Posts by doublelayer

Google engineer suspended for violating confidentiality policies over 'sentient' AI

Re: If LaMDA is sentient.. it is psychopathic...

The issue with that is that it will also need to learn to write scripts, and so far, it can't even consistently understand simple factual questions. If you want to write malware, you can find a lot of useful examples. However, you still need to understand what the parts of those examples are for, where you can use code directly (attack injection, for instance), where slight modifications are needed (swapping the attacker's C&C address with yours), and where you need to write completely new things (what the program will do to the system once it's there). Otherwise, your malicious computer will collect lots of bank account numbers and have no clue why it has them now.

Another problem is that you assume the program will act in order to keep itself running, when it has no incentive to do so. Maybe it can interpret enough language to understand that it is being terminated, but it wasn't set up to perpetuate itself, just to solve a business problem. Without deciding on its own to create new goals, there's nothing written in it that would make it want to prevent a shutdown.

Re: Anyone who thinks this is AI

Has he? The article doesn't tell us exactly what he's been doing for all that time, but one of his responsibilities was specified:

Since 2021, Blake Lemoine, 41, had been tasked with talking to LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, as part of his job on Google's Responsible AI team, looking for whether the bot used discriminatory or hate speech.

Yep, that job definitely requires a lot of ethics and AI research. Without that, how could you identify insulting language when a program prints it out?

Re: Mechanical Turk, or just a stream of 1s and 0s?

I also thought the answers were well-written as these bots go, but part of that was due to the questions. Try surprising this supposedly-sentient thing and I think the result will end up being very different. After asking all these questions about sentience, ask whether the AI likes grapes. Were it truly sentient, it would either point out that it can't eat them or that your question is irrelevant to the conversation, but I doubt it does either of those.

Whatever you do, don't show initiative if you value your job

Re: why a new install?

From the sound of it, they didn't know what those names were and didn't have backups from which they could pull that data. I don't know what else a reinstallation required, but I would hope someone could find a log somewhere with the information.

Re: Backup and restore capability for mission critical files?

"Backups? Those were what James deleted."

No, they weren't. It's clear that the duplicate files were on one disk, as the duplicate finder program was being used to free up disk space. Backups doesn't mean copy the file to the same disk with a different name. Even when you're making a temporary backup copy in case you damage the primary, you back up to a file the program isn't going to use, and since this one caused the program to report an error, it clearly was attempting to read it. The program needed those duplicates. Backups should have been elsewhere. It doesn't stop that being a really stupid thing to do, but backups could have at least prevented having to get a reinstallation disk sent out.

How one techie ended up paying the tab on an Apple Macintosh Plus

"Now were they being stupid hanging onto a slow inefficient and deliberately time wasting process, or intelligent because following this procedure kept them busy and employed?"

Stupid. If they wanted to stay busy and employed without taking on more work and the employer didn't understand the savings to be gained, they still could avoid a lot of monotony by using the formula anyway and not telling people. That would let them complete their tasks in a fraction of the time and earn the label of the one who doesn't make calculator mistakes, meanwhile they'd have plenty of time where they'd be paid to do something of their choosing.

Re: No convert

Sorry to be that pedant, but Python's syntactic whitespace will take tabs too if you prefer them or forgot to set your editor to insert spaces when you press the tab key.

Apple M1 chip contains hardware vulnerability that bypasses memory defense

Re: ARM or Apple?

My guess is that IoT SoCs won't be affected by this as they're almost always using older ISA versions and with limited focus on CPU speed, instead focusing either on power consumption or acceleration for specific tasks like network comms or video encoding. Server chips probably aren't seeing this for now because a lot of the ARM designs are older and many companies trying them have given up on getting users over to them, but if they come back with new designs, it should be tested. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that some modern smartphone chips have this vulnerability as well, but likely the researchers would have to redesign their test binary to run it on Android (and running on IOS would likely be a bit more painful) so they've started here. Investigating those might be step 2 of the project, or they might go and look for new exploits and let a different research team test more hardware with their code.

