July 14, 2022 · 19:28

Realisation

This happens, at times we realise something AFTER the fact and for some reason not before. The BBC gives us (at https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62158936) ‘Netflix and Microsoft team up for cheaper plan with adverts’, apart from the setting that they decided to trust Microsoft on this, the setting of movies or TV series with advertisements is called TV, The Dutch have channels one, two and three. The Brits have the same but they call it BBC One, Two and oh, four is ITV. And so every nation has its own version of TV, so why would we want Netflix when we can get the others for free? It comes with “It lost 200,000 subscribers between January and March, compared to the 2.5 million analysts had been expecting the firm to add in the period. Netflix also now expects to lose a further two million subscribers between April and June.” And this is a surprise? How? The covid era ended, people are expected to be back in the offices and do actual work. And those who decided to quit their jobs to be at home for whatever reason will soon be in a space where they CANNOT afford Netflix. Instead of offering an 8 hour segment (when they aren’t working) for less, and as such create 3-6 timezones to capture the bandwidth pressures, they decided to compete with local TV stations at a price, whilst local TV is free. I reckon (and that I merely my view) that the people will stop subscription TV, especially as some favourite series are spread over several providers. And these people will return to Channel 7, Channel 9, ITV, RTL+, Sjuan, TMC, TFX and the list goes on for a while. I reckon that they will not be too happy with Netflix and they will demand local based sanctions against Netflix. In addition, some will demand that the bandwidth usage of Netflix users will be capped or even surcharged to avoid congestion on several levels. It is not whether it happens, it will soon be on WHEN it happens. Especially when the Amazon and Google group could stick it to Microsoft, they will be enthusiastically motivated to do just that. 

Do I care?
Not really, I sometimes get a month subscription to load up on missed things and I have to as we all have budgets. I reckon that the UK is facing a much harder time. When they get to decide on two of the items (Food, Rent and heating) Netflix will be the first to go, and after that cheaper internet deals. The cost of living bites everywhere and Netflix should have seen this coming. I think they did not, because in all my dealings with Americans, they always avoided any discussion on market saturation, it was always the fault of the bad salesperson. This time around there is no escaping it, and I saw this setting in 2020 when I was clear about saturation, and they were all in the stage of ‘We never heard that’ but the stage was clear and Covid ended as such the good times were gone and now Netflix with their desperate act decided to rely on Microsoft. Whether these two are in bed because of the Netflix game streaming is unknown to me, but it would not surprise me. And that too will backfire on them when Tencent comes out to play. Tencent could muscle in on both Amazon Luna and Google Stadia as well if these two did not adjust their way of thinking. 

These players are all realising that there is one population and they can no longer afford EVERYTHING. These people have to make choices, some of them hard and depending on what TV brings instead of Netflix comes with $10 a month savings, for a lot of people it will be a simple choice. It is this realisation that governs the global population. If EU inflation is up by 8.6% (last month), how long until people have to select what food they can afford? This is not out of consideration at present, the UK seems to be going back to the daily fish and chips. In the Netherlands some vegetables went up between 29% and 34%, that is HUGE! It is in this setting that Netflix makes a move the way they did and at some point people will realise that they get the same by watching TV, which does not cost them $10 a month, and that was the only reason keeping them on Netflix. Realisation is a dangerous and ugly thing. Yes, we can continue to watch Netflix, but how long until those prices go up? Which will drive a lot of people towards their normal local TV stations again, some already did. 

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July 13, 2022 · 20:20

Questions, presumptions and speculations

There is pretty much no country in the world that hasn’t heard of Canadian Mobiles, Rogers Telecom and the mess that they are in. I wasn’t paying attention initially, because things do go wrong at times. There can be many to point at in some blame game, but the overall setting is that things just go tits up at times. As such I looked in different directions. That was until yesterday when I saw news that people had been without mobiles for three days, that definitely got my attention. You see things do go wrong, but for a setting of this size to be out of check for that long a time takes a lot. As such I started to look and today I found (at https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/massive-rogers-outage-caused-by-a-maintenance-update/) ‘Massive Rogers outage caused by a maintenance update’, this did not make sense to me. I checked ‘bleeping computers’ and beside the name we share, I found nothing really negative. So when I saw ““We now believe we’ve narrowed the cause to a network system failure following a maintenance update in our core network, which caused some of our routers to malfunction early Friday morning,” Staffieri said in a statement published Saturday.” There was something really wrong here. It is possible to loopback a server and realign routers in a matter of hours, this was something else, but so far I could not find anything that gave a decent explanation of the matter. You see, it is a setting of mere hours, so mobiles to be out as well as emergency services, that takes a hell of a lot more. My personal experience (which is not great) is well beyond basic and my graduate degree makes me wonder what actually happened. As such, my mind started to wander through the decades of IT experience and I suddenly remembered something from the 80’s, It was less than a year after the first virus was created. It was called a jigsaw worm. But about that soon enough. 

