October 3, 2021 · 18:48

We stand on guard for thee

This is a special edition, this is for my Canadian fans (there are a few). And there are a few items that concerns them. First off, we have a little funny go at their prime minister Justin Trudeau (for form sake). I see the too much negative stories about him.

I do wonder about that at times, but others have their right to a view too. In this side there are two images. And yes, I do have a reason, you see the home-front is part of him, he married Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, a lady of 27 springs, which is fine, but why does he insist on looking 10 years younger than her? All men know that looking younger than your wife will be our downfall in a few ways, so as I thought he had gained insight during the pandemic, we suddenly started to see him with a posh beard (a beard loaded with silver), so we thought someone whispered a few facts of life to him, but no, recently he has gone beardless again and I reckon there will be a fallout in Maison Trudeau soon enough, but that is enough about him. 

You see, Canada will be in a tough situation soon enough, I reckon in 4-6 weeks hell comes calling. And when we realise that Canada got through the pandemic a lot better than plenty of others. The NY Times reported that 1,639,169 had the disease, less than 28,000 died from the disease making them 26th on the mortality list. With 72% fully vaccinated and 78% at least one shot they are in a good place, the US has only 56% fully vaccinated and 65% with one doze. 

The Canadian setting is a lot better than many European nations and it comes to 0.7% of American casualties of a permanent nature. Canada has reason to be proud and it happened when Trudeau was at the helm. Here I distinguish ‘was at the helm’ versus ‘was steering the nation’, that difference requires me to know a lot more and I do not.

But the pandemic is merely one side, the larger problem will be the US, when the debt ceiling is reached the impact will be seen in many ways. Not merely in the stage of the debt, larger changes, dangerous changes are at foot. The IP Watchdogs might trivialise it with ‘Leahy Bill to ‘Restore the AIA’ is Too Unbalanced to Pass’ yet, I am not convinced. The senator from Vermont has a collection of powerful companies backing him, optionally merely to protect their own needs. A source gives us “Bernie Sanders supported some parts of the bill but had misgivings over the “no strings attached” emergency appropriations available to the semiconductor industry”, it is a fair call and both sides have merits, but the larger station is now, when the US decides to use ‘nationalised’ patents and IP to bank the second credit card, the US will give a larger chunk of the battle field to China and South Korea, who have a massive IP setting. That stage and the debt default gives rise to the dangers. Millions of Americans will choose larger taxation and safety over US exploitation, in the we end up seeing Canada in the same predicament that the US had with Mexico and there is no Rio Grande between the US and Canada, there are the Niagara Falls, but apparently you can cross it in a barrel. I wouldn’t know. The larger station for Canada is now 4-6 weeks away and it sets a awkward stage. How dangerous is this? It is not merely the US, there are plenty of people in the EU and Australia that see more options in Canada and the Pandemic is pushing for brain drains all over the field. One might argue that we have seen this before. In the era 400AD – 600AD change hit Europe “The Great Migration took place in the waning days of the Western Roman Empire. Hunted by the advancing Huns and lured by the riches of the politically weakened Western Roman Empire, from the fourth century onwards several mainly Germanic tribes invaded Western Roman territory.” We now see something similar as the US is crumbling as the powerhouse the once were and then pretended to be a bit longer. I do not think it is the blame of President Biden, the six presidents preceding them did close to nothing to stem the debt and as it is now surpassing $25,000,000,000,000 (25 trillion), all whilst we see arms deals cancelled, fiasco’s in naval and airforce construction, fiasco’s that wasted well over 10% of the entire US education spending, two projects the waste was THAT much and the people will see the numbers and realise that staying in the US is going to get less and less healthy, as such the problem for Canada, they will get a massive influx of people hoping that they might find happiness there. I would like to state that the Commonwealth nations stands with them, but to be honest, I have no idea where the G20 Commonwealth politicians from Australia, UK, South Africa and India stand. They are too much about enabling America and too little about holding them too account and I fear it might cost Canada at some point. What happens then? 

I honestly do not know.