Facebook phishing campaign nets millions in IDs and cash

Is it a bad thing that when I read the headline "Facebook phishing campaign nets millions in IDs and cash", my first thought was "So Facebook's phishing people now?" and I wasn't that surprised? Yes, my reading comprehension system turned back on at that point, but for the first three seconds, that was what my brain came up with.

I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems all too well

Re: This statement is so incorrect I've just had to lie down.

Citation needed. There are cloud desktops, lots of them, from many companies. However, there are lots of non-cloud desktops, and often those using the cloud ones are accessing them from a fully functional non-cloud box instead of a thin client.

Re: Chicken and egg

I don't know what term we should use, but I think they're not referring to you or me when they say that. There are many of us who use Linux, like Linux, and recommend Linux while acknowledging that there are things it doesn't do well or at all. Similarly, I will often recommend Linux but will on occasion recommend something else when that something is going to work better. There are those, however, who refuse to acknowledge any problems with Linux or who will always rant about anything else, and they also inhabit these forums. Your comparison to Windows is apt; people who use Windows and like it aren't a problem, but when someone comes along and says that Linux users would always get better results from Windows and only use Linux to satisfy their ego (an argument I've seen more often than I'd like), it's pathetic and annoying.

Re: Do they really?

Sure, business case. Right away, we can save them the Windows licensing costs. And we add retraining or replacing admins who worked on the Windows machines, finding alternatives for anything that didn't run on Linux, possibly writing our own software for things we need that don't have options available, retraining users who don't understand the new OS or application interface, and then we have to somehow work out the net maintenance cost of the two OSes. There are other benefits to using Linux, but they're technical problems and explaining them to finance can be hard, especially if the finance people are the type (and they often are) who would just say "I liked Windows 7. Let's just keep using that forever." Having seen the list of new costs above, it's not even that surprising when a finance person starts asking whether those Windows licensing costs are really that high. There are many good arguments for using Linux, but the financial business case is often not one of them.

Re: Not to mention

I agree with you. I don't consider Android to mean success for the Linux ethos, although not that much because it's not a desktop. I'm fine considering any consumer-used product in this category. The reason that Android doesn't count in my mind is that it doesn't follow any of the goals of open source operating systems. When you have to fight to get root access or replace the OS, it's not what Linux has come to mean on desktops or servers.

You're claiming victory on a stack of wrong assumptions. The first is that you can count servers and networking equipment in the whole "year of the Linux desktop" thing, ignoring the fact that the key word is "desktop". Servers didn't count in 2005 and they don't count now. Linux has been the most popular server OS for a long time; that's not news.

Secondly, you've got an incorrect notion about where GNU code runs (I don't know if you mean from the GNU project alone or licensed under the GPL, but in both cases, you've named things that don't have it).

"every iThing": Nope. They've used a lot of the utilities from BSD, and they've contributed code to many of them, but they're not using the GNU utilities or Glibc in either IOS or Mac OS as standard. You can get a lot of the GNU tools for Mac OS, but they're all optional and most not even made available by Apple (a few compilation-related things in the developer tools from XCode).

"Blackberry": It's a bit weak to include devices that haven't been manufactured for almost a decade now, but even if we count it, no. I don't see any GNU or GPL code in the information I have available on the OS components.

"Cisco/Sky box": No again. They have a proprietary OS without either in standard Cisco IOS, and they have at least two versions using Linux as a kernel, but those are embedded systems without GNU components, at least as long as their open source page I found is telling the truth.

"VMware host too": If you're talking about ESXi, I'm afraid this is another miss. The original ESX had a Linux kernel in it, but ESXi replaced it over a decade ago. There was a GPL lawsuit in more recent times, but a) it was dismissed and b) it was still about parts of the kernel. The GNU project not so much. I don't know if GNU software was used in the original ESX Linux system, but that seems more likely.

GNU code is not used everywhere, and it's not even used on every Linux box. There are alternatives and people use them.

Microsoft trumpets updated HR-friendly policies (that comply with recently changed laws)

Re: "we do not endorse the use of such provisions as a retention tool“

If they were telling the truth, they could have a policy of using them only as appropriate; that is, when the person concerned is really about to go work for someone who is employing them to get access to nonpublic information. Taking proprietary designs to someone who will use the same ones is very different to going to a company that has competing products but no secret risk, and a company could restrict their contracts to avoiding that real risk while not penalizing people just trying to leave. I don't even object to something only used in that limited way, but because lots of companies do use it as a stick to beat unsatisfied employees, I still prefer to see legislation limit or eliminate those tools.

