Opinion : Google and MasterCard are not being entirely truthful I suspect

We learnt recently via a The Verge articlethat Google and MasterCard had an agreement whereby all purchases using their cards would be sent to Google.

When an organisation does this kind of transaction it’s precisely because it feels there is value in the data. As we’re all aware, Google places importance on “personal” data in just about everything it does, going as far as tracking location despite users explicitly setting their phone to prevent such tracking, see this articlein The Guardian. MasterCard says this data is anonymous and by extension not personally identifiable [or useful]. If this was totally true, the data’s intrinsic value would be reduced to be virtually worthless. Which begs the question, why doesn’t Google want it so bad ? I call BS.

What many do not know, and what Google and MasterCard are hoping that you don’t either, is that much of this data can be de-anonymized using techniques that are well within the realms of Google. Take a look how a couple of researchers were able to successfully de-anonymize data from Netflix during a competition hosted by Netflix called the Netflix Prize — https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0610105

How come ? De-anonymized data doesn’t live in a vacuum, it lives in a world flowing — no gushing — with data surrounding it. The more there is, the more likely it is that de-anonymizing may turn up clues to help break the code and re-attach personally identifiable data back to what appears on the surface to be garbled junk. I suspect that Google pays handsomely for this data because it ‘knows’ it can re-attach information to its users giving it even greater shadow surveillance over its users.

They may not be doing this for nefarious reasons, sure, but this is certainly not buying a bunch of random data from a friend to fill an empty database in the datacenter. So, Google, MasterCard, stop treating us like fools and be more respectful with our information because at some point you will go too far and the results of which you’re unlikely to enjoy, most likely painful regulation by authorities tired of your fast and loose treatment of humans.

And that’s the point, there are real humans affected behind this, not just bots, serial numbers or tables in an SQL database.

Photo by Chris Ried on Unsplash

Music to my ears

Depuis mon blog : Minus453F

De temps en temps je m’éloigne de la routine quotidienne pour réfléchir de toute et de n’importe quoi. C’est une exercice très difficile dans les temps modernes, quand on est connecté à l’internet (Facebook, Twitter, RSS etc.) occupé par le quotidien, la maison, le travail, les enfants. Une liste sans fin.

Je fait avec un outil génial, même magique. Un outil capable de me transporter dans un autre monde, dans un autre état d’esprit. Un outil universellement disponible, accessible à tous. Un outil, que pratiquement toute le monde s’en servent à un moment donné dans leur vie. Par fois, complètement inconscient de son implication — la musique.

J’adore la musique. Depuis, pratiquement que j’ai de la mémoire permanent (3/4 ans ?), je me rappel d’être totalement séduite par la musique. Ma mère écouté la radio, « les 8 track » ou des 12” en vinyl. Habitants d’un quartier populaire, des amis divers m’ont fait écouter différents styles de musique. C’était très enrichissant, pratiquement magique, une chance.

Déconnecter

Retour au présent. Pour déconnecter de la quotidienne, j’ai remarqué qu’il faut se battre contre trois obstacles ; la difficulté inhérente de l’exercise (notre attention est attiré en permanence), le sentiment de culpabilité d’avoir désisté des responsabilités quotidiens (la ménage, le jardin etc.), et l’envie de décompresser et relaxer, toute simplement (on n’as pas toujours envie).

La déconnexion est un exercise très difficile à réaliser. C’est parmi les principaux raisons pourquoi ceux qui médite n’arrive pas au bout de leur méditation sans décrocher. La patience, la volonté et du temps doit être à votre disposition pour le faire. Se sont les ressources peu disponibles aujourd’hui.

Par contre, nous avons une arme en notre assistance, très développé et très puissant pour nos aider arriver vers la déconnexion, nos oreilles.

L’Oreille est une merveille technologique, sans parallèle. Mais, comme tous les outils, il faut apprendre comment les utiliser pour mieux apprécier. L’oreille de l’humaine est extraordinairement capable et parfaitement conçue pour écouter la musique.

Le son

Un petit rappel de la matière scientifique — sans rentrer dans trop de détail — est important pour savoir comment l’oreille fonctionne véritablement. Il faut savoir ce que c’est le ‘son’.

La définition de Wikipedia « Le son est une vibration mécanique d’un fluide, qui se propage sous forme d’ondes longitudinales grâce à la déformation élastique de ce fluide ».

En simplifiant, le son se manifest par les ondes qui vibre dans l’air. Au vibrations plus vite, le son deviens plus aiguille et l’inverse au vibrations moins vite — le son est plus bas. On appel les différentes vitesses de vibration, la fréquence. Nous avons formulé les measurements pour simplifier l’utilisation dans le domaine de comprehension et utilisation ; on l’à appelé Hertz (notation Hz), après Heinrich Rudolf Hertz. Pour référence, un vibration par second égal 1Hz, un son très bas qu’aucune humaine est capable d’entendre.

