[QUOTE=retina;526108][url]https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/smart-tvs-smart-home-devices-found-be-leaking-sensitive-user-n1055796[/url][/QUOTE]So you are likely safe while watching vintage copies of Rambo on you 1987 Goldstar VCR.

[url=https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/10/1/20887003/tech-technology-evolution-natural-inevitable-ethics]The biggest lie tech people tell themselves — and the rest of us[/url] | Vox: [i]They see facial recognition, smart diapers, and surveillance devices as inevitable evolutions. They’re not.[/i]
[quote]Imagine you’re taking an online business class — the kind where you watch video lectures and then answer questions at the end. But this isn’t a normal class, and you’re not just watching the lectures: They’re watching you back. Every time the facial recognition system decides that you look bored, distracted, or tuned out, it makes a note. And after each lecture, it only asks you about content from those moments.

This isn’t a hypothetical system; it’s a real one deployed by a company called Nestor. And if you don’t like the sound of it, you’re not alone. Neither do the actual students.

When I asked the man behind the system, French inventor Marcel Saucet, how the students in these classes feel about being watched, he admitted that they didn’t like it. They felt violated and surveilled, he said, but he shrugged off any implication that it was his fault. “Everybody is doing this,” he told me. “It’s really early and shocking, but we cannot go against natural laws of evolution.”

As a reporter who covers technology and the future, I constantly hear variations of this line as technologists attempt to apply the theory Charles Darwin made famous in biology to their own work. I’m told that there is a progression of technology, a movement that is bigger than any individual inventor or CEO. They say they are simply caught in a tide, swept along in a current they cannot fight. They say it inevitably leads them to facial recognition (now even being deployed on children), smart speakers that record your intimate conversations, and doorbells that narc on your neighbors. They say we can’t blame these companies for the erosion of privacy or democracy or trust in public institutions — that was all going to happen sooner or later.

“When have we ever been able to keep the genie in the bottle?” they ask. Besides, they argue, people buy this stuff so they must want it. Companies are simply responding to “natural selection” by consumers. There is nobody to blame for this, they say. It’s as natural as gravity.

Perhaps no one states this belief more clearly than inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near: “The ongoing acceleration of technology is the implication and inevitable result of what I call the law of accelerating returns, which describes the acceleration of the pace of and the exponential growth of the products of an evolutionary process.”

In fact, our world is shaped by humans who make decisions, and technology companies are no different.

To claim that these devices are the result of some kind of ever-improving natural process not only misunderstands how evolution works, but it also suggests that everything from biological weapons to fraudulent startups like Theranos to Juicero (the $400 machine that squeezed juice out of packets) are necessary and natural.

While these “innovations” range from the dangerous to the silly, they share a common thread: Nothing about them is “natural.” No natural process is creating a “smart” hairbrush or a “smart” flip flop or a “smart” condom. Or a Bluetooth-enabled toaster, a cryptocurrency from a photography company, or an internet-connected air freshener.
[b]
Evolution is a terrible metaphor for technology
[/b]
Technologists’ desire to make a parallel to evolution is flawed at its very foundation. Evolution is driven by random mutation — mistakes, not plans. (And while some inventions may indeed be the result of mishaps, the decision of a company to patent, produce, and market those inventions is not.) Evolution doesn’t have meetings about the market, the environment, the customer base. 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...[/quote]

[QUOTE=ewmayer;527771][url=https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/10/1/20887003/tech-technology-evolution-natural-inevitable-ethics]The biggest lie tech people tell themselves — and the rest of us[/url] | Vox: [i]They see facial recognition, smart diapers, and surveillance devices as inevitable evolutions. They’re not.[/i][quote]Imagine you’re taking an online business class — the kind where you watch video lectures and then answer questions at the end. But this isn’t a normal class, and you’re not just watching the lectures: They’re watching you back. Every time the facial recognition system decides that you look bored, distracted, or tuned out, it makes a note. And after each lecture, it only asks you about content from those moments.

This isn’t a hypothetical system; it’s a real one deployed by a company called Nestor. And if you don’t like the sound of it, you’re not alone. Neither do the actual students.

When I asked the man behind the system, French inventor Marcel Saucet, how the students in these classes feel about being watched, he admitted that they didn’t like it. They felt violated and surveilled, he said, but he shrugged off any implication that it was his fault. “Everybody is doing this,” he told me. “It’s really early and shocking, but we cannot go against natural laws of evolution.”

As a reporter who covers technology and the future, I constantly hear variations of this line as technologists attempt to apply the theory Charles Darwin made famous in biology to their own work. I’m told that there is a progression of technology, a movement that is bigger than any individual inventor or CEO. They say they are simply caught in a tide, swept along in a current they cannot fight. They say it inevitably leads them to facial recognition (now even being deployed on children), smart speakers that record your intimate conversations, and doorbells that narc on your neighbors. They say we can’t blame these companies for the erosion of privacy or democracy or trust in public institutions — that was all going to happen sooner or later.