Yet we need to return to the Prime Minister. We see several online settings of anti-Trudeau. One seen in the Conversation is “Accusations that Trudeau has betrayed Canada was a common theme as we began studying grassroots Facebook pages in 2019, another election year. We found no Trudeau meme pages celebrating the leader. Instead, we watched anti-Trudeau pages describe him as a traitor who deserved to be treated with contempt.” It seems to be that there is a flock of Trudeau trolls and the CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) as well as the RCMP will need to look into this sooner rather than later, because trolls are like rats, they will leave the sinking ship at the second sign of trouble and they will become a Canadian problem soon thereafter. This gets us to one source (a debatable one) called the Hill Times. We see there (at https://www.hilltimes.com/2021/09/30/canzuk-time-is-canada-ready/319763) ‘CANZUK time, is Canada ready?’, there we see “Canada has a chance to be a major player in CANZUK to usher in a more politically stable and mutually beneficial version of a modern Commonwealth”, in this weirdly enough it is Canada and New Zealand that are the stable making elements, the other two are deep in the American pockets and that is about to backfire largely. This is not about submarines, it is not about local settings it is about them siding with the US against Chinese matters all whilst there is a failing level of evidence. No, China is not innocent, but it all got tainted through the Huawei stage and China (understandably) took offence. There is no way that China can absolve too many events, but some they can and the US in a failing IP grip, a failing debt grip and a failing power grip is trying whatever they can to seem important. New Zealand has been steering clear and Canada needs to make up what to do, they do have the US (aka South Canada) on their border so it is not an easy decision, yet should all talks in the US fail and the debt ceiling becomes cemented, the people harmed by it will desperately seek a way out and north is the one move that makes perfect sense to many American.

Canada, we stand on guard for thee, yet the clarion call can, and should only be made by Canada, we cannot do it for them.

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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 2, 2021 · 00:41

The waste of overrun

The BBC gave us news today, the news is open to interpretation. This is not their fault, but it calls for a larger setting. This is seen in “In solidarity with France, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has questioned whether the EU would be able to strike a trade deal with Australia”, now I never regarded Ursula to be a useful tool, in this my setting for that was seen in 2019 when we were given by Politico (and a few others) “Ursula von der Leyen is planning a new career as European Commission chief in Brussels, but the German defence minister still has questions to answer back home”, so she is like that physician running from location to location, to avoid a malpractice suit. The quote “Last November, she told the German parliament there had been “mistakes” in how external consultants were hired and said “this never should have happened.” But she defended the use of such consultants, saying they had been required to undertake a huge overhaul of the ministry.” Yes, there are always mistakes, there are always miscommunications, that happens, and in this we can have all kinds of directions on those consultants, even when they are tools or stakeholders for others. Yet when we return to the reason why France is angry “Australia cancelled a $37bn (£27bn) deal with a French company building diesel-powered submarines, and, what’s more, France – a traditional Western ally – found out about the new pact only a few hours before the public announcement” we need to consider another source. Business Insider and a few other sources gave us “France’s deal to build Australia’s new submarines was dogged by years of problems”, as well as “The project to replace Australia’s aging Collins-class submarines was supposed to cost $US36.5 ($AU50) billion, Politico reported, but the cost had nearly doubled by this year to an estimated $US66 ($AU91) billion”, so we see a cost overrun of nearly 100%, and so far the BBC and a few other sources are extremely willing not to mention that. If I go to my boss and tell him that something was 10% more expensive, I will get fired and I will not be able to get a job for years to come, the French double the cost and they are heralded as victims? By the way, the more advanced Los Angeles class a nuclear powered submarine is less than $2,000,000,000, as such the cost overrun will pay for 15 submarines, as such, did anyone in France (or Strasbourg for that matter) do the math? So cancelling the 12 French submarines at $66,000,000,000 will get us 15 at 50% of the price and in this is anyone surprised that the deal was cancelled? The fact that the BBC is also willing to overlook a few matters in this calls for a little vetting in the BBC. Now, should the BBC find debatable evidence of the ‘evidence’ that Business Insider and ABC gave us, that is fine, we can take that into consideration. Yet it is odd that such a large setting is overlooked by France and the BBC, not to mention some former excuse for a German defence minister. 

