Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

What are the issues with it? I don't really have a clear understanding of what it means.

* much more bandwidth, but on freqs that can be easily blocked by plywood doors
* any device can bounce traffic from any other local device, just what you wanted your phone battery to be used for
* intercept/spoofing is moderately harder for spies and criminals - but only if implemented correctly (governments still have free reign per local rules)

I’ve had the opportunity to be around a lot of 5G nerds in the last year or two and “the bandwidth” is all they talk about despite the fact that it doesn’t work inside, you know, buildings

Huge capital expense to buy new backhaul equipment to accommodate “the bandwidth” while almost no end users are going to be able to benefit /GAF

I already can't use my phone at home except for one corner, 5G is going to be awesome.

10 yrs ago I thought we'd be reaching the point about now where we could look back and laugh/cringe at the horrors of spotty cell coverage...

5G is WiMAX 2.0

5G has been great for streaming for me (I think), but it blocks my laptop's connection to the printer, I have to connect the two directly to print anything out

different 5G

confirms I really don't understand it

5G - everything has to be an antenna to get coverage

LiFi indoors

CryFi in our hearts

main end users who’ll see value are probably businesses. unlike 4G which made a huge difference to the media streaming industry, the drivers for 5G are not personal mobile/laptop use. some teleco infrastructure companies did think it might be HD live media, but that only really meant appointment to view sporting events which still tend to be watched collectively on televisions.

the ability to network slice and provide virtualised networks with allocated resources for specific purposes and avoid contention means a level of resilience that industry can rely on for day to day use.

when you actually try and dig down into use cases tho it’s quite hard to find things that *necessitate* 5G - looks at times like a technology looking for use cases.

that’s not true tho - one aspect of this is future proofing expected usage. we are going to be using mobile and IoT devices to transfer data to a massive degree in densely populated urban areas. you need a way of ensuring that set of consumer and business services.

IIoT (industrial IoT) will be the revolutionary use - things like orchestration across supply chains, management of machines in factories, and ultra low latency data transfer across data intensive enviroments like hospitals and factories. In theory businesses could replace expensive LAN infrastructure (a huge amount of spend goes on LANs and WANs) with dedicated, scalable 5g networks. it also allows a lot more cloud technology data transaction to mobile devices, bringing the two together in a way that hasn’t been possible, easy or cheap before.

anything which requires manually assisted remote handling of precise machinery, whether remote surgery or drone construction, needs an ultra low latency highly reliable data connection, as the time loop between you doing something and it being accomplished and fed back to you is a key constrain in remote management of precision tools. (think the virtual desktops of eight years ago).

signalling systems which also may need to carry voice communication - like mass transit will be able to operate more easily using 5g.

power supply management, crucial for the efficient use of energy. what power do you need when? (when the answer may be *i need it right now*)

there’s a load of guff talked about self driving cars, but where they *will* be useful and manageable is robot vehicles to move round controlled industrial sites with their own private network.

vr mmo rpgs if that’s your thing.

So i think it will be transformative, and perhaps more importantly will maintain an ability to use mobile devices of all sorts. but there’s a lot of work to do to get there. a lot of the industrial use cases are quite specific and need specific deployments. and although new use cases will emerge with the new technology, right now there are technologies, like low-powered wide area networks for low bitrate sensors (think pollution measurement across a city) that kind of meet similar requirements. there’s a large amount of capital investment and standardisation work needs to be done to get this off the ground.

i imagine there will also be a lot of use cases that make our lives look like a kakatopian nightmare future.

this blog post by nick hunn is a very good example of how shit greedy commercial management and deployment of an essentially useful idea really fucks things up - in this case the area of smart meters and energy management.

Don’t get me started on digital meters (don’t call them smart because they aren’t). They serve one purpose and one purpose only and that is to bill someone without sending a guy in a truck to read the damn thing and most of them don’t seem to be able to do that right. You can’t get real time info from them most of the time and forget doing anything that benefits the customer. Guess what you have to do if you install a battery or want to monitor someone’s solar; you have to install another meter because you can’t tap into the feed from the one that is already there.

It is incredibly dumb.

They are beginning to roll out meters that are provider agnostic, not before time - I refuse to get one until they can guarantee it will be one of the new breed.

To be fair, I think smart meters are a very good idea, but this part of the blog post explains the problem with how it's been done in the UK (and Spain):

That dichotomy between smart grid and accurate bills is key to understanding the GB smart metering programme and why it’s gone wrong. The key reason for installing smart meters should be to provide data to make the grid more efficient. To make the grid efficient, you need to be able to react to demand, which means real-time information and the knowledge of how to use it. However, in Britain, we have let the meter design be driven by the energy suppliers. They have no real interest in real-time data; as for billing they only need it on a monthly basis. Instead, they compromised and designed meters which upload data once a day. The whole of the rest of the smart metering infrastructure, from the DCC through to the cellular contracts for uploading the meter data, has been designed and costed on the same basis, which means that the £20 billion or so we’re spending on the program will not help us get a smarter, more efficient energy grid

that's also a good one for 'market driven innovation' not automatically bringing about best outcomes.

excellent posts, Fizzles

all of the things 5G sounds great for are definitely industrial/corporate and trying to hang a consumer hat on it as a marketing force is insanely clumsy

WiFi 6 (formerly 802.11ax) looks decent and I'm wondering how much support both standards are going to get from the next round of consumer devices

today there was a university-wide network outage, so the copying machines wouldn't work, because you need to scan your id card on the machines to confirm that you have copying privileges, and this requires internet apparently, there is no way to make the machines work without that online confirmation.

