Blog - Elixis Technology

What Is Short-Circuiting?

Elizabeth Technology December 5, 2023

What’s a Short Circuit?

A short circuit is when something comes into contact with an electric current, and unintentionally gives it a shorter path. For example, sticking a fork into an active toaster will result in the fork redirecting the electricity through the fork, because it’s an easier path. Fun fact: the reason the coils inside the toaster get hot is because the path the electricity travels through has a lot of resistance. The fork is a much shorter path, but the other end is usually connected to a human body – which doesn’t handle electricity running through it very well. Old fashioned Incandescent lightbulbs work in the same way, but they’re juiced up so much that they produce both heat and light.

So why does this break things inside the computer? Well, not everything in the computer is meant to run off of 120V of pure outlet-supplied house power. If that flow of electricity comes into contact with a piece of hardware not made to handle it, the hardware fails, sometimes irreparably.

Static shock on the very delicate parts can short circuit them too. Be sure you’re grounded and charge-free before touching the computer’s insides!

What’s a Hardware Failure?

The difference between hardware and software is the difference between the machine and the things it does, basically. The CD tray is hardware, but the disk it’s holding contains software. A video game is software, the controller you use to interact with it is hardware! Music files on your computer? Software. Speakers to listen to it? Hardware! Hardware failure can be anything from the Wi-Fi receiver getting bent out of shape, to the CD tray getting stuck, or pins/solder coming loose inside the machine, and while software failure can be caused by hardware trouble, it can also happen spontaneously. If the computer blue screens? That’s a software failure. If the fan starts to sound like it’s hitting something repeatedly? Hardware!

The really fun issues are the ones that could be both: is your screen showing funny colors because a cord is pinched, or because something important in the software for the display was deleted?

What’s a Kernel Failure?

A kernel failure is when things happen to confuse the kernel, the essential bit of software that keeps programs from trying to pull the same file all at once. If you’ve ever worked with Microsoft Word, you might’ve experienced trying (and being unable) to move a file in the file selector while the document is still open. The kernel doesn’t control that, but it’s a similar principle. The file selector won’t move the doc as long as it’s open because you’re also using it – more specifically, Word is using it and can’t share. You have to close the document to let the file selector ‘use’ it to move it.

The kernel operates on similar principles: when one thing is using essential software, the kernel keeps other things from using that software until the first program is done with it. It keeps a schedule of what programs get to use which assets and when. While that might make it sound like it’s a software thing, both hardware and software can cause kernel panics. Incompatible driver extensions and incompatible or corrupted RAM are two of the most common causes.

What’s a Blue Screen Error, and What’s a Crash?

If you’ve ever owned or worked long-term on a Windows computer, you might have seen this one before :The Blue Screen of Death. A blue-screen happens when an illegal operation confuses the computer and causes it to shut down. For example, if a program’s permissions are read only, but another program tries to write on it, the computer may bluescreen and restart. If a program tries to use a piece of software reserved only for the operating system, the computer blue-screens and restarts. Permissions violations, and illegal operations both cause blue-screening, but hardware failure is sometimes a cause too.

A crash is a pretty broad term. Anything that brings the computer to a stop can be a crash. Overloading it? Crash. Blue screen? Considered a crash. It shuts off randomly, and the tech can’t tell what caused it? Crash!

Sources: http://thexlab.com/faqs/kernelpanics.html

What is a short circuit?

https://www.explainthatstuff.com/electrictoasters.html

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/sbs/windows/troubleshoot-blue-screen-errors-5c62726c-6489-52da-a372-3f73142c14ad?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

(original page no longer available – web archiving service is fundraising as of December 2020, you have been warned) https://web.archive.org/web/20030823202532/http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=150314

Water Proofing and Phones

Elizabeth Technology November 30, 2023

Getting your phone wet used to be a death sentence. It still is, for a lot of phones, but it used to be too.

Non-Smartphone Devices

Retail computers usually stay far away from water unless it’s for cooling purposes. There’s no reason to tack on another year of development, parts, and labor for a computer that will never get close to a pool or ocean. Of course there are computers meant for the water, but they’re not normally made to also be used at a desk on the regular. Usually. As such, certain elements inside retail computers may be waterproofed, but not the whole thing.

Flip phones and smart phones are much the same way. There was no reason to waterproof until a market started appearing for clumsy folks, and people who get pushed into pools. Even then, Samsung, Motorola and Sony didn’t make that a feature for every phone they sold.

Once the speakers, flip phones, and other computer types got on board, it was only a matter of time til smartphones joined the party.

