So, there you have it. The interiors of our homes, coffee shops and restaurants all look the same. The buildings where we live and work all look the same. The cars we drive, their colours and their logos all look the same. The way we look and the way we dress all looks the same. Our movies, books and video games all look the same. And the brands we buy, their adverts, identities and taglines all look the same.

But it doesn’t end there. In the age of average, homogeneity can be found in an almost indefinite number of domains.

Mainframe computers are often seen as ancient machines—practically dinosaurs. But mainframes, which are purpose-built to process enormous amounts of data, are still extremely relevant today. If they’re dinosaurs, they’re T-Rexes, and desktops and server computers are puny mammals to be trodden underfoot.

It’s estimated that there are 10,000 mainframes in use today. They’re used almost exclusively by the largest companies in the world, including two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, 45 of the world’s top 50 banks, eight of the top 10 insurers, seven of the top 10 global retailers, and eight of the top 10 telecommunications companies. And most of those mainframes come from IBM.

In this explainer, we’ll look at the IBM mainframe computer—what it is, how it works, and why it’s still going strong after over 50 years.

Wie teuer ist “ein Admin-Team”? So teuer wie Deine AWS Rechnung hoch wäre, und die ist in den meisten Läden dreimal bis fünfmal höher als ursprünglich gedacht. Das ist das Ausmaß des Understaffing in Operations in den meisten Firmen.

Accenture (vormals ARZ - Allgemeines Rechenzentrum, siehe https://newsroom.accenture.de/de/subjects/%C3%B6sterreich/accenture-vereinbart-uebernahme-des-arz.htm ), nach eigenen Angaben "führend in Digitalisierung, Cloud und Security" und quasi in jedem österreichischen Ministerium präsent, hat offensichtlich eine Abneigung gegen Elliptice Curve Cryptography.

A is for awk, which runs like a snail, and
B is for biff, which reads all your mail.
C is for cc, as hackers recall, while
D is for dd, the command that does all.
E is for emacs, which rebinds your keys, and
F is for fsck, which rebuilds your trees.
G is for grep, a clever detective, while
H is for halt, which may seem defective.
I is for indent, which rarely amuses, and
J is for join, which nobody uses.
K is for kill, which makes you the boss, while
L is for lex, which is missing from DOS.
M is for more, from which less was begot, and
N is for nice, which it really is not.
O is for od, which prints out things nice, while
P is for passwd, which reads in strings twice.
Q is for quota, a Berkeley-type fable, and
R is for ranlib, for sorting a table.
S is for spell, which attempts to belittle, while
T is for true, which does very little.
U is for uniq, which is used after sort, and
V is for vi, which is hard to abort.
W is for whoami, which tells you your name, while
X is, well, X, of dubious fame.
Y is for yes, which makes an impression, and
Z is for zcat, which handles compression.

Authorized transcript of Bruce Sterling’s lecture during the TU Eindhoven conference AI for All, From the Dark Side to the Light, November 25, 2022, at Evoluon, Eindhoven, co-organized by Next Nature.

YouTube link of the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB461avEKnQ&t=3325s

In Alan Turing’s Computing Machinery and Intelligence, deception is placed at the centre of the test to determine a machine’s capacity to exhibit intelligent behaviour.
...
And even tho deception was never the main objective, creating the illusion of intelligence rather than intelligence itself became the force driving sentient-like technologies like AI.

I've been aware of the Bechdel Test since the late 1990s and actively using it as part of my unconscious checklist for how to write a novel that doesn't suck in some way, but even keeping it in mind, I sometimes fail. And I think it's worth looking at where and why that happens.

So I decided to compile this score card for my books. (SF novels first, then Merchant Princes and Laundry Files.)

The US, China, and the EU are exporting their domestic regulatory models in an effort to expand their respective spheres of influence, pulling other countries into the orbits of the American, Chinese, or European digital empires. The US’ global influence today manifests through the dominance of its tech companies that exercise private power across the global digital sphere. China’s global influence can be traced to its infrastructure power, where Chinese firms—all with close ties to the Chinese state—are building critical digital network infrastructures in countries near and far. The EU exercises global influence primarily through regulatory power that entrenches European digital norms across the global marketplace.

Fringe Science Warning Signs

“Money in the Bank,” a new story by John Kessel and Bruce Sterling

Researchers at Google say they used existing noise-canceling headphones to get pulse readings by updating their software

Chile was building an analog of our modern internet way back in the 1970s. A massive, national communications network for business and government to coordinate efficiently. The engineer (Stafford Beer) who designed it was from Surrey, in the UK, and worked for the Allende goverment that was building this system.

After the 1973 coup, General Pinochet had the system destroyed.

Had it caught on, we might have had global internet in our homes in the 1970s.

The relation between expert communities and society at large does not take place in a vacuum, but in a field marred by vested interest. For if policies change, this creates winners and losers—and potential losers have an interest in the status quo remaining in place. One strategy they can choose is to accept the facts and openly fight for their interests. But often, these potential losers choose another strategy: undermine the public dissemination of the facts that would suggest that change is needed.

How can we reset the expectations we have of connected devices, so that they are again worthy of our trust and money? Before we can bring the promise back, we must deweaponize the technology.
Guidelines for the hardware producer

These are things we want consumers to expect and demand of manufacturers.

• Control
  *Think local
• Decouple
• Open interfaces
• Be a good citizen

LibreOffice-Anwender:innen wähnen sich hier oft auf der sicheren Seite und ändern, wie vermutlich auch viele MS Office Anwender:innen, nichts an ihrer Konfiguration. Das BSI hat aber auch für LibreOffice Richtlinien entwickelt bzw. entwickeln lassen:

• Sichere Konfiguration von LibreOffice: Empfehlungen für Unternehmen mit einer verwalteten Umgebung
• Sichere Konfiguration von LibreOffice – Empfehlungen für kleinere Unternehmen, Privatanwender und Privatanwenderinnen

Auf der Seite LibreOffice – Aber sicher! sind die Empfehlungen in Form einer LibreOffice XCD-Datei als Service zum Download verfügbar. Die enthaltenen Direktiven wirken vergleichbar zu Gruppenrichtlinien bei Microsoft Office und sichern LibreOffice entsprechend dem Leitfaden. Die Datei herunterladen und im Installationsverzeichnis von LibreOffice in den Pfad share/registry/res ablegen. Wenn man danach LibreOffice startet wird diese Vorkonfiguration automatisch angewandt. Damit lassen sich komplette LibreOffice-Deployments für viele viele Workstations sichern ohne die Anwender:innen das alles selbst machen zu lassen.

Businesses love high switching costs – think of your gym forcing you to pay to cancel your subscription or Apple turning off your groupchat checkmark when you switch to Android. The more it costs you to move to a rival vendor, the worse your existing vendor can treat you without worrying about losing your business.

Capitalists genuinely hate capitalism. As the FBI informant Peter Thiel says, "competition is for losers." The ideal 21st century "market" is something like Amazon, a platform that gets 45-51 cents out of every dollar earned by its sellers. Sure, those sellers all compete with one another, but no matter who wins, Amazon gets a cut

Sovereignty is the absence of strong dependencies on third parties. The Sovereign Cloud from AWS is a misnomer here.

POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere.

The idea is that you, the poster, should post on a website that you own. Not an app that can go away and take all your posts with it, not a platform with ever-shifting rules and algorithms. Your website. But people who want to read or watch or listen to or look at your posts can do that almost anywhere because your content is syndicated to all those platforms.

Work software isn’t really about work anymore -
It’s all about organizing how you’re planning to complete tasks, instead.