Posts by DavCrav 3894 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2007
"I feel the moment we "clamp down on propaganda" we're no better than China or North Korea."
Well, you feel wrongly then. There is a difference between executing human rights campaigners and blocking ISIS beheading videos. If you cannot see this, your opinion isn't worth listening to.
"Gavrilo Princip didn't think it necessary to live stream to Facebook when he threw a bomb at Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, and neither did many other terrorists through the years. Live streaming merely adds a new horror to an old evil. Stopping live streaming merely attacks the symptom, not the disease."
It won't stop all acts of criminality, this is true. It will stop some of them. I assume you didn't lose any friends or relatives in this attack, so you aren't too bothered about whether it could have been stopped by forcing Facebook to improve its content detection.
You people are fucking nuts. The US isn't a fantastic place to live if you are poor, but they are not currently engaged in cultural genocide. To compare human rights abuses by the US and China is insane.
Think about it and decide if you really, really, believe China as the world's 'global policeman' would be as relatively benign as the last two decades. Arrest one of their citizens for fraud? Expect your innocent citizens to be kidnapped, tortured and executed in response. And that's now, not even when they are even more powerful.
"It is therefore hardly surprising that businesses are slow to report a breach. They will want to make damn sure that there has been one, before reporting it."
I think the point was the gap between finding a breach and reporting it, not the gap between there being a breach and it being found.
"Indeed, particularly as no one's going to believe his change to "not probing for vulnerabilities" when reminded of things such as the Computer Misuse Act..."
However, surely he was authorized to put text into the text box? How many characters do you have to put in before it becomes unauthorized?
"I'm not surprised though considering how poor TalkTalk are with customer service/care. They're the kind of company that offer you more expensive deals at a subsidized price when you attempt to cancel your service with them."
So, like every other mobile phone, internet, TV, etc. company I've ever dealt with then?
"Even worse, part of the "mitigation" was that the system was dithering over what the object was and kept changing its "mind". I'm not sure why that should matter."
Indeed. If I think "I'm not sure if that's a person or something else" at night I don't then think "well, I'll just carry on and find out when I get there". So human 1, AV 0.
"Well, not quite, because you see although the vehicle can determine that braking is needed, it won't actually apply the brakes when operating autonomously, but it will alert the safety driver who is then required to perform the emergency braking maneouvre, so it really depends on the safety driver being alert and their reaction time"
It's worse than that. From the article, the safety driver isn't actually alerted.
"Weirdly in the UK there is a level of liability on the Pedestrian, they still need to stop look and listen before they step out in to traffic. If they don't do that drivers are not at fault outside of a marked crossing!"
False. A driver is at fault if they do not make every effort to stop.
I thought it was primarily designed to keep people in rather than out? I guess I am demonstrating my ignorance and half-remembered nonsense here. It's true that it's not thousands of years old, though. I cannot now correct the timescale on my joke unfortunately, so it will have to stand forever as a monument to my lack of both humour and history.
"It is quite possible, indeed likely, that the NSA had independently invented it already and just hadn't told anyone."
Possible, but I don't think likely. Indeed, GCHQ told the NSA about CCA (Cliff Cocks algorithm) soon after he discovered it, and they didn't say 'oh yeah, we've got, like, three of them'. At the time there was a lot of co-operation between the two agencies.
"so it is right that RSA got the credit"
No, that's not how discoveries work. That's how patents work, but this is about reality, not the legal system. For example, consider this sentence from Wikipedia on the telephone:
"The first telephone was invented by Antonio Meucci, but Alexander Graham Bell is credited with the development of the first practical telephone."
Meucci never patented or sold his telephone, so he didn't make any money from it. However, he is the inventor because that's what actually happened in the world.
"Many important ideas in maths have been invented independently by multiple people. We try not to get hung up on who happened to be first, and sometimes the person it's named after isn't the first, but the one who did more with it, or was just lucky to be on this side of the Iron Curtain."
Is that really true? It might vary from field to field then. I think in pure mathematics it is important to establish priority, even if the results were obtained independently. Nowadays citations matter -- and determine promotions -- so if your original work is ignored over a later one, that has a negative impact on your career. For example, the journals of the London Mathematical Society (disclaimer: I'm on the editorial board) list one of the reasons for a corrigendum to be issued is to establish priority, even if the results are correct.
