LOL *NSFW* *The new Demote thread*

Rather like Rimmer and the ‘H’ on his forehead, Meta smart glasses wearers, should have a ‘P’ permanently attached to their forehead.

 

This reminds me of a conversation that I once had with a former sales rep at work. You know that the next lines in the conversation are going to be an..... interesting ride when he starts of with "now I'm not a pervert... well yes, I am but........".

It really is kinda sad that the smart glasses are being tarred with this stigma as I have always dreamed of cyberpunk style augmented reality vision. Head-up display navigation, real time translation with subtitles, that sort of thing. But now having glasses that can do that immediately gets you marked as someone dodgy, especially as the dodgy types are doing things like disabling the camera on light...

 

See, thing is, that kinda stuff is still really cool. IMO, anyway.

But what we don’t need is cyberpunk-style goggles/glasses with cameras. Sensors for things like hand-tracking, sure. But cameras that point straight at whatever you’re looking at is where it crosses the line from “potentially useful technology” to “tool for perverts”.

 

But, the sad thing is that perverts will use whatever tools or technology is at their disposal. So how could the potentially cool/life changing/etc stuff be created while limiting their ability to use it for perverted ends?

 

By not designing technology that is inherently creepy, such as a pair of glasses with a camera on it.

I still see the term “glasshole” being used to describe people wearing Meta glasses. That came about as a backlash against Google Glass, and that was eleven years ago.

Right now we have to basically trust that companies like Meta are telling the truth when they claim that, for example, it’s not possible to activate the camera in their glasses without the light coming on to alert people. We’ve got no way of verifying that without risking prison and/or massive fines, because the DMCA (and its equivalents in other countries) makes it a crime to defeat a “technological protection measure”. And everything you might use to try verify for yourself is barred behind a “technological protection measure” of some form - firmware, DRM, encryption, etc. Meta have lied and manipulated consistently, of course no one is going to believe their claims, and security researchers face the threat of prison time if they try to verify independently.

 

I got some flack last year for refusing outright to sell or recommend the Metas to anyone, ever, for any reason.

The (ray)ban is now business wide, whatever your ethical feelings towards them, they're also some of the shittiest glasses ever made and fall to pieces at the hint of a stiff breeze.
It's been very funny to watch the the attitude on them go from rampant enthusiasm, to not selling, servicing, adjusting or glazing them.

Plus the only people showing interest them are exactly that kinds of people you think.

 

But, it’s not necessarily ‘inherently creepy’. Telescopes, binoculars, zoom lenses, camera phones, and the mkI eyeball have all been used for ‘pervy’ purposes. But they weren’t designed for that.

You could have glasses designed with a lot of the features @Almightyrastus suggested without the need for cameras. But for AR, or as a support for visually impaired people, you need them. It’s the same with microphones for language translation. They could also be used to record conversation for nefarious reasons.

We have to recognise some people will misuse technology regardless. The bigger question as a society is how do we deal with the people that do that?

 

FWIW - Meta are now reportedly building no-camera smart specs

https://roadtovr.com/meta-smart-glasses-without-cameras-report/

 

Smart specs with a microphone to add subtitles for hard of hearing? As a voice assistant for people with hand/arm/any below the neck physical disabilities etc? Excellent idea.

Smart specs with a camera? For perfectly able bodied people to record others in secret? WHY ARE YOU?!

 

The difference with those is that they’re obvious. But it isn’t obvious if the camera in a set of smart glasses is in use or not.

If I ever used my Viture One AR glasses in public, it would be obvious that I’m not recording people because they don’t have a camera. I’d look like a pillock, but I can live with that . Similarly, if I saw someone using a VR headset in public (like in a coffee shop or something), then I wouldn’t find that creepy even if I can see that it’s obviously got exterior cameras. I would think they’re a bit of a dork, but I’ve been called that enough times myself .

But someone wearing camera-equipped glasses made by a company known for invasive surveillance and owned by a man who doesn’t view most of the population as “real people”… yeah, that’s someone I would be very uncomfortable being around.

Sure, you need sensors. But those sensors don’t need to be cameras. My phone packs a LiDAR Scanner in the rear (regardless of what I think of its utility). It’s near the cameras, but that’s only because it’s used to assist camera focus - the sensor itself is just a slightly red-ish round disc of plastic on the surface.

 

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.p...e-broadband-plan-to-support-bigger-boats.html

@Arboreal

Can't you get PornHub via Semaphore?

 

Just to remember where I left my keys, coffee, note book and just to record the mad **** that just happens as you walk around Bristol, I often wish I could dump out what I have seen some days as some of it is just unbelievable

A rearview camera on them would be handy too, again, Bristol, pre-mugging warning.

Plus of course, I'm a perv.....

Downside if it is like the rest of the tech, I don't need to worry about the big corps and what they are doing, but my missus who will no doubt find a way to hack into it and watch my every move, I get calls, you are by Tesco can you pop in an buy x/y/z, MI5 has nothing on her ( I know I can disable the stuff, I allow it )

 

Many years ago I was asked by a fossil fuel giant to include exchange servers sitting on ocean going survey ships in a global email transformation to private cloud. They connected via old fashioned satellite (iirc, Inmarsat but I could be mistaken), this was when mElon was still taking credit for others work at PayPal so not many choices.

Why they installed an Exchange server on every ship is a whole other demote conversation.

After quickly determining that a satellite connection wouldn't work, I asked them for the schedule and duration of provisioning stops the vessels operated under. They said 12 hours every 3 months.

I ended up recommending that they might need a longer stop or we were going to have to lift & shift each server back to a secure location to be able to migrate the email data, leading to a period with no historical email access whilst it was done.

They then said, "that's fine, we will just copy all the emails to SharePoint to access them whilst you do that, that shouldn't take long should it?"

They figured out from my laughter that there might be a problem with that suggestion.

I never got to resolve that particular problem, I got moved to another client after the main transformation was done but before they could look at the survey ships, it became someone else's problem.

 

LOL , according to google ai it would have taken the old sat link 155 days to transfer 100GB and a survey ship would have already sailed entirely around the world or more depending on speed and weather.

 

Who needs web devs when you have AI?

 

Who wouldn’t want a “pair of crusty socks”?

 

Is it as good on Linux as i'd imagine?

 

Yeah, it's pretty good - I had it set up as a steam machine for a while and it was bloody good. Just listed it for sale.