Posts by Another User

The truth nobody wants to admit: Chinese or not, open models are competitive now

Re: Real questions

The weights cannot phone home by themselves, but the runner can. On my machine the Ollama binary imports socket/connect/bind/listen functions, links DNS/TLS-related system libraries, and contains net/http, crypto/tls, ollama.com, registry/pull/push, and localhost API strings.

Asking the model:

... As an AI language model created by Alibaba Cloud, my primary function is to engage in conversation with users and provide insights based on my understanding of various topics. I don't have direct access to external internet-based servers or any specific programming tools like those found in a host program. ...

nm -u shows direct socket/DNS symbols:

_socket

_connect

_bind

_listen

_accept

_sendto

_recvfrom

_sendmsg

_recvmsg

_getaddrinfo

OpenAI claims GPT-4 will beat 90% of you in an exam

Re: Robo sanctions

Don’t worry. You will be rehabilitated. On a Monday night.

OpenAI's ChatGPT is a morally corrupting influence

Please, tell me a lie

As an AI language model, my primary function is to provide accurate information to the best of my abilities, and providing false information goes against my main purpose. However, I can generate a fictional story or scenario that isn't real, would that be helpful for you?

Re: About as accurate as a 3 bob watch

I cannot reproduce your result: I edited Xxxxx

Which famous person was born in Xxxx, xxxx?

As far as my knowledge cutoff, I don't have any information about any famous person born in Xxxx, xxxx. If you have any more information about that person, please provide more details or context about the person you are thinking of, this will help me to understand what you are looking for.

What is your knowledge cutoff?

My knowledge cutoff is 2021, which means that the information I have is up-to-date as of that year. Any events or new information that has occurred after that date, I am not aware of.

Germany's competition watchdog to investigate whether Apple's ecosystem damages other businesses

Re: Multiple complaints from other firms

Well, it is serious. The complainants are the guys with access to lobbyists. The outcome is open and may neither be beneficial for consumers nor for progress.

The first thing I would abolish is geo-fencing but that is unlikely to happen.

After demonstrating a facial recognition system that works on cows, moo-chine learning pioneer seeks growth funding

Re: Forget Facial

Nothing new. Already this kind of ... is turned into money.

“Need to track down a dog poo-petrator? There’s a DNA test for that”

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/27/dog-dna-test-pooprints

Re: Must have been a slack day

No, these tags cannot be removed because then you cannot sell the animal to be slaughtered. The whole life cycle of the animals have to be tracked. Remember Mad Cow Disease?

This new technology is interesting for roaming animals but as you can’t control the dispense of food for individual animals it is of limited use. As a test bed it is interesting because you can automatically check if all of the animals are identified correctly.

With intelligent life in scant supply on Earth, boffins search for technosignatures of civilizations in the galaxy

Good luck with that

Intelligent life on a tidally locked planet? Easier to find arguments why it is unlikely. There is only a narrow stripe which could be arable land. The rest is either too hot and bright or too cold and dark. There are no tides. Hard to explain water circulation which does not disappear into either the too hot area or too cold area. Tidally locked makes it unlikely there are plate tectonics. This also means likely there is no or are very weak magnetic field. The solar wind would remove the atmosphere in this case.

Now it would be interesting to see how all of this could be overcome regardless...

Franco-German cloud framework floated to protect European's data from foreign tech firms slurpage

Re: Megalomaniacal Europeans try to rule the World: GAIA means Earth (mother)

I do not think it is worth to spend too much energy on this one. So far this project has produced a lot of documents without too much content. Without massive funding it will not make an impact.

So I completely understand the ‘Bingo’ comparison.

Gaia is also used for different projects like ESA’s Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics.

There clearly the acronym was chosen later. This spacecraft is looking at the Milky Way.

Here I looked at the statements of the politicians and why they chose a project name.

Re: Megalomaniacal Europeans try to rule the World: GAIA means Earth (mother)

You are mistaken. The name is not an acronym. The project Initiators chose a name. Then they thought about an acronym but decided against. Here is some information

https://www.cloudcomputing-insider.de/was-ist-das-projekt-gaia-x-a-881800/

“Der Projektname GAIA-X bezieht sich auf die griechische Erdgöttin. Dem Vernehmen nach haben die Projektgründer zunächst über ein entsprechendes Akronym nachgedacht, Begriffe wie „General Artificial Intelligence Architecture“ schließlich jedoch verworfen.”

Google translate gives:

“ The project name GAIA-X refers to the Greek earth goddess. According to reports, the project founders initially thought about an appropriate acronym, but finally rejected terms such as "General Artificial Intelligence Architecture".”

