"Amazon said hotels will not have access to voice recordings of Alexa interactions or responses"
oh really?
the second part seems to contradict this
"recordings of Alexa commands are remotely wiped"
unless that implies that the hotel doesn't keep a copy but Amazon does.
My guess is that they do have access to recordings - but let's imagine that they don't:
What happens when the guest orders a load of perishable food to the room and then when it arrives they deny all knowledge [e.g. through malice or if their romantic getaway turned sour and they didn't want that expensive dinner any more or they claim someone else walked in the room and made the request or... ] ?
Are you seriously suggesting the hotel wouldn't keep a copy of the order to play it back to the guest?
If they don't then there's plenty of scope for 'pranks' and or sabotage from their competitors to run up the food wastage bills ; if they do keep recordings for this eventuality, then why not for other purposes (which gives a weasel excuse to cover any/all occasions).
I suspect that the poster wasn't thinking about stealing it but meant that it will be removed in the sense of a call to the front desk "Please take this from my room - thank you" and/or physically taking it out and dumping it in the managers office.
As someone who lives in the UK, I take a slightly different view from the somewhat rabid and over-hyped fear-mongers on this site.
Let's have some context:
The UK government is in a mess. The whole Brexit fiasco was poorly thought out and people were asked to vote on little/no information at best and outright lies at worst. This has resulted in many many views on what the result meant and massive in-fighting in the government which is spending so much time on the issue nothing else substantive seems to be happening. Couple this with an election leaving a minority party in power, with little opportunity to make any changes and you have a confused muddle.
So what to do? take decisive action? no too hard!! -- let's have a distraction: royal weddings are good for a couple of months run-up but even they pass. An attack on internet companies is always a short term winner - it panders to the worst elements of the press (who see their business model of peddling hate and discord being threatened) and hits the hot buttons of "terror" and "what of the children/women?".
The level of debate here shows the distraction technique works.
As for implementation -- just look at history: England have more chance of winning the world cup than a UK Government IT system working properly. A few consultancies and IT companies may make some money (but at least nowadays the government does try to claw back overspend on its fiascos)
I seriously doubt that anything will really change and in six months to a year's time things will be just the same.
I wish I could get hold of a copy (electronically or in dead tree format, but I recall vividly a story by the science fiction author Eric Frank Russell. Several of his stories and novels had a slightly anti authoritarian and anti establishment feel (Next of Kin, Allamagoosa and Wasp being prime examples which are available in ebook formats).
His "Study in Still Life" though is the classic. It was written in the late 50s/early 60s but is still 100% relevant. Essentially it's about a bureaucrat who games the system to prioritise life saving equipment: the request and its approval / traceability / fulfilment process is described in detail at each stage for what is basically a bundle up and put in the mail activity -- it would be comic if it were not (still today) very true. The twist in the tail about bureaucratic hierarchies is a real gem.
Read it if you get the chance [and please post a link if you find a copy online as I'd love to read it again:-) ]
vectorisation -> 3d printing -> 3d scanning -> logging the result on a blockchain -> AI interpretation of model -> rasterisation -> colour correction -> writing to cloud -> retrieving from cloud -> sharing of images on (n+1) social media accounts -> copy to clipboard
Each of which would be in a managed container.
(The sending of files to Microsoft, NSA, Google, GCHQ.... is implicit here and not called out as a set of separate actions)
"People everywhere are already using their fingers and faces to 'unlock' their mobile phones and PCs"
Not in my circle of tech literate friends and colleagues.
1) Many realise that biometrics == username and not an authentication 'password'
2) Fingerprint & face technologies are not robust and can be fooled. False negatives will turn people off the idea so expect the pattern matching to be loose at best.
3) Biometrics can't be changed easily (if at all)
4) Many people don't have/want phones / laptops with fingerprint readers or face recognition software. I for one don't see why I should dump perfectly serviceable hardware just to buy new copies with these features (which have yet to settle on a widely accepted standard). I could argue on 'green' grounds about why this is a bad idea but basically I'm too mean to waste money repeatedly changing and upgrading just to keep in fashion.
