dent9876543

Not good news.

Although I suppose it's good that it's getting studied.

I wonder if we are measuring, and therefore concentrating upon, things that turn out to be only incidental to how much we, or perhaps some of us, feel stress.

I have same — dead chip.

Cost of replacement is not relevant as the chip and passport are linked, so need a new passport to get that fixed. Not terribly costly. But annoying given that, like you, it is due to no obvious fault on my part.

However it seems pretty routine. All the face-scanning readers eventually (after several attempts and failures) bubble you up into to a process exception that refers you to a human and you get sent into another queue: this time, to be reviewed by a human.

Unless border control are particularly by the book, most of them will simply accept the explanation, and let me directly into the human queue. Sometimes this works out for the better — for all their cleverness, the automated scanners seem particularly tricky for them to keep working reliably. Other times there's lots of families travelling, and I end up waiting a bit longer.

Either way, I'm glad that most of them are alive enough to the issue that time consuming try/fail/repeat/escalate/re-queue part of the process can be skipped.

But China wasn't a honeypot for crime and fraud before they had the firewall, facial rec, and so on.

It is true that many Chinese citizens don't give it a thought.

But there's no demonstrable cause and effect going on there.

Heh. Perhaps not really that different at all.

I thought you may mean that the legal rights provide protection, so one need not worry until deidentification or detachment. Maybe your emphasis was same.

But for clarity, I think we need to worry long before deidentification and detachment — basically the Trusts are not to be trusted, and our legal rights will vanish in a heartbeat.

It rather assumes you could enforce them. Those rights will be great against a responsible outfit. But if the data is exposed in a breach, or if the outfit goes rogue (or if a future government decides to change the law and sell your data, as, by the way, the previous Conservatives tried to do), then you're lost.

We should not be giving money to these mega corps because that also implies giving them our most personal health data. For sure they'll say that we can trust them — maybe it's even true right now, but that can change on a dime, and I don't want to have no option but to trust a crook with no way to pull our public money and my personal data out.

We do need to make things more efficient. But it's lazy of us tech types to fall for centralisation in its most naive form — centralisation of personal data storage always comes with huge risks. We overstate the benefits, and we're not around to pay the price when the benefits fail to pass and the hidden costs creep out.

Instead, we should be pushing the health record out to individuals, and away from the centre. We should own our own data — perhaps it should even reside on our own device. Our governments should be pushing to store less data, not more.

Oh, I do that too.

But to your point about not cheering on NAT, well I will because I see NAT as useful tool.

It is not an opinion well aligned with the preferences of the IETF. But the purist model of transparent end-to-end networking has never sat well with me. It’s just not a thing we want.

That NAT is a problem presumes that we actually want our IoT devices reaching out to the out-of-intranet zone.

NAT gets the blame, and the intranet as a concept is generally a big corp term.

But I prefer my IoT devices not to need to reach out of my network. For me, NAT is an unwitting ally in the fight against such nonsense.

The problem is that OKRs are divorced from the “go do this piece of work” instruction, and so, just like code comments, they quickly become out of date or are outright ignored.

Because of that, the prescription about SMART and focus on delivery is simply wasted effort. At best a duplication.

The good part about OKRs is (/should be) that it forces an alignment conversation between teams and amongst managers. And the performance discussion with manager is often useful and sometimes revealing. More often both focus on metrics, losing the last opportunity to extract value from the concept.

Yes, I think that's correct.

There was an absolute willingness to allow views in support of a fear narrative win through. (No matter their grounding.) The probing/questioning threads were quickly closed down.

Some of it was done by the social media companies acting at the direction of the state. But much of it was actioned by military information security units acting against the general population.

But I think you hit the nail on the point that “it is actionable”.

You argue any such conclusion is not actionable. But it is, and to make example, one can imagine that senators will be more circumspect in sponsoring labs to do this kind of work. If no one held the opinion, they wouldn’t care a hoot.

Is it a certainty? For sure it’s not. But having opinions is worthwhile.

If our hypothetical $1 common cold pill turns out anything like our COVID pill, it will only be effective for a few months before making you marginally more susceptible than you were before.