Waterproof, or Water Resistant?

Waterproofing a phone is difficult, and not because of the screen: all the buttons, speakers, and ports have to be sealed as well, and it has to hold up over time. Once a user comes to expect dunking their phone in water, they’ll continue to do so. Taking pictures in a pool, listening to music in the shower, scrolling online in the bath, etc. All kinds of things they’re very much not used to doing right now can turn into habits.

User wear and tear had to be taken into consideration, and at the same time whatever they surrounded the buttons and openings with had to be lightweight. Around the screen, lightweight sealants already existed, but around the buttons? A whole new story. If it were easy, it would have been done with the first smartphones! Right now, waterproofing comes down to gluing the components inside of the device together really well and using rubber gaskets around buttons.

Interfaces

This construction method isn’t perfect, but it retains as much of the interface that users are used to using as is possible. Buttons are still on the sides and front, ad there’s no extra resistance from the gaskets. It’s a compromise. Water will eventually get past the seal, and submerging the device too deep puts the rubber under so much pressure that it fails.

Ratings are how manufacturers tell users what their phone can hold up to. By most standards, the best phones on the market are water resistant, not waterproof. IPM, or Ingress Protection Measure, tells the user how resistant the phone is to foreign bodies and water. The rating starts with IP and is followed by two separate numbers: the first number tells the user how resistant the device is to solids, while the second tells the user about the moisture resistance.

Most phones aim for IP67, meaning it’s rated at a 6 (out of a 0-9 scale) for solids and 7 (out of 0-9 again) for liquids. This equals 30 minutes under about three feet of water before the phone begins to leak. Perfect for folks who didn’t want to worry about their phone during a sudden rainstorm, or the clumsy among us who drop their phone into the sink, in a pitcher, in soup, etc. and can retrieve it right away. It’s not for beach or pool use. It just means the phone’s not dead if you happen to drop it while taking an above-water picture.

Water Resistant (Up to Thirty Minutes)

Samsung’s first cutting edge smartphone with water resistance was the Galaxy Note 7. It was a breakthrough moment for waterproofing technology! But it wasn’t the first: Motorola made a phone that met IP67 standards, the Motorola Defy. It was a smaller device, built with a heavy-duty case and rubber plugs for the cord holes. It was definitely a ‘lifestyle phone’, the kind you’d get if you camp or fish on the regular. As a result, it was… a little ugly.

Samsung’s new Galaxy Note 7 took the Motorola’s sturdy design and lightened it up for the average consumer who’s only going to be using it just outside the pool. It had the same rating, too – for some reason thirty minutes seems to be the tap-out for water resistant and water proof phones, even today. Invest in a case or a waterproof camera if you want to take pictures while diving!

Stopgap: Cases

(Note: this is not a buyer’s guide. This shouldn’t be treated as an endorsement).

Most touchscreens rely on conductivity, or how your fingers conduct charge. Most phones won’t work if your hands are wet, because the water is also conducting the charge, and it confuses the screen. You might have noticed your phone trying to zoom in or spasming when drops of water are on the screen.

For gloves, the fabric usually keeps the charge from conducting at all because most cloths are insulators, meaning they don’t carry charge very well. Gloves have to be specially made with conductive finger pads if the user wants to use that phone while gloved. The same goes for cases: if a case is going to be usable, it has to be made with conductivity in mind.

But wait. Water is conductive. How do you get a case that reacts to touch and not to water? The answer is also difficult! Most cases that keep water out and allow you to touch the screen are pouches, and even then, not all of them work underwater. Some are simply designed so that you can keep your phone in your pocket when wading, or kayaking – you’re not expected to actually be using your phone.

The difference is both in the material of the case and the phone: the phone has to be programmed to know what water ‘looks’ like on its screen, and sort it separately from your inputs, and the material has to be conductive enough for touches to get through. Thinner material gets better readings to the phone, but thicker material has fewer fake inputs from the water. It’s a challenge! The best way to get what you’re looking for out of a waterproof casing is to look at reviews, and the IP rating. If it’s 67 or above, you’ll know it can handle being submerged for a little bit.

Anything above is a bonus, and means it can go deeper in the water for longer. Look at what sports the manufacturer is advertising it for: are you meant to be using it on boats, or is it for snorkeling? And if it has anything about touchscreen use, be sure to test it before you really test it, using your sink or bath. If the screen’s not responding through the bag, you’ll know ahead of time.

