In a blog post, Microsoft says Defender is enough for most Windows 11 users. No extra antivirus needed if you keep defaults enabled and update regularly.
Microsoft might be right, but instead they are so wrong here, The average computer problem exist between the computer and the chair. Even the most security minded individual can find themselves trapped in a moment where they have to wipe their entire PC out due to one misclick .
Give or take even if you have a secure version of windows they are assuming you never install 3rd party software, Never update your drivers and never have the computer on the internet with the computer locked in a scif. Otherwise, the second you are on the internet, Microsoft is leaking a shit ton of telemetry on your computer to the world.
if you never take a risk ever with the computer, You should be “fine” however you go to site to download common safe software and you get to play roulette, four different download buttons two chain off to different sites and one gives you the computer STD.
From the second you enter in your information for your windows 11 , Windows(microsoft) is already messing around in your cupboards taking inventory so if you have a stash of photos of your family Microsoft has already taken that and moved it to onedrive without asking much… well they did but they did a batch accept on all microsoft logins and by the time you violated some privacy policy or moved a picture of someone who did not want to be on the net it is already there with a shared use from microsoft. Given the fact that MS leaks this much out of the box anyone trying to hide from domestic abusers or worse there is a major chance to leak and leave yourself out in the open.
The other thing is , if there is a 0-day exploit on a wednesday, You have to wait till next tuesday until MS patches windows defender to update the definitions. With mainstream AV programs , it could be as little as hours until the AV updates to stop the 0-day.
Also bad websites are telling people to put commands in the “search” which in reality just fucks you over by installing spyware where you might just kiss your bank account goodbye. NEVER run anything a website asks you to do in a search bar.
But to make Microsoft’s Assertion accurate. You turn on the PC , Never Log it in. Air gap the updates to it . Never connect it to the internet. destroy bluetooth and Wifi Cards. Otherwise the second that PC thinks its on a network it shouting into the ether on IM HEEEEEEEEEEEERE.
Not to mention, Microsoft undoes any safety margins you have created every time it updates. Deleting onedrive from the system is like trying to get rid of lice with butter, it just doesn’t work. It switches you back to Edge and tries to import anything from other browsers back to edge. Microsofts security is part of the whole, if you must run it , Get Malwarebytes , on a secondary level do not be afraid to run another anti-virus to be double sure. if your PC is acting strange, don’t just assume that everything is ok. Google occasionally fails at spot checking their own sponsored links. That vector can lead to the fastest accidental system infection.
The worst part of the whole thing is Microsoft claims to have made everything easier, it has made it where as long as you invite the vampire in by either command line or installed software or even microsoft themselves they are free to do what they want and microsoft defender won’t look up from looking at the magazine it’s looking at.
A single misclicked installed chrome or edge extension can lift your entire saved password folder without even as much as a thank you.
In the end Microsoft is saying you can have the safest PC in the world, Just don’t use it, move it to an island without internet nor power and your fine.
Matt Novak Starts his article with ” The AI Doomers Who Are Playing With Fire: For years, the dangerous rhetoric has been out of control. And things are turning violent.”
Well now that is an opener. Novak says on how chatGPT burst on to the scene and lays up how AI companies went to congress to told them, That the technology that posed imminent risks to society. AI had the power to destroy the entire world. These AI companies went to congress and they wanted to be regulated now rather than later, because receiving regulation now is easier than getting regulated later. metaphorically its easier to destroy a door than put one up.
No supposedly AI Execs are telling everyone to calm down over AI.
Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s global policy chief, sat down for an interview with the San Francisco Standard this week in the wake of at least one attack on CEO Sam Altman’s home.
What is the grammatical formation of this sentence? “in the wake of at least one attack” what kind of word soup is that?
Moreno-Gama was carrying an anti-AI “document,” according to police, suggesting his motivations were related to concerns over artificial intelligence and existential threats. The Wall Street Journal reports that he had called for “Luigi’ing some tech CEOs,” a reference to Luigi Mangione, who’s been charged with murder for allegedly killing UnitedHealthcare’s CEO.
While Moreno-Gamas attack with a firebomb was deplorable , it makes me wonder why he did it , and what was this “document” the way “document” is framed in this sentence as well is kind of weird. Also for notation here, the firebomb struck a metal gate. Not Altmans house.
