wright_is

https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Amazon-Mitarbeiter-sollen-Kundendaten-verkauft-haben-4166361.html (German website)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-investigates-employees-leaking-data-for-bribes-1537106401 (paywall)

The Wall Street Journal reported today that Amazon is currently investigating allegations that Amazon employees have been selling customer data.

Affected are allegedly customers who have written reviews, the datasets were allegedly offered at between $80 and $2000. They also offered prospective purchasers the removal of negative reviews.

Amazon said that it will deal with employees who broke its rules with internal disciplinary procedures, through to dismissal. It will also deal with sellers that broke its rules.

Unknown is how many customers' data is involved, how many employees were in on the scheme.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/12/apple_film_rights/

Interesting, if you buy movies from Apple (and I assume from other online sources), you don't actually buy the movies, just the right at the time of purchase to download a copy of the movie.

If Apple (or any other online store) don't renew the rights to the films you have purchased, the films you thought you had purchased, will be removed from your library...

To apease the customer for removing his movies without refunding, they offered him 2 movie rentals to compensate for the lost films. No refund is possible.

Apple notes – again, buried in its terms and conditions: "It is your responsibility not to lose, destroy, or damage Content once downloaded. We encourage you to back up your Content regularly."

I hope that Paul and his family aren't too affected by the large forest fires sweeping through the country!

My thoughts also go out to those who live in Sweden and are affected by the fires.

Jaron Lanier held an opening keynote at CeBIT in Hannover today.

He was supposed to talk about VR, but instead he mainly spoke about the "free" business model used by Google, Facebook and other social media platforms.

He said that the business model is sick, it is stupid, dangerous and undignified. On the other hand, he praised businesses like Netflix, which for a monthly fee is creating some of the best content for years.

He was at pains to repeatedly point out that he was an enemy of technology, and he saw it as a great way for improving communications between people and that technology is "magical". But the free business model, subverted by advertising is a "fake" business model.

He went on to say, that the whole idea of big businesses having no real relationship with their customers (their users), but only with advertisers.

How stupid is it, that two people communicating with each other do it on a platform that hands over their information to a third party to allow them to tailored advertising, or as he called it, "behaviour modification loops".

He also went on to say that adertising in-and-of itself is not bad, but the tailored advertisments are the bad player here.

He also said the hacker culture, free information and open software (i.e. the original definition of a hacker, not the one corrupted by the press in recent years) is partly to blame.

Unfortunately, I haven't found any English language articles on his talk yet, there are a dozen or so German ones so far...

https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Kranke-Geschaeftsmodelle-Cebit-beginnt-mit-Abreibung-fuer-die-Tech-Branche-4075894.html

I’ve been thinking, recently.

I wouldn’t have replaced my last smartphone, if it wasn’t for a long commute and Audible.

I currently have a fairly good phone, but I talk maybe 5 minutes a month on it. I never send or receive SMS. Data is used, mainly, for downloading new audio books on the move.

In essence, I just need an MP3 player that can play Audible books and podcasts. I could, theoretically, download these at home, before I go to work.

The phone sits on the table at home, until I leave. I then connect the headphones, listen to books/podcasts on the way to work / walking the dog etc. and then, at work, it sits on a corner of my desk, until I go back home.

That would save me 30€ a month on my contract (10GB data, unlimited calls and SMS). An MP3 player would also be a lot cheaper to replace than a smartphone.

Possibly the only thing I would miss is the odd message (Signal) from my other half, when she wants to pick me up from the office or I need to pick something up on the way home…

This is an interesting one, I have the same phenomenon with both PowerShell and bash (Linux under WSL) on Windows 10 Pro.

If I start a shell (either) and run commands that update the screen, E.g.

While(1) {ps | sort -des cpu | select -f 15 | ft -a; sleep 1; cls}

or a bash script that uses tput and echo to redraw the screen, if it runs on the local machine, it flashes and blanks and looks horrible.

If I remote onto another Windows machine or ssh onto a remote Linux host, the same scripts run a lot smoother, there is little or no flashing, the response to key presses is faster and it is generally a better experience...

The above example, run locally blanks the window (cls at the end), pauses, then redraws the window. On the remote host, the blanked window is not shown, the list of processes is simply overwritten, which looks a lot better. It is as if there is a slight pause, locally, before the window is redrawn, whereas remotely it is redrawn so fast, that the cls is never seen.

Surely, if the commands are running locally, it should provide a more smooth experience than running them remotely?

(the above command is similar to Linux top, it displays the top 15 processes, by CPU usage, every second)

Just a quick heads up, I noticed this today...

Serif are having a sale in the Windows Store (Windows 10), Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer are 25% off its regular price (41.24€ instead of 54.99€), according to the store this runs another 6 days.