The Google Nest Hub was advertising as providing a Cooking Coach. When told to look up a recipe, it would "intelligently" break it down step by step. Several professional reviews of the product recommended getting partly based on having this feature.

The problem is Google removed it and several other promoted features at the end of Feb 2024 (which is over a year ago). There was never a reasonable replacement for it provided. The hub "experience" has never really gotten better, just less "intelligent" and more lobotomized.

To put what Apple has done in Google'ized wording: they refused to release to production a feature which in it's current state would be underutilized (as Google likes to call it). However, Apple selected to do it in a different order, they went from announcement, to admitting it is not ready yet, to continued commitment to get it right. While Google went from announcement, to releasing semi-working/broken, to using the incompetence resulting in the lack of utilization to provide an excuse to have zero commitment to getting it right. From my perspective, the Google way seems much more like a bait and switch. They dangle it somewhat working just long enough to maximize sales of the product and then just take it away.

My perspective, Google's own statements seems to be an admission customers should be able to "just change their Google Nest Hub" for a different product. There has been over a year long delay it providing an intelligent "Cooking Coach." And therefore, Google should issue a recall on the Google Nest Hub.

Now that Brexit has completed, will Boris Johnson be paying National Health Service the 350,000,000 GBP per week via check?

Or will Boris Johnson pay by cash and deliver it via bus?

The beef industry has made such a show of defining the term "meat" and "burger," I just really would like to see the look on their face if grocery stores started having the option for "Slaughterless protein patties" next to the beef industry's products. The term "Slaughterless protein patties" avoids both the words "meat" and "burger." Hence it addresses the stated concerns of the beef industry's that labeling needs to be honest and accurate to avoid misleading the public. Anything else the public might find implied by calling the new option "Slaughterless" seems incidental.

APNIC was the first Regional Internet Registry to claim IPv4 exhaustion status (on April 19, 2011) and has attempted to aggressively hold on to what it can of the final APNIC /8's pool.

At the beginning of 2019, both RIPE NCC and AFRINIC had a larger pools of IPv4 address left than APNIC. Not only has RIPE NCC run out, but AFRINIC has also fallen below APNIC. It is expect that AFRINIC will have allocated all of it's remaining IPv4 addresses before April 2020.

Google still shows global IPv6 adoption below 30%.

When Boeing makes a statement like that "all its aircraft are built to the highest levels of safety and quality," I ask myself what does Boeing have to loose if they are wrong? Would the cost to Boeing be so great for allowing the lost of life that the profitability of the company would be at stake? Or can they gamble with known issues resulting in a lost of life while the life of the company largely not be impacted?

The Boeing 737 MAX 8 victims fund seems to answer this question. Each victim's family is being provided $144,500.

Now let's put the cost of a life in Boeing terms:

Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg has a salary of $23 million. The value of a life to Boeing is worth less than 0.7% of the Boeing's CEO salary.

Boeing net income was $10.46 billion. The value of a life to Boeing is worth less than 0.002% of Boeing's net income.

So, when Boeing says they believe all their aircraft are safe, that gives me about 0.002% to 0.7% increase in confidence from zero they are commitment to addressing every known issue which could compromise my life by using their product.

But at the end of the day, I reached the conclusion that I value my life more than Boeing does. The degree to which their claims are actually backed by hard numbers regarding value just is not nearly good enough. I don't expect Bernie Madoff to help make me rich and I don't expect Boeing to get me to a destination safely.

For people pointing out that the Slashdot title is somewhat clickbait'ish, please consider the article titles that Bloomberg and Reuters selected for this story:

• Self-Driving Uber in Crash Wasn’t Programmed to Spot Jaywalkers
• In review of fatal Arizona crash, U.S. agency says Uber software had flaws

Neither of these are favorable towards Uber. The statement that Uber self-driving cars "were involved in 37 crashes over the prior 18 months" comes straight out of the Reuters article. It is not clear if the 33 involving the self-driving car being hit was due to erratic or non-standard behavior on the part of the automated driving or not. It seems likely several of those 33 accidents could not be prevented by the self-driving car. However, just because it was the one hit does not mean it was not at fault for any of those 33 accidents. One important statement from the Reuters article is: "The Uber car also initiated a one-second delay of planned braking while the vehicle calculated an alternative path or the safety driver could take over." If a self-driving Uber had to break faster because of an artificial impairment delaying performing the breaking, then that might result in the Uber getting rear ended. If Uber didn't include impaired reaction to breaking in the self-driving code then it would give the car behind the Uber a full second more to react to the break lights. If you get rear ended because you are drunk driving and need to stop suddenly, the fact another car hit you does not mean it is not your fault. Also, if you talk to someone working a car insurance company, being hit by another car regardless of who is at fault is still a factor in determining risk to the insurance company in the future.

But the most important points for me come at the end of the Bloomberg article:

• "Less than five months before the accident, Uber had cut back to a single safety driver in its test vehicles. Other companies, such as GM’s Cruise affiliate, use two."
• "The Uber Advanced Technologies Group unit that was testing self-driving cars on public streets in Tempe didn’t have a standalone safety division, a formal safety plan, standard operating procedures or a manager focused on preventing accidents, according to NTSB."
• "Instead, Uber had company-wide values it promoted to its employees, such as 'do the right thing,' the NTSB said."

There have been a number of other articles since March 2018 which paint a picture of Eric Meyhofer having cut corners in establishing reasonable safety practices for Uber ATG public testing. If a commercial truck driver showed the same level of disregard for public safety that Meyhofer seems to have, I am sure that the truck driver would loose both their license and their job. Yet somehow Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi decided to stick with Meyhofer for head of ATG when moving forward with ATG in Pittsburgh. No matter how many times Uber claims they have made changes to ATG, getting rid of Meyhofer has not been one of those changes yet.

I believe there may still be value in Uber developing a self-driving car, but I hope the results of the November 19 meeting show that Meyhofer failed to meet any reasonable moral or ethical code in how he has run the Uber ATG division. Hopefully the NTSB review has enough bite to encourage Uber to find a replacement to be the head of ATG. It is not in the public interest to allow the head of a self-driving car division gamble with the lives of the public during testing on municipal roads.

Eric Meyhofer needs to be held accountable for moving forward with testing on public roads without having established a formal safety plan ahead of time. We shouldn't allow an apple that is so clearly rotten to the core create a seed of doubt about the self driving industry.

If you read AWS marketing about their "cloud security," they make it sound like they thought of almost everything. Yet the criminal case against AWS employee Paige A. Thompson seems to indicate that AWS puts a lot of faith in each individual employee. The degree to which they have policies in place to perform a double check the actions of each employee's actions to catch a rogue before damage is done does not seem adequately in place.

If Amazon files a protest with the Government Accountability Office, their actions may result in an official government document that is open to a Freedom of Information Act request which questions the security of AWS. While Trump might have cross a line regarding his handling of Jeff Bezos, the Washington Post and Amazon, the DoD and GAO may still be within their right to bring up other issues regarding AWS security. An official response from the GAO may result in tech journalist re-visiting questions about the Capital One data breach that AWS rather not answer or even be asked.

I personally would like as much transparency as possible and hope that Amazon does file a protest with the GAO.

Normally I would just write a statement like this up to politicians being stupid. When Senator Stevens claims that the internet is a series of tubes, he really believed what he was claiming. But I am finding it really distributing that someone with John Potucek's experience of over 17 years as a Senior Manufacturing Engineer makes such a seemingly stupid statement. He appears to have the education and skills to understand the rare earth metals that go into each cell phone and what is really at stake but still wants to suggest buying a replacement is always preferable to mandating repair information be published? He has to know his stated position does not serve the interest of the general public in the term long--but he doesn't seem to care. What happened to make him so jaded and toxic?

The courts did not always side with the ADA covering the web. Access Now, Inc. v. Southwest Airlines Co. was probably the basis of Domino's lawyers claiming the ADA only applies to brick and mortar locations. In the case of Southwest Airlines, they had been providing web only deals. Anyone that was blind could not take advantage of the deals because Southwest refused to put text ALT tags on the majority of images that made up the navigation of the website. Southwest Airlines indicated it would be too costly to add the text required for a blind person to browse their site. They also refused to provide any exception for a blind person to order the web-only deals via phone.

It is a huge step forward to get this recognition that the web is not a completely separate world. For a blind person to have reasonable equal access in today's world, they need to have the protections of the ADA for accessing online resources. The W3C has published Web Content Accessibility Guidelines but they have been ignored by companies like Southwest Airlines and Dominos. Instead, these companies have favored a web site that is heavily dependent on javascript and graphics with no reasonable alternative for text to speech rendering.

This is a common practice on InterActiveCorp owned dating sites.

The fact you are seeing similar conflict of interest in policy of Tinder as happens on Match should not be a surprise given they both owned by the same parent company.

IAC also owns Plenty Of Fish and OkCupid. So when someone because disgusted by Match's predatory behavior and sign up for an alternative, in reality they are just ditching paying for one IAC owned dating site for yet another IAC owned dating site.

Huawei smart phones used to include the option to unlock the bootloader by submitting a request for an unlock code on their website.

Once the bootloader was unlocked, the owner could root the phone and more easily review the firmware. They could also replace the firmware if they decided they trusted a third party more.

And then by Huawei policy, that just suddenly stopped.

Owners of Huawei phones that had not unlocked the boot loader now had no official way to do so. They could have a $600 phone they were not comfortable with and Huawei position remained that this was a "better user experience."

In comparison to a $600 investment, the 5G equipment investment to be made by American businesses will be MUCH larger. Once Huawei collects millions of dollars, what is the stop them for having another "better" experience policy change? This new more "open" version of Huawei still has not brought back the boot loader unlock site.

What will an USA company do if critical updates are available under a Huawei policy that prohibits the review of the update?

Will the USA company just continue using the equipment without the critical updates?

