Showing 1 - 10 of 20
Protect yourself when online
Life, James Hein, Published on 03/08/2022
» A friend of mine, let's call him Dave, wrote to me recently about identity theft. He told me that all of his identifying information like phone numbers, email addresses, old passwords and his usual security questions, were all available on the dark web. He also had a number of notifications of personal information breaches that resulted in fraudulent charges, the need to replace credit cards and attempts to set up fake bank accounts in his name. The latter is used if a hacker is planning to get into your other accounts so they can transfer funds to themselves under your name.
The fight for a freer web continues
Life, James Hein, Published on 17/03/2021
» The social media platform Telegram has over 500 million users with over 55 million active every day. Unlike other platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and others, you are free to express your opinion there without being cancelled, shadow banned or throttled in searches.
Limiting discourse, leaking borders
Life, James Hein, Published on 19/06/2019
» It is difficult to ignore the latest moves by social media providers like YouTube to change their terms and conditions so as to block individuals and groups they don't like. The shift from an open platform, where all ideas are welcome, to one more concerned with the window of discourse is disappointing, and points to the huge pressure being applied by a small number of special interest groups, mostly via advertisers. The really sad part of this is that there are already indications that Minds, a supposed open alternative, is already censoring content, so for the moment at least I need to withdraw my recommendation for that platform.
Protecting your privacy
Life, James Hein, Published on 05/04/2017
» Internet privacy is dead, at least in the US. This will trigger a rush to VPN's, the use of Tor browsers and advanced encryption, for some. In the US, new legislation allows your ISP to collect and store all of your browsing history. This will include length of time spent on sites and pages visited. The information will be at the mercy of the ISP to keep or use it to apply social engineering in terms of recommended sites and marketing. While the point seems to be to allow ISPs to make more money, the scary part for some will be that hackers seem to be able to regularly hack into ISPs and grab stored data.
2016 in the rear-view mirror
Life, James Hein, Published on 28/12/2016
» Another year has passed, and it is time to take a look back.
Even Facebook can't crack AI
Life, James Hein, Published on 30/11/2016
» So where are we as far as artificial intelligence is concerned? For some time now Facebook, with all of its resources, has tried to build a machine intelligence that can reason based on text input. Different groups have been trying for decades to build some form of machine intelligence but it is still a long way from what TV shows like Westworld and Humans portray. Even so, there are groups such as the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence in Cambridge that are also looking into the long-term risks of developing AI, just in case.
Connected to the grid for life
Life, James Hein, Published on 03/08/2016
» I had an unsettling experience recently where all of my Yahoo emails seemed to vanish and I mean everything. When I logged into my account it was completely bare. While it was all there a couple of hours later it made me realise just how dependent I was on my email account. Thinking a bit more I realised that I also depend on Skype and to a smaller extent Yahoo. Then I thought about the people who have a much larger online presence. For some who are always sending electronic messages it could be a terrifying experience to be suddenly cut off from all regular communication. This kind of effect is a very modern one and I suspect that it has not been investigated very thoroughly in the journals as yet but I suspect it will be a newly defined psychology condition sometime in the near future.
Connected to the grid for life
Life, James Hein, Published on 03/08/2016
» I had an unsettling experience recently where all of my Yahoo emails seemed to vanish and I mean everything. When I logged into my account it was completely bare. While it was all there a couple of hours later it made me realise just how dependent I was on my email account. Thinking a bit more I realised that I also depend on Skype and to a smaller extent Yahoo. Then I thought about the people who have a much larger online presence. For some who are always sending electronic messages it could be a terrifying experience to be suddenly cut off from all regular communication. This kind of effect is a very modern one and I suspect that it has not been investigated very thoroughly in the journals as yet but I suspect it will be a newly defined psychology condition sometime in the near future.
Let it all go with Pokémon
Life, James Hein, Published on 20/07/2016
» The Pokémon Go game is taking the smartphone world by storm. Like Ingress before it, it is a real world location based game so you physically have to get out of the house to play it. Unlike Ingress, it has a cartoon character so kids love it but mums and dads don't so much because they have to drive their kids around to out of the way places to get the next Pokémon. This is another game by Niantic, a group within Google and the ones who built Ingress. The game was also quite insecure on iOS phones but that was apparently fixed with a patch. There have been no issues reported by Android phone users.
Operating without support
Life, James Hein, Published on 21/10/2015
» For most customers, Windows Server 2003 ran out of even extended support back in July but there are still plenty of people using it, including the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) where half of their servers are still running on the old but very good at the time operating system. For some, running an old operating system has no downside. What software and functionality that is running on it has probably happily been doing so for a decade or more and also in all likelihood without any problems. If the device is not connected to a public network of any kind then the risk of security breaches is also very low so missing out on any security updates is likely to have no impact. There is also no need to upgrade hardware to support a later and more demanding operating system. For some users this is a win-win.