Posts by doublelayer

How tech went from free love to pay-per-day

Re: Speaking the copium

FOSS is certainly not all about supplanting Windows or proprietary, and the people who actually make it know that. However, to say that assuming it is misguided may be going too far. There are a lot of supporters of FOSS who do speak as if there is a struggle against proprietary versions. Whenever someone announces that, for example, a big organization is going to switch their desktops from Windows to Linux, people respond as if it's a victorious battle against their foe and that anyone who didn't do the same was making an obviously stupid choice because everything would be better if they did. People who watch this would be hard pressed to make that align with your characterization of "uninterested".

We know that these are often separate groups. The people who make this stuff are often not the ones describing unrealistic evil plots by Microsoft (it's always Microsoft, why can't some other company be evil some time) to ensure that Linux dies next year. Those who are not as directly involved in multiple parts of this may not understand this. Someone nontechnical recently told me a joke which, unfortunately, I can't remember well enough to tell in a funny way, but the point was that Linux users were more annoying than all sorts of stereotypically annoying groups like telemarketers and Apple users. Those who don't know us but know a little probably have a similar thought in their mind, and it will take more than your statement to prove why this is not the case. Worse still, if they see that kind of argument and try using it, they may conclude that not only are there a lot of annoying evangelists, but those people are wrong because they said that an insufficient piece of FOSS software was as good as a proprietary one and it isn't.

Usually not, but they advertise a lot, probably because the people who sign up don't use their service very much. In addition, they can at times be edging closer to the line. They often talk a lot about privacy without necessarily providing much themselves; yes, your local network won't be able to intercept your data if you've used it properly and they can't be blamed for people who don't, but if they keep tons of logs on your usage, they're not private. They can at times use other methods, for instance a VPN service whose advertisements focused a lot on watching region-locked content, but all their endpoints were well-known and blocked by a lot of content providers. They're not automatically scams, but I wouldn't trust everything in those advertisements.

FreeDOS and FreeBSD prove old code never dies, just gets nifty updates

Re: Why?

"A lot of vendors sell budget laptops with FreeDOS"

Do they still? I did a quick search, but I only found one company (HP), they're only doing it in one regional store (India), and they're definitely ripping off their customers because the prices and specs are terrible (27k inr, £255, $324 US for a low-end Athlon and 4 GB of RAM). I can get laptops with the same or better specs in many countries that includes a Windows license and, from more manufacturers, ones that ship with Linux preinstalled.

Nintendo sues alleged Switch pirate pair for serious coin

Re: On one hand...

That argument would work better if they had made a homebrew modification that made piracy possible, but that was an unintended side-effect and they did it for completely legitimate purposes. It would have worked better if, even though they intended to use it for piracy, they said it was an unintended side-effect, etc. They chose neither of those options, meaning that your defense of them is falling a lot more flat than you probably intended.

The rest of your defense isn't helping either. Your characterization of their antipiracy measures, which I wouldn't be happy with if I owned their hardware, as trying to "police coding and learning" when we both know that's not what they're doing, does not help your point. Nintendo is not locking down their hardware because they want me to be unable to learn how to code. They are doing it because they want to charge lots of money and make it difficult or impossible for people to play the games without paying them lots of money, and that's something they have the right to do. For those two reasons and many others, I do not have Nintendo hardware. Incidentally, their use of a pirated copy of an emulated game, while humorous, is not itself piracy because they own the copyright to the thing.

Brace for new complications in big tech takedowns after Supreme Court upended regulatory rules

Re: It's actually good.

And that's what they did. They wrote a law expressing what they wanted to happen and specifically named a group which was supposed to encode that law into specific regulations and keep them updated. It's remarkably similar to software: someone writes an HTTP spec, which tells people how to talk to HTTP servers, but they leave the decisions about what it will do in certain conditions to the software writers so it can better match intended behavior. That means, for example, that when a new change to communications technology happens, a regulator can approve that change without having to take the whole spec to the legislators and say "I know you don't understand any of the stuff in this, but we would like you to paste it into a law and then pass it".

The normal procedure would be to check whether the regulations passed actually match the authority the law gives. If the law says that the regulator can require fishing boats to carry regulators, but doesn't give them free rein to charge them for doing so, then their attempt to add that regulation doesn't match their powers and they would lose. That's not what happened here. Instead, the courts eliminated that power entirely, meaning that until legislators pass laws that include every detail of how something operates, the court can basically decide at the time whether to approve or deny any regulatory action based on no knowledge of the situation and with almost no limit. The power they're so worried about someone else having they've just taken for themselves. The situation wasn't good before, but it is no better now.

