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[Sheb]

So is that guy just straight up not allowed to run for president?

Edit: Read more about him. I like the idea of him being a champion for justice but all the things he says sound like echoes of Trump. “Fake news”, “false charges”, etc. I guess it’s hard to push against the mainstream.

... so is there like a super informative post on the Russian politics thread somewhere?

Well, yeah he was convicted on a corruption charge which might or might not be trumped up.

[Reelya]

How stupid is it that Alexa answers to the name Alexa as the default on all devices?

This is playing havoc with people. Recently there was a story on TV about a little girl who asked Alexa for a doll house, and it sent her an expensive doll house. People who saw the story on TV reported that their Alexas also tried to buy doll houses after the story aired. So you can now just say "Alexa do <x>" on video and this will cause people's Alexa to obey the commands.

So if you get Amazon Echo or similar, the first thing you should do is definitely change the name. Especially if you're actually named Alexa:

http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/01/how-to-change-amazon-echo-alexas-name-to-something-else.html

Last week, when human Alexa’s father, Dean, asked her to grab some water from the kitchen, Amazon’s Alexa wanted to help, too. “Amazon’s choice for water is Fiji Natural Artesian Water, pack of 24. It’s $27.27, including tax. Would you like to buy it?”

To be honest, i have a bad reaction to anyone who has a device in their house which by default tries and gets them to buy over-priced shit as the default option to any query. If it's going to be a thing, it needs to be open-source and not owned by a company with a vested interest in selling you more stuff.

[bloop_bleep]

How stupid is it that Alexa answers to the name Alexa as the default on all devices?

This is playing havoc with people. Recently there was a story on TV about a little girl who asked Alexa for a doll house, and it sent her an expensive doll house. People who saw the story on TV reported that their Alexas also tried to buy doll houses after the story aired. So you can now just say "Alexa do <x>" on video and this will cause people's Alexa to obey the commands.

So if you get Amazon Echo or similar, the first thing you should do is definitely change the name. Especially if you're actually named Alexa:

http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/01/how-to-change-amazon-echo-alexas-name-to-something-else.html

Last week, when human Alexa’s father, Dean, asked her to grab some water from the kitchen, Amazon’s Alexa wanted to help, too. “Amazon’s choice for water is Fiji Natural Artesian Water, pack of 24. It’s $27.27, including tax. Would you like to buy it?”

To be honest, i have a bad reaction to anyone who has a device in their house which by default tries and gets them to buy over-priced shit as the default option to any query. If it's going to be a thing, it needs to be open-source and not owned by a company with a vested interest in selling you more stuff.

Though this probably doesn't have much effect given you can cancel Amazon orders if they haven't shipped yet. More of a nuisance than a gaping security hole.

[Reelya]

It's enough of a hole that someone could exploit it, and apparently there are only 4 choices of wake-word that you can give any Echo device.

I also forgot to add that the little girl in the story asked for "a doll house and some cookies" so Alexa also sent them a 4 pound tin of expensive danish butter cookies. So, in other words, Alexa is probably tuned such that if there's any ambiguity at all, it sends you the most expensive item it reasonably can (or at least, the one where Amazon gets the biggest commission). I wouldn't have a piece of shit device like that in my house.

[wierd]

This is the future that people welcomed into their homes.

People (at large; this is not a condemnation) decided that individuals who asserted that "Cameras and microphones, being monitored by a corporation, who's only real interest is to sell me things? No thank you, I prefer my privacy" were paranoid tinfoil hat wearing cranks. As such, welcome to the brave new world of targeted advertising. It's so easy to shop online, that it shops for you, when you dont really want it to.

Similar story for "smart TVs". 

Basically, devices like Alexa exist, in the form they do, because people are willing to tolerate it that way.

[scourge728]

I like the idea of voice activated stuff sometimes, but not when it has purchasing power

[Frumple]

"Accidentally gave iphone power of attorney, lawyer can't figure out how to get it back from a smart phone, please send help."

[Akura]

"Accidentally gave iphone power of attorney, lawyer can't figure out how to get it back from a smart phone, please send help."

*attempts to jailbreak the iphone; iphone responds with a court order*

[Max™]

*automated legal aide succumbs to a speculative processing overflow attack initiated by the prosecuting expert system and attempts to enter a plea of "MARBLECAKE ALSO THE GAME" which is accepted somehow and results in your legal name getting changed to that*

[Loud Whispers]

Tbh it's a bit disappointing seeing the world go from teaching their younglings to not even put their age online, to paying a company to install a microphone that hears everything in their house 24/7 and builds a profile of their entire life in order to sell them useless shit

[scourge728]

Is using a false age online actually legal?

