Posts by alain williams 2650 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
Humans should then be responsible for making decisions.
After (re)viewing the evidence (ie images) that the AI matched to the person. This might be hard for a human if the image quality is bad or the person has different make-up or ...
What happens if AI is not being used and a venue owner thinks that s/he recognises someone who caused problems some time back ? The owner may well be confusing an innocent person with someone else - this has likely happened many times.
Jesus people. All this bashing of SonicWall when these things went EOL *7 Years* ago!
When I have bought things I do not remember seeing something that says "This will EOL in 2022", or similar. But the EOL date is becoming increasingly important.
Maybe the EOL date should be mandated to be big and obvious on the box & web site.
It is more secure than working on a home PC full of games and untrusted applications,
Eh ? Keeping files on some MS server to which god knows who has access to is more secure ? Who has been smoking what ? How much has the NSA helped create this ?
Oh, I suppose what they are saying is "The MS Windows that we provide is so insecure that you cannot trust it".
Then: what happens when your Internet connection is down or the MS servers are dead ? If it is all on your own machine then it is always available.
Yes: I do see that being able to access files from multiple machines is useful, but there have long been other ways of doing that.
So about 1/2,777,777 of an Olympic swimming pool or 1,277 of a Tun (beer barrel).
I suspect that a lot of old and little used connectors will not appear on new motherboards and save a $ or two. If you really need it a USB to serial adaptor will help you - but mean that you have more spaghetti behind your PC.
All of this shows how remarkable that Voyager 1 & Voyager 2 launched in 1977, some 44 years ago, are still working. OK: running out of power and simpler computers with some problems but still not failed.
I, and others here, have said many times that if insurance did not pay ransomware then companies would be forced to up their game.
Yes: it would hurt a few that did not get the message, but after a couple of bankruptcies other companies would start to take it seriously - not just try to blame others.
If this is not done then the pain will persist for many years, this will not stop it but should make it much harder for the crooks.
It will be from when first released, not from when you bought it. So for many they will only get 2-3 years of updates - this is nothing like enough.
I get it that they want to sell you a new shiny as soon as possible but that is not what I want - I will replace mine when it breaks.
Red-tape has many purposes, one of which is to make things safe for us. Remove regulations and house builders will rejoice as they can cut corners. The fact that we will have houses more likely: to go up in flames, fall down and flood will be none of their concern and we will be left to pick up the bill - assuming that we did not die in the fire.
Deregulation of banks was a large part of the 2008 crash, the lessons of the 1929 Wall St Crash having been forgotten.
Similar concerns on all other areas where red-tape is cut.
What really irritates me is that the government is making such a song and dance over this while failing to sort out tax laws for big business and the rich which makes contracting look like a drop in the ocean....
Quite easy to fix: contractors should start making donations to the party in power ... IR35 will recede
Digital might seem a no brainer for us techies, but the ONS says In January to February 2020, 4% of households in Great Britain did not have internet access.
So are these to be excluded ?
The evidence is that "the vast majority of people have not objected" - so if they did not object then they must be strongly onside. That most people do not know about it or do not understand how easy it is to de-anonymize data and how personal data can be abused in years to come - is not an issue that Hancock wants to talk about.
This is using the same logic that a losing candidate uses when claiming that the victor was elected by a minority ... having assumed those who did not vote as would have voted against the victor.
Do we know if Hancock has opted out ?
Yes: Levi Strauss won that. IIRC Tesco were selling Levis bought in Czechoslovakia, etc, at prices cheaper than available in the UK.
So: the likes of Levi Strauss can take advantage of globalization (ie get stuff made where cheapest) but consumers cannot. One rule for the big companies, another for consumers.
I would agree with Levi Strauss charging more for jeans in the UK if they made the jeans in the UK paying workers UK wages.
Is what Oracle is doing really very different ?
Chinese people are generally friendly and hardworking but anything coming from the communist party need to be treated as dangerous as it is.
Your typical Chinaman is pleasant and friendly, I know several. The Chinese government causes me great concern.
This happens in many places:
I have Israeli friends but despise how the Israeli government treats the Palestinians.
