Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
Is there a link to any article regarding drones instead of fireworks? Fireworks are pricy for our small village and I’d like to see if they would be a more economical substitute?
My Google fu turned up this. I have no idea if their numbers are accurate.
Intel was one of the early leaders of the idea (since the drones need low cost CPUs on board and Intel makes those.) Try Googling accordingling “Intel drone display” for example for other news and videos.
2 Likes
this is what we used
2 Likes
@Leo @gigastacey @JeffJarvis
Regarding Google Analytics and GDPR in Sweden: It isn’t the fact the data is being collected that is the problem and it isn’t what data is being collected.
It is the failure of the US Government over the last 2 decades to hold itself to the agreements it made with the EU on how data will be handled, if it is stored in the USA.
Under EU law, all personally identifiable data has to be stored in a country that has equivalent levels of data protection to the EU (such as Switzerland, Greenland, Canada, Japan, Equador and about a dozen others), or in countries that have put in place a guarantee that EU data will be held in special silos and treated as it would be under EU law.
The USA tried this twice, in 2000 with Safe Harbor, which was ruled as invalid in 2015 and again with Privacy Shield in 2016.
The data from EU citizens cannot be used for purposes other than collected, it cannot be shared or sold to third parties, without the express written permission of the identifiable persons (express written permission has since been defined as on paper or through double verification online - an I agree on a website, using an email address and a verification sent to and responded to in an email, usually a verification link in the email the user has to click on). The data cannot be shared with authorities without a valid EU warrant.
So, US companies have to hold themselves to this, and this is probably one reason why Threads is not launching in the EU, they want to share the Threads data with all of the other Meta businesses, including advertising, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. This is not allowed under EU law, that data has to be held separately. Meta either didn’t want to restrict the data grabbing in Threads, because it was too much work or because the data they capture in the rest of the world is too valuable to be worth restricting their voracious apetite, when it comes to EU users.
Anyway, back to the main problem… The US agreed to this in principal in 2000, then in 2001 they introduced the Patriot Act, which blatantly trod all over Privacy Shield. This was compounded by National Security Letters and the FISA Court. An Austrian student, Max Schrems then took the US Government to court in the EU and won, proving that the US Government were not fulfilling their requirements under the Safe Harbor treaty.
So the US and EU worked on a replacement, Privacy Shield. This included the same exceptions to law enforcement as previously, plus a permanent ombudsman. It went into effect in 2016. By 2020 the US Government had failed to name the ombudsman and they also went ahead and implemented the CLOUD Act, which gave themselves extra-terratorial authority over data held by subsidiaries or parent companies of US companies abroad (US company being a broad definition, any company with even just a sales office in the USA is automatically a US company and subject to the CLOUD Act, as far as I am aware).
The fact tha the US Government (under Obama and Trump) had blatantly ignored the treaty and actively moved to sabotage it meant that Schrems went back to court and got Privacy Shield overturned.
This gives the impression that the US Government is very anti-Big Tech, as they have done their best over the last 22 years to sabotage Big Tech being able to do business abroad, especially in the EU. Although in reporting it is usually the EU that is the bad guy, for upholding the law and trying to get the USA to honour their side of the agreement.
Because the US Government failed in their duties to US businesses with Privacy Shield, it is currently not possible for US companies to store information on EU citizens in the USA and it is questionable (because of CLOUD Act), whether they can hold that information within the EU either.
As to @Leo s question about email, that is not a problem, the sender has given implicit agreement for the information in the email, plus their email address, to be held on the recipients servers. If I send Leo an email, or I write in these forums, it is my decision and I have given my agreement to the information being held outside the USA - because I know Leo is in America and unlikely to be using an EU based email or web server.
5 Likes
Thank you for such a thorough overview. I certainly would pity any person who was the privacy ombudsman in the US.
3 Likes
Pretty sure the Intel drone division was sold off recently
Smart homes might actually take off if there is now a Walmart price point!
1 Like
So if all the ‘professional journalists’ take their work and put it behind pay walls. The Internet may start to look something like Compuserve and AOL again.
There may even be space for semiretired people like me to start writing again for the fun of it and telling tech news for real people. I have a lot of pent up reality to vent .
I can see my headlines forming already -
The iPad exists, there really is no need for an Android Tablet!
The best laptop is the one you can afford - why pay twice as much for a Macbook, that it is 10x faster than you can think and has battery life longer than you will ever need (and still doesn’t have a touch screen)
What Google will kill next?
What brilliant product Microsoft will announce and fail to market?.
.
Why Bing isn’t Google search, and why that is a good thing?
.
Why Edge is far better than the geeks would have you believe
1 Like
This is a video on fireworks. He seemingly had far too much fun filming this. I thought it might be interesting, because it gives you some sense of why fireworks are so impressive, and logically why they’re pretty expensive (in that you’re basically burning all this money in a very visual way.)
2 Likes
I just stumbled across and watched this video, it shows that the huge shows are getting pricey, but I do wonder if you discovered if a smaller one is possible at cost effective prices. Judging by the overheads (planning, permitting, programming and apparently a persistent lack of trained workers, my guess is maybe not.)
1 Like