Posts by Long John Silver

Europe plots escape hatch from enshittification of search

Thank you

Following brief testing, search results appear to be more helpful.

Paul McCartney, Elton John, other creatives demand AI comes clean on scraping

Re: Debate?

Messrs McCartney, John, et alia, are not contributors to "our rich cultural heritage". In essence, they are 'entertainers' for the masses, whether that be through stage performance, recorded performance, film, or written 'work'.

Setting aside the media of book and film, the essence of entertainment is live performance. Money willingly paid for entry to a theatre or concert hall is just reward, as too is voluntary donation to a street performer. Makers of film, performers of recorded music, and writers of books, have no deep entitlement to charge an arbitrary monopoly-driven price for access to their works; so-called 'creatives' must woo audiences, readerships, fans, and patrons, financially to support their efforts to create new works. The bedrock from which artistes and writers begin is their innate talent and acquired skills. Their income must be acquired 'work' by 'work' in an open market for patronage. The digital era demonstrates that completed works become 'water under the bridge'; demanding continuing income from them is becoming a fools' errand.

Consider Leonardo da Vinci, an undisputed figure in Western mankind's genuinely 'rich cultural heritage'. He depended upon patronage. He was in competition with others. Furthermore, he claimed no exclusive proprietorial 'rights' to his brush strokes, choice of colours, to distributing his publications, or against derivation from his written works.

It's a certainty that none of the 400+ complainants whose whining is reported here has achievements such as those of da Vinci to carry forward to future generations.

My heart bleeds for them

Most, perhaps all, of the alleged 'creatives' draw sustenance by feeding off the rich pickings from bottom-end culture.

US Copyright Office found AI companies sometimes breach copyright. Next day its boss was fired

Surely, even a 'true believer' in copyright should acknowledge that what you suggest deprives nobody of anything?

That may be the simplest, least time-consuming, way to obtain a copy to evaluate. Perhaps if you like it, you will pay for it. Maybe, you run a company and decide to negotiate a price for the use of a hundred copies.

In the realm of law-protected IP, caveat emptor carries little weight. Unless a product can be established as 'fit for purpose' before purchase, physical goods can be returned on the grounds of breach of contract.

Woe betide someone seeking reimbursement for software, or an electronic book publication, failing to reach expectation. The same applies to a printed book: unless bought to serve the purpose of a doorstop, the physical incarnation is irrelevant.

USA rentier economics facing its doom?

The clash of the Titans in the USA is hotting up.

Reduced manufacture in the US of physical goods, has made its economy, internal and with regard to international trade, more heavily dependent upon so-called Intellectual Property (IP) than before. Mr Trump's recently stated intention to protect 'Hollywood' from foreign competition, accords with this. Other areas of publishing are immensely influential too.

We are witnessing a battle between two very powerful civilian components of the US economy: electronic technology and copyright dependent rentiers. IP is facing its inevitable 21st century demise, that is, at present, the copyright protected element.

Neither side in the fight is motivated by a principled stand to defend copyright or by the increasingly unassailable arguments as to why copyright is culturally and economically destructive. The winner, undoubtedly the 'tech' side, will be decided by the might of lawyer power, political lobbying, and customary bribery; even AIPAC, which presumably stands for Hollywood, cannot prevail.

Meanwhile, and regardless of events in the US, other nations, especially BRICS, will follow their own best interests.

Users advised to review Oracle Java use as Big Red's year end approaches

Added value from Oracle Java?

What do subscribers to Oracle's proprietary version of Java receive in addition to entitlement to use the software? Presumably, there is something. Alternatively, open source options are too unreliable.

Microsoft wants us to believe AI will crack practical fusion power, driving future AI

Somebody, please explain the push for mega-AI?

I am not denying the many potential uses for so-called 'AI'. Yet, it's unclear why there need to be large power-hungry data centres dotted across nations.

Creating new AI models appears to necessitate access to considerable computational power, but nothing on a scale more than many institutions already possess. Also, 'refined' or cut-down variants of newly made, and thoroughly tested, models should percolate downwards among government, business, educational & research institutions, and into private residences, there to be hosted on 'consumer level' equipment. A factory using one or more AIs to handle stock control, assembly lines, and whatever, might experience greater reliability and security by keeping the AIs on its premises; it could/should have secure backups held on premises it owns (one room might suffice) on another site. Additionally, AIs not intended for direct contact with folk offsite ought to have no connection to the public Internet.

Another example is hospitals using AIs as diagnostic aids. Instead of 'all singing, all dancing', and all too fallible, ersatz doctors and technicians, departments should call upon specific models, tailored for particular needs, and hosted on local computers of no greater specification than those required by avid 'gamers'. For instance, 'Radiology and Imaging' departments could host mammographic screening aids to spotting putative lesions, and pathology departments could have AI software tuned to histological examinations.

Similarly, onsite hosted AIs dedicated to literature curation, teaching aids, and administrative tasks could be housed in schools and universities. AIs deployed in these institutions may have demands placed upon them, necessitating 'higher-end equipment' than found in homes, but nothing hugely drawing on electricity.

So, what is the intent of Microsoft and other players in AI development when seeking to build mega-computer-farms? Presumably, it is to offer, via the Internet, services to government, industry, commerce, education, and private users.

It's well understood that the planned computer centres would pose problems for current electrical supply grids. The UK's Mr Starmer has committed (at least until he is ejected from office) to a costly backbone for AI megacentres. Doubtless, unimaginative political figures in other nations think along similar lines.

Computer power for running AI models devolved to work-sites and to homes may be only marginally, at worst, above that at present required. Bear in mind, that small, task-specific, AIs may substitute for some PCs already used for similar purposes. Should overall use in this manner exceed the electrical requirements of proposed mega-centres, demands on power grids would be geographically balanced.

Devolve your 'thinking power' to Microsoft and to similar? Let an horrendously ill-advised demand on electrical power be approved?

The Telegraph jumps the gun on World War III

Re: Torygraph, schmoreygraph

Indeed, the Daily Telegraph (DT) has, increasingly noticeably during the past quarter-century, declined in stature as an organ for news, analysis, and opinion. At one time, the items of news the paper chose to publish were presented dispassionately, sometimes enhanced by a twist of humour. Similarly, analysis strove to be balanced, and clearly distinguished from reporting. Commissioned 'opinion pieces' were clearly delineated from news and analysis. Similarly, editorials could thunder to the delight of faithful readers without being mistaken for reportage.

All the historically 'broadsheet' newspapers have shifted away from an ethos of reliable gravitas: the DT and Guardian mostly so but in differing manners. Underlying causes are speculative, but likely are a mix of the following: (i) a changing commercial environment, (ii) decline in the number of potential readers of the previously anticipated educational/cultural level, and (iii) a concomitant match of the aforementioned decline in the pool of aspirant journalists, including those destined for editorial positions.

The DT's fall from grace has been exacerbated by increased reliance upon income from mail order goods and from sponsored 'content'. Inevitably, the target demographic has broadened. Crudely put, the DT at one time appealed to people with a bit of money and some taste, but now seeks anybody with disposable income who can be gulled by flighty pieces on 'lifestyle', 'celebrity', and conformity to what now has become 'influencer culture'.

In the past, the DT had appeal to people of a 'small c' conservative outlook, those not hostile to 'big C' Conservatism of the kind pertaining before Neoliberal economic and social policies were introduced during the 80s and subsequently embedded in all three major political parties. For some while, the DT appears aligned to policies emanating from the government in power, whether Con/Lib coalition, Con alone, or 'Newest' Labour.

The DT, and other media, knuckled-down to being handmaidens to Johnson's bizarre Covid-19 epidemic management orthodoxy and to NATO's ambitions based upon the USA 'Brzeziński doctrine': the era of MSM's enthusiastic participation in censorship and propagandising. The DT, perhaps other media also, stooped to going beyond censoring (i.e, deleting) readers' online comments and engaged in criminal deception by 'shadow-banning' some paying subscribers' comments. The State adopted a stratagem akin to that of Nazi Germany by attempting to forbid access to alternative news sources (e.g. RT). Records show that in comparison with recent times, the UK suppresses dissident opinion far more keenly than during WW2, perhaps a throwback to WW1.

It will be fascinating to watch how the DT and other 'loyal' media cope with the latest twist in the game of pillorying Russia now Mr Trump is in a hairsbreadth of making the EU/UK declare the USA a trade enemy rather than competitor.

TAKE IT DOWN Act? Yes, take the act down before it's too late for online speech

You ain't seen nothin' yet

Across the pond, the UK government is planning to introduce legislation prohibiting making/distributing sexually explicit 'deepfakes' of people, usually women, as a means to harass victims. That's an extension of the 'revenge porn' idea when conventional photographs taken by agreement in intimate settings are released to other people by, for example, an aggrieved ex-lover. However, the sudden rise in popularity of AI image creation/modification models, easily deployed in (or online from) domestic settings, has spewed forth worries becoming as intense as when Internet-borne child pornography got attention.

