* Posts by doublelayer

9576 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Feb 2018

Iran cyberattacks against US biz more likely following air strikes

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Re: SSDD?

There's often a degree of restraint involved, where the attackers still do things they find useful, things where they don't think they'll get caught, or little prods in reaction to something, but they deliberately don't do something against someone who might respond by escalating. That restraint is unlikely to be seen after large bombings, so I would expect that some things may be different. Of course, they could still have some restraint if they think the retaliation might be more bombings. So far, I do think there has been said restraint, I don't think the level of activity in the last few years is the most they can do, but I don't know what they will decide to do now.

Huawei chair says the future of comms is fiber-to-the-room, which China has and the rest of us don’t

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Re: Going beyond 10Gb/s requires fiber for now

"The "build it and they will come" argument is dumb."

That is what I said in my last comment, but it is still less dumb than saying that they're the first to bring fiber lines to individual units in a multi-tenant building, which has been done in new builds and retrofits in many countries for at least a decade. I don't think we're going to see massive increases in bandwidth needs from residential users, and they'd get happier users by bringing existing quality to the many buildings that don't have fast cabling yet. Of course, there are datacenters that will need fiber going everywhere, but they tend to already have fiber going everywhere.

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Re: Going beyond 10Gb/s requires fiber for now

As I said in another post, there are two options:

1. You are correct, FTTR is a mistranslation, and they are lying to claim superiority because that's often done in buildings with fiber, either actually delivering the fiber to each flat and putting something fiber-capable on the end of it or bringing fiber to a local network closet near the flat and having a short copper line from there into the actual flat.

2. You are incorrect and they actually do mean bringing fiber lines into the building and connecting them to each office or room of a house, in which case they're right that we are not doing it and maybe they are, but I don't think we'll turn out to need it any time soon.

I don't know which one it is, but number 2 is the less stupid argument, because it is very similar to the arguments for 5G and 6G they have been making for some time. The theory goes that we will eventually need more bandwidth for something, and the places with the technology to provide it will be better situated than the ones that stuck with cheaper technology that becomes a bottleneck. That was true before; houses with some internal ethernet cabling are nicer than ones that don't have that and need a mesh WiFi setup to the one location. 4G data was much faster than 3G and enabled some uses that 3G wasn't very good at, and before that, 3G was capable of data traffic at a moderate, usable speed whereas 2.5G data traffic was often either too slow or too unreliable. The problem for Huawei is that the cheap and old version of the technology we have now is actually working rather well, so to justify replacing it, we will need something that uses more bandwidth.

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Re: FTTR? Really?

If that's what they mean, then they're wrong to say that China has it and other countries don't. That's still a home, whether there's one or more rooms in it. What FTTR suggests is that in something like an office, the inter-office cabling is fiber as well. There are only a few situations where that would be noticeably different from older copper cabling, but it would be noticeably more expensive.

The AIpocalypse is here for websites as search referrals plunge

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Re: Some of hese comments seem to miss the point

Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the concept of a patent, which means there is a public document out there describing how the thing works, in a public database. That's what you have to do to get a patent. I think the company concerned probably didn't want that to be easy or they would have put their patent numbers on their website like others do, but it's still out there and available to me. Eventually, I can find that patent and read it to learn what makes their thing different from others. I was hoping to avoid having to do that manual search by using a tool which is supposed to be better at searching than I am and was probably trained on a bunch of patents including this one (from 2016) since they are public documents. It wasn't, hence why I had to do that search, which took a while, but now I have the details I was looking for.

And guess where I got that patent file eventually? I tried going to a few patent offices first, because they store the databases. Their search systems aren't very good, though. That means I ended up finding the patent number in question at...drum roll please... Google patents. You think they might have trained their own AI on that? The point being that this is yet another case where AI will try to answer a question it has no ability to answer and prove to be useless.

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Re: Some of hese comments seem to miss the point

When I do searches, I don't know the answer. A wrong answer is not any better than a useless answer. In the case of your pepper grinder example, I don't expect the AI to give me a correct answer tailored to the model of grinder I have, but instead what tends to work on most grinders. Twisting the top would have been my guess to open it, and then I expect there is a hole where I put in the new peppercorns. If that's all the AI summary says, it is no better than my guess. So just to check, I put the prompt "How do I open and refill an OXO pepper grinder?" into some LLMs, and that's what I got, paragraphs to tell me to open it and put the peppercorns into the hole, which is located either on the top, bottom, or side.

Meanwhile, if I ask a question about something more specific, the AI summary is more often wrong than useless. Either way, the answer is so frequently wrong that, when it is right, I can't count on that. Meaning I have to look at results to try to figure that out which is what I was going to do anyway. Maybe you're getting better results, although the people I know who trust LLM results have often found that following those instructions has given them results they don't appreciate.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: Some of hese comments seem to miss the point

If you're warning us that they can always make the AI answer worse, granted. However, it's already annoying for most of us because the answers are often wrong or useless. For example, I recently deliberately ran an AI search through Google and Perplexity because I wanted to know how a certain technology works, but all normal search engines sent me to pages that had no interest in the technical details. What I really needed was to go to the effort of finding the patent for the technology or some introductory material describing the mechanism and get a summary of that, but that wasn't very easy to find in search results (including the word "patent" in the search query just found a lot of pages telling me that the mechanism concerned was in fact patented).

Seems like something that search-equipped AI agents should be able to do. They can find which pages have that information and distill the information for me, right? And I expect that they may get the information wrong, but at least Perplexity cites sources, real ones that actually exist, right? So I run the query and the LLM happily tells me that the mechanism works "electromechanically". Which is true. Yay, the LLM didn't make anything up. Of course, that's hardly any more detail than saying the thing was built out of atoms of some elements mixed together, or in other words, the AI search result was even more useless than the search results I had before, but it was pretending not to be.

In other cases, the answer is simply wrong, but people who assume that, since it looks plausible, it is probably correct end up acting on it anyway. Ideally, you get the correct answer to your query, but you're probably not getting it as often as you think.

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Re: Be careful what you wish for

And you've gone too far the other way. The law and the politicians who called for it, both the Canadian version and the Australian version which was almost the same, specifically said that they had to do something about the problems of linking and quoting. If they had just stopped at quoting, maybe they'd have had a point, but they called out linking from Google and large social media as a problem requiring compensation. They were surprised when the response to a law that was passed because linking is bad was that the people they spent months saying should stop linking or pay for doing so decided to stop linking.

The problem was stronger on the social media side, where people, including the social media companies themselves, had an incentive to copy the entire text of a news article and put it on that network so people stayed there instead of going to the paper's website. Sometimes, to try to make their act less obviously illegal, they'd only copy the first four paragraphs, thus removing important context without cutting it too short that anyone was motivated to leave. Obvious copyright violation though that is, I can see why someone might decide another law is needed to do something about it. It is, as you will have noticed, entirely separate and opposite to linking, which would be the good thing they could do instead, and that's what many search engines were already doing, quoting a couple, possibly cut off, sentences for context but requiring people go to the site to read the whole thing.

And yet, the laws were written so badly that the only way to interpret them was that linking was the problem. What the backers of the laws wanted was to take money from tech and give it to newspapers, and that's why they included linking, but the result is that the law effectively tells you that including large newspapers in search results is a bad thing and you shouldn't do it.

Former US Army Sergeant pleads guilty after amateurish attempt at selling secrets to China

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Some of them probably were, but some of that was also spammers trying to do it cheaply and not having great English skills. It also really depends on what kind of phishing this is. The kind that says you won a prize, but you need to follow some steps by talking to them is the kind that benefits most from deliberate errors, because they're sending that to millions of people and can only talk to so many to get payment details from them. The kind that gets sent to you looking for you to click a link and enter a password benefits a lot from not having those errors because they benefit from a very brief level of trust. A lot of phishing can work well without those deliberate errors, and a lot of the people using it as a tool aren't good enough at their job not to make them.

UK students flock to AI to help them cheat

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Re: “um…?”

The US and UK have different versions of the pint. They're both an eighth of a gallon, which doesn't help because the two countries also have different versions of the gallon. And before some UK person insists on lambasting the US for changing everything, the US pint is the older one, and the UK one is the one they made up in 1824. And before some US person lambasts the UK for that, the US decided to have two measurements of volume, one for liquids and one for solids (if anyone tries to measure gasses in pints, I'm going to pretend they're not talking) call them both a pint, and have them be completely different. Anyone outside those countries can look down on both systems.

doublelayer Silver badge

"But LLMs as a tool to turn an argument I've both reasearched and made, and as importantly organised, into long-form text - seems, in principal, no different to using a calculator."

I'm not sure how you arrive at that conclusion. There appear to be many major differences, all of which are incredibly important to education and most of which are similarly important to any other use anywhere.

In education, teaching writing can be as much the point as teaching the information the student is writing about. History essays are testing both of those skills, and literature classes often care or at least should care more about the writing of the essay than the analysis of whatever Shakespeare was trying to say there since the students have little experience of Shakespearean language or context and are unlikely to come up with anything interesting. Even in something as simple as a lab report, the writing is important as well as the scientific information within. Producing something adequate but being unable to do it again is exactly what that education intends to prevent.

LLMs also have the nondeterministic problem. If I use a calculator, then as long as I put the right numbers in and it isn't broken, I get the right answer. If I get the wrong answer, I did it wrong. I can put correct information into an LLM and still get wrong data out. I frequently get new evidence for this. For example, I had a situation where I needed to describe something in about two sentences, but I found it tricky to get the useful information in in less than a couple paragraphs. So I decided to see what an LLM would do with the task. Instead of taking my paragraphs and distilling something out of them, or even selecting two sentences at random from them which would have been better, it invented new incorrect information and gave me that. That's a bigger problem for those who accept whatever an LLM produces without question, but it isn't comparable to a calculator if you have to do that.

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Re: Erm, but how many are getting away with it?

"I have never either agreed with, or seen the sense in requiring coursework to be submitted electronically rather than written in longhand"

Mostly because it does nothing whatsoever to prevent cheating, since it's really easy to take cheated work, whether LLM-generated or plagiarized from another source, and write it on some paper. In the past, it did make it harder to check, because comparing students' work for similarity was easy to automate, but LLMs can now generate new cheated essays for everybody so that is less easy. Still, there's no benefit, as far as I'm concerned, in making people handwrite versus type, and since most people will be expected to write by typing later on, that works for me.

If, instead, we are trying to prevent cheating, we'll probably have to worry more about where students do work than how they write what they do. It's much easier to prevent cheating when they're doing the work in a constrained and observed environment, so more tests and less homework seems like the logical start, but there are many courses that wouldn't handle that well and it involves spending less in-class time on teaching. Still, the other approaches that have been suggested haven't struck me as likely fixes. I don't hold out much hope for teachers managing to phrase assignments in a way that an LLM can't answer, I don't think AI to detect text written by AI is going to work out very well, and how they turn it in has no effect at all.

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If there is a flood of Windows 10 machines which can't be upgraded to Windows 11, install Linux on them, an editor, remove the browser and maybe as much of the network stack as you can, and have the students type on those. Nothing says that writing has to be on paper to avoid LLM output.

LibreOffice adds voice to 'ditch Windows for Linux' campaign

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Re: 430 million

"But if Linux Mint acquires a quarter of the market it will shake Microsoft to its foundations."

I agree, but let's phrase that in a different but equally correct way:

"But if Linux Mint acquires half a billion new users and doesn't lose them within the next six months, it will shake Microsoft to its foundations."

That's not going to happen. Even if you try your absolute hardest, it's not going to happen, but most involved are not trying their absolute hardest. I am not either. I'll install Linux if requested, and I'll offer it if asked for options. People aren't asking, and when I suggest it, they aren't requesting I install it. They have asked me to install Windows 11 though, and most of the time, the computer they have does support it. This is why I'm less certain about that number of unsupported computers. There is a large number of machines that can support Windows 11 but are still running Windows 10 (let's call that X). To know how many machines in active use are going to be cut off, we need to know the value of X, but it won't show up in surveys of OS usage so we can only estimate it, and the most reliable way to estimate it is to have figures about which processors and TPMs were used in machines sold in the 2017-2020 period which I don't have and I don't really want to read.

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Re: 430 million

Of course, and those will work great. However, they are not as common in businesses as they are among home users, and businesses are more likely to do something organized about the end of support, whether that's installing Linux, buying patches for Windows 10, or getting new hardware. Home users may do all of those things too, but two other options are quite likely: break the checks on the Windows 11 installer to install that, which is much easier for them than it is for corporate IT because they'll only have to run manual steps on one machine rather than hundreds and no security audit is going to complain at them for having done it, or just stick with Windows 10 with no patches because they don't know or don't care about the risks.

If you want either group to switch to Linux, I think you'll have to be more active at getting them to do so given the many other options they'll consider. If you want to switch enough people to Linux that Microsoft really feels it, I think you have to convert many businesses.

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Re: 430 million

I don't know where that number came from, but remember that many devices that don't run Windows 11 have broken since they were bought. Basically every machine released in the last seven years will support Windows 11, and businesses often replace user desktops more regularly than that. Some businesses might do a three-year or four-year replacement cycle for some reason, despite the fact that they're getting rid of perfectly functional equipment, but even those who sweat their hardware see a lot of attrition due to damage and will have bought plenty of machines since that date. That means a lot of computers that can't be updated are no longer in use by the places that would be most worried about it and therefore the most likely to switch to Linux if they had to to keep updates coming.

Remember also that Microsoft has extended updates for Windows 10. You just have to pay for it. Businesses who care about updates and don't want to replace their hardware have that choice as well. Probably a few of them will take it. I still predict that there will mostly be a wave of people updating to 11 at the last minute and another set of people who never update, even some who easily could but just don't want to, even as security updates end. If you want a lot of those people to switch to Linux, then you have to shout loudly, as various organizations have been doing, and make the process easy, which none of them have really done, and you have to do it quite soon. Some people will take this opportunity to try Linux and find they like it, but that's not going to be 430 million people even if I'm wrong about that number of computers being an overestimate.

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Re: As I've said before

The complaints are that you can't use that with the keyboard-shaped 500. You can do it with the 5B, but when the 500 was designed, they didn't put an M.2 connector on the board and they didn't expose the connections to attach such a hat.

My solution to this would be to not buy a 500, buy a 5B instead, and plug in a keyboard. But then, I still don't understand why people like the keyboard units more than the SBCs, so there may be a reason why that's not their chosen solution. To anyone who has that preference, I'm still curious why and would appreciate hearing your reasons.

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Re: Is Windows 7 THAT different in the APIs???

No. Nobody ever has or ever will. It's that OS that everyone, hopefully including Microsoft, is content to not think about. If something is supported under 7 and 10, then 8 should probably run it, and if it doesn't, too bad. If something is supported on only one of those, then 8 might run it, you find out. It has the benefit of being out of support too, meaning we have even more reason to not think about it.

UI changes meant that almost all businesses decided to skip Windows 8, and it only stuck around for a couple years before 10 replaced it, so it's also one of the versions that had the least market share. Another reason for that is that Vista was unsuccessful, so many people who were buying new hardware had bought it when Windows 7 was new, meaning they didn't need to replace their hardware for something with 8 included. Unlike with Windows 11, there wasn't as much time between 7's release and 8's, so there was less replacement due to attrition.

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

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Re: manuals

It's often quoted as from him, but it seems to have a somewhat clear spread from non-famous initial usage in the addiction recovery area three decades after Einstein died. Unless those quotes were made up too, it also makes more sense in that context* than it does in modern usage, where there is insanity that doesn't involve mindless repetition and mindless repetition which can better be described as stupidity than insanity.

* The first quote used "insanity" to contrast with "sanity" which was being used as a synonym of sobriety or at least a lack of addiction and related negative effects on life, and the repetition concerned involved the repeated acts of someone with an addiction even though they knew it was harming them. Suddenly, it actually makes sense to me how that quote would have come to be which makes a lot more sense than IT people dealing with frustrating users. Incidentally, although I previously knew that the Einstein source was misattributed, I only read about this initial usage about five minutes ago.

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Re: manuals

I agree that it's not a good definition of insanity*, but I do think we need a word for whatever that is, because I get frustrated by that far too often. People who, because they don't know what to do, try the same thing over and over even though they have no reason to believe that anything has or even could have changed so it will work where it didn't before.

If it said "try again later", fine, keep repeating it. If you've changed something else that should unblock it, okay, run it once more. If it's exactly the same, pressing the same button on the theory that it will eventually do what you want instead of that thing that button does is a bad idea, and I wish I hadn't seen people use that approach.

* I also have trouble coming up with an actual definition for insanity. Defining mental illness is hard enough, but defining that unclear line where it goes to that higher level has often proven challenging to me. Usually, I think that the core part has to be dissociation from reality where they either invent nonexistent things or fail to recognize existent ones, but that too can be hard to define. It's a good thing I'm not a psychologist.

European consumers are mostly saying 'non' to trading in their old phones

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The more likely versions are:

Trade-in site offers you £5 and sells your used device for £120. Nobody buys it because it is not worth that much.

Trade-in site offers you £5 as a discount so you buy the new device from them, then tosses the device into the bin.

Trade-in site offers you £5 sight-unseen with a little footnote about determining device condition. That makes sense, because you can't tell them everything about the device you're sending in and there could be a problem that reduces the value. They get it, immediately toss it into the bin, and tell you it is actually worth £0, but are you going to complain about such a minor loss? Are you going to pay for the thing to be shipped back?*

The alternative that gets closest to the place you're describing is where you post it on a marketplace and find a buyer, and except for any fees you might pay, the money they pay is the money you receive. Great, let's do that. The problem is that you end up spending a lot longer describing, photographing, posting, and responding to questions about a device that people probably don't want to buy because a fair price is about £25 and the lemon problem applies. That is why, in my example above, I was happier to simply hand the phone to someone who would use it than to post it for sale and deal with this work for an uncertain and small reward.

* The trade-in for value that vanishes situation is one I've experienced personally, although in that case I was expecting it. A friend's ereader had been broken, and I was buying her a replacement. They had a trade-in program and offered me a small amount for the old one. It asked me to describe damage, and it had a field for "screen broken" which I selected, but they still offered me a nominal value. To not my surprise, they determined on receiving a ten-year-old device with a mostly nonfunctional screen that they were no longer going to offer me that discount, even though in this case they had all that information up front. Of course I didn't complain, because I didn't want the broken thing back and I didn't think there was anything better to be done with it. I also wouldn't be surprised that they do the same for functional devices. It's an easy way of taking competition off the market.

doublelayer Silver badge

Re: Do you really need that expensive phone?

The dumb phone finder has filters for both WhatsApp and Signal. If that is your primary problem leaving the smartphone, you might find some candidates there. I have not used it or the devices it recommends as I appreciate many aspects of the smartphone and don't want to leave it, but it seems like these people have categorized a lot of devices.

doublelayer Silver badge

Exactly. In my limited experience, the only way to get an even slightly reasonable number for trade in value is if you bought the thing a year or two ago and it was a flagship model. I don't buy flagship models because they're way too expensive, and if I did, I'd keep them much longer than that. In fact, I keep my cheap phones a lot longer than that. By the time I don't need one*, no organized business is offering much for it. In some cases, they might have a little more resale value if I sold it myself, but at that point, I end up having to decide how much it is worth to go through the effort of posting it, responding to questions, and hoping the person it gets shipped to isn't trying to get a free phone.

* Most of the time, I stop using a phone when it's doing something unfixable, so that isn't usable by anybody except for someone looking for parts, and I don't know how to find them. On occasion, I have had a phone that worked but I didn't want it, for example the case where I needed a temporary device and when temporary ended, it was still usable. Stuck on an old Android version of course, but it actually got some security updates. I still couldn't easily sell it and ended up just giving it away to someone wanting a phone for a child.

Australia finds age detection tech has many flaws but will work

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Re: Data collection...

"you are suggesting that "We should just sit here and suck it up"........and do absolutely nothing to protect our own privacy!"

Am I now? No, I'm suggesting two things to everybody else. One is that we focus on more things than our own privacy, since the privacy of others is actually important no matter how selfish we are. One of the best ways to avoid surveillance is to be one of a crowd. That means making sure everyone can use encryption, because practice shows that lots of people will use it if they're allowed to and that protects us all. The second thing I suggest for others is to actually think about how well their personal privacy methods will stand up to attack, because they are being attacked, and modify their plans. You have instead chosen the complacency that your methods work (somewhat) and would still do what you describe under legislation such as this (no), and those who are worried about their own privacy should be thinking further and making plans to keep it.

But, if you've decided that I'm calling you a criminal for seeking privacy when I've been condemning privacy-invading legislation, the rest of this clearly isn't getting through. In that case, you're right, your system is perfect and you'll be fine, no need to bother worrying about anybody or anything else.

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Re: Data collection...

The government will be happy to decide what documents count. If a birth certificate counts, then yes, go ahead and use that. If it doesn't, then take your birth certificate down to the people who approve passports and get one of those. Either way, you will end up using paperwork the government permits for the purpose. You write as if using papers to establish identity is something governments don't know how to do. Pretty much everywhere does it, and they have their list of acceptable documents for the act you're doing. If you want to do the act and you don't have the accepted documents, then you have to go get one of them in order to do the act. Of course, the ideal document acceptance list for this particular interaction, visiting a website that has no need to identify users is "none required and none accepted if the user wants to provide one", but that's not going to happen if a law like this gets passed. Australia's considered three alternatives and since identity verification is the only one that's not really easy to circumvent*, that's where they're going to land.

* One of their other options is AI age verification, which will be really annoying and risky, but depending on what images you have to put in to be verified, it probably won't be too hard to spoof it with a quick sample from someone who looks older or even an AI adult video generator. It will also be a nonstarter because it will get a lot of the answers wrong in the opposite direction. The remaining one is trying to use a credit card, which is a lot easier to steal than valid identity documents, can be used frequently, and won't even be noticed much if they're just checking validity without charging it.

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Re: Data collection...

"Only if "the system" knows that the specific identity in question is fake. How would "the system" know this?"

We appear to be in a loop. Consider again, over and over if necessary, what you would do if they told you to scan your passport. You have four logical choices:

1. Scan your passport.

2. Scan someone else's passport, knowing that simply obtaining it has made you guilty of identity theft and you can go to prison.

3. Scan a fake passport and hope they don't have the technology to immediately identify this. Most likely, they can get that if they need it and they can make your fake a crime too.

4. Refuse to use the service.

Now you are correct that some people have indeed successfully committed identity theft before, and not just people with some degree of legal cover; people in your hypothetical position, I.E. criminals, have succeeded. Maybe you'll be one of them. Others have ended up enjoying some time in a room without internet access because they tried. Some of us might think that, if you actually commit it, you belong there. It's also much harder to obtain identification documents for someone than it is to obtain a burner phone or pseudonymous (happy now? I use the right word) email address, even if you are overestimating how well those work. Other than that, you have no problem with the course of action you suggest. I am worried about what happens to everyone else, which evidently doesn't concern you, and at this point, I'm not too worried about what befalls you as you clearly have a plan you like.

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Re: Data collection...

And you write as though you missed the part about verifying age by looking at identification documents and denying you access if you don't. Your burner phone (incidentally, I'm guessing you're not in Australia because Australian phone law is stricter than UK or US regulation) and emails will do no good if the website you want to access with them says "photograph of your passport or you're not getting in, and by the way a photograph of someone else's passport is identity theft and a photo of a faked passport is fraud". You can take some actions, and doing so helps, but two things remain the case and should be taken into account when we consider what laws should be:

1. Anonymity mostly works when the people you're interacting with are content to allow it. Only a few things work when the rest of the system involved is determined to block you.

2. The things you do to remain anonymous are difficult or expensive and many others don't do them, either because of the difficulty or because they don't know that you can.

Chances are that what you think will protect you isn't as strong as you think it is, but even if it's perfect, we should oppose these laws for others and so that the next push doesn't break the protections we use.

DHS warns of sharp rise in Chinese-made signal jammers it calls 'tools of terrorism'

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Re: "illegal key fob jammers"

That's not a jammer. Jammers transmit to prevent something else from usefully transmitting. Your tin is a passive thing to prevent a transmitted signal from getting to where you don't want it. They're completely different and your one is legal.

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Re: Don't panic people

Some of those are real concerns, for example if there is no coverage in an area, that will be a problem for emergency comms in the area. Some of them are not. For example, as long as they use radios, a jammer can jam them. It doesn't matter whether those are cellular frequencies or some other frequency band because the jammer hardware is almost identical, so unless they have massively multiband radios that can hop around to whatever band is not being jammed right now, someone with the hardware can jam emergency radio transmissions if they are willing to put in the effort. Criminals jammed traditional P2P police radios as a tactic before cellular was even an option.

Microsoft testing PC-to-Cloud-PC failover for those times your machine dies or disappears

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I don't think it's about data. Mining that is not easy. Mining it and getting anything useful is very hard, since most will be random business files of no import to anyone, possibly including anyone in the business. One reason I think this is that, if I've interpreted the article correctly, they're relying on using OneDrive to store user documents, which they've been pushing for some time and occasionally gets used as a sort of backup system*, and so the data they'd be syncing is already on their servers anyway.

To me, the explanation is much simpler. If you can convince someone in IT or IT management that this works well as a backup solution, that's another item in the Microsoft bill that gets paid without question forever without anyone thinking about whether they're using it. If they actually use it, then they may start using more cloud desktops which means plenty of money per month for what you could buy for about three months rental. If they don't use it, then Microsoft gets paid for merely having the ability to provision one if requested which doesn't happen. Either way, it's easy profit.

Europe slams online tat bazaar AliExpress for dodging obligation to stop dodgy traders

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I've seen lots of obviously dodgy tech items on there. Even when something is plausible, it's mostly random whether you get something the manufacturer is able to make really cheaply or a quick imitation of what that product might look like. I needed a Bluetooth audio to 3.5 mm audio device, and I got one from Aliexpress for less than it would cost me to make the plastic enclosure of such a thing, let alone getting it shipped. It's been working very well ever since. On the same visit, I was advertised a phone with a terabyte of storage for about £50, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't going to be the same story if I bought it. A lot of the time, you're deciding for yourself whether the product being advertised is actually plausible, in which case it's probably real, or if it's too good to be true in which case it definitely is. Eventually, someone will get smarter and start advertising fake products using descriptions and prices that make it look like a possibly real one and the platform will die, but for the moment, it's a dangerous area full of fraudsters that can be successfully navigated if you're careful.

Regulation would be welcome, but like Amazon and eBay before it, I doubt they'll do enough to have the effect they'll need to. Policing a market where people can list their own products without review is hard, and the platforms that have that challenge have mostly responded to it by deciding to not bother. Regulators of those platforms have decided to mostly ignore this. Until both things change, this situation will not end and it will be up to the customer to be as careful as they can.

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

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Mozilla undoubtedly has more people than truly needed to accomplish the goal, but you can't make a comparison like that. Seven people have not yet built something, but you're implying that their 2026 alpha will arrive on time and work, neither of which is proven or provable. I've aimed for a release date before. It doesn't mean I achieved my goal each time.

Also, even if they do have a release by then, there are lots of things the alpha will probably break on, which is not a surprise, because it's an alpha, but how long do you think it will take to get from 2026's alpha to full, production-quality, tested release. Also, it's often quite a bit easier to build something from scratch than it is to build the same thing among a bunch of older code which you have to avoid breaking, to make sure everything works on all the platforms that run the same code, or at least subsets of the same code. They also develop more things. Does the Ladybird project intend to develop desktop and mobile browsers? From a quick read of their website, I'm not convinced they are writing anything other than the engine, but Mozilla does build all those other things. Having another browser engine would be great and I hope they do hit their targets, but I'm not going to jump from "I want it" to "it will definitely happen and be perfect".

When Ladybird has a functioning release, we can compare their team size to Mozilla's browser engine people. Until then, the comparison has insufficient information. Even when we have that information, comparisons from a team building one piece to an organization building many will be invalid.

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Re: They keep removing features. When was the last time they added one?

Not all the things you listed have actually been removed. Some of them are still there, so I must conclude that you didn't look for them.

The problem with adding features is that they'll often only appeal to a specific subset and anyone outside the subset tends to be a little annoyed that they spent effort on them. For example, they did add a new feature relatively recently, and it's one I quite like, namely translations a la Google Translate but using offline models. I use that feature a lot and get privacy benefits from it. But if you don't, then I could understand why that doesn't seem to matter much. The article author has a similar thing in Pocket, which I have never used and was rather unpopular when Mozilla spent money on it, but now it's unpopular when they stop. I don't think all the things Mozilla does are valuable, but I have to consider that maybe there are others who benefit more than I think from the things they've developed.

I've got plenty of complaints about Firefox, but I have always ended in the same place, which is that they are the best browser of the realistic choices available to me. Everyone else is either more limited (Safari or Chromium-based things), or they built their thing around what Mozilla made. If I use Librewolf, I'm still using most of Firefox, and the project would not exist or would not work well if Mozilla wasn't building the things they do. Of those who bother to do it, Mozilla is doing a better job than the rest of them in my opinion.

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Re: Fork it

What do you mean by that? Because I can still change the search engine, either the default one easily or to a different one on the fly for a search. Admittedly, they did annoy me by removing one of the methods to do that, but that's just a UI change and I can still do it, just not by the keyboard-friendly way I used to (typing the first few letters of the search source and pressing tab used to do it, but now it's less convenient).

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Re: OK, but what now?

I'm curious why you want the VPN there? I run my one at OS level unless I can get it to run on the network device the computer is getting a connection through level*. I want as many, ideally all non-connection packets to go through the VPN if I have it turned on so I only have one network path to be worried about, so doing it through the browser means there are all sorts of other things that would bypass the VPN altogether.

* It's quite easy to implement the VPN on a little hardware device when it's a personal one, which is my primary VPN. It's much harder when it's a corporate one I'm buying because they all want to connect me through some large binary that does who knows what. I have broken the protections on one of those in the past in order to use it the way I wanted, but it wasn't easy to get the necessary information and it changed often enough that I had to script it. Also, that is probably against the terms of most services, though I looked and the one I was doing it with hadn't thought to forbid me yet. I still stopped doing that routinely, though.

Danish department determined to dump Microsoft

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Re: SSH/SCP

At least refer to NFS if you're talking about where files are stored, rather than the way you log into or transfer files to computers other than the one you're typing on. Then, you could make a comparison, albeit likely a simplistic one, rather than naming something unrelated.

Also, I don't think they were advocating for a cloud storage solution, but asking what the one in place is. Storage is one of the easiest things to deal with in this situation, with plenty of self-hosted methods for storing large amounts of data and every cloud company larger than twelve servers having a storage service you can pay them for. Unlike some big tech services, where there are actual benefits to the system that open competitors haven't duplicated entirely, OneDrive has almost no feature that you can't have with existing well-tested open source software. Just as long as you pick software that stores files, which does not include either SSH or SCP.

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I think your example is a great one. When you were switching, you had to determine that it could do all the things the previous option did to a similar or better standard. It wasn't as simple as deciding you liked that one better and letting users find out if it was good enough. And, if you had found that it worked just fine for most people, but there was a category that it didn't work for, you would have dealt with that problem. For example, if neurologists needed something that the new software didn't do, then maybe you'd have switched everyone else to it first (assuming that the two groups didn't need to use the same software), then found workarounds for the neurologists, rather than just telling neurology to find some neurologists who didn't complain so much. That's all I suggest here, because most Office users could use LibreOffice just fine without much change at all. Maybe a quick training on the important UI changes and some quick way of having someone who can search a menu find the equivalent when someone can't find an option they need, and you've probably covered 90% of the users. Some of the remaining 10% should also be capable of that but are just more resistant or ignorant about computers. You then only need to deal with the small subset who actually have problems converting because there's something they need that isn't present, and that problem is much smaller and can be dealt with when you focus on it.

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Then don't worry about the terminology. You've complained about people calling themselves "power users", but the article only quoted someone referring to other people as such. Thus, your complaints are irrelevant. Instead, use whatever other term you like and talk about the kind of people who have the most challenging situation when asked to switch from something. I used Excel as my example as it's a pervasive one, but the same thing happens with any complex bit of software. If you dislike the term "power user" so much, call them whatever you want, but acknowledge that they're employed there for a reason and that, if you can't find an administratively acceptable way to maintain what they were doing, your plan is likely to be rejected.

The rest of your comment does seem to boil down to "my change is good, other changes are bad". Many changes might be good ideas, but there's always resistance. Replacing cobol might be helpful because it's easier to find people who know other languages and redesigning the application will make it possible to better structure and document it, but that will be resisted by people who don't want to change a language that was functioning just fine, they're comfortable writing, and taking the risk that rewriting the thing introduces bugs they'll have to spend a long time hunting down and squashing. Replacing Microsoft products has its advantages, and in all my comments, I have said so. What I'm telling you is that it is not as easy to do it as you've suggested if they've been heavily used, especially as your solutions have completely ignored how large those challenges are. If someone wants me to change things, I make them justify the change in many ways and I challenge them to explain how they will deal with problems we'll encounter during the change. If they ever say something like "if you're not smart enough to be able to make this change, then we don't need you", I resist their change because they clearly haven't thought it through and will blame its failure on me. I therefore expect that any change I suggest to them will and should face the same level of justification and planning to handle problems before it is accepted.

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No, it is what you've guessed the article means. Instead, what you have is it being imposed from the top by people who have to. Do you think the Danish minister of technology, or since they don't appear to have one, the minister whose role includes this is going to personally make sure this works out? Do you think they know all the tech tools and have a plan for their replacement? I know this one. They don't. They've written a piece of paper to an employee telling them to do this and that's the last they thought of it.

The important question is, when the IT people to whom the task has been delegated come to the minister and tell them that there is a problem with some users of a program, do you think the minister is always going to side with the IT department over the others? If the IT department says the solution is to replace the workers involved and rebuild the workflows they were using, the minister will respond "Absolutely, no problem, I'll get right on that"? That's what "motivated" means, and the article makes no statement relevant to knowing how motivated any of the people involved are. What I suggest is ways to make it work without having everyone in authority motivated to accomplish this change over any other goal, since you will almost never get that. In this particular case, it being run from the top is an asset and makes some things easier, but if you wanted to accomplish that somewhere else, you might not even get that, so I also pointed out some ways to help it happen if you're in another situation such as a company where you might want to do the same thing.

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Is this your way of saying that yes, you would complain loudly about any of the changes I mentioned, but you don't think others should because your reasons are better? In which case, you appear to have missed all of my points.

"Power user" is not a well-defined term and it can mean almost anything, including people who have absolutely no clue what they're doing. Let's take a more specific example. I know one of those people who is a big Excel user. He probably should have been taught real programming, but nobody did it. Instead, he self-taught a lot of programming concepts in Excel. I know the image you have, because I tend to have the same one: someone who thinks they're an expert programmer because they've managed to have ten formulas in the same sheet without any compilation loops. That's not what this guy is like. If you want complex mathematical models performed, he can probably find a way to make Excel do it faster than a programmer will, mostly because the programmer will need to spend more time on data import than he will. He has been using Excel for decades, and although the things he makes are less efficient and less maintainable than an actual program, they do work well.

If you tell him he has to use LibreOffice Calc instead, he will react much like if you went to a Cobol programmer and told them that they will now be using Java for everything and to start converting. He doesn't know how to use LibreOffice, and some things won't work, and because these are spreadsheets, there's far less automated testing, so he's going to have to manually check everything to verify that they didn't break. Let's see how to handle this and what happens if you, the IT team in charge of the transition, try them:

1. Fire that guy, replace him with someone who knows LibreOffice: his team freaks out because there aren't too many people listing LibreOffice as skills and they're the people who would have to find the replacement. They join ranks to fight you.

2. Fire that guy, replace him with a programmer: Again, the team freaks out because although they aren't as good at Excel as that guy, they can use it, but they don't know how to program so making changes will be challenging. Also, they're going to have to explain lots of details about their processes to someone who has a completely different background and they're worried it will go badly.

3. Provide training to help him and them learn how to use LibreOffice. They grumble, but if the training works, they will be able to convert.

4. Buy an Excel license and stick it in a Windows VM (if you're also switching to Linux) and let them keep using Excel. They're mostly happy.

5. Hire a programming team which you can divert among the various teams writing programs, have the spreadsheet users work with them to reimplement everything as a program, then either move the Excel guy onto the programming team if he learns how to code, have him focus on more business-focused things when his spreadsheets are obsoleted, or make him redundant when nothing he does is necessary because it's been replaced. The outcomes are very positive, but doing it properly takes a lot of time and money.

When comparing these options, the best outcomes tend to come with choices 3 to 5, but choice 5 is so hard that it's usually not an easily chosen option. Choice 3 means you have the least disruption, and choice 4 means you have the least financial cost because intensive retraining in LibreOffice, the kind that shows you how to accomplish those things you did in VBA, is more expensive than just giving that guy an Excel license. You have instead chosen the first two options whose primary advantage is that there's less work for the IT department because all of the disruption is the responsibility of the team with the spreadsheets who has to find new people and get them trained. This is why, unless you are an all-powerful leader who can do whatever you want on command, you will have more trouble choosing those options. If you can't even recognize why this is the case, then the people who make the decisions are all too likely to choose option 6: ignore the change request from the IT guys and buy some more licenses from Microsoft. If you want them to choose something other than option 6, you should start realizing why that "power user" is still employed there and why you can't ignore them the way you want to.

The launch of ChatGPT polluted the world forever, like the first atomic weapons tests

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Re: Almost infinite supply of low-background steel

True, all of those things are real concerns with using them for low background steel. However, they didn't say that everything was fine if you used them, but that using them would generate a lot more than a few kilograms of material, and so would using ships that don't have human remains in them. However extreme the demand, there is more supply than Michael Hoffmann's post suggests. I don't know much about the market for the material, and most likely the existence of illegal mines for it means any figures I can obtain will be wrong to some degree.

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Re: Huh what a load of twaddle

I wonder if that's true. A lot of people have learned guitar because of the famous music they like so much. Even more have practiced singing, especially as we have things like karaoke that encourage them to do it even if they can't play the music to go along with it. Do you have any evidence that recorded music has stopped or reduced the number of people from learning to play it? I admit I am biased as a musician* who was born after that period, but I know a lot of people who have learned to play an instrument, and their failure to play professionally has more to do with downsides of the musical life** which are no different now than they were before.

* In the sense that I have played music in public for payment, but I don't do it now because writing software pays better.

** Playing music professionally is not the easiest, so most people I know who were good enough to do it looked at how much work they'd have to do, how much disruption doing it would have on their lives, and how low their chance of achieving success would be and decided to do something else for a job and play music as a hobby. Many others were motivated to start learning to play an instrument but realized that playing well takes a lot of time and passion and they didn't have quite so much of those, so they are not capable of playing professionally.

Techie exposed giant tax grab, maybe made government change the rules

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Re: Hmm

"If the law required everyone's wages to be advertised net of all deductions, almost no-one would resent paying income tax, either."

That would be an interesting experiment in psychology or behavioral economics, but I do foresee one small problem. Any change to the tax rates would be immediately noticeable and fiercely popular or unpopular. You have the reverse of the effect you get when the rates are stable. Instead of seeing a change to a percentage in a table of lots of percentages which gets conveniently divided, people would have their annual difference calculated for them and presented to them as a wage cut. In both cases, the amount they're paying more this year is the same, but if you're using the choice of numbers to show them to hide one of them, it brings another one into clearer view by definition.

There would also be an interesting ethical discussion to be had about this, but since any choice you make will involve making some numbers prominent and others slightly hidden (easily calculable but you have to bother to do it), I'm not sure if there is a right answer. I suppose you could make a case that the most ethical thing to do is to always show all numbers, so people see pre-tax and post-tax numbers in all circumstances, but that could be confusing to some.

Spy school dropout: GCHQ intern jailed for swiping classified data

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Re: Minority report

Tell me, how do you identify beforehand that someone is going to steal code covered by a law that says you go to prison if you steal it? What was supposed to turn up during vetting that would have told them not to hire this person? I get the people who say GCHQ should have had more immediate detection of the copying, but the calls for extra vetting seem to presume that there was a way to identify the risk by doing so and I don't know what way they have in mind.

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Re: Bethan David, head of the counter terrorism division at the CPS, said

The point of the signing is right there in the quote:

"Hasaan Arshad knew his actions were prohibited"

The actions would have been prohibited whether he signed that or not. The signing was just a demonstration that he was aware of that, so ignorance of the prohibition is not an option. Had he not signed it, that ignorance could be argued as an extenuating circumstance which could possibly reduce his sentence, depending on how the judge interpreted it, but signing that bit of paper means that the information has been delivered and he has agreed to it.

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Re: "Signing" The Official Secrets Act

I'd check the legalities before jumping to conclusions. A lot of security clearances are not secrets in themselves. If someone worked in a certain area of government or military which wasn't a secret, then they needed a clearance to do it. If the clearance was an official secret, so would their employment there and they'd have to come up with some other explanation for what they were doing at the time. Except in particular cases, this is usually handled by not making their clearance or employment a secret. The stuff they did there is one, but that they were doing something is not. It will be different in different countries and for different jobs, but I think you may be incorrect about the untrustworthiness of the applicants involved.

Do you trust Xi with your 'private' browsing data? Apple, Google stores still offer China-based VPNs, report says

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Re: Does China do this?

Actually, yes, they do scan devices at the border or wherever else they may choose, and they've been doing it for longer, which is a problem. And they do deport you if you say something about their leader, although that's not the worst thing they do to such people. You might have had a point if you were trying to compare them and negatively describe the US's unjust and possibly illegal actions by pointing out the pages they copied out of China's book, but by asking whether they do the same while implying the answer is no, you're just showing that you don't know what you're talking about.

AI coding tools are like that helpful but untrustworthy friend, devs say

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Re: 76% ... won't ship AI suggested code without human review

Not really, depending on what the "junior" is doing. If they're putting in prompts until the thing compiles, then sending it to the reviewer, then the reviewer is picking out lots of bugs and not getting any real work done because they're cleaning up after the LLM. Of course, the junior could be doing a better job, actually writing some code that works and having someone reviewing it, and if they can manage that by using the LLM then more power to them. Unfortunately, in my experience, most usage of the LLM ends up being counterproductive because it introduces bugs that no human would write, meaning whoever ends up having to remove those bugs is going to take a long time and the reviews have to be much longer because we're searching for things that would never be an issue in the real world. Some of the time, that's the original user of the LLM whose productivity suffers as they try to use something that should save them time but doesn't, and sometimes, it's the reviewer who receives things that obviously haven't been tested and either needs to review it and report the problems, review it and fix the problems, or throw it away and write it from scratch so the patch can go out now (the most dangerous option because they may not have another reviewer to send it to).

In traditional code reviews, there were various pieces of code that didn't have to be reviewed too strongly because you could reasonably assume that they had been written correctly enough and tested enough before it got to review as long as the person who wrote it was someone you knew and trusted. Of course, that's not the most professional approach, and ideally, every line would be ruthlessly scrutinized, but in many environments, that didn't happen because speed was an important factor. LLMs have introduced the ability to fail in places where professionals would not. That means the really detailed code review is being done, which would be an improvement if the code quality was the same or better, but it isn't because we're now dealing with the possibility of ridiculous errors having been written in by the LLM which even an incompetent human wouldn't have done. There are probably some people who have found ways to use an LLM to write functioning code, but unfortunately not as many as people who think they have but are wrong.

Cyber weapons in the Israel-Iran conflict may hit the US

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Re: "fully reversible DDoS attacks"

If I'm reading that correctly, they're using "fully reversible" as an opposite of "destructive", meaning that a DDOS attack doesn't cause permanent damage because it only blocks access until the attack is terminated. They're using that to contrast with the ability to damage stuff permanently, where the DDOS is something you do to point out you're annoyed without getting anyone too angry at you. I would think "non-destructive" might be a better opposite, but I suppose it's not entirely inaccurate.

BOFH: Rerouting responsibility via firewall configs

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Re: The BOFH is back to his true form

That doesn't have to be deliberate. HVAC systems are perfectly capable of doing that all on their own. Two adjacent labs in a building far too new to get any slack for this were consistently about 10 degrees apart in temperature, up and down five from normal room temperature. Our theory was that the temperature sensors were recorded as in the opposite rooms, but it could have been an even simpler problem. Either way, it never changed no matter how many people commented about it.