The Conspiracy Chart 2021.

Nekomonicon.

The Mystical, Magical, Terrifying Supernatural Cats of Japan.

The first known appearance of a supernatural cat in Japan arrived in the 12th century. According to reports, a massive, man-eating, two-tailed cat dubbed the nekomata stalked the woods of what is now the Nara prefecture.

How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation.

The tech giants are paying millions of dollars to the operators of clickbait pages, bankrolling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world.

The Billion Pfennig Code.

Was Google Earth Stolen? (no) (via johnmccrea.medium.com).

SGI built a public-facing demo called “From Space to [Your] Face” shown in 1996 or earlier that zoomed in from space to a 3D spot in the Alps, just like TerraVision and Google Earth (but constrained), to show off the new InfiniteReality with their novel hardware clip-map feature.

Relevant: TerraVision, ART+COM, Joachim Sauter, and his beautiful digikinetic installations.

Update: I have now seen the whole miniseries and the making of, and there is a lot amiss in both, the film dramatization and the rebuttal attempts: Keyhole is one weird company, owned by US american secret services, obviously. The US american patent system is flawed, obviously. And certainly, Google is one evil shithole.

The haves and the have-yachts – the superrich and their bunker mentality.

Underground lairs have hollowed out London.

The current system clearly isn’t working, so where do we go from here?

The humane asylum.

Today, people with SPMI can be at risk of aggressive, potentially harmful overtreatment early in their involvement with the mental health system. Later – after suboptimal or negligible responses to available therapies, and in the face of persistent psychological suffering and associated disability – they are at risk of therapeutic neglect, coloured in part by burnout and therapeutic nihilism among caregivers, and in part by a dearth of suitable models and care settings.

AI Futures: how artificial intelligence will change music.

The sound of the voice itself is not covered by copyright law. The reason you can impersonate someone with deepfake audio is because there are only two protected objects in copyright law – the musical work and the sound recording. The musical work refers to the song – notes, chords and lyrics. And the sound recording protection can only be applied to a specific track. This means deepfake audio is a grey area, as the voice isn’t considered [by law] as a part of the composition.

Sunday Sketches.

The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger.

Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime.

Dear tech consumer’s diary.

The battery of the Xiaomi phone was starting to conk out, and I decided to try and replace it; ordered a new battery, found some useful disassembly guide for the MI 5S – and destroyed the display when trying to open the phone… 😠

I am not good with hardware.

I was using the phone for about 5 years now (and – except for the battery – satisfyingly so); thus, I gnashingly took this as a sign to get a new device.

As I wanted to continue my slow degoogling process, I thought a refurbed Huawei would be a good idea – it comes without any Google apps, that sounded like a good idea.

Of course, it was plain stupid.

Because even if you manage to install some popular app with F-Droid or Aurora, it often does not work without these darn Google Play services…

The phone itself was too big and too heavy, and I just did not want to use this everyday. And I returned it.

It somehow begs the question what justifies this annoying form factor of clunkiness in current smartphones – but this was already posed multiple times and ultimately answered: reasonably sized devices are simply quite the slow sellers!

I never will understand consumer’s choices.

Nevertheless, I discovered some cute little phones like the Jelly 2 or the Palm Phone (via takemy.money) which rekindled some hope in me again. Still, they are not what I was looking for.

Searching for the best phone for degoogling ultimately leads you to GrapheneOS – and they support – Google’s Pixel phones! Badum tss!

Quite some twist in this degoogling story.

From the newer Pixel models they recommend I chose the 4a because of its size, its price, and the convincing reviews for a budget device. I expected something like an Android version of the iPhone SE 2020.

I think it’s exactly what I got – a new Pixel 4a from the German Google store where it was offered even cheaper than many used ones on second-hand platforms.

(No idea why it is not available in the Austrian store… Thanks to LogoiX this was hardly an obstacle, though.)

Now let’s see when I get the courage for installing GrapheneOS on it.

Btw. the b0rked display of the Xiaomi still bugged me pretty much. So much, I decided to give myself another chance, order a spare display and try to replace this too. This time I was more experienced, and of course luckier. I managed to disassemble the phone without any further damage, exchange the display and put everything back into place again. Almost a brand-new phone. Well, the fingerprint sensor had to go, that was baked into the old display and not possible to remove. Finally, it even got Android 11 via the PixelExperience – now it’s in such a good shape I would not have needed a new phone in the first place. Bad timing.