How smuggled mobile phones are rewiring Brazil’s prisons

Posted on April 17, 2014 by Steve Mays

It’s easy (for me) to become discouraged about the surveillance state the US (and lots of other countries) has become. How can you resist an entity like the NSA? Perhaps, in the long run, we cannot. But in a twisted way, stories like the one below give me hope.

In Cell to Cell: How Smuggled Mobile Phones Are Rewiring Brazil’s Prisons, Jonathan Franklin describes how Brazil’s prison gangs are using technology.

Wired prisoners change the entire concept of incarceration. Instead of being isolated and punished, the inmate with access to a cell can organize murders, threaten witnesses, plan crimes, and browse online porn to figure out which escort to order up for the next intimate visit. […] Brazilian organized crime leaders continued to have widespread ability to make calls, receive calls, organize conference calls, and even hold virtual trials where gang leaders from different prisons are patched in to a central line to debate the fate of gang members accused of betraying the group’s ironclad rules.

Yes, I get that the gangs are committing awful crimes. But then, so are oppressive governments. We can talk about Right and Wrong at Sunday School, this is about technology.

Driving Miss Steve

Posted on February 5, 2014 by Steve Mays

Self-driving vehicles seem inevitable. As Kevin Kelly might say, it’s what technology wants. I’m hoping they become a reality by the time I need one. But let’s say that doesn’t happen in our lifetime. Can there be any doubt our vehicles will more and more intelligent?

I’ve been kicking myself a little for going too fast on a snowy/icy highway (https://www.smays.com/2014/02/black-ice) and wonder how it might have gone if I had been driving a car that’s smarter than I am. (Insert jokes here). I would instruct my smart car to use Morgan Freeman’s voice from Driving Miss Daisy.

Me: Mornin’ Doke. Take me to that Japanese restaurant at the mall. I’m meeting a friend for lunch.
Doke: Um–hum. I saw that on your calendar but the roads between here and the mall are something awful and according to your email setting this up, it ain’t all that important. I shore wish you’d call him and reschedule. Here’s his mobile number.
Me: Come on, the roads aren’t that bad. I’ll be careful. Let’s go.
Doke: The safest speed I’d feel comfortable with is 30 mph and you’d be pretty late going that slow. Mr. Brandon’s calendar shows him with no lunch plans the rest of the week. Let’s call him and reschedule.
Me: Are you going to make me use the POC (Programming Override Command)?
Doke: Gimme a second to pull up my original system settings… Here we go. Uh huh, you checked the DON’T LET ME DO ANYTHING STUPID box and agreed to Terms and Conditions. So, you see, I can’t let you drive under these conditions.
Me: So you decide when and if I can go somewhere. Is that it?
Doke: Aw, now, Mr. Steve it ain’t like that. Let me have the House Bot make you some hot chocolate and we’ll see how the roads look in a few hours.

Million Dollar Illusion

Posted on June 8, 2013 by Steve Mays

A fascinating (scary?) report on why a million dollars might not be enough for retirement.

“One out of 10 people who are 65 today will live past 95, according to projections from the Social Security Administration.”

Or (gulp) this:

“$10,890 is the median financial net worth of an American household today.”

Not surprised to learn that more people are not planning to retire.

“An annual survey for the Employee Benefit Research Institute found that in 1991, only 11 percent of workers expected to retire after age 65, while this year, 36 percent said they would retire after 65 — and 7 percent said they didn’t plan to retire at all.”

The piece confirms what my advisors recommended regarding SS benefits.

“If you delay claiming benefits past what the government calls your “full” retirement age — 66, for people retiring this year — your monthly benefits increase by 8 percent a year until you reach 70.”

I confess to finding it a little hard to scrape up a lot of sympathy for someone that can’t live on sixty or seventy thousand dollars a year. Guess it’s what you’re used to.

“The maximum Social Security benefit for a retiree at 66 this year is $31,000 — about the equivalent of drawing down 3 percent a year on a portfolio of $1 million. […] Still, even $61,000 or $71,000 a year — the combined Social Security and cash flow from the $1 million portfolio — isn’t likely to be enough for most people who have grown accustomed to living on $150,000 or more a year. And $150,000 is the median income of a typical household in the top 10 percent, roughly the ranking of a family with $1 million in net assets, Professor Wolff says.”