Now there is broadening on three fronts. There is AI revenge porn among adults, there are schoolchildren, mostly male, who 'nudify' images of female classmates and maliciously circulate them among other pupils via mobile phones, and there are realistic (or anime) indecent images of fantasised children (i.e. children with no doppelgänger in the real world). Atop this, is an additional worry, one as yet not headline material, over deep-faking technology being applied to 'important' people such as government ministers, 'royals', members of the Lords, and 'celebrities'.

These matters merit concern. However, doubtlessly, they will be 'talked up' into the latest of the series of national panics besetting the polity over the last three decades; perhaps a convenient distraction from concerns over 'austerity' imposed in preparation for defence against invasion from Russia.

There is stated intent to meet out severe penalties on people creating/distributing, the wherewithal to engage in unacceptable fakery, on people in simple possession of the software, and on people trying to possess copies of the end results.

We may anticipate a dog's breakfast of legislation. It will arise from almost every member of the legislature being anxious to be seen/heard to condemn the wrongs and put in their pennyworth of 'catch all' detail into the Bill. Instead of a stepwise approach to legislating - i.e. wait and see the impact of major each step, amend later, before continuing - an 'all singing, all dancing' deadweight, of law will be foisted upon us. The police and prosecution service, will be left to make sense of the new law; their members must somehow shoehorn its demands into an already huge body of priorities matched by inadequate resources. Magistrates, Crown Court Judges, and appeal courts, will be obliged to make sense out of a morass of pious wishes, and to figure out where among it lie priorities feasible to match. The police and the courts must determine the nature of victimhood deemed unquestionably worthy of attention.

Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit that wants to become an addiction

Losing text

Having spent time composing text for submission in a post, and having it disappear, whether by one's own mistake or from the behaviour of stroppy software, is a considerable annoyance. Linux users are not immune to this malignity of fate.

On my Mint system, I deploy Mozilla Firefox. This browser has an add-on called Form History Control (II). If it is available in Windows Firefox, give it a try.

Downvotes missing?

If you ask nicely, I will give you a downvote. I am adept at their acquisition and already have one for my post of 12 minutes ago. They are a badge of honour.

The missing element?

Having read previous comments, I conclude their authors to be IT professionals or otherwise people knowledgeable about technology they daily rely upon. Not surprising given The Register's intended readership.

Many of the comments suggest long-term familiarity with varying incarnations of Windows, and some with experience going back to the heady days of the inception of 'personal computing', and perhaps before. All these have free choice over home computational equipment, and some in their workaday environment too. Some document their transition from Windows.

Accounts of personal salvation are interesting, but miss deeper questions over whether non-experts can be 'saved' too.

Almost all schoolchildren, college students, and working adults, are thoroughly immersed in the Microsoft ethos: at home as well as in their places of instruction or work. Microsoft Windows and office products are ubiquitous, so also software dependent upon Windows. Clever marketing, subsidies and loss-leaders offered to educational establishments, cement dependence in later life by students. Consequently, private enterprise and public services are entrapped.

Tom Lehrer's 'The Old Dope Peddler' song comes to mind. The last two verses being pertinent here.

He gives the kids free samples,

Because he knows full well

That today's young innocent faces

Will be tomorrow's clientele.

Here's a cure for all your troubles,

Here's an end to all distress.

It's the old dope peddler

With his powdered happiness.

AI training license will allow LLM builders to pay for content they consume

Times change, laggards are left by the wayside

"Training AI models on copyrighted content requires permission and compensation."

Permission, why? Compensation for what, and to whom?

Those are simple questions in a context of enormous assumed certainties.

Consider the UK "Public Lending Right" which leeches upon Britain's communal libraries. When introduced, it overturned long-established principles regarding access and use of books. If charged at librarians' desks to borrowers, there would have been an outcry. It passes itself as a hidden component of 'rates', the tax paid by home occupiers and businesses. Doubtless, if it was considered remotely feasible, a 'rentier' tax would apply to private book/music/DVD lending among individuals; I made no mention of 'copying' which belongs in a different kettle of would-be monetisable-by-edict fish.

There is wailing in some quarters over people, these deemed alike to others 'who steal cars', who use the 'Robin Hood' services of Anna's Archive and Sci-Hub. A notable difference among the categories of complainants about the existence of these facilities is that the former consist of publishers and authors, whilst the latter, distributing academic literature, occasions moaning only from publishers.

During the early days of home copying of digitally encoded music onto CDs, later film on DVD also, some nations introduced a levy on retail sales of blank media to 'compensate' publishers' creative accountants. Incidentally, that did not affect early attempts within the same nations to extort money from some users of the BitTorrent protocol.