“When have we ever been able to keep the genie in the bottle?” they ask. Besides, they argue, people buy this stuff so they must want it. Companies are simply responding to “natural selection” by consumers. There is nobody to blame for this, they say. It’s as natural as gravity.

Perhaps no one states this belief more clearly than inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near: “The ongoing acceleration of technology is the implication and inevitable result of what I call the law of accelerating returns, which describes the acceleration of the pace of and the exponential growth of the products of an evolutionary process.”

In fact, our world is shaped by humans who make decisions, and technology companies are no different.

To claim that these devices are the result of some kind of ever-improving natural process not only misunderstands how evolution works, but it also suggests that everything from biological weapons to fraudulent startups like Theranos to Juicero (the $400 machine that squeezed juice out of packets) are necessary and natural.

While these “innovations” range from the dangerous to the silly, they share a common thread: Nothing about them is “natural.” No natural process is creating a “smart” hairbrush or a “smart” flip flop or a “smart” condom. Or a Bluetooth-enabled toaster, a cryptocurrency from a photography company, or an internet-connected air freshener.

[b]Evolution is a terrible metaphor for technology[/b]

Technologists’ desire to make a parallel to evolution is flawed at its very foundation. Evolution is driven by random mutation — mistakes, not plans. (And while some inventions may indeed be the result of mishaps, the decision of a company to patent, produce, and market those inventions is not.) Evolution doesn’t have meetings about the market, the environment, the customer base. 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...[/quote][/QUOTE]This is not the first time Darwin's ideas have been misappropriated to the detriment of the general welfare. In the Nineteenth Century, the Robber Barons and their ilk subscribed to the notion of "Social Darwinism," that societies "evolved" according to "survival of the fittest," a phrase coined, it seems, by one Herbert Spencer, sometimes called the "father of social Darwinism." Andrew Carnegie was a great admirer. There is thus a certain irony in the following incident, which I found described on an [url=https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/carnegie-herbert-spencer/]American Experience feature page[/url]:[quote]During the voyage, Carnegie used all his powers to convince Spencer to include Pittsburgh on his itinerary. The business tycoon argued that the Edgar Thomson Bessemer steel plant was evidence of the industrial order that Spencer had declared as the next and final stage of man's social evolution. Spencer finally agreed to the stop, and when he arrived in Pittsburgh, Carnegie and his partners met him at the station.

Spencer, however, was not as impressed with Pittsburgh as was Carnegie. The visitor complained about the smoky, polluted air. The heat and noise of the mills almost forced the sickly Spencer to collapse at one point. When the tour was over and Spencer was about to leave, he gave his verdict of Pittsburgh, one that must have hurt the city's champion: "Six months residence here would justify suicide."[/quote]

The misapplication of evolution brought another person to mind. It took a bit of digging to find the text of William Jennings Bryan's [url=http://moses.law.umn.edu/darrow/documents/last_message-of_W_J_Bryan.pdf]undelivered closing statement[/url] in the Scopes "monkey trial," but I found it worth the effort. Reading it shows that Bryan was hardly the ignorant buffoon he is often portrayed as having been. His indictment of "social Darwinism" (which begins on page 23), for example, very effectively quotes from Darwin's [u]The Descent of Man[/u].

The following passage seems pertinent to the subject at hand:[quote]Most of the people who believe in evolution do not know what evolution means. One of the science books taught in the Dayton High school has a chapter on "The Evolution of Machinery." This is a very common misuse of the term. People speak of the evolution of the telephone, the automobile and the musical instrument. But these are merely illustrations of man's power to deal intelligently with inanimate matter; there is no growth from within in the development of machinery.[/quote]

Did you install TOR on your "smart" phone?

No? Are you sure? You might have installed it without knowing, or your carrier did it for you (why do people buy their phone from a carrier anyway?! :loco:).

If you do have TOR then you are probably leaking your sensitive data to unknown parties.

[url]https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/millions-phones-leaking-information/[/url] [quote]There is a privacy threat lurking on perhaps hundreds of millions of devices, that could enable potential attackers to track and profile users, by using information leaked via the Tor network, even if the users never intentionally installed Tor in the first place.

...

The researchers explained that they set up several Tor exit nodes, just to see what they could find, and the results were surprising. The researchers found that approximately 30% of all Android devices are transmitting data over Tor.

...

In a series of demonstrations, including live dashboards shown by Bhargava, the researchers showed what data they had collected from mobile users that were inadvertently using Tor. The data included GPS coordinates, web addresses, phone numbers, keystrokes and other PII.[/quote]I expect those apps are using TOR to hide the content and the destination from anyone watching the line.

Once again the "smart" device is the dumb choice. :razz:

[QUOTE=retina;527960]Did you install TOR on your "smart" phone?[/QUOTE]This is not the Tor you are looking for.

I use Tor.

[QUOTE=xilman;527985]This is not the Tor you are looking for.

