The Gig Economy Keeps Growing, But Worker Benefits Aren't
Umm... wasn't that kind of the whole point of companies pushing for a gig economy? Does anybody really believe that this consequence wasn't at least foreseen, if not downright planned for, by the corporate sector? Corporations believe it to be in their best interests both to reduce the amount of money they pay their employees, and to decrease those employees' freedom and autonomy so as to make them more docile and compliant. A gig economy gives workers the illusion of increased freedom, even as it increases their servitude. I'm pretty sure that's the penultimate wet-dream of c-levels and board members everywhere. Of course, the ultimate wet-dream is to replace all those workers with machines.
In addition to the stupidity of all those people out there who don't know and don't care about the danger this initiative represents, there is a fair measure of stupidity in big corporations signing up for Adobe to be their sole source for all that data.
Just for a moment, let's adopt the worldview of power-hungry despotic corporations and the marketards that serve them. In the first place, how much less valuable is the anonymized data than the data that is traceable to specific, named people? I'd say it's a LOT less valuable, probably from the standpoint of fleecing their marks, and almost certainly from the standpoint of power over their customers.
In the second place, putting all your eggs in one basket is one thing, but putting them all in somebody else's basket is quite another. Do they really want to hand over data collection to a company that can just turn off the tap at will? Is it a good idea to have a monoculture of privacy-invading tech that potentially provides a single point of failure vulnerable to browser extensions, specialized third-party services, and plain old hackers?
Tim Cook has been... publicly rebuking Mark Zuckerberg over the social network's business model.
Much as I hate the Zuck, it would be entertaining to see him to take Cook to task over Foxconn's shitty treatment of its suicidal employees. In SV, pretty much nobody's hands are clean. Glass houses, something something, stones.
I fully expect Amazon to start 3D mapping your house and everything in it. They'll do it for your security, cameras on the cleaners to prove they aren't stealing anything. Then they'll use the videos for profiling the types of things you like. Then they'll offer a virtual furniture makeover. And finally a percentage of your house sale when you list it through Amazon and use their virtual walk-through.
Guess what. These cleaners can deliver your and your neighbor's Amazon purchases when they visit too. They can even pick up things you're selling through Amazon.
Insightful comment. I have no mod points left, so I'm replying to it just to increase its visibility.
Last week showed how much more work we need to do to enforce our policies and help people understand how Facebook works and the choices they have over their data
Last week showed that the jig's up, and that at least for a little while we have to pretend that we give a shit about the concerns of Facebook users by making a show of giving them the illusion of control over their data. Dumb fucks.
It seems that way, but I'm not sure why it should be. Suing a company for using your API's, is like suing a customer for calling your company's AVR system and pressing buttons on their phone to retrieve billing info and make payments. I think I could make that pretty obvious to most people, even a judge. Maybe Google's lawyers are making things too complicated?
India, in particular, and developing markets, in general...
When the phrase "developing markets" is used to describe the context for a story about a health crisis, then you know the corporatists are winning. Yeah, I know, it's 'just a turn of phrase' - but consider the implications, then ask yourself if you even stopped to question the wording while you were reading TFS.
I just watch films as they get home releases. I don't have any need to watch them the instant they hit theatres.
"New" just means "new to me". I don't give a shit when other people watch them.
On the whole I totally agree, but I can see why others don't. Watching a blockbuster, (or even just a reasonably popular movie), close to its release, means there are friends and co-workers that you can talk to about the flick while it's still fresh in everybody's minds. Plus, you're less likely to hear spoilers.
I think cinemas as we've known them are pretty much in their death throes anyway. I suspect that within a decade, new movies will be available for home viewing either immediately, or within a week or two of release. Obviously, the former will happen if cinemas are dead by then. The latter will apply to any cinemas that might remain, because box-office receipts will fall off very quickly after opening day. In that situation maintaining an exclusive won't help the theatres much, but probably will reduce the movie's total take significantly.
