Posts by doublelayer

Lloyds Bank reviews tech and engineering personnel in reorg

Re: typical corporate bullshit

I'm not convinced that IT outsourcing and scam call centers have any real connection. If anything, I'd say the scam call centers are more connected to all the outsourced real call centers we put in India, at least that they have the same reasons: lots of people who can be paid badly and speak English. Many of the centers are not paragons of high tech. Sure, they need some techs to set up their communications systems, but that's basically all modern businesses. The scammers themselves don't have to be very technically aware. Many of them run a scam unrelated to technology, the ones that pretend your computer has a virus have to convince the nontechnical, not know anything about real viruses, and most of them are probably following a script anyway with only minor improv required.

Huawei to bring massively expensive trifold smartphone to world market

Re: Don't remember

It makes some sense. People do buy regular foldable phones occasionally, and people use tablets. The existing foldable phones unfold into a square thing, but a triple-fold system would be much closer to a typical tablet form factor. Of course, I wouldn't buy one because of the price, worries about it breaking, software, and because I don't actually like tablets, but some of those are specific to me and some of them will go away in time. It doesn't strike me as the worst idea.

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

Re: Scrum

I suppose that depends what you're building. There is a lot a team of six can manage. But if this was something massive like an operating system, nothing says your teams always have to be the same people. You could discuss a feature you want to add, design the APIs, then create a new team to write the thing. Once they're done, merge that back in and come up with a new feature for a different subset to write. If you're doing something that large, you will need to split it up, partially to reduce the number of meetings. If every person who wrote any part of Linux or Windows had to get into one meeting, it would be a massive meeting that wouldn't help most of them.

And as I said, there are several cases where the Agile approach is not very useful. Not really because of standups breaking down, but because of all the other suggestions/requirements they have which work only if your project has a few attributes that not all projects do. For example, Agile works great when you can deliver incomplete versions of software to users, but if you can't, it's probably not going to work and trying is going to be worse than recognizing the gap and using something that fits better.

Re: Top Cover

Yes, history has shown me that there is no good idea that can't be overdone by someone who doesn't understand what the point is. I'm imagining an environment where you don't know what anyone is doing because meetings about it are considered harmful. Probably that's not what they meant.

Re: Scrum

I'm not a fan of Agile, but in this case, the point is that you split projects into smaller teams specifically so these things work better. The "scrum master" isn't supposed to be another person. If you need one at all, that would just be one of the members of the team, but you can do these meetings without anyone to facilitate it, so eliminate them from the set. Product owners at this level would also be people working on it in some way, and testing is supposed to be done by everyone. That means you can have five programmers and one person who mostly interacts with other teams. That is if you're trying to do the original idea of a standup, which got its name specifically to tell people to do it really quickly. Now that we have hour-long standups with shared screens, it's something completely different that achieves none of the goals of the original thing.

Open source maintainers are really feeling the squeeze

Re: This is really a great marketing campaign from m$ ??

I think you've misinterpreted most of those articles:

"a tyrannical mr. Torvalds": Do you mean that Torvalds gets to decide what goes in Linux and what doesn't? Because that isn't tyrannical, it's how a lot of leaders work. He tends not to overrule everyone else for no reason, but when there is disagreement about whether something will go in or not, he is often consulted.

"Greybeards putting up hurdles to join": No, you've definitely got that one wrong. It was asking why younger people were not joining, not why older ones were keeping them out, because they weren't doing so, at least not actively. The comments suggested several reasons, including that young people actually weren't out after all, or various stereotypes about young people which struck me as flawed, but don't work with a conspiracy of the elders to keep the kids out.

"name calling rants": Yes, that happened. That isn't saying that all open source does that. When it happens, especially on important projects, it is news.

"The message these authors are spreading is that the OpenSource world must be hell": No, they're spreading actual news. People who want to work on open source might want to know what happens. If they want to work on Linux, for example, they might want to know that there are a lot of people with lots of experience, that getting into it for the first time will not be easy, that there are some people who may get angry at their code, and that Linus Torvalds can make final decisions if it comes to it. Some of those things are neither good nor bad, and the ones that are bad are also facts of life. It might be nicer if nobody got name-cally or ranty with code they didn't like, but some do, so people should expect it. And this brings us to the one I left out earlier, the one about women being treated unfairly. That is also news, and if the article is correct, it allows us to focus on whether and what sexism exists and what we can do about it. If the article is correct, talking about it will help us fix it while remaining silent would make it continue. If the article is incorrect and there is no problem, then it allows us to prove that.

Re: Obligation to maintain?

The understaffing issue is correct, but not exactly relevant to the discussion about upstreaming things because, if people were developing patches for it, they would have lots of reasons to want them upstreamed. If nobody is doing it, that's a completely separate issue.

The FUTO license is not my favorite, and I can explain why. While it's not as bad as most faux-open licenses, it has the same central problem that they all do, just not right now. To require payment from an unclear set of people, it restricts the ability to modify and distribute modified versions. I am not allowed to remove certain parts of the code, and I am not allowed to perform any commercial activities if I'm modifying it. Why is this a problem? Here is an example. To demonstrate my problem, I will compare it to the GPL/AGPL, the other licenses they have used.

