hospitals are expecting critical staffing shortages” consider that this is not an American or a Florida issue, it has become a global issue. London gave us all (earlier this year) “London hospitals would be short of nearly 2,000 acute and intensive beds” and when we realise that millions more will die and that this issue has surpassed the 1918 flu pandemic numbers and estimates, consider that it will get worse, a lot worse. The last one is my speculation but the numbers are fuelling my point of view. So will you take a longer slumber? It is your choice, and if you are dedicated anti-vaccine person, the queue of Hades awaits. Feel free to oppose that view, it is your right, yet India a mere hour ago reported ‘India reports 26,964 new Covid cases’, which might be true, but the other numbers cannot be true, there is too much of a sliding scale in play. So how fast will the US emulate India? I honestly cannot tell, but the numbers show a grim reality and in the end the games that some people played will burn the soil in front of them, that is the realisation that history gave us. So do you really want to slumber a bit longer?

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September 22, 2021 · 19:41

Consuming expectations

Yes, this happens, but it is not about food, it is not about what we expect, it is where our expectations lie and here I found myself in a weird stage. Due to lockdown events I have became an international man of mystery (sorry Austin Powers) by watching city walkthroughs. Places I had visited like Rotterdam, Stockholm, Munich Chicago, London, more London and places I had never seen before Monaco, Montreal, Toronto, and many more places. As such I became more and more interested in the Hero by GoPro. I wrote about this earlier, and over the week (yesterday and today) I saw a lot more on the Hero 10. Yet in all this, I also saw a few anti Hero 10 video’s. Most of them seemed to be people lacking expectations, some were people pushing a few weird limits two stood out, one was an Italian giving us why he did not recommended the Hero 10, but the reasoning was quite interesting. He gave us that the Hero 10 was an amazing great system, but compared to his Hero 8 overpriced and particularly as his Hero 8 was doing well above what he needed. I liked that. Yes, at times it is always about getting more whilst what we have is just fine. The other one is the one I want to focus on, it was all about the system being so expensive, He was a day 1 buyer of the Hero 7, Hero 8, and now the Hero 10. This is important because we need to consider what was and what we have now. 

I am a photographer. I was never much of a film geek. My first film camera came in 1998, it was the JVC GR-DV1, it had 100 times zoom (almost ridiculous much) and together with the docking station, it added up to $1049 dollars. I used it in my first long vacation that year after 10 years of not having a real vacation. And the camera was nearly always there. I never regretted buying it even if I barely used it. The film seed was planted. For the most I moved on with photography and filming was never forgotten, but it was in the back of my mind. It roared its head in 2010 when I was offered a really nice deal in 2010 with the Sony Handicam and I went for it, for two reasons, I was interested in filming, but I wanted digital video and the Sony offered it, it costed me $1100 with all the bells whistle’s and extra’s and I could afford it. There was also the added benefit that I could export to memory and edit it. I did not have the software, but overall the Sony was a leap forward, so now 12 years later there is the GoPro Hero, version 10. I missed the previous versions but there are a few parts that people seem to overlook.

The first camera only gave me 1080, it had sound but almost no smoothing, no colour settings and no frame rates. The Sony had a lot more and more importantly was able to export to USB. A few additional options, yet the larger stage was not there and we cannot blame Sony, they gave us a lot for less than the previous versions. Now we see the Hero 10 and people (quite a few) are complaining. Some places have it for a mere $499. The delivery is stated as 11 days but that is OK for plenty of people and for a system less than half the price that I paid for a system with less options, we are given 5.3K at 60 fps, 4K at 120 fps and 2.7K at 240 fps. The bundle includes a 32GB card. I looked and found a card with the same high speed and in 256GB for $40. A system that surpasses all others, has smoothing 4.0 which does things neither camera could ever do, have all kinds of colouring. And a load of extra’s that work on all Hero’s, batteries that are the same as the previous versions and we are told that upcoming software releases will give the consumer even more. And this camera is a mere 50% of my previous one. So what are people bitching about? 

We are so obsessed with getting things for free that we forget that compared over time a lot of electronics have become to that lowly priced. PC elements are pricing annual more and more, all whilst camera’s are in some cases the same, we seemingly get more and more for less. I am not digging into the wisdom of it, but consider that a GoPro cameraman can close to equal a TV News film crew and upload almost as quickly, so how long until someone sets that stage? As we see it in many places, the news is outdating itself more and more by going for the emotional story so that they do not need to report on things that matter. So when people figure out that one GoPro person can deliver equal to 5 news teams, how long will their future remains? 

This is not about the news, it is not about people and skills. It is about people and their expectations, or perhaps it is the expectations that are fed to them. I do not know, what I do know is that there are makers that drive creativity and that is always good. Where it ends we do not know and that is good too. Because as I personally see it, the creativity we never expected is the one that makes us smile and I do believe we need to find a reason to smile, even if it comes from a piece of hardware.

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