As if being sick weren’t bad enough, now it seems I can’t submit copy to my various editors. Nope–our “new” [sardonic laughter] email system won’t let me do that. Makes you wonder about the point of any mail system that doesn’t let you send mail.
This computer has it in for me and is trying to destroy me. So now I have columns and articles and no way to deliver them. What’s next–smoke signals? Carrier pigeons? Yelling real loud and hoping they hear it in Oregon?
But I’m afraid that if I try to yell real loud today, I’ll collapse.
Computer problems are frustrating to say the least, and when we’re not feeling well, it’s worse! Just imagine what life will be like with this:
http://www.nowtheendbegins.com/iphone-siri-apple-smartphone-getting-ready-take-integrating-every-aspect-daily-life/
There are a few videos embedded. The first one, I didn’t bother with but the second and third are very short – and scary!
Well, I can’t submit any articles, my head hurts, and I might as well go outside and have a cigar. It might help.
I don’t have an iPhone. I have this #$@%$ computer and that’s enough technology for me.
We must have the same kind of computers 🙂
Enjoy your cigar and dream of Lintum Forest.
I can’t send my chapters to my editor. Or to anyone else, for that matter.
Are you able to send or receive email at all?
As long as it’s not in Word, I can send it. But that’s where everything is.
Sorry, Lee. I’m of absolutely no help there. I wish we had someone trustworthy to look around in our computers to see what’s going on and fix them 🙁
I use iPhones and iPads extensively, but the first thing I do is disable Siri.
As a civilization, we have rushed into technology like lemmings over a cliff. Privacy has been handed over to these tech companies in exchange for perceived convenience, but it’s an illusion at best. The iPhone I used six years ago was amazingly good, my current one is mediocre, at best. Every new set of features, none of which I have requested or wanted, has reduced the base utility of these devices. Frankly, the only reason I have a smart phone at this point is to be able to play music, basically an iPod with telephone capabilities. If it weren’t for that, I’d probably have the cheapest cell phone in all the world.
That wristband thingy is very scary to me. Having a band around my wrist that displays a functional app right on my skin – no thanks!
What bothers me is that when you use Siri, the processing of your request now ends up at Apple’s datacenter. In other words, there’s a record of everything you do which utilizes Siri.
Now they state that this in anonymous, and there’s a degree of truth to that, but only a degree. The fact is that meta data is very powerful and can be used to derive a lot of information about someone, even if that person’s name is near revealed.
When I visit any number of web sites, the ads are directed at my demographic. My browser cache lets advertisers know my probably age, marital status and income bracket. They usually know my location with astonishing accuracy.
Recently, I visited a small town in Nebraska where they Main Street bridge was being repaired, which disrupted traffic to a number of businesses just east of downtown. While that visit ended three weeks ago, this weekend I had an add appear from the car dealer east of the bridge, offering irresistible bargains due to construction slowing down their traffic. IOW, anonymous information on my computer told them I had visited that town, three weeks ago. That’s scary!
It sure is! Even on my laptop, which I never move from its spot on my kitchen table, scares me. It knows entirely too much. As far as I know, my ‘location’ is turned off, but sometimes I wonder. For instance, when I visited a particular website, a location was displayed (not mine). When I tried to continue, it reloaded the page with my current location displayed. And even when I think I’ve cleared my cache and history, there’s an ad for something I may have looked at recently.
As far as my smartphone (I have an LG G2), I have GPS turned off and turn off Wi-Fi when I leave my house, but I’m not confident in that. There is no such thing as privacy anymore.
Unfortunately, I know next to nothing about the workings of these invaders that we willingly albeit ignorantly brought into our lives.
Now they’re advertising even scarier stuff: refrigerators that can tell you while you’re grocery shopping what you need! and windows you can remotely open or close from anywhere, doors you can lock or unlock from anywhere, thermostats you can raise or lower from anywhere, and much more! These things are truly scary to me.
Well, you’ve got a lot more hi-tech stuff than I have, and what I’ve got is killing me.
If you have a mobile phone, which is quite common, these days, then you are leaving bread crumbs everywhere you go. Mobile telephones work by allowing the individual telephone to switch between “cells” in real time. Cells are relatively small geographic areas covered by one set of frequencies, so when you connect to a certain cell there is a record that you were in a certain geographic area at a certain time.
In densely populated areas, cells can be quite small, maybe just a few square blocks. (In lightly populated areas there is less of a need to reuse frequencies, so the cells on an rural highway might be much larger, using taller towers and limited only by line of sight.) So as you drive from place to place, there is a record of your passing through. You might not be able to nail someone down to a specific street address, but I wouldn’t bet against it either.
When the cellular telephone system was first created, our privacy was sacrosanct and the law reflected this. Just tracing a landline phone call was all but impossible in the seventies, but these days it’s routine for individuals to be able to do so. The steady erosion of our privacy has reached epidemic proportions in the Internet era.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see some pushback. The novelty of the Internet has worn thin in the minds of some folks, and I expect this to grow over time. Once I reach retirement, I plan to become unentangle myself from the Internet to the greatest extent practical.
A few weeks ago, I was driving on a rural stretch of Interstate highway in the midwest and an Amish buggy crossed over on a bridge, just as I was approaching. I felt a twinge of envy. 🙂