Posts by Whitter

Windows File Explorer gets nostalgic speed boost thanks to one weird bug

Fast opening of Windows File Explorer

I've found that opening File Explorer using the microsoft key + E is much faster than clicking on an icon to do the same job.

Maybe the same effect with a different path?

So much for CAPTCHA then – bots can complete them quicker than humans

I doubt security is the purpose

Distorted text capchas may well be a security thing, but the more common "label things in a street photo" reek of being "free" input to an AI for self driving vehicles.

Cumbrian Police accidentally publish all officers' details online

Norfolk and Suffolk police: Victims and witnesses hit by data breach

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66510136

But it OK, according to them, 'cos "data was hidden from anyone opening the files"

Those well known sure-fire ways of keeping data private one assumes:

Excel Hide column / Word version history / black superimposed highlighter / White text on white

I wonder which one they used?

After fears that Europe's space scope was toast, its first images look mighty fine

Slight flaw...

I'm sure many have seen this classic, but just in case...

https://i.redd.it/d5okexm0alj51.png

Airline puts international passengers on the scales pre-flight

Not if they didn't care where any specific person was going: if they were only trying to measure the current distribution of passenger weights, then no-personal-info is ideal.

You can estimate weight very accurately from the security scanner image.

Is it ethical to do so? would be the question there.

Baidu boss says good luck talking AI to Beijing if you don't understand censorship

"Does not hallucinate"

Perhaps more likely "Hallucinates in the approved manner"

CEO sorry after telling staff to 'leave pity city' over bonuses

Good for the goose...

One wonders if the remuneration packages of those on the board have automatic 'bonus' arrangements?

Requiem for Google Reader, dead for a decade but not forgotten

Deletion of Google Reader did us all a favour

It taught us that we cannot trust Google.

We shouldn't forget that lesson.

No more rockstars, say Billy Idol, Joan Jett in Workday Super Bowl ad

Brian Cox

And don't forget Brian Cox (the Musician/Physicist one)

Airbnb hosts less likely to accept bookings from Black people than Whites

Hard to read the tech paper

The tech paper behind this story is here:

https://news.airbnb.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2020/06/Project-Lighthouse-Airbnb-2020-06-12.pdf

I couldn't see if other variables (maybe #previous uses of Airbnb and reviews thereof) were also visible to the property owners. If any such data was there (I've never used Airbnb so I've no idea how the system works), I could see no attempt to establish if there was bias in the other variables between the perceived racial groups. But the tech paper wasn't a nice read, so I'll admit I didn't spend too long trying to understand it.

Voice assistants failed because they serve their makers more than they help users

Re: My voice assistant doesn't understand me....

It is traditional at this point in a forum chat to add the following link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMS2VnDveP8

"finding became restricted to commercially advantageous search results"

Sad that all challengers to the search crown, a tarnished and tawdry bauble, have followed the same "screw the end user" design as Google

ChatGPT has mastered the confidence trick, and that's a terrible look for AI

"It’s a Dunning-Kruger effect knowledge simulator par excellence"

The irony is strong in this one

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking/dunning-kruger-effect-probably-not-real

I'm not actually going to ague the arguments - I do know that I don't know enough - but given the context of the Godel / Turin chat, the concept of (potential) equivalence made me smile

Russia says Starlink satellites could become military targets

So, your man is saying it is a war then?

Won't that get in him trouble with his boss?

Lessons to be learned from Google and Oracle's datacenter heatstroke

Subheading

Awesome! Well done

FDA clears way for an AI stethoscope to detect heart disease

Ausculation is on the decline

Ausculation has been on the way out for quite a long time: many doctors aren't properly trained in it nowadays, making some of the measurements a tad difficult to assess without a more in-depth read (which I haven't done obvs.)

I wonder if doctors will keep the stethoscope as a "symbol of medicine" once none of them know how to use it?

Testing for COVID with the sound of a cough? There’s an app for that

tested on only 14 asymptomatic patients

Just as well that that snippet was at the end. It's an immediate "nothing to see here yet" flag

Techniques to fool AI with hidden triggers are outpacing defenses – study

Re: The training data is one of the problems - the source code for the DNN is another

One can imagine a future where many a site will use NLP models pulled from <wherever> to power their websites, or models for reading barcodes, or models for correcting gramar, or models for <insert task here>.

They will be the same users that pull <whatever> set of javascript dependencies to sanitise an input string and have neither the interest nor the skill to debug 'their' work.

India bans drone imports to help local manufacturers take off

IP concerns

There's quite a lot of IP in drone design and manufacture. How will India cope with that?

Russia's naval exercise near Ireland unlikely to involve cable-tapping shenanigans

... the area is rarely visited by boats with location-transmitting AIS equipment switched on ...

But frequencly visited by boats with location-transmitting AIS equipment switched off...?

Lawmakers propose TLDR Act because no one reads Terms of Service agreements

It exempts "small businesses"

Until such time as we stop

1) non-small-buisnesses isolating/wrapping up their multiple arms into allegedly small-buisnesses

2) the sale of cusomer data / contracts between companies

then that's an easy loop-hole to exploit.

It takes more clicks to reject their cookies than accept them, so France fines Facebook and Google over €200m

Opt in

Necessary cookies (logged in etc) - you don't need to tell anyone but can if you want.

All others: opt in.

Not an opt out, no matter how few clicks implment it.

Huawei's AppGallery riddled with malware-infected games

"if we receive a substantial reply"

Does that mean El Reg won't bother us if "Our customers are our top priority" ?

Nice!

Assange psychiatrist misled judge over parentage of his kids, US tells High Court

What is a Judge's role here?

"...Judge Baraitser would have ruled differently. Lewis argued that having one's own children to protect and raise can reduce the risk of suicide..."

I assume that clinician(s) gave the court one (or more) expert evaluations on suicide risk. The judge then ruled. But this barrister is inferring that the judge would have re-evaluted the suicide risk themselves under the impression that judges are more expert at psychology than psycologists? Sounds more like a slurr on the Judge than anything else.

tz database community up in arms over proposals to merge certain time zones

Just think of the Atrologers!

First time I've ever said that...

Google staff who work from home might see pay cut under corporate policy – reports

Childcare

On the assumption that childcare is female-dominated, it seems likely that this policy structurally sexist

Tencent to acquire Brit games developer Sumo Group

Mr Livingstone I presume?

I'll raise a glass to the mighty Ian Livingstone, without whom the gaming world would be a much poorer place

Android devs prepare to hand over app-signing keys to Google from August

Closest icon to a flamey eye

One key to rule them all

One key to find them

One key to bring them all

And in the darkness bind them

BMA and Royal College of GPs refuse to endorse NHS Digital's data grab from surgeries in England

Does this include historical data?

I lived in England for a year or two many years ago, so there will be some records of that somewhere.

However, I don't think I have any means to avoid this data grab if it does include historical data of people no longer in the NHS system in England/Wales.

Blessed are the cryptographers, labelling them criminal enablers is just foolish

Order is important

“These platforms are used almost exclusively by SOC [serious and organised crime] groups"

Rather reminds me of the classic logic failure: "I see a black swan; therefore all swans are black"

I might have believed “SOC [serious and organised crime] groups almost exclusively use these platforms"

Though to be honest, I doubt that. There's a lot to be said for being a tree in a forrest.

IBM compiles dataset to teach software how software is made: 14m code samples, half of which actually work

AIs are very context sensitive

So they intend to build an AI that might help me code one of two specific tasks?

Google Play to require privacy labels on apps in 2022, almost two years after Apple

Developers will be responsible for writing their own disclosures

So devs who do this responsibly will end up with a scarey list, while the bad actors claim thir apps are nice and clean.

Wait 5 years before it obviosuly fails and needs to be tightened up, aka +5 free years of the wild west.

Vote to turf out remainder of Nominet board looks inevitable after .uk registry ignores reform demands

Shine a light

Perhaps PublicBenefit.uk should specifically highlight the "How is your registar voting?" section on their website?

https://publicbenefit.uk/#lookup

Apple begins rejecting apps that use advertising SDKs for fingerprinting users

Turkeys / Christmas

It's wack-a-mole. Somebody tries to make tracking more difficult, the tracking industry develops new techniques to continue. They will not stop. Their career is at stake. A career of hacking APIs to achieve the unintended or a career buying/selling the resultant data (despite its dubious value: both sellers and buyers pretend it is data-oil as they'll have no jobs or skills if anyone without skin in the game has a look at the cost/benefit)

Mysterious case of Arizona state senators skipping a vote on tackling Apple and Google's app commissions

He who pays the piper...

People vote for their representatives. They don't pay them.

It appears there is a significant difference.

Big problem: Nominet members won't know how many votes they're casting in decision to oust CEO, chair

Personal interests well before corporate

Once ousted, their behaviour should be audited to establish if they can ever be described as "fit and proper" to hold any executive post, anywhere, ever again.

British govt emits fuzzy vision for UK version of American boffin special forces group Darpa

Post "incubation" what happens? Who owns what?

