Posts by Doctor Syntax 42029 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"a company I haven't even heard of before."
For a while they owned the ex-BBC transmitter network in the UK after the British Broadcasting Corporation decided it didn't want to do any actual broadcasting.*
* Quite reasonable. It meant they had to employ men who hadn't been to Oxbridge and who wore brown overalls with pens in their breast pockets. What was worse, most of it was outside London.
It's all a bit puzzling. TFA seems to imply that ThreadX was something that MS found themselves with, but didn't really need, as a consequence of buying Express Logic. That they might then open source it and shuffle it off to a foundation seems reasonable although very un-Microsoft-like behaviour.
But AFAICS from a quick search ThreadX was EL's only product. In that case what did they think they were acquiring? Was it just the development team? Is there some other product? Was the whole thing just a mistake by the M&A department - you know how it is, you get to the checkout and then find you picked up the box next to the one you intended.
"Burning vegetables still puts C02 into the atmosphere."
It puts into the atmosphere the CO2 that was taken out by the growing vegetables. That's a net zero at that level. However transport and processing have to be considered so if they used fossil fuels there's addition of some CO2 as a second order effect. If this is genuine waste then it's not a case of plants being grown for fuel. However destroying forest to grow cash-crops, even where those cash-crops are food, is a concern.
Apart from the personal data is anyone claiming there were secrets to protect? The need for security for the main collection is the integrity of the administration - although if it were to facilitate the theft of some rare book it might go beyond the temporary loss of access - and, where material is digitised, the integrity of the content against both loss and corruption.
I'm not sure if a desktop would be sufficient to rebuild a copy of the BL.
HMG needs to put more effort into securing our public systems than farting around trying to pry into citizens private affairs with the likes of the Online Safety [sic] Act.
"Ultimately, trusting one's data – particularly data on which a business depends – to any sort of cloud storage should only be done after fully understanding the implications of the services' terms and conditions."
Namely, that it's somebody else's computer and your files aren't as valuable to them as they are to you.
Here's an idea for the regulators. For every hour an alleged online banking system is offline the bank is required to open a given number* of branches and keep them running for a minimum of 10 years before closing them. It might or might not be an effective incentive to improve uptime but it would help to provide a mitigation.
* Perhaps dependent on the potential number of customers affected.
"that is literally a part of what the beta channel is for"
That may be the case with Microsoft. What it should be for is to ensure that the development and integration testing has been done properly. In fact, it's arguable that that's the role of the alpha testers. There should be relatively few issues making their way through to the beta testers.
Given that certificated of airworthiness are required for aircraft national regulators have a handle on the airline/aircraft industry. (When, as per 737MAX, the supposedly regulated is allowed to become its own regulator there's lesson to be learned for regulation as a whole.)
In the first part of the article Huston seems to have eliminated all possible candidates for the role including national regulators. Service providers are certainly not going to do anything that might bring liability to their doors without compulsion so I can't see any option other than OFCOM and its equivalents providing that compulsion. Even so it would take a good deal of government oversight to protect them from regulatory capture.
Picking up the nearest paper-back I find a copyright declaration that says "All rights reserved" and then goes on to say "No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted without the prior permission..." (my emphasis).
That's from a 1985 printing so such declarations have been around for a long time. You buy a book, you have the right to read it, you have the right to pass it on in the same binding (imposing similar conditions on the recipient if you do) and that's it. No right to slurp it into any system. Nothing could be clearer.
"Six stories about Sam Altman on the Register in the last week! Who is paying for them? Is he issuing his own press releases?"
Alternately:
Six stories about the OpenAI on the Register in the last week! Who is paying for them? Are they issuing their own press releases?
Which is the better fit? A useful guide to working that out might be to identify the prime mover(s).
It doesn't need to be species-ending to be harmful. What we're seeing is individual victims suffering penalties at the hands of the state or big business with inadequate or no redress. Disentangling such cases is made worse because there is no audit trail to show how the problems occurred.
The big attraction is that with any form of algorithmic decision making there's nobody to blame so that nobody can be charged with misfeasance in public office, fired or even given a bad annual report.
This needs to change. Individuals need to be held responsible for lack of due diligence, lack of supervision or whatever it is that leads to bad outcomes. There also needs to be an emphasis on sorting out consequences ASAP.
Horizon is a prime example: once the misuse of a faulty system had been exposed it should have been assumed that all convictions that involved Horizon data were unsafe, including those where the accused had been persuaded to plead guilty and/or made "restitutions". Not only should convictions have been quashed in bulk, there should have been urgent measures to compensate the victims and investigations into perjury, etc. started. As it is many convictions still stand, compensation is still being argued, nobody has been brought to court for their parts and we have a long running enquiry to establish what's by now largely public knowledge.
"but why would anyone need a middle-man to actually send the data for them?"
Because manglement have, in their wisdom complete lack of understanding how their businesses work and/or gullibility in the face of salesdroids, hollowed out their organisations to the point where they don't have anyone of their own capable of doing it.
"it is quite interesting to see just how many problems can be cracked open by a really good pattern matching engine"
I saw that sort of thing back in the 80s. What we have now, at least as far as powering search engines is concerned, are really poor pattern matching engines constructed on the basis that as many hits as possible are a good thing and an empty results list is an anathema, even when there are no hits that match the search terms.
"Except that the OpenAI board thought they'd sling Altman under the bus, and be left holding all the cards, and laughing all the way to the bank...I can't see the board of OA having a future with that company"
If they really didn't give thought to the possible downside would they have a future at board level at any other company?
