The Thirsty Robot

 Here's some of what you missed at The Thirsty Robot: Technical Musings Technology Topic - Patents Protecting intellectual property is one of those fascinating backwaters of technology. Hugely important, and capable of bringing even the biggest of companies to their knees, but also very likely to be immediately ignored when a 'tech news' headline mentioning PS5s, or GPUs appears. You can see this with NFTs : combine Cryptocurrencies with Art and you have that strangest of strangenesses: a topic where the number of people who actually know something useful about both is only just above zero.  The Thirsty Robot has a way of doing right angle turns (Not like the recent US news, where the Department of Defense said that the UFO/UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) VIDEOS they had released were real, which was immediately misinterpreted by the news media as meaning that UFOs were real...), which is how patents came up. Someone mentioned a monopoly, someone else mentioned the bo

Here's some of what you missed at The Thirsty Robot: Technical Musings Technology Topic - The 5 Stages of Hacking Discussion turned immediately to Security this time. The fifth stage of Hacking was mentioned, in the context of digital forensics. Hang on, you might be thinking, the fifth stage of Hacking isn't Forensics! Photo of one of the 5 Stages by  Antoine Julien  on  Unsplash Let's refresh our memories about those 5 stages first. No, not that sort of stage! - Reconnaissance - Scanning - Gaining Access - Maintaining Access - Cover(ing) Tracks Now, if you are talking about Ethical Hacking, then that fifth stage is often changed - to Forensics. And some people insist on calling it 'digital forensics', to differentiate it from dusting for fingerprints, looking at blood splatter patterns and all those other 'Witless Silence' tropes. (The long-used incorrect spoonerism of a famous BBC crime drama was first given a mass audience in the 1999 Easter Special epi

Here's some of what you missed at The Thirsty Robot: Technical Musings Technology Topic - Bicycle Spoke Ornaments Discussion almost turned to WiFi at first, but veered in a totally different direction: bicycle spoke ornaments. Yep, those bits of reflective plastic that came in cereal packets and which you fastened to your cycle spoke so that you were more visible at night (and in the day). I can't think of a better way to show how discussions can change in The Thirsty Robot! Free in cereal packets Amazon, of course It seems that you can still get them, but not free in cereal packets... Of course, the photo of a bicycle used here just had to have spoke reflectors in it! Photo by  Daman Singh  on  Unsplash     Technology Topic - AI Previously, AI has been a discussion point, but this time, things were different. We weren't sure if the people behind this thought that their visualisation was good, or bad... https://replika.ai/ One sentiment was: 'Can't we just use the I