Sources:

Apple, If Samsung And Sony Can Make A Waterproof Phone, So Can You

https://www.androidauthority.com/first-water-resistant-android-phone-1153031/

https://www.androidauthority.com/best-waterproof-pouch-cases-smartphones-689477/

https://www.hoista.net/post/42353282830/the-evolution-of-the-first-waterproof-phones

https://uk.rs-online.com/web/generalDisplay.html?id=ideas-and-advice/ip-ratings

https://www.travelandleisure.com/style/travel-accessories/best-waterproof-phone-case

How to Make Your Phone Waterproof & What Mistakes to Avoid

What Is A V-Tuber Concert?

Elizabeth Technology November 28, 2023

A V-Tuber is the colloquial name for a virtual entertainer puppeted by a real person. A digital character onscreen blinks, moves their hands, looks around, and opens their mouth to talk at the same time as the person controlling them behind the scenes does. The software to do this is quite complex – the program controlling the model often works through a camera pointed at the real user (although some people do use things like pedals and controllers to control the model’s actions). A one-to-one real-time movement-matching simulation like the kind V-Tubers use are no easy feat, and they’re always getting better. The more recent ones are good enough to dance live with!

Why Have Concerts With These Things?

There are a couple of reasons. Firstly, the V-Tuber’s onscreen model can do things humans just can’t! The model can wear outfits that defy gravity, it can jump off cliffs or up through clouds, it can jump through sparklers and fireworks onscreen without ever risking anyone being burned, and it can do all this while still tethered to its owner and dancing in time. Speaking of which, while pre-recorded routines are possible, the singer is often still singing and dancing live offstage as well, although the complexity and mix of the routine can vary from show to show. It’s still live!

Secondly, a V-Tuber is mainly recognized through their model – not their own face. This grants them anonymity that many pop stars and internet celebrities don’t have, as well as a break from a cutthroat pop industry that insists singers be young, size 0, and pretty for as long as possible even at the expense of their health, both long and short term. The V-Tuber model does not suffer to meet these nightmarish standards, and the singer behind the model can focus harder on their voice and dancing.

Even for the ones who focus on video games and livestreaming instead of dancing and singing, the anonymity of their V-Tuber model is a serious plus. While it doesn’t eliminate the risk of being doxxed, it makes existing in public a lot easier! Walking around a Twitch or gaming convention anonymously is just not possible for YouTubers who show themselves on-screen. For V-Tubers, it’s the default.

A Matter of Movement

With the pros out of the way, there are cons: namely that if they started out on a platform like YouTube, they may not be ready for a concert. A performance at a Cosplay Arts Festival in July of 2023 went viral on TikTok because the person on screen, the V-Tuber Dacapo, wasn’t dancing. The most movement came when the character model’s bangs were swept out of his eyes during an intense part of the song, which made his many fans in the crowd go absolutely nuts, and even that didn’t come with an animation. While the person behind Dacapo did sing the cover of the song themselves, the model wasn’t rigged for anything more intense than looking around and moving side-to-side – the most movement he could do live was sway. One arm was frozen in place holding a cigarette as a stylistic choice, and this was not changed for the concert. Neither was the framing of the character, who is normally only seen from the chest up. This culminated in a performance with some very technically impressive singing paired with the sort of setup you see from livestreamers, but blown up twenty feet tall. (He has a replay on his official channel, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2FNn8d5o4A&ab_channel=DacapoCh.%E3%80%90ARP%E3%80%91)

It could hardly be called a waste of money, because the concert itself was free with the purchase of a ticket to the cosplay con it was hosted at, but it felt stiff. That model is part of a group of V-Tubers pulled together by the Thailand-based Algorhythm Project, which put Dacapo into a boy group with a couple of other singers. He debuted under that project – he was the fastest-growing member of it. This guy didn’t get famous by accident. For them to not have an alternate model for concerts, or at least modify the current one so it could move more freely, feels like an oversight! Especially when other V-Tubers prove it can be done.

That said, the next concert will probably be better – no performer has a flawless first stage show, no matter what their tech looks like.

Sources: https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/vtuber-dacapo-receives-support-from-ironmouse-after-concert-sparks-backlash-2206437/

Are We Forgetting How To Curate Our Online Experience?

Elizabeth Technology November 23, 2023

If you’re on TikTok, you may have heard of the Bean Soup fiasco. A woman made a recipe video for an iron-rich bean soup, only to have a comment section full of people asking if they could omit the beans. While this should be a problem with an easy and obvious answer – don’t make a bean soup if you don’t like beans in soup – it demonstrates a larger problem with the direction the internet is headed.

