I have a certain set of sites my browser loads automatically on its first launch of the day.
Perhaps some of these gleanings will help you in some way…Read it all
You’ve Been Warned
Is That You You Hear Grumbling?
Grumbling is a bunch of ungratefulness wrapped in selfishness and bound tightly with cables of negativity.
It doesn’t look pretty as a gift.
And the content is disgusting.
A grumbler has a sense of entitlement to something better.
Maybe rightly so. More likely, not. Read it all
What’s That Vague Malaise About?
- “When you get up again…you feel a vague malaise.”
- “Where life is, and where it is not.”
- “Go where the nourishment is.”
- “The streams of real life flowed elsewhere.”
- “Enough to keep you from scurvy and beriberi but not enough for optimum health.”
That reminds me of some of my entertainment experiences.Read it all
How Moral Was Hitler?
The obvious answer seems, “Not very.”
Surely the terms moral and Hitler have to be mutually antagonistic.
And yet…
Author Richard Weikart offers the proposition that Hitler was a moral man.
See what you make of this: Read it all
Cloud-Powered Facial Recognition
Maybe it’s time to quit posting personal photos online.
Anywhere.
Actually, it’s too late for me.
But I could continue to abstain from posting photos of new family members.
See what you make of these excerpts from an article I quickly scanned tonight:
With Carnegie Mellon’s cloud-centric new mobile app, the process of matching a casual snapshot with a person’s online identity takes less than a minute. Tools like PittPatt and other cloud-based facial recognition services rely on finding publicly available pictures of you online, whether it’s a profile image for social networks like Facebook and Google Plus or from something more official from a company website or a college athletic portrait. In their most recent round of facial recognition studies, researchers at Carnegie Mellon were able to not only match unidentified profile photos from a dating website where the vast majority of users operate pseudonymously with positively identified Facebook photos, but also match pedestrians on a North American college campus with their online identities.
The repercussions of these studies go far beyond putting a name with a face; researchers Alessandro Acquisti, Ralph Gross, and Fred Stutzman anticipate that such technology represents a leap forward in the convergence of offline and online data and an advancement of the “augmented reality” of complementary lives. With the use of publicly available Web 2.0 data, the researchers can potentially go from a snapshot to a Social Security number in a matter of minutes:
[…]
The relevant point here is not Schmidt’s thought on behavior and choice but the fact that, no matter what you choose to do or not do, your life exists in the cloud, indexed by Google, in the background of a photo album on Facebook, and across thousands of spammy directories that somehow know where you live and where you went to high school. These little bits of information exist like digital detritus. With software like PittPatt that can glean vast amounts of cloud-based data when prompted with a single photo, your digital life is becoming inseparable from your analog one. You may be able to change your name or scrub your social networking profiles to throw off the trail of digital footprints you’ve inadvertently scattered across the Internet, but you can’t change your face. And the cloud never forgets a face.
How naive we’ve been.
Well, for me, “had been.” The moment of awakening to this came several weeks ago. But still, prior to that was much too long a time to have been naive.
For a generally-suspicious, naturally-cynical, privacy-and-security-conscious person, that’s pretty bad.
But now it’s now…so…now what?
Do we just accept our fate and continue carelessly?
I say, “No!”
(So…?)
Facebook: Its Face in Your Book
If your life is an open book, Facebook has had its face deep into it.
And if you thought your life was a closed book, Facebook has had its face deep into it, you poor deluded soul.
Facebook privacy issues: Social network is watching you even when you’re logged out
Facebook has admitted that it has been watching the web pages its members visit – even when they have logged out.
In its latest privacy blunder, the social networking site was forced to confirm that it has been constantly tracking its 750million users, even when they are using other sites.
The social networking giant says the huge privacy breach was simply a mistake – that software automatically downloaded to users’ computers when they logged in to Facebook ‘inadvertently’ sent information to the company, whether or not they were logged in at the time.
Before this, it was OnStar.
What next?
My cellphone listening in, even when it’s not on a call? Or when it’s allegedly turned off?
And what about Google?
Or my answering machine?
Or my toaster? 😯
OK. I lost interest in fleshing out this post. Sorry. That’s just the way it is. I have a real life to live…and that means I have to earn a living. Or rather, try. 🙁
PS to Facebook: The “blunder” and “mistake” and “inadvertently” and “bug” concepts all require the willing suspension of disbelief.