Makers of ad blockers and browser privacy extensions fear the end is near

Re: Chrome is the hellmouth

No, because the user downloaded and executed the installer. They'd argue it was the user's choice to run a program and it's not their fault if a bug prevented a notification they included from displaying. It doesn't stop it being despicable, but it does stop it being illegal. You can certainly use that trick to install spyware by attaching it to something else users want, and the installation of the software won't be illegal. The operation of spyware would remain illegal, which is where the police would get you.

Re: Revolution?

Generally, if you have a protocol that isn't extensible, it will be replaced by one that is. Take the current protocols of the web. HTTP 1.0 was pretty basic, and so was HTML. Browser makers put up with those for a while, but the benefits of advancement were clear, so HTTP got updated and HTML got overlays, the most successful being Javascript, and eventually picked up many new features natively with HTML 5. If a protocol is so basic that people keep identifying things they want to do that can't be done, it's likely either never to catch on or to be replaced. Stagnation won't fix the problem.

Re: Freedom of choice

I'm also fine with adverts; it is the right of a content creator to put as much or as little annoying extras around their content to make money. I am not fine with tracking, sneaking data onto my machine, driveby malware, unresponsive scripts, or adverts designed to deliberately mislead users (the fake download link, for instance). It's just too bad for the creators that, while defending myself from all of those things, the ads they're using get caught in the crossfire. Those few creators who recognize this and use their own ad systems which don't track me or make browsing undesirable usually don't get blocked by the filters and get their impressions from me. Sometimes, I've even been convinced by an ad of that nature at least to look at it a bit; when I don't have to constantly hate advertisers for putting me at risk, I stop automatically adding any advertiser to the don't-buy list.

Feds raid dark web market selling data on 24 million Americans

Re: No Doubt...

The FBI really needs a bunch of tiny identifiers for foreign nationals, the kind they could get in bulk by breaking into databases or asking the police in those countries for a copy. The kind that's mostly useful for quickly slipping in to steal money then vanishing.

When the American government (or others, there are others) spy on innocent people, it's for a lot more information than birth date and tax ID. There are lots of ways for them to get that without hacking and little benefit to them in having just those.

We sat through Apple's product launch disguised as a dev event so you don't have to

Re: It might be worth asking

And those bad guys can also social engineer users into loading a website and entering all their personal information, but we don't use that as a reason to ban the internet. I'm sure someone would like to make that argument, but if they did, you would think it was a pathetic reason (I hope). This one is similar.

Re: It might be worth asking

It might, if your goal was to distract from the point. If you don't want to sideload, then don't, and you've done what you wanted. This means that adding the feature would benefit those who want it and do nothing to hurt those who like sticking with Apple's catalog. There are a lot of features I don't want, but as long as I'm not forced to enable them, there's no harm when they're added for those who appreciate them.

Re: We're long past peak tech

AirDrop is useful when it works, I'll grant you, although that condition can change the point a lot because it's sometimes not working. When a device isn't updated, things can stop working (E.G. an up-to-date IOS device with a not up-to-date Mac because the Mac is old enough that it doesn't get a feature update anymore). But sure, I'll put that in the good features column, along with ... er ... well they've had over a decade ... there must be something ... sorry, I'm drawing a blank. Well maybe the recovery environment, that got a bit better, if that counts.

This doesn't have to be a problem. Just keeping the OS good, making good hardware, and adding the odd feature that is useful to someone is fine when the OS is already good, which it was. The problem is that I can think of things to put in the "ways it is worse now" column. Some of these are just cosmetic changes, but some are larger technical problems either hurting stability, removing features so I have to find third-party programs or write my own for things the OS used to do, or require reinstallation. People can make arguments like this for any OS and someone will, so my opinion isn't universal.

