Posts by doublelayer

Is it OK to use stolen data? What if it's scientific research in the public interest?

Re: I only do car analogies...

Neither analogy is at all connected.

"whether it is legal and ethical for someone interviewing you about your driving experience and then publishing the findings" is clear, it is legal. Because they tell you at the beginning that they want to interview you and they will publish the findings and they tell you how much of your personal data is going out. Not telling people that either leads to no data (don't tell people you want to interview them) or is illegal (disclose information you haven't obtained consent to disclose). Research review boards have the responsibility to maintain such regulations.

I can't think of many car-related analogies, but the closest is someone creepy puts a tracking device on your car to track you, someone who isn't the attacker gets the data, and they intend to use it for whatever they wanted without your consent and despite the fact that, if asked, you would probably refuse.

That's storing the data and allowing you to see if you're in it, not using it for other goals that you never agreed to. In addition, there should be restrictions on services like that to prevent them from storing certain types of data. Don't keep the name-to-email stuff, for example. And definitely don't share it. It's unclear, but that is designed to protect user's privacy and security rather than obtain someone else's goal with tenuous if any benefit to the person whose data was taken.

It's bizarre we're at a point where reports are written on how human rights trump AI rights

Re: AI rights are property rights'

AI rights are not property rights. For one thing, there is currently no such thing as AI rights. By most definitions, AI rights would be the rights given to an artificial entity acting on its own, which likely requires consciousness. For now, we can skip the debate about whether sentience/sapience/consciousness (all different, not important) are possible in an artificial entity, because at least we know there isn't one now. Hence, it's more appropriate to describe them as AI regulations, or even better, regulations on the use of AI, or even better, regulations on the use of technology affecting the public, because some of this stuff doesn't use AI by either common definition. I think the headline writer was taking a few liberties to get to "AI rights".

Even in that case, the regulations on the use of something are not property rights--after all, I can own a hammer but be restricted from using it to break your windows. I can own a computer but be restricted from using it to hack yours. I can own a camera, but it's illegal to use it to stalk you. Hence, they are entirely different legal things and can be treated differently.

Re: A Fate Destined to Be, or Not To Be Considerably Better than Death ‽

You are not thick, or at least if you are this occasion does not prove it. The post that started this thread was written by a prolific bot which has become a fixture in these forums. The posts sometimes make sense, occasionally by plagiarizing others' posts, but most of the time, they're complete nonsense based on a sentence from a replied comment or the article. You will probably see more examples of the same on other topics as well.

De-identify, re-identify: Anonymised data's dirty little secret

"If your employees are scared to speak up, then you have bigger problems."

No, if they're scared to speak up, then this is your bigger problem. Which is why you often need some method for them to report. If they know of something unethical or worse going on, do you think they're going to be happy to go announce that? They're not, and they're right to be worried. The incidents of punishment against those reporting misconduct are many, so it can be useful to have some method to send the information without putting an immediate target on your head should it turn out that the person who received it wants to blame you for causing a problem.

Even then, it's hard to do it, as there's usually a small set of people who could know the thing you're disclosing, but at least you have some protection. Forcing everybody to be identified at all times is just forcing them to stay quiet and leave as their only remedy, which harms everybody except those who create the original problem. By the way, this works the same way for complaints about a bad employee as it does for larger ethical or legal issues, just shifted down a little.

Ransomware crims saying 'We'll burn your data if you get a negotiator' can't be legally paid off anyway

Re: Backups

It depends on what resources you have and what risks you're willing to adopt. Nothing can make your system impervious to attack, but some things can make it better. If you are successfully attacked, it doesn't automatically mean it's your fault. There are very determined attackers who can get through anything you could put in place and there are places with so little to spend on resources that they can't have the resillience they need.

That said, there are some steps which mean you don't have to go to 200-day old data. Having incremental backups of various files can allow you to roll forward files which cannot contain executables. If ransomware encrypts them, the incremental gets a lot bigger since every file has changed entirely, so you get a warning about it. Recovery from that can be a long process, but it brings you a lot closer. Some backup companies provide services like this, which of course cost more as they're storing data in the cloud, but it's an option. It all comes down to your willingness to take risks, which for the moment includes ransomware. If you don't do anything on the assumption that, if you're attacked, you can just pay them off and get your data back, what is your plan if they ask for more than you can afford, are the type who just asks for money but doesn't give your data back, or come back in a bit to ask for a renewal subscription? That's not including the ethical objections against funding criminals, even ones who can hurt you, when you have an alternative.

