Posts by doublelayer

SpaceX cuts off Ukraine's 'offensive' Starlink use

Re: State of Russia's space program

He could always get some people to try firing a laser directly at one of the satellites. That's unlikely to go full Kessler syndrome, but if they can actually hit the satellite, probably not too much fun for it. I'm not sure about the feasibility of it, but the point is that you wouldn't need to know it works. Just trying it once would be a warning shot and if you give any physicist* I know a laser and permission to try firing it, they'll try it.

* To be fair to physicists, I would also be a bit consumed by the cool factor. I've restricted it to physicists because I don't get to use any lasers in my work and they know better than I how to try using one as a weapon.

Scammers steal $4 million in crypto during face-to-face meeting

Re: NFC?

There's always the chance that they didn't, using instead their mobile data, only the attacker had a stingray that captured their traffic. However, there's a healthy chance that people are just unaware of security and do stupid things and this guy could have been one of them. Things that we know not to do aren't as common knowledge as they should be.

Re: Proof of Funds

The part where they had to prove crypto was a bit weird, but proof of funds in general is less weird. Startups aren't filing public statements about internal information, and they're things that need more diligence when you're going to invest in them, because scams are a lot easier and failure much more likely. As such, if a company claims to have a bunch of money available but it also wants yours, it's reasonable to check that they have the money, for the same reason that it's reasonable to check that they have the level of technology they claim to have. Doing that by showing a crypto wallet on a screen, a UI that is easy to fake, is the weird part of this.

Find My Kids app is basically AirTags for your offspring

You can, but you would then need to pay for the connection to the watch, which isn't as simple as putting a SIM in it. I also think you can have only one watch per iPhone, so if the parent has one of their own, they'll need another phone for the child and that's now two mobile connections. The equipment isn't cheap, even if you buy second hand. That said, having children isn't a cheap activity, and the cost for this setup may not be that large compared to other expenses even if the total cost ends up being a big number (doesn't stop it being unnecessary though).

Apple complains UK watchdog wants to make iOS a 'clone' of Android

Re: You missed the point

Somehow requiring you not to, by your own admission, tinker with things you don't want changed is breaking your phone? All you have to do is not change the options you don't want changed. For most or all of them, if you do change them, you can change them back immediately with no lasting effects. The good news for you is that more choices for me doesn't require you to make any of the new choices I'm making.

Re: 99% er

So if I'm understanding you correctly:

1. Developers will make shoddy web apps that you can't trust. You don't want this.

2. If they have to list them in the App Store then they won't make shoddy apps because a reason you didn't say.

3. Therefore the App Store makes good apps from the same developers that would make bad ones otherwise?

If what you want is "a set of reliable, secure, integrated and managed apps", you need to only install apps that fit all those adjectives, and if one of their authors breaks that, whether they stay in the store or go to the web, you have to change it. Here's a basic example. I can download a truly massive number of navigation apps on an iPhone, some of which will work offline, some of which won't share my data, some of which use up-to-date data sources, and some of which do none of these things. It's my job to pick one that I think is best, and the store doesn't protect me from any of the poorer options. Having a mandatory Apple tax does not ensure any of your praise is or remains true.

No more free love: Netflix expands account sharing restrictions

Re: Infinitely worth every penny. Division by zero error!!!

I don't know what their internal numbers are, but I imagine they've calculated the costs for sending large files to multiple users and for paying royalties. They can use their existing logs to see how much less of both of these they'd be paying if they cut off certain classes of users, with the possibility that any person cut off may either stop watching, saving them the costs, or buy another membership, increasing their revenue. They probably don't know any way to accurately estimate how many of each will do that, but they can more accurately estimate the savings possibility.

Google unleashes fightback against ChatGPT, a Bard by any other name

Re: Like running face first into a wall...

"Voice assistants are last weeks news, but somehow the exact same technology that people decided not to give a damn about attached to the buzzword of "AI chatbot" is shiny and new."