And in this, is anyone paying attention? Even as France has its idea’s and shakes on ‘Gaullist’ temperament and dreams of greatness, it does help if they can keep their builders in a stage of competitiveness, which does mean that cost overruns that approach 100% is totally out of bounds. In this the US is not absent of such settings either, but to get a diesel submarine at twice the price of a nuclear powered submarine, all whilst the diesel version lasts 18,000 miles and the nuclear one can travel non-stop for three decades is a bit of a stretch. Yet the cost overruns are left outside of plenty of newspapers. The ideology of non-nuclear is fine, but when it comes with a cost overrun of 100% we need to ask questions and the news seemingly is not.

This is a different stage, even as the USS Zumwalt failed all its objectives and reached the unique objective of being the ugliest dinghy in US naval history, the US nuclear submarines like the Los Angeles class has proven itself and is also a nice looking vessel. People go out to the shoreline to watch submerged submarine races hoping to see the shadow of an LA class vessel, it is a spectator sport.
As such the Naval builders got the job done and then some. Especially in an age where we look for cheaper solutions, the idea that any submarine needs to refuel thrice a century is a bit overlooked as well. 

So whilst we might show some level of understanding on the sentiments of French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian who called this “a stab in the back” it needs to be state that le petit Jean-Yves needs to take a look at cost overruns and set the proper tone to that side of the sliding scale. In addition to this, the ideas of 12 submarines needing refuelling every 18,000 miles is also a setting for debate, which is not on France mind you. 

So as the clock passed midnight and I complete my 2,000th article I will do a small victory dance after which I will try to break my record of being the loudest snorer in the nation (we all have goals). We all have records to break and France might do the same by trying to limit their cost overrun.

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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 30, 2021 · 01:26

And so it begins

We all have sides, and we all have sides we tend to look less at. There is no exclusion, no even me. I try to always take the bigger picture in view, but at times I too fail to do that and today might be such a time. So if you have objections, you might be right. It all started a little over an hour ago when I took notice of ‘CNN denies Australians access to its Facebook pages, cites defamation risk’ (at https://www.reuters.com/technology/cnn-quits-facebook-australia-citing-defamation-risk-2021-09-29/), on one side I am in a state of ‘Who the fuck cares?’, on the other side I am wondering why someone would take the stage to this degree? You see, we take notice of “after a court ruled that publishers can be liable for defamation in public comment sections and the social media firm refused to help it disable comments in the country”, so what happens when the public comments commence in http://www.cnn.com? The newsagent does have a website and lets face it, social media is not a place for news, it is a place for flames to bolster engagement, as such the part of “the social media firm refused to help it disable comments in the country” makes perfect sense. News leads to flames, flames leads to engagement and engagement leads to additional advertisement revenue which is the bread and butter of Facebook. I for one do not consider Facebook any kind of place for news, and if there is any, it is not place to comment there, I have a blog that does that and if there is a real reason to directly offer issues, they have an editorial and they have an email address (which tends to lead to the circular archive system). Flames are not now and mostly not ever useful, it only propagates the limelight of ones own ego.