I don't care much about that. Being a dick seems to go with the job, and Moonchild is FAR from alone in that regard among the people who head up major projects. What I care about is that I still have a browser that supports all the FF extensions I have come to rely on, along with a sane and configurable UI, instead of Mozilla's flavour-of-the-month-and-users-be-damned bullshit.
Their business model is to break as much privacy as they can get away and sell the data... Hoping for anything else is being incredibly naive.
Came here to say pretty much this. And to add "Third-party apps? Gimme a break, Mozilla!". Facebook follows even non-logged-in users, (and a crapload of non-users as well), all over the Web. They suggest both products and FB friends to people, based on geo-location data that the FB app collects, and will even suggest friending someone whose only connection to you is having once been in the same location simultaneously. The primary problem isn't third party apps - the primary problem is that Facebook is still alive and has so many suckers lining up to be sold as products. Facebook needs to die, and the sooner the better.
They didn't collect anything. It was all fed to them by users.
Yes, much of it was fed to them by users. But FB Hoovered up a shitload of additional data by stalking their users, (and non-users), all around the Web. Perhaps the users should have known better; but I'm sure they had a reasonable, (if entirely unrealistic), expectation that when they weren't actively using Facebook they weren't continuing to surrender details of their supposedly personal lives. It's easy to blame the users, but let's keep in mind that in large part they are victims of a sleazy, cynical, and utterly evil corporation.
Why logically is it legal to think about child porn but illegal to store it on a hard drive? Isn't the brain just another storage device? We humans draw weird little lines in the sand about what is right and what is wrong. In the future if you could externally read some one else's mind would it then be illegal to think about child porn? What if they were actively sharing these thoughts with others? Logically I find myself rejecting most child porn laws as being unjust but emotionally I find child porn disturbing and accept these laws. How should we as a society decide laws? Emotionally or logically?
Possession of child porn effectively makes one an accessory after the fact to the crime of child sexual abuse. Paying for child porn probably makes one an accessory before the fact, because it funds and encourages additional abuse. So I have no problem at all with most child porn laws. But as I mentioned in an earlier post, given the rapid advances in creating realistic computer-generated images, it's going to get harder and harder to differentiate between porn that documents a crime, and porn that simply documents depraved fantasies. If we ever do arrive at the point of being able to read minds, the ambiguity will be the same - did the 'criminal' thoughts originate in the witnessing / perpetration of an actual crime, or only in the mere imagining of it? Somehow I don't think legislators will care about the distinction, and neither will the average person. A lot of people will be locked up, or worse, for what comes down to imagining things.
Actual child porn, and the possession thereof, has always (at least for the past few decades) been illegal, because it is legally akin to aiding and abetting the act which produced it (doubly so if you straight-up paid for the stuff.)
Soon, child porn, (or any other video depicting various kinds of victimization), won't necessarily be evidence of an actual crime. CG animation and video editing are already at the point where it's hard to differentiate between records of actual events, and images that only ever existed as digital data. It will be interesting to see how lawmakers and LEO's respond to this in the coming years.
At least here in Ontario, lead fishing sinkers are still available. I purchased some recently as weights for adjusting thread tensions on sewing machines.
Your grandfather used lead to make sinkers. My dad used sinkers as a source of lead; he melted them down and poured the lead into the holes he had drilled in the head of one of his putters. He was tuning the balance so the club would be more accurate.
Interestingly, I haven't personally noticed problems with lead-free solder on SMT components - probably because most of the repair work I've done has been on lower-tech electronics where the parts and packages are larger and the connections are much less dense. My beef with lead-free has to do with through-hole components, especially those that carry higher currents and/or are subject to thermal cycling. I've seen quite a few such joints fail, even with plated holes, suitable hole sizes relative to the leads, and solder fillets on both sides of the board. I didn't see this kind of thing nearly as often before lead-free solder came on the scene. The lead-free solder just seems to be more brittle. Maybe the thermal cycling causes some work-hardening - I can imagine lead being much less susceptible to that.
