Now, biting my nails awaiting delivery …
Blog
(Old) New non-app
For those that see the world as coming to an end i.e. have a slight dislike for the popularity of apps and their users in particular, there’s hope of sorts in e.g., this.
As not all the world has in an instant gone from a salon socialiste ideal of ultracommunal discussion groups to hyperindividualistic eyes-glued-to-mobile-millennials (and younger…).
On the contrary, there are some signals that rebounds happen in all sorts of places. Children (can we lose the downright ugly ‘kids’, please ..!?) seem to still want to go out and play (big-if their parents aren’t ridiculously fearful, to be found out to not have an own life), and new media are made part of, not all of, their lives.
Also, the older ones, the ones that actually with their own hands built all the new gadgetry from the (scientific and artisanal) ground up, seem to adopt whatever is to their liking. Picking, cherry-picking, not losing themselves in uncritical slavery. This is what the above link demonstrates…: The Old may return, and be valued by all ages for what it stood and stands for. The feelz, that no ASI can emulate yet. Where humanity would seek refuge, calm and a sense of purpose; ‘robots‘ [oh dang HTML play nice with the ” and anchors! (sic, below)] outdoing us in the mundane.
No, no melancholy! Or so. Just positives. E.g., why would people still travel so much when the vast part of the experience can be streamed online? Including the standard holiday pics. Why would anyone care whether you’ve actually been there, and done that? Where ‘that’ was purposefully created for tourists only… And:
[“If you wanna second class, dip a ring for it”; the Yard, MD]
De administratie is van geen van allen … [Dutch]
Was triggered by this here article, as read in het Parool but repubd – and deserves republication in many more places. Yes it’s in Dutch unfortunately, as I don’t think the problem is exclusive but it may be tearjerkingly worse and exposed here…
Waar nog bijkomt dat een flink aantal (?-tot-100%) ‘bestuurders’ nog steeds in de illusie leven dat ze iets ‘besturen’ en dan ferme besluiten nemen, met de vuist op tafel slaan zelfs, en dat er vervolgens niks gebeurt. Helemaal niets. Het ‘besluit’ was immers de prestatie *quod non* en de uitvoering, tsja, dat is voor het lagere volk. Daar ga je je niet mee bezighouden. Terwijl het besluit zó ver los staat van de werkelijkheid lees implementeerbaarheid (op wat voor manier dan ook; taalgebrabbel los van normale praktijk, met bij voorbaat zeker gierend budgetgebrek) dat niemand zich waagt het op te pakken. Dus *gebeurt* er niks…
Als je dat maar eventjes stil kan houden (fijne wensmanagementrapportages in bestuursjargon ja We Zijn Nu Eens Echt Goed Bezig Met Actiemaken maar niet heus), dan is het Na Ons De Zondvloed. De naam ‘Asscher’ gaat rond in het Groene-artikel. Wel goed dat er een enquête komt! (of al voorbij is gezucht zonder dat iemand er erg in had). En oh wat goed dat die wordt gehouden door dezelfde in-crowd; dan weet je zeker dat er iets echts uit gaat komen..! </sarcasme>(?)
Maar ja, er schijnen zelfs nog mensen te zijn die werkelijk denken dat we in een democratie leven. Als de facto een pak ‘m beet 0,0001% van de stemgerechtigde bevolking uitmaakt op wie je überhaupt kán stemmen en geen enkele partij de moeite neemt om te zorgen dat je het met meer dan maar 30% van de standpunten eens kan zijn (waar de rest persoonlijke hobbietjes zijn; belastingmiljardenverslindend en vaak nutteloos) met een persoonlijke aansprakelijkheid van nihil, terwijl “dan richt je toch zelf een politieke partij op” niet kán werken, ja dan heb je een echte democratie hoor ..!
Passend:
[Actual government, direct; tranquil reflection on that]
Unknown Stats
Just as an intermission; this. QQ, QZone ..? Good to (learn to) know (them), if only to wake us up to the classic-Western-world bias some may have…
That’s all for now. Your conclusions are valid, almost as valid as mine, in the limit. This:
[Oh how glorious, brilliant, radiant (… you know …); and Central
If you wondered why the vertical warp: dunno, probably just WordPress’ error …]
First take on 10
… Oh I didn’t mean to mean actual #first, just that the dust clouds around the official Win10 launch should have subsided and the first indicators of near-future trends should have become clear.
’cause I recall this tweet (?) about some peer that posted: at home, ten years ago (M$) PCs were for business and Macs for fun and now things had changed around but started to reverse again. And I wondered — are there indicators that this would be a trend, due to Win10 ..?
That wouldn’t do much for M$ as the basic first …(double digit)% of business machines still did run on, well, maybe not quite NT-to-XP but still something theirs, and Macs had made some in-roads (in design corners) but not much, and the explosion that caused a relative decline of M$ had been on Other platforms on Other devices. But if we now see Eple demand-push retreating from such a still very, very important market, it makes it, more than before (?) a narrowly-focused operator. Which is fine, in its own right, as the co would have to (innovation-)play on many less fields concurrently than M$ — that still is on anything from desktop, mobile, OS, software of a bewildering variety, business services (cloud et al), gaming world, etc.etc. how do they retain the overview and innovative power everywhere ..?
