Posts by Doctor Syntax

UK gov pays public £550 to discuss Digital ID – then bans journalists from the room

"reframe the question and ask another sample set of volunteers"

There will be no question framed in a way that could result in a "not thanks" response.

"You don't need to know anything about this topic to take part,"

"In fact we very much hope you don't."

BOFH: Arrr, I smell piracy ... and it's comin' from a machine with executive privileges

New boss -> ex-boss.

No wonder he didn't last long. Far too inquisitive.

Anthropic admits it dumbed down Claude when trying to make it smarter

BigO? WTF went wrong there?

BigCo

It might be a newcomer to the IT scene but has quickly picked up standard BigO working pracitice: ship code then see if it works.

To fix this Wi-Fi network, we'll need a crane

"Everybody like big boom."

Not everyone. I was glad to have missed the car bomb in our lab's entrance gate.

Age checks could turn internet into an ID checkpoint, complains Proton CEO

Well, yes. That's just what we've been saying for some time.

Microsoft gives your Word documents an AI co-author you didn’t ask for

Plausible deniability for authors! Finally Coprolite has a use case.

Stale gov.uk pages are feeding AI overviews old data and Brits are believing it

TNA is the place for archives or, for the web, archive.org

"On the same basis would we be burning certain pages out of Hansard just because the policy or law being debated at the time has been changed since?"

No, because they record what was said even if the policy or law has changed since.

But consider this. You have a web page with a banner saying some of the rest of the content on the page may be untrue - or out of date if you prefer the verbose form. Now go through each piece of information on the page, testing it against the banner and delete it if cannot be relied on. Because the banner tells you it can't be relied on you'll delete every piece of information and be left with an empty page. At that point you might reasonably decide to go for the current page.

A page which purports to tell you something current needs to be current. Stale pages have been the curse of the web almost singe TBL invented it.

"may contain out of date information"

If there's no way of telling that information on the page may be true or false - which is what "outdated" means then the page contains no information at all and ought to be removed because there's no point in keeping it.

Archive it off-line for historical purposes if that's required.

IoW some departments have no process for removing pages when they're superseded. Sir Humphrey would be most displeased.

Pass the key, passwords have passed their sell-by date

Re: Great!

AFAICS it is you who is wrong. From TFA "Passkeys work by creating a cryptographic key pair between a user's device and the protected account." After that just about any quickly found explanation on the web seems to resort to hand waving, the more detailed mentioning "challenge" but if it requires a cryptographic pair on the two ends it suggests that it involves exchanging some encrypted text.

This is not the same as having KeePass generate passwords that look like line noise and store them encrypted. Having said that the KeyPass option would be my choice. The ability to share copies across devices avoids the reliance on a single device.

Re: stubborn old git who needs to get with the times ?

"Just wait long enough and familar, saner times will catch up with you."

That's the hope.

Re: Companies not listening

What happens when your Yubikey is damaged, lost or stolen?

Re: implementation

"and only on their mobile."

Whoever has your mobile is you.

Re: Great!

"I can store passkeys in my browser or 1Password which are stored locally on my machine."

I can store my passwords locally on my machine in Keepass. I can sync to my local NextCloud and from that to my spare machine.

Keepass is encrypted and protected by its own password which is the only one I need to remember.

Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope trumps Trump cuts, is launch-ready ahead of schedule

"despite repeated attempts by both Donald Trump's first and second administrations to cut funding"

Nevertheless, when it's in orbit it will be claimed as a Trump success.

Then he'll insist it's renamed after himself. Of course DDTT has a certain structure to it : Despite Donald Trump Telescope.

Medical data of 500k Biobank volunteers listed for sale on Alibaba, UK minister reveals

"they've already had their access revoked"

It should serve as a warning to the rest.

Re: It already is in the wrong hands

The data is supposed to be collected from volunteers. It sounds very much like the outfit I corresponded with some time ago as a possible volunteer. I tried to get some sensible answers about control and access. I failed - in fact they stopped responding - and left it there. I am not surprised by this report.

Scotland Yard can keep using live facial recognition on people in London, say judges

Re: "100% correct results"

The tools were fine (note independent examination of DNA, the problem was with those wielding them.

The Wikipedia article mentions hair examination. The FBI lab used to maintain they could make positive identifications. I never believed I could and neither did my colleagues. A match fell into a category of "yes, it looks the same but that doesn't say much". I had the strange experience of being cross examined by the counsel who called me* trying to get me to go further which I wouldn't; the defence eventually stepped in and objected.