Re: I like the US idea.

No, by not paying the criminals, you are denying them what they thought they would be getting and therefore you are hurting them; their efforts have been wasted. Your analogy is flawed at multiple levels.

That's the job of management. Assuming you manage the various departments, you have to figure out if IT is correctly using the money you give them to protect you from the various threats to your business, not limited to ransomware. They might be incompetent and taking your money for a shoddy system, able to achieve a better backup setup with the resources they have, or they could also be doing their job well and really require extra resources. It's simplistic to assume one without checking on the details, which is why IT doesn't rule the company.

That said, IT equipment and those who manage it are expensive. People unfamiliar with it may have many incorrect assumptions about its actual value. In order to ensure that you have backups of everything, going back a long time, in different places to deal with local risk (building fire, for example), online for easy access, offline for more resilliance against deliberate attack, takes a lot of equipment. Getting the system to back up everything takes proper configuration, I.E. a lot of time. Ensuring that each stage of that is secure from external risk is another place where a lot of work is needed. So it's quite possible that the money that IT is asking for is being used toward those goals in a reasonably efficient manner (or if you have a professional staff, incredibly efficiently). If for some reason you don't care about the goals, then by all means tell them not to bother with them. But then be aware that you're increasing your risk.

Re: It is easy for us to say "don't pay"

"hundreds of floor workers actually making widgets. All of those folks "deserve" to be out of a job because the IT guy is an idiot?"

None of those people deserve anything, as they didn't do anything wrong. However, they are likely to lose their jobs due to the incompetence of others, which is the problem. It's not new, and it's not limited to IT.

If these people worked in a manufacturing plant as your example suggests, that plant likely has safety risks and equipment to deal with them. If the management decided not to include fire protection and the plant caught fire, the workers would probably lose their jobs. In that case too, the workers did not deserve any bad consequences. That is why negligence related to safety is in most cases a crime and sufficient penalties assessed to prevent it from happening frequently (void in some countries or particularly negligent operators).

I do not like saying that someone deserved a bad outcome happening to them, and in this case I don't think that's the best word for the situation. However, in many cases, I don't have sympathy for the management who didn't try for backups. If it was very small or the attackers very good at their job, there would be some. If a business is large enough to employ a hundred widget-makers and still doesn't bother to invest in their survival, I do think the management needs to take some blame for that as they would in many similar circumstances where computers are not involved.

Technology does widen the education divide. But not always in the way you expect

Re: REAL books! Aaaargh!

I don't see that argument in either post. They're objecting to the term "real books", and in neither case do they say there is a problem with standard printed text on paper. They simply argue that other methods of getting that text into the brain are just as real as other books. Perhaps you could clarify where you're seeing the judgement against them, rather than just expanding the set? The closest I can see is the negative description of paper from the first post, but that's not really a judgement on those who use it.

Re: Clarification

I've wondered that since Monday, and based on the articles so far, I think that's what the poll means and you've linked the for/against labels correctly. However, the articles aren't really arguing much like that, with each basically saying that there is a tech divide and it could be a problem or not. Nobody's stated an absolute opinion that tech is good or bad for education--they're all basically in the middle with slightly different viewpoints. Nor do they appear to be arguing a different specific point. I would find it hard to come up with a statement that one side agrees with and the other side disagrees with.

Apple debuts iPhone 13 with 1TB option, two iPad models, Series 7 Watch

Re: Apple Watch battery life

You could do that, but that makes the whole sleep tracking feature kind of pointless. Certainly people have reasons to use the more power-hungry aspects of the Apple watch, but focusing on making it last if it can't be charged one night would help more than speeding it up even more.

Re: Apple Watch battery life

"there must surely be a sweet spot somewhere where you can have greater power efficiency and battery life lasting for at least a long weekend, no?"

There are a lot of those, and people who want step counting and heart rate tracking often use watches with batteries lasting from a week to a month.

"What exactly does a smartwatch do that sucks battery life quite so insanely hard?"

It's the much faster processor in there working on smartphone-style tasks. The watches that last longer are usually a microcontroler that logs some fitness data and sends it to a phone via Bluetooth, maybe getting information about notifications, but that's it. The Apple watch has a two-core CPU running a limited version of IOS in order to present the user with many tiny apps, some of which use GPS monitoring (from the watch itself if you want to kill the battery even faster). They've also got WiFi and 4G radios in there, the latter for when you are out and didn't bring your phone, which I'm sure for many iPhone users is never. All that takes a lot more power for those who want such things. I have only seen a couple watch-based apps which strike me as a little useful, but there are many things I don't do, so there are likely better reasons that I don't know about.