So as we take notice of “defamation lawyers accusing Australia of not keeping up with technological change and noting the contrast with the United States and Britain where laws largely protect publishers from any fallout from comments posted online”, my issue here is that the posters of comments are also absent of accountability and there is a problem there. With “Australia is currently reviewing its defamation laws but in the meantime, other global news organisations, especially those that feel they can easily live without an Australian Facebook audience” we do see a truth, there is no need for ANY newsagent to be on Facebook, but that stifles the revenue of Facebook, does it not? And it is true, the world does not need the 25,000,000 people in Australia. Facebook has close to 3,000,000,000 members (read; near active accounts), so 25 million are not much of a dent, but it is a beginning. There is an upside for all newspapers to move away from Facebook, there is a downside as well. You see one place to flame all is a setting that rarely ever will lead to anything positive, but the newsagents all tend to think that it leads to revenue and for a few at times it might but there is a reason why I check WWW.BBC.CO.UK, theguardian.com, www.ft.com, www.reuters.com, www.aljazeera.com on a nearly daily basis and there are a few more (ABC, SBS, Arab News), you see the papers are still in levels of problems, the papers have to deal with bias, political siding, stakeholders and a few more and as I see the same article on a few sites I get a better view of the issue (that is when they do not directly copy and paste from Reuters). But I digress, it is about CNN and here we see that Reuters have two more gems to offer. The first is “We are disappointed that Facebook, once again, has failed to ensure its platform is a place for credible journalism and productive dialogue around current events among its users,” this from my point of view two issues, one is that Facebook is not a place for credible journalism, no matter how you slice it. Too many are in a stage to get traction and visitor revenue through flaming and through the incitement of flaming. And the second part is ‘productive dialogue’, there is no way in my mind that ANYTHING on Facebook will lead to that unless it is a closed circle of personal friends and family. The second gem is “defamation lawyers accusing Australia of not keeping up with technological change and noting the contrast with the United States and Britain”. It is a gem because it raises a few issues. It is not about technological change, it is about accountability. And we see close to nothing on that front from either the USA or the UK for that matter. There is also a larger stage that adhering to this on a much larger stage is a problem. Even though I will oppose the news mummy (Rupert Murdoch) on nearly every front, because I believe that he lost the plot on news and he is too much about flames and revenue (which is not entirely wrong for him). In this, the danger of flames depending issues and people, the danger becomes the house catches fire and that is not a good thing (newspapers burn really well). 

Until there is a real stage where the people on social media get hauled towards accountability this stage will not change and Facebook does not want change. The newspapers are close to zero in their consideration. It is about engagement to sell advertisement and so far Facebook has the upper hand. This is not meant good or bad, it is their business model and it works for them, yet over the years we see media look at places like Facebook and they all wonder if they can tap into this, First Google search, now Facebook and soon they will move beyond Twitter. Where next? Who can tell. Yet the Murdochs and Murdoch wannabe’s will continue because their newspapers are founded on the need to entice the people to flame, they have been at it for a long time in many places. So when Australia held Facebook liable Facebook closed the tap and they are entitled doing so. As such it is not “Facebook, once again, has failed to ensure its platform is a place for credible journalism and productive dialogue”, it is “Posters need to be held accountable for what they post, including posters of comments” and the law in many many nations are not ready or prepared to do that. Too many places rely on flames of all kinds. It is time to recognise that part of the equation.

In this consider a UK setting. In the first we see a statement (wiki) “The Daily Mirror, founded in 1903, is a British national daily tabloid-sized newspaper that is considered to be engaged in tabloid-style journalism”, here we see two parts ‘newspaper’, as well as ‘engaged in tabloid-style journalism’. Yet in another source we see “largely sensationalist journalism (usually dramatised and sometimes unverifiable or even blatantly false)” and it is a stage we see far too often. So in addition we have an image.

With the text “Big Brother’s Grace and Mikey expecting fourth child and say people think they are mad”, so it is a story about people, a woman who willingly received a penis into her vagina with a long term gift (36 weeks later). Now, I am happy for her, but is it news? This is not royalty, or people with global impact. And this is on the FRONT PAGE of the Daily Mirror (website), this is news? And here the problem starts, we agree that CNN is real news but the ledge that separates them from a place like the Daily Mirror is too small, moreover on places like Facebook too many people cannot tell the difference. In all this the one element (not) overlooked is the need for (actual) Newspapers to find ways to grow revenue, I do not oppose that, the problem is that other ways need to be found and in This they will find a better venue talking to places like Google then Facebook and that is before we see a new social media side in Amazon, because that option is mere inches away. 

When the people start realising that Facebook lost the edge is had, when they realise that true social media comes from places like https://cocoon.com Facebook will get hit after hit and there the people will be able to set a stage for what some spokespeople call ‘productive dialogue’, Google might have shut down its plus side, but it opens the realm for Amazon 

So it begins and it did not start in Australia, it did not start in censorship it started with the realisation that there is nothing to be gotten from flaming, there almost never was and that realisation will cause the loss of revenue in plenty of places.