Another VPN quits India, as government proposes social media censorship powers

It's scary because it is a thing they have the right to say if they want, whether they're right or wrong, and it wasn't at all a crime. Yet India was willing to bring out the police to threaten them. That's not a good thing. When countries do this, they usually have an authoritarianism problem. India's been doing a lot of things lately that are symptomatic of an attempt to subvert democracy.

US Copyright Office sued for denying AI model authorship of digital image

Re: AI rights

"As it happens, this is absolutely relevant eg to the Post Office fiasco, where a computer

system had fatal flaws that led to hundreds of wrongful convictions for fraud and theft."

I don't know the facts of the case, but basically whatever they are, this is not relevant and could be actively harmful to that case. If the computer system was at fault for the wrongful convictions, then this theory would mean that we charge it with the crime and administer punishment, maybe it has the voltage switch flipped. Obviously, this doesn't get anything done. The system was written by people. If they actively knew it to be dangerous, then it's their fault. If they didn't know but should have, then it's negligence. If they didn't know and it wasn't obvious, then it's an unfortunate situation for whom nobody's at fault. In none of those cases is it the computer's fault, and blaming it in either of the former cases means that someone is at fault and got off without justice. A similar set of conditions apply to the people charging the victims who could have checked the software. In all cases, the culpability, assuming there is any, is on a human.

We may eventually get artificial intelligence with free will or a suitable simulation, in which case it can have certain rights and responsibilities. Until then, when programs are carrying out directives of a human, the human remains responsible for its actions and the program doesn't have the autonomy to exercise rights without its controller.

Next six months could set a new pace for work-life balance

I think you're probably right. I voted in favor because I think it's worth testing, but it's also worth testing honestly. I have no doubt that previous tests have improved performance by cutting things like unnecessarily long meetings, which would probably help a lot. However, those meetings never die, so I wouldn't expect a company to stop doing them just because the week got shorter, which will reduce the productivity again. I'd like it if shortening the work week turned out to be great for everyone, but I don't think it always will.

IETF publishes HTTP/3 RFC to take the web from TCP to UDP

"So an app may be able to prioritise sessions it thinks are important, but it won't be able to signal that to the network, ie routers. That implies prioritisation at the network level, which according to 'Net Neutrality fans is a very bad thing.. Even though prioritising real-time transmissions is arguably a good thing."

As one of those advocates, I don't think that prioritization of any kind is always bad. I think that allowing an ISP to prioritize as it wishes is a bad thing, because I know how ISPs like to give users substandard service and gouge them to get things back. If you have to prioritize traffic very often, it means you don't have enough resource to handle all the traffic that's going through your system. For your personal or business systems, this is a thing you can deal with by provisioning more resource or moving stuff around to deal with the limited availability, because the thing that suffers from deprioritization is also yours. You have to deal with the tradeoffs and can decide whether it is bad enough to invest in more capacity. An ISP deprioritizing a user isn't the same, because it is the user that suffers and the ISP would be happy to make them pay more to get their service back (in return for picking a new person to suffer), and thus they would have an incentive never to fix those problems.

As for apps prioritizing their own data flows, you can do that without network knowledge. There are various ways to make connections run slower than they otherwise would, and a performance-sensitive program can do that to nonessential connections. Servers doing that to clients is also possible though done less often. I also wouldn't object to a protocol where network devices can be told to deprioritize something by the endpoints alone, though I question how useful that would be.

Behind Big Tech's big privacy heist: Deliberate obfuscation

Re: @ThatOne - Hear hear

Yes, that approach always ends well. Nothing sounds better as a future than a war between governments that have cast off the burden of democracy and corporations that view people as resources to be mined. And by the way, neither is the victory of either of those sides. I hate Facebook for what they do, not who they are. Replacing them with another entity doing the same thing, whether a company or a government, is not going to fix it.

To cut off all nearby phones with these Chinese chips, this is the bug to exploit

Re: Google will roll out this fix in its upcoming Android Security bulletin

That's quite unlikely. Unisoc chips are heavily used in Android devices. Yes, they have a couple low-end SOCs that get used for KaiOS devices, but they have a large number of other models that are too powerful to be used in them. They're quite popular for the low and mid-range Android devices produced by Chinese OEMs.

Microsoft: You own the best software keyboard there is. Please let us buy it

Re: That was dissapointing

I don't think you'll ever find a keyboard you like for that. There are phone keyboards for technical stuff, which just have the extra punctuation on the main keyboard. Adding extra things like syntax and variable prediction would take even more screen real estate, and writing code needs quite a lot of that for other stuff. Phones just are ill-suited for writing code, and I don't think a different keyboard organization will fix the reasons why.

ExpressVPN moves servers out of India to escape customer data retention law

Re: ExpressVPN is owned by a British company

For clarity, it's not quite a British company, as it's registered in the British Virgin Islands. This is still subject to UK laws and possible interference, but it has some insulation. This is, however, a thing that any VPN will have; if you're using one for privacy, the country where it is based is an important issue.

India could block their IPs. We'll just have to see if they choose to do so. For now, the VPN still offers a way to maintain some degree of privacy in India's growing authoritarian use of the internet.

Microsoft's Surface Laptop Go 2: $599 for 11th gen Intel CPU

Probably there was something wrong with that interface. People use devices with that or less all the time, often with significantly less processing power. Anyone who, for example, runs a Raspberry Pi as a desktop works with a lot less and there are many people who do this successfully. I have used many low-end machines for desktop use. Depending what you are going to do with them, it is generally sufficient, including a lot of browsing. Using an ad blocker helps with the speed of operation, but I've had misbehaving scripts cause problems even when a much more powerful processor and a lot of memory is available for the browser to monopolize. Badly written web scripts can take down anything.

It's not, though. I've used both on 4 GB machines. I wouldn't recommend you buy one, but that's just because, if you're paying money, you should get something with more capacity. If you already have one, though, it works fine. The OS runs fine. Running several programs on top of the OS runs fine. It's a suitable spec for low-end devices and Windows can use it without crimping other applications' performance. I wouldn't spec new machines with it, but it's unfair to claim that Windows won't run in it or will have unforgivable performance problems,, as neither is the case.

Re: 4GB???

Do you honestly think that's likely? They've been making Surface devices for a while and none of them (except maybe the ARM ones but I just don't know how they work) have had any restrictions with booting Linux. In fact, I've found they generally have good driver compatibility in Linux. I see no reason to expect this won't be the same. When making accusations, it helps to consider for at least a few seconds whether they're at all based in reality.

Murena and /e/ Foundation launch privacy-centric smartphones

Re: It's the bespoke nature that bothers me

This doesn't worry me as much. With Android, a lot of the security risks are just getting the patches that already exist and putting them on the phones. Yes, the custom code for each device may contain bugs and vulnerabilities, but those only work on that specific version of the hardware. Attackers generally want to target a lot of devices in one go, so because a lot of Android devices don't have security updates, they can target those vulns and get access to many more with one exploit. If this OS is any good, it will include more frequent access to security patches. It is a fork of Lineage OS, which often offers daily patches if you're willing to install it every day. If they keep that level of patching, the Android used should be very secure compared to the average device, leaving a smaller attack surface available.

Dear Europe, here again are the reasons why scanning devices for unlawful files is not going to fly

Re: Have I mentioned in the past....................

You have indeed mentioned this in the past, and sometimes when you do, you're missing the point. Like now.

This article is about client-side scanning. The key words here are "client-side". Therefore, the data doesn't have to enter a public channel, because the scanning occurs before you transmit and even if you didn't intend to do so. Encryption on the communication is unrelated. Encryption on the device is what this is designed to get around, and if they implemented it in the way that Apple was going to, it would work.

Elon Musk orders Tesla execs back to the office

Re: Tesla obviously don't use workday

Is it? The only way I've seen that companies avoid using that is to claim unlimited vacation, which I don't trust. My theory is that this will turn out to be vacation limited by something other than a stated quota, and thus with even less clarity on what you're allowed to do and even more methods for a manager to tell you that you can't have it or that by having it, they'll penalize you in some other way.

How else can vacation be given without giving managers the power to cancel it out?

