[Richard]

Bob, I understand that though the proposed production company is foreigner owned, the actual production plant is in the UK, so exchange rates and tax payments might be protected. It also begs a question, why was De La Rue so far off on the costs and, I also understand, their technical compliance. Did they hope to wing it one wonders, hoping that no one would read the price or compliance statements? Perhaps they were hoping for a because its us contract award. They, or one of their senior bods, have been stirring the witches brew.

[Richard]

Well I tried three times to respond and nothing ‘took’.

Ed, I very much agree, though I wonder how much long term hard will have been done to the digital slave market.

Perhaps some will wake up to the fact that so called targetted marketing is hardly better than scatter guns and so narrow their remit to everyone’s benefit.

[Richard]

I might have misread the item but once more it appeared to be a herd identifying tool that was then used to too what appeared to be slightly appropriate morsels in the direction of those herds thought or found most susceptible to the content. It was never, so far as I could see aimed on the basis of personal markers for particular people. So not a ‘I see Mr Smith you like this so you should vote for Trump and stop that criminal Clinton’, or even a more furtive ‘Mr Smith remember to like Trump so much nicer than the criminal Clinton’. Clearly the message about ‘criminal Clinton’ would be most likely to resonate with certain view holders, so could be and was pushed to the greatest extent but mainly on a semi targetted basis.The ‘message’ that ‘criminal Trump’ is now bashing Amazon in the hope of helping his old business buddies with their rumbling real estate is not yet being pushed so successfully.

[Richard]

I had a beard and some of the most stupid sideburns ever for a while in the 1970s. My brother’s hair and beard give me fair prototype warning of what I might look like now. It is not a good look in my wife’s eyes so best avoided.

[Richard]

I used to have a 14,000 mile limit on one car and suddenly realised when the MOT was due that I had done about 13,500. Cue a quick swap to the the other car for a while and I ended up just about on the limit that year. Now I only do less than 4,000 so dropped the annual total down on that one to something closer to the expected total @ 6000 it is now giving a good cushion. All mileage is now more or less local, supermarket, doctor or hospital, though one or two hospitals are a little further away, a 55 or 60 mile round trip is about the longest. It was the regular longer round trips two or three times a week a week that build up the total. Once or twice a year we might see my wife’s family and that is only about 100 miles round trip so I am comfortable with the mileage limits on the cars. If all else fails I will dig my wife’s car out – because of all of the health issues it has done less than 2000 miles in total and is now 5 or 6 years old… I do find that increasing the journey lengths was not as challenging as I expected, but after a longer trip I want to sit down for an extended rest. Longer hospital round trips with our daughter are the most tiring because of the strain of her possibly brewing up to a meltdown, seizure or something else. Every safe arrival home is a walk away success.

[Richard]

Well Tippon you are not far off in that assessment. We did manage a holiday in 2009…

Hospital visits don’t normally need the map function the cars go there so often they could almost get there without a driver, just follow their wheel ruts, except when a route round an obstruction is needed. I have a trip to another different hospital in April, but I know the route there. It is not the first visit though this time it is for me not to retrieve someone from an unfortunate self inflicted injury. Most times I only travel up to 30 miles in a day though that can be made up from 8 or more local trips, though on many days I do not get out of the house.

My wife and I did once manage a drive round Europe, we picked up a new car from Fiat in Turin drove round the area almost into Yugoslavia, then through Switzerland Germany and France, but that was along time ago in 1975. It was all paper maps and guess and god for navigation back then. During the whole trip we were only stopped once, in Surrey at about 3:00 a.m. in a Police roadblock. I guess we looked a right pair, tired driving, an Italian registered car that was full to the gunnel’s. I had a choice of three licenses, UK, IDP, or one in Arabic and all the documentation for the car – in Italian. I think I still have the Italian log book somewhere. It was all part of a different life.

[Richard]

I might have phrased my description a little off when I called it an accessory. My mobile is used for family emergency calls though not quite the same scale and type as yours. I have written of the need for hands free as for example driving along on a fast dual carriageway with a passenger who has started to have a seizure, or heading off to pick them up from one point only to get a message to pick them from a hospital in another direction makes the mobile telephone more than an accessory. Voice is essential as it is real time, text is not real time and cannot be processed when your hands are full. I understand the phone’s value to you and though a different form to me as well. Most of the time the rest is close to fluff for me.

[Richard]

Bob, memories are great and thank you for sharing some of them with us.

[Richard]

Weren’t we nicknamed the borrowers in Iraq?

