I received a rather distraught DM from a Twitter friend last week. They were upset that I was following an account which did nothing but spew out racist bile all day long. Did this mean that I endorsed their hateful views. I was confused. I didn't recognise the specific account, and didn't recall seeing any of their tweets - but I was following them. How? Why? Was it a hack? I did a little…
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A deconstruction of gender through the voices of Siri, HAL 9000, and other computers that talk Considering Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Her, and more, Liz W. Faber explores contentious questions around gender: its fundamental constructedness, the rigidity of the gender binary, and culturally situated attitudes on male and female embodiment. Going beyond current scholarship on robots and…
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The world is a complex place. It is tempting to enforce simplicity upon it to make things easier for computers. Gender is a boolean, no one is older than 99, all text flows left to right, and names are always in English. That makes it nice and easy for us to write computer systems - and who cares if it is dehumanising? Recently, I tried to register with phone company EE. When someone asks for…
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Like most of you, I'm inundated with spam calls. So I have a new solution. When an unknown number calls me, they get routed to this audio file. 🔊 💾 Download this audio file. This was created with Amazon Polly which is free for casual use. I was pretty impressed with the voice quality. Although there are limits to how well you can control the speed and intonation. While there are a nu…
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I'm doing an apprenticeship MSc in Digital Technology. In the spirit of openness, I'm blogging my research and my assignments. This is my paper from the Technical and Digital Leadership module. I think it is fair to say I didn't get on too well with it. I found it very focused on American companies - which wasn't great for someone working in the UK Civil Service. It also had a weird focus on…
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I was inspired by this delightful bookshop clock: David Coates@OziasMidwinterBookshop clock... pic.x.com/1tvwJiI4kn❤️ 39,543💬 468🔁 017:03 - Sun 16 May 2021 I wondered - if it was possible to create a similar clock using books from a single author? So here's my first attempt - using Agatha Christie's novels. I've tried to use first edition covers, where possible. There are a few notable absen…
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Like many of you, I'm inundated with spam calls. I've suffered endless car accidents, my National Insurance Number has been suspended multiple times, and my broadband will be cut off imminently. Wouldn't be nice to screen out all the fraudsters? So I've set up a Bananaphone. When people ring me, they get 30 seconds of my favourite song. Then the call is passed to me. The theory being that my…
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Bit of a boring write-up, but here we go. Taxi app Gett had a content injection flaw in its search function. By searching for an HTML string, it was possible for an attacker to add links or images to a page. It was really hard to contact them - but the threat of media attention sprung them into action. For example, searching for a specially crafted string meant that an arbitrary SVG could be…
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I got a student discount to buy a Google Stadia games system for £60. Seemed like pretty good value. But I didn't buy it - because Google refuses to tell me how much their ecosystem costs. Upfront Cost There's nothing on the main Stadia page which says that you need to pay £9/month to get the 4K version of games. Go on, take a look at https://store.google.com/gb/product/stadia?hl=en-GB. It s…
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Felicity Staples hates reporting on murders. As a journalist for a mid-size New York City paper, she knows she must take on the assignment to research Madison May's shocking murder, but the crime seems random and the suspect is in the wind. That is, until Felicity spots the killer on the subway, right before he vanishes. Soon, Felicity senses her entire universe has shifted. No one remembers…
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I'm an indifferent cook, and mostly-vegan. But I like to be adventurous in my eating habits, when I can. So I decided to follow and then adapt this intriguing recipe for "banana peel bacon". OK. But Why? Food waste is a big issue. People throw away lots of perfectly edible food. They also discard tonnes of packaging. The next logical step, it seems to me, is to have edible packaging. Bananas…
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Here's a little telephony mystery for you - can you find out how much your phone provider charges for 056 calls? (Skip the background and jump to the survey) Background Way back in the mists of time - 2004 - Ofcom decreed that "Voice over Broadband" was going to be the next big thing. VoB (which is like VoIP, but specifically tied to a broadband line) would receive the prefix 056. In that…
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