Re: But who in their right mind would want to buy a phone

They patched that. Everyone with an iPhone released in 2015 or later can get that patch. When you think about the ones that Android has and how many can patch them, there's reason to wonder which is better.

The only thing that Apple has that weakens them in the comparison is their reporting thing, and I hate that just as a lot of people do. If they're convinced to never launch it, that will go a long way to helping their case, though some trust has been lost irretrievably.

Beijing wants its internet to become 'civilized' by always reflecting Marxist values

I don't think Xi minds capitalism as long as the companies concerned only compete for money. When they start to compete with the government, or if they should ever say no to the government, that's when Xi and the rest of the CCP wants to push them down a bit. I predict that they won't dramatically change companies' operations except to keep them somewhat small and therefore easier to kill should anything catastrophic happen.

Er ... is this really news?

China has always wanted and mostly gotten widespread control of their internet. These regulations, suggestions, or whatever word they're using are not even new--it's always been forbidden to say something against the party. They have had reporting systems for that for a long time. As such, this is an announcement which merely restates what they have been attempting for two decades and what we all know they'll continue to do as long as they can.

Beijing orders Alibaba, Tencent, more Big Tech to stop blocking links to rivals

Re: I wonder...

Does Apple block links to things? This regulation doesn't regulate app store monopolies, which is the only real one they've got there. If they do block links in iMessage, I've never heard of it and would like some details.

Sort-of Epic win as judge kills Apple ban on apps linking to outside payment systems

Re: Epic Greed

I referred to 2007 in response to this original sentence:

"When Apple first started their service there were only apple apps so your argument is false."

I assumed you were referring to the original iPhone, which did only include Apple-written apps. I assumed you were not referring to the Apple I, which had no apps and wouldn't be relevant. Hence when Apple started having a mobile device which ran apps, it was 2007. In either case, 2007 and 1976 are very different from 2021 so the argument still holds.

I didn't say and don't think that Apple is greedy because their hardware is pricey. I don't really care what they choose to charge--if it's too high which it often is, I'll just not buy it. For that reason, I still use an old iPhone which was the cheapest model when I bought it. I think Apple is illegitimately placing itself in a monopoly decision over software written by others and using that to extract money to which they don't have a right. It is something they did not do with the Mac, for that matter something they didn't do with any product other than IOS ones.

"You say that EPIC had no choice but no one forced them to push their product in the Apple market."

Apple shouldn't have a right to a monopoly market, and thus it shouldn't be theirs to set a price on. That's the reason. They had a Hobson's choice because the other party was abusing a position of power.

"EPIC were fully aware how much they would have to pay for the privilege but they still signed up . Clearly they thought they would still make enough money to pay off their costs and still make a profit or they had already thought about breaking their agreement with apple in light of the perception that their products were overpriced."

Possibly, and they're not the company I'd like to see make this challenge, but in most legal cases, you can't sue a company and say "They are anti-competitive, so make them stop so I can compete with them in the future". The law usually requires you to say "They are anti-competitive and have already hurt my business, so make them stop." In order to prove their point, they had to suffer harm.

"Someone has to pay for the R&D and profit from innovation, for a long time now in computing it has been different people doing the work and getting the reward. You want more of the same and I am saying that it just is not sustainable, there has to be someone along the line that invests in R&D and that means higher costs."

I'm all for R&D. If Apple does R&D, they integrate it into new products. Newer iPhones with lots of modern cameras on the back, neural chips in the middle, and software which my old one can't run. If I want that, I'll buy a new iPhone. This is how R&D works--you make a product and sell it for as much as you want. You're trying to make the case that they should fund their R&D by taking money from others for things they didn't make, forcing them to comply by restricting how software can be received. That's illegal for a reason, and I'm hoping it will be recognized eventually by a court.

Re: Epic Greed

I'm afraid that, while your previous comment was opinion based and subject to debate, you're either wrong or nearly so about a lot of the facts alleged in this one. Some of them are not relevant, but I will address them anyway.

"Apple did not start in 2007."