5) If remembering passwords is an issue, use a password safe. Personally I LIKE passwords - they can be complex yet easy to remember and I have [the illusion of] control.
Years ago when I first discovered Slashdot it was genuinely a place where interesting technology and scientific issues were discussed.
Nowadays a large and growing proportion of posts seem to be ad hominem attacks, political entrenchments and mud slinging, invective and general nastiness.
Is this representative of the audience - or of the society we've become?
That a world renowned physicist is the target of barbs and attacks?
Really?
(standing by for the barrage of 'you're a snowflake' comments that only underline the point:)
It may be worth waiting to see if this comes to pass. At the moment we're discussing rumours and "what may be".
At the risk of making a huge generalisation here... people who get hung up about cookies & privacy [and I include myself in this set] are generally also technically competent and able to hack around about:config pages. Loss of a UI, whilst hurting the general population (and acclimatising them to the inevitability of cookies & tracking) is not so big a deal for those who manage cookies already.
That said, changing the way they're managed is fine; removing the facility to do so is a retrograde step and another nudge towards alternatives.
I'm no psychologist but... as a species we tend to delight in dividing into 'them' and 'us'. and then projecting onto the other one all of our own fears, failings and foibles. If there isn't a convenient bogeyman to blame, never mind we'll invent one; if the other side starts to appear reasonable, then it's a trick. Paranoia and propaganda is everywhere - and it serves the interests of the leaders(overt and hidden) to keep it stoked up [never mind truth or facts - broadcast the news we want people to want to hear].
Perhaps the threat of aliens (however ludicrous) is intended to make us collectively forget our petty squabbles and project the 'other' as a threat to humanity as a whole - ie get the whole world onto the side of 'us'.
I don't seriously think that this was the motive**, neither do I think it would work - but it's a nice theory.
**more likely to be "pay attention to me!!" narcissism
Ford Prefect (or rather his creator, Douglas Adams) was not entirely flippant.
I'm sure much brighter people than I have addressed this but it would be nice to know what the time is measured against / where is the datum.
In 'normal life' any discrepancies caused by the relative motion of clock and observer can be ignored - they're too small an Newtonian mechanics is fine.
However even at low earth orbit conditions, GPS satellites and receivers need to make relatavistic adjustments.
When we're measuring to such (almost incredible) levels of detail and talking about movements in various gravity wells surely an agreed well defined datum is required otherwise how can any sensible measure be taken.
Years ago I was at a meeting where I was told by a member of another organisation that "we are supposed to have a blame free culture" to which I responded with a completely off the cuff remark that "a blame free culture is about as likely as a paperless office".
Fast forward about 8 months and at a presentation by a member of that organisation to a group of us working in a multi company team and my words appeared almost verbatim on a PowerPoint slide covering "real world viewpoints".
"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
Social media has its place - entertaining, yes but certainly not informing and enlightening.
Sadly, the comfort zone 'bubble' appeals to those of all political and religious persuasions and, far from being 'social', recent system have been ever more divisive.
One place I worked at was in a converted factory building. The air-con and heating zones were very sensitive to change (ie the new open plan office wasn't really a good idea for what was a compartmented building previously).
The building manager was forever trying to balance the system and put up notices in big letters "PLEASE DON'T ALTER THE THERMOSTAT SETTINGS" but to no avail as people still fiddled with them to get their desk area comfortable and ignoring the effect on others [who subsequently came along and tinkered with the settings.... you get the idea].
One weekend he went in and reset the thermostats to the known stable setting then disconnected the control wheel on the front from the mechanism (basically a curled bimetallic strip and spring).
He then sent out an e-mail telling people that the system was adjusted and they could set the thermostats as they wished [which because of the carefully chosen words was not a lie].