Algorithms

The internet as it exists today defaults to a conveyor belt of advertisements with some entertainment slotted in, unless one goes out of their way to leave the big websites and visit smaller ones. Youtube’s front page algorithm shunting people into extremist circles is well documented; TikTok’s For You page is always studying your actions to make you stay longer and watch more ads. Social media websites like X, Instagram, Facebook, et cetera are much the same, relying on algorithmic interpretations of you as a person to feed you things you’ll stay and look at. Even apps like Spotify have plenty of algorithmically generated playlists to supplement the ones you made manually. If you’re not on premium, every once in a while it’ll put one on for you in the middle of yours and just… not tell you.

While this is convenient and profitable for the websites, it makes it hard for users (especially younger users who don’t remember the times before Google) to stray outside of the box. People are told constantly that websites are spying on them, that Facebook knows their blood type and zodiac sign, that Target can figure out someone is pregnant before they do, all to send them ads and make money. Now that it seems inevitable, it’s almost viewed as a trade instead of an invasion of privacy: this website can show me ads, sure, but it better know what else to show me.

To go back to the bean soup recipe mentioned at the start, users are asking if there’s a substitute for the beans because they were served the video on the content conveyor belt they’ve been using instead of subscription features, so the content must be for them. TikTok shows them videos they like and doesn’t show them things that they dislike. Instead of simply searching for another recipe, or trying substitutions themselves, they ask the content creator to fix the algorithm’s ‘mistake’ and show them something without beans in it, as if it was a choose-your-own-adventure and not a pre-established recipe.

Made for Me

To clarify, the algorithm didn’t make a mistake. TikTok occasionally tosses in videos from other niches to see if the end user will watch them too. If they don’t, they don’t get those videos again. If they do, they get more. This is a good thing, even though it creates friction, because it makes it harder to end up in the horse video corner where the only videos are videos of horses. Unfortunately, the people who want to be in the horse video corner will occasionally be shown a video about welding, or maybe grain silo fires, something tangentially related but not about horses.

The conveyor belts work too well. They make the user too comfortable. The user doesn’t want to subscribe to creators when the ‘For You’ page will conveniently shovel them that creator anyway. They forget where they used to go to find the content that they used to like, and instead rely on that website’s conveyor almost entirely. TikTok defaults to the “For You” page, not the page they themselves curated by following people. So does Youtube, where you have to click into your subscription feed. So does Spotify, where generated playlists and recommended podcasts are shown above yours. Other big websites like X slot in recommended tweets between subscribed ones; Threads, X’s competitor, doesn’t even have a purely chronological feed.

To use the websites, users must accept being shown things they don’t like; at the same time, they expect the high-quality experience that they’d be able to build themselves if the websites weren’t pushing their algorithmic feed as a replacement for it, because the building would take work but the algorithm is already made.

Side Note: You Can’t Use TikTok For Search

TikTok is a perfect storm of misinformation and poor-quality search results sorted by the wrong metrics. The app offers up a ‘popular search’ at the top of the comment section, linking to the most common search their users make after watching a given video. The problem is that the search has the same inflammatory power that headlines do! To clarify, the popular search is user-generated, not made by TikTok or fact-checked in any way. A user may see ‘[x] creator embarrassing Christmas party picture’ and continue scrolling through videos without looking, assuming such a thing must exist if searches for it exist. Or, they see ‘[x] creator is dead’ in the search and panic, assuming this must be because they missed an announcement somewhere.

Even if they do question the search and tap it, they’ll end up scrolling through videos made to exploit the search instead of answer the question. Trying to find out what slang means on TikTok is near impossible, for example. The top videos put the slang or acronym in the tags and description of the video, and then the video itself will be just music or a video of the creator looking around in front of a wall, no definition included. To be fair to those creators, even though it’s annoying, nobody should be using TikTok for research. It’s a social media app. It’s not easy for users to fact-check creators, it’s riddled with people pitching colloidal silver and borax drinks casually, and people often exaggerate or even lie about what credentials they have. TikTok is for fun and shouldn’t be for anything else. If you want to learn about an acronym, visit Google. To suggest searches in this environment may have been what users wanted, but it’s not good.

Unfortunately, the users themselves are not encouraged to search anything off the site because no app or website is designed that way. You’re supposed to stay on the site. The site doesn’t want you to leave. You probably don’t want to leave the site to find your answers, and many other apps and websites try to enable that urge to stay.

Public Internet Access Terminals

Elizabeth Technology November 21, 2023

In the early days of the internet, the average computer was still bulky and often pretty pricey. Most electronics were! Some people still have the brick phones or old CRT monitor computers they used before the size of transistors and chips shrank, and finding those old models in movies or on eBay isn’t hard.