Original iPhone: Announced January 2007, released June 2007. If you're counting the partnership to have a phone with a music player, that was a commercial failure and they also didn't build it.

"Only after Apple's iphone was there an "apps" market."

Not technically, but basically true. Because phones sped up and now could run more complex apps. Hence my point that apps are very important to the viability of a mobile OS in the current age, as proven by Windows Phone, Firefox OS, and Ubuntu Touch (though that one is getting a bit of a revival).

"Apple created the home micro computer market long before the Apple II, one which other hardware vendors copied, the Apple II was an upgrade in that market rather than a new start."

Not really relevant to the point, but basically wrong. They built the Apple I before that, but they sold two hundred of them. That's not creating a market. That's producing an admirable technical achievement. They were instrumental to the market with the millions of Apple IIs that got released and others created it along with them.

"For a long time hardware vendors offered only an OS and a BASIC interpreter and that was what people wanted to buy not ready build software but VisiCalc changed the perception of microcomputing from "only for hobbists" to a business tool."

Exactly my point. VisiCalc, not Apple, was the reason the Apple II was so successful outside the hobbyist computing market. That and other software written for the platform because businesses had already purchased them to run VisiCalc. This is why the viability of a platform depends so heavily on the writers of applications for it, and therefore why it makes as much sense to ask Apple to pay their app devs as to go the other way (in each case, no sense).

"Apple have lead if not created a lot of the innovation of computing that the smartphone market relies upon, it was this that allowed Apple to change the the mobile telephone market away from the complete dominance of the cellular companies to one where not supporting Smart phone's was no longer an option."

They made a smartphone that people wanted, and that's basically it. You could give Android the same credit. That involved a lot of work, and I commend them for the product they made, but they got paid for that every time I and others bought an iPhone.

"As to software developers having impact upon sales, as I said this is all relatively new. The move away from bespoke system designers who would create both the hardware and software to only meet the customers requirements, to programmers who relied upon existing hardware platforms all happened after Apple's creation of the home computer market and before the Apple II."

No, it's relatively old. Bespoke systems you could argue was a lot of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, but that's still less time than we've had personal computers on which software written by others was loaded. That's if I concede the bespoke thing at all, because even in the 60s, people loaded their own code on mainframes and could purchase someone's program even though it only ran on a single type of machine. VisiCalc was selling Apple IIs by 1979. It has worked like this through all the decades following. Publishing software sold a lot of Apple's GUI-capable machines in the 80s and 90s, for example. Office sold a lot of Windows boxes. Custom tools which only run on Windows sell them now.

"Accessible hardware had to come first and independent software houses came much much later."

As in two years later, forty years ago. We've reached that point.

"As to gouging, this is what happens when the consumer has no choice, EPIC here are not the consumer and they always had a choice."

Wrong. Epic has no choice to get people to install their applications on IOS and users of IOS devices have no choice for where to get their applications.

"They chose the safer option of selling their software for other vendors hardware"

That's the normal choice. Few software companies sell software which could run on a computer on a single-purpose device. It's called a general-purpose computer because it can run most software, and it can. Microsoft does not charge you for having a Windows binary. Apple doesn't charge for having a Mac OS binary. Google doesn't charge for having an Android binary. In some cases, they may charge for the use of their stores, but in each of the named cases, you have the choice to eschew the stores and let users install the code anyway. Here is where IOS differs and causes the problem.

"and then tried to use political manipulation to improve their income against what they had agreed."

They didn't agree, they were given no choice. This was not a negotiation because Apple doesn't do those, and they had no other choice.

"For my part both sides are guilty of greed and stupidity,"

I agree here. Epic is not at all altruistic; they just want money. However, they want Apple not to take their money for purposes that have no legitimacy, so I am still reluctantly on their side.

"both chose to play dirty but for my part I still remember what Apple did for computing and that gives them much more leeway than what EPIC have done."

I disagree. Being nice once (for lots of money) doesn't mean you can be nasty later without consequences.

Re: I’m sure they’ll be looking for ways to skirt this judgement.

"Despite Epic trying to push for no commissions, the app store they've set up for third party game extracts a fee (12% IIRC) so they are themselves doing what they were suing Apple over doing!"

But it doesn't make people use it, so if you don't want to pay them, you can still distribute your software and pay them nothing. If Apple had multiple methods of getting apps onto their devices, then they could charge whatever they wanted (assuming they didn't cheat to advance their option) because they could be competed downward. It is the combination of charging an arbitrary fee and not having any competition which causes the problem.

Re: Epic Greed

"When Apple first started their service there were only apple apps so your argument is false."

When Apple started in 2007 and the mobile market today are very different. We've seen this work with others who wanted to start smartphone platforms. In each case, the number of third-party apps was directly linked to the level of success they got. Those with few apps died fast. It's also worth pointing out that Apple started with only their own apps in 2007, a policy which lasted as long as 2008. One year's sales, which incidentally were dwarfed by most other years' sales, isn't proof of anything.

"historically hardware vendors have released their products with only their own software. Only since CPM80 was there an existing software market that hardware vendors designed their systems to support, one which MS copied for MSDOS."

No, they made platforms and waited for coders. When Apple built the Apple II, they didn't release it with plenty of other software, but neither did they restrict it to their own code. Developers bought them, wrote the software for them, and sold that software (without giving Apple a cut). As a result, Apple sold a whole bunch of Apple IIs. Other companies which didn't get that much developer attention sold many fewer of their computers. The platform is used by users and developers, and the platform developer benefits as these people buy hardware and software. The platform developer should not have a monopoly on value creation here and they don't.

As for your judgement calls, I don't care. It is not my decision whether Apple or Epic did the more interesting job. I don't like playing games, so Epic is not getting any money from me. We don't let people gouge others based on them having done something more interesting.

Re: Epic Greed

"I do think they should receive some sort of recompense considering they host the app, distribute the updates, provide the APIs, development tools, etc. They are a business and not a charity after all."

Those things have minor if any justifications. There are two different ones there.

"host the app, distribute the updates": These two are basically the same--that they provide some bandwidth to download the app packages. Which is a fair point, but A) that costs very little at their scale and B) Epic wanted to host their own store and spare Apple the expense. Since Apple refused to let that happen, it ends up sounding like "They must pay for the thing we force them to use", which is a lot less defensible.

"provide the APIs, development tools, etc.": They write the OS, and software runs on it. They benefit tremendously from this; if there were no apps other than the ones they write, then many people wouldn't buy their hardware. Like other operating systems, their investment in encouraging developers helps them a lot. They can also choose to make tools which they charge for, and they chose not to. This asks the developers to pay for something they didn't choose to make and may not have chosen to use. App developers are businesses, not bank accounts for Apple's development teams.

I have heard frequently how Apple is owed gratitude in the form of cash from developers who get to users on Apple's platform, despite the fact that the users would be on someone else's platform if Apple didn't have those developers. In my opinion, you could make an equally cogent argument that Apple owes developers of popular apps for their users and should be paying them a cut of their tremendously profitable hardware sales. It makes just as much sense.

Off yer bike: Apple warns motorcycles could shake iPhone cameras out of focus forever

Re: You're holding it wrong!

This type of argument always confuses me. It's as if you don't understand how anyone could want something to tell you how to go somewhere. First, you might have trouble memorizing a longer route. Second, if the route changes, for example your map had you going through a road which has been closed, you might like something which can quickly calculate a new route rather than stumbling on it yourself. Third, if you change your plans while out, you might have a destination you didn't have when you left and hence can't look up the route in order to memorize it. For example, if you've really gotten lost and you now want to go home quickly or if someone asked you to meet them in a place you're unfamiliar with.

Perhaps you've never needed one, but there are plenty of reasons that others do.

Re: plenty of other brands of phone

There are only a few mobile OS options. There are lots of mobile hardware options. Since we're talking about hardware damage from vibration, we're clearly referring to hardware options. I can think of at least fifteen brands, though a few are owned by the same company.

Tech widens the educational divide. And I should know – I'm a teacher in a pandemic

Re: Maybe I'm just stupid

I suggested that with the "what hacker means" poll. They didn't agree. Then again, I think they should have one debate, with all positions in the same place, and a single poll at the bottom rather than four polls for each day.

Maybe I'm just stupid

I can't blame remote schooling for it, but I'm having some reading comprehension problems with the poll. What sides do "for" and "against" stand for?

For: I am for technology as a solution?

or

For: I am for the point made by this article (against technology as a solution)?

Every time I think one is more likely, I think for a few seconds and quickly lose that assumption.

New poll: this isn't a good question format and the choices should be made into whole sentences. Select for or against.

WhatsApp to offer end-to-end encrypted backups in iCloud, Google Drive with user-managed keys

Re: iCloud Backup Not Secure?

Backups are protected from external access by Apple's encryption, but since Apple have the keys, they can access the file for their own reasons, to give to someone else, or if their backup system is penetrated in such a way that the keys are available (guessed the iCloud password is the easiest way but other attacks could work).

This encrypts the file before putting it in there, meaning that someone who can get Apple to decrypt the file still doesn't have the data unless they can get the key the user set.

Insert boiler plate about Facebook holding a lot of other data and not being trustworthy here.

Re: encrypted backup ?

"unless i totally missed the point"

You did. It's not public. The chat messages themselves are encrypted during transit. Now you can back them up in an encrypted form too. If you trust Facebook to have all the other stuff that isn't encrypted like who you sent messages to and when, you can have more secure backups now. You probably shouldn't though.

Re: Cast iron security

If you want to overload servers, you're going to have to do a lot more than that. Let's run some numbers; I'm bored.

Let's assume each message has a thousand characters. Manually sent once per day to ten people. That makes your storage impact 10000 bytes for payloads and ten metadata frames, let's say those are another thousand bytes. Your friends each have ten friends who will do the same, not including you. So we now have a total of 111 people doing this. Current daily traffic is now 2.2 megabytes (using decimal). At Azure storage prices, that would cost Facebook about $0.00019 per day for all of you combined. If you do this routinely for a decade, that takes it up to $0.68. That's if they never compress your messages or delete the ones which are obvious garbage.

But what if your friends can find other friends like a multilevel marketer's sales pitch? Well, if they go out four levels with ten friends each time, you now have 11111 people all spamming the system. Over our decade, that's a storage bill of $69.00. They will not notice.

Microsoft releases new Windows 11 builds, confirms running on an Apple M1 'is not a supported scenario'

I don't know about other screens, but I know that at least one type won't work, namely those large displays which identify themselves as two smaller displays so the resolutions are standard. The M1 supports only one external display, so that kind won't work.

DoorDash, Grubhub, Uber Eats sue NYC for trying to permanently cap delivery fees

Not in itself--if they otherwise compete with each other, they just happen to agree that they think something is illegal. Of course, given that they're all charging massive amounts to restaurants, there may be other collusion there, although probably tacit collusion not to compete for restaurant contracts.

Re: Increase delivery prices for customers!

"or the business that has been subsidised by venture capital isn't actually viable unless there's only one or two players in the game."

It's that one. In 2020, a lot of these services got tons of orders. If they could make it work with their business model, they would have made lots of profit right then. Restaurants were signing up in droves, they had already built their platforms, people wanted spare income. In each case, they were well positioned even if they wouldn't be after the pandemic ended. Yet most of the efforts lost money.

Not too bright, are you? Your laptop, I mean... Not you

Re: me too

The early ones were for saving battery, although airplane mode was probably another factor. Now, if they're still there, it's more for security. I like having them as long as I know they're on it.

LA cops told to harvest social media handles from people they stop, suspect or not

Re: I have a facebook and twitter but have no idea how to log in

I have made exactly this point in my post. I would continue to be perfectly polite to them during this theoretical confrontation, but not for the reasons that the poster to whom I replied suggested. I don't do it because the police deserve my courtesy as they break the law. I do it because I know they have more power than I do and they will cheerfully use it against me if I displease them. That is not a good thing.

Re: I have a facebook and twitter but have no idea how to log in

It's called anger. If I started demanding you give me information to which I had no right, and probably not in a perfectly polite manner, you too would get irritated. It is a good idea not to be belligerent when the other person has lots of ways to make you regret it, but anger is completely justified. A few things perhaps should be taken into account when making points like this:

1. Being annoyed at a police officer is not a crime. It is never a crime. It is inexcusable for them to treat it as a crime. Saying "I will not give you any such information" is not resisting arrest or any other criminal offense.

2. A police officer does not have the right to demand that information.

3. If a police officer gets angry at me for refusing an unlawful demand from them, I will likely have a similar feeling toward them.

4. They are expressing their anger at me, so there is no longer a social more that I must hide my own anger.

5. If I hide my anger anyway, it is because I am fearing their reprisals, which comes back to point 1.

Re: I have a facebook and twitter but have no idea how to log in

Original: "It's like the TV Licensing people coming round to your house"

Reply: "Wrong jurisdiction there, pardner. The LAPD is in the US, not the UK."

It was a comparison, hence the word "like". They're making an analogy to something which occurs in a different place and using that comparison to draw a parallel which they can point out as a problem.

Re: But ...

"If you don't create the information in social media it can't be used against you when an unknown (to you) acquaintance of a friend of a friend is caught doing something naughty while you're not far away."

That is not true and the conclusions that would come from it are not good.

If you don't create the information on social media, false links can still be created from other information. People's phone contacts, mail client address lists, or similar can be used to create a similar social graph which is as useless as the social media one.

Furthermore, though I don't like social media, the conclusion shouldn't be that you shouldn't use it if you like it because then the police will use it against you for no reason. It should be illegal for them to conduct this surveillance without proper controls, which would leave the decision of whether to set up accounts back at the justifiable personal reasons. I made my decision not to use social media because I didn't want to. I should not have to make that decision out of fear.

Epic Games asks for Apple's help to put South Korea's alternative app payments law to work

They will probably ask Google to add it too. This won't make them stop the legal battles by any means, but if they get Apple to do it, they win some money and if not, it becomes another legal argument (further abuse of monopoly power even when explicitly illegal), could hurt Apple, and more attention drawn to what they want.

Why we abandoned open source: LiveCode CEO on retreat despite successful kickstarter

Re: DarkBasic

He wanted people not to use goto and to instead use statements which handled it better, from loops to functions. He didn't say to destroy any functionality that looked a bit like it.

Amazon to cover 100%* of college* tuition* for hourly employees* in the US

Re: annual budgets will increase to $5,250 with no lifetime maximum

Factoring in taxes, but almost certainly. Especially if the educational opportunities available aren't comprehensive or convenient. If someone has shifts at all hours, they can't easily attend a school's schedule. If they're limited to a few courses of study, many won't be interested in that. Amazon may get a few workers with this method, and there are people who will benefit, but probably not as many as they or we would like.

A developer built an AI chatbot using GPT-3 that helped a man speak again to his late fiancée. OpenAI shut it down

Re: But isnt that how it works for humans?

I disagree. We use chunks of experience to make such decisions, but we don't link word choices to our conclusions. Those who speak English can recognize that "I don't know how to decide" and "I would like advice" are both long ways of asking for an opinion and can be treated identically along with at least a hundred other ways of phrasing that concept (which applies to most other things you might want to say). We know how to link experiences that are similar but not identical to draw conclusions. We can understand a person's emotions from their speech and use that to understand what they are saying and how they feel about it. We are not simply looking for memorized things that others said in order to respond. Therefore, it is not even a limited version of what we do, because GPT3 doesn't need to understand anything, just make a response that's related.

"I guess the question everyone asks but nobody dares to ask is "At any point does Samantha have a soul" ?"

Ah, but that's a difficult or impossible question to ask. You first have to ask what a soul is. Some think that you and I don't have one. Even religions that agree that souls are real things (broadly linking lots of synonyms that kind of work like 'soul') disagree on what it is, how it's made, what things have one, what it does, and what can happen to it. If you and I were theologians agreeing on what we thought a soul did, we could try to have this conversation though it might be pointless. However, I think the chances are very high that you and I don't agree at all about that first question, and therefore we cannot discuss any following ones with any certainty. However, one point might work if I assume your beliefs correctly, namely that since the program was not a single chatbot, the question should read "Did each chatbot have a soul?".

Re: Samantha skips the small talk, goes straight to breaking OpenAI's rules by talking about sex ...

"wouldn't it be wonderful if you could have that kind of a 'box' with you, translating on the fly from what 'he/she says' to what 'he/she means'."

Oh no, that sounds horrible. Either I find out that people are mostly honest and nothing's gained, or I find out that most people are dishonest and succumb to misanthropy. That's easy enough to do already. I need no automated assistance to my cynicism, especially if the box just assumes everybody is dishonest even when I find a truly honest one. Actually that last one sounds like a good premise for a short story.

Re: Sad

"Sad really - Samantha could have been someone eventually."

No, for three independent reasons:

1. Samantha wasn't a single entity. Each user trained a new chatbot and talked with it. Each chatbot was discarded at the end of the interaction. There was nothing which could have evolved, because the starting point was always the same. Any improvements came from changes to the underlying model or to the code around it, made by humans who were not part of a theoretical conscious computer.

2. There was no learning or evolution going on. GPT3 isn't taking the interactions and editing their database. It's a mostly static unit which gets tailored for a situation and used. Nothing was learned, and something which cannot change can't grow.

