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]

Per vertical lines of defense

What if … Lines of Defense aren’t three (or four or five) ‘horizontally’, but vertical, like actual protection against things getting out of bounds ..?
Wouldn’t that return the whole concept of 3LD, TLD, Three LoD or what’s your favourite abbreviation, to the already tried and tested process control models of yesteryear and when not if Yes, wouldn’t you be found out to be a sort of bumbling eager beaver when you think you’re still doing great and are Really Important and a GRC star and don’t see your kindergarten Importance is called out to hang high ..?

Because then, you’ll need no more big Risk departments with all the procedural justice, compliance on paper (and actual (operating) effectiveness nowhere!), etc., just some nimble support structure. Then, a major part of the conzulting industry would collapse and core management capabilities would have to be returned to formal and practical education and experience-training.

Oh well, one can dream, can’t one?
And:

[A lot of science and engineering there, inside and out, and how beautiful it is (for it); Valencia]

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]

D-raacdronische maatregelen

Okay, for those of you unable to understand the disastrous (understatement) word-play in the title because it’s in Dutch… It’s about a court case (verdict here) where neighbours were in this vendetta already and now one flew a camera drone over the other’s property succinctly the other shot down the drone.
Qua culpability for the damage to the drone, the Judge ruled that a. the drone pilot was trespassing so put the drone illegally where it was shot down, b. the gunman [an experienced shot, apparently] was not to damage other peoples’ property, both are guitly and should share the damage (and share the legal expense).

Side note: the verdict also states through witnesses, that the damage incurred was to one rotor only (after which the drone made a controlled landing; not such a good shot after all) and it had been flown into a tree before the incident (not such a good pilot in the first place), so the damage amount as reported by an independent expert were doubtful, even more so since the independent expert nowhere indicated in the report how the assessed drone was identified or identifyable, as the drone in question or otherwise.
Stupid amateurs.

Moreover, the Judge stated that a breach of privacy weighed no more of less that a breach of property rights. Now there‘s the Error [should be all-caps] in the assessment of current-day societal ethics which in this case, where the Judge appears to demonstrate a sensibility of the case i.e., the vendetta between the neighbours having dropped to a state where mediation is an option no more, would have called for understanding of the derogation of property rights by the privacy concerns as is prevalent (yes; fact) in society in which the verdict should fit. Apparently, neighbour considered the privacy breach already of more value that the risk to his property otherwise would have abstained from the risk of property damage. And the property rights should be compared with the privacy rights one has when e.g., throwing away printed materials; when discarded in the dumpster, one has surrendered one’s right to privacy-through-property re the dumped information. When voluntarily move into or over another one’s property, certainly without consent and against that other one’s want, does one not surrender one’s [protection of!] property rights to the other one? Of course one can ask one’s property back but what if the other one refuses or uses it as security re exchange for something else?

Legal scholars don’t seem to Always have a “hackers’ mentality” when it comes to finding all the side roads … Most unfortunately!
And:

[From the department of infinitely high control; Ronchamps]

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]

When ABC– will use AI, success

So it turns out that the company formerly known as Google, may very well enter the job market. Qua brokerage.
In which it may succeed (it already caused to-be competitors’ stocks to nosedive, a little at least), when deploying smart AI solutions.

Let’s hope, then, that Alphabet Jobs [as it might be called in a stab’let at $AAPL ..?] will use the AI to bypass the most ridiculous aspects, that are many, of the current process. E.g., obliterating the tick box atrocity – as certainly, its own search capability will burn the fuses when trying to find anyone on this planet that fits the requirements for just any job description as billed by ‘recruiters’. Dropping the similar requirements also of ‘having ten years of experience with this totally unknown system that only three current sysadmins can handle and had been implemented only two years ago’, or the infamous but near-certain to surface ‘millennial with thirty years of industry experience, will work for barely entry-level / intern salary’. Don’t say these requirements aren’t realistic like being real over and over again. They are! They’re there, everywhere!

And what does it tell you that ‘we’ may need AI to overcome this stupidity ..?
That Disruption with a capital is desperately called for.

We can hope, can’t we?

And:

[Tomb of the Unknown Candidate. No don’t wry-smile, pay some respect…!; Paris]

Appetite for destruction ..?

Not even referring to the Masterpiece. On the contrary, we have here: … Well, what?
Interested as we all are in the subject, since it is defined still so sloppily, we all look for progress, I started. But stopped, when it turned out … risk appetite is defined in hindsight, with a survived disaster being the appetite threshold. Nice. So you’ll know what your appetite is when it hit you and were lucky enough to survive. If you didn’t survive, you now know you passed the threshold. Same [?] with projects: Only if it fails, do you have to write off the investment. The idea of sunk costs may be an enlightenment..?

Etc.

I believe the CRISC curriculum has other, actually somewhat useful, information on this, and on risk tolerance ..?
Your comments, please.

Plus:
[For 20 points, evaluate the risks, e.g., qua privacy, bird strikes, value development; Barça]

Cyber-Allfinanz

Strange, that we see ‘cyber’ (#ditchcyber) Insurance behaving as if it’s not Insurance but banking:
A banker is someone who lends you an umbrella, but wants it back when it starts to rain

Which already has a lot to add; ‘lends against a princely interest sum’, ‘the umbrella will be small, not enough to protect your family that’s the Deluxe edition for a premium’, not ‘starts to rain’ but ‘is predicted to be only slightly possible to have rain in some undisclosed upcoming time period’, ‘wants it back’ means ‘has it reposessed, violently’. Etc.
But that’s not the issue. The issue is that the underwriter of the insurance will not want to pay out. Duh.
Because it’s not if but when you’ll get wet. Despite all reasonable, or more, efforts on your side to protect yourselves from it by not being in the streets when the first drops fall. But then, you can’t stay inside all the time; you’re in business which means going out to play. No matter what sou’wester you don, you’re done.

In other words, no matter how perfect your compliance with, e.g., ISO2700x, you are not safe. Which means you’ve overlooked something, didn’t do e-ve-ry-thing perfectly 100,0% – certainly not when ‘compliance’ means ‘60% or above, of the reasonable efforts’. If the latter is 80% of max, you still end up with having done only less than 50% of what was possible. In the more than 50%, there certainly is something that with hindsight and progressive insight now you’ve been hit you may have done differently.
And the insurers only act on hindsight, qua culpability and cover…

’nuff said; and:
[Differently since positive: Within an unknown Cala hides an unknown Cala; Toronto]

Having fun with voice synth

In particular, having fun the wrong way.
Remember, we wrote about how voice synth improvements, lately, will destroy non-repudiation? There’s another twist. Not only as noted, contra voice authentication for mere authentication (banks, of all, would they really have been in the lead, here, without back-up-double auth?), but in particular now that your voice has also become much more important again [after voice had dwindled in use for any sorts of comms, giving way to socmed typed even when with pixels posts of ephemeral or persistent kinds; who actually calls anyone anymore ..?], we see all sorts of Problems surfacing.

Like, mail order fraud. When hardly anyone still goes on a shopping spree through dozens of stores before buying something in store but rather orders online, of course Alexa / Home/Assistant / Siri / Echo / Cortana are all the rage. For a while; for a short while as people will find out that there was something more to shopping than getting something — but recognising the equilibrium that’ll turn out, may be in favour of on-line business, with physical delivery either at home, or at the mall.
The big ‘breakthrough’ currently being of course some half-way threshold / innovation speed bump overcome, with the home assistant gadgets that were intended to be much more butler first, (even-more-) mall destructor second. But that second … How about some fun and pranking, by catuyrig just some voice snippets from your target, even when just in line behind ’em at Wallmart, and then synthesizing just about any text? When a break-in on the backside of your home assistant (very doable; the intelligence is too complex and voluminous to sit in the front-end device anyway [Is it …!? Haven’t seen anything on this!] so at least there’s some half-way intelligent link at the back) may be feasible per principle but doing a MiM on the comms to some back-end server would be much more easy even, and much easier to obfuscate (certainly qua location, attribution), a ‘re’play of just any message is feasible.

Like, a ‘re’play of ordering substances that would still be suspicious even when for ‘medicinal purposes’. Or only embarassing, like ordering tools from the sort of fun-tools shop you wouldn’t want to see your parents order from. Of course, the joke is at delivery time [be that couriers, DEA/cops, or just non-plain packages] — oh wait we could just have the goods delivered to / picked up at, any address of our liking and have the felons/embarressed only feel that part plus non-repudiability.

This may be a C-rated-movie plot scenario, hence it will happen somewhere, a couple of times at least. Or become an epidemic. And:
[No mall, but a fun place to shop anyway; Gran Vía Madrid]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord