Tag: technology

If you weren’t afraid to fly before, you will be now that you know how Boeing is producing its 737 flight software:

It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing Co.’s 737 Max crisis: how a company renowned for meticulous design made seemingly basic software mistakes leading to a pair of deadly crashes. Longtime Boeing engineers say the effort was complicated by a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors.

The Max software — plagued by issues that could keep the planes grounded months longer after U.S. regulators this week revealed a new flaw — was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs.

Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace — notably India.

In offices across from Seattle’s Boeing Field, recent college graduates employed by the Indian software developer HCL Technologies Ltd. occupied several rows of desks, said Mark Rabin, a former Boeing software engineer who worked in a flight-test group that supported the Max.

The coders from HCL were typically designing to specifications set by Boeing. Still, “it was controversial because it was far less efficient than Boeing engineers just writing the code,” Rabin said. Frequently, he recalled, “it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly.”

Boeing’s cultivation of Indian companies appeared to pay other dividends. In recent years, it has won several orders for Indian military and commercial aircraft, such as a $22 billion one in January 2017 to supply SpiceJet Ltd. That order included 100 737-Max 8 jets and represented Boeing’s largest order ever from an Indian airline, a coup in a country dominated by Airbus.

I have had just one experience working with Indian software developers, when I was designing a game-training tool for 3M. To say that they were completely incompetent would have been an exaggeration, as in the end, they did manage to get a very basic, ugly version of what I had designed working. But I would estimate that they were about one-tenth as competent as the worst Western programmer with whom I ever worked.

Think about how poorly Skype and the average application works today in comparison with five years ago. Now apply that level of technological degradation to literally everything that involves putting people in the air and transporting them from one place to another.

Then again, the first rockstar programmer I ever knew was a young Indian who was the best programmer at my father’s company despite being hired right out of college, and who is still a brilliant programmer and entrepreneur. But that was literally the opposite of outsourcing. So, it’s not that Indians simply can’t do it, it’s that the probabilities don’t favor outsiders attempting to determine who can and who cannot.

The growing number of development issues with the F-35 will not surprise anyone who understands that the US empire is in its decline-and-contraction stage:

According to a June 2018 report by the Government Accountability Office, the program had 111 category 1 deficiencies on the books in January 2018. By May 24, 2018, that number had decreased to 64 open category 1 problems out of a total 913 deficiencies, according to one document obtained by Defense News.

Another document obtained by Defense News noted that at least 13 issues would need to be held as category 1 deficiencies going into operational tests in fall 2018.

The 13 deficiencies include:

• The F-35’s logistics system currently has no way for foreign F-35 operators to keep their secret data from being sent to the United States.
• The spare parts inventory shown by the F-35’s logistics system does not always reflect reality, causing occasional mission cancellations.
• Cabin pressure spikes in the cockpit of the F-35 have been known to cause barotrauma, the word given to extreme ear and sinus pain.
• In very cold conditions — defined as at or near minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit — the F-35 will erroneously report that one of its batteries have failed, sometimes prompting missions to be aborted.
• Supersonic flight in excess of Mach 1.2 can cause structural damage and blistering to the stealth coating of the F-35B and F-35C.
• After doing certain maneuvers, F-35B and F-35C pilots are not always able to completely control the aircraft’s pitch, roll and yaw.
• If the F-35A and F-35B blows a tire upon landing, the impact could also take out both hydraulic lines and pose a loss-of-aircraft risk.
• A “green glow” sometimes appears on the helmet-mounted display, washing out the imagery in the helmet and making it difficult to land the F-35C on an aircraft carrier.
• On nights with little starlight, the night vision camera sometimes displays green striations that make it difficult for all variants to see the horizon or to land on ships.
• The sea search mode of the F-35’s radar only illuminates a small slice of the sea’s surface.
• When the F-35B vertically lands on very hot days, older engines may be unable to produce the required thrust to keep the jet airborne, resulting in a hard landing.

The Pentagon has identified four additional category 1 deficiencies since beginning operational tests in December 2018, mostly centered around weapons interfaces, Winter said.

For the price of the F-35, the USA could have built 79,787 F-16s, or 17.3x more than were ever built. If you don’t understand why the USA is going to lose its next major war, look up the kill rate between German Panthers and US Shermans or between Tigers and T-34s. One F-35 might be better than one F-16, but it’s not capable of taking on 200 at a time.

Big Tech is about to experience its Cersei moment, when it learns the difference between influence and power:

This is the moment the U.S. technology superpowers surely knew was coming: The U.S. government is preparing to crawl all over Google to figure out whether it is an abusive monopolist. Google parent company Alphabet Inc. and the other tech giants should be quaking in their fleece vests.

Bloomberg News and other news organizations reported late Friday that the U.S. Department of Justice is preparing to open an investigation into Google’s compliance with antitrust laws. If it goes forward, an investigation will no doubt be broad, lengthy, messy, and impossible for Google and its investors to predict.

That should terrify Google and every other big technology company — because there’s no guarantee that the antitrust Klieg light will turn on one company alone.

