The only things you really need to know about Microsoft's E3 press event

boing
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Well, they’ll know your age, your race, you kid’s age, the words they use, what brands they wear, they’ll deduce your annual income for better targeting, better data-mining. You’ll get older and crankier, and you have something like a 40-50% of chance getting a divorce, but that data will remain at databases for when even your kids will only want to tolerate you at holidays. What if some of your kids do something wrong in front of the damn thing, something that will bite them back when older? like saying the n-word as microsoft gaming network kids do always, he/she could be blackmailed

You think it is too much paranoia? Just look at the recent Google public captcha images, they capture everything and AI analyze it , from faces to what are you eating and where, what do you own and how, who do you are with, etc… Microsoft is no way less evil than Google, and some would say it’s the worst at tech.

If you play their game you’re not the custumer, you’re the product. They’ll tell you this data is secure, but it is not, it’s only a little open backdoor to be leaked (Kapersky, the most secure IT security company, just got hacked badly last week), and by murphy’s law it will be leaked, to the chinese, to anonymous, to some black hats somewhere, to some 3 letter post-NSA agency. I have in my hard disks files from previous leaks of passwords, I found them on public torrent trackers, millions and millions of passwords, from the last year’s ebay hack, the sony hack (I downloaded it to look if mine was there, you know what? it was, I found mine there), and you know, a lot of people just don’t give a damn like you and never change their passwords, and that’s about securing access, what you guys are doing is just opening your home to whoever is stalking.

I’m not a gamer, with the sony hack, after all that fiasco, some of my buddies that have playstation network got some games or coupons as an apology, they changed passwords and patrolled their credit card accounts , but we all know it’s not safe enough , and months later somebody hacked sony pictures, as a corp as a whole they didn’t learn anything. Microsoft is even more sloppy at security.

We adults take decisions and ripe the consequences, so I’ll keep turning on my hardware manually and not by voice.

Sorry for the rant, but it just amuses me how people are totally OK about reality turning into something from a XX century dystopia novel arround them, I don’t want anyone to take the red pill or call them sheeple and I’ll say I’m a moderated about this. But please , get informed, enlarge your data and experiences for a better opinion, and think beyond the shiny surface Microsoft and alikes wants to sell you, for your your souls.

If somebody is interested in knowing what to do to be safer online, this org is a very thoughtful resource. Hoping you to be well.
https://prism-break.org/

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… and? If we’re going under the assumption that advertising isn’t going away (and BoingBoing itself has shown that it’s not, check out all those awesome sponsored posts, and all the shitty stuff they offer in the BB store!), I’d at least rather be stuck with ads that are actually targeted directly at me. I’ll still do my best to avoid them as much as I can (AdBlockers, pvr to skip for live broadcasts, etc), but at least the ones that manage to slip through will be at least somewhat more interesting.

Well, it’s good to know that something will survive even after my marriage and my relationship with my kids dies (seriously, what an odd comparison to use)

[quote=“mknaomi, post:22, topic:59703”]What if some of your kids do something wrong in front of the damn thing, something that will bite them back when older? like saying the n-word as microsoft gaming network kids do always, he/she could be blackmailed
[/quote]

I’m much more worried about my kids doing something stupid online where it will end up in a Google cache, than I am about them doing something in front of the Kinect where they might, maybe, somehow end up in a database that might get passed along to the government. At least in the case of a Google cache, you KNOW that will follow them for the rest of their lives.

How do you know it’s not safe enough? Were your friends’ accounts compromised a second time? Was their credit card information compromised? Or are you just saying that because Sony Pictures was hacked, that means the Playstation network is now completely insecure?

Yes, you’re very moderated, claiming that I am selling my soul by connecting a camera to my XBox. Why not go whole hog and just call us all sheeple? Because really, that’s where you’re going.

That site gives lots of options for other people to supposedly trust. But who’s to say the government hasn’t inserted malicious code into any the various apps recommended there? How do you know that the government hasn’t already slipped malicious code into the CyanogenMod kernel, or the various linux OS flavours? OR, how do you know that prism-break.org isn’t a front for the government itself, to trick you into downloading malicious software? At what point do you decide who to trust?