I cannot tell how Canada runs it business, but EVERY phone I know will have the option to call emergency services and I was seeing all kinds of news that this was not possible. This was more than just a maintenance update.

Speculation
When going back to the Jigsaw worm, someone had the idea that surpassed a data virus. He created a program that was incomplete. It was like a jigsaw of 4 pieces, the key of part ‘A’ called the lock of ‘C’, the key of ‘C’ called the lock of ‘D’ and so on, when the 4 combined it became a powerful worm, causing mayhem on networks and as one part was created for networks that piece could be set to a TokenRing solution or any other network. The puzzle was interesting, it as novel, but it never got the attention it deserved, and it was forgotten over time, but I do remember it. So now, as we have the Internet of Things, that ‘solution’ becomes a lot more important. And to give you the rundown lets make a new one. In this one we have a 3×3 puzzle. 

Here the important part is piece 8, you see, the previous edition had a weakness, or one that could be detected decently easy nowadays. When we invert the solution, the key does not proclaim it is there, but the lock leaves a flag, each piece its own flags, 8 flags in total. Try finding 8 specific flags on a server system of a telecom company, good luck with that idea. The 8 pieces finding each other and linking and sitting dormant somewhere, optionally in a cloud space that is as badly managed as it is monitored. When the 8 flags are turned piece number 9 comes into play and sets one flag, and the 8 connected pieces accepts piece 9 in its midst and mayhem gets surpassed by chaos in the least acceptable way and it will take a long time to find, because a work does not need to replicate too often, it merely needs to be there. And unless you replace each piece of equipment and purge all data from each system, the damage will merely continue over time. 

This is not my invention, it is almost 40 years old. Well over a decade ago we were taught and others were clearly taught that self-repudiation was going to be a big thing. But there is a group of people where greed and stupidity are neatly and efficiently packaged, such a person tends to be a  member of a board of directors and they were really driven to get as much profit out of everything.  Speed over self-repudiation, greed over privacy and now the chaos will come, more of it and more often as well. 

Could I be wrong?
Of course I could be wrong, this could be a simple setting of stupidity, lack of resources, lack of procedures and policies, it could be that simple. Yet in that how much of these elements needed to go wrong for people to be days without mobiles, without the ability to reach emergency services. Consider that setting and wonder what really happened. I cannot fathom what happened, because I do not know these systems to the degree I would need to know them. But in my speculations, I also realise something else. Canada would never be a good target, but the US, the US could be and Canada was merely a dry run of a new developed system. Is it the one I speculated on? I have no way of telling and in the end it might be merely a speculation that leads to an interesting story, one for TV, or one for the big screen. I will let you consider what I wrote here and consider that no telecom provider when down the way Rogers Telecom went down. In Australia Vodafone had issues, but that was simple a fire in a key component as such the damage was clear and the impact as well. It seems that Rogers Telecom has no idea what the damage is and no idea what the impact will be.

Suddenly my speculation is not that far fetched, is it?

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July 12, 2022 · 21:36

The blind seeker

This is not a riddle, it is simple. I cannot tell what the rules are for getting a script. I created three of them and I get it, it needs to be a certain format, it needs appeal, but as a storyteller, I do not care, and that is not some short sighted look. Around 35000 stories are submitted and only 350 get made. I am not some person seeking wealth (well I am, but not in stories), and as I have stated in the past. I lived the FX slogan, ‘The Story is everything’, it has been true for the longest of time and it ill remain true decades from now. So as I recall an article I wrote in ‘The stage of a game’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2020/09/24/the-stage-of-a-game/) almost 2 years ago, someone in Hollywood or Netflix should have woken up.

The fact that a comic (1965-1982) with artists like Don Lawrence; Oliver Frey; Gerry Wood; Philip Corke; Ramon Sola; Ron Embleton; Miguel Quesada can still tempt the mind of the reader a generation later should have alerted them to the setting that they have a winner here. In the age when special effects and CGI are so close to the real thing that we can no longer tell the difference whether something is real or CGI should have triggered the idea that the Trigan Empire could be big bucks. The fact that this remains a hidden treasure is delighting in so many ways. The series I started to follow at the age of 5 (2 years after it was released) and still has this appeal on me and on thousands who were around when they first appeared is a wonderful feeling. It gives rise to the appeal that Flash Gordon had in the 50’s to the previous generation and this generation who is a lot on the Hogwarts stage. Every generation has its special stories and to consider that the next generation could enjoy on the screen what the previous generation loved in equal measure in comic books, is overwhelming. I wonder if it ever becomes real. Well, Valerian became a reality in 2017, 50 years after the comic book launched. Even as the movie flopped (according to the numbers), I was happy to see it and as part 2 is now ready to be filmed and a part three is on route to become a reality too, I merely hope that I live long enough to see all three parts. But the small voice in me silently hopes that the Trigan Empire will become a reality too. And there is a lot more in the comic books that never graced the American shelves. Don Lawrence gave us Storm, the Spanish artist Vicente Segrelles gave the world a comic named ‘the Mercenary’ in an age of knights, magic and dragons. 

So many awesome stories that one wonders how blind are these Hollywood seekers, these diggers for Netflix, Hulu and Apple+? A stage that is merely waiting to be found by a limelight, any limelight. Dozens, if not hundreds of comic books, all undiscovered as they never graced the American comic book shelves (a speculation of mine). Yet in the stage of what we see now and what we hear now, so many series flop. I honestly do not know why, some I have never seen, some I saw and it was not my favourite, yet it was not bad. The reason of what we see and what some things are rated as follows definitions that some might think ludicrous and mostly because we do not understand what drives the ratings. So under those rules will series like the Trigan Empire and the Mercenary make it? I cannot tell, but I hope they do, to see my childhood hero (Valerian) make it to the big screen was mesmerising, I hope to see the other two there as well.

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July 12, 2022 · 00:04

Referring to the previous

OK, this time it is not merely a case of Microsoft people (the non thinkers). I also left a piece out of the previous article. In part because I thought it was self evident, in part because it is a little harder to explain, not harder exactly, there is a lot more to this than meets the eye, but those in this environment will get it fast enough. You see, my solution might not help Elon Musk, he doesn’t have enough time. Even if his Tesla Mobile department gets cracking, he might not get the minimum numbers to convince a judge (I reckon 9%-11% would do the trick). First we need to look at a specific population. 

This is a representation of a fake account population. For arguments sake I kept an even distribution (which is not the case). The top segment are governments, really clever hackers and a few others. We won’t be able to get to them. Then we get the clever click-farms and trolls and last the eager beaver click-farms and stupid trolls. It’s the lower two segments that matter, the lowest tier is the easiest to get to, but will need work. The other one needs a lot more work and that is the path others have not trodden on (at least I think they have not).

In this there are two groups click-farms and trolls. We can get to a lot in the same way. A click farm get the revenue, by clicking (yes, it is that easy), the problem is that they need 10 clicks for a cent, as such China has a lot of these farms. People pressing buttons one after another. But here is the little surprise. There is a method, there are paths we can use to find them, and the lowest group first. There are all matters of ways that some hunters go through, because they have specific targets. In this case we also have targets, but the lowest group, it also means the most work. 

The simple click farm has one text. We need to find the first text that goes to any click farm, when we have that (from experience we know where the recipient is), so we know the text. Now we need to backtrace as much as possible and find EVERY transmitter (clicker) of that message. We do that by seeking 90 seconds before and 90 seconds after and seek the system for that text. Depending on how fast the click-farm is, we could find 200-300 click mobiles in that time, if needed we extent to 30 seconds in both direction. Now we have our first cluster. We can seek and capture these identities and set them in a database. The slightly more clever click-farm will do this with a collection of tweets (as such I showed you 3 text icons). This is also important. You see one cluster is fine, but we need a hell of a lot more, but we get a little help from the people at the click-farm, they tend to be lazy (or greed driven) so the more they transmit, the more money they get. As such we then seek who had these three messages in succession. Here we need to filter, some recipients are gullible and take anything that this click-farm sends out and some click-farm have recipient clusters. The salesperson often has a story to tell, but he’ll take any listener (even the useless ones). So we need to distinguish between the two. The recipient farm often does not send forward, some do. But now we start shaping an image. An image and a message path (a pattern) and these paths are not always the same, they can sent the covid misinformation one day and Russian propaganda the next. But in this way we get at least a dozen clusters. The problem is that this needs one hell of a server and optionally a rack of servers seeking in different regions. So Musk will have the hardware and he has the people, but does he have the time to get this all done? (perhaps he already did). And the third path is to engage with a click-farm to send your own message which you seek online. When you get that cluster you can seek what else came from there and then you have a nice setting to compare. You see, Twitter is about engaging an audience, the click-farm does not care so they are actually more exposed then others. Then there are the the click messages that hand over the #FF statement. It is risky, but the lower tier does this to get results faster and as such we get a node of connections and all connecting to clusters. 

