Chasing the GDPR hippo

As I was reminded of the ‘Kill the Hippo’ meme, I realised its application is valid in specific circumstances, too.
Where the Hippo is of course here. And the application that I was thinking of, is here.
Not this one, that may stay where appropriate (which is much less than always)…

No, your Usual Suspect isn’t the CEO or whatever, and suggesting the CISO is just a pun, but … the lawyer(s) involved…
All you have to do, is take a look at their billing rates. And at the hippo-original abbrev meaning (sometimes, even the original meaning outright qua looks but in the most-expensively-dressed-in-the-room version, hopefully?) — pointing at the need to not listen to them as the most effective way to deal with the issue(s) at hand since they may on occasion (50,1%++) have the least useful insights to bring to the table…

Oh well. I’ll leave you with:

[Dead straight, according to your lawyer. Cromhouthuis Ams]

Where’s F Fatigue ..?

Considering the fatigue seen everywhere re fake news, about all that is out there is called into question.
Which led me to search for a meme that just swirled into my mind: ‘Facebook Fatigue’. Boy did I think that could be quite some recent development, with the brag about ‘users’ (meant to mean ‘addicts’; the brag being towards ad salesmen as street corner suppliers, and investors as proceeds rippers ..?) being at something over 1.8B or so.
Boy was I wrong. Already in 2008 … And 2012, and 2015, and since …

When you try the same thing over and over again, and expect different results, you will!

Update later: This here; QED.

Now, where did ‘Newconomy’ go ..?

So there is hope. And there is:

[Paint your castle – is such a hass’le; Dublin C]

Panoptic business

Recently, I heard the gross error of thinking again “When people use their business IT for private purposes, they have no right to privacy” – rightly countered from the room that standing European law most clearly has the opposite: Employer has zero rights to see anything unless there’s prior evidence of some malfeasance or malfunctioning (e.g., performance problems – of the employee, not of the infra…). So, blanket or categorical surveillance (or blocking, which presupposes monitoring how the heck else would you detect the to-be-blocked URLs..!?): No sir.

What about the recent spat where a bank blocked Netflix because employees’ use of it at home, using company laptops that Citrixed back to the bank and from there onward, overloaded networks of sad (typo not said, intended to characterise the) bank? Well, a. how dumb can you be to Netflix over Citrix etc, or is one so incredibly cheap (hey, works at bank; apart from the exceptions you know, go figure) that bandwidth cost is an issue? Then maybe you’re too scroogy to be allowed to wok at a bank in the first place; monumental failure of ethics wise, b. in this case, clearly there are performance issues – when it’s noticable on the company network level, certainly it goes for a number of individuals, even if only by disturbing the performance (bandwidth availability) of others. c. there’s no absolutes in what employers cannot do.

But clearly, in just about every case considered today where categorical blocking by blacklisting would be attempted because managers sideways involved in HR stuff would understand what the URL is about, i.e., not-business-related entertainment however SFW or N-, skipping the blacklisting of the really to be blacklisted sites (torrents, malware shops and other rogue tooling),
we have again the panopticon argument of “observation changes behaviour” – and in these times of clueless managers (the less they know that of themselves, the worse cases they are!), you need in particular those ‘users’/employees that go beyond monkey typing away to be creative in their work and find new revenu / cost reduction directions. Which means that when you observe, or only log to be able to observe, you squelch productivity and profitability… Way to go!

Oh, and:

[Not the one mentioned above; HypoVereins München on a heat-hazy day]

AI learning to explain itself

Recently, there was news again that indeed, ABC (or The ‘Alphabet’ Company Formerly Know As Google) was developing AI that could improve itself.
O-kay… No sweat, or sweat, qua bleak future for humankind, but …
Can the ‘AI’ thus developing itself, maybe be turned first to learn how to explain itself ..? Then, this [incl link therein!] will revert to the auditors’ original of second opinions … Since the self-explanatory part may very well be the most difficult part of ‘intelligence’, benefitting the most from the ( AI improving itself )2 part or what?