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Receiving advertisement it’s not a problem, I mentioned because that’s one of the profitable reasons they keep your data, as you mention, Adblockers will do, software plugins or actual brain-wetware disengaging.

It’s odd because it’s personal, so, do you think it’s odd a total stranger discusses such issues with you online? what’s odder? Not odder enough as having all the mega-corps peeking at your family home 24/7 via audio & video with the chance of it being leaked to chinese black hats. I guess that’s not personal enough.

It’s like another front, the panopticon eyes is an hydra. Only education and changing usability patterns will help, Try ixquick instead, even paradroids like RMS use it when they want to browse web.

The hardware backdoors are still there for sure, the usual security mesures are to patch them by the sofware layer, if they so. But the usual thing is to get access only by 1 backdoor, and gain full access from there, and keep the others undiscovered security breaches into obscurity for more future profits. We got to know about those hackings because those hacking groups wanted publicity, it’s uncommon for a hacking group to tell someone about their exploits, so think those huge hacks where only the tip of the iceberg. And Credit card fraud it’s the not only way you can profit from people’s info.

Hoping you’re not that much of a religious guy, no offense to religious people, because that was just hyperbole. Sheeple is another hyperbolic concept, the sad truth is that it points to our very ingrained docile, foolish, and easily led herd behaviour, it’s an evolutionary emergent trait i’d guess. But we can regain full awareness on most situations, and if working collectively, doing it with accords and without group-thinking and/or blind trust.

And yes, I’m very moderated compared to the usual RMS-sycophant tech red pill crowd, heh.

The people with high reputation about security issues, and us (I Count Myself Among Them) the people peer-reviewing them mercilessly. It’s a wild west ecosystem where reputation is the highest asset. And trust is never blind. Fool me once: shame on you, fool me twice: shame on me. By their fruit you’ll know them.

It helps having a heavily decentralized sources patrolled and contributed by multiple trusted individuals, the issues gets fixed as soon as noticed, by individuals, who want the best for the users. Not by corporations that only want monetary profit from people, as security issues are mostly not monetary profitable. Not by power-ties in positions of power.

Examples: The Debian superuser hacks didn’t succeed, the FBI BSD backdoor fiasco didn’t succeed, Snowden got it and out with the help of TAILS, wikileaks’ platform is open source, the push for an open UEFI, etc… Lots of successful examples around, even legal ones like the groklaw chronicle. IT WORKS. it had been the only thing at the tech scenerio in the last 30-40 years giving a kick and succeeding against the totalitarians, govs or corps.

We will don’t know 100%, because such accuracy is out of reach for humanity, but we must push to know such breaches. Just not giving even a rat’s ass about will only make things worse, not only because unethical individuals at positions of power-ties to power-trip all over of us, but too because after even those unethical ones die of old age or disease, the egregoric oppressive hierarchical pyramidal structures they create could last for hundreds, if not, thousands of years. It’s a non-stop battle against assholes for a better future for humanity.

Sorry if this got personal, and I don’t personally know you but I ultimately respect you and your opinions as yours, it got personal because it’s really personal, it’s about all us being taken advantage of, individually, for power and profit, and each of us is a person, with the birthright to decide for the better for our own selves.

But ultimately you’re free to do and think as you like, and I’ll respect that.
Regards.

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Serious question: Have you tried calibrating it with the volume set to a normal loud valume? Moving furniture around, moving the kinect will affect the multi-channel microphone array echo cancellation, as it’s measuring the sub-millisecond reflections of the sound. Changing the volume of the TV also seems to affect quality, as it seems to cancel out the speakers at the volume you calibrated it.

The tech is seriously amazing when it’s calibrated. I used to work with the guy that developed the software running on the Kinect. There was an example clip where you couldn’t hear anything because the TV was so loud it was clipping… but after his algorithm you could just here him say “Xbox Record That.” It was real CSI-level stuff.

