Posts by Doctor Syntax 42400 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
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.
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.
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.
"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.
"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.
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.
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.
"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.
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?
My desktop has a lot of folders and files on it.
That doesn't mean they're not orderly (or not entirely disorderly). For instance right in the middle is a link to the 1st Ed 6" OS local sheet with links to the N, NE, E, S, SW and W sheets appropriately arranged round it (SE corner has a link to the local sheet of the Jefferys map and the NW to a C18th copy of a local medieval map. Centre top is a folder synced to a Nextcloud folder which is also synced with a folder on my wife's laptop etc.
Stuff I use a lot stays there where I can find it quicker than having to go through a hierarchy on Dolphin. The KDE desktop, along with others, was designed to be used to put stuff at the fingertips of users who chose to use it that way. When you see stuff on other people's desktops, don't assume it's just lying around.
"All desks had to be clear of everything at the end of the working day ... Security would check overnight and anything not in a secure cabinet was taken away and a note left in its place - the note saying to report to security to explain why you had breached rules"
Did you ever find out what Security was doing with all the PCs they'd collected?
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.
It will all depend if people are willing able to afford to spend the new, much more expensive, costs associated with power consumption.
FTFY
That's the critical factor. If* the somewhat more realistic costs for users give them no return then they won't buy. At that point the whole AI supply chain ceases to be able to pretend that it could, itself, provide a return and that's the bubble popped.
* "If" is doing some pretty heavy lifting here by assuming the possibility that they might be able to afford it.
"For this to have gone through would have been against the advice of every commercial and legal person in HMG .... the blond buffoon would have overruled his advisors to push this through."
Always assuming commercial, legal and advisors even got to see it before it was signed up.
"A senior British politician has openly voiced the business poison which is proprietary licensing."
I'm not sure to whom you are referring. Most of the quotes come from Wrigley who is not part of the government. Ahmed is a junior minister but in any case neither will be putting their hand in their own pocket as it's our money which I'm sure we will want to see spent better.
In fact proprietary licensing is not being criticised, just the fact that the supplier retains the software and not the client. In the past I've written S/W as a freelance which was then owned by my client. If ownership of the Palantir written S/W had been passed to the NHS this particular bit of criticism could not have been made but it would not have become free unless the NHS had made it so.
There's no point in the minister's talking about evaluating at the time of the break clause. If the clause is to be used the preparation needs to be started in time for alternatives to be in place. The evaluation needs to be now and then, assuming the break is to be taken, start work on the replacement. Given that several trusts have their own solutions which are better the obvious line of approach is to roll out one or more of these to other trusts, running one infrastructure which provide the required sovereign data guarantees. Do that ASAP so that the trusts which haven't signed up to Palantir can take advantage of it along with those who have signed up but find it useless. If, by the time the break point arrives, the NHS has been paying for some months when everyone had moved to something that works well then that's better than paying to get a bad service.
"This decision enables us to focus our resources on product categories where we can deliver the greatest customer value and drive long-term innovation."
Customer value requires long-term availability. Even if HP stops long-term innovation on a particular product it doesn't matter if the product itself remains available.
Customers have to trust a vendor in order to commit to depending on its products.
Customers will have trusted HP when they started using these products. HP has now betrayed that trust. Will those customers trust HP enough to buy products from them in the future? Probably not.
"Simple, you just don't implement a customs boarder and accept that a small amount of goods will get driven across the boarder. Now if the ROI decided they want one then they can implement their own but that would put them in breach of the GFA."
You expect the RoI to breach the GFA to oblige your political views?
Such a customs border would not simply be an RoI customs border, it would be an EU customs border. Do you think this would have been agreed in the Brexit negotiations.
Just more woolly thinking, ignoring realities.
"A real Brexit has not been allowed to happen yet. Maybot and her oven ready deal kept us chained to the EU via northern island"
I'll try to make this easy. It may still be too hard for you but here goes.
1. The Good Friday Agreement which brought an end to the Northern Ireland* troubles required no customs posts at the border.
2. That was possible because both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic were both in the EU so customs posts had already gone.
3. Brexit required one of two things:
3a. A customs border between GB and NI in order to satisfy 1.
3b. Tear up the Good Friday Agreement because 1 could not be satisfied.
This was explained many times as were all the other issues. As with all the other details it was ignored by the blinkered Brexiteers. And you, like all the other, then come along and whine because "It wasn't the Brexit I voted for". The reason it wasn't the Brexit you voted for was because the Brexit you voted for couldn't possibly exist.
You were told that.
You were told that over and over.
You were told that over and over again.
But you didn't listen.
You voted for Brexit. You got the Brexit that was possible. So shut up and suffer the consequences along with those of us who voted against it who are the only ones who have alegitimate basis for complaint. We're all in the same boat. Your boat.
"Maybe once a real government gets in with the balls to do what required"
If you're as smart as you think you are you tell us what you think is required and explain how you think it's is possible in the real world including satisfying 1 above.
* Note the capital initials.
