Posts by Doctor Syntax

Congress to FCC: Where’s the damn report on mobile companies selling location data?

Do they have the power to have him subpoenaed arrested and brought before them to be questioned under caution? And tell him he'll stay there until they're happy with his answers.

Here are some deadhead jobs any chatbot could take over right now

Re: "Microsoft scammers"

their details were getting forwarded to action fraud etc /dev/null

Re: why don't phishers script a few skills so that a voice-AI can make unsolicited phone calls

"Remaining silent makes them hang up."

Eventually. Or have they wised up since the days they used to ring me? I seem to have got on a blacklist & never get any of those these days.

Re: why don't phishers script a few skills so that a voice-AI can make unsolicited phone calls

"What question do I ask for Windows?"

Tell them you really need the licence number otherwise you won't know which one they're ringing about. Yes, you're looking after about 1,000 of them. Really get his hopes up that he's landed a big fish. Or phish.

One man's mistake, missing backups and complete reboot: The tale of Europe's Galileo satellites going dark

Who, me?

Go on. You know who you are and you know you want to.

When the IT department speaks, users listen. Or face the consequences

Re: Not an IT problem

At which you point to the poster on the wall which says "Experience is a dear teacher but there are those that well learn by no other."

Instructions and warnings are two different things.

Re: Beautiful

"What you don't do is wash your hands of it because you sent out an email and now your arse is covered."

Now wash your hands.

Re: Not an IT problem

I'm with you up to a point but it's also management's call on what's a long dead system. The system you might want to get rid of might be the one that does the work that brings in the money that pays IT's wages.

All bets are Hoff: DXC exec is standing for Brexit Party in UK General Election

Re: West Worthing?

" have no doubt some did vote in particular to end free movement (particularly in historically Labour areas) as said free movement was at least perceived to be depressing wages."

They're going to have a bit of a shock when they find what happens to wages when their employer, who's in the UK as an EU base, or their employer's direct or indirect customer for similar reasons, buggers off. Even without that particular exposure disappearing businesses will affect wages through unemployment. Still, don't worry; jam tomorrow.

What do you get when you allegedly mix Wireshark, a gumshoe child molester, and a court PC? A judge facing hacking charges

That doesn't preclude the DA having instructed the court IT staff to do that. I wouldn't have thought he'd be entitled to do that but maybe the reality is different. She should have issued a warrant to the investigator and made it official.

Open wide, very wide: Xerox considers buying HP. Yes, the HP that is more than three times its market cap

Sounds like a lot of balls to me.

Re: Bottom of the barrel

"they used to produce good quality printers. Adding a scanner on top really should have been easy for them"

They did that. My HP all-in-one works just fine. And keeps on working. Unfortunately for HP it means I'll never need to buy another. They don't like that so the later ones are cheaper to build and you will need to buy another. That seems to be the thinking. It back-fired. I wanted to buy a colour one. Having seen more recent HP printers I didn't buy my colour one from them. Maybe it does work overall because there do seem to be places where nobody ever got fired for buying from HP.

Re: How are they going to fund it?

Then they file Chapter 7 because none of the "leaders" have any idea how to actually make and sell products at a decent price.

Re: How are they going to fund it?

And economists still wonder why productivity has stayed flat.

Dough! Jobs microsite for UK's data watchdog set hundreds of cookies without visitors' consent

Re: Dumb, dumb, dumb

" What in the name of all that's clueless were they thinking"

It's Hays. That probably negates your question.

"We expect to deploy a new solution in the coming weeks which will address your concerns"

Translation: GDPR took us so completely by surprise that it's taken us a good 18 months to react to it.

Blood, snot and fear: Why the travelling lone tech reporter should always knock twice

"a young lady who I vaguely knew. She seemed to think it was obviously pre-ordained so I stayed."

And got to know her less vaguely?

Re: Interesting problem

Poisson d'Avril?

