Scary Message From Obama Is Truly Scary, Even If It's Fake News

Jordan Peele literally put words in Barack Obama's mouth using
technology that would make today's fake news seem like kid's play

A PSA recently came out that features former President Barack Obama, but it's almost immediately apparent that something is off when you start watching it.

His voice sounds a little weird. Like he's been drinking (Obama has absolutely no reputation as a drinker.)

The things he says are even more off kilter.

Here's part of the script:

"We're entering an era in which our enemies can make it look like anyone is saying anything at any point in time - even if they would never say those things......So, for instance, they could have me say things like, I don't know, (Black Panther's) Kilmonger was right! Or Ben Carson is in the sunken place! Or how 'bout this, Simply, President Trump is a total and complete dipshit."

We all know Obama would never say things like publicly. But in the video, his lips are moving perfectly with the words being spoken. How could this be.

It turns out "Obama" is being voiced by filmmaker and actor Jordan Peele. (One of Peele's schticks is impersonations of Obama.)

As BuzzFeed reports, the PSA was a project developed by Peele and BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti, who is Peele's brother in law.

The screen in the video splits, to show Peele delivering the PSA and Obama appearing to do it. It's amazing the technology makes it look like Obama is actually speaking. And scary, for sure.

The script continues: "This is a dangerous time. Moving forward, we need to be more vigilant with what we trust from the internet."

Buzzfeed describes this technology and ugly world future this way:

"A slew of slick, easy-to-use and eventually seamless technological tools for manipulating perception and falsifying reality, for which terms have already been coined - 'reality apathy,' 'automated laser phishing' and 'human puppets."

Buzzfeed goes on: "Such tools could be used to create pornographic videos with celebrities' faces superimposed or have world leaders appear to make outrageous and potentially dangerous statements. "
I have to admit: Donald Trump has a point. There's a lot of fake news out there. It's just that most of what he calls fake is true, and some of what he calls true is fake.

That's the crux of the problem: Who do we believe? And what do we do about people who absolutely believe things that aren't true, because fake news can be so convincing?

The point Peele is illustrating just points to how much worse things are going to get with technology. How are we going to trust what we see and hear? Even legitimate news sites will have trouble discerning what is real and what is fake.

Plus, let's face it. Most people believe things that fit their already set viewpoint. And many are willing to go over the top with their beliefs.

There's still a lot of people out there convinced that "Pizzagate" is real, that Hillary Clinton is running a child sex ring out of the basement of a Washington DC pizzaria, never mind that said pizza place doesn't even have a basement.

There's an amazing number of people out there who think the Earth is flat, that jet contrails are really "chemtrails" raining chemicals down on us to control our minds, that surviving students of the February mass shooting in Florida are just "crisis actors" trying to take all our rights away.

When this becomes widespread, when videos will literally put words in other peoples' mouths, this conspiracy theory, fake news believing group will become bigger and bigger.

And real world problems won't get solved because everyone will be chasing fake world problems.

Technology can be a force of good. But more and more often, it's being weaponized. Mostly for psych ops. That's not the future I want.

Amazon Echo Is Laughing Creepily At Us

Is the random laughter coming from Amazon Echo's
Alexa a sign that she's turned evil and murderous?

I'm glad I read the NPR article I'm about to cite before Alexa, the voice on my and everybody else's  Amazon Echo could scare the daylights out of me.

Apparently, Alexa has been breaking out in creepy laughter for no apparent reason.

Here's how NPR describes the typical scenario, kind of like a teaser for a horror movie:

"Late at night, in the gathered shadows of your bedroom, you may have heard it. Or, perhaps you heard it over breakfast with your family in the kitchen, the sound rising unbidden from over your shoulder in a corner of the room you had thought - and now, desperately wish - to be empty. 

Laughter. Quick, inhuman laughter."

Normally, to get Alexa to talk and give you information, you have to say the name Alexa and ask your question. Example: "Alexa: How old is Alex Trebek?" (For the record, Alexa tells me Trebek is 77 years old.)

If you don't ask Alexa any questions, she's supposed to keep her mouth shut.

But she's into the laughter lately, freaking out lots of people.   Some people have said when they hear that Alexa laugh it is "time to move" and "the scariest shit I've ever heard."

You can rig up an Amazon Echo to turn your lights on and off. One person wrote on Reddit: "I was trying to turn off some lights and they kept turning back on. After the third request, Alexa stopped responding and instead did an evil laugh."

On Twitter, a guy named Gavin Hightower wrote: "Lying in bed about to fall asleep with Alexa on my Amazon Echo Dot lets out a very loud and creepy laugh....there's a good chance I get murdered tonight."

Amazon explains that sometimes the Amazon Echo mistakenly hears the command, "Alexa, laugh" and does.

I can't imagine a random bump in the night sounds like "Alexa, laugh" but what do I know?

Or are there creepy people wandering around outside and tellling Alexa to laugh from outside the house. Or have they broken in? Yikes!

Amazon said it's working on a fix in which the Echo won't respond to the command "Alexa, laugh." If you really want Alexa to laugh, you'll have to say, "Alexa, can you laugh?"

And in that case, Alexa will respond, "Sure, I can laugh," followed by laughter.

