Have you got some sort of Bill Gates bondage kink?

The ‘smart’ phones in everybody’s pockets already are. Kind of, more or less.

Well perhaps the intention wasn’t to wiretap everybody, but it has ended up that way.

The chain going for £1 is obviously the story here.

I tried something or other on aws. I only needed the ‘definitely free, no cost whatsoever we will suspend the account before you hit whatever limits we set - that I didn’t even hit a fraction of’ tier free trial month to do whatever it was I was doing.

At the end of the ‘totally free’ month they charged me something like £1.80. Obviously £1.80 is inconsequential, it is the fact there was any charge at all given everything I had been told - I can’t remember what I did, probably learned to set up a vpn or something simple - I didn’t even use it beyond setting it up and testing it.

I made sure I burned the account in a big firey pit and I will never go back to them for anything I am paying for (news that I doubt is keeping Jeff Bezos up at night, but it isn’t inconceivable I might have bigger projects in the future). I doubt they could figure out what the charge was for. Presumably chatgpt hallucinates their billing now which might be an improvement.

Most news sites ask me to consent to google tracking or pay, neither of which am I prepared to do in almost all cases. I am sure I am not alone in this. Their decision to align with google in this way is more than a turn off, it is an indication of their untrustworthiness.

I shouldn’t need to explain why I do everything I can to avoid being tracked by the likes of google. The idea that I will pay to be subject to propaganda died with the 20th century. If news outlets want my eyes on their pages they need to come up with a way to make it worth my time.

We need new search. Really we need a new web.

Blockchain’s immutability might serve a public record of ‘news’, even moreso if combined with certificate verified identity on information disseminating ‘social’ media. The blockchain could actually be useful in this case. You don’t have to link your irl identity to your internet identity everywhere, but it might not be a bad idea in the areas of information disseminating social media. These are just idle thoughts.

Edit - I saw a post today purporting to be a twitter screen grab of a James Woods post with a reply. The James Woods post was a screengrab of a video, supposedly of the current LA riots, with a comment along the lines of: Democrats can’t talk about peaceful protest and support this. Following this was a reply saying ‘this video is from 2020’.

I have no idea if either or both of these tweets happened, if the video was from 2020, or if either person were who they said they were! With the blockchain’s immutability you could verify all of this automatically, and algorithmically reduce the reach of repeat offenders’ posts.

There is a lot of value in this in terms of public discourse.

Similar processes could happen with both scientific/academic papers and government policy v. outcomes.

It might change the nature of the public debate.

Well linux is the kernel of many operating systems, including many ‘smart’ devices.

If this was your joke then apologies, but it probably is in a load of ‘smart’ toasters. If they exst of course, I assume they do.