And the original factoid I posted earlier:

“A typical 65-year-old couple with $1 million in tax-free municipal bonds want to retire. They plan to withdraw 4 percent of their savings a year — a common, rule-of-thumb drawdown. But under current conditions, if they spend that $40,000 a year, adjusted for inflation, there is a 72 percent probability that they will run through their bond portfolio before they die.”

Why local TV is alive (if not well)

Posted on June 7, 2013 by Steve Mays

I avoid local TV like dog poop on the sidewalk but it seems to be alive and well, perhaps for the same reasons millions of people still use AOL. Here’s a couple of pulls from a commentary by Terry Heaton, a guy who seems to know a lot about TV

“The concept of network content distribution through local affiliates is what’s being challenged by the Web. Local broadcasters are middlemen in the delivery of network content to the masses, and that was fine in a world absent horizontal connectivity. My version of Gilmore’s Law is that “the net regards middlemen as failures and routes around them,” and I’m not alone in this thinking. The networks simply can do their thing far more efficiently — and thereby, profitably — by going directly to consumers.”

Oh, now I remember why I stopped watching local TV.

“Local television is still atop the heap in terms of delivering the goods for certain advertisers, most notably political candidates. Saturating the airwaves — especially in key states — with ads for those running, delivers incredible profits for local broadcasters. This is not going to change, and absent some major innovation that pushes campaign managers elsewhere — perhaps mobile? — the money is going to continue to support local broadcast companies.”

What does mobile explosion mean for news?

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Steve Mays

Some nuggets from new Pew Research Center report based on a survey of 9,513 U.S. adults conducted from June-August 2012 (including 4,638 mobile device owners)

Half of all U.S. adults now have a mobile connection to the web through either a smartphone or tablet
Nearly a quarter of U.S. adults, 22%, now own a tablet device-double the number from a year earlier
64% of tablet owners and 62% of smartphone owners say they use the devices for news at least weekly
As many as 43% say the news they get on their tablets is adding to their overall news consumption. And almost a third, 31%, said they get news from new sources on their tablet
Fully 60% of tablet news users mainly use the browser to get news on their tablet, just 23% get news mostly through apps and 16% use both equally

Apple taking over mobile?

Posted on June 25, 2011 by Steve Mays

The first iOS gadget shipped in 2007 and just a whole bunch of folks scoffed at the notion anyone would pay $400 for a mobile phone. What’s happened since then?

Nokia’s smartphone handstet market share dropped from 24% to 16% in one year.
97% of all tablet traffic in the United States comes from iPads. The number is 100% in Japan and 99% in the UK. (The global average is 89%.)
last year Google earned about $102 million from apps sales, while Apple raked in $1.7 billion.
Apple has ordered two manufacturers to build enough iPhone 5 handsets to sell 15 million in the first month of sales (August or September).
40% of all smartphone buyers in Europe say they intend to buy an iPhone next time they buy a phone.
There are 910 million mobile phone subscribers in China (where the iPhone is very popular)
Apple has sold 25 million iPads to date and one analyst believes Apple will sell a billion of them.

“Bottom-Up Revolution”

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Steve Mays

From an opinion piece on Al-Jazeera, by Paul Rosenberg

Obama, however, is just one political figure, reflecting the more general state of US politics – particularly elite opinion and major economic interests. His ambivalence is, in this sense, an expression of America’s fading power. Obama’s belated attempts to play catch-up with the Arab Spring are but one facet of a more general loss of previous dominance.

And this from Wadah Khanfar, on the obsolecense aging Arab regimes:

This outstanding change, this historic moment, was totally lost on ageing governments that thought they were dealing with a bunch of kids who only needed to vent and then go home to their aimless lives. But they were wrong: because their ideas were old, their opinions were old, their minds were old, and their spirit was old. Ignorance can sometimes be a tool of destiny.

I’m finding Al-Jazeera a very credible and refreshing source for world news.

And then there’s this from a recent NYT story:

The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”

Reminds me of all those Stinger missles we gave the Taliban fighters to use against the Russkies.

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“We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts.” — Sam Harris

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