Still, I think this whole thing means we should be paging Steven King.  He's done horror books about inanimate objects before. Think "Christine."

Imagine the fun King could have with Alexa going murderous on people?

Fake News In The Near Future Will Be Scarier Than You Thought

Researchers have made convincing videos of Barack Obama
saying things he said years ago and inserting them into new
clips. It's a matter of time before fake news people can
make it look like people are saying things they never did. 

Donald Trump always yells about fake news when there's coverage that doesn't flatter him.

Maybe he's got a thin skin. But maybe he's ahead of his time.

In a scary story, Gizmodo had a report on research that uses machines to learn the facial movements of people and then render real looking lip movements for any piece of audio.

In other words, people with this program can make videos of anyone saying anything they want. You can see how easy it would be to make a convincing fake news clip of somebody saying something they really didn't.

How will we really know what's true and what's not.

According to the Gizmodo report,  researchers at the University of Washington developed the method to study the facial movements - in this case of Barack Obama. They were able to make it look like things he said when he was a law student were just said recently.

From there, it's easy to insert words and sentences into a video of Obama, or anybody else talking, and literally put words in their mouths.

What's worse, this techology is getting better and better, less and less expensive and easier and easier to use.

Which makes it a matter of time that anybody, even some teenager in a basement, can make a sophisticated fake news clip.

 Of course, this technology would not only be applied to news clips, to make it look like politicians and candidates were saying things they really didn't.  This could be applied to any video clip.

As Gizmodo put it: 

"If you thought fake-looking news websites were a problem, just imagine what a completely fake police body cam could do."

Scary indeed.

Just When You Thought Adveritising Couldn't Get More Annoying, There's This

This jerk in a Burger King ad will trigger your Google Home
and other devices, subjecting you to a cacaphony of
Burger King advertising. Ugh. 

UPDATE:

The Burger King Google device advertisement has backfired. As noted below in yesterday's post, the ad triggers voice activated to start reciting the Wikipedia entry for the fast food chain's Whopper sandwich.

So, people went into Wikipedia and altered the Whopper entry.

According to The Independent, the change in the Wikipedia definition of the Whopper describes it as containing cyanide, causes cancer and is the worst product sold by Burger King.

Take that!

PREVIOUS DISCUSSION

Burger King has a great new idea to piss people off through advertising.

According to CNBC:

"Burger King is launching a full-fledged marketing blitz based on triggering voice-activated Google devices, in what could become a grim precedent for TV and radio ads talking directly to voice-activated gadgets like smartphones and Amazon's Echo speakers. 

The fast food company's new TV ad features a person looking directly into the camera and saying, "OK Google, what is the Whopper burger"", which - if anything goes as planned - will trigger Google devices like the Google Home assistant and Android phones that have enabled voice search."

Great. you got yourself a handy dandy Google Home assistant or Amazon Echo - and they are kind of cool - and now you have to hide them away and shut them down every time you turn on the TV or radio.

Or, you will have to endure these devices yakking on about the stupid product some advertiser has that triggered the devices.  The ad makes the devices start reading the Wikipedia entry for Burger King's Whopper. You can see why CNBC called the Burger King ad a "grim precedent."

By the way, this is not what Google and Amazon intended with their devices. Neither company worked with Burger King or anyone else to do these ads, says CNBC. 

Burger King president Jose Cil is enthusiastic about the idea. "We saw it as technology to essentially punch through that fourth wall....a cool way to connect directly with our guests."

I don't want Burger King or any other advertiser punching through any of my walls.  

I keep hearing from the ad industry that annoying ads are effective because they make you remember the brand. 

It's true I remember the brand after seeing a bad ad, but not in a positive way that makes me want to buy the product.  You'd think this would be obvious. 

Now that I know about Burger King's device-triggering ad, I can picture myself driving by a Burger King, remembering the Google Home-triggering ad and going, "ugh" before driving on as fast as I can. 

I have not found any article or information that explains to me how annoying ads can make me or anybody else buy products.  I will confess that compelling ads, done well and unobtrusively, will make me take a second look at a product and make me consider buying it. 

Why don't most advertisers understand that concept?

Some advertisers recognize we don't like them and their products with annoying ads. Proctor and Gamble is backing a group called Coalition for Better Ads to curb the most intrusive and infuriating types of ads online and on mobile devices. 

We'll see if that has any effect. 

On the bright side of sorts, there's a bit of an arms race to stop the Burger King ad from being effective. Tech Crunch reports Google did something that stops the ad from working on their devices. 

For the first two hours after the ad appeared, Google devices were triggered by them. Then, it stopped working, Tech Crunch said. 

Score one for Google!

But, then again, there are reports this morning that Burger King altered their ad to make it trigger Google devices again.

Sigh. 

For the record, here's that odious Burger King ad:

Some People Are Too Enthusiastic About Technology, Get Themselves "Chipped"

Dude with a microchip to e implanted in humans, for
convenience, I guess. But what about privacy?

One of the better inventions that's been around for awhile is those little microchips we had implanted in our dogs Jackson and Tonks.

If they get lost, and somebody finds them and brings them to a vet or an animal shelter, they'll get scanned, and they'll figure out where they live.