Result: no effective change to the heating system but suddenly everyone was happy. Seems the illusion of tinkering and control was enough to convince people that they were comfortable:)
As an extension... every prime greater than 3 is of the form 6n+1 or 6n -1 (wish I knew how to get the plus or minus sign into Slash comments)
6n is obviously not prime (divisible by 6)
6n+2, 6n+4 are divisible by 2
6n+3 is divisible by 3
which just leaves 6n+1 and 6n+5
6n+5 is equivalent to 6m-1 (where m=n+1)
so 6n+1 6n-1 are necessary but not sufficient conditions but do provide a quick & dirty test for primality for small - medium sized numbers [divisibility by 2 is easily checked; divisibility by 3 is sum of digits mod 3 = 0]
It's one of those cases where neither side deserves sympathy - it would be good if both could 'lose' after much public mudslinging.
Though as someone once said "when elephants fight it's the grass that gets trampled" - still nice to watch these two waste time, money and energy squabbling
I also have (lowers voice to stop you know who piping up....) facebook and several related sites set to 0.0.0.0 in my hosts file. Some sites may "break" or fail to load pictures but on the whole the bits of the internet I'm interested in work fine.
An interesting geometrical application -yet what do the first 9 comments focus on? the word "Islamic". As I understand it (and I'm not a Muslim) creation of images is frowned upon (from the Jewish old testament commandment about graven images) so a lot of Islamic art is based on calligraphy and patterns (incl. some geometrically interesting tessellations).
Slashdot used to be a good site for technically minded people - over the past year or two it's degenerated into yet another cesspool of bigotry and hatred - whether it be based on religion, women, gun control, Brexit or US politics.
Save your bile for Facebook, Twitter and other similar sites and let Slashdot return to its roots in its anniversary year
I can sympathise with TfL's stated aims - knowing how many people go from place A to place B via route C at certain times of day is useful and can be socially beneficial if it helps train scheduling.
But this can be done in a simpler way (albeit not in real time - but is that really necessary?).
Many years ago I recall using the metro and local trains in Copenhagen when they were doing a survey. When you entered the station they gave you a paper slip with the station name and timeslot written on it; when you reached your end destination there was a bin to drop the paper slip into. That's it from the passenger viewpoint - minimal inconvenience and no linking to you as a person (and you could even opt out by keeping the paper slip if you were so minded).
I'm guessing that at the end of the day they collected the slips at each station and could work out just how many people went on each journey within hour long blocks.
I do recall thinking that a bar code or QR block would simplify the counting process.
But that's not cool enough - it's too simple for today's management to consider (and it cannot be subverted or surveilled).
Slightly off topic - doesn't everyone turn off the phone wifi & bluetooth when not in use? -- doing so seems [in my experience -YMMV] to extend the time between charges by quite a useful margin.
Pretty much every aspect of your life is subject to the collective will of the society in which you live.
This seems to be universally true - yet most people seem to have blinkered vision.
No one has a universal answer (and I doubt that one exists). Both the US and EU approaches have merits and both have drawbacks
US observers cry statism and slippery slope at the EU approaches. They point out the democratic deficit in some structures (albeit with less corruption/bribery than campaign contributions in the US).
Non US observers point out that freedom of expression in the US is fine as long as you toe the party line. They remember Joe MacCarthy They point out how, for all the vaunted freedoms, the societal limitations placed upon anyone who happens to be black, gay, atheist, muslim, socialist....
Neither party comes out with much glory, both have an element of hypocrisy - yet both are much better than fundamentalist theocracies or single state tyrannies and we should celebrate that.
There's more in common than different and grandstanding, assuming moral superiority and slagging each other off doesn't help
Slashdot Mirror
"Amazon said hotels will not have access to voice recordings of Alexa interactions or responses"
oh really?
the second part seems to contradict this
"recordings of Alexa commands are remotely wiped"
unless that implies that the hotel doesn't keep a copy but Amazon does.
My guess is that they do have access to recordings - but let's imagine that they don't:
What happens when the guest orders a load of perishable food to the room and then when it arrives they deny all knowledge [e.g. through malice or if their romantic getaway turned sour and they didn't want that expensive dinner any more or they claim someone else walked in the room and made the request or ... ] ?
Are you seriously suggesting the hotel wouldn't keep a copy of the order to play it back to the guest?
If they don't then there's plenty of scope for 'pranks' and or sabotage from their competitors to run up the food wastage bills ; if they do keep recordings for this eventuality, then why not for other purposes (which gives a weasel excuse to cover any/all occasions).
I suspect that the poster wasn't thinking about stealing it but meant that it will be removed in the sense of a call to the front desk "Please take this from my room - thank you" and/or physically taking it out and dumping it in the managers office.
As someone who lives in the UK, I take a slightly different view from the somewhat rabid and over-hyped fear-mongers on this site.
Let's have some context:
The UK government is in a mess. The whole Brexit fiasco was poorly thought out and people were asked to vote on little/no information at best and outright lies at worst. This has resulted in many many views on what the result meant and massive in-fighting in the government which is spending so much time on the issue nothing else substantive seems to be happening. Couple this with an election leaving a minority party in power, with little opportunity to make any changes and you have a confused muddle.
So what to do? take decisive action? no too hard!! -- let's have a distraction: royal weddings are good for a couple of months run-up but even they pass. An attack on internet companies is always a short term winner - it panders to the worst elements of the press (who see their business model of peddling hate and discord being threatened) and hits the hot buttons of "terror" and "what of the children/women?".
The level of debate here shows the distraction technique works.
As for implementation -- just look at history: England have more chance of winning the world cup than a UK Government IT system working properly. A few consultancies and IT companies may make some money (but at least nowadays the government does try to claw back overspend on its fiascos)
I seriously doubt that anything will really change and in six months to a year's time things will be just the same.
THANK YOU.
I understand about protecting sources :-)
I wish I could get hold of a copy (electronically or in dead tree format, but I recall vividly a story by the science fiction author Eric Frank Russell. Several of his stories and novels had a slightly anti authoritarian and anti establishment feel (Next of Kin, Allamagoosa and Wasp being prime examples which are available in ebook formats).
His "Study in Still Life" though is the classic. It was written in the late 50s/early 60s but is still 100% relevant. Essentially it's about a bureaucrat who games the system to prioritise life saving equipment: the request and its approval / traceability / fulfilment process is described in detail at each stage for what is basically a bundle up and put in the mail activity -- it would be comic if it were not (still today) very true. The twist in the tail about bureaucratic hierarchies is a real gem.
Read it if you get the chance [and please post a link if you find a copy online as I'd love to read it again :-) ]
You're obviously not with the trend.
You forgot the intermediate steps of
vectorisation -> 3d printing -> 3d scanning -> logging the result on a blockchain -> AI interpretation of model -> rasterisation -> colour correction -> writing to cloud -> retrieving from cloud -> sharing of images on (n+1) social media accounts -> copy to clipboard
Each of which would be in a managed container.
(The sending of files to Microsoft, NSA, Google, GCHQ.... is implicit here and not called out as a set of separate actions)
It's not pre - installed on Mint either
"People everywhere are already using their fingers and faces to 'unlock' their mobile phones and PCs"
Not in my circle of tech literate friends and colleagues.
1) Many realise that biometrics == username and not an authentication 'password'
2) Fingerprint & face technologies are not robust and can be fooled. False negatives will turn people off the idea so expect the pattern matching to be loose at best.
3) Biometrics can't be changed easily (if at all)
4) Many people don't have/want phones / laptops with fingerprint readers or face recognition software. I for one don't see why I should dump perfectly serviceable hardware just to buy new copies with these features (which have yet to settle on a widely accepted standard). I could argue on 'green' grounds about why this is a bad idea but basically I'm too mean to waste money repeatedly changing and upgrading just to keep in fashion.
5) If remembering passwords is an issue, use a password safe. Personally I LIKE passwords - they can be complex yet easy to remember and I have [the illusion of] control.
Years ago when I first discovered Slashdot it was genuinely a place where interesting technology and scientific issues were discussed.
Nowadays a large and growing proportion of posts seem to be ad hominem attacks, political entrenchments and mud slinging, invective and general nastiness.
Is this representative of the audience - or of the society we've become?
That a world renowned physicist is the target of barbs and attacks?
Really?
(standing by for the barrage of 'you're a snowflake' comments that only underline the point :)
It may be worth waiting to see if this comes to pass. At the moment we're discussing rumours and "what may be".
At the risk of making a huge generalisation here... people who get hung up about cookies & privacy [and I include myself in this set] are generally also technically competent and able to hack around about:config pages. Loss of a UI, whilst hurting the general population (and acclimatising them to the inevitability of cookies & tracking) is not so big a deal for those who manage cookies already.
That said, changing the way they're managed is fine; removing the facility to do so is a retrograde step and another nudge towards alternatives.
I'm no psychologist but... as a species we tend to delight in dividing into 'them' and 'us'. and then projecting onto the other one all of our own fears, failings and foibles. If there isn't a convenient bogeyman to blame, never mind we'll invent one; if the other side starts to appear reasonable, then it's a trick. Paranoia and propaganda is everywhere - and it serves the interests of the leaders(overt and hidden) to keep it stoked up [never mind truth or facts - broadcast the news we want people to want to hear].
Perhaps the threat of aliens (however ludicrous) is intended to make us collectively forget our petty squabbles and project the 'other' as a threat to humanity as a whole - ie get the whole world onto the side of 'us'.
I don't seriously think that this was the motive**, neither do I think it would work - but it's a nice theory.
**more likely to be "pay attention to me!!" narcissism
...lunchtime doubly so.
Ford Prefect (or rather his creator, Douglas Adams) was not entirely flippant.
I'm sure much brighter people than I have addressed this but it would be nice to know what the time is measured against / where is the datum.
In 'normal life' any discrepancies caused by the relative motion of clock and observer can be ignored - they're too small an Newtonian mechanics is fine.
However even at low earth orbit conditions, GPS satellites and receivers need to make relatavistic adjustments.
When we're measuring to such (almost incredible) levels of detail and talking about movements in various gravity wells surely an agreed well defined datum is required otherwise how can any sensible measure be taken.
Paperless office ?
an anecdote:
Years ago I was at a meeting where I was told by a member of another organisation that "we are supposed to have a blame free culture" to which I responded with a completely off the cuff remark that "a blame free culture is about as likely as a paperless office".
Fast forward about 8 months and at a presentation by a member of that organisation to a group of us working in a multi company team and my words appeared almost verbatim on a PowerPoint slide covering "real world viewpoints".
Still applies nearly 20 years later
As Isaac Asimov said, many years ago...
"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
Social media has its place - entertaining, yes but certainly not informing and enlightening.
Sadly, the comfort zone 'bubble' appeals to those of all political and religious persuasions and, far from being 'social', recent system have been ever more divisive.
One place I worked at was in a converted factory building. The air-con and heating zones were very sensitive to change (ie the new open plan office wasn't really a good idea for what was a compartmented building previously).
The building manager was forever trying to balance the system and put up notices in big letters "PLEASE DON'T ALTER THE THERMOSTAT SETTINGS" but to no avail as people still fiddled with them to get their desk area comfortable and ignoring the effect on others [who subsequently came along and tinkered with the settings.... you get the idea].
One weekend he went in and reset the thermostats to the known stable setting then disconnected the control wheel on the front from the mechanism (basically a curled bimetallic strip and spring).
He then sent out an e-mail telling people that the system was adjusted and they could set the thermostats as they wished [which because of the carefully chosen words was not a lie].
