Skill Zone News issue 128
We would all like our own website to be the top of search engines, but you have to be a US president to be able to complain to Google about it. If politicians could dictate the news and control the internet, where would we go for our alternative facts?
30th August 2018
May may be confusing
The English language is beautiful and flexible, but its flexibility is too often abused by the world of business. Even plain English can be made deliberately ambiguous, and that's never for the benefit of the consumer.
Keeping mum on personal data usage
Lifecycle Marketing Group (LMG), which operates the website Emma's Diary aimed at new mothers, has been fined £140,000 by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) for illegally profiling mothers and selling the data to a political party.
Give me some time and I can make it rhyme
The computer scientists are on a mission to make humans obsolete. Not only do we have cameras which compose their own pictures, and computers which synthesise their own music, we now have machine-generated verse.
Milk and sugar?
The USA's patent system leaves a lot to be desired. Patents are intended to help inventors, but the US system is over-run with land-grab patents which take any normal business practice and add "with the aid of a computer". The latest evolution of patent portfolio mass production is to add "with the aid of a drone".