It's peace of mind.

It would be super easy to translate that technology into humans, since it's basically the same, painless and safe from a health standpoint.

But would you really want to give somebody else the ability to track you.

A surprising number of people are saying Yes.

As the Associated Press reported, employees at a Swedish startup called Epicenter are voluntarihly being "chipped."

Microchips the size of grains of rice are being injected into their hands, and they function as swipe cards, can open doors, operate printers and buy smoothies at the wave of a hand, reports the Associated Press.

Sounds convenient!

But I'd rather just hand over cash for a smoothie than do that.

I'll let the Associated Press explain why: "......As with most new technologies, it raises security and privacy issues. While biologically safe, the data generated by the chips can show how often an employee comes to work or what they buy. Unlike compay swipe cards or smartphones, which can generate the same data, a person cannot easily separate themselves from the chip."

What if we get to a point where employers require you to be chipped. It's appropriate obviously, for your supervisors to monitor you and your job performance at work, but this would enable them to watch your every move when you're off the clock, too.

And what if the chips are hacked?   What would hackers do with this information? There's a lot there. They'd know when you're at work, when you're not home, and pretty much what you're doing and how you're doing it pretty much all the time.

Still, some people are enthusiastic about being microchipped, so maybe I'm missing something. But I doubt it.

At Epicenter, the business the Associated Press highlighted, some employees are enthusiastic. One, Fredric Kaijser, who has one of those weird tech job titles - chief experience officer - is blithe about his microchip and privacy.

He said people who learn that he has a microchip "get all excited about privacy issues and what that means and so forth. And for me it's just a matter of I like to try new things an just see it as more of an enabler and what that would bring into the future."

I guess newness trumps everything else.

I think I'll wait and take a pass for now on this Great New Thing.

Dolls Keep Getting More And More Nosy. And Scary

 Could hackers access voice messages left by kids
on this internet-connected cute toy?
Security experts say yes. 

Since when have toys gotten so nefarious?

In December, I told you about Cayla, the doll that collects information from chatty kids. This information could be used to target advertising, or worse, scam the kid or their family.

Now, we're learning about more dolls and toys that are just as cavalier about privacy.

There's a group of toy animals, made by an outfit called CloudPets, that can store and replay voice messages sent to them via the internet, says the Huffington Post. 

Often families buy these toys for things like sending hearfelt messages to and from dad or mom who might, say, by deployed in the military overseas.

The problem is, the personal information of more than 800,000 customers is now out there. These include some two million voice recordings, many of them made by children, the Huffington Post says. 

What's worse is CloudPets appears to some to have a pretty cavalier attitude toward the data breach.

Information like customers' login and password information and voice recordings, was in a database there for anyone who knew how to find the information.

Security experts like Troy Hunt ried to contact CloudPets about the issue, but never heard back from the company, the Huffington Post reports. 

The head of toy maker, Mark Meyers, denied that the voice recordings were stole, says Network World. 

The security threat isn't huge, espeically if the passwords for CloudPets products aren't the same as users' other devices.

But the data could be used to push messages to children, and there are a lot of creepy people out there.

I really think we should just go back to old fashioned dolls that have no connection to the internet.

According to The Guardian:

"John Madelin, CEO at IT security experts Reliance ACSN, echoes Hunt's warnings. "Connected toys that are easily accessible by hackers are sinister. The CloudPets issue highlights the fact tht manufactuers of connected devices really struggle to bake security in from the start."

Madelin called the accessibility of the CloudPets data "unforgivable."

Time to haul out the internet-free teddy bears we got when we were kids, I guess.

"Bringing Back" Virtual People Has Scary Orwellian Implications

Will the Light Stage technology shown here someday be used
to make it look like to the world that somebody who's innocent
is doing something not innocent?
Photo by Al Seib, Los Angeles Times

I was watching "CBS Sunday Morning" and what started out as a quirky fluff piece quickly scared the hell out of me.

The segment began by noting that the recent Star Wars movie "Rogue One" had in its cast the British actor Peter Cushing.  

Cushing died in 1994, so how can he be in a recently released film?

It turned out actor Guy Henry performed the new scenes, and a special effects engineers replaced Henry's face with Cushing's.

Here's where we begin to turn scary, when they introduced a guy named Paul Debevec.

According to CBS, Debevec invented something called the Light Stage. It has more than 10,000 LEDs, inside of which a subject - a person - is photographed with roughly 20 high quality DSLR cameras, which produce a series of high-resolution photos from different angles to reconstruct a 3-D model of the subject's face.

Debevec told CBS: "We'll have the actor make a succession of about 50 different facial expressions. And that produces all of the different motions of their face. But we also can record a facial performance from all these different angles, and then create a digital performance of that character that does exactly what they did in the video."

Adds CBS: "Once an actor has been scanned into Light Stage, engineers can digitally insert him or her into scenes, even if the actor is unavailable, much older or younger or deceased."

That's all fine and dandy if we're talking about the make-believe world of Hollywood. At least 100 famous actors have stood in this Light Stage to be scanned for movies, notes CBS.