FUTO, the company, is privately owned. The code they make is owned entirely by them. This means they can change the license if they want and they can add whatever they want. Fortunately, its current owner and those who work there are public-spirited, so they make useful things without abusive features. One day, as all of these people are having a meeting, a meteor comes through and destroys the building, killing those people who were doing this. The company is inherited by someone who is not interested in the privacy, freedom, or anything else that drew people to this company. They want money, and they only have the rights to some code. So they modify the code to introduce surveillance and advertising. What can we do about this?

For projects using the GPL or AGPL, this is easy. We say goodbye to the organization that no longer has our interests at heart, and we fork the project. Someone else can continue development of the code. In fact, we can form a new organization to do that if we want. We can accept donations or even continue to ask for payment for this. This is what open source software allows. What happens with the FUTO licensed stuff? We are allowed to modify the code, but we are forbidden from removing any of the FUTO-added commercial code. Right now, that just means that we can't remove the part where FUTO asks for money nor redirect that money to ourselves, but in the world where FUTO has gone bad, that could easily include their other commercial stuff such as the advertising. But maybe we can argue that we forked before that happened, so we just have to leave in the part where people are asked to pay new-FUTO. Still, we are forbidden from acting in a commercial way, meaning it is probably impossible to collect donations or form an organization. Not only does our version, forked specifically to get away from new-FUTO, have to ask users to pay them, our users cannot help with donations or we've violated the license.

In fact, this applies even without the threat of a rogue organization. If I am writing extra code for one of their projects, unaffiliated with FUTO itself, and you want my feature added, you are not allowed to donate to me to help get that written. In practice, I'm sure they would ignore this and let me collect that donation, and I would probably still accept it because I'm that confident about it, even though my typical policy is that I don't violate the letter of the license even if I don't expect it to be enforced. They may not really know this is what their license does. It follows similar not open licenses that have been used in exactly this way as previously open source projects try to keep more of the funding to themselves, and I don't see any way that their license avoids what those licenses have done. There is a reason why people got angry when they called it open source. By the way, this doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with what they've done; it's their code, and I am perfectly happy with people making their code proprietary, so less open than I'd like is not something I object to. I still prefer something truly open to this, and those reasons are why.

Re: Subtitle: "Overworked, under pressure, and subjected to abuse – is it really worth it?"

For context for the following, let me first say that I have taken your approach for requests made to me, for family and friends, requests of most types, for a long time. I help people as soon as requested and I have neither asked for nor received something in exchange. I am still happy to keep doing this. However...

Your comment blames someone for an attitude that can make sense in a number of cases, and they did not say enough to determine whether those cases apply. They may be reacting to this from people who make reasonable requests politely and respond with gratitude, but this is not the only type of user you face while doing it. Read comments on articles that discuss this and you'll see many other cases, such as the "you have to fix it now" guy, the "why is it taking so long" guy, and the "you broke everything" guy. Part of the reason why I've continued to work for my friends and family is that I've at most gotten the low levels of this. While I too have had the experience of someone calling me to figure out how I broke their computer a few weeks after I fixed it, weeks in which it was working fine, I have not had anything extreme. If I did, I too would have dropped that person from my free support.

Not that I don't get unreasonable requests. I recently was asked to obtain a free computer, set it up, and teach a user how to use it. The user concerned was a friend of the daughter of someone I have helped before and would help again. The person to receive this free computer was someone I had never met. I did it. However, I must say that, when I was chided for my slowness in the process of repairing an old machine so I could give it to them, I did start to get annoyed with people who took my ability to do free labor and provide free equipment for granted. Incidentally, they also thought I could obtain a free Microsoft Office license. They got LibreOffice and that's all they're getting. Since I am a programmer, people have also requested, in the same way that they request help with a computer problem, that I write mobile apps or websites for them or their business. These I have occasionally done if they are small enough, but even I will reject some of them even if I could do them.

You don't know whether the person concerned has been the recipient of unreasonable demands and reactions, but it might be helpful to consider that they might have. It is also helpful to consider whether there is a double standard. I provide computer help for free, but I do not ask my friends to do work for me for free, and they do not offer to do so. I mostly do this because a lot of it is somewhat short and because I agree with you that other options are not great.

Re: Obligation to maintain?

"You are the maintainer of a useful piece of FOSS software. You have a slowly increasing bug/feature backlog created by corporate employees."

No problem. I'm going to not fix any of those things unless someone I care about wants it fixed. People I care about include myself, people I like, people who did other work which I'm willing to reward with some from me, people who pay money. Otherwise, the feature will just sit there. It's that company's problem and they can solve it in many ways.

"All that will happen is a patch file used by that corporation will be compiled in as part of the build process (coincidently point 4 in the OSI's open source definition) and neither developer time or money is donated to your project."

That is not point 4. Point 4 is that I cannot stop them from modifying the software. There are three restrictions permitted for how I may restrict them, but they are allowed to modify it. Which is what I want, because people being able to modify it is how such software grows in the first place. If they never upstream changes they made, that's their choice and their problem because I won't know it exists and won't have any problem accidentally breaking it with updates on my side. I'd also be interested to know how you think heartbleed happened as a result of this given that it was an oversight in the original codebase, not something that was patched in or out of it.

"Usually the problem isn't insufficient funds, it's lack of fair/transparent disbursement & hoarding."

This was the same suggestion that came up when Bruce Perens came up with his post-open disaster. It will have the same problems. For the moment, I'm going to skip over the required payment bit, whether that's a good idea, how you would implement it, and how you would prevent abuse of it. Those are massive problems, and I could write at length about why, but for the moment, let's stick to only one major problem: how you allocate the proceeds after you get them.

When I make my payment, does it go just to open source code I use, or to everything? If it's only what I use, then I have to report that, but how does it get split up? Does every project get an equal share of it, from the massive program that has a hundred full-time equivalent developers on it to the library written by one person who hasn't committed anything to it in over a year (I have a few of those)? Or do we have to allocate it based on its importance or scope to me, which would probably fund complex projects more, which is probably necessary, but would be an administrative nightmare. But if we don't use my funds for code I use, but instead make a general pot, then how do we decide who gets the support? If we support everybody, then that means that plenty of funding will go to people who make open source code that isn't much used and may not be well-supported. I have a project that I think is somewhat good, but I think it's probably got about ten users worldwide. I don't know that for sure, but it mostly doesn't matter because I wrote it for myself. Do I get funding for that one? If we leave some projects out, how do we tell what counts? If we give the organization control over that, they could allocate funds to things they support and ignore projects they don't like. If we try to set a standard for size and support anything larger than that, expect that to be gamed. For example, if you only get funding if you have more than X active users, then you'll need to build in some telemetry to prove that you do, and you could get some fake users to put you over that total.

This is not the only reason why it's a bad idea, but it is certainly one of them.

Re: Especially galling are large corporates ...

This can be a problem, and the best way to respond to it is to show them exactly how important a feature request is when the justification is "we want it". I've been in both positions to some extent. If a request like that has been sent to a project of mine, I'll respond if it's a security issue because I can't bear to leave that in, but if it's a feature request, then they'll get a message that it has been added to the suggestions list but I cannot guarantee when or if it will ever be implemented. They can see from the suggestions list that I'm not joking about that. They get to choose whether they do something about this.

Fortunately for me, my employers have been, while not any more generous about paying for features, at least willing for an employee to write them. If we want something bad enough, I'll make the point that the thing we're trying for may not be used by anyone else, and requesting existing maintainers to add it may never go anywhere. They are usually receptive to the suggestion that I or one of my colleagues write the thing and upstream it, which is not as good as paying a maintainer to do it, but at least it reduces the annoyance to maintainers asked to do something they have no intention of doing for free.

Re: Obligation to maintain?

What alternative do you propose? Because the alternative you'll get if you remove that is that you can forbid anyone from modifying your source, which doesn't do very much to improve it, and is not easy to enforce anyway because anyone who wants is going to modify it anyway and not tell you. When you propose your alternative, consider why open source (or free/libre software or whichever term you like the most) is better than proprietary, and consider whether it would still be with your new standard.

Nearly 10 years after Data and Goliath, Bruce Schneier says: Privacy’s still screwed

You don't understand, sir. Production doesn't pre-build the custom cars because, if you decide not to buy, that would be wasted. Take the delay up with them. For our part, the payment information is to find people who have recently bought any car, not just our cars. That's why we need to add that to our advertising model and why we can't get the information from our purchase records system, though now you mention it, we will now send copies of our internal orders system to our advertising partners*. But you can help us improve efficiency even more. Sign here.

* Those who bid highest for it, anyway.

The problem, sir, is that we get a tremendous amount of data about potential customers of our products. Before you bought one, you showed interest in it, so you would have been a great person to advertise to*. But we don't get everything there is to know in real time. If we had access to everyone's purchasing records, we could advertise even more efficiently. We would like you to authorize this extra funding for access to a database of payment information** so we can prevent that little bit of waste. But know that, even though we do occasionally show advertisements to people who have already bought, this is all needed to focus on the ones who are most likely to buy.

* Probably advertising to someone who already likes the product isn't the most helpful advertisement as compared to people who don't know that they would like it, but they can say it.

** Not actually all of people's payment data, but they can always ask for more funding and access later. Once they get the funding, they have to buy the data so it shows up in the budget, but the rest of the funding, explained as needing to use that data, can go to bonuses. Improving advertising targeting can be left for later or never. Since they did pay for the data, companies that specialize in getting it come to the conclusion that there is a market for this data, so they collect more.

This open text-to-speech model needs just seconds of audio to clone your voice

Re: signalized?

It's a Jules Verne book and likely an earlier translation of them. Modern translations of those are pretty good, but I wouldn't be surprised if that paragraph came off Gutenberg. Gutenberg has the original 1860s and 1870s English translations, and almost all of those are terrible translations by inept translators who mangled scientific details even when they were trying. Some of them also decided to change names and locations because who cares about accuracy. I am perfectly able to assume that one of them would have invented some words, possibly due to a misunderstanding of French or English, only one of which they understood too well.

US lawmakers press Trump admin to oppose UK's order for Apple iCloud backdoor

Unless all three illegal products are actually desired, that won't work so well. There are several types of data that can be poisoned like that. You can do it to documents which might be leaked in their entirety in the hopes that the journalist involved will either publish them verbatim or do some searching based on the extra data, letting you identify them. Doing it to a single fact that can be stated in a couple sentences is really quite hard, and if a leaked document is rendered down into a couple of sentences in the story, figuring out which copy of the document it was isn't going to be easy. That's when they get out the normal set of tools for responding to leaks: the surveillance systems on computers that often don't tell you unless the employee concerned was inept, the manual investigations of the most likely candidates, and the questioning.

Oh, the relevant parts of the US government can get the truth from Apple, and they likely already have. They just aren't likely to share it with anyone because various people would get angry if they did, and possibly because the kind of people who can get Apple to tell them are also the kind of people who would quite like the idea of having a backdoor themselves. They have repeatedly ignored requests for information or to follow the law coming from the same few legislators who care, and if it suits them, they can ignore this too.

Why do younger coders struggle to break through the FOSS graybeard barrier?

Re: Also ...

Which, with that phrasing, sounds like a smug and overestimating person. However, with slight modifications, it could sound a lot more normal. For example, joining a small project that nobody uses may not be a good first contribution because there's a chance that, with few contributors, their code might not get the reviews it needs. That could go either the way where nobody reviews it because it is a mostly inactive project or one where the people working on it don't want to deal with a young contributor or the way where, because so few people try to contribute, reviews are cursory and any new code gets sent through if it passes the tests. If nobody uses it, then maybe time spent adding code to it is wasted. A larger project might have better resources for a new contributor.

I'm not saying they meant it that way, just that there can be a lot of different ways that someone might look for something to contribute to. Not everyone who stays away from open source is doing it because they want fame or cash for every contribution. Some of them might be worried about whether they're wasting their time, whether they will be able to use skills they aren't certain of without either breaking something or getting shouted at, or many more understandable things.

UK's new thinking on AI: Unless it's causing serious bother, you can crack on

Re: AI is a perfect fit for local and national government in the UK.

Sometimes, it is helpful to define what serious bother would be first and forbid it, then give them free rein in what remains. Otherwise, they will create plenty of serious bother, they'll just think that you gave them permission to do so first and consider cleaning it up someone else's problem, that is if they ever stop doing it. This is how we ended up with lots of data collection requiring repeated patches, the largest of which, GDPR, is not enforced because the people concerned have been abusing so much data over the years that we can't exactly make them stop without consequences*. It might have been better if we ruled that out at the beginning, and businesses could have found different ways of operating that would have complied with it.

* I'm willing to accept those consequences, since it's mostly things like Facebook losing lots of money. However, my willingness isn't enough to make it happen.

Re: local council on the front foot!

It is, but I have no idea how they were doing it before.

"The result has been significant financial savings, it's claimed. Where previously documents of 5-10 pages cost around £600 to convert, Simply Readable does the job for just 7-10 pence, freeing funds for other social services."

If reformatting a document costs that much, I'd like to have the customer list for whoever was doing it before. You don't need an LLM or a lot of expense to change the font size and spacing and scale up some images. While there are probably some documents that needed more than that, I have a feeling it wasn't most of them, and even those should not cost anything near that much to redo.

After clash over Rust in Linux, now Asahi lead quits distro, slams Linus' kernel leadership

I think it's worth considering that the "you break it you fix it" rule is still a very distinct option here. Anyone who breaks the Rust is free to fix it too, they just have assurances that they can call on a Rust person to do it for them if they object to doing it themselves. The Rust team agreeing to fix things was intended as an olive branch to people who did not want Rust to be added because people didn't want to fix it if they broke it. Some of your comments are reasonable, but not all of them are the ones used by people attempting to stop the addition of Rust here.

Except that Hector was not the person who wrote the code concerned and the discussion did not answer the question of whether it would be merged or not. The code concerned may still be merged, because the person who tried to stop it doesn't have the power to do that unilaterally. All Hector's involvement did was make several people angry because he insulted people who wanted to block the Rust contributions, Linus rebuked him for that, and he is now leaving. The leaving was probably not only about this incident, given that Hector has reacted similarly, if less extremely, to previous episodes of this long-running series of "people arguing about programming languages". This episode may still end, after we've all stopped paying attention, with the original code considered fine and merged over continued grumblings from the reviewer who didn't want it. Or, for that matter, it being merged to a massive explosion of anger from the same guy, it all depends. The latter would be problematic, and it's far from the only bad way this could end.

Yes, he did, and it's the one thing he asked for that I think was reasonable. He made lots of comments there which I disagree with, including some personal attacks on people who oppose Rust which I thought were at best a bad idea. However, I think, for the reasons stated in my original comment, that continuing to have this fight every month or so when someone writes something in Rust and someone else gets annoyed because it is Rust is going to cause problems. Each time will add a little stress to some people, and if it happens often enough, those people are going to start reacting to that stress. We just lost one maintainer out of this. Maybe we think that doesn't matter; I'm not using Asahi anyway, and probably others will keep working on it, but do we want to keep rolling those dice? If you dislike Rust, this isn't good news for your side, because for all we know, an anti-Rust maintainer will be next to quit because they're annoyed that nobody is stopping the continued commits of more Rust into the kernel.

I don't know what Linus can do about this. He is unwilling to tell either side to stop at the moment, so maybe he thinks it will work out best if they eventually settle it among themselves. I have my doubts that this is going to happen that way. If anyone has an idea for how this could be mediated so we don't have long fights with personal attacks and insults regularly, I think it would be useful to try.

Re: please post a link proving your point - I'll go first

Read the sentence again. I think you already know the context, but if you somehow don't, they were stating a hypothetical where other operating systems adopted Rust or something else that eliminated memory-related CVEs*, and Linux didn't, thus that in this situation which is not where we are today, Linux would be the only one with those CVEs. You decided to take something that was clearly a what if and treat it as if it was stated as current fact. That makes it easy to disprove**, but it doesn't make other points.

* And you had plenty of points you could have made. The way we would get to a memory CVE-less world is far from clear here. You could have argued against them by pointing out how difficult that would be in practice. Linux could reduce or eliminate theirs in a few different ways. You could propose one you liked better. I'm not going to argue either of those for you, but you can if you decide to argue against what they said.

** You didn't have to go to an LLM to disprove it. If you know how these CVEs work, you can get actual information about real ones in other operating systems, for example the ones in Microsoft and Vmware that were covered in an article in this paper yesterday. A summary from a bot that could have made up the existence of things is less reliable information, even if it was correct this time.

He is leaving in a huff, and many of his statements about the Rust issue haven't been very convincing to me. However, one of his points is, in my opinion, correct.

Linux has a problem with Rust. It will go better if they either decide that Rust is in it, and anyone who is unwilling to see Rust can feel free to leave or shut up, or that Rust is forbidden, and anyone who wants it in the kernel are free to leave or shut up. Right now, though, they have the situation where Rust is technically allowed, but when someone writes something in it, some others come around and try to stop it. This is guaranteed to annoy everyone involved. The Rust people see their work, which is often carefully written and tested, trashed by people who don't have a technical objection but just dislike the language. That is frustrating. The people who don't want Rust see an extra burden on them, sometimes supported by irritating ideological arguments and they don't know whether they can opt out of that or not. That is frustrating. While this argument continues, we can pretty much guarantee that everyone will get more frustrated and some of them will burn out as a result. The rest of the Linux community, including developers who are more indifferent and users, would all benefit if this didn't happen. I don't have a way of making it stop, but it would help if the developers could figure out such a way or, if they can't, for the people managing the project to try.

Re: "Rust project ... burnout is shockingly high. "

You'd have to do a lot of work to figure out what is comparable. For example, if the burnout in the Rust community is at all related to kernel problems, then neither of the other languages you list can be compared as they are not used there. You'd probably also have to consider community size, but you can't compare size without comparing scope of what the community is building as one may manage tools the other one doesn't need, leaves to an open source developer, or just doesn't bother with. You would also need to add in how many people are paid to do it by an employer, as those people will burn out in a very different way, if at all, to their volunteering colleagues. I'm concerned that any research attempted would find these problems too annoying to solve and would have to use a simplistic definition for all the important elements to come to any conclusions.

I'm a security expert, and I almost fell for a North Korea-style deepfake job applicant …Twice

Re: Hire Purpose

"However, I'm more interested in the nuance for rejecting the applicant. He really wanted to hire 'him' because his responses and answers were so good. So... why didn't he?"

As much as you might want to hire a brilliant identity thief, the identity thief part might outweigh the brilliant part. Even ignoring the likelihood that this was a North Korean, someone willing to fake who they are could be all sorts of problems, from someone on a list of people you're not supposed to pay to someone who is willing to do malicious things to your company. You already know they're lying about some things, so why should you trust them not to do anything else. What it really means is that they would really like to hire a person with the same skills as this one, but without the criminal aspect.

If we add in the typical methods of the North Korean IT laborers, they sometimes do good work, but in many cases, they can't even if they are good at it because they're often working multiple jobs to collect as much money as possible. Many of them work in the short term on the theory that they will be discovered eventually and thrown out so they want to maximize their gains until then. They also have a tendency to install ransomware and steal code and customer data. There are two types of companies where the damage is even worse. If you run a cryptocurrency operation, their goal is stealing all the cryptocurrency. If you run a security company, their goal is to steal the vulnerabilities you know about and use those for their malware. They focus on both of these a lot. This being a security company, that is one more reason on the already admirable stack not to hire the person no matter how much they know.

Re: A job's a job

Because that's not what you said earlier. You've written a softer message, one that I agree with, and pretending it's what you've been saying before. You did not defend Koreans as a people because nobody was attacking Koreans as a people. I'd happily employ someone from North Korea who had escaped, because they would have to escape for it to be possible, because nothing is intrinsically good or bad about their national origin. Your defenses have been of North Korean government-organized operations by denying that they were this, or pretending that they didn't install malware, or mutating the reasons why anyone would hire them to ascribe to the employer a level of complicity that they did not have. Now, you're deflecting from this by suggesting that those who say otherwise are prejudiced against Koreans, when in fact we're prejudiced against state-run criminal groups no matter who runs them or where they were born.

I too have worked with people from lots of countries, nearly all of whom were wonderful people. Many of those were former residents of countries whose governments I do not trust at all. They were not installing malware on corporate devices. They weren't copying customer data. They were not being monitored by agents of the government of the land of their birth, at least as far as I know. The people in these articles were all of these things, and that is what we have a problem with.

Re: Asian accent!!!

I'm guessing this is why they pretend to be Polish or Serbian, assuming that people will not know what a Serbian accent sounds like and will mistake their Asian one for a Balkan one. Trying to pass it off as Chinese might be easier, but I think many small companies would not hire a Chinese remote worker at all due to more complicated Chinese labor laws and they would also probably offer a lower salary.

Techie cleaned up criminally bad tech support that was probably also an actual crime

Re: "This person does not work here."

A private company that does some types of work for the government may still be required to respond. The responsible government agency will receive the request and collect needed information from whoever has it in order to send it through. Then again, it sounds like this might have been a little different.

A win at last: Big blow to AI world in training data copyright scrap

Re: "The copying of our content was not 'fair use.'"

Yes, I get it. To you, "price discovery" means "copyright is evil and everything should be free". From other comments you've made, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that most phrases mean that to you. To me, "price discovery" means discovering what prices things, including competing products, are should I want to obtain them. This is often not a problem for copyrighted works.

You focus entirely on the small costs of copying digital data, which you incorrectly reduce to zero, but they are quite close to zero so I can live with that. What you have failed to take into account, repeatedly, is that if these are zero, they become nearly meaningless to the price of the work, but the other costs such as the ones needed for the creator to produce the work still exist as they always have. I would try to convince you of this by pointing out the situation with those things you're willing to accept, but I fear that there are two problems that will prevent this from doing any good. The cost of printing up a physical book is much lower than the price it sells for because the difference is being paid to the authors, illustrators, editors, typesetters, and everyone else who did intellectual labor in order for the book to exist. Some of it is also being paid to the publisher because, in many cases, they paid in advance so the author could produce the book. Most of those same costs exist if it's a digital book, and if the people concerned can't get money, they won't do the work, and the book won't exist. I'm afraid that you will ignore this because you appear to think this labor is infinitely available, which it's really not. Furthermore, I expect that, were we having this argument in 1970, you'd be passionately arguing that anyone with access to a printing machine should be allowed to churn out unlimited copies of any book and anyone with the requisite copying machinery should be able to reproduce copies of any media at all, but you're reducing your scope to digital data here for simplicity.

If you would not argue this, then consider that digital copying is just a cheaper printing machine, and the creators of that book still incurred a similar cost to make it. If you would, though, I don't think we'll ever see eye to eye because you are arguing that intellectual labor has no value. If you really think that, why not just never buy anything made with it, as it has no value, but no, you want to have access to the products of their work but you don't think they deserve to benefit from doing the work you're enjoying unless someone just happens to donate. I still wonder what kind of work you do.

Re: "The copying of our content was not 'fair use.'"

The guy in the Lehrer song isn't exactly the hero of it, you know. This issue is not about picking the more sympathetic corporation. This issue is about finding the right rule, either currently, where we're trying to figure out what rule the current law already says, or for the future if we decide that is wrong and we want the law changed, for every situation where this crops up. This means that the giant AI corporation copying an individual's work without permission and a scrappy individual with an AI model copying a massive enterprise's work without permission should be treated the same way. That way, they both know what is required of them before they start out. In fact, I would suggest that the sizes of corporations demonstrate why we need that clarity; the kind of thing that large AI companies do routinely would be immediately and rigorously smacked down if an individual did it, and only similarly large corporations have the legal might needed to push against it. This is unfortunate, but I support the people with copyright, even if they are large, because by defending themselves they also defend smaller creators with the precedent.

Re: "The copying of our content was not 'fair use.'"

"Am I violating Reuters's copyright by doing so with their material?"

Well, if you are told you need to pay for it, but you find a way of getting a copy without paying for it, I think you'll find that courts think you are. The same reason that, if I ever get a copy of the AI models these companies make and use them, even if I don't sell them, they're going to think that I don't have a right to do it.

Re: "The copying of our content was not 'fair use.'"

Patience might be helpful here. You're demanding a response from people mere minutes after posting something. These forums don't work that quickly. You're also getting angry at what is at most two downvotes your original post received (no, not me). For all I know, it was only one by the time you complained. Get used to it, more people will express their views through votes than through replies. You may not get many votes or replies on this topic because the copyright of legal documents is not an article a lot of people are likely to click on, but if you do, they won't come through as quickly as that.

Re: "The copying of our content was not 'fair use.'"

If I want to train some AI on publicly available court decisions, I have a brilliant idea: I should do it with the public court decisions, rather than someone else's summaries of those decisions that I don't have permission for.

Yes, I do like paying people for things if I like the price. If I don't like the price, then I don't buy them. Price discovery and an open market are almost always available. If I want a certain book, then it is not hard to find the places selling the book and how much they charge to get a copy. If they all charged £200, then I will probably read a different book. Of course, there have to be some restrictions. For example, one of the only cases where anyone tries to charge £200 for a book is for textbooks, which is why I would buy used ones. I'm sure textbook authors would try to prevent people from selling used copies if they could, and I will fight against any attempt they may make to do that, but that is much less far than you constantly argue for.

Lawyers face judge's wrath after AI cites made-up cases in fiery hoverboard lawsuit

Re: what are you paying for

My post was not about whether they should say it, where, and to whom. I agree that they should say it. My post was about what they can be sued for for their mistake, whether they said they used it or not. Fraud would be a valid charge if they lied about not using it, then used it anyway. Since they have no problem admitting it, it seems almost certain that they either said they would use it, then did, or made no statements about using it, then did. This makes it more of a negligence issue than fraud, and I think the lawyers would probably lose that case.

Re: what are you paying for

It's not fraud, unless they promised that they wouldn't use any AI tools. Since they evidently have their own internal tool, they probably did not make that promise. So fraud is definitely off the table. What it is, however, is incompetence. Their clients have every reason to be angry with them about that, and they may be able to sue these lawyers, but for negligence rather than fraud. I'm not sure how likely they are to win, but I suppose I can find out by giving an LLM the prompt "Show me case law demonstrating that lawyers citing nonexistent cases is considered negligence".

Of course, the events described in the article aren't at that level yet. This is a court potentially punishing the lawyers, not their clients. Courts can penalize lawyers for a variety of things with a lot of latitude for the judge. Even if this wasn't sufficient negligence for the clients to win against them, a judge can assess some penalties, either on the lawyer, for example finding them in contempt of court, or to the client, for example by rejecting their motion to exclude evidence because they failed to make their case. These things are complicated because the terms for what a judge is allowed to do are a little vague and some of this might be overturned on appeal if the evidence really should have been excluded but wasn't due to attorney incompetence.

Feds want devs to stop coding 'unforgivable' buffer overflow vulnerabilities

Re: If C had a string type managed by the compiler...

The problem with that is that, unless there is a relatively standard library, you can only do that within your own code. Find a string library you like, hope they've got all the Unicode support you'll need in there, but if you ever need to include code from someone else, you can be quite certain that they did not use the same library you did. All the strings going back and forth to that will either be C strings or they'll have their own internal format, maybe because it's similar to whatever library they picked. Only some types of programs can use the model you describe. This is one reason that a lot of other languages have treated strings as a primitive. You are still welcome to get a library that implements them differently if you want that, but there is a more full-featured option as default.

Reddit’s first public year shows growth, but Wall Street’s still not happy

Re: How did Reddit ever become a thing?

That is easy. What Reddit can do that a forum can't is nothing, but what Reddit does do which a forum doesn't is stay around for longer and be easy to set up. I don't use Reddit often either, but I fully understand why it's a thing.

I have had accounts on lots of forums in the past. Many of these were relatively small groups with niche interests. This came with several little annoyances. Let's see what something like Reddit does about each of them:

1. I have twenty login/password pairs to remember. Reddit centralizes them.

2. Occasionally, the people hosting the forums would grow bored. Sometimes, they would delete the forum. Sometimes, they would just stop any maintenance, meaning new users couldn't register (most of them needed manual approval because spambots were great at using forums). Reddit makes it easy to give someone else moderation powers and just leave. Nobody is relying on someone keeping the server online or trying to see if they can have the domain name and backup so the thing doesn't die.

3. Some of the forums were so niche that they had small numbers of users. By being hosted on a subdirectory of someone's personal site, they were not easy to find. Not that it's super easy to find niche Reddit groups (or whatever those are called), but there are several search facilities available that make it easier to locate them. That means more interested people who can post information and thus a more long-lasting group.

4. To have a forum, someone needed to decide to host one. Someone needed sufficient dedication to create the thing, but they also needed to be someone comfortable enough running a server. To us, hosting a prebuilt forum program in PHP on an HTTP server, either a fully self-managed one or some webhost's, is child's play. Five minutes and however long it takes to fill in all the boxes and it's working. That doesn't apply to everyone, meaning that there were many more forums about technical subjects than about other things. Fortunately for me, I am most interested in technical subjects, so that works out just fine. For people who want to talk with interested people on other subjects, though, making a new group on Reddit is easier.

I think I would use Reddit if they stuck with a forum-style interface, with comments in either a chronological order or in a nested thread model like here. Instead, they seem to have used bizarrosort where finding the context of a post takes far more work than it should. I'm sure I would find other things to complain about if I used it enough. Most of my experience with it comes from finding it in search results when I'm looking for information that's not easily found elsewhere, and when I use those pages, I often find what I'm looking for in that post, after fighting with the interface to see more than the two it typically shows me straight from the DDG search page.

Ignorance really is bliss when you’re drowning in information

"As far as "Quite why people obsess about current events that they have no actual control or influence over I have no idea." goes, I agree 100%."

Speaking for myself, I give myself two reasons for why I care about these things, even though I can do nothing about them and I might be happier if I didn't. The first is that we've often been told that we can actually do something about them, and some people are able to do it by spending lots of time campaigning or organizing people. I am not doing either of those things because I'm often working, doing other things I've already committed to, and when I'm done with those, I'm tired, but since I know that I am technically capable of doing something, it seems like I should at least know what's going on so I can decide to start doing that if it ever comes up.

The second reason is that I've seen the kind of people who actually manage not to know about current events, and in large part I don't want to be like those people. They mostly fall into two groups:

1. People who know nothing about any event you might bring up and are apathetic about it all. It doesn't matter how local an issue, how much they could actually do about it, or how much it might affect them. You could tell them that someone is about to close their street unless just one person asks them not to and they would be blase all the way until the street was closed and they were confused why this would happen with no warning.

2. People who don't know about any of this but decide to have strong opinions nonetheless. The French are evil because something Sarcozy said about the British being inherently malicious, and when you point out that Sarcozy probably never said that and he hasn't been president of France since 2012 anyway, they don't seem to mind or they insist that your facts are equally reliable as their assumptions.

Why the existence of these people should make me read about all these things is a good question. After all, just by knowing these things, I'm not reducing their numbers at all and it just makes it all the more annoying when I meet one. Still, that is one reason why I instinctively want to read about any sufficiently large event or one that's likely to impact something I might interact with, even when I can't do anything about it, and so far, I have not gotten over that instinct.

Re: Puzzled........

That can be part of the problem, the extra time spent trying to take the information provided and figure out what truth is, but it is not the whole problem or even the largest part depending on where you're getting information from. For example, a thing that happens very often is that some incident occurs and broadcast news and websites start to post information about it. They are going for speed, which means the information may be faulty, but if you're using reputable sources, it is probably fine. The problem is that it's little pieces of disconnected information. To understand the situation, you need to either assemble the puzzle of data until you have the truth, remembering to immediately remove any pieces when they report that oops, that wasn't quite what happened. The other approach is the one I've often taken. I don't know if it's healthy, but when an event happens, I respond by ignoring any news for several hours so that, when I do read about it, they can provide me with a more cohesive report.