I reckon that this approach could bank up to 20%-25% of the fake account, showing that the Twitter idea of 5% was a joke from day one and has been so for years. There are of course a few more ways to get there, but revealing them would also show the hand to the more clever click-farms and that is what we are trying to prevent. I reckon that it should be possible to get 90% of the green group and 30% of the yellow group. In this I set the graph to reveal equal groups, but the green group is 20% smaller and yellow group is at least 40% larger. The red group is relatively small, and does the most damage, but that was not the exercise, it was to show that the Twitter claim of 5% fake accounts was folly (from the start mind you) and I reckon that this could be relatively easy to show, but to get these numbers takes a serious amount of server power. It would even be better to set the results in something like IBM Modeller or Palantir Gotham to see where else the data leads, because that would become the next task, mapping the disinformation streams and how it is distributed. Even if these people do not break any laws, they are helping and propelling disinformation, optionally endangering their own nation and that too needs to be known. There comes a point where the right to be stupid is no longer an excuse.

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July 11, 2022 · 18:52

Meme by Elon Musk

The guardian is giving us a part, other papers are giving us a part. Yet no one is treading on the side where they have to be, the media pussies on patrol. Trying to keep safe their digital dollars. And it is about to come to blows. You see the article ‘Elon Musk may have to complete $44bn Twitter takeover, legal experts say’ (at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/10/elon-musk-may-have-to-complete-44bn-twitter-takeover-legal-experts-say) gives merely part of the painting. Yes, legal experts state “Quinn said Musk’s information requests on spam accounts were not “reasonable” and would not be accepted by the court. “He can’t use unreasonable information requests to create a pretext to claim a violation,” he said.” But the setting is incomplete. Twitter has maintained that no more than 5% of the Twitter accounts were fake, I have data suggesting it is as high as 20%, another source (www.trollrensics.com) has data showing the number of fake accounts for trolls and misinformation to be as high as 50%, this implies that Twitter is trying to sell a bill of goods, but the bill is only 50% filled and that has been at the centre of this all along. So whilst Jack Dorsey and friends and now in a stage where the gig is up, they need to get as much out of it as possible, because the media will at some point ‘wake up’ and take a much deeper look. Consider hundred of media outlets and they have been avoiding this part all along. Politicians setting their premise, misinformation on covid, election misinformation, and the Ukraine war thousands to troll accounts working day and night to give a false premise of what is going on and in all this the media remained SILENT. 

Trollrensics has data spanning 8 years (at least) and that is merely the beginning. You see, on route to home I remembered that trolls and click-farms rely on greed. As such we see a different setting. First there is the ‘unmonitored source’ that gives us “Twitter doesn’t reveal IP addresses of its users. They use it internally and strictly restrict the public from this information. But there’s always a way. In this article, we’ll discuss how to find someone’s IP address on Twitter.” This implies that we need another path, but criminals and click-farms are lazy, they will reuse what they can. Every second they can tweet is another few cents in their wallet, as such more is better. This implies that if you create a database of the @TwitterAddress and you strip all the messages, you can look per message and see how it moves. This is not a simple solution, you need serious computing power for this. But as such, you get a message that is spread (in the near same instance) from different mobiles in the same location you optionally have a click farm point. Now if we get a multitude of misinformation from clusters of mobiles, we have found such a place. 

This is a mere setting to get to the numbers. You see, Russia and China have hundreds if not thousands of these click-farm locations. And now we have a serious number, when we move that action from nation to nation, we get well beyond my 20% and way past the 5% claim of Twitter. When that is obtained, we get what might be considered evidence towards what some would call the alleged fraudulent sale of Twitter to Elon Musk. Why Fraudulent? Well, Twitter maintained that they have no more than 5% fake accounts. These numbers would prove them wrong and with the previous part that they had IP addresses they had the information a lot longer than anyone would care to speculate on and as they speculatively lived by the rule that they look sexier with 330 million active users, than with 120 million active users. And one source gives us “Twitter has some 330 million monthly active users (MAU) based on its last reported data that leveraged this metric in the 1st quarter of 2019. As of 2020, Twitter’s monetizable daily active users (mDAU) stands at 166 million, which represents a 24% growth from 2019.” In the middle of Covid Twitter grew 24%? I am not saying it is not possible, after all Amazon pulled it off, but how many stores were active during coved? In addition to this, where did these funds come from? In all the presidents men we hear ‘Follow the money’, that equally applies to trolls and click-farms. They got paid, they paid for things, that money trail is equally important in discovering what was what. It is not fool proof, because others use similar paths for valid reasons, but that is one person, one business. Not a person or business with hundreds of phones. 

All this should have been seen and looked at by the media years ago, but it wasn’t interesting is it not? And as for the meme, see below. When you consider the elements of the meme, the silence of the media makes even less sense. Yet, I leave that to you to look into. 

Meme by @ElonMusk

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July 10, 2022 · 20:38

The joke on any corporation

Yes, there are corporations that are comfy and good and there are corporations that due to hiring practices and whether they rely on hiring teams or recruiters are soon to be seen as a joke. It all started with ‘The over-qualified workers struggling to find a job’ (at https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220705-the-over-qualified-workers-struggling-to-find-a-job). There we see several connecting issues, but what caught my eye was “In some instances, recruiters can see workers applying for positions apparently ‘below’ their current career level as a red flag”, you see there are two problems with that. The first is their subjective view, one that is often given to them by superiors who have lost all connection to a working force that is now beyond their comprehension. The second one is that I had been looking for something for almost 8 years. The fact is that this boss is a lot better than the previous two. I had actually forgotten what it was to be treated like a person. That last part is on me, but it is still unnerving how the workaholic setting took over my life and made me less than human. So there are issues all over the field and as this work force is experiencing a new breath of life. Bosses that treat their staff good (like mine now) will suddenly find an abundance of interest, because everyone wants to work for such a boss. 

So it is a new sight to work for, in an age of shortage a lot of people will have learned that more pay is second best to nice treatment. The second issue is seen in ““In hiring, you have to act paranoid,” he says. “If someone is coming down a level or two, and they’ve likely already achieved what the role offers, then you have to ask questions about their motivation.”” The recruiter is again in short supply of brain matter. It is old way thinking, the idea that a good boss with prospects in 1-3 years is preferable than a new challenge with no future in sight is beyond their scope of vision. Knowing you can do the job matters, it always did, but the Deloitte idea of a bigger future is still on their brains, even though beyond Deloitte and half a dozen firms that idea will never be delivered on, merely speculated on. I reckon that a player like Deloitte is one of the few that actually delivered on their mission statement. The rest will hide behind “It is a complex situation and we are feeling the market right now” is an excuse that was acceptable 10 years ago but it is obsolete now. And it is worse when you see the impossible way where Amazon is burning through  the global workforce. There is every chance that they will become the first undesirable employer for the working class (packaging and shipping). Fortune reported less than a month ago ‘Amazon’s warehouse problems? It’s running out of workers to hire, and has too much space’, it had become a place where proper robotics and automation would have made all the difference, but there is a chance that they could buckle before that point is reached. So in all this as we see temp agencies and recruiters seeking people, they had ventured on the wrong highway and when we see “In turning down such workers, employers may say they’re too experienced for the position. Sometimes, they inform them that they’re simply not the best fit for the company.” We suddenly see the failure that Apple stores engaged in, to seek the average person, not the inspiring one that is handled by a senior to get that person on board for the Apple frame of mind. Look in any Apple store, all young, dynamic and in some cases clueless past the Apple articles they promote. Some will try to adjust their way of thinking and that is good, but those who wrongly assessed a person will not just lose that person, it will lose that persons friends as well. You see in this atmosphere of hiring shortage the recruiters relying on capturing resume’s with fake jobs will not survive for long, the ones who did a fair job and adjust to a new working atmosphere will be around a lot longer. You can watch it happen in the short term at a recruiter agency near you. As I personally see it they all had the same flaw, instead of collecting resume’s they should have engaged with the candidate and whether it was their boss who told them, or their own insight that 500 resume’s will get them their bonus faster than engaging with 50 candidates is a numbers game, but I reckon that any recruiter that engaged with 50 candidates will have a much better 2022 than the other one. Mark my words.