Shall there be demands put before easily 'bought' legislators that all private users of the Internet are taxed to compensate allegedly creative individuals (publishers masquerading as such) for material 'filched' via Anna's Archive, Sci-Hub, and from non-rentier-compliant Internet-based AI services? Perhaps, renowned economists will be set to determine what proportion of every person's disposable income can be extracted, at source, to keep the massive cultural rentier monopolies free from worrying that their easy way of doing business is under threat.

Despite being unpalatable to some, it is undeniable that rentier economics applicable to digitally representable culture is taking its last gasp.

AI bigwigs urge AGs to block OpenAI's profit pivot

'Not-for-profit', dodgy charities, and 'for-profits', often indistinguishable

Neither 'not-for-profit' nor 'charitable status' offer guarantees of organisational integrity. Each is amenable to exploitation for huge personal gain.

'Educational charities' of dubious societal worth abound, for example The Atlantic Council of the United Kingdom which is a component of an interlocking set of propagandising outfits under the aegis of The Atlantic Council.

An infamous non-profit is the The Ayn Rand Institute in the USA. Consider, too, "The World Economic Forum", based in Switzerland, which currently is receiving adverse publicity about the behaviour of its founder. The Forum's "Young Global Leaders Alumni" consist of many murky characters. Britain's PM, one Mr Starmer, has ties with the WEF. Also, the WEF has cross-membership of some personnel with the Tony Blair Institute, which perhaps is due to be renamed The 'Call me Sir Tony' Blair Institute.

There is a plethora of non-profits, some of which doubtless perform useful service. The interconnected set of Neo-Liberal and arms industry supporting Institutes, Councils, Fora, Funds, and so forth, must welcome OpenAI regardless of whether it is (notionally) non-profit or openly for-profit.

Whilst the idea of dismantling the present day nonsensical incarnation of 'democracy' is welcome, the people seeking to wrest control are the most narcissistic, self-serving, and unscrupulous on earth. Nothing changes. No hint of Noblesse oblige.

NTT creates a drone that triggers and catches lightning – then keeps flying

It's been done before

This story reminds one of the foolhardy/brave American chap who flew a kite near thunderclouds. The next calendar year, a guy in St Petersburg, attempting to replicate the experiment, met an untimely death.

RIP, Google Privacy Sandbox

Advertising essential to mankind's wellbeing

Where would we be without rampant advertising?

How else would one brand of baked beans be brought to attention as superior to another? No matter that both brands belong to the same huge multinational conglomerate.

Two components of modern economies have established themselves as essential: marketing and copyright-based rentier activity. Their strengths rest upon the enormous numbers of people employed in middleman roles, and in the easy takings for those in charge. Consider, the vast welfare bills, should modern society be too squeamish to cull the displaced parasites.

Think too on the pinnacle of commercial culture: the influencer. Without them, how would empty-headed people be guided to establish a persona by virtuous disbursement of disposable income?

Advertising is the sharp end of marketing. To keep the wheels of commerce turning, people with products designed for our (their?) betterment must be permitted to intrude on unrelated activities. Lest economic and cultural collapse occur, it must be made a criminal offence to engage means for bypassing advertisers.

Bad trip coming for AI hype as humanity tools up to fight back

A scattergun argument in favour of IP?

The author has weakened his argument by centring it upon so-called 'AI' and two billionaires. Indeed, AI is not what it's cracked up to be. Each billionaire is immersed in controversy over his business ventures. Hence, sources for confusion.

AI and the personal motivations of two people are irrelevant to discussion of IP's validity as a concept and of its capability of being enforced by law within the general intellectual and geopolitical context of the 21st century.

How to stay on Windows 10 instead of installing Linux

The Register doing the decent thing?

Despite total lack of personal interest in MS products and the bewildering array of current Windows variants, I was intrigued by the mention of, indeed a link to, 'Massgrave'. No bones about it, Massgrave's operators admit to engaging in piracy, the kind I deem as virtuously Robin Hood. The site sits within the open Internet, no skulking in Tor, or in less well-known hidden networks. It's unclear in which legal jurisdiction it resides and whether there is any attempt at blocking it.

Massgrave's team claims to have reverse engineered the Microsoft authentication engine. No small patch can remedy that for MS.

Ramifications of these reverse-engineering skills upon the whole raft of proprietary software, including games, could be immense. General purpose, suited to each proprietor, authentication engines risk universal subversion. Software may not become open source, but it will be free to use.