Bringing the internet out of designated places (colleges, libraries, the home, etc.) into other spots it might be useful was difficult. One of the wackier ideas of the time, the Public Internet Access Terminal, foresaw a world where computers would be like payphones, in 2003.

American Terminal Public Internet Access Portal

Sources on this company are incredibly limited. One Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DASfwrCjICg&t=5s&ab_channel=RicDatzman pops up when the exact name of the kiosk is searched. One very old commercial proves the existence of the internet’s first tendrils encroaching into public space.

The commercial itself is a perfect snapshot of how people viewed the web in its early days. You might need it on the go. It might be like a payphone someday. The computer inside the terminal will make you money and won’t need to be replaced by the next more powerful model anytime soon because it’s good enough as it is (as a reminder, Moore’s Law stated that the number of transistors on a circuit would double about every two years, and up until recently ). People in the comments remember using them to check online game accounts and send last-minute emails before hopping onto planes or busses.

And yet, no other source aside from this commercial seems to exist! Despite their confidence in their product, they weren’t confident enough to build a website for prospective franchisees.

I Just Need To Send An Email

Internet usage at the time was limited – Amazon was still selling primarily books, computers were still pretty large, and while things like email were much more convenient than snail mail or phone calls for their traceable, info-dense nature, not everyone had an email address. For the lighter users of the internet, stopping by the library to check their digital mailboxes was a cheap and easy way of keeping up with the times without committing to a fullblown computer. After all, the dot com crash ruined the internet’s most aggressive investors. If it somehow didn’t pan out, they wouldn’t be out too much money.

The problem was that while that crash was disastrous, the internet still had plenty of use! And people who didn’t want to invest in the equipment were being pulled further and further into it either by work or for recreation.

In the midst of this, a particularly enterprising company thought to put together internet terminals that could be put in places like airports, and controlled by outside franchisees like vending machines often are. To the people trying to sell these products, the age of computers was slowing down post-crash, and while they may have anticipated that these computers would be fully depreciated by the time the owner paid back the investment and maintenance costs (just like any free money scheme, if this was actually as low risk as they advertise, they would have kept it to themselves), they likely didn’t picture a world where the very thought of one of these things existing freely, unmonitored, in public, paid for by the minute and not the GB, would seem outdated. Like a payphone.

Nintendo Just Kind of Banned Gaming Tournaments

Elizabeth Technology November 16, 2023

With little exception, having age-appropriate gaming tournaments is a good thing for a game (and the company behind it). Big communities getting together to play their one-on-one games means people bringing guests who might be interested enough to buy a set of cards or minifigs after and play in the next get-together.

Some companies even make guides for tournament hosters, partially as an investment in the community, partially so any tournaments hosted using that pack won’t reflect poorly on the parent company. Others go even further and sponsor tournaments themselves, like Capcom with its Street Fighter tournaments. Copyright permissions are handled differently by different companies in different mediums, but generally the tournament event can use their game’s imagery and names to advertise for-profit events as long as the event follows rules established by the company.

If done right, the players have a fun and exciting time, the game company gets a bunch of free (or subsidized) advertising, and everybody wins.

Nintendo’s decision to ban large tournaments in this environment is nothing short of bizarre!

The Announcement

Nintendo’s announcement regarding tournaments using their games boils down to: no huge events (200 spectators or less IRL, 300 or less online), no use of Nintendo copyright properties to advertise (including game names), no merchandise, food or drink sold in-person at the events, and no profit (ticket prices and winning pools are capped to ensure this). Organizers also can’t raise the prize money from ticket sales or use modified versions of the game, either, and must obtain a special license from Nintendo before the event takes place. While Nintendo is legally well within their rights to do this, why would they? Capcom enjoys a huge amount of positive publicity thanks to it’s 2D fighter tournaments. Magic: The Gathering is known for drawing large crowds to events, and Wizards of the Coast, its owner company, is pleased to see it. Nintendo was not.

As you may guess, this severely handicaps future tournaments! Smash tournaments, one of the cornerstones of the early online competitive gaming communities, have just been slashed pretty hard. For context, Smash Summit has had final winning pools in the five-digit range since 2016. Smash Ultimate Summit has hit the six figure range. Smash tournaments have been running since the last decade. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of players have passed through these tournaments hoping to win, and the spectator count is magnitudes higher. Nintendo may not have set out to make tournament-ready games, but by golly they did, and now they want to take it back.

What Now?