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July 9, 2022 · 22:47

Today in the price is right

Yes, that is at times the question. What is something valued at and what are the reasons and facts of this valuation. The Guardian (at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/08/elon-musk-buy-twitter-withdraw) gives us ‘Elon Musk withdraws $44bn bid to buy Twitter after weeks of high drama’ Yes, it was high end drama, and it was high end drama because the media doesn’t like Elon Musk and because they should have known better, but in their race for digital dollars, they really do not want all the facts to come out. Even as we are given “Mr Musk is terminating the merger agreement because Twitter is in material breach of multiple provisions of that agreement, appears to have made false and misleading representations upon which Mr Musk relied when entering into the merger agreement, and is likely to suffer a Company Material Adverse Effect” yes legalised porridge this is, but it is a setting of a truth, one that the media was clearly aware of. And we see the dice roll high when we are given “Musk and his lawyers accused Twitter of withholding information about the number of “spam” accounts on the platform. This week, the company revealed that it was suspending more than 1m spam accounts a day.” As such we need to take a much stronger look at “This week, the company revealed that it was suspending more than 1m spam accounts a day”, and this has been going on for a while. I saw some data that indicated that not 5%, but well over 20% was fake, a reliable source (which I discussed) earlier gives us (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2022/06/08/what-the-media-silences/) ‘What the media silences’, a setting that is closer to 50%, that is a really high number, but with the Ukrainian war, Covid and Chinese trolls the number of fake Twitter accounts is going through the roof. And this source has ACTUAL data, data that they collected over years. And when that is proven, even if the evidence shows that it is only 30% (speculative) it implies that either Twitter was incompetent as they see only 5% fake accounts, or they were intentionally fraudulent. I cannot tell which of the two it is but the media had a much larger sight on this FOR YEARS and they did nothing. Now they try to use it to flame for a little longer, but consider that the media was lying to you for years, knowingly keeping us in the dark, I reckon that Twitter might be safer in the hands of Elon Musk. And in this Jack Dorsey has a lot to explain, no matter how the cake knife falls. As I personally see it, he was either incapable of keeping Twitter safe, or he was intentionally grossly overpricing Twitter.  I am willing to let him explain what it is, I feel certain that Elon Musk is dying to hear that part of the equation as well. Either way, he wins, a setting that was never in question.

So when we see “Musk stood to take control of a social media network with more than 200 million users. An avid, but critical user of the platform, he had vowed to push through various reforms, including relaxing its content restrictions, ridding the platform of fake and automated accounts and shifting away from its advertising-based revenue model.” Is anyone wonder if this is including the fake accounts? You see, this would amount to a maximum of 100 million users and if we are to believe some facts, Nicky Minaj has 25,449,548 follower at present, this amounts to 25%, so I reckon that Elon Musk could buy that account for less then 10% of what Twitter is asking. That is one way of doing it, and consider that of all the users one in four is following Nicky Minaj, what is the actual value of Twitter? You merely have to look at it from another side. But that is merely my view on the matter.

 

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July 9, 2022 · 15:52

The dream that teaches

This is not some article, this is a story, a story about a dream, a dream I had. In this dream mankind was done for, greed finally won and this planet was going down fast. But there was hope, a ship was made, a ship that looked a lot like the one we saw in the movie Titan AE (yes, the cartoon). Anyway, the ship was loading. The people were boarding through 8 gates each quarter of the ship got two gates, a high and a low one, and they all went to different floors. I was walking down one floor, the gate had two trenches, the normal one and a first class one. I was in the first class one, not because I was a VIP, but because I think I was a crew member. As I was going through the gate the doors started to close, there was a door every 100 meters and I had passed the 6th or 7th door and I saw the 8th door slowly closing. Just for a second I hesitated, then I started to run as fast as I could, I got past door 8, I had to duck for the 9th door and the 10 I got by diving and rolling just before the door would close. I ran over the gangway into the ship.

I was in the ship, and I saw confusion everywhere. Then I felt the shudder, the engines were preparing a launch. I shouted people to get into any cabin, any room with seats and buckle up. I ran towards the hatches, they were closing too. I saw the panic of people still outside. There was nothing I could do. I ran to a comm board, I tried to raise the alarms, but my security clearance was not high enough. I felt the strong shudder, it was lift off time. I saw a chair ran to it, sat down and strapped in. On the other side of the room was another man with three women, all strapped in, all looking confused and all but one passengers. One of the women was a deckhand, or steward. I could not tell, but her rank was decently higher. Lift off and the g-forces were pushing me in the chair, the ship was taking off, leaving well over half outside and who knows what supplies never made it onboard. I felt the acceleration and I lost consciousness, or I drifted away in some sleep like statement. It was four minutes later when I came round, at least that is what my watch indicated. I looked at the others The officer was already on the systems trying to look for an explanation. I introduced myself. Engineering assistant Lazarus, Ma’am! She nodded. Do you know what happened? I shook my head. Not a clue, I was before door 8 when they started going down. I ran as fast as I could and here I am. She nodded. We need to get to the bridge, follow me engineer. I followed her, she seemed sure and determined. Just the I like my officers to be, knowing what to do next. We got to the central ring where the elevators were, my ears started to hear something odd, I could not put my finger on it. But she opened the door and entered, she looked around and as I entered she seemed to be speaking, but no sound came out. I suddenly remembered the white noise. I grabbed her arm and yanked her out of the elevator just as the doors were closing. We got out, but barely. She looked almost haunted. Tried to shout at me, but still no sound. I pointed at her mouth and shook my head. I pointed at my ears and shook my head. I think she got the message. She was still silent, this was going to take some time. We walked to another elevator a quarter of the ring further. I heard almost the same sound, my ears were affected as well, not as much as the voice. The elevators were rigged, but why? Then I remembered, the AI will monitor any usage. But its camera’s would pick up our gestures and voices. It could lipread as well, so the action made no sense. But for now we were stuck on this floor. 