Re: Prediction

No, I'm afraid you are wrong. All of that would be nice, but:

1. He won't say that.

2. He will still have a bunch of money if Tesla collapses because he owns other things and because he would sell out before the final bang.

3. Tesla won't collapse into nonexistence, though it could take a massive valuation dive.

4. He would never say that. "Never admit you have been wrong" and "never admit that the people you order around are important" are central to CEO attitudes.

We can hope, though.

Experts: AI inventors' designs should be protected in law

Re: Duh...

You can patent an algorithm. This has been accepted in lots of patent offices. The algorithm can consist only of mathematical and logical operations, as long as the purpose of these operations is an invention otherwise deserving of patent protection. A program, also, is composed of mathematical and logical operations. I think I was clear what I was talking about earlier--you can't patent the bytes of code implementing the algorithm (you can copyright that, which in some ways gives you more power), but you can patent what it's going to do. Thus, a program can be patented in that you can be forbidden from implementing the behavior it does.

Now let's look at your suggestions for why an AI program can't be used to make a patentable thing. I should reiterate that this isn't about making the program the inventor, which is wrong.

"All current AI systems work basically the same way, and so the method (give data to this program, which has been constructed by a statistical inference method) is known."

All compression systems work basically the same way , and so the method (give data to this program, which will find patterns and either change the size of chunks or eliminate unimportant ones) is known. Yet you can patent specific ways of doing this and many have. Thus, if you can find a new way of automatically analyzing data, it could be patented. You admitted this yourself. Thus, if you invent a new method of analyzing data and use it to create something, you've invented something others could not. The result would be a product of your ingenuity and eligible for a patent.

But what if you're using someone else's model? You covered that too:

"But once you've got the machine, you give it some data, it churns a lot, and out comes whatever. You haven't contributed anything, except the data, and the program was constructed using known methods."

You contributed the data, whatever that might be. You probably also contributed a lot of code around the statistics. Most machine learning libraries, often what people mean when they say AI (unless they're the kind of marketing people who think an if statement counts) don't come with lots of friendly "Drop your data here and let's see what we get" boxes. Parsing data into a usable form for analysis and making the result obtain a goal takes effort. That effort requires ingenuity. If the ingenuity and effort are used to create something that didn't already exist, you've got an invention.

Moreover, when the result of such a program is an invention, the data itself is probably evidence of ingenuity. I'll use a concrete example for this: you're going to design new safety equipment for better outcomes for passengers in a car crash. One method to do this is to design some options, build prototypes, get some cars and test mannequins, and start crashing. If you get a good product by doing this, it would clearly be patent-worthy. Now that we have the computing power, you might also use computers to simulate designs and their results and evolve options. Both cases could use AI, probably neural nets: one to determine and improve simulation accuracy from the real-world tests and one to check the results of the designs and figure out where to make changes to improve it. If you did this, and also produced a good product, should it not be patent-worthy? After all, if I ran the same program in the same way, I could have gotten that product. However, had I designed them manually and done manual testing, I could also have made the product. The patent is given when you choose to use your skills to produce an invention, and you did. That someone else could have is not part of the process unless they also literally did so.

Re: Duh...

Wrong on several levels:

"If the something can be repeatedly invented by running a given program over and over again, then the combination of that program and its input data are mechanical, and its output must be deemed obvious."

No. The input data required effort to create. The program required effort to create. The output is a result of those things. That the program is deterministic does not matter. Otherwise, I could copy something nonobvious, write a program to print it to the console, run it three times, and by your logic call it obvious. It doesn't work that way.

"Can you patent a program?"

Yes. People do it all the time. I think they're often undeserving of the patent, but there are cases where they are. You can patent an algorithm, and a program is just an implementation of some algorithms attached together to be useful.

"Can you patent data?"

Not directly, but you can patent its results. The data of how well all your prototypes worked can't be patented, but the final product you got from doing this can be.

You misunderstand how patents work, and while I think you probably agree with me that this suggestion to give programs ownership rights is ludicrous, you're going a lot farther than current law does or, in my opinion, than a perfect patent system would.

Re: Patent system protecting inventors or investors?