3. The words spoken by Samantha are not "hers". This is not an AI which is trained to understand an input and draw conclusions. The words come from someone online who got scraped, with the sentence created from a variety of others' thoughts massaged into a specific speaking style. It is as if you came to me for advice, but I merely copied your question into a search box, stitched sentences from each result together, and sent it back. It may be interesting or useful, but it wasn't me thinking of the response.

Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos fraud trial begins: Defense claims all she did was fail – and that's not a crime

Re: No honor among thieves

"What happened to 'innocent until proven guilty'?"

It never worked the way you think it did, I.E. when we see someone obviously commit a crime, we must sing their praises until they are in jail. We are not sentencing this person. We are correctly describing what happened, which is a matter of public record.

For the same reason, a person who killed someone gets legal assumption of innocence until the jury delivers their verdict, but those in the public who know what happened may well decide to speak ill of the person in the meantime. That is why jury selection usually ignores anyone who has heard of the person being tried, because they may have opinions which could bias them against the accused.

If your storage admin is a bit excitable today, be kind: 45TB LTO-9 tape media and drives just debuted

Re: It depends on what you are backing up

True, but unlike every other kind of storage, they're quoting a random number which is only true in the optimal case. They should just be honest: 18 TB tapes, and we've got a nice compression system available if you want it. Especially as I can also compress a database and get that large a decrease with a lot of other compression software. If a hard drive or SD card manufacturer said such things, they'd be lambasted and likely sued for false advertising.

Re: Old IT guy, niche?

That's not a call for tape. It's a call for cold backups, which you can do on a lot of different media. Cold backups on disconnected spinning disks are just as good for ransomware resistance.

Open-source software starts with developers, but there are other important contributors, too. Who exactly? Good question

Re: Teaching collaboration

Oh, they are. At least that's the word that gets used for it. It usually ends up boiling down to the following points, but at least you can guarantee to learn them nearly anywhere you study:

1. You will be assigned enough work for your team.

2. Someone on your team won't do any work.

3. Someone else will do work but not until the last minute.

4. Nobody likes having meetings to decide what they will do.

5. You will have to put together the pieces at the last minute from those who did it.

6. And also for those who didn't, so hope that those sections allow you to better glue together the disparate parts done in isolation.

7. Google thinks having a single document into which anyone can write helps. They are wrong.

8. If you have some mechanism for turning in members of the team who didn't work, it's easily abused to your detriment. On no account lead the unproductive one to the belief that you might use it.

9. Don't complain about points 1-8.

10. Don't complain about points 9-10.

11. Some people still think this works. It's too late to convince them otherwise.

Re: There are two types of programmers...

And there are three kinds of suggestors: the interested, the motivated, and the demanding.

The interested describes their suggestion and leaves the programmers to think about it. Maybe it will get done.

The motivated makes the suggestion and takes up its case. If knowledgeable about the code, they may implement it themselves. If not, they still look for feedback, improve the idea, find developers who seem interested, and work to get the suggestion in there with their skills.

The demanding sometimes look like the motivated, but where the motivated interact with the other contributors, the demanding tend to have a more one-sided operation. If a problem's pointed out, they will dismiss it and tell the developer to do it anyway. If people are quiet, they will add more noise without finding out why. If they submit code, such things as reviews are beneath them.

It would help if more programmers were listeners, but there are reasons why they sometimes aren't.

Glasgow firm fined £150k after half a million nuisance calls, spoofing phone number, using false trading names

Re: Usual dissolve company start a new one

There are a few problems though:

1. They don't do that with a lot of companies, making this a somewhat rare option.

2. If these people are banned as directors, they can find someone else to be the director while they continue to operate the new company.

3. The only consequence if they're penalized, which is not guaranteed, is that they're not allowed to direct a company. They do not serve a sentence or even pay the rest of that fine.

A new law adding these things as a crime resulting in personal penalties could do a lot for those who conduct it in the country. It may not be as effective against companies running everything from a different country, but I'd rather deal with half this stuff than all of it.

Re: How do you find them?

It is definitely illegal. The problem is that nobody wants to investigate it. The police don't know who it is and don't have the resources or desire to focus on a crime where you were harassed when there are larger crimes to deal with. Those regulators who do have that kind of crime as their particular remit frequently delay taking the necessary action, don't find their victims, or sometimes completely ignore all the reports.