Posts by Insert sadsack pun here 460 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Nov 2017
Worth making the point that the legal wrangling at hand here is not about the reliability of the AI/facial recognition software. It's about the prosecution's (apparent) failure to turn over relevant material (including the facial recognition support).
Whether any challenge to the quality of the facial recognition documentation happens pre trial or during trial, I have no idea.
https://www.criminalattorneycolumbus.com/what-is-discovery-in-criminal-law-in-ohio/#:~:text=In%20Ohio%2C%20discovery%20is%20governed%20by%20Criminal%20Rule%2016%20of,evidence%20and%20information%20before%20trial.
It was a little unsporting of El Reg not to cite (or even link to) the excellent, in depth reporting done by the Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Financial Review and The Age to break the story. The SMH/Age do an incredible job of investigative reporting around harassment, bullying and white collar crime in Australia...including of their own employer when needs be!
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/no-more-wise-guy-the-downfall-of-linkedin-lecher-richard-white-20241025-p5kl9i.html
The boss had a degree in psychology rather than technology, and so was better at managing people than technical issues.
"worthy
noun [ C ] humorous
UK /ˈwɜː.ði/ US /ˈwɝː.ði/
a person who is important, especially in a small town:
The front row of chairs was reserved for local worthies."
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/worthy#google_vignette
To be fair, I've only ever heard it in the plural.
“cases against Chinese entities often move very, very, slowly if they're brought in China"
Maybe - but India isn’t known for lightning fast litigation either. There’s a 300 year backlog!
https://www.irishtimes.com/world/asia-pacific/2023/06/27/where-justice-delayed-is-truly-denied-300-years-needed-to-clear-indias-backlog-of-judicial-cases-says-think-tank/
"Why are so many US cyber security companies headed by former Mossad officials, such as Black Cube, NSO Group and XM Cyber ?"
None of them are 'US cyber security companies'. As you know perfectly well, they are all Israeli. Black Cube and NSO Group don't even have a presence in the US. Stop making stuff up.
The SEC press release is a little less coy.
"According to court documents, SAP and its co-conspirators made bribe payments and provided other things of value intended for the benefit of South African and Indonesian foreign officials, delivering money in the form of cash payments, political contributions, and wire and other electronic transfers, along with luxury goods purchased during shopping trips. Specifically, with respect to South Africa, between approximately 2013 and 2017, SAP, through certain of its agents, engaged in a scheme to bribe South African officials and to falsify SAP’s books, records, and accounts, all with the goal of obtaining improper advantages for SAP in connection with various contracts with South African departments, agencies, and instrumentalities, including the City of Johannesburg, the City of Tshwane, the Department of Water and Sanitation (a South African state-owned and state-controlled custodian of water services), and Eskom Holdings Limited (a South African state-owned and state-controlled energy company)."
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/sap-pay-over-220m-resolve-foreign-bribery-investigations
That sounds a bit insecure to me. I have a secretary in Switzerland that prints out my emails. He or she or they - I have never met them, for security reasons - prints them in tiny font on rice paper, and then insert them into a yellow Kinder Egg container. The container is zip tied to the left leg of a pigeon that flies to my clifftop lair. The pigeon then reads the messages to me, and I dictate any required replies, which are returned in the manner the inbound message was received.
"It would be hard to imagine that SpaceX's missile/rocket technology isn't controlled."
Maybe yes, maybe no. But just because the technology is export controlled, that doesn't mean a) that everyone working at SpaceX has access to it, and b) that only US citizens and permanent residents may have access to it.
A blanket ban on hiring certain people who are lawfully entitled to work in the US is illegal unless there is a laeful exception - as the complaint makes clear.
Trump is awful in every single way, and yet he was not and will not be a dictator. He won a reasonably democratic and fair election, he left office after losing another election, and (unbelievably) might return to power on the basis of a third election. He is being prosecuted in open court, there is still a free-ish press, the rights of assembly and free speech are in okay state, etc. That's totally different from Russia and North Korea. The US is very flawed and Trump worse, but it just isn't a dictatorship.
"The problem here is that what the police do is "lock people up". That's the police job. That's what they are trained to do. That's all they are trained to do. It's a blue-collar job: they aren't lawyers or social workers: they arrest people."
You're betraying your ignorance about actual police work here. Police officers arrest relatively few people. In Detroit specifically, there are about 10,000 arrests per annum, and about 2,000 police officers. That means the nominal average office is making an arrest every 2-3 months. It is just not the case that police work is a conveyer belt of arresting people, throwing them into custody, and then heading back out to arrest more people - whether you think that is a good thing or not.
https://detroitmi.gov/departments/police-department
https://www.vera.org/publications/what-policing-costs-in-americas-biggest-cities/detroit-mi
"FACCT was spun out from Group-IB last year – likely in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine."
You said this last time you reported on Group-IB, and you failed to consider your own previous reporting that Group-IB's founder and CEO is still in pre-trial detention in Moscow on dodgy charges. All that happened months before Russia's further invasion of Ukraine, and is the actual cause of splitting the Russian and foreign businesses.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/29/group_ib_ceo_arrested_treason_claims_russia/
https://www.forbes.ru/tekhnologii/466849-il-a-sackov-forbes-srazu-posle-moego-zaderzania-sostoalas-bol-saa-vecerinka
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-12-03/who-is-ilya-sachkov-russian-cyber-ceo-linked-to-2016-election-fancy-bear-leaks#xj4y7vzkg
"It's all a question of perspective, and "Oz was a Prison Colony" seems a rather 'colonial' one."
Yes, exactly, I'm glad someone made this point. The prison colonies were tiny and short-lived: most of them failed after a couple of years, and even the "successful" larger ones were only in existence for 50-60 years. Compare that to Australia's 120 year existence as a modern state, and the thousands of years of indigenous life beforehand, and it does like a particularly perverse perspective to emphasize one colonial aspect...
...and added to that, it's just hacky.
Federal prisoners do 85% of their sentence, at least. Holmes will serve many years.
"White collar criminal prisons" don't exist. You are presumably making a sarcastic and ill-informed to minimum security facilities. But they're not comfortable or enjoyable - it's prison, and as Holmes's sentence exceeds ten years she is not even eligible for minimum security.
She's going to be separated from her children and kept in a prison. Maybe she deserves it, but it's nothing to revel in.
https://www.businessinsider.com/white-collar-prisons-2013-12?r=US&IR=T
At the risk of providing a literal answer to a rhetorical question, it is #1. It can be proven that e.g. Holmes lied to Walgreens; Walgreens invested on the basis of those lies; and Walgreens lost money as a result. For investors not in the room when Holmes lied, who knows? But it's all irrelevant anyway, none of them will ever get anything back
"surely the time to decide whether evidence was legally obtained is before the trial, and not afterwards?"
No. The trial itself is when to decide whether the evidence is admissible in the trial, and as part of that the court will - if it is asked - to consider whether the evidence was obtained legally.
Bitdefender says: "Surprisingly, many impacted organizations say they have been told to keep the data leak confidential despite their obligation to report it. Over 40% of security professionals surveyed said they had been told to keep a breach under wraps..."
Yeah but hold on - there's not a legal obligation everywhere to report every data breach externally. Only some data breaches must be reported as a matter of statutory law to e.g. a data privacy regulator, or as a matter of contract to e.g. clients or vendors. If there's no obligation to report and the breach was immaterial - I don't see why maintaining confidentiality is a bad thing.
"As anyone familiar with TikTok knows, it's not a healthy environment for pre-teens thanks to its bizarre gamut of user-generated content. Heck, it's not a healthy environment for any age"
This doesn't stop BBC Radio fucking One (which has a significant audience of 12-18 year olds) promoting TikTok through on air mentions in nearly every DJ's segment. It's a fucking outrage.
"Those were the days..." ...when he was fraudulently extracting subsidies from the UK Government, and he was convicted for it. He's turned over a new leaf since then, of course: now he still extracts subsidies from the government, but he does it completely legally!
"So we don't accept submissions from Russians, but they're completely free to use the code? That's choking what, exactly?"
The point is to isolate, disrupt, and exclude the Russian high value electronics industry in *all* its interactions with US markets and US IP.
The guy is frustrated and stamping his feet? Good - that's the point. Getting cut off from GitHub isn't half as bad as having your ciry bombed, as has happened to many Ukrainian devs in the past 9 years.
"better and more IT retaliation would be to route all access via one IP filter so international news access for Russian citizens is automatically part of gaining access to the rest of the world"
Russia is not North Korea or China. There is a high rate of smartphone access and the Internet is pretty cheap. Although Roskomnadzor does block some websites, generally speaking there is easy access to a ton of foreign news media in the Russian language.
The problem is not a technical one of lack of access. The problem is that Russians either don't trust those media sources or that they don't care - just like most westerners don't care what's happening in Yemen or the Sahel with western arms.
"just because he's evil, that doesn't mean he's stupid. I'm sure Kanye has interesting ideas sometimes."
Kanye in the past has been very self-deprecating, insightful, intelligent, and creative. Unfortunately, in recent years (and since the traumatic death of his mother) he has totally gone off the deep end. He's obviously completely unbalanced. I think he is mentally ill, not evil - but he is doing evil things.
"...That’s in stark contrast to 2008, when the US government poured billions into failed banks"
Just as an aside, the taxpayer certainly bore a risk of loss in 2008, but the federal government ended up making a USD 15 billion profit. Although that might or.might not have been wiped out by inflation, it's not like taxpayers ended up paying out tons of money to save fat cats...in that instance.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Economic_Stabilization_Act_of_2008
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