#some ai fishing hacker has it sold

[lumplkinz]

another year without you bub

i am still so tired of grief

i am still terrified of September

[procrastiel]

It’s official y’all.

The internet is now nothing more than an online marketplace where you need to pay money to access content.

Want to watch movies & TV shows? Read the news? Pay.

Want to reminisce on old photos with your college friends on Facebook? Better pay up.

Where did all the blogs from Peter, Paul and Mary go? Why do I only find websites that have a million ads when I google pancake recipes?

Have you noticed that Overlord Google doesn't show you more than 46 pages or results any more? Which means most websites aren't even listed so the only way to find them is by typing in the URL directly or finding it through a link??

Where did all the forums go that were free, where people were just chatting along?

Are we lured into believing we can only choose between macOS and Microsoft for $$$ when in reality Linux is for free?

The only choice you have now is to either pay with money or your own identity.

It’s been like this for a while, where companies pretended something was free but they sold the user data illegally to advertising companies.

Now that this gaping hole of a cesspool has been somewhat patched up by the GDPR and CCPA laws, the companies “clap back” by putting up paywalls.

Why do we think this is acceptable?

The internet was free when it started. It was designed to be an anti-government movement, but it looks like it’s been hijacked.

Who is to say that this isn’t a deal the governments and companies made on purpose so they could make more money? Even if they didn’t, they will certainly both benefit from these changes.

Cashless society? Great, now the government has all your data and can restrict access for you if they don’t agree with how you spend your money.

Also, and for some strange reason I have never heard anyone voice this particular concern on any news outlet, what if someone hacked into that system?

In 2021 Ireland’s government health system was cyber attacked and shut down. People who have never given out their phone numbers online have been getting fraud calls since this event, but never before. Coincidence, or some smart Russian dude selling Irish people’s data on the black market? You decide.

What if that happens to your bank account?

What if rich people hire hackers to mess with the numbers and get even richer because suddenly a few more zeroes were added to their online wealth? When the general population can’t even afford to buy a house any more, and everything is now on lease, on credit, borrowed?

I am making a choice alright, Meta, and that choice will not be you.

If we need to look for an underground online platform or create our own internet, so be it.

If we need to go completely off grid before you realize who has the real power, so be it.

Don’t take us for fools.

Is the whole AI debacle just a distraction, so they can push shit like this on us and get people to just cower and accept it?

How does the poem go?

When the last fish is killed, and the last tree has been felled, maybe then we will realize that we cannot eat money.

[coopdigitalnewsletter]

14 Jan 2019: Amazon in your garage, financialising people, Alexamas

Hello 2019

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter and welcome to 2019, a year in which everything is going to stay interesting. Big tech will continue to struggle with privacy and trust issues relating to user data. There will be more security breaches and controversies. Politics and Br*x*t will continue to be eye-opening. There will still be worries about job automation and the state of high street retail. Making people and society increasingly central to the aims and practices of technology will be as important as it ever has been. And this newsletter will try to keep explaining what’s happening and why it’s interesting.

Thank you for reading and please do send ideas, questions, corrections etc to @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading please consider telling a friend about it!

[Image: Christian cybre.space - Crayola had a line of tech-themed crayons in 1997 called "Techno-Brite"]

Amazon will try deliveries to garages instead

People were freaked out by the idea of Amazon employees sauntering into their front rooms to make a delivery (see previously, here and here) - Amazon Key boss said that there were some “challenges” and “emotional concerns”. So Amazon’s modifying the plan to deliver to garages instead.

Related: in 2017 Walmart was looking at placing shops inside your home, and the garage is a version of that airlock idea, except that a delivery person has to fight their way past a bunch of broken bicycles and other junk. Amazon (or someone!) should sell a standalone secure dog kennel-sized delivery box - a personal version of an Amazon locker.