Playing a game competitively is very, very different from playing it for fun. People dedicate huge chunks of their life to trimming off inefficiencies and practicing. For many, it is literally a second job, during which they may stream their practice to make some money off of all of the hours they’re investing into learning. The people viewing those streams then go on to watch them in the tournament, bringing money in for the tournament host, too.

Nintendo effectively just crushed an entire industry. Rather than work with the fans and try to spin their tournaments into advertising the way many other companies do, they instead decided that the current tournament fanbase was unreconcilable with their goals and simply cut them off. Already, Smash tournament organizers (often retired tournament winners themselves) are promising they’re going to keep going until they personally receive a cease and desist from Nintendo. They don’t really have another choice – players aren’t typically interested in switching games and losing all their practiced skill to switch over to Street Fighter or any other 2-D fighting game.

Who knows what happens next. Nintendo owns the intellectual property that this industry is built off of, but rug-pulling it like that has generated a lot of backlash from adult fans, even ones who weren’t watching tournaments before. It echoes the move that Unity just made, and before that, Adobe. The average consumer is getting sick of companies squeezing them out of stuff they already spent their money on. Nintendo may have underestimated the negative press from this announcement, but whether or not they’ll walk it back remains to be seen.

Sources: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/fun-sponge-nintendo-places-strict-094104104.html

https://kotaku.com/smash-bros-ultimate-switch-nintendo-tournaments-1850955614 (warning – link contains foul language sourced from tournament competitors’ tweets in direct citation)

Chrome Just Rolled Out New Ad Policies

Elizabeth Technology November 14, 2023

Did you get a notice that Chrome just updated its ad policies when you opened it last month?

Take a closer look at the privacy settings! Chrome’s most recent update is seeking to use different advertising permissions to show you more relevant ads. Instead of third-party cookies, Chrome will now be using ‘Topics’ to give websites the info they need to show relevant ads. This is a slight upgrade, but not nearly the same level of privacy offered by Mozilla Firefox, or Edge on work computers. As such, you may want to change the settings!

The easiest way to do that is to click the button to change your preferences at the bottom of the popup the first time you get it – this leads right to the settings themselves, and you don’t have to navigate through any menus. If you didn’t read it when it popped up and just hit ‘okay’, don’t worry, turning it off is still pretty easy!

Go to the settings tab, from the dropdown menu in the upper right corner of the browser menu (where you would normally go to look at your browsing history or bookmarks in the default browser). From there, go to Privacy and Security, then Ads Privacy, and look for Ad Topics, Site Suggested Ads, and Ad Measurement, the three new items launched with that announcement popup. You may or may not want to disable them, but either way you should look them over and see what they’re doing with your browsing data.

Firefox and Edge

We recommend Microsoft Edge for work computers. It’s fast and secure, and constantly updating to ward off threats and vulnerabilities. For work purposes, it really doesn’t get much better than that!

What about off-work, when those ads are more likely to get you? Firefox has many great add-ons, including ones that block cookies altogether and make you much harder for advertisers to profile. Nothing short of TOR can truly prevent you from being identified while browsing, but sometimes, you just don’t want to be followed around by ads for dog food because Google figured out when you tend to run out.

Using Biometrics: Is It Really Better?

Elizabeth Technology November 9, 2023

Some phones allow users to use their biometric data as 2FA, or as a password by itself – how does it measure up to PINs?

Cons

1) Your Face Looks Like Your Family’s

Every single service using face unlock handles this a different way – they all use different programs, and those different programs handle similarities differently. Apple, which uses state-of-the-art hardware and code to see faces, still sometimes mixes it up. For Apple, the program that reads your features and unscrambles this information is constantly updating itself and adding to its library of what you look like. If it didn’t, a sunburn or a new eyeliner shape would trip it up and lock you out for looking different.

The problem is that it’s allegedly doing that by looking at the person holding the device when it’s unlocked (using a passcode or otherwise), which is usually you but sometimes isn’t. People who look similar enough and who may be holding your phone enough (like family) can sometimes trick FaceID into opening for them by accident. While this is getting better, there’s no way to rule out a twin unlocking your phone without also sometimes locking you out too.

2) Law Enforcement

Most police forces have the right to collect some of your biometric data if you are ever arrested – your face and fingerprints go into their records. The legality of using that to unlock your mobile device pre-subpoena varies from state to state; some states will allow you total freedom to decline an un-subpoena’d unlock request no matter how your device is secured, while others won’t let you decline at all, but some states depend on the type of lock. Certain biometric data is not legally protected in the same way passcodes or PINs are. Look it up for your state!