Rearguard action by major software houses - e.g. MS, Apple, MapleSoft, Wolfram, Adobe, Mathworks, Nintendo, and Autodesk - will be fierce. Setting aside ultimately futile litigation (c.f. Anna's Archive), there are limited options available. One such, would be to make authentication procedures far more onerous than at present; that could reach a point whereat customers are deterred and seek the most 'user-friendly' vendor. Another, could entail pretty much continuous Internet connection with everything delegated to 'cloud computation'; an unattractive inconvenience for many, and a security concern for others; worrisome issues of security gaining prominence through naive legislators seeking to impose 'backdoors' under an assumption of nobody noticing.

'Intellectual property' (IP), so-called, is a specious concept now facing its passing into the dustbin of history. Copyright has had a good run for over two-and-a-half-centuries. Digitisation, and now supposed 'AI,' proclaim its death knell.

Software production will devolve to cottage industries. Income will arise from offering support services, and from bespoke tailoring for specific niches. That, more or less, is how Linux has arisen. Furthermore, the open source movement is developing applications offering serious technical challenge to products made by the proprietary vendors listed above; open source software sometimes lacks the gloss and easy user-interface available in commercial products, but those too are catching up.

Brit soldiers tune radio waves to fry drone swarms for pennies

Countermeasures?

Would anyone care to hazard a guess about countermeasures that could be fitted to drones?

It's fun making Studio Ghibli-style images with ChatGPT – but intellectual property is no laughing matter

Intellectual perhaps, property no.

I haven't a clue about the looks of Studio Ghibli-style images. I can't be bothered to find out. Yet, the whining about so-called 'intellectual property' (IP) infringement by imitators of the images' style adds to a crescendo of 'rentier' protest emerging after digital technologies completely upset prior notions of connecting ideas inextricably to the physical medium upon which they were represented, and thereby inducing faux scarcity.

Whoever claims 'ownership' of the abstraction known as 'artistic style' of the mentioned images should be delighted in its popularity, imitation, and the possibility of other talented people building upon it (aka 'derivation').

The arrival of supposed 'AI', an interesting yet perhaps misnamed technology, is 'icing on the cake' for we who know putative IP to be a specious notion based on false premises. It brings the indefensible - in two meanings of the word (i.e. unwarranted and unstoppable supposed 'infringement' thereof) - mode of business dependent upon an artificially maintained monopoly, one backed by a dog's breakfast entanglement of statute and case law, to the attention of people who otherwise might not have thought deeply about the matter: a body of law as silly as that once enacted in California to decree acceptable behaviour between man and wife in the privacy of their bedroom and, likewise, soon to be discarded.

A sound non-rentier basis for funding creative endeavour has been outlined elsewhere by others and by me. It fits properly within market-economics where, in principle, monopoly positions are not favoured. In essence, 'scarcity' is attached to the skills for idea development, but not to digitally represented end-products. The key protection afforded to creative individuals rests upon an entitlement to attribution of source when someone else's creations are independently distributed or derived from; this can be encapsulated in simple to frame law designed to protect creators' reputations when they compete for recognition and funding.

Meta's AI, built on ill-gotten content, can probably build a digital you

Your observation is as pertinent to the distant recorded past as it is to the present.

When literacy developed, it immediately divided populations into a tiny minority able to write/inscribe accounts of their thoughts, their deeds, and of events around them. Unless noted by the literate, the thoughts, and actions of ordinary people have not been passed down to us; perhaps sparing a lot of boredom.

As time passed, the divide narrowed, but the literate subdivided into what were known as the 'literati' and the remainder. In Western culture, the literati had an extensive grounding in Latin, Ancient Greek, and one or more contemporary European languages. With further passage of time this educated class spawned an increasingly broadening, yet always a minority, cadre in disciplines called 'natural philosophy'. In 19th century Britain, feverish activity took place in what's now known as physical sciences, biological sciences, engineering, mathematics, and analytic philosophy; specialised vocabularies emerged; familiarity with Ancient Greek became subordinate to the ability to read texts in French and German and, in addition, to speak 'mathematics'. A marked divide emerged between what later would be known as "The Two Cultures"¹: on the one hand traditionally well-educated folk able to expound upon the 'Romantic poets', Shakespeare, the writings of the 'Good Dr Johnson', and ‘Pumpernickel as a Factor in the Politics of 16th-century Westphalia’², whilst, on the other hand, scientists (i.e. 'mere technicians') obsessed with arcane nonsense no gentleman would waste his life upon.

From the latter part of the 19th century, common people in Europe began to receive elementary education in schools. By the beginning of the final quarter of the 20th century, almost every indigenous origin British school-leaver had basic competence in reading and writing. From thence, onwards and upwards, to a population within which all young adults had fulfilled their individual academic potentials, a population within which access to 'high culture' (pursuits stimulating the mind and encouraging engagement with creative endeavour) was demanded more than ever before? Not a bit of it.

