A strategic consideration. Enough here to get you thinking...
https://www.makeuseof.com/cloud-storage-vs-local-backups/
Forget Cloud Storage: Here's Why You Should Switch to Local Backups
… If you're considering switching to local backup, here's everything you need to know.
A new and elegant approach? Will the average computer user take the time to consider each request? Or will they rely on a “click here to give me access’ button I provide?
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/11/inrupts-solid-announcement.html
Inrupt’s Solid Announcement
Earlier this year, I announced that I had joined Inrupt, the company commercializing Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid specification:
The idea behind Solid is both simple and extraordinarily powerful. Your data lives in a pod that is controlled by you. Data generated by your things — your computer, your phone, your IoT whatever — is written to your pod. You authorize granular access to that pod to whoever you want for whatever reason you want. Your data is no longer in a bazillion places on the Internet, controlled by you-have-no-idea-who. It’s yours. If you want your insurance company to have access to your fitness data, you grant it through your pod. If you want your friends to have access to your vacation photos, you grant it through your pod. If you want your thermostat to share data with your air conditioner, you give both of them access through your pod.
This week, Inrupt announced the availability of the commercial-grade Enterprise Solid Server, along with a small but impressive list of initial customers of the product and the specification (like the UK National Health Service ). This is a significant step forward to realizing Tim’s vision:
Never was?
https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/
Your Computer Isn't Yours
I’m speaking, of course, of the world that Richard Stallman predicted in 1997, The one Cory Doctorow also warned us about,
On modern versions of macOS, you simply can’t power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored.
It turns out that in the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique identifier) of each and every program you run, when you run it. Lots of people didn’t realize this, because it’s silent and invisible and it fails instantly and gracefully when you’re offline, but today the server got really slow and it didn’t hit the fail-fast code path, and everyone’s apps failed to open if they were connected to the internet.
Because it does this using the internet, the server sees your IP, of course, and knows what time the request came in. An IP address allows for coarse, city-level and ISP-level geolocation, and allows for a table that has the following headings:
Date,
Time, Computer, ISP, City, State, Application Hash
… This means that Apple knows when you’re at home. When you’re at work. What apps you open there, and how often. They know when you open Premiere over at a friend’s house on their Wi-Fi, and they know when you open Tor Browser in a hotel on a trip to another city.
… Well, it’s not just Apple. This information doesn’t stay with them:
Know how that AI thinks!
Pursuing Open-Source Development of Predictive Algorithms: The Case of Criminal Sentencing Algorithms
Currently, there is uncertainty surrounding the merits of open-source versus proprietary algorithm development. Though justification in favor of each exists, we argue that open-source algorithm development should be the standard in highly consequential contexts that affect people’s lives for reasons of transparency and collaboration, which contribute to greater predictive accuracy and enjoy the additional advantage of cost-effectiveness. To make this case, we focus on criminal sentencing algorithms, as criminal sentencing is highly consequential, and impacts society and individual people. Further, the popularity of this topic has surged in the wake of recent studies uncovering racial bias in proprietary sentencing algorithms among other issues of over-fitting and model complexity. We suggest these issues are exacerbated by the proprietary and expensive nature of virtually all widely used criminal sentencing algorithms. Upon replicating a major algorithm using real criminal profiles, we fit three penalized regressions and demonstrate an increase in predictive power of these open-source and relatively computationally inexpensive options. The result is a data-driven suggestion that if judges who are making sentencing decisions want to craft appropriate sentences based on a high degree of accuracy and at low costs, then they should be pursuing open-source options.
Perspective.
We currently have no smart cities — by 2025 there’ll be 26
Spending on smart city technology is expected to reach US$327 billion by 2025, up from US$96 billion in 2019, according to a new forecast from Frost & Sullivan.
The analyst company said an uncertain post-pandemic situation will compel cities to focus on developing collaborative, data-driven infrastructure for use in healthcare, public security services and more.
… Cities have already invested in contact-tracing wearables and apps, open data platforms, autonomous drones and crowd analytics to fight COVID-19, according to the report, and smart grids, intelligent traffic management, autonomous vehicles, smart lighting and e-governance services are expected to gain traction when the pandemic passes.
Have we crossed from defiant to delusional? (That’s a rhetorical question.)
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-loses-string-of-election-results-lawsuits/ar-BB1b07iS
Trump Loses String of Election Results Lawsuits
In quick succession, Mr. Trump was handed defeats in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Michigan, where a state judge in Detroit rejected an unusual Republican attempt to halt the certification of the vote in Wayne County pending an audit of the count.
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