Posts by doublelayer

Man sues OpenAI claiming ChatGPT 'hallucination' said he embezzled money

The general public doesn't understand "generative", and in many ways, nor does anyone. It's not a typical word in most contexts, and if we start using its strict definition, it isn't clear what you have to do to generate something. For example, Google generates search results, but only when pages are created by others, so people wouldn't assume that their generation means producing text at random. Electricity generators generate electricity only if there are fuels or other external power sources, so people don't see generation as producing spontaneous energy. Anyone who goes to the effort of parsing the name could easily come to the conclusion that this program generates a block of text which contains what you were asking for based on an incorrect estimation of what it's doing with all that source data. "Generative" does not mean "generates randomly" or "generates something unreliable", and we shouldn't expect people to determine that from the name alone.

Unless they've added it recently, it certainly will not go out and retrieve data from elsewhere. You'd think it would be pretty easy to look at the input text for web addresses and tell the user "Hey, I'm not going to pull that", but evidently not. The program can summarize* stuff if you paste it in first, which might be why the journalist thought it could be done.

* Well, it will read it first and quote chunks. That's no guarantee that the summary will be good or that it won't still make up stuff.

Hey, BARD, GPT told me that this man stole funds. Is that true?

Someone lazy enough to use a chatbot and not understand what it does is probably dumb enough to think that another chatbot can double-check things.

To be fair to them, they didn't say we should call it "lying" either. Both terms anthropomorphize the program to some extent. Probably the most accurate way to describe it is simply "produce incorrect statements", though less polite phrases are available.

I find it difficult to decide whether there should be consequences to this; people should now be aware that the AI programs are still effectively weighted random word generators. However, OpenAI has made its business out of hiding this fact, so I won't feel too bad if the consequences of people believing their hype hurt them.

Identity thieves can hunt us for 'rest of our lives,' claims suit after university data leak

Re: Very often you can avoid disclosing your SSN

If they were really using only your name and birthday, then things are probably fine for the John Smiths, but less fine for those with less common, but not nationally unique, names. It also makes identity theft much easier, since birth days are much less opaque than insecure government numbers.

However, those two problems are so large that somebody would find an alternative mechanism. That's no guarantee that the mechanism they agree on will be good for customers, because it would probably be something along the lines of "You must voluntarily sign up for a credit tracking account before any bank is willing to open accounts". However, I'm reasonably confident in saying that the name-only system would be rejected pretty quickly by financial companies.

Re: "SSNs are assigned at birth, and never change"

This appears to fall into the "accidental assignments of the same number to more than one person" category as quoted. They're supposed to be unique, but it's a government system and sometimes they fail. I'm not trying to pretend that they do anything well, from assignment to use, but that doesn't change the fact that reuse of the numbers is not part of the planned system, and when it appears, it's an error which must be corrected.

Re: "SSNs are assigned at birth, and never change"

Wikipedia indicates this to be incorrect:

The Social Security Administration does not reuse Social Security numbers. It has issued over 450 million since the start of the program, about 5.5 million per year. It says it has enough to last several generations without reuse and without changing the number of digits.[41] There have been accidental assignments of the same number to more than one person.[42]

In addition, it appears that numbers beginning with the digit 9 are not permitted, so that would allow for expansion if the key space is exhausted without breaking old numbers.

Google HR hounds threaten 'next steps' for slackers not coming in 3 days a week

Re: Showing your North Eastern Employees How Little You Care

It's almost as if you didn't read this part of the article:

As for the policy, requests to stay at home to work are now deemed exceptions. That doesn't count for this week, though. The wildfires in Canada and the subsequent bad air policy on the East Coast of the US mean that Googlers are advised to stay at home.

You may object to the policy as a whole, but your particular objection appears to be based on assuming something that is the opposite of reality.

US Senators take Meta to task for releasing LLaMA AI model after token safety checks

Re: Ok...

I haven't seen a lot of abuse of this model yet, although I'm certain we will. The problem with the gloomy pronouncements from politicians and companies is that they appear to think the models will be very dangerous, when what they will actually be is annoying.

For example, you can get models to write you an extortion letter. GPT may balk, but you can reword your message and get it to do so anyway. The letter won't be obviously crap and will probably be as convincing as such letters can be. However, with about two more minutes, you can write your own extortion letter and it will be just as good, since we're talking about a very small set of required information to get across to the victim: "We have your relative, we aren't averse to harming them, you can prevent this by paying us, and here's how to contact us to initiate payment". A chatbot will not help a kidnapper with the harder parts of this, like actually kidnapping someone or successfully pretending to have done so (some AI programs could be used there, but it's not the text generators).