There was a second incident involving a firearms discharge at Altmans house. This is an incredibly long lead in to get to the meat of the article.
The so-called AI doomers simply aren’t being sold properly on the benefits of this new tech, Lehane argues. “Our job at OpenAI and in the AI space — and we need to do a much better job — is to explain to people why … this is going to be really good for them, for their families and for society writ large,” Lehane told the Standard.
The So called doomers are seeing AI’s drawbacks in real time. One AI company has been sued for a child’s life ended at the assistance of AI. Neighborhoods having brownouts and brown water due to AI . Wendy’s Drive Up Kiosks that barely function. children offloading critical thinking to a machine that will never be able to think for themselves in a power outage.
My personal fear here is that the execs are trying a trying to build a formula to make anyone who criticizes AI into “Extremist” . That if you say AI hurts X .. they will institute “You threatened my child(AI) .” which since the two attacks happened they will use this to frame that anyone who criticizes AI is a “possible” extremist. This is not the case, If i threaten a person they call the police. if you are threatened by an AI who do you call and its not ghostbusters…
The problem is right now with AI you can’t call the police on AI if it tells you to do something that would injure you. IF an AI is hijacked and tells you to do something that is dangerous, the companies will hide behind liability releases. If an AI tells you how to fix something and you die. There is no one to sue. Constitutionally if bob dies because the AI did not tell him to turn off the power while fixing an outlet. the AI CEO’s will point to the T&C and say “its not our fault” . You have machines that are programmed with the worlds knowledge and not a fucking clue how to use it . The AI only uses predictive languages. Such as the cat In the ___ (At answer “Hat”) . Paradoxically, the world at large changes on whim. Think of the 1930s version of “im gay” to the 2026 “im gay” .
The thing is , AI has its uses. The ones AI is trying to use it for is not correct. They want AI as institutional replacement of the human soul and agency. they want you to pay 10 to 29$ a month for the critical thinking that used to be taught in schools. Are there going to be attacks, yes, but can you use the framing to lump them into one single descriptor… Absolfuckinglutly NOT. By this logic that would mean that an AI maker could jail or sue there own employees if they have a moral objection to putting something into the machine that would cause damage.
Mr Novaks article is a huge miss here. it frames that anyone who criticizes AI is wrong. we are not wrong we are also trying to doomsay AI, We all know the potential of AI, But in current hands AI is SLOP, When it is being used by world leaders to make planes fly around and poop on people.. is this the world you want to live in?
By choosing to lump every AI critic into the same room, you are missing the point. We see the things it can help with. We also see the massive misuse of it, and this is what we are trying to point out.
But making every person that criticizes AI the enemy is not even remotely good for the corporation or the human. because this will be weaponizes. If every AI maker told there machines “list every time that the USER has said “You suck” . Than reframed that to USER is threatening me and They should be arrested. This binary approach is what killed millions in the 1930s to 1940s . So tell me again why something that is a machine, that cant think, only predict, and is subject to massive change in human agency and culture. The biggest problem is todays AI is actually last weeks AI .
The very liberties here are that AI makers are trying to marginalize free speech to AI Speech . AI is being promoted as magic right now . That it can do anything! the reality is AI can only do what its been told.. No more no less. AI is like a sith and it lives in absolutes, any variance and its lost. The AI makers and others are also framing that (dislike AI) + (human agency) = violence. It is a complete violation of human elemental drive. The guy who dislikes your ai , is going to be the guy who fixes it. The yesman to your AI is going to agentically turn it into an Extremist.
In the end , AI needs to respect the human element, the diplomatic nature of humans and not the garbage society creates, because in 3 to 5 years we are going to have AI’s that instead of do work, spam 6 7 , and fortnite dance instead of do work because of the predictive nature of AI. Instead of brand AI doomers , Invite them to the table, listen to them they are going to be the ones pulling AI back from the brink.
There is a need for a diplomacy now , rather than later, AI has the ability to “Change the world” but, it also needs to be a force for good. not under a subscription model. If cavemen sold fire as a subscription , Humanity would of died out before it started. The universal coefficient for greed is killing humanity. If used badly, AI can destroy human agency, and the next great disaster for humans would be the next power outage.