Grocery and retail

Large US grocer Kroger is partnering with Microsoft to make retail stores of the future. Their exemplars feature “smart shelves with digital displays that update prices dynamically and show personalized icons to help shoppers find items they’ve put on their shopping lists. The shelves will help also help workers identify items to fulfill curbside pickup orders”. Beyond the aisles, Microsoft and Kroger plan to use various cool tech (AI, cloud, IoT!) to “redefine the shopping experience for millions of customers at both Kroger and other retailers around the world”, which suggests that they are thinking about selling the solutions to other retailers.

Leveraging the data: consumer packaged goods brands are paying Amazon to send free samples to its customers based on what Amazon knows about their purchasing preferences.

Alexamas

It seemed as if Alexa devices were going mainstream this holiday season: a very anecdotal survey of 6 (six) households found that thirteen Alexa-capable devices were acquired, and none from Google, Apple et al. If the pattern were true more widely, perhaps shoppers are buying on brand rather than say AI capability (otherwise they might choose Google), and perhaps households tend to commit to one product, probably because it’s one less thing to learn and worry about. If so, the “Amazon wins the kitchen, Google wins the living room” argument that this newsletter has sometimes handwaved seems a bit less likely. Maybe homes will be Primehausen or Googlesteads.

Anyway: a profoundly unreliable survey (unrepresentative, small sample size, sherry-fuelled and so on), so are there better numbers of smart assistants in the home? Amazon says it has sold 100m Alexa-capable devices, and by definition most of these have been purchased as a speaker with a convenient voice interface to a room. Google says it is approaching 1bn Google-Assistant-capable devices. However most of these are mobile phones that came with Assistant pre-installed, so it’s hard to say how much Assistant is actually being used on them. But it is fair to say that both Assistant and Alexa are now platforms with proper scale.

Financialising people and their habitats

Lambda is an education funding proposal that replaces education fees with an “income sharing” agreement. It would retrospectively means-test your ability to repay student loans, which will make it feel a bit like a tax. Pipo is a crypto/blockchainy stock market in human capital. It looks like Kickstarter meets money-lending meets venture capital meets, well, sharecropping.

“What’s in your portfolio?” “I’ve shares in a couple of kids that Arsenal might sign I know I know they’re a long shot. Also I own a bit of a basket of 10,000 or so Facebook content approvers but I’m thinking of selling those and buying a piece of some AI psychotherapists.”

Pipo describes itself in terms of selling equity in an individual, but Matt Levine points out that it’s still like a (variable) debt. It feels problematic: what happens if that full-of-potential footballer decides to quit and become a poet? If there’s a problem with the blockchainy bit, do you ask pipo-ers to “roll back” and do that job again? Things that would explicitly financialise human capital - and make it tradable! - seem quite uncomfortable.

Elsewhere, office space landlord WeWork is rebranding and raising some more money. “Rather than just renting desks, the company aims to encompass all aspects of people’s lives, in both physical and digital worlds”, which seems quite ambitious. The next focuses are education (We Grow) and homes (WeLlive?), both of which offer opportunity to financialise the lives of twenty-something humans while supplying them free beer.

Trust and mental health

People trust each other a bit less, and trust the government a bit less. (It feels like governments trust the people a bit less too.)

People trust chatbots more quickly than therapists, probably because they can disclose anonymously and with less fear of judgement.

Ditching Facebook could reduce stress but also make you less happy.

Phish tanks and phishing attacks

When you make a computer do something useful, that often becomes a way the computer can be compromised. Add a network connection to something so you can get information from it, feed it new information or update it, and sooner or later some Curious Nerd or Bad Person will use that connection for purposes you didn’t intend. A casino's database was hacked through a smart fish tank thermometer. “A cyber-security expert has reported that a high-profile casino was hacked via its IoT connected fish tank. The hackers gained access to a database of high-rollers.”

