Posts by rmv

Man sues OpenAI claiming ChatGPT 'hallucination' said he embezzled money

Dramatis Personae

The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF): Gun rights group who brought a lawsuit against the State of Washington (https://www.saf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Dkt-1-Complaint.pdf)

The Citizen's Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA), also plaintiff in the above lawsuit.

Both organisations were both founded by Alan Gottlieb, SAF is a 501(c)(3) organisation (contributions are tax deductible, but no political lobbying allowed) and CCRKBA is the sister 501(c)(4) organisation, (contributions not tax-deductible but no restrictions on political lobbying).

Alan Gottlieb, who confirmed the facts to Fredy Riehl, the chairman of the CRKBA and also vice-president of SAF and founder of both organisations.

Mark Walters (the plaintiff), a director of the CCRKBA (https://www.ccrkba.org/?page_id=5210).

Fredy Riehl, (the journalist), a friend of Mark Walters and on the board of trustees of the SAF (https://www.saf.org/board-of-trustees/).

The complaint (https://aboutblaw.com/8ts).

In the complaint, Mark says "The plaintiffs in the Lawsuit are the Second Amendment Foundation and others, including Alan Gottlieb.", quietly forgetting to mention that CCRKBA is also one of the plaintiffs.

He also says that "Walters is neither a plaintiff nor a defendant in the Lawsuit.", neglecting to mention that he is a director of CCRKBA.

He very carefully says: "In the interaction with ChatGPT, Riehl provided a (correct) URL of a link to the complaint on the Second Amendment Foundation’s web site, https://www.saf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Dkt-1-Complaint.pdf."

I'm very suspicious that he doesn't say Riehl provided that exact URL, as it's quite easy to get ChatGPT to make up an article based on information in the query string (https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/10/chatgpt-internet-access/).

I suspect this is a couple of chancers trying to get publicity for their organisations and the case is going to be dropped as soon as OpenAI subpoenas or submits Riehl's ChatGPT history.

Re: This is not GPT.

"It’s a stupid and lazy journalist who should be fired"

No, it's not. It's the "journalist" is a mate of the plaintiff and the only publication is the communication between ChatGPT and this journalist.

That's because the journalist is Fredy Riehl, the editor of Ammoland and has known Mark Walters (the plaintiff) and worked with him for over a decade (https://www.ammoland.com/tags/mark-walters/page/4/#axzz847ri43uC).

Fredy Riehl is also on the board of trustees of the SAF so he knows fine well that Mark Walters is not the treasurer (https://www.saf.org/board-of-trustees/).

Given that, I'd be interested to see the complete conversation between Fredy Riehl and ChatGPT as I'd suspect that it has not come up with this summary completely spontaneously.

Bitcoin mining rig found stashed in school crawlspace

Re: Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

"What were the grounds of restriction for the security bods?"

Probably that Canary Wharf isn't public property, it's owned by CanaryWharf Group PLC and they've set rules about what photography is allowed to take place on their property.

Billionaire's Pagani Pa-gone-i after teen son takes hypercar out for a drive, trashes it

Re: Ask any actuary

They completed the section of the North Devon link road between our village and Tiverton, but it was several months before it opened to anything other than construction traffic. We used to skateboard down it on weekends - five miles of pristine tarmac, downhill all the way to town. They even put chicanes in every quarter mile or so to make it more interesting for us.

More recently, my dad watched the police set up a speed trap just west of the Bolham roundabout on that road. An unmarked police car drove west from the roundabout along the single lane section, considerably under the speed limit, building up a queue of traffic behind it. Then it pulled into the layby at the end of that section. Everyone in the queue immediately accelerated and tried overtaking as they entered the two lane section just in time to get caught by the speed trap the police had placed just around the corner. The unmarked car then did a U-turn and went back to the roundabout to repeat the process several times.

Return of the flying car, just when we all need to escape

Challau?

"a system that lets you teleport into remotely controlled robots [...] For the next couple of weeks at least, you can remote-control your own Challau robot"

Someone else obviously played Cholo by Firebird Software, circa 1985!

This is how demon.co.uk ends, not with a bang but a blunder: Randomer swipes decommissioning domain

Oh, yes... that was me.

Belatedly jumped ship after the after the first invoice from Sky that included a surcharge for NOT getting Sky TV. Why? I was quite happily not getting Sky TV for free before.

The Edinburgh Fringe festival isn't happening this year, but that won't stop a digital sign doing its own comedy routine

Re: Students and tourists and spying landlords

If they start renting the flat to "noisy, drug taking" students, they'll

1. Have to register as landlords.

2. Need a a HMO certificate.

Edinburgh's standard HMO certificate conditions require them to prevent and deal with any anti-social behaviour from their tenants and provide all neighbours with their daytime and emergency phone numbers. Given the good will they've already earned from the neighbours, I'd expect them to start receiving a few 3am phone calls.

Ah, the steps up to High School Yards - They used to be where the junkies used to hang out to stay out of the rain. I was nearly stabbed at the bottom of those steps - although the guy with the knife was too far out of it to be much of a threat. And once I had to call environmental health once because some shit had thought it was funny to inject a dog with heroin there - I found the body with three needles sticking out of it.

This was "last century" though. Happy times.

FTP is crusty and mostly dead, right? AWS just started supporting it anyway

FTP / SFTP

Yeah, but most servers don't allow it these days. For some reason allowing people to get a server to send data to a random port on another server was being abused.

It used to be good for bounce scans - proxying a port scan through the FTP server to scan IPs behind the firewall.

Okay, there's less you can do directly with an FTP password - but anyone capturing network traffic can read it, and if it's also the user's login password then you're stuffed. And most FTP servers (proftpd, wu-ftpd and pure-ftpd for example) by default require that a user has a valid login shell.

And that's not even considering all the goodies you often find by logging into a FTP server as "anonymous".

The things you need to do to *properly* configure FTP are not significantly simpler than setting up SFTP and at least if you use SFTP you don't have to worry about people sniffing credentials.

Asterix co-creator Albert Uderzo dies aged 92

Re: Farewell and RIP

s/Bounty/Beagle/g

Brit housing association blabs 3,500 folks' sexual orientation, ethnicity in email blunder

Re: Why?

Well that's stupid. Because treating impact assessments as a box-ticking exercise misses the chance to actually benefit from thinking about it.

Potential issue one - moving the bus stop 100m up the road to facilitate the residents parking spaces places it directly outside the local BNP office, causing increased risk of violence to LBGetc & ethnic minorities.

Potential issue two, replacing disability parking spaces in this street with residents only parking impacts the disabled & elderly users of the podiatry clinic at no.5.

Potential issue three - restricting parking on this street to residents only will increase the parking pressure on the next street over which contains a primary school and a nursery.

Is it a make-up mirror? Is it a tiny frisbee? No, it's the bonkers Cyrcle Phone, with its TWO headphone jacks

Re: Dead on arrival

Do you mind if I make a suggestion? Don't dig there, dig it elsewhere

You're digging it round and it ought to be square

Doogee Wowser: The S40's a terrible smartphone, but a passable projectile

Re: There was a time....

Not in our school. It was generally hard to tell the difference between a concussed child and those in a natural coma from having sat through one of the lessons. Most teachers threw chalk though - we only had one Latin teacher who threw board rubbers.

He also used to line us up against the wall with our hands out. He'd go up and down the line asking questions. Get one wrong and you got whacked across the hands with a wooden ruler. Get three in a row right and you were allowed to go back to your desk.

I now still have a negligible grasp of Latin but a surprisingly high tolerance to pain.

Au my bog: Bloke, 66, on bail after 'solid-gold' crapper called 'America' stolen from stately home

Re: Fishy

The artist reckons he used 103kg of 18-karat gold to make it.

Hands up who can tell me which pupil details transfer system has glitched. Yes, Capita's

Who to blame

So, little Bobby Tables is moving up to big school is he?

Slap visibility beacons on bikes so they can chat to auto autos, says trade body

Re: Yeah... Right

@AMBxx: "If there's no yellow line, there's no reason not to park in the cycle lane."

Well there's the highway code, which you're meant to be following.

Rule 240 of the Highway Code:

You MUST NOT stop or park on:

[...]

a tram or cycle lane during its period of operation

Rule 243 of the Highway Code:

DO NOT stop or park:

[...]

where you would obstruct cyclists’ use of cycle facilities

Court throws out BT's plans to reduce pension rates

@Chris Miller

And there was me thinking it was Nigel Lawson under Margaret Thatcher who introduced the Finance Act in '86 which lead to all the big corporations taking massive pension holidays; silly me.