Arizona laptop farmer pleads guilty for funneling $17M to Kim Jong Un

GDP is a useful number in some cases, but it isn't comparable in this case. North Korea doesn't publish GDP figures of their own, but estimates put it at $15 billion. However, a lot of that is never in cash; if someone in North Korea does some farming and someone eats the crops, nobody got any money but it adds to GDP. North Korea has lots of labor, treating almost everybody as slaves will give you that, but they don't have a lot of cash with which they can buy things they don't know how to make.

It's also worth keeping in mind that this was just one operation among many for them. They have more than one laptop farmer and they operate their tech worker scheme in many countries. They do all sorts of other things to get money, from organizing thefts from banks, both retail and central, to hacking anything with cryptocurrency in it, from personal wallets to large exchanges.

T-Mobile goes live with beta of satellite phone service for the US

Re: There is no escape from the surviellence network

"Free has always meant freedom in English,": Oh, how clever of you. It has. It has also meant several other things, and you understand which of those they meant. If you don't understand, read the dictionary entry for free on a loop until you understand that there are other meanings.

"You do in fact need to pay for the mobile plan to use it - they merely "generously" claim that they won't increase the price of the mobile subscription if you send a SMS and it happens to use a satellite until July it seems (chances are they already increased the price a couple of months ago to cover the satellites rent and will increase it more in July)."

As you can see from my other comments here, I think their pricing is likely to be high for a long time. However, your allegation is false, which you can prove easily from the article. Users of other mobile providers in the United States may also use it for free, according to them, meaning that yes, it is actually free for this short period.

"Freedom enjoyers who write free software that respects the users freedom certainly won't be annoyed when I call their free software, free software, instead of insulting it by calling it "FOSS" or worse "open source"."

I think you'll find that a lot of people who write what you'll call "free software" don't have the same ideological problems you have with other terms. They may use them themselves. I, for example, write software and use the GPL or AGPL on some of it. I describe those things as open source. If you come to me and tell me how wrong this is, I will, in fact, be annoyed with you. Of course, this may not be sufficient proof of my claim because there's nothing saying you would enjoy any of my software, but I am confident that I'm not the only one in this situation.

Re: There is no escape from the surviellence network

You: The article has written; "Free text messages", "Access will be free until July"

Which, as you well know, is true, in that you don't have to pay until July when it starts being not free at all. But do go on assuming that there is only one definition of "free" and it was created in 1983. Surely, it will eventually convince someone that they were a complete idiot when they used it to talk about prices, which only came about when some anti-FOSS people wanted to torpedo the word. It will also make the people who make the software you like annoyed with you.

Man who binned 7,500 Bitcoin drive now wants to buy entire landfill to dig it up

Re: The real question

"The hard drive is inside a PC casing": No, it's loose. Try again.

"covered with dirt so it's more or less protected from the elements": No, not dirt. It's covered in rubbish of many types, some of which is much nastier. Not that dirt is great, because dirt lets water through and water is nasty to hard drives. But I admit that it's probably no more broken now than it has been for years, given that high pressures will probably have slowed some processes that could damage it. The damage it received was probably mostly front-loaded.

"And it's obviously sealed.": There are several posts here explaining how it's not sealed. Why are they obviously wrong?

To say nothing of the other ways a hard drive can be destroyed, such as getting crushed by the weight above it or through violent contact with machinery that is not intent on preserving things.

Re: Is the needle even in the haystack?

I don't care if they do. I got rid of it. If they want it now, that's theirs as long as I have no more responsibility anymore. It is why I erase things before getting rid of them, though.

Re: The real question

I have a challenge for you. Get an old laptop hard drive. They're extremely cheap these days. Write some data to that drive. Then bury it with no protective arrangements, ideally in a place that gets rained on and next to rotting things for a year. See how recoverable that is when you dig it up. Corrosion is more powerful than you think. Of course, the options of the drive getting smashed or simply being impossible to find are there, but in the situation where you found it and the platter hadn't shattered, you would still have a device that is not in good condition to be read.

Re: There's a simple solution to all this.

Buying a landfill and excavating it, even in the cheapest, most destructive way, is going to cost more than that. Recovering data from a corroded hard drive itself is extremely expensive, because the average data recovery specialists don't see things in the condition this drive would be. Maybe he has found some people willing to make this bet, but if that's all he's raised, he will need more.

Re: Oh Dear, Oh Dear, Oh Dear

And if he ever buys it, remember to subtract any charges for doing any excavation with zero environmental damage and making him clean it all up afterward. Make sure that money is put in an account that can only be used for that purpose before he takes possession. At that point, let him give it a try; it's not our problem if he wants to waste more of his life on an impossible dream, but we're not letting him break things while doing so.

The biggest microcode attack in our history is underway

In the interest of disclosure, did you receive any funding from someone who disliked USAID or stood to gain from its destruction? If you say no, should we believe you? After all, the articles and comments on a relatively niche tech-related news site are such valuable online territory, we should expect all authors and commenters to routinely receive thick brown envelopes for their writing. I'm mostly funded by the Paraguayan navy, the authors of FFmpeg, and the people who make SATA connectors. Who's bankrolling you?