Dictator Alexander Lukashenko is not typical of Belarus peoples.
etc
but employees of Apple and SIS. They were employed in a security capacity and have demonstrated a total carelessness and negligence in what they did. Making these personally pay Bah, on top of huge compensation by Apple & SIS, might make others in similar positions take their responsibilities seriously.
Fines for wasting police time would also be appropriate.
Who owns the copyright on the images that they have downloaded, do they have permission to keep them ?
Granted that most of the big Internet corporations ignore copyright (unless you are breaching theirs) but that does not mean that the question should not be asked.
I would love it if were as simple as Martin Gardner’s Two Tribes: one side always tells the truth, the other always lies.
Reality is more complicated. Even our side lies, I would like to believe that they lie less that the others. It is not just Boris & Trump, but also our security services, various other agencies and what the press says. Sometimes it is to gain advantage over the other lot, sometimes to cover up their blunders & incompetence.
I probably over optimistically flatter myself that, with a bit of work, I can see what is true & what is false.
I'm talking above about politics, those at corporations also lie as well.
There are some exclusions When your choice does not apply, one of which is When information that can identify you is removed - we all know how ineffective that is: Machine learning algorithm can identify 99.98 per cent of people in any anonymised dataset, so who are they trying to fool ?
to everyone, especially the large corporates who depend on it. Guys should work for free so that these corporates can make even more money, why should they contribute a penny when they can get it for free, free, free .... ?
And if they did pay for features to be added then their competitors might use these features and that would be a bad, bad thing!
If the FLOSS software does not quite do what they want: then they will pay many times more than a contribution to the FLOSS developers ... because, well, closed source vendors need to be paid, you cannot use their stuff without making large, repeated, payments ... that is how it works y'know.
Well, that seems to be the attitude. I suspect that if they did a real cost benefit analysis then helping FLOSS would come out on top - often (not always); but the managers & bean counters cannot see that. If it is open source it should be free, free, free!
Look at what the GDPR says about this.
Just 2 of the points:
* Consent requires a positive opt-in. Don’t use pre-ticked boxes or any other method of default consent.
* Explicit consent requires a very clear and specific statement of consent.
Mind you: the majority of web sites & applications do not do what the GDPR requires them to.
Storing financial quantities in floating point will only give you a head ache; eg do not store a bank balance in pounds. Store it as an integer number of pennies (or whatever the smallest currency unit is). If you store in floating point you might get a rounding error of a penny and the auditors will go bananas looking for someone bacon or salami slicing.
Having said that: I do see people manipulating prices in Javascript where numbers are stored as double floating point (IEEE754); but the maximum integer value that can be safely held is 9,007,199,254,740,992 ~= 9×1015 - which can easily hold a BRK.A.
You might need to do some calculations in 1/100 of pennies - to keep the VAT people happy.
I divorced 25 years ago and the fall out is still badly affecting us, especially the kids.
Although I did not like how he went about business I will remain tight lipped and not make flippant comments about their divorce - they are entitled to a private life.
All that I will say is to wish them the best, hoping for as little emotional bruising as possible.
I would not wish divorce on my worst enemy.
that can come up with recommendations about: not paying ransoms; chasing down the crooks; international cooperation; ... All of this is needed, but there is almost nothing about coming up with technical recommendations.
On page 47 Action 4.3.1: there is a bit about "Unencrypted shadow copies of data", which I assume means backups. This has got to be the best way of recovery: a clean wipe of compromised machines; reinstall the OS; retrieve data from backups. Large organisations should have the manpower to work out how to do this, smaller ones could benefit from HOWTOs that they can follow. Thus if/when attacked you point two fingers at the crooks (== 1 finger for you in the USA). If the crooks don't make as much money they will be less inclined to carry out attacks.
Wipe/reinstall/restore-backups should take about a very busy day if you are well prepared. You will lose 1 day's work assuming daily backups, incremental 1 hourly backups work well when there are many small files (eg word processor documents), not databases but there are ways of handling these.
Yes: this will cost to setup & do and occasionally test, but prob cheaper than 21 days downtime, 287 days to fully recover & $312k average ransom (page 7).
Also: no mention of using more robust software, eg Linux with SELinux (Yes: SELinux does need better documentation & HOWTOs).
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