PTW

Just thought I would put something on this forum because at the moment it is non existent. If your not on facebook u can forget about any chit chat about things in the club. Thumbs up to Alf for putting club event news etc. R I P the forum. Rant over.

Hi Stewart,
yes it seems the forum is not as well used as it was, but its down to members to use it, all we the committee can do, is provide the facility. I guess as Facebook is a part of life for many people, its just easier. It would be a shame if the forum did ceased to exist though.

Ive seen so many forums die because people moved over to Facebook. It’s a real shame.

You won't drag me onto Facebook. I know how they make their money.

You've got to start thinking of the humble internet browser as a surveillance tool, keeping track of every single page you visit, every search term you enter, every item you purchase, every like, every view, every click. Harvesting that information is a massive industry. At the moment there are tracking systems (called Canvas Fingerprinting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_fingerprinting) which cannot be defeated, but all they will reveal is that 'someone visited A, then B, then C'.

However, if you are logged into Facebook then they will know 'exactly who visited A, then B, then C'. You will have revealed to them precisely who you are, and once they have that information, they have it forever. Facebook are being paid to host the tracking code of all the organisations that want to track you on their login page. Facebook is currently the lynch pin around which the whole industry pivots. And for the paranoid amongst you, it's not just greedy corporations who have access to this information, but really shadowy 'political consulting' firms like Cambridge Analytica, intelligence agencies, foreign powers, The Syndicate and Spectre.

You might think this cannot be fought, but it can. If you must login to Facebook, or social media in general, do so in a separate browser. Do not use Google Chrome, since (rather obviously) it is written by Google. Use Firefox instead, since it is written by a non-profit organisation. Do not use Google for Web Search, use Duck Duck Go instead since it is the only search engine that does not track you. Install the Privacy Badger, and marvel at how many sites it is blocking that are trying to track you. You will quickly realise that Google Analytics is providing far more information to Google than it does to the owners of the websites it is supposedly serving. Hardest of all, stop using Google Mail, or any other free services. After all, if something is free then guess what, YOU are the product.

And finally, use the PTW Forum, because this website does not track you at all, and all of the information behind it stays behind it.

Rant over :-)

Damn it, where is the 'Like' button?

Of course, we're the only people reading it, which kind of defeats the purpose.

On a slightly separate note, and this is really for the absolute scientific techies out there, I recently marvelled at the rather modern solution to an age old problem called 'Maxwell's demon', first posed in 1867 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon. To quote:

"In the thought experiment, a demon controls a small door between two chambers of gas. As individual gas molecules approach the door, the demon quickly opens and shuts the door so that only fast molecules are passed into one of the chambers, while only slow molecules are passed into the other. Because faster molecules are hotter, the demon's behaviour causes one chamber to warm up and the other to cool down, thereby decreasing entropy and violating the second law of thermodynamics."

Since the second law of thermodynamics cannot be violated, how is this conundrum resolved?

The real solution to this problem was first proposed only in 1982, 115 years later, and states that "erasing information is a thermodynamically irreversible process that increases the entropy of a system". This might not seem to have anything to do with all the previous waffle about Google, but it does.

Information is equivalent to entropy, and entropy is equivalent to energy, and energy is equivalent to cold hard cash. Therefore, don't give it away.