Blog posts

One of our discussion meetings. Several apologies received. We discussed whether we wanted to continue to use Sight Life if they put the cost of room hire up. Sheila commented that the room hire rate was comparable with other city centre options. We noted that some venues were free, but that none had the capacity, room layout, WiFi and screen that we required for successful meetings. It was noted that some members were prepared to pay £2.50.

We noted Jim’s spoof notifications of Argos and Dell deals, and wondered how any one could expect to get something for nothing. Phil did however comment that if you traded in a Kindle, and did so on the right date with Amazon, you might just approach getting a new one for Free. [It’s also worth remembering that Curry’s/PC World offer a £5 voucher (or cash ???) for old IT equipment.]

We then went through news items – all up on Flipboard, so not links on this page. We focussed on the legal issues surrounding “big tech” both in the EU – the Digital Markets Act and AI legislation, and the US DoJ going after Apple for anti-trust and monopoly reasons. Many commentators have reported that this will be unlikely to be successful and could be drawn out over many years – by which time, things may have changed. Some of us expressed the view that if we were happy to pay more, and happy to accept the closed garden of Apple, then we should be allowed to retain the status quo. Ralph highlighted the need for a level playing field and if there were monopolies these should be challenged. Phil drew the analogy of a car that had limits on what size tyres you could fit. Was this a restrictive practice??

Ian led several discussion points on developments in AI, including advances in breast-cancer diagnosis, the change in permitted usage for military purposes with the acceptable use of Open AI software, and the very good online sessions provided by u3a – details of which are given below …

Generative AI, and other interesting meetings on the Computing Community

‘An introduction to AI chatbots’, Thursday April 4th, 3.30 pm, and ‘AI News’, Thursday April 11th, 3.30 pm – which unfortunately clashes with our next meeting.
Please book via u3a Online Learning Website.

… you’ll probably be amazed at what’s available online from u3a – I’ll try and write a post for the Cardiff website to point members to these resources.

We discussed whether hardware suppliers (in this case Apple) should be bound to give details of what an Update contains, in the light of some concern that the latest release (v.15.4.1 of iOS) has little or no information on the security issues it seeks to resolve. Ralph suggested that this was a wise move, as if you said what you were trying to fix then it might encourage the bad “players” to try and test the weakness on unpatched devices – I’m not so sure. I think there’s an ethical duty on suppliers to state why you should do something and not just say “do it”!!

Phil then in the discussions that followed told us about his attendance at a Bill Bailey concert where he played all manner of electronic and digital musical devices including BlueTooth Ribbon Bells and a laser harp. He also told us that AI was used to create a response to a verse in shanty tunes.

Ralph enquired whether I’d changed my views on cookies, as he’d heard alternative advice recently. I sheepishly had to admit that although I maintained the view that cookies were generally harmless and were there to improve your browsing experience, that I’d recently chosen to reject cookies and had been able to continue viewing the website. So, my position has changed. If you just want to drop into a website on a one-off basis, there’s no benefit in selecting cookies, so try accessing the site after saying”no”. Sometimes however sites require you to switch off ad blockers, if that’s the case you need to make a decision on whether you want to proceed, or not.

Sheila raised the perennial problem of email hacking, spoofing and phishing. There’s been a few strange emails recently which seem to come from a valid address, but are not from the person, and which surprisingly don’t have a “payload”, ie click-here to do something. I will try to get to the bottom of this, but it’s very strange.