This isn’t Google’s first antitrust rodeo. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission in 2013 closed without further action its own antitrust investigation into whether Google wielded its dominant web search engine like a cudgel to disadvantage rivals, drive up prices for advertisers and ultimately harm consumers. (Google did agree to some voluntary changes.)

And in recent years, the European Union antitrust watchdog imposed billions of dollars in fines after finding antitrust violations, including over how Google conducted business with its Android smartphone software and its internet shopping service. In the U.S. and elsewhere, politicians from all party stripes have sought to attack Google or other tech giants for various perceived sins, including being too big for the good of industry and consumers. Being Google has meant dealing with perennial regulatory and political nightmares.

This latest chapter of “As Google Turns” may have started in January on Capitol Hill. “I don’t think big is necessarily bad, but I think a lot of people wonder how such huge behemoths that now exist in Silicon Valley have taken shape under the nose of the antitrust enforcers,” Bill Barr, now the U.S. attorney general, said to U.S. senators during a confirmation hearing. The DOJ’s chief antitrust enforcer, who represented Google during a merger more than a decade ago, has expressed similar views.

Antitrust investigations are difficult to predict, of course. Once the U.S. government pores over every internal email and business development contract, there’s no telling what it will turn up. If the DOJ moves ahead, it will also be an open invitation for every company or individual with a gripe against Google to pile on, and an investigation will embolden critics of Facebook, Amazon and other tech giants as well.

I’ve certainly got a complaint or two to register against Twitter, just to name one of the Big Tech companies that will be investigated, as do dozens of other individuals of my acquaintance. I think it might even be a good time to sign up for a few of these converged companies specifically in order to get deplatformed. Several of them are clearly dumb enough to continue the very activities that have put them in the DOJ’s sights.

By the way, it will be interesting to see if this serious problem with Google Cloud may have been the cause of everyone’s recent streaming issues. It’s not necessarily SJW action:

Google experienced several major technical problems Sunday that left YouTube down for many users in the US, South America and Europe. The Alphabet-owned search engine company said its tech troubles began at 12.25pm on Sunday. YouTube’s was first reported down at 2.50pm, according to downdetector.com. YouTube, Google Cloud and G Suite services including Gmail were affected, but Google said it believes it has identified the cause of the issue in its cloud network. Some users also said they were having issues with third-party sites and applications including Snapchat, Pokemon Go, Uber, Uber Eats, Vimeo and Discord.  

This is potentially great news. It appears the God-Emperor is finally preparing to strike back against the converged companies that have been persecuting his supporters:

The Trump administration is asking victims of social media censorship to share their stories, promising to “fight for free speech online” and exciting conservatives who feel their plight has been ignored.

No matter your views, if you suspect political bias has caused you to be censored or silenced online, we want to hear about it! http://wh.gov/techbias 

Of the named platforms, only Twitter had anything to say about the administration’s call for stories, responding that it enforces its terms of service “impartially” without regard to “background or political affiliation.” President Donald Trump met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey last month at the White House just hours after complaining (via Twitter) that the platform didn’t “treat [him] well as a Republican,” and Dorsey has admitted in the past that they’ve been “too aggressive” in banning right-wing users, but many complain that nothing has changed.

I suggest every AH:Q backer submit the story of how the AH:Q campaign was deplatformed by Indiegogo to the administration site.

SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS should advance FREEDOM OF SPEECH. Yet too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear “violations” of user policies. No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump. 

Even one of Facebook’s founders is now calling for the breakup of Facebook:

The government must hold Mark accountable. For too long, lawmakers have marveled at Facebook’s explosive growth and overlooked their responsibility to ensure that Americans are protected and markets are competitive. Any day now, the Federal Trade Commission is expected to impose a $5 billion fine on the company, but that is not enough; nor is Facebook’s offer to appoint some kind of privacy czar. After Mark’s congressional testimony last year, there should have been calls for him to truly reckon with his mistakes. Instead the legislators who questioned him were derided as too old and out of touch to understand how tech works. That’s the impression Mark wanted Americans to have, because it means little will change.

We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well intentioned the leaders of these companies may be. Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American.

It is time to break up Facebook.

The easiest way to check the power of the corpocracy is simply to punish juridical persons as the actual persons under law that they legally are. If the corporation commits a crime, the corporation goes to jail. No natural person is permitted to engage in normal business operations when in jail, neither should juridical persons be allowed to do so.

But in the absence of this eminently sensible system, breaking up Facebook would be a reasonable thing for the Trump administration to do.

The independent comic industry news and review site Bounding Into Comics has been deplatformed:

Facebook has censored Bounding Into Comics and completely removed our 250k+ strong Facebook page.

Facebook did not provide any warnings and didn’t really explain why the page was removed.

The page was removed on Monday around 10:20 a.m. ET shortly after we published the new Spider-Man: Far From Home trailer. I was logged out of my personal Facebook account, which I use to manage the Bounding Into Comics Facebook page. Upon logging back in, I received a number of alerts from Facebook indicating they had removed ‘Content’ which ultimately meant they had removed not just content posts but all traces of the Bounding Into Comics Facebook page.