I guess that's the end of my cavalier attitude towards lead-based solder - now that I've been soldering for 50-plus years and still use my lips as a 'third hand' to hold solder sometimes. I know it's elemental lead and therefore less readily absorbed, but still... I've had my blood tested for lead levels a few times, and never had any results that caused my doctor even mild concern. But now that I've read this... It's probably too late for me, but from now on I won't be making any more snarky comments about "politically correct solder".
Lead based solder performs much better than the alternatives, because lead is an 'aggressive' metal. I guess even the elemental form may be similarly aggressive when it comes to biochemical activity. Of course, this also renews my concerns about the mouthful of mercury I have in the form of dental fillings.
... the current FCC’s efforts to combat illegal robocalls and spoofing.
I don't know the current legal definition of an illegal rebocall, but I know what it SHOULD be. ANY robocall placed without the recipient's prior and ongoing consent, should be punishable by a fine of $10K per call for the first offense, $50K per call for the second offense, and loss of corporate, charitable, or party status for the third offense. In short, with VERY FEW exceptions, (public safety, life-or-death, and the like), ALL robocalls should be illegal, and violations of the laws forbidding them ought to result in the harshest penalties. For that matter, these rules should also apply to the non-automated forms of telemarketing as well.
Of course, that will never happen, because we have government 'by the corporations, for the corporations'. That's what we get for allowing collectives to be treated as 'persons before the law'.
Technology provides us with the possibility of OBJECTIVE insight and provides framework for OBJECTIVE verification (with mathematics).
This is simply arguing for dystopia and forsaking a new Enlightenment, a new Renaissance, because "eh, it's too hard to care."
Technology also provides us with the impossibility of the both-broad-and-deep analysis of raw data that we need to navigate even the present, never mind the future. That's because it presents to us with a huge amount of complex data about a huge number of important topics. Additionally, that same technology is itself an ever-rapidly expanding source of complex raw data. This is true even for those of us who have the intelligence, knowledge, and interest to have this discussion - how much more applicable is it to those who don't have these things?
Reputation is emotional and therefore non-objective. Animals can construct hierarchies based on reputation. We are human beings with all the tools to shape our reality. Why should we forsake our intellect for an animalistic way of life? Because it allows us to be controlled by whoever is at the top of the hierarchy dispensing reputation? This article, this idea, is poison.
Humans are animals; we have always constructed "hierarchies based on reputation", and probably always will. This is analogous to programming in a higher level language. Even if you're capable of understanding and programming the 'bare metal', (which most programmers probably aren't), you probably don't get out a hex editor and analyze the code that your compiler has produced - you trust the reputation of the compiler based on its past performance. You trust it to do the appropriate job until you see some behaviour that gives you cause for mistrust, at which point you then investigate more deeply. If you keep encountering problems then the compiler loses your trust, at which point you either do something to improve it, or move on to a different development environment. Civilization is built on this kind of 'abstractive shortcut', and most of the technology we rely on simply wouldn't exist at this point in time without it.
mature citizen
she
Yep, this is a propaganda stunt.
This assumes facts not in evidence. It also strikes me as "emotional and therefore non-objective".
The message here is "blindly trust your favorite source, here's a falsely sophisticated argument for why it's okay for YOU, the smart he/she/xe/.... that you are, to do so".
FTA: "Whenever we are at the point of accepting or rejecting new information, we should ask ourselves: Where does it come from? Does the source have a good reputation? Who are the authorities who believe it? What are my reasons for deferring to these authorities? (emphasis mine)...... These new competences constitute a sort of second-order epistemology. They prepare us to question and assess the reputation of an information source (emphasis mine), something that philosophers and teachers should be crafting for future generations". Translated to my previous analogy, this might say "keep evaluating your compiler's behaviour and results, but don't waste time looking at every line of object code without good reason". It really doesn't sound to me as though she's advising people to "blindly trust" anything. She's simply acknowledging that we can't personally evaluate all of the data available about all of the things that affect us, because it's just too big a job and it takes too much time.
