Posts by Nick Kew 2841 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jan 2007
So tell me again why it's better to have a central political government like the EU controlling R&D? Apart from a large unaccountable taxpayer-funded budget, I suppose.
Compared to what? The total EU budget for 28 countries - including all that agricultural nonsense, as well as waste[1] - is a drop in the ocean of Sir Humphrey's empire, and it's focussed. Science being one of those focuses.
[1] Both real waste and the product of 30+ years of often-false news from Murdoch et al.
Nope. If the vortex generates more work, that in turn will feed more lawyers.
If it were the UK, they'd get themselves a ruling that the taxpayer should fund the extra work through one of those feed-the-beast systems like legal aid. AIUI though the system is different, the US parasite has no shortage of hosts, either.
the problem is that the clause was unenforceable
No. That would be for lawyers (ultimately a court) to determine, and will inevitably vary between jurisdictions.
This actually means that anyone who distributes the updated microcode can only do so if they are in a position to enforce
"Enforce" in this instance meaning that you alert your users, by distributing Intel's notice. Putting it in an abandoned cellar behind a "beware of the leopard" sign (or perhaps something like in /etc/legalese/notices/intel/CVE-whatever-2018) should be fine, so long as they have it.
There may be a reason for that: namely, benchmark tests are often propaganda and spin. Nevertheless, it should be obvious that a clause like that can only make things worse.
Perhaps governments could pick up on that. Declaring such clauses unenforceable would have limited effect, but banning the sale of goods with such onerous restrictions - or requiring such sales to be approved by a licensing authority through an onerous process including public consultation - would surely cause vendors to stop and think what's reasonable.
We may argue over what kind of a case Redis has here.
But one thing seems to me pure evil. Their new licence has some serious potential to confuse, and to p*** all over two valuable trademarks:
(1) It's already been spotted "out there" referred to as "Apache Common Clause". If Redis themselves sanction such use it's a clear violation of the Apache trademark.
(2) "Common Clause" and the inevitable abbreviation CC have obvious potential for confusion with Creative Commons.
I honestly don't know what we who value those trademarks can do about it. Any lawyers lurking here?
Apologies if you're already well-versed in the dynamics of forking an open-source project ...
If your "I" there really means a potentially-viable developer community interested in working together on it, then that could be an interesting effort. Go ahead and see how much momentum you can build. And trawl github et al for folks already doing related work.
On the other hand, if it's just you scratching your own concurrency itch in isolation, you'll soon end up with something that falls behind redis and may become ever harder to maintain.
Since when is a private firm producing goods and services for the commercial market required to produce items for disabled people?
You could reformulate that in a more historic context. For example, "No blacks, no dogs, no irish". Or if you're not familiar with British history of about the 1950s, substitute your own example, perhaps involving another group like Jews or Mexicans.
This is just one of many anti-discrimination laws. We may argue at length over details, but I think most of us firmly support at least the basic principle, don't we?
(Besides, this isn't about Apple's products, it's their website that's the issue).
@Charles 9 - Dynamic content is inherently easy. You build accessibility into the content generation software.
@Various commentards - Accessibility is designed right in to HTML, and is much cheaper and easier to get right than to screw up 1998-deezyner or modern-deezyner style. The situation is not remotely comparable to the compromises that sometimes have to be made in the physical world.
If you can enumerate those things then I expect so can someone paid to do so. So yes, it will include them, and many more. It needs to learn principles, not situations. Principles such as "people, animals and vehicles all have the capacity to do something silly, so anticipate". And "where there is no clear line of sight, something might emerge".
Having worked with and on simulations for UK government clients, I would see this as largely an irrelevance. It won't damage the AI, but neither will it do much to help it that the Industry hasn't been doing much better for years already. Though it might become a box to tick in the red tape.
I guess the most positive precedents are things like the simulators used in pilot training. The pilot doesn't go straight from the simulator to being in charge of something critical: it's just one stage of training.
Debating point: does El Reg not implicitly preach what it manifestly fails to practice?
Anecdote: I recently ordered a "big-ticket" item of furniture, from a big-shed retailer on a big retail park. As part of that, I checked online, including a visit to the retailer's website from my 'phone.
That was using plain ol' Chrome. Given my very limited use of the web from the 'phone, and the fact I don't expose anything of value on it, I've never been arsed to fine-tune it against ads and such nonsense.
Sometime after, I visited El Reg from the phone. And found that every bloomin' ad on the Reg pages is now that same furniture retailer! If I visit the Reg front page, more than one ad. will appear as I scroll down, and it's always the same: the retailer whose page I visited! Click to another page, it's the same ad. OK, enough, this is just annoying: delete effing cookie!
This looks like classic deprecation warnings. And yes, warnings are a useful tool: don't you always use at least -Wall with gcc and insist it builds cleanly? A policy that can make life more difficult when faced with a third-party or legacy codebase that generates reams of warnings, especially when combined with a PHB who insists you treat it as a 'black box'.
But it's a narrow focus. And when it makes a programmer's life more difficult, it risks being counterproductive, by causing the programmer to take his eye off the ball and risk introducing other errors that should be obvious. Perhaps the next experiment should test whether the warnings are productive when the programmers are presented with a legacy codebase that generates a gigabyte of them?
Actually orthogonal to the legislation (as I read the article).
It'll mean you can't sell gnupg in Oz. And if you sell a tool that implements PGP, you'll have to be prepared to cooperate with the stasi.
