Showing 1-5 of 5 results
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Seamless synchronicity
Life, James Hein, Published on 11/09/2019
» As I was walking to work thinking about this week's column, I did a quick self-inventory. I was listening to On Liberty by John Stuart Mill through my noise cancelling headphones. The audio was being sent by Bluetooth from my Samsung Galaxy S10 5G phone that I was also using to play a location-based game, Ingress. This was being fed my position by satellite and receiving information from the internet via my phone's data connection. Occasionally I would pull down the notification tab to see what was on for the day and who had tried to contact me via a number of social-media services.
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Think twice before going with Huawei
Life, James Hein, Published on 28/04/2021
» The Chinese firm Huawei is in the limelight again for allegedly snooping on the Dutch prime minister's phone calls, with the information used to track down Chinese dissidents. This was a while back and it only came to light now because back then the Dutch were worried about exposure. Huawei was able to do this because they have core components in the Netherlands' mobile network. The result was that Huawei employees could not only listen in on any conversation but also identify those in the conversations across their 3G and 4G networks. Even today, the Chinese have admin-level access due to the network management outsourcing deal. Huawei strenuously denied any wrongdoing but those thinking that their 5G Huawei networks will be safe might want to rethink this or look very carefully at the access granted under the contracts.
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Think twice before going with Huawei
Life, James Hein, Published on 28/04/2021
» The Chinese firm Huawei is in the limelight again for allegedly snooping on the Dutch prime minister's phone calls, with the information used to track down Chinese dissidents. This was a while back and it only came to light now because back then the Dutch were worried about exposure. Huawei was able to do this because they have core components in the Netherlands' mobile network. The result was that Huawei employees could not only listen in on any conversation but also identify those in the conversations across their 3G and 4G networks. Even today, the Chinese have admin-level access due to the network management outsourcing deal. Huawei strenuously denied any wrongdoing but those thinking that their 5G Huawei networks will be safe might want to rethink this or look very carefully at the access granted under the contracts.
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Don't call AI bigoted
Life, James Hein, Published on 06/11/2019
» Despite what some claim, Artificial Intelligence is not racist. Google built a system to detect hate speech or speech that exhibited questionable content. Following the rules given, it picked out a range of people with what some try to claim was a bias toward black people. Wrong. The AI simply followed the rules and a larger number of black people and some other minorities, as defined in the US, were found to be breaking those rules. It didn't matter to the machines that when one group says it, it isn't defined as hate speech by some; it simply followed the rules. People can ignore or pretend not to see rules, but machines don't work that way. What the exercise actually found was that speech by some groups is ignored while the same thing said by others isn't. As the saying goes, don't ask the question if you're not prepared to hear the answer.
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Try not to drop your phone
Life, James Hein, Published on 25/03/2020
» The big news these days is coronavirus, the family name that covers the latest version, Covid-19. The impacts on tech are fairly obvious -- a lot of stuff is made in China these days. Apple, for example, is heavily invested in Chinese manufacturing and it has closed stores because the supply chain has run dry. Replacement iPhones are in short supply, so if you've damaged your phone, expect a potentially long wait before a full replacement is available. This also applies to replacement parts. So don't drop your phone. Employee travel is also discouraged while the virus spreads across the globe. At the time of this writing, stores in China have reopened and will not close. As an aside, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a non-partisan think-tank, named Apple as one of 83 internationally known brands utilising the slave labour of Uighur Muslims.
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