This is what happened to the FBI's claims: https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-testimony-on-microscopic-hair-analysis-contained-errors-in-at-least-90-percent-of-cases-in-ongoing-review

* Counsel aren't supposed to cross examine their own witnesses unless the judge agrees they're hostile witnesses.

It was certainly the case in N Ireland. It was almost impossible to get a guilty verdict from a jury west of the Bann. The consequences are worth reflecting on.

Patients' money was being stolen. One of the nurses on the ward was suspected. We supplied a marking material (various components, some fluorescent, some not) and I gave evidence identifying them on the suspect. In addition,the thefts started when he joined the ward and stopped when he left.

The jury, who are there to represent the community, the community that also included the patients who were the victims, gave a not guilty verdict.

None.

Holding the vendors responsible to the victims is the only thing I can suggest but it would probably have the effect of them throwing it in the bin.

The administrative mind always wants short cuts. That might be in the Home Office, the Met Police or anywhere else. In my view there are no short cuts to achieving justice.

I note there are some interesting downvotes here but whoever it is who's in favour of miscarriages of justice doesn't seem to want to identify themselves.

Re: Statistical extracts

See may comment above about unless they were deployed where 80% of the faces were black. This may, in fact, have been a possibility.

My comparison fluorescence microscopes, TLC, my colleagues electrophoesis, heated stage microscope/Cargill oil kit, GLC, IR spec and all the rest, nowadays DNA profiling systems were/are also only tools. But they damn well better turn out correct results 100% of the time because that's what was required of them.

Re: The injustice system of the UK

I've had a quick (it's tea time!) skim through. AFAICS it dealt with fairly narrow grounds on the legality of the Met's policy for deployment. These were the second and third of the original grounds for complaint. The first and second apparently related to the stopping of Shaun Thompson on suspicion of being his brother and were discharged with costs and compensation awarded to him. Because of that the information is limited but it sounds intriguing. The brother was on bail after being charged with attacking him. It's not clear why they should have stopped, as they thought based on the system, the brother. Being on bail doesn't sound sufficient unless it was a location where he would have been in breach of bail conditions.

The outcome partly seems to revolve on deployment being enabled by UK law which brings us back to whether the system should be allowed, and under what circumstances if it is.

Re: the identifications potentially prevented many more sex attacks against vulnerable children

It sounds like conveniently unquantifiable line of argument. Convenient because not readily falsifiable. Popper would not have been impressed.

Re: The injustice system of the UK

"The judges love to treat the population like serfs."

In the course of many years of watching court procedure and giving evidence myself that was not my experience.

In this case I wonder whether the false positive line was argued well enough or the requirements are not adequate. Maybe I should find tome to read the judgement.

"I don't have a problem with the technology itself.

...

Anyone wrongly identified should be questioned, of course"

Let's run a thought experiment:

Cav is making his or her way through London and has a train to catch on the way to a job interview. He or she is flagged as a false positive, is stopped, taken for questioning, finger-printed, held until the misidentification is corrected and is eventually released, By now the train and interview are well in the past. Apologies on the lines of "I was held up by the Met." will scarcely be conducive to getting the interview rearranged even if the job hadn't been filled by another interviewee.

Is Cav still without a problem with the technology itself?

As many readers will know from my previous posts I spent many years in forensic science. One of my nightmares was that I wake up one day and find a breaking story that one of my old cases had become a miscarriage of justice. The efforts involved in avoiding mistakes was considerable because of the knowledge the mistake could seriously affect someone innocent. The accumulated stress of that eventually became too much.

The notion that we can airily accept this technology because it only makes mistakes that result in a few people being wrongly pulled in for questioning is anathema to me. Yes, I know the police will inevitably pull in the wrong people for questioning for various reasons but that is not an excuse for adding to those reasons.

Re: EU citizen

Or from any other country including non-Londoner UK citizens?

"Overall, the system's performance remains in line with expectations,"

Whose expectations? False positive rates need to be evaluated in the light of the impact on those affected. If the consequence is an arrest and prevention of the victims' going about their daily business, however urgent they should be financially supported in making a claim for false arrest against the officer concerned - or maybe the Commissioner - and libel against the equipment vendor who should have strict liability.

"and any demographic imbalances observed are not statistically significant,"

Unless the cameras are deployed in locations where 80% of the faces are black the figures do not support this claim.

What happened to the principle of policing by consent.

SK Hynix’s aspirations for ’Merica-made HBM inch closer to reality

"with vertical construction slated for later this year."