3) Nefarious Children

A much more common unwanted-unlock scenario is a child getting hold of your phone during a nap and holding it up to your face to buy Robux. While face-unlock adapted, and many smartphones don’t let you attempt an unlock with closed eyes anymore, fingerprints stay the same even if you’re asleep. Still pictures of the target tend to trick older Face ID as well, although that is improving with each new generation of phones.

Pros

1) When Done Right, It’s Really Tough to Beat

Barring the similarity issues above, when biometric data is used correctly, it’s pretty darn good at keeping unwanted people out. Collecting fingerprints to unlock a device or account is often more difficult than it’s worth, and deters bad actors from trying. Strangers will generally not have photos of the phone’s owner good enough to unlock it on-hand – more recent phones use infrared too, so pictures don’t even work on new phones anymore. Cracking biometric locks takes a lot of coincidences or a lot of effort, not just a computer stuffing passwords.

You also can’t write down your face and lose it somewhere like you might for a password, and (at least for phones) you can’t have it breached in the same way as a written password.

2) When Done Right, It’s Faster

You’d need to wait for a sent 2FA code, but you don’t need to wait for a fingerprint or a face unlock.

3) As Long As Policies Stay the Same, The Data Doesn’t Leave The Phone

As of the writing of this article, Pixel and Apple devices state that the mathematical representation of your face which the phone uses to unlock will not leave the device it’s being used on. Apple even goes a step further and separates the computer that handles facial recognition from the computer that does everything else inside the phone!

The caveat of course is if those policies stay the same – companies make promises and then go back on them all the time. American privacy laws are fairly lax compared to other countries, so any privacy policy not written into law needs an eye kept on it for changes.

Fungus Guides Written By Bots – Don’t Die!!

Elizabeth Technology November 7, 2023

The single biggest problem with AI right now is people abusing the shortcuts it presents. Much like real life shortcuts, the AI shortcuts involve wading through tall grass, walking on private property, and trying not to pick up ticks on the way. We’re seeing a wave of AI-generated literature hitting the market, and it’s becoming concerning.

The first wave was children’s books. Children’s books? Whatever. Children’s books are popular entry points for people looking to get into the self-publishing business, which comes with pros and cons; you may find a real gem of a book for a child going through something specific (many large publishing houses are reluctant to publish books like that because they may not sell well), but you may also find a lot of books written by people who think kids don’t care about quality: they whip up something quick and generic, buy some illustrations from an artist online, format for print-on-demand from services like Ingram Spark (or sometimes Amazon) and collect a teeny bit of money from passive sales.

For the people actively trying to make quality books for the art of the process, this is just more noise in the background they’ll have to compete against, but for the people looking to make a quick buck off of a book, generative content has streamlined the process. AI removes some steps at the expense of quality (and copyrightability).

The messaging an AI comes up with may be unsuitable for certain lessons, but many kid’s books are – you’re expected to use them as a teaching guide, read in conjunction with other books, and not the single wellspring from which you teach a child morals. “The Giving Tree” and “Little Red Hen Bakes A Cake” teach opposite messages about sharing, and both of those were written by humans. You’re also generally meant to know what you’re getting into when you read it, as in you should read it yourself before you read it to a child. That alone filters most of the issues you could run into with an AI-made book (bad message, bad or disturbing art, etc.). Yes, AI kid’s books are now all over the place, but kid’s books were all over the place before that, too.

When we get into serious guides, however, there’s an issue: any parent, guardian, or babysitter knows that you can’t be telling kids “Actually, Hitting Is Always Okay!” but those same people wouldn’t know not to trust a fungus guidebook with bad advice in it. It moves past common sense into real expertise.

Fungus Guidebooks

Mushrooms are delicious. Foraging for food is fun. Many people want to try fancy mushrooms that either can’t be farmed or can’t be transported, but lack the necessary knowledge to tell a chicken-of-the-woods from a witch’s butter mushroom. Worse, if they think they do and grab the wrong fungus by mistake, they can put themselves into liver failure and die.

The bad news is that almost every edible mushroom has an inedible-to-poisonous lookalike: even the grocery store staple, the white button mushroom, has wild doppelgangers that are incredibly poisonous. The good news is that there are a handful that are tasty, and have lookalikes that are more like cousins instead of twins appearance-wise. Morels and puffballs, for instance, have lookalikes with obvious giveaways, so they’re generally pretty safe to forage if the forager has good instructions. Speaking of which, all foraging instructions need to be tailored to the region they will be foraging in, and consider invasives like the ”angel of death” mushroom, which – as you may guess – is a poisonous lookalike that snuck up on unsuspecting foragers expecting a native edible.