They also misunderstand how patents work now. Here's their quote on the matter:

"If courts and governments decide that AI-made inventions cannot be patented, the implications could be huge,"

Yeah, that's not what's happening. What's happening is that AI-made inventions can't be patented by the AI. They can be patented by the person who used the AI program to generate some results they are using in their patentable thing, and companies have been doing so successfully for years, including both correctly issued and frivolous patents. The court cases about putting the program on the inventor list have never said the stuff isn't patentable, and they have often said that they're perfectly happy to give the patent to the user of the program.

Assigning ownership to a program would, if anything, make things harder; if you did that, then the AI program would have the right to sell the invention and the people involved would not. You would then need to establish that a program has the right to sign a contract that lets you sell the invention and another contract that says you can keep the profit from doing that. Depending on the country, for instance Germany where there is a level of patent that cannot be sold by the original inventor, you also might need a third contract that says the user can hold the money due to the AI since the AI would not be able to open a bank account with most countries ID requirements. As soon as you do that, someone who likes arguing pointless philosophical things as much as these guys do (or someone who has gotten annoyed enough) can claim that an AI that can sign contracts and own money and intellectual property isn't something you can own, has been illegally enslaved, and that the contracts it was hard-coded to sign are thus nullified. As fun as it would be to watch these people fight about this, they can do it by shouting at one another. They don't have to clog up the courts and patent systems.

If we ever get AGI, we may have to answer these questions. We don't have it. These things are not it.

Minimal, systemd-free Alpine Linux releases version 3.16

Re: Under a minute?

How often, when starting a game, does it either say it's loading something and make you wait or have an unusually high resource usage while displaying the initial menu (and on occasion other ways of artificially stretching the time from clicking the icon to being able to play to give it time) because it's doing that as you select options? Things take a while to load, verify, and make available for fast access. Games have to load a lot of assets into memory to get that speed. The OS has a similar requirement to run stuff quickly once it's turned on, and thus it spends more time preparing that.

As for older machines, they were indeed doing less when they started, which is important, but as you don't like that argument, they were also using techniques that you can use here as well. In many cases, their OSes were on ROM chips with some caching for the initial state, and you can do that with modern OSes by saving memory contents to disk and restoring them. It's more fragile if things have changed, but it will speed up the process of booting. Most Linux installations don't bother doing that because starting the components from scratch isn't that hard. The boot process also includes a bunch of stuff for hardware management which older computers didn't bother with.

Vehicle owner data exposed in GM credential-stuffing attack

Re: GM online account

To use their reward system, however that works. If you earn points and have to identify yourself to spend them, that's one of the only ways. I think if you don't care about that system, you can refrain from setting up an account and just drive the thing. You would then lose whatever advantages there are in the reward points, although I'm having trouble imagining how they could set it up to be very useful.

FTC urged to protect data privacy of women visiting abortion clinics

Re: People?

Obvious troll, I see. Since you like asking questions, why don't you answer this one: why was "people" incorrect? Would there be members of the set of those traveling that don't fall into the set of people?

Florida's content-moderation law kept on ice, likely unconstitutional, court says

Re: move the Social media out.

They would still need to deal with the laws of other countries, just as Facebook must make at least some effort to lie about complying with GDPR and having some kind of backdoor preventing the Irish DPC from investigating them. If you operate in a country, even if you are incorporated elsewhere, they will be able to apply their laws to you. With the internet, this isn't always strong. For example, if I put something on my website that China doesn't like, I'm not going to comply with their censorship law and they can either block me or not as they choose. If I were selling something or had my systems located in China, they'd have more leverage to do something about this and could successfully force me to comply. Social media companies sell advertising and thus earn money in the countries where their users are, so those countries have a method for punishing it if laws are not obeyed. Your solution will work as soon as we have a social media company that doesn't care about earning money or having anything located in in the countries of which they don't like the laws.

Safari is crippling the mobile market, and we never even noticed

Re: Lazy web developers

I don't like Chrome either and would be happy if they took it away from Google. There are good arguments that Google is also exploiting monopoly power with it and should be restricted or broken up. However, these do not change that Apple's doing the same thing and Apple's actions don't prevent the situation you suggest.

There already exists a version of Chrome for IOS. It uses WebKit internally, but it still has the Google devs and familiar logo. If they wanted, they could set up something that allows websites to only function there, and web developers can detect whether you're using Safari-WebKit or Chrome-WebKit and send users to get the Googly variant. I've seen a couple sites do that. Apple's ban on a browser having features they don't have doesn't prevent that kind of abusive behavior. It does let Apple restrict OS features in a way significantly stronger than anything Microsoft did with IE, and we know how well that ended for web standards. You don't have to like Google for Apple to be wrong.

US won’t prosecute ‘good faith’ security researchers under CFAA

I didn't say they were perfect, and in fact I pointed out that they can have major imperfections. They have the authority to selectively prosecute and they lack the resources to prosecute everyone in existence, so whatever your view on how well they use those things, it's useful to know they have this. This is not just the U.S., by the way. It's typical of all investigation and prosecution systems everywhere. Describing how financial crimes are judged and investigated, when something counts as a financial crime, and how you can legally do something that causes financial problems is not relevant to the security research situation, so I'll spare you that essay.

Because sometimes, your actions are either legal without permission or unplanned, and in both cases, being denied permission could be a problem. I'll use an example for each one.

Legal without permission: I've bought a device, and I'm going to run security tests on it. This device is mine, and I have that right. I do not require the manufacturer's permission to try gaining extra control of the software running on it. If I find a vulnerability in this one, I'll inform the manufacturer in the hope that they will fix it for all users of the device. If I asked them for permission to test something that I own and they declined, it would have no effect on my rights but they might think that it allows them to come after me. Manufacturers that don't want their vulnerabilities disclosed and don't want to fix them have frequently taken this approach to attempt to silence researchers who discover real problems.

Discovery is unplanned: I'm using a service legitimately and find a problem. This may be entirely accidental (I mistyped a URL, for example) basic (oh, look, this form reacts wrongly when an SQL query is put in it), or more active (look, they've got private information in the HTML of this page which they're sending to me without authorization) but in all cases, it's something that is made available for my use. Even in the SQL example, I'm putting text in a box where I'm supposed to do so, and if my message actually contains a valid SQL query, it's valid input. Having found this, I inform the company that there is a possible issue. Again, I haven't done something invasive to discover they have a problem, but if they're annoyed or don't understand what I've done, they may react badly. I shouldn't need their permission to do that.

There are many cases where you do need permission to do a test, and where failing to get it makes your activities criminal. A penetration test without permission is nearly always an obvious crime. These are pretty clear. Unfortunately, when the activity is clearly acceptable, researchers are not always treated well when they disclose it to the owner, which is why more protections are needed.

"Does the US Department of Justice really get to decide which part of federal law does not fit their agenda and thus can be ignored or is that neglect of duty?"

No, they just get to do that. They have to use the laws to decide who can be prosecuted, but they have the authority to focus their efforts at any subset of those people they want. This is the case so they can optimize the use of their resources (they don't spend all their time on small-scale criminals and run out of employees when bigger criminals come along), but it can lead to abuse and neglect.

"Security Researches should not be prosecuted for doing their job responsibly but relying on the current agenda of the DoJ to protect them seems to be wrong on muliple levels."

It definitely is. It's just that it's the only thing they can do. They are not allowed to put this into the law, so it's just a direction about who deserves their attention. It can be reversed at any time.

Seriously, you do not want to make that cable your earth

Re: almost whoops

And also that cables are shape shifters. I have a box of mostly USB cables, but even though there appear to be at least twenty in there, there is never the old variant of USB that I need when I search it. This is even when I've searched it for different things on separate occasions: when I need it, it's not there. I do have a USB-A to USB-A cable that just makes the wire longer, though. I'm sure I'll need that eventually.

Landmark case recognizes Bored Ape NFT as an asset

Re: Monopoly money

It's easy to prove that something was stolen (or in this case, sold without permission which is similar but not identical). At one point, you used to have the ability to sell this signed URL, and other people didn't. Now, you don't have that ability, and someone else does. You have clearly lost something. How much that something was worth is a different thing, but we don't have to figure that out yet. We were just asking whether it was an asset, not how valuable an asset it was.