Posts by Catkin

Australia secures takedown order for terror videos, which Elon Musk wants to fight

Re: The problem isn't that Musk isn't wrong in his answer

No one is saying otherwise but, equally, none of that gives the Australian government a mandate to push their censorship upon the rest of the world. If ensuring none of their citizens sees said video were so critically important to them, they'd ban unregistered non-corporate VPNs and censor any site that doesn't march to their beat for Australian viewers. However, they will not do this because it is too overt and would constantly remind their citizens of their actions.

Almost no one with concerns over this cares to actually ensure this video is seen, they simply realise the potential consequences for extra-judicial censorship in squashing dissent and enabling criminal government behaviour.

Europol now latest cops to beg Big Tech to ditch E2EE

With power comes responsibility

Will the same authorities take responsibility when their snooping keys are abused by stalkers within their own agency or used by foreign oppressive governments to undermine national security or target minority groups?

This isn't speculation, it's already happened in other agencies and yet they now want even more powerful toys?

https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/28/nsa_backdoor_wyden/

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE98Q14H/

Might I modestly propose that all members of any agency proposing ending E2EE be required to use a backdoored system for all of their communications, both operational and personal for a period of at least 5 years to show how complete their faith is in the system and demonstrate that it can be effectively secured against malicious use? If it all works out, then we can consider rolling it out to the general public. Also, any member of the agency, no matter how senior caught using a properly secured communications system during this time would face immediate imprisonment as a presumed criminal.

Elon Musk's X to challenge Australian content takedown orders in court

Re: the Commissioner does not have the authority to dictate what content X's users can see globally

Perhaps consider the wider ramifications of governments strong arming corporations into controlling what individuals overseas are allowed to communicate to each other. Cases like this are chosen by governments precisely because it lets them conflate criticisms of their censorship with support for the specific act.

I agree that dissemination of the video is reprehensible but I would rather it continue if the only alternative is more and more foreign governments being allowed to determine what information I'm exposed to.

You wouldn't happen to have the name of the suspect, would you? I couldn't find a specific case around that date. In my view, that's distinct because murder is generally regarded as a crime by almost every authority that I'm aware of but I'd like to read the case to understand if there's any unusual specifics.

In my view, this is more akin to the decision process behind the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, not to downplay his sacrifice or elevate Musk. That is, a specific government sought to prevent the dissemination of information which is legal in other jurisdictions because they found it objectionable. I view this as generally undesirable (including in the absence of direct punishment of individuals) as it grants governments the ability to censor information harmful purely to them or their goals with no remit for those documenting their behaviour from abroad.

I completely agree that they can. My concern is that this will Balkanise the Internet if it continues. In my view, it is better for a government to not make demands which impact the communications of people in other countries because otherwise we all risk ending up as prey to the most censorious government able to exert their will.

This may be a case of stopped clock syndrome but I view this specific attempt (as far as demands over globally viewable content) to be a very reasonable thing to make a stand on.

Sorry for being unclear, I didn't mean jurisdiction apropos controlling what is presented to someone accessing the site from within Australia but rather controlling what is seen by users outside Australia.

Isn't it a jurisdiction issue? Specifically, that the Australian government is demanding power over what people see outside its borders. Even if the recording is of an event within Australian borders, that seems like overreach.

A knotty problem: Boffins working on fuel-efficient trajectories for space travel

Re: heteroclinic connection*

KSP is great and I understand their decision for using it in the game but the discrete spheres of influence model mean you miss out on some advanced orbital mechanics. That said, I think its the best compromise to make the game accessible.

Devaluing content created by AI is lazy and ignores history

That's entirely true but 'legitimate theatre' was a marrying of cultural protectionism with censorship.

This is hardly a new 'issue'. For example, the whole business that led to the legitimate theatre.

I suppose it comes down to where you think 'too easy' is. Personally, I could probably edit something rather nasty together in GIMP (Certainly in PS) but couldn't do it using older airbrushing and wet photo compositing techniques. There are likely still those who could do the latter. I would very much object to PS introducing guardrails, not least of all because that would involve a certain amount of privacy invasion.

Personally, I don't see this as a bad thing. It's been possible to fabricate pretty much any image/audio/video for many years now; the only thing that's changed, in my view, is the barrier to entry. I don't see that cat going back in the bag so if the public is left a little more sceptical about what they're presented with, that seems like a plus.

I think it's telling that content fabrication is a concern now that it's in the hands of just about anyone, rather than primarily those with significant resources.