[Richard]

Yes Steve and Bob, I agree with those sentiments. Hospitals are our main tour destinations these days and some are really huge sprawling places. The two things I don’t like are their ways of inventing new names for once familiar entrances and the cost of the car parks. The internet cannot solve the second but can sure as heck help with the first. Mobile access and a mapping function was a real time life saver when roads were blocked by silly events on the way to the hospital, but it helped us to get there only 10 minutes late. We are back there again this Tuesday, first thing. With younger daughter on the cusp of one of her melt down phases and elder daughter’s two dogs staying with us, a dash through rush hour traffic via the motorway access roundabout is not a happy prospect. My emerging electronic friend will be on standby to bail us out again I hope. I might try the full ‘bypass hell route’ this time and miss out the town we would otherwise go through.

One issue that email and texts do not suffer is wet mail problems. Some years back one of my wife’s friends was scheduled to pass via the nearby airport but the flight number on her letter was water damaged. Anyway we left a party at about 01:00 hours rolled up at the airport and drew an airside pass. So with sketchy details we were stumped as to where the friend could be, there were three or four flights in at the time. I bet passengers still talk about the time their plane was searched at 02:00 hours in the morning by two people my wife in a long evening dress, who had clearly left a party to turn out. You could feel the crowd sink a little lower into their seats when a chap bowled up with SECURITY in large bright letters on his top and asked if we had found who we were looking for.

We found the friend in the shop in the transit area during her stop over.

[Richard]

Ed P wrote:

their Quartermasters could beg, borrow or steal nearly anything they wanted and fix the records accordingly.

I have heard that before, perhaps it was just another version of initiative working I guess.

[Richard]

I you have expressed similar views in the past. I don’t use social media, so I have not suffered any adverts. I have no concerns about a domestic right wing mob take over my concerns are very different. The so called Greens or the Water Melons, (green on the outside and totally red all the way through) concern me far more. Their agenda offers benefits to outsiders and nothing domestically. The hostility to anything which could  serve our rather than other’s interests is  with actual as well as threatened violence is used to drive their desires. In fact such efforts are stamped on many other protests many of which are aimed at weakening attitudes. Remember the efforts of the money grubbing ‘Nick’ who fooled many including incompetent police with his fantasies, while real child abuse was being ignored because of PC issues? A string of real cases is now being disclosed involving both sex  and drug dealing involving children, anyone for a ‘county line’?

I see this as part of dangerous pattern eroding public confidence. Implosion rather than invasion is my concern. Hearts and minds stuff is far more insidious as no one can see an enemy with which to deal.

[Richard]

Bob,  several years before father died I noticed that he was in the habit of rushing about and risking his stability in the process. I thought for a moment, then said, remember the army training; do things by numbers it will slow you down enough to allow you to catch up with yourself. He then admitted, he never did basic training, perhaps a very little bit of drill and a few times of guard duty. Due to a chemistry background was put almost straight to work leading a team dealing with  disarming and disposing of explosive devices, though not your UXBs. After that little discussion I wondered how he managed to survive the war if he had used the same rush and clatter approach to dismantling shells that he showed in his late 80s and early 90s. So not all army training reached every part for every person. Part of his explosives disposal methods in this country included helping the food production effort – by blowing up anything in the way of farm production, tree stumps, rocks, anything that did not move. So forget ‘if it moves salute it, if it doesn’t move paint it white’, his lot followed ‘if it dosen’t move blow it out of the way’, so I guess they did use the ‘initiative working’ method.

[Richard]

Yes Ed, code is a bit like a brick of explosive, without something to initiate action it can just sit there as a logical brick. It needs some form of initiator just as explosive needs its primer and/or detonator, though some may self initiate and detonate themselves through shock. I have connected dodgy boot drives from one computer to a host in the past with interesting and in fact beneficial automatic effects. The host OS examined the guest drive and promptly announced that there were errors it would fix. The previously non booting drive was repaired all quite autonomously.

In this case Malwarebytes had found nothing more it did not like, so the PUP issue should be removed, though one can still wonder though finally the machine at issue has finally been declared safe and stable. The user was clearly guilty of unwise use on a premeditated basis.

[Richard]

I am still wondering after reading all of the responses if there is a stereotypical pensioner with stereotypical needs and interests. In a way this is the issue over social networking data mining, a tag can loosely assemble a group with some things in common, yet they will still not share essential parts of their interests, needs, hobbies or capabilities. I guess I think of the issue a bit like a help yourself buffet serving, unless ideas begin to match a person’s needs, or more especially can prime them into starting to think something is of use, it will probably not achieve ‘prime time’ acceptance. I’ve had a mobile telephone for over 20 years and had one for a while as far back as the mid 1980s, but it is still a life accessory rather than a life essential.

