Meeting Notes - 2 September 2014

by **bdahm** Sat Sep 06, 2014 6:04 pm

“Eat so we can meet” - Since the Airport Greenery has been providing us free use of the restaurant on Tuesday afternoons for close to three years now, it would be fitting if we patronized the place by buying food and/or drink while we are there. Eric suggested that for those who do not wish to partake of anything that they have on the menu, make a small donation either to the wait staff or in the tip box at the check-in desk in the lobby.

Technology Will Never Replace Love
In the past DTAC has come up some very nicely done TV spots dealing with technology and human interaction. Here is the latest and one of the most effective of those.

http://tinyurl.com/nzlg5e9

Knee Defender to the Rescue
There’s a battle going on in those “friendly skies”. It’s battle between your knees and the person in front of you who wants to recline. And the stakes are pretty high. In the last several weeks there have been at least three altercations over this issue. In one case it resulted in the pilot making an emergency landing and kicking the two combatants off the plane. The story appears at the link below. Scroll all the way to the end for a nice animation of the incident.

http://tinyurl.com/q7ud8z4

The Wing Project
We’ve seen any number of drone video over the last few months and we’ll no doubt be seeing a lot more. We’ve seen how Amazon is testing drone delivery of small parcels in the coming years. Google is deep into robotics with its autonomous cars and Project Loon, high altitude balloons to bring internet coverage (and its ads) to under served regions of the world. Now there’s Project Wing from the Google (X) group, which will potentially compete with Amazon when it comes to small package delivery. Personally I like the Google solution better, but it remains to be seen if either approach will come to fruition.

http://tinyurl.com/mypjfg8

And here’s a video of some of the testing that they are doing in Australia. They are doing it in Australia, because there are no laws governing the use of these vehicles in the US, so they are technically illegal there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRTNvWcx9Oo

Data Brokers
We’ve all been reeling over the Edward Snowden disclosures of NSA spying, but that’s only part of the picture, the Big Brother part. There’s also the Little Brother part, companies that sell your data to advertisers so they can sell you stuff. So whether it’s on Face Book or any of the Google properties or anywhere else you choose to alight on the internet, someone is following you and recording where you’re going and what you’re doing. What about all those “free” services you think you’re getting? There are not free. Your data, your personally identifiable data is being aggregated, bought and sold.

Jerry sent me this 60 Minutes video and it lays out quite clearly what’s going on. He also delivered a nice introduction to the video.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1bOkRb82OEEa1I4SmVDazVzaG8/edit?usp=sharing

What can be done about this? Not an awful lot if you want to continue to use these services, but awareness is the first step. Another thing you can do is turn off third party cookies in your browser. These are off by default in Apple’s Safari. If you go into Settings you can turn it off in Google Chrome as well as the other popular browsers. This will slow down the gathering of this kind of information.

So, this week it’s been a pretty full plate, so I’m going to call it a wrap for now. Catch you next time.

-Bill

by **bdahm** Mon Sep 15, 2014 7:11 am

As if it isn't enough that these data brokers such as Acxiom have all this information about us, but a lot of it is just plain wrong.

http://tinyurl.com/qxxwv2f

-Bill

by **bdahm** Mon Sep 15, 2014 10:41 pm

The are efforts afoot to deny data brokers access to our information. Here are a couple such efforts. You will be able to listen to this report at the link below.

http://tinyurl.com/pd2xr9e

-Bill

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Meeting Notes - 2 September 2014

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