Posts by lukewarmdog

Tech demo takes brain scan, creates a picture of what you're looking at

Finally

A machine that can tell me what video I really want to watch on PornHub tonight!

(other websites may be available..)

If we plan to live on the Moon, it's going to need a time zone

Just make it 5PM Everywhere and All The Time

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/it%27s_five_o%27clock_somewhere

Uncle Sam to unmask anonymous writers using AI

Obligatory South Park

Nobody else read this and thought of the Troll Hunter episode?

Skank Hunt is what you'd need to search for, obviously it's not what you type but how you type it in..

Meta: We need 5x more GPUs to combat TikTok, stat

Three quotes

"There's probably a bunch of people working here who don't need to be" said Zuckerberg with not the slightest hint of irony

When management went nuclear on an innocent software engineer

Re: Ok hands up

And then licks their finger to see what flavour of paint it is, remembering too late that ice cream coloured paint wouldn't taste of ice cream.

Prisons transcribe private phone calls with inmates using speech-to-text AI

A prisoner named Sue

Surely if and when a prison gets sued it just hires a lawyer. If it's worried about being sued it could do worse than send a questionnaire round to get an idea of prisoners issues. The idea off AI listening to prisoners calls back to their parents seems a waste as well as an infringement.

Google sued for firing staff who claim they tried to follow 'Don't be evil' motto

Re: Politics, not Good

Apparently a Facebook meme, a doctored image.

If you scrape a low hanging tree, you'll get low hanging fruit.

An anti-drone system that sneezes targets to death? Would that be a DARPA project? You betcha

Stop the pigeon

This goo idea seems to have “pay and spray” built in as no doubt goo refills are pricey and need dedicated techs to do the replacing if you’re not going to invalidate your warranty. I seem to remember dastardly and muttly had a plane with a net to scoop up their target. There was also a flying anvil, a pair of cymbals, baseball bat / mitt.. DARPA need to get in touch with the Hanna-Barbera studio for new ideas.

Also what happened to the water cannons the U.K. spaffed money on? Surely we could sell those as an alternative to the hummer/drone package?

Brian Eno's latest composition: A giant Christmas card with Julian Assange on it

Re: Looking forward to

Have an upvote for HMMB who were in cracking form when I saw them last week.

Why can't passport biometrics see through my cunning disguise?

Glasses

I renewed my UK passport a couple of years ago and had forgotten the no glasses rule.

I took my six quid photos to the passport checking service and was told "I'd take them again, without glasses, if I were you".

If i'd insisted, i'm sure I could have had those photos sent off but it seems a bit insane to invoke a helping service and then not take the advice it gives.

With hindsight I wonder if there was some profit sharing between the passport checking people and the phonebooth owning people.

I have, since those photos, grown a beard and my hair. I even died my hair and beard blue to go to Iceland. I have no trouble with my passport despite these changes, as long as I remember to take my glasses off, that seems to be a key problem.

DeepMind gets good at games (and choosing them) – plus more bits and bytes from the world of machine learning

Play store

I hate it when a company tries to guess what I want to do next. Pretty much every time I’ve got back from holiday, tripadvisor mails me holiday opportunities for the place I’ve just got back from. And if I buy a watch on amazon, I’ll get an email saying “we thought you might like these next” and it’s a bunch of watches. eBay is the same, bought some speakers, get an email about other speakers. The best AI at this point would simply decide not to email me at all. Whilst that would make my day, it wouldn’t last long in the relevant data centre.

Jodrell Bank goes full UNESCO while Dundee awaits the decomissioners

Bluedot

Anybody else been to the bluedot festival at Jodrell?

Must be making them a few bob which hopefully is going to keeping the place and the festival going for a few more years.

Also went to several of the one day concerts they held here before they went full festival.

https://www.discoverthebluedot.com/

Band banned, Tarka arrives on Windows 10 and Visual Studio hits RC status

So no "band on the run" then?...

Cray's pre-exascale Shasta supercomputer gets energy research boffins hot under collar

Optional Alexa enhancement

Would be so cool if they could just ask it questions:

"Shasta, show me the weather prediction for the next five days"

"Shasta, what are the chances of a sharknado happening"

"Shasta, what's the weather like over that place North Korea first missiles from, just zoom in and see what's going on"

Incoming! Microsoft unleashes more fixes for Windows 10 October 2018 Update

Rimjob

"1809 is going to RP today and will be critical for helping kick start servicing"

That there's the problem, they've sent it off to Role Players and they all inconveniently took arrows to the knees and couldn't do any proper testing..

The mysterious life of Luc Esape, bug fixer extraordinaire. His big secret? He's not human

One of the interesting questions raised by the project..

Was how they were going to get away with spending the substantial bug-fixing rewards they envisaged the bot getting for them before it gained sentience..