Will the USA company abandon a multi-million dollar investment to switch to another equipment provider?

Or will the USA company be forced to accept the change in Huawei policy?

To me it looks like Huawei is asking us to accept their form of vendor lock-in and just trust they won't bait and switch on their policies again. If Huawei was serious about being a much more open company, the boot loader unlock site would be back again--it is not.

The location tracking part of the app I was kind of on the fence about.

When I was working at an university, the network team had your device MAC address and the what/when of the university public wifi access points the devices had associated with. Confirming with the system administration team in the same department could result in discovering the IP address and what university systems that IP address had signed into. If we had problems with a misbehaving laptop such as malware that impacted university services, we should trace down who was using the laptop, where they had been and if still active on the network we could figure out to about 150 feet where they are.

University of Alabama is using a different method of location tracking and accuracy (the app seems to include support for GPS and bluetooth tracking in addition to wifi based). They also have very different intentions on who and how the tracking is being used on along with a much broader scale. But technically we already had been collecting location information as well.

But then there is the "Retrieve running apps" permission FanMaker applies in the Android Tidy Loyalty Points app manifest. That is information we never dreamed to ask students to be willing to disclose to us. The privacy policy for the app also fails to make clear when this information is collected and how it is used. In fact, the privacy policy is extremely vague given the type of information they are collect. Depending on your interpretation of the word "purpose," you could completely different readings on what the privacy policy allows them to do. I personally would not be at all comfortable with the "Retrieve runnings apps" permission used with these privacy policies.

As to Coach Nick Saban's heavy handed stance on justifying the app, he could easily address the privacy concerns by demonstrating how he wouldn't be concern if the information was collected for himself. Have fanmaker release an app that allows geo-stalk and monitoring the running apps of Nick Saban. If he is willing to accept this level of monitoring 24x7 for himself, then I think that would change the context of his statements. When he says that everybody "got to make the sacrifice," does that mean he is willing to? Where is Nick Saban right now and what apps is he running? Do the students deserve to know? Does he want to be No. 1 in giving up his privacy or No. 4? Is he willing to do everything to be No. 1?

I believe under the YouTube terms of service, such an application would be considered a violation. Other companies, including Microsoft, have attempted to provide alternative apps to the official ones and unless the app flies under YouTube's radar unnoticed they eventually shut it down. The end result is no third party interface to YouTube is ever allowed to get too popular.

Under YouTube's rules, if you want a feature such as an interface for parents to perform curation that is then enforced by the app, you must request that of YouTube and hope they see a reason to perform the request. Since YouTube's ToS gives them a monopoly on the UI, they have a clear conflict of interest as they never have to fear a competing UI to their content gaining popularity. If the alternative that provides the features they don't want to take the time to officially provide does gain too many users, they simply just revoke the API key or take legal action against the author.

At some point, I would really like to see Alphabet / Google / YouTube admit that handling of the amount of content on YouTube requires third-parties to be heavily involved. Content curation and comment moderation are areas that other companies have performed better at than YouTube has but those companies are locked out of heavily limited on what they are permitted to do when it comes to YouTube.

Larry Page clearly pulled a bait and switch as he built up Google. He lulled people into a false idealized view of a trustworthy company that promotes an open web following open standards and wide open APIs. In reality his company now provides a heavily controlled terms of access with proprietary APIs that function in a self-serving way on behalf of Google.

I have a hard to buying that such a reveal would break on CBSN. While CBS News has tried hard to have low political bias, they still seem to have editorial bias. We have had plenty of proof in the past that CBS will take part in editorial interference to make sure CBS and it's subsidiary "journalist" provide a message that helps the CBS agenda.

A message that using data to manipulate is the path to controlling the future goes against CBS a couple ways:

• It is bad for several of CBS advertisers to indicate data is being used to manipulate
• Such a reveal all brings the CBS All Access "Privacy" Policy into question

Even 60 Minutes interview with Mark Zuckerberg is softballing and avoiding the questions of manipulation via data collection rather than being "hard-hitting journalism." The types of issues that ProPublica writes about Facebook will never appear on CBS because it is against CBS' interest to raise those types of issues.

That is not to say CBS is all bad. I am just saying in comparison to a non-profit news source like ProPublica, the conflict of interest and manipulation of "journalism" at CBS starts to show through.

To provide a deep fake of Zuckerberg saying what he did not really say with CBSN logo in the corner just feels very similar to if the entire deep fake was spoken in Simish. Just doesn't really fit together in a way that could be remotely believable.

The second generation GPS satellites have 2 Rubidium atomic clocks and 2 Caesium atomic clocks. Both of the elements are in the Alkali metals column of the periodic table and appear as elements #37 and #55. Other Rubidium oscillator providers claim to off by less than 2 ns per day. For NASA to claim their Mercury based atomic clock drifts by no more than 1 ns every 10 days is really impressive.

However, given Mercury is #80 on the periodic table, I suddenly recall a Marty McFly quote: "This is heavy"