This was the first part of the dream, the dream took me forward instantly (by a lot), the AI was partially hacked, not the AI itself, an AI cannot be hacked, but the AI was Arabic, the hackers did away with the profile parameters, they disabled linguistic options, gestures and lipreading. The AI would not know what was going on. In the end the AI was hacked, not by attacking the AI, but by hacking the access ports to the AI and disabling access to it. Each port was replaced by a simulated null: port that streams data and numbers, but the numbers would make no sense and as the AI took more resources to figure out the data given, less resources, other than the bare minimum would be available for all other duties. A hacking achievement never seen before and the hackers ended up with nearly all planetary goods and not much people to dump into space. The biggest heist in history and the witnesses that were still around were floating in space, not alive at all.

As I said, greed won, in the end, it would infect other places too, that is the outcome of greed, it never ever stops. 

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July 8, 2022 · 23:10

Timing is not always a good thing

That is the stage we at times debate. Corporations are all about timing and getting the timing right so that they can profit the best. OK, that is to some degree to be expected as corporations are depending on their shareholders to keep them employed, so they want the best deal possible. It is the price of doing business. And what about governments? You see Al Jazeera gives us ‘UK warship seized ‘advanced Iranian missiles’ bound for Yemen’ (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/7/7/uk-warship-seized-advanced-iranian-missiles-bound-for-yemen), for the most we would think yowza and happiness to all who sail here. Yet that is not the larger issue. The larger issue is “A British Royal Navy vessel seized a sophisticated shipment of Iranian missiles in the Gulf of Oman earlier this year”, it seems simple, but what happens to your opinion when I give the added part that this optionally happened in April. So three months of either dragging their feet, or trying to get something out of it. Is that really “work in support of an enduring peace in Yemen”, or is it opportunism. You see, there is more to this. I had several questions BEFORE I posted ‘The questions not asked’, which I posted on December 27th 2021, months before the UK Navy vessel finally was competent enough to find weapon smugglers from alleged Iran. The article (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/12/27/the-questions-not-asked/) gives us some of these issues, together with a very frustrated Colonel Turki Al Malki. 

Frustrated because the western media remained largely willing to ignore a decent amount of evidence, apart from the fact that there is no place to properly manufacture missiles and their electronic parts in Yemen. But the media was happy to ignore that fact, and now we see in Al Jazeera “Despite a United Nations Security Council arms embargo on Yemen, Iran has long been suspected of transferring rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, missiles and other weaponry to the Houthis since Yemen’s war began in 2014.” Yes, and in other news “Water is now proven to be allegedly wet” We can consider two parts. In the first, the west has had enough of Iran, or two the west is becoming too desperate for oil and will suddenly find the evidence that Colonel Turki Al Malki has been voicing loudly for a very long time. Of course there could the setting that common sense takes over and people are finally realising that they are at least 4 years late to the party, and in this case better late than never does not apply. Nor the stupid or the less so are allowed to hide behind this. Too much has happened and it is time for the media filters to be properly examined by open sources (not the ICIJ) and from there we might get some names that are also on some Iranian oily do gooders list, but that is merely speculation from my side. What is a given is that Iran will soon see that their games have an end date and some parties will stop whatever they can beforehand. They are realising that the time of filling their pockets are over and they will try to make a clean break, in the end there is no telling, but some will get away with it. 

In the end it took 8 years for the evidence to reach the media, are you realising that the media that speculated over a columnist that no one cared about seconds after each event with more and more wild conjecture, but the clear setting of missile transfers to a terrorist organisation doesn’t make the cut? Wake up, will you please? And this I give you before others will come with the excuse “The time was never right”, the time was always right, it was the NOW of that moment, that was the right time, especially in journalism. And they are every bit as guilty as I personally see it.

