Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Boffins bash Google Translate for sexism

It's statistics darling

It's a machine learning algorithm, it learns translations from a corpus of texts. Its gender bias represents the bias of the corpus.

UK.gov went ahead with under-planned, under-funded IT upgrade? Sounds about right

Re: Alien Agilities .... Remote Virtualised AI Facilities with SMARTR Utilities

Where is the problem embedded whenever the sense of it is unknown to you? What would you not be understanding in all of the evidence previously sent and so freely advised to be readily available for printing and presenting.

That's a relief ....

Re: Alien Agilities .... Remote Virtualised AI Facilities with SMARTR Utilities

No it's el'regs reality-canary - when it makes sense it means the AIs have taken over.

Y'know what? VoIP can also be free from pesky regulation – US judges

Re: "you cannot call emergency services if there is a power outage"

But if you have to supply this to 10Million customers, deal with updates (3 year life?), take back old units for recycling etc - it can be a lot cheaper to spend a $M on lobbying for it not to count as a phone service.

Re: CCIE Opinion for those who care

Over here on the left-pond the cable co have to supply expensive battery backup VOIP adapters to ensure the 911 requirements. One also got fined $$$$ because they didn't update the records and sent an ambulance to the customer's old address (because they didn't know where the physical box was)

This ruling means that telcos don't need to worry about any of that - 911 service becomes no more important than facebook

Dear America: Want secure elections? Stick to pen and paper for ballots, experts urge

Re: Outdated report

Everybody knows the Soviet Union was just a PR front for Oracle

Re: It doesn't matter if an OMR machine can be hacked

You don't even need to tamper with enough to win the vote.

Have a couple of noteworthy senators defeated by 65536 votes to zero - or even win by the same margin. - and you start the new administration with everyone believing the vote was rigged

A boss pinching pennies may have cost his firm many, many pounds

Re: Outcome?

What happened to the regular weekly monday "TSB went titsup" story ?

China will overtake America as leading AI superpower, warns ex-Google Beijing bigwig

Re: per capita

Hence my brilliant plan to convince all Chinese students to switch to media studies, convince the politicians that science is bad and vaccines make you gay.

With a bit of luck we can keep China and the USA equal

Re: AI-Social-Credit-Score coming to a City near U soon

Unlike the USA where poor credit score has no effect on school, university, where you live and medical care

It looks like tech-savvy drivers will have to lead connected car data purge

Re: Movie Chase-Scene Idea

Scene from Heat where they run out of the bank, leap into the car.

Press the brake while starting, wait for the startup splash logo on the dash screen, put on the seatbelt, press ok to the "do not use while driving" media screen, wait for the iConnected iDrive to iConnect

Then pull away silently in hybrid city mode

An opportunity

Used to work on one of the early GPS fleet tracking systems that could work out in the bush.

Family owned logging business, husband notices that the truck his wife uses seems to spend nights parked in the suburbs next to another company truck

Wife was "inspecting the chopper" of one of the lumberjacks.

After the divorce they end up running the 1st and 2nd biggest logging operations in the state - and we sold vehicle tracking to both of them !

(although presumably she learnt her lesson and used her own car for dates)

Voyager 1 left the planet 41 years ago – and SpaceX hopes to land on Earth this Saturday

Re: 3.6AU per year

> so it's only twice as fast as the ISS

But it is straight line speed that matters.

Voyager was built in America so it can't do corners

ISS was an international collaboration so it goes round in circles very very fast but doesn't get anywhere

Re: Voyager

Surely Voyager 0 should be first ?

That's what happens when you let FORTRAN programmers build things

European nations told to sort out 'digital tax' on tech giants by end of year

>They give most of the profit to staff as bonuses. So, the bonus being quite high, the staff pay 40% income tax on it

Except they don't, the first 10K of gains is tax free and the rest is taxed as capital gains - that's why companies pay in stock options. There is also no NI paid on stock grants.

Here on the left pond, there is a lifetime $800K tax free for stock grant gains if your company jumps through the right hoops ;-)

Re: Taxing revenue is inherently unfair

>A 3% tax on revenue therefore hits Amazon 3x as hard as it hits Google. How is that fair?

They can tax Amazon AWS separately from Amazon retail - Amazon already break out their financials into the different businesses.

Except Britain has industry (for now)

Ireland can afford to drop corporation tax because the amount it earns from FANG, even at 1%, is more than it loses from native industry ie. makers of Father Ted memorabilia and religious statues.

If Britain lowered tax to attract Apple it would have to apply the same tax rates to Rolls-Royce, HSBC, ICI, Shell, etc etc

>there's no reason for them not to tax the UK profits of EU companies, is there?