Article 13 pits Big Tech and bots against European creatives

Re: bad law

the problem with laws, writing and re-writing them.. is it's the job of the lawyers to do this.

And you're back to having Google own the lawyers and getting them to write clauses in that benefit Google.

And whilst I pick on Google here, the same can be said of any of the majors when it's their interests that are being threatened.

There's every chance Trump is going to come along and threaten to remove America and all American content from The Internet if The Internet doesn't stop threatening American interests.

2-bit punks' weak 40-bit crypto didn't help Tesla keyless fobs one bit

We rented a car recently with a fancy fob. I double checked we'd definitely locked it when we stopped at a service station. All doors locked.. check. Check boot.. boot unlocks. Can't get boot to lock.. cue panic as it was full of everything needed for a long festival.

Turns out, after perusing the manual that it's a "feature".. if you're within range of the car and have the fob, the boot unlocks. I can see the use case for this but it was a source of some rage at the time.. I am pretty sure our next car will have a physical key.

Don't let Google dox me on Lumen Database, nameless man begs

I'm sure they could figure out who he was if they wanted to..

"I'd like the court to make Google remove all mention from their databases of John Charles of Epping who was in front of a judge last year for defrauding lots of old people because it's stopping me setting up a series of totally legitimate businesses where OAPs give me money to invest in pyramid schemes."

I'm really puzzled as to how he has managed to pay for any of this anonymously. Getting a judge and lawyers into a court room is a lengthy and expensive process, has he just been dropping bundles of cash off in the admin office?

Back to school soon – for script kiddies as well as normal kids. Hackers peddle cybercrime e-classes via Telegram

wondering..

How many of these sites are honeypots, whilst you're busy learning the crime business, the FBI are grabbing your IP and sending someone round to your basement.

Glibc 'abortion joke' diff tiff leaves Richard Stallman miffed

I love the fact that one of the people who doesn't like the joke has threatened to write better code to spite Stallman. (from reading the email chain posted earlier)

If all it takes to get better programs was to offend people then I strongly suggest he goes full offensive.

From tomorrow, Google Chrome will block crud ads. Here's how it'll work

Adverts

I realised a while back that adverts on TV annoy me. We're in the process of cancelling our VM package and I'll just download what I can't get on Amazon (Prime member) or Netflix (the amount of money I'm saving not having VM, I'm treating myself to Netflix. Will also cut down on the number of things I need to download).

As for internet ads, the few times I forget and end up reading the local paper online without an adblocker, reminds me that nothing good can come of having your content paid for by advertising.

Yorkshire cops have begun using on-the-spot fingerprint scanners

OTOH

Yeah on the one hand I quite like this, on the other hand...

Autsch! Germany slaps Facebook in its abusive little face for 'limitlessly amassing data'

Anyday now Germany is going to come up with a verb for "to be facebooked" and then we'll start to get to the crux of the matter.

ML fails: Loyalty prediction? Not really. And bonus prediction? Oh dear

doctors surgery

My doctors texts me this after every visit.

"How likely am I to recommend the surgery to friends and family"

Vodafone have started randomly texting me too.

"How likely am I to recommend Vodafone to friends and family"

It's more a question of how likely am I to just delete the text upon receipt.. very likely.

The Quantum of Firefox: Why is this one unlike any other Firefox?

happy so far

It did have a weird moment where it wouldn't connect to news.google.com. Claimed it was making a TLS handshake and then sat there for ages before failing.

I did wonder whether it was doing it on purpose..

Seems fine now it's over whatever the problem with it was.

I'm currently surfing the Internet on the premise of "testing the new browser, boss". Seem to be getting away with it too, just need to avoid any meddling kids.

We went to Nadella's launch of Hit Refresh so you didn't have to

book review

"big enough to prop up that one table with a dodgy leg"

ideal present for "the insomniac who has tried everything else"

place most likely to be found "still in the bookshop, probably reduced for quick sale in the new year"

Switzerland says Uber's an employer, sends social security bill

Re: Contractor or employee

There are other reasons besides "fun" that you can use public transport.

Those you provide are certainly not the four main reasons at all.

Cost is one issue, my annual bus pass is incredibly good value. If I'm in a different city I often just buy the 3/5/whatever travel pass that city has. At home my pass covers weekends so when I choose to go out somewhere, it just gets better and better value.

Environment is another one. I object pretty strongly to the number of cars driving around where I live so I bus. I could cycle and if there were less cars, maybe I will.

Convenience is another. Very often I'm going into a town/city centre. I can bus in, do my shopping, meet friends, go to the cinema.. all the things you can do in a shopping area basically.. then bus back. I also use the bus to commute to work/back, there's a bus stop outside my house and one outside work pretty much.

I'm not some kind of weird social introvert who is scared of public transport and the thought of having to sit next to someone.