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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 · 19:12

Sphere or Cube?

In continuation of yesterday, we have today. This is a direct consequence of time. Yet, that is not how some spin it and it is about spinning. In this we introduce Australia’s own spin master ACCC. They decided to inform us via the Guardian with ‘Google’s dominance of Australia’s online advertising needs to be reined in, says ACCC’, I personally wonder who they are speaking off (plenty of volunteers) but the article struck a chord, especially after what we saw today. I am not stating that limits should be drawn, I am not stating that the article is completely wrong. Yet the stage as it is painted does not add up, especially as some of the stakeholders are now in a stage where they painted themselves into corners. There is no real timeline here, because the article is actually quite good, but I am better (and a lot older). So let’s take you through the threads unravelling them one by one. Let’s be clear, there is no real lying here by the article writer. Yet when you see the unravelled strings, you might wonder how they got to this article. Time is the first element. The article is spun like it was a continuation of events, but it is not and more importantly the weavers seem driven to keep larger players Microsoft, Amazon and IBM out of the limelight. In light of this lets take a look at the article (at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/28/accc-calls-for-new-powers-to-rein-in-googles-dominance-of-australian-online-ads) and look at that first thread. 

The first thread is “Google’s takeover of ad companies, including DoubleClick and Admob, as well video platform YouTube, have helped to further solidify its position, the ACCC said” the fact that these companies became part of Google is not in question, the statement “takeover of ad companies” however is. You see, YouTube was bought in 2006. In 2005 it was launched as a “an American online video sharing and social media platform owned by Google”, the players here namely Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim became multimillionaires overnight. After a golden idea a year later was tossed for a little over $1,500,000,000. In this we get from Steve Chen himself “he was inspired by how the search giant monetised without hurting their users. “It translated over to Youtube as well. There are people that create content, view content and pay for content,” he said.” Take here that the operative part was “without hurting their users” and it is important. Look at personal video’s, look at reviews of hardware (Hero 10, PS5) review of books, games and music, even video’s of songs. It all benefits the people, all the people. It was created in 2005 and sold in 2006. It was not until 2008 when they gained 480p videos, AFTER Google acquired it. Thanks to GoPro and DJI we now see 4K movies of cities. In all this time there was no mention of advertisement, the corporate world was not ready and not prepared for YouTube. 

Double Click was pure advertisement, and even as it was founded in a basement (behind the washing machine) by Kevin O’Connor and Dwight Merriman. It offered technology products and services for a mere handful of advertisers that included Microsoft, General Motors, Coca-Cola, Motorola, L’Oréal, Palm, Inc., Apple Inc., Visa Inc., Nike, Inc., and Carlsberg Group, and this is important! So why is this important? You see DoubleClick was acquired by an equity firm named Hellman & Friedman. Basically a greed driven Wall Street player who saw that this would be worth something over time. And the two clients that DoubleClick had (Microsoft and Apple) never saw the potential, even as they were trying to break through in all the markets that Google had created, we see things like MSN Search, aQuantive and adCenter (renamed to Bing Ads) as well as Search Alliance (renamed to Yahoo! Bing Network). Microsoft used a 20 year old tactic, why create when you can acquire. Google acquired too but evolved the segments into behemoth, all whilst there is every chance that the Bing Network would be unable to properly identify the word ‘Behemoth’. A stage we do not see in the Guardian article because it raises too many questions. The one given part here is that only Google knew what it was doing, the rest merely tried to invoke invoices on the corporate world, Google tried to cater to the greatest denominator here, they tried to adhere to the needs of the seeker, the searcher, and as Steve Chen states “without hurting their users”, a stage that was a winning mixture and we do not see that in the ACCC spin, do we?