The technology is not the same. Not that either is very impressive, but voice assistants never tried to engage in conversation. They listened to a free form sentence, and if it wasn't one of a few forms they recognized, they rejected it. Say anything unusual to Siri and it will put your transcript in a Google search box. Say anything unusual to Alexa and it will say "Hmmm. I don't know how to answer that". Say anything unusual to GPT and it will still try to answer your question, possibly with made up data or with a don't know response, but in the form of a properly structured response to your question.

It would have made sense for Amazon, the company that's invested the most in having a voice assistant that they talk a lot about, to get a chatbot so their box could pretend to engage in conversation with the users. Maybe that would have added enough novelty for people to use the devices, because it would stop acting like a malfunctioning command line. It would probably also have had many chances to advertise products, and that would probably appeal to a company like Amazon. They didn't bother.

Eager young tearaway almost ruined Christmas with printer paper

Re: Of all the confusing icons

"How many adults have never held one of those "receivers"? Or even seen one,"

In developed countries, or at least where I grew up, everyone has seen one. I am old enough that I didn't have a mobile phone in my childhood, but young enough that I got one not much later. Even when I had one, lots of places still had old phones, especially offices and schools, where the children would see them and people using them. Likely schools which are never using the most advanced technology still have them. Everyone knows what those are. Older phones, like rotary dials or crank ringing devices, are not familiar, and fax machines would qualify, but landline receivers are common enough that they'll still be familiar. Maybe in another generation. This might be different in less developed countries where landline infrastructure wasn't well established, where mobile phones are a lot more common than landlines ever were.

Re: NBG

I wasn't the downvoter and I wouldn't say that he did. I also don't think the original post said he did, so you're arguing against an empty panel.

If I have to guess why there is a downvote, maybe it's because Gates, though he didn't invent the computer or the microcomputer, was still rather important in the development of personal computers. Love Microsoft or hate it, and I know there are many who hate it, it's had a large impact on the market both historically and in the modern day. A lot of the design of modern computers is due to choices made by early Microsoft, just as the original design decisions of Unix when it was meant for a smaller use case and set of users are still important today. Gates, Wozniak, and Thompson didn't have to invent computers (and none of them did) to be important to their history (and all of them are).

Re: Procedure update

In my experience, accountants tend to be a lot like us. When we explain to somebody (in my case only when they ask and after warning them that they don't care) about how a compiler works, or what DNS is for and why you need it, or what makes for a well-designed database, people find it very boring and also difficult to understand. Accountants have a different set of interests that they're good at solving but involve a lot of complex moving parts that we don't know a lot about, likely in this case related to the concern that certificates that weren't confirmed destroyed could be used in a fraud scheme, and even the appearance that a fraud scheme was possible wasn't acceptable. Those details would have taken some explanation about how share certificate processing worked in that company, though.

Just as there are people who work in tech and can't make a database that works at all, this doesn't mean that accountants are necessarily good at what they do or at connecting what they do to the rest of the organization. I think the best accountants are like the best technical staff, good at making their complex knowledge work for those who don't want to know about it, even if that involves hiding from those who don't understand and just getting things done.

Re: Communication....

Any day's a good day for a BOFH. The one you mentioned is here.

School laptop auction devolves into extortion allegation

Re: Investigating RDA ?

"Would you do business with a PC shop that openly admits it examines data on PCs that pass through their hands?"

No. On the other hand, would I do business with a shop that notices that a disk wasn't wiped without having to poke through all the files? Sure. There's a difference between "I noticed this disk has a filesystem, which means it wasn't wiped" and "I had a read through all the emails I could recover because why not". The first is acceptable and worth warning about if it indicates a risk of additional damage, as in this case. The second is unacceptable and likely criminal.

Re: Does the TSA know what "online" means?