In Britain - other places must speak for themselves - an anti-elitist, 'inclusive' (i.e. the lowest common denominator) approach to education set in at the behest of conniving political forces (from Left and Right), these, presumably, being dependent upon an ignorant and easily manipulable electorate. This seems also to have impacted private education, e.g. Boris Johnson from Eton College is no exemplar of Renaissance man. Similarly, the quality of other politicians and of public figures has worsened over the past four and more decades. Entry into the supposedly 'best' universities guarantees little beyond mediocrity tinged by a superficially plausible manner. Just consider the plethora of Oxford PPE graduates who have entered 'career politics' convinced of their own profound knowledge of philosophy, politics, and economics acquired from the equivalent of one year's study of each, and with no evidence of cross-reference among the three disciplines.

Be that as it may, the huge majority of the indigenous British population inhabits a cultural wasteland, and with no offing remedy. In that regard, leaders and plebeians are indistinguishable. Perhaps, the content of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube 'influencer' videos, and nail-biting Eurovision Song Contests, represent a pinnacle of achievement?

People retaining vestiges of erstwhile virtues, e.g. curiosity, self-direction, wide-ranging knowledge, and a capacity for independent thinking, should eschew all 'popular culture' outlets. These beguile the ignorant, yet once trapped the hapless plebeian becomes the property of corporate entities seeking to mop up all vestiges of disposable income for the furtherance of 'consumerism'. Letting these entities deploy 'AI' to capture traces of one's individuality, and to assemble them into soulless doppelgängers, is a degradation too far.

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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TheTwoCultures.jpg

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porterhouse_Blue

Copyright-ignoring AI scraper bots laugh at robots.txt so the IETF is trying to improve it

P*ssing in the wind?

'AI' technology is rapidly escaping into the wild. Its penetration is actively supported by one faction of 'capital' (i.e. major players in IT), and strongly opposed by another faction (i.e. smug rentiers of information). It's a replay of brash capitalists of the 18/19th centuries introducing mechanisation and being pitted against Luddites; in the present case, each side commands considerable wealth, and neither merits sympathy as being 'downtrodden'.

What's happening shall in retrospect be deemed an inevitable consequence of emerging digital technologies, these combined with the global reach of the Internet. Meanwhile, there will be heated legal tussles and much prattling in legislatures.

Continuing the analogy to times past, the 'hungry and imaginative' IT-related corporations shall trample over the time-expired and complacent neo-Luddites. On the one side, huge amounts of capital will be expended, much of it to be lost, whilst giants and start-ups pursue ideas which include many dead-ends. The other side will wither on its hitherto bountiful vine.

There is a glimmer of hope of mankind, as a whole, benefitting. This arises in part from the likelihood of computational power continuing to increase whilst cost and energy consumption decrease or stabilise. That is, the development and training for 'AI' implementations is set to escape the grip of extant financial powers and fall within the remit of small companies, universities, professional associations, charitable institutions, and Internet-connected amateurs. From these intermediaries shall flow finely-tuned, cut-down in size, packages, these suitable for use on 'domestic-specification' devices. As for all software products, these will reproduce willy-nilly regardless of attempts to package them as proprietary.

Brit universities told to keep up the world-class research with less cash

More austerity in support of the corrupt Ukrainian government?

Cutting back the research budget is an unnoticeable, for most people, addition to communal austerity as Mr Starmer prepares a war economy, that perhaps with conscription and mobilisation in mind; we have been warned that Russian armed forces will be massing on the Channel coast by 2030 unless we Dig (in our pockets) for Victory.

UK's attempt to keep details of Apple 'backdoor' case secret… denied

Where in Whitehall is the still small voice of reason?

That professional politicians are clueless about the matters upon which they pontificate may be taken as read. The lawyers acting for the government 'take instructions' and are laymen so far as encryption is concerned. Given that initiatives government ministers preside over generally pass through committees, there should have been opportunities for doubts to be expressed over the sense of gunning for Apple. Some agencies of government, e.g. GCHQ, MI5/6, the diplomatic corps, and military signals intelligence, must be awash with people possessing deep, sometimes profound, knowledge of encryption.

In the light of that above, it's hard to believe the proposal to weaken Apple's encryption would not have received savvy scrutiny somewhere along the line. Some people charged with protecting national security or dealing with crime might believe that, on balance, weakened privacy for ordinary folk would, despite argument to the contrary, benefit society as a whole. If so, the instructions to Apple would be seen as the first step along the way to weakening all encryption available to the public. If a financially powerful and influential company of Apple's standing can be coerced, it ought to be plain sailing putting other companies under the government's thumb. Indeed, support would be forthcoming from the EU. Also, every company, no matter where based on the globe, offering commercial products involving an encryption facility, can be prevented from accepting UK clients.