The Light Stage was wicked expensive to build, but the price of this type of technology is coming down, and like most technology, will continue to come down fast.

Here's the scariest part, brought up by CBS Sunday Morning: What happens if someone scans a person, even unwittingly, and tries to pass it off as reality?

I'll take it to a ridiculous level. Remember that insane wacko rumor that Hillary Clinton was running a childhood sex ring in the non-existent basement of a Washington DC pizza restaurant?

So imagine scanning all these images of Hillary Clinton and making a film that "proves" she was running the child sex ring.

There are so many gullible people out there. An insane number of people believed the Clinton sex ring story. What if there was a computerized film to "prove" that it was true.

People are also always looking for blackmail opportunities, or to make it look like people did something bad that they didn't do.

Already, people hack into computers, making it look like they were committing crimes. Imagine using this Light Stage technology to produce videos for blackmail or worse that "show" the victim doing something terrible.

The lines between reality and fiction are blurring, be it politicians who do it by repeating false things, or people who use technology to make things up and pass them off as real.

This is another example of this blurring.

What kind of world will we live in when we can't distinguish the difference between what is really going on before our eyes, and what is pure fiction?

Now, Apparently, We Need Clothes That Confuse Face Recognition Technology

Will we all have to wear clothing with patterns like
this to fend of advertisers who use face recognition
technology to make pitches to us?

It seems a lot of businesses and other entities want a good look at our faces.

There's a building demand for technology that would use face recognition to determine, say, what kind of mood you are in when you go into a store. That would help determine what kind of sales pitch you get.

An example of this brave new world is in China, where a KFC uses face recognition technology to figure out people's gender, age and mood to make recommendations of what to order.

Facebook is experiment with face recognition to help its dreaded algorithms determine what users want to do, and to target advertising, of course. Google Face Unlock allows users to get into their Android devices without using a password or other inconvenient method.

Sounds great, until you realize that it'll seem like everywhere you go, marketers will use face recognition on  you to target advertising. You can imagine governments using it to figure out what you do, where you go and who you're with for "law enforcement."

You can see how some people would be weirded out in terms of privacy and just general creepiness.

So it's come to this: An artist and technology geek in Berlin has come up with a line of clothing to confuse facial recognition devices, says The Guardian.

The artist, Adam Harvey, calls the project Hyperface.

According to The Guardian:

"They Hyperface project involves printing patterns on to clothing or textiles, which then appear to have eyes, mouths and other features that a computer can interpret as a face. "

Harvey said Hyperfine is about "overloading the algorithm with what it wants, oversaturating an area with faces to diver the gaze of the computer vision algorithm."

The artist has also previouslyk come up with hairstyles and makeup people can adopt to confuse face recognition technology.

Yes, it's coming to this. We have to wear special clothes and makeup just to avoid the constant bombardment of marketing we experience all the time.

It's fine to advertise, yes. But must 100 percent of our lives be taken up by fending off the marketing department?

Geez!

Milo Yiannnopoulos Can Just Shut Up Now, Thank You

Tech guy, all around troll and jerk Milo Yiannopouos
is whining that Twitter finally kicked him out
because of his abusive Tweets and how he
encouraged others to attack people online.  

Poor Milo Yiannopoulos.

He's this weird guy, a former tech startup sort of guy who is gay and seems to hate gays, loves Donald Trump, and is more than a bit of an Internet troll who also has a somewhat shaky background in the tech industry.  

Last week, he launched a Twitter attack against Leslie Jones, the comedian and actor currently starring in the "Ghostbusters" reboot.

That part is unremarkable. People criticize and troll public figures such as actors and politicians on Twitter all the time.

What happened next turned into a big fight over free speech, and how awful you can get with your free speech before somebody tells you to shut up already. Twitter told Yiannopoulos to shut up already.

A lot of people cheered that move. Others didn't.

Yiannopoulos has got a great big posse of fans. A lot of them are trolls, and as Yiannopoulos egged them on, the trolls unleashed a huge and unrelenting racist and sexist attack on Jones, calling her a gorilla, saying she was the source of AIDS, you know, nice things like that.

The "problem" largely stems from Ghostbusters. The misgynistic trolls can't stand the fact the new movie has a female cast. And worse, Jones is African-American. Egads! On top of that, she's not a toothpick skinny supermodel with breast implants the size of watermelons. How dare she!

Also, female comedians are supposedly not funny, according to these idiots. (I'm sure my fellow fans of female comedians starting with Lucille Ball and Phyllis Diller going all the way up to today's Jones, Samantha Bee, Tina Fey and many others would beg to differ.).

In any event, Yiannopoulos and the followers he was encouraging  finally got so odious that Twitter permanently kicked him out, says BuzzFeed News.

"'People should be able to express diverse opinions and beliefs on Twitter,'  a company spokesperson said in a statement provided to BuzzFeed News. 'But no on deserved to be subjected to targeted abuse online, and our rule prohibit inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others."

Yiannopoulos and his legions of follows  (almost 400,000 of them before Twitter suspended his account.) are crying foul, saying Twitter is suppressing free speech and squelching comments that don't adhere to a liberal, politically correct skew.