But some attacks come straight in the front door: it’s now possible to play real-time, fully automated phishing attacks against SMS two-factor authenticated email accounts. “Behind the scenes, the hackers’ servers take the victim’s phished credentials, enters them into the legitimate email service, which then returns a request for a 2FA code (the real service then sending the code to the user’s phone.) The hackers’ server asks the victim for that code, which the hacker then passes back to the real service in order to login, all at around the same speed it would take to log-in ordinarily.” This weakens 2FA that relies on text messages. 2FA using hardware tokens is more secure.

Co-op Digital news and events

Seven more start-ups to join The Federation’s tech and social entrepreneur hub.

Co-op to serve-up over 100 new stores in 2019 as part of £200 million store investment programme.

Events

Delivery community of practice meetup - Mon 14 Jan 1pm at Federation House.

Funeralcare show & tell - Tue 15 Jan 2pm at Angel Square 12th floor.

Manchester TED Talk Discussion Group - Tue 15 Jan 7pm at Federation House.

Line management drop-in clinic - Thu 17 Jan 1pm at Federation House.

Heads of practice community of practice meetup - Thu 17 Jan 2pm at Federation House 5th floor.

Python North West - Thu 17 Jan 6pm at Federation House.

Motion North with Momoco and A+C - Thu 17 Jan 6.30pm at Federation House.

More events at Federation House. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.

Thank you for reading

Thank you, beloved and thoughtful readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc to the newsletterbot’s flunky @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading please consider telling a friend about it!

If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog.

[entergamingxp]

Let your mind wander with 40 of our best reads • Eurogamer.net

We’ve been lucky enough to publish some wonderful work on Eurogamer over the years, written by some wonderful writers, and we thought pulling some of it together at a time like this would be a nice thing to do.

If you see something you like, scroll down to the bottom of the piece and click on the author’s name to see what else they’ve written. There are some real treats I haven’t been able to include here – it’s a long enough list as it is!

Thank you everyone who contributes to Eurogamer and helps make it what it is, and thank you for reading it. Have a nice Easter weekend.

How Age of Empires 2 got some Scottish kids into RTS – Here’s a question: How do you get a bunch of disillusioned kids in the arse end of Scotland into real-time strategy games? Sam Greer remembers the 90s in Scotland and an unlikely gaming champion.

Petscop, the internet’s favourite haunted video game – Last March, a YouTube channel titled Petscop began releasing Let’s Play-style videos of what appeared to be a bargain-bin Playstation One game designed to entice undiscerning children. But things quickly took a darker turn, as Sara Elsam finds out.

An ode to video game doors – It’s easy to underestimate doors, Andreas Inderwildi writes, and yet they are also imbued with a kind of magic. If you’ve ever wanted to see a lot of lovely video game doors, now’s your chance.

After half my life, Ace Attorney’s re-release brought me full circle – Some games can have profound influences on our lives. Jay Castello grew up with the Ace Attorney series and wanted to be a lawyer – but life doesn’t always go the way it was planned.

I went Christmas carolling in Rust with a real piano, and got shot a hell of a lot – When Emma Kent heard that craftable pianos were coming to Rust (with MIDI support) and she could plug a microphone in too, there was only one thing she wanted to do. But would her fellow Rust players share in her festive spirit?

The story behind the Oblivion mod Terry Pratchett worked on – Imagine one day getting an email thanking you for the companion you made for Oblivion, signed by someone claiming to be author Terry Pratchett. Then imagine discovering, many letters later, it really was him. Cian Maher tells an unlikely story of friendship and collaboration.

The Lords of Midnight: on the legacy of a truly epic wargame – Even now, there’s little else remotely like it. Jennifer Allen remembers a cruel but magical adventure for Commodore 64. And thanks to devoted fans, there is now a way to play it.

Red Dead Redemption 2 and XCOM 2 have one crucial thing in common – companionship – From perishable squad mates to tales around a camp fire, Vivek Gohil digs into what makes companions in Red Dead Redemption 2 and XCOM 2 so special.