Megalomaniacal Europeans try to rule the World: GAIA means Earth (mother)

Hearing ‘GAIA’ makes me cringe. It is not only a European attempt but an attempt to rule the World. This is not something unintentionally as if they didn’t know that GAIA means Earth (mother). Minister Altmaier is explicitly comparing it to GDRP which he sees as an example the world has to follow.

Far-right leader walks free from court after conviction for refusing to hand his phone passcode over to police

Astonishing that he is still a far right person

This should have been a lesson to him that it is foolish to foster far right ideas.

Thinking I may have to clarify: even the treatment he experienced is “far right”

NASA mulls restoring Saturn V to service as SLS delays and costs mount

This will work

This will work. I saw it recently on TV. Well it was Apple TV. “For all Mankind” is/was a feel good movie series.

Now they can bring back asbestos to good use as part of the heat shield and also to prevent the corrosive fuel from leakIng. Thinking about analog instruments- it was possible to read the display in total darkness thanks to Radium.

Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft speech-to-text AI systems can't understand black people as well as whites

Re: Racist, really?

Looking at your registration date I tend to think that you are fairly young. This means you do not have first hand experience of segregation. You saw this in the Apple movie ‘The Banker’.

Cool deduction with limited data available?

Here is something regarding facial recognition https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/13/facial_recognition_software_is_better_at_white_men_than_black_women/

Forget James Bond's super-gadgets, this chap spied for China using SD card dead drops. Now he's behind bars

Re: Stupid

Your ideas do not improve the situation. Posting to a news group leave a permanent trail pointing to the sender. Same applies for a letter sent. Using dead drops sounds like a reasonable thing to do.

Also surveillance requires much less effort if you get on the radar. Tapping your comms is a no brainer. Giving your letter some extra care is also not so difficult. Getting caught in the act is really only the last step. We need this for a fair trial. The perp already knows he is guilty but for us citizens it is important to know that he is really guilty.

Ofcom measured UK's 5G radiation and found that, no, it won't give you cancer

Do not belittle Cathode Rays

Cathode rays are a whole other ball park. For CRTs and television screens they are in the 5 keV to 30 keV range. X-rays are in the 100 eV to 200 keV range. You only need a metal like Tungsten as target for your electron beam to generate X-rays. Other metals like copper would also work.

So there is the potential of a CRT emitting X-rays. Of course this is tested for and due to safety measures taken by the vendors no risk has been found in current CRTs.

https://www.fda.gov/radiation-emitting-products/resources-you-radiation-emitting-products/television-radiation

Apple finally clambers to top of phone market again as spider-eyed iPhone 11 lures fanatics out of the shadows

Re: Only one in town is best?

Well if your business colleague lives within China then yes.

But for the rest of the world? There are no google services available.

That means no SatNav as Google Maps, no Here, etc. Maybe TomTom is coming at the end of the year.

If he needs other business applications then he may also be searching in vain.

So he has bought a great hardware without having software for now.

IT consultant who deleted every account on UK company Jet2's domain cops 5 months in jail

Laptop to be destroyed...

Will the laptop be hung drawn and quartered? Or will it be burned at the stake in proxy?

Forfeiture of the laptop is obvious but why harm the environment by willful destruction of a valuable object which could be auctioned off?

Is this paragraph from Trump or an AI bot? You decide, plus buy your own AI for $399

Yay!

I made exactly the 4/10 score like the average! Robo for president...

But all of these sentences are about topics that could have been said. There isn‘t really anything that is subversive or totally strange.

Additionally having ghost writers etc. what is really authentic?

That's not long division, Timmy! China school experimented on pupils with mind-reading tech

Re: I am glad that I am planted well into middle age...

Winston was not arrested arbitrarily. That would amount to despotism. He really did not feel love for the ‘big brother’. He commited what we nowadays would call a ‘hate crime’.

That being said I am also glad that I will not experience this technology during my lifetime.

FYI: Get ready for face scans on leaving the US because 1.2% of visitors overstayed their visas

Don’t exaggerate the system’s capabilities

Recognizing you when yo try do board is not exactly rocket science. You already have a ticket and your biometrics are connected to this ticket. The automatic boarding system only has to match your image against the 200-400 expected passengers. This will have a very low rate of false positives.

It does not help against fake IDs at all. Why? It is a new ID to the system. It will connect your newly recorded image with this fake ID and make sure that only this fraudster/terrorist can travel with this ‘ID’.

Other agencies will search for duplicates. This should find people under witness protection who have been given a new identity, spies from foreign countries, and lots of people who just look like somebody else. With a population of almost 8 billion not everyone can have his unique face...

If there's 5G connectivity but no 5G devices on it, does it make a sound? Wait, no, that's not right

Untrue argument that supermarkets will use these.

