Posts by vtcodger

UK government gives Automated Lane Keeping Systems the green light for use on motorways

Re: The technology could create around 38,000 new jobs...

I think maybe automated driving on known expressways just might be doable. Get in the right hand lane. Stay there. Maintain a safe distance from whatever is in front of you. Don't exceed the speed limit. And, above all, DON'T HIT ANYTHING. All of that can probably be done with today's technology. Albeit barely.

What is tricky is detecting people, wild animals, livestock, "stuff", snow, sand, vegetation, construction, accidents, water, other liquids, other liquids--burning, etc, etc, etc in the right of way and handling them appropriately and non-lethally. Maybe that's somehow doable, but it is hard to see quite how. Whatever is done, it has to be reliable and shouldn't result in 50km long traffic jams when your vehicle encounters its first tumbleweeds, insect swarms, or escaped kangaroos.

I don't know how to do that. I don't think anyone does.

Re: Naysayer

:unless it was blue."

Or an emergency vehicle covered with flashing lights ... or maybe a bridge abutment. Tesla's record for obstacle detection seems a bit spotty.

Re: Naysayer

Indeed. Rear view cameras and GPS are genuinely useful. But they can be retrofitted inexpensively. I've been doing that to our cars for a couple of decades. ABS is probably a good idea if you don't drive much on unpaved roads and don't have to deal with ice and snow four or five months of the year. The rest of the junk (ESC et al) mostly seems to fall into the "Now You Have Two Problems" category.

I don't expect that automated driving technology will be fully sorted out for decades. I'd prefer that someone else does the sorting.

Re: The technology could create around 38,000 new jobs...

38000 jobs? Most likely in the collision damage repair, emergency medical services, and mortuary sectors?

A system that beeps at the driver when he/she drifts out of lane or gets too close to the vehicle in front might be a good idea. Worth trying I think. (But with an off/on switch please, if you don't mind.) The notion that computer technology in its current state can safely steer a vehicle in any but the most carefully controlled situations is nuts.

48 ways you can avoid file-scrambling, data-stealing miscreants – or so says the Ransomware Task Force

Re: Ransomware........

Maybe preventing bad guys running stuff on your network might be a better target for remediation

If you can figure out how to do that, a fortune awaits you. So far as I can see, not connecting your computer(s) to a network -- ever -- is the only known method of preventing all malware attacks. And even THAT may not be sufficient if you insist on inputting "data" to your computer(s).

Microsoft joins Bytecode Alliance to advance WebAssembly – aka the thing that lets you run compiled C/C++/Rust code in browsers

Re: The first web assembly library is out!

Sure, sure ... but can it tinker with your filesystems or insert keystrokes via the keyboard driver? Sounds like there's still work to be done before it can claim to be the perfect malware vector.

Traffic lights, who needs 'em? Lucky Kentucky residents up in arms over first roundabout

Re: Boston?

Roads were labeled by route numbers - exclusively. No destinations, sometimes not even a direction ...

On top of which, even in following decades, there are places on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River opposite NYC where so many numbered routes merge into a single stretch of expressway that there isn't room on the signs for all the route numbers. Thus you end up with the GPS telling you to take route N in 200 feet and you have no information whatsoever as to whether N is the right fork or the left fork. This is not especially fun.

Clearly, you've never driven in Boston. Not only do they not have signs that tell you where roads go, they have street signs that somehow never reveal the name of any street that you'd be likely to use. My understanding is that they feel that if you don't know where you are and where you are going, you don't belong there.

China claims it has stolen a march on 6G with colossal patent portfolio

Our house, our rules

Given China's long standing and utter disdain for intellectual property rights, why should anyone here give two hoots about patents held out there too?

It's we in the West who put our faith in "Intellectual Property". The Chinese are surely well aware that the wheels started to come off the patent system in the late 19th century and that it is now a vast swamp of (intentionally) incomprehensible documentation presided over by hordes of vicious and insatiable lawyers.

The Chinese want to sell to us stuff. A lot of stuff. Patents are one of the things they will need. So they have patents (in our system BTW). Lots of patents apparently. quelle surprise

6G

6G will be wonderful! The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together. And all the cops will have wooden legs. And the bulldogs all will have rubber teeth. And the hens will lay soft-boiled eggs. And the farmers' trees will be full of fruit

And yes, there will be hookers. And blackjack.

Toyota buys Lyft’s autonomous car group for $550m

What's an ePalette?

Apparently it is a campus/airport shuttle (or delivery) vehicle with virtually no road clearance, capable of traveling up to 19kph (12mph). It looks and specs like what I think a reasonable person would hope an early autonomous vehicle might look like. Most conscious vertebrates should be able to elude it if turns rogue. Pictures at https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/29933371.html

JavaScript developers left in the dark after DroidScript software shut down by Google over ad fraud allegations

Re: Kafkaesque

Franz Kafka lived a century too early. From the IMDb review of The Castle.

"A land surveyor is summoned to a village to work, yet finds that nobody knows who sent for him. As he tries to understand what is happening, he is blocked at every turn by bureaucratic Kafkaesque obstacles and officials."

Perhaps it is time for a new term -- "Googlesk"

Report: World's population of developers expands, JavaScript reigns, C# overtakes PHP

Doom

The world has more developers than ever, a new SlashData survey has reported - with 1.4 million more JavaScript developers than six months ago

More Javascript? Human civilization (assuming such exists) clearly is doomed.

GCHQ boss warns China can rewrite 'the global operating system' in its own authoritarian image

Re: Who are they addressing?

There is no such thing as a global operating system.

And in any case every multiuser OS I've ever seen has, of necessity, at least one admin account that can do pretty much whatever it damn well pleases. One account to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. How much more authoritarian can you get?

And, as far as digital currencies are concerned, ... The only reason for these are for government surveillance.

Seems to me that there is a use case for an anonymous digital currency for small transactions. You wave your "wallet" (whatever it's physical form) at a parking meter or chewing gum dispenser and a small amount of value moves from your possession to someone else's in return for a few minutes of parking or a pack of gum. Doesn't require one to have tokens (coins) of the proper dimensions and mass or to physically transfer a token. Can it be done? I haven't the slightest.

But if it can be/is done, I doubt it will require blockchain.

And I imagine that it'll be anonymous because tracking who spent how much for what for small transactions will almost certainly be more trouble than it is worth.

Emotet malware self-destructs after cops deliver time-bomb DLL to infected Windows PCs

Re: Bad-Good

Sure is a good thing that the Emotet folks didn't leave a doomsday device behind that will brick the affected devices a few after their DLL is removed. They wouldn't do a thing like that ... right? That'd be uncivil.

Perhaps they will just be content to use the bogus admin account they installed last year when they had control of the machine.

My point in case it isn't clear. This security thing is a contest. And the black-hatted guys aren't stupid. It might be a good idea to be cautious about taking possibly premature victory laps.

Watchdog 'enables Tesla Autopilot' with string, some weight, a seat belt ... and no actual human at the wheel

Re: Hmm ...

Ultimately you can't protect people from themselves.

True. But the underlying issue would seem to be that of protecting innocent bystanders from the excesses of inept/unlucky/overwhelmed system designers, demented marketeers, partying Texans late on Saturday night, and similar menaces.

What I read suggests that ALL automatic driving and current collision avoidance systems (except perhaps Waymo's) are not yet ready for prime time. Too many edge cases. Too much stuff that isn't quite right yet. And that's when used as intended. Much less when bypassed. Yet those systems are being advertised, sold, and, inevitably, abused.

May I suggest that it's past time to impose adult supervision on vehicle automatic control systems? Heavy vehicles traveling at high speed on public highways are an inappropriate venue for "move fast, break things", "Worked once - ship it. We'll fix the bugs in production" and similar craziness.

==== A quote that seems appropriate ==

"... the fact is, free markets don't provide safety. Only regulation does that. You want safe food, you better have inspectors. You want safe water, you better have an EPA. You want a safe stock market, you better have the SEC. And you want safe airlines, you better regulate them, too." M Crichton, Airframe,1996

Ah, you know what? Keep your crappy space station, we're gonna try to make our own, Russia tells world

Re: Vanity projects..

Not commercially viable? The same could be said of the ISS dontcha think? BTW, a significant part of the ISS is owned and operated by Russia. How much? It's surprisingly hard to find a number. The best I could find is Wikipedia $12B from Russia from a total cost that might (or might not) be around $150B. (2015 numbers?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#Cost

Re: Unmanned space station == satellite?

"Not permanently manned" Very likely means like Skylab in the 1970s. When you have enough worthy experiments collected to justify the trip, you send a crew up for a few weeks or months to occupy it, run the experiments, and shut it down again. That actually might be cheaper than paying the ongoing costs of a permanent presence in space on the ISS.

Radiation? I dunno. I suspect the problem comes from the Russian's probably entirely reasonable desire to be able to observe the northern portions of their country from space. The ISS 51 degree inclination orbit wouldn't allow that. Their own space station probably would. I don't fully understand the mechanics of how the Earth's magnetic field protects against radiation but my very crude mental image suggests that radiation protection might be a problem at high geomagnetic latitudes -- which would presumably be where they would like to visit?

iPhone XR caught fire after getting trapped in airline passenger's seat

"The phone exists in a superposition of lost and found states?"

A phone in a superposition of lost and found states can emit foul smelling smoke? Could this observation be the long sought after key to truly understanding quantum mechanics?

"Could be"

There's pretty good article on the state of the investigation as of Tuesday at Ars Technica. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/04/elon-musk-denies-autopilot-was-active-before-deadly-crash-in-texas/ Their take away It's a confusing situation where all possible explanations seem rather unlikely.

BTW, the police seem (or at least seemed two days ago) quite certain that the driver's seat was empty and both passengers were belted in. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/04/cops-almost-99-9-sure-tesla-had-no-one-at-the-wheel-before-deadly-crash/

The most plausible explanation based on the "facts" at hand would seem to be that there was a third entity driving the vehicle who was teleported to safety just before impact.

I doubt we'll have to wait for an official report. That may take months or years. But we certainly would seem to need more complete/more accurate data.

'There was no one driving that vehicle': Texas cops suspect Autopilot involved after two men killed in Tesla crash

The List

I reckon we can now add trees to the rather lengthy list of large immovable or minimally movable objects Tesla's electronics have trouble distinguishing. By my count, the list includes fire trucks, police cars, bridge abutments, and semi-trailers. Have I missed anything?

Brit authorities could legally do an FBI and scrub malware from compromised boxen without your knowledge

Fasten your seatbelts

Given the dismal state of internet security and the fact that has become clear in recent months that it's wall to wall crackpots out there, it's not too hard to imagine a digital threat from some malicious agent(s) that needs to be dealt with **NOW** not six weeks from next Thursday. So, yes, the government probably needs to be able to step in and fix things sometimes. Can/will they abuse/botch that intervention sometimes? Probably.

I don't think we've been told why the FBI felt they had to act immediately. They probably had reasons. Maybe good reasons. Or not. At least they got a court order. So they probably had at least a plausible justification.

What to do about all this. I haven't the slightest. Neither, I suspect does anyone else. It's a serious issue I think. But it's not even in the top ten problems I think I see looming in this shiny new digital universe.

It's going to be a bumpy night.

India appoints ‘IP Guru’ to push nation towards IPv6

Re: Time to give up on IPv6?

Probably no reason to give up on IPv6. But it should be pretty obvious by now that there is a LOT of resistance to implementing it. Could be there are reasons for that. Might be time to consider plan B which likely involves seamless dual stacks and "one-click" disabling of anything remotely resembling the obviously unsecurable Internet of Things.

To have one floppy failure is unlucky. To have 20 implies evil magic or a very silly user

Re: Reminds me of the "my PC's cup holder is broken"

The setting: A rural elementary school. The library

Six year old pushes cdrom button. Tray slides out. Six year old digs chocolate chip cookie out of lunch bag. Places it in tray. Pushes button again. Computer eats cookie while making odd noises. Six year old entertained. Librarian outraged.

I thought the incident showed a certain amount of commendable initiative. Don't recall if I was able to salvage the cdrom drive. Probably not. Quite a few non-standardized fragile plastic parts in those things. The school went through a fair number of them every year even when used properly.

"a photocopy of a floppy disk."

or, sometimes, a FAX rather than a photocopy.

Microsoft OneDrive for Windows 7 drives off a cliff for business users

Re: Is Win10 stable yet?

I need stability, I need reliability. I need my OS to just work & keep working.

Sounds to me like you are a 19th century man somehow trapped in a 21st century world.

Docking £500k commission from top SAS salesman was perfectly legal, rules judge

Let's try this ...

How about we capriciously and arbitrarily hold back Judge Holmes' salary for a few years and see if his views on fair and equitable treatment are altered?

Intel offers to produce car chips for automakers stalled by ongoing semiconductor supply drought

Re: It’s our fault

"Back to tinfoil hat land for me."

Tinfoil seems kind of low tech. What sort of processor does it use? What's its battery life? It's memory footprint? Is there an OSS version?

Come on man. It's 2021. Surely we can do better than century old technology.

Re: Meanwhile at the trough

its going to have to be more fabs since the current ones are all full...

Can Intel or anyone else build a new fab in 6 to 9 months? That's 185-275 days from deciding to build to draw up plans, acquire permits, plumb water supplies, order and install equipment, order supplies (raw silicon? chemicals, etc) hire and train staff, etc,etc,etc.

I remember visiting a fab once to fix someone's modem. There was a line of squirrel-cage blowers each the size or a suburban garage in the parking lot presumably awaiting installation. I'm pretty sure that huge air blowers are NOT something one orders on Amazon and gets delivered overnight. Acquiring stuff like that probably requires months of lead time and for all I know they are built up on site from parts as I suspect that delivery by road or rail is also a problem.

Meanwhile at the trough

So Intel is leading the hogs to feed at the federal trough. Fair enough.

One question though. I don't know a lot about semiconductor fabs, but I'm pretty sure that they are complex factories with a lot of special tooling and process unique support procedures and equipment. Does anyone who is more familiar with fabs and their workings think that 6 to 9 months is or is not enough time to repurpose one or more existing fab facility(ies) to making automobile chips?

And are these new chips going to be identical to the old ones? Functional equivalents? Pretty much the same with only a few firmware tweaks needed? Something else?

And what about whatever said fab used to make? Is that stuff then going to be in short supply?

So how's .NET 6 coming along? Oh wow, Microsoft's multi-platform framework now includes... Windows

Re: Native look and Feel

"You need a different GUI for phones, big tablets ...,desktop"

Amen Brother!!! The industry has spent 20 years proving this. Can we just acknowledge that reality, design for it, and move on?

Beijing steps on Alibaba's Ant Group by forcing it to submit to same regulation as banks

Re: Time to apply the duck test

I was going to say much the same thing. As I understand it, PayPal is already treated like a bank in Europe. Now China as well?

Not being willing to hand over my financial details to an unregulated bank (and especially one with a long standing reputation for high-handed conduct) I don't use PayPal. That's kind of a problem as most North American vendors seem to believe that nothing could possibly go wrong as long as PayPal is available and not too expensive.

I realize that China bashing is the motif dejure, but perhaps we Americans could lease a few Chinese regulators for a while. Maybe we could pretend they are Japanese or slightly odd looking Italian consultants.

UK's National Rail backs down from greyscale website tribute to Prince Phil after visually impaired users complain

Why?

I understand why it didn't occur to them that greyscale might be hard for some users to read. Could happen to any of us I think. But why did they not, once informed, simply add a conspicuous header that says "OUR WEBSITE IS TEMPORARILY RENDERED IN GREY IN TRIBUTE TO OUR DEPARTED PRINCE PHILIP. IF YOU NEED THE COLOR VERSION, CLICK HERE" ?

Of course, it would help if clicking actually switched to the color version.

SpaceX's Starlink: Overhyped and underpowered to meet broadband needs of Rural America, say analysts

Re: They will be competing with fixed 5G, not 1.5 Mb rural DSL

The satellites don't stop working just because they aren't over the US (or Canada?). In point of fact, anyplace on the planet between roughly 54S and 54N should have continuous coverage. That's roughly all the seriously inhabited parts of the planet except Alaska, Northern Europe and much of Russia. There may be ground station and frequency band allocation complications, but at least in concept, Elon should be able to sell his service to most of humanity. And that's hopefully without impacting service in the US.

Limited resource

It's Musky, so of course it's overhyped. But I'm extremely skeptical that the average rural household actually needs 2-plus Mbps per second bandwidth just to watch some TV and support some work activities. Won't do 4K video? So what? Maybe rural users have to settle for moderate resolution. Or download the HiRes stuff in the middle of the night and view later. And at least the latency should be tolerable for most users.

You've got a resource limited by availability. Try allocating it intelligently (for a change). I know. I know. Applying intelligence isn't how we do things in this best of all possible worlds. But perhaps if we tried it, we'd find that it doesn't work all that badly.

How do we stamp out the ransomware business model? Ban insurance payouts for one, says ex-GCHQ director

Re: We have created this mess for ourselves

You're dead right and upvoted accordingly.

Internet security is a difficult problem and ultimately there may be no very satisfactory answers to many of its problems. But today at least, many/most of our problems are due to ignoring warnings that in the long run X is a terrible idea and you'll wish you hadn't implemented it.

Re: How hard is it ...

"Genuine question - what kind of files are people losing to ransomware?"

I've always assumed that most of the problem is the loss of one or several days worth of work product and/or transaction data. Not a big deal for some of us, but for a retail business or hospital, it's a disaster. The older data can presumably be retrieved from the backups (assuming they exist, worked properly, and haven't been trashed or booby trapped), but this morning's orders and deliveries and payments are toast unless hard copy transaction records have been rigorously maintained along with the digital stuff.

Real users

It would help if everyone were trained to follow a simple rule: do not click on a link

It would. But anyone who has dealt much with real users will tell you that the only way to keep one substantial subset of that bunch from clicking on links would be amputation of their mouse clicking appendage.

One could try using a text-only mail reader like Alpine or Mutt or perhaps a 1990s version of Eudora. But I expect that some users would still find ways to get themselves (and your system) into trouble.

SAP: It takes exploit devs about 72 hours to turn one of our security patches into a weapon against customers

Re: Rock, meet Hard Place

how much worthwhile testing can your organization do over and above that done already by the manufacturer?

That's a reasonable argument. Really, it is. But if there is one thing I learned in 60 years in the software business (other than that it is best to assume that all salesfolk are liars) it is that users are tremendously good at finding creative ways to use products. Often they don't even know that their usage is not what what the manufacturer intended. Depending on what you use the software for, it can be really important to make sure that patches don't inadvertently break your workflow.

Facebook says dump of 533m accounts is old news. But my date of birth, name, etc haven't changed in years, Zuck

Re: FraudBook

I used to tell sites that wanted personal data for no obvious reason that my name was No Wei and my email was [e-mail]. Worked back then. Wonder if it still does. Nowadays they probably send a email and demand a near instant response -- or else.

Or else what?

Time for the usual security advice

But my date of birth, name, etc haven't changed in years

Well then. It appears to be past time to change them. Yes, all of them. And put in place a program of periodic changes. And do not use simple change patterns like stepping your middle initial by one with every update. Casual attitudes toward security simply will not do in this day and age.

While truly self-driving cars are surely just around the corner, for now here's an AI early-warning system for your semi-autonomous ride

Re: And the purpose of self-driving cars is..?

"There is a solid use case for self driving cars."

There is indeed. But I'm a little hazy on what's supposed to happen when, for example, the car encounters a situation beyond its capability and tries to turn control over to a blind or incapacitated driver.

Time for an upgrade: Dev of the last modern browser for PowerPC Macs calls it a day

Documents?

What are these "document" things you speak of? I vaguely think I might have encountered one or two many years ago. But I really can't remember the details. Are there tools that can be used to convert them to a modern presentation with popups, mouseovers, unrequested videos and ads?

Trustify CEO gets eight years for lying to investors, spending millions on homes, private jets, sports tickets

Re: How is he going to pay that back?

I imagine to come by that sort of money he'll have to found another tech company. Something involving AI, quantum computing and blockchain should do the trick.

No JavaScript, no trackers, no SSL security: Retro computing boffin gives Google News a Netscape 1.1 makeover

Re: has anyone compared load times yet?

Not a real load time check, but I tried 68k.news with dillo whose claim to fame is that it renders html very quickly. And indeed, for those news links that worked -- which was most of them -- the rendering was lightning fast and far more readable than using links or w3m on google news.

Red Hat pulls Free Software Foundation funding over Richard Stallman's return

Re: Let's Cancel IBM

I think IBM is evolving into a self-cancelling entity. Within a decade or two it will probably shrink to a CEO, a board of directors, 6000 lawyers attempting to enforce the ever-shrinking patent portfolio, and a temp who answers the phones, empties the trash and pays for pizza deliveries. Any profitable subsidiaries will have been sold off.

Re: Achievements of Richard Stallman

per Wikipedia;

The original EMACS was written in 1976 by David A. Moon and Guy L. Steele Jr. as a set of Editor MACroS for the TECO editor.[2][3][4][5][11] It was inspired by the ideas of the TECO-macro editors TECMAC and TMACS.[12]

Nonetheless, GNU emacs surely wouldn't exist without Stallman. It's an impressive accomplishment even if there are only 17 people in the world who have fully mastered the obtuse and non-intuitive keyboard interface. And that's only one of his accomplishments.

I gather that Stallman is a difficult individual. Perhaps the desire not to have to work with him is understandable and even justified. If the FSF board doesn't want him, that's OK I suppose. But why not give him a title and allow him to write the odd manifesto and even ask his advice from time to time? Seems to me that the FSF might be a happier and more effective place if they made some effort to get along with him.

Semi-autonomous cars sales move up a gear with 3.5 million units leaving forecourts

"The same could have been said, at the time, for many technologies or infrastructure projects we now take for granted."

That's a valid point. The problem is that many automotive technologies have taken a long time to mature in the past and that may well be true in the future. It's sort of OK if the entertainment system is a bit obtuse or attempting to change the heater settings can somehow dump you into the panel lighting backcolor logic. It's not so OK if the overly helpful traction control systems attempt to put you on someone's front lawn when roads are icy or refuse to let you climb a steep hill.

One point being that it takes time for this stuff to mature, and safety related capabilities are exactly where trial and error is almost certainly not a good idea.

A second point being that car salesfolk ARE sales folk. They put considerable effort into overselling dubious or even dangerous "features". They are, if anything, less trustworthy than politicians. It's probably not prudent to give too much credence to their claims of efficacy.

Tesla broke US labor law with anti-union efforts – watchdog

Punishment

"The decision also directs self-styled "Technoking" Musk to delete a May 20, 2018, tweet because it implies workers must give up their stock options if they unionize."

They want Elon to delete that wrongheaded (and illegal) posting? Why? It' seems far more appropriate to have the tweet tattooed on Musk's forehead and forbid him from having it removed for some reasonable time interval -- five years perhaps.

'Agile' F-35 fighter software dev techniques failed to speed up supersonic jet deliveries

Re: Basics

from Wikipedia "The Apollo flight computer was the first computer to use silicon IC chips. ... The computer had 2048 words of erasable magnetic-core memory and 36 kilowords of read-only core rope memory. Both had cycle times of 11.72 microseconds. The memory word length was 16 bits: 15 bits of data and one odd-parity bit."

Which is to say, nowhere near as powerful as an Apple-IIe or the original IBM-PC. Probably coded by one person or a handful of people in assembler. Probably not capable of managing most of the subsystems in a 1999 Toyota Camry much less those in a modern fighter-jet.

We've moved on a bit.

Not that there isn't a lot to be said for keeping things a simple as possible.

As for Agile. Haven't tried it or seen it tried, but creating satisfactory mission critical software is not one of the things I would expect it to be capable of.