Yiannopoulous was quick to respond that it was just Twitter hating on conservatives. "With the cowardly suspension of my account, Twitter has confirmed itself as a safe space or Muslim terrorists and Black Lives Matter exremenists, but a no-go zone for conservatives."

Twitter does make its terms of service pretty clear. "You may not incite or engage in the targeted abuse or harassment of others" You could get kicked off Twitter if you incite others to harass another account or if the primary purpose of an account is to send abusive messages to others.

Twitter's terms of service do not say conservative opinions can't be held. There's tons of conservatism on Twitter, actually. Take a look if you don't believe me.

Still, Yiannopoulos said of his banishment: "This is the end for Twitter. Anyone who cares about free speech has been sent a clear message You're not welcome on Twitter."

First off all, Yiannopoulos is confusing Twitter with the government. The First Amendment says that the government cannot squelch free speech. Like it or not, a private company can.

Still, the more free speech the better, and it's always a good thing for social media and media in general allow a full-throated airing of diverse opinions.

I generally don't like it when any business or institution, say, cancels a speech because activists don't like the speaker's opinion.  But it's a different thing entirely when the speech becomes harassment. Would you want somebody constantly yelling on your front lawn that they want to kill you? Well you shouldn't be doing that on Twitter either.

If you don't like somebody, you can say so on Twitter. Just don't turn the dislike into threats and harassment. Look, I'm saying here that I don't like Yiannopoulos, and I bet Twitter won't throw me off. Especially since I don't want to see him suffer any harm and I DON'T  want armies of trolls attacking him online.

However, Yiannopoulos forgets that free speech has consequences. Free speech is a right and a responsibility.

When you start massively harassing a person, and get your friends to pile on, there's going to be pushback, and a lot of us will tell you to shut up already, just like Twitter did.

So quicherbitchin' Milo, and remember that just because you're yacking up a storm doesn't mean we have to listen. You don't deserve a special platform any more than the next guy.

Yiannopoulos isn't the first person to whine about not being guaranteed a free public forum to spew garbage and he won't be the last.

According to Tech Dirt, the odious Pamela Geller, she of her virulent, wildly wrong All Muslims Are Murdering Assholes activism, is suing the federal government, and by extention Facebook, I guess.

Pamela Geller is also demanding a guaranteed
platform on social media, but fuhgetaboutit
 n

Geller says that Facebook would take down her page somehow is wrong, and the federal Communications Decency Act violates the First Amendment because she says it enables censorship.

Says her lawsuit:  

"Denying a person or organization access to these important social media forums based on the content and viewpoint of the person's or organization's speech on matters of public concern is an effective way of silencing or censoring speech or depriving the person or organization of political influence and business opportunities."

But, again, the First Amendment bars the government from censoring people. All the Communications Decency Act does is allow private companies to take down content they deem "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable."

As noted, I do think major social media outfits like Facebook and Twitter have the responsibility to let people air controversial topics, and they do.  But legally, they can take stuff down. And if the content relentlessly harasses anybody, including Muslims and Jews like Geller, it should be taken down.

Still, we have First Amendment rights, but we don't have a right to use a private platform for whatever we want. Almost all businesses, including Twitter and Facebook, have their own ethics policy and are free to adhere to them, unless they discriminate against a whole class of people based on things like religious affiliation, gender and race.

As Tech Dirt states: "(Geller's) lawsuit is the legal equivalent of that idiot who claims that any company moderating content is violating the First Amendment."

But as we all know, there's a LOT of idiots on social media.

Turns Out Robot Waiters Aren't As Good As Humans After All

Turns out, thank goodness, robot waiters aren't nearly
as good as humans for the job. n

A restaurant in China decided to obtain robots to serve meals to customers rather than deal with the expense, messiness and, well, human-ness of actual people as waiters.

It didn't go well, which means at least for now, the legions of waiters at all those restaurants out there can keep their jobs, unless of course they keep forgetting orders, dumping beer on customers or steal from the till.

Luckily, almost all human waiters are better than those described in the above paragraph, which is more than I can say for the robot waiters in China.

According to The Verge, the Chinese restaurant chain bought several waiter robots at $7,000 a pop, but the robots couldn't even pour drinks right. Or serve soup. Or take orders from customers and understand them correctly. Plus they kept breaking down.

Two of the restaurants had to close down due to the incompetent robots. A third restaurant in the chain was able to stay open, but only because it hired flesh and blood humans to serve customers.

Apparently, robots can handle repetitive tasks well, but have trouble when interacting with us quirky, weird humans.

Maybe you don't have to tip robot waiters, but its probably worth tipping humans if it means you actually get the food and drinks you want at the restaurant.

Hey Patent Trolls: Listing Your Favorite Things Isn't Patent Infringement

Hoping a trend is starting to reign in greedy,
corrupt patent trolls.  

A Pennsylvania photographer named Ruth Taylor had an innocent website called Bytephoto, on which she ran photo contests in where winners were chosen by viewers choosing which images they liked best.

It's something that's been going on since there were humans: People rank things in order of how much they like or dislike them. Nothing innovative about that. 

The problem is, there are still epic problems with patent trolls, people who find examples of mundane activities and sue, or more accurately, try to extort money by claiming the idea is stealing from a patent the trolls say they own.