I was in Football Manager and I don’t know how to feel about it – Imagine our surprise when writer Chris Tapsell turns around and announces he was once in a Football Manager game, a series he loves – but as a football player. If it weren’t for a shoulder injury he may well have been a professional footballer today. But something always bothered him about his FM representation: his stats weren’t right. His height, his birthday, his eccentricity. This is the story of him getting to the bottom of it.

Roleplaying across the internet – It doesn’t have to be people sitting around a table. In its purest form, roleplaying is when a person says, “Let me tell you a story,” and the other person says, “Me too.” Giada Zavarise takes into the world of forum roleplaying.

If Ubisoft wants to cling on to Clancy, it’s time to talk politics – Tom Clancy relished a political drama so why does Ubisoft try to avoid it in his name? Is such a thing even possible? Edwin Evans-Thirlwell takes a closer look at Clancy and the legacy he left behind.

I owe everything I am to Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday – You’re in a game shop in the mid-1990s and you have £15 to spend, and that’s a lot – you’re a kid and you’re poor. Jennifer Allen had a choice on her hands. What to choose? Pele? Streets of Rage? Or how about this box with the hero and the aliens on…?

Kazunori’s War: the world of Gran Turismo’s creator – He keeps a selection of pre-packed bags by his desk so he can leave at a moment’s notice. He’s an occasional racing driver. And he spun out a car at 200km/h as a very naughty youth. He is Kazunori Yamauchi, creator of Gran Turismo, and Martin Robinson travels to Japan to meet him.

It’s not easy being green: a brief history of orcs in video games – Who invented orcs, how did they get their green colour, and when did they start being more than dumb enemies? Nic Reuben seeks answers.

Why did ancient Egypt spend 3000 years playing a game nobody else liked? – Here’s a game responsible for one of the first ever instances of trash talk, a game played by pharaohs, but even after 3000 years of play, Senet went the way of the disonaur. Christian Donlan tries to find out what happened.

The boy who stole Half-Life 2 – In May 2004, a German boy wakes to find his bed surrounded by armed police officers. Seven months earlier, the source code to the in-development-and-late Half-Life 2 leaks onto the internet. Simon Parkin tells the story of a global hacker hunt, from both sides.

The six-year story of GTA Online’s long-vacant casino – When GTA Online launched, the Vinewood Casino was there. It wasn’t open but it was “opening soon”, according to a sign on the door. One year later, still closed; two years later, still closed. Nearly six years later, still closed. Why did it take so long? Jordan Oloman digs into a troubled development.

The cult of Hideo Kojima – What is it about Hideo Kojima that has crowds turn out in their hundreds to meet him? Khee Hoon Chan waits among one such crowd in Singapore, and then all of a sudden, spotlight on, Kojima is there.

Hearts and minds – Tom Bramwell puts on his best suit for the WWE Hall of Fame ceremony, and it leaves him wondering why there aren’t more heroes in games.

The US town ruled by an AI storyteller – Great storytellers talk about creative partnerships with all kinds of things, from drugs to religion to half-awake states of mind. Can artificial intelligence now be added to the list? Emily Gera shines a light on a fascinating storytelling experiment.

The God who Peter Molyneux forgot – Do you remember Curiosity and the promise of a life-changing prize for whoever tapped the last block? Brayn Henderson does – he tapped it. But did it change his life? Wesley Yin-Poole travels to Scotland to find out.

The Wind Waker inspired me to build a boat – Ever decided to build a boat because you really liked a game about sailing around? No of course not. Nor, I bet, have you ever bought an ocarina instrument because of a game, or fashioned your hair to look like Nathan Drake. Or have you? Omar Hafeez-Bore ponders the influence of games.

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp and the feud that keeps on running – This time he’s demanding a single coconut. Philippa Warr tells the a hilarious story of two lifelong friends falling out over a valentine.

