Tag: internet

Facepalm Newsoids 47: Internet and Internet Things

A snipped cable is inserted into a plug with the AWS logo seen in the background.

Internet and Internet Things: The loss of institutional memory and worker experience caused by the layoffs at Amazon Web Services related to AI indicate that this may not be the last major internet outage coming from AWS. AWS has emerged as being critical to the financial sector, leading to calls for it to fall under financial sector regulations. Discussions are popping up regarding decentralizing any service that touches money, safety or civic life of large numbers of people by only a handful of servers. The same issue was faced here in Canada 4-5 years ago when Rogers’ servers went down, affecting a host of internet services involving private and public sectors. And back then, the discussion went to the subject of too many internet services in too few hands.

AWS is responsible for 30% of market share of cloud infrastructure, while Microsoft’s Azure comes in at 20%, Google Cloud at 13%, with the rest mostly in the hands of Alibaba, Oracle, Salesforce, IBM, and Tencent, according to data from Synergy Research Group. For the first time last year, only 49%, or just less than half, of internet traffic was generated by humans. The rest was generated by IOT devices, telemetry software, and other forms of automation from software bots.

Internet Intelligence Iatrogenically Influences IOT. The layoff of some hundreds of programmers working for Amazon Web Services (AWS), to be replaced by AI bots led to a meltdown on October 20, of their wide range of online services leading to some hundreds of billions of dollars in lost productivity across several industries. These include factories, airports, retail chains, Amazon’s main retail site, social media sites, video providers, gaming platforms, banks, government services, “smart homes”, and “smart devices”, all spanning the entire globe.

Burning Bed by Bezos’ Bungling Burdens Bedtimers. Buyers who paid $2000 for a “smart” mattress were in for a rude shock when they found their beds stuck at high temperatures and in odd positions during the night as the AWS failure went on in the wee hours of October 20. The mattress, made by a company called “Eight Sleep”, relied on Amazon AWS web services  for its operation, and like most IOT devices, does not have an “offline” mode in case the devices lose their internet connection.

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Title translation: life, according to spam email

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Translation: these are subject lines of emails i have received recently

Yeah, this will be difficult reading. These email subject lines were actually fed through the “L337 Speak Converter” at www.brenz.net. Consider this to be a test of your “Leet” (L337) translation skillz 🙂

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Getting rid of the cell phone

Cell phone contracts are easy to get. Companies these days make cell phones very affordable. They are eager to sell you value-added services that you never needed to use prior to the purchase, and you are hit with a bill that can go upwards of $45 per month.

But what if you are like me? You have the cell phone, and now you realise that it is a ball and chain. I don’t just mean the contract; there is also the fact that you can be anywhere and people can get in touch with you. Well, what happened to concepts like privacy? Are there still places left on this planet where people won’t be texting me or phoning me, or emailing me? I need space; I need quiet time. I need a little freedom. I need to get rid of the damn cell phone.

Getting rid of the cell phone takes real mental discipline and concentration. The first time I tried this, I had to get past Emily, the automated Bell Telephone Fairy. The fairy could grant me three wishes, but cutting my cell phone wasn’t one of them. It didn’t understand me when I gave her a voice command to “BUG OFF!” so she sent me to a human.

From then on, I had to endure an onslaught of sales pitches as to how I can improve my cell phone experience by changing my package selections. But they didn’t see the main point: I have a land line, which in effect means that Bell dings me twice each month. I pay them $100 a month just in phone bills. They could not see that this was entirely unacceptable. They also didn’t see that this was my sense of rational decision-making and rational budgeting at work. That wasn’t allowed to enter the conversation either, no matter how rational I tried to sound. Then, they asked me for my password to get into my private account (all this was over the phone after all). I vaguely remembered making this password 6 months or more previous, but I had no idea what it was, and told them.

So, I was told that the only way I could cancel my account was to show up at a Bell shop, and show them some ID. So, weeks passed until I thought once again to go through with it, and when I did, I had to endure yet another sales pitch similar to the telephone ordeal, and finally we got down to business, and I showed them my ID. I brought my cell phone with me, but they weren’t interested in looking at it. They told me that I had to complete the billing cycle, and in 6 weeks, I would be free.

Of course, this 6 weeks did not go by quietly. I got brochures telling me to come back, we’re sorry, we didn’t mean to piss you off; I got a “courtesy” call asking me to reconsider, and after fighting them off bravely, I reached my summit, the top of the hill: NO MORE CELL PHONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ad parody for Windows Vista

Follow this link. It is the best Nat Lamp parody I have seen in a long time. Apologies for the repost, it is being posted to several new categories.