Then we get thread two “Rod Sims told Guardian Australia a key issue facing news sites and other users of ad tech is they did not know how much revenue ad tech providers like Google were making from each advertisement served up to readers”, in this I find ‘a key issue facing news sites’ as well as ‘they did not know how much revenue ad tech providers like Google were making from each advertisement’. It’s almost like hearing a toddler ask “these juggling tits, do they always provide milk?” In all this does it matter how much the advertiser makes? How often was this asked of Yellow pages or the advertisement moguls in New York? And it is important, because this hits Microsoft as well (Bing Ads, or Microsoft Advertising) Google was upfront in this, they even made it public in their documentation. “No matter how much you bid, you are only charged $0.01 more than the previous winner”, so if we see the bids $12, $9, $2.36, and $0.99 number three pays $1.00, number two pays $1.01 and number one pays $1.02, not $12. A setting NO advertisement company EVER offered, it was all about how much they could rake in and in their defence a system like this was not possible before the digital age. More important, the digital innovators (Google) took that step from day one (well, almost day one). A customer facing setting that prolongs the visibility of marketing departments because they can advertise more and longer, a stage they never faced before, yet the Guardian never touches on that, do they? It was all about the threat that the friends of the ACCC see, not what we actually experience. Oh, and when it comes to advertisement. Why is there no mention of Facebook, or Amazon for that matter? 

The article gives us that there needs to be a border and there should be limits, but is that up to the ACCC? 

So when we see “if you want to block certain companies advertising on your website, it’s very hard to do that through Google” there is a choice, do not advertise on your website, or get your own channel, and, oh…. Here is a thing, Google states “To give you editorial control over the ads that may appear on your site, AdSense offers several options for reviewing and blocking ads. There are various reasons why you might not want certain ads to show on your site. You may have content or business reasons, or philosophical issues. Maybe you have a vegan food blog and you don’t want to show an ad for a steakhouse”, as I personally see it Sims engaged in some forms of non truths (aka lies). And that is the beginning of a much larger station. The ACCC is the BS caterer of their friends and the Guardian did exactly what it was told to do, not inform us but to perpetrate issues that are not really there. And the entire article gives no mention of AdSense at all, why is that? It might not fit the needs of the ACCC, does it?

Consider what you are offered and vet the information, it is important that you do, you are given a pile of goods that are glued together, a setting of 10.000 cubes, glued together so that we see a sphere, but is it a sphere? I will let you decide.

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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 27, 2021 · 04:43

Stark contrast

There is an old ‘expression’, The people will rally against the injustice of children, yet for the most, only if it hurts THEIR children. It is a saying that most people ignore because there is a string of pain, the realisation that the need of ‘me’ overrules the need for all. And guess what, Apple joined those ranks a while ago. We see BBC News headlines (last year) like “Ricky Gervais slams Apple over Chinese factories” and we laugh, but the pain is a lot more real than you think. There is an ignored side and there Apple does not seem to give an ‘eff’ (as long as the revenue comes in. It is there advertisement section, the one that is ‘hidden’ in games. Games that give an advertisement and that is OK, but then they take you STRAIGHT to the installation page. Where did we sign up for that? And this is not some innocent ‘barbie game’ this is how pokie and gambling sites assault the weary and the vulnerable. They take the game and the problem to a whole new level. You see, the ad is not the real issue. The issue becomes when you want to close the window and the super-small ‘X’ that closes the window is in the top left corner, and if you miss it, the excuse will be ‘We assumed you wanted the program’, but the close icon is small enough to miss it way too often.