If listened to it could have terrible effect on society, especially if its effective on the "tech sector", the people who have pretty much the only jobs that matter in the "second industrial revolution", the people who have the power to contest the will of their employers and prevent dystopia. If the horrors that mass surveillance + AI + automation offer us are to
Also, YouTube can do as YouTube pleases. They're not the government and they don't have a monopoly on the online video space.
Fundamentally I agree with you, but I'm still a bit uneasy. Really, YouTube DOES pretty much have a monopoly when it comes to the average citizen being able to upload a video and having a decent chance of it being seen by at least tens of thousands of people. With great power comes great responsibility. If YouTube either is ineffective at rising to that responsibility, or doesn't take it seriously, then perhaps legislative intervention is in order. And perhaps it's NOT in order - I'm simply saying that a knee-jerk proclamation on either side of that argument may be ignoring some complexities that ought to be considered.
... I decline to participate at a site that wants to turn my browsing into the reading comprehension section of the SAT...
Browsing != commenting. And if you ARE going to comment, it would be good to know that you care enough about your own comments, the story you're commenting on, and the audience you're writing for, to answer a simple quiz. Frankly, if you don't care that much, then I'm probably even less interested in what you have to say than you yourself appear to be.
No need to trust. A cheap RF signal meter can tell you for sure.
It can - so long as they aren't turning on the transmitters in the phone in short bursts once every minute or so. In that case you need something that can log those short bursts of RF over a specified band or bands. You might be able to put something together around SDR that would do that, but it would take some time and effort. AFAIK the only off-the-shelf solution would be one of the more sophisticated, (read "expen$ive"), spectrum analyzers.
Even then, your phone might be receiving in stealth mode, in which case there might be provisions for making it 'phone home' on demand. Then it's likely that you would never catch your phone defying the Airplane Mode setting. If that capability doesn't exist now, it almost certainly will in the future. And in THAT case, the Faraday cage that others have suggested is the only measure, (short of not carrying a phone at all), that will keep you off their radar.
Yes. I use a desktop mail client precisely because I like to maintain my own archive...... whenever somebody needs to know what X said in an email from Y months or years ago...
^^This, a thousand times. I still use POP, so I can maintain an archive of inbound mail on any and all machines I have. And I'm slow to clear the server, so it's easy to bring even new machines up-to-date without copying over the database manually. Now, if I could just find a way to make POP synchronize the sent mail on all of my machines. I've been told that IMAP can do that, but I've never been able to figure out how to make IMAP (a) leave both sent and received messages on the server while (b) storing both sent and received messages locally and (c) automatically syncing both sent and received messages on any device I choose.
It's linked to your windows login, so if you have a hotmail account from the 90’s (which you probably do if you had email in the 90’s) logging in with hotmail and having it sync everything is incredibly convenient. Plus with Google linking your email with YouTube account and social media I don't like giving out my gmail anymore, don't want people to look up everything I ever uploaded or every comment I've made when I send them an email.
I totally get your mistrust of gmail - the only account I have there is pseudonymous, and I only have it because I need access to the Play Store, and that's the only use it ever gets. But let me get this straight: you trust Microsoft - the folks who forced their rented-spyware-masquerading-as-an-OS onto the computers of gazillions of people - more than you trust Google? Why?
Note for long, sadly. Hopefully they provide some sort of API for service additions (e.g. dealing with Exchange's bullshit), but I'm not holding my breath.
Thanks for the heads-up on this AC. Time to change my Apt settings so Thunderbird never gets updated again. Now I have to hope that Moonchild takes on a 'Pale Bird' project to save Thunderbird from the crackpots at Mozilla, the way he saved all that was good from Firefox with Pale Moon.
