Posts by alain williams 2956 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
Once a week or so I receive a call on my landline that starts something like "This is bank security." Note: nothing about *which* bank. This must succeed often enough to make it worth the crooks' effort.
Maybe people are naive, or stupid or what I do not know. But this is the sort of thing that needs a public information campaign that is repeated several times a year.
The only reason that the tip is these days called a "service charge" is because someone lost a court case against HM Customs and Excise (the VAT man) some 30 years ago. People were having a business meal and claiming the cost of food + tip on expenses. HMRC objected saying that the tip was discretionary and so could not be claimed. Calling it a "service charge" made it allowable.
So: what was optional & for good service became an obligation. The amount is creeping up, it used to be 10% but some want an outrageous 15%.
if they are programmed into the AI in the first place. It is all well and good pretending that AI owners will not want to harm humans but this is not the case. We must expect the likes of the NSA/CIA and Mossad/IDF to make their AIs follow their own agendas; both flout laws; both have illegally killed people in foreign countries and much much more (Israel already uses AI to kill in Gaza). Similar agencies in other countries will do much the same - while their political masters claim otherwise.
But AIs will become cheap enough that many other organisations & some individuals will do likewise - most of which will not live on a volcanic island and stroke white cats.
The information you provide to people must be concise, transparent, intelligible, easily accessible, and it must use clear and plain language.
This is point 6 of the right to be informed, hiding it in 300 pages is not "easily accessible".
Pamela Jones explained what was going on in a way that was understandable to non lawyers.
In the physical world how do we stop theft ? By laws that are enforced. This works because the losses are felt by property owners who are (generally) richer than the thieves who take stuff. Rich people tend to be the ones who make laws.
AI companies are richer (or better funded [not quite the same thing]) than those who's IP they pilfer so the pressure to not make IP theft laws or enforce existing ones is there.
This is also all quite new and legislation takes time to catch up.
What is needed is some kind of extension to robots.txt or similar that is legally enforcible (quickly, simply, cheaply) to hammer AI companies that ignore it.
Running Linux under MS Windows means that you cannot trust the Linux VM - it will still be subject to Microsoft's spyware, oh, sorry: telemetry.
If you want to run both on the same hardware: Install Linux and run MS Windows in a VM under it.
Who knows what Trump will order MS to secretly exfiltrate from machines running Windows anywhere on the planet.
That will not be as a result of the LHC or even the HiLumi LHC but climate change. Something that most of our politicians are trying to pretend does not exist.
Trouble is that there are not many votes in "we need to spend a lot of money now to avoid disaster in 50 years time." Although given the heat last week 50 years might be too large an estimate. The other excuse is: why should we bother when bigger emitters are not doing anything ?
> UCS-2 is much simpler: a character is 2 bytes and that's it.
So only code points (characters) in the BMP can be encoded: U+0000 to U+FFFF. Thus a smiley (U+01F600) cannot be represented.
Javascript was originally UCS-2 but then moved to UTF-16. This is almost the same as UCS-2 but the code points U+10000 to U+10FFFF are represented by surrogate pairs - ie 32 bits.
But code points in the BMP is prolly good enough for now, as you say it keeps things simpler.
Damn: el-Reg refuses to let me put a smiley in my post complaining: "The post contains some characters we can’t support" - but the page is encoded UTF-8 so it does work -- I see it in the preview.
Many years ago I delivered a 1 week training course at IBM. I had to sign in at the front desk on arrival (as expected).
One mid morning there was a fire practice so we all trooped out to the car park and had a roll call. Everyone was accounted for, but one extra person: me, I was not on any list of those supposed to be there.
Companies can take (not 'make') a lot of money in the UK but through dodgy accounting shift the profit to a low tax country like Luxembourg.
It is not just tech companies but also the likes of Starbucks and Amazon. This has long been the case. In 2012 Margaret Hodge attacked these companies but nothing changed; I can understand that it is hard as some countries make a lot of money through low tax thus laundering profits.
Taxing profits where they are made is what must happen. End phony accounting. Trump will throw his toys out of his pram so this must be done in coordination with many other large economies.
> Registration is required BY LAW to operate the school.
Can the teacher not do so using a pen & paper ? It might not be ideal but for a day or so better than not teaching the children at all.
No electronic white board & stuff, can the teacher not dig most of the material out of their head & use pens on the white board ? I remember, some 30+ years ago, teaching a week long Unix course in France. French customs did not release the teaching materials until Wednesday - the first two days I taught from a short paper course index.
My teachers some 60 years ago must have been bloody geniuses to teach using: pens, paper & chalk.
The point is that you could be someone worth spying on, they just do not know until they have done so. They need to look through a lot of trash to find the occasional diamond.
Also: one of your mates could, unbeknown to you, be worth spying on thus your suggestion to visit a pub could provide an opportunity to do something nefarious.
> There is no need to struggle. Change your bookmark to archive and never visit the front page again.
Oh, thank you so much - I feel that I almost have old El-Reg back again!
Maybe the old layout could be a preference that I could set (hint, hint).
Do not buy HP printers
My Brother inkjet in 16 years old and still works nicely, I use 3rd party ink.
I run Debian Linux which would prolly also help as driver updated directly from HP/wherever would not be downloaded.
It cost this guy not just a new printer but a lot of lost time and increased blood pressure.
Another here who runs his own email server. One nice thing that I have set up is <anything>@mail.$my_domain will be sent to me and a reply by me will come from that address. This means that I can create new addresses with zero set-up effort.
But my primary email address is known by spammers as I last changed that 40 years ago.
Or maybe: "We are programmed to receive / You can check out any time you like / But you can never leave!"
Now that SAP has hijacked all of its customer data by pulling it into its cloud it are increasingly tightening its grip to ensure that customers pay perpetually and for whatever new services that they decide.
The ultimate lock in.
This needs to be addressed by the EU in the same way that John Deere is being taken to court over its repair practices.
as the old code will be in modules that are only loaded if the device is installed in the system. No device means no old code means little worry about old bugs.
Do not get me wrong: removal of old cruft is a good idea but do not expect vast bug reductions as a result.
A side benefit is that kernel maintainers will not need to waste time on unused code which means more time for what we actually use.
As needed for Linus's Law to be effective.
AI will be be used by the bad guys as well as the good ones; but the ultimate losers will be the likes of Israel's NSO group and the world will be a safer place.
The miscreants can often be identified today; the problem is what happens next - which seems to be not much.
My sister was burgled last week, the culprit quickly identified, a well known local drug user - presumably out to score for a fix. Apparently responsible for 95% of local thefts.
He needs help to turn his life around, get off whatever he is on and address the issues that make him want to take it in the first place. This will not be easy.
Others should be fed porridge for a time and, when they come out, helped into finding a job.
I do not have the panacea and realise that the reasons why people steal is almost as large as the number of people who steal. It will cost in the short term but hopefully will be beneficial in the long term.
Gosh: I hope that I am not coming across as a Tory MP!
Not always.
Some 30 years ago I spent a year working for a large company that provided IT services. Two departments worked back to back. They went through ISO9000 assessments 6 months apart.
There was one aspect that was really hard to be compliant so my department pushed the burden to the other one. 6 months later they pushed responsibility to us.