Amazon will claim not to make any profits on physical sales and since the AWS server farms aren't in the UK any profits on them are nothing to do with the UK govt.

Microsoft will claim the same with Azure while demanding a tax rebate for any UK saless to keep jobs in the UK.

Google will book all advertising sales in the USA - the post Brexit UK isn't about to impose an embargo on USA firms.

Lights, camera, AI-ction! Robo-drones turned into spies, er, filmmakers

Re: Yes, really just an incremental improvement

>about optimisations designed to produce aesthetically pleasing shots

Unfortunately they trained it on Michael Bay movies so it focuses on zooming toward a different car every 30 nanoseconds and then crashed through a window.

The one they trained on independent movies entirely ignored the scene it was supposed to film and watched a bit of litter blowing along the street until its batteries ran out.

Roskosmos admits that Soyuz 'meteorite' hole had more earthly origins

The original:

It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract.

Alan Shepard

Good news, bad news, weird news – it's the week in networking

Re: ATC over IP

That's why it is much safer for a Russian ATC to read a long complicated series of instructions and directions to a Chinese pilot in English over a noisy shared VHF link

Spies still super upset they can't get at your encrypted comms data

Re: business won't comply

That doesn't matter - so long as the enemy complies

I'm sure Russia, China, N Korea and Iran are rushing to put in back doors so that Nato can access their communications

New Horizons eyeballs Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule, its next flyby goal

Re: I propose we call this KBO the Sir David Attenborough

No it was a brilliant response to a patronising government "seekking input" ploy.

Re: I propose we call this KBO the Sir David Attenborough

>But how did it not end up being called Rocky McRockface?

The poll was only conducted among Volvo owners with roof boxes

VMware 'pressured' hotel to shut down tech event close to VMworld, IGEL sues resort giant

Re: Not just IT

>Its almost as if the whole effen place is run by the mob or something. Oh, wait...

Worse, it's now run by the PR dept of Global Megacorp

If you have to simulate a phishing attack on your org, at least try to get something useful from it

>Yes, it's annoying to have to email your team and say

Presumably you first have to send a memo to all of them telling people that `that email` is genuine, and have a company wide meeting to say that the memo is genuine and ....

I get really professional ones at work all the time.

They appear to come from the boss's email, demanding status reports and project updates - but I never fall for them

Defense Distributed starts selling gun CAD files amid court drama

Re: Good on him

Is he or is he just trying to get around the ban on assault rifles - or just make money from the people who think that Obama will make them marry a gay unless they own 12 assault rifles?

Personally I think the USA should stand behind the 2nd amendment and allow citizens the same weapons as the government, nukes for all (although possibly not the ability to take them out of the country).

It's the only way to reduce the surplus population.

Re: Magical thinking

But banning hacksaws is the only way to prevent bank robberies with sawn-off shotguns

This isn't really distributing cad files for any CNC home machinist.

He sells a machine which is only made for machining the restricted part of an AR15 and the files to run it.

It's like in Iraq war when Matrix Churchill claimed they were just selling machine tools - when their own DRM prevented them making anything other than the artillery shells there were programmed for.

Or when during prohibition the vineyards would sell kits of concentrated grape juice with the warning "do not add contents to x lbs of sugar and y gallons of water and keep in a warm place for t days because an alcohol beverage will be produced"

Judge bars distribution of 3D gun files... er, five years after they were slapped onto the web

Re: Pointless

I think they already ruled that rising sea levels didn't apply to them

Re: delusional

Not with a $200 makerbot but you can 3d print turbine blades with the right kit - a shotgun wouldn't be too challenging

Re: Bad Logic

Hope you aren't in the UK DCFusor. Collecting or distributing "information … likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism" gets you 20 years

And for all el'reg regular readers, repeated viewing of the above information gets you 15years

Re: Remember PGP

Not quite, PGP was banned from being exported - being a weapon.

But the 1st amendment rights still won, so he was able to export a printed book of the source code

It is one of the advantages of a written constitution and an independant judiciary - things don't just get banned on the whim of a home secretary or a BBC DJ

Surprise! VAT, customs likely to get a bit trickier in a Brexit no-deal world

Re: "but instead of ditching the plague of a currency they sacrificed"

>The problem currently screwing the Euro is Germany needing a much stronger currency

The whole point of the euro was to weaken the German currency (so it could export German goods)

And to give the poor countries a stronger currency so they could borrow money (to buy German goods)

And incidentally because they think it's immoral to make money from currency trading rather than engineering

Based on past Government IT projects it will be a shitshow if we do leave with a deal!

Re: Bad for business and probably worse for individuals

Yes but once the deal is finalised (about 11:59pm on the day before Brexit) we will be able to implement a new government IT project to solve all this

Re: Can anyone

I don't really like Turkey, can we do a free-trade deal with Chile and the Sandwich Islands?