Basically what it seeks to prevent is not unbreakable encryption, but rather making unbreakable encryption available to the Great Unwashed.
Those of us who can use gnupg are the tech equivalent of people capable of manufacturing drugs or weapons. You don't wipe us out, but you come down heavily on a person who supplies them to anyone else.
Ironic that it was an Aussie (Eric Young) who originally wrote the software that later became OpenSSL, back in the days when that would've been illegal in the US.
The security hole isn't really what's claimed: ability to forge a From: address is baked in to SMTP, and it relied on Damian having sysop privileges.
It's the mail system that first accepted the message then bounced it. Anyone who's suffered a Joe Job knows the hard way how inexcusably broken that is - and has been for the last 20 years or so (since mail abuse went from prank to spam). Either reject it or accept it; don't bounce!
Looks to me like a perfectly routine use of AI. The expensive Quack will do the high-level stuff, while the AI takes the technician role.
Experiments with AI in such roles help determine whether it's competent, either in an absolute sense or compared to human workers. Hopefully the AI can do a good job of avoiding some traditional problems, such as mistakes of boredom.
The paragraph quoted in the article doesn't imply breaking crypto (nor of course does it imply the contrary). It *could be* a perfectly realistic bill dealing with situations like the FBI-Iphone row.
Flat-earth George has now moved on: wikipedia tells us he's now Aussie High Commissioner to Blighty. Damn, he should be a Barry Humphries character!
They cannot move the conference to the UK because the visa issuing department will reject most of the applications.
... which would be a big improvement for unfortunate victims like Sklyarov or Hutchins.
Not sure where to suggest. There are a few countries with more liberal track records re: the 'net, but such things are subject to change (e.g. Oz, Germany). Perhaps a venue with a well-developed hospitality industry but busted government might suit. Greece, for instance?
Erm, different markets there. People who need help with wheelchairs or luggage are orthogonal to the question of who drives them.
My infirmity is my eyesight. I think I'd be reasonably safe (though not legal - despite holding a full, clean licence) driving in good conditions, but lethal in the dark and wet. No problem lugging a heavy load. The fact that self-driving doesn't solve every problem doesn't mean it's not a potentially-excellent solution for some disabilities.
Doesn't rather depend on what the VPN product claims for itself? The app store page you link isn't specific enough to tell that.
When I've used a VPN Client, it has nothing to do with hiding my identity. It's just a means to connect to an employer's or client's network. A higher-level (and much more scary) alternative to ssh, and providing less privacy than ssh, in that it gives the relevant BOFH a lot of audit trail if I do anything so frivolous as read El Reg on $work time.
In a product aimed at the employers and clients for whom I've used one, DNS lookups outside the VPN would not be an issue at all.
OK, quoting your actual words from the opening paragraph:
today's facial recognition technology is not safe for making serious decisions.
Is anyone seriously trying to claim otherwise? There's a world of difference between making a serious decision and flagging something for human attention.
A couple of years back, I had a nasty incident with police, who thought I was someone else (who I've never met, let alone know why they wanted to arrest him) and wouldn't accept I'm me[1]. Facial recognition technology might have helped there, and - crucially - couldn't have made things worse!
[1] Their evidence? I opened the door at my home, where the man they wanted had previously lived. I had never thought an estate agent could be so useful as the one who manages this place and eventually was contacted to confirm my identity - and when the occupant had changed - in a manner they'd accept!
If they told the government, then within hours they'd be exploiting it themselves, for who knows what nefarious purposes!
Speaking from ignorance here. But I'd've thought that, as with any big organisation, there's both good and bad. Not everyone in the US government would have a clue what you were talking about, let alone exploit it.
I'm sure there's someone they could've told who would just have filed it.
If the client side javascript can scan localhost, I guess that NAT firewall isn't too much use against browser-based attacks.
Verily, it has come to pass. The world has routed around misguided security.
I get VERY grumpy at etailers that try to introduce 3rd party scripts at the final stage of a payment process
If that's the abomination called "verified by visa" you have in mind, these days my transaction seems to go through just fine if I just back out of it. I presume that's Just One More inexplicable aspect of its brokenness.
@Chloe Cresswell
Last time this came up, I was told I would need 2 ID cards, with different names and genders on them.
So you're ideally set up for a life of crime and depravity as Mr Hyde, while maintaining Dr Cresswell's status as an entirely upright and respectable member of society.
Any time we get one of these "look at the hate" articles, it leaves one crucial question unanswered.
Are the "victims" themselves (or researchers, in the case of those whose funding depends on Outrage) Making an Issue of their "group identity"?
Consider
Person: "I'm a straight white male and proud of it"
World: "So?"
Person: "I'M A STRAIGHT WHITE MALE AND PROUD OF IT!"
World: "Shut up, idiot. We heard you the first time."
--- vs ---
Person: "I'm a black lesbian and proud of it"
World: "So?"
Person: "I'M A BLACK LESBIAN AND PROUD OF IT!"
World: "Shut up, idiot. We heard you the first time."
SJW Army: "WAH WAH HATE SPEECH"
A quick google finds as a data point[1] our entire GDP was around £52.7bn in 1970. A phone (let alone a phone call) may have been a somewhat-expensive luxury back then, but I doubt they consumed more than 100% of the entire economy!
I'm not even being pedantic when I say claims like "all-time low" need to be qualified! There is genuinely no clue in the article WTF the claim is supposed to mean!
[1] Or rather two data points: GDP $130.672bn, and exchange rate 0.4033.
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