So not only is Apple setting a stage, they are doing this in the setting of “We do not want any issues in the schools where OUR children go, we do not care about the rest” it is a stage that is speculative, but consider the impact. How many children get exposed to that part? And they are not alone, there is more and more out there coming to all of us regarding a ‘game’ named coin master. Even if it has an ad with Joan Collins. In Change dot org (and a few other places) we see messages like “I have been playing coin master for about 8 months and saved up all my coins and spins and spent a fortune on the game then one day i open up my game and the 117billion coins i had and 22,000 spins are gone , i had been reset , apparently coin master are reseting accounts with high savings which is against their own rules because they cannot tell the difference between people who play honest and the cheaters”, now this is a setting of accusation that require data and evidence and I do not have any myself. But coin master is important as it is not only vying for your cash (which is fair enough). It is combining with the ‘sentiment and acceptance’ of pokies, but what we see is not a pokie, it is a game that looks like a pokie and there we see a problem. The makers were decently brilliant, but there is a new stage, “what looks like one” is not the same as one actually is and the makers are in the clear and there is a larger station where it is happening under the noses of Apple (and a few other places), but there the stage is not protective, because it is as I paraphrased “in the schoolyard where we see no Apple employees” so no one at apple seems to care. So when we take a look at some media that give us ‘Complaint Website Flooded By Angry Coin Master Players’ we think that there is a case for action, but that article is almost 2 years old, as such they are doing something really really right or Apple just does not give a hoot (or is that hooters) about their consumers? And the stage is rapidly getting larger. Deceptive conduct (like the gardenscape ads), several ads all showing something that the game does not have, or perhaps in some obscure mini game. And the people are getting less and less choice, because the in game advertisements are seemingly not policed. 

And Apple (Facebook and Google too) needs to start acting. 

And here is the rub, we might see the complaints, yet the game was downloaded in extent to 100,000,000 times, so their app will hold what Apple might see as a remarkable advertisement magnet, and there is the problem, when an app becomes too big too fail there is every chance that the three players will not act in fear of driving people to one of the other two channels, but in the mean time your children are just in danger, because if an app (or game) like ‘Happy Color’ can spout these two advertisements, what other apps will expose your children to the dangers of gambling? 

And consider the start contrast hat Forbes is trying to give us (at https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2021/09/04/ios-15-apple-just-revealed-a-game-changing-new-iphone-privacy-feature/) a mere 3 weeks ago. There we saw “We already knew iOS 15 would come with multiple privacy features that will further hurt the data-hungry habits of Google and Facebook. But now, Apple has just revealed that iPhone users will finally get a choice whether to enable Apple’s own personalised ads on their devices” yet, how does that fare for the in-game advertisements? The Forbes article does not bare that out and I feel decently certain that Apple (Facebook and Google too) is not willing to put the foot down there. So in the end how much danger are your children in when they play a ‘free’ app? Consider that nothing is for free and a player like Coin Master makes on average $24,000,000 a month. I did not look into the revenue of Lightning Link, but that is clearly a pokie, so it is clear gambling. The problem there is that kids might not understand the difference. So you thought EA games was pushing a setting? I think parents have bigger problems and in this Apple (Facebook and Google too) have a much bigger problem protecting the vulnerable and that is something the media seemingly tends to shy away from a little too eagerly in my books. This whilst somewhere in February this year we saw ‘Apple slapped with class action suit over gambling apps’ where we also see “according to plaintiffs, users are unable to collect actual cash in the casino games, but they do have the ability to win and therefore acquire more playing time. This system — paying money for a chance to win more playing time — allegedly violates anti-gambling laws in the 25 states at issue in the case” and that is only the US setting, Apple et al could have stopped this by blocking that stage but it seems they were eager to get more cash, so even as some would voice “The people who play, are literally paying to kill time”, it is a point of view that is fair enough in some cases, but the advertisements seen are using the little tricks to get a few more vulnerable players into their fold and that is a larger station. If there was a much larger ‘X’ in the advertisement they might have been in the clear, but they did not and moreover they take you STRAIGHT to the app installation page whilst the sentiment to do so was not there. A stage of deception a few times over and there will be a larger invoice for all the players allowing for this. In a stage where political players all over the field are gunning for their coffers these players did something really stupid, they are making it easy to gun for them and when the politicians get to use the cards ‘gambling’, ‘vulnerable people’ and ‘easy exploit’ together (optionally in one sentence), places like Apple (et al) will be handed a fine that could end up being considerably larger than the $1,200,000,000 fine they faced in march. 

These players see it as mere parking fines. The fines are tax deductible, the 100,000,000 downloads seem to validate a speculative advertisement revenue of $10,000,000 a day in just ONE APP and that is the stage, if the case only takes 2 years, the players are looking at an optional $7,000,000,000 in advertisement revenue, the people do not stand a chance to get a fair shake here, so where can they go?

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