Posts by Gordon 10

Tropical island paradise ponders tax-free 'Digital Nomad Visa'

I was gonna say Tenerife but the point stands.

Look to insects if you want to build tiny AI robots that are actually smart

Re: We should be glad that most humans don't operate on that basis.

s/don't operate/occasionally don't operate/

I think there is much evidence to suggest many humans suffer from permanent Template locking. I cite 99% of TwitBook as my evidence base.

Ditto Daily Heil readers.

Consultant plays Metaverse MythBuster. Here's why they're wrong

So basically

McKinsey have probably recieved a large bundle of cash from FaceTwat to talk up the Metaverse and are doing do by redefining it as "Gaming on the internet".

In particular failing to mention the well publicised kiddy risks - especially wrt Roblox. And that before we get to the flying penises of Second Life.

Bzzt FAIL

Re: Holodeck

I look forward to the day I can push my mother in law in and shout "Computer Disable Holoroom safety protocols" whilst starting up Doom 2030.

GPUs aren’t always your best bet, Twitter ML tests suggest

So basically a custom processor is better than a GPU - well duh! This nothing but a vendor sales pitch and hence worthless.

Atos CEO resigns after board proposes splitting the company

Bonkers

Makes you wonder who on the board was behind the split and what they expect to gain. Seems ludicrous that a possible split wasnt discussed with an incoming CEO.

Meta slammed with eight lawsuits claiming social media hurts kids

Re: True AI - nobody sees it for what it is

Me too. Between my browser, Apple Pay and Paypal I can barely remember the last time I had to enter a CC num.

Maybe their target market is non-digital crumblies?

Elon Musk needs more cash for Twitter buy after Tesla margin loan lapses

Re: Genuine question

You are mixing up the financing of the buyout with the buyout itself. Musk has a financial house of cards he is juggling to produce the funding to buy enough of the publicly traded twitter shares to take it private.

At a high level the buyout works exactly as you have articulated.

Clearview AI fined millions in the UK: No 'lawful reason' to collect Brits' images

Re: And the enforceability of this fine is done how?

Since what they are doing - collecting images without consent is pretty much illegal in the UK - I'll doubt they'll care. They obviously dont give a stuff about operating in the EU or UK or they would never have gone down this route. BUT EU/UK citizens data will still be used to populate the training sets for their ML models.

Especially if you consider what they'd actually have to do to comply - which is to hard delete both the photos AND the ML models that were generated from them.

Never

Gonna

Happen

So I say again. What actual enforcement actions (that will work!) are open to the ICO? The only one I can think of is get them added to a sanctions list - but that seems tall ask for the ICO to achieve and I'm not sure the framework is in place for it. I think they'd have to write to one of the junior ministers in charge of the UK Treasury.

You downvoters are a bit naive on this one I think.

And the enforceability of this fine is done how?

Seems a pointless headline grabber by the ICO - I'm assuming that by design this company has no UK/EU assets or presence.

So the ICO is going to make them stop HOW exactly?

Safari is crippling the mobile market, and we never even noticed

Re: mobile screens too small?

Meh.

Even then I'm unconvinced unlocking the iOS browser engine will generate the wild surge of innovation they suppose.

Its very Western, Capitalist thinking that change for change's sake is good.

Maybe a dull steady state with lots of known - and therefore avoidable - bugs is better than rampant "innovation" and "creative destruction"?

I know I've come to dread every Chrome for Desktop update. Something annoying generally occurs 1 patch outta 3.

LIDAR in iPhones is not about better photos – it's about the future of low-cost augmented reality

Re: Letter to Elon

Thing is I'm not sure its funny. LIDAR for Phone <> Lidar for a car.

Apple to replace future iPhone Lightning port with USB-C next year, this guy claims

I'm unconvinced.

Especially by the analysts BS rationale about speeds and charging. This is Apple. Multiple inventor or adopter of "different" connectors and protocols.

If they put their mind to it they could easily invent or promote something better just like they did when they were about the only big company to promote Thunderbolt or SCSI or Firewire.

Now as a BOM reduction exercise from Tim the master beancounter - as mentioned further up the comments - that I could believe.