Brando and Bowie: The amazing stories of a man you’ve never heard about – He alone witnessed Marlon Brando’s last ever performance, and David Bowie kissed him on the lips. He held high positions in the video game world and directed big games for big companies. And yet, he never quite found success as we know it. Or did he? Bertie tells a long story.

Why can’t video games get shoulders right? What an inspired question! And it turns out it’s all in the shoulder blades. Alan Wen investigates.

Viva Piñata places a brutal lens on late-stage capitalism – Don’t be fooled by its cutesy looks. Viva Piñata is, as Hazel Southwell tells us, maybe the only game where the kind of business psychopathy preached on Huel-based wellness retreats outside San Francisco will actually work.

The promise of a game world you can touch – James Holland puts his hands in front of him and as the on-screen bubbles start to pop, he feels them popping on his skin, on his bare skin – he’s not wearing gloves or equipment of any kind. Is this the tech of the future?

Inside Tomb of Horrors, the hardest D&D module ever made – Just getting inside can be an ordeal, as two of the entrances lead to certain death, and losing a character level 10 or higher – all that time invested – really hurts. Why would someone make something like that? Malindy Hetfield takes a closer look.

PS2: The Insiders’ Story – The PlayStation 2 is still the best-selling console in the world. It was a landmark machine and its success made Sony feel invincible. Ellie Gibson takes us back to a time of David Lynch adverts and wild parties.

VR has already taken people with dementia to the seaside, and now video games are exploring neurological disease itself – Watching a participant literally cry with happiness as they remove the headset is not a sight writer Luke Kemp will soon forget.

Decoding Shenzhen: The Chinese city that makes the world’s tech – Known as the mecca of manufacturing, Shenzhen is a fishing city turned megatropolis, where an idea can be made a reality and sold in a market stall in two weeks. Arshiya Khullar investigates.

The human cost of Red Dead Redemption 2 – In October 2018, Red Dead Redemption set a new benchmark for the kind of production values a video game could reach. Technically, it was a marvel. But at what cost?

The folklore roots of Sekiro’s anus-ball snatching enemies – Why does an enemy in Sekiro grab a pale fleshy thing from your behind, hold it up like a trophy, then devour it in its own behind? It’s all to do with some disturbing monsters in Japanese folklore, as Ewan Wilson finds out.

Why I play video games – Dr Omar Hafeez-Bore believes a good part of why he chose to pursue medicine was because of video games, and not for the reasons you may think.

Stories with dice: the thrill of old-school D&D – Even 40 years on, video games have a lot to learn from Dungeons & Dragons. Oli Welsh discovers the joy of pen-and-paper role-playing games.

A horse named Gizmondo: The inside story of the world’s greatest failed console – It’s like it never existed now, but for a while Gizmondo – a handheld gaming machine – was going to conquer the world. The 2005 launch party even featured Pharrell Williams and Sting. But less than a year later, the company behind Gizmondo collapsed into bankruptcy. Ellie Gibson hears the whole shady story from the people who were there.

Passing on the gift of games – Have you ever passed the gift of gaming on and watched someone come to terms with it like you once did? Oh the tantrums I used to throw playing Street Fighter! Emad Ahmed has a niece and nephew to pass the gift onto, with surprising effects.

After I stepped into Yakuza’s world, Yakuza’s world seeped into mine – Wish you were there, in Japan? Well, there are few games better than the Yakuza series for taking you there. They helped Malindy remember happy years studying there, and overcome a painful memory.

The quest for Shadow of the Colossus’ last big secret – What if everything in Fumito Ueda’s renowned game had not been found? Could there be a 17th colossi hidden somewhere, waiting to be discovered? Craig Owens takes us into a world of unsolved mysteries and secret hunters.

The secrets of Dark Souls lore explained and explored – It’s not easy to get at the story in Dark Souls because unlike in other games, it’s scattered and hidden away. Richard Stanton connects the dots for us.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/04/let-your-mind-wander-with-40-of-our-best-reads-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=let-your-mind-wander-with-40-of-our-best-reads-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net