As we saw yesterday, staying highly skeptical of all cyber-information, from friends/followers through speeches and videos is a necessity these days.

But the question arises,

Where did we get the idea that tech meant progress and that it’s inevitable.

Neither are true, especially the inevitable part.

The tech world loves to claim that technology is like evolution, therefore inevitable.

Technologists’ desire to make a parallel to evolution is flawed at its very foundation. Evolution is driven by random mutation — mistakes, not plans. (…)  Evolution doesn’t patent things or do focus groups. Evolution doesn’t spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to ensure that its plans go unfettered.

What a crock, but people have bought into the mindset.

You can see it playing out in all the smart (hackable) products.

People claim they want the convenience, but that so-called convenience is killing creativity.

Humans make choices.

Tech bosses are human.

And it’s us humans who will pay the price for the supposed inevitability of tech evolution.

Image credit: Charles LeBlanc

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Good, bad or silly, ideas for products are generated in response to a problem or need. It doesn’t matter if the problem/need only exists in the entrepreneur’s mind (think Jucerio), it’s still the driving force behind creating whatever. So what happens when there are no perceived problems? When the current whatever is treated as THE solution?  Innovation takes a nosedive and monopolies thrive.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry when I see ads for stuff that responds to voice command, especially when it’s for stuff like changing the TV channel. I guess that using the remote takes either too much energy or too much intelligence to work it.

Everything today is about convenience, a trend I’ve been suspicious of, although I wasn’t sure why.

However, after reading an op-ed piece by Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia and the author of “The Attention Merchants: The Epic Struggle to Get Inside Our Heads,” called The Tyranny of Convenience I’m starting to understand what about it makes me itch.

In the developed nations of the 21st century, convenience — that is, more efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks — has emerged as perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies.

Granted I’m known as a digital dinosaur, but there are some conveniences — washing machines, telephones, cars, email, and Skype chat, among them — I’m all for — although I see no reason they need to be smart .

However, I have no cell phone, avoid any app, service, etc., provided by Google, clean my own house, wash my own clothes, shop for my own food, and do my own cooking just as I’ve done since I was 18.

I search using startpage.com, no ads, no tracking and my life functions just fine without always being connected. I’m not on social media and don’t suffer from FOMA; I meet friends for meals and fun and we talk on the phone in-between.

I suppose that all sounds very inconvenient these days, but I’m never bored and enjoy the feelings of accomplishment that come with doing stuff yourself, as well as figuring out better ways to do it — it’s called ingenuity.

I’ve seen many “convenient” items come to market years after I came up with a similar approach to use for myself.

Americans say they prize competition, a proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet our taste for convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the economics of scale and the power of habit. The easier it is to use Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes — and thus the easier it becomes to use Amazon. Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows (emphasis mine).

Professor WU (or someone) needs to do a follow-up article entitled, “How Convenience Killed Creativity and Strangled Entrepreneurship.

Image credit: jim212jim

Do ads for smart stuff excite you?

Do you lust for a smart refrigerator, smart doorbell or some other smart product?

Do you want a smart home?

What about a smart city?

We already have a smart electric grid.

What do they all have in common?

They can be hacked.

It’s something to think about.

Smart = hackable.

Hacking a personally owned smart device is bad, but it pales in comparison to what happens if (when) the grid is hacked, whether by a foreign power or civilians for ransom.

Ukraine’s power was hacked in 2015, but old technology saved it from a far worse outcome.

A bill introduced in 2016 has been working its way through the US Congress. It would require similar old tech for US power grids. The bill provides a study period, so it will be 2020 before anything actually happens.

The old tech is actually the only solution that is immune to cyber/digital attacks of any kind.

Can you guess what it is?

If you guessed analog/manual/human give yourself a gold star. If you are under 40 you get five gold stars.

“Specifically, it will examine ways to replace automated systems with low-tech redundancies, like manual procedures controlled by human operators,” said US Senators Angus King (I-Maine) and Jim Risch (R-Idaho), who introduced the bill on the Senate floor in 2016. (…) The US is very close to improving power grid security by mandating the use of “retro” (analog, manual) technologies on US power grids as a defensive measure against foreign cyber-attacks that could bring down power distribution as a result.