(as an aside USB-C PD charging on the newish Ipad Pro is as brilliant as the standard USB-C on it charging is poor.)

Appian awarded over $2b after claiming Pegasystems stole its data

Re: Odd

Which to be fair to Delaware - is pretty much how the English court system works too afaik. Probably where they got the idea from.

Odd

Seems a very odd ruling to me. If the only "trade secrets are a bit of look and feel and some UX functionality copied from videos then 2Bn seems a bit steep. Especially when all these Workflow/load code tools tend to converge on the same paradigms and concepts.

Without knowing more this seems to be a typical "US Court system doesn't understand Tech" result.

Study: How Amazon uses Echo smart speaker conversations to target ads

Re: How far will they be willing to go?

Yes if only the Uk was part of a supra-national entity that was willing to protect us from these rapacious ad revenue hungry US Tech Bros.

Oh wait a minute..... you dont think it was deliberate do you?

Twitter faces existential threat from world's richest techbro

Re: Do what?

Thats hilarious. Just because he lacks total power over Twitter doesn't mean he has not garnered significant power elsewhere. The exception does not prove the rule.

Re: Do what?

And what happens when the laws and courts are effectively 50-60% owned by that person?

Anyone who doesn't realise we are witnessing a group trying to smother American democracy on behalf of an angry white minority (hint its not the left) and mostly succeeding is delusional.

Freedom of speech requires democracy, sometimes freedom of speech has to come second to the needs of democracy.

Frankly it's only American's that put freedom of speech on such a ridiculous pedestal. Rather like not flag burning.

Elon Musk says he can get $46.5bn to buy Twitter

Re: Wait, what?

I don't think the Holme's comparison is valid. She was a total fraud. Musk (the public persona) is more of a PT Barnum figure, but genuinely successful at multiple things he puts his mind to.

By comparison his peers like Bezos and Gates are one trick ponies. - albeit very successful ones.

That ain't how interest rates work.

Re: SpaceX is his most solid buisness at this point.

I would take issue with much promised and little delivered. Yes he overhypes but none of the deliveries that Tesla and SpaceX have managed have been achieved by any of the incumbents in those industries.

(3 if you count paypal)

Cheapest Space Launch system ever.

Biggest Electric Car manufacturer.

Best Charging network.

Like it or not - he's a disrupter in the true sense of the word - not the VC bullshit sense of the world.

British motorists will be allowed to watch TV in self-driving vehicles

Re: Clippy behind the wheel

"Decisions like it is safer to go faster than the speed limit right now are potentially impossible for computers."

But thats a decision where there is always one answer - NO. Thats not even a binary question.

A "self driving" car that accelerated and braked smoothly and always obeyed the speed limits would be a quantum leap forward both for Safety and Climate change.

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

Re: Gardening leave

More fool him. He should have done his contracted minimum and left it 90% finished.

SPAC sponsors could soon be held liable for over-hyping to investors

WTAF

Why would you be stupid enough to buy shares in a SPAC if you have no idea what they are for?

CAVEAT EMPTOR.

ExoMars rover launch axed over Russia tensions

Re: I guess

If I've got the stats right standard Falcon 9 has the grunt to lift Exomars (~4500kg) to GTO. Its done up to 7000kg to GTO before.....

Ukraine invasion: We should consider internet sanctions, says ICANN ex-CEO

Re: its over

Instant down vote from the use of the phrase "cancel culture".

You are part of the problem and I see you.

Good job you didn't use "woke" as well as El Reg doesn't allow multiple downvotes.

Re: its over

AND?

You're seriously suggesting that the conceit of a single world wide internet trumps the ability to hobble war mongers from war mongering?

Your argument doesn't hold water. There are multiple worldwide financial transfer networks. They work just fine.

I'm not sure the "architectural purity" of the current Internet is a valid argument tbh.

Huawei UK board members resign over silence on Ukraine invasion

All that is valid, see also the Western support for Iraq and Afganistan.

However there is one element of Realpolik that none of these foreign wars have materially threatened mainland Europe. Ukraine manifestly does. One wrong clash on the Polish border and WW3 is possible.