Unfortunately, many people don’t get to experience it, because it has to be tuned for the room it’s in.

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Uh… I’m not a shill: I was very up-front that I work at Microsoft in games?

Or, to be more clear: I am a biased source.

Simply trying to provide an alternate perspective to how Kinect could be a useful addition to VR/AR, just as you’re providing an alternate perspective on how data collection of consumers can be used for Evil.

At the end of the day, you subscribe to technological determinism, while I subscribe to social determinism. :slight_smile:

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There’s a heck of a lot of Fleischer Studios in there too, one might argue moreso than Disney (especially that straight-up Bluto priate), although it’s is overall a pastiche to the entire 30s animation era, and absolutely beautiful. It’s amazing how far it’s come and how much bigger it’s gotten since the first teaser.

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I’m not a technological determinist because my perspective doesn’t push out social issues, I subscribe more to a middle point between using social tools to solve engineering problems, in this particular case empowering the user’s privacy. (FOSS is inherently social, it doesn’t works without being social)

So banning a specific technology is not the solution, I believe surveillance could be a tool if used ethically and technically wise. All of this with also pointing to unethical behavior by your peers and their pyramidal structures (corporations and govs), and not playing on their field, with their ball and with their rules, instead playing at ours, that’s a solution, you can keep living on a neo-feudal state is you want, freedom without harming others is our rightbirth.

In the same vein, determinism is not exactly a good term, I subscribe more to a “compatibilist” view, but I remain flexible:

Compatibilism accept determinism but argue that man is free as long as his own will is one of the steps in the causal chain…

In “Compatibilism”, because in the cause and effect chain, our decisions make the difference, human consciousness and actions makes the difference either by using social or technological tools. We humans are not philosophical zombies.

Determinism is saying that either physical reality or GOD is the only cause, and that human conciousnes is out of the equation, hence the chain of cause and effect is “determined” and out of the reach of human volition. Discussing beyond this point about materialistic absolutes will get me write about the ugly “scientism”, and that’s another whole post, and ultimately I really don’t care about scientism opinions. (For the record, I’m non-theist and I believe in the scientific method being one of the most powerful tools the humanity ever developed, but fascist scientific “determinist” views are just plainly awful.)

But it doesn’t matters what faction you believe you are in, (since ultimately they are just concepts and doesn’t exist beyond our ever changing minds, so I would say I’m a compatibilist, but in reality I’m just one in my mind) We need to do a better work at not enabling and promoting all the misuses that corporations and govs had been doing against us.

So It’s not about banning of certain technologies, as in the straw man your quoting gives about banning guns, guns are useful, but must be used in ethical ways, such ways determined by the social construct you are in.

It’s about good engineering for avoiding any murphy’s law related issue (privacy issues, security breaches), and that includes misuse by corporations, PLUS not letting those doing bad to us to keep doing it.

I’ll stay with voxelands and minetest with mods, and with the eventual open VR/AR hardware to come, even if it takes years for them to come. Nowadays It’s pretty funny wonderful software, it has a large enough community and it keeps growing (even more specially after Notch sellouted), you can play with it as you want and it lacks the corporate overlords determining what feudal tithe we shall pay, be monetary or turning us into their own products. For me this is way better than because of all the E3 hype, to neither contributing to FOSS VR/AR nor being patient enough and supporting FOSS VR/AR and wanting to see your voxels TODAY at any cost on your dinner table, but with the omnious egregoric shadow all over you, looking over your shoulder.

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I went through its normal setup procedure, which I vaguely recall involved calibrating the audio input, and haven’t moved the furniture.

Quite possibly if I googled it and spent 20 minutes it would work better.

I also don’t always use the same volume levels, and the volume levels for various sources are all over the place as well. Maybe that is the problem? But I can’t be calibrating it every time I use it.

Anyhow, this whole discussion? That’s a mass market consumer product failing to work well enough.

But, yea, the tech is cool.

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