I interpreted that to mean that nobody, after obtaining the list, turned around and put the entire thing elsewhere. That means that I can't go out to some open file site and obtain a copy of the list. The only person known to have seen it outside the airline was a researcher who won't be handing out copies, and if any more malicious people got copies before the server was secured, they aren't making them available. That means that the list hasn't been as compromised as if it was available to literally anyone with a connection.

Re: Never should have been possible.

"All drives must be destroyed when done with service. All but one company I worked for had this policy"

All companies I've worked for have had this policy. None of them did it reliably. The small ones were disorganized enough that you could walk off with a disk and nobody would know. The large ones were so large that people didn't understand the process for disposing of equipment. I somewhat recently had a discussion with a team where we determined that an old machine under a desk was not used by any of us, maybe from the last people to use the office but nobody knew who that was, we didn't know who to call about this*, we didn't have an identifier we could tell them even if we found out, the machine did still have a disk in it (we assumed it wasn't wiped but nobody wanted to check), and that every alternative course to leaving it under the desk seemed more risky**. If anyone hid a bug in it, they got to listen to us for a long time.

* We were developers, so we knew enough to manage our own machines (and IT trusted us to do so) but we didn't know any of the IT people. I sent a message to our local IT helpdesk, and they didn't respond.

** We considered wiping or destroying the disk for the company because even if they cared about the data, there was no chance they'd find it, but we decided they could blame us for destroying corporate property. We considered turning it on and connecting it to the network in the hope that monitoring software would find it and someone would do something, but if it was unpatched that could be undesirable. We considered bringing it to the IT guy and leaving it there, but that room wasn't secured and our place was, the guy was frequently working remotely and we had no clue if he came in at all, and the data on the computer was potentially sensitive even to other employees. Then we decided that talking more about the machine would delay our work and moved it to the corner.

Could 2023 be the year SpaceX's Starship finally reaches orbit?

Re: Gwynne Shotwell

There are some feasibility limits. Finding places to operate the rockets without annoying everyone would pose some challenges. Likely they would have to operate them from rural locations far from where their travelers want to start, and having to drive for an hour to get to the launch facility and another hour from the landing facility to your destination would make it pretty bad at routine commuting. At this point, it'd just be a faster trip. Getting people to pay a significantly higher bill for a faster trip has been tried before, and it didn't prove profitable. That faster trip wasn't as unpleasant as this would be, either.

I wouldn't take the suggestion seriously and I think they're aware that it's potentially possible in the same way that building an orbital station for tourists is possible. We could reproduce the ISS's facilities and launch people to it, but few people would be able to afford the stay, few of those would be willing to pay even though they could, and if someone went, they wouldn't enjoy the experience as a vacation. I'm sure you could get a few rich people to voluntarily sign up for it, but not enough of them to justify building the station. Possible, but not a great business idea. This might change eventually if we improve the technology for keeping people alive and healthy in orbit, but not in the next couple years.

South Korea to treat crypto tokens and virtual assets as if they were securities

Re: Not securities

Some cryptoassets are maintained by a specific company and controllable by them. I think those fall into the definition of security rather well. Decentralized, no-authority cryptocurrencies are more like commodities. I think any regulation that treats these two categories as subject to the same regulations as other securities and commodities is logical and should probably be attempted given the success that crypto-themed fraud has had so far on uninformed investors (they think they're investors, anyway, but maybe gamblers applies better).

Twitch bans AI-generated Seinfeld show for making transphobic jokes

Re: Is the intelligence really artificial?

This doesn't matter that much to the point I made. Whether you filter the output based on a view you no longer think is valid, based on a view that you think is fine but others don't think is valid, or just to prevent it from spitting out any more of the stupid jokes mentioned in last week's article on this show, that's a filter which will change what you see but won't artificially limit the ability for the model to produce useful text on a topic you didn't filter out. You can argue with the settings someone put on the filter, but that's not relevant to the effects of filtering in general on models that produce text.

Re: Is the intelligence really artificial?

We're all filtered in some ways. Teaching is not just a process of giving you a bunch of stuff to put in your brain, but also pointing out the wrong stuff. A good teacher not only tells you how to solve a quadratic equation, but shows you why you can't prove something the way you just did and how to do it correctly. That's a factual correction, but it uses the same filtering system that telling a program not to say something does. You're not prevented from using the faulty proof in the future, but if you want to appear correct you'll remember and avoid making the same mistake.

Regardless of your opinions on what we tell the programs not to say, removing undesirable output is not a limiting factor on the program's "intelligence" if we have a program we deem to be intelligent. Depending on what we choose to restrict, we could be reducing the program's independence, but I would question whether we want many independent programs (and even if you do, whether you want one that's entirely independent and could decide, to take the obvious sci-fi trope, that killing you is not filtered out so it's going to do it).

Cat saves 'good bots' from Twitter API purge

But Musk is a genius. Only someone like him could manage to make the only car company to have full self driving, and think of how cool Spacex is, and if you don't know what he's doing then that just proves that he's smarter than you, and if there's no obvious reason for a very public announcement then it means he's hiding the secret plan to prevent the haters from messing with it, and if he breaks Twitter then that's his plan to get rid of all the problems with it before he brings it back, and anyone who has more money than you must be better than you which is why I've put all my money into Tesla shares, and look at how big that company is compared to the other places that make cars, which definitely doesn't have anything to do with the item before this in the list.

Sorry, the inexplicable fans will be here soon to start explaining why something that looks stupid isn't stupid, so I figured I could save them some time trotting out the classics.

Ransomware scum launch wave of attacks on critical, but old, VMWare ESXi vuln

Re: Haha!

I'm having trouble understanding what you want the alternative to be. Would refusing to include any non-English words in an English article be better under your conception? Couldn't that be interpreted as negative as well? Maybe this confusion is due to my missing the mockery you imply is present; all I see is a note demonstrating that French language authorities made a local word for ransomware, as they do with many English-rooted technical terms, and Italian either didn't make one or didn't use it.

Chinese surveillance balloon over US causes fearful gasbagging

Re: Why not shoot it down ?

And, in case this needed proving, a plane has just gone there and fired a missile which took down the balloon. No experimental tech was needed and the balloon went down.

Re: Why not shoot it down ?

"It's rather higher up than most of our planes normally fly."

But not high enough that military planes can't fly there*, and I think China is also aware that we have high-altitude military planes. The point being that we don't need technology that China's not aware of to make a balloon fall down, so if it became necessary to take down the balloon without giving out any military secrets, it would be possible.

* The internet appears to be filled with copies of this article that don't mention the altitude, but other articles specify an altitude of 60,000 feet or 18 km. That's well above civilian air and routine military traffic, but several planes are capable of getting there and some are explicitly designed to do so.

Re: Difficult

With just bullets, kind of hard. With bullets and something that can start fires, a bit easier. We have lots of weapons that can start fires these days, and in fact a lot of weapons that have specifically been designed to try not to start a fire this time, so I think we may have more options on downing something filled with hydrogen if it ever shows up.

Re: Why not shoot it down ?

All you'd need in this case is a plane that can shoot at a target. I think China is already aware that the U.S. has planes with guns mounted on them. Not a lot can be learned from that.

It's your human hubris holding back AI acceptance

Re: Outsourcing human experience.

I agree. The obvious counterpoint to the study is to consider what an anti-AI person would have done with the alternative. "Gullible participants trust answers from a computer without context". It's clear that's the alternative and that the participants have no idea how likely the computer is to know what it's doing.

I thought so. Well actually I thought that none of the answers were that great and wondered about the size of essay they'd take for an analysis, but of the four options, C provides critical information to debunking the obvious alternative and D provides extra circumstantial data. Both would help, but if I can only take one, I'll take C. I wonder who wrote the test and how much effort they put into making sure it was logical.

Re: Outsourcing human experience.

"If we outsource fundamental human experience to AI, the humans have no more relevance, and would be better replaced with AI drones entirely."

If we were able to outsource things to AIs and not have everything break, which we can't, then I would say we go for it. If a computer can solve a problem better than a human can, then obsoleting the manual process for the better automatic process isn't making them "an accessory object to an inhuman overlord". It's making them a person who no longer has to do that boring thing because they have a machine that can do it. That's just as true if the machine is a sink so the user doesn't have to carry buckets of water to wash things then find a place to dispose of it or a computer that can produce a statistical report so the user doesn't have to manually find all the different measurements of a dataset and try different basic regressions on their own. AI, if we ever get a reliable version, will be a tool which can be used to allow humans more ability to do what they want. It won't have to be an overlord if we don't make it that way, and I don't know of many who want an overlord, so it seems unlikely.

Prepare to be shocked: Employees hate this One Weird Clause

Re: How long is contract valid for?

The contract will specify this explicitly. The legal language will boil down to "This part is about what you have to do while you're employed, and this part is about what you have to do while you're employed and afterward". They'll put in a sentence making it clear that the contract doesn't just end when you quit or are fired. This is quite normal, and some clauses of that nature are enforceable.

A contract is a detailed agreement, and there can be perpetual clauses or clauses that extend past the end date of other clauses. Don't assume that quitting automatically voids the contract.

No more free API access, says Twitter: You pay for that data

Re: The old ways is the best ways

You want to play a game of who can adapt fastest to unwanted scraping? Companies that don't want you to scrape can mess with the UI in so many ways that it's often not worth doing it if they have the knowledge and will to combat it. Combine that with a terms of service that forbids it (possibly not enforceable but do you want to argue it in front of all the courts because they have more lawyers than you). If you're planning to make a profit from consistently scraping a company that doesn't want to be scraped, you face some large challenges. Maybe Twitter will fail at properly blocking scraping, and I'm in favor of people trying it because having overworked engineers constantly changing things to foil scrapers means it's more likely to break and watching it break would be fun, but I wouldn't want to set up a business doing it.

Re: Maybe he really doesn't care about the money at all

"Curious why the saudis would invest in twitter. I wouldn't have thought it would be a big thing in their parts."

Your assumption is incorrect. As of June 2022, an estimated 71.9% of the Saudi population were Twitter users, third to WhatsApp and Instagram which are both Facebook products and thus can't be bought so easily. It would make sense for them to get control of something that popular for their own political ends, whether that involves censoring stuff for the locals, monitoring private messages, or getting more personal information on people they want to hack (first with spy software, then with autopsy tools). I don't know what power they have currently, but I wouldn't trust Musk to tell us honestly. If the company went bankrupt, they'd likely get more control of the remains.

Re: They just did this in the wrong order

Or alternatively, that guy might take the adverts to a different social media company and Twitter will have fewer people looking at them to which they can show other adverts. It might help with revenue, but it might also decrease the size of the user base. They've decided to find out which factor makes the larger difference to their financials in production.

Re: They just did this in the wrong order

That depends what form the advertising takes. Unwanted ads for things I didn't want? That drives me away and I try to block it. However, the post you replied to was about a very different kind: promotions sent out by the company selling it seen only by those who subscribe to it. That does tend to work better. I'm on a few companies' newsletters where they announce new products, discounts, etc. These are basically ads they send to me, but I not only agreed to see them, but I volunteered for them. I did this because I'm actually interested in possibly buying some of their stuff, and when that's no longer the case, I'll unsubscribe. Similarly, I also periodically visit a site which is basically a stream of ads from Chinese companies making weird items because it's fun to see what strange combinations they've come up with. That's not on Twitter, but if I liked a company and decided to go check whether they've posted any discounts I'm likely to use, that would attract some traffic.

Re: They just did this in the wrong order

"So I'm not sure why he would expect Twitter to provide that service to his business for free. TV stations and newspapers didn't."

Twitter doesn't have to provide that service for free, but every other social media company does and is going to keep doing so. Twitter benefited from people posting information because it drove attention, both theirs and that of people reading it, so Twitter could shove ads at them. Since the other companies are still going to keep allowing that, people faced with a new request for payment might well decide to abandon Twitter, and Twitter would lose the revenue they were bringing in from the viewers. It's not that Twitter is or should be obliged to provide the service for free, but that there are downsides to losing the business and charging is likely to lose them clients when their competition is still allowing free usage.

As Apple sales slide, Tim Cook says fanbois will tolerate higher iPhone prices

Pride over where the designer happened to be is a bit crazy, but if I wanted to defend him, I'd point out that it was designed by more than one person, and the other people were more likely to be Americans or even Californians by birth, if that matters. Although probably the design team will have people in multiple countries from even more national backgrounds, because they only said "Designed in California", not "Designed exclusively by Californians".

Qualcomm feels the squeeze because you don't want a new smartphone right now

Shortages for components of phones have eased for this period, so not really. If you want a phone, you can go and get one quickly and cheaply if you get one that's designed to be fine rather than one that's designed to appeal to someone who doesn't know that there is a limited amount of money available.

People aren't buying as many phones because they don't need to replace them, because inflation has caused them to cut back on expensive items that they don't need to replace right now, or because they don't see advantages in any of the new products. It's happening the same way with a variety of other items, including most consumer tech.

Everyone's doing it: PayPal sends 2,000 workers packing

Why, whenever there is an article about companies with many workers is there somebody to post a question like this that completely ignores what the business actually involves? Can you make an HTML form? Great. So can I. Now I'd like to see you figure out legal compliance to serve as a financial company in nearly every country which works with each country's tax authorities automatically so businesses can use the thing. Try doing that on your own. Which part do you think is harder?

I'm sure some employees of the company are unnecessary. That doesn't change the fact that their technology is more complex than a single form and that their business is more complex than a UI and a database.

So you want to replace workers with AI? Watch out for retraining fees, they're a killer

Re: Bring on the Luddites!

In fact, my point was basically the opposite of what you just said. With technological advancement, there is going to be disruption, and that will harm somebody. There are two ways you can deal with this. Only one way works.

Option 1: Don't allow technological advancement when it will harm someone (almost never, in other words). You can't functionally do this. Things break quickly. Take any era where you thought things were best for the workers and reflect on the fact that, without technological advancement in the previous decades, that era would not have worked that way. If we'd banned the telephone because "Think of what will happen to those telegraphists who spent time learning Morse", we wouldn't have had jobs for telephone operators. If we hadn't allowed cars to be manufactured because of all the damage it would have done to people with jobs related to animal-based transport, no wonderful manufacturing economies. Similarly, when those things become automated, it makes sense to adopt the improvements.

Option 2: when people are harmed, have a plan for how to help them. Instead of trying to hold back progress so everyone can keep doing what they've always done (often without considering whether what people have been doing is something they enjoy doing), provide resources to those whose jobs have been lost. The world changes, and those who live there will have to change as well. The best thing we can do is to make sure people have assistance making necessary changes.

I lied. There's a third option: the Luddite option. That's basically where you take all the improvements from technology that affects others without thinking of them, but as soon as something looks like it will affect you, you demand special treatment. In the specific case of Ludd and his compatriots, it was well-paid production work that was automated, but they couldn't accept that anyone else could produce fabric and thought that they were more important than the people getting jobs operating the new machines. This is the hypocrisy demonstrated by the original post: "As AI becomes more useful and starts put of we techies out of jobs". Now I've seen the code that GPT spits out, and I don't have that much fear of that, but if it happened, it's the way improvements change the world. Technology has done it to others, and it may do it to us. It is our job to prepare and adapt, and if we're going to ask for more resources if it happens, we should ask for them for others as well.