I think once we get past the autonomous car and start looking at autonomous buses, we might be on to a winner. We don't need more cars no matter who isn't driving them.

Sysadmins told to update their software or risk killing the internet

Re: Further changes I expect

Not just 'the' emergency services, they're 'your' emergency services.

Google bins white supremacist site after it tries to host-hop away from GoDaddy

Re: Nazis love diversity

"if we fight fascism with fascism then we become fascists ourselves."

What if we fight it with lesbians? Or children? Or bears? Oo or all three.. young lesbian bears against fascism.. what do we want? We have no idea, we're an incredibly confused fiction in some comment section. When do we want it? Why are you asking all these questions, we just want to fight fascists.

Re: As much as I hate nazis...

"If you want it shut down because you just don't like it, then you're no better than they are."

I'm way better than nazis and I want them shut down.

Norway Quizwall experiment ends with more quizzing than commenting

confused

So for the first line, there were 140 people that got the quiz right and were eligible to post but only 9 people posted. 150 got it wrong and weren't eligible. Are they unique posters or could have you multiple attempts until you'd cracked it?

Anyway it just seems to prove that no matter what question you ask, very few actually care enough to post. Which seems to me to imply that the quiz is way more popular than the article. In fact, they'd be best off stop posting stuff nobody cares about and move into the quizzing market where they appear to have quite the audience. Could even be money in it.

Google tracks what you spend offline to prove its online ads work. And privacy folks are furious

Re: This is why you want anonymous payments

"I have a taste for Bovril, Toblerone and pastrami in crusty rolls, usually from the same half dozen supermarkets at home and work"

That's one of my concerns. If you're tracking what I'm buying and where I buy it from then you know when I'm not at home. You know how far away from home I am and how long I normally spend on my round trip.

First time that db gets hacked, every burglar knows when you're not home.

You see a basic version of this when a footballer goes on holiday and gets burgled. Knowing when everyone is away and what they recently bought on their credit card would be carte blanche to thieves. The guys who work at that shop you just bought that £5k TV from know where you live and now they know you're out. Sure it's unlikely they'll rob you but someone will if they can get that data.

Judge uses 1st Amendment on Pokemon Go park ban. It's super effective!

Raise Taxes

Have a charge for using the park.

I assume it has gates, set up a toll booth.

Free if you can produce a bill showing you are a local resident.

Orbital boffins cut four years off NASA mission to shiniest object in the Solar System

cunning plan

Cunning plans always make me think of Blackadder.

Which led me to this:

Blackadder: Baldrick, have you no idea what "irony" is?

Baldrick: Yes, it's like "goldy" and "bronzy" only it's made out of iron.

SPY-tunes scandal: Bloke sues Bose after headphones app squeals on his playlist

Requested Data

When re-doing secret questions for an online service as I'd clearly made my last lot so secure even I couldn't get them right.. one of them was "who was your favourite musician growing up?" or something along those lines. Maybe "what was your favourite band?".

You really don't want your headphones providing an answer to that question to some data slurper.

NY court slaps down Facebook's attempt to keep accounts secret from search warrants

Really torn by judgements like this. On the one hand we're told they're civil servants faking illness or a known drug pusher living abroad or it's a priest caught with child porn on his laptop and they just want to find more on his phone. All terrible people and legitimate targets of the courts.

And then on the other hand the police want to access their Facebook account. Why? What is that going to prove that will stand up in court? Why can't these people be caught via other police actions?

FBI agent: "Says here you posted you were going to the post office. Says right here, at 10:30 am you posted to someone called Ted123 that you were going to cash your disability check. Is that true John.Calzone69?"

Defendant: "No your honour, that wasn't me, must have been my son"

FBI agent: "Oh and was it also your son who posted these cat pictures to your Facebook?"

Defendant: "Yes, your honour, or my wife"

FBI agent: "You really expect the court to believe you allow other people to update your profile?"

Defendant: "Yes. I have no arms so I can't update it myself very easily"

I mean seriously.. what the hell is on your Facebook surely to God (if one exists, obviously) can not be used in a court of law to prove you cheated on your disability claim.

FBI: "says here you told John.Calzone69 that you were going for a walk round the block but your disability claim says you can't walk!"

Defendant: "My wife pushed me in a wheelchair, you already have the video and photographic evidence to prove this from the van you have parked over the road from my house"

Maybe I'm missing something, maybe all people do on Facebook is post incriminating evidence that is acceptable in a court of law but I don't really see it myself.

Kremlin hackers suspected in assault on athletics governing body

Re: Athletes confidential files not confidential

My thoughts exactly.

Client: "We have all this stuff we need to keep totally private"

Idiot: "We can just keep it on this Internet facing server"

Rather than trying to protect the unprotectable, stop sticking this stuff on the Internet. Or at least stop being surprised when it gets taken.