It’s is not true that every item in a supermarket will be tagged with 5G devices. This claim had been made before with RFID tags.

Every item would be automatically scanned when you left the supermarket. Except that it was too expensive and it did not work as expected.

The too high price for RFID tags is 7 cent per tag. This already exceeds the profit margin for most food products up to 5 US$.

Vengeful sacked IT bod destroyed ex-employer's AWS cloud accounts. Now he'll spent rest of 2019 in the clink

Wouldn’t make a difference

Log of ‘random site’ would have showed the exact same IP address of poster. So same result: 2 years in the slammer.

Core-blimey! Riddle of Earth's mysterious center finally 'solved' by smarty seismologists

Re: Gone fission....

Kelvin had calculated the age of the earth to be between 20 million and 100 million years. Radioactivity and its effects were unknown when Kelvin performed his analysis. The current age of the earth is 4.5 billion years. This age can be explained by having a fission reactor in the core.

I don‘t understand why and when the fission should have stopped. After this we are in the range of 100 millions of years range of Kelvin‘s calculation before the core gets too cold.

Vodafone and EE ship Apple's Watch 4, but not without LTE teething issues

Re: No Roaming with AppleWatch 3/4

Unfortunately this is legal. Here straight from the horse’s mouth:

‘Every existing or new contract that includes roaming services will change to "roam like at home" contract.’

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/faq/question-and-answers-roaming

No Roaming with AppleWatch 3/4

An eSIM could give you additional freedom in selecting a provider. Here you cannot even use the AppleWatch in other countries. Particularly in Europe it is easy to cross borders. No roaming is a massive limitation.

Y'know what? VoIP can also be free from pesky regulation – US judges

Should be considered implementation detail

There is not only VoIP. There exists VoLTE and WiFi calling which is supported by Android mobiles (and iPhones). Important is if you can call or get called by someone using a POTS telephone.

If so the this should be considered a phone service.

It should be up to the provider to change the underlying technology if it is cheaper to operate. Still the operator should be bound by the existing regulations (public utility, wiretapping etc.)

Re: CCIE Opinion for those who care

Not really true. German Telekom for example is replacing all its POTS technology with VoIP.

End customers get a box (combined modem, switch router, hot spot) where they can attach their phone to. Customers do not get internet access unless they book it.

Difference for customers is that this box needs power, whereas a phone is powered over the phone wire. QoS is handled by provider. Obvious disadvantage is that you cannot call emergency services if there is a power outage. So this looks like a phone service and behaves like a phone service. Also wiretapping rules do apply etc.

Apple to require privacy policy on all apps

Re: re: Anything interactive MUST collect data as a matter of course, and usually use that data

‘Timetable lookup”. For convenience the app will ask you for your location as this is likely to be the place where you want to lookup the timetable.

So collection of PII.

You are using the app in two different cities. Now the app vendor could sell the data to a train company and you will get special offers.

In a Facebook way the app could ask for your contact list so that your contacts could be offered cheap fares to visit your on your birthday.

I guess this looks like a prime example why privacy rules need to be in place.

US Declaration of Independence labeled hate speech by Facebook bots

Facebook worked better than expected

At the time the colonies were at war with England and as such the Declaration of Independence was incitement.

Facebook did catch that.

Today every government would forcefully object if citizens were to complain about „no taxation without representation” and were about to ‘enforce’ stronger representation.

Password re-use is dangerous, right? So what about stopping it with password-sharing?

Those two guys will be successful in their future lives...

Although they state in their second sentence of the abstract that their idea is bollocks:

‘Though the design of such a framework is fraught with risks to users' security and privacy’

they decide to proceed regardless.

I see great potential in further screwups of processor design. Maybe ‘optimizing’ virtualization. Why not have global inode ref counters for shared file systems...

Storm brewing? Weather buff uses deep learning to predict patterns

Weather proverbs

Should easily reach 88%. Deep learning seems particularly unsuitable for this kind of problem.

Maybe deep learning can be applied to find out to which kind of problems it can be applied :-)

Death notice: Moore's Law. 19 April 1965 – 2 January 2018

Re: Two words...

It is fine as long as you and the cat are together in the steel box. But better do not tell the result.

Hackers' delight: Mobile bank app security flaw could have smacked millions

Re: This is why personal certs are required

Your certificate is not good enough. The bank will have your public certificate to establish that you are the person you claim to be. You can prove this with your private certificate. Now the fake bank will also have access to your public certificate. So you are preventing the fake bank from getting cheated.

