Good Morning All!
54F @ 78% and dark.
Did you catch the news about the Amazon delivery guy? Apparently he rang the doorbell and heard some kind of racial slur. Called his dispatch whom called somebody higher up. That resulted in Amazon shutting down his Alexa. Big Brother ... right? The thing is Alexa also controlled most/parts of his house which shut down various things, Lights is what they mention, did not say anything about Heat/AC or if the door(s) got unlocked or not, or what ever else was in the mix. Come to find out the homeowner was not there so who knows what the driver heard as he did have a headset on. Amazon's spokesman said something like "At Amazon, we strive to give our customers a friendly environment when using any of our devices; and stated Alexa was shutdown by mistake". Then kinda apologized to the customer. What? What if Amazon determines that they do not like Red cars, and if Video Doorbell sees one in your driveway with you getting out, they shut you down? A whole myriad of crap could happen here. On top of that, what about security? Most people do not have a clue about securing any of their devices/computer or even that WiFi enabled refer, so hackers *could* get into your devices and have their way with the house ( and you ). Alexa does call home you know?
Which also brings up those EFI chips in your new(er) PC that Micro$oft ( and others ) want. The OS reads those chips on boot and somehow determines if your hard drive has been tampered with. If it has, the OS tells you about that and will not bring up the Desktop. Guess what? Windows update can read/write to those chips of which Micro$oft can decide you can not have W11 for free anymore and not allow a boot until you fork over $$$. Well, Micro$oft is an upstanding company and would not do that, right? IBM DOS was pirated and converted into MS DOS many moons ago. So their track record is not all that good.
And we do not even want to talk about all those Chinese devices you have; many of those call home too.
Maybe Later!