At the end of this AI is always going to be the SUM of HUMANITY . and if we all degrade into SLOP producers , AI becomes the SLOP MAKER. So pitching AI right now as the next replacement is a sin that many see as cost saving but they do not think past the AI prompt. Your Wendys order in tokens for the AI if you speak in broken language likely just took up 25% of the cost for the order. The AI removed the human intuition, The wendys worker that saw a tour bus pull up and he throws on extra fries as the 88 people form the bus comes to the door. The Wendys person that now has to play AI interpreter because the AI thought it heard its wants an order of burger that Tries.
If we move forward in the rollout of AI, ethical diplomacy becomes Machine subserviency , Human foresight becomes an obstacle. Human critical thinking gets disassociated to the machine and possibly lost forever.
I think that this article poorly frames the ideas of why people are critical of AI, by framing the few extremist as the majority. It is a diplomatic dishonesty that they are focusing on. There is a real chance here for AI companies to align with people with foresight, not come out with AI underwear or AI Soda just because you can slap AI on it and think you are going to make billions. Right now companies are pushing products out the door with the word AI slapped on it, and the thing that was changed. Nothing. they just added an element that phones home and a subscription model.
Humanity is being pushed back to the age of you could not take a shit without spending a quarter. The AI Companies have seen there own models in the last year , They know the models are degrading in quality because its a feedback loop.
The thing is without the human agency in the loop, the AI will degrade and the companies know this. so its is unequivocally the 1849 gold rush that they are selling the shovels for and they know the end point already.
Some mornings I take a peek at the news and I just read up on things while I wait for my coffee, and one article caught my attention.
Struggling shoe retailer Allbirds makes bizarre pivot to AI, adds $127 million in value
Shoes to …AI ? Did I read that right. Yes I did . The first thing that came to mind was SouthPark. than The 1990s.
A Business pivots so hard that even a contortionist goes damn!
Give or take right now, AI is “hot” but, it’s as hot as running a building full of graphics cards with a failing cooling system. The thing is ALLBIRDS reads as a master class of failure. They make shoes, The shoes become popular. Allbirds leverages itself that they are the Steve Jobs of shoes and don’t read the room. Two years out they are sputtering and failing and have not become the next reebok or nike. They come up with a “brilliant” plan , They sell off all of their assets and jump on the AI train. ALLBIRD than renames themselves to NEWBIRD AI. Sure sure they likely wanted to create an image like they were a phoenix reborn from the ashes of their old company. But they missed out .. ALLbird to AIBIRD (which would of been perfect. like the mimicry of a parrot?). They could of adjusted there merch with a sharpie at that point.
But here’s the thing. A shoe maker has a soft fail, they could of sold off all of the assets that was shippable. Clearance out the shoes, Leverage out the lower markets and find out if the non tech-bro market liked the shoes and pivot there. Less risk than buying the AI lottery ticket. The fact they exited the shoe market at 39 million means they were not cratored.
They have Zero experience in the AI market. They have nothing other than cash to invest, Than they spoke the word they are going to invest an AI and than the venture vultures came. There market cap climbed to 148m . The funny thing is this is all speculative. like the .com bubble. Everyone is jumping in. NEWBIRD AI doesn’t even have land yet, they need to get in line for AI infrastructure, they need to find land that will not overwhelm local infrastructure. So right now they are selling their vision on a feverdream that by the time it comes to realization may be gone.
If ALLBIRD was a tech startup and they had some revolutionary code to help AI this would be a viable path but in the end, this is a shoe company that is buying a shovel from NVidia and trying to be the next big thing when the shovel is a kids play shovel and other companies are using construction machines in the AI market with very small to negative returns.
One last thing, “Stockholders are also asked to approve a charter amendment to remove the company’s environmental conservation public benefit and to authorize a plan of dissolution the Board could implement within 12 months.” Talk about the Theoretical take away from this. live in good nature and ecology than, setting your customer base on fire pissing on the fire and walking away from your mission statement.
For Allbird, They could of paired down the back stock . Sent shoes to influencers , built a brand on tiktok with a close enough reproduction , Kept there ecologically sounding mission statement, built an entire sector off of sephora girls and won big off of “vibes”.
