Posts by Whitter

Cook'd: Judge says Apple lied to court in Epic case, asks Feds to mull criminal charges

Perjury

Alex Roman seems bang up for perjury.

Did the judge also recommend that, or only corporate contempt?

UK data watchdog seeks fresh blood as more complaints lie unanswered for up to a year

Response, or meaningful response?

Has anyone every had a response from this shower that was anything other than template blurb and a total lack of meaningful action?

Looks like paywalls are coming soon to a subreddit near you

Re: "the so-called Front Page of the Internet"

Surely that would be ftp://aaa.aaaaaaaaaa.aaa ?

Kill Oracle's 'JavaScript' trademark, Deno asks USPTO

Alternative solution

It's always been a shoddy name: can't we change it?

Then who cares if anyone has a trademark on the original.

Epic judge orders Google to let rivals set up app stores

What reasons given for appeal?

It is tiresome in the extreme that whenever somebody/something wealthy has a ruling against it, an appeal seems almost immediate.

Doesn't there have to be formal ground to appeal? And some likeliness of success established?

I assume its always been the way to protect the rich, and pay more laywers...

What is missing from the web? We're asking for Google

It's the simple things

Ignoring the snooping / tracking "feck your cookies" dialogs, the thing I'd really like is for pages not to reposition items in the view as the page loads.

I want the button I'm about to click to stay the button I think it is, not shift layout so the mouse is now over the previous button 100ms before I press it.

Study backer: Catastrophic takes on Agile overemphasize new features

...adults would much rather software worked properly than was chock full of new features

The inference being that Marketing / Project owners are not adults...

Google begs court for relief from Epic Games' Play Store demands

"Google says gives third-party app stores a free ride to benefit from Google's own app catalog"

There is no value to "Google's own app catalog" other than the restriction that, without sideloading, you have to use it.

A worse search engine/discovery interface one would struggle to find - even worse that Amazon, and that's a very low bar.

How Apple Wi-Fi Positioning System can be abused to track people around the globe

Deja vu?

Is this not a bit similar to Google's "accidental" harvesting of WIFI info from their street-map camera-cars many years back?

This time, crowd-sourcing the car.

Tech titans assemble to decide which jobs AI should cut first

... already facing staff shortages...

This concept might be appealing for those in industries already facing staff shortages. However the real concern is AI's potential to cut staff...

I assume most of such industries are not short of staff because they can't find suitable staff: rather they refuse to pay for them as a business strategy, the solution being to have current staff doing <insert number>% more work than is reasonable. These industries are already hamstringing themselves to reduce the number of staff. Any sniff of an opportunity to reduce the staff pool still further is very likely to be taken with both hands. Again, almost regardless of how much damage it may do to the functioning of the company.

Cloud server host Vultr rips user data licensing clause from ToS amid web 'confusion'

If they don't know what's in the ToS, what expectation users do?

Is the company alleges not to have read its own ToS - then they are on shaky ground assuming their users did.

If it claims it didn't understand its ToS, again, users now have an open door to claim the same.

Or perhaps these shoddy ToS sections need to be regulated to something meaningful.

FBI v the bots: Feds urge denial-of-service defense after critical infrastructure alert

Captcha

Do captchas actually work these days?

Last I heard, the bots were better at them than humans are.

Air Canada must pay damages after chatbot lies to grieving passenger about discount

Re: Air Canada must really be terrible

Perhaps they are also using an AI chatbot to respond to complaints?

Sandworm's Kyivstar attack should serve as a reminder of the Kremlin crew's 'global reach'

Re: User data leakage ?

At least nobody believes the company exec line, as indicated by "I am very concerned that Ukraine's counter offensive was monitored in real time and troop locations were exposed to facilitate drone strikes"

While we've all become accustomed to nonsense being spouted from exec's about data breaches, I wonder if Ukraine will accept such glibness in their current wartime scenario?

White House hopes to power up American battery factories with $3.5B fund

"Now that's the kind of current affairs we're into..."

Exceptional!

A pint in your honour!

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)