We'll see plenty of AI-generated spam and it will be used to create fake references. This will cause problems when trying to find reliable information quickly, and I also expect there to be more work ahead for people who do moderation on online communities. It's not going to evolve into a world-destroying monster, nor is it going to make criminals' lives so much easier. At least, not yet.

Beijing proposes rules to stop Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networks going rogue

Re: Puts me off sharing my Wi-Fi

That's probably forbidden by your ISP. If you leave an open network, then it can be written off as incompetence or you not thinking about how your guest network would be available elsewhere, but if you put in extra systems to track the guest users, not so much.

I wanted to do the same thing as I have plenty of bandwidth, but for the same reasons, I have decided that the risks are greater or at least more concentrated than the benefit to others.

I'm not sure we have a great definition of what a government has to do to be Communist. They're definitely doing things differently than the Soviet Union, North Korea, or any of the other nations that claimed to be Communist did, but they all did it differently anyway, and none of them really stuck to the Communism out of the Communist Manifesto, whether that would even be possible. While I don't think China is a good representative for what Communism looks like in theory, I can't name anyone else that could be that representative.

It ends up not mattering anymore. When China says "Communism", it means whatever their rulers say it means. That, at least, is something that Communist states have been doing throughout their existence, though it's not limited to them.

US govt now bans TikTok from contractors' work gear

Re: Only a limited ban then

Most of the time, they would already have access to that information, because most secure facilities are already on maps. They may not say what they do in there, but that it's government property and you can't go in there is in most cases already known, and China already has a list of most of the people who work in such places as well as anyone who posted information about it online.

There are, of course, exceptions to that. However, those places tend to put a bit more into security than having a good lock, so people who work there are unlikely to be able to simply take their phone. There are some pieces of information that could be gleaned from a personal device, but the point of the law is to prevent the software from having access to data on the device, not metadata. Maybe they will try a more severe ban, as some of them have indicated a desire to do.

Re: Only a limited ban then

Yes, as long as they are able to use their phone in that location. For secure sites, personal devices are usually not allowed to enter the facility, so you wouldn't be able to access it. For other sites, they don't care about use in the building, but use on a device with their data on it. So this really only affects people who actually bring their own mobile device for government work. I can't believe people do that very often. I don't like installing any employer-provided software on my devices. I'm willing to accept SMS messages and calls to my mobile number and to use multifactor authentication apps which are not tied to a profile. If they want more than that, they buy the device to run the code on and they can control it as tightly as they like. For the same reason, I won't use my personal laptop for work and they won't install anything on it. So far, my employers have accepted that preference.

Windows XP's adventures in the afterlife shows copyright's copywrongs

Re: ???

"how did public domain get into this? Nobody else suggested that."

It was probably a simplification of this:

"Perhaps the same should be true for copyright - you have to publish the original work (source code) and not the derived one (machine code) in order to claim copyright protection."

That's not public domain, but it ends up looking the same in that there's no barrier whatsoever to people getting the code and using it without permission, thus turning the copyright protection into a worse administrative nightmare for a company wanting to make money than DRMing the thing until it can't breathe.

That was more generic than this specific case, but as many have noted, it's already likely that they would structure a project as work for hire, thus getting the source code. The latest comment can probably be explained as an answer to your question:

"if custom software is being specified then the implication is that it will be written from scratch. What would it be rewritten from? And how do you rewrite from scratch?"

No, it isn't exactly guaranteed that every piece of custom software is written from scratch. It can be written from an existing base which is not open source, using libraries a company has already written to simplify things. A lot of database systems use an existing database and bolt on the written from scratch parts. The same is true of many systems where there are wheels that don't need reinventing. This doesn't have to be a problem if you give the code that was written for this project, but not the code of those dependencies. However, if you're asking for the ability to build it all from source using only a compiler, then you'll need the dependency source as well, which the company may not be able and is probably not willing to do. If you want it written from scratch or atop open source components only, that needs to be in the contract, and it's a very reasonable requirement that is found in a number of contracts. I would certainly encourage governments and basically everybody to try to use open source components when possible because it's much easier to change the system later if there isn't a license snarl in the way, but not everyone takes that advice.