And:

[Improving yourself as the imperative; Frank Lloyd Wright’s Beth Sholom at Elkins Park, PA]

Autoflexelec

Oh (not like here though supported) when will EVs be useful? Like, being available with diesel range (1000kms, seriously! I seriously need that) and station car luggage space (660/1950ℓ – yes really need that, too), at a fair price (which is 2nd hand, not even a fifth of what 40%-featurematching EVs go for today).

No, I’m not going electric today because EVs will get better in a couple of years. I’m not going to waste buckets of money and opportunities by sitting out those years with a severely underperforming car. If others do that; that’s their bad decisions.
But wait; there’s hope around the corner (of the Cobra, Málaga–Ronda and v.v. kind): When we have electric (?) autonomous trucking sometime soon (like Big T is proposing or already developing), the results might be scaled down to anything in the range, in due time. And/or current auto-elecs are scaled up considerably. Squashing my own hope, this will take a couple of years.

By lack of proper alternatives, trying to do away with fully functional transport, is an attempt to hinder the due functioning of society; to be categorised as illegal.

I rest my case. And:

[Once upon a time, in a world far, far away (i.e., not so far Valencia), training was Fashionable]

Bringing back symmetry/-ia

Some issues, aspects of interest, collided a couple of weeks ago.
Macron’s team with their skillful double-cross deceit in the ‘leakage’ of election-sensitive info (!read the linked and weep over your capabilities re that, or click here for (partial?) solutions or others or devise your own).   One down, many to go; Win a battle, not win a war yet.
In unrelated (not) news, what are the tactics used IRL to actively engage in pre-battle tactics? Can we plant our own systems with scar (?) tissue i.e. fake immunised (for us!) / unused information that is weaponised with trail collecting (or only source-revealing) capabilities, like shops and private persons can get “DNA” spray paint thus called because it’s uniquely coded so is identifiable and traceable? Can we harbour ‘hidden sleeper (?) cells’, pathogens i.e. malware, that doesn’t affect us but when ‘leaked’ to an adversary’s environment / stolen, oh boy does it become virulently active and destruct? (Silent) tripwires, boobytraps where are you?
How far behind the curve are the general public (us, I) with intel on developments in these areas? If the French used some of this stuff (using is revealing, qua tactics, unfortunately) certainly others would have considered the methodologies involved. Raises questions indeed, as were around, about whether or not the cyrillic traces were planted into WannaCry1.0 or left there in error. [There’s no such thing as perfect Opsec but this would severely hurt some involved at the source / would’ve cared better, probably.]

Just so we can get a better view on the balance being shaken up so vehemently, between asymmetric simpleton hacks [the majority you know (like, you actually can learn about; the real majority you may not hear about) of big organisations with their huge attack surfaces and attackers only needing one pinhole] and more-or-less regaining-symmetric nation-state attacks against each other (all against all) where the arms’ race of tooling now is so out of balance.

Would like to know, for research purposes only of course, really.

We’ll see. And:
[Yes that’s real gold dust on the façade hiding in plain sight, but you wouldn’t be able to scrape it off. Would you? Toronto]

No Dutch AI

How far behind is the Dutch (startup) scene with AI ..?
That may seem kurt, but …
Really there is no sign of Dutch AI industry or even industriousness.

Unbefitting the Dutch, is it not? ‘We’ should have all the brains needed, the industriousness, the venturing spirit, the openness to things-new.
But apparently, ‘we’re still stuck in collectivist ideals, where rocking the boat is only allowed when for some naïve progress [Uhm this is no sligh to Boyan Slat; on the contrary I and everyone likes his ideas and heart and soul he puts into it]. When searching for ‘Dutch AI scene, hardly anything turns up. This among the hardly search results; ominously.

So, it’s a Shame. And Why ..!?
Yes I did list some why’s but they don’t cut it, against the Aye’s. We need a new élan! How to get such a thing going!?
And:
[If that is the neo-modernistest that you build / apparently want to spend your money on, then well you may be doomed indeed; Zuid-As Ams]

Visual on socmed shallowness

When considering the senses, is it not that Visual (having come to ther play rather late in evolution or has it but that’s beside the point, is it?) has been tuned to ultrahigh-speed 2D/3D input processing ..? Like, light waves particles who are you fooling? happen to be the fastest thing around, qua practical human-scale environmental signals – so far, yeah, yeah… – and have been specialised to be used for detection of danger all around, even qua motion at really high pace (despite the 24-fps frame blinking).
Thus the question arises: What sense would you select, when focusing on shallow processing of the high-speed response type? Visual, indeed. Biologically making it less useful for deep thought and connection, etc.

