Amazon

Vacation Day 1: Mild Annoyances Are The Best Annoyances

by

Had to do my first ever factory reset on my Fire HD8 today. I’m not sure how I managed it, but once in awhile when I plugged in headphones Alexa would try to activate, and since I don’t have the tablet registered with Amazon it begs me to register. I usually just hit the Not Now button and get back to the apps I’ve installed outside Amazon’s eco system; but there must have been a FireOS update that took it out. I tried to close out the app, but to no avail. I managed to get back to the homescreen, went into Waterfox and found that the only button I had at the bottom of the screen was the Back button. I had no choice but to restart, and found that I couldn’t continue any further until I registered the device.

Of course… I’m too much of an asshole to give up that easily. 😛 Factory resetting it did the trick, at least for now. I’ve been trying to replicate the problem again but haven’t had any luck. I’m planning to do a little science experiment with a little help hopefully not too far long down the road that could help prevent this from happening again.

I also had to fix a couple things in Windows tonight too, went under there tonight to play and privately livestream DMC2 (don’t ask). I wanted to run OBS in the background but found that my drivers were out of date, as the AMD codec was missing. Updating the drivers fixed the problem but… when installing the driver I had to hit reset on my computer because all of a sudden all of my USB ports fucking died. Windows went into Recovery Mode… and failed. I booted in anyway and sure enough, everything was fine.

So yeah, vacation is off to a great start. 😛 Better to have it now than during a busy bork week. Think I’ll end the night with a game that doesn’t end in DMC2…

Fallout TV? What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

by

Bethesda is partnering up with Amazon to make a TV series based on Fallout:

The Fallout franchise has been home to some of the best storytelling in gaming. The post-nuclear apocalypse series has seen a number of iterations, and is set to receive another soon. It’s been announced that a Fallout TV series is in the works for Amazon Prime Video. The show is being produced by the creators of Westworld.

My only question is if this will be based on the games, or if this will be another reality TV type thing after a nuclear attack?

You know, I do have prime… the question is can I be arsed to watch enough of it to do a write up?

Video Editing Diary: One down and 1.7TB to go

by

I got through my Crash Bandicoot livestream footage tonight! It looks like I have three videos worth to come out of that. Tomorrow I think I’ll tackle my Deadpool gameplay. I’m not entirely sure if that one will be salvageable. I remember we had a hard time riffing that one due to the fact that the game itself is self aware. If not I’ll have plenty of other footage to go through. I had a look at my main recording drive and found that 1.7TB of my 2TB drive has been consumed by video footage. A few more streams and I’ll have to pull out one of my other blank drives to continue recording. 😛 It’s one way to ensure I have plenty of content to work through, that’s fer sure. :melon:

I was a bit bummed this afternoon. My SSD arrived in the mail, and to my disappointment it was a 512GB module instead of the requested 1TB. I’ve already scheduled a return with Amazon. My Linux SSD install will just have to wait a bit longer, fortunately I have plenty to occupy my time as it is. :rick:

Paying to be guinea pigs

by

As if Alexa sharing a local neighbor’s echo information wasn’t bad enough…

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Millions of users of Amazon’s Echo speakers have grown accustomed to the soothing strains of Alexa, the human-sounding virtual assistant that can tell them the weather, order takeout and handle other basic tasks in response to a voice command.

So a customer was shocked last year when Alexa blurted out: “Kill your foster parents.”

I’ll admit, that line really pulled me into the rest of the article. It also reminded me of a story that I heard from one old man who owns one of these Echo’s, apparently his was shouting out “Praise Satan” among other things.

Meanwhile the news just keeps getting better:

Alexa has also chatted with users about sex acts. She gave a discourse on dog defecation. And this summer, a hack Amazon traced back to China may have exposed some customers’ data, according to five people familiar with the events.

Companies like Amazon and Microsoft are blatantly making average everyday end users into beta testers for their products. Microsoft has recently stated that they’ve made it so that every single person using their operating system is a guinea pig. It seems that modern day devices, programs and projects all seem to be stuck in the alpha or beta stage, and Jeff Bezo’s is taking a fairly similar stance with Alexa:

The project has been important to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who signed off on using the company’s customers as guinea pigs, one of the people said. Amazon has been willing to accept the risk of public blunders to stress-test the technology in real life and move Alexa faster up the learning curve, the person said.

Translation: Thank you for beta testing the future!

The privacy implications may be even messier. Consumers might not realize that some of their most sensitive conversations are being recorded by Amazon’s devices, information that could be highly prized by criminals, law enforcement, marketers and others. On Thursday, Amazon said a “human error” let an Alexa customer in Germany access another user’s voice recordings accidentally.

Right now the only “human error” that I see is owning one of these if you value your privacy. Again, this would be another case where I would look at building my own, or at the very least hack these devices if applicable.

The Internet Of Things and Stuff

by

Oh Canada…

Leave it to the Canadians to hack into someone’s security system and politely tell them that it’s insecure, then finish it off with an apology. :v: 

Seriously though, it was a nice gesture and better than the alternate universe version where someone hacks into his security camera and starts livestreaming it to Twitch. Stuff like this is the reason why I wouldn’t want to invest in the smart-enabled setups. If it’s connected to the internet there’s a good chance someone will see it.

All of these electronics are made overseas, on the backs of cheap labor with the idea of turning a profit while providing some form of convenience to the consumer. Things like security are not going to be a top priority in most cases, unless you decide to make your own. If I were to buy a security camera or system I would probably make my own setup using a Raspberry Pi kit. It would be cheaper, have no hidden fees and ideally it would be much more secure.

But, if you thought the above story was bad enough…

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – A user of Amazon’s (AMZN.O) Alexa voice assistant in Germany got access to more than a thousand recordings from another user because of “a human error” by the company.

The customer had asked to listen back to recordings of his own activities made by Alexa but he was also able to access 1,700 audio files from a stranger when Amazon sent him a link, German trade publication c’t reported.


There’s this funny thing I’ve noticed over the years. A good chunk of the people that I know who happen to own these devices and praise how convenient they are also happen to fear things like the government spying on them (as if they were that important to begin with) and yet they have no problems signing over their privacy to corporations that collect data on their users to sell them more stuff.

We seriously need to have laws put in place that encourage companies to do a better job securing their merchandise.


If you have nothing nice to say, start an Open Thread

by

I don’t know what it is, but it seems like the more I work with the public, the more stupidity I seem to see on a regular basis. Today I had to explain to an old woman what “style” meant because she was confused and agitated when she saw two USB flash drives with the same storage capacity that were the same price, but (GASP!) were two different colors! Oooohhhhhhh! When I told her they came in different styles she had to ask me “WHAT DOES STYLE MEAN?!?!?!” which was rather fitting because her clothes suggested that her question reflected her fashion intelligence. She ended up buying one, but wanted to confirm that either one would work… as if color makes all the difference.

I tried going back into Windows to continue working on my video, mainly just extracting particular audio bits… but I got distracted by Halloween shopping on Amazon. I think I have an idea of what I want to wear with my mask this year. Perhaps I’ll try again on my project tomorrow… kinda kicking myself, because everything I did could basically have been handled under Mint these last two days. But that’s fine, I played Doom 2016 on my laptop in Mint during lunch today, it runs perfectly! Now if I could just figure out how to get it to see my mouse on my Desktop I’d be able to actually play it.

Who needs the library when you have Amazon?

by

Everything about this statement is wrong to the point of making me puke in my mouth.

Wrong enough apparently that Forbes removed their entire article. Considering I read posts from both the left and the right, and most of them hated the idea it must have been enough for them to 86 the damn article. :zorak: