Posts by Whitter

Atlassian swears it can handle AI without blowing out costs, or being swamped

I swear at Confluence every day

See title

Microsoft illegally installed cookies on schoolkid's tech, data protection ruling finds

Re: Default On.

You are right, despite the "use the library" answer that is available.

Don’t bother with the retailer’s website, says Google: Gemini can shop for you

Track Record

Google's track record at selling stuff is the Play store.

Difficult to find a worse shopping portal. At least, from the customer POV.

Australia’s spy boss says authoritarian nations ready to commit ‘high-impact sabotage’

The boards are responsible

“Boards need to be curious and discerning about the information provided to them. You can’t PowerPoint your way out of this risk. Don’t let management do that to you.”

I guess this is sugar coating the pill that it has been the boards refusing to invest, rather than being misled but their minion management. Whatever the cause, the quote seems to be the wrong way arouund.

Cyber insurers paid out over twice as much for UK ransomware attacks last year

What about revenue?

Payouts going up - fair enough.

But is this good or bad for insurers? Are they getting more money in via more companies getting insurance and/or paying higher premiums?

Is it currently a loss for the insurance providers? Or a excuse to make even greater profit?

Labor organizers accuse Rockstar Games of 'ruthless act of union busting' after layoffs

What downsides to Rockstar?

I guess there is a risk of "reputational damage", though they don't really have any positive reputation to speak of.

If an employment tribunal is called, and they loose (quite likely if the info in the story is a fairly complete picture) - what do Rockstar really loose?

AI layoffs to backfire: Half quietly rehired at lower pay

The first rule is exec renumeration

The C Suite don't really care if they kill the company, so long as they have enough time to sell shares / get out to the next patsy. Shareholders only care while they hold the shares. Its kinda odd that the folks most invested in most large companies are the grunts, who have the least say / influence.

Elon Musk's Grokipedia launches, filled to the brim with plagiarism and AI slop

Don't feed the trolls

"Don't feed the trolls" is advice often disregarded.

Though one imagines a few of the responses are trolls too.

Amazon's AI specs aim to stop delivery drivers getting lost between van and porch

Data gathering for robotic delivery?

Yes, it is a somewhat paranoid thought, but... Hoover up all the video for physically getting from a vehicle to the doorstep for a year or two, then train an AI robot to do it.

Retro nerd hacks LEGO's Game Boy into the real deal

Natalie is a star!

See title

Empty shelves, empty coffers: Co-op pegs cyber hit at £80m

Senior leadership's non-priority of IT

Its very "told you so", but C suites have wilfully underinvested in IT for a decade or more, while the risk was very clear. The costs are becoming clear - but for every C-Suite person, its a risk profile of "so long as it doesn't happen on my watch". And they are a bunch of risk-takers, as they can always golden-parachute out when things do go wrong. Given that system, how companies learn? Perhaps the smaller ones can. Fingers crossed.

One token to pwn them all: Entra ID bug could have granted access to every tenant

Icon required

If you are going to reference Microsoft code review (or the equivalently missing test), one should use the Joke icon :)

Senator demands to know status of 'duplicate' Social Security database 'immediately'

it's pronounced Cray-poe

No. No it isn't.

Anthropic to pay at least $1.5 billion to authors whose work it knowingly pirated

Designed never to be spent

Sounds like a made-up number to sound good, but once anyone claims, then there's the need to "prove" loss of income, which I imagine to be near impossible. And loss of profit certainly wouldn't be much for the huge majority of books copied. So they can say any headline-grabbing number they want, and for those few prepared to lawyer up, pay out $100 or so should they successfully grind through the process.

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...?