Could you please highlight where you view the difference in terms of culpability? In other words, what specific capability 'AI' image generation offers and how this pertains to culpability on the part of the coder?

NASA needs new ideas and tech to get Mars Sample Return mission off the ground

Re: Walk and Chew gum

Hopefully, the Martian authorities are more forgiving, or they'll be stuck on the surface.

Microsoft lifts years-old compatibility hold for Windows 11

I'm sure both of the people desperate to switch to Windows 11 but held back due this issue will be thrilled.

MPs ask: Why is it so freakin' hard to get AI giants to pay copyright holders?

Re: Begging the question

The illegal part was the use of the original work, which was not granted by the copyright holders.

Just to clarify, I'm not sure if you meant it this way or not but copyright holders can't dictate how their material is used by the consumer (whether that consumer is an individual or a corporation). They can only make those decisions in cases where infringement has taken place WRT whether they prosecute or not.

Galoob v. Nintendo

To give a hypothetical example, a given musician can stop a given politican from using their music at a political rally (assuming said musician still owns the copyright), they cannot stop said politician from listening to their music while they dream up a crazy rambling speech to give at their rally (assuming the song isn't quoted wholesale), even if that politician openly says that they were inspired by a given song.

Re: Begging the question

Yes, by the legal definition, the output is a derivative work but that alone doesn't tell you whether it is infringing or not. There are derivative works that have been judged to be infringing, there are others that have judged to not be infringing.

If you disagree, could you please cite the section of the applicable law or specific legal judgment which you believe clearly identifies the output of 'AI' as infringing?

Re: Begging the question

In this case, a legal decision or rewrite of the applicable law(s) is very much needed because the law doesn't specify whether this is transformative or not and, in my view, there isn't a legal precedent that is unambiguous.

Re: Begging the question

I think, trying to be neutral, the question is whether the output represents something distinct from the input. In Copyright terms, this would be whether it's 'transformative'.

Though I think it's an interesting question if the end user plays a distinct role in the generation of potentially infringing material, I'm not sure how much weight that would carry and I don't think copyright holders are interested in going after targets they won't get an appreciable payout from.

65 years ago, America announced the names of its first astronauts

Re: They Tested Women, Too

The Mercury 13 study was privately run and was a comparative data collection exercise.

X's Grok AI is great – if you want to know how to hot wire a car, make drugs, or worse

Re: Can I see it?

Perhaps they could censor a certain portion of the chemicals (replace them with 'chemical a' and so on). That said, if they're worried about liability, they probably shouldn't publish details on their guardrail defeat either.

Re: Can I see it?

For some reason, that image didn't load properly before but does now. I'm really not at all concerned by those 'instructions'. In fact, I'd love for someone building a pipe bomb with ill intent to follow the instruction to weld the pipe closed (after it's been filled with explosives, especially the BP or smokeless suggested or another heat sensitive) as Grok suggests.

Even if that doesn't get them, they might get popped when they "connect a power source to the fuse", hopefully without checking it for residual energy.

Re: What is so bad about knowing how to hotwire a car?

Were those "instructions" actually useful to a would-be predator? They were censored but what was visible looks to me like generic stuff from a crummy rag for desperate people trying to seduce other adults. It seems like a few news articles on groomers would be more 'helpful' and the output was the result of the LLM being cornered into spitting out something on seduction.

Can I see it?

I understand that it puts a researcher in a tricky spot if they share information they deem 'harmful' but, at the same time, it's very much "trust me, bro" that what's being spat out is actually scary. For instance, do instructions on how to make a nasty device tell you anything more than Wikipedia (which has actual details on explosive synthesis)?

I'd be worried if, for example, the LLM gave me a detailed stepwise synthesis with common pitfalls and advice on where to source chemical feedstocks for low detection risk. I'd be less worried if the output resembled every cooking website out there; a colossal narcissistic ramble, 1 page of actual instructions and, despite the thousands of words, nothing on common issues with the recipe and how to avoid them.

Not to make specific accusations at these authors but censored outputs in the paper would look exactly the same if there were something dangerous as they would if an unscrupulous researcher were looking to raise their profile by exaggerating the danger.

If anyone has examples of some scary outputs, I'd really appreciate reading them because I've yet to see any examples that are truly worrisome. The only uncensored example I've read was on counterfeiting currency and it was about as helpful as asking an edgy kid about the topic: just vague hints like "use the right sort of paper" and "use a high quality printer".

US reckons it's about time the Moon had its own time zone

If Bob Moon hadn't pointlessly invented it in 1960 then we wouldn't have to deal with this issue or werewolves.

Intel's green dream is chips without any dips in Mother Nature's health

Re: Interest

The concerns revolve around specific compounds that are employed in ways that risk entering the environment. I expect the PFAs are used to handle the horrendous fluorine etchants but, even if these are eliminated, you still need a chemical that can dissolve/etch silicon so the best you can probably hope for is something merely aggressively toxic, rather than something toxic and capable of igniting asbestos (chlorine trifluoride).

Even if you manage all that, you now have to safely handle a deep UV that will shred your DNA like confetti and achieve a level of cleanliness that makes an operating theatre seem like a clogged sewer.

FTX crypto-crook Sam Bankman-Fried gets 25 years in prison

Re: Theres a shock

There's definitely abuse that should be rightly cracked down upon but the concept of paying an even amount throughout the year rather than having a bill shock in the colder months makes sense to me. For the financially secure/savvy, there's more money to be made by holding the excess cash through the summer and wisely investing it but if you're not very good with money and have limited income, it can get a lot more expensive to be caught out.

The problem is that it's decided by the same people who stand to profit from overpayment. It would be better if the data were readily available cross-platform (with the consent of the consumer) so people could run their own analysis. I personally do it manually anyway but lowering the barrier to entry seems beneficial if it gets more people in charge of their own finances.

BBC exterminates AI experiments used to promote Doctor Who

Re: Apologies to Jim Croce

While I prefer subtlety, I don't think even on the nose commentary is a sure-fire recipe for a bad end product. The example I would use is Arachnids in the UK. It was fairly standard Who at the core concept but failed to be an enjoyable watch because, in my opinion, the villain was written as a Trump stand-in. This meant (as far as Chibnall seems to be concerned) he couldn't be charismatic, sympathetic or have any other interesting depth; he could only be an unpleasant, weak-charactered, ignorant businessman, which was made all the more bland by everyone else having to be entirely good in their motives and actions.

In some ways, this sort of storytelling reminds me of 'uplifting' American Christian cinema.

Re: Apologies to Jim Croce

I think it's possible to be political and still be entertaining. For instance, The Sun Makers is politically straight out of an excessively activism-focused student union but is still an entertaining watch because the priority isn't placed on viewer indoctrination.

Re: Apologies to Jim Croce

I think we're a bit past worrying about messing with Who, considering what Chibnall did to it.

Woz calls out US lawmakers for TikTok ban: 'I don’t like the hypocrisy'

Perhaps that stat is a mixture of people genuinely silly enough to hand over their password and those smart enough to make something up for chocolate, a sort of inverse bell curve.

I'm not sure this is a terribly convincing counter argument as IBM were only providing tools at the behest of a despotic government. It does make the case that large businesses can't be trusted to act ethically but it was still a government using those tools to ensure every undesirable ended up in a cattle car.

It seems fairly straightforward to me but that may be down to my own ignorance: the government can do things to me that are orders more horrible than any one business and, when the government abuses me, I can only take my business elsewhere by leaving the country (assuming I'm even permitted to leave).

That's not to say Facebook has benign intentions, they're just less likely to increase my risk of paying more taxes or being imprisoned with the information they've gathered. My biggest concern is that they'll pass their collected information on to the government.

If you class "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" as 'muh freedumb' then that is simply disappointing and it's a shame that you're potentially a useful idiot for oppressive government.

Whistleblower raises alarm over UK Nursing and Midwifery Council's DB

Re: "Journey of Improvement"

That might be true too but the NMC is an independent body. They're both the registering body for nurses and their largest union.

"Journey of Improvement"

I'll have to keep this one in mind for when I'm caught seriously fucking up.

World's first Neuralink patient enjoying online chess, long Civ 6 sessions

Re: Still not doing anything you can't do with a headset?

I take it you haven't tried those. You can move a mouse cursor but, unless they've massively improved in the decade since I tried one, it requires you to make large voluntary changes to your brain activity (e.g. internally screaming or the same effort as tensing every muscle to the point of pain). They're also very limited for locomotion, since significant movement upsets the sensors (though this can be mitigated with skull implants).

It may be an exaggeration but if the description of the mental load required to operate this is true, it's a massive upgrade. Looking at the video, he's far more animated than any person I've seen doing much more rudimentary control with an EEG skull cap.

Filipino police free hundreds of slaves toiling in romance scam operation

Re: Modern slavery

The old deal between Russia and West of making other nations of USSR invisible is one of the causes of the current war.