Re: Standing on the shoulders of giants

And depending on how you've built your AI, you might be able to do that. Many systems that are in active use aren't built that way. You can only add so many layers on top of one, most of which simply filter the results that no longer apply and make the model try again, before you start inhibiting the performance you're looking for. A model based on millions of words can't just read a few million more and insert them in because it's already weighted things based on the old words and those weights will effect any future data.

If we end up using lots of massive models in the future, machine learning researchers may start pivoting to methods that make it easier to perform incremental training. So far, that hasn't been necessary so people haven't bothered doing it.

Re: Bring on the Luddites!

That's not precisely true. The specific group directed by Ludd weren't specifically against the technology. They were against the technology's effects on them. The new machinery meant that their skilled manual labor was not needed because a person with less skill could get the same thing done. They weren't advocating for a general increase in worker's rights or services; they wanted compensation for themselves because technology made their previously high-paid work obsolete.

We techies, as you call us, are in the business of automating things. Stuff that previously took inefficient processes involving a lot of people can now be done automatically by a computer; there aren't banks of people doing mathematical calculations manually and repeatedly anymore, for instance. People have lost jobs that have been automated, and new jobs have arisen to take their place. That has neither been completely for the better or for the worse, but it has happened and if you work in technology, you have aided it. Now that you think it's likely to affect you, you've changed your tune. Perhaps you're compatible with Ludd's thinking after all, when you could be advocating for everybody.

Three seconds of audio could end up costing Fox $500,000

I found this copy on Youtube. Although now I'm not sure if that's the right thing. It's a bit menacing with a high drone, but it's got a really basic 1970s-style base which takes a lot out of it. Maybe I'm missing the context that it went with, as I heard that the Protect and Survive information was harrowing to watch.

Re: Harmony by disharmony

The factors of a frequency don't matter much, as a frequency is just the number of pulses per second. There is no problem using non-integer frequencies, and in fact most music wouldn't work if you limited yourself to integer frequencies (high and medium pitch notes are far enough apart that you could get away with it, but the low notes are close enough together that people with perfect pitch would start hating you). Thus the factors of a frequency or that one is prime have basically no importance to their use. I'll stop here before I bore you with too much information.

"But alerting the entire country at 2am because of a missing child thousands of miles away, sometimes at "Presidential Alert" level,"

From a quick online search, the presidential alert level has been used exactly once, and the message read in part "This is a test. No action is needed." Where did you start assuming that this highest level of alert would be used for child abductions? As others have already noted earlier in these comments, the Amber alerts that are used for child abductions can be disabled without disabling other types of emergency alerts.

Re: Coming to the UK soon (allegedly)

Since the point is to not have alerts that often and the tone should be rather annoying when they do come in, I'm not sure that configuring it to a tone of your choice is that important. It's designed to get your attention, so perhaps loud and screechy is an asset.

That's incorrect. That procedure is not used now, but that was the expected activation procedure for the original system, using authenticated messages only to a small number of powerful stations which were to seed the airwaves with the signal. Here's Wikipedia's summary of the original system's activation procedure:

Actual activations originated with a primary station known as a Common Program Control Station (CPCS-1), which would transmit the Attention Signal. The Attention Signal most commonly associated with the system was a combination of the sine waves of 853 and 960 Hz‍—‌suited to attention due to its unpleasantness. Decoders at relay stations would sound an alarm, alerting station personnel to the incoming message. Then, each relay station would broadcast the alert tone and rebroadcast the emergency message from the primary station. The Attention Signal was developed in the mid-1960s.

Before they had lines or satellite feeds going to all the stations or functionally so, and when they feared that an attack would take down those lines, the idea was that you could have more secure lines going to specific stations which could be heard by local stations. Therefore, you'd only have to successfully send the emergency message to one station in a region for every one to cut over to the alert. The only part of the description that's not true is hearing the signal anywhere else, as it would have been a small number of possible source stations that had to be monitored. That system is no longer used, but back in the days of analogue technology, that's really how they decided to do it.

