Category: ranting

Random thoughts, frustrations, ideas and opinions. Quality not guaranteed, consume only under adult supervision

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ranting

The sea turtle’s death

We went to Desaru during the school holidays. Just a couple of days to relax before the next term begins for the girls. We stayed at a resort on the beach, but the waves were to violent to do any swimming in the sea.

I walked along the beach just before sunset one day and a few hundred meters down the shore from the resort I saw a monitor lizard walking up the beach towards the jungle. He was a bit far off but I took my phone out to video him as I walked closer. As I was watching him, still a hundred meters away I notice a large shape on the beach.

It wasn’t a rock; there are lots of jagged black rocks out in the surf alone Desaru beach but this was too round. In the shadows it took me a few moments to figure out what it was. It was a sea turtle. A big one. A few seconds later I figured out the only reason a monitor lizard would be there was it must be dead. The tide was combing in and I guess the lizard didn’t want to eat in the surf.

As I got closer I could see how bloated the creature was. I was surprised it didn’t smell. I was up wind but even up close, where I could see it was missing its eyes and the softer skin of it’s face was mostly gone, eaten or rotted off, I didn’t smell it. I got a few whiffs of it when I moved down wind, but it wasn’t that smelly.

I wonder what killed it. There was no obvious thing. I’m not an expert but there was no holes —other than where the eyes and one fin had been eaten. I wonder if we killed it? Did it eat one too many plastic bags? Maybe it died of old age, it was very large, but, maybe I’m too pessimistic I suspect humans until proven otherwise. The beach was littered with bottles and other bits of plastic, covered in small clam like creatures. This is on a beach at a resort that is raked every morning. There was a shoe, and further down the beach an insole. I wonder if they go together? Humans suck. And all of this trash has been in the past century. We are disgusting creatures who can’t control ourselves.

Human trash washed up on Desaru beach

It is changing, slowly. Slower than a glacier moves, and much slower than all the glaciers are melting because of us. Singapore, which should be able to be way out front on such things can’t even get there. Almost all take away containers are plastic, delivery makes it worse, everything is wrapped in plastic and then bagged in plastic and comes with plastic utensils and straws and little plastic packets of condiments you won’t use. Even when you chose the “don’t need cutlery” they sometimes include it. Even if they do leave it out they will throw in more ketchup and chili than you could use. If you get take out from many food stalls you get styrofoam. Something McDonalds stopped using when I was a kid is still the standard for many takeout places in Singapore.

The Singapore government could outlaw this, but I guess it would inconvenience people, maybe they would vote against the government, and for sure there are a number of local companies that make all this plastic —I see their trucks on the road sometimes, with pictures of all the plastics and saying things like “manufacturer of all kinds of plastic food containers!”. Yea, the government should help them move on to other work and cancel the plastic. I remember more than a decade ago being in Taiwan and seeing that all the takeout was in cardboard boxed that were waxed to resist the liquids at least long enough to get home and eat. How come Taiwan can do it and Singapore cannot? Singapore can do better, and should. Many stores have started to charge for plastic bags but few people are carrying their own bags regularly or reusable food containers. For a place were tiffins were once ubiquitous it’s sad, everything is double and triple packed in single use plastic today.

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Cultured Meat is Vegan

If [vegans] want to see an end to animal exploitation, it is our moral duty to call lab-grown meat vegan, even if it unnerves us.

Jude Whiley [wired.com], from Yes, Lab-Grown Meat Is Vegan [wired.com] on Wired

It’s a good article, go and read it. I agree. The author writes better than me and his almost all the points I can thing of in a relativly short article. Seriously, go read it. I’ll wait.

I’m not a vegan, I tried that briefly —too hard to be practical for me— but I am a vegetarian, have been for close to 25 years now. More than half my life. I came to vegetarianism and the concept of animal liberation through utilitarian ethics. Reading Animal Liberation [confusion.cc] was one part of my journey, though I think Practical Ethics [confusion.cc] was more important in my journey. Maybe that speaks to why I couldn’t commit to to being vegan.

