Showing 1-10 of 12 results
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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.
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Huawei facing tough time outside China
Life, James Hein, Published on 29/07/2020
» China, and in particular Huawei, is not winning these days. Huawei has some excellent hardware. Their latest phones are as good in many aspects as any other manufacturer. However, the fuzzy area is the company's links to the Chinese government. Huawei claims they are not directly linked to the government but many others say there are direct and nefarious links. Huawei recently lost their foothold in the United Kingdom as their 5G network has been disallowed or marginalised for the future. This leaves only Canada as part of the five eyes intelligence partners still supporting Huawei 5G. Other nations have also been hesitant to adopt the technology.
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Fujitsu in first big WFH move
Life, James Hein, Published on 15/07/2020
» - As predicted, Fujitsu provided a great example when it announced the permanent closure of half of its office real estate in Japan. They will instead have 80,000 workers working from home permanently. This is a huge redefinition of work culture in the wake of the Covid-19 outbreak. Called the "Work Life Shift" campaign, Fujitsu is to study data on how employees use offices, with a view to giving them more tools and options to work from home, at hubs or be more mobile. This will end the habit of employees commuting to and from offices. It also indicates the allowance of a higher degree of autonomy based on the principle of trust, Fujitsu announced.
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In 2020, China heads into 1984
Life, James Hein, Published on 23/10/2019
» China will have 626 million CCTVs installed by 2020. That's close to one for every two people in the country. By the end of 2019, any application for Internet access will require first having your face scanned. In 2020, if you want to surf the web you will first have to pass a facial recognition process. If you are recognised and your social score is high enough you will be able to connect. This directive comes from the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Technology.
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AI -- what is it good for?
Life, James Hein, Published on 28/08/2019
» Why do we care about machine learning and the kind of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems I mentioned last time? The amount of data being taken in by systems in modern times is outstripping the ability of humans to keep up. Enter machine learning systems to pre-process the information, highlight patterns and identify the bits and pieces that humans may find interesting. Key areas include fraud detection, whereby a set of rules is applied to data and flagged if those rules are detected. It also includes the age-old problem of the best delivery routes to bring manufactured goods to customers, with the additional benefit of using less fuel. A recent McKinsey report found that AI improved on "traditional analytics techniques" in 400 use cases across 19 industries and nine business functions. As far as the current situation, AI or machine learning is not an end state. Human intervention is still required to make sure the results make sense and also to ensure stuff isn't being missed in the process. There is also continuing training and refinement being regularly applied. It's a growing field and those organisations that are not at least aware of it could be left behind by their competitors. At least, until Skynet takes over.
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Will fold-out phones start a new revolution?
Life, James Hein, Published on 27/02/2019
» Lower cost Google phones will be arriving this year. There will be mid-range offerings somewhere in the 4,700-22,000 baht range and another below that as a low-range product. The target is emerging markets that are fairly well saturated with other brands, both Korean and Chinese. The Google Pixel is the high-end product and is supposed to have the best camera, for now, but they are not cheap. The new range will round out the lower end of the market.
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Beware ransomware
Life, James Hein, Published on 08/02/2017
» Ransomware can hit anywhere. In the town of Cockrell Hill, Texas, with a population of just over 4,000 souls, the police force there was hit and lost over eight years of evidence. The attackers used a "cloned email address imitating a department issued email address" to deliver the ransomware and then requested four Bitcoins worth about US$3,600 (126,000 baht) to decrypt the files. Any good IT department would have decent backups but as it turned out this process had only backed up the encrypted files. After talking to the FBI they were told that there was no guarantee they would get their data back so they wiped their servers and restarted with eight years of data and videos destroyed.
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Updates confuse and infuriate users
Life, James Hein, Published on 17/08/2016
» Most software builders want each successive version of their application to be better, faster and have more features. In the latest version of Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo decided to buck the trend and remove useful features to the point where their application is next to useless. They've started by no longer indicating if one of your contacts was online or not. I typically only send a message to someone I see is online. Yahoo also decided to hide many of your contacts, make it hard to add them, and I'm not sure where conversation history went. They removed groups, audio and video chat, got rid of emoticons and a lot of other stuff including no configuration of options. Basically they took a good, usable application and turned it into a steaming pile of trash.
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Flaws in the scramble for safer driving
Database, James Hein, Published on 01/12/2010
» Imagine the uproar if the government announced that all cars would need to have scrambling technology installed so that drivers - and, by extension, passengers - could not use a mobile phone while the car was in motion.
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Why PayPal indirectly supports the conmen
Database, James Hein, Published on 16/06/2010
» Some weeks I wonder what I am going to write about but something always seems to happen to give me a story.
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