Posts by doublelayer

Admins wonder if the cloud was such a good idea after all

Re: Rainy clouds?

Probably some of both, and in the areas of increasing price we can also add the price of workers. Somebody needs to replace broken things and write the software to administer the hardware, whether in cloud or not. When running on prem, the price of the latter is often outsourced to a company from whom management software is bought, but they're probably increasing prices too. It's likely that prices to run a server anywhere has increased, and that when they increased for cloud providers, those providers tacked on a bit more when they raised the prices to account for it. I don't like it, but it is what I can expect from any company; I'm sure those who have higher prices to run their server rooms have passed that on to me and added a bit more as well. I can't stop it, but at least I should not be surprised when it happens.

Re: Cloud is a financial model not a technology

Because they're money now and money continuously, and those are different. Not necessarily as different as accountants like to treat them, but different nonetheless. Have you ever rented somewhere to live? Why didn't you just buy a house? It's just paying for somewhere to live, after all, so surely it's the same. There are sometimes benefits from renting, and sometimes substantial downsides because you've paid a lot more than you needed to and don't have anything at the end, but you can't treat them as the same because there are times where the one that seems the more expensive is the only option that gets you what you need.

What is this computing industry anyway? The dawning era of 32-bit micros

Re: ARMed and Ubiquitous

I wonder how much of this is speculation based on what we would want rather than what is realistic. Apple could have used ARM chips in Macs at the time, and yes, that would have been decades before they actually did. At the beginning, those would have been fine. However, would that necessarily have kept ARM strong in comparison, or would ARM have become the new PowerPC: good enough, but there is something faster that eventually needs to be switched to?

It is relevant that the current ARM chips came from the enhancement of lower performance, lower-power mobile chips. In fact, might a 1990s-era push for faster performance for mostly desktops have harmed ARM's power usage, something that was important to getting it in every mobile device in the 2000s and 2010s? It certainly did for X86 as Intel discovered when nobody wanted to put an Atom in a tablet.

AI firms propose 'personhood credentials' … to fight AI

Re: That solves neither set of problems.

If your only goal is slowing them down, then you have better ways that won't have stronger impacts on the legitimate users than the illegitimate ones. If I'm a criminal and I want a bunch of verified accounts, then I'm probably planning to make a bit of money out of this. I can bribe some people to go to your office and collect tokens for me; if I'm successful, I'll get it back. Meanwhile, someone who just lives in a rural area will try to go themselves and it will take a lot more time.

There are lots of ways to slow down a transaction. Collect an address, mail something to it, make them enter the number. Get a credit card number, charge something to it, wait for it to post, then return it. In many cases, there is no compelling reason to do either of those things. A physical office visit is worse than both of them in many cases, not that either of those is good.

Re: So what stops me

Basically there is no method for this to work at all. If the identity tokens are used at all, then someone will get them. They might buy them. They might steal them. They might get an issuer to generate lots of new ones. It falls into the same challenge that has hampered all cryptographic key-based systems since we've had them: key management is hard, especially when the users don't care. All the potential harms you point out are realistic, and there are tons more available. For limited groups and limited uses, this could work as well as anything else, but when you try to apply it to the whole internet, it breaks almost immediately.

Three problems with that:

1. Most things I connect to never see my MAC address.

2. Most things that do see my MAC address will happily accept a randomized one, including a continually randomizing one that changes by the hour. Those that won't work with that, for example corporate networks with MAC allowlists, will need one that doesn't change but don't need it to be globally unique or the one specifically issued by my manufacturer.

3. Most computers and phones allow me to change the MAC address manually if not automatically. That doesn't generally apply to IoT stuff, but a lot of the ones that I use will let me do it.

Re: Kill the 1-to-1 concept of identity

What good would that do? There are places where that's fine, and they already let you do that by using something like an email address as an identifier. There are lots of places that don't want that and won't let you do that, so they'll still use something that's unique per person, and if you take away one, they'll find another one. That's never going to end.

Re: EFF

"Apart from birth and death certificates, passports, ID cards (those countries that have them), driving licences, social security, etc..."

Let me guess. You live somewhere where the paperwork seems to be handled adequately, and you've never had significant problems with yours. Congratulations, but your experience is not that of many other people. Yes, if you need to find a place that has validated paperwork, governments are your best bet, but that doesn't mean they're good. It means that all your other options are even worse.

People manage to get born without getting birth certificates. There are some weird people who see that as a good thing. Often, governments don't notice until many years later when that person tries to get some other documentation and can't prove their identity. As a child, any physical paperwork about me was handled by my parents. What would have happened if they lost it, it was destroyed in some way, etc? Problems, many problems. What happens when one person gets copies of documents and uses them to live as someone else? Chaos. For instance, the real person gets put in a mental institution. That's not entirely due to incompetence. Sometimes, the challenges of establishing an identity are that hard.

That is all in a nice developed country that spends lots of money on those databases. It works even more badly when the government is dysfunctional, the identity database had a bomb drop on it, or a government is specifically trying to delete people from the database. It works badly when people travel without reporting in, either because they didn't feel like it or because it's illegal (there are illegal international migrants of course, but in some countries like China, there can be illegal intranational migrants too and paperwork is messy). Or simply a place where people don't report a birth because they've rarely done it before and don't really see why they need to now.

Re: In-Person Verification

That solves neither set of problems. Unless you make them prove identity, you have no way of knowing whether the person that showed up at your office claiming to be X is X or not, so if you issue them some token they can use later, you'll have done nothing other than proving that, at some point, a person was there. Someone who wants tokens for bots can hire a hundred locals and have them walk through your office giving random names and sending the tokens back to base.

Meanwhile, if you're going to solve this problem by collecting lots of identity details, then you don't have to make them show up physically. You can just use the complicated, dangerous, and useless solution these "researchers" came up with. Since you're unlikely to put offices everywhere humans live, the digital solution, while all the adjectives and some much nastier ones would still apply, would at least be implementable while the physical one would have all the same downsides and also not work.

Why is that desirable? Start with something that's not soft. The soft factors will not be suitable passwords and they're very likely to break. They won't be that hard for someone to impersonate, and they will be very likely to show false negatives just because someone's computer broke and was replaced or they clicked on one of those Google ads and ended up using Chrome even though they didn't want to. You'd be constantly ringing false alarms and gaining nothing for it.

That's to say nothing of the privacy nightmare that would be. I do not give my biometrics to any random site on the web. I don't tell them where else I browse. If something is medium or higher security, let's stick with the direct methods. If something is low security, let's also stick with direct methods but we can use a cookie, which I can allowlist, to remember me and keep me logged in. Neither of those is likely to lock me out at an inopportune time. Neither of those will result in well-deserved GDPR fines as your solution almost certainly would.

Elon Musk’s Starlink won't block Elon Musk’s X in Brazil, as required by court order

The reasons for that are complicated, and I'm guessing you don't care about them, so I won't bother going into it. The other important fact there is that the U.S. government took the plane. Not a random company, not a specific company like its manufacturer, but a government. It is much easier for a government to take property from a foreign government, either following or ignoring law, international, treaty, or local. It is much harder for a company to do so. Most courts will ignore the request by saying they don't have jurisdiction. If they find a judge who agrees to let them do it, the country will appeal it and it's likely that the next judge will cancel that. If they get a judgement and try to enforce it, they are likely to have other problems, because if you go after the money that the Brazilian government might hold in a large New York bank, Brazil can threaten that any dollars taken from their account there will be taken back from that bank's holdings in Brazil, holdings which cannot be quickly removed to prevent them from doing that. Those banks do a lot of business in Brazil and don't want to pick a fight, so they can find reasons why the judgement needs to be reconsidered and, since it's likely not to be legally binding either, they are likely to have it reversed before any hard decisions need to be made.

This applies whether the country is democratic or authoritarian and no matter how justified their action is. It is why companies that invested a lot of money in budding dictatorships often lost it. People who stored their money in Venezuela or Russia, for instance, often lost it and were unable to get anyone to give it back. We may have agreed that they deserved it back, but they weren't likely to get permission to start selling off anything those countries had to take.

Canadian artist wants Anthropic AI lawsuit corrected

Re: Less prolific than El Reg even with AI autocomplete

In my, admittedly limited, experience, writing is a lot like code in that speed of words written is a bad metric and that that number is highly variable. Writing documentation, for instance, is something that comes easily to me. I know what this program does because I've been using it for weeks, so now I have to write down a description. I can do so at length. I may still need a review to point out where I've been unclear on something or where I've made a mistake in my haste, but it isn't very difficult and few changes are needed.

Many other types of writing are more complicated because they also include a lot of planning and review. Well-written fiction should be one of those things. It's not just having an idea of an interesting thing for the characters to do and writing down the idea, but you have to make the words paint a picture or you end up with some very boring prose, you have to include sufficient description so that the reader understands the image you planned, and you have to tie that scene to all the rest of the plot. If you mess up on the last part, then at best you end up with a book that's way too disconnected, and at worst your scene contradicts something important and breaks the reader's interest. There is no canonical program out there for you to check your writing against, and therefore you have to do a lot more work. I would not expect people doing different forms of writing to have any similar number for words written per hour of work, and in fact I would expect that different authors, even in the same area, would also have very different numbers.

Re: Boucher using Claude to write 97 books in less than a year

From the other article, the books being written don't have that many words. Two to five thousand words is a short story. The only question is, without reading them, whether the 40-140 images are making this part of the plot, effectively a short graphic novel.

In his defense, writing a bunch of short stories is a very different thing to writing a bunch of novels. I can't know how much effort has gone into any of the short stories without reading them, and I'm not paying to do that. I'd still think that writing a hundred of them in a year probably means there's not that much in them, but it is conceivable for an author to do that by hand and therefore conceivable that someone could use GPT to generate one, then clean it up to be something worth reading. That doesn't mean that's what he has done. There are lots of people who put in some prompts and sell whatever text comes back, and just because he claims not to be one of them doesn't prove he's not.

Techie made a biblical boo-boo when trying to spread the word

Re: Missing detail

It's generally available from VOIP systems which can probably impersonate any number they want, and even if they can't, they have permission to use your number so they can use it on as many outgoing lines as they want. Also, this story suggests it was probably a while ago since it was distributing identical audio messages over the phone which is not as common nowadays, meaning even fewer protections on what number you can use to identify yourself and fewer people who would notice.

Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model?

Re: "Whether we burn $500 million a year or $5 billion – or $50 billion a year – I don't care"

"All of which are exactly the sort of errors a student programmer might make."

None of those are the sort of errors a student programmer should be making if they're using the least amount of effort. Including but not using a library, fine, I'll give you that one. Forgetting halfway through that you're supposed to count letters? Making up random Unicode ranges when all the characters I asked about were in the normal ASCII range? We're talking about a three-line program here with at least twenty simple ways of writing it. Most of the errors this system made weren't even in the logic of the program but the set of characters to be checked, and I gave them that part.

I've dealt with student programmers, and of course I was one at one point. There are a few different classes of errors that could be expected. Not dealing with character encodings is certainly one. Not considering scale is certainly it, and it implemented it with a relatively inefficient algorithm, but I don't mind that because that would be my starting implementation too which would be modified if I needed to do this to very long strings. Missing something related to case could happen, so I can give you the original checking upper and lower cases even though I explicitly said "only lowercase". What isn't so excusable is ignoring that I told it to find commas and that neither attempt did so. Well it did find "、", but not ",", and no, I can't give it any credit because it didn't just find "、", but also all the other symbols in that block like 〇, 》, and 〒.

Re: "Whether we burn $500 million a year or $5 billion – or $50 billion a year – I don't care"

"Yes, exactly. Sorting them physically into piles, is a known strategy to cope with human well-known cognitive lack."

Which is why I referred to counting things in a microscope. Biologists are not picking up and sorting cells (or whatever it is they're counting).

"Wow, you’ve fallen right into the anthropocentric trap. Why is counting 3 items so much easier for a human? Because the human brain literally has specific circuits for counting in blocks of 2, 3, 4 and 5."

That's not the point. If there are eleven items, which is neither in that list nor an even multiple, it still won't take as long as 237. Quantity is the problem if the question is losing track, and you are the one who brought up the losing track prospect. Of course, a computer has hardware which is great at not losing track, so a program that was able to make use of that to perform cognitive tasks should be much more reliable than a human would. This is all irrelevant because the computer is not trying to count, as you said yourself:

"You just need to understand the tool you have; and want to succeed at the task in hand, rather than trying to catch it out."

Which I will extend "You just need to understand the tool you have; and what it can do (generate some text) and what it can't (guarantee that the text is at all relevant or correct)". That is the only way you will know whether your tool can let you succeed at the task in hand.

Because yes, it can probably write the program "strawberry".count("r"), but with many other tasks, your suggested solution wouldn't work either. Whenever it has to write a program that's a bit more complicated, it fails and badly. For example, I asked it to write a Python script that would count characters from a larger set. It gave me a valid Python program that counts characters. From another set. I asked it to count the number of characters that were in the lowercase alphabet and a small set of punctuation. It gave me a program that counted letters in the lowercase or uppercase alphabet and no punctuation at all. When I pointed this out, it gave me a new program which had the following criteria:

1. The punctuation I asked it to count were mostly not counted.

2. It told me I needed to import the re (regular expression) library, but never used it.

3. It would now count some characters in Unicode code ranges that didn't include the characters I asked for but did include several others.

4. It stopped counting any letters.

5. The only character from the example string that was counted anymore was ".".

But sure, that's a trivial strategy that works flawlessly.

Re: The linguists clearly having kittens...

Easy. Go to a library, book store, or school. Find one book with the words "English" and "Grammar" on the cover. Read that book. You will be guaranteed to get clear rules for how English must be written. Warning: do not read a second book. If you do, you will get another set of rules which will almost certainly differ in some respects from the first set of rules. Both sets of rules will also have some differences between the way people actually speak and write English when attempting to communicate. You can either accept this or become one of those people who like to point out split infinitives even though nobody else cares.

Re: "Whether we burn $500 million a year or $5 billion – or $50 billion a year – I don't care"

What kind of argument is that? Let's consider your 237 items. I have to count them. Without any physical interaction? What does that mean? I can't pick them up? People count things all the time when they can't move them. I've known biologists who have to manually count things through a microscope. Sure, it seems like incredibly boring work, and it's work that I hope has been superseded as often as possible, but they can manage it. I can count tiles without labeling them. So yes, I can eventually count 237 items, it will just take a while. If I lose count, I will either tell you I lost count or decide that the task is pointless enough that I'm refusing to complete it.