Re: Can anyone

>China's stopping taking stuff is certainly a problem that needs to be solved

UK leaves Eu, can renounce all Eu environmental protection rules

UK has a large amount of unproductive land from which it is difficult to commute to London (aka the North)

The same land has a large number of unemployed unskillled workers

The UK is a lot closer to the Eu than China is

I think I see a cunning plan to fund Brexit ......

US Democrats call in Feds: There's something phishy going on with our voter database

Re: "This fake website was spam-vertised using bogus emails"

But what if instead of companyname.sharepoint.com it is companyname.sharepoint-microsoft.com as in some of the Russian sites MSFT shut down ?

If it is an email with a from line of [e-mail] but a sender header of evil-russian-hacker.ru goes to everyone in the company I expect the corporate security to notice.

Ironically Microsoft are the worst at doing this themselves. Authorisation on Office365 can be to x.sharepoint.com, x.outloook.com, x.live.com or outlook.live.com. The site for developers downloading official test ISOs of Microsoft OSes was the spammiest url you could imagine

Re: "This fake website was spam-vertised using bogus emails"

Ever worked in a large organisation - or a government one with layers of local,provincial and federal management? One with outsourced IT?

Where you get emails to update your "team foundation customer management experience portal gateway" password every month because of "security". Of course the link to where to change it changes every month depending on which cloud provider is cheapest.

Where because of a bunch of mergers, depts not talking to each and ancient outsourcing deals you have umpteen different accounts and passwords on different bits to do your job.

And you naively assume that if an email gets through all that corporate security and appears to come from your own IT dept it is their job to look through the headers and detect the real origin - not the job of cathy on reception.

Saying it's the "users job to be careful" is like saying it's the passengers job to check the maintenance logs and type approval on their holiday flight's aircraft =- not the airline's

Don't mean to alarm you – but NASA is about to pummel the planet with huge frikkin' space laser

Re: Height measurement precision

The height problem in GPS is because the satellites are much more similar in height than they are in distance to you.

Measuring the height of this satellite doesn't depend on GPS - it just depends on measuring the orbit time (easy and accurate) and knowing where the planet is and how much it weighs (trickier but we do this)

I'm guessing you can nail this to higher accuracy than the LIDAR system, so they will likely use passes over known flat fixed earth targets to calibrate the laser ranger assuming a known orbit - rather than use the LIDAR to measure the satellites' height.

Re: Missing information

Measuring time interval to 0.1ps is easy, measuring a laser return isn't.

You are assuming you send out a perfect square wave and get back a perfect return. At this range you send out a pulse that is a few of micro-seconds wide and get back a tiny fraction of that energy smeared over the pulse width - you have no idea where (in time) in the outgoing pulse the peak return is. It is further complicated because the same outgoing pulse will reflect off different layers in the target and give multiple return pulses.

Re: Err

Raw return accuracy is 15cm for ice, about 1m on ground and 10m on steep ground.

One of the problems/features is that the measuring spot is quite big on the ground (100m) so you average out small scale variations but end up with low overall elevation accuracy compared to terrestrial LIDAR

UK's info commish is having a howler: Site dies amid 'plagiarised' GDPR book scandal

Re: ALL the regulators are useless...

>stores the REAL number at your local exchange for subsequent investigation and prosecution

Banning international calls or intending ICO to have global reach ?

Of course since calls can also route over satelites we really need the ICO to have some sort of forceful presence not just globally but in space - a space force ......

Brit Railcard buyers face lengthy, unexplained delays. Sound familiar?

Re: Everything is getting worse.

Fortunately after Brexit all this will be fixed as we go back to the good old days,

Old steam trains will be liberated from a museum and pushed through the town to beat the bus service run by that scamp of a South African immigrant.

I think I saw a public information film about it.

(there are a whole series of them, one covers how trade will work in a small isolated market with no rules and another how imported freight will be handled in Scotland)

Apple web design violates law, claims blind person

Re: Map and Goegraphic Information sites?

Youtube presumably faces a similar problem.

You could implement a H265-speech converter: "red green,green,blue........ HSYNC, red,red,......"

Apple.com is not a public domain. It is a company owned by its shareholders the OP was making the point that it should be a business decision if it wants to spend money to attract blind customers.

The claim was that it was accessible to Apple's own screen reader - but not competing products.

Microsoft: We busted Russian Fancy Bear disinfo websites

Re: Why

They could probably get the onedrive and sharepoint ones handed over on the basis of MS trade marks. I suspect the others were actually shut down by court orders with MSFT providing the evidence - but that is too complex a distinction for the news