Slashdot Mirror
The Gig Economy Keeps Growing, But Worker Benefits Aren't
Umm... wasn't that kind of the whole point of companies pushing for a gig economy? Does anybody really believe that this consequence wasn't at least foreseen, if not downright planned for, by the corporate sector? Corporations believe it to be in their best interests both to reduce the amount of money they pay their employees, and to decrease those employees' freedom and autonomy so as to make them more docile and compliant. A gig economy gives workers the illusion of increased freedom, even as it increases their servitude. I'm pretty sure that's the penultimate wet-dream of c-levels and board members everywhere. Of course, the ultimate wet-dream is to replace all those workers with machines.
In addition to the stupidity of all those people out there who don't know and don't care about the danger this initiative represents, there is a fair measure of stupidity in big corporations signing up for Adobe to be their sole source for all that data.
Just for a moment, let's adopt the worldview of power-hungry despotic corporations and the marketards that serve them. In the first place, how much less valuable is the anonymized data than the data that is traceable to specific, named people? I'd say it's a LOT less valuable, probably from the standpoint of fleecing their marks, and almost certainly from the standpoint of power over their customers.
In the second place, putting all your eggs in one basket is one thing, but putting them all in somebody else's basket is quite another. Do they really want to hand over data collection to a company that can just turn off the tap at will? Is it a good idea to have a monoculture of privacy-invading tech that potentially provides a single point of failure vulnerable to browser extensions, specialized third-party services, and plain old hackers?
when Silicon Valley eats its own.
Tim Cook has been... publicly rebuking Mark Zuckerberg over the social network's business model.
Much as I hate the Zuck, it would be entertaining to see him to take Cook to task over Foxconn's shitty treatment of its suicidal employees. In SV, pretty much nobody's hands are clean. Glass houses, something something, stones.
I fully expect Amazon to start 3D mapping your house and everything in it. They'll do it for your security, cameras on the cleaners to prove they aren't stealing anything. Then they'll use the videos for profiling the types of things you like. Then they'll offer a virtual furniture makeover. And finally a percentage of your house sale when you list it through Amazon and use their virtual walk-through.
Guess what. These cleaners can deliver your and your neighbor's Amazon purchases when they visit too. They can even pick up things you're selling through Amazon.
Insightful comment. I have no mod points left, so I'm replying to it just to increase its visibility.
Last week showed how much more work we need to do to enforce our policies and help people understand how Facebook works and the choices they have over their data
Last week showed that the jig's up, and that at least for a little while we have to pretend that we give a shit about the concerns of Facebook users by making a show of giving them the illusion of control over their data. Dumb fucks.
FFS... we need a special court for tech cases.
It seems that way, but I'm not sure why it should be. Suing a company for using your API's, is like suing a customer for calling your company's AVR system and pressing buttons on their phone to retrieve billing info and make payments. I think I could make that pretty obvious to most people, even a judge. Maybe Google's lawyers are making things too complicated?
India, in particular, and developing markets, in general ...
When the phrase "developing markets" is used to describe the context for a story about a health crisis, then you know the corporatists are winning. Yeah, I know, it's 'just a turn of phrase' - but consider the implications, then ask yourself if you even stopped to question the wording while you were reading TFS.
I just watch films as they get home releases. I don't have any need to watch them the instant they hit theatres.
"New" just means "new to me". I don't give a shit when other people watch them.
On the whole I totally agree, but I can see why others don't. Watching a blockbuster, (or even just a reasonably popular movie), close to its release, means there are friends and co-workers that you can talk to about the flick while it's still fresh in everybody's minds. Plus, you're less likely to hear spoilers.
I think cinemas as we've known them are pretty much in their death throes anyway. I suspect that within a decade, new movies will be available for home viewing either immediately, or within a week or two of release. Obviously, the former will happen if cinemas are dead by then. The latter will apply to any cinemas that might remain, because box-office receipts will fall off very quickly after opening day. In that situation maintaining an exclusive won't help the theatres much, but probably will reduce the movie's total take significantly.
Not a big pale Moon fan. The author is a dick.