Are you surprised? I’m not.

I always thought hooking the power grid up to the hackable internet was a dumb idea.

Kind of like locking your house and then taping spare keys to the doorframes.

Now we’ll spend millions on these “improvements.”

Stupidity really does rule.

Image credit: Midnight Believer

As promised yesterday, I’m updating the “don’t trust them, they lie” list (in mostly alphabetical order) with new links to the nefarious doings of your favorite “can’t live without ‘em” companies.

First up: Amazon. Anyone who has bought from Amazon is aware of how it uses your buying data to suggest additional purchases, as do all ecommerce sites. And there have been multiple stories about Alexa listening and responding even when it’s supposedly not on. But did you know that those supposedly anonymous recordings are discussed for amusement in Amazon employee chatrooms?

On a far more serious note, Ring, the video doorbell company Amazon acquired, is teaming up with police departments to offer free or discounted smart doorbells. And although it supposedly goes against Ring’s own policy, some of those PDs are adding to the terms of service the right to look at the saved video footage sans subpoena.

Sadly, Apple is on the nefarious list, in spite of it’s famous “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone” philosophy. But, as with other companies, the facts are more complicated — the thieves are in the apps.

More tomorrow.

Image credit: MySign AG

I ended a post a couple of weeks ago by asking “when will they ever learn” and answering my own question with “never.”

“They” referred to the millions of people who continue to rely on Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. — in spite of every security breech, hack, lie, prevarication, hedge, and excuse — not to mention buying all kinds of smart devices.

So what’s new?

What’s new is that Google won (conned) the right to teach kids how to behave online.

The tech giant is positioning itself in schools as a trusted authority on digital citizenship…

That is the message behind “Be Internet Awesome,” a so-called digital-citizenship education program that the technology giant developed for schools. (…)  Google plans to reach five million schoolchildren with the program this year and has teamed up with the National Parent Teacher Association to offer related workshops to parents.

Impressive, considering that historically the NPTA has been dominantly female (although they’re working to change that) and Google is the company that not only protects high ranking abusers, but pays them millions.

Mr. [Andy] Rubin was one of three executives that Google protected over the past decade after they were accused of sexual misconduct. In two instances, it ousted senior executives, but softened the blow by paying them millions of dollars as they departed, even though it had no legal obligation to do so. In a third, the executive remained in a highly compensated post at the company. Each time Google stayed silent about the accusations against the men.

The spying, listening and other sneaky actions of Google Assistant and Alexa are legion and now Facebook joins the herd, with a new in-home device equipped with microphones and a video camera that can really sell you.

“Portal voice calling is built on the Messenger infrastructure, so when you make a video call on Portal, we collect the same types of information (i.e. usage data such as length of calls, frequency of calls) that we collect on other Messenger-enabled devices. We may use this information to inform the ads we show you across our platforms. Other general usage data, such as aggregate usage of apps, etc., may also feed into the information that we use to serve ads,” a spokesperson said in an email to Recode.

You can bet people will buy it.

Alexa has a particularly creepy approach.

Amazon has submitted a patent application, recently granted, outlining how the company could recommend chicken soup or cough drops to people who use its Echo device if it detects symptoms like coughing and sniffling when they speak to it, according to a report by CNET. It could even suggest a visit to the movies after discerning boredom. Other patents submitted by the company have focused on how it could suggest products to people based on keywords in their conversations.

And, if you have one in the bedroom, just think what Echo could suggest based on what it hears.

Most smart devices cater to “what’s in it for me,” with little concern for their users.

However, some work a bit more for the public good, such as Kinsa smart thermometers, which has a public health focus.

“What this does is help us really target vulnerable populations where we have a clear signal about outbreaks,” Mr. Sarma said.

Mr. Singh, who was an executive vice president at the Clinton Health Access Initiative, said that Kinsa worked only with clients that can help with its mission of preventing the spread of illness through early detection. It made sense to work with Clorox, he said, because of the C.D.C. recommendation about disinfecting.

Since it’s Halloween, we’ll end with a truly terrifying look at Facebook in the detailed review of The Autocracy App by Jacob Weisberg

When will they ever learn?

As every link in this post proves…

Never.

Image credit: Paul Downey