Tag: collateral sustainability

Museum of Software Mainstays of Yore ..?

The ‘terrible’ news (not) that Flash is about to be abandoned by one of its last if not the last pillar of support, reminds me of similar ‘developments’ of the past. Like, where did Dynamic HTML go ..? DEC, Sun (Sparc), Compaq, WordPerfect, Norton Utilities, 9-pin matrix printers, bulletin boards, portals. Etc.etc. Yes, yes, I know, some are still around, like OpenVMS is. And in software in particular, there may be many, many more of the lost ark items – where I’d like to see more focus on. Are they valued enough, for their staying power ..? Isn’t their staying a bit exasperated, in some dark corners of the usage landscape ..?
But more importantly (it is); is there some museum or so out there that preserves them for prosperity? I don’t mean just any ‘computer museum’ as they are (all?) of the scattershot type. I mean some museum that captures most of the essentials of the already many eras past, in IT. Like What the Dormouse Said is on paper, but then in software, running, and presenting systems as end users would experience them, a decade, two decades, -plus, ago. Without smartphones, without fastest Internet let alone actually working WiFi.

Edited to add, before scheduled posting: This, on a farewell to ‘screen savers’.

So, if you’d have some pointers, please..?

[Edited to add: A chunk of the above, here.]

Thanks in advance through:

[Once (??) was modern; Madrid]

Collaborative economy

Just a shout-out for some positive initiative, indicative of what you too, could do qua collaborative economy…: This, for all your poetry in business, in particular when you’re Dutch. Which might be an oxymoron of sorts, semantically…
Whatever. Just sponsor …

Plus:
[Past poetry in 3D; Zuid-As Ams]

Don’t lower the bridge … Wait.

Would it impact you when I told you that the world’s mountains all are getting lower..?
Because that is what results from global warming. Ice melts. Sea levels rise. The zero-level is that sea level (average), right? So any distance up from a risen mark, will be smaller. QED.

Or we’ll have to start measuring from some, fixed in some improbable way, sea bottom / land point but that may not be so easy, and as said also not fixed enough. And/or the earth’s shape may change, either being more perfectly round or moving the opposite way, more 3D-elliptoid. What will happen to the rotational speed of the earth? Will we have more that 24 hours in a day, to work ..? Dynamics, tensions in the earth’s crust, etc… all is flux, nothing is stationary: Heracleitos was very, very right.

If time slows down, we might live longer. Or time relativity, or we’ll not be able to live on this earth. Or …

And:
[Heat haze will be, and the fish will swim…; Barça]

M, and A, and G, D, P and R

Now that you have finally got something going qua GDPR compliance – way short of what you’d want but still, at least something, better than the Nothing to which you were limited so far – there is a new twist to the requirements…
To be clear; by now you should at least have the requirements clear, and also possibly have some upsides lined up (if not, go shop with some vendor consultancy (and others); they’ll tell you about the benefits of data minimisation, the unstress of having your house on order, etc.). And have something going qua reconnaissance, though not armed recce or recattack.

But now, you may have to rethink. A bit. About what you’d have to have prepared when you land in M&A territory, or even in Chapter 7/11/13- (and 9-!) or any glocal receivership. Because … well, the idea sprang from this thing with de-anonymising data from sperm banks (in NL); until now most highly classified secrets (qua donorship). Turns out that not all clinics have the old data, still, because previously the secret was to be eternal hence best secured by throwing away the data.
But more seriously, not all clinincs exist anymore and there is no way to know where the data went, if anywhere.

And that’s where you organisation comes in. Not qua LoB but qua existence, now and in the future. Will you buy, take over, integrate some other org, or be on the receiving (uh…) end of the turmoil? You may want to make sure that the “GDPR” record of the other party is impeccable… Or end up with a mixed compliance bag which is equal to no compliance…
Possibly, you may have to prepare for some form of end-of-organisational-life where there is no body to take over your data and you might have to prepare for that ..?

Well, we’ll see what WG29 comes up with. At least, it will be additional stuff.
Plus:
[In a weird twist of interpretation, this complex of buildings could have housed a private bank of said kind…; Sevilla BTW]

Solar panels, water, plants

Wasn’t it that through carefully placed cloth, one could capture night’s (?) air moisture in a desert?
What if we could use solar panels to provide the shade underneath which, such moisture is catured, and/or immediately applied to plants (crop!) growing straught under the panels, so they survive due to temparatures not boiling them but being in the shade, they’re OK and can provide food and income, whilst providing electricity to … the rest of the world ..? Plant up the Sahara!