As for encryption deployed outside commercial contexts, it cannot b eliminated, but only a minority of UK residents would be able to implement it, and that on a small scale. Presumably, banks and some other institutions would be licensed to use secure encryption when dealings with clients.

On the issue of AI copyright, Blair Institute favors tech bros over Cool Britannia

Blair? A former PM who could receive greater accolades from history than Johnson?

Mr 'Call me Sir Tony' Blair's Institute is not often heard about in my circle. Setting up institutes appears particularly to be an American affectation. Coming to mind is the Clinton Foundation, which provides a clever tax shelter for the would-be Clinton dynasty. Perhaps one of the most odious institutions is the Ayn Rand Institute, set up in profitable memory of one of the WEF's Patron Saints. Anyway, it's good to know that Mr Blair's lingering memory is being perpetuated among the most prestigious organisations yet conceived.

Foundations, Institutions, and Councils (e.g. that pertaining to the Atlantic), provide cosy pseudo-academic havens for pretentious feeders off various 'causes'. The Atlantic Council, has Senior Fellows, Fellows, and all manner of grandly titled associates; its website is worth a visit just for a laugh at the lengthy list of people feeding at its trough (funded by taxpayers and armament manufacturers). Doubtless, Blair's dip into guaranteed posterity, a recent entrant into this market, shall accumulate all necessary accoutrements.

Blair's foundation presumably is mandated to develop and proselytise Blair's 'take on life, its meaning, and purpose'; in respect of content one may posit it being similar to Ayn Rand's glee club.

Within the aforementioned context, the report under discussion here, indicates developing cognitive dissonance within the get rich for least effort community. Bear in mind that Blair is by deed a Neo-Liberal, whose impact upon Britain developed and cemented that of Mrs Thatcher. Blair brought the Labour Party into the Neo-Liberal fold so that it is almost indistinguishable from the Conservative and Lib-Dem Parties. Mr 'Call me Sir Keir' Starmer is a bit-player opportunist in these matters, but he with his chums Macron, and von der Leyen, is busily condemning Western Europe to life within (profitable to some) war economies.

Dissonance arises because of two competing themes. That of 'intellectual property' rentier economics - almost perpetual entitlement to receive income for no further effort - and that of unbridled entrepreneurship (never mind the 'externalities'). The rentiers seek to keep their grip on what they deem to be their property, and also to milk cattle feeding on pastures new, i.e. 'AI' technology. People determined to exploit 'AI' will brook no obstacles. The impasse is genuine because copyright law is so tightly constructed that a feasible compromise appears impossible. However, given that copyright monopoly only continues to exist by consent of governments, it can equally arbitrarily be dismantled.

Neither side holds high moral ground. The rentiers are motivated by greed for easy money, and have no concerns regarding the culturally stultifying effects of their restrictive practices. The AI proponents are seeking to establish profitable niche markets for their software and return from investment in the manufacture of supporting physical technologies; they are ignoring copyright (excellent of itself), but for the wrong reasons, i.e. convenience rather than principle.

Writing for humans? Perhaps in future we'll write specifically for AI – and be paid for it

Pie in the sky

Forty or so instances of litigation in the USA: so what?

'AI' software is easily and freely distributable, as is so for every other digitally represented artefact. Attempts to quell the escape of digital sequences from behind paywalls inevitably fail, and the time from initial marketing to the first breakout is diminishing rapidly. What's more, one instance of 'escape' usually is sufficient for indefinite propagation. It is a fact of life that binary digits do not tolerate being corralled.

Upon consideration, treating sequences as if physical property is doomed to failure either when approached from a moral perspective or from a legislative stance. Sharing sequences does not equate to theft, attempts to claim otherwise are nonsense because the key element in the definition of theft is deprivation of property; deprivation of income arising from other people refusing to acknowledge an arbitrarily defined and priced supposed 'entitlement' indicates imagination is required for finding alternative means for funding sequence production.

'AI' is the greatest threat ever to people complacently believing they can barricade behind an anachronistic legal framework based on a specious notion. Among current practical uses for AI, its ability to cross-reference divers information and to draw, as yet imperfect, but impressive, inferences is as revolutionary as the steam-powered cotton gin and looms once were.