Antitrust cops cry foul over Meta's pay-or-consent ultimatum to Europeans

Re: They screwed up

It's not paying to avoid ads. They could easily have that model and not violate anything. It's the pay or we get access to and permission for all your data at any time, which would already be a problem, and then it turns out that if you pay, they still collect and use all your data anyway. Having a paid ad-free service is something they can definitely do, and maybe they will consider it if they are ever penalized sufficiently to get them to stop collecting excessive amounts of data. I had hoped that GDPR would get us closer to that and it didn't, so I'm not optimistic that the DMA will end differently.

Supreme Court orders rethink on Texas, Florida laws banning web moderation

Quick summary:

"The courts decide that the government can attempt to influence free speech and moderate content."

Translation: They should not be forbidden from having any contact between government and social media, including providing non-binding, non-incentivized*, suggestions. The government is allowed to suggest that some piece of information is wrong, and social media is free to ignore them and leave it there.

"The courts decide that the government cannot create laws to uphold free speech and ensure the playing field is level."

Translation: governments are not allowed to pass a law forcing social media to keep up messages, whether they want to or not.

Do you notice the big difference? The first case involves communication and optional suggestions. The second provides mandates and punishments. If the first case involved government forcing comments to be taken down, that would have been struck down too.

Your choice to describe forced publishing as "uphold[ing] free speech" suggests that you don't need help understanding, you just don't like it.

Re: Waters still muddy?

A publisher has a lot more free speech than a common carrier does. A common carrier is supposed to carry my message, no matter what's in it*. A publisher can choose what it is willing to publish and what it's not. That reduced freedom is why common carriers get special protection in law and publishers just have the normal freedom of speech.

* Not that common carriers are forbidden from blocking. Email providers are often considered common carriers, but if I'm accused of sending spam, they'll come down hard on me. One of the services I've used is very concerned about spam and, while they've never done it to me, they have some scary messages about extremely quick punishments for the smallest of spam reports.

CISA looked at C/C++ projects and found a lot of C/C++ code. Wanna redo any of it in Rust?

Re: Pay no attention to Dunning and Kruger

Relying on the user to solve the problem isn't always the right approach either. Imagine that I built a car with a little switch that would lock the steering wheel at an extreme point, so if you twisted it too far, it would get stuck and send your car in circles if you didn't flip over. People ended up buying these, making a mistake, and crashing into things. I responded by saying that, if they were better drivers, this wouldn't have happened, and I'm right. You still might decide that my car design was more at fault than the drivers were.

We try to improve the quality or safety of things made by tools all the time, and it doesn't always take the form of telling the users of the existing tools to be better and blaming them when anything went wrong. Sometimes, we tried to improve the products by improving the tools, and sometimes, defects were more due to tool problems than user problems. We can't expect that every problem can be fixed by having a better tool, nor can we expect that all problems can or should be resolved by chastising the users.

Re: The tools are wrong.

The difference between a string library of your choice in C and strings in the standard library of a different language is that strings are very common types that lots of things use. Yes, when the code is entirely mine, I can use the library and be completely covered. When I have to connect to other libraries, they will not be using my library of choice. Likely, they won't be using any library at all, because they don't want the dependency risk, meaning that many parts of the program will be using the basic subset included in the C standard library. Is this necessarily a problem that we need to solve? I don't think so, but when you make a statement like "String handling in C is entirely down to which library *you* decide to use", it does not help when it's wrong.

Yes, that is a good thing. My statement doesn't mean that all suggested improvements are necessarily better. There are many valid reasons to suggest that C is fit for purpose, and they can be debated. That's not what I was objecting to. I was objecting to the simplistic logic that any vulnerability in a C program is the total and undivided fault of the programmer that wrote it, and therefore that there is no reason to consider changing it.

Re: The Rust Evangelism Strike Force...

While possible, it is unlikely to give you privilege escalation because GCC doesn't need to run with elevated permissions, is not a suid, and therefore probably doesn't have any more access than the program calling it. If you're already running and you want to elevate, you need a vulnerability in the kernel or something that already has those privileges, and those would be more dangerous targets than a compiler. That doesn't make the compiler bugs completely safe, just less important than a kernel bug or one in utilities that run with different privileges. The one situation that makes sense to me is running on a different machine, so a malicious program could spread itself to a machine on which you compiled code.

"A poor workman always blames his tools", but it does not follow that "he who blames his tools is a bad workman". It may also be that he who blames his tools has bad tools. Of course, the statement worked a bit better when workmen chose their tools, rather than having about three that are capable of doing the job and the selection among them was often made long ago. Dismissing every argument about improving the tools with this logic simply guarantees that our tools, whether they're good or bad, will not improve.