The worst part of all of this, is this is an AI adjacent, that needed to talk about no technology and honestly the fucktons of money thrown at nothing. New Bird AI might be the Futures New Turd AI.
update: You know its bad when Voidzilla enters the conversation….
Walmart has recently made move to require a walmart account on your Vizio and ONN branded Tv’s and its not over Watch metrics, its over how much data they can take from you. Its how much they can market your name and sell it off to other Entities. They claim it is a unification, Its not, it is walmart wants your living room, These TV’s likely have microphones in them and worse proximity sensor to know who’s in the room.
Beyond innovation, the results from Walmart and VIZIO are already clear for customers. 65% of surveyed Walmart customers report that CTV ads helped them discover new products3, underscoring the power of placing premium content in front of high-intent shoppers.
How the fuck did they flavor this question. They probably used a no win question where they gave 5 answers and gave people a no way out. something like “How much do Walmart ads on your VIZIO TV help you learn about new items? 1.Significantly 2. Somewhat 3. A little bit 4. Not much 5. Not at all.. They just flavored the poll to 4 yeses and a no. The poll is bullshit and likely people don’t know what they answered to. Because they will bias the outcome. But Walmart should not have the control over the TV they want. We bought Vizio Tv’s for the game room, for grandma when her tv dies. We dont want to buy a TV for grandma when it makes her able to click the interface and made the home shopping channel in one go because she was watching the big bang theory and walmart spawns and ad for notebooks on sale.
Roku does the injected ad Garbage. Even when you try to turn it off you find ads overlaid on other ads. Roku recently patented technology for “HDMI Customized Ad Insertion.” This allows the TV to monitor the HDMI port. Meaning when you have a monitor for a test while you are checking out someones test results while you are looking up someone’s health roku just made a hipaa violation. Privacy is now a subscription service, the price of getting the subscription is shopping at savers and finding old tv’s that don’t record you while you take a shit. The problem is Walmart is the granddaddy of data from customers , they are the place the FBI turns to when they cant answer a question. they made the reason facebook knows you jerk off because they are reading your watches and phones sensors while you sent memes an hour ago to your work buddy.
The sad part is walmart just leaped over facebooks tracking. Because walmart just stepped up the game. They will probe your phone via the Vizio, Than when you hit the store they will have a tracking Tag that probes your phone again and if you go for the product that was on TV they have your home address, they have your means of payment. they have everything. This needs to stop. With this if you stop to long in an isle walmart will hallucinate that you are buying Plan B while you are pregnant because you dodged out of an isle to talk about something important. In states where birth control is frowned on you could be arrested.
My answer to this as much as I hate it, Buy a Firestick or a google device. Amazon uses Sidewalk, But you can turn that shit off. They are geofenced, they go no further than your TV. They have more regulatory rules to stop them from doing what walmart wants to do. If it is discovered that either them are taking information beyond the boundaries than you know to stop it . If that Vizio or ONN tv refuses to setup without an account, return the TV as a defective product. Make a report to the FCC that the TV is refusing to let you see OTA TV. Under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, specifically the OTARD (Over-the-Air Reception Devices) rule, manufacturers cannot place “unreasonable restrictions” that impair the use of antennas for video programming. There are people out there without internet still and imagine nursing homes being TV locked because no internet.
But honestly at this point I am almost ready to say if you buy a cheap TV , use a cheap Chinese brand, They will track you but the end game what is a Chinese man going to do if you talk about farts with a friend for 45 minutes.
Walmart is creating a surveillance state that the US government is dying for, now if walmart follows through they dont have to do it. Worse yet if Walmart cheats and says “you need the Vizio APP to set up the TV” congrats you have given walmart your location down to the foot.
It’s bad enough in the generation of smart Devices that you need a SCIF to talk about stuff that is under NDA or court injunction because of a divorce or other means. We as the consumers need to place boundaries. we go to the store to get products, we don’t need to spied on at home because we ran out of coffee.
Also, You know all of this is going to further enshitified by AI , The fact you know these TV’s are going to be taking private data, the second you replay the BLURAY/DVD of your child’s birth congratulations, your or your significant others Vagina is on the internet.
