Posts by JimBz

Dutch cops arrest man after sending him confidential files by mistake

Naive and/or stupid. I'm not sure how anyone could not be aware that there are some seriously fierce laws against unauthorised data access that it's better not to mess with.

X sues to protect Twitter brand Musk has been trying to kill

Probably a smart strategic move by twitter.new. You lose the case, but get the free publicity for the new platform. Modify the logo and name. Job done.

AI datacenter boom could end badly, Goldman Sachs warns

Re: It is!

"You can't sue us if we're wrong, even if it destroys your business." It's a disclaimer. AI changes every week. It's currently in a phase of competition for capability, competition for efficiency will come.

Amazon complains that Perplexity's agentic shopping bot is a terrible customer

Re: positive customer experience

Sign the AI bots.

AWS admits more bits of its cloud broke as it recovered from DynamoDB debacle

Re: What a great idea

In-house apps break too. Small businesses will rarely have the resources or expertise to manage and secure complex systems. They are typically way better off using cloud apps than trying to maintain a bunch of servers.

Microsoft admits it 'cannot guarantee' data sovereignty

Re: Technically correct, but with massive caveats

Privacy is a consideration but there are others like cost and reliability that are often way more important. Nothing ticks every box. It's easy to say "Just. Say. No." if you aren't paying and don't care if the it breaks.

The AIpocalypse is here for websites as search referrals plunge

Re: Some of hese comments seem to miss the point

Never seen an AI answer that was correct? Really? It's not always perfect, but it's often enough or at least a good start for my kind of query.

I totally prefer AI answers over a list of promoted sites and optimised ad bucket sites. Google didn't put AI at the top because it wants to give you AI answers to demonstrate how wonderful its AI is or something, it did it to stop a migration to alternate AI answer sites. It's a loss of revenue but that's better than a total loss of relevance. Goggle want to remain the default search engine.

There's plenty of problems with AI, and we are in the early days when everything changes every other week, but this is better for me at least.

Cops want Apple, Google to kill stolen phones remotely – so why won't they?

Re: Do the opposite

Never? Seriously? That sounds like ideology, not evidence.

Turns out using 100% of your AI brain all the time isn’t most efficient way to run a model

Re: What a coincidence... No LLM?

We certainly don't "know how the brain works" but we do know a huge amount about the brain. There's plenty of evidence that brain circuits are not always on, they are activated when they are triggered.

VPN Secure parent company CEO explains why he had to axe thousands of 'lifetime' deals

I'm all for suing the company, if it works. I don't know anything about the legal merit of this case, but I'd guess it probably won't work. And if even it does, it probably won't hit the scammers who made the original offer.

But generally, if a deal is too good to be true, it's too good to be true. We're absolute suckers for the free lunch and it creates one crazy situation after another. Personally, I'd tend go for the best sustainable deal in this situation, but there's also the let's-see-how-long-we-can-milk-this-cow approach if that floats your boat. But imaging that the unsustainable will continue forever "because advertising" is just nuts. Believing your own dummy spit just keeps the circus going.

There's a great adage in economics: If a trend is unsustainable, it won't continue forever. Corollary: It may continue for longer than you can afford to bet against it.

Three Brits charged over 'active shooter threats' swattings in US, Canada

Re: What could possibly go wrong?

Compliance is still a lot smarter. (I don't always agree with the FBI, but this is good advice, unfortunately.)

Google says it's rolling out fix for stricken Chromecasts

Re: Too Bad

I've updated to the streamer but I still have a beloved old Chromecase Audio which is the same Gen 2 firmware, I believe.

10 years is actually pretty impressive for tech gear imho. I can understand someone thinking 10 years is plenty back then. And it falling off the radar.

Google Timeline location purge causes collateral damage

Re: Faster than a speeding bullet

Any big dataset has errors but that doesn't make it useless. We take into account context, corroboration, reasonableness. If there's a murder down the road and your timeline says you were there you are in serious need of a reliable alibi. Your location blips probably won't do the trick. If the murder was in South America, and you had to travel at the speed of light to get there and return, you're off the hook.

Smile! UK cops spend tens of millions on live facial recognition tech

OK, let's stick with the landed gentry because someone might get hurt. It's generally better to use short narratives than having to any tedious analysis of harms and benefits.

D-Link tells users to trash old VPN routers over bug too dangerous to identify

Running an EOL router is just a very bad idea, whether there are known exploits or not. There's an arms race going on.

NASA wants ideas on how to haul injured moonwalkers

Works on Mars. The Moon atmosphere is thinner, but it's there. My back of envelope calculation says rotors 15 km long.

Cisco scores a perfect CVSS 10 with critical flaw in its wireless system

Re: Is there any Cisco kit that's not a security nightmare?

Risk increases with power.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Re: Good

That's good and reasonable, but people are mentally different and have different capabilities. A government would be voted out if it only licenced drivers who meet your level. A bit of a capability augmentation is ok. How do you feel about ABS? Lane keeping and vehicle distance monitoring? Ideally, we all be ideal drivers, reality is messy.

Time Lords decree: No leap second needed in 2024

As a protest, I will be conducting a personal stolen leap second calendar riot. There, it's done. Went well. Didn't get up to much but that's not the point.