Re: Make like trademarks, not patents or copyright?

True, they have to be selling it, but they can keep changing the terms under which they're selling it until they no longer have to actually make any other than the one prototype. Even the craziest fan eventually stops if the price goes high enough. I just included the processor so that nobody can claim that it's not really a computer. The point is that even trademarks are pretty easy to keep if you're willing to go to a little effort and don't put anything near the restrictions or requirements that people are calling for.

Re: The problem is caused

Except your analogy doesn't fit the software experience at all. If you work in industrial controls, you already know this.

Microsoft did not disable Windows XP from working. It still runs on any machine on which it was installed, and you can still activate it. They don't sue anyone who makes spares for it; if I open a company where I say I'll help you install XP on something, I'm allowed to do so. If I write antimalware software for it, I'm allowed to do that. Microsoft not only doesn't sue me for doing this, they have no right to sue on that basis. If I sold a bunch of copies of XP which I've hacked, they do have the right to sue me for that, although they probably don't care enough to bother, but that is not at all what you were implying with your car analogy.

If we stick with the car analogy, manufacturers eventually stop making spares for a certain model. That doesn't mean you're forbidden from using your old car, or that you won't be able to find spares, but at some point, they don't consider it worth it to continue making parts that few people need. Software people do the same. It's your choice whether to use the old versions, buy the updated version, or switch to an alternative product. Where that choice is limited, I oppose it, but the response to that should be freedom to choose the software you are going to buy, not a mandate for permanent support.

Re: Make like trademarks, not patents or copyright?

"the publisher still stands ready to fix any significant bug or security vulnerability that might pop up."

You don't have that now. The publisher will try to fix any bug or vulnerability that they feel is bad enough to cause them a problem, but not otherwise. This is annoying, but there has never been any requirement that manufacturers of anything, software or otherwise, fixes a problem you might have unless it leads to safety issues. You can sometimes return a product based on those, but not even that in all cases.

It's not really a parallel to trademarks either; to keep a trademark, you must continue to use it in business, not to make available the products with which you once used it. If Apple decided they were shutting down but wanted to keep the name for computer products, they could make a single Apple Computer which sells for a million dollars and contains as the only processor an RP2040 and a tiny screen, no battery, no disks, and no ports. Insert your joke about actual Apple prices and product features here. They can still keep the name, even if all the Macs are dropped.

Re: Hmmm..

"You will never fix *anything* if you put off trying because "doing that one thing won't fix it all in one fell swoop"."

You will also never fix anything by just making changes because you're aware of the problem but not how or whether your changes will address it. That approach is likely to have more counterproductive effects, because after a few "Something must be done, so how about this" attempts, people lose the desire to keep trying things at random.

"Copyright should be 20 years" is a policy that's going to cause several big changes in the area of IP. We don't know what all of those are, but even those which can be assumed are being ignored by many here who are proposing it. For example, if copyright was canceled that quickly, then you could use Windows XP for free without legal problems, which is ... basically what you already have because Microsoft hasn't sent anyone to punish those who leaked the license generator. It's not enshrined in law, but it is what happens de facto. That's not what people are asking for, though, which means that when the change to copyright means that software support and availability hasn't changed, they'll want to introduce a new change. For example, some posts here which have advocated some type of mandatory publishing of source code, which will cause a lot more changes. In the meantime, the shortened copyright term will have caused a lot of chaos in other types of intellectual property that don't become as obsolete in two decades, and someone will want to clean that up. This idea seems to have been written after about five minutes' thought, and that's a poor way to fix any problem.

Re: Coppyright length

"Where is that income stream coming from? Obviously from the pockets of music consumers (e.g. subscribers to streaming services), but less obviously, by diverting money away from current, less well-known artists, into a small pool of incredibly wealthy artists and corporations."

No, that's not the case. It comes from people who still like that music, even years on. If everybody decided that they've heard that music and they're done with it now, there would be no income stream. It exists because people who listen to music, buy it and put it into something else, or ever make a choice of a particular piece are choosing that one. The successful artists are making a lot of money, and the corporations that have those artists in contracts are making even more, but they're only making that much because the music available through those contracts continues to be popular. Under your system where that popular music becomes free, you're going to get even less money going to new artists for a simple reason. Here's an example.

The current method:

Advertiser: We want to put some music under this advert. We could buy the rights to a very popular song from the 1980s for $bunch_of_money, or this less well-known song for $bunch_of_money/4. Which one do you want?