On a related note; how much desert surface woud one need, to a. lessen the world’s dependence on oil quickly by turning to the electricity generated, b. cooling the earth straight away by not letting the soil be heated by the sun but soaking up that heat in the panels, into … right.

And/or, whatddabout using the electricity to desalinate sea water, providing clean drinking/plant water to any land even remotely close to the sea ..?

Note that we would probably not need the latest, most expensive solar panels; cheap ones with “low” efficiency will do when sun is abundant. Could one bootstrap a factory that makes solar panels on the sort-of spot, using the electricity generated by some seed panels? Maybe not many, by #jobs-generated, too. Or have a look at this, though maybe a coupled, on-grid thing may scale even better.

And then, there’s this. Paint that generates hydrogen fuel — burn it, and you have clean water and (the heat to, if you’d need that) power engines. All in one; bring it on!

Also, creating less drought-related wars (as they are, all around! fact.), less mass people deplacements, refugees, -disasters (what they are, almost always), etc.

One can dream and/or ask, right? I just would want to see estimates – possibly they could be interesting to investors…

Oh, and:
[Less global heating, less washed-up pirates; Dutch coastline ;-]

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]

GDPR is just a legal attempt at Y2k

Suddenly I realised, as one who profited handsomely (not in money but in perks’ way), that the whole GDPR compliance thingy is becoming quite similar, all too similar, to the hype that was called The Millennium Problem … too bad we now know how that ended, otherwise an illustrative movie could be made of the latter – now only (?) a documentary review is worthwhile, as history writing. Too bad it isn’t out in the open that despite all efforts then made, actually quite a lot of companies ended up having to hire temps to do all sorts of manual corrections in their administrations due to e.g., spreadsheets [the very things the toughest, most important business decisions hinged, and still hinge on!] going heywire over date fields.

To come back to the Issue … Are you not hit by that, almost sudden, avalanche of GDPR compliance warnings lately, like, the past couple of weeks ..? Is it not a warning that you need to do loads of things now, starting with hiring consultants (call to action; they’re Sales messages of course) this time not of the tech kind – engineers that see a problem, craft a solution and we’re done –, but of the legal kind – profiting only from prolongation of your insecurity.

And ah, there’s the snag! Multifaceted it is;

  • One: With some deadline suitably near to instill fear of lurking deadlines but suitably far to be able to still write you up with many, many ticks (per 6 or 3 minutes ..!?) at ridiculous rates, will be written;
  • Two: Unlike the patching that was the core solution (after Inventory – you did keep that in appropriate order in your wide-scope CMDB ever after 31/12/00, right ..? Even with some global outpost in the corner writing that down as 12/31/00. What stupid value loss if you didn’t! We’re only 17 years on! Did you really think legacy problems would have gone away by now …!?), we now see there is no solution but just getting compliant with all sorts of stupidly unprofitable, inefficient (and might we add, ineffective! yes if you are realistic, that’s what it is) good-for-nothing overhead;
  • Three: The good-for-nothing part — maybe not fully nothing, but oh so limitedly good for anything that you should’ve done already long ago not only for any ‘privacy’ compliance but for effective and efficient IT, -security included.

Following on this Lotus list, indeed there’s a lot of work to be done to become compliant … on the Legal side. On the IT side maybe also, but what needs to be done there, is (re)implementation of sound practices that should have been common daily practice anyway, and when implemented as such, ready; done.

The legal side on the other hand, sees all sorts of enduring challenges, like many cultural changes; no leaning back and await questions for advice to be answered out of hand with “It depends…” / “Come with a proposed solution and I’ll tell you whether it may or may not be permissible”, but for once being actively engaged and delivering definitive answers, and designing, implementing, and carrying out your (Legal) selves reams of procedural stuff. Acting on assessments, acting in communications, acting in control(s), etc.

You get it — the GDPR brings many problems for many organisations, the biggest of the problems being how to manage back the (Legal) consultancy fees… Remember, when data leakage isn’t preventable (as some dunces might still believe, many on the Legal side of GDPR compliance among them – hey they even think pseudonymisation amounts to anything), bad things are bound to happen. When (not if) not already via the avalanche of information requests …

I rest my case now, for you to have time to process the above, get it, and leave you with:

Your GDPR compliance looks much, much worse (this is actually quite good!); Toronto]

Decision time for informational priv

When discussing Privacy, a lot of attention goes to informational privacy, easily tautologised with person-possibly-indentifying data.
If that reads mixed-up, it’s because it is.
But that’s for another session series. Of series.