The fact Russia is the main actor rather than propping up a supporting regime also changes matters.

Reg reader rages over Virgin Media's email password policy

Smug mode off

Downvoting because Virgin mandates that you use a Virgin mail address for logon to their billing screens.

There wasn't an alternative last time I checked. You can get a copy bill sent to any address you like but the actual logon requires the Virgin address.

NHS Digital's demise bad for 55 million patients' privacy – ex-chairman

Re: FTFY

My thoughts exactly. I thought NHS-D were a bunch of data bandits?

Is the chairman not the pot calling the kettle......

arrrr!

Ericsson report details how it paid off Islamic State

Re: Tough Moralism

Ericsson didn't have to do anything. There is no universal rule saying a region has to have a mobile network so badly its worth bribing actual terrorists to get things done. After all the infrastructure would have benefited them anyway so strategically they probably could have negotiated a deployment without a hefty bribe.

Harvard, MIT, Berkeley are still fighting over genome-editing patents. Now another ruling

Here's an idea

Maybe fix the broken US patents system where only the lawyers win?

EU digital sovereignty: Cloud players unconvinced

Talk about a day late and a dollar short - Elvis has left the country.....

The opportunity to build a EU hyperscaler has been and gone. There is zero chance of them being competitive with Oracle and Ali let alone the big 3.

They would be better off bribing approaching MS or AWS or GCP (please no) to set up a duplicate ownership model in the EU. License the technology from the Mothership but total network and company segregation from it. Like Gov.cloud but EU.Cloud.

IBM HR chief insists 'no systemic age discrimination'

Re: The bump in the virtuous road

You are a BOFH and I claim my £5.

UK pins hopes on 'latest technology' to whittle down massive National Health Service waiting lists

Oh FFS

Stop spending peanuts on tech boondoggles and start hiring to replace the 93k NHS vacancies, plus the next 100k who are approaching burnout.

£37Bn on T&T - cant even be arsed to fund the NHS properly - even with an 12Bn NI rise. There is a point at which it becomes ideologically led destruction of the NHS in favour of their Tory donating mates.

Geomagnetic storm takes out 40 of 49 brand new Starlink satellites

Re: Cost

So 80% of 20m = 16m - total cash sunk in experiment $26m

Re: Insured?

Interestingly the estimated cost of a Starlink bird is $250k to $500k

Assuming the lower end SpaceX have just lost a cool $10m on an experiment.....

Tiny Uber offshoot tries to do for data lakes what Snowflake did for data warehousing

The're a bit late to the Party

No-one except Web 3.0 darlings with megascale are building on Hadoop anymore. Because old school relational (MS, Oracle) and new skool relational (Snowflake) are good enough to cover off most Lake use cases as well these days.

Besides there have been a couple of Hadoop as SAAS/Managed Service products around for years. BlueData and Cazena/Cloudera SAAS.

NASA taps Lockheed Martin to build Mars parcel pickup rocket

Alternative view. Elon gets there first but accidentally crushes the sample tubes under his bootheel when doing his "One Giant step for Elon" speech.

Alternative alternative view. The Tesla Roadster crash lands on Mars smashing Perseverance to bits just before it drops the tubes off.

Attack on Titan: Four Japanese Manga publishers sue Cloudflare

Why stop there? Lets takedown all the DNS servers.

Even better why dont they go after ICANN? I'll get the popcorn.

HPE has 'substantially succeeded' in its £3.3bn fraud trial against Autonomy's Mike Lynch – judge

Re: Absolutely ourageous

As much as I dislike to admit it - its your "common sense" again the experience and expertise of a top tier Judge for which these matters are one of his specialties.

HPE being a gang of clowns and Auditors either not doing their jobs or doing them incompetently doesnt stop there actually being Fraud committed - which is what the Judge has ruled.

Re: Lynch should be in prison

Unfortunately this verdict will be used as a fig leaf to cover the HPE execs of the time I guarantee they will get no comeback.

Aliens will be the least of his problems.

Thats Lynch f*cked then. In many senses of the word.

Court papers indicate text messages from HMRC's 60886 number could snoop on Brit taxpayers' locations

Re: WTAF

@David12.