Mind you, the corporations had other options than just grabbing the money and spending it on bonuses and dividends; they could have decreased the pension "surplus" of the time by increasing pension benefits for the fund members, for example. So they're not blameless in this whole mess either.

Unlocked: The hidden love note on the grave of America's first crypto power-couple

Re: British Eizabethan

People have been referring to the natives of the island group of Britain as British (or Brittani, Pretannoi etc) since about the 4th century BC, and I expect they will continue to do so long after England is eventually absorbed into Greater London.

The monitor didn't work but the problem was between the user's ears

Power User

I had a boss once who was an Apple fanboy and fancied himself a bit of a power user.

I came in one morning and found every server and PC disconnected from the network.

Apparently he'd come in to work after hours and couldn't get his macbook to connect. Naturally, the fault couldn't be with his macbook so he went around every machine in the office trying to find a network connection that "worked". Anyone else might have given up after a couple of tries, but this guy was management material and exhaustively tested every single connection.

Visitors no longer welcomed to Scotland's 'Penis Island'

Re: With all due respect to Gaelic speakers...

It's better than English in that respect; If I "take a bow", there's nothing in that to tell you whether I'm acknowledging your applause or getting ready to shoot you full of arrows. Except the context of course, but Gaelic shares that too.

I'm sure there are some Gaelic speakers who want to "keep the language pure" but hey, you can say that about pretty much any language; You just need to absent-mindedly drop a split infinitive in English and the language pedants leap out of the woodwork.

I can barely string two words together in Gaelic as I have no talent with languages whatsoever. But my wife's family from the Hebrides speak it as a first language. The eldest of them is in his seventies and the youngest has just turned 21, and when they're rabbiting away, it doesn't seem like a dead language to me.

Here's the Gaelic for Punks lessons if you want to learn a bit:

https://soundcloud.com/an-t-uabhas/sets/togaibh-ur-guth/

R

"throughout Ayrshire - where again, nobody speaks Gaelic and nobody ever did"

So all those Gaelic place names in Ayrshire, like Dunure, Kilmarnock, Ardrossan and the like - they were all chosen by the non-Gaelic natives for their exotic, foreign sound?

Carrick was known to be a Gaelic speaking holdout against Lowland Scots certainly through until the early 16th Century. In 1504, William Dunbar repeatedly sneered at Walter Kennedy of Dunure's Gaelic in The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy (an early predecessor of The Register comment section and the first recorded use of the word "shit" as a personal insult).

R

Boeing 787 software bug can shut down planes' generators IN FLIGHT

RATs

"The fly-by-wire systems will be fine, because the RAT will pop out and produce power."

"Last June, the FAA approved an exemption to allow the 787-9 to enter service on schedule despite a substandard reliability record on the GCU for the RAT. The agency approved the exemption because it was deemed extremely improbable that all six power generators on board could fail at the same time."

From the flightglobal article (http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/faa-orders-new-787-electrical-fix-to-prevent-power-failure-411794/)

Staffs Police face data protection probe over 'drink drivers named' Twitter campaign

Re: mind your use of language

"and it actually is unless

by saying *until* you are giving judicaries the right to keep trying you until they get a verdict that they like, think carefully about the language you are employing. Also look up a little legal history ;)"

Legal History:

The phrase doesn't appear in English Case Law before it was coined by William Garrow in England in 1791 - using the word "until".

The phrase used by William Best in "On Presumptions of Law and Fact" in 1845 used the word "until".

The phrase was first cited in the US Supreme Court in 1894 (Coffin vs. U.S.) and used the word "until".

The 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights uses the word "until".

The 1953 European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights uses the word "until". That right is incorporated into English Law by the 1998 Human Rights Act.

It is possible that all the lawyers involved in drafting those documents were wrong and you are right, but I've not seen any evidence of it so far.

Re: Re:

"the legal principle is actually; Innocent *unless* proven guilty"

No it's not.

UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 11, Section 1:

"Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence."

Kent Police clamp down on tall photographers

Robin

"Yet here is the Met guidance in respect of s.44: [...] Not quite. The Met guidelines make no mention of reasonable suspicion"

That's because S.44 doesn't require reasonable suspicion. In fact S.45 says quite explicitly that powers under a S.44 authorisation can be exercised "whether or not the constable has grounds for suspecting the presence of articles [of a kind which could be used in connection with terrorism]".

A stop and search under S.43 requires reasonable suspicion.