The shortened copyright method:

Advertiser: We want to put some music under this advert. We could buy the rights to a song which is not well-known for $bunch_of_money/4, or a very popular song from the 1980s for $0, which a lot of people are listening to because anyone can have it for free. Which one do you want?

In the second scenario, the artist who wrote that famous song will be getting nothing, but the new artists will also be getting less. You would have a cheap streaming service which just has all the popular music, not including the last twenty years or whatever limit you set, and they'd be able to charge much less because they keep all the profits.

Raspberry Pi production rate rising to a million a month

The prices they're selling them for are the same ones as before, starting at a $35 model. It's true that there was a time when $35 would buy you 2 GB of RAM, and I think it's still only 1 GB now, but that's still rather cheap and cheerful. The supply problems mean that others are trying to sell them for higher prices, but not that the real prices have increased at all. If you are referring to those prices, how cheap do you want them to get? They have lower-power A and Zero boards which cost less as well, and those are a bit easier to find as well.

I don't understand this. I don't know what price you're getting for the NUC, but I'm guessing that if it's comparable to the Pi, it's really very old and maybe there's something wrong with it. You're surely not looking at the highest Pi price on Amazon to determine the cost of that? I know they're frequently hard to get, but you know what the prices are and, when it's come up before, people have found stocks in several countries by looking around hard enough. You will find anybody selling something for a ridiculous amount, but that doesn't make that the market price.

Re: A Bit Late Now

I think you've reached the point where you want specific peripherals for your use case and everybody has a different set they want. If you're including ethernet ports, then I'll take a few USB ports but set lower so the ethernet jacks are now the thickest part, but you didn't say whether you wanted any, so that might break things for your use case if I were to build it.

As such, you probably want to use the compute modules which give you all the benefits of the SoC and connect to whatever board has the socket for it, then design that board to have the specific set of connections you want. It's not as cheap as if the company made a board that has precisely the set of stuff you want to use, but given the number of options, they're unlikely to do so.

Re: A Bit Late Now

In your opinion, what would have been the least damaging group to upset? Is it just whichever group you personally have the least contact with? I understand that nobody's happy with the lack of supply, but a lot of complaints about the situation appear to imply that there was some easy answer that they just didn't take, and so far I have no idea what you or anyone else think that was. I have some idea of what it wasn't, but that's not the same.

Re: A Bit Late Now

There are several products that aim for that part of the market. This post compares several good options for performance and power usage, although it didn't include everything and has not been updated. In many cases, it comes down to your specific requirements. Many projects will absolutely need something that not every other project does, and so some of these boards will leave something out that makes them unsuitable, or in some cases include something that makes it worse such as adding on other peripherals which increase the size of the unit for space-constrained projects.

Has Amazon found the ultimate lock-in? Cheap cellphone service for Prime

Re: Connectivity and reach

That's probably true, and they'd have to make the system themselves because the mobile providers I'm aware of don't tend to make it easy to buy a lot of individual connections that are mostly unused. I've commented on this before, but I wonder if the costs are really high enough that they don't want to let people have lots of connections which are charged by the data used, not by just having a line open. If I could connect something cheaply without having to pay a frequent renewal payment, I'd probably have quite a few of them.

However, if this is limited to the United States, then Amazon may have an alternative since that's also where they have the Amazon Sidewalk (use your neighbor's bandwidth) system.

Re: I might as well sign-over my pension check to Amazon. NOT!!

"I did not find any which excluded 5G (OTOH, none promised 5G would work)."

Out of curiosity, why do you want that? If your device doesn't support it or the signal isn't present, it won't be used. If your device does support it and you travel somewhere that has it, you get to use it. They tend not to exclude it because they don't really care which signal you're using, so whatever they have, they'll use that to provide you the service. The rest of your considerations make sense, but I'm not sure that finding one that is specific about that will be possible or would be helpful.

Smartphone recovery that's always around the corner is around the corner

Re: Every comment above nails it

"no lack of gimmickry and complexity."

Actually, I can't think of any real gimmicks recently. Of course, every announcement includes something they say they've done with the camera using AI, but they're usually not clear what that is and I wouldn't use it anyway. As for other gimmicks, the only one I can think of is folding.

