* Posts by ExampleOne

241 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jun 2017

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Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

ExampleOne

Re: I agree with the majority of the article...

It may be an unpopular stance, and not what you want to hear, but if you are that heavily invested in photoshop and it is a business tool for you, probably your best and only viable option is to pony up the money to Adobe.

Which is just the way Adobe like it. The writing was on the wall about this when they first introduced their subscription licenses!

Linux rolls out the welcome mat for Microsoft's Copilot key

ExampleOne

Re: Microsoft makes keyboards?

In general, MS peripherals are, or were, pretty good. Mostly terribly boring, but that is what made them so good.

I have even heard people making informed defence of some of their mobile hardware. The problem here almost always was the software!

Intel sued again over struggling foundry business

ExampleOne

Re: "sued yet again by shareholders"

The article seems to imply, in this case, they are suing the board rather than the company with the proceeds going to the company. This seems a reasonable scenario to allow.

Windows 11 market share falls despite Microsoft ad blitz

ExampleOne

SteamOS?

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 struggles to take off

ExampleOne

“Promoted” being the most important part of that comment regarding scaling. When I was working with AWS, the documentation made clear that auto scaling measured response time in minutes or tens of minutes, not seconds or milliseconds.

Blood boffins build billions of nanobots to battle brain aneurysms without surgery

ExampleOne

Surely tumour targeting anti-cancer drugs would also be a major application of this type of technology?

Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model?

ExampleOne

McKinsey says 70 percent of companies will deploy some sort of AI tech by 2030

To be honest, I am surprised they don't already.

That said, my definition of AI tech includes statistical pattern recognisers that make decisions which are NOT LLMs. Like SpamAssassin.

So the real question is "What do we mean by AI?" Does it include spam filtering systems? How about search engines? Is spell check an AI function? What about predictive typing? Even basic autocorrect has a modicum of AI to it. Most SatNav routing programs today have AI components.

The thing about good and successful AI products is they don't tend to need to advertise the fact they are AI, because they are so much better at solving whatever problem we buy them for we don't care!

Windows 11 Insider preview brings new Sandbox features and fatter FAT32

ExampleOne

So they finally managed to remove the 16bit limits from the FAT creation code?!

This means that many older devices using external can benefit from modern cards even without vfat support, so long as they have a proper 32 bit FAT implementation. I have a camera that meets that criteria.

EU gave CrowdStrike the keys to the Windows kernel, claims Microsoft

ExampleOne

Depends on the checksum you use, but the md5sum of zero is NOT zero.

$ md5sum <(echo 0)

897316929176464ebc9ad085f31e7284 /dev/fd/63

Game dev accuses Intel of selling ‘defective’ Raptor Lake CPUs

ExampleOne

Re: Can't help feeling

The article seems to be saying it allows the CPU to ask for that, not that it is putting that through the CPU unasked.

If this is correct, than I think it is safe to say the CPU is defective. I do wonder if OEM systems exhibit the same behaviour though, because if they do, this would provide a very obvious avenue to really hurt the OEMs by burning out the CPUs while under warranty.

Local councils struggle with ill-fitting software despite spending billions with suppliers

ExampleOne

Re: Problems and solutions not welcome

DLUHC could (and should) make this happen by offering the budget for the resources to define the process - in return for a cast iron agreement to adopt them from participating councils. This won't be easy or cheap, but nationally there's no excuse for hundreds of completely different systems and processes.

Most councils will see this as a recipe for getting forced onto a solution that is not fit for purpose and would run a mile from it. "Cast iron agreement to adopt" an unknown solution is an incredibly risky commitment to give, even if they actually trust the DLUHC.

The way Apple, Alphabet implemented DMA rules 'seems to be at odds' with law

ExampleOne

I think they already have been warned, what we are seeing is the start of the process of actually fining them. A process that is going to end up in a court room, so they need to do their best to make it legally watertight.

EU-turn! Now Apple says it won't banish Home Screen web apps in Europe

ExampleOne

Re: "We have received requests"

Which is to be expected if they have genuinely passed IP68 certification testing, but in no way invalidates the contradiction between claiming waterproof status while excluding water damage from the warranty.

ExampleOne

Re: "We have received requests"

They claim IP68 in the marketing material, in the small print they exclude water damage. (Or did when I read it a year ago)

So they just drop the marketing material in the EU and move on.

Meta says risk of account theft after phone number recycling isn't its problem to solve

ExampleOne

Setting aside the questions around SMS 2FA (which I don't think is the core of the problem here), the question is "Who is responsible for a user maintaining correct contact details?".

As I see it, the complaint seems to be Meta provided the password reset details to the contact details the user asked them to provide them to. Why can Meta be held liable if the user fails to update those contact details? I am pretty sure we have seen similar stories when domain names have been recycled, and the new owner of the domain started receiving email for the previous owner. I know I still receive post for previous residents of my current home, some of whom last lived here over 20 years ago!

ANZ Bank test drives GitHub Copilot – and finds AI does give a helping hand

ExampleOne

It won’t be a popular point, but… if the reported gain in productivity of 40% is correct, this is the single best investment they could make.

Doing some basic math, $39 per user per month is break even for a developer being paid $1000 a month if it gives a 4% improvement in productivity. They are claiming a productivity boost 10x that. Though it isn’t mentioned, I suspect they are using developers paid a lot more than $1000 a month.

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

ExampleOne

Re: Screw the Hoi Polloi!

Run a cable across the pavement? So who is liable when someone trips over the cable? We may not like the reality we live in with ambulance chasing lawyers, but it is a bad idea to ignore it when formulating national policy.

Ok, so you dealt with the lawyers… how about the copper thieves who come down the street in the middle of the night and steal all the cables?

Or the pram pushers trying to push a pram along that pavement? Are we really convicnced that making pushing prams and pushchairs difficult is really a great policy?

Epic decision sees jury find Google's Play store is illegal monopoly

ExampleOne

Re: confused

They lost against Apple because the judge ruled that the iPhone App Store was not a monopoly because the market should be defined as all smartphones.

The jury here have decided that Google Play Store is a monopoly, which at least implies they disagree with the Apple case judge on the question of how the market is defined.

Will anybody save Linux on Itanium? Absolutely not

ExampleOne

Re: like video games localization

Is a wine/proton port a "native port"? I suspect for the ideologues, it isn't.

My take is that an officially supported wine/proton port is effectively a native linux port of the game, so long as the developer is willing to commit to addressing issues that arise only on wine/proton. I don't dictate the game engine, why should I refuse to accept a usable stable set of libraries over the API they speak?

In quest to defeat Euro red-tape, Apple said it had three Safari browsers – not one

ExampleOne

Re: The title is no longer required.

Except the European Commission, by entering Apples own marketing material, turn this argument into “if it works, you face prosecution across the EU (and beyond) for false advertising”. Add to that, anyone who bought an Apple device since the false advertising now has a case against Apple as well.

So yes, there may be a 1 in 1000 chance it works, which is better than a 0 in 1000 chance, but that only holds if you ignore the risk of it backfiring.

This looks a spectacularly silly argument to advance.

Qualcomm and Iridium's satellite link-up loses signal

ExampleOne

Re: Translation

Yes, for a tiny minority of people, this is a feature worth paying a premium for. But it is a tiny minority. Most phone OEMs probably would prefer to wait for a working standards based solution than invest any effort into integrating a solution the overwhelming majority of their customer base don’t have care about. Once the working standards based solution arrives, they do the work, and they can be reasonably confident that work won’t be hostage to a single vendor.

Microsoft does not want ValueLicensing CEO anywhere near its confidentiality ring

ExampleOne

Re: MS is a monopoly

The depends on how the market is defined.

The fact someone can choose to opt out of a market completely does not mean that market can't be a monopoly.

Microsoft makes some certification exams open book

ExampleOne

I strongly agree with this, for one simple reason: "How do you do X?" questions, unless they are trivia, should really be answered "I google to find the correct process in the official docs, and follow them"

A poster child for this I have been asked in an interview was "How do you restore an Active Directory backup with the entire computer network offline?" As an interviewer, I would be seriously worried by any candidate who could answer that correctly and accurately in detail without prompts!

After years of fighting Right to Repair, Apple U-turns-ish in California

ExampleOne

Does not require that manufactures allow repair shops to disable security features

So, basically, if Apple implement "security features" to prevent non-Apple parts working, repair shops would not be allowed to disable those features, and would have to use Apple parts, at whatever excessive price Apple charge?

Focuses on manufacturer obligations to support authorized repair channels

Who authorizes "authorized repair channels"?

Call me cynical, but surely those two caveats basically neuter the entire proposal?

Hallucinating ChatGPT finds a role playing Dungeons & Dragons

ExampleOne

Interestingly this was my first thought for a good application of chatgpt, with a human DM keeping factual statements correct.

The hallucinations aren’t a problem in NPC conversations, because the NPC could just be wrong!

ExampleOne

it's hard to wrangle but the sodding thing goes off in some wild directions, sometimes.

Only sometimes? So it is marginally more predictable than a human player?

80% of execs regret calling employees back to the office

ExampleOne

Overall, only 9 percent of those surveyed have moved away and not subsequently returned, it said.

Given how long moving typically takes, and the fact that many people won’t have really believed that they would never have to come back to the office, isn’t 9% a fairly high number to have actually moved three years on?

Sarah Silverman, novelists sue OpenAI for scraping their books to train ChatGPT

ExampleOne

Re: OED

Transformative, possibly, but surely all the LLM output is derivative work of the training corpus?

Former Twitter employees accuse it of holding up 891 arbitrations

ExampleOne

The company tried to insist on arbitration, won, and got upset when the class retaliated by using an automatic arbitration filing system.

The company then went to court to try and set aside the enforced arbitration process in favour of a class action. The judge was not amused.

Supreme Court says Genius' song lyric copying claim against Google wasn't smart

ExampleOne

While I completely accept they should not be allowed to enforce copyright they don't own, surely they have a copyright on their presentation of the lyrics: In this case, surely there is a "spark of creativity" to the "REDHANDED" morse code message which would be potentially worthy of copyright protection.

I mean, if a dictionary (or API!) is copyrightable because the presentation of the content has a "spark of creativity" to it, I'm failing to see how a hidden message in a bit stream is not.

In this case, that could probably be dismissed as insufficient to be protected.

Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams

ExampleOne

The potential problem is not the with-holding the code, it's terminating subscription agreements for of end users who exercise their GPL rights. This is basically exactly the same legal argument advanced by GRSec, and it was called out as GPL violation then. Why is it not being called out the same now? Or were all the claims then FUD?

Truthfully until this particular model is legislated, we won't know if it breaches the GPL. If it IS legislated, and it DOES breach the GPL, RH and IBM are in a massive world of pain, as anyone who contributed anything to any GPL component of RHEL would have standing to sue. Including Oracle and Microsoft. Essentially, this is potentially a massive gift to those opposed to Linux.

ExampleOne

Doesn’t this mean Red Hat are potentially getting sued for GPL violation by Oracle? I mean, Oracle contribute to the Linux kernel so should have standing?

These Microsoft Office security signatures are 'practically worthless'

ExampleOne

Microsoft, they claim, acknowledged the findings and awarded a bug bounty, but "has decided that the vulnerabilities do not require immediate attention."

Perhaps MS telemetry tells MS that no one actually uses the signing functionality in OOXML documents anyway?

I have seen "password protected" documents from time to time, but never a digitally signed one. Once digital signatures are involved, IME, it's always been PDFs.

Google HR hounds threaten 'next steps' for slackers not coming in 3 days a week

ExampleOne

Re: It's in the employment contract

It does happen.

I worked for a company that had an office move constrained by staff pointing out that moving office was a material change to their contracts.

Google changes email authentication after spoof shows a bad delivery for UPS

ExampleOne

Re: Bug/Vulnerability or just bad implementation?

But Google should not be trusting the message headers.

In the scenario you outline, MS have allowed an account to relay for a sender domain that is not validated to the account. This would be a problem in O365, as it allows any customer to masquerade as any other customer!

Now we can argue that Google should have rejected because the DKIM signing key was wrong, but that is a problem with DMARC or BIMI, but if the policy is “one of two”, you can’t fault Google for correctly applying a one of two policy.

ExampleOne

Re: Bug/Vulnerability or just bad implementation?

What happened in Office 365? It sounds like ups.com currently, or at some point, used Office 365 as a mail host leading to Office 365 SPF records. Any Office 365 customer would be able to send from the same servers. This is not a flaw in SPF so much as a scenario it simply was never designed to deal with.

How the bad actors were able to set up to send from ups.com through office 365 is probably a more interesting question.

Elon Musk hit with insider trading claims over his Dogecoin crypto-hype

ExampleOne

Re: Wouldn't this require

While the law of the land might not, in the U.K. at least it would probably fall foul of the FCA rules of conduct, especially if he is lying to do so.

ExampleOne

It is only insider trading if he knew his actions in advance and planned for them.

AI, extinction, nuclear war, pandemics ... That's expert open letter bingo

ExampleOne

Call me cynical, but firms who have already developed functioning AI products are calling for AI development to be regulated? Is this a case of pulling the ladder up behind them to ensure no one else can compete?

Subpoenaed PyPI says bye-bye to as much IP address data as it can

ExampleOne

Re: Salting IP addresses

That was pretty much my thought. 32 bits of meaningful information, less a bunch of IP addresses that will never be seen.

IPv6 address hashing might be more useful, but how much of their user base are IPv6 users?

Leaked Kyndryl files show 55 was average age of laid-off US workers

ExampleOne

Re: Unfortunately...

> An older engineer (rightly or wrongly) will always be more likely to push back against progress.

I am going to have to take issue with this. A good engineer doesn’t push back against progress.

A more experienced engineer is more likely to question “fad of the day” hype, which is not the same thing!

Exhibit 3,021: Millions wasted on US govt IT due to poor oversight, audit finds

ExampleOne

Did you miss I had reduced the total budget from 17.4 billion to account for that 5/48 factor?

ExampleOne

So, out of what? 1.74 billion dollars of spend analysed, 25 million dollars was wasted? That doesn’t sound that unreasonable actually.

Brexit Britain looks to French company to save crumbling borders and immigration tech

ExampleOne

Well, they can hardly continue to blame Brussels now we have left, so they need a new excuse to replace the one they used for the last 40 years.

Microsoft disarms push notification bombers with number matching in Authenticator

ExampleOne

If the problem is bad actors spamming users with authentication requests till they approve the access, why not implement rate limiting on the accounts?

Guy rejects top photo prize after revealing snap was actually made using AI

ExampleOne

Given the origin of the term ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography#Etymology ), I am dubious about claims the AI images are any less photography than most camera captured, human developed and edited images are.

Google again accused of willfully destroying evidence in Android antitrust battle

ExampleOne

What does The determination of an appropriate non-monetary sanction requires further proceedings. translate to? Is that they are getting a slap on the wrist, or is it code for something more severe than a straight default judgement? Interestingly, the judge appears to leave open the possibility of a default judgement once discovery is complete!

As I understand it, the conduct the judge has entered a ruling of fact over is covered under the US criminal code in the Obstruction of Justice section.

FOSS could be an unintended victim of EU crusade to make software more secure

ExampleOne

Re: Sorry but where is the problem?

Best of your knowledge? Are you really sure you want to incentivise finding the worst possible certified auditors?

‘Mother of Internet’ Radia Perlman argues for centralized infrastructure

ExampleOne

So, basically, an Assassins Guild?

Microsoft delays controversial ban on paid-for open source, WebKit in app store

ExampleOne

Re: Free as in freedom

receiving code that misleads about its origins

Actually, doing that for financial gain may be sufficient to count as criminal fraud in some jurisdictions.

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