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July 8, 2022 · 18:06

A gamer darkly

That is what we are at times, a dark player in a field of poppies trying to remember where we were in the first place. It is not some riddle, at times most of us (including me) are clueless on where we go, yet we know we need to get there. It drove Ubisoft to fame, and even now as Ubisoft becomes less and less relevant to the gamers of today players like Guerrilla take over with their Horizon games. What was the world of Mass Effect and Assassins Creed became the world of Elden ring, Horizon and the heroin Eloy. Tomorrow it seems to be a stage of the last Horizon part, Hogwarts Legacy and Gotham Knights. And it is important that we address ‘seems to be’. You see, I have heralded moves to the streamers and there is every indication That they did not listen and Tencent did. You see, even as some state “Chinese tech giant Tencent is apparently planning to launch its own handheld gaming console, going by a patent spotted recently. (2021)” I do not think that people have any idea what gamers are about to get. You see this looks like a handheld Switch lookalike, but it isn’t. 

Jumping to the past
In 1989 Astral Software launched Archipelago. The game was decent enough, the graphics were not the greatest but with 1000 levels there was enough fun for everyone and in the end there was. Some called it ““one of the most original games I’ve seen, both in gameplay and in original concept”, with an “odd and eerie setting that works despite an eminently forgettable scenario”” Now consider that this was a game that was less than 1MB. Now reset that game with todays graphics, make it an offline game and when you consider that this was originally a 92% game, consider that this game (and well over a dozen others) could end up being 88%+ games. Now all the other streamers have a problem. They relied on ‘has-been’ Ubisoft to cater to their needs. A player that could not keep its eyes on the price and with what we were given this week

We now have two streamers that need to adjust image, adjust course on their streamers, or they will be surpassed by Tencent. Another field here China ends up getting the mustard (my 50 million console idea is still safe, I checked). And now that the facts are slowly seeping, I wonder what Netflix will do. Microsoft is not a player in this (merely a marketing idea), and if Tencent makes at least two steps in the direction I expect, before the end of this year Google Stadia will be a forgone lost solution to a direction gamers are not interested in, that leaves the Amazon Luna, it has options, but Tencent is seemingly directed into a field to capture the heart of gamers, something the others needed to have done long ago.

Even as Google is seemingly using the media to give us quotes like “After debuting to middling reviews, it had to suffer through a slowly growing library, a limited user base and the shuttering of its first-party studios. But Stadia is still alive and kicking, and Google intends to prove it next week.” They are in more trouble than they think, they relied on Ubisoft to solve their issue, but Ubisoft only tries to solve its own issues and now the earlier article makes more sense. Techspot gives us “In a nutshell: Ubisoft will decommission the servers of 15 games in the next two months, including some of the most popular entries in the Assassin’s Creed franchise. Most of these titles are about a decade old, so there are likely not that many people still playing the multiplayer components. However, users also won’t be able to download DLCs they previously bought for these games.” Gamers hate to loose parts, including DLC’s, and for the “so there are likely not that many people still playing the multiplayer components” could be translated into a stage where the 2-3 games per server idea was cast aside. Now, in many cases I do not care about the online parts, but Ubisoft made it part of the game (to embrace people), and now when revenue is king players are pushed out. Gamers will see this as a betrayal. In a time when Tencent is looking for gamers to push its IP forward, Ubisoft plays right into their hands and if they considered what I put online, gamers will get dozens of golden oldies. They will feel catered to and that seals the fate of Ubisoft and optionally Google too. They decided not to develop games and now that decision will bite them. 

We now get a new pool and the streamers (seemingly) are Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Netflix and Tencent. They will vie for a slice of the entire pie that includes Sony and Nintendo. These two will see the impact, but will not lose players, if anything these players will have a streamer on the side and that is where Tencent becomes really visible, over time they could get a much bigger slice of the $200,000,000,000 that is stated to be the pie of next year. Yes, we know that a lot of it will go to mobile games and that is exactly where Tencent will see the profit, catering to gamers, catering to online players, mobile gamers and their console can store it all, they played a beautiful hand. I personally hope that Amazon gets the push it needs, I do not care either way whether Tencent gets it, as long as Microsoft does not. There should not be any award for stupidity, should there be?

A stage I emphasised over two years ago and it is coming to fruition in the next 12 months. Although to be honest, I merely saw Microsoft as the loser and I did not see Tencent coming two years ago, now they are a much larger concern to the other players. But perhaps the Tencent console will be seen as spy equipment by the CIA, they still haven’t presented any real evidence on Huawei, so why should we expect to see any on Tencent?

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