Posts by Orv

Apple's new 'spaceship' HQ brings the pane for unobservant workers

Hire fewer avian employees. Try bats instead.

La, la, la, I can't hear you! Apple to challenge Bose's noise-proof cans

Re: Sennheiser...

Over-the-ear headphones don't tend to be very comfortable for glasses-wearers, unless the tension is very light and/or the earpads are soft. My Sennheiser's are in that category, but they actually provide very little noise isolation for pretty much the same reasons they're comfortable.

I once had a pair of $50 Monoprice active noise-canceling headphones that were blatant rip-offs of $200 Bose cans. They worked remarkably well and I frequently used them on the bus and on planes, but in true Monoprice fashion they quit after a year.

New algorithm could help self-driving cars scout out hidden objects

I learned this lesson as a teenager, after a scare in which I barreled around a blind curve at 50 mph to find there was a tractor there doing 5.

I try to drive such that I can always stop within the distance I can see ahead. This actually lends itself pretty well to "slow in-fast out" cornering, since as I go through a curve my view opens up ahead.

Re: Or it could

You can get around some of that by tilting the passenger cabin, but that obviously has complexity issues. It also won't help with those sharp, blind hill crests. (Neither will this laser tech, probably, due to the lack of a surface to bounce the beam off of.)

Re: Vibrations

Infrared will fry eyeballs too. Just because we can't see it doesn't mean it can't heat up our retinas. In fact infrared is worse, because unlike visible light it doesn't trigger our reflex to look away.

Current LIDAR systems are already only OK because of their constant scanning -- if the beam ever stopped on someone's eye for any length of time, there could be trouble.

Re: New algorithm could help self-driving cars scout out hidden objects

I remember that article!

I could see it working for trucks, which often carry large off-road lights anyway. With the right filter the light would appear to be off. Probably easier to just not speed, as cool as the idea of a "stealth" car is, especially since there are lots of other ways to catch speeders.

Cryptocurrency miners go nuclear, RSA blunder, Winner back in court, and plenty more

Re: I don't really have a problem with it

That's true, but I'd rather pay for content with higher energy cost than with my personal information and eyeballs.

I'm sure you'll soon be doing it with both, unfortunately.

Re: I don't really have a problem with it

I'd be less happy if I were accessing the site with a laptop in my lap, cooking my thighs while the battery rapidly drains. Not to mention that some places have expensive power, and the last thing you'd want to do with it is heat your house.

Re: Tuesdays Winner is George Soros.

Nice troll, but try to be a little less obvious next time.

SCREEEECH: US national security agency puts brakes on Qualcomm takeover

I'm assuming it's a hostile takeover, where Broadcom has acquired a controlling interest in Qualcomm's stock. If enough shareholders vote for the merger, the board can't stop it.

Wi-Fi Alliance allegedly axed army reservist for being called up. Now the Empire strikes back

Re: Purely as an outsider

You can downvote me if you want, but the fact is there are no contemporary newspaper accounts of it happening. The story seems to first appear after 1980. If this were really a widespread thing you'd think there would have been some news coverage.

The supposed spitting story spread because it was useful propaganda. Anti-war veterans (about 75% of Vietnam vets were anti-war) were a major political problem if the government wanted to be able to go to war again. It was necessary to discredit peace activists. There's a reason the Bush administration brought up this story during the run-up to the Gulf War; justification for war had become a circular matter of "we have to fight because our troops are there," which made elevating the status of troops to religious martyrs necessary.

Re: Purely as an outsider

The "Vietnam vets getting spat on" story has all the markings of an urban legend. I'm not convinced it ever happened outside of the movies. There's some evidence it originated in one of the Rambo movies.

Sheer luck helped prevent mid-air drone glider prang in Blighty

Re: Chute etc

Frankly, on final you're concentrating on your touchdown point; a drone collision is likely to take you by surprise before you can do much. It's not so much about energy as it is about time to react. In particular, you can't turn a glider suddenly; their large wingspans give them very slow roll rates.

The geometry really doesn't help you here, either. A drone on a collision course won't be moving in your visual field. It'll be stationary except for growing larger. And may very well be against a cluttered background of trees.

Other than the startle factor, though, in the pattern is probably one of the better places to hit a drone; you're moving relatively slowly, and you're close enough to the field that damage to the nose or canopy that lowers your glide ratio probably won't force you to land short.

The worst time, IMHO, would be during a typical competition finish, with gliders coming in low, heavy, and close to Vne. Maximum impact potential, and minimal time to regain control.

I think most people saying "how could it do damage?" would still be uncomfortable if a similarly sized object were chucked off an overpass at their car.

Re: adverse weather ???

I think the trick here is aerodynamic loads and impact loads are very different.

I've seen wings that were designed for +4g/-2g loads get damaged on the ground by even mildly rough handling.

That's the high tech version. The gliders I flew had wooden wings with painted fabric coverings. The fuselages were steel tube space frames, also fabric covered. This is a time-honored construction method that's reasonably light and very easy to repair, and can handle some pretty heavy aerodynamic forces. But it's not tolerant of point loads. It's entirely possible to put your thumb through the fabric if you apply force in the wrong places.

A typical example of this kind of wing construction, with the covering removed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleicher_K7#/media/File:Schleicher_K7_C-GALN_wing_recovering.jpg

The canopies in these gliders were blown plastic, maybe 1/8" thick. I saw one cracked after a pilot hit his head on it during a sharp maneuver.

Aircraft like this, while a bit crude, are very, very common still. They're actually fairly safe -- in a landing accident, most of the energy tends to be dissipated as the wooden wing structure crumples. But bird strikes have been known to cause serious damage to both plane and pilot, and I think the risk is definitely there with drones.

At last, sex trafficking brought to an end with US House vote on new internet law (Yeah, right)

Re: The House passed it?

He'll sign it if it hits his desk.

First off he doesn't actually care about the contents of legislation, only about "wins."

Secondly, anything that hurts online services hurts blue states far more than red states, and we've already seen that he likes using his position to punish states that didn't vote for him.

Thirdly, he is at heart an authoritarian, and while I'm not one of those people who thinks this law is wearing jackboots, it's definitely bookmarking them on Zappos.

Use of HTTPS among top sites is growing, but weirdly so is deprecated HTTP public key pinning

Re: You reap what you sow...

HTTPS at least ensures that if there's something unsafe, it's something I put on my site, not something inserted by the ISP or a rogue access point.

Re: I only just noticed...

I've had https up and running for a few years now on my personal server, and didn't pay anyone a thing. I used StartSSL at first, then switched to Let's Encrypt. Google, GitHub, Amazon, et al have nothing to do with it.

Super Cali's futuristic robo-cars in focus. Even though a watchdog says tech is quite atrocious

Re: I keep saying...

First the roads have to be up to spec.

In California they're having to go through and paint lines on all the roads instead of just using Bott's Dots as lane markers, for example, because the dots turned out to not be readable enough for AIs.

A street near my house was recently repaved and left with no lane markings at all for nearly a year. How's the AI going to cope with that? What about places where it snows, obliterating all the lines from view? Is everyone just going to stay home all winter?

Re: Not a good idea

I wonder if they'll follow usual call center staffing procedures, with one person responsible for a half dozen or so cars?

Re: We trust you implicitly to fail misserably

The ability to drive perfect F1 laps under computer control has already been demonstrated, under practice conditions. The sanctioning body was not amused.

Hubble Space Telescope one of 16 suffering data-scrambling sensor error

Re: Generation X

I remember hobbyists adapting low-light CCTV surveillance cameras back in the 90s. The best of those "box" type cameras with removable lenses had pretty high sensitivity. Sometimes they'd cool them with liquid nitrogen to reduce the noise level.

IBM Java CTO: Devs shouldn't have to learn Docker, K8s, 30 other things to deploy an app

Re: Why!!!

Node.js is pretty nice when developing client/server stuff using websockets, since you can work with the same socket libraries on both sides. It greatly reduces the mental gear-shifting you have to do to go back and forth between browser-side Javascript and server-side PHP.

I don't know if I'd try to write a huge, massively scaleable service in Node, but I might very well prototype one in it.

A lot of people's complaints about Node.js stability and maintainability are really complaints about npm. Nothing says you can't manage your modules manually, or nail down specific versions in npm, though. People just use it sloppily without thinking about the repercussions.

RIP, Swype: Thanks for all the sor--speec--speedy texting

Re: Familar pattern

I switched to MusicBee, which doesn't have the nostalgia value but is similarly simple and does what I need a music player to do.

Re: Familar pattern

See also the long, slow death of WinAmp.

Intel didn't tell CERTS, govs, about Meltdown and Spectre because they couldn't help fix it

Re: Specter / Meltdown were not mistakes...

I'm pretty paranoid, but I don't really buy that in this case. These security holes are a direct result of using caching and speculative execution together; they're fundamental to how the chips get the performance they do, not something that was grafted on to make them less secure. It's a bit like saying that Chevy is in a conspiracy to make me late for work because they designed cars that drive on streets and have to stop at traffic lights.

Now, if you want to complain about the management engine, you might have an argument there; it's largely superfluous to how the CPU works, and was designed so insecurely that it would almost require special effort.

Re: Note that they didn't bother with open source operating systems

The flaws can only be exploited on platforms that run untrusted code. I.e. javascript, Flash, et.al. . BSD variants see mostly server use, so are not that much affected.

IMHO the biggest risk is to shared hosting platforms, which is why Amazon was involved. This breaks down the barriers that are supposed to exist between virtual hosts. Now if you can get your VM on the same machine as a sensitive VM, you can potentially read stuff from their memory space. That's why Amazon was included, and why this has had VMware scrambling. Linux is also frequently used as a VM host. FreeBSD often runs as a guest, but is rarely used as a VM host on a commercial scale.

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Re: Note that they didn't bother with open source operating systems

OpenBSD has been included in embargoed fixes before, and slipped the changes into the codebase so users were protected on day one of the public notice.

Pretty sure their history of doing that is why they WEREN'T included. If you slip something into the code repository, people can diff it and figure out what you're up to. They don't need a commit message that says SECURITY HOLE HERE to catch on.

Kinda by definition open-source projects can't keep secrets.

Hua-no-wei! NSA, FBI, CIA bosses put Chinese mobe makers on blast

See, my calculation is that we already know the NSA passes tips on to US law enforcement, while it's unlikely the Chinese would be quite so helpful. So if my main concern is the police snooping around in what I'm doing, I'm better off with the Chinese phone.

Industrial espionage and IP theft are serious concerns for some people, and I probably wouldn't trust any phone if millions of dollars in trade secrets were on the line. But in reality that's all way above my pay grade. Hell, most of what I do at work is public record anyway.

Re: Well, duh

For me a lot of it is that high-end phones have gotten physically very large, and I prefer a phone I can work with one hand. The Chinese makes are actually bothering to keep making small-format phones with decent specs.

Re: Well, duh

Sadly, my ZTE phone has held up *way* better than my Sony phone did. Build quality on the Sony phone was pretty bad, the screen started de-bonding from the casing within a year.

Is the problem that they're worried the Chinese government has backdoored those phones? Or are they worried that *they* won't be able to backdoor them? I imagine it's a lot harder for a US agency to secretly lean on a Chinese-based company.

On the whole I think I'd rather have the Chinese government spying on me than my own government.

Farewell, Android Pay. We hardly tapped you

Huh. I've rarely used contactless payments, because the contactless receivers always seem to be broken or not supported by the merchant's software. Also, when AmEx issued me a card with a chip a couple years ago, they removed the contactless feature. Since it was a transparent card I could see pretty clearly that this was a physical interference issue, i.e. the contact chip went in the same place that the contactless one used to. From that I got the impression it was a dying technology, but maybe that's only true in the US.

A few states have laws banning credit card surcharges, but in most places it was the merchant agreement, not the law, that forbid surcharges. In 2012 Visa lost a major court case and lost the ability to enforce that clause.

In my experience it's very common for gas stations to surcharge credit card users, although they describe it as a cash discount. (The discounted price is usually the one they display on the sign, however.)

Re: What could possibly...?

I always check for skimmers on the gas pumps - in case you haven't figured it out already, I'm a bit on the paranoid side - and I've turned a couple of them over to the police.

In the places I've lived the most common place for a skimmer was *inside* the pump, wired to the pump's own mag stripe reader. Thieves would either get the help of an insider at the station, or have duplicate keys to open the access doors.

Re: What could possibly...?

Orv, the problem with the bank refund is that it's the sellers money the bank is taking. The crook still got the goods. Crime pays.

Their fault for accepting a stolen card number. This is as it should be. There need to be incentives for both banks and merchants to exercise basic care, instead of pushing all the consequences onto the consumer.

I tried Android Pay three or four years ago. It worked but it really confused cashiers, and it was awkward and embarrassing to hold up the line while I explained, so I went back to just using my cards.

I have the circular problem of always only having $20s, because I rarely pay cash for things, and I feel like it's rude to make the cashier make change for a $20 when I'm buying something small...

Re: What could possibly...?

To me identity theft and payment details are very different things.

Identity theft is serious because they can create new accounts I don't know about, and that's hard to resolve. Account numbers, likewise, I try to guard a bit (because you can do a bank draft with them.)

But credit card numbers? I long ago stopped freaking out about those. If my number gets stolen I flag the transaction, the bank refunds it, and they send me a new card with a different number. It's a minor hassle. The threat model doesn't usually involve anything PC-related, either; around here it's mostly skimmers on card-enabled gas pumps.

Coinbase, Worldpay, Visa play blame game after dosh vanishes from crypto-fans' pockets

Re: Unfortunately...

Interesting. This doesn't seem to be American Express's policy, at least in the US. I had a hotel double-charge my card once and they took care of it, even though I'd given the hotel my card info.

Farts away! Plane makes unscheduled stop after man won't stop guffing

Re: Low pressure cabin...

Reminds me that I once had a makeshift server room in a building with no A/C. To cope with heat the rack had a massive ARU mounted on it, with three centrifugal blowers, that sucked hot air out the back of the rack and dumped it outside via a couple of 8" flexible ducts. For make-up air there was a frame in an adjacent window that held a couple of pleated furnace filters. The building had steam heat, so there were no other ventilation openings. The result was I could tell when the filters were getting clogged by how much force it took to open the door.

Re: Its not like you can escape

In fact modern FAA regs require that any failure not result in exposing passengers to a cabin altitude above 40,000 feet for any length of time. That pretty effectively puts a 40,000 foot ceiling on passenger jet operation. There are exemptions, though; I think the A380 has one.

Facial recognition software easily IDs white men, but error rates soar for black women

One of the tricky things about that is, because a lot of what we "see" is interpolated by our brains, we're kind of fooled into thinking our eyes are much more reliable sources of information than they actually are.

One interesting example is a friend of mine who has migraine headaches that come with blind spots in his vision. He said until a blind spot covers about a third of his central visual field, he can't see it directly; the brain fills in what it thinks should be there, and he ends up looking at objects and not seeing them, or seeing blank pages where there should be text. There's a threshold beyond which the brain can no longer patch things over, and then he sees the blind spot as a shimmery area.

As the joke goes, any engineer who built a camera as bad as the human eye would be fired...although I think we'd cut them a lot of slack if they'd built it out of jelly and meat.

Re: Is spreading

If the facial recognition is so much more poor with darker skins, then mainly white "persons of interest" will get flagged up by facial recog.

That depends on whether the failures are false positives or false negatives. It could be the software will decide all black people look suspiciously like its database of perps.

Re: Really

A lot of the problem there is you'd really have to be clear on what the intention of the data was. "People who use male pronouns," "people with an M on their driver's license", "people with a Y chromosome," "people with high testosterone levels," and "people with a penis" are sets that do not entirely overlap, but we often act like they do. As a result we tend to ask the wrong questions and get not very consistent results.

It's also worth noting that even given a set of only cisgendered people, humans do not guess gender 100% correctly. I've seen studies that showed faces with more contrast were considered more feminine, which suggests that our mental algorithms are skewed by our "training set," so to speak, having a lot of women wearing makeup in it.

+1 for referencing a show that should have gotten more attention than it did.

Re: So facial recog is not reliable for non-white skin

Blacks get subjected far more than whites to unjustified police contact (for example, "driving while black" really is a thing...

I remember being somewhat startled to find out that every black person I knew had a story about being pulled over and harassed by the cops for no reason other than being black and driving a car. And these were well-off professionals.

Surely it's absolutely not racist since the one thing it can't do is discriminate?

That's a bit like saying that there's no problem with racial minorities being shot by police, because guns can't see skin color.

Computer software can't help but reflect the biases present in the data sets it's trained with (AI), or validated against (manually coded algorithms.) One of the dangers here is that computers will become a way to codify bias in a socially acceptable, plausibly deniable way. "It's not me, it's the computer."

From July, Chrome will name and shame insecure HTTP websites

Re: I need a HTTP page to force a redirect to my corporate wifi access

Does it even necessarily have to be a valid HTTP page? In my experience anything with a DNS entry is usually good enough for the sign-in hijack.

These days most OS's I use will automatically detect that hijacking is happening, and pop up a window with the sign-in page, anyway. I only rarely have to trigger them manually. We really need a better system for this, though.