The Oppenheimer Report 4/3/17

I had an email from one of my readers (and sometime listener to the radio show) who’d read last week’s rant about design flaws. He suggested that I scrap the Honda touch screen radio and go buy an after-market unit that was more user-friendly. Were that it was so simple! My old car came equipped with a stackable CD player, which meant that one could load as many as six discs into the unit at one time. While it worked fine for many years, it was problematic as well and eventually froze up, with a CD stuck in the unit.  I was told that in some newer cars, it can be a problem to install after-market players. I took it to a guy up here and he installed a very simple but effective Kenwood unit, which served me very well for the next two and one half years. The sound was noticeably better than the original factory-installed unit, and it included a blue tooth connection that allowed me to run my cell phone through it, as well as a stereo jack to accept auxiliary players. I could then play my field recorder in my car and hear live concerts I’d recorded over the car stereo. These features are standard with a lot of cars today, but back in 2006, they were not. I really miss that after-market Kenwood. If and when I keep this new Honda longer than the stereo lasts, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to replace it easily, because the unit is tied in with the onboard navigation system.

Let me for a moment talk about GPS technology. Troglodyte that I am, I got along just fine with a road map for the majority of my driving career. As a real estate broker in Western New York, I also had some fairly detailed city maps which I could consult when I was in an unfamiliar part of town. I purchased my first GPS, a Garmin, after I moved up to Toronto. It was fairly easy to use (i.e luddite-friendly) and I did find the technology helpful. That said, it was not entirely reliable, and directed me to more than one dead end. It helps to have a general  idea where your destination lies before you rely on the GPS. As well, sometimes territories re-develop, and the unit then needs to be updated. My second GPS unit was a TomTom and it was entirely UNsatisfactory. Equipped with voice activated technology, that TomTom was a piece of computerized crap. It required constant time-consuming updates on the computer, and was hard to program. One day, I was driving along Hwy 401, one of Toronto’s busiest and most congested highways, and the unit went completely berserk. It froze, and began to make a distracting noise, rather like a damaged CD. There I was, on a busy highway, and I couldn’t even get the thing to turn off! I came very close to throwing it out the window.  I have never had much luck with voice-activated controls. Shauna’s car has that feature for making phone calls, but it hardly ever works properly.

Further to my discussion last week about design flaws, and labor-saving technology which is anything but, I watched a segment on The Daily Show With Trevor Noah, which made me chuckle. They did a bit on the oxymoron of “smart technology”, ranting about silly unneccessary applications that are designed to improve our lives. There is apparently a hair brush now, equipped with some kind of sensor to alert the user when he or she is brushing too vigorously. An alarm sounds,  warning the user to brush more gently. Perhaps we have reached the tipping point here. Who needs this? That comedy bit summed up the way I feel about much of this high tech nonsense. There has been a lot of talk in the media over the past month about surveillance technology and computer hacking. I have known for a long time that hackers can get into my computer and steal my deepest darkest secrets. Now I have learned that hackers can spy on me using my computer camera or a myriad of other computer operated devices. I still don’t understand how it possible to spy on someone using a microwave oven, but admittedly, I am not the brightest person when it comes to technology. There are applications on smart phones that will allow the user to interface with the alarm systems on their homes, turn on their lights, program their PVR s, etc. While all of these things may sound remarkable, as one computer expert suggested, anything that employs computer technology to control something else remotely can be hacked. How would you feel if you tried to disable your security alarm system and someone had changed the password, or better yet, locked you out of your house?
Almost everything is run by computers now, and this should be of concern to everyone.

It is becoming increasingly clear that hackers from some country - and sorry Donald, it probably was Russia – interfered or tried to interfere with the American elections. A teenager in Markham, Ontario somehow managed to hack into the Canada Revenue Agency a few years ago. Look at all the havoc WikiLeaks has wreaked by releasing sensitive information on a number of governments around the world. Maybe I’ve been watching too much Mr. Robot, but I am concerned. When it comes down to who has the smartest hackers, I’m not entirely confident that a country that willingly elected Donald Trump will be the ones to protect us from cyber-attacks. When I look at all the things going wrong with computer technology today, it makes me want to tear my hair out. Then again, I won’t even be able to do that, because my computerized hair brush will sound an alarm if I try.

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2017 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED