Posts by Raphael 182 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jun 2011
We do public consultation software. One of our clients printed out letters to submitters, so the mayor could physically sign each one. They then scanned the letters (to PDF) and uploaded them back into our system to email to the submitters. They then wondered why the links in the PDFs wouldn't work anymore.
They already did that a while ago under a "your subscription cost is increasing" message which was sneakily changing you over to the plan with co-pilot. I had to go to cancel my M365 Family subscription to get the option to stay on the plan without copilot (which was the original pricing as well).
In Australia, Victoria cops want to be able to log in to people's home CCTV (currently it would be an opt-in but I can easily see it becoming a requirement)
https://tanea.com.au/en/victoria-pushes-bold-policing-reform-remote-cctv-access-plan-could-save-200m-a-year/
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1007675657862800
A Long Long Time Ago, 2006, the ever-brilliant David Brin (one of my favourite authors) wrote an article called "Why Johnny Can't Code"
It seems things are just going to get worse and Johnny will never code.
https://www.salon.com/2006/09/14/basic_2/
For three years -- ever since my son Ben was in fifth grade -- he and I have engaged in a quixotic but determined quest: We've searched for a simple and straightforward way to get the introductory programming language BASIC to run on either my Mac or my PC.Why on Earth would we want to do that, in an era of glossy animation-rendering engines, game-design ogres and sophisticated avatar worlds? Because if you want to give young students a grounding in how computers actually work, there's still nothing better than a little experience at line-by-line programming.
Only, quietly and without fanfare, or even any comment or notice by software pundits, we have drifted into a situation where almost none of the millions of personal computers in America offers a line-programming language simple enough for kids to pick up fast. Not even the one that was a software lingua franca on nearly all machines, only a decade or so ago. And that is not only a problem for Ben and me; it is a problem for our nation and civilization.
There is a case here in NZ where a chap won a case for some very large damages against the local council, and when they refused to pay, he got the court to say he could start selling their assets
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/northern-advocate/news/whangarei-district-council-to-appeal-contractors-61m-high-court-ordered-payout/ZX2SAAYAFRFALEVFR4HRLNXFXE/
maybe I am mistaken and it's the toggle between different cameras but the below from previous launches is what I am referring to
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1795583341363949684/video/1
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1786156323878682779/video/1
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1774194152009568366/video/1
The icing is of course not normal.
I may have told this story before. But many moons ago I was working for a largish international company (offices in NZ, Australia, the UK and Canada). An engineering intern had been allowed near the internet and read about the latest computer virus spreading around the internet.
Armed with this dangerous knowledge the intern decided he needed to warn everyone in the company. Instead of using some of the distribution lists (the memory is lacking as to whether or not he had permissions), he added every single person in the company to the To field.
This made the email about 2MB in size with all names added. Which meant the mail servers got hit with about 2GB of emails. Which they did cope with.....until a number of helpful folk hit Reply All. After which the mail servers expelled excrement and fell over taking most of the network down as they tried to handle the load.
I watched a Youtube Law stream a while ago, and the one lawyer does Family Law and was pointing out what a nightmare this is. You can relatively easily use AI to fake up a call from an ex having them say all sorts of nasty things. and you could probably get around any watermarks by using a crappy speaker to play it and then record from there. Now you have to try and prove that your client didn't say what was on the recording.
this may be one of the reasons why the US Supreme Court recently ruled against the Andy Warhol estate that Warhol's painting of a photo of Prince was a violation of the Photographer's copyright (as it was used for Financial Gain).
I am sure the copyright cases against OpenAI by Sarah Silverman et al. will be citing this case.
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