If manufacturers were making a lot of weird devices, I might not want them, but at least they'd have some interest level. Do we want a device with a custom-made laptop dock it just slots into the device with more buttons on the sides for shortcuts, or the device with multiple USB ports designed for connecting other peripherals? You might not want either of those, but we'd be able to discuss the potential benefits or drawbacks of the features. As of now, one phone compared to another comes down to basic specs and camera details for those who actually use all the different kinds of cameras that are available. Nobody is doing anything experimental; they just shove new SoCs and lenses into another rectangle and fling it out.

Re: Every year is worse

“All too often, technologists solve problems by introducing additional layers of technology abstractions and disregarding simpler solutions, such as outreach and engagement,”

As a counter to that, sometimes we do that because not doing it is viewed as laziness, incompetence, or worse.

User: I loaded this file which starts as valid XML, then goes into complete corrupted garbage. The program crashed.

Programmer: [Idea: engage the user] Sorry about that, but this program doesn't handle corrupted files. In this case, could you repair the file and send that through?

User: You're just going to let your terrible code crash when it receives invalid input? How unprofessional can you get?

Programmer: Point taken. It's not great. I can do something to at least prevent a crash.

[One day later]

User: I put the corrupted file through today, and it doesn't crash anymore, but it doesn't work.

Programmer: What happens?

User: Nothing happens. It just ignores me.

Programmer: [Idea: user experience outreach] Can I watch how you're using it? [...] Why did you just close that message box? [...] Yes, but could we just take a look at the message to see if it's an error I have to fix? [...] See, it says the file is corrupted and needs to be repaired. So you need to repair it.

User: So you're just giving me the error message and making me deal with it?

Programmer: [Engage? Outreach? Options exhausted] Let me think about this and get back to you.

[Three days later]

Programmer: I'm thinking we should have a library which can parse truncated XML, present the user with a graphical structure document, and provide them a rich editor so they can repair data without modifying a file. Either that or an office in a different building and some code to intercept and delete emails.

Re: Looking back (nothing to look forward to)

In honesty, those things are not gone, just less common. For the same reason, I often complain about the size of smartphones today as I'm in the group that liked the small ones, but you can still find those. The problem comes when you want all four of those together, and also long software support and someone else has ported other versions of Android to it, please. There won't be a perfect option and some compromises are unavoidable, but there are still options.

Depending on how you rank those desires, headphone jacks and SD card slots are quite common, just not on the most expensive devices. Look at the medium range and you're likely to find a device with both of those in at most five tries, probably fewer. Replaceable batteries are less common outside the very lowest end. However, you can still find at least some devices with those that aren't very weak. The most famous devices that fall into that category are the Fairphone and the Samsung Galaxy Xcover line, neither of which I have. If some of those things are more important than others, you can also look at companies that aren't as famous as phone manufacturers go.

Starlink bags US defense contract to keep war-torn Ukraine connected

Re: No good deed goes unpunished

Read literally, it's still accurate. Musk demanded money to continue the service, the demand has been met. That doesn't mean he wasn't within his rights to make that demand, which he was. It doesn't mean that the demand couldn't be predicted, which it could. All it means is that Musk asked for something and the Pentagon has given him what he asked for.

We can get into a debate about the connotations of the phrase and whether it implies that the demand is unreasonable, but as a statement of fact, it correctly explains the event that occurred.

This malicious PyPI package mixed source and compiled code to dodge detection

Re: Why have pyc files in a package anyway?

You could, but that is likely to be detectable by code analysis. This exploit didn't do that and included the compiled version directly. I think the new policy should forbid that. Not only is it a security risk as I think this incident amply demonstrates, but it also loses all of the benefits introduced by new versions of the Python compiler, which can compile the same code to faster byte code. Most .pyc files are version specific, and while there's backward compatibility, there's a good reason they are usually recompiled instead.

Millions of Gigabyte PC motherboards backdoored? What's the actual score?

Re: How do we defend against this? - Linux edition

I suggested the same thing, but that only works against a lazy implementation. If they were determined to push it, they wouldn't have to be blocked by encrypted volumes since, to boot them, you'll eventually enter decryption keys. The firmware could watch for them and then jump in to make edits before the kernel finished booting from them.

Implementing that would be quite a bit harder, and I wouldn't expect a company just trying to manage updates to do so. That doesn't make it impossible, though.

Re: You missed a question.

"I don't expect that UEFI would be able to forcibly write this file to a local filesystem."

From other posts, it appears it's not trying to. However, it certainly could if it wanted to. The firmware has hardware access to the disks and has filesystem drivers for some of them. At most, someone would need to include a new driver in it if it doesn't have the one it needs, because the firmware cannot be blocked from accessing whatever hardware it wants. There's a bit of a space limit on most firmware partitions, which limits the size of the bootstrapped attack vector, but not such a small limit that it's likely to protect you if anyone did write firmware that bad.

Re: You missed a question.

I'm not sure how that folder indicates any particular risk, given that you can run a system service from any folder. They could as easily write it to a user folder, anybody's, and run it just the same. For the same reason, they could write it into any Linux installation if they were willing to, but presumably they didn't compile it for Linux.

I wonder whether this works on encrypted OS disks, where the firmware doesn't have the keys to mount and write to them until the user enters a code. It could always insert the software after decryption occurs, right before booting that disk, but if it's running at the start, that might stop it. Either way, I can't imagine why someone at the design stage didn't explain how stupid this plan was, or more likely, what happened to those who did.

Amazon finds something else AI can supposedly do well: Spotting damaged goods

Re: "it's 3x more likely to spot damaged goods"

So, your accepted outcomes are:

1. Near complete perfection.

2. Ridiculous false positive rate which causes complaints

3. The system must be entirely bad.

These seem to leave out a lot of options. Perhaps the three times better than a human deal is because, if they ask for 99% accuracy, they get too many false positives? Maybe my incredulity at your choices is because I'm having trouble seeing "three times better than a human" as a bad result. Sure, it would be nice if it never made a mistake, but it's a visual recognition task which is not deterministic.

For that matter, once it's built, the acceptable rate might have been if it was equal in accuracy to a human, because a computer with a camera running software you already have is probably cheaper than a human who also has a camera. Things that are three times faster or better at performing a task as I am tend to be rather useful things.

Probably not, since it's just looking at the package it comes in, but it's not designed to do every task they have. It's just intended to reduce their costs from dealing with stuff that's sent back by people who are unhappy with its quality, and they want to catch the things that are likely to lead to such complaints. That isn't going to eliminate the existence of fraud.

That said, you could always train a new one on all the products that are typically sold and give it an x-ray generator so it can investigate the contents of packages. Why does this not sound like a good idea?

You might have been phished by the gang that stole North Korea’s lousy rocket tech

Re: I wonder if

The attack method is kind of basic, but the rest of it isn't. They do a lot of research into their victims before they attempt to compromise them. They know a lot of information which can be used to convince them they're legitimate, and they do it to so many people that they have chances to practice.

I think we overestimate our own resistance to scams. We have technical knowledge to know about macros in Office documents, which is great, but it doesn't follow that we also have knowledge to detect scams in other areas in which we don't work. I've known people who were great at IT and did not understand finance or law, and if someone tried a scam that wasn't related to computers, they would be more likely to fall for it. It's not even limited to lack of knowledge, as successful manipulation of the victim's emotions can circumvent an otherwise skeptical person's brain. That includes both you and me, if the scammer is good enough at finding our weaknesses.

Re: "Do not enable macros on documents received via email, unless the source is verified"

When that protocol was younger, it still contained all of that, but it didn't check any of it. I could open a connection to a mailserver, submit a message with any headers I liked, from any address I liked, with a long fake history if I pleased, and all that would be available afterward to try to track me down would be the IP address with which I connected to the first real server in the chain.

Nowadays, there are a lot of patches designed to prevent that from working, and most servers actually check those. However, it doesn't stop people from trying the old ways. I've run my own mailserver at times, although I don't now, and looking at what bots tried to do was instructive. Several types of attack were attempted, including many spoofed emails and some attempts to get my server to act as a relay for messages going to others. Fortunately, relay attempts were rejected and spoofed emails went to a separate mailbox for curiosity until I just sent them all to /dev/null. Still, not only can a mail client be manipulated to show an inaccurate source, headers can be spoofed if your server isn't careful.

Feds, you'll need a warrant for that cellphone border search

Re: I think I get it...

Then follow the other branch of that if statement.

"RealLife perps on the run from the cops and actively being pursued rarely change vehicles (On the rare occasion that they do, the carjacking victim tells the cops EXACTLY what the new vehicle is"

In that case, any time spent on pulling over a car which isn't the type of car they're looking for is time wasted and people needlessly harassed. The original statement confirmed that they were testing every vehicle, hence they were not following that logic. I stated this already, so I see no reason why you think the point is as ridiculous as your reply implies.