[Starver]

If I was 8 and told Twitter/Facebook/whayever that I was 15, that would anull my acceptence of its T&Cs, but I would be below the age of criminal responsibility in most (and probably all relevent) jurisdictions so the worst repurcussion is the deletion of an account that I would not have been properly allowed to have in the first place.

If I am 18 and I register with the details that I'm 25... Well, I'm not aware of any reason that this would upset any corporate policies or legal barriers (or switch to 28 and 35, or upwards more, if there's a regime with higher-yet age-of-majority rules). In 'social media', you can register as "Queen Hepititus of Gwondaland" if you wish, and while your stated age (or year-of-birth) is likely going to be restricted to a 'limited' range in a drop-down box, they really don't care if you say your DOB is 1/Jan/1900 (if that's allowed) or even 29/Feb/1900 (if the sanity-checker isn't fussy enough), so long as you're not asking them to take on the corporate responsibility of being responsible for your actions.

And, switchways, the 65yo dirty-old-man playacting the 16yo schoolgirl... Whilstsoever that playacting doesn't breach guidelines, it's not bannable, and whilstsoever it doesn't go into illegalities (as acceptibly interpreted by already complex internationalised caselaw) it also should not be prosecutable in any fair court for the illegalities. The age thing might be contributing factor, but not fraud in and of itself.


I'll tell you now, though, that when I've been asked to give a DOB for various places (not actually tied to anything like online banking, etc) , I have never given my actual DOB. Never outright lied, like makng myself not underage when I really am (much too late for that, anyway... I was old enough to get past most (ostensibly) age-limited resources on the web before ther was a web!), but always moved the date by a given amount just to Stick It To The Man Big Data, should The Man Big Data ever get ahold of it. I have never found a T&C that has any reasonable prohibition against my doing this, so it's all fair game.


edit: Just checked, and this forum has my DOB as 00-00-0000. Forgot to note whether that was DD-MM-YYYY or the stupid way round (though internally I prefer YYYY-MM-DD over both of those), but as it wouldn't matter anyway I'm not going to go back and find out properly.

edit2: Erm. Actually I did go back and check. Despite what I just wrote. And it is YYYY-MM-DD, thus 0000-00-00. Just so you know that I had (not) converted it automatically in my head, anyway, yet I had assumed I hadn't (not) done so. That's for the pedants out there..

[Reelya]

Is using a false age online actually legal?

How would you enforce a law like that? It's no more illegal than any other piece of information you put into a website. e.g. if someone asks you for your name in real life and you say "Jack Shit", you can't be arrested. Websites have no more legal standing than that. There's no law that forces you to be truthful at all times.

in fact the statement "using a false age online" is pretty vague. e.g. it would be pretty silly if you could be arrested if I made a website that just said "what is your age?" and you entered a false age, then i called the police on you. And the fact is, "big" websites have no more legal standing than that silly one-page website I made. e.g. lying to Twitter about your age is no more an enforceable crime than lying to bay12 about your age, or lying on a website that you yourself created.

[Starver]

Well, I think I may have found a neural network project that I actually find interesting. I'm curious whether I'm crazy/an idiot or that this project is actually as novel as it appears?

I can't actually work out what they're saying. Sounds a bit like they think that they can work with a kind of inverted form of what reflexology allegedly is to do stuff, but I may have missed what stuff they thus want to do, leaving us with just the "we think a kind of geotagging of knowledge is what we need to do, so we're having a go at doing that".

I'd appreciate a better summary, though. I know that they aren't wanting to publicise their secret internal plan to take over the world technical IP, but they seem not to be writing a web front-page (which acts as a drill-down in itself) that's got any tangible ideas on it.

[Starver]

Oh, I wasn't serious about the hidden agenda. I just don't see what's exciting you, yet. Or the novelty aspect, if it's the weighted input thing, because that's par for the course in NNs, isn't it?

I thought the new part was the bit about "All areas of the neocortex assign their input to a 'location' in the external world." Which reminds me of a stateful machine, perhaps formed in an abstraction of logical feedback loops. Designing that in (with preconceptions) is trivial, when surely the Holy Grail is to find it cropping up as an emergent property, during training, upon deep analysis of a system not actually primed (perhaps prejudicially) with that as an intention.

Or I might just be reading it/you wrong. That's not unlikely.