Posts by John Brown (no body)

After huffing and puffing for years, US senators unveil law to blow the encryption house down with police backdoors

Re: International hacking?

"In which case your law requires companies to undertake international espionage on your behalf. I think other countries might take exception to that.

Hmmm....Ireland...Microsoft...emails....

"It should be a required test for legislators proposing this sort of legislation to publish this up-front."

Did the current President ever disclose his accounts?

Re: Yay! Its groundhog day!

"A disagreement between rational individuals about the colour of something can generally be resolved by looking at the thing, problem solved."

So was The Dress black'n'blue or white'n'gold?

The red one on a grey background ----------------->

Re: So once the Government gets its way....

"The College works on a strange and convoluted system and in the 2016 Election Hilary Clinton actually got more of the popular vote than Trump and still lost."

That can happen in the UK too. Not sure if it's ever happened, but "first past the post" means you won more seats, not necessaries more votes. Enough "just good enough" results wins the race even if you lose massively in all the other seats. This can also lead to a majority government with as little as 25% of the vote.

Re: stupidity out of ignorance or avarice

I wonder how much "black budget" the TLAs have available for lobbying?

Internet Society, remember your embarrassing .org flub? The actual internet society would like to talk about it

Re: Is this an “American thing”?

"these companies could never have grown as they have anywhere else but the US."

Possibly not as quickly, but there are other enormously large and wealthy companies in other areas of business. Some in the EU, many in SE Asia, some in India, pretty much everywhere actually. But yes, the worst offenders do seem to be US tech companies in particular.

Re: Hmm

"a contractual impossibility under our registry agreement."

Unless that contract contains the phrase "in perpetuity", I doubt that very much.

I wonder if Ethos Capital and the string of shell/holding companies still exist and what their current capitalisation is? It seems fairly obvious to most that Ethos was set up specifically for this purchase to hide the real buyer from the limelight. But since I don't have an MBA, hey what would my opinion be worth anyway? Probably about as much as Ethos Capital.

Ransomware crims to sell off 'scandalous' files swiped from Mariah Carey, Nicki Minaj, Puff Daddy's legal eagles

A second tranche?

If the first lot doesn't live up to expectations, then the second lot won't be saleable. So if there's not enough juice in the first lot, why would they split it into two lots to be sold at a different time? If there was little to nothing of value, they'd do better to pump the entire trove in one big hyped up sale.

Laws on police facial recognition aren't tough enough, UK data watchdog barrister tells Court of Appeal

"The number of people being picked up is no criteria if the majority have turned out to be innocent."

Everyone is guilty of something :-)

On a more serious note, I can see most of the world, especially the western world, looking for the silver bullet, ie a system which spits the name and details of the subject. In China, I could easily imagine that there are entire "call centres" full of people looking at the selected image and many, many likely matches spat out by the system and using the Mk I eyeball for the final step in the process. A process that here in the west would be seen as prohibitively expensive so government and law enforcement will happily accept the poor success rate and pass the costs onto the legal system to sort out. Rather like the US patent system, now that I think about it :-)

TikTok boom: Brits spent a quarter of their waking hours in lockdown online – Ofcom

"it's responsible for the worst of left wing politics ( right wing stuff doesn't tend to take hold )."

So which is The Twitterer-in-Chief? Left, right or some weird outlier?

Once again, racial biases show up in AI image databases, this time turning Barack Obama white

Re: An end to police racial bias?

Whoops, sorry. My mistake. The Beeb was talking about facial recognition that claims to tell if if someone is a likely criminal by looking at a mugshot. THAT one is in the realms of phrenology!

Re: An end to police racial bias?

From what I read on the Beeb, it was rejected for publication and the university has distanced itself from it.

Re: this is not bias

"at the scale included in the article the image of Obama and not Obama are very comparable indeed."

If you squint and blur your vision, the general shape is very good. But the skin tones are significantly lighter in the generated image. That's the bias showing. Generally, when upscaling or zooming a poor image to enhance it, you want to create new pixels between the larger pixels which are averages of the general area of the image. How you can interpolate lighter pixels between darker areas such that the average across the whole area becomes lighter is beyond me.

It'd be interesting to see what it does to a pixelated image of Trump after he's just come off the sunbed and is at is most "orange panda-like" best. It'd probably put glasses on him :-)

When you bork... through a storm: Liverpool do all they can to take advantage of summer transfer, er, Windows

Re: sigh

He's an ACist!!!!! Arrest him!!

Segway to Heaven: Mega-hyped wonder-scooter that was going to remake city transport to cease production

I thin k the biggest problem with the C5 was the battery and motor tech wasn't yet their to cope with using proper wheels and a decent chassis. New materials science used across the board (chassis, body, drivetrain, motors, batteries) should be able to produce a much better C5-a-like nowadays. Although I'd still not like to use one on the public roads.

Re: In the UK

blares "look at me, I'm a tosser" repeatedly at decent volume

That mean they would still be banned in York then :-)

Wired: China's Beidou satnav system, 35th bird in orbit. Tired: America's GPS. Expired: Britain's dreams of its own

Re: And next: commercial positioning

"A microsatellite system that is constantly repositioning, relaunching etc just doesn't seem like a good fit for the above, even if the power requirements are reduced because of closer proximity to the ground - because that closer proximity also makes the ground station atmospheric compensation extremely difficult."

Do you think it might be possible if you can see many dozens of sats at the same time rather just the 3-10(ish) with current systems? Would the required levels of accuracy per satellite drop in proportion to the number of data points the receiver is able to work with?

UK police's face recognition tech breaks human rights laws. Outlaw it, civil rights group urges Court of Appeal

Re: What's a "Human Right"?

Is it actually written as "protestants" or is it "Protestants". The latter would be those adhering to a certain Christian sect, the former, anyone who is protesting. Yay! More legal shenanigans!

Re: Face Masks

Likewise, farting loudly to mask the sound of a cough.

Facebook accused of trying to bypass GDPR, slurp domain owners' personal Whois info via an obscure process

"And the examples given by Tucows show that Facebook is probably automating these requests and that legitimate domains could be impacted by this"

As with other automated takedown requests, when does the number of false positives turner the suer into a vexatious litigant?

Re: What do you think it is about

"Try explaining to people that commercial television is NOT about showing entertainment, but that their main goal is to show commercials."

It's not quite that black and white. They have to show enough "good" entertainment to attract enough eyeballs that they can sell the adverts. Having said that, there is clearly a subset of humanity who are happy sit and watch adverts all day, hence the various shopping channels.

Windows fails to reach the Finnish line as Helsinki signage pleads for help

Re: Windows "is a service"

"So stop bothering us at 10 in the morning with an impending update"

Ah, but that is 5:30pm or thereabouts somewhere in the world so that's who they are targeting their convenience at. Timezones and timed updates? Yeah, no, don't think that's possible, it's complicated.

Ah, but can the Coloured Pencil Clan play their Flash-based creations on it?

Non-moving, non-interactive, non-multimedia adverts are just sooooo prehistoric!!

Re: Windows as a Service

MS, obviously.

Re: Sledgehammer, meet nut.

"That said, it's really trivial to pause Windows updates indefinitely. If no-one on your staff can figure that out, maybe even the above is too much to ask."

These are the people who use crayons and coloured pencils. They may well have highly advanced technological tools, but they may not have any "mechanics" on staff. They just "drive" the tools, have learned some of the right buttons to press and if anything "breaks", the just take it "to the garage".

Machine-learning models trained on pre-COVID data are now completely out of whack, says Gartner

Re: AI?

"They're all still dumb as bricks most of the time."

That's a very good analogy. You can make all sorts of very useful things out of bricks. Bricks are very useful and come in different styles, shapes and materials so they can be used in different situations, On the other hand, you'd not really use bricks to build a car or an aircraft or even a ship, let alone a computer.

And so, likewise, algorithms are dumb, most of the time. They can do certain things very well. But they are not truly "learning" or "intelligent".

Re: But...

"At last, someone points out the "obvious" flaw in current A.I!"

Agreed, but I would point out that it's not the first time these flaws in so-called Artificial Intelligence or Machine learning have been referred to on these hallowed pages. I think pretty much all readers here would agree there is no such thing as "artificial intelligence" (apart from that poster who claims he i9nvnted it, of course!)

Hey NYPD, when you're done tear-gassing and running over protesters, can you tell us about your spy gear?

Re: Liar, she hit a traffic light

"maybe escalating the situation."

Oops, didn't check the spell checker. That should have been "de-escalating".

Re: Oh, good. Another case of having an agency (NYPD) police its own actions.

If they'd had any sense, they#d have taken advantage of the free jolly, taken you at your word, flew back and then almost certainly been sent back on another free jolly to confirm certain details that they "forgot" to clarify the first time around. I'm sure they could have turned it into "no case to answer" eventually anyway.

"If there wasn't looting where did all the video footage of people running out of broken windows carrying expensive goods come from?"

I blame Hollywood. US kids are brought up on a diet of TV and movies showing them how to behave if or when a protest turns nasty. The only thing missing was a zombie attack.

Re: Liar, she hit a traffic light

"CCTV-on-pole, has one draw-back,"

...it's impossible to quickly turn and focus based on sounds like a human being on a horse can. CCTV is great for the incident commander to get an overview and maybe evidential purposes, but you can't beat people on the ground for seeing and dealing with the detail and maybe escalating the situation.

Having said that, I also remember the miners strikes and what went on during that time.

Re: Liar, she hit a traffic light

Maybe you are too young to remember the days of the "firms" travelling to football matches specifically to fight the other "firms". It was a weekly occurrence all around the UK and lead to massive police presence at matches, away and home fans being strictly segregated, away fans being escorted in "parades", flanked by 100's of officers and horses from the bus/train stations to and from the ground, and an entire generation of young kids not being taken to matches, and the threats and fines from UEFA and FIFA against British clubs because of the violent fans.