Now that the world has turned so Visual (socmed with its intelligence-squashing filters, etc.; AR/VR going in the same direction of course), how could we expect anything else that the Shallows ..? Will we not destroy by negative, non-re inforcement, human intelligence and have only consumers left at the will of ANI/ASI ..?

Not that I have the antidote… Or it would be to Read, and Study (with sparse use of visual, like not needing sound bite sentences but some more structured texts), and do deep, very deep thinking without external inference.
But still… Plus:

[An ecosystem that lives off nanosecond trading – no need for human involvement so they’re cut out brutally; NY]

Making yourself less and less special

Over the last couple of decades, we have seen a rather disturbing development. Negative multipliers.
Where the ‘trickle down’ economies have been proven to be the lies that they were assessed to be but no-one listened because the truth already then was buried in the impostor-syndrome shouting of the powerful (not: autorities; they hadn’t any, not: leaders; they didn’t) that were on their way to prove Piketti correct (despite the nitpicky critiques, he was and is; facts overwhelm secondary/tertiary methodology issues). But this is a digression.

Where, moreover, and foremost, sites, platforms, apps, that tried to ‘cut out the middle men’ by brokering themselves … did all a disfavour.
It started with banks et al., once the epitome of the service industries. A large part of the manual processing was transferred to masses of clients. E.g., transactions entry. Left to masses, millions, of unspecialised users thus costing those users millions of man (sic) hours, still today — ad having saved banks much, much less labour costs as management of the processes, coaching the users and systems etc., grew a little and the cheapest categories of labour only saw some cuts.
So, all are worse off, some more than average, and little was saved or made any more efficient or so. All this was sold as Progress and improvement.

This falsehood has been copied into the app world. Where e.g., real estate agents/brokers, are being cut out by self-service apps. Which means less agents/brokers, that were specialised in what they did hence could do it efficiently and earn themselves part of the savings that accrued to the sellers, buyers, since they outsourced their sides in the process not for nothing. The clients, they could earn a living and make enough to provide the brokers with an income. From which the baker could be paid; the baker could pay the butcher, the butcher could pay the supermarket clerk (indirectly), etc.etc.etc. — your classical definition of multiplier effects.
Now that everywhere, not only are people bound to do all sorts of business to which they weren’t accustomed let alone trained, thus losing valuable opportunity to remain specialised i.e., make the most money of their expertise hence had the most available (hum, more or less I know) to multiply (in an economic sense, you pervert mind),
but also numerous links in the multiplier chains are cut out, turning the positive multiplier chains into negative job loss – spend cut chains. It even brings secondary/tertiary markets to life, even when it’s about almost-no-human business…

But will the 0.1% care ..? Not likely.
So we’re doomed. Or ..?

And:

[No time, money to go flaner anymore; M’drid]

Profiling the politics of the GDPR

When looking up the definition of ‘politics’, no-one can escape the notion that it regards something-choice or in any form the application of power to make decisions applying to all members of a group.
When looking up what leeways for profiling there is in the GDPR, even when so completely fellow-traveller-like as e.g., here [apart from the many, many more errors of logical reasoning, of thought, and of morality and ethics in that piece], the special category of data immediately springs to mind … that is about political opinion – representing the individuals’ autonomy in matters of choice. As any behaviour in public of said individuals is a matter of display of preference qua conduct in social affairs. As hence anything that has to do with profiling [even if only for the mundane making decisions of what ads to show to certain groups or not; abstracting even from the right (…) to have a human in the loop, seriously], has to do with political preferences.

Where is the field of study, by the way [not so much; rather a both parallel and intertwined track], of metadata and inference being special2 categories of data, not requiring consent but should’ve been outlawed per se ..?

Plus:

[Artful bars, but suppressing; Brittas Museum London]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord