Posts by doublelayer

British Airways fears a future where AI agents pick flights and brands get ghosted

Re: Third party booking sites?

Presumably the other part of your recommendation is ""don't be price-sensitive"". The point of most of the aggregators is to get lots of prices for similar things so you can decide whether flying an hour earlier of a different airline, possibly not one you've used a lot, is worth a lower fee. In my experience, the next step is to go to that airline again and see if you can get an even better fee from them directly, which you often can, but if you always go to your standby airline, you'll always get a flight but you may not be paying a low amount. Not only are there many people for whom cost is important, there are some for whom it's so critical that they can't travel without optimizing. The alternative is just to have all the airlines websites open and try to look up the options on every one of them simultaneously, navigating each site's method of showing you the flights that it would be most advantageous for them that you buy.

Ex-CISA officials, CISOs dispel 'hacklore,' spread cybersecurity truths

Re: Is this really the priority?

Mostly, the battery consumption with those turned on is negligible. Bluetooth uses more active scanning, so it would technically decrease your battery life but usually it's been optimized so much by companies that specialize in Bluetooth chips that the decrease is not noticeable. That is different when a device is connected and using the connection which definitely does drain battery somewhat faster, especially when doing things like audio which require constant high-bandwidth transmission, but if it's just sitting there looking for a device announcing itself, it's very low. NFC is mostly passive until activated by proximity, so that would be even harder to notice. If you need to eek out a couple more minutes from a charge, then turning them off might get you that, but if you expect hours of difference, you won't get it.

Sorry, but your glitchy connection might have cost you that job

I still can't blame the video platform. Whichever person and reason there is for turning it on can take the blame or decide if they have a sufficient need for it that the network needs to be upgraded.

"No, the onus is on the employer."

The employer will only be an employer if they think the perspective employee is going to be able to do the job. If they think the employee cannot or will not have the infrastructure needed to do the job, then they won't be the employer and have no onus. If I was the interviewer, I wouldn't consider someone having a bad connection as an indication that the employee isn't good enough, but before being willing to hire them, I'd need to know how we could get them a suitable one. And if we can't manage to do the interview for me to decide they're good enough except for the bad internet, then that's not going to go their way.

Your assumption of companies' willingness to hire someone with an inadequate internet connection is pure guesswork on your part. It all depends on what that lack of connection does to the quality of the work, including meetings and anything else that requires data transfer. Whether the better connection is claimed through the company or just included in the salary, they're going to need one to do the job.

I would have to ask them if they have another option. Perhaps that is the best service they have because the local ISP won't build anything better. If that's the case, then although I sympathize, unless they have an alternative planned or are going to move, I expect it's going to make them incapable of doing the remote job from the remote place they've chosen.

As the candidate, I'd have to find a better place to do the interview from at the least because rescheduling it repeatedly isn't going to show me in a good light. I can easily conceive of this being caused by understandable circumstances. For example, perhaps the cable delivering service was cut and, although the ISP told me it'd be fixed by Tuesday so I rescheduled the interview for Wednesday, it's late on Tuesday and the cable is still broken. At that point, I would be trying first to find another place I could be on Wednesday to do the interview. It doesn't automatically mean the candidate's in an unsuitable position, but that the possibility they are is so severe that reassurance is likely needed.

Re: I've never seen the point of meetings :o

Sometimes, they are pointless, but sometimes, the benefit is speed and context switches. We can discuss one idea between us and collect each other's opinions more quickly without writing detailed written proposals every time which makes it safe to suggest things that aren't fully fleshed out, and that sometimes turns out to be useful because something you would have rejected if you had to formally specify and request it might turn out to be a good idea after all when combined with other things other people knew. By "context switching", I mean that it takes much less time to switch between me telling you my idea and you telling me your idea, hopefully for the same thing, whereas writing things back and forth can take much longer as we either wait for each other to have free time to respond to the message or, in the case of a synchronous chat, wait for the other person to write and edit their response. I'm with David Mitchell (video) on this.

Re: Connection "Problems"

Probably true, but if the candidate is not able to attend things they want to attend, will they be able to connect when needed, and not just to meetings? Do I have a reason to believe that they can and will get a better connection if they are hired? If they can, then I need to know why they haven't yet, but if they can't, then they may be unable to do the job from their current location. People not wanting to do things is one problem, but people being willing but not able to do them ends up working in a similar way.

Really? Because I remember some. Sure, you could blame a few of them on the user, for example all the things that could go wrong with the short-range wireless phones that communicated with a base station, which usually worked but were subject to various signal and quality problems. I suppose you could tell everyone to only use the kind that has a wire all the way from your ear to the other person's.

Sometimes, though, the phone lines themselves had noise or interference, and rarely a call would drop, hence the common joke of hanging up on someone and getting a call back from them assuming that you had been cut off, one that wouldn't make sense if lines were always perfect. A lot like video calls today. I have them all the time with international users, and sometimes I have them with users on three continents, and they work so often that we don't bother having a backup procedure. But sometimes something goes wrong, and quite often, it's a problem with the user, not the service. I can't blame the video platform when someone insists on having video on when they've got a rural DSL connection.

Workday project at Washington University hits $266M

Sure, maybe that's what that translates to. However, maybe it translates somewhat differently, because I've also seen deployments that could be described that way. The way those worked, the ancient application from the 1990s needed to be manually tweaked for every change in input data because that input data was defined as a sprawling C++ object rather than anything that a non-programmer user could modify themselves. As processes changed more frequently, that meant more work for the people who maintained it and now had to spend most of their time operating it. It had serious efficiency problems which couldn't be fixed both because there wasn't much documentation of everything inside it and because the people who could give it a try were busy running it over and over every time someone who wanted output needed some changes which required the programmer to modify the source, so they had no time to reimplement big components. One procedure was so tricky to automate within the software that nobody did and, if you wanted the results which were needed at least twice a year, there were two different ways to do it: way 1 which involved a bunch of people in a room manually moving pieces of paper around and way number 2 which involved a separate Excel spreadsheet with macros that routinely took eight hours to complete.

How do you know they didn't have those? You don't have evidence to say that their old code worked any more than I can use my anecdote to prove that it was as fragile as what I have witnessed. Keep in mind that universities change a lot and software that handles them properly would ideally be implemented so generically that it's easy for the software to handle when departments are created or destroyed, when the criteria for graduation change, or about a dozen less common* but more drastic administrative changes, but in practice, most software is not written that way because doing that takes a lot longer than writing software that works well with the system we run today and we can always patch it when things change later.

* The examples I posited are just things that happened at my university while I was a student. Sometimes, things get a lot more crazy and difficult to handle. I doubt Workday will do a lot better, but I wouldn't have bet on the previous mechanisms.

Reddit sues Australia to exempt itself from kids social media ban

Fortunately for the rest of us, that's not how courts work. Even if they fail, they will not be fined for raising a completely normal constitutional challenge. And it's far less stupid than you think or phrased. The constitutional right has been upheld by Australia's courts many times, and never in the text or in their opinions did they decide that children don't have that right. They could modify their ruling to account for that, but that would be a substantial change. I agree with you that the second argument about anonymous accounts doesn't seem to have any effect on the law; sure, it might kind of work as an argument that this law is stupid, but courts can't strike down laws for being stupid, only for contradicting other things, so I expect that part to go nowhere.

Re: It's Time To Reign In All Of Them

That is not parental gatekeeping. It is governmental gatekeeping. If a parent thinks something is fine, can they let their child do it legally? No. If a parent thinks a different site is bad, can they add it to the denied list? No. It is not giving any parents more power. It is the government making blanket parenting decisions, whether you like those decisions or not.

Re: Um, Reddit, that is not how things work

Not if you think the law as written is illegal. If you do, you can make that case, and if the courts agree with you, you win and the law stops existing. Are you unaware that laws can sometimes be struck down? In this case, their first argument is an easily understood constitutional complaint, if not one that has an obvious answer. If you tried to pass a law that had a higher age limit, it would almost certainly be struck down as a violation of the Australian Constitution's guaranteed rights, so the question for the courts to decide is whether it is compatible to deny those rights to children. It might decide that it is because those children cannot vote, but it is far from the obvious result you claim. Countries where you cannot do that have a name: dictatorships. Fortunately, Australia has the rule of law and must properly handle challenges like this, whatever the answer ends up being.

Why do you think that's new? Why do you think that's bad? It is neither. If a country passes a law that is not compatible with other laws, that's one of the tools, and in practice pretty much the only tool, to do anything about it including finding out what the answer is. That's the entire point of legal and constitutional courts, as opposed to criminal and civil courts. While countries rarely have explicitly designated courts only for that purpose, most of the higher appellate courts spend most of their time on exactly these problems and have been doing so for centuries, pretty much as soon as the rule of law took over from royal decree.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Re: "I'm looking at a Blank Screen"

So what's the answer instead? Put the line at the top? How would that make any difference when the screen is small enough that the user can see the whole thing. Especially when, as in many cases, the bottom line is already used for status and this is a status update. Instead of making a new type of window, you continue to place the information in the same place, meaning any user who receives training and understands it knows where to look for the information about what's happening. Consistency can be helpful to users as well.

Re: In this instance i cant blame the user for this!

While I kind of agree about IT visiting, that's based on an assumption that any building with users on terminals probably had IT on site. If it was a distributed thing with a user at a facility with no IT staff on site, we're now talking about a much longer travel to have someone physically show up for a minor problem.

But the tape thing is different. I don't know what the procedure was for loading one and whether the user might have had to ask for it. Maybe there was someone who should have loaded that earlier. However, even if it was completely automated except for a human loader, there would still inevitably be at least a couple minutes latency for any tape to be loaded and the user would still see that screen, just for less time. They would still have had the call with the helpdesk, it would just have abruptly ended when the user hopefully said that it all came back to normal. Either way, when the user faced an expected part of the interface and didn't understand it, it was their inaccurate description of the situation that caused all of their problem.

Re: Error message

I'd adjust it a bit. In my experience, it's not the people who can't read, as in don't understand the message. They usually ask for help and listen. It's the people who can read but don't. A lot of messages that get ignored are things that the user can understand if they read them, and even if they don't, it is something they can contact a person about and read clearly so that person can help. A lot of people do that. Those who don't usually don't out of choice rather than ability.

Re: reminds me of the telnet test

I had the opposite problem. A charity I sometimes volunteer for wanted a copy of something that was being maintained for them by another company. That company provided them with temporary FTP credentials. So far, I wasn't involved other than recommending an FTP client because I hadn't set up that service. But when they consistently failed to figure out how to use the FTP client, even with the assistance of their providers' helpdesk, that's when I was called in.

The people at the charity were using the FTP client correctly. They kept getting errors and new sets of single-use credentials, none of which solved the problem because the people providing them evidently never thought to consider that their FTP ports are normally firewalled off with an allowlist and, as far as I know, never collected any IP addresses to allow through. Every connection would time out before the credentials were tried because only the SYN packet ever got sent. I don't know why their support system wasn't equipped to add things to their firewall when they were to generate an infinite number of temporary passwords, but it took escalation to what they called L3 support before they found someone who understood my email which boiled down to "This is the IP address. This is a log of no TCP connection. This is a log of a successful connection to the port the application runs on. Something is wrong with only the FTP server. Might this possibly be that this address is not allowed through your firewall?". I wanted to but did not ask "What address did you think would have worked here since you never asked anyone for one to allow".

Re: Nifty-Looking Desktop Computer Cases

That's one approach, and nothing's very wrong with that, but another perfectly valid approach is to have a flat top surface if it fits your design but don't make it in such a way that it causes problems. Put the power button, reset button, ports, and everything else on some other side and leave the top blank or with something decorative on it. That way, it can be flat and it still can't be misused. Designers should always start with how their equipment will be used and can then be creative within that envelope.

Re: "I found that a strange concept of 'nothing,'"

It still should be something that never happens, since the user was not asked to understand or even read the message, just to recognize that some things on the screen is not the same as the screen being completely blank. Sadly, it's also very common. I have a few people who will report problems to me but cannot understand that, if there is an error message, I want to hear A) that there was one and B) what it said, and if there was not an error message, I want to hear what was attempted, what normally happens, and what happened differently this time. I don't know why they have not learned that, when they tell me that "The server doesn't let me work", the first thing I'm going to ask is what it said (okay, what I'm first going to ask is what they're calling a server today, but once we've established the thing they're trying to work with, looking for the error message is the first step after that).

Crypto-crasher Do Kwon jailed for 15 years over $40bn UST bust

Since he's a South Korean citizen, yes, since he will be deported there. They could also work with the US to charge him earlier or even have him finish his US sentence there, though since prison is expensive, they might not bother.

AI superintelligence is a Silicon Valley fantasy, Ai2 researcher says

Re: Some people still think the Earth is flat

As I understand their obsession with the south pole, one explanation for why there's not an edge to fall off if the world is flat is that Antarctica is a big ice wall that keeps the oceans from flowing off the edge and onto the floor (or whatever is below the flat which they never seem to have thought about).

I don't know who came up with that theory, and if you try to work anything out geographically, it breaks down. It would put the north pole at the center of the planet, and I have yet to hear an explanation for why the center is cold, halfway from the center to the edge is warm, and the edge is also cold. Maybe there's a ring-shaped heater suspended over it somehow. The reason for the north pole being at the center and the south pole being the edge is because they argue that planes never fly over the south pole which proves that airlines are covering up the flatness. I've also never heard a theory for why anyone is advantaged by covering this up. Those times I've talked to flat earth people, both of them, I've always secretly suspected that nobody, or at least nobody I've met, actually believes it and they just find it fun to play-act that they do.

I don't know about that. As soon as they started trying, RAM makers could increase production to their capacity and undercut them. Those companies have already been paid or entered into contracts, so they don't have an incentive not to. I'm not sure the market is complex enough for OpenAI to successfully set up a middleman position in it.

Re: See Icon

I don't think they are entirely "humanities focused". Their objections include lots of problems when using them in scientific or engineering areas, and in fact most of the problems they name are worse in those areas. If you're asking for some poetry, a little variation from the same prompt is not going to hurt and may help a little. If you're trying to use this tool to solve a problem where answers are right or wrong, variation makes it much worse.

I'm hoping that you successfully use this as a tool. Maybe you do. Unfortunately, I know many people who say they can and they definitely do, a tool that solves their problem very quickly if the problem is that they have tasks to do and solving the problem consists of being able to lie that those tasks are now complete. Unfortunately, most people I know who like to use AI have quality problems and some of them make those my problem by failing to care enough about the usefulness of what they produce. You can get lots of summaries that occasionally include completely wrong information. You can write lots of software that occasionally fails to even compile. Perhaps it is sometimes faster to correct the inaccuracies than to generate the whole thing from scratch, but I unfortunately have to deal more often with people who decide that it's always faster not to correct the inaccuracies at all.

Disney turns to dark side, licenses IP to OpenAI for videos, images

Re: The Mouse that roared

They probably got quite a lot out of OpenAI as well, though the terms other than the investment, and most of the important ones about that part too, are not disclosed in things I have found. There's a benefit for OpenAI, and not just the one that when Disney goes after all their competition, they'll be insulated. Disney has lots of money and lots of lawyers experienced at punishing people with copyright, so AI companies don't want Disney for an enemy, especially if they teamed up with someone else.

Meanwhile, most of the Disney-related output is probably not something Disney actually cares too much about. There's plenty of art depicting Disney characters, and while they are more vicious than some others, they mostly ignore it because they don't have much of a choice and aren't suffering as a result. I think Disney probably came out ahead from this negotiation and that OpenAI probably isn't very disappointed either.

Vibe coding will deliver a wonderful proliferation of personalized software

Re: I read a Google "vibe coding" gush-agrada thing last night...

Both parts of that are words for substantial amounts of praise. Gush is a common term in English, whereas agrada sounds like it was either taken from one of a few romance languages where it's a word meaning the same thing or as part of one of a few English words that come from the same Latin root such as gratify, congratulate, or ingratiate. So I think you could translate that as "I read an intensely self-congratulatory thing from Google". I'm quite certain that's the intent from the gush part, so if they meant something else by the "agrada", they can correct this.

Re: Redundant Department of Redundancy

If we're going to be pedantic, and you started it, then those integrateds don't mean the same thing. The original integrated meant that the development tools were all together, integrated with one another. The second one means that those tools, still integrated with each other, are now integrated with a code guesser too.

That's neither small nor obvious. The old version involved copying and pasting code into and out of models, and it was a lot worse if you wanted to play roulette with your code generation. How to keep all of that code in the context window was tricky. Now the software is theoretically able to manage it for you. I doubt it does it well, but that's something that was quite a bit harder with standalone models. Other coding models managed it with IDE plugins which had similar goals, although depending on how much work Antigravity did, it could easily exceed those in feature set, and if I had to guess based on the amount of destruction it can cause, I think that it is likely they have managed a larger integration than their competition.

Re: It's going to be interesting

The more people there are who understand this, the more it happens, and yet even if managers and PMs don't understand it, there is a certain amount of coverage that programmers will do all on their own. I know that, if I don't make this work with certain error cases, they're going to happen and I'm going to have to fix it and I'm going to be yelled at for why it broke in the first place, so I might as well make it work now. If the PM who didn't understand this complains about me doing that, it's probably easier for me to explain, possibly dishonestly*, that this is necessary to keep it from blowing up than to try to do that after they have an error they are blaming on me.

* I fortunately have mostly had managers who understood what I was talking about so I've rarely had to. I will admit that I have, at least once, lied to people that something I was fixing was done to prevent serious consequences even though, in practice, we might have avoided the edge case altogether and it wouldn't have been terrible if we hit it, just because I didn't want to live in a world where the code was guaranteed to fail if we did. In that situation, we did end up hitting that edge case (from logged data), so I count it as having saved at least a day and some user complaints, but that was not guaranteed.

Re: I read a Google "vibe coding" gush-agrada thing last night...

Some definitions and translations you may find useful:

Contoso example: A fake company frequently used by Microsoft to demonstrate how a service might be set up using a specific Microsoft product. "Example" because it wasn't a full implementation, but a usage demonstration of a specific component. Microsoft assumed people reading the examples would decide which components to use, so they were showing how to use each one, not telling you which ones you needed for any given task. Therefore:

"looked like it had crawled out of a Contoso example": Had the form of a solution without the content and was missing important elements that needed to be added.

"No back end": The code that was produced only shows the interface. You need the back end code to do any tasks. Given their assessment of the quality of the front end (part you see), they weren't very confident that it would have managed the rest.

Does that help?

I don't have a position on it either way, but those two statements come from the same source. Someone who doubts the first might also doubt the second, with the option that the author is exaggerating or inventing his history, that he has forgotten important parts of that history, or that, while having done exactly what he claimed in the past, he still doesn't have enough understanding or testing of his new tool to be so confident in its professionalism. Among other things, his claimed history with VRML could mean that the software is professional in its ability to do the tasks he's testing but doesn't necessarily prove that the code is professional, an important aspect if it is to be later maintained. Any of these things would have to be supposition without external knowledge of the author's skills and experience which I certainly do not have, but so would any assumptions that those statements are both true.

Re: Job losses

I think the Iraq War example is a lot closer to the mark than you claim and has similar restrictions and answers as the AI example, starting with a simple problem with your statement: "Technically, it would have been possible to do it in a week with WWII technology if it was politically acceptable to have high civilian casualties."

Fine, everything's on the table. You can carpet bomb, small nukes, kill anyone you want. What can you actually do within a week? If the goal was simple, find where Saddam Hussein is and kill him, maybe you could. Even then, all sorts of things could get in the way of that quick a timeline. That's a short timeline for finding a hiding place if he was fortunate enough to go to one. That's analogous to code that you only need to work once and can go wrong in many ways, and we do have plenty like that. If I can write something quick and dirty which will get the results I want rapidly, even if I cause several errors using the run first and check whether I followed the API requirements later, I can do that too.

If your goal is a little bigger, obtaining the surrender of Iraq's armed forces, now it's trickier. Oh, it might look easier because somebody's going to surrender when you're threatening to nuke Baghdad, but you don't just need them, you need everything. That's analogous to something quick but that you're going to run multiple times. Little bugs are no longer acceptable, but at least there shouldn't be so many you need to iron out because the task itself is small.

But neither of those was the complete goal, hence why the actual war was long. Debating the goal of the attackers is not relevant here, but no matter what you think it was, whether that's making Iraq a democratic country, eliminating terrorist groups resident there, preventing more genocide, weakening other countries' diplomatic or military positions without going to war with them as well, those are not simple goals and no level of weaponry was going to make that happen because the trouble was not easily locatable and bombable. Getting that after World War II took a lot of time, money, and some threatening countries that the allies were protecting the vanquished from, and repeating that is not easy either to achieve or to convince politicians and citizens to pay for. And that's what people who write software mostly need as well. They need software which continues to work long-term, that can be fixed or improved without rewriting big chunks, reasonable confidence that those little changes won't introduce massive new bugs, testing to confirm that, and correct documentation and understanding from those maintaining it. These are not simple requirements and current LLMs do not do them at all. Nor is it likely that just throwing more money at it will make that happen any more than more bombs in 2003 would have prevented ISIS from forming. There are some problems that can be solved by throwing more money at them, but diplomacy and inventing unproven technology tend not to be among them.

Really Simple Licensing spec lets web publishers demand their due from AI scrapers

Re: Enforcement?

They weren't saying that the mechanism doesn't allow setting a price, but the generic anti-copyright "everything digital should be free at all times" crap. At least in the narrow case of their comments, they're correct; it is digital and it lacks any worth, monetary or otherwise.

Affection for Excel spans generations, from Boomers to Zoomers

Re: Dunno

There are plenty of free databases using SQL or SQL-like syntaxes, notably Postgresql (you still need to install it somewhere) and SQLite (works entirely portably). Licensing isn't really the problem.

The problem is that you can put a spreadsheet in front of a user and they'll figure out how to find an intersection between a row and column to enter data, but put them in front of an SQL CLI and they'll be immediately lost. Most systems that use a database have programmed UIs built specifically for it, and if you have those, they are generally quite helpful with two major drawbacks. It took someone with more programming knowledge to write them, so if you don't have one of those, you don't have them. And, if you need anything that's not already in the UI, now you've got an annoying process of trying to find someone to add it and the addition won't be a simple formula or view, a problem that gets worse if your change needs to change the database's structure by, for example, adding a column which some things will handle, most things will ignore, and some things will break on. That's why spreadsheets have and will continue to win for this kind of task. We have not succeeded at making anything better from the users' perspective.

Re: Dunno

I think that does account for a lot of users. In case people are interested in the blog we're talking about, it is here and it's from 25 years ago.

The problem with the complaint is that we're entirely correct that Excel has a lot of problems when used as a database but, from the perspective of most users, there isn't anything else for them to use. Following the same design advice from that post, we haven't considered what the people who don't have experience with databases need and therefore haven't built something that solves their problems. If we tried, we'd likely end up with something that looked a lot like a spreadsheet but just didn't do as many of the spreadsheet things. It's likely not very hard for us to write an SQL table schema to describe the data we're going to store and some input validation restrictions, either running at the SQL level or slightly above it. Both are foreign to a lot of people who need to create and store records with specific fields. Therefore, it's often quite difficult to figure out what to tell people to use instead of Excel. The stereotypical comment doesn't even try, just saying "a database" which doesn't specify what database engine or how they'd configure it and certainly doesn't cover the entry and display parts of the problem.

Some of them do have to use Excel, whereas others could use any spreadsheet but are so used to the Excel UI*1 that they don't want to change. In both cases, they could use it through a VM*2 if ditching Windows was desirable.

*1 Sometimes, Microsoft has changed the Excel UI and angered users. I knew many people who were very big users of Excel who got very unhappy with the introduction of the ribbon. But now that they've finally gotten used to that, they will react equally unhappily to any other big UI change including going to LibreOffice.

*2 I don't know if you can use Wine or related software with the full Office. I've never bothered to attempt it and my initial thinking is that something will go wrong. The web version of Excel is technically capable of the same things and looks sort of like the desktop version, but I have also never tried having someone who uses Excel a lot go that way and imagine that the decrease in speed would be as noticeable there as it has been whenever I've used that or Google Sheets.

UK finally vows to look at 35-year-old Computer Misuse Act

Of course it needs changing. The problem in the text is the word "unauthorized". What does that mean? People who don't like that you've pointed out they've got a gaping hole often interpret that as "we did not like that you told us this, therefore you were unauthorized to do so". It's not defined, so what authority can authorize you to do what thing is entirely unclear. Do you need prior written permission to view a public site? How about to take apart hardware you legally purchased and own? Or take things I do at my job. I work in security and have plenty of authorization to poke lots of places looking for problems, including things we bought or licensed from others with access to our data. Do I also need authorization from those others to do that, with my employers' being insufficient?

In practice, this has no definition other than what a complainant and law enforcement are willing to accept. Therefore, if I find a problem, report it, and get threatened that if I say anything to anyone about this ever again, they'll have me arrested as an evil criminal hacker, I don't have any certainty that I won't find myself in police interviews and there's at least some chance I might find myself convicted. Probably not, which is why I still report things, but I know people who have gotten plenty of legal threats. The fact that I and most of those can point to professional work in security, will push back against threats, and are not asking for money act in our defense. We should not need any of those things to be able to report problems without fear, and there are people who don't have those and still have valid reports.

The analogy to doors is almost always flawed and makes this tricky, but I will try anyway. The difference is that these are doors in a very public space where the general expectation is that they will be unlocked and open unless the owners wish otherwise. Websites are intended to be accessed by all sorts of people from almost anywhere, and thus they should be treated differently than private property.

Consider a simple example: I'm navigating a website to download a driver I need. I click the link that says it's for the driver. I get a 404. So far, I'm accessing public resources available to anyone through paths created by the website owners. But now, since I didn't get the file the link was supposed to go to, I try removing the last part of the URL to go up a level. I'd argue this is still completely normal, no more invasive than going around the back of a shelf to see if they just misplaced it. If they don't want me to do that, blocking that is incredibly easy.

This brings me to a directory of files, and I choose the one that looks like it's the file I wanted. But when I open it, I discover that this is sensitive internal information they really don't think should be public. Have I broken the rules here, just because I didn't only follow their own links? Is it different if I followed someone else's link to the same page? In both cases, this is available to anyone who knows a predictable URL and would have been very easy to block.

This is not a theoretical example. This is an example I went through, reported to the owner of a website, and received an irritated response to. While they didn't go to the effort of threatening me with legal consequences, that does happen. I did not apply to the corporate headquarters for a written permission to navigate their website, nor in my opinion should I need to in order to avoid prosecution because they were unhappy that they put things they didn't want people to see there.

The information was sent to their personal email account. That's a lot more akin to having a key mailed specifically to you, and you would have a few reasons to try to figure out what it was doing there. For example, did you have an account you created years ago and forgot about, the most plausible reason that they would think there was an account using your address? Was someone specifically impersonating you, in which case you have a personal security reason to identify it and close it? In both cases, you would have every legal right to do exactly that because mail that is directed to you at an address you legally control is yours.

Google Antigravity vibe-codes user's entire drive out of existence

Re: What the Fark did you expect?

Good news, you can do that to any software you run on your computer. That proprietary blob that's Microsoft Windows: you can do that. You'll just be doing it with the machine code that gets executed which you can easily convert back to the more human-readable assembly. Have fun.

You are not owed every line of code someone wrote, no matter how much you want to have unrestricted and free access to it. If you don't want to run anything you can't read, then don't run proprietary software. It doesn't mean you can apply your favorite terms to any software or make ridiculous laws designed, not to solve any problem, but to force people to comply with your wishes. Nothing else works like that; I'm not required to give you all the manufacturing diagrams for a tool to remove myself from legal responsibility if you bash yourself in the head with it. It doesn't work that way with software either, it shouldn't, and it never will.

Tech leaders fill $1T AI bubble, insist it doesn't exist

Re: No slow down

Your proposal would not work. The reason you cite, that it's really hard to make everyone forgo money when they don't have to, is only one reason it wouldn't. Another is that, if everyone sold their RAM at cheap prices today, that would only make RAM slightly cheaper for the average consumer. AI datacenters would not buy that because they're using different types of RAM than a lot of us. They're made at similar or the same facilities, but most of the RAM they are buying is either fast VRAM that's connected to the GPUs or slower ECC RAM connected to CPUs. It also wouldn't work because the secondhand RAM market is tiny compared to the new RAM market. It's hard to make a dent in prices when you start from that.

Re: No slow down

I doubt it. The initial shock may be a little faster, but markets already moved really fast in 2000, so I expect that the only difference is that the people who manage to sell before the shock is over will be more random and include more retail investors.

The big collapse after that will probably not be any shorter because that's the part that deals with individual humans trying not to follow suit. A company that still thinks it has a workable plan isn't going to fire everyone and declare bankruptcy a day after a market collapse. No, they'll say they're different and keep going until they can't raise any funds. That could still take weeks for small startup companies and months for ones that raised a lot of investment and have the foresight to not build the most expensive part of their plan and use that funding for extra runway. Except in this case, we have some of the companies with the most cash in the world participating. Microsoft and Google don't have to throw in the towel for a long time. They can keep insisting that Copilot and Gemini are different and that they will be the winners when the smaller models are gone while part of their bulwark of cash burns merrily. Their doing that makes it possible for related businesses to say that they're still able to operate. It will take some time for all of the people who will eventually give up to give up.

Re: No slow down

This is a good point and it can be extended. Bubbles popping are rarely as fast or as contained as comments predict. Fast ones still take weeks just to finish the first plunge, and the aftermath is much longer but less spectacular. Yet it's the aftermath that causes most of the problems. A few companies failing costs the employees of those companies and some suppliers or investors their jobs. A year of slow collapse costs far more jobs, but they happen slowly so people often point to that one spike. That goes for any of the consequences, whether RAM prices or tech hiring.

Cloudflare blames Friday outage on borked fix for React2shell vuln

Re: more rust fail

And this has to do with Rust how, exactly, since it was a Javascript dependency they didn't write? For someone who is complaining about evangelizing, you're doing a very thorough job of evangelizing how much you hate Rust even as you demonstrate that you lack any knowledge useful to proving any point you might have had about it.

First, React is not Java, it's JavaScript. In case you were unaware, those are not the same. If you were unaware of which language React is in, the clue is in the first sentence of the article.

Second, there's lots of both Java and JavaScript all over the place, including online. I have no idea who told you that Java is unsafe to use on the internet, and if you're referring to the fact that nobody uses Java browser extensions or applets anymore, that's because they often had serious performance and interoperability problems. They were no less secure by definition than their JavaScript-based replacements, browser plugins or add-ons, can be without Mozilla and to a lesser extent Google putting effort into better sandboxes, so while there were several with security problems, that was due to mistakes in the code or bad dependency inclusion, both problems that affect any other language. The language rarely decides whether the code written in it is fit for what it's used for. You cannot decide a company's competence by their choice to use one of the most popular programming languages, nor by their possible use of a different one of the most popular languages.

I have some of the same complaints about CloudFlare that you do. I agree that they cause problems for normal browser users and are frequently used by criminals. They do make some efforts to try to improve on both of those, and to some extent I give them credit on the latter because any large internet company will have criminal customers they haven't found out yet. Still, we can agree on some of their downsides while not agreeing on the language choice part.

Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours

Re: Similar Story with FTP

That won't work. rm -i will just list files until you try to delete them, and only then will you find out whether you can. You can do manual stat calls to find out whether you can if you need to know that information. However, this sounds like it was from FTP, meaning your access is slightly different and normal terminal commands aren't what you're using.

Re: Medical systems are a nightmare

But there is often a way to create user-specific passwords for something which you can then revoke individually rather than needing to revoke the common password every time a single user isn't supposed to have access anymore. In my experience, most shared passwords don't get revoked when someone leaves, so unless you're already doing that, you've failed, and if you are doing that, there's likely an easier and better option. If you have individual accounts, there are many situations where you never have to have a shared password for anything.

Re: Medical systems are a nightmare

It is dangerous because anyone with access can copy that password and continue to use it and you can't lock them but not everyone else out by changing it. You can try to lock them out by changing the password and locking them out of the vault, and as long as that's what your planning, it's probably not too dangerous. If you ever locked someone out of a vault without changing every common password they have accessed in the past, then a step was missed which can lead to yet another of those "IT employee sabotages employer after termination" articles. Read the comments on one of the articles. See everyone calling the entirety of IT idiots? That's you in this scenario, which is why shared passwords are a danger that needs to have some plan for how to prevent it going wrong.

Re: Lost for words

At least you can create subdirectories which have a more limited scope, which is what I have done when software needs to store temporary data that something else shouldn't read. I doubt everyone has done the same.

Judge hints Vizio TV buyers may have rights to source code licensed under GPL

That's not what this is about. Vizio didn't put their own software under the GPL then try to not give out the code. That's because a) you'd have to be a complete idiot to do that and b) it's almost impossible to put the GPL on something you don't want to share, at least in the same way that it would be to sign a contract saying you agree to do things you refuse to do, and there would be several ways out of such a choice.

What happened here is that Vizio used other people's software and that software is under the GPL. They can't change that because they didn't write it. That makes any software sufficiently combined* with the software they used from others GPLed too. They can't change the license on that either without removing all the software that uses the GPL. So to do what you're suggesting, they would end up having to rewrite the parts that interact enough with the GPL.

* That said, "sufficiently combined" is somewhat narrow. The fact that they've got a Linux kernel in their TV doesn't mean that they have to release the application stack that runs on the TV. It just means they have to release the Linux kernel with any changes they made directly to it. I haven't read the details on this case, but from previous examples I've seen, none of the specific pieces of software mentioned in the article are likely to get interesting source out. Perhaps there's a different GPL component attached to something likely to be substantially different. I've gone through the effort of getting open source code from companies when it turns out to be almost the same as what I could have gotten directly from the source with changes that didn't make any useful improvement.

Lawyer's 6-year-old son uses AI to build copyright infringement generator

Once again, they can, which is why people wanting to produce this stuff should be careful. However, I think you'd be surprised how much of that is out there without anyone bothering much to stop it. There's plenty of depictions and writing about Disney characters that Disney didn't approve and wouldn't like which they are ignoring because it's not really a problem. That doesn't mean it's legal, it means their lawyers have bigger problems. Still, if you're claiming that it's not out there in absolute abundance, you aren't looking, and I suggest you stay not looking because nearly all of it is worthless.

Bots, bias, and bunk: How can you tell what's real on the net?

Re: You have to be careful with everybody

"I'd argue that our experts letting us down is at least one of the reasons we have so much of a problem with populism at the moment."

I'd alter that slightly as "I'd argue that our expectation that experts should be able to fix anything and their letting us down on this incorrect belief is at least one of the reasons we have so much of a problem with populism at the moment."

For example, one of the groups of experts who is most often accused of letting us down is economists unable to predict recessions, except that:

1. Many of them did predict them but it was more fun to keep investing than listen to those buzzkills.

2. They were being complained at for not predicting something they can't predict. Economists can often explain how risky a thing is in the long term, but that doesn't give them the power to know when something's going to fail down to the month. If they could, they'd have all the money and would probably rule the world. Expecting that they can predict with that degree of precision is as foolish and as doomed as expecting that a really genius doctor can tell you when precisely you will die by reading your MRI results.

3. Pretty much nobody was listening to economists until things went horribly wrong, and then the economists that were later blamed for failing to predict were called in to suggest how to clean it up, and by the time they could make any suggestions that would be listened to, they only had the choice between options that were all extremely expensive and wouldn't reverse the problem from which they tried to select the one that would cause the least damage, which means they got blamed a second time for not bringing everything back to when it was all fun.

It's the same with all the other kinds of experts. Experts in medicine can't make a pandemic disappear. Experts in criminal justice can't make people stop wanting to break laws. Neither experts in diplomacy nor expert military strategists can cause world peace. As long as we keep riding the pendulum between expecting that they can do those things and getting dismissive because they can't, we'll never go in the extra direction of figuring out what they can do well and how that connects to the rest of us.