No, I did too. I find the similarity a little "something", quite what that "something" is I'm not quite sure
Posts by Ian Mason
233 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jun 2014
Signal chat app clone used by Signalgate's Waltz was apparently an insecure mess
Three Brits charged over 'active shooter threats' swattings in US, Canada
Re: sentenced to 20 months in prison, suspended for 18 months, in April 2024.
They couldn't be extradited. Our extradition treaties with other nations require that the offence being extradited for would also be an offence in the UK. As the article points out, there isn't a specific "swatting" offence in the UK. The reason that our treaties are like that is so we don't have to extradite people for offences are incompatible with our idea of the rule of law, like apostasy or lèse-majesté which are criminal offences in some countries.
Bad trip coming for AI hype as humanity tools up to fight back
Re: Patent law has been abused for decades.
You're wrong about patent law being created to reward creators, it was created so that creators could share their methods for the general good while still enjoying exclusivity on benefiting from their methods for a limited period. The deal was that rather than protect their ideas for their own exclusive use by keeping their methods secret that they would be given exclusive rights for a limited time if and only if they openly published them in a patent application. Patents were originally about promoting openness.
Re: Copyright is not IP
You are going to have to spend a long time living down the manifestly stupid claim that copyright law and intellectual property law have nothing to do with each other. Your claim is on the close order to claiming that red paint and paint have nothing to do with each other.
GCC 15 is close: COBOL and Itanium are in, but ALGOL is out
The characterisation is unfair
The characterisation of algol 68 as "over-complex" is both unfair and untrue. Any competent programmer could pick up Woodward & Bond's 99 page "ALGOL 68-R User's Guide" and learn and use 99% of the language in a single day. In fact it's gloriously simple and regular, or "orthogonal" as the algol 68 designers liked to describe it.
I challenge anybody to learn 99% of C++, Swift, Go, or Python in the same timescale.
Unloved, probably true, but that just demonstrates how rare good taste is.
'Cybertruck ownership comes with ... interesting fan mail'
Re: Unless a finger smear or a slice of cheese is enough to damage the Cybertruck
They got the very last of the brains, just after the ginger cats.
There is a theory that there is only one labrador braincell and that they all have to share it in a fashion similar to the single electron shared by the whole universe as mooted by Pauli (Man, I want some of what Pauli was smoking that day).
Nvidia shovels $500M into Israeli boffinry supercomputer
UK government tech procurement lacks understanding, says watchdog
Tongue-zapping spoons, tea-cooling catbots, lazy vacuums and more from CES
Tesla, Musk double down on $56B payday appeal
The latest language in the GNU Compiler Collection: Algol-68
The stated reason for the RS compiler and language variant was to support modular programming as the ALGOL 68 view of the world was all monolithic programs. The RS extensions introduced ways of compiling chunks of ALGOL 68 as modules and then compositing them into a complete program, it wasn't pretty. The modular extensions aside, the RS compiler was a pleasant enough implementation to use. There was, of all things, a Multics port of it which I got to use.
Fear of Foxconn reportedly driving possible Nissan, Honda and Mitsubishi merger
Judge hands WP Engine a win in legal fight with Automattic
The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++
That position you just applied for might be a 'ghost job' that'll never be filled
Definitely illegal in the UK.
This falls squarely under Section 2 of the Fraud Act 2006. "... dishonestly makes a false representation ... cause loss to another or to expose another to a risk of loss [i.e to an applicant]".
If anyone from HR or an employment agency is watching, that's worth up to 10 years in prison plus a fine.
Linus Torvalds affirms expulsion of Russian maintainers
Re: Approach? What approach?
I doubt they are. Typically it is only selected institutions and people that are sanctioned. It's unlikely, but not impossible, that the individual contributors are on the sanctions list. This smacks more of ignorance or laziness in understanding the sanctions regime and regulations.
I note that in insulting people's lack of historical memory he doesn't also educate them that Finland was on the wrong side in WWII.
Missing scissors cause 36 flight cancellations in Japan
Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union
British Airways blames T5 luggage chaos on fault 'outside of our control'
The vague "Vodafone Platform"
Hmm. Vodafone don't do IT, just connectivity, so I wonder if 'interacting with the Vodafone Platform' just really means "our data sims have stopped working".
Vodafone are phasing out some of their data only sim plans; I got an email telling me that a Vodafone data only service I use is ceasing soon (1st August in case of the particular service that I use). What are the chances that someone at BA got a similar email, failed to act on it and the deadline to find an alternative to a Vodafone data only mobile service just came and went? Is this just a variant on the "forgot to renew a certificate" classic fail?
Microsoft bigwig says the Feds catching Chinese spies in Exchange Online is the cloud working as intended
Research finds electric cars are silent but violent for pedestrians
Texan construction workers put a rocket up Team SpaceX over 'unpaid bills'
How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes
Re: 0/10 for current affairs
Intelligent creatures learn from experience and adapt, LLMs don't. Ergo intelligence is qualitatively different.
If you correct an LLM it doesn't incorporate that into its world model. Playing with the llama2 model (prompted by this article) it conflated race and ethnicity. I pointed this out, it apologised and issued a 'correction' without the mistake, except that all it did was substitute the word "ethnicity" for "race" in its first appearance and then continued to say "race" for the rest of the paragraph.
How to Netflix Oracle’s blockbuster audit model
They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut
That's not the web you're browsing, Microsoft. That's our data
X hiring 100 content cops in bid to tame Wild West of online safety
The Post Office systems scandal demands a critical response
"the Post Office, had the very unusual power to bring private criminal prosecutions."
No, there's nothing unusual to it. Everybody has the power to bring a private criminal prosecution.
You used to just have to pop into the nearest magistrates court and 'swear out an information' but nowadays you just toddle along to gov.uk, grab a copy of the form "Application for summons or warrant for arrest for alleged offence under Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980 section 1, CrimPR 7.2(6)", fill it out and submit it to the court. There's a lot more detail to actually conducting a prosecution, but the essential thing is that anyone has the power to bring a private criminal prosecution, perhaps not the expertise to, but certainly the power to.
GNOME Foundation's new executive director sparks witch hunt
Re: It's not a witch hunt.
Luxury? You 'ad it easy.
When I were a lad we had to program t' computer by hardwiring the program into it, in actual wire on plugboard. And we had to make the wire ourselves, after getting up two hours before we went to bed to mine the ore for the metal for the wire ourselves.
Re: Probably off-topic, but ...
It's necessary to point out that Dublin is in Ireland because Americans may read this, and they get very confused when a placename, that they have reused umpteen times to name somewhere in the US of A, is used to refer to the original and not the Dublin in Ohio, California, Georgia, Kentucky, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Texas, or Michigan (and I've probably missed some).
If only the early settlers had possessed just a little more imagination, the USA would not have 21 Glasgows, 7 Edinburghs, 10 Londons, 7 Cardiffs, 16 Birminghams, and 27 Brightons - that last one clearly suggests a lot of people wishing for somewhere to go to for a dirty weekend.
China uses Alibaba's Euro logistic hub to spy on stuff, Belgian intelligence fears
Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure
Britcoin or Britcon? Bank of England grilled on Digital Pound privacy concerns
Incompetence, as usual.
Breeden responded: "We haven't got to the point yet where those [privacy] issues have been raised; we're at the technical design point. ..."
Then the people involved aren't competent to be involved. Privacy issues in a digital currency have to be at the core of the technical design if it is to have a possibility of meeting any privacy constraints placed upon it. Anybody who doesn't realise this has no business being anywhere within a thousand miles of any digital currency design.
By the sounds of it they expect to bake privacy in by saying, legislatively, thou shalt not breach privacy instead of ensuring technically that it is not possible for you to breach privacy.
This kind of idiocy is not surprising to those who have watched various government types keep insisting that there must be a way you can break encryption but only for the "good guys".
Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure
Arm's lawyers want to check assembly expert's book for trademark missteps

ARM: pay attention
People don't like bullies. If you want to see yourself lose market share to RISC V, just carry on the thuggish behaviour.
People don't forget, and perhaps even now there are embedded engineers the world around going "You know, I've been meaning to have a play with RISC V and if ARM are going to run around being arseholes perhaps now's the time to do it. If they can be this stupid in how they treat people who are trying to help them by educating about their architecture, what other boneheaded mistakes are they going to make once the IPO really goes to their heads?".
Bombshell biography: Fearing nuclear war, Musk blocked Starlink to stymie Ukraine attack on Russia
What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?
Amateurish, at best.
Many, many years ago in 1985 I wrote a password generating algorithm for the company where I then worked. It took a 30 bit pseudorandom number, split that into three 10 bit fields and then spat out a three word password, with each word of the password taken from a list of 1024 words, all nouns, that had been carefully crosschecked for possible confusion by feeding them all through the "soundex" algorithm. Soundex is normally used to find words that sound alike, even if the writer uses the conventions of another language (e.g. "mare-duh" instead of "merde"). It was developed to help match people's names under variant spelling.
If as a fresh faced junior programmer I could manage to spot, and mitigate, the risk of homophones, what does that say about the quality of the thinking that went into What Three Words?
Official science: People do less, make more mistakes on Friday afternoons
Re: Narrow but uncertain applicability?
Hey, at least they stated their assumptions.
I recently read a paper on how exercise modes affect blood pressure that was reported in the the press akin to "These two exercises could reduce your dangerously high blood pressure" where they made the assumption that the control groups in the papers they were doing a meta analysis of were sufficiently similar to allow all the studies to be linked. Of course they (1) didn't actually state the implicit assumption or (2) provide any evidence that the assumption held thus rendering the paper little more than prettily worded bunkum and the conclusions worthless.
Unlike this paper, which at most is going to be used to justify a bit of Friday afternoon bunking off, that paper is going to possibly genuinely and seriously affect the health of people who get an exercise prescription from a medic who (a) didn't read more that the conclusions or a report of them, (b) isn't smart enough to spot the terrible methodological mistake.
Twitter sues Brit non-profit, claims hate-speech reports scared off advertisers
Re: Arrogant Muskrat
Given that the word's roots are Latin, via Italian, the Italian Partito Nazionale Fascista, the Italian Fasci Italiani di Combattimento the Italian Fasci d'Azione Rivoluzionaria, and the Italian Fascio Rivoluzionario d'Azione Internazionalista I think claiming a French origin might be a bit off the mark.