What today’s post title is about, is the distinction between the two sides of the house; informational privacy (which is about information about you, or which you generate) versus decisional privacy (commonly defined in terms of your right to freely decide over your body’s integrity). As you read that, clearly the latter needs an update; a heck of a long KBxyzuvw article attached.
Because both the

  • Outright choice limitation through covert or overt profiling and covert or overt automated decision making, sometimes limiting your choice to none when you get rejected (from the ability to even decide) for something, or get no service proposition at all, a.k.a. the Hobson’s choice of socmed,
  • Covert choice limitation through filter bubbles – which would more accurately be called filter fish-trap,

can result from a lack of informational privacy. But both aren’t well covered in the definition of decisional priv whereas that infamous thing with The Freedom of the Pursuit of Happiness or whatsitcalled I don’t care you get it, Freedom, should be guaranteed.
So tightly coupled with all sorts of metaphysics, ontology, and topology of Privacy. Like, the feeling and understanding y’all have when you hear that word. It’s not only ‘bugger off nothing of your interest here’ privacy but also ‘get off my back‘ privacy; no weighing down.

Oh well. This being among my interests but not really my training, so I’ll go read up the latest qua this all. Pointers appreciated. And:
[For no reason whatsoever, totally unconnected; Riga Jugendstil]

The Secret of Innovators — “Keep on trying harder!”

Recalling all those ‘motivational’ quotes about seriously too late, ridiculously over-aged to ever still start a unicorn eleven-somethings, you having to fail for the rest of your life or you’re a failure (right? If you don’t fail, you don’t learn or whatev’), or in conclusion, you’re not failing grossly enough if you don’t succeed – or was it the other way around ..?

Suddenly I realised: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it. (W.C. Fields)
And: The above keep-on-trying train / ship of fools, is a perfect application of The Secret to innovation.

Yes, indeed, ‘perfect’ with the pejorative tone you carry throughout the day. And The Secret being that oh so rightfully discredited piece of paper (!) waste that even today some still believe in; would you believe it?
Yes, have a fresh look at the first line above: It’s the same as the book’s content.

On a less black-and-white note: Aren’t ‘Innovators’ typified as those that naïvely believe that one just have to deny very hard that anything might not work, just put in endless effort and hey presto you’ll succeed? If you fail, you didn’t deny hard enough.
[ Or you’re outright criminally breaking the law, then complain that the law needs to be changed to allow you to reap unethically large profits for just-above cold air, like the … U know who … Why am I not allowed to be a gun for hire!? I make good money out of it and the current system doesn’t get my opponents killed fast enough! Totally ineffective! but that’s beside the main line of this post…]

Where actual Innovators that win in the end, are (what you read in Originals plus) the ones seeking the highest-risk roadblocks and undo them when possible or evade them, believing that fortune will come your way when caring against ill fortune.

So no putting your life’s all into something and hope you’ll win life’s lottery of purely accidental unicorn success, but spread your bets, cut losses, etc. Less exiting a gamble maybe but less of your life at stake.

Plus:
[Down (to) the Tube(s); for no apparent reason and no reference to ‘Samsu’ in the background either, Vienna]

Collateral (un)patching; 0+1-day

Is this a new trend? Revealing that there had been a couple of exploitables, backdoors in your s/w when you patch some other ones and then have to roll back because you p.’d off the wrong ones since you accidentally also patched or disabled some hitherto secret ones.
At least, this is what it seems like when reading this; M$ stealthily (apparently not secretly enough) patching some stuff in negative time i.e., before-zero day. When later there’s rumours about this patch(ing, possibly parts of) is retracted.

For this, there appear (again) to be two possible reasons:
a. You flunked the patch and it kills some Important peoples’ system(s);
b. You ‘flunked’ the patch and you did right, but the patch effectively killed some still-not-revealed (in the stash) backdoors that the Important peoples (TLAs) still had some use for and were double-secretly requested to put back in place.

I’m in a Movie Plot mood (come to think of it, for no reason; ed.) and go for the second option. Because reasons (contradictory; ed.). Your 2¢ please.

Oh, and:
[So crowded and you’re still much less than a stone’s throw from a Da Vinci Code (was it?) big secret — I may have the pic elsewhere on my blog…; Barça]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord