Posts by gnasher729

Teen turned away from roller rink after AI wrongly identifies her as banned troublemaker

Re: exhibit ingrained racist assumptions in the design

No, it only becomes racist if different quality of the results is not taken into account.

Dark faces are harder to recognise with light-based photos or video, that's just a fact. If you try to improve recognition of black faces, you will also improve recognition of white faces, the difference stays the same.

Assume that a black kid has a higher chance of a "97% match with known black troublemaker" than a white kid having a 97% match. So far no racism. It becomes non-racist if the software requires say a 98.2% match for black kids and a 97% match for white kids, or whatever the numbers are so that all innocent kids have the same chance of being rejected. It becomes racist if you reject twice as many black kids than white kids.

Re: "If" - Context

I assume “97% match” means 3% of all Americans look as similar or more similar to the photo as she does.

If they had 50 people banned then most people would be a 97% match to one of them.

Re: That's not how they were using it wrongly

FaceID uses distance measurement, basically analysing the detailed shape of your face. Skin colour has no effect on it at all. Demonstrated using some models with an amount of face paint that would have been unrecognisable by any human, didn’t affect faceID.

Florida Man sues Facebook, Twitter, YouTube for account ban

Re: Typical slander

In this case, every decent person just _wants_ to play the man.

Re: It's the plot of 'The Producers'.

Self-proclaimed billions don't get you far when lawyers want to see real money.

Audacity fork maintainer quits after alleged harassment by 4chan losers who took issue with 'Tenacity' name

Re: physical harassment

Since BKA is getting involved, this would be in Germany; no shotguns for you,

DiDi, China’s Uber analog, booted from local app stores for data naughtiness

Re: Still

If an app “leaks data to the west” then it leaks data.

Would be nice of them to send information about what exactly was breached to the AppStore, play store etc. So they can check if store rules or laws were broken elsewhere.

Go to L: A man of the cloth faces keyboard conundrum

At a former place, around the time of the millennium crisis, our build system broke on February 2nd, 2000. Some code checked the date and rejected this one. Investigation showed that the date checking code was completely, absolutely broken. It was written in Perl, and it was the kind of brokenness that you could only produce in perl. But - it was never given an incorrect date, and in the past it had reported all dates are fine.

Exercise to the reader: In which way was February 2nd, 2000, different from every single date in the 1000 years before?

The M in M1 is for moans: How do you turn a new MacBook Pro into a desktop workhorse?

gratou, first it's a low end machine. Second, you can get a cheap ten port hub which is plenty. Third, you can get a cheap USB-C hub which _includes_ charging. So you can charge and use two USB-C hubs. Fourth, lots of people don't use a single USB port.

It’s a low-end machine. All the M1s are low-end machines. They are bloody fast low end machines, but they are low end. Apple is still selling many mid-range and high-end Macs with Intel processors. If low-end isn’t enough for you, don’t buy it.

I’d expect a whole range of mid-range Macs in the second half of the year, they should be much more suitable for you.

Doggy DNA database adopted by Gloucestershire cops to bring crims to heel

Can’t they use Bill Gates’ technology that is used in the Covid vaccines? Just leave the vaccine out, inject the 5G antenna into your pet, and you can find it’s location at anytime on a website.

Now that China has all but banned cryptocurrencies, GPU prices are falling like Bitcoin

Re: Good for Bitcoin

Why was that worrying? It would have f***ed up bitcoin completely, which would be good news.

Re: Mining...

No, you are not creating real money.

Bitcoin is like 50 million lottery tickets. Each ticket is supposedly worth $37,000. But there is no cash anywhere. The way to get your $37,000 is by finding some idiot who is willing to pay $37,000 for your lottery tickets.

And these tickets are very hard to forge. There's a known way to forge them which means spending about $20,000 or so on electricity in countries where the cost of electricity is subsidised to let people live better, like in Venezuela. That's why when you mine bitcoin in Venezuela using subsided electricity, you are effectively stealing from the country, and they put you in jail for it. In the UK, the same electricity costs $60,000 so it only happens when people steal electricity from their neighbours.

But in the end, all you created is not real money, but a lottery ticket where you hope someone will give you money for it.

Open-source projects glibc and gnulib look to sever copyright ties with Free Software Foundation

Re: Why assign copyright?

Richard Stallman is a dinosaur. He was a dinosaur 20 years ago. And he's a dinosaur with a questionable attitude to women, children, and the stuff between his toes. I don't have any vendetta against him, I just wouldn't want to be associated with any organisation that he is part of, as a married man, father and grandfather. And as myself. And my wife wouldn't allow me to be associated with any organisation that he is part of.

BOFH: When the Sun rises in the West and sets in the East, only then will the UPS cease to supply uninterrupted voltage

I remember working at a place with a server where nobody knew what it did, except we all knew its fan made a lot of noise.

Two years after I started, the decision was taken to turn it off and deal with the consequences. We turned it off. The room went silent. And for the first time I realised that my Mac wasn't actually 100% quiet, it's just that I had never heard its fan over the noise from the server.

We never heard of anything failing without that server.

Gov.UK taskforce publishes post-Brexit wish-list: 'TIGRR' pounces on GDPR, metric measures

Re: MPG

So if Americans tell you about ridiculously low mileage on their cars, don't laugh. Their gallons are 20% smaller, so the same car has 20% fewer miles per gallon in the USA.

Re: Christ , they walk amongst us...

Well, we had the idiocy when the millennium dome was closed on the last day of the old millennium (31st of December 2000). I had wanted to visit it in the new millennium back then and couldn't. Plus one truly idiotic politician claiming it was Jesus' 2000th birthday. Which would have been on Dec. 25th 2001 If we had got his birthdate right, which we haven't.

Re: the partial return of imperial measures

10,000 km is the distance from the equator to the North Pole, as measured back in the day. Measurements today are a bit more precise, so just as a day isn't 86,400 seconds, the distance from equator to North Pole is a bit over 10,000 km.

The distance is also 90 degrees times 60 minutes = 5,400 minutes, so the nautical mile is about 10,000 km divided by 5,400 = about 1,852 meters.

Re: Brexit bollocks

A was in need for new carpets around the time they changed from feet to meters. First, the carpet shop had gone metric. Their prices where not pound per square yard, but pound per 0.8631 square meters. Seriously.

Next, I needed a carpet, 13 foot 11 inch long. The pimply youth at the shop pulled out his calculator and typed 13.11 * 0.3048 = 3.9959 meters. Lucky enough I know that 13 foot 11 inch is just a little bit less than 14 foot which is more than 4.2 meters. Now I'm older and nastier than back then, I would him take his calculation, and write down "customer ordered 13 foot 11 inch" on the order paper. And wait for the carpet fitter to arrive with a carpet that is 20cm too short for the 13 foot 11 inch room. With proof that I ordered a carpet that fits.

Re: The UK political sphere has been so overtaken by Brexit

As a quick help to convert pounds to kilogram: Divide by two and subtract 10%. To convert kilogram to pounds: Times two and add ten percent. It's not exact but usually good enough.

Pakistan's Punjab province tells citizens to get jabbed or have their SIM card blocked

Let’s say the government achieves 100% vaccination. The result will be that 100% of infections and 100% of deaths are vaccinated people.

60% deaths in fully vaccinated people is not unlikely. Consider that those most at risk have the highest vaccination rate, and vaccination doesn’t work 100% if the time. So the unvaccinated will have more cases, but since they are mostly lower risk the high infection rate doesn’t translate into a high death rate.

Re: Hmm, awkward

Car seat belts are mandatory. And sometimes they kill people. We know that. They just save 10 times more, that’s why they are mandatory.

Re: Hmm, awkward

Right for you to be anonymous.

Without vaccine: 4.5 million infected, 150,000 dead. With vaccine (two jabs): 5,800 infected, a handful dead. No difference whatsoever.

