Book of Days: asher553

Russia and China are after your internet (with the help of the United Nations).
http://thedailychrenk.com/2019/12/30/russia-china-internet/
'It would be nice to think that countries like Russia and China genuinely care about online crime, as corruption and crime ridden as they themselves are, but one does not have to be too paranoid to suspect that the cybercrime they are most concerned about combating is cybercrime against the state. As the article mentions, China is world-infamous for its “Great Firewall” and a tight grip on what goes on online within its borders (often, hypocritically, assisted by the Western tech giants). Russia, on the other hand, has been conducting tests of its own internal internet, Runet, which could be used to cut the county off from the rest of the world. It’s not hard to guess what sort of websites and online activity could be banned by the Kremlin on its national intranet. ...'

Warshipping: the Unabomber, high-tech version.
https://boingboing.net/2019/08/07/warchakalakaboom.html
'The device scans for visible wifi networks; once it senses a network associated with its target (indicating that it has arrived on the target company's premises), it alerts its controllers over the cellular radio, and then scans the local wifi for instance in which users' devices are initiating new connections to the network. It captures the handshake data from these connections, transmits them over the cellular network to its controllers, and they can then crack the password offline, send login credentials to the warshipping device, login to the target network, and attack the network from within. ...'

Apparently, "drinking like a fish" isn't all it's cracked up to be.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/jim-beam-bourbon-spill-killed-fish-kentucky-ohio-rivers-a9262921.html
Happy new year, and please celebrate responsibly.

I've got several boxes full of old CDs and DVDs, all of which I keep meaning to watch or listen to "someday". Last night I decided to give one of those DVDs a go (a production of a Shakespeare play that I'd had for maybe 5 or 6 years) and I put it in the DVD player. A few minutes into the play, the faces of the actors dissolved into blocks of pixels as if they had all been placed under the witness protection program. Soon thereafter, the disc stopped playing entirely.

Disc rot. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot] It's the same problem I'd been having with many of my DVDs and audio CDs. Meanwhile, my old vinyl records - some of them inherited from my parents - still play, for the most part, pretty well.

Sony gave us the CD back in the early 1980s [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc] and I can remember the extravagant promises that were made about the digital compact disc's durability and longevity. Now I'm wondering if it's time to just cut my losses and toss all my old optical media in the dumpster.

I can watch videos and listen to music on streaming digital media and downloads now. Of course, the continued viability of those media depends on the survival of the technological infrastructure that they inhabit: successive generations of computers, mobile devices, music players, and so on.

I'll confess I have a certain sentimental nostalgia for vinyl - but my reasons for keeping up my vinyl collection are pragmatic. I want a record that'll damn sure play 10 or 20 years from now. I don't know that about my digital tracks, and I certainly don't know it about my CDs, but I know it about my vinyls.

And as for Sony - the folks who brought us the compact disc in the first place - what are they up to these days?

Well ...

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/29/534854280/sony-will-start-making-vinyl-records-again-in-japan-after-nearly-30-year-hiatus

The tables have turned ... at 33 1/3 rpm.

So, I've been driving around town with this crazy woman in my car.

She talks too fast and too much, as if she's had way too much coffee. She gives me confusing, contradictory directions, takes me on seemingly random detours, and can never seem to make up her mind what she wants me to do. She is, literally, driving me crazy.

She is Google Lady, the voice of the Google Nav on my Android phone, and she's the one I've gotta follow when I do my deliveries using the Uber app. She makes me long for the soothing tones of my longtime companion, Garmin Lady, but I guess you can get used to anything.

Last night I thought I'd try to get along without her for a run. Big mistake. The delivery was just straight down Burnside and I thought "Oh I'll just go down Burnside and turn right on 1st." Except that I don't know the city as well as I thought I did: you can't turn onto 1st from Burnside, and I ended up having to continue across the bridge to Eastside and turn around - using the nav, of course. Google Lady had had the last laugh. I felt compelled to apologize.

"Okay, Google Lady, I'm sorry I doubted you - "

"To use voice command, say 'OK Google', and then ... "

* sigh *

It's going to be an interesting relationship.

Instant pictures, SX-70 style!

Apparently in some quarters this qualifies me as a "hipster":
http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/09/26/hipsters-and-low-tech/

Whatever.