My complaints about patent trolls might seem esoteric, but the reason I do is because  it affects everybody.

 Like shoplifting, it drives up prices for all of us. The unfairness of it is also galling. People getting rich of things that aren't an original idea, or not any kind of real idea at all. They're just scammers and crooks. 

Unfortunately, it's easier to pay the ransom trolls demand than pay lawyers piles of money to fight these cases, so people hand over money to the trolls to make they go away. Which encourages them to keep extorting. 

Every once in awhile, though, somebody fights back. While I don't know if I would fight back, I still wish more people would, since Congress doesn't have the balls to pass sensible legislation to reign in the trolls and bring a whacked out U.S. Patent Office back under control.

A guy named Michale Garofalo, who had a little-used video website called Garfum.com, sued Taylor, saying she was infringing on U.S. Patent 8,209,618, Ars Technica reports.   Taylor, he said, was somehow infringing on the patent with her photo contests, reports Ars Technica

Garofalo initially demanded $50,000, but cut the demand to $5,000, and later $2,500 when he discovered Bytephoto didn't have much of an income. 

Taylor decided, instead of paying, she'd take a shot at contacting the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is kind of an ACLU for free and open and fair access to the web.

EFF filed a motion to dismiss Garafalo's suit, saying the photo contest patent should be thrown out, as per a 2014 U.S. Supreme Court decision that said that adding technological sounding or computeresque language to an existing idea isn't enough to claim patent rights.

Garofalo at that point gave up and dropped the case.

But it gets better. Finally, a patent troll has really been held accountable.

U.S. Chief District Judge Jerome Simandle said Garofalo's company, Garfum, should pay the lawyers fees because of its "unreasonable" behavior during the litigation, Ars Technica says.

"The practice of ranking things in categories based on popular vote was well-known before the advent of the internet, or even computers, and the requirement to involve an online database does not make this claim inventive," Simandle wrote. "Any person with a pen or paper could perform the same steps."

Well, duh!

But that doesn't stop patent trolls. Ars Technica says the Garfum case was handled by Austin Hansley, a Texas law firm that worked on some of the most outrageous patent troll cases.

Austin Hensley also represented an outfit called aDekka, a patent troll that was ordered to pay $390,000 in attorney's fees for 168 cases thrown out by a Texas federal court,  Ars Technica says.

By the way, the town of Marshall in eastern Texas, from where those 168 cases grew, illustrates the most extreme example of corruption surrounding patents and patent trolls

The story is unbelievable.

Local federal judges there began encourage these patent troll cases to be heard there, instead of in places closer to where the alleged patent misdeeds happened. All these high powered lawyers and consultants and such that were forced to make trips to Marshall made the town prosperous, because they went to local businesses.

Locals serving on the juries in these cases knew it and acted accordingly.

So the area became a patent troll mill.

According a 2014 article in Texas Monthly:

"Over the years, Marshall has earned a reputation as the intellectual property equivalent of a speed trap, a place where juries smack big companies with huge judgements. And over the years, federal lawmakers have tried to do something about it, with little success.

The U.S. Supreme Court and the federal appeals court in New Orleans have enacted restrictions on new filings. (The late) U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia declared Marshall "a renegade jurisdiction.' "

Last year, a bipartisan bill in Congress was being considered to reign in patent trolls, but so far, nothing has been passed.

The bill was blocked by conservative lawmakers who said strong patent protection create wealth and  jobs in the U.S. and encourage innovation.

Sure, but can't you have strong patent protection and stop patent trolls too? Kinda like walking and chewing gum at the same time?

Patent trolls don't deserve any protection. Time to reign them in, and punish those who abuse honest entrepreneurs and others. Let people who come up with great, innovative ideas obtain patents and the protections they deserve to preserve their investments and inventions.

Commerce and wealth should rise from good, innovative businesses. Not from extortion and corruption. 

Teacher Loses Job Because Creepy Kid Stole Her Phone, Photos

This teacher was forced to resign because a student
swiped her phone, and distributed photos of her
he found in one of the phone's apps.  

Picture this scenario: A female high school teacher momentarily leaves her cell phone on a classroom desk to  deal with a brief issue.

A male high school student steals the phone and discovers the teacher had taken a couple of racy photos of herself, partly undressed, which were intended to turn her husband on around Valentine's Day.

Until the student swiped the phone, the only people who saw the photos were the teacher and her husband.

The teacher, named Leigh Anne Arthur had no intention of showing them to anyone else. She had simply forgotten to delete the photos.

The creepy high school boy decides it would be fun to spread the photos far and wide to his friends.

"He told the whole class that he would send them to whoever wanted them," Arhur said, according to television station WSPA in Spartanburg, South Carolina. "Your day of reckoning is coming," he also said to the teacher.

So: In this scenario, who gets punished: The student, for stealing the phone and invading the teacher's privacy, or the teacher, for setting her phone down on a desk.

By the way, the 16 year old had to go through the trouble of opening the phone's apps to get at the pics, so it took a little effort It's not like Arhur left printouts of the photos on the desk for anyone who wandered by to see.

