Showing 1 - 10 of 28
YouTube hypocrisy deserves flagging
Life, James Hein, Published on 27/09/2023
» YouTube is behaving badly again. A prominent presenter I occasionally watch, who has millions of subscribers, has been demonetised, for some possible actions 20 years ago. This is not a commentary on potential innocence or guilt, but on YouTube's processes. There are people whose lives are supported by revenue from their presentations on YouTube. This ranges from small fries all the way up to the big fish like the one here. When an individual is demonetised they can lose the ability to support themselves. In this case allegations were made by the media, not the police or authorities, and at the time of writing there have been zero charges made. YouTube is essentially saying, bring us all your viewers so we can hit them with ads and we can make lots of money, but you will be getting nothing for your work.
Those pesky pixel trackers
Life, James Hein, Published on 12/10/2022
» I've written about the tracking in TikTok. I recently found out you don't need to have the app installed to be providing tracking data to this platform. The term you need to learn today is "tracking pixel".
Protecting the jewels
Life, James Hein, Published on 11/03/2020
» A while back I looked at the LG V20 as a new phone option but I ended up getting the latest Samsung. The next LG top-end model is the V60 ThinQ. Its 5000 mAh battery offers a lot of battery life and will eventually be used by the Samsung S20. It will come with a 17.2cm edge-to-edge screen and unlike the S20 will retain the headphone jack. It also supports a clip on second screen but with a hinge between them. This allows two apps to run side by side, useful in a number of circumstances. It has 8K video recording but not the 10x optical zoom found in the top end S20. Pricing is expected to be less than the S20 range. When you're buying a new phone these days there are a lot of options so find the features and price point that suits you. After that it probably comes down to the colour of the case.
Facebook guilty, Huawei continues to claim innocence
Life, James Hein, Published on 13/03/2019
» I've been thinking about the new foldable phones. For many years, I have been hoping for a foldable e-book that has, to date, not materialised in a form I'd want to buy. There is something about the traditional book format that is familiar and comfortable. The first releases of foldable phones are aimed at those with lots of spare cash and who want to dip their fingers into the technology. These buyers form a baseline for the manufacturers to build on. I see this as testing the waters and I expect to see Apple jump into the market in the near future, as they have a bucket load of patents for similar technologies.
AI-aided hope on the horizon
Life, James Hein, Published on 13/02/2019
» Despite some of my criticisms in the past there are some excellent examples of emerging artificial intelligence technologies. I've mentioned some of these from the medical world in earlier articles but a new one caught my eye this week, figuring out in which hotel a picture was taken. No, not to help people remember where holiday snaps were taken but to track down human trafficking where pics of women are taken to sell them for sex. The three groups behind this identification technology are from George Washington University, Temple University and Adobe, all in the US. Like many AI systems a large amount of source data is used and to help with this more than a million images have been collected from 50,000 hotels worldwide. Using all the room elements in backgrounds a neural network is being trained to identify a hotel chain and then a location.
VPNs outlawed in Russia
Life, James Hein, Published on 08/11/2017
» By the time you read this a new law in Russia will have banned the use or provision of virtual private networks (VPNs). ISPs will be required to block websites that offer VPNs and similar proxy services, currently used by millions of Russians to bypass state-imposed internet censorship. President Putin justified this draconian step as a measure to prevent the spread of extremism online. Its real purpose is to restrict the population to information approved by Russian regulator Roskomnadzor, being the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media, or more simply censorship.
The inflexibility of silicon
Life, James Hein, Published on 26/04/2017
» Since the 1950s, silicon has been the basis for our integrated circuits. The changes in component density since then have been staggering, with your smartphone now more powerful than the early supercomputers. Current chips can cram over 10 million transistors into a square millimetre, and these can be scaled in 3D, giving us the storage solutions we have today. The problem for some applications is that silicon is quite rigid, and while it is not going away anytime soon, some applications want processors to be bendy.
A very taxing problem for all
Life, James Hein, Published on 08/03/2017
» Every government wants taxes. It is, after all, how the salaries get paid, and how funds are raised for re-election and looking after the country, often in that order. Consider the UK as an example. Starting in April, there will be a new set of tax regulations based on the IR35 guidelines. With the uncertainty surrounding this change there has been a rush of IT contractors leaving government positions, in many cases over half, halting a wide range of projects. This has been happening for over a year now with, as an example, the Ministry of Defence losing 30 out of 32 contractors last year. When the process of government is stopped because of taxes imposed, you're probably doing something wrong.
Mind your passwords
Life, James Hein, Published on 25/01/2017
» Google, Facebook and Apple are the names of a few companies working on artificial intelligence (AI). I don't mean the kind of AI that simply teaches machines to be useful to humans, though that is also being done everywhere. I mean the self-aware kind. After so long at it I think the bigger organisations are locked in a series of dead end paths. Instead, I predict the first breakthroughs will come from small, even one-man operations thinking outside the cube. As an aside, when it comes to the search giants like Google or Yahoo and social media sites like Facebook, they all have their biases so the results you see may not be all that comprehensive, balanced or accurate.
Of hacking and international cyber affairs
Life, James Hein, Published on 21/12/2016
» According to some reports Russia was the one that hacked into the Clinton servers and arranged the email leaks to get Trump elected. Many of the US security agencies don't agree with this latest assessment. So what do we know? We don't know for example if the servers are running Microsoft or Linux operating systems, if the emails were grabbed in a single block or slowly over time. There is very little info. This is a classic case of one side blaming the other for a result they didn't want, and I suspect that the real story won't come out for some time.