I don't care much about that. Being a dick seems to go with the job, and Moonchild is FAR from alone in that regard among the people who head up major projects. What I care about is that I still have a browser that supports all the FF extensions I have come to rely on, along with a sane and configurable UI, instead of Mozilla's flavour-of-the-month-and-users-be-damned bullshit.
Their business model is to break as much privacy as they can get away and sell the data... Hoping for anything else is being incredibly naive.
Came here to say pretty much this. And to add "Third-party apps? Gimme a break, Mozilla!". Facebook follows even non-logged-in users, (and a crapload of non-users as well), all over the Web. They suggest both products and FB friends to people, based on geo-location data that the FB app collects, and will even suggest friending someone whose only connection to you is having once been in the same location simultaneously. The primary problem isn't third party apps - the primary problem is that Facebook is still alive and has so many suckers lining up to be sold as products. Facebook needs to die, and the sooner the better.
^^ Mod parent up!
They didn't collect anything. It was all fed to them by users.
Yes, much of it was fed to them by users. But FB Hoovered up a shitload of additional data by stalking their users, (and non-users), all around the Web. Perhaps the users should have known better; but I'm sure they had a reasonable, (if entirely unrealistic), expectation that when they weren't actively using Facebook they weren't continuing to surrender details of their supposedly personal lives. It's easy to blame the users, but let's keep in mind that in large part they are victims of a sleazy, cynical, and utterly evil corporation.
Why logically is it legal to think about child porn but illegal to store it on a hard drive? Isn't the brain just another storage device? We humans draw weird little lines in the sand about what is right and what is wrong. In the future if you could externally read some one else's mind would it then be illegal to think about child porn? What if they were actively sharing these thoughts with others? Logically I find myself rejecting most child porn laws as being unjust but emotionally I find child porn disturbing and accept these laws. How should we as a society decide laws? Emotionally or logically?
Possession of child porn effectively makes one an accessory after the fact to the crime of child sexual abuse. Paying for child porn probably makes one an accessory before the fact, because it funds and encourages additional abuse. So I have no problem at all with most child porn laws. But as I mentioned in an earlier post, given the rapid advances in creating realistic computer-generated images, it's going to get harder and harder to differentiate between porn that documents a crime, and porn that simply documents depraved fantasies. If we ever do arrive at the point of being able to read minds, the ambiguity will be the same - did the 'criminal' thoughts originate in the witnessing / perpetration of an actual crime, or only in the mere imagining of it? Somehow I don't think legislators will care about the distinction, and neither will the average person. A lot of people will be locked up, or worse, for what comes down to imagining things.
Actual child porn, and the possession thereof, has always (at least for the past few decades) been illegal, because it is legally akin to aiding and abetting the act which produced it (doubly so if you straight-up paid for the stuff.)
Soon, child porn, (or any other video depicting various kinds of victimization), won't necessarily be evidence of an actual crime. CG animation and video editing are already at the point where it's hard to differentiate between records of actual events, and images that only ever existed as digital data. It will be interesting to see how lawmakers and LEO's respond to this in the coming years.
At least here in Ontario, lead fishing sinkers are still available. I purchased some recently as weights for adjusting thread tensions on sewing machines.
Your grandfather used lead to make sinkers. My dad used sinkers as a source of lead; he melted them down and poured the lead into the holes he had drilled in the head of one of his putters. He was tuning the balance so the club would be more accurate.
Interestingly, I haven't personally noticed problems with lead-free solder on SMT components - probably because most of the repair work I've done has been on lower-tech electronics where the parts and packages are larger and the connections are much less dense. My beef with lead-free has to do with through-hole components, especially those that carry higher currents and/or are subject to thermal cycling. I've seen quite a few such joints fail, even with plated holes, suitable hole sizes relative to the leads, and solder fillets on both sides of the board. I didn't see this kind of thing nearly as often before lead-free solder came on the scene. The lead-free solder just seems to be more brittle. Maybe the thermal cycling causes some work-hardening - I can imagine lead being much less susceptible to that.