Re: The Rust Evangelism Strike Force...

"how can a buggy compiler hurt me?"

A lot of the answers you've gotten have considered intentional flaws in a compiler or bugs that generate the wrong result, but if you specifically mean memory safety issues, it could still allow an attacker to generate code which executes something when you compile it. The risk is not as high as some other things, since if you are compiling code, you'll probably run it yourself later, but it might be another attack method, for instance one that can infect a build server rather than your development machine. I agree with you though that, as memory safety vulnerabilities go, there are things that are a lot worse than a compiler you run manually.

Microsoft CEO of AI: Your online content is 'freeware' fodder for training models

Re: Copyrights as a structural obstacle

"On the moral side, it is funny to read pro-copyright opinions on the same forum where ad-blockers are considered acceptable."

Copyright has no influence on what I allow my computer to display. They are free to run ads. They are free to try to prevent me from seeing their content if I block those ads. I am free to strike things from the document that gets printed to my screen. Ad blockers are not the same as piracy, and I don't care whether you're a pro-piracy or a pro-copyright person who makes that claim; it's equally wrong.

Re: So we need DCMA 2.0?

"The conceptual problem I see is: how is my reading and internalizing a web page manifestly different from a LLM being trained with the same page?"

This again? Every time, some argument like this is made, and each time, it does so by either misunderstanding or misrepresenting facts. Starting with:

"In neither case are the page's contents reproduced or stored the LLM or my brain (I don't have an eidetic memory.)"

They are stored and they are reproduced, often accidentally. First, they are stored in the training archives, without permission. That is an accurate, byte for byte storage. Then, they are partially stored inside the LLM. True, I can't, even with access to the model, run a command like "llm-extract book-title" and get it back, but it will often print from it verbatim. This has happened, over and over, across models and sources, relevant to the query and not, and it is only somewhat less now because code has been written to minimize it because it makes their crimes too obvious.

"A fairly simple example I would consider is where I train a LLM on the entire Public Domain corpus of The Gutenberg Project say from an offline resource (eg their 2010 DVD.)

From my reading of Gutenberg's T&C I think I would not be in conflict with any of those provisions."

You would not be in conflict with anything, even if you downloaded them fresh, although if you're going to, Gutenberg would rather you used something like their Kiwix versions so their servers aren't stressed and that way you can have the full archive rather than the subset on DVD. This is specifically because the work they distribute is not copyrighted. You can do whatever you want to that data.

"Posing rhetorical questions I would ask what moral or ethical lines will I have crossed at that point? And when I provide free, open access to my trained LLM? Finally when I place a paywall in front of my LLM?"

No lines at all. Public domain training content is fine to use for all purposes, commercial or otherwise. It's other content where those lines appear, and they appear at the start. Training your model on content you don't have the right to is both unethical and illegal.

"Finally how does one legislate ethics and morality? Extant attempts are without exception cures disastrously worse than the disease."

That's what law is. Laws are always intending to codify our concepts of ethics and justice. They have lots of downsides, but unless you think that no law is better, we've already decided to try.

FCC wants telcos to carrier unlock cellphones 60 days after activation

Re: change network provider

That kind of fraud is a problem with any installment plan. If you use one of those split payment things or even a credit card, you have the option to not pay back the bill you said you would. This isn't new and there is no reason why phone companies should have any different experience than anyone else. If someone does it, they have a lot of different ways to collect on the debt, and if they don't want to, they can outsource part or all of the process. There is no reason for them to stop having an installment plan with that minor risk, and if they did, people can use other methods to split the cost. Like the phone contracts, doing this will often mean they pay more than the price of the phone, but they will pay less per month.

Organized crime and domestic violence perps are big buyers of tracking devices

You: The other 63% are unknowns,

Me/article: 63% of customers were not "adversely known to the NSW Police Force"

Are these sounding different to you? They don't sound different to me. Not known to be criminals. They might be, but they might not be. Hence, you cannot say that "the largest majority of Trackers are used for nefarious purpose" since the majority is, by your words and mine, unknown.

The other important part of this is that this is 63% of a sample of about five thousand. That's a small sample and we have no reason to expect that it's a random sample. Purchases of trackers are not automatically reported to the police, so a lot of people who purchased them would not have ended up in the set at all. Meanwhile, criminal reports to the police are quite easily tracked. It would not be surprising for criminals using trackers to be much more commonly known to the police than noncriminals using them. From what we have, the true percentage of trackers used for criminal purposes is unknown and unknowable, but for those reasons, I think the number is likely to be lower than the 37% they have stated.

You have four options here:

1. Admit that you don't know the number and try to find more evidence to get a more reliable number, which will take some time.

2. Admit that you don't have a reliable number or a chance of getting one quickly and speak about the issue generally. This is what I recommend.

3. Use this number, acknowledging its weaknesses.

4. Make up your own number that isn't even this number. This is the avenue you must take if you intend to use phrases like "largest majority", since you need to add at least 13% to get to any majority,.

That's a rather expansive version of "largest majority". The article lists many numbers, and one thing they all have in common is that none of them are above 50%, especially those that included all customers as the denominator. The highest number was 37%, which means that 63% of customers were not "adversely known to the NSW Police Force for criminal behavior". This was only in a dataset of about five thousand trackers, and many more people have purchased these in Australia, so we should consider that the number may be quite different in either direction, though it seems to me that one direction is more likely than the other.

That doesn't mean that it's all fine and we have no problem, but if you intend to describe the situation to argue for a policy change, you should not misstate easy numbers. The question is whether we should ban tracking devices with the capabilities they currently have as a result of these risks. The alternatives include finding more software or hardware limitations to try to prevent them from happening, although Apple's built a bunch of those already and it doesn't seem to have prevented AirTags from being products of interest, or to continue to allow their usage, knowing that some of them will be used by criminals in a dangerous way. The prevalence of those bad outcomes should be considered when choosing between these options, but that should include the real prevalence, not numbers you've made up.

Elon Musk to destroy the International Space Station – with NASA's approval, for a fee

Re: Can't help wondering

Another cost worth considering is what happens if, after we've put it up there, we decide that's not a good place for it. The potential usefulness relies on a lot of what ifs, but many of those could also lead to it having a negative effect. Either we have to continue to control its movements or something could hit it, causing damage and debris. The lower the debris is, the less time you have to wait for it to clean itself up. Even if it doesn't happen, if we decide that it is too likely and we'd now rather that it came down, the cost of retrieving it from that higher orbit could be a lot higher than retrieving it from where it is now. Orbit isn't just a big empty space where we can leave things, and treating it like that can have some bad consequences.

AT&T wants Big Tech to help fund US internet access

Re: As much as I hate to admit it

That changes nothing, because without the internet, Cisco would be much smaller if it existed at all. Without a valuable network to drive demand for equipment to communicate, there would be less money for companies building that equipment. That example works as well as any other, that is to say, not at all.

I provided many examples of utilities where products that require them should not and are not responsible for providing them. Do you agree with any of them? If you think that manufacturers of toasters should be paying to build power plants, why? If you don't, why should the internet be any different? Also, I'm wondering what you do, and therefore which services I should be making you pay for instead of paying for them myself. Would it be fair if I demanded that, far from me paying you for whatever work you do, I should be paid by you to use it?

Re: As much as I hate to admit it

Why would that make any more sense than requiring any other company to do it? Everyone uses the internet, so because I need a company name at random, let's just send the bill to Cisco. They use the internet, so they're responsible for making it available.

The ISPs are responsible for building the networks they said they would. They are free not to serve an area if they think it's too expensive, and they sometimes do. When they don't, it's usually because the government gave them millions to serve that area. If that wasn't enough, they should have refused it and not built the service. Instead, they take it and provide substandard service at ridiculous prices, and every few years, they demand more money to make even slight improvements. This time, they're trying to get it from some companies rather than the taxpayers, but either way, it boils down to trying to put the bill on someone else for services they agreed to provide.

If I sell you electrical products, I am not responsible for getting better electricity service to your house. If I sell swimming pools, I am not responsible for giving you bigger pipes and water treatment plants. If I operate services on the internet, I am not responsible for connecting you. In each case, there are businesses who do those things and they have both private market reasons and often government subsidies to improve their services to you.

Reddit hopes robots.txt tweak will do the trick in scaring off AI training data scrapers

Re: do rate limiting on requests?

They've said they're going to, but the AI company can start running a parallel scraper to try to get around that. Renting lots of addresses temporarily is comparatively cheap, so they'd have to write better criteria to detect that bot without too many false positives that break their users. Now the arms race is on.

Of course, if copyright law existed, they could simply indicate that unlicensed use of the data would result in legal action and companies would stop of their own accord, but that won't happen unless some of these cases eventually refute the AI companies' assumption that laws just don't apply to them.

Hong Kong's Furi Labs shakes up smartphone scene with dash of Debian

Re: Why low-end?

Because getting the kind of hardware needed to build that phone is not easy. As far as I can tell, there are almost no phones with 24 GB of RAM. Unless you're including the popular tactic of Android makers to turn on what's effectively swap space then report that as RAM anyway, you've got a phone that's pretty rare.