Result: no effective change to the heating system but suddenly everyone was happy. Seems the illusion of tinkering and control was enough to convince people that they were comfortable :)
As an extension... every prime greater than 3 is of the form 6n+1 or
6n -1 (wish I knew how to get the plus or minus sign into Slash comments)
6n is obviously not prime (divisible by 6)
6n+2, 6n+4 are divisible by 2
6n+3 is divisible by 3
which just leaves 6n+1 and 6n+5
6n+5 is equivalent to 6m-1 (where m=n+1)
so 6n+1 6n-1 are necessary but not sufficient conditions but do provide a quick & dirty test for primality for small - medium sized numbers [divisibility by 2 is easily checked; divisibility by 3 is sum of digits mod 3 = 0]
I may be alone in hoping this drags on.
It's one of those cases where neither side deserves sympathy - it would be good if both could 'lose' after much public mudslinging.
Though as someone once said "when elephants fight it's the grass that gets trampled" - still nice to watch these two waste time, money and energy squabbling
You're not alone. I too have had concerns about their lack of concern for people, environment or even their customers.
Glad I'm not the only one.
I also have (lowers voice to stop you know who piping up....) facebook and several related sites set to 0.0.0.0 in my hosts file. Some sites may "break" or fail to load pictures but on the whole the bits of the internet I'm interested in work fine.
An interesting geometrical application -yet what do the first 9 comments focus on? the word "Islamic". As I understand it (and I'm not a Muslim) creation of images is frowned upon (from the Jewish old testament commandment about graven images) so a lot of Islamic art is based on calligraphy and patterns (incl. some geometrically interesting tessellations).
Slashdot used to be a good site for technically minded people - over the past year or two it's degenerated into yet another cesspool of bigotry and hatred - whether it be based on religion, women, gun control, Brexit or US politics.
Save your bile for Facebook, Twitter and other similar sites and let Slashdot return to its roots in its anniversary year
I can sympathise with TfL's stated aims - knowing how many people go from place A to place B via route C at certain times of day is useful and can be socially beneficial if it helps train scheduling.
But this can be done in a simpler way (albeit not in real time - but is that really necessary?).
Many years ago I recall using the metro and local trains in Copenhagen when they were doing a survey. When you entered the station they gave you a paper slip with the station name and timeslot written on it; when you reached your end destination there was a bin to drop the paper slip into. That's it from the passenger viewpoint - minimal inconvenience and no linking to you as a person (and you could even opt out by keeping the paper slip if you were so minded).
I'm guessing that at the end of the day they collected the slips at each station and could work out just how many people went on each journey within hour long blocks.
I do recall thinking that a bar code or QR block would simplify the counting process.
But that's not cool enough - it's too simple for today's management to consider (and it cannot be subverted or surveilled).
Slightly off topic - doesn't everyone turn off the phone wifi & bluetooth when not in use? -- doing so seems [in my experience -YMMV] to extend the time between charges by quite a useful margin.
Pretty much every aspect of your life is subject to the collective will of the society in which you live.
This seems to be universally true - yet most people seem to have blinkered vision.
No one has a universal answer (and I doubt that one exists). Both the US and EU approaches have merits and both have drawbacks
US observers cry statism and slippery slope at the EU approaches.
They point out the democratic deficit in some structures (albeit with less corruption/bribery than campaign contributions in the US).
Non US observers point out that freedom of expression in the US is fine as long as you toe the party line.
They remember Joe MacCarthy
They point out how, for all the vaunted freedoms, the societal limitations placed upon anyone who happens to be black, gay, atheist, muslim, socialist....
Neither party comes out with much glory, both have an element of hypocrisy - yet both are much better than fundamentalist theocracies or single state tyrannies and we should celebrate that.
There's more in common than different and grandstanding, assuming moral superiority and slagging each other off doesn't help
What would Mandy Rice-Davies say??
But this is homeopathic posting - the rarer it is the more potent :-)
To use the usual paraphrasing of Mandy Rice Davies' immortal words "well he would say that wouldn't he?"