I guess that's the end of my cavalier attitude towards lead-based solder - now that I've been soldering for 50-plus years and still use my lips as a 'third hand' to hold solder sometimes. I know it's elemental lead and therefore less readily absorbed, but still... I've had my blood tested for lead levels a few times, and never had any results that caused my doctor even mild concern. But now that I've read this... It's probably too late for me, but from now on I won't be making any more snarky comments about "politically correct solder".
Lead based solder performs much better than the alternatives, because lead is an 'aggressive' metal. I guess even the elemental form may be similarly aggressive when it comes to biochemical activity. Of course, this also renews my concerns about the mouthful of mercury I have in the form of dental fillings.
... the current FCC’s efforts to combat illegal robocalls and spoofing.
I don't know the current legal definition of an illegal rebocall, but I know what it SHOULD be. ANY robocall placed without the recipient's prior and ongoing consent, should be punishable by a fine of $10K per call for the first offense, $50K per call for the second offense, and loss of corporate, charitable, or party status for the third offense. In short, with VERY FEW exceptions, (public safety, life-or-death, and the like), ALL robocalls should be illegal, and violations of the laws forbidding them ought to result in the harshest penalties. For that matter, these rules should also apply to the non-automated forms of telemarketing as well.
Of course, that will never happen, because we have government 'by the corporations, for the corporations'. That's what we get for allowing collectives to be treated as 'persons before the law'.
Technology provides us with the possibility of OBJECTIVE insight and provides framework for OBJECTIVE verification (with mathematics). This is simply arguing for dystopia and forsaking a new Enlightenment, a new Renaissance, because "eh, it's too hard to care."
Technology also provides us with the impossibility of the both-broad-and-deep analysis of raw data that we need to navigate even the present, never mind the future. That's because it presents to us with a huge amount of complex data about a huge number of important topics. Additionally, that same technology is itself an ever-rapidly expanding source of complex raw data. This is true even for those of us who have the intelligence, knowledge, and interest to have this discussion - how much more applicable is it to those who don't have these things?
Reputation is emotional and therefore non-objective. Animals can construct hierarchies based on reputation. We are human beings with all the tools to shape our reality. Why should we forsake our intellect for an animalistic way of life? Because it allows us to be controlled by whoever is at the top of the hierarchy dispensing reputation? This article, this idea, is poison.
Humans are animals; we have always constructed "hierarchies based on reputation", and probably always will. This is analogous to programming in a higher level language. Even if you're capable of understanding and programming the 'bare metal', (which most programmers probably aren't), you probably don't get out a hex editor and analyze the code that your compiler has produced - you trust the reputation of the compiler based on its past performance. You trust it to do the appropriate job until you see some behaviour that gives you cause for mistrust, at which point you then investigate more deeply. If you keep encountering problems then the compiler loses your trust, at which point you either do something to improve it, or move on to a different development environment. Civilization is built on this kind of 'abstractive shortcut', and most of the technology we rely on simply wouldn't exist at this point in time without it.
mature citizen
she
Yep, this is a propaganda stunt.
This assumes facts not in evidence. It also strikes me as "emotional and therefore non-objective".
The message here is "blindly trust your favorite source, here's a falsely sophisticated argument for why it's okay for YOU, the smart he/she/xe/.... that you are, to do so".
FTA: "Whenever we are at the point of accepting or rejecting new information, we should ask ourselves: Where does it come from? Does the source have a good reputation? Who are the authorities who believe it? What are my reasons for deferring to these authorities? (emphasis mine) ... ... These new competences constitute a sort of second-order epistemology. They prepare us to question and assess the reputation of an information source (emphasis mine), something that philosophers and teachers should be crafting for future generations". Translated to my previous analogy, this might say "keep evaluating your compiler's behaviour and results, but don't waste time looking at every line of object code without good reason". It really doesn't sound to me as though she's advising people to "blindly trust" anything. She's simply acknowledging that we can't personally evaluate all of the data available about all of the things that affect us, because it's just too big a job and it takes too much time.