I assume all the successful outcomes would be sold off to tax-haven investors while the UK keeps all the failures?

Microsoft pulls the sheets off first .NET 6 preview and... it's still a mess. Native Apple Silicon support, though

Who would benefit from using .NET 6?

From the vibe of the article, I'm not sure who would start using .NET 6 who wasn't using .NET before, or why previous .NET users would want to update to .NET 6. If sounds like a half-way-house to doing some new stuff - but not very well yet - so why would you bother? Perhaps it is intended to prove they are following a roadmap to a better mutliplatform IDE, though perhaps not a version to actually use?

Machine-learning software scours database of already available drugs that could treat COVID-19 infections

Interesting work

Interesting as a general approach, not just for Covid.

But how much resistance will there be from big pharma, who really don't like folks reusing old-working rather than paying for new-shiney. Much like any other industry.

Minister tells the House of Lords it'll be another 12 weeks before UK's deleted criminal records can be restored

Karma

How much of the deleted stuff should have been, erm... deleted, rather a long time ago anyway?

How do we combat mass global misinformation? How about making the internet a little harder to use

Blind spots

"It’s harder to anticipate blind spots that only become apparent in moments of greatest need. "

Harder still to 'spot' those you never, erm, spot, 'cos they're blind spots.

ThinkPad T14s AMD Gen 1: Workhorse that does the business – and dares you to push that red button

Mouse button position

I find the mouse buttons being above the trackpad makes click/drag much more tricky: typically a two-hand move.

When the buttons are below, then left-click drag is a thumb-click-hold, any other finger drag. easy.

The obvious downside of buttons-at-the-bottom is accidental button press, something I personally never seemed to do, though no doubt milage varies on that.

And after owning a Lenovo for 6 months or so, I still hate their Fn / Ctrl key layout. BIOS swap option shows that they know this. But don't make the keys the same size so you can swap them.

Google’s Pixel phones to measure heart rate and breathing, other ‘droids coming soon

... measure breaths ...

Pixel phones will measure breaths if users “place your head and upper torso in view of your phone’s front-facing camera and breathe normally.”

Is this intended for measuring a heathy person's breathing rate during gaps during a training run or the like?

Whether useful for that, or indeed anything, rather depend on what thye mean by "normally".

Does it exclude deep or accelerated breathing? Shallow breathing? Require a static upper body? Hmmm...

Study: AI designed to detect diabetic eye disease blinks in the real world, makes more work for doctors

Anything that would increase the rate at which diabetic disease is flagged up from an eye exam would inevitably increase the workload of human reviewers. Is this result really a bad one? Difficult to tell from the article, which implies poor performance but doesn't show the data. e.g. How many true detections were made that would have been (or were) missed by eye docs? Maybe that is in the original research, just not the El Reg snippet.

I guess it ultimately depends on just how many false detections were being made: alarm fatigue is a well-known problem in medical institutions.

Boeing will cough up $2.5bn+ to settle US fraud charge over 737 Max safety

Other countries

With their admission of a failure to act on aviation safety, will any other contries consider banning 737s (or even, as it is evidence of a lack of the 'required' company safety culture, all Boeing craft) from their skies? Until of course they also get a bung of cash and sudenly the risk is gone.

Unsecured Azure blob exposed 500,000+ highly confidential docs from UK firm's CRM customers

Re: No more Mr Nice Guy

At the very, very, least, punishment needs to cost more than the savings from not doing it.

Travel agent leaked customer data by – this is embarrassing – giving it away in a hackathon

No longer runs hackathons

Why not? Seems a PI breach was found in quite a safe environment, they then reacted sensibly and quickly.

Would they rather the issue was found by some balckhats later, then compromised for n-years before they found out?

Feels like the same ol' issue well known to test teams that the dev teams don't like to be told of bugs. Before release. Before anyone else finds out. Sigh.

Currys PC World website crumples into unscheduled maintenance as shoppers chase latest gaming machines

"Those lucky enought to have made it..."

Or perhaps not.

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.currys.co.uk

I wasted a month dealing with them in late summer: first they sent the wrong laptop; there's no email to 'customer services', and the 'live chat' they promote everywhere doesn't work; so its a phone line with 1hr waits. Got the wrong device returned and proper one scheduled. But they never bothered to sent the actual order. Rinse an repeat with customer services. Still no laptop. Rinse and repeat again, Finally I noticed on the website they no longer had the thing I wanted in stock and so this was all pointless, so cancelled. A month of hassle and nothing to show for it.

Apple on the hook for another $503m in decade-long VirnetX patent rip-off legal marathon

Re: Multichoice

Doh!