Posts by David M 145 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2008
It's not just a question of potentially losing access to American tech resources. There is also the fact that the US government can use the CLOUD Act to demand access to any and all data held by any US corporation, regardless of where in the world the data is physically held. Which is fine, if you completely trust Trump not to abuse that power. Hmm...
If you're accessing FB from a desktop browser, take a look at fbpurity.com. It's a browser addon that lets you turn off most of the annoyances. An ad-blocker also helps. I've used this setup for years, and when I look at FB I see posts from friends, posts from groups I follow, and nothing else. Which is as it should be.
How about we make it a strict rule that a datacentre can only be designated as NSIP if it is completely sovereign, i.e. British-owned and absolutely not subject to the US CLOUD Act. That would provide the requisite boost for British tech and industry, without lining the pockets of certain multinationals.
The original system design was flawed—4G was never a good fit for emergency services use, lacking support for peer-to-peer and push-to-talk. As is so often the case with large IT projects, the people senior enough to make procurement decisions completely lack the technical knowledge (or independent technical advice) to ask the right questions and make sensible decisions, so they get the wool pulled over their eyes by big suppliers offering a solution that will allegedly save money.
By the time the system finally goes live (if ever—2029 is looking very optimistic), 4G will be obsolete, and we may have to start all over again anyway.
Our other failing is a refusal to look at what other countries do. Surely most countries in the world must have systems like this, so could we not have found some of the most successful examples, and bought one of those?
Or, for GBP 3 billion, we could even have set up an entire company from scratch to build, deploy and support an entire system designed exactly to our needs.
"This will enable OpenAI's models to run on local, sovereign compute infrastructure for use cases such as critical public services, regulated industries like finance, research projects or national security partnerships, [OpenAI] claimed."
Except it wouldn't, as US law says that the US government can demand access to any data held by a US company, regardless of where that data is geographically located.
> Is that signed or unsigned?
The article answers this: the weights are +1/-1 with a shared scale (exponent), though it doesn't say how many weights share the same scale, or how big the scale factor is. But one could imagine something like a 32-bit value containing 24 1-bit weights (±1) together with a shared eight-bit exponent. Of course that would limit the available values - each weight would have to be ±2ⁿ, and n would have to be the same for the whole group, but I guess that's good enough for this kind of model.
"The agreement, priced at £472.8 million including VAT..."
Why would HMRC need to pay VAT? They're only going to collect it back again.
"HMRC can pay for extras including business services transformation, migration of services not run from the three Fujitsu datacenters, and application modernization."
...can pay through the nose for extras...
FTFY
It should be noted that juries are far from perfect. Jurors have no legal training, they're subject to all sorts of biases, prejudices and external influences (social media, I'm looking at you) and, crucially, they're not required to explain how they reached their verdict. Whereas a judge or magistrate has to provide a written explanation of their decision, making it much easier to appeal, should there be a problem.
Also, if an offence carries a three-year sentence, that three years is the absolute maximum given by the sentencing guidelines, and almost all defendants will receive a different/shorter sentence, depending on the circumstances of the case.
The jury trial is undoubtedly a good thing, but I don't think the proposed changes are that bad, and if they reduce the time (sometimes years) that defendants hang around on remand, then justice may be better served.
Introducing AI, on the other hand, is a terrible idea.
"Government and military communications would be exempt from the plan."
I wonder why. If the backdoors are so safe, and those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear, then these rules should apply to everyone. It would be interesting to see how politicians' attitudes change, given the prospect of their own communications being scrutinised.
I still have a few old radio programmes on pre-recorded cassette, and one of the things I like is that I can press 'play' and the programme picks up exactly where it left off, even if the tape was previously in a different player. Is there any modern recording medium where every album remembers its place?
I agree that backwards compatibility has its uses. On my Linux Mint box, I just sync-ed my PalmPilot using an ancient copy of pilot-xfer. Hardly a common use-case, but it's nice that such things still work, and thus keep some old hardware usable that would otherwise end up as e-waste.
"It uses deep learning and foundation models trained on large datasets of human driving behaviour [...] This means that vehicles are designed to benefit from vast amounts of real and synthetic driving behaviour data to safely navigate complex environments..."
I bet they haven't trained it on any of the roads around here. In recent times I have had to deal with...
And those are just a few examples - something unique and unexpected seems to happen fairly often, and if the training data doesn't cover it, who knows what the AI would decide to do?
The microwave oven equivalent figures fail to take into account the fact that the magnetron in a microwave oven is only about 65% efficient, for example my 800W microwave has a rated input power of 1270W. So taking one of the examples from the article, 3.4MJ would correspond to 3.4e6/1270 = around 45 minutes, not an hour as stated. The point of the article still stands, of course—that AI uses a shocking amount of electricity to deliver very little value—but we might as well get the engineering right.
One problem with phones and 'smart' devices is that software/firmware updates often stop after a ludicrously short period of time, rendering older devices dangerously insecure. I just tried to update the firmware in my DSL router and discovered that the manufacturer (Zyxel) classes it as 'end-of-life' and will no longer provide updates. It's about 2½ years old.
The entire purpose of a door lock is security, so purchasers are likely to give at least some thought to how secure it is. If, on the other hand, I'm buying a smart lightbulb, or an audio streamer, or some other internet-connected appliance, I'm unlikely to even consider its level of cyber security unless it comes with some kind of official rating or warning label.
I'm not sure that follows. Just because the US Government doesn't practise what it preaches doesn't necessarily mean that what it preaches is wrong. The principle that certain software security vulnerabilities can easily be avoided and should not be tolerated applies regardless of who is saying it. Of course it would be better if the Government led by example, but the idea is still sound.