"and they certainly never take the time to don theatrical makeup."

A better point, but if I was on the run from the law and made a career of it, I might try that approach; it seems it would have worked in this case, at least if the police use the same logic you do, which as the car example shows, may not be as certain.

Re: I think I get it...

Original: "Fortunately the office looked in the car and based purely on a glance was able to determine that there was no need to question any of us"

Reply: Becuse they were looking for a Mexican national in a blue Ford pickup, and you were obviously pastry white Brits in a green Chevy sedan?

If that was the logic, that's terrible logic. If they're willing to use "Not the right kind of car" as a reason not to question them, then they don't need to pull over that car, do they? If they're willing to assume that the person they're looking for could have changed cars, then that part of your argument has no importance. As for the appearance of the person, there are a variety of time-tested ways to make yourself look different which actors have been testing for decades. You can't prove that one of those people was the person in disguise along with some compatriots who had provided the replacement car. Either the situation justifies pulling over every vehicle and questioning the occupants or it requires a more specific search pattern, most likely the latter. The anecdote they supply doesn't appear to have followed either.

NASA experts looked through 800 UFO sightings and found essentially nothing

Re: Experts?

You just have to get a certification from a [person with access to a printer] I mean certified expert who tests your knowledge by [making sure you will back up any lies they say], sorry again, are knowledgeable about the subject matter including all the stuff the government doesn't want you to know, unless your subject is one of those which holds that the government is powerless when compared to some other shadowy conspiracy. Your certified examiner will be able to provide you with important study materials about the subject as well to provide you with more information you need to know. If you don't agree with those materials, you are free to do your own research for which all you'll need is a blank sheet of paper and some way to put writing on it.

Fortunately for you, I am a completely certified expert and examiner on all those topics and many others as well [at least I will be when I turn this PDF into a piece of paper]. Just send your topic of interest and registration fee and you too can be an expert.

That's possible, but there are only so many entomologists. Most of the people walking by would not be one, so the chances that that particular nest would be found by an entomologist are rather low given how many nests there are. There's also the chance that the entomologist, having completed a long day's work studying some other ants, wouldn't look closely enough to determine that these were an undiscovered species and just walked past thinking that they already understood what was going on.

If we posit an alien species that has the travel technology to end up here, there are basically two situations:

1. There are a lot of planets with life on them, in which case why are we of particular interest to the aliens who have likely already seen plenty of them.

2. There are few, possibly only two, living civilizations in the universe, in which case how would the aliens discover our existence so quickly?

My only solution to either hypothetical is to admit that, if aliens show up, we were probably quite close to them or it happened by accident.

Ukraine war blurs lines between cyber-crims and state-sponsored attackers

Re: Void Rabisu used RomCom against .. water, energy, and financial entities ..

Nothing says they have to be. If they infect an energy company but don't manage to get access to the infrastructure, they can still do a number of things. They could look at communications and impersonate people, they could get records of energy usage from the bills, they could make fake documents to try to confuse people, or they could take down the corporate systems and see if the IT department can get them back up before problems show up. It's not as big an effect as taking down the energy generation systems would be, and I'm sure they'll happily accept an exploit of those if they could, but that doesn't make it harmless.

Twitter now worth just a third of what Musk paid for it

Re: The Seething is Real

"a monster like [person we previously all worshipped for building electric cars, LEO satellite internet, SpaceX, etc."

This is where you failed. Actually, you failed right at the start with Twitter being the most important platform, but I'm assuming that was mockery. Yes, some people did appear to have a cult of personality around Musk. I was not one of them. It always struck me as weird and off-putting, but at least I respected Musk for Spacex, because I thought that was a good goal and at least he was managing to let others accomplish it. Not so much with Starlink, as whenever someone mentioned some of the problems with it, some Musk fan would come along to explain why nothing else could do it, the marvelous humanitarian advantages we wouldn't get, etc. And of course there were a lot of strong opinions about Musk from people who had strong opinions on electric cars, and those opinions happened to be direct mirrors of one another. I neither loved nor hated him consistently, although he's been doing increasingly more annoying things for many years before the Twitter fiasco which isn't helping. Fortunately for me, I haven't used Twitter so it doesn't directly affect me if he breaks it. For those who do use Twitter more frequently, I can't blame them for being annoyed as someone trashes something they used to like.

Re: Crazy valuation??

