Robotics, Dogs, 34C3, Bots, Fingerprinting

• Watched yet another robotics documentary. Afaik, it's silly that they want robots to be "humans" or even humane. There are just so many drawbacks on that. How about keeping robots, as robots. There's no reason why these things should resemble living things. I guess that brain deadness comes from movies. Where battle robot is 'in pain'. It's just hardware. It's just as pain as I pressed backspace deleting typo a while ago. Doesn't mean a thing. I just love totally illogical people. NOT. Efficient interaction doesn't require feeling, emotion or fill in words. Short and efficient communication is the key. As well as efficient execution. So many things can be efficiently handled by just with three words. Anything else, makes it just way more complex and harder to interpret. Result, all this garble compressed into final result: Humanoid robots suck. Simple approach, like good old Lucas Arts point and click commands, with extremely simple tokens. Get Butter. Why bother with 'natural language' or especially with 'polite natural wasteful inefficient language'.
• Dogs capability to understand sentences did blow me away. I told dog: "You'll get your food, when we'll come back from walk". It took a good while for the dog to process that. But then he wanted out, and went out, took a piss on yard and came right back in, waiting for food. - Wait what? - Did he really understand that? Well, there was only minor misunderstanding. I said we come back. I didn't go out. I just watched him going out. But still I think it's amazingly well done.
• Project documentation vs reality. Just a funny thought came to my mind. Customer requires that one thing is done in a specific way. Yet I know, it would work much better, if it's not done as they ask it to be done. It would be kind of fun to write documentation as they want it to be, and then do the practical implementation in my way. The real joke is that it would be interesting to know, if they even ever notice that they didn't get they what they asked for. But they got something, which just works well and they don't have a need to dig into details due the fact, that everything is working well. - Would that be unethical? They're happy with documentation, and operation aspects. Who cares, if the documentation doesn't reflect reality?
• Watched plenty of 34C3 videos. But I'll collect comments about those into separate post set, as usual.
• Social Bots, Fake News und Filterblasen - Fake News, Twitter Bots, etc. Nothing new just analysis of past things.
• Thanks Väinö, your TestCard is awesome. Also I've used Lagom LCD test page so many times while tuning displays. Awesome tools when configuring and testing new wall of 4k displays.
• Sigh, once again annoying IPv6 issues with more or less broken 6to4 gateways.
• Reminded my self about differences between Bitcoin, Zcash, Monero and Ripple.
• Zero-Width Characters invisibly fingerprinting text. Nothing new. You shouldn't ever use any original data, when trying to hide what data you're exactly having. Always create version which is far enough from original and invalid to prevent easy finger printing, or passing any other information which isn't intentional. If you use anything original, you've already failed, because there's no way to prevent fingerprinting / formation leakage in that case. This is also great reason to avoid any screenshots, especially video, audio, photograph material and so on. Just pure ASCII text, written by someone who doesn't know enough, or 'recreates the text from memory' to add extra ambiguity to the information. Even if you write the text yourself, you're probably already passing enough patterns to de-anonymize you. This is something which you have to especially remember, if the crowd having access to the information is initially very limited. - Btw. Just for fun I had to check that the copy pasted title for the article didn't contain any hidden information. They clearly did that badly, it would have been fun trolling to begin with.
• About copying arbitrary data ... All that hidden junk is often problem, when crazy users go and copy paste something from random source and place it in some text field or so. It's so easy to just pickup any junk and pass it forward. Without intention. I've so many times had problems with such junk in databases and integration files, etc. So it's bad idea how ever you're doing it.

2019-04-21