For instance, there is a famous lemma in permutation groups called Burnside's lemma, but it definitely isn't by him, and is often now called the Cauchy-Frobenius lemma. Both Cauchy and Frobenius are dead and already have enough named after them, but historical record is important. In most books since this became widely known, this fact is mentioned along with the result.
As a negative example however, the Cauchy--Riemann equations were known to d'Alembert, and Euler used them, about a century beforehand. This is mentioned on the Wikipedia page (I just checked) but not in Conway's GTM on complex analysis. (My other complex analysis textbooks are buried under a pile of things, and so I'm not going to check.)
Certainly 45 years after the fact, and now we know who the inventor of RSA is, things should be stated as "discovered by Cliff Cocks in the early 70s, and subsequently independently rediscovered by RSA". Certainly that is how I've been trying to do things in the book I've just finished writing, including both the Soviet and Western discoverers of results when they appear independent.
It wasn't invented by R, S and A. It was invented a few years earlier by Cliff Cocks, a British mathematician working for GCHQ. He was told about the (at the time unimplemented) idea of asymmetric encryption and literally overnight came up with the same algorithm, but he couldn't write anything down because he wasn't in the building. R, S and A merely rediscovered the process.
Adi Shamir has done enough things that were definitely his without using as an example something he didn't really invent.
"The escape velocity for a 25 km diameter asteroid (assuming it is spherical and the same density as the moon) is just slightly over 17 meters/sec (38mph). A lot of the blown off bits will have a velocity relative to the asteroid greater than this so will not be recaptured."
Yes, but the total amount blown off would need to be greater than the big asteroid you've just added to the mass to be of any use. And the more you throw off very fast, the less energy there is to chuck off the rest. Slamming a small thing into a big thing won't smash the big thing into enough small fast bits, is the conclusion of this.
"How many companies would be falling over themselves to make evidence available that they pay men and women equally for the same job role."
That's not what this is about. This is taking the median male and female salary and taking the percentage difference. They are not for the same role.
The Equal Pay Act has been law for decades, and has real bite, as opposed to this gender pay gap fluff, which does not.
Thank you. A lot of people here seem to say 'America is bad. China is bad. Therefore they are as bad as each other.' Guantanamo is a bad thing, an unhappy answer to the question 'what do you you do with dangerous people you pick up on a battlefield who aren't fighting for a particular country and therefore aren't prisoners of war?' Sticking a million Uighurs in prison for being Muslim is also bad.
But, and let's be really clear here, the Uighur concentration camp is much, much worse than Guantanamo. And if you cannot see that, you need to really think. China hasn't kidnapped a single person. They've kidnapped two so far, and sentenced a third guy to death, in an extra hearing that wasn't even legal by China's own law. So that is murder then, not execution.
So what we are saying is, if a country arrests an executive of China on receipt of a valid extradition request, and hasn't even extradited them yet, China can kidnap and threaten to murder a few of that country's nationals, and people on here will cheer them on.
Look at yourselves in the mirror. Really.
"In this case Huawei are right that US can't ban specifically their products only, without any more specific reason than "they're Chinese". If NSA etc have proof of pwnage or attempted such, they should demonstrate. Otherwise it's just trumpian hot air"
Except here's the proof:
1) Huawei is Chinese.
2) There is a Chinese law that says Huawei has to backdoor its stuff if China wants.
3) Proved that it is a risk.
Whether the Chinese government has invoked the law is irrelevant; Huawei, and every other Chinese company, became a security risk as soon as it looked plausible that China would do such a thing. passing an explicit law saying they can definitely makes it plausible.
"are any number of companies looking to sue the UK government for trashing their profits thanks to Brexit. Starting with the Japanese who have invested billions on the basis that the UK was in the EU."
Luckily, companies cannot sue on the basis of democratic choices made by the electorate. At least, not yet.
"if stealing was a source of some of this surely they would be behind the company they stole from."
Unless, you know, you nick a bunch of stuff and then work from that. You don't have to replicate all of the original basic stuff, like designing a robot hand. You just steal it.
"My father offered to buy it, but was refused as there were "procedures"."