I use Tor.[/QUOTE]

Da steh' ich nun, ich armer Tor!
Und bin so klug als wie zuvor. -- [url=https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/36019-habe-nun-ach-philosophie-juristerei-und-medizin-und-leider-auch]Goethe, [i]Faust: Der Tragödie Erster Teil[/i][/url]

Not really a big surprise here:

[url]https://mobilesyrup.com/2019/10/21/amazon-alexa-google-home-approved-malicious-apps/[/url] [quote]Security researchers have revealed that they were able to create apps accepted by Google and Amazon to eavesdrop through the companies’ smart speakers.[/quote]But the conclusion is very poor:[quote]“To prevent ‘Smart Spies’ attacks, Amazon and Google need to implement better protection, starting with a more thorough review process of third-party Skills and Actions made available in their voice app stores,” the researchers stated.[/quote]No. To prevent attacks people need to stop buying this :poop:.[quote]Both companies have said they are improving their vetting processes.[/quote]Well that makes me feel much better. I'm sure now they will never ever have any more problems. :rolleyes:

_________________________________________________________________________

Also:

[url]https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/22/japanese_hotel_chain_sorry_that_bedside_robots_may_have_watched_guests[/url] [quote]Japanese hotel chain HIS Group has apologised for ignoring warnings that its in-room robots were hackable to allow pervs to remotely view video footage from the devices.

The Henn na Hotel is staffed by robots: guests can be checked in by humanoid or dinosaur reception bots before proceeding to their room.

Facial recognition tech will let customers into their room and then a bedside robot will assist with other requirements. However several weeks ago a security researcher revealed on Twitter that he had warned HIS Group in July about the bed-bots being easily accessible, noting they sported "unsigned code" allowing a user to tap an NFC tag to the back of robot's head and allow access via the streaming app of their choice.[/quote]There is nothing wrong with a key. Why all this facial recognition nonsense?

And a robot watching you and listening to you in bed ... I'm sure nothing could ever go wrong there. :loco:

Just because it is new and "cool" doesn't mean it is better.

Updates that you have no control over are always good :sigh:
 

[url]https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/24/google_bricks_home_devices/[/url] [quote]Google has somehow managed to brick some of its own smart Home and Home Mini devices, leaving an unknown number completely unresponsive after an automated update.[/quote][conspiracyTheory]Marketed to look like a mistake. But actually deliberately designed to get you to buy the latest :poop:[/conspiracyTheory]

[url]https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20191104-01/?p=103052[/url] [quote]For some reason, my alarm clock requires that I install an app on my phone. And the app required me to create an account.

I’m going to repeat that: In order to set my alarm clock, I had to create an account with the clock manufacturer.[/quote]For "some" reason? I would have thought a person like Raymond Chen would be smarter than that. That "some" reason is clearly to make sure you have an app that does its utmost to watch everything you do and report back to the mother ship.

Anyhow, it gets better because now the clock is broken.[quote]So now I was left with a clock that reads “12:00AM January 1, 2018”.

...

I think the problem is that the clock’s Wi-Fi chip is broken.[/quote]So the "smart" bit is broken and the rest of the clock is now useless.

Older clocks, the ones that just worked forever, would count the incoming mains supply frequency. They kept time perfectly. No need for Wifi. What was the point of adding it?

[QUOTE=retina;529640]Older clocks, the ones that just worked forever, would count the incoming mains supply frequency. They kept time [strike]perfectly[/strike] adequately for many purposes. No need for Wifi. What was the point of adding it?[/QUOTE]

Fixed that for you.

I happen to prefer NTP and GPS-locked clocks which are adequate for many more purposes, not least because they keep track of stuff like down-time for routine maintenance as detailed in the following announcement:

[URL="https://twitter.com/BadAstronomer/status/1190849546458476544"]"Don't forget that tonight astronomers stop the rotation of the Earth for an hour for routine maintenance (mantle flushing, core convection rebalancing, Moho layer alignment, and so on). Things should be good as new when you wake up. The Sun might rise earlier but that's normal."[/URL]

Still no need for an app though.

[QUOTE=retina;529640][url]https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20191104-01/?p=103052[/url]
<snip>
Older clocks, the ones that just worked forever, would count the incoming mains supply frequency. They kept time perfectly. No need for Wifi. What was the point of adding it?[/QUOTE]Here in the good ol' USA, it seems the standards for mains supply frequency have been relaxed, so clocks based on its accuracy may be less accurate than they once were.

I used to rely on a plug-in clock radio with alarm. It finally crapped out, but it had a long long service life. Nowadays, I think an alarm clock should not be totally dependent on house current. A plug-in alarm clock should have a battery backup, just in case. For especially important wakeups, I go for a standalone battery-powered alarm clock. Even if the power goes out, it will keep working.

All the alarm clocks I've ever had could be set (both time-of-day and alarm) either purely mechanically (for mechanical clocks with face and hands) or by pushing a few buttons for clocks with a digital display. Contriving a convoluted clock-setting mechanism that relies on a wi-fi chip and a phone app is a fine example of what I call maliciously designing something to be difficult to use or maintain. Rather than unplugging the clock and putting it in a closet, I would unplug it, take it outside, and smash it with a sledgehammer.

BTW, I was in a public library recently. The librarian mentioned to me that some of the adolescents who had come in recently did not know how to read the time from the analog wall clock.