Re: Hope the hack is up to date with his TB jab

"which IIRC contains 23 separate needles for the strains"

It's a long time ago but IIRC the multiple needle thing was the test which was supposed to come up and leave a scab if it was positive. The scab could leave a permanent scar. You used to see people with one or even two scars the size of an old halfpenny on their upper arm. My test? Not the slightest reaction so I got the jab with a singe needle.

Have you been naughty, or have you been really naughty? Microsoft 365 users to get their very own Compliance Score

First step to compliance: don't put your stuff on somebody else's server which can be accessed by a foreign - or any other - busybody just by telling the operator to hand it over.

Sure, we made your Wi-Fi routers phone home with telemetry, says Ubiquiti. What of it?

"Ubiquiti told customers all of the information is being handled securely, and has been cleared to comply with GDPR"

By whom?

And did nobody think of what might happen when this hit the fan? Actually, it's quite possible somebody did and were told to stop being negative.

Communication, communication – and politics: Iowa saga of cuffed infosec pros reveals pentest pitfalls

Re: Due diligence

One can almost hear the sheriff saying "Boys, you in a heap of trouble."

Until the writ for malicious prosecution lands.

Beardy biologist's withering takedown of creationism fetches $564,500 at auction

In a word...

...provenance.

Morrisons tells top court it's not liable for staffer who nicked payroll data of 100,000 employees

Whilst we can debate what are appropriate technical security precautions there's another aspect. Was appropriate due diligence carried out in the appointment of the auditor? IIRC there was some disagreement before hand in which case why was access not rescinded when that happened?

Re: Real life example

Nice one Steve. It says a god deal about the auditor if they disapprove; they ought to be in favour of such security.

Re: Depends if decent efforts at data security made by Morrisons

"A USB port suggests commodity hardware."

Epoxy is also a commodity.

California’s Attorney General joins the long list of people who have had it with Facebook

Re: How do they get away with not complying with legal orders

I don't know about the US but UK directors do have personal responsibility for ensuring the company conducts its business in compliance with the law.

Remember the Uber self-driving car that killed a woman crossing the street? The AI had no clue about jaywalkers

Ninety nanometres is a bit close.

Re: Surely

There's no excuse for this inability to handle classification errors: had it been able to see "something" was moving on a fixed course, things probably wouldn't have come to this.

There may be no excuse in terms of letting the thing loose on the road but there's a likely reason. If there's more than one unclassified object in view then from one sample to the next it can't link up these to "know" that one was on a fixed course because it can't keep close enough track on them because it can only do things sequentially.

Re: remember the initial status of a new object is "static"

"most objects will be static"

Unless the vehicle's stationary they're all dynamic because they're being observed from the viewpoint of the vehicle Parallax will ensure that even objects static relative to each other will have the angles between them change from the PoV of the vehicle..

Re: Surely

"Unfortunately, deleting the movement history every 1/10th of a second isn't going to help get it right!"

The movement history is simply the tracking of what's recognised as the same object in 1/10th of a second intervals. If you can't reconcile some of the objects with the objects in the next sample you either have to discontinue your movement history or accept that there are N possible continuations based on the number of possible options to identify the unclassified objects with their candidates in the previous sample. Unless you can successfully identify objects from one sampling of a scene to the next you have a combinatorial explosion of possible trajectories to consider.

Re: Surely

"Chucking movement history away when a thing appears to be something else."

This is the fundamental problem.

If tracking is only achieved by joining up intermittent sightings of what is recognised to be the same object there is no movement history to be chucked away of the object can't be recognised consistently. Any unclassified object in a given sampling might be any unclassified object in a previous sampling.

If we have objects at positions A and B and then a second later we have objects at positions C and D then we may have something that's moved from A to C and something else that's moved from B to D but we might equally well have something that's moved from A to D and something else that moved from B to C. If there's insufficient processing power to handle that - and there are probably a good deal many unclassified objects than just two (and all moving relative to the vehicle due to the vehicle's movement if nothing else) then the system cannot establish any trajectories.

Unless there's sufficient processing power to track objects continuously the system will fail and that's the problem with doing things in code: you're trying to use a few cores to do what the eye* and brain does with massive parallelism.

* Processing starts in the eye before the brain even gets involved.

Re: Surely

What you disparagingly call the meat sack has parallel processing capabilities that vastly outstrip whatever is driving your Johnny Cab.

Re: "But most of us have two ranging mechanisms."

I'm not sure precision is a big factor. I think our inherited mechanisms as humans are more to do with predicting trajectories, including our own, and whether they're likely to intersect at roughly the same time. Roughly because we'll apply a safety factor which obviates the need for precision.

It's not so much object position that matters, not even relative position, because its position to ourselves is constantly changing whilst we're in motion.

Re: How about

"Humans are far from perfect drivers. Just have a look at the US fatality figures - 40,000pa, and that excludes injuries."

That needs to be set against vehicle miles. I don't know how your figure compares to vehicle miles in the US but in the UK it's a huge number of miles per fatality. I doubt autonomous vehicles have got anywhere near it.

Re: How about

"My point was voice recognition isn't 'perfect' but for many people it would be no surprise anymore if a system sat there and could recognise 99% of what you said."

Sometimes I can't avoid TVs in public places sitting there with the sound turned off and subtitles of attempted automated transcription. That the transcription can be attempted is admirable but the results are pretty dire. You certainly couldn't rely on them if your life depended on it - which is the case for autonomous cars.

Re: How about

"However a car driving autonomously in a defined public urban area is available and doing it today"

And do it right up to the point where they hit somebody as here.

Re: How about

And "up the motorway in formation" implies sufficient coordination to prevent that. So long as there's enough slack so that Charles's trash tornado at M1 junction 29 doesn't stop traffic right back to junction 19.

I'm not sure either "safety" or "culture" applies individually let alone in combination.

Re: I've never worked in AI in any form...

I think that as humans we follow both processes.

Re: I've never worked in AI in any form...

And until it can draw the distinction reliably or fail safe it shouldn't be on the road.

That should just be a basic requirement. I know "let's do a rough build and then let the users find the bugs" might be a fashionable development process right now but moving fast and breaking things isn't good enough when the things are human beings. There needs to be a constraint and not running down pedestrians is a good place to start.

Re: "...ignorant cyber-Judge Dredds"

Remote control by human.

Re: Don't forget the orientation

"The processing capability can fit into a car. But you have to do the right processing."

The right processing applies to every object in the visual field. I agree movement must be tracked but there needs to be some sort of classification of the objects to evaluate the probability of static objects starting to move and of moving objects changing speed and/or direction.

That processing capability can certainly fit into a driver's head; the despised "wetware". Whether the required hardware can when it's only weakly parallelised is a different matter.

Re: I hope...

"Distracted includes looking at phone, sat nav, pretty lady on the pavement etc."

1. We're expected to keep the speedo under sufficient observation to adhere to arbitrary indications. If that's not a greater distraction than the sat nav I don't know what is.

2. The pretty lady might move from the pavement into the road and requires the same degree of observation as the ugly gent.

NSA to Congress: Our spy programs don’t work, aren’t used, or have gone wrong – now can you permanently reauthorize them?

Do US legislators have the power to withhold budget? If so it might be time to start using it.

Re: Can't or wont?

"On the other hand, Feinstein's refusal to be briefed in a closed session indicates that something odd is afoot."

Something odd such as in insistence on transparency?

Chrome OS: Yo dawg, I heard you like desktops so we put a workspace in your workspace

"Virtual desktops have been available in Windows 10, macOS and Linux for some time so Google is catching up with these established operating systems."

I don't know about macOS but, depending on the desktop manager used, Linux and the BSDs have had multiple desktops available for a long time. Windows 10 was a catch-up for Microsoft.

Helen Fospero makes yet another Brit telly presenter to win IR35 case against taxman

It would depend on circumstances. Possibly she wasn't engaged for the period that required a stand-in.

Another one they say they're going to appeal. I wonder if they'll risk it.

This news article about the full public release of OpenAI's 'dangerous' GPT-2 model was part written by GPT-2

Storage and CPU cycles have obviously become too cheap.