I needed to give a placement exam, and I ended up having to write the exam problems on the blackboard in the exam room.

AS GOD INTENDED

I feel like there isn’t enough attention given to the fact that all these high tech, self driving transportation options are ultimately going to translate into restriction of movement. “Firewalls” that can’t be crossed and “regions. Seems like it should be a bigger concern.

same with keyless locks for apartment blocks etc

I needed to give a placement exam, and I ended up having to write the exam problems on the blackboard in the exam room

oooh do i feel this one
happens at my workplace -- the more technologically "advanced" we get (the fancy copiers -- we don't scan IDs but they are connected to/require internet connection for printing), the less we are able to cope when there is inevitably an outage. it's kind of horrifying to witness in these small increments.

the existence of sim swapping (as seen in the hack of jack)

current vending machines are slower and less reliable than old ones - complex electronic and touch-screen displays, elaborate gadget to fetch the soda and bring it over to a chamber that spins around to release it, etc.

would need to see the data on that one. Archimedean screw failing to push out a bag of doritos for enraged male feels like a trope.

the screw sucks, but the new candy machines still have them! the fetching robot is for bottled soda, replacing your classic wood-paneled opaque prism dropping cans down a chute.

that opaque prism occasionally drops the wrong can.

chute also turns soda bottles into bombs iirc

being able to see that the supposedly out-of-stock item is very clearly in-stock does make me want to break the control panel into bits tho

As a prank you could shit in the vending machine. On all the snacks

Trust me when I say that the 'prank' defense doesn't hold much water with the fuzz.

Not sure if this is the right thread but:

Smart ovens have been turning on overnight and preheating to 400 degrees
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/14/20802774/june-smart-oven-remote-preheat-update-user-error

Like I know I should be holding a microphone and standing before a brick wall with the sleeves of my suit jacket rolled to the elbows while saying this but...folks, today's smart technology? Seems pretty gosh darn stupid from where I'm standing! Am I right? Am I right?

butt burning down the house

by the butt talking heads

Smart fridge pic.twitter.com/xKSSLdCR3b

— pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) September 3, 2019

However, in Britain, we have let the meter design be driven by the energy suppliers. They have no real interest in real-time data; as for billing they only need it on a monthly basis. Instead, they compromised and designed meters which upload data once a day.

hahahaha wow this is fucked up

Getting DDoS'd by my cats - whose dumb idea was this cat flap? pic.twitter.com/bRDWyJYr1o

— Norm Driskell (@n0rm) September 6, 2019

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit

read this a couple days ago, fairly convincing argument (not wholly original) that the collapse of soviet models of state-sponsored r&d since the 1960s means that the last 60+ years of technical innovation are really just the gradual commercialisation of innovations paid for by state funded research. The idea that capitalism drives innovation is a myth and outsourcing technological improvement to private industry has predictably meant declining standards as the bottom line is better served by exploiting global networks of cheap labour than spending money designing robots that can do everything. I think the caveat he leaves out would have actually improved his argument. Medical innovation has been huge in the last sixty years but it also the most socialised model of provision of any sector, even in the highly commercialised US healthcare system where the figures of state spending are famously high.

recent uk government alignment of the university sector with private industry imperatives (Jo Johnson, the national industrial strategy) shows the gov pursuing a legacy where state-funded universities must compete to secure funding by directly appealing to the needs of industry. A sort of frankenstein partial regression to the model the article outlines but with the post 2008 crash neoliberal ethos of "socialism for the extremely rich, horrible venture capital logic for the rest of you plebs." No wonder everything is truly shit.

ticket taking used to mean ripping the stub and letting someone in. obv fraud was an issue so of course they moved to the scan system. ok, one extra second or so.

but now all these events are Mobile only so you have to wait for some asshole to remember to pull up the event on his phone, and god forbid his screen brightness is low, they sit there for five minutes trying to get scanned in.

i was at Halloween Horror Nights last night using an express pass and the line would come to a standstill multiple times while the staff had trouble scanning in someone's mobile express ticket because either the brightness was too low, they were holding the scanner wrong, they didn't know how to use the scanner, or the doofus didn't have it ready when he got to the front of the line.

mmmm meter data

I dream of a basic HTML version of all websites and a way to make this default

xxp - ha, the argument and title sounded familiar - that essay is also in Graeber's book "Utopia of Rules" that I read a few months back. The title essay is really good, and then I got to that one and felt like it was a filler track on a 90s album in comparison

I dream of a basic HTML version of all websites and a way to make this default

I use lynx to read nytimes

I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation).

Are those safety precautions? About readability? Something else?