Lower specs, higher prices and the opportunity to have all my data inspected by the Chinese government. Where do I sign?
Posts by monty75
305 posts • joined 24 Mar 2010
Alibaba Cloud reduces RAM, disk size and price of some cloud servers
Microsoft to Cortana: you’re not going out dressed in iOS or Android, young lady!
No wonder Brit universities report hacks so often: Half of staff have had zero infosec training, apparently
Twitter says hack of key staff led to celebrity, politician, biz account hijack mega-spree
CEO of motherboard maker MSI dies after plunging from headquarters' seventh-floor
Heir-to-Concorde demo model to debut in October
Mind the airgap: Why nothing focuses the mind like a bit of tech antiquing
Once again, racial biases show up in AI image databases, this time turning Barack Obama white
Wednesday 24th June 2020 16:12 GMT
Re: this is not bias
It's not my definition, its Merriam-Webster's.
The bias is in the training. The GAN learns from the training data what a face looks like. If it sees 90% white faces it will favour white skin in its definition of "face". This isn't a new revelation - it's a well-known phenomenon as the journal article referred to in the Reg article states. It's basically a manifestation of the old maxim "garbage in, garbage out"
Email innovator Hey extends an olive branch in standoff with Apple, tweaks code to make the iGiant appier
Bricks and mortar chemists take down Indian contact-tracing website
Ah lovely, here's something you can do with those Raspberry Pis, NUC PCs in the bottom of the drawer: Run Ubuntu Appliances on them
Legal complaint lodged with UK data watchdog over claims coronavirus Test and Trace programme flouts GDPR
Hoverbikes, Hyperloops and sub-orbital hijinks: Yes, the '3rd, 4th and 5th Dimensions of Travel' are coming soon
Far-right leader walks free from court after conviction for refusing to hand his phone passcode over to police
Dutch spies helped Britain's GCHQ break Argentine crypto during Falklands War
What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you
Snapchat domain squatter loses comedy £1m URL sellback attempt
UK snubs Apple-Google coronavirus app API, insists on British control of data, promises to protect privacy
Tuesday 28th April 2020 09:45 GMT
"To declare yourself infected, you need to enter a special code from a healthcare provider after testing positive"
So it solves the trolling problem but introduces a bottleneck around the testing capacity which is part of the problem it's supposed to solve. What about the large number of people who contract the disease but have relatively mild symptoms requiring some bed rest and recouperation? Are we expecting everyone who has a bit of a cough to make their way to a testing centre "just in case"?
Happy birthday, ARM1. It is 35 years since Britain's Acorn RISC Machine chip sipped power for the first time
Forget tabs – the new war is commas versus spaces: Web heads urged by browser devs to embrace modern CSS
Just because we're letting Zoom into Parliament doesn't mean you can have fun, House of Commons warns Brit MPs
Stuck inside with nothing to do? Apple fires out security fixes for iOS, macOS, wrist-puters... and something weird called iTunes for Windows
UK enters almost-lockdown: Brits urged to keep calm and carry on – as long as it doesn't involve leaving the house
Coronavirus pandemic latest: Trump declares 'two very big words' – national emergency – and unexpectedly ropes in Google to help in some form
Saturday 14th March 2020 18:25 GMT
"We are developing a tool to help triage individuals for COVID-19 testing."
"Dr Deborah Birks, White House coronavirus response coordinator, presented a chart indicating that the alleged website will allow people to log-in through some undisclosed mechanism and check their symptoms."
All of which sounds an awful lot like the one the NHS has been running for weeks now. I bet they managed with considerably fewer than 1700 devs.
What's inside a tech freelancer's backpack? That's right, EVERYTHING
Uber takes a downer as ride-sharing app service crashes
After 1.5 million days of computer time, SETI@home heads home to probe potential signs of alien civilizations
UK.gov lays out COVID-19 guidance as the tech supply chain considers its own
Call us immediately if your child uses Kali Linux, squawks West Mids Police
What do we want? A proper review of IR35! When do we want it? Last year! Bunch of IT contractors protest outside UK Parliament
Startup Mycroft AI declares it will fight 'patent troll' tooth and nail after its Linux voice-assistant attracts lawsuit
Wake me up before you go Go: Devs say they'll learn Google-backed lang next. Plus: Perl pays best, Java still in demand
Shouldn't Uber freeze app accounts to prevent spread of coronavirus by drivers and fares? Oh, OK, it already is
This episode of Black Mirror sucks: London cops boast that facial-recog creepycams will be on the streets this year
Friday 24th January 2020 15:41 GMT
They're playing fast and loose with the statistics. They say 70% of wanted people who walked past the camera were matched. How do they know that? That would presume that they know exactly how many wanted people walked by and were able to identify them all by some other means. It doesn't take account of how many people who were on the watchlist sauntered past completely unnoticed by computer and by plod (the "unknown unknowns" in Rumsfeld-speak). What they actually mean is that *at least* 30% of wanted people were not spotted.
As for the 1 in a 1000 false positives, we're meant to take that as meaning it's right 99.9% of the time but it doesn't consider the number of false negatives (wanted people who are not identified) and as I said above that presumes that we know how many wanted people are actually in the crowd to start with.
Then there's the fact that they are talking as if all people are uniformly likely to be picked out in error. As regular Reg readers will know, facial recognition is notoriously bad at identifying non-white people so while the overall false positive rate might be 1 in 1000 that could be something like 1 in 100,000 white people but 1 in 100 or even 1 in 10 black people (depending on the makeup of the crowd). Being stopped every tenth time you step out the house could get really annoying really quickly.
Finally, we are meant to just assume that everyone on the list is there because there is some genuine need for the police to stop them. They don't tell us anything about how accurate and up to date their data is. Sure, they may identify 7 out of 10 people they're looking for but if those people aren't actually wanted by police then the efficacy of the facial recognition system is greatly diminished. GIGO.
Addendum: finally finally, there's no comparison given for this facial recognition system against other methods such as, you know, giving coppers a bunch of mugshots or even just randomly stopping people and fingerprinting them.
This is also a system for GPs, right? UK doctors seek clarity over Health dept's £40m single sign-on funding
Friday 17th January 2020 11:50 GMT
Re: WTF are they doing ?
My phone and laptop have automatically connected themselves to Eduroam networks at other unis all over the U.K. and also in Germany. It’s not always welcome as the phone sometimes decides to stop using 4G when it can see a weak Eduroam hotspot at some educational establishment or another a mile or so away.
Apple calls BS on FBI, AG: We're totally not dragging our feet in murder probe iPhone decryption. PS: No backdoors
Microsoft wields ML to catch child predators, city drops 7-year facial-recognition experiment after no arrests...
We won't CU later: New Ofcom broadband proposals mull killing off old copper network
Sir John Redwood backs IR35 campaign, notes review would have to start 'immediately' before new off-payroll working rules kick in
Thursday 19th December 2019 12:38 GMT
Re: let the shafting begin
Has Boris Johnson published that report on Russian interference, the one he blocked before the election but promised would be released afterwards? I must have missed it. Maybe Dominic Cummings' russian handlers decided best to keep it under wraps.
It was approved for release almost immediately after the election - odd that isn't it? We still have to wait for the technicality of the appropriate committee being reconstituted before we get to see what has been allowed out unredacted.