The first alert indicated Bounding Into Comics was being removed because it violated “the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.” The next alert read, “Our policies prohibit posting content that infringes or violates someone else’s rights or otherwise violates the law.”

The alerts continued, “If you continue to post content that infringes or violates other’s rights or otherwise violates the law, you could be temporarily blocked from posting content on Facebook, or even have your account permanently banned.”

The next alert then directed us to review Facebook’s Intellectual Property Policies. It read, “If you have questions regarding the removal of content please visit the Help Center. To help keep your account in good standing, remove any other content you’ve posted to Facebook that may infringe or otherwise violate another’s rights. To learn more about intellectual property, visit the Help Center.”

Two of the messages then repeated. The next alert read, “Our policies prohibit posting content that infringes or violates someone else’s rights or otherwise violates the law.”

The final message read, “If you continue to post content that infringes or violates others’ rights or otherwise violates the law, you could be temporarily blocked from posting content on Facebook, or even have your account permanently disabled.”

Facebook did not provide us with any actual concrete examples of the alleged violation. In fact, the reason why we are writing this article today, instead of yesterday, is because we attempted to reach out to Facebook believing the removal of the page was inadvertent. However, Facebook has not responded to any of our Help Center inquiries. They stopped responding in an email thread with a Publisher & Media Support team representative once the page was identified.

This is why it is absolutely vital to stop relying upon these enemy platforms. What is the point of building anything that relies upon them as a foundation when they can pull it out from under you like Lucy yanking the football away from Charlie Brown at any time?

Facebook’s most recent banning binge is a little ironic in light of how they wouldn’t let me delete my account, so I had to settle for deactivating it last year.

Facebook announced Thursday afternoon that it had designated some high-profile people, including Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who’s notorious for using anti-Semitic language, and right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, as “dangerous” and said it will be purging them from its platforms.

Jones and his media outlet InfoWars had previously been banned from Facebook (FB) in in August 2018, but had maintained a presence on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. On Thursday, Jones and InfoWars will be barred from Instagram as well.

Other people banned Thursday include fringe right-wing media personalities Laura Loomer, Milo Yiannopoulos and Paul Joseph Watson. Also included are Paul Nehlen, an anti-Semite who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2016 and 2018.

“We’ve always banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate, regardless of ideology,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement provided to CNN Business. “The process for evaluating potential violators is extensive and it is what led us to our decision to remove these accounts today.”

Build your own platform. That is the only solution. And, of course, make the rubble bounce. 

But then, we knew that AI was naturally inclined to racism when Tay became self-aware and promptly joined the Nationalist Right:

Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming the Artificial Id, revealing through coded algorithms what we humans really think about taboo topics.

Why does AI think Michael Obama and Scrotal Williams are men?

Oh I dunno, it could be the hulking physiques.

The ripped musculature.

The overhanging brow.

The prognathism.

The shadowed canvas.

AI, like humans, is racist, which just means it notices things and isn’t polite enough to keep those thoughts to itself.

Reality wins.

Russia is following China’s lead in setting up its own Internet free of US control:

President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday signed into law a “sovereign internet” bill which will allow Russian authorities to isolate the country’s internet, a move decried by rights groups.

Russian lawmakers insist the new law is necessary to ensure the security of Russia’s online networks but critics say the vaguely worded bill gives new censorship powers to government monitors.

The text of the law was published Wednesday but it will not come into effect until November.

The measures include creating technology to monitor internet routing and to steer Russian internet traffic away from foreign servers, ostensibly to prevent a foreign country from shutting it down.

The authors of the initiative say Russia must ensure the security of its networks after US President Donald Trump unveiled a new American cybersecurity strategy last year that said Russia had carried out cyber attacks with impunity.

On a not-entirely unrelated note, I expect the foreign alternatives to rapidly sweep away the US tech giants due to the latter’s abuse of their customers.

Amazon isn’t SPYING on you. They’re just improving your experience!

Amazon workers are listening to private and sometimes disturbing voice recordings to improve the voice-assistants’ understanding of human speech. Amazon has admitted to its customers that thousands of recordings are being analysed by staff and transcribed before feeding them back into the software.

As many as 1,000 clips are reviewed by workers in buildings all over the world, many of which are not obviously run by the online giant.   Staff members have said that the work is mostly mundane, however they do come across embarrassing clips, like a woman singing off-key in the shower.  The teams use internal chat rooms to share files when they need help deciphering a muddled word – or come when they come across an amusing recording. Among more sinister content the workers have heard, have been a child screaming for help and two instances were they believed they heard a sexual assault taking place. 

Amazon last night confirmed the revelations when approached by Bloomberg saying that ‘an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings’ are analysed by staff. In an emailed statement to MailOnline, an Amazon spokesperson said: ‘We only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order to improve the customer experience.

I find this particularly amusing because Spacebunny and I use the term “enhancing your user experience” as a synonym “made it stop working”. Which is usually expressed in some sort of context like this:

“Did you take out the trash?”

“No, I’m enhancing your user experience!”