Best to build in all 3 directions.

GitHub opts all CLI users into telemetry collection whether they want it or not

Altogether now: "It's soneome else's computer and .... " You know how it goes.

OpenAI now lets you screenshot your privacy in the foot

"Another possibility is that the AI biz has embraced masochism as a public relations strategy."

Yet another is that they hope we've forgotten. If it's aimed at Mac users there's a possibility that many of them won't have taken too much notice of what happened over in the MS world.

France's 'Secure' ID agency probes breach as crooks claim 19M records

Yes all these national sites running digital ID systems, age verification and the like which we can trust implicitly are all secure until they aren't.

Database world trying to build natural language query systems again – this time with LLMs

I remember reading of some product which worked the other way round. It would explain the system in natural language. I thought it might have been just the thing to document the database for manglement but the company was snapped up - or should we say embraced - and the whole thing never heard of again.

Murder, she wrote: Ex-FBI chief wants some ransomware crims charged with homicide

I wonder is it's possible to take the fight to the beancounters who are the perennial source of the problem.

Require accounting standards to include quantifing the risk of the internet connection in terms of money and deduct that from the book value of the companies assets. It would show up as a sharp loss in the first year which could be reduced by spending rather less than the loss in eliminating as much of the risk as possible.

Re: Still, officialdom doesn't get it

"it would probably be simpler and cheaper to rip out and rebuild than try and harden existing infrastructure, but either way it's going to cost a bloody fortune."

In some cases it might be possible to refurbish and reconnect the old infrastructure that was disconnected when the inernet connection was installed. That shouldn't be too expensive.

Anthropic tests how devs react to yanking Claude Code from Pro plan

Re: Surprise!

"I was going to write stop burning money but that won't happen"

It will happen when it's all burnt.

Nation-states want to cause harm, not just steal cash - stop handing your cyber defenses to the cheapest contractor

Re: Idiots.

"Instead of wasting money pandering to Trump, building datasheds for GAFA"

The sheds full ow processors consuming power to no great end except to make hallucinations could be regarded as a direct attack on infrastructure themselves.

Apple has an opportunity to rediscover humanity in its push toward AI

CEO Tim Cook has served shareholders well, but he increased the company's value at the expense of Apple's image and reputation.

... Thanks to the legal concept of fiduciary duty to shareholders, public companies have to spend most of their energy on "think profit."

Profit on what time-scale? Concentration on short-term profit at the cost of image and reputation may be harmful to long term profit. Is that really consistent with that fiduciary duty?

'Invisible mouse' made a mess of PC rebuild

Re: Fire hazard

"when the phone rang he couldn't find it to answer it"

Find it to answer it isn't usually a problem. In fact getting somebody to ring it is a recognised way of finding it in order to make a call.

Iran claims US used backdoors to knock out networking equipment during war

Re: Old equipment - no budget for replacement

IIRC the reported conclusion was "clean but not great quality".

But the Orange One spouts so much self-contradicting if not random stuff that the stopped clock principle comes into play. It's just a matter of trying to work out which bits are right.

Vibe coding upstart Lovable denies data leak, cites 'intentional behavior,' then throws HackerOne under the bus

"If" has it heasy. "management", "really", "believe" and "quality" are working a lot harder.

Panasonic creates device-locked QR codes to speed facial biometric capture

Re: I will be impressed if they do manage it

I suppose tattooing the QR code on the forehead would help with facial recognition but there would still be too many failure modes.

Linux 7.1 will have an optional new NTFS driver

Re: What is this for?

Here's a particular instance that illustrates one use case:

My cousin-in-law fell victim* to a rather amateurish virus - it didn't actually overwrite the files, it wrote out new encrypted versions and just DEL-ed the originals which could be restored**.

However to be on the safe side and protect against future occurrences I repartitioned her drive and installed Zorin***. Being able to read N\tFS partitions in Linux enabled me to set up a folder which was a link to her original data on the original partition.

* Phished by an email purporting to be from someone she knew.

** Photorec to the rescue!

*** Contrary to the expectations of some of the nay-sayers she had no problems with the switch from W7 to Linux and from MS Office to Libre Office. She is now in her 90s and still uses it regularly. Even her Windows-using children in their 50s are able to use it. I've come to the conclusion that the only people who find a switch to Linux difficult are Windows-using IT folks of any age.

Re: What is this for?

A simple mkfs should be sufficient.

Re: Ownership

Well, it's more reassuring than telling us he formerly worked for Fushitsu and Crapita.