This is America, so of course the teacher gets punished. She was told by her school district to resign or get fired, so she resigned.

The school superintendent, David Eubanks, also said he figured Arhur was contributing to the delinquency of a minor. I guess to school official's minds, there's nothing wrong with stealing the phone and invading privacy. Especially since it appears the student has gone unpunished.

The school district claims that the student will be punished, probably, and that Arthur was not where she should have been when she left her phone. (She says she had to attend to a problem in the hallway) and that she let students use her phone, which Arthur denies. And even if she did let them use her phone, does that give students the right to distribute her private photos far and wide?

We'll see if the teen actually gets punished.

This happened in small town South Carolina, and I kinda get how things sometimes work in small towns.  The kid is probably the offspring of some big fish in that small pond town, so the adults tread lightly.

The kid knows he can get away with anything because of this, so he does anything. I suspect that's why the stupid teen gave his little "day of reckoning" speech to the teacher.

Arthur was a rather popular teacher and at least 11,000 high school students, mostly in South Carolina, signed a petition asking that she be reinstated, says television station WLFF in Greenville, South Carolina.

But Arthur, understandably, isn't sure she wants to go back to her job teaching electrical engineering and computer programming in the school district.

Mostly because she doesn't want to work at a school where the students are running the show, and not the educators.

As for the 16 year old, Arthur is considering pressing charges, so maybe he'll get his "day of reckoning,"  too.

We can only hope.

Robot Dog Vs. Real Dog Battle It Out

Boston Dynamics' robot dog isn't nearly as
pleasant and tag waggy and fun as a real dog
but it is a nifty piece of technology  

It's come to this: We have real dogs playing with robot dogs now.

I'm rooting for the real dogs, but still.

In a video posted a to YouTube a few days ago, we see a robot dog (named Spot, of course) playing with a real dog, named Alex.  You can see the video at the bottom of this post.

Alex does not quite know what to make of his metallic robot new friend, with it's fairly accurate dog movements, but he gives it a whirl.

The robot dog was created by Boston Dynamics, the same outfit that caused a bit of a stir last week when they unveiled their nifty humanoid robot that could do lots of physical things that robots could not previously do, like navigate like a human around obstacles, keep its balance, and get right back up when somebody pushes it over.

Apparently, these things would be good in warfare, as it will be machines killing each other rather than humans, goes the theory.

The robot dog can also easily get up and walk away after lying down, it can walk over curbs and rough terrain, and can walk in a variety of different ways.

Impressive robotic work, but I still prefer the real furry companions. Yeah, my real dogs Jackson and Tonks sometimes have accidents in the house, bark at inappropriate times, make a mess and get sick, something that robot dogs won't do.

Robot dogs are cool, but I'd MUCH rather hang on to
my two real furry companions, Tonks (left) and Jackson. 

But you can't replicate the excitement the real dogs Tonks and Jackson bring when you come home from a long day at work.

Robots can't really replicate the laughs you get in a tug of war game with flesh and blood dogs, and they can't comfort you the way a warm dog sits on your lap contentedly when you want to relax and chill out.  

Still, a couple Christmases ago, my young nephew Jonas from Minnesota received a toy robotic dog for Christmas that follows simple commands and "learns" the habits of its human to help make the pair friends.

While not nearly as nice as a real dog, Jonas' robot dog was oddly endearing.

Boston Dynamics' dog is not endearing at all, but obviously that's not the point. The company was just showing off its nifty robots and what they can do.

But, if you're into that type of thing, you can watch the video of the robot dog and real dog cavorting in a parking lot, below:

Why You Shouldn't Get A Hoverboard, In Case You Didn't Know Already

Maybe getting that Hoverboard for Christmas wasn't
such a great idea. 

The big rage this past Christmas was to go out and buy Hoverboards.

It looked cool, floating along on those things, but humans being humans, and technology being technology, it didn't work out so well.

Hoverboards seem to catch fire, and those that don't seem to boost business at emergency rooms as people fall off them.

If you need proof and a good time waster, watch this video of disaster involving Hoverboards and other technological toys.

It'll make you want to become a Luddite.

Watch:

People Are Hacking Baby Monitors To Terrify Infants, Families

Is somebody checking out the baby besides
mom, dad and the bsbysitter? Baby monitors
might not be very secure. 

Now this is scary.

It turns out baby monitors are often incredibly easy to hack, and a lot of people know this.

It also turns out there are a number of sickos out there who like to terrorize babies - and their families.

A married couple, identified only as Jay and Sarah, said their three year old kid kept saying he was scared to go to sleep at night because the "phone" kept talking to them, said television station KDVR in Denver. 

Jay and Sarah could NOT figure out what was going on with their boy until Sarah walked by the baby monitor and heard a stranger's voice coming out of it.

The voice said, "Look out little boy, daddy's looking for you," KDVR reported. 

When Sarah walked into the room, the camera's night vision lens turned to examine her and the voice added, "Look, someone's coming into view."

This wasn't an isolated case. A Minnesota family learned their baby monitor had been hacked when they found photos of their baby online, probably taken via the monitor from somebody controlling it remotely.

Foscam, the company that made Jay and Sarah's baby monitor, said it might have been hacked and controlled by someone using a smartphone app or laptop.