Anyway; we’ll see… And:
[Nothing special, NO! edits; just a camera test at Noordwijk beach]
#ditchcyber CSI, this was real
A quote, a post:
This is a story of a very high-tech kidnapping:
FBI court filings unsealed last week showed how Denise Huskins’ kidnappers used anonymous remailers, image sharing sites, Tor, and other people’s Wi-Fi to communicate with the police and the media, scrupulously scrubbing meta data from photos before sending. They tried to use computer spyware and a DropCam to monitor the aftermath of the abduction and had a Parrot radio-controlled drone standing by to pick up the ransom by remote control.
The story also demonstrates just how effective the FBI is tracing cell phone usage these days. They had a blocked call from the kidnappers to the victim’s cell phone. First they used an search warrant to AT&T to get the actual calling number. After learning that it was an AT&T prepaid Trakfone, they called AT&T to find out where the burner was bought, what the serial numbers were, and the location where the calls were made from.
The FBI reached out to Tracfone, which was able to tell the agents that the phone was purchased from a Target store in Pleasant Hill on March 2 at 5:39 pm. Target provided the bureau with a surveillance-cam photo of the buyer: a white male with dark hair and medium build. AT&T turned over records showing the phone had been used within 650 feet of a cell site in South Lake Tahoe.
Here’s the criminal complaint. It borders on surreal. Were it an episode of CSI:Cyber, you would never believe it.
Just to remind you; it’s not all APTs only that hit you. Here, it was ‘just’ hardcore kdnapping. And think about victims of false … [fill in your favourite of the four horsemen of computer crime and colour the picture] accusations alone: Defamation by the clueless, works at much longer terms, and maybe more effectively. Nothing progressive, innovative, disruptive about that… And:
[Yes that is the First Flag – government project: (i.e.) unfinished]
Golden Oldie Pic Of The Day
A sobering thought
Actually, not one but a great many sobering thoughts, in this great piece: What They Don’t Teach You in “Thinking Like the Enemy” Class. In a high-quality series.
To which one might add … not too much. Maybe the 100%-is-infeasible line, and Schneier’s Return of the Security (is..?) Theatre trope. Oh, and the one that has still taken far too little root; the deperimetrisation-means-you-need-to-focus-on-information-not-the-fortress aspect that has been around for a decade already but still has hardly been implemented properly.
Or, we redesign the world. Somehow, we need to get into the mindsets of the global populace – that so far hasn’t been standardised to any degree; happily! for cultural diversity hence overall societal flexibility, development and progress … – to accept that after human development was pushed by physical wars for all of its existence so far, we have arrived at a new round of warfare innovation. After the man-to-man (sic) manual combat, and the ethically despicable practice of not even seeing the Other in the eye individually that gunpowder brought on – glossing over the trebuchet-and-others long-distance hurtling and archers’ reach –, we are now engaging not only in drone-led warfare (distance being even greater), but also in this: humans not being the soldiers anymore; that part being taken over by the robot. By which I don’t mean humanoid robots – why even bother – nor masses of stand-alone AI. But rather, unembodied A(S)I that operates on any platforms together, creating resilience not by numbers of clones but by moving swiftly over servers by having been virtualised at various levels of conceptuality, as they are compounded-mem complexes battling each other evolutionarily. And still aiming at humans.
…? Well, what’s the purpose, otherwise ..!?
Which is far off from where this post started. And foregoing the intermediary step I wanted to write up; where ideas cleverly capture (numb, dumb?) people and ‘ideologies’ fight each other for global dominance. With all sorts of ‘neat’ (quod non) tricks. But [w|h]ell… and this:
[All humans removed from picture. Naturally]
You, me, and ASI; the difference
Before we forget: Why some don’t see how ASI would surpass AGI and humankind, is that humankind has not learned to work together in all the time humans have existed in groups beyond the first few Dunbar numbers (2, 8, 20, 50). Which means we humans spend the most delicate thought and most thinking energy on the operations and tactics of working together, before the ‘external’ task can be solved if at all. Where ASI would have no trouble having all human culture combined into one processing faculty already, hence think-acting at a level of all humankind in concert, or beyond. We have external response flexibility, ASI has that covered internally with an n-dimensional external surface, n possibly > 4.
Deep-think that one over. And:
[Indeed, one section. Goes for all of your brain’s work, too]
Still valid; MIS is a Mirage
Somehow, some neurons fired that sublimed into a thought about John Dearden’s MIS is a Mirage, of 1972 … Turns out I’m not the only one who thinks it’s still very much valid today. As e.g., here. Oh, the insights that run in deep undercurrents throughout today’s management- and other fads…!
But, once ASI comes along … Then at last, MIS can do without the, then relative but still, stupidity of mankind. Or ..?
[No pic today. Post too short. First, you study the article at length!]