[Richard]

Ed, if I correctly read what you are saying it is rather along the lines of, ‘most ducks can swim while budgies tend only to splash or drink with water’. I will set aside the old established process of linking relationships to (hopefully) reconstruct identities, it has been used for a long time in all sorts of walks of life. However sticking with the ducks and water analogy, data miners realise that the greatest chance of finding ducks is near to duck ponds, and feeding them something they like will get their attention, but is this really news? If you replace ducks with people the same thing applies, those who like football are probably likely to either have a Sky subscription, another on-line subscription or possibly a season ticket, so advertise products thought to appeal more closely to that grouping on or near football grounds. What a single member of any such group will or will not do is wide open to discussion and guess work. Of course some will have key buttons that will fire them up, that is how advertising is supposed to work, but does it hit the target every time? Scatter gun approaches are still the popular game. I get the same holiday offers that everyone else gets or news of wonderful competitions with the chance to watch some football in Russia. Perhaps some would really wake up and enter, I am just never going to be part of that group. (This example came from a company that should have its own internal data resources on me, so a classic fail.) This why I am with Steve, wishing for better targetting to filter the junk.

Bob, I understand that the ever so helpful bounty packs come directly from a commercial relationship between the hospital and the sales representative who is paid to capture data from expectant women. I suspect similar relationships exist for some other products. For a while I received a load of age related contacts, but none of them were of the slightest relevance and thankfully that flow has more or less dried up. I do get regular pitches from investment consultants, the recycling bin gets well fed. Like you, I also have a very jaundiced approach to ‘surveys’, for a while I would enter junk data, but now I no longer have the time to waste or the inclination to waste it any more.

[Richard]

That should bee good news, until the user gets hold of it once more.

[Richard]

Steve, yes I agree targetted might just spark an interest. Currently the targetting is still poor, very poor. ‘

We saw you bought a carrot peeler, here are another dozen alternatives you might like.’

Is just not targetted at all! Perhaps offering a saucepan might be better.

At least I don’t get too many offers for women only personal products any more, so I’ll call that progress.

I have to suggest that limiting what you put out so inferencing has less to go on is a good idea. As for movement of the line, I had some early insights into the coming power of data analysis. I also had sight of the ways that data mining could also go horrible wrong, as associations between totally unconnected matters were easily made.

[Richard]

Ed, it is possible that the HD could contain some self replicating code that might try to spread onto a drive in a connected PC. Would it be best to ensure that at the very least it was connected to a non Windows machine to scan or copy the files. A read around the subject suggests that if it really is a root kit infection then it would likely be a far better use of your time to thoroughly wipe the drive and start again. If you first salvage any wanted files they would need to be very thoroughly inspected for hidden nasties. Care would need to be taken over how any files were copied and the use of a non windows OS, such as a live CD/DVD might be wise.

If you do restore the machine, make an image of the drive so that in future restoration is made a little easier.

Some went as far as to suggest removing the HD and replacing it as the risk of not removing the rubbish is too great compared with the ongoing costs of repeating the exercise.

[Richard]

The Duke wrote:

Set you accuracy to high, if you want a better track. It will eat a bit more battery though.

Yes Steve, it is already set to high, I hate to think what it would be like if set to low. Perhaps I would be shown as being on holiday somewhere – that is about the only way that will ever happen.

As to Ed’s point about Google’s and more particularly others’ roles in drawing inferences I am not clear as to how effective or otherwise these inference engines really are. They generally rely on soft data such as views expressed or social interactions, probably including some data on purchasing habits. Is it not something we all do every day?

We make snap judgements all the time, maybe we cross the road, or turn round and move away from something or someone we do not wish to encounter. The better our data, the safer we feel making a judgement. Perhaps the issue is where and when a line should be drawn and not crossed. At the moment false judgements flourish. The mother of a child at my granddaughter’s school lost a baby in doubtful circumstances. The mother blames the child’s vaccinations rather than the fact that she went out drinking. When she woke after sleeping it off the baby was dead. Her inference was that the vaccination killed the baby not her drinking with her soon to be ex-partner. A whole illusory heap of false theories has now been built about how bad all vaccinations are as e.g. smallpox was eradicated by soap and water… Foolish people still tout long discredited folk lore so people with limited understanding draw the inference that an onion will prevent illness entering a home. This based on an ancient story that an onion drew bugs out of the air because when the onion was cut open, (long before viruses were known about or could be evaluated) it was full of ‘bugs’.

So in my book inferences are never substitutes for substance. In some cases they are best guesses but in others they are no more than dangerous illusions.

[Author]

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