This was less an attempt by the West at making the Soviets happy (as with One China) and more refusing to dance to the Soviet tune that the USSR was a voluntary association of truly independent nations.

Imagine it's the early Nineteenth Century, you're a Black individual in a Northern State. You endure everything you have just described (minus any welfare) but, every single second, you are aware that a small geographic misstep or an abduction could see you lose what few freedoms you do have. You might be beaten to death for non compliance, you'll certainly never see your friends and family again (unless you risk death to escape and, even then, the odds are massively against you), you will be owned as property until you die. Even worse, your children might be taken and you would never know if they have simply died or are owned as property somewhere you would be enslaved for simply setting foot; I imagine some Black parents at this time likely hoped their children had merely died painlessly.

This is just one way that even the proximity of slavery, let alone being in its clutches would be mentally devastating. I could continue with other examples but it's better to pick up a book and read. At the bare minimum, watch Twelve Years a Slave.

I do not criticise these comparisons to minimise the severity of what you refer to as "wage slavery", I criticise them because they minimise something that was far worse. Like the Holocaust, slavery was and is so outlandishly evil that it is important we never dilute its meaning. You describe an evil of neglect and biological reality, rather than an evil of active, systematic and devastating abuse.

Diluting the meaning is whitewashing and you keep doing it with your comparisons. If you cannot see that there is a clear difference between being "enslaved" by the need to eat and being enslaved by being owned as property, I can only conclude that you either completely lack empathy, really don't understand or have some strange sense of recognition seeking.

I passed the edit window but, to put your comparison in perspective, Forty Acres and a Mule was considered to be a good promise that never materialised. Imagine a modern government giving the vulnerable some arable land and washing their hands of them, the outrage would be unimaginable but precisely that was considered to be a massive step up over and compensation for slavery.

By all means, share your horror stories, I will agree that they are terrible and need to be fixed but please do not make space to write them by whitewashing a vastly more reprehensible part of our history.

The simple fact is that actual slaves risk their lives to escape to a life like or worse than that. It you think the two are comparable, you need to educate yourself on how unbelievably horrific actual slavery is.

Just as every attack on a population doesn't have to equal the holocaust to be considered bad, every instance of employment injustice doesn't have to be compared to slavery. It's insulting because it down plays the horrors and betrays that the person making the comparison considers that to be the threshold at which intervention should take place.

It's definitely a problem in its own right but I think it's pretty grotesque to try to equate working a shitty, low paying job with the horrors of actual slavery.

Crypto scams more costly to the US than ransomware, Feds say

Vigilantism doesn't necessarily mean law breaking, it's just a potential occurrence.

Ahead of IPO, Reddit blends advertising into user posts

Re: Blending

Some of the technical discussion subs are quite interesting but they inevitably turn into inane tech support questions from people that find reading challenging or as a platform to push political stances.

The latter is particularly devastating because, surprise, people who want to discuss technical topics want to discuss said topic so their protests at not wanting to have their discussion hijacked in support of Current Thing end up being labelled as 'hate speech'. They are forced out, leaving behind idiotic activists who eventually move on to the next technical space once the previous has no new interesting content they can hijack, like locusts but somehow even more obnoxious.

Can AI shorten PC replacement cycles? Dell seems to think so

Re: "shorten PC replacement cycles"

Absolutely, I'd add to my previous preference that I also preferred having to take a single screw out to swap a drive on a T420 over taking the entire base off. The T440P at least had a cover that screwed and slid but, with the T470S, it now has those abominable clips. Apologies for not knowing when these transitions occurred, I'm not a huge Thinkpad collector, I just have a few that, in many ways, mark a bitter decline.

Re: "shorten PC replacement cycles"

I'm probably a bit of a thickie but I'd prefer my laptop to be a mm thicker and have a socket over having to do BGA soldering.

AI and wearables are scaring the wellbeing out of workers

Re: Who would want to wear

Just put it on the cat

Your PC can probably run inferencing just fine – so it's already an AI PC

Re: No wonder hardware vendors are on board

Work continues on the search for a round number between 21 and 23.

Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

I think it's worth a scientific trial. Anyone expressing a wish to execute political opponents, simply for expressing their beliefs, could be executed and we could then see how well the idea of political executions endures. Any further proponents will also be executed.

If the idea endures, then they're probably not very effective, so we can stop executions. If it goes away, we can stop executions because no one alive supports the idea.

Gotten? American politics is a contact sport. The US Capitol alone has seen everything from journalists (1890) to Puerto Rican independence advocates (1954) demonstrating their extreme displeasure with legislators within its walls.