En gros et ce qu’il faut retenir c’est que, l’oreille est capable d’entendre des fréquences relativement bas — au tour de 30Hz — et très haute — environ 19KHz (K = milliers). Pour référence, un très bas grave dans un morceaux sera autour de 40Hz. Dans les conditions de laboratoire, certains sont capables d’entendre jusqu’à 12Hz à 28KHz ! Nous possédons pratiquement tous les informations nécessaires à mieux écouter la musique.

Petite parenthèse intéressant, dans l’espace il n’y a pas de son. On entend rien. C’est du vide, un vacuum, et du coup, il n’y a pas de l’air à vibrer pour produire le son.

La musique se compose de plusieurs éléments à des fréquences différentes qui rendre le son intéressant à nos oreilles. Ce n’est pas n’importe quel mélange de fréquences qui marche, par contre. Certains combinaisons de fréquences sont très désagréable à entendre. Quand les fréquences ne sont pas alignés ou les combinaisons sont bizarres on interprète le son un peu comme un mauvais goût. C’est étrange, c’est dérangeant.

Ecouter

Pour être capable à déconnecter, il faut apprendre écouter la musique. Vraiment écouter, pas entendre!

Il ya des techniques très simple qui peut transformer votre appreciation de la musique. Pas besoin d’être audiophile, ni dépenser la somme d’une maison sur l’hi-fi — c’est possible. Certes, il faut quand même un minimum. Au moins un pair d’écouteurs ou casque de qualité raisonnable. Quelque chose autours d’un centaine d’euros suffira largement. L’investissement, meme à ce niveau, donnent un résultat très intéressant.

Ce que j’aime avec les casques, est la connexion direct avec cerveau et — subjectivement — le corps entier. Écouter un morceau que j’aime avec un casque de qualité vaut vraiment le coup.

Comment écouter alors ?

Première chose, il vaut mieux être assis confortablement dans une pièce calme, éventuellement sombre en luminosité. Le but est de créer un environnement sans distractions pour que le cerveau puisse concentrer uniquement sur la musique. En suite, choisir bien la musique que vous voulez écoutez — personnellement j’ai créé des playlists. J’utilise Apple Music (et iTunes), mais n’importe quelle service de musique en ligne ou application de bibliothèque musique va faire le nécessaire.

Ecoute

Confortablement installé, avec la musique prête, il est le temps de commencer à écouter.

Fermez vos yeux, appuyer sur “Play”. Écoute d’abord de façon globale la musique. Après quelques seconds essayez d’identifier une instrument ou une voix qui vous touche particulièrement. Le suivre pour plusieurs seconds et focalisez sur un autre pour changer. Continuez comme ça en faisant une rotation entre les instruments et voix pour bien identifiez et distinguez la composition de son présenté à vos oreilles. J’aime imaginer la scene de concert ou le studio d’enregistrement, je place les personnes et leurs instruments physiquement dans l’espace virtuelle que le cerveau a imaginé. Laisse votre cerveau balade dans le groupe, instrument par instrument,

Touché

Comme pour tous les choses, il n’est pas simple le première fois, mais en pratiquant ça devient de plus en plus facile et les bénéfices se manifestent de plus en plus. Après une séance de relaxation par la musique je vois, souvent, les choses plus claires. Ca m’aide à voir mieux les jours qui viennent.

La récompense d’avoir écouté la musique dans ces conditions — la musique vraiment touchante — avec la concentration que ça mérite, c’est incroyable ! Certains morceaux peuvent vous touchez profondément, que vous pleureriez.

Image : FreeImages.com/Matthias Stelzi http://www.freeimages.com/photo/music-2-1258712

Hey Siri, say Please.

From my blog @ https://minus453f.blog

Siri doesn’t use or teach us good manners. Siri doesn’t acknowledge the use of the word “please”. She often adds it to the query as part of the demand. Recently, whilst writing a paper, I asked Siri what a synonym of “develop” was. Here’s my query :

“Hey Siri, what’s a synonym of ‘develop’, please?”

Siri’s response, I found curious, as it included the word “please” as part of my query.

“OK, I’ve found this on the web for ‘synonym of develop please’.

Does Siri ignore pleasantries ? Does Siri want you to be curt and to the point ? Does it say more about American society — and frankly world society — that barking commands at an inanimate object, without a basic amount of respect, is to be viewed as normal. To where will it extend ?

Would it be acceptable to snap at the McDonalds’ Restaurant Crew without saying please ? Clearly I don’t think so, but Siri, in a very subtle way, is teaching us to do just that.

I would hope that it would be simple to implement a change that could recognise politeness, the please and thank-you’s if you will, and respond to them accordingly. Perhaps Apple should go further and prompt you to say please once in a while, to solicit and promote good behaviour. Surely that can’t be a bad thing ?

I’m aware that I could reorder the phrase to make life easier for Siri ; “Please could you …” or Could you please …” but I was using a very common position in the phrase of the word please, as it is a more natural request.

For information, I’m not specifically targeting Siri. She is the tool I currently use, being as I can’t buy an Echo or Google Home where I live. Is it the the same for these too ?

I think we can do better.

I caught “iCloud Account Locked” Herpes

Don’t misjudge the title, which is a little click-bait-y — perhaps a lot click-bait-y — this is in fact a positive tale. A tale of despair, frustration, but ultimately an enjoyable experience with kept promises and an interaction with the Support team that many other companies would do well to replicate.

Aside from the frustration, lost hours, lost productivity and general despair of the situation I must say, Apple’s Support Team were fantastic. And I mean just that. Fantastic!

Start from the beginning, i’ve always been told…

Where did it all start?

Foolishly I decided this year to upgrade my old phone, an iPhone 6, for a shiny new iPhone 7. Order promptly placed, order less-promptly received. Although to be fair that’s more to do with where I have chosen to live rather than Apple’s fault.

That’s where the fun started.

After receiving the phone, it was switched it on and set it up as a new phone without adding an iCloud account, to get a feel for the device and to be honest, to play a bit before setting it up from a backup of the old phone.

The backup was unfortunately fraught with difficulties due to, as I found out later, a faulty Lightning/USB cable — an old one from my drawer. It then became impossible to backup the phone once there was a corrupt backup in iTunes. Failed every time with a fairly cryptic error message. I forget which, but it certainly didn’t say, “Hey, you’ve got a corrupt backup in iTunes. Delete it and try backing up again, that’ll fix it” which would have saved me something like an hour or two of searching, reading and eventually tripping up on a clue.

So, I deleted the corrupt backup, unravelled the new cable from the iPhone box and successfully backed up the 6.

After the eventual backup to the local computer, to preserve passwords — something that is now possible through iCloud I notice — I reset the phone and setup the phone as new from a backup, using the new cable of course!

Bam ! I got a notification that my iCloud account had been locked and that I needed to unlock it. Unlocking it wasn’t too drastic, but the procedure required a reset of my password. No problems, password changed. The setup from restore process continued and there it was, my shiny new iPhone 7 setup as I like it (9 years of configuration and tweaking since the original iPhone).

The fun continues

A few days after using the phone, I wake up one morning with the iPhone asking me to unlock my locked iCloud account again. Strange. OK, i’ll do it.

Same thing, password reset required. Rather a pain, as I’ve omitted to state. Because like many of you, I own not just one Apple device that logs into iCloud but many — iPad, AppleTV, iMac etc.

I’d forgotten to change the iCloud password somewhere on a device and it was that that had hosed my account I told myself. I went around all the devices and double-checked. Damn it! I’d forgotten the Back to my Mac password on the 3 Airport base stations. Changed them. All ok now, I’m sure.

I didn’t forget App-Specific Passwords this time either.

Petit parenthèse

This is where I go off on a rant about how ridiculous it is that Apple makes you enter the iCloud password in iCloud preferences and it sets up mail, iCloud Drive, but NOT iMessages/FaceTime — uses a different input of your login/password — but I won’t. Or that iTunes is yet another place to enter the password. Please Apple, consolidate this ASAP. One place to enter the password with check boxes for iTunes, iMessages, FaceTime etc. would not only be awesome, but better for security.

It didn’t stop there

It didn’t stop there, unfortunately.

Several days later, yet another iCloud account blocked notification. FSCK#&!!! … I did say it was like Herpes!

So, this time I decided to invoke Apple Support. Either someone is really trying to hack my account or there’s a problem elsewhere. Which, could still possibly be my fault.

I 💙 Apple Support

Firstly, if you haven’t used the Apple Support site, its excellent. Clear, concise. It gets you to where you need to be very quickly. I arranged a call time and dialled the number. The call was answered quickly and I was immediately talking to the first-line support guy with the allotted ticket number as the reference.

Being that this was 1st line, the person was knowledgeable and listened carefully to double-check I’d done all the right things before calling for help.

Check (Yay me !).

He then transferred me to the next level engineer who was clearly senior. Again, patient, listened attentively and most importantly was empathetic to my problem. How can that not be an excellent experience?

We exchanged details and off he went to investigate further. After a short delay and a quick exchange of thoughts/information we hung up and I received an email asking to fill out a survey, as is the norm these days. Then another email giving me some feedback about the issue.