Vegan vs. vegetarian discussions aside, I’m in complete alignment with the key points to the article:

First, vegans, and vegetarians, should be 100% behind lab grown, or cultured, meat. The idea that lab grown meat is bad because cells had to be harvested from an animal is kinda self defeating, if you want to save animals from slaughter. If the goal is to eliminate the slaughter, or even the wider exploitation of animals then a few cows having a biopsy should be an acceptable evil to prevent millions of cows from being born into exploitation and slaughter. To hope that humans will have an epiphany and realize the equality of animals is farfetched. Too many vegans are ‘religious’ about things and think that it has to be black and white. Even if a vegan chooses not to eat lab grown meat they should support others eating it to limit the cruelty and explotation.

Second, lab grown meat should be a thing unto itself, sold as lab grown not used as some sort of cheaper filler combined with uncultured meat, to make it cheaper or increase the profitability of meat. Today lab grown meat is much more expensive than farmed meat, but that will change and, if allowed, companies will ‘cut’ farmed meat with lab grown meat like drug dealers cut cocaine or heroin. And they will try to hide that fact with marketing speak and labeling shenanigans so people not looking for lab grown meat will buy it.

We should normalize lab grown meat as meat, all the tasty tasty without the murder.

At this point I should note that despite living in Singapore, which was the first country to legalize cultured meat, I have not actually tried it. It’s currently only available at a single restaurant that requires reservations and blah blah blah… I can’t be bothered. Hopefully it will be available more places and in the grocery store soon.

The author does miss two important points. First, how will people who are vegan or vegetarian for actual religious reasons see lab grown meat? It’s much more interesting than how the vegan society and its’ members will see it. Second, he notes:

[A]nimal abolitionists, who sit at the radical end of veganism, argue against lab-grown meat on the basis that it is speciesist. Speciesism states that humans place themselves above other animals as more important, and that this bias leads to all forms of animal exploitation, from burger consumption to greyhound racing. Vegans who worry about speciesism contest that the eating of meat grown from animal cells—even if no animals are slaughtered—still upholds a belief that animals are “something to eat” in a way that humans are not.

But I beg to differ, lab grown meat can eliminate specimen. We can eat humans. There are already companies selling this idea. The Soylent Vats are Coming [confusion.cc]…

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If they collect it they will sell it

I understand these companies want my data but you’re supposed to be sneakier and better at getting it than this by now.

Hope Corrigan, in Ubisoft’s launcher broke Steam games on Linux and Steam Deck, [pcgamer.com] on PC Gamer

It’s funny because companies are supposed to hide the fact they are collecting and monetizing our data. By now we all know they do it, but we are not supposed to talk about it. Pay no attention to the data collection behind the curtain.

One of the most insidious aspects of the internet is the “data economy”. User data is hovered up and hoarded by the giant internet companies we know and collected and traded quietly by companies most will never hear of. The harvesting and commercialization of our habits and our connections has become a billion dollar business. Allowing an economy to be built on this trade erodes our privacy more every day.

Even if you choose to live off of the internet or jump through the considerable hoops to keep your data out of the hands of the data brokers and social media they still likely know way more about you than you think. Short of living like Ted Kaczynski you can’t escape it.

Shadow profiles are created about you based on your phone number or email when your friends and associates allow companies to access their contact list. Every website you visit is telling the data brokers what you are reading, what you are buying, what you are searching for. Too many people still don’t realize that if you aren’t paying, you aren’t the customer, you are the product. And more and more even, if you are paying it’s not enough, your data is too valuable to just take your money. Capitalism is the beast which cannot be satisfied, profits must rise, if customer data is monetizable, monetized it shall be. If they collect it they will sell it.

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quotes ranting

Nazi AIs are the logical conclusion of the internet

How are people surprised that AIs trained on the internet are spewing Nazi shit [gizmodo.com]? (Substitute any bigotry you want, any -ist or -phobic adjective you prefer) I mean, a Nazi AI [forbes.com] is not even a new thing… This is the internet people, don’t you know how it works?

Godwin’s law, short for Godwin’s law (or rule) of Nazi analogies, is an Internet adage asserting that as an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches 1.

Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]

Somehow people think that AI trained on the web is going to be like Project 2501? Elegant and articulate? Fuck off. Do they know about 4chan? Without content moderation on social media it would descend into some unholy offspring of The Human Centipede and Mien Kampf.

It’s amazing that we aren’t all gouging our eyes out like Dr. Weir on the Event Horizon. Hats off to all the underpaid, over traumatized [duckduckgo.com] content moderators out there. Take a Prozac and get some therapy.