Re: A better incentive

"Big pharma must be rubbing their hands with glee! " If 70% in Pakistan are vaccinated, and 30% are not, there is not _that_ much reason for glee.

Re: Makes no sense

You can easily get a list of say everyone registered to the NHS who hasn't been officially vaccinated. And you could easily give that list to BT, O2, EE etc who are all supposed to know who has bought SIM cards. And it would be easy enough to black all those SIMs.

If you instead hand over a list of everyone vaccinated, you kill all the SIM cards that were bought under false names as well.

We don't know why it's there, we don't know what it does – all we know is that the button makes everything OK again

Re: The knob......

We had that, but one of the controls was upside down - try to turn the heat up, and it would cool down the other area.

Australian cops, FBI created backdoored chat app, told crims it was secure – then snooped on 9,000 users' plots

Re: Like Liam Gallagher says...

You get to do it again once all the criminals have forgotten about it.

And an important thing is that if criminals fear that their "encrypted" data can be read by the police (there have been two completely cracked "real" applications and now this trojan), and that makes them hesitant to use encryption apps, that slows the criminals down, which is also a good thing.

On the other hand, when I hear politicians calling that end-to-end encryption should be removed: For law enforcement purposes, I really hope that they play a game where they give Facebook, Apple etc. a bit of hell but not too much, while at the same time working with them to actually get that "end to end encrypted" data.

On the other hand: Priti, I have nothing to hide, but my data is none of your f***ing business, and I don't trust you further than I could throw you and your whole family.

"So how is this not entrapment?" The police didn't suggest to anyone that they should commit crimes.

Apple settles with student after authorized repair workers leaked her naked pics to her Facebook page

Re: How?

Some small problems that I had, I had to enter the unlock code myself.

Re: Details

You missed about five million important points in your analysis.

Re: Details

Since the repair was done by someone authorised by Apple, the victim received a nice amount of money. Anyone else she could have sued of course but the perp wouldn’t have been able to pay a tenth of what Apple paid.

Re: In before . . .

What makes you think anyone would start blaming the victim?

Oh my god, I read some more posts and there they come…

Nude pictures sent to your boyfriend/girlfriend and they get shared: Cut his balls off. Blame yourself for the shared pics. He can blame himself for his loss.

Nude pictures on a phone without passcode get stolen: Blame yourself. If you find the perp see above and he can blame himself.

Nude pictures on a phone that you hand to Apple for repair: Blame the idiots who copied them, collect money from Apple. If you’re Apple, find the perps and see above.

Apple: We didn't take commission on 90% of App Store sales and billings

Re: Just Make it Physical

You are making that much too complicated. Pay through the website, pay through an Android app wit different terms. Apple charges only for purchases made _from within the app_.

Re: Why not Amazon?

You can’t pay for Netflix through the Netflix app on iOS. You can guess why Netflix doesn’t let you.

Re: Why not Amazon?

The rule is: Anything that goes in your device goes through Apple _if_ the purchase is made through the app. Anything that goes elsewhere or is purchased through the internet doesn’t.

Amazon goods don’t go on my phone. Amazon Prime isn’t paid for on the phone. Netflix isn’t paid for on the phone. Uber is a taxi service, it doesn’t go on your phone. Epic can sell little figures that you put on your physical desk through their own system.

Re: Revenue $15bn, cost $100m

Falmart, who do you think pays for WWDC?

Re: Revenue $15bn, cost $100m

Pascal, please go back to your school and ask for a refund for your maths education.

And I bet that Congress critter estimating the cost at $100 million has some real experience running businesses. Mostly into the ground.

The annual cost of WWDC alone is about $50 million.

Seagate finds sets of two heads are cheaper than one in its new and very fast MACH.2 dual-actuator hard disks

Re: Reduced testing time

The pictures that I saw were 10 platters, and five read/write heads for the top five platters connected, and five read/write heads for the bottom five platters connected. Instead of all ten heads connected. Like having two hands with five fingers each instead of one hand with ten fingers.

It's very significant space and power savings compared to a RAID drive, and speed advantage compared to a single disk drive.

Reduced testing time

That's absolutely brilliant. The drive runs faster, therefore it can be completely tested faster, therefore production time and cost goes down. Pure genius.

Today I shall explain how dual monitors work using the medium of interpretive dance

Re: Laptop + Monitor = two computers?

I always thought that for dual monitor users, Apple should sell monitors that look exactly like their iMacs. Maybe with a small marker somewhere. Which would look good if you want to have two screens, which would let you pretend you have an iMac when you have a MacMini, which would let you pretend you have a Mac when you have a PC - and which would confuse the hell out of some people.

Maybe where other monitors display "no signal" it should display "this is a monitor, not an iMac".

Antivirus that mines Ethereum sounds a bit wrong, right? Norton has started selling it

There was a quite recent report about a gang stealing £16,000 of electricity to mine £8,000 worth of bitcoin. (They had about 100 computers that were confiscated, so they must have ended with a major loss unless the computers were stolen as well). In the countries where Norton is mostly selling, you can't make money by mining anything.

Code contributions to GCC no longer have to be assigned to FSF, says compiler body

Re: Apple and GPL

You got this completely wrong. _Every_ copyright holder can sue over license violations, in this case both FSF and Apple could sue. Even if one of them didn’t want to, the other could.

What multiple copyright holders prevent are changing license terms. The FSF could sell a proprietary license to Google if they wanted, but not if Apple holds copyrights and doesn’t agree.

Re: Apple and GPL

Actually, the reason why apple and some others had to switch from gcc was that they wanted to compile code at runtime (OpenGL, opencl, JavaScript etc. ) and that due to one Mr. Stallman that wasn’t possible. Stallman shot himself and gcc in the foot in a major way.

Why did automakers stall while the PC supply chain coped with a surge? Because Big Tech got priority access

Re: They only have themselves to blame

You call Apple and Samsung bullies... You can bet that TMSC has contracts in place where customers have to take a specified number of chips. And Apple can't just switch suppliers, because the next supplier doesn't have the capacity at all.

Apple sued in nightmare case involving teen wrongly accused of shoplifting, driver's permit used by impostor, and unreliable facial-rec tech

Re: He may be lucky..

Nobody’s life is ruined. The guy was arrested for a short time, then it was found it wasn’t him, and that’s it. Happens to lots of people all the time. The only thing different is that he is trying to get lots of money out of this, failed to get it in one court, and three years later tries in another court. Of course his lawyer tries to make everything sound as bad as possible. Like the “facial recognition” that everyone hates and that didn’t exist.

So there is a thief. He is photographed, and he loses a forged library card with his photo and someone else’s name. What would you expect the police to do? I’d expect them to check out the person whose name is on the library card. With the library card or a copy in hand.

“It’s not a valid ID” is a ridiculous argument. If you want to catch a thief, you use anything you can. “They conveniently deleted the picture” is also nonsense. Nobody claims it was his picture. And I assume the thief had long been convicted, no reason ans possibly illegal to keep his picture after that.

The server is down, money is not being made, and you want me to fix what?

Re: 'Delegation'

A relative may have had the shortest ambulance wait. She arrived at a roundabout and had to wait for an ambulance on the roundabout to pass. Some idiot drove into her car. Ambulance driver had seen it in his back mirror, went round the roundabout and stopped to help her.

Unfixable Apple M1 chip bug enables cross-process chatter, breaking OS security model

Worst case

Here’s the worst case that I can think of: You have a server with multiple users, all properly separated, with no internet connection, so even malware couldn’t spill any secrets.

One of the users is malicious and _has_ an internet connection. The other users run apps that are not protected from each other. If I can install malware on one user’s account, that malware can transmit any data to the malicious user, and the malicious user can send it to a server.

Re: Te bug is real but can it be exploited

You need two malicious apps actually. An app cannot spy on another app with this, but receive data that is being sent intentionally.