An idea can become a reality & be easily reachable to more people than ever before. It might be something that appeals to only a tiny fraction of people who are scattered around the world, but the effort to create one copy of an idea is most of what'
Any surveillance tool will be abused by some. If the impact of a piece of tech's misuse is high, then so should the controls behind it. Today, my focus is on further spreading the mindset of questioning how tools, like the ones I'll list, are used.
I arrive home, the light on my Ring doorbell tells me that it's detected me. I replaced the software on the doorbell a few months ago, paying paid £20 for version 1.x, which includes all future updates & a heavy discount to purchase version 2.x, which
I have no skills at drawing. I could AI-generate a fitting image for each blog post, likely saving me a lot of time. They could be of any art style & be seemingly impressive. Instead, I'm committed to drawing my ideas, however rough or crude they may
Here's an area of life that could be better left in the hands of humans. Live facial recognition cameras are being introduced more & more widely. I've found myself in areas that will have scanned my face, & likely many more where my face was scanned
I have a number of friends who argue for online tracking, with the aim of having a personalised algorithm on tech platforms. They want to see more of what they're interested in & want tailored ads, rather than generic ones. This is a viewpoint I don't
AI models come with "system cards" which describe each model. Some reach hundreds of pages of detail, but of the ones I've looked at, I've only seen at most a couple of generic sentences detailing the training data used. A link to a model&
The YouTube app on my TV has a consistent feature: if I long-press on a video thumbnail I'll get a pop-up window of options, like adding the video to a queue or going straight to the creator's channel. Except when I'm already
The John Deere (https://consumerrights.wiki/w/John_Deere) tractors stolen by Russian troops during the war in Ukraine were inoperable when they were turned back on. John Deere has remotely locked them. As much is this might be a win over theft, it highlighted a reality: these tractors were
But may they communicate? Every time some tech company erected a 10-foot enshittifying fence, someone would show up with an 11-foot disenshittifying ladder. Those 11-foot ladders represented the power of interoperability, the inescapable bounty of the Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machine, which, by definition, is capable
Today, tech could be better by Amazon simple not imposing onto third-party sellers what they do today. They have the tech to oversee practically all online sales, so they have the tech to play fairly & be transparent. In 2019, Amazon silently dropped the clause in contracts with third-
Consumer group Which? has accused the tech giant of "trapping" users into its cloud service. It says 40 million iCloud customers could be entitled to roughly £77 each if successful. -- BBC News UK (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c932d1r0p96o) £77 ($102) isn't a whole