Obviously, this whole thing freaked out Jay and Sarah enough to take a lot of safety measures around their house, because who knows what the hackers were really up to.

Last year, when a security firm named Rapid 7 tested nine widely available Internet connected baby monitors and found security on all of them lacking, reportedWired magazine.

Says Wired:

"'Eight of the nine cameras got an F and one got a D minus,' security researcher Mark Stanislav told Fusion's Kashmir Hill. Security flaws included issues such as lack of encryption, the use of default passwords, and access to Internet portals with the device's serial number or account number. Rapid 7 disclosed the vulnerabilities to the companies, who will hopefully all take the information to heart."

Yeah, we hope they did.

It's probably better at this point to go back to the old fashioned way and going in yourself to check on Baby John Or Baby Sue, rather than glancing at the baby monitor.

Because maybe a lot of other people are glancing at it, too.

Drones Put On A Sky Show To Beethoven's Fifth Symphony

Drones crearte patterns in the sky as an orchestra
plays Beethoven's Fifth Symphony

OK, I'll admit right off the bat that this whole thing is basically an ad for Intel Corp.

But the resulting video is so cool I have to show it anyway.

Back in November, Intel technicians controlled drones using PCs running on Intel software to sync the flight and light displays on the 100 drones as an orchestra played Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on the ground.

This was good enough to earn a Guinness World Record for the most unmanned aerial vehicles airborne simultaneously.

The performance video was unveiled, naturally, at CES, which is the big annual technology tradeshow in Las Vegas.

Here's the video:

A Love Story: Phone Company Deletes Cherished Voicemail, But Technicians Get It Back.

Stan Beaton reacts when hearing his late wife's voice again.
A voice mail recording she made before her death was
deleted, but technicians eventually recovered it.  

Stan Beaton's wife died in 2003.

It comforted him a little that he kept his wife's voice on the home voice mail.

But recently, technical work by his telecom firm, Virgin Media, deleted the voice mail, and it was thought that it was permanetly deleted.

Beaton, 68, of Mirfield, West Yorkshire, England, was devastated by the loss of that snippet of his wife's voice, the BBC reports. He was initially told the voice was "lost forever."

"I've always resisted changing companies because whenever I mentioned that my wife's voice was our voicemail message and would it be retained and each company said no, so that's why I never changed.

Sadly, it disappeared. I was absolutely devastated by it, but also extremely angry......I just could not tell people how it affected me at that time. It really did devastate me."

But technicians at Virgin Media began to poke and prod and do all that alchemy with computer systems that tech geeks do, and got the voice mail with Beaton's wife back.

Given how a lot of big telecom companies aren't exactly awesome at customer service these days, you have to appreciate Virgin Media's efforts.  After all, the chances of getting that voice mail back were slim.

Here's what Rob Evans, executive director of engineering at Virgin Media said:

"It was like searching for a needle in a haystack, however, a team of 11 engineers spent three days tracking it down."

Here's a nice video of Beaton with the newly recovered voice mail message. What his late wife says is as mundane as possible, but given the importance to Beaton, also incredibly profound.


a

Ineffective, But Highly Satisfying Identify Theft Protection You Might Want To Try

In the video in this post, "Mr. Forthright" explains how you can avoid on-line identity theft.

I'm not quite sure his method would work, but it sure looks cathertic. Given the troubles I've had with my balky laptop lately, I just might take Mr. Forthright's advice.

You might want to, too. Watch his video and find out:

A Korean Cell Phone Symphony To Musically Start Your Saturday

When a cell phone goes off, it can be annoying, especially if you're trying to concentrate.

The Korean cell phone "orchestra" 

If 30 of them go off, sometimes you get a nice musical interlude.

Such was the case recently, when somebody in Korea brought together 30 cell phones and four pages, programmed them in just the right way to offer a little bit of music.

The Korean telecommunications company SK Telecom put this together to celebrate 30 years of mobile electronics in the country.

Korea has probably the fastest Internet connections of any country on Earth.

You probably don't recognize the song, as it's a jingle from a previous SK Telecom ad

A strangely fascinating video to watch and listen to:

Cool Ad: Incoming Subway Blows Around The Hair of the Model In the Ad

Here's a advertising idea that might be a little startling but really cool

The hair on the model of this ad blows
in the "wind" when the train enters the station.

At a train station in Stockholm, Sweden, there's what looks like an ad for a hair car product, the kind of still ad with a photograph you see at any train station or public place like that.

Then, according to Mashable, when the train rolls into the station with its little rush of a breeze, the "photograph" becomes animated. The model's hair blows in the wind like she's there, caught in the gust from the train: an

Says Mashable:

"Apotek, a pharmacy brand, outfitted subway platform ads in Stockholm with ultra-sonic sensors that discerned when a train was coming. The ad featured a model with a lush mane, and when the train came, her hair flapped in the wind and she struggled to keep it in place"

The ad probably scares some passersby who don't expect the ad to move like that, but it does draw attention.

And the thinks kids do with technology these days!

Here's the Vimeo video of the ad:


Apotek Hjärtat - Blowing in The Wind from Ourwork on Vimeo.