nicerdicer

I wouldn’t want to know that. Imagine even if you get to know only a part of that knowledge, for instance, you get to know that you will die on a Tuesday or within a specific month. With that information in mind you would dread every upcoming Tuesday (or a specific month) and in the end it all may lead up to a self fulfilling prophecy.

The last time I bought a map was around the early 2000’s. I drove to another city and bought a city plan along with a newspaper. I used both to search for appartements to visit and rent while being there for the whole day.

The last time a physical map got handed to me was when I registered as a citizen in yet another city I went to study for. Students who moved there were handed a shoulder bag filled with some brochures along with a map of the city and a book with the timetables for all public transport routes as a welcoming gift. That was in 2007.

Perhaps there will be a time in the future when we look back to when everything was “just” flat design. Meanwhile the UI will adapt the aesthetics of AI generated imagery which will be the new design thing then. Everything will look overly saturated but also a bit blurry, like AI generated landscapes. .

Or not. It depends on what data an AI will be fed with. Maybe it goes Frutiger Aero all over again (at least what the AI interpretation of Frutiger will be) since AI generators could be fed with the existing examples of such an era. We would have gone full circle.

There is an eerie resemblence between the smallest neuron and the largest structure in the universe - Galaxy Filament

Back in 2565 BC cameras weren’t that advanced like they are today. Due to the long exposure time these people had to stand still for several hours in order to avoid too much blurriness of the photo. You can see that the people in the background (middle left in the photo) were moving slightly as the photo is a bit blurrier compared to the foreground.

Distraction is just one click away.

Bad Wolves - Zombie

“House of the Rising Sun” has been covered numerous times. The most known version is from The Animals. I was today years old when I learned that this is the original version of the song. However, my personal favourite cover version is from BTO.

Another well-executed cover version is of the song “Johnny B. Goode”, covered by Peter Tosh, beause it is tranferred into a different music genre.

Correct. The said vending machine was collecting data without users consent. And because it was facial recognition data it means that the collected data can be tied to an individual.

It would have been different if the collected data was just a counter which indcated the number of users of that machine. These kind of data could not have been tied to a specific individual.

That is correct. Switzerland is not a part of the European Union. The manufacturer, Invenda, is located in Switzerland. That is where their headquarters are. It might be possible that their vending machines are produced within the EU (another country where production costs are lower). It might be possible that these specific models (those who offer data collection) are designed for markets outside of EU.

They advertise their product as “Made in EU” (see brochure). This could be made on purpose to implicate that their data collection meets GDPR requirements, leading to believe that everything is compliant with the law.

Bad news, the manufacturer is located in Switzerland and, as stated in the brochure, they advertise their product as “Made in EU”. Probably to implicate that any data which will be collected and processed will be under the terms of GDPR.

I haven’t looked up the terms regarding GDPR, but I assume that their data collection is somewhat “compliant” with GDPR, which does not necessaryly mean anything. It can just mean that data is not stored locally, albeit it will be send to the manufacturer (but probably entcrypted). However, under GDPR you can enforce your right of deletion of the collected data - that is, if you know that data about you has been collected.

What makes this issue so severe is that it would have never been detected that data has been collected and processed, if it weren’t for a malfunction.

Edit: grammar, spelling

The worst part of all is that no one would think of the fact that a vending machine is performing facial recognition techniques, because in general it is assumed that a vending machine is a mechanical device, as it has been in the past. There is not any user benefit in that.

I researched the manufacuter and in their brochure (see page 6) of a similar vending machine it is revealed what data can be processed:

Among the worst data sets are:

• product demographics
• measuring of foot traffic
• gender/ age/ etc.

Bonus: on page 7 of the product brochure they introduce an app which allows the customer to make purchases directly from their smatphone, with features like

• consumer engagement through gamification, interactive marketing, gifting, scratch-and-win receipts, product sampling and cross selling

“What do customers get?”

• a fun and engaging payment process

Finally! I always thought that payment is not fun enough. What a time to be alive.

I haven’t had any issues with slow buffering yet, but I have experienced something different: Sometimes the video playback suddenly stops altogether in the middle and throws me out of the video completely. I suspect that an ad is supposed to be played in this particular part of the video. I have to re-start playing the video from the part where it threw me out. Sometimes this happens several times in the same video.

I use the latest Firefox in combination with uBlock Origin (also always up-to-date).

Edit: typos

It only would be a big problem if household devices like washing machines are built in a way that makes a connection to the internet mandatory in order to function properly. Imagine you can’t do your laundry because of an internet outage.

Name any household device (washing machine, dishwasher, dryer, toaster, water kettle, iron, coffee maker, (microwave) oven, …) that has been improved in functionality by connecting it to the internet, making it a internet-of-things-device. I can’t think of any.

We have a washing machine that cannot be connected to the internet. After starting the program, we set up a timer on our smartphone, 15 minutes longer than the time the washing machine display is predicting. Works like a charm.