A growing awareness of just how dangerous foraging can be, combined with a desire for unusual foods straight from the Earth with limited processing, is creating a huge demand for guides.

Thus sprung up a number of AI-generated fungus foraging guides, with a nonexistent author’s name on the front. Again – kid’s books are one thing, but a foraging guide relying on generative content programs like ChatGPT is practically an unexploded landmine for anyone unlucky enough to buy it without realizing.

As cited in The Guardian (linked below), sometimes these guides will name an edible mushroom, but give advice not appropriate for the region, even though the book is supposedly up-to-date.

Sometimes they advise tasting the mushroom to identify it, which is bad for two reasons: one, poisonous mushrooms don’t often taste bad or bitter, and two, a handful of poisonous lookalikes are deadly enough to kill you even if you make it to the hospital in as little as a bite. Tasting a mushroom, deciding it tastes fine, and then dying later is exactly what people are trying to avoid when they buy mushroom guides. Taste is not one of the metrics by which expert mycologists determine species. ChatGPT thinks it is. Putting these two on the same footing without even a disclaimer is a serious problem.

The worst that can happen if an AI writes a bad kid’s book or digital recipe is a waste of a few dollars and time. AI-generated field guides to mushrooms with no human supervision over the writing are borderline criminally negligent. The reading party has no way of knowing their instructions are bad or inaccurate because ChatGPT’s main goal, once again, is not to be correct but to sound human.

Sources: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-pickers-urged-to-avoid-foraging-books-on-amazon-that-appear-to-be-written-by-ai

Degeneration of AI

Elizabeth Technology November 2, 2023

ChatGPT has gotten worse at a number of things since its introduction to the public. The problem with publicly-fed generative content programs like ChatGPT is that they will always be both producing into and siphoning from the same pool of information. As more of its own text ends up in the pool, the chatbot forgets more each day what color the pool used to be (or what people used to sound like). The pool gains a noticeable purple tinge, but unfortunately for the creators, siphoning out the individual particles that are turning it purple is borderline impossible at this stage, so the best they can do is add more new information to try and dilute it back to its original quality, which isn’t a real solution either.

ChatGPT has already scraped a ton of data. A large portion of the open internet has been fed into the machine. Finding more at this point requires dealing with large companies and their copyright laws (think publishing houses asking authors to allow their books to be scanned) so fixing it by adding more human text is not the easy way out, but it is the easiest out of the options available to that company, up until they start including books written by AI into the mix, and they’re back at square one.

What To Do About It

The unfortunate side-effect of having an automated writing buddy to make whatever you want, for free, is that free access to a sellable product makes a lot of less scrupulous people stop caring about whether or not the product is any good.

This is relevant – people trying to give tips to kids who don’t want to write their own graded essays are telling those kids to fact-check what it writes, but people slinging AI-written articles don’t even care enough to read over it once and filter out inaccurate information. As a result, passable AI content that’s true is less common than passable AI content that isn’t! ChatGPT thinks there are freshwater species of octopus right now. It thinks that because there are accounts of freshwater octopus online that exist in the same state of mind as sightings of Bigfoot, and it simply extrapolated that these two tropical octopuses (which are very much saltwater ONLY) are actually freshwater, for some reason: https://www.americanoceans.org/facts/are-there-freshwater-octopus/

While this article has no listed author, this is such a bizarrely inaccurate and yet specific mistake to make that a human author seems unlikely to be the culprit. The idea that a human author on this ocean fun fact article website just randomly grabbed at two scientific names for octopuses out of the hundreds of species known, but didn’t bother to do even a shred of research into what kind they are is the sort of thing you’d see on a skit show.

Included in that image is my search bar on today, October 17^th, 2023, and this is the first result that pops up in answer to my question.

Now, both of these incorrect articles may be fed back into the machine and spit out something even more wrong. All of the easy ways to flag articles like this are discouraged by the nature of the beast itself. Some people don’t like AI being used to write fluff pieces because it took that from a human, some don’t like it because they know it’s not accurate, but either way they don’t like it. So instead of owning up to it, sites like the ocean site don’t list an author at all. No author, and no disclaimer of AI usage means that the programs feeding ChatGPT can’t filter it the easy way by looking for labels. The hard way doesn’t work either: AI detectors are routinely wrong, having evolved as an afterthought and not a precaution. If the program listened to an AI detector, there would be no content to feed it on at all.

The snake is starting to eat it’s own tail, and if it’s not corrected, it will continue to get worse.

Elixis Technology