Of course, the UK wasn't alone in this and some countries are still being sanctioned because of their fans behaviour to the extent that some internationals have been held behind closed doors cutting off that income stream.

Re: Protests

"under Brack Husains Admin."

I would have downvoted you anyway, but that childish phrase garners an automatic downvote every time. Shame you didn't start your post with that so I could have saved the time it took to read the rest of it.

Ex-director cops community service after 5,000-file deletion spree on company Dropbox

Re: Bulley got off lightly

There seems to be quite a few small startups that think running their entire business through the likes of Google Documents and Dropbox is the cheap and agile way to go. It all rather reminds me of the many small business that used now defunct ISPs home user accounts for their entire business email and web presence. I saw a plumbers van sometime in the last year with an AOL email address on it.

Wow! Apparently you can still get AOL accounts!!

Re: Crikey!

Probably a legal term/definition for use on a charge sheet.

Faxing hell: The cops say they would very much like us to stop calling them all the time

Re: Fax will never die!

Oh yes, I remember Newbrain laptops with their one or two lines of green led display being in pharmacies many years ago. And it's not THAT long since I last saw one still there, in use.

Re: Way back when...

I was pushed on one occasion, thanks to belligerence (must have been management) to answer the phone with "trying the same thing multiple times and hoping for a different result of a sign of madness".

But with the old electro-mechanical exchanges, sometimes a strowager relay would stick and not roll through the correct number of contacts, giving you a wrong number, even though you dialled the correct one. Re-dialling that same number again (and again) would eventually get you the right number most of the time.

Re: Fax will never die!

"my GP refuses to hook up to whatever modern-ish system exists for referrals and they hadn't sent the correct fax over, or some such nonsense"

One of the silver linings of the CV19 cloud. GPs and pharmacies have been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century! Just a few short months ago, it was quicker to call in to the GP surgery and request a prescription renewal than to have to keep re-dialling the single phone line hoping to get anything other than an engaged tone. (They did already have an online offering, but my wife can't register for that because she doesn't have enough of the right kinds of ID to prove she's the same person that's been going to that GP surgery for the last 20 years.) They have a nice simple system now. A separate prescription renewal number you call, giving name, address DoB and prescription and it gets delivered a day or so later. Simple, works and minimum technology.

Re: Fax will never die!

SAP and fax machines, together at last. *shudder*

Just wait until they spawn!!

Re: I called the cops

"Only if you're getting it from Priti Patel"

Nurse! Mind bleach, urgently!

(Oh you meant getting the NUMBER from her!)

Google isn't even trying to not be creepy: 'Continuous Match Mode' in Assistant will listen to everything until it's disabled

At least now I know...

...why Google overrode my clear intentions. I had Google Assistant turned off on my phone. Suddenly one day last week it was not only turned on but spamming me with requests to look at all the wonderful new features. It's turned off again, of course. I think. At least I disabled it. Maybe. Until Google decides for me that it should be on again.

CERN puts two new atom-smashers on its shopping list. One to make Higgs Bosons, then a next-gen model six times more energetic than the LHC

Oh, shove it up your nose!

"4 million times greater than the proposed FCC"

Trump and Pai won't allow it. They'll withdraw funding. Only the one true FCC is good, very good, very very good, the best.

Re: 1 TeV

"Why take the change of destroying this Universe because some person wanted to see what happens with a few 500 megaton nukes going off in some far off basement laboratory ?!"

I take it that you don't subscribe to the likelihood that amongst the beelions and beelions of galaxies out their, with there beelion and beelions of stars in each, with stars meelllions of years older than hours, that they're must have been someone/thing that's already tried this and the universe is still their.

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_{Yes, I am messing with grammar nazis heads :-)}

Re: Eventually

Hotels have already proved that system works, so would an LHC become the worlds vacuum cleaner? Will his Muskiness bore the tunnels all around the world as required? How much to connect up the pipes to my house? Will there be room for future upgrades? Will it support Internet Protocol Vacuum 6?

Re: Old Moore's law?

I thought Old Moores was some sort of French brandy or cognac like spirit that helps you read the future?

Internet blackout of Myanmar States that are home to ethnic minorities enters second year

Re: Attempted genocide of the Rohingya

"And Australia's inaction is apauling."

Why single out Australia? They are long way away and don't have a direct border. Surely the prime movers in dealing with this appalling situation ought to be Bangladesh, Thailand or China as their direct neighbours. (Ok, maybe not China)

So, how exactly do people connect up His Muskiness' Starlink network?

ServiceNow slammed for 'tone deaf' letter telling customers contracts can't be tweaked as COVID-19 batters businesses

Re: A contract is a contract, not a suggestion

"You wouldn't like it if a service on which you depended said "Nope, I know we agreed to that price but we can't make enough profit at that price so we aren't going to honor the agreement". It goes both ways."

And yet, if you put more bums on seats, the SaaS provider wants more money off you. So when you have no choice but take bums off seats, and use far less of the SaaS, then why should you not pay less? After all, as you say, it works both ways.