For instance, they mostly have the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC. There are three problems with using this SoC in a Linux phone. The first problem is that you can't just buy a few of those. Qualcomm wants big orders from established companies for chips like that. If you're smaller, you're not just selecting a lower quantity, you're not paying a higher price so you can have a smaller quantity, you're not getting them at all. Second, they need something they can get Linux drivers for and, depending on who they think their customers are, as few proprietary blobs as possible. Some people won't mind some proprietary modem firmware, while others will dislike this immensely and want something like the Librem or PinePhone which isolates it (PinePhone has some attempt to custom-build firmware for it). None of that is available for flagship chips. Many midrange chips don't have it either, so you have to be careful with which one you select. Third, they're trying to sell these things, and if they cost a ton, which all 24/1024 phones do, many otherwise interested people won't buy them. There's only so big a market for expensive phones, and that market gets a lot smaller when it's not an established company and they're intentionally making a device that's not as compatible as others.

Julian Assange to go free in guilty plea deal with US

Re: Not been said yet

Their argument was that they were the victim, and if they are, they can request to extradite. If I break into your computer, steal your financial information, then your money, but I'm not in your country, then your country can request my country or any other country through which I might pass to arrest me and send me over. They may even do this if they think I have done the crime but don't know it for certain, as the point of extradition is that I still need to face trial if I am sent over. My country might refuse, and there are many different reasons for them to do so. Mr. Assange's lawyers tried several. Your argument that extradition simply doesn't apply at all is much more difficult to argue as it is incorrect.

Re: Not been said yet

The how and why are both covered under extradition legislation. It has been described, specific to this case, and in general, several times. It is the job of the court to read those laws, interpret the situation, and determine, then explain, why it applies. If you're looking for the legal explanation, it makes sense to get it in its full details from there, which is why others have suggested that you do so.

In short, the United States does not have any special consideration in the process, and any country could make a similar claim if they can claim and prove that they were the victim of a crime. To use your own example, Russia can and has used these requests numerous times. Sometimes, they have done it to get actual criminals. Sometimes, they have done it to try to get noncriminals, and the countries often reject those requests. In neither case would extrajudicial killings be permissible, and when countries do that, as many have done, it is a crime and could, depending on the methods and purposes, be considered an act of war. Often, the consequences for doing it are not as strong as I would like them to be, but that is not comparable at any level to the normal, legal process of extradition. If you want to know more, many good textbooks on international law and law enforcement are available for your perusal. If you want to know more specific to this case, many court decisions and applications from lawyers are similarly available.

Re: Sweden

Those charges no longer apply. Why they no longer apply is something that people with strong views about him like to fight about, and I don't have those strong views so I'm not going to go into any more detail about that. However, Sweden no longer has an extradition request for him so, once the US court work is done, he would be free to go to Australia.

Record labels gang up to sue AI music generator duo into utter oblivion

Re: All your tunes belong to us

Sometimes, but many such cases have failed because the thing that was "copied" was so small or so common that it did not deserve protection. Each time, it's just an experiment to see what the jury thinks. There are also distinctions depending on what exactly was copied. For example, a sample of a recording is considered copyrighted, while a note is not. While they might seem similar as they take about as much time (fractions of a second) to play, they should be and are treated differently. What I was trying to point out is that releasing a pattern of notes will not invalidate copyright on a subsequent song that also plays that pattern.

Re: All your tunes belong to us

The problem with that is that it's similar to taking a dictionary, making all possible sets of eight words, then claiming that no book can be copyrighted anymore because I've copyrighted every sequence of words. It's been clear from the start that copyright is based on originality of the whole thing, not tiny parts. I can't write "The world was" (copyright me, you have to pay me to use it), but neither can I invalidate your copyright even though you said "the world was" and I said it earlier.

A lot of music copyright cases are unconvincing to me, because they focus on exactly this kind of tiny thing and try to claim ownership of it. Usually, when I read about one musician suing another (or usually a company or family rather than the musician themselves), I think they're making a stupid argument and deserve to lose. This case does not follow that rule. This is not someone with a similar chorus. This is someone taking whole sets of files, in their entirety, and using them wholesale to make money. If these companies had their models stolen, I would not be permitted to use them at my leisure because they are copyrighted. That applies equally well to their training data. I often disagree with RIAA actions and statements, but once again, this is an exception.

Linux geeks cheer as Arm wrestles x86

Re: ARM needs to standardize

That wouldn't have fixed the problem they're talking about. It wouldn't have done anything at all for any other ARM equipment. They're talking about standardizing the firmware on ARM boards, which would mean not only that I would have a chance of booting a Linux image on any one of them, but that, with minor changes, you could do exactly the same with Risc OS. Instead of being Raspberry Pi only (some models not supported), it might boot on all of the ARM SBCs out there.

Meanwhile, Raspberry Pi trying to push Risc OS instead of Linux would have doomed their boards. An operating system that might be nostalgic for you to use, but by your own admission, crashes frequently, doesn't have any modern applications, doesn't allow the use of pretty much any commonly used programming languages nowadays, and would have been attached to some slow hardware. That would mean that educational buyers who wanted their students to learn any language they could ever use elsewhere wouldn't buy it. Individual enthusiasts who wanted to use them as networking equipment, media servers, home automation boxes, or almost all the popular uses except a desktop wouldn't have bought one. Industrial users who need something stable to control their equipment wouldn't have bought one. That means there would be very little money for the next version, so we might not have seen any hardware improvements. I'm quite glad that they did not try to force Risc OS as the standard. Risc OS can and has improved only because enough Pis were made that they are good experimentation targets, and they would be in an even better situation had the recommendations made in the original comment been carried out.

Re: What are the odds...

Exactly, which the board I linked can maybe do, but probably not. If it has to read some bits out of RAM and shove them at your link, maybe, though you'll have to connect your own because the NICs they built in are only 1 GBPS. If you have to do something to the data first, you'll probably find four A76s and four A55s to be a bit anemic. Even if you don't, there's still the question of why buy that board when you could have a better one for the same price if you switched architecture. That way, you have room to expand.

Re: What are the odds...

Yes, such a thing does exist. For example, this one. The question, however, is whether you will want that when you have to deal with comparatively weak performance. I'm guessing you would like something similar to Apple's processors or the competitors intended to run Windows, so the specific SoC on this board may be underwhelming. It's pretty good at raw compute in comparison to a Raspberry Pi, but not so good compared to low-end X86 CPUs, and it's priced a lot more like those than a Pi.

NASA ought to pay up after space debris punched a hole in my roof, homeowner says

"Does it apply to military kit? If a US shell casing or drop tank lands on you does that get you compensation, does you have to be a citizen / ally / not-a-target ?"

Yes, although you have to be not a target because if you are the target and you are able to sue, they'll just try again. Still, militaries have been sued for damage before and have had to compensate for it. Expect that they'll have lawyers to argue that it shouldn't apply this time.

"Does it apply to pollution? Is NASA responsible for emissions from its rocket launches ?"

I would think so, but the good news for them is that the people who write the pollution laws can also exempt things from them if they want. If we decided that we want them to be exempt from this, we could make that happen.

"Are US merchant vessels responsible for CO2 emissions in the same way as they are for pollution ?"

To the extent that it is regulated, yes, although there are complications related to where the ship is registered and located which may allow a ship operated primarily by and for Americans to avoid having those laws apply some or all of the time.

Re: Sounds fair

It was comparing the way that contracts can use vague language so they can include or exclude almost anything while not looking as if they do. Of course, the definition of "reasonable" or similar words is not whatever the drafter was thinking, but to get a ruling on it, you have to get a judge to decide what it meant. That takes a long time, potentially a lot of money, and can still be pretty random.

Y Combinator, startups funnily enough aren't fans of draft California AI safety law

"Just make it vlear that legal responsibility for the "decisions" of an AI rests with the last person in the chain of developing it training it and finally letting it loose in control of something that causes harm."

Bad plan. That's exactly what the companies making this stuff want to happen. They build a crap model, collecting lots of money from investors to do so, then they send people to sell it to someone else by promising things it can't do, collecting more money from them, and when it finally blows up, it's all the user's fault. After all, they were the ones to turn it on. The initial responsibility should rest with the user, but that user should be able to pursue the creators of the thing if it was their fault.

You know, the way that anything else works. If my car blows up, I should consider the manufacturer responsible and liable and they are. However, if it turns out that the explosion was due to parts made by a different company, the car manufacturer should be able to hold the manufacturer of those parts responsible. If those parts were dangerous because the raw materials were improperly provided, the manufacturer of the parts should be able to hold the supplier of those materials liable. By making the entire chain responsible, as long as each link in the chain actually did something wrong, you might actually fix the problem. If you only make the last person responsible, then all the other links will continue to do whatever they want because they'll never have any consequences.

Apple Intelligence won't be available in Europe because Tim's terrified of watchdogs

Re: This makes perfect sense

"to have a capability at all, however rarely enabled, requires the architecture to support it. And the test infrastructure. If it doesn’t, natively, you have to *change your entire software architecture*."

They have the capability. When you install something from the App Store, there is a program that creates the environment for the app and installs the image in it. When you upload code from XCode, it creates the package and installs it. When you have a corporate profile and a non-store app, it obtains the package and installs it. When you use beta-testing through profiles or TestFlight, it gets a package and installs it. When you restore from a local backup when offline, it takes the app packages that iTunes has collected (at least it once did) and installs them. All they need to do to have sideloading is have one more avenue for calling this package installer. They don't need to change the architecture, they don't need it to run Android applications, they don't need to change or eliminate sandboxing, they take a package, without checking for their signature which is not required in the installer anyway, and run the same install procedure they already have.

How Europe can force Apple to support competition

Re: EU: DON'T KILL iOS SECURITY!

I have news for you: the walled garden is fine. All this law requires is that, if I want to walk outside that garden and brave the dangerous woods, I can. You can remain in that garden, with the gates closed, all you want. If something bad happens to me in the woods, that's on me.

You don't need me to be unable to do something just because you don't want to do that thing.

Since joining NATO, Sweden claims Russia has been borking Nordic satellites

From most points of view, you are absolutely correct. The average Russian citizen suffers from corruption. Their institutions suffer. Some of their larger projects, like the invasion, suffer. However, from the dictator's point of view, corruption that leads to them is what they want. A less corrupt system is one where Russia as a whole might be doing much better, but Putin would probably be doing not as well. From that point of view, that is control. Sure, it might mean that when he tells people to invade Ukraine, a lot of them die while not moving as quickly as they otherwise could, but in a non-corrupt system, they might not invade it at all and that would mean he has less power.

Who would have thought it: when you're at war with a country, they tend to get a short stick in media. If you consider when they were an ally against Napoleonic France or Germany in the first world war, the stories will probably look a little different. There are people who understand the Crimean War, but if you're expecting me to say that there was a clear good and bad side, you'll be waiting a long time. That is not the same as saying it was all evil Western aggressors against innocent Russians, because it was more four countries wanting to control part of the map, none caring about the people in the middle. This doesn't change what they are doing today, and it's not about Russian people being bad guys who want to mess with us, but with dictators wanting to increase their power. There are lots of Russians who don't want this, but their government cares about them only as much as it takes to imprison them.

Do they have to care? Yes, Russia is smaller than the USSR was, but it's still quite large and Putin is working on fixing that problem. In addition to trying to add territory from countries that tried to go away from them, Ukraine and Georgia, he has several countries which frequently go along with him, most famously Belarus. They have tons of resources, and even though it is a smaller amount than the USSR had, they are better at extracting and selling them. More rotten and corrupt? Debatable, but the people deciding what Russia is going to do are the people who are rotten and corrupt, so your sentence can be rephrased from their point of view as "more in our control and for our benefit", so they don't have a problem with that.

T-Mobile US drags New Jersey borough to court over school cell tower permit denial

Re: TMobile is correct, but...

"But "the council isn't allowed to take that into consideration"? Are you even being serious right now? The council, which is elected, isn't allowed to ask the questions that a lot of its voters want asked?"

There is a reason it's not a local issue and why there are legal limits to it. If I convince someone that something which we all know isn't dangerous is dangerous, does it automatically become their right to do what they want about it? Stupidity has to be limited in a variety of ways. That means that the rules of what constitutes water safety is made at a higher level, so that neither the chemical company saying "let us dump or we'll fire you all" and the person saying "someone told me that dehydrogen monoxide is deadly so we must get all of it out of our pipes" get to decide what they want to do. It means that what is a crime gets defined at a higher level, so a group of sufficiently motivated neighbors can't define insufficient yard maintenance as a felony (sadly, there are some people who might want to). And it means that electrical safety is defined at a higher level and that if you think that it's wrong, you don't get to redefine something safe as dangerous, even in your local town. If you want to redefine that, go get a job at the FCC, but expect that people will prevent someone as ignorant as that from getting there because they have actual work to do.

Samsung Korea warns many apps won't run on its Qualcomm-powered Copilot+ PCs

Re: Broken

You know what was meant, though. It allows running a user-mode application. It doesn't allow device drivers. If the application has specifically written code (DRM) that doesn't work with it, that's not the fault of the emulation. Such things break in VMs all the time, or sometimes just because it was feeling like it one day. The main possible problem with this emulation is its speed.

I don't have firsthand experience with how good it is because I have not been convinced to want an ARM laptop. I have continued to assume that the emulation wouldn't be fast enough, even despite Apple's success with their similar emulation. I do know one person who has experience to the contrary, but they are running software that controls scientific equipment, which is probably not the most CPU-intensive program out there. Those who play a lot of games may have a different opinion.