Frugality is still a good idea, because a person who has all the same things as the situation 1 guy but doesn't have debt is better than both. Frugality, though, can go to a level where it is harming you. To pick an obvious example, if you were so frugal that you neglected your own health, then you'll find out that repairing medical problems is a lot more expensive than preventing them.

My simplistic financial advice: avoid debt when you can because it's quite dangerous, but if things are bad enough, there are things that are even more dangerous. This leads to very different results based on your needs, income, and career potential, and some of it will be subjective. The same advice applies to companies as well; a company can refuse to spend on everything and have a nice balance statement for a while, but it's likely to cause problems as time goes on.

Re: Crazy valuation??

"Surely if they're approaching break-even it's financially healthier?"

Not surely at all. Consider two situations:

Situation 1: You have a full-time job and you earn a nice salary, but you have expensive tastes and have spent a lot of money on stuff you didn't really need. As a result, you find yourself in debt in order to afford your living expenses.

Situation 2: You have no job but you occasionally find money on the street, and you've identified some places where food is quite cheap. So far, nobody has interfered with the cardboard box in which you live, along with your meager savings.

The person from situation 2 is not only breaking even, but is turning a profit. Their situation is not better than the person in situation 1. If something bad happens, the person in the first situation is much more likely to be able to handle that, and they're also more likely to be able to fix their debt situation than the other person is to consistently maintaining those savings.

As this applies to Twitter, let's assume that somehow they are at a break-even position, which I doubt. They need not only to maintain that but to start turning a profit so they can pay for the things that allow them to keep existing. If they've reached their financial situation by cutting a lot of expenses, they run the risk that some of those expenses weren't as unnecessary as they thought, because if their systems fail, they will no longer be earning any revenue. Maybe they'll be able to run their systems on the payroll they have now and they'll continue to get advertisers to pay them, but if either of those fails, they may find that their break-even position has turned into a loss-making position when they weren't expecting it.

North Korean spy satellite launch ends in sea smash

Re: "discovering concrete causes"

While the North Koreans do like unnecessary executions and have continued to carry them out with extreme frequency, part of the success they've seen is because the latest Kim is slightly less stupid than his father was. Previous technical failures resulted in several executions, which didn't exactly help people learn from their mistakes. They have significantly reduced that policy, which might explain why they now have missiles that appear to be usable whereas their missiles from the 2000s were quite unimpressive for a country that spends all its money just building weapons.

The FBI as advanced persistent threat – and what to do about it

Re: Assigning Traffic To A Real Person Can Be Made Difficult.....

A lot of things that criminals don't find difficult are things that the rest of us find harder. Sometimes it's something immoral and we just won't do it, but that doesn't apply here. Two other problems apply in this case:

1. We don't particularly want to get punished by law enforcement, so we avoid doing stuff that's against the law even if we don't agree with the law unless we have an extreme objection to that law. If I obtained a fake piece of identification, that's a thing the police don't like, and I'd have to be in a pretty bad situation to take that risk.

2. Things that criminals have access to are not as easily available to non-criminals. I'm sure that there are markets where criminals can buy a number of things that aren't legal, but I'm unaware of how to find those places and to gain entry. I can find basic fake identification somewhere online if given enough time, but I'm not sure how much verification the countries that require it will do. If they do, then I might have to use a real identity that doesn't belong to me, and now we're looking more at the immoral category.

Fortunately, I don't live in a country that would require identification for that.

Seriously, boss? You want that stupid password? OK, you get that stupid password

I think that most accents wouldn't be able to turn "thirty" into "three t", and "twenty" is even further. However, I've known a few people who for some reason swallowed the ending n from numbers ending in -teen, so that might even out the opportunities for miscommunication.

Re: I wouldn't call it malicous compliance, but yes, I have a story

Do you have any level where it becomes the company's responsibility? If I bang on every door with a problem, a suggested solution, and volunteering to do it singlehandedly, how many people have to say no before it stops being my responsibility and you stop blaming me for the consequences of that problem. As the original poster indicated, they didn't even create the problem. I also assume that, had they attempted to fix the problem and introduced a new problem, you'd be blaming them for doing that when management hadn't approved.

Why do you jump to assuming that this person's failure to solve a problem that nobody cared about and they didn't create caused the demise of the company? It seems more logical to me to assume that the company's inability to work on the problem was a symptom of inept management which caused the collapse, something an individual tech, even if they took the initiative to fix everything above the complaints of management, couldn't solve.