The cost of living... what can we do?

Yes, @shiney they are still trying to convince us all to go with the power company's smart meters within our homes and that are controlled by them. I would say it is a giant flop as most people want to be able to decide what temperature they set for indoors.

The smart meters most people think of when they hear that name, are the ones at the point where power reaches the house and transmits data to efficiently charge us through the nose!

And our Trudeau government just put in place some really scary stuff. They control when and what media are allowed into the international airports. They also are working on a bill that will allow them to control what people can post publicly, whether it is a letter to an editor or a remark on facebook or a tweet.

 

I too am not worried about it. Everyone who uses a mobile phone is tracked everywhere they go. The information is available to the authorities (and your mobile provider) should they need it. It won't stop me from enjoying the convenience of a mobile phone.

 

So if nobody is worried about it why do they get all fired up about accepting cookies , or filling in an online form.
Or get all excited when some company says they have had a data breach and your details are out there for all the world to know.

 

Still, at least we're not in China. Many of their CCTV cameras feed directly into a massive great computer system that uses AI to automatically recognise and track individuals. I watched a documentary once where their lorries have cameras watching the drivers face, and the AI can tell when the driver is getting tired and at risk of losing concentration.

They tried it in London a few years ago but with us being more free to object, it quickly got ditched. Personally I'd be in favour of it in high security settings like airports but I think it's a bit much to have that kind of tech in the streets. The big risk of course being that AI doesn't always get it right, and in one study, AI based facial recognition was bizarrely accused of being racist on account of it being worse at differentiating 'black' faces from 'white'. I say bizarrely, because firstly AI is just software and data, and secondly because the tech is still pretty new and experimental. The guys and girls that develop it still having to figure out some very complex maths. But I think the fact that when even well educated accuse a computer system of being racist it demonstrates that society is not ready for such technology.

 

It will happen here, its just a matter of time.
And of course it will be all about our safety and our good.

 

So do you let your computer remember your bank log in details, I dont.
But it dose remember my log in for Morrisons shopping.

 

The cookie part is whipped up by tabloid media who either don't understand a simple concept or choose not to so they can mislead and wind people up.

In case anyone is wondering, a cookie in this context is nothing more than a tiny piece of anonymous data that the browser uses to remember your browsing session on the site that set it. It's built right into the browser security that a website can only read the cookies that it set. One site can't read another site's cookies.

The data breach is a very different thing. When you enter confidential details into a secure website, for example if you're buying something online, you have a right to expect that your name, address and card details will only be used for the legitimate purpose of fulfilling your order. If someone nicks that data they can defraud you.

 

Sorry, but that's not true.

Unless your computer has been infected with malware, the only application that can read a cookie without administrator privileges is the browser that set it. Even if you have two browsers on the same machine, say Chrome and Edge, they can't read each others cookies. When I was a developer we used this fact to our advantage when testing. It enabled us to log into the same site with different identities to test that it worked correctly both logged in and not for example.

Further, a cookie is set by a specific website, and only that website can see that cookie, so the BBC website for example can't access cookies set by this forum and vice versa.

Years and years ago, when the internet was new and people were just getting to grips with the new concepts, some badly developed websites stored passwords and other sensitive data in cookies, but that has long since been deemed terrible practice so nobody does that now. Even if they did, anyone gaining access to such cookies would only have the details for that website. The risk there being that such badly written sites were also easiest to hack, on account of the developer clearly not knowing what they're doing. So hack that site and you can harvest all its cookies every time someone visits that site. While websites still get hacked, nowadays nothing sensitive is stored in cookies.

All that said in defence of cookies, there is one scenario where they can still be misused by the developer of the site that set them. By default a cookie is bound to the site that sets it, but the web developer can specify that it's accessible to other sites. Websites do this for things like affiliate marketing, to enable specified other sites to see that you've been to their site. Even then, they're not going sensitive data, unless by sensitive, you've been looking at things that might generate ads you'd rather your missus didn't see.

 

I prefer to use the phone app for bank use now.
I was sceptical at first but find it very convenient, I assume it's secure enough, most of the world seems to be using that kind of thing now.

 

I agree Shiney, however, T'other Half can only function this way and spends lots of time 'correcting' things when they don't work as he intended! However, since he can be away from the house most days for one reason or another, I do like to be able to have contact by mobile if necessary.