However, the argument is bad for another reason, namely that the quantity isn't the same. Asking someone to count 237 items will take them some time. Asking them to count three items is much easier. There are only three Rs in "strawberry". Quantity is not the problem here. The problem in anthropomorphic terms is that the program does not know how to count. The program knows how to respond to sentences with other sentences. It is not adaptable enough to understand the query, and if it was, the problem would pose no difficulty as it could return to the string to count characters. Incidentally, this disproves your other flawed analogy to translation, as the original string is easily read both during the initial tokenization as well as at any other point before a response is returned. The tool is being asked to do something that it was never designed to do, but it appears as if it should be capable of it, and people treat it as if it is capable of it. The tool is not intelligent because it wasn't intended to be intelligent. It is the user's fault and the user's problem when they wrongly assume that it is.

Re: Sometimes I wonder whether I'm talking to a person

I'm not sure how I work, and I wouldn't automatically say that complex statistics couldn't be it. If it was, then yes, I have internal goals, but those goals are derived from statistical inputs about my situation, and I introspect in order to improve the analysis of those statistics, and my emotional responses are artifacts of the process which are created from the statistical analyses and then used as inputs to the next ones (this one I'm more confident about because sometimes they help and sometimes emotions are distractions which reduce my ability to get to my goals). However, even if that's true, it's the next leap in logic that they attempt which loses me. The way they argue, they seem to be following this syllogism:

Our brains are statistical (you appear not to believe it, I think it's possible but unproven). LLMs are statistical. Therefore LLMs are capable of acting in the same way as the human brain. Therefore they already do act in the same way as some of the human brain.

I have problems with both of the therefores, not just because they're unproven, but because I think there is sufficient evidence to call them both false because we do have some understanding of how an LLM is arriving at its answer and our understanding fits well with the many things it gets wrong where a human trained on the same material would not. Thus, whether we are primarily statistical machines or not, which I can't prove, I am not convinced by the broader argument. I see a lot of people anthropomorphize programs. I think that this may be partially due to the use of analogies in terms (training, reading, hallucinating, etc), but since it's been going on back to Eliza if not earlier, I can't blame the terminology for very much of it.

"If a human being (say a student) is told by an authoritative human they trust (say a professor) that they are wrong, will they stick to their guns or will they scrabble around for another answer?"

I might, because the professor is likely to have a point that I need to consider. But sometimes, I have had disagreements with authoritative humans I trusted where I was right and they were wrong, so that option will be considered. Some of the professors I know understood that and, either to vaccinate people against it or just to have fun, took to questioning answers even when they thought they were completely correct. As a student, I didn't really like that because they always asked the question as if I had made an elementary mistake, and when I stopped looking for what it might have been, they told me that they didn't have any problem with it either, but maybe it was helpful.

Good luck ever getting agreement on a definition for AI. Nobody here will agree, and if by some miracle you achieved it, marketers would come along to break the definition almost as soon as we had one. Some people think AI is an if statement. Others won't accept that a computer is an AI until it breaks out of human control and massacres us, and even as they get attacked by robots the computer designed and built they'll still say that it was just mathematics. My guess is that most surveys about who has, is making, plans to make, or will never touch AI don't bother to define it, so you're seeing an amalgamation of respondents' guesses about what it means in this situation.

Re: The written word

They can be quite good at telling jokes. Take a string that's already in the training data as a joke, and print it. At making new ones, pretty terrible. Then again, I can't be sure that the stuff they print wasn't generated by a human, and there are a lot of humans who are bad at writing jokes. In my opinion, humorous people tend to tell comedic stories rather than inventing wonderful two-line jokes, but if you ask for a joke, LLMs will tend to produce the latter rather than going for a longer premise with many funny asides and a good punch line at the end.

Re: The linguists clearly having kittens...

English has precisely-defined rules too. It's just that there isn't a single organization that's considered the final decider. The result is the same: actual people ignore what those organizations say when they want to communicate. For instance, the French Académie Française hates using words from any other language, so when words from other languages start to be used, they can be counted on to make up a new word or phrase from French words (words they got from a language at a time old enough that they're happy with it). That doesn't mean that French speakers defer to those new lists. When most French speakers I know speak of an audio file on an RSS feed, they call it a "podcast", not an "audio à la demande". It also doesn't say what should happen when their opinion about the language differs from either of the authorities in Belgium and Canada which are independent and have different words in their lists, nor with the many countries where people speak French and don't have an authority trying to manage it.

A standard grammar does no good here. An LLM can follow it, and the best it will get them is that the produced sentences look grammatically correct. It won't help make those sentences factually correct, useful, not random, or any of the other things they're supposed to be.

Check your IP cameras: There's a new Mirai botnet on the rise

Re: Ok, I'll ask

Probably, people want to see through their cameras from not inside their houses. The technically knowledgeable people have firewalled networks with VPNs to access them, which doesn't include everyone. Other people may have made do with giving it a public IP or forwarding a port. If they didn't do that deliberately, it's always possible that the camera used UPNP to do it for them, whether the user actually used the result or not.

A last look at the Living Computers museum before collection heads to auction

Re: A story of things that didn't happen

I would think that storing the data in Exif, which has a comments field, might be more reliable because it would then stay with the image file and could be used in automated sorting. No need to invent a new format because most of them already have support for that. Often, it's used to dump random data from the camera manufacturer, but you can put it to better use.

Except that you could have transferred it off that disk to something else at many times, including now if you still had the disk. Then, you could either print it out or just keep transferring the file from medium to medium as you updated your backups. I have files from decades ago that are on modern hardware because it's 135 kB, so no need to clean it out when transferring backups from the small disks to the larger disks. In many cases, the availability of data later on is not due to what it's on, but how much you cared. Lots of paper has been discarded or damaged because the stuff written on it was not stuff I valued at the time, whether I wanted it later on or not.

Hangover from messy Walmart tech divorce ongoing at Asda

Re: "The overwhelming majority of these were completed successfully"

It would be 96,000 and that kind of thing happens all the time when converting records. It would be 100% if there were no weird corner cases, but there are always corner cases when you've relied on something for long enough. Something weird got read off a piece of paper, typed in wrong, automatically imported incorrectly when two databases got merged, is valid under the schema but the schema couldn't represent something important so someone made up a representation for it, extra data was added in a spreadsheet and that got imported into a database which was able to process all the records but they had been mangled by the spreadsheet, or many other things. Ideally, that would not happen. In most large systems, it ends up happening at least sometimes. You don't need pervasive incompetence to achieve that, just that at some point in the many years the systems have existed, someone preferred speed to quality. I'm sure we've all seen that happen before.

The future of AI/ML depends on the reality of today – and it's not pretty

Re: Good for fun

It must at times come up with something useful, defined as something as correct as it needed to be. However, when I or others have used it, I have seen only outcomes where it messed up or where it did something that would have been relatively easy to do without it. I wonder how often it did mess up, but the thing that it was doing was unimportant and nobody cared that it was wrong.

Large amounts of parallel compute is not a new thing. Before LLMs, there was lots of other machine learning work which people will keep doing. There's also cryptocurrency mining which has fallen lower on the hype list but there are still plenty of people spending lots of money doing it. There are animation studios that use lots of GPUs who will fund manufacturing advancements. If all of those collapse as well, there are always gamers who will need something to drive 8K displays at 144 Hz (sure, they're not doing it now because the chips can't manage it, but I know some who will if they can and I'm not sure if they'll stop there even though it seems overkill to me). GPUs are popular because they're almost as versatile as CPUs were. Everyone needs fast single-threaded performance from time to time, but although not everyone needs reasonably fast parallel compute, so many different use cases can benefit from it that they're going to keep making new chips to do it.

The one area where we agree is that individuals won't be building new raw models like GPT4. Those require too much training data and training to go somewhere. They will certainly take the ones that have already been trained and keep building things on top of those, though. I'm also not convinced that an AI winter will mean that nobody is doing LLMs anymore. I can easily see some companies deciding that they'll never make their money back and they're out, but I don't think we'll get them all to stop. Somewhere, a company will decide that there are enough clients who want to fire their remaining customer service people and are willing to pay for the LLM that does it, and those people will keep spending.

"Who and what is going to continue pushing down the cost of the chips if the massive tech giants who were driving most of those sales in the first place are no longer interested?"

Moore's law, same as before. One of two things will happen to the chips involved, mostly Nvidia's products.

1. Someone else will come up with a use case for tons of parallel compute, so they'll keep buying those chips. Nvidia will continue to receive money and invest it into faster chips. Those who want to use the chips for LLMs will be able to buy them.

2. Nobody will find any other uses for those chips. The price will fall, and improvements in manufacturing will make it easier to keep making them. Those who want to build LLMs will use more than one of them.

Option 1 is a lot more likely. Even if there was an AI winter, it's not like everyone everywhere would stop developing something around them, and even if they did, progress could still be made on those tools. Whether that progress will ever get something that can be trusted is less clear.

'Uncertainty' drives LinkedIn to migrate from CentOS to Azure Linux

Re: User admin

Is your objection that some software, including some Microsoft software, has decided to install itself into the user's directory instead of Program Files, thereby allowing an unprivileged user to install it? If that's not your complaint, what is the problem you are trying to solve? If it is your complaint, you are aware that people can install binaries into directories they have access to on Linux, that removing them from sudoers doesn't stop them doing it, that you can stop them doing it if you're willing to put heavy restrictions on what they can do, and that Windows has the same ability to take that broad an action?

The reason they won't is that's not at all a clean slate. Running atop Linux means bringing in all the things Linux has had to do for decades. That has some advantages, because they don't have to write their own implementations of filesystems or the many other components that Linux has installed, but it also means they can't do any of the things that designing from the ground up generally lets you do. They would be trading the 1990s restrictions that went into the NT kernel, many of them based on older restrictions carried over from VMS, DOS, OS/2, and other operating systems for a different set of 1990s restrictions, many of them based on older restrictions from Unix and BSD. If they want to run anything natively, they'll also have to keep around quite a few of the first set as well.

Designing that way doesn't let them do any of the things that starting from scratch and building an NNT kernel might. Not that I expect them to do that either, but if you're going to go through a long and expensive migration project, doing one that lets you design anew is probably considered more worthwhile than doing one that, if successful, means everyone is at the same place they were before and it's easier for people to stop using the product.

I've heard it before and I'll hear it again, and I probably won't believe it then either. In my estimation, Windows will stay Windows while people are still buying it and running legacy applications. If enough people stop doing that that it's not worth keeping around, then it will die, and people will use something else and use VMs or compatibility layers for emulating it when necessary. I don't think that will happen soon, as I don't know what is likely to replace it in the near future. A ground-up reimplementation seems unlikely at all, and if it happens, I see no reason why it would use a Unix or Linux base.

"When one considers what companies might put up some stiff competition against RedHat / IBM, MS is probably one of the likely candidates whom may even be acceptable to many in the OSS community."

I don't know why you assume that, and I might be wrong, but I don't think MS would be accepted. It's pretty ingrained in many free software advocates that Microsoft is the enemy, has always been the enemy, and will always be the enemy. When Microsoft builds in a Linux layer, I see people crying "embrace, extend, extinguish" at it. When Google builds Linux into operating systems, then denies users the ability to do anything with it, I see people trying to convince me that Android should be counted as a Linux system and means that open source is winning. I think that Microsoft could develop many useful tools that work well with Linux, but if they tried to make their own distribution, I expect lots of people to refuse to run it on principle.

TikTok isn't protected by Section 230 in 10-year-old’s ‘blackout challenge’ death

That's true of intentional abduction, but it isn't true of accidental harm. If a child wanders away and falls down some stairs, we don't blame the owner of the stairs for not having posted a guard to monitor for unaccompanied children. There is a limit to how much we need to modify public spaces, including the internet, to attempt to get safety that will not be achieved. No matter how much we do, there will be things on the internet that a young child should not see.

It is not the intent of the ruling, though it wouldn't be hard to extrapolate it into doing that anyway. However, it is exactly what the original post in this thread would get if their idea was implemented. From previous posts, I'm guessing they're one of the people who don't like how moderators removed or posted additional information around something they agree with, and they want that to be illegal, but they haven't considered that the law they're trying to gut is the main reason that any similar posts are available at all.

"now we need to get the other side. Allow all speech and keep protections, but when you decide to block certain topics, now you're a publisher and liable."

You do realize that, with something that stupid, the law would then say that everything at all would have to be posted to keep the protections. I.E. unless you keep up the terrorist beheading videos, you're liable. You would effectively prevent all public posting, including these forums, except for those places so extreme that they don't mind hosting literally anything, no matter how illegal, that someone decided to upload. That goes for the places you like as well. Maybe you're into some conspiracy theories and you're tired of those being moderated. Sorry, but if the sites that are keeping those up ban anything, be it even more extreme ones that you don't believe in or people disagreeing, they can now be sued for anything they keep up, meaning they're much less likely to decide to keep up the stuff you want to see or get away with it if they do.

The elusive dream of cloud portability: Why migrating workloads isn't so simple

I've operated multi-cloud systems before to take advantage of things that were better or cheaper on a different cloud provider. I didn't really like having to do that, but if it saves a lot of money, it can make sense. Of course, it is like any other development challenge. To do it, you have to actually know about the differences, meaning that you will have to read the docs and pricing pages and set up test systems on multiple providers, not just one. That takes time and effort, so unless that's worth expending, a lot of people won't do it. In a lot of cases, companies attach themselves to one cloud provider not because they have to, not because it's the best one, but out of inertia alone.

On prem isn't really an exception to this either. My multi-cloud systems sometimes include our own server room as one of the places where servers live, and I've seen companies lock themselves into one approach that includes self-hosting the hardware, for instance one where they insisted on self-hosting hardware in a location with network links that couldn't really handle the traffic they were getting from the internet. This is why I prefer to be a programmer, not an administrator.

Microsoft Bing Copilot accuses reporter of crimes he covered

Re: There are two fundamental problems here.

And another part of problem two is that there are a lot of people intent on making these programs do their work. I've had several people try to use an LLM to do something. Sometimes, it is because they are lazy and don't want to do something they're supposed to. Sometimes, it's because they don't know how unreliable it is and actually think they're being helpful. In both cases, they basically just came up with a prompt, sent it to some LLM, and copied the response without any other consideration. That's how I know they did it, because those responses have often been uselessly generic if not actively incorrect. It's not just employers who want to get out of having employees by using an LLM.

"Given that it seems likely to have been a generic error fixing it one case at a time isn't going to help."

But that's the main purpose of many of the employees AI companies have hired. They have to quickly patch prompts or predefine answers every time someone comes up with another thing that breaks them. Does it print copyrighted material when you ask it? Does it show off its training when repeating words? Can an odd phrase cause it to go into gibberish mode? Does it tell people to do dangerous or lethal things? Does it start emulating a crazy person who you would run away from? Just patch over each of those holes and a lot of people will pretend it never did those things and certainly won't do it again.

Of course, paraphrasing the original sentence is often enough to make it break again, but they're not interested in making it not do the undesirable things. They're interested in having negative news stories, a user putting in the prompt that broke something, seeing something reasonable, and decide that the news story was blowing it out of proportion. That is how we can still have people post here saying that it doesn't print copyrighted content even though it has on numerous occasions.

Linux Deepin 23: A polished distro from China that Western desktops could learn from

Re: Open Source in China

I think you're painting a more open source friendly picture than reality. China may not protect copyright that much, but there's a ton of closed source in China. They probably won't be protected if someone pirates it, but that is a far cry from you having access to see and modify the source, and if you did, you're not guaranteed any protection if they pursue it. Chinese companies are well-known for ignoring the licenses of open source code they use, due to the same limitations in copyright law that you have been praising. Open source isn't just the freedoms, it's also how much source you can actually access. If they never give it out, then lower copyright protections don't do anything for you.

HMD Skyline: The repairable Android that lets you go dumb in a smart way

Re: No headphone socket

The most compelling arguments to prefer wired over wireless headphones are these, though some of them don't apply to all headphones and will be noted:

1. One fewer battery that needs charging.

2. Less power usage overall, though for many people, it's so small anyway that they don't actually care.

3. Higher latency for wireless, although there are many modern ones that have low-latency modes which reduce this significantly. This matters for some things but not as much for listening to music.

4. Longer time to connect, although in my experience, the wired ones will eventually get there when their cable has to be tilted in a certain way for them to work.

5. More complicated steps required if using them routinely with different devices.

This uni thought it would be a good idea to do a phishing test with a fake Ebola scare

Re: Phishing simulations a waste of time

"Rather than waste everyone's time, better to build a working defence against these incoming emails in the first place."

People have been trying to do that since the 1990s if not before. If you can find a better way than all the alternatives, you can probably sell it to a lot of people. The problem is that, just like all the others, your solution will either pass through some phishing or dump some important emails in a location where nobody can find them, probably both. This is why people are trained to know that it might come in and tested to make sure they're aware about what to do.

Your suggestion is yet another item in the familiar category of requesting that a computer make it impossible to do something undesired. From the earliest computers, people have been asking for them to eliminate human error. Some types of human error can be limited, but none can be eliminated and some types can't be reduced much at all. By all means keep trying, but I'm going to continue having plans for if you don't achieve 100% success.

Maybe we send and receive different types of mail. I frequently have things that I want to send. Let's take an example.

I've just found an interesting paper produced by a university. This paper can be found at https://ee.engineering.someuniversity.ac.uk/ce/2018/~efermi/archives/2016/rgaaf-pg15-38.pdf

I want to tell my colleague about this because it has something relevant in it. How should I do it. I could include the URL, but evidently, that makes me bad at communication. So maybe I should give them the last search string I used to find this from a search engine. Except that search string is confusing because I was using it to replace the absent or malfunctioning search box on the university's site, so it has a site: filter and a few words that look like I just picked them out of a bag. Also, I used DuckDuckGo and they're using Google, so their results might be different. So I tell them to go to DDG, enter this search string, select result number 5, and oh right, this PDF was not what result number 5 links to. Result number 5 links to a personal page from graduate student R Feynman who worked on a paper about something else with professor Teller. I'm not interested in that, but fortunately, Feynman mentioned when linking to Teller that Teller also works on the kind of thing I'm interested in, so I click on that link and go to a page that Teller wrote. Only there do I find the link to a different paper that Teller wrote with Professor Fermi, which is why the PDF is under Professor Fermi who I hadn't heard about before. So maybe giving a search term isn't the best option.

So instead of that, maybe I should take the link I have and see if I can find a path back to the university's home page. If I'm lucky, I may be able to tell my colleague to navigate to the home page of Some University, and if they don't know that they can always google it, then find the link to the engineering departments, then the twenty more links needed to arrive at this professor's page. So that is not much better and there's a decent chance they'll take a wrong turning and end up at the wrong URL entirely.

If I have somewhere that I want someone else to go, a URL is the way to ensure they arrive there and not somewhere else. This is why, when I tell people to download something, I always make sure to give as clear a URL as possible and never give them a search string. Frequently, when I have used other methods, bad things happen. For example, they Googled something, clicked on an ad that I didn't see because I block them, and ended up in some sketchy site that's more than happy to provide them software downloads, just not the software download I told them to use.

Re: Priorities?

The argument was that email is the weakest link due to technical limitations. There are a few technical problems with email that could be improved, but in many cases, they are not necessary and not used for successful phishing attacks. Email is the most often used path into an organization not because it's technically weaker, but because that's the most common way for an external party to communicate with the organization. I can't hop on a company's internal Slack or Teams groups without hacking an account (although an attacker might hack an account so people need to know that phishing can happen there as well), but I can send them email. If email were removed, then most phishing would come through whatever external communication method replaced it.

It is popular to see phishing as a technology problem. IT people like it because we are already used to trying to solve most problems with technology because we can and it doesn't require any of the less reliable methods of trying to solve it. Non-IT people like it because it means they can tell IT to fix it and stop paying attention. It sometimes makes more sense to file it there because sometimes it is attached to things that are actually IT problems such as malware or account compromise. The problem is that it's not really an IT problem any more than scam letters were a post office problem. No matter what technology-based solution you try, the improvement will be marginal. Since nothing else is being done, by all means find any technical hammer and hit that nail. However, if you expect a lot of movement, to not have to train people to be vigilant, or to not have failures, you will never get any of those things.

Bargain-hunting boss saw his bonus go up in a puff of self-inflicted smoke

Nikolai wasn't the only person to not check the switch. From the article, at least two more people did the same thing, and those at least two more people covered a total of eleven machines to Nikolai's one. Also, that kind of thing is not one that a lot of people have to consider unless they've already been warned about it. I saw where this was going, but mostly because I've heard the same story in other articles. I have seen relatively few power supplies that needed manual switching, and all of those were already switched correctly, so I don't think this was common knowledge at the time.

On another topic, I've noticed that all those stories have involved devices attached to 230(+-) V power while set to 120 V. Is the damage similarly picturesque if it's set to 240 V and plugged into 120 V and the difference is mostly due to 230 V being the more common voltage from readers of this site?

Under pressure from Europe, Apple makes iOS browser options bit more reasonable

Re: Groan

I use iPhones and Macs, but I don't think Apple has the right to tell me what I can or can't do with them. They've acknowledged that with Macs, and I think they should have to with iPhones. Many people can use Macs perfectly well, using only Apple's store for installing software. The fact that they have root access and could do something else doesn't prevent them from using them productively without it. Apple doesn't have to make their phones any harder to use in order to let other app stores work. If the other app stores are tricky to use, that's their problem, and most of the users you're talking about will not be using them anyway; all the normal apps they might install will stay in the Apple store for ease of use.

Apple does not need to change the experience for the many users who do not care about any of this, and we already know that they won't be changing any more than they have to. I think your concerns about the changes to their business practices may be unfounded.

Benign bug in iOS and iPadOS crashes gizmos with just four characters

Re: Aaaaand another parsing error

It doesn't look that easy because any string inside the quotation marks does the same thing. Maybe there are a few tokens that, if placed in there, would do something and not crash, but if so, it's not just a missing check for an empty string but a check for being present in a list of recognized tokens.

Re: Aaaaand another parsing error

"http": doesn't match the pattern because you need another character after the colon, so it doesn't cause a crash, but "http":/ does. Just tested it. The Settings app didn't like it.

CockroachDB scurries off to proprietary software land

Re: People will bother to work on a project if you pay them

The problem with the line is that "free as in speech" software means more freedoms than "free as in beer" software. If you make software with the freedoms involved, you will have to deal with the fact that getting free as in beer copies is going to be possible, in fact somewhat easy, and you are specifically removing your ability to do something about it.

There are a few pieces of open source software that are built to be purchased. For instance, many of the projects of FUTO are open source and they ask you for payment when they start. That is fine. However, access to the source means that, without paying them, I can get my hands on the code and remove that part. They can't forbid me from doing it. I can then take my version and distribute it to others. They can't stop me from doing that. I am not going to do either of those things because I think paying them for the work they've done is perfectly fair, but you can.

That is why, when companies like this one want more money, they start stripping out the "free as in speech" stuff as well. They want it to be illegal to not pay them for the software, and the only way they can make that happen is to take away most if not all of the freedoms that open source has brought. It is no different than any other piece of you can see the source maybe software out there. What happens if I have a copy of the source for Oracle's software, which for some products is available, and I don't like what they're doing? May I modify it? No. May I use it without their approval? No. May I distribute modifications? Definitely no. Pseudo-open licenses are the same thing masquerading badly as open source, and in the case of Cockroach, that wasn't even enough.