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever's new startup aims to create 'safe superintelligence'

Re: Risk versus preparedness

It's not that you're wrong, but that nothing you said is very connected to anything they said. When they say "safety", they don't automatically mean avoiding any negative or toxic uses for the technology. Of course, getting a clear definition out of them tends to be hard, but when they've spoken, it often includes a couple basic things, such as use directly in weapons systems, and a few extreme things, like it spontaneously taking over the nuclear arsenals because that's what the sci-fi greats wrote about. I have little reason to think that a different AI company will want to or be able to deal with the more annoying uses, such as auto-generated spam clogging up the internet or not stealing all the training data. Sutskever complained about many things that OpenAI did, and when he did I often thought he made more sense than Altman did, but he didn't, as far as I know, express an objection to the kinds of things you're talking about.

Satellite phone service could soon become the norm

I'll believe it when I can use it

I have seen lots of satellite connection mechanisms and two things unite them all:

1. They take a lot of power.

2. They are so expensive, even to use a small amount of it, that they're not worth buying unless you use them a lot or need them to make a lot of money.

I doubt that these LEO satellites, cheaper though they may be, will change either. If people are charged per SMS message, they're likely not to send any unless it's a major emergency. Businesses that need satellite connections have already found many services, and they may adopt these as well, but there is not as much room in that market to expand. The individual consumer market won't buy if the price is too high. My guess is that LEO from phones won't end up being affordable to the average consumer, and someone will eventually notice how unsuccessful the thing will be.

That PowerShell 'fix' for your root cert 'problem' is a malware loader in disguise

Oh good, that means you know of an operating system that would prevent someone knowingly pasting code into an admin or root CLI from causing damage. Please tell me what it is. I've got a couple versions of Windows, Mac OS, about a dozen Linuxes, and a few BSDs and none of them can do it, so I'm always interested in an idiot-proof and even a malice-proof OS. Of course, your critique means you have such a thing, right? Not that you have no clue what you're talking about and want to castigate someone you dislike for something that everything would be vulnerable to?

US Surgeon General wants cigarette-style health warning labels on social networks

Re: Questions

"So you condemn peer pressure to get people to quit, but you're quite on-board with peer pressure to get people to start,"

Did they say that? I'm not them, but as I agree with some of what they said, I'll try to defend them.

I take a negative view toward anyone who believes they should chide someone for not being on social media, but that view is not much different if they're chiding them to not be on social media. Consider for the moment someone chiding you for posting to the El Reg forums. It would be annoying. It wouldn't make you like them. Perhaps most importantly, it wouldn't change your mind, would it? If they were more extreme, you might stop to get them to stop, but it wouldn't be because you understood why or even that they were necessarily correct.

Pew: Quarter of web pages vanished in past decade

How many boxes of paper have been tossed out because they're big, heavy, and easily recycled? How many more boxes of paper have been destroyed because they were put in a place where they could burn, rot, or be eaten by something? The existence of old paper does not prove that it is better than alternatives. It only proves that it is older than alternatives.

You can preserve information in lots of formats if you try to do it. The compactness and ease of reproduction are advantages for digital data, but neither will it continue to exist if nobody goes to the effort of doing it. Paper does not remove either of those requirements from the archival process and it makes some tasks more difficult. For instance, if I had found that box of race results in my house, I wouldn't have scanned them. I wouldn't have retained them. I would probably have asked the one person I know who cares about races if he wanted them, then when he said no, into the recycling bin. Unless I could find an easy race archives that wanted paper and was willing to come get and process it, it wouldn't have been preserved.

McDonald's not lovin' its AI drive-thru experiment with IBM

Re: The concept of automated voice ordering at a drive-thru doesn't make any sense to me

If you're going to do that, have some UI testers and give them lots of time and budget for users to test with. Those screens often seem to confuse people when they're looking for some menu item that isn't there, want a specific customization option, etc. Meanwhile, if you make the most simplified interface possible, anyone who can find what they want will be delayed as they have to tap through things they aren't interested in. If they're not careful, they may find fiddling with the interface reduces the speed and their revenue.

That might be true, but the franchisees won't buy them unless either they're forced to or it provides them a benefit. If it ends up being more expensive than having a human doing it and they have a choice, they'll employ humans to do it. So while there's an indirection in the middle, it still mostly comes down to cost and whether they can keep a reasonable level of quality while doing it.

Re: Incoherent Customers

I think their supposition wasn't about the language processing capabilities, but instead the speech recognition capabilities. A cheap microphone in an area next to a running car and a customer talking in whatever direction they want can make for a challenging recording experience, and software that's been trained on good recordings can make mistakes even without that.