One of the procedures is to make sure nobody buys something they want on the taxpayer's credit card, then pretends it's not needed any more and flogs it off to himself on the cheap. Of course this isn't the case here, but it's difficult to write a policy 'don't be a dick about things'. Hence why tax law is so complicated and still full of holes.
What's quite impressive is that your example of not being able to decide whether Russia or the US lies more is some really small half-quote in a newspaper once. Whereas an example of Russia lying is pretending that their soldiers are all on holiday when really they are invading a foreign country.
I mean, if you are going to say that the US lies, at least go with the fact that Trump, who I remind you is inexplicably the actual President right now, has lied more than 8000 times since taking office.
"We in the technical community know that they're making fools of themselves"
That is a very bold claim. Suppose that the prosecution's claim that Huawei has a 'Steal secrets! Big prizes to be won!" policy. (If they don't, it's a bit hard to square with why a piece of T-Mobile kit just happened to fall and land in a Huawei engineer's bag.) Now, I've never worked in an organization where we were encouraged by senior management to commit crimes, I don't know about you.
So we can be pretty sure that there's some apparent proper dodgy stuff going on at Huawei. Including faking an internal report that proved it was all a big misunderstanding. This sort of behaviour might explain why they are suddenly a world leader in certain technology areas...
We also know that there's some 'security flaws' that have been found by the UK testers, that for some reason weren't fixed for over a year.
The backdoor threat is probably garbage, yes, but this company does not exactly look pure as the driven snow.
"20k is taking the piss. If he had gone in with a more realistic number like 250k he may have got somewhere."
Why? You don't need thousands of hours of legal time to explain why you aren't subject to VAT. Unless you really are, and you are busy leafing through lawbooks, trying to wriggle out of reality.
"Right & wrong aren't helpful words when crafting an arguement. They don't mean whatever it is you think they mean to anyone else reading this."
They really do in a Common Law jurisdiction. If the QC can show that the way the rules are being implemented is incompatible with the intention of the original lawmakers, then the judiciary can set a precedent that the interpretation should be more in line with 'common sense'. Such statements as 'a reasonable person' do show up in the law.
"If that's what happened then the case goes out the window because there was no VAT to create a VAT receipt for in the first place."
That's why, I guess, the request was for a VAT receipt for £1.06 rather than the whole £6.34. It looks like its Uber's portion. It would have been good for there to have been more detail about the case itself in the article.
Got the first one wrong, learned what the differences were, and next six all correct. Then I got bored.
It's some form of human learning algorithm. Very powerful stuff, but difficult to explain to the layman. "You show humans a few images, and they seem to work it out for themselves."
"10 Print "We will deliver brexit. A brexit people voted for. A brexit good for jobs and the economy."
20 Goto 10"
You need an if statement as there's a massive difference between which leader you ask.
if(party == "Conservative")
cout<<"red, white and blue Brexit";
if(party == "Labour")
cout<<"jobs-first Brexit";
"First They Ignore You,
Then They Laugh at You,
Then They Attack You,
Then You Win"
You say this, but this is survivor bias. There are far more concepts and ideas that don't get past stages 1 and 2 than make it to stage 4. For example, Nike's new shoes that need an app to do them up. I don't need to attack them for it, because I'm still at the laughing stage. And I can confidently predict that I really, really hope they don't win.
See also, IoT locks for your front door. That's a stage 3 idea. It's at the full-blown attack stage because enough people decided to buy one that it's now an issue. In the far future, they will reach stage 4, but not until they are much better.
"If I find one now, but I don't tell them until next year, then I get more money that way."
Or someone else finds it and claims the money.
"I hesitated to mention that - but if you're smart enough to find the bugs, then you're smart enough to think of it without my help."
If you're smart enough to find the bugs, then you're smart enough to see the problem I mentioned above.
""you should have prepared an argument" - not about innocence/guilty of the alleged offense."
But that is his argument. I have not been charged with any crime, why have you stolen my stuff? And apparently that wasn't good enough for the magistrate, but it'd be good enough for most people. So since she decided his perfectly reasonable point was unimportant because she decided he did it even though she's not supposed to make that judgment, now it moves on to whether the system can screw some cash out of him for having the temerity to ask for his stuff back.
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