If listened to it could have terrible effect on society, especially if its effective on the "tech sector", the people who have pretty much the only jobs that matter in the "second industrial revolution", the people who have the power to contest the will of their employers and prevent dystopia. If the horrors that mass surveillance + AI + automation offer us are to
Also, YouTube can do as YouTube pleases. They're not the government and they don't have a monopoly on the online video space.
Fundamentally I agree with you, but I'm still a bit uneasy. Really, YouTube DOES pretty much have a monopoly when it comes to the average citizen being able to upload a video and having a decent chance of it being seen by at least tens of thousands of people. With great power comes great responsibility. If YouTube either is ineffective at rising to that responsibility, or doesn't take it seriously, then perhaps legislative intervention is in order. And perhaps it's NOT in order - I'm simply saying that a knee-jerk proclamation on either side of that argument may be ignoring some complexities that ought to be considered.
... I decline to participate at a site that wants to turn my browsing into the reading comprehension section of the SAT ...
Browsing != commenting. And if you ARE going to comment, it would be good to know that you care enough about your own comments, the story you're commenting on, and the audience you're writing for, to answer a simple quiz. Frankly, if you don't care that much, then I'm probably even less interested in what you have to say than you yourself appear to be.
No need to trust. A cheap RF signal meter can tell you for sure.
It can - so long as they aren't turning on the transmitters in the phone in short bursts once every minute or so. In that case you need something that can log those short bursts of RF over a specified band or bands. You might be able to put something together around SDR that would do that, but it would take some time and effort. AFAIK the only off-the-shelf solution would be one of the more sophisticated, (read "expen$ive"), spectrum analyzers.
Even then, your phone might be receiving in stealth mode, in which case there might be provisions for making it 'phone home' on demand. Then it's likely that you would never catch your phone defying the Airplane Mode setting. If that capability doesn't exist now, it almost certainly will in the future. And in THAT case, the Faraday cage that others have suggested is the only measure, (short of not carrying a phone at all), that will keep you off their radar.
Yes. I use a desktop mail client precisely because I like to maintain my own archive ... ... whenever somebody needs to know what X said in an email from Y months or years ago ...
^^This, a thousand times. I still use POP, so I can maintain an archive of inbound mail on any and all machines I have. And I'm slow to clear the server, so it's easy to bring even new machines up-to-date without copying over the database manually. Now, if I could just find a way to make POP synchronize the sent mail on all of my machines. I've been told that IMAP can do that, but I've never been able to figure out how to make IMAP (a) leave both sent and received messages on the server while (b) storing both sent and received messages locally and (c) automatically syncing both sent and received messages on any device I choose.
It's linked to your windows login, so if you have a hotmail account from the 90’s (which you probably do if you had email in the 90’s) logging in with hotmail and having it sync everything is incredibly convenient. Plus with Google linking your email with YouTube account and social media I don't like giving out my gmail anymore, don't want people to look up everything I ever uploaded or every comment I've made when I send them an email.
I totally get your mistrust of gmail - the only account I have there is pseudonymous, and I only have it because I need access to the Play Store, and that's the only use it ever gets. But let me get this straight: you trust Microsoft - the folks who forced their rented-spyware-masquerading-as-an-OS onto the computers of gazillions of people - more than you trust Google? Why?
Thunderbird is still awesome.
Note for long, sadly. Hopefully they provide some sort of API for service additions (e.g. dealing with Exchange's bullshit), but I'm not holding my breath.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/thunderbird-will-phase-out-legacy-add-ons-will-support-webextensions/
Thanks for the heads-up on this AC. Time to change my Apt settings so Thunderbird never gets updated again. Now I have to hope that Moonchild takes on a 'Pale Bird' project to save Thunderbird from the crackpots at Mozilla, the way he saved all that was good from Firefox with Pale Moon.