Winter Table | self-portrait by The Burning Hell
This is why I love the Innertubes: You can hear something delightfully off the wall on the local NPR affiliate, look it up with a few strokes on the keyboard, and discover an entire band of Canadian weirdos you didn’t know existed. Well done to Peggy Hessing, who was spinning the platters during Friday’s Afternoon Freeform.
I’m particularly fond of the lyric: “Life is a comedian who used to be funny but then became a born-again Christian. Now it’s all punch and no punch lines and he calls his routine his mission. And he doesn’t understand the difference between laughing at and laughing with him.”
This is why I hate the Innertubes: Your “smart” hardware can use it to rat you out.
Siri chirped some inanity at me once when I had a lot of balls in the air and I told her to shut the fuck up. “I’d never talk to you like that,” she replied. You can say that again. But she can’t. I turned her off.
Tags: Alexa, Siri, The Burning Hell
May 26, 2018 at 6:20 am |
If you think about hackers and worms, viruses, malware, and such, and realize all your devices have microphones and cameras, it becomes easy to get paranoid. That is one reason I stick with Apple stuff. Apple devices are still a small target for hackers, and Apple seems to care about customer privacy, at least more than most innertubes companies.
May 26, 2018 at 6:41 am |
A few seasons of “Mr. Robot” won’t help, either. It’s not the walls that have ears, and eyes.
I’ve masked the cameras on my desktop computers to keep Anonymous from tweetstorming video of me mining my snout for booger nuggets during allergy season, but there’s not much I can do about audio piracy.
Alas, what I say in private is pretty much what I say (and write, and draw) for public consumption. So I imagine my dossier is already about the size of the Beijing Yellow Pages.
May 26, 2018 at 8:12 am |
I’ve probably said this before, when my master degreed computer scientist put a post-it-note over his laptop camera when he is not using the camera, I pay attention.
May 26, 2018 at 8:50 am |
Oy! First, the master degreed computer scientist is my nephew in law. Second, thanks for the link to the NYT article. Third, I should have remebered that the NSA was involved with this kind of bullshit. I should have remembered it, because taking over cameras was highlighted in a scene in the movie, “Snowden.”
May 26, 2018 at 8:24 am |
“Just because you’re paranoid. …” etc.
May 26, 2018 at 7:23 am |
their song ‘fuck the government’ is a pretty good love song.
May 26, 2018 at 7:26 am |
And what a catchy title! I don’t see that one getting much airtime on major-market FM radio, though.