Who’s The Pirate In This Phone Scam?

The past few days I have been repeatedly called by criminals posing as “technical support people”, mainly for Microsoft – one said they called from my internet provider, but couldn’t explain why he spoke English although my provider should do its business with me in Dutch. I do wonder though: why is it that my home number is targeted just this week, after being ignored for many years? The callers all spoke English with an accent that I associate with India and Pakistan. I guess someone out there must have picked up a phone list from the past and said: hey, let’s try these numbers again.

Anyway, I had to think immediately of the solution to this problem that I read about in BoingBoing’s “Vacation scammer telemarketer spends 15 minutes talking to a bot”. The recording in that post is hilarious: it’s not just a Jolly Roger Phone Company bot replying to the caller, the bot takes the lead in the conversation while all kinds of interruptions are going on in the background.

Checking other samples from the other bots offered by the company shows that these are just as good (and just as funny). Too bad the Jolly Roger Phone Company service isn’t available here in Belgium!

By the way: isn’t it strange that phone companies are in no way responsible for helping these criminals?

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This Is Not A Placeholder Post – Or Is It?

This is not a placeholder post. But it may look like one, since it will (or at least may) be different for each visitor. I’m using the Picsum Lorem website to add a more or less random image to this page.

Click the image to go the Picsum Lorum home page

Picsum Lorem takes a well-known concept: the use of placeholder text when designing a document, and applies it to images. The images are free, coming from the Unsplash community. For details about what Unsplash means with “free” you should check out their Help pages. In summary and according to my interpretation, “free” does mean “free” as in “free beer”, but it is considered a basic form of politeness if you credit the photographer of an image when you use it in a commercial context. Sounds logical, no?

I guess it won’t be long before we also find a “Moviesum Lorem” – or perhaps we should call it “Vidsum Lorem” ;-)

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Yeah, But: “We Could’ve Voted On Deleting Article 13, Which We Wanted”

From “Sweden Democrats & Swedish Social Democrats Defeat Motion to Amend Articles 11 & 13“:

Sweden Democrats have now issued a comment on the vote.

“Today we had three push-button votes on the Copyright Directive. On one of the votes, we pressed the wrong button: the vote on the order in which we would vote. If it had gone through we could’ve voted on deleting Article 13, which we wanted. The vote should have ended up 314–315.”

The BigCo’s must be laughing like mad after reading this. I’m just flabbergasted: I thought MEP’s were supposed to be smart enough to push the right button out of three…

 

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Make Our MEP’s See This Video

It’s a catchy #SaveYourInternet song with good lyrics!

The software in Tesla’s car was hacked just a few days ago, so these words from the song are particularly appropriate for today:

And if we still don’t trust AI in Teslas yet
Then pray why would we let it suppress the Net?

Or how about this quote?

It isn’t about creative control, nah,
It’s about controlling creatives for cold cash

Thank you for this song and video, Dan Bull! And thank you, BoingBoing, for pointing them out!

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This Is NOT How I Want To Feel After The Vote On Tuesday…

I’m talking about the final EU debate and vote on the new Copyright Directive, which is/was planned at 0900h CET on Tuesday, 27 March…

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From Bad To Even Worse…

As summarized by Cory Doctorow in “The EU hired a company that had been lobbying for the Copyright Directive to make a (completely batshit) video to sell the Copyright Directive“:

In other words, the Parliament gave public money to a corporation that stands to make millions from a piece of legislation, and then asked that corporation to make a video that used false statements and hysterical language to discredit the opposition to the law. It’s not even lobbying, where a corporation uses the promise of campaign cash and other incentives to get officials on-side: this is public officials paying lobbyists to sway public opinion to win a law that will vastly enrich the corporation the lobbyists represent.

Cory is a far better writer than me, so let me use his words to reiterate (and reinforce!) the point I tried to make two weeks ago:

If the Parliament gets its way, those Eurosceptic parties will go into the elections with a devastating piece of ammunition: if the European Parliament votes in a law in spite of the largest petition in the history of the human race opposing it; if it passes the law after being directly contacted by millions of concerned voters; if it passes the law after massive, continent-wide street demonstrations opposing it, then the Parliament will have proved Eurosceptics’ point for them.

I hope it does not have to get even worse than that before it can begin to get better with European politics.

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No, I’m Not Waiting To Be Bribed By Google…

When I first read these words (by Cory Doctorow), I was quite surprised. Could an executive entity be so… stupid… ?

The EU Commission has been forced to retract a Medium post in which it patronised and dismissed opponents of the controversial Article 13 proposal that will force platforms to surveil and censor users’ postings with copyright filters, calling them a “mob.”

The Commission characterised the opposition as being stooges for Google, hoodwinked by the company to carry water for it, despite the fact that Google has quietly supported the idea of filters as an acceptable alternative to other forms of regulation (Facebook, too, has supported the proposal).

The answer to my question above is: yes. And just to be clear: I oppose some of the Articles in the proposal, but no-one has paid me to do so!

If you want to read what the EU Commission published, head over to TorrentFreak – they have archived a copy of the text.

Does the text of the Commission in anyway address some of the critiques levelled at the current proposal? Not really. It tries to explain the rationale behind it, but hides that attempt between a number of fabrications that can only be classified as condescending, disrespectful and anti-democratic. How else can you interpret a text that says “Do Google, Facebook or others really need to pay to persuade?“, when you know that such companies are among the biggest lobbyists in Brussel (just check LobbyFacts.eu).

Anyway, let’s talk facts: if you want to know what’s wrong Article 13, head over to the EFF website and read “Artists Against Article 13: When Big Tech and Big Content Make a Meal of Creators, It Doesn’t Matter Who Gets the Bigger Piece“. In short: Article 13 is about filtering content, and no reasonably-size forum can do so without automation. Given that all pattern-recognition software (that’s what AI is about) is strongly dependent on the input used to train it, it’s more than likely that many errors will be made. Obliging the platforms to police the content of its users amounts to a form of privatisation of censorship – without much recourse to a fair trial to redress errors and fraud…

What worries me, as a longtime supporter of Europe, most about the EU Commission’s blog post is that incidents like this one are very likely to diminish enthusiasm for the European unification and for the upcoming European elections; it certainly does so for me. Two decades ago, being an elected official for Europe was an ambition for those with a genuine will to make the European Union a success. These days, it seems more like an extension of local and national politics: you try to be elected because one way or another there’s (big) money to be made there… I know this is a very cynical view – but I can’t help feeling that whoever wrote that EU Commission post as far more cynical about democracy than me!

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