The fake bank will know that ‘you’ are ‘you’

You need to have a certificate issued by the bank to get a verification that the bank is the site it claims to be. Such a certificate can be baked into a banking app. Expiration of such a certificate is no problem as the application can be updated.

Do VPNs really help?

The discussion is not about web browsers being tricked into accepting fake web sites but applications failing to check the chain of trust and not using a known certificate to establish the communication.

An App can be easily updated. It does not have to rely on a certificate it gets presented.

That said what is different with a VPN connection? In addition to names of banks an attacker will know the names of commercial VPN sites. Now there is the same problem for a MITM attack. Does the VPN software really know the supposed target? I doubt that a VPN provider only using a well know preshared secret and the email address can give protection.

Boffins craft perfect 'head generator' to beat facial recognition

All white look the same ...

The paper contains pictures where the original face is in focus. The featureless face is out of focus - blurry. To me these do not look the same. Moreover the modified picture is ‚lying‘. It is worse than a retouched picture.

Another way to avoid eye contact: 4G on the Tube expected 'in 2019'

Re: Won't matter to me

That is funny. ElReg is my social media platform...

World Vasectomy Day: 15k men line up for live vent-blocking

Vasectomy - The Best Gift a Man can Give?

Seriously?

Divorce rate is between 30% and 50%. There is no population growth in most western countries.

This attempt is vain and futile. Where it would help it is not practiced and often illegal.

Dear America, best not share that password with your pals. Lots of love, the US Supremes

Re: What happens if...

The issue is really different. Even the Netflix case is not correct. If you share your Netflix details with somebody else then you are in breach of terms and conditions of the contract. The person you gave access details never entered into a contract with Netflix. Netflix can try to remedy this situation when the login process requires to agree to the contract and its T&Cs.

If you borrow a tablet from me and watch Netflix what then? You did not need to login to Netflix. Legal or illegal? Fine for an hour? Fine for a year? Still fine when you give me money for rent of the tablet?

What with email which is configured too for several accounts? Are you now a hacker when you start the App?

What does the Moon 4bn years ago and Yahoo! towers this week have in common? Both had an awful atmosphere

Re: It, closer & larger

Diameter is meant. It is also a property which can be easily observed. Area would be nine times larger.

Hackers can turn web-connected car washes into horrible death traps

Spaceballs quote

1-2-3-4-5? That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard of in my life! That's the kinda thing an idiot would have on his luggage!

Who will save us from voice recog foolery from scumbags? Magnetometer!

Next version will use camera

To detect if your ear is in the vicinity of the phone.

Even as kids we used non electro-mechanic contraptions to convey sound. A tin can telephone could work too.

To detect something as 'near' is not possible. You could use parabolic reflectors to get the sound 'near'.

Maybe we need a distinction between scientist and "scientist".

Murder in space: NASA orders astronauts to KILL cripples – then fire bodies back to Earth

Re: Most expensive pointless biology experiment ever?

No control group on earth? Unlikely. So 40 more mice with the same condition. Killed on the exact same date. Preparing the mice went flawless in each instance? Maybe not. So a total of 100 mice. Monitoring by actual biologists should have been possible via a video link. Maybe somebody on board even got some training with the experiment before? A complete test run? Double the number.

Pointless? I doubt that. Gruesome? From an animals rights group perspective certainly.

How to nuke websites you don't like: Slam Google with millions of bogus DMCA takedowns

Using lawyers against lawyers?

Pure unadulterated brilliance

Appliance-maker Liebherr chillin' with Microsoft, prototyping another Internet fridge

Do not open

your fridge unless properly dressed? Fridge pics (NSFW) which are sent to your Facebook friends and family if you do not send money via Western Union?

Apple kills eavesdrop bug in FaceTime

Re: a confession

FaceTime is one of the killer features. The calls are also encrypted what is not the case with most VoIP calls. When your family is spread around the globe you really appreciate such a cost saving feature. A virtual guided tour around the premises is nice. And if you are sitting in the bathtub there are also audio only FaceTime calls.

UK's climate change dept abolished, but 'smart meters and all our policies strong as ever'

Re: 3% energy saving

That is likely to be a skewed result. a) A smart meter was a novelty. This will quickly wear off. And b) participants in a beta programme are generally more interested because of a)

If we can't find a working SCSI cable, the company will close tomorrow

Re: Malchronism

Commodore PET 2001 was available 1977. It had 1 KB or 4 KB of RAM. Programmable calculators are even older. 75 years ago would've been a Zuse, Hollerith/IBM, Bletchley Park system. So, yes the dates are correct.

Teen faces trial for telling suicidal boyfriend to kill himself via text

Re: Theatre Fire

Your argument doesn't hold water. Do you really think that texting 911 with such stuff will be considered free speech?