Why bad technology dominates our lives

[Kona]

Technology only dominates your life if you let it.

Personally, technology makes my life so easy, it's stupid. I've automated a lot of my daily life so I can focus on coming up with ideas to get to the next level.

Set up some rules and follow them. Otherwise, you will be manipulated.

My man here gets it.

Let's look at the ancient art of fishing. I was taught the semi-old fashioned way by old folks, who were taught an even older-fashioned way by even older folks. Everybody is catching fish, nowadays I just catch more.

Why? Because I had great teachers first and foremost. However, the good people at Raytheon have made it so much easier to take the skills to another level. I could go out right this second, in the pitch goddamn dark, and catch a massive ahi. I just radar the fucker down in locations GPS has marked for me. Then I dangle a lure designed by fish scientists at lure headquarters probably wearing white doctor jackets.

People that want to get manipilulated and dominated by technology do it to themselves. Why on earth did I need iPhone 4 or 5 or 6 or 7, or how about the 8? Because I'm a suckered that's why.

If you get caught up in it, and it becomes a see-and-be-seen thing, you screw yourself. You focus too much on the novelty and not actually putting the technology to work for you.

Aloha!

 

[JekyllAndHyde]

There are benefits in going old school and utilising technology to your advantage.
Meet women in clubs and online.
I would rather check the oil levels with a dipstick rather than have it read out to me but for other things I don't mind having technology automating some things for me.

An interesting article that looks deeper into how humans are serving technology and not the other way around.

Just think about your life today, obeying the dictates of technology–waking up to alarm clocks (even if disguised as music or news); spending hours every day fixing, patching, rebooting, inventing work-arounds; answering the constant barrage of emails, tweets, text messages, and instant this and that; being fearful of falling for some new scam or phishing attack; constantly upgrading everything; and having to remember an unwieldly number of passwords and personal inane questions for security, such as the name of your least-liked friend in fourth grade. We are serving the wrong masters.

I think it's been a while since I went camping.
I have a hand-cranked emergency torch.

 

[Aurini]

One of the problem with technology is the decreasing reliability. Just an electronic sensor failure, and a car can't start.

https://www.edn.com/electronics-blo...is-your-car-less-reliable-than-it-used-to-be-

Probably the most reliable vehicle I have had was a 1987 Toyota pick-up with a 22R 4-cylinder engine. There was not much in the way of electronics in it – just a transistorized ignition and a radio. The rest was all mechanical or electromechanical. Not much went wrong with it. All I replaced was an igniter and a set of front hubs. I traded it in at about 160,000 miles (260,000km). It was simple enough I could do most anything in the way of basic maintenance myself.

By comparison, many of today's vehicles are loaded with electronics: "power this" and "electronic that." Vehicles even have electronics subsystems in the rear view mirror. Each piece of electronics itself is fairly reliable. Let's say that each stands a 0.1% chance of failure each year after leaving the dealer's lot. The real issue is that each function may have an MCU and associated bus as well as a host of discrete parts. The number of MCUs, FPGAs, and even ASICs, can be mind-boggling alone. What used to be a dashboard with a few mechanical gauges is now host to scores of complex semiconductors. The powertrain uses more. The accessories even more.

Let's say this is a mid-complexity car with around 200 complex semiconductor-based boards. This means there is a one-in-five chance that something will fail in the vehicle each year! If left alone, after 15 years (the length I kept my Toyota), there could be three failed items. On vehicles I've purchased following the Toyota I have had this very thing happen – and not just with minor systems, but with things that affect the engine and brakes.

Bluemark discussed the "top down" problems of companies bloating their software; this here is the "bottom up problem" of moron consumers pursuing gimmicks instead of improvements.

Most tech commercials feature some silly feature over performance, whether it's cars with dual climate zones, or an iDildo that can stitch together panoramic shots.

I just wish I could buy a 1980s car built with modern materials and techniques, or a smartphone that didn't start shitting the bed 3 months after the purchase of it.

The problem isn't that technology is anti-human - the problem is that it's TOO user friendly to the point where it doesn't even function anymore.