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ranting

The Perils of 2FA

Yesterday I was sitting at a cafe near my house with my daughter, I had just finished a video call with my boss —a weekly touchpoint since my boss sits in Amsterdam and I sit in Singapore— when a guy approached me and asked if he could use my iPad.

It took a minute to understand what he wanted and why. It seems that his phone screen had died, he could receive a call, using his headset to answer it, but he could to make a call or browse his phone in any way. He wanted to log into gmail to get a contact number and use my phone to call them.

Ok, no problem I’m happy to help a guy out. So I opened up Firefox in incognito mode and loaded gmail. After the username and password were entered a two factor authentication (2FA) page opened. Google wanted the guy to enter a code that could be found on a device already logged in… that would be his phone, the one he could not access.

Google gives options to allow you to try others ways of verifying yourself; receive an code by email (not helpful if you are trying to login to that email), receive a code by text (since his phone screen didn’t work he would not be able to see the code), and others. The only one that was an option for this guys was to receive a code by voice call. Luckily he could still receive as call and pick it up using his headset.

So after a couple of minutes he was able to login and get his friends contact. I let him use my phone to call and his friend called him back so they could coordinate whatever they needed.

Glad to help a person out. But the real story here, for me, is the perils of 2FA. All the security experts out there will tell you to enable 2FA for all your logins, all the major services on the internet offer 2FA: Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, blah, blah, blah.

I’ve been using 2FA for about two decades, I believe I was issued my first physical RSA token back in 2003. Now days I have multiple software tokens on my phone – Microsoft Authenticator (for work), Adobe Access —just for creative cloud, damn you Adobe—, Authy. Google has an Authenticator, which I don’t use for anything anymore, I should delete it and most importantly 1Password for as many services as I can use it’s built in code generator.

Google and Adobe, and, to a lesser extent, Apple piss my off with their 2FA. Google and Adobe use proprietary software, I can’t add them to my 1Password for the code generation. I have to use Gmail and Adobe Account Access respectively. Gmail is the worst, I don’t use Gmail’s app for anything else, I use the built in mail app on my phone, but I have to keep Gmail on my phone just to login to Google. Adobe is nearly as bad, they have a dedicated app, it’s not even in the existing Lightroom or Creative Cloud or other Adobe apps I already have. Apple uses a push to logged in Apple devices and since I’m helplessly mired in the Apple ecosystem that’s not really a problem but how do people with only one Apple device do it?

I think 2FA is important, we hear daily about new hacks. I have been on the internet for three decades and using the same email address for almost that whole time. I was foolish, like most people, and used the same password for everything for years. That email address has appeared in many leaks, accordng to haveibeenpwned [haveibeenpwned.com] I have, in fact, been pwned 26 times. And that’s only known pwnings. My old go to password has appeared 4 times, meaning the plain text password with the hashed string is there, so if that hash shows up in another breach the hacker does not even need to break the encryption, they already know the password.

So, these days I use a password manager. I use 1Password. And while there is always a chance that they get hacked an my data get leaked I think the benefits out way the risks. I am able to set a different password for everything and I don’t have to remember them, I only have to remember one master password, I can make that as complex as I want to make it harder to crack, not worth the time of a hacker (If you want to understand how easy it is to crack passwords watch this Computerphile video [youtube.com].

1Password allows me to set 1Password as my 2FA code generator [1password.com] for sites or apps that follow the standard. You can see which sites support it here [2fa.directory] and which use proprietary solutions.

But, for all the extra security 2FA provides you have to be prepared. To make sure you have access to the code generator. If you loose your phone you still need to be able to get a code to login… I can login to 1Password on my computer but what if someone does not have a computer, only their phone? What if I’m overseas without access to my computer? What if you loose your phone so you go to use someone else’s computer to login somewhere and to get the code you need your phone? Sure, they offer other methods to verify, so you select receive code by email, but then you need a 2FA code to login to your email, but you’ve lost your phone… How deep does this rabbit hole go? When it works it’s great but I can see how this whole thing is to complicated for many people.of

This rant isn’t goin anywhere so let me explain, no, there is too much, let me sum up: Passwords suck, but we don’t have anything better yet (people are working: Alternatives to passwords [builtin.com]), 2FA is better, but there are some issues. All of this security is to complicated for most people.