Cheap, flimsy, breakable and replaceable – yup, Ikea, you'll be right at home in the IoT world

reminds me of Morrisey singing "there is a light that never goes out".

In the IoT world this becomes "there is no light that hackers can't gain control of" or "there is no light because your app has become outdated and is no longer being maintained, visit Ikea to get a more up to date version."

Obviously not as catchy, I'll work on it.

Good news, everyone! Two pints a day keep heart problems at bay

Re: This is correlative not causative.

I dunno.. if I got shot, got cancer and got put on a cocktail of sensitive drugs, I think I'd need a pint to come to terms with all that.

London councils seek assurance over Capita's India offshoring plans

Claims

I often claim things are completely untrue because it suits me at the time.

Councils claiming they won't be affected is a nice soundbite but nothing more.

"to the best of our knowledge, this will not affect services" said somebody at the council who is purposefully kept in the dark so they can say that with a straight face.

Murder in space: NASA orders astronauts to KILL cripples – then fire bodies back to Earth

I think what saddens me with this story is not that we sent broken limbed mice out to space then killed them for the return journey.

Nope what saddens me is that somewhere there is a a process document that describes (probably with pictures) how to break the legs of mice and how to repair those breaks. The appendix is a list of the brave mice that suffered and died, reduced to a project number and individual ids.

I'm not sure what they're simulating here either. If I broke my leg and was waiting for it to heal, you can bet any money the space shuttle company would not let me travel and no amount of me waving a newspaper cutting that said mice did it first would get me anywhere.

Uber bans 'brilliant jerks', will train staff on Why Diversity Matters

No, you're a jerk.

Let's hope nobody chokes on anything because I think the Heimlich maneuver would count as a "brilliant jerk".

For starters, "brilliant jerk" is not a category, secondly it's not the one they need to address.

Since when was "jerk" synonymous with sexist, racist, homophobic, misogynist etc. etc.

Seems to me they're leaving the door open for the current management to carry on being dicks.

Facebook, Google slammed for 'commercial prostitution'

Personally I think they're taking the wrong people to task entirely.

If you could get the heads of the advertising channels in one room and say you were going to bankrupt them with new online advertising taxes unless they started vetting where their adverts went then they'd do a cost analysis and become more careful with where their adverts went.

Don't really think going after the heads of the social media platforms is going to achieve anything at all.

Facebook, Instagram: No, you can't auto-slurp our profiles (cough, cough, border officials)

I think the problem here is the "we depend" bit of Ozers speech.

If you "need" to communicate about the most important issues in our lives, stop doing it on a third party platform that censors you, that sells your personal information to advertisers, that can track your activists and shares your information with various Government agencies.

By all means use social media to link to a post on your own website but do not depend on social media to help you out because the second it doesn't you become very, very unimportant. Plus whereas before a group of activists might have come together in a bookshop and the local police would have needed actual surveillance, now Facebook knows who all your friends are and what you're saying to each other. It's a stupid place to do politics.

Tech titan pals back up Google after 'foreign server data' FBI warrant ruling

Poor FBI, can't do right for doing wrong.

I mean they could have just demanded the data and hidden the demand behind a gagging order.

Instead they craft a perfectly good warrant, get a judge to sign off on it and do it all out in the open.

You gotta give them some props for trying.

It does amuse me that they seem to think getting an American judge to sign off on something gives them global reach. They could have reached out to Interpol and then onwards to local law enforcement but nope. Bless.

Official: America auto-scanned visitors' social media profiles. Also: It didn't work properly

Thing is, if watching American cop shows has taught me anything, which it has, you'd be better off WITH a social media account (not suspicious) than without one (impossible to verify who you are otherwise, "yes I know we have his passport and driving licence and his whole family vouches for him but..HE HAS NO FACEBOOK").

Just make it a really good fake profile.

There are, definitely, people who post about their terrorist activities who are terrorists but can you imagine James Bond having anything but a great itinerary, pictures of the grandkids in his wallet, exactly the right number of sunglasses?

You'd want to wave him through.

After that he'd get the girl, kill the baddies, save the entire planet and still be back in time for breakfast.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee refuses to be King Canute, approves DRM as Web standard

Not sure why your browser has to be the place that all this happens in.

Take it out of the browser and stick it in apps. DRM the app of your choice, leave the browser alone.

A web browser should do what it says, browse the web. If you've got a film you want me to watch for a price you should be delivering that in a different way.

Prisoners' 'innovative' anti-IMSI catcher defence was ... er, tinfoil

Chances are, if you can see tinfoil up in a cell, that person has a phone and you should search the cell.

You could surely make a positive out of this cockup.

Germany, France lobby hard for terror-busting encryption backdoors – Europe seems to agree

bear arms

My bear arms will beat your puny human arms in any hand to hand combat situation.