Anyways, if you buy a TV read the TOS , privacy policy and be safe. otherwise the assholes win. I need a coffee now…
The Pixel watch is a really good watch, it has the hardware to last through a day of work. It can make calls, it can connect to your calendar. It CAN NOT text on its own? What .. the .. hell google? This hit me when I was stuck without my phone in a snowstorm. I tried to text my friend and The text could not send. Again, WHAT THE HELL? You have a watch that will tell me when i have fallen if my heart stops. But it won’t protect me in an emergency that does not require 911? Given that i was in a situation that I could make a phone call, I called my friend. Overall it was a situation better handled by text.
Now there are situations you would think a safety oriented watch would think of these things. If you are in a situation where verbal dialog is not possible. Bad Dates, you have fallen, You are lost but your friends are near , worst case is domestic violence. No one is going to bat an eye if you are fooling with your watch. If you are in a situation where your phone dies or your phone is smashed. An attacker might see a phone as a weapon of communication. a smart watch might be seen as a time piece or a toy. But Can you quietly Discretely reach out ? No. but is there a work around?? Possibly:
If you use if you use WhatsApp or Telegram you are safe. However if you don’t use that you are kind of screwed. Using WhatsApp/Telegram exposes you to giving out personal information to companies. In some cases you may not care to use another third party app.
There is always option B:
Create and send an email to your friends and just have them reply to you , use that email in a folder called “work” if you need help you can hit “reply” and send a message Via email. While you are not able to append your GPS location over the watch you can definitely give a shortened message to get the point across while “checking your watch” .
This is seriously a big miss by google, if you are in a domestic situation if you grab your phone the aggressor is going to break that. They are far likely less to react to a tiny watch when you make a bit of time because you have to use the bathroom and send an email over your watch. If you are on a bad date, You can reply to an email quickly and lie to the person saying sorry I have a work email to deal with. When you are really emailing to say “Come to soandso and meet me” . Especially if you have your friends knowing that this work email is your “angel shot” , its super discreet and not likely to be noticed because you look like you are just emailing your “boss”.
But in all, for a watch that is supposed to be used independent of the device it is still forced to be slaved to the phone device. Google really dropped the ball on this…
It would seem like Meta is the first to throw in the towel with their announcement of the Meta horizon worlds is going to be retired as of June, This was a platform powered by slop. The Idea of building a universe with AI was a bad idea in general. WIth that you would end up with places such as 6 7 land or some shit like that. Most people do not get the astronomical waste that AI in its current from is , for a child to make some 67 slop video that is 60 seconds long it uses the an insane amount of energy! The Same energy required to boil a tea kettle 240 times or charge your iPhone from 0% to $100% every day for three years or a “personal massager for 50 days straight. That amount of power could power a 144 Lumen Ultrabright Portable LED Work Light/Flashlight from Harbor Freight for 6000 hours! You could play the Nintendo Switch continuously for 1,714 hours.
Worse yet, Meta claims they are going to focus on AI. Facebook, Horizon worlds have a large problem, AI brain rot. people are fleeing from AI chats. because, do you really need a sycophantic chat person never to criticize you if you are doing something stupid.
When you are a multibillion dollar company and you fail copying VRchat, and Instead you decide to pump the AI balloon some more with LLM. Meta is likely seeing the explosive “growth” in AI which is nothing more than the .com bubble of the 90’s. The thing is as far as most AI right now when people are done with making slop or AI gets enough rules where unregulated slop can not be made anymore, People are going to stop using it. Right now AI is available to the elites or bored enough to pay for the LLMs. Once we hit market saturation the millions of AI’s will start dying a dime a dozen. In the Enterprise adoption of generative AI has hit 71%. but, over 80% of companies report zero measurable impact on their bottom line. As of right now we are seeing a utility gap where the cost of using the AI exceeds the costs of its output. Companies in its wild adaption are finding out the hidden costs of hardware, Repair, upkeep and electricity.
Meta Horizon worlds had problems with this exact issue , user generating slop and diluting the product into nothing. So to which end VR ends like the 3dTV with actually a higher user base. They are wasting an entire platform when they should of integrated the biggest advantage they had in user market base. Don’t kill of meta horizon worlds, Instead keep the AI there, Focus on making an AI which can overlay the Quest 3 with AR, They could integrate the headset a a visual learning device, they could use it to get directions In the wilds of the cities while hot spotted to your phone. Say things like Chiltons car service manual, showing you what screws to remove or how to replace your spark plugs. Lego with instructions on how to put together your lego Death Star. the options in AR are limitless.