 

[questor70]

As far as software getting worse rather than better, that is a byproduct of complexity. I'm sure a quick google search would return how many lines of code the Windows codebase is or how many people are employed to maintain it, but it's incredibly bloated, even moreso now because of the duplication of both tablet-friendly and classic UIs for many things. Complexity is very hard to manage. Go study the Apollo project and some of the catastrophic failures that they had to deal with or almost had to deal with due to, sometimes, the simplest little mistake. This is true in hardware as well, like the CPU bug in Intel chips that opened up vulnerability to the Meltdown and Spectre viruses. It's also true of anywhere else there is too much complexity--like the beurocracy of big government and big corporations. When things are simpler, they are easier to manage. That's because humanity was designed to be tribal bands and technology little more advanced than basket-weaving and bows and arrows. We've managed to do more and more, but it's like a tower of Babel. One hand doesn't know what the other is doing. Managing large projects is extremely difficult. That is probably why monuments are such a facet of ancient civilizations, as they were sort of a training ground for a people to operate collectively. And once they were done, they provided hard evidence of what could be done in the right circumstances.

 

[911]

Are you saying this isn't progress?

If theres anything in this life that I hate... its how Arnold kicks so much ass but at the same time is a total cuck.

Arnold is all about the pursuit of money and power for its own sake, at any cost. He's basically a high-end shabbos goy.

 

[TheFinalEpic]

3. Online banking and payment services are very convenient but their password requirements are a pain in the ass because they vary so much across different services. I find myself constantly having to create new passwords to fulfill the requirements of a website that are different (not necessarily stricter) from all the existing services. Worse, when I set up auto payments, I don't end up logging in for several months. When I eventually do (e.g. to enter a new credit card), I forget the special password that I created and often end up getting locked out due to trying too many passwords and having to call the company. This wouldn't be a problem if these websites showed the password requirements during login to help me remember, but these IT departments are not run by people who care about efficiency or practicality. They'd rather let the customer service department handle the calls to unblock logins after too many failed retry attempts.

I've actually had the exact opposite experience, that there are banks here that believe that a maximum of 6 character password is adequate.

I left that bank, but the time it would take to brute force a 6 character password with current technology is about as long as it took you to read this sentence. And that is with special characters and such, if its anything simpler than that, it would be an instant crack.

I think that the point made about the fact that software developers don't even really know what they are doing is super accurate.

 

[Handsome Creepy Eel]

Don't pretty much all login services have automatic timeouts, i.e. if you fail the password 3 times you get locked out for 5-10-XYZ minutes? Or do hackers somehow bypass that restriction and manage to spam a billion combinations a second anyway?

 

[kuqezi]

Don't pretty much all login services have automatic timeouts, i.e. if you fail the password 3 times you get locked out for 5-10-XYZ minutes? Or do hackers somehow bypass that restriction and manage to spam a billion combinations a second anyway?

A bit off topic here but...yes and no.

Yes, there is a lock out after some retries but sometimes tied to a specific device/ip/mac etc.

No, because it's easier to spoof IPs and MACs and come from different NAT exit points etc.

I won't go further in this since it gets pretty hairy technically.
Cheers!

 

[kuqezi]

3. Online banking and payment services are very convenient but their password requirements are a pain in the ass because they vary so much across different services. I find myself constantly having to create new passwords to fulfill the requirements of a website that are different (not necessarily stricter) from all the existing services. Worse, when I set up auto payments, I don't end up logging in for several months. When I eventually do (e.g. to enter a new credit card), I forget the special password that I created and often end up getting locked out due to trying too many passwords and having to call the company. This wouldn't be a problem if these websites showed the password requirements during login to help me remember, but these IT departments are not run by people who care about efficiency or practicality. They'd rather let the customer service department handle the calls to unblock logins after too many failed retry attempts.

I've actually had the exact opposite experience, that there are banks here that believe that a maximum of 6 character password is adequate.

I left that bank, but the time it would take to brute force a 6 character password with current technology is about as long as it took you to read this sentence. And that is with special characters and such, if its anything simpler than that, it would be an instant crack.

I think that the point made about the fact that software developers don't even really know what they are doing is super accurate.

The password itself needs to be complicated but as you correctly point out passwords nowadays with multi-threading and multi-cores are not that difficult to break...granted brute force is not always optimal.

The key things today are multi factor authentication and one time passwords together with strong encryption.

Sorry for going off-topic again on my own thread.