Re: Harmony by disharmony..turned off Amber Alert as well

That may be true, but it also appears that you can turn off one type of alert without disabling the other alerts. So the issue is less with the emergency alert system at all, but just with the Amber alert part.

Home Depot sent my email, details of stuff I bought to Meta, customer complains

Re: Unhash?

There are a lot more than seven hashing algorithms, and you are capable of writing one of your own quite easily (though if you intend to use it for cryptographic purposes, think twice or ten times). If the goal was to have an internal representation that is opaque if leaked, anyone can write their own hash function to sort of do it, though a better way is to assign a random number instead.

The reason Facebook has access is because Home Depot wants them to have access. They agreed on the hashing algorithm to use. Probably the point of using the hash instead of sending the address directly was to have something to say if any non-Facebook user protested about the sharing. Home Depot would say that Facebook was sent a value that, if they didn't have your address, wouldn't identify you. This is without considering that Facebook has lots of email addresses of people that don't have accounts that they could use if they were so inclined.

Re: Unhash?

Hashing is one way, but every time they hash an email address, it will match anyone else hashing that email. They have two options. They could hash every email address when it comes in and just store a database of emails and hashes. Or if they didn't do that, they can go to their big box of email addresses and hash each one to see if it matches.

Hashing is useful in the case of passwords because there are so many possible passwords out there. If I had a list of hashes and knew that all of them were from an initial set of a million possibilities, they would cease to be useful. That's why hashing a common or weak password doesn't prevent it from being insecure.

AI cannot be credited as authors in papers, top academic journals rule

I don't really have a problem banning the tools, and having banned them, to punish those who violate such bans. When those tools have been used to generate false data, it's probably easier to prove the lies and punish the author. However, if the tool is just used to produce text, I'm less confident that a test will eventually become available that detects that well.

The problem is that AI's text looks generally like humans' text, even if it's written differently. All a test can do is suggest that some words look like they could have been automatically generated, but it can't prove that. It can use a bunch of methods to distinguish between human-written and machine-written text, but many of those are prone to mistakes that could be damaging if people are assumed to be guilty if the computer says it's suspicious. For example, if it builds a model of typical text written by a person and compares writing to that, passages written by other contributors, passages written in a group, or passages that have been significantly modified in response to critiques would probably look quite different from the norm. For that matter, I know that my writing style can vary quite a lot depending on whether I have an interesting point to make, whether I am tired or active, and whether I've successfully switched my brain from informal to formal writing modes. If it's about grammatical or vocabulary patterns, people who are less familiar with the language are more likely to have patterns they're more comfortable with and use more often.

If five years from now I can present you with a computer-provided report which shades a bunch of text in various warning colors for possible use of AI, how much do you have to see before you're willing to use the punishments you describe? If you wait for extreme confidence, a lot of people aren't going to get caught and they may think that using AI is safe because you'll never catch them. If you use low confidence answers, a lot of innocent people are going to get punished. Even if your test is right, you can't prove it and the person who received the punishment can probe the tool you used to point out its problems and claim you attacked them on faulty evidence.

User was told three times 'Do Not Reboot This PC' – then unplugged it anyway

Re: Content

"That would be true if the sentence was written in a way that could be universally understood, which is not the case here."

Isn't it? The person in the article who didn't follow the message didn't express that they thought it said something else, or that their actions weren't contradictory to its instructions. When asked about the message, they understood that they had made a mistake without needing the message clarified. Their problem was not a lack of understanding. It was a lack of following instructions. I've seen lots of vague messages that omitted important details or were phrased in a confusing way. This wasn't one of them.

But I don't know how to make something universally understood, so teach me. What part of this message wasn't universally understandable, what phrasing would be universally understood, and what is the method you can use to guarantee that when writing future messages? My guess is that your answer to the first part will be tenuous as with the arguments over "attempt" and "reboot", your second will be as easy to quibble with as this one, and your third will be unusably vague or difficult. I'm ready to be proved wrong, and I write messages in programs, so it's worth teaching me if you can.