Blog
That Steph Curry Video
I don’t know if you’ve seen the video, but it is damn impressive. But I had doubts. Turns out, for a good reason:
How to Use Physics to Tell If That Steph Curry Video Is Real
I’m not going to spoil it for you, but the ending is just as impressive when you think about it.
25 December 2022 — French West Indies
Oops. It wasn’t just account information… It was your passwords too!
The Verge:
If you have an account you use to store passwords and login information on LastPass, or you used to have one and hadn’t deleted it before this fall, your password vault may be in hackers’ hands. Still, the company claims you might be safe if you have a strong master password and its most recent default settings. However, if you have a weak master password or less security, the company says that “as an extra security measure, you should consider minimizing risk by changing passwords of websites you have stored.”
If I were a LastPass user, I’d be very worried.
I’d probably move to another service, or find an on-premises solution that doesn’t rely on trusting someone’s ability to implement security correctly.
Whether or not they had played fast and loose with the security of their customer’s data or not is irrelevant —unless you are an EU Citizen, and perhaps you should look at provisions under the GDPR for redress. I’m not a lawyer, yada yada…— their slow drip feed of disclosure is unforgivable.
They either knew and were withholding information (did someone mention GDPR?), or they didn’t know that they had put customer password data on backups, albeit encrypted. Both are dreadful examples of management.
There are a number of commentators speculating that cracking this data will take millions of years. I doubt it. Quantum computing, for one, is likely to solve that problem soon. Two, that estimate only holds true if we are static and don’t progress. A hundred years ago, we couldn’t imagine that we would have things we take for granted today in less than a million years.
23 December 2022 — French West Indies
It’s only going to get worse
According to the Guardian, “Cheating in professional exams is still a ‘live’ issue at the UK’s biggest audit firms, the accountancy watchdog warned.”
Just wait till ChatGPT or its successor gets good.
I’m a teacher, and I’m already trying to find ways to understand how to test that makes it harder for AI models like ChatGPT to provide coherent answers. I fear I may be losing that battle.
21 December 2022 — French West Indies
Another “End of Era”: Terry Hall
His voice and the Specials were part of the sound when we were growing up.
Saddened to hear of his passing.
The story behind Gangsters is interesting and totally Terry Hall.
Enjoy.
19 December 2022 — French West Indies
End of an era: The final Boeing 747 is delivered after 50 years of production
Reduced to a cargo plane today, this was probably the most important plane ever designed, developed and put into production.
I flew on one once, maybe twice.
It was first produced before I was born and flown commercially in the year of my birth. Its production has stopped, with the last plane being shipped to Atlas Air as a cargo plane.
One thousand five hundred seventy-four planes were produced, and less than 4% were lost in accidents or incidents that put them beyond repair—a formidable record.
Of the 61 lost, only 32 resulted in a loss of life. Less than 2%. That’s a lot of safe air miles.
Sadly, however, when they did crash, it usually ended in significant losses of life. Holding the record for the highest death toll of any civil aviation accident, the highest death toll of any single aeroplane accident, and the highest death toll of a midair collision simultaneously, we’re unlikely to see another plane like it.
So long, 747.
19 December 2022 — French West Indies
Freedom
For a specific class, freedom always means freedom to do and say what they want, not what anyone else does or says.
As the owner of a private platform, Elon Musk is free to do as he pleases, but he cannot escape the consequences.
It will be interesting to see where this goes.
As of today (Sunday, 18/12/22), the platform violates two important GDPR provisions and is under warning from the EU regarding the de-platforming of journalists.
The unmasking of Elon as a far-right apologist and activist is not that surprising.
You can find me on mastodon.social.
18 December 2022 — French West Indies
The Same Old Logical Conclusion
Despite the odd way it works —and the new, sometimes, infantile terminology— Mastodon feels a lot like Twitter when I first joined in 2009, but I can’t shake the feeling that it will go south quickly as more get on the app.
It’s a small community (really stretching that definition, but hey 🤷♂️) with civil discourse and a genuine will to keep it that way.
It won’t last.
It never does.
There is only one logical conclusion with Social Media, regardless of the business model. And that result is a cesspool of the worst of humanity intertwined with pure gold.
Happy Holidays.
15 December 2022 — French West Indies
The Line I Will Not Cross
Yesterday I wrote about how I’d likely dial-down Twitter use, but not leave the platform. Then this:
Forcing me to give my location AND opt-in to personalised ads is a line that I won’t cross. I’m confident that many people will not do so either for all sorts of reasons, from personal privacy to personal (physical) safety from nefarious actors. Because location information is data, it can be breached and used to profile and locate people physically on the planet. Twitter is not immune to being hacked. Gaining access to this type of data is becoming easier, with one-stop shops for buying and selling hacked data easily accessible, which means almost anyone can do it.
I suspect this is not legal with the GDPR and could not be successfully implemented in Europe and European countries.
14 December 2022 — French West Indies
Not particularly social
According to Insider Intelligence, as reported in the Grauniad, Twitter will likely lose 30 million users over the next two years. To put that into perspective, Twitter’s Q2 2022 DAUs were in the region of 238 million.
Ad revenue is in free-fall to boot.
I, for one, am looking at alternatives, and the recent uptick in posting is partly to do with that.
For the moment, I’m still on Twitter, but I’m no longer engaging, not that I did much previously. I only use an automated bot to post updates on this blog, something that will eventually get turned off I suspect.
I’m on Mastodon, and besides the really quirky way it works, I’m beginning to see more activity from the topics and people I tend to enjoy reading. I anxiously await a decent client and an API for WordPress and other systems to post automatically.
13 December 2022 — French West Indies