Sorry, I'm having big problems with the Weebly service, and so I'm checking things out. I don't know if this will get posted -- and I can't guarantee I'll even be able to delete this if it does show up, so...we'll see.
If I can't get the problem resolved, I may not be posting here for a while until I hear back from Weebly tech support -- and they seem to be phasing out support for the blog feature. And perhaps the blog service itself. If that's the case, I'll keep trying to post updates on Facebook and maybe Twitter, and see about porting the entire site to another company, but that could take a while. Right now, I'm trying a different browser. Hopefully this will be resolved MUCH more easily. And soon.
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If you didn’t see Last Week Tonight with John Oliver last night, his Main Story was on the power grid. It’s a well-done piece – a bit convoluted at times, but then that’s some of the point of the story. But it’s interesting, and has good humor. One odd quibble of sorts. At one point, Oliver shows an old video from the 1950s and shows a housewife really pleased by how electricity helps making her ironing so much easier and better. As you might imagine, Oliver has a lot of fun with this. Except… Years ago, when I was in high school, I remember asking my Grandma Rose a question. She was a wonderful person, one of the truly sweetest I’ve ever known, traveled a bit, enjoyed reading and opera, worked at the family department story in Gary, Indiana, when she had the time, loved singing and playing the piano, and had a good perspective on the world. She had been born in 1895, and I asked her – with all the inventions she’d seen in her life, like cars, airplanes, radio, television, space travel and more – what did she think the greatest innovation was. And to my surprise (and I suspect it would be John Oliver’s, as well), she said…”The electric iron.” Really. Honest. Needless-to-say, that was not remotely what I expected, so I asked her why. She explained that when she was young and you had to do ironing, you had basically a slab of metal which was put into the middle of the fireplace to heat it up. Then you reached in to grab it – risking being burned – and did some ironing until it cooled off…when you put it back into the fire, heated it up, reached into the fire again to grab it and go through the whole process again and again, until your ironing was done. And do this every time you did the laundry and needed to iron. When the electric iron came along, that changed everything, and you didn’t risk being burned repeatedly whenever you had to iron. By the way, her story taught me an important lesson: people tend to judge what’s important to them by how things impact their life, not necessarily how it changes society. So, Oliver’s quips about the electric iron aside, which Grandma Rose would sweetly inform him of his mistake, here’s the segment. It didn’t get much attention at the time -- and I was busy here writing about other issues that kept cropping up, waiting to address it -- but three weeks ago the Biden Administration did something critical that was largely ignored during the Trump years, whether through apathy or intent. But there was a major meeting at the White House to deal with cybersecurity in the country. And among the top business executives in attendance were some significant heavyweights: the leaders of Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google and IBM. At issue was how government and business can work together on cybersecurity.
Afterwards, the White House put out a press release that the National Institute of Standards and Technology “will collaborate with industry and other partners to develop a new framework to improve the security and integrity of the technology supply chain." More importantly, several of the company already pledged significant involvement. Among them: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company will invest $20 billion on security solutions over the next 5 years, along with $150 million “to help US government agencies upgrade protections and expand our cybersecurity training partnerships." Google CEO Sundar Pichai said they would over $10 billion during the next five years in cybersecurity efforts, among them helping secure the supply chain and strengthening open-source security. Additionally, Google will expand "zero-trust" programs, whereby companies don't automatically trust any person or device. And also, they pledged to train 100,000 Americans in tech support and data analytics – and they said they would train another 10 million Americans in a range of digital skills over the next two years. And IBM said that it would train 150,00 people in cybersecurity by the end of 2024. Clearly, this is not The Solution – nor are these the only initiatives to come out of the meeting. But given the lack of attention on cybersecurity by the government over the past four years, it’s a strong start on something so deeply necessary. If you missed Last Week Tonight with John Oliver last night, his Main Story was about ransomware. It was a very good, comprehensive report -- full of alarm, yet with humor -- though I follow this subject fairly closely and so fast-forward though a bit of it. The report was very good, though I had another quibble similar to one last week -- it's about him taking to task the administration supposedly having a "you're on your own, pay the ransom" policy. Yet earlier in the story, even the show acknowledged that some of the money of the big Colonial Pipeline attack had been recovered. That money (and it was a lot) was recovered specifically because the FBI got involved
No, no, don't rush off, this is seriously fascinating, bordering on important for what technology can do in the future.
Having written my tech column for about 20 years, I tend to pay attention to tech thingees (the official term). And when I came across this yesterday and first read the description, I thought “What in the world??" It’s about the first FDA-approved video game for kids with ADHD, and I wondered if they were stretching the limits of government approval for such things. But then after watching the details, it's much more clear, and I was really impressed.
This is really weird -- but for being SO unexpected, mainly because of the source. Which is Microsoft, not known for its humor, let alone self-effacing humor. And boy, does this define self-effacing humor. Last year, Microsoft released a new video game for the Xbox, called "The Outer Worlds." It was very popular, so they went into making a sequel. And this is the teaser trailer the company released to announce the upcoming release, only a year after the original game it the market. The teaser is wonderful. (And all the more so to me for having written my share of movie trailers and teaser trailers.) And it's gotten a great reaction online.. As a bonus, here's the same teaser trailer, but embedded with podcaster/influencer reaction watching it blind -- not knowing what it was for -- when it was shown online to them exclusively during the "virtual" E3 gamer expo. There is a whole series of these "reaction" videos for the game, all of which have a similar response (especially fun since these are people who have seen SO many teaser trailers trying to sell them and who know every cliché about them that's been written and after all this time are a bit jaded from it), but this reaction video is one of my favorites. And this one is fun, too. |
AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. Feedspot Badge of Honor
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