It is clear that LLM AI and parallel offerings are within the scope of many organisations globally to develop at far more modest cost than first believed. Regardless of the outcomes from litigation in the USA and Western Europe, models will be developed using material to hand, i.e. anything already in digital format or transferable thereto, and aided by the Internet. Everything accessible via the Internet is 'fair game' for AI training and for archives to be associated with specific AIs (e.g. academic disciplines, learning aids, and helpers for scholarship); the pre-existing unofficial archives, e.g. Anna's Archive and Sci-Hub, are making a huge contribution to AI training, and if these archives were expunged tomorrow, no matter, the horse has bolted.

The feature of AI to seal the fate of copyright rentiers, rests upon how initially extensive models can be parred into smaller variants enabled to run on modest devices including domestic PCs, and laptops. Many of these will be distributed freely and widely. Technological advances will enable ordinary users privately to run increasingly complicated/extensive models. Strictly commercial models will leak in similar manner to 'pop music'. In principle, at home, college, public libraries, institutional libraries, and all manner of workplaces, to hand will be ersatz librarians and subject specialists; individual items, in their entirety, and taken from the original training materials will be nearby, these either downloaded to accompany particular AI's or sought from among communal online archives. Luddites wending their ways through judicial systems will find they were outsmarted from the beginning; they may win judgements, but the juggernaut is unstoppable. Also, individuals at risk of civil or criminal prosecution shall absent themselves to tolerant, or at least, lackadaisical jurisdictions.

Re: What's the difference between reading a book (and making note) and copying it?

Absolutely

GCHQ intern took top secret spy tool home, now faces prison

Re: Maths

Are "talent acquisition people" those who once occupied positions in personnel departments?

Disquieting features

Why was the defendant admitted to a highly secure area without being impressed by the need to surrender his phone?

Given that the secure area is open to people on short-term contracts, why are such people entering it not checked for items they carry? More to the point, why is anybody other than trusted individuals of some standing admitted if the area contains a "top secret" tool which they estimated was worth millions of pounds? Else, is "top secret" a gross exaggeration? Does "worth millions of pounds" refer to black-market value rather than development cost? Would anyone care to speculate about the nature of this extremely desirable software?

What prompted suspicion about the defendant's activities? Why, did almost a month pass before the house search was made?

Two indecent images seem like icing on the cake. How indecent were the images? Had he constructed them ab initio himself, or were they 'picked up in passing' from a fetid Internet site? If the former, were these, presumably photographic images, 'snapped' by the defendant, were they 'AI' constructs, or simply drawings based upon imagination?

Why was mention made about the GCHQ policy of 'affirmative action' regarding supposedly 'disadvantaged' groups?

Windows 11 adds auto-recovery, kills offline setup loophole

Where lies 'added value' in Microsoft products?

Given that reliable 'free', no payment or subscription required, operating system variants exist, upon what basis does MS continue to believe people/companies will pay considerable sums for the privilege of using Windows and associated products?

For individual users of Linux flavours, there exist nowadays online user groups containing considerable expertise. Similarly, business can acquire 'enterprise' versions with varying degrees of 'pay-for' technical support.

Register readers, almost daily, are regaled with tales of Windows mishaps, sometimes with further annoyances arising from attempts to fix them. MS is highly restrictive over user options to tailor the product to their specific needs, this being an irritant to knowledgeable folks capable of navigating through the labyrinthine structure. Additionally, apparently increasing use by MS of Windows intrusively to promote its other products and those of "trusted partners" doesn't sit well with the growing number of people unhappy with advertising-based culture (Amazon being the greatest offender). Moreover, the ease by which an almost ubiquitous OS available from only one source can morph into surveillance/control apparatus for state agencies, 'rights' holders, and marketing trackers, should be apparent.

The aforementioned concerns tie into the growth of 'cloud computing'. Fast Internet connections allow high level operating system functionalities (e.g. running 'office software', many 'entertainment' options including games, and highly specialised applications such as image processing and 'AI') together with some processing-related memory (e.g. RAM) and longer-term storage memory to be devolved to proprietary clouds. Not only is control over data delegated, but also there is incentive for 'consumer' level computing products to be simplified into Internet dumb terminals. Taken a step further, the state could license only certain individuals and institutions to possess stand-alone and non-cloud computing. Ultimately, when long-term storage becomes, for most people, available only in the cloud, it becomes feasible for agencies to check upon legitimacy/legality of 'content'; also they could detect most instances when disapproved encryption has been deployed.

The sketched scenario offers beguiling simplicity for users of computational devices: unobtrusive apparatus requiring only to be plugged in, text and images viewable anywhere connected without fuss to the household Intranet, most interaction via speech, and mobile phones as intermediaries for uploading homemade images and audio to the cloud. So-called 'influencers' can be recruited