Ask Paul: November 18 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Let’s get the weekend off to an early start with another blockbuster round of reader questions.

Our future AI overlords

wright_is asks:

With the increasing use of AI to recognise NCMEC [National Center for Missing & Exploited Children] and the increasing reliance on online services, there are some serious problems that are coming at us.

There have been cases of people having their accounts locked, because they took pictures of their children to send to their doctor and their phone automatically uploaded a copy to Google Photos.

In Germany, someone was out with his sister and her family at the beach. She borrowed his phone, because it had a better camera, to take pictures of her children playing on the beach, being small children, they weren’t wearing bathing suits.

His phone uploaded the images automatically to OneDrive. The next morning, he found that his account had been locked. No warning, no information about why it was locked. He filled in the form on the Microsoft website, but the reply was that he had broken the terms and his account was locked, end of story, no information on what rule he had broken.

No email, no Xbox Game Pass, no access to purchased games, no access 10 years worth of files on his OneDrive, no access to Office. Nothing, everything that he had paid for or was paying for, gone. No explanation, no way to get it back.

Finally, after 18 months, he found out what had happened, when he received a letter from the police, that he was being investigated for distributing NCMEC. He went for the interview and was confronted with the images his sister had taken of her children playing on a public beach. The police dropped all charges, but that wasn’t enough for Microsoft, his account remains locked, with no way to get it re-opened, after their AI miss-classified family photos and reported him to the police.

What can somebody do in such a situation?

Right now, all we can do is call attention to these issues and hope that Big Tech understands that this is one of many areas where human oversight is and probably always will be necessary in this push toward the new automation, which is AI. And that they are not the overlords of the law: that is the responsibility of government and law enforcement.

A couple of thoughts.

You’re right in that this happens all the time: I just saw a fascinating and disturbing story (I think in my Pocket feed) about an astronomer who tweeted a video of a meteor shower and was subsequently banned from Twitter for posting “intimate content.” The ban was initially for 12 hours but then it just continued and she exhausted her appeal options over 3 months. And this was before Elon Musk destroyed Twitter and fired all the moderators. Ironically, after the BBC published an article about this incident, her account was finally restored. But many other astronomers and others posted similar photos and videos of the same event—some, the exact same video—and no others were banned. Why? Who knows.

Looking closer to home, we know that Apple was getting ready to institute automatic sweeps of iCloud photo collections looking for child pornography and had to back down for reasons similar to the story you relate. But more generally, the bigger issue is an over-reliance on automated processes and the belief that technology can replace people. Microsoft is the prime example here since it overly relies on telemetry data in Windows—and has since 2015—to identify what’s broken and then determine what gets fixed. This system has failed repeatedly, often very publicly. But there have been no meaningful changes to the policy, nor any improvements to its reliability.

I nearly got caught in a similar situation this summer, I, luckily, used my Sony camera and not my smartphone, to take pictures of my granddaughter’s christening. In the garden, the kids where playing, including a 3 year old running around naked, she appeared in several photos, which would have landed me with a permanently locked Microsoft account.

I edited the images locally on my PC and cropped out as much of her as I could, but I also copied them to a USB stick to send them to the cousin’s parents, because I didn’t want to risk my online presence. Nothing erotic or NCMEC, just a child playing with her family in a garden, but still so much fear of bad AI ruining my life. What about people who don’t understand this AI and just want to document their children growing up?

Unfortunately, we’re in the thick of it now, and there will be mistakes. I do wonder about things like Personal Vault in OneDrive and Locked Folder in Google Photos that are designed specifically to store sensitive and private data and whether these are secretly proactively monitored for illicit content. And what this “Minority Report”-style surveillance says about the legality of Big Tech taking on this responsibility for itself outside of the purview or control of government or law enforcement. Surely, this is an antitrust issue, and whatever one’s thoughts on the terrible crimes that people are capable of, some legal process involving warrants and official investigations—and not Big Tech fishing expeditions—should be the only trigger for any action.

But again, for now, all we can do is publicize such events and push that they lead to regulation and change.

To 4K or not to 4K?

helix2301 asks:

I play pubg and destiny 2 on an xbox series x many people have said to me that those games are not really 4k quality. Is there a place I can look or a site where you can see what games are in 4k and what are not?

Hm. That’s an interesting question. I’ve always wished that Xbox would offer an overlay that showed at least the frame rate, similar to what’s possible on the PC. But in my case, I have a display that tells me what the resolution is and whether HDR is enabled whenever either changes, as it does, say, in the shift between the Dashboard and a game. The one thing you can be sure of is that any Xbox game will use the highest-possible resolution and frame rate on whatever console it’s played. And that you’ll have the best possible experience on the Xbox Series X. And even if you discovered that, say, PUGB was really just running at 1440p or whatever, it’s not like you could “fix” it. It will play at whatever resolution it’s configured for.

I guess at the very least you should ensure that the Xbox is using 4K resolution and, if available, HDR/Dolby Vision. This is configured in Settings > General > TV & display options.

Cheap Arm dev

helix2301 also asks:

Is there a cheap ARM dev kit available? The one you had before is no longer for sale and I really did not want to spend $600 on the one from Microsoft. While it’s getting great reviews with 16 gigs of ram I cant spend $600 on it.

No, those are the only two I’ve heard of. But I wouldn’t recommend the cheap on I had even if it was still available, as it used a 7-series Snapdragon chipset that was out of date before the thing even launched. And even that new dev kit, while nice on the surface, isn’t really the right device either. If you’re interested in making sure your apps run properly on Windows 11 on Arm, you need a real WOA PC, meaning a laptop or tablet with touch/pen capabilities and 4G/5G. There is no such thing as WOA desktop PCs out in the world, and the future of this platform, like that of the PC itself, is mostly mobile.

And for devs, there is no such point in developing directly on Arm because this is not the only platform out there, nor the one that really matters: what you really want to do today is develop on a real x64 computer and then use Visual Studio to deploy the app remotely to the Arm PC in addition to locally on the PC itself. That may change over time, yes. But for now, developing on Arm is pointless.

On that note, you could probably find an old Windows on Arm laptop with a one- or two-generation old chipset. It would run faster than that cheap dev kit I had, and would let you test apps on a real PC with a multitouch display. There aren’t many WOAs PCs out there, but I bet there are many people who were disappointed with one and would let them go for a relatively low cost.

Photo editing

wmurd118 asks:

I’ve read through all of your “What I use” articles and I may have missed it but what do you use for photo editing?  I thought I heard on one of the WW podcasts that you use Affinity but I could easily be wrong. I’m specifically looking for a product I can use to clean/brighten up some old 35 mm slides I digitized.  I originally used a DSLR with an attachment over the lens that allowed me to take a jpeg of the slide. But I did this more than 15 years ago and really didn’t know what I was doing and didn’t bother adjusting the jpegs to be more like the originals. Before I take the time to rescan those slides with a dedicated scanner I’d like to try and clean them up via software. I’ve tried using the built in Win photo editor as well as the iOS photos app without great success.

I use a combination of Adobe Photoshop Elements and Affinity Photo. I would have switched entirely to the latter, which I purchased from the Microsoft Store a few years back at a steep (50 percent off?) discount. But I had an issue for a long time with exported JPEGs having white streaks of emptiness in them; this happened on multiple PCs and impacted some of the photos I’ve posted to the site. So I primarily use Photoshop Elements (2020) now but switch to Affinity for certain use cases. For example, there are still some file formats that Elements doesn’t support* (which is crazy). And I find it much easier to export transparent PNGs like the ones I use for Eternal Spring using Affinity.

Anyway. Either of these should work well. (I assume Affinity has solved the issue I had by now.) And while buying either through the Store will give you that basically infinite number of installs thing that I love so much about that Store, Elements is still version-based, so you won’t get future upgrades. I believe that Affinity is just always up-to-date (not that much is changing year-over-year with these things. There are definitely sales on both from time to time as well.

* One solution to the file compatibility issue is to use a viewer app like ImageGlass, which I strongly recommend anyway, to convert to a new format. If you’re viewing a file that is in a format that Photoshop Elements doesn’t support, ImageGlass can easily convert it to PNG or whatever. I do this several times a week now.

This is why I drink

jeroendegrebber asks:

I have no subtle way to ask this, so I’ll be blunt. (I’m Dutch, you have had some personal experience with our bluntness I believe).  How do you stay sane?

So, I joke about this all the time. I joked about this issue this morning with Brad on First Ring Daily when for the umpteenth time on a PC on which the configuration has not changed once, Teams came up with the wrong microphone, speaker, and webcam. Seriously. WTF. But I joke about it with my wife too: I’ll either describe some crazy tech issue I’m having or she’ll witness it, and I’ll say, “and this is why I’m a crazy person.”  When my mother told me several years ago that she felt like she should learn how to use computers, I told her, “you’ve gotten this far through life without this heartbreak. There’s no reason to hurt yourself with that now.”  (She since got an iPad without my assistance.)

By and large, you care about the products and services you write about.

Yep.

And you observe the current trends and how that sits with your personal/business viewpoints and values. Over the last years, there have been so many disappointments. The way Microsoft handles Windows (11) for example.  It would be easy to become cynical or pathetic. And yet, you don’t and it remains a joy to read your musings about things technical and personal. So I am curious either about your coping  mechanism or what balances it out for you.

Honestly, I don’t know that I do cope. I joke about it, I guess. (One common line: “technology has never failed me!”) But really, I hope that in writing—or ranting—about something that, to me, seems like common sense, I can in some small way inspire change or improvement.

And that does happen. HP, for example, just shipped their first laptop that has two USB-C ports, but with one on each side, a feature I’ve been requesting (complaining about) in my reviews for several years because that’s where the power goes and the cable can get in the way if you use a mouse. And a long-time contact at HP emailed me when I mentioned that in the review and said they did it for me. Not really, right? But they were paying attention.

All I can do is try. But what really frustrates me the most is when someone will read a sarcastic or critical tweet or review or commentary piece or whatever and respond to me with something along the lines of, “if you hate whatever product/service/company so much, why don’t you just leave?” The idea there is that I’ve criticized something they like and what they want to see online—what we’ve been trained is normal—is only those opinions that align with our own. They want to see cheerleading and confirmation bias. The circle jerk that led to all of our societal problems today.

And that misses the point. The example I always use is that I love my children, but when one of them came home with a bad report card from school, I didn’t hug them and tell them I loved them no matter what and if they wanted to fail that was just fine with me because they’re perfect. I got mad, demanded better, and made sure that that never happened again. And I did this because I love them. And because I want them to be the best they could be. Not just for me. But for the world.

People who don’t immediately understand the logic of this are confusing to me. That you can love a person—or a thing—and still want them to be better when they do badly. This is just common sense.

Anyway, you seem to get what I’m trying to do, and I appreciate that. And I do get cynical, of course, I can’t help it. But all I can do is … what I do. I have this tiny platform, and I try. What else is there when you really do care?

(I’m also always reminded of the scene in “Back to School” where Sam Kinnison plays the insane history teacher who goes on a hilarious rant to which Rodney Dangerfield can only remark, “He really seems to care. About what I have no idea.” All I can hope for myself is that it’s clear what I care about. And that my heart/mind is in the right place.)

The first smartphone

ErichK asks:

Paul, forgive me if this is a silly question since it was years before I ever paid attention to handhelds, but was the iPhone really the first smart phone, or was it just the first one to do it “right?”

So, the iPhone was definitely not the first smartphone: there were smartphones with apps and app stores years before Apple got around to it. But I have described the iPhone as the beginning of the modern smartphone era, which is defined by devices that are all-screen (no hardware keyboard) with multitouch capabilities and backed by app store and services ecosystems. It’s a fact that the entire market shifted to emulate this one device and that those platform makers that moved too slowly to do so—RIM/Blackberry, Microsoft, etc.—all failed. The only one that succeeded, Android, did so specifically because that team saw the iPhone launch, scrapped their original plans, and emulated the iPhone as closely as possible. (And, to its credit, also address some iPhone shortcomings, including even such things as licensing.)

The iPhone is a great example of how real innovation (in tech, probably elsewhere) often requires an outsider that looks at a market with fresh eyes, correctly identifies issues, and then delivers on key scenarios. None of the existing players were capable of doing this because they were too protective of what they had. And whatever one thinks of Steve Jobs, this was his real skill: the iPod/iTunes/iTunes Store, iPhone, and to a lesser degree the iPad, were all the result of rethinking existing products/markets in which Apple, to that point, had played no role. (One might argue that the relative lack of success of the Mac under Jobs was related to that platform not being different enough from Windows to matter, and that its subsequent gains are mostly related to an iPhone halo effect.) Even some Jobs initiatives that failed, like Mobile Me, where the right idea, just implemented badly.

This outsider thinking is basically what’s missing at Apple today, though I feel like Cook’s Apple stumbled into the right market for Apple Watch after an initially misguided launch strategy. It’s hard to be like that when you’re richest company on earth and have lots to lose: now it’s Apple that is protecting markets.

Answering the Call of Duty

rbwatson0 asks:

I bought MWII for my XBSX but I haven’t played since maybe (original, not remastered) MW2. Any tips, hacks, general advice for getting up to speed in multiplayer? I’m slowly figuring out the load out for weapons, but don’t know what to focus on in perks and stuff. Also, how to actually kill people? Kill streaks are a pipe dream at this point!

Ah boy. I’ve often commented that it would be very hard for someone who has not played Call of Duty recently to pick up any of the recent games and figure it out quickly. These are complex games from a configuration standpoint, and they get more complex with each release. That started with the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and has only escalated since: the new game is confusing even to long-time fans.

With the understanding that I am absolutely not progressing in any efficient manner, nor am I doing particularly well from a K/D (kill/death ratio) perspective—it’s literally at 1.00 right now, meaning an even number of each—because I was forced to play non-hardcore game types until Wednesday … yeah, I have a few thoughts.

There are numerous keys to success in any Call of Duty game. Knowing the maps, for example. Knowing which type(s) of matches you prefer. Understanding which types of loadouts (weapons, perks, field upgrades) are best suited to you. And so on. Just figuring this system out is hard enough.

I stick exclusively to Hardcore Team Deathmatch (which is now called Tier 1 Team Deathmatch for some reason), which has a greatly reduced HUD (heads-up display) and almost zero feedback: you don’t know when you’ve earned killstreaks, you never know the names of anyone you may/may not have killed or been killed by, etc. It’s not for beginners. So I guess I’d recommend starting with a non-Hardcore/Tier 1 mode. To me, this would be normal Team Deathmatch, but maybe consider one of the cooperative modes.

For weapons, I always start with Assault rifles, but I’m looking forward to moving on to Marksman rifles, which in past Call of Duty games have been a combination of Assault rifle and Sniper rifle capabilities, which is useful on bigger maps. But fully automatic weapons are best to start. You get 5 “points” per gun, which let you add 5 add-on items—optics, muzzles, ammunition, etc.—and while you start with nothing, push for those add-ons that improve accuracy and damage. (There are graphs that change as you make selections.) I usually create the same loadout twice, one with a rocket launcher for downing drones and helicopters, and one with a pistol as the secondary weapon. I often run out of ammo.

You get a tactical weapon and a lethal weapon. I use Stim for the first, as it gives you your health back, which is key in Hardcore. But for the normal game types maybe a Flash grenade or similar would be better to stun enemies before shooting. (“Soften them up,” as a friend says.) I always go with a Proximity mine or Claymore for the latter: these are the “passive income” of Call of Duty, the thing you leave somewhere on the map in the hope that an enemy will trip it and give you a free kill. Classic.

For perks, I prefer stealth, and in past games, I had a very specific set of perks that made me largely invisible to both players and aircraft. But in the new game, there is a new and confusing system of pre-made perk packages. Fortunately, you can create a custom perk package and so I’ve tried to emulate what I did in the past as much as possible. But it doesn’t work the same way: I start off with Battle Hardened and Overkill and then earn Cold Blooded and then Ghost as each match progresses; previously, you had all your perks all the time. This is an area I need to pay more attention to.

I can’t stand the field upgrades in this game and really don’t like any of them. Right now I’m using Anti-armor rounds but … whatever.

Killstreaks are tough. They’re different in this game, of course, with segregated sections where you can choose one from any of three sections. I start with the lower-end ones and I have UAV (4 kills), Cruise missile (5 kills), and SAE (6 kills) configured, and I can usually get all three in any game (multiple times, usually). But now that I’m in Hardcore/Tier 1, there’s no notification and I literally forget I have them many times. In one game, I suddenly remembered and had all three waiting to go. I’ll get there. (And maybe advance to where I’m only using 5-, 6- and 7-kill killstreaks or higher.)

It kind of goes on and on. The time between matches is so short you can’t really adjust your loadouts or perks or whatever easily anymore, which is something I used to do when progressing. So you need to drop out of the lobby first. But I don’t do enough adjusting and I have a weapon I’ve been using for a long time and I still don’t have all the add-ons available to me. Maybe you’re supposed to use one of each type in turn to get further ones, I’m still figuring that out. The only thing I am doing, just by playing, is progressing: I’m at level 67, which is Prestige 1. (Prestige 2 hits at level 100.) But I need to spend more time figuring out how to do this more efficiently. So far, I’ve just been learning the maps and grinding away.

It’s hard to know if any of this is in any way helpful. I can’t even imagine looking at these screens with fresh eyes as they were complex enough for me with years of experience. It’s just a hard game to get into.

Good luck!