It's complicated, and mostly one of outlook. The EU believes fundamentally in data privacy for individuals - the US doesn't. At the practical individual level you are right - there's probably not a lot to choose between them. Both the US and EU governments have stepped over the mark - but arguably its habitual in the US compared to EU.

Its different in terms of magnitude and the differing treatment of EU citizens. EU governments - more precisely their security arms - are more constrained in what they do whereas the NSA/DoJ have a history of bulk hoovering and mass interception (and getting caught). There have been multiple instances of US Govt overreach that got the EU riled up. The Microsoft email case for example. US border cell phone seizures. Their habit of gaining secret access to data centres using FISA laws also doesn't endear them to the EU. Basically if you are an EU citizen in the US you have much less data rights than a US citizen and that pisses the EU off.

Lastly the thing you have to realise is the Spirit of GDPR is really cool and hard to disagree with, however compliance to every last inch of a bunch of legal rules written by lawyers with only a faint grasp of technology is virtually impossible even before you get to cross border data exchanges.

Which is why nearly everyone sensible takes a risk based approach, but on the one end you get Facebook and AdTech firms actively abusing it, others keeping their heads low (Telco's & SMS triangulation), and people like Max Schrems - whom I admire but is a bit of a fundamentalist on privacy - who will use any tiny clause of GDPR to go after Facebook and anyone else he fancies.

HTH

Re: WTAF

"Do you remember all those things you clicked OK on when you got your shiny new phone? It was probably in there."

Ultra dense unreadable T&C's - Meet GDPR's informed consent rule. TL:DR if its not obvious - its not informed consent.

WTAF

The operation of the service as described seems like a breach of GDPR to me.

At no time has my network provider sought my consent to provide my location to various unsavoury third parties. (The rozzers/emergency services are fine imo)

Telco Commentards - just how widely accessible/queryable is the SS7 protocol?

Feels like a class action is in the offing.

It's more than 20 years since Steps topped the charts. It could be less than that for STEP's first fusion energy

Re: Ludicrous

I agree it won't happen because most of our current politicians lack any of the long term vision needed to deal properly with Climate change (except worryingly perhaps China).

I disagree in that all of the other problems are solvable if you throw enough time money and skill at it.

Re: Ludicrous

"You don't seem to understand that STEPS is a DEMO of ITER and closely related, while ITER is much too big for just one European country."

I get that STEPs is an ITER evolution, you've misunderstood my point.

STEPS should be funded to overtake ITER ASAP

ITER is not too big for any 1 country. At 45-50Bn its basically 1.5 Track and Traces (37Bn) but over say a 5-7 year timeline rather than the 1-2 of T&T. Even 100Bn is peanuts to a G7 Government. It's just about willpower.

The best thing we (UK) could do is start a Fusion "Arms" race. This collaborative effort is bullshit post WWII defence contractor thinking, more about spreading Pork around than achieving a goal.

Unfortunately I doubt any single government in the West has the balls to think this way anymore. I suspect China will get excited about it at some point and make us a laughing stock.

Mike Lynch loses US extradition delay bid: Flight across the Atlantic looks closer than ever

Re: If that wasn't bad enough...

That's the naive view. Its entitle possible the US Govt is acting as a proxy for HPE. It's hardly unknown and should be a consideration in the extradition hearing (if only tacitly)

Re: Let the chuckles ring out!

@Malcolm.

Not a bad analogy but missing one point. The US wants to try Lynch for stealing milk. Whilst HPE (the milkman) is also chasing him for the bill for that stolen milk.

The allegation that he stole milk is being first tested in the UK. If this is rejected it fundamentally calls into question whether there was any milk stolen in the first place in which case the US prosecution is uncalled for and the extradition unsafe.

Whilst they may legally be quite separate it raises a valid question for the Home Secretary as to whether trying Lynch for essentially the same crime in 2 jurisdictions is a good use of the Extradition treaty.

(As an aside I do love the concept of the Extradition Judge trying to get Patel to hurry up. - It begs the question as to whether he can compel her to sign the extradition in his timescale rather than hers.)