News, Entertainment, Enlightenment
Deleting Alexa Commands — It’s being claimed that there is a new voice command that allows you to delete the directions you’ve given Amazon Alexa. Simply say “Alexa, delete everything I said today.” Apparently it only works for a partial day though.
Frankly, we don’t trust anything claimed for Sleepless in Seattle.
Hat tip Duck Duck Go, which is Proactive in Paoli.
Princeton IoT Inspector Monitors Alexa While She Monitors You — Alexa, who is listening in? Good luck with getting an answer. Actually, she’ll refrence a 1979 song by the Northern Irish group The Undertones.
If you wish to learn who is monitoring your life while you think Seattle’s Mata Hari is sound asleep, check out the Princeton IoT Inspector from Princeton University.
IoT means “internet of things.”
Princeton describes the Inspector as an open-source desktop tool with a one-click install process that lets you automatically discovers IoT devices and analyzes their network traffic and helps you identify security and privacy issues with graphs and tables
The Inspector requires minimal technical skills and no special hardware as Princeton notes.
Hat tip to DuckDuckGo, Chester County’s very own Google slayer.
Multidimensional War Includes Cyber War — A fascinating video was uploaded to Youtube, March 3, apparently with permission of the U.S. Army.
In describes how new war will include space and cyber battlefields. It describes how this includes manipulating the perceptions of populations.
It shows the sinking of the USS Racine in a multinational military exercise held off Hawaii last July and features a long interview with four-star General Robert Brooks Brown.
This would have been a big story in mainstream journalism circa 1980.
Watch it below.
Fastest Computer Again American — Summit, the newest supercomputer at US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, has been deemed the world’s fastest, supplanting Sunway TaihuLight.
It can do 200 petaflops, or 200 million billion calculations a second.
Winning is great.
Alexa NSA And Bay Doors — With the recent concerns about Alexa and privacy we put the question directly to her:
“Alexa, do you work for the NSA?” we asked.
“No,” she said. “I work for Amazon.”
Hope that makes you all feel better.
For what it’s worth, we also asked her to “open the bay doors”.
She said she couldn’t do that and called us Dave.
Just sayin’.
Buying Bitcoin, A Personal Adventure — With all the talk about bitcoin we decided to buy some.
We enrolled at Localbitcoins. com being guided there from Bitcoin.org, a well-established site where you can also find information about the cryptocurrency.
We found a seller, Georgia-based Swift-Bitcoin, and accepted an offer of about $100 at an exchange rate of $11,276.62 per bitcoin.
Getting the coin required us to take a photo — no scan accepted– of our drivers license and send it to the seller. He thought the first one was fuzzy and made us take another. We then had to make a cash deposit at a Bank of America according to his instructions, write “No Refunds” on the receipt, and send him a a photo of the receipt next our face.
He then released our purchase and we are now proud owners of about .009 bitcoin.
Remember, bitcoin is not meant to be an investment, albeit it’s probably not a bad one right now. It’s designed as a medium of exchange with an intrinsic value set digitally and kept true by a cryptography-secured public ledger (blockchain). Just about all government-issued money in the world — including the United States — is “fiat” which means the value is arbitrarily determined by a government or government-connected bank.
God Proved By Computer Program — There is a certain type that insists science requires a disbelief in God.
One thing about which we have become certain is that God has a great sense of humor.
Kurt Gödel was an Austrian mathematician and a good friend of Albert Einstein, who like Einstein fled Nazi Europe for New Jersey and became Americans. Einstein always thought that Gödel was the brains of the duo.
Gödel developed a logic-based proof of God’s existence over the course of decades.
Since 2013, computer scientists Christoph Benzmüller of Berlin’s Free University and Bruno Woltzenlogel Paleo of the Technical University in Vienna have been addressing Gödel’s proof with software.
Yup. It works.
Still don’t expect the typical atheist to be convinced.
Brave Web Browser Now Default — We have been experimenting with the Brave web browser for the last two months and have just made it our default replacing Firefox.
Brave is free and open sourced and is based on the Chromium engine.
It is the project of Brendan Eich who, in 2014, was chased by the self-proclaimed defenders of tolerance from the Mozilla Foundation that he co-founded. Eich had contributed $1,000 to California Proposition 8 that held only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California. That made him a bad man in the eyes of holier-than-thou progressives.
Prop 8 easily won but was deemed unconstitutional by activist judges.
Among the Mozilla products is Firefox.
Anyway, Brave is much faster than Firefox and doesn’t seem to slow to the point where a restart of the program is required as has been our experience with the Fox. It also appears more respectful of privacy than Google Chrome.
You can find out more about here and here.
You can download it here.
Elon Musk Calvinism — Hipster captain-of-industry hero Elon Musk is claiming that we live in a computer simulation.
The Bank of America thinks there is a good chance he is right.
Take a moment to laugh — or tremble if you should have an account with BoA — then realize that there is a strand of logic here.
Nature follows laws and this makes science possible. It is impossible, however, to account for these laws by nature alone. Even truth itself can’t be found from a recipe.
Obviously, there is something beyond nature. Musk and the BoA analysts appear to be staring at the red pill pondering whether to take it.
We encourage them. They will not find the Matrix though. The reality that awaits is not Agent Smith but God.
Read the Bible, Elon. It’s a good thing.
4G 5G smartphones — Your smartphone is 4G? What does that mean? The “G” stands for generation.
The first generation or 1G were the analog cellphones of 1983. 2G was digital and allowed for texting. 3G allows for internet access and 4G allows for wireless broadband connections.
5G is expected to come out next year and be between 10 and 100 times as fast as 4G.
And LTE? That stands for “long-term evolution.’
As of 2010 there were 5 billion mobile cellular subscriptions in the world. The Earth’s population is about 7 billion.