It then happened again. Damn pox, you can’t get rid of it! This time at a really bad time. A time when I just didn’t have the availability to deal with it. So, I called Apple Support again, once i’d got some free time and had reset the account yet again. Not to rant or shout, but to see if there was any feedback and also to give them new information. You have to treat people how you wish to be treated yourself. It’s basic stuff.

I fell upon a different guy, again, probably senior, and to my surprise the attitude was the same. Attentive, empathetic, knowledgeable. I’m seeing a pattern here. Great work Apple!

We chatted for a while exchanging what had happened, going through in quite some detail the possibilities, with, at no point any pressure to close the call quickly from Apple’s side. He was there for me. We eliminated one by one all possibilities and he looked in depth at the devices that had logged into iCloud. All checked out.

So, we were back to two possibilities. A hack or a problem chez Apple. A hack was eliminated by a simple deduction from the engineer, 2-factor authentication, device validation and domain verification — apparently, having your own domain is slightly better than a public @comcast or whatever domain.

This left Apple as the probable culprit.

Now, in my experience large companies tend to do their utmost to pass the buck to someone, something else. This guy? No chance. He took it on-board and said he’d speak to the other engineer, update the ticket and go and speak to the engineers dealing with security. He then promised to call me back before or during the weekend with feedback. I’m used to this tactic. Gain a little time, works every time.

Holy shit! He called me back the day after. He even took note of my time zone so as not to call in the night!

So, what’s the state of play currently?

Apparently, a problem was seen in my account about how the Apple authentication system treats multiple devices logged into iCloud simultaneously. Something that triggers a lock down as though the account has been hacked or a bad password has been entered too many times.

Something has been changed/fixed and I should see how it goes over the next few days or so.

Regardless of the outcome, I wanted to say that if you have an issue, you shouldn’t, for a second, hesitate to contact Apple Support. You’ll get professional, empathetic support for your issue. Within reason, of course.

So, I can’t declare the problem irradiated just yet, but the inoculation procedure was as helpful and pleasant as I could possibly wish for.

Thank you, Apple Support. You should be proud of yourselves.

I’m sure that like many of you coming from the generation that grew up with radio, the recent Podcast boom is very welcome indeed.

I listened a lot to the radio in my youth, music, news — all sorts to be honest. I particularly enjoyed the local pirate radios stations that played the stuff the corporations wouldn’t. I was lucky, where we lived. We could pickup stations from miles and miles away. The independence of those stations always attracted me.

Which brings me to Podcasts today.

They’re essentially like local independent radio stations — albeit on a global scale — playing (mostly talking) just about whatever they like. If you have a niche interest there’s almost certainly a podcast for you out there. If you’re trying to learn a new language they can be an excellent resource to help you.

For the last few years I’ve been treated to shows ranging from the essentially amateur, but interesting, to the seriously well-produced professional shows like This American Life and dare I say Serial. All this totally free. Fire up your podcast app of choice, punch in the show name, subscribe and bingo!

Ads or subscriptions?

These shows have mostly been Ad-supported and that’s fair enough, but it seems the Ad revenue is drying up as the popularity increases — or at least the diffusion amounts are increasing — basic economics.

So what have the podcasters decided to do about that? Subscriptions and memberships are where its at, apparently.

Unsustainable

I’ve paid for some and will likely continue, and pay for more but at some point this is even more unsustainable than the Ad-supported model. Why?

Well here’s the thing. Most people like to watch many TV channels — podcasts are no different. My feed contains around 33 podcasts. And I’m not even an extreme case.

The subscription model that complements the falling Ad revenue is going to have to increase and be more prevalent otherwise the podcasters are going out of business. They don’t do ‘just for fun’ ! Most of the ‘Membership’ models require around 5 to 10$ per month. If only half of my feed goes subscription that translates to around 80 to a 160$ per month to listen to a few Podcasts, that’s nearly a 1000$ a year Minimum. It just won’t fly. My albeit fairly shitty Satelite subscription isn’t even close to that range and offers around 100–10 watchable — practically 24 hours a day.

Consolidation and mutualisation

So the next logical step is consolidation of the podcasters. We’re seeing some of this already — although its more of a natural phenomenon rather than revenue pressure — where quite a few Podcast Networks have sprung up. But further consolidation will be necessary in order to mutualise and benefit from the economies of scale. That may or may not reduce overall quality, but I doubt that.

I’m more concerned that we get back to the starting point of big corporations running ‘Podcasts’ and the small independent guys being squeezed out — until the next enabling technology comes along.

The question is; will the independents get big enough to fight off the corporations only to then become the new corporations …