notinversed's comments

notinversed | 6 years ago | on: FTC Approves Roughly $5B Facebook Settlement

Which level?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D_TkbPZXkAITIol.jpg

There is zero impact to Facebook from this fine. They are celebrating with champagne and looking at new yacht prices in Menlo Park.

Nobody goes to jail, everyone keeps their jobs. They only broke Democracy, it seems like that would be the one crime you wouldn't just get off scot free for. The FTC is complicit, we don't seem to have a functional regulatory system in this country any more.

notinversed | 6 years ago | on: FTC Approves Facebook Fine of About $5 Billion

If you're a director that's a new Maserati. Who's my candidate? I have never voted, not sure what you're trying to project on to me.

They broke Democracy. That's putting it nicely, I think, and being charitable to Facebook when you could use much more malicious phrasing based on their actions.

They broke Democracy. Get used to that phrase, you're gonna be hearing it a lot in the coming years, because they broke Democracy.

notinversed | 6 years ago | on: FTC Approves Facebook Fine of About $5 Billion

The massive spike in FB stock as this was announced is not exactly encouraging. All those executives getting paid largely in equity learned... what exactly did they learn?

They don't even have to admit they did anything wrong? Zero fault? For breaking Democracy? What the hell.

notinversed | 6 years ago | on: A problem worse than Zoom

So any website can make arbitrary requests to localhost or any internal LAN server? You could have a field day with just a little bit of internal knowledge on that one.

Do random malicious web pages in IOS still have the ability to open the app store too? Was that the genesis of all this nonsense, just trying to make the app store easier?

notinversed | 6 years ago | on: Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations

You're getting too lost in the weeds here.

It doesn't matter if a company takes your data, does a poor job of anonymizing it, and then decides to label it as "training" for their "AI" or if they just stick it all in a flat .txt files and process it in Fortran.

It's the exact same thing. You should be mad about the data being saved and used. Splitting hairs over implementation details to try and find a loophole is just a waste of time.

notinversed | 6 years ago | on: Living without the modern browser

This is a great read. I spend so much time fighting the web. If you want to maintain a shred of privacy you then have to regularly read about all the latest trackers, dns monitors, browser fingerprinting techniques, shady vpns, blocking social domains, etc, and even then you're probably not very anonymous or private.

I hadn't ever really considered just giving up on the browser before. But I think yeah, maybe it's time. The web has become such an awful cesspool of surveillance capitalism, I'm tired of fighting it all.

notinversed | 6 years ago | on: IBM's Acquisition of Red Hat Closes

IBM was a true pioneer in the bullshit AI industrial complex with all that Watson nonsense.

Many companies seem to have copied that strategy of just pretending they are sprinkling some AI fairy dust on whatever and that it's better somehow, while actually doing zero work.

Outside of that accomplishment I have no idea what IBM has been doing since the 90s.

notinversed | 6 years ago | on: Stricken Russian Nuke Sub Crew Prevented ‘Planetary Catastrophe’

The primary role of subs has been intelligence for as long as subs have existed. One of the first missions subs carried out in WW1 was cutting undersea cables.

Despite all the undue attention placed on the combat U-Boats and their limited success in sinking merchant ships, the history of submarines is primarily the history of getting in good positions to tap cables or radio frequencies or put people in places.

There is very little need for torpedoes or missiles anymore, outside of creating dramatic scenes in the movies.

notinversed | 6 years ago

Now that all? of the nation's major media orgs are behind paywalls I kind of wonder what the point of even writing this article is?

The few rich dudes on the coasts with WSJ subs found this read interesting I'm sure, and will talk about with their friends at a party maybe. The history of Hong Kong is truly fascinating.

I didn't read it. A bunch of other commenters will chime in without reading it. No regular or poor people subscribe to any of these media paywalls, so who are you informing? Who gets to be part of the debate? Who are you writing for and why?

There is another WSJ article floating around today that I would really like to read, it's defending the history and practice of share buybacks. Nobody but rich white dudes will read that and use it to continue their ever increasing share buybacks. I would really like to understand their thinking, but I can't.

Does anyone else see the problem here?

notinversed | 6 years ago | on: EASA demands additional changes for the 737 Max

It really seems beyond just negligent and greedy to me, it's almost like Boeing was just running a malicious social experiment just to see what they could get away with.

I understand the goals of the plane and how avoiding pilot retraining is more important than any other priority in the world of aviation, but even then the design is just so bad it's hard to even make sense of.

notinversed | 6 years ago | on: Why Everyone's Leaving YouTube

Tying yourself (and your job and income and status) to one company or one platform for years on end seems like a terrible choice. It doesn't seem to matter much what the service or platform is: Youtube, Twitch, Airbnb, Uber, Monsanto, etc... who cares? If you need that platform for your career then that platform owns you.

Every company is going to cut costs and converge more to the safe mean over the long term. The history is pretty clear on this. Why would you tie your whole life to a company and then spend every day complaining about that company?

notinversed | 6 years ago | on: Navy Got 'UFO' Patent Granted by Warning of Similar Chinese Tech Advances

Welcome to Colorado. If you camp up in the mountains where there is no light pollution and do some stargazing you'll usually see something classified within a week or two. It was hilarious to me when the B-21 was announced and I could confirm I wasn't regularly hallucinating the profile of an F-117 or something.

The stuff they are doing now with drones is even more wild, I can't wait to read about how those actually work in a few years.

notinversed | 6 years ago | on: Microsoft Flight Simulator

I just want a pretty flight sim with a handful of planes that lets me fly everywhere in the world without dollar signs appearing in the menus.

Actually I'm finding myself giving up on video games for the exact same reasons I gave up on television 20 years ago, I'm tired of everyone trying to sell me more shit during the increasingly rare free moments I have.

notinversed | 6 years ago | on: US Senate report on Equifax breach [pdf]

This report is brutal, it goes into great detail about the technical incompetence in many areas.

Yet Equifax is doing better than ever. No new laws, no reform, nobody goes to jail. All the rich people get to keep their money.

Thoughts and prayers.

notinversed | 6 years ago | on: Testing advertisements across the network

I love how the responsibility is always on the end user to watch out for and report malicious ads, and in postings like this they always talk about how good they are at removing the "bad ads".

If we're going to be test subjects for new malware delivery vectors that the owner of the site has no control over then I think we should at least get numbers for revenue and profitability for these ad programs.

I guess this post isn't really about StackExchange, I'm just tired of being the product and the test subject of these monstrous ad networks.

notinversed | 6 years ago | on: A Wave of Fear in American Commerce

The fact that you think either side has a "vice grip" on anything speaks volumes to how effective the filter bubbles have become. You hear what you want to hear, see what you want to see, the engagement stats are through the roof!

90% of reality has been filtered out and you're being fed a constant stream of "poor white man persecuted for wrongthink" stories to keep you clicking.

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