Sure, you’ll look like a goofy bastard, but you’ll be a goofy bastard who knows exactly where he’s going and how to fix his own car. WIth the use of AI you could have an interactive LLM telling you that you dropped a screw or missed a turn.
Update: Meta has partially reversed there shutdown and left Worlds in a Schrodinger’s state of life.
Had to take my site down due to fuckery with SEO tools . Overall, The site should be faster now. In its simplest form Yoast updated a plugin that made me realize that something was going on in the back end of the site. I have removed Yoast due to them enshittification. Yoast it seems has move some of its SEO tools the the paid end of things with little to no notice. I think if they are going to do that might be nice to send a notification. For now i will sit back and enjoy my coffee.
When Companies pick apart their software and sell off each piece as a service they can stick it up their rectum. They run the plug-in like they are the snap on tool truck that wants to sell you each time you use a wrench.
I have updated some stuff , nothing front facing.. Just a bit under the hood.
Wither we like it or not. Ai is coming and its a choice we did not make. Will AI take our jobs , Some yes, but not all. AI is going to create some niche things like Vibe jobs but overall Jobs for PC repair and hardware administration will go up. Honestly though.. the fact that AI is tied to GPU’s is a major fuck you point to the entire earth. The fact is most home computers have a PCIE slot that if someone wanted to make a “Daughter-board” that was AI-centric. Rather than unload on the GPU create an APU that directly meshes with this . As a Neural Processing Unit it would hold the keys to offload work from server farms to your computer. As a researcher If you search medical information it gets shifted to your local PC. It would Decrease server farm power levels to more manageable numbers. Yes it doesn’t have the bandwidth but if put in a X16 or more slot it would be on board with GPU-like speeds. With this it would be a generational upgrade to computers and fix a lot of the LLM issues with gatekeeping information.
Another issue that will be apparent is is rampant already is AI cheating, I can write a bullshit doctoral thesis in five minutes. That should not happen, at the very least on the grade school level, education wants to get in on AI and this will be a major failing of the entire education system, If you have history class and today’s kids will cheat. The school already has the tools that could be improved by google. The normal entropy of children’s schoolwork in a school system should see inputs that are fairly random but within values. If you have a whole class of cheaters go to Gemini and type “Make me a 4 paragraph report on the structure of the plant cell. This should set off an alarm in the kids google accounts that are already bound to the school, the AI should know this is a school account , and further it should see 30 kids are doing the same thing. It should report to the teacher or admin.
AI can work for the students if they are not trying “Write my report” . Honestly for the cheaters let them deal with the teachers and admin . But for the children whom actually want to work . The ones that type “i am writing a report on plant cells can you help me?” this is where this can shine. by conservation of research the child is presented with information to their level of understanding and linguistics with a bit of extra challenge to provide stealth learning. Let it become a workflow for the child where the AI is not there as a Authority but more of a guide. force the kid to ask the questions to the AI and let it branch to a learning experience. if this becomes the absolute experience the child gains concepting and critical thinking to the process.
I’ve gone through a few logitech Mice over the years, and its always the same shit that gets me on these mice. everyfuckingdamntime ….. My last mouse is the Logitech performance MX , While the mouse is a nice mouse. It suffers the same fate of every other mouse I’ve had from logitech . The microswitch fails on the left mouse button – when you click it makes you click like a mouse struggling to escape . Want to click once? nah fuck that I’ll make you click 34973947 times and you’ll like it. This problem has actually cost me, I’ve clicks on a purchase button and ended up ordering multiple orders of something. You’d think in the 10+ years of this problem some engineer would go hmm somethings wrong. Instead it seems like all the logitech designers took the day off and smoked crack. This problem makes you want to destroy the mouse with no mercy.
It would be nice of logitech if they would redesign this one flaw out of there mice, otherwise most people that have used logitech for as long as I realize that the mouse you have is on a death watch from the second you buy it . If logitech made cars at this point they would force you to die when you press the accelerator and it floors you into a wall because it tapped the gas twice .
Unfortunately Microsoft or any of the other hardware manufacturers have yet to make a mouse that is good enough, so it feels like I am going back to a dealer that cuts his product with powder bleach or something.
Now that the cloud services are hitting the market more and more, the more bullshit things that the corporate droids are saying what it can do. Honestly, the state of the cloud is something closer to smog. You don’t see the problems with the cloud till you are totally engulfed in the cloud of smog, and through the “information superhighway” your creamed by some asshole in a mack truck and get your car stolen with your wallet and by the time you come out of the cloud you’re naked and asking your self “WTF JUST HAPPENED?!”
Matt Honan learned this the hard way. He got hit in by the mack truck of social engineering when someone retrieved his password than went on a rampage of deleting his accounts and spamming with other accounts. One of the biggest problems with the cloud is there is only a single point of access, Once that’s broken it becomes fuck all and pretty much if you don’t have it backed up to solid media such as a DVD or a backup drive , you might as well just light your computer on fire in the end. Even if you do have your media backed up on the computer that you’ve connected to the stink cloud, in all chances you may end up with your device wiped due to that single point of access and accounts attached to it.
Also with the perceived “Security” that the cloud has its really just unicorn farts and rainbows due to in part the end user. How many people will just log into there cloud putting in the password every time or will they hit save password and screw themselves in the fact that its just “easier”, Not to mention a lost device could doom all of your information since there is interconnectability in the toxic waste cloud.
It just makes me wonder about the security of the cloud thing. If someone can call and pretend to be you, how many other ways is your account on the exhaust cloud vulnerable. If media is able to execute in the cloud is there any stops to malware infecting your account and possibly everyone else with an account on the server or node your clouded information is on . Likely your information is stored like a cesspool everyone else’s shit is in the tank with yours. If someone finds a way to gain root access, Than pretty much rather than one account being hit thousands or more could be affected in the process. Since the security in the cloud is based on black magic , someone named tom and a cookie with m&m’s next to the keyboard to hopefully distract the person or persons trying to gain access to the information.
Websites, portals, and social media platforms have been dealing with these problems and can be directly relatable to the possibilities of problems that are ahead. Blizzard being the most recent, Linkedin , Amazon all being hacked With the biggest problem of you’re taking someones word for if your information is safe or not. Sony being hacked last year left customers in the dark for days with the hacking of their servers . So it only leaves you guessing if the “cloud” goes down for an extended time.
Also, some people are taking a liking to the cloud for other reasons security aside. At kotaku Patricia Hernandez likens the point of the portability of the “cloud” and how her information is accessible everywhere. Try saying that when the internet goes down , or the authentication server shit itself and you have lost complete access to the game since you cant grab an internet connection. She goes on to say…
But overall? The benefits of the cloud outweigh the drawbacks for me. Everything feels more convenient with the cloud. I can buy the games from my home, without having to go anywhere. I don’t have to worry about space, which tends to be sparse for me. And even if it wasn’t, if you’ve played games as long as I have, then you’ve accrued a sizable collection.
Having something being easy is not worth it when it comes with eroded customer rights, lack of ownership , Security issues, Likely needing to be bound to an internet connection. sure the cloud has some good things with it but, over all its just like a cloud left from a stinkbomb, It can be fun, have long lasting implication and at the same time can be your worse nightmare as Matt Honan learned. On another end is since all your information is bound to one point, if you get banned from said cloud, Your information and possibly your money with it due to any expenditures you have bought and is bound to said cloud. Sure you don’t have to worry about scratched disks , or loosing the books with the game . but, in all its not worth loosing everything because someone decided to make a stupid decision and leave your whole account open due to a hole somewhere and everything is gone. Also worth mentioning is if a company goes out of business with your cloud, than your cloud becomes a fart in the wind and is gone. Since you have no control of how stupid a company can be or have any control when some company decides to end its science project with a cloud saying its too expensive to maintain. you could loose everything in a moments notice including material stuff that matters such as credit cards, memories of events due to you only having your pictures in one place or other important work when your device suddenly clears itself due to someone hacking into your cloud and hitting wipe devices.
If the cloud is to succeed, there has to be allowed user changes and changes in the accessibility of the cloud, the future of cloud gaming may kill off any user modding and free creativity.
Don’t get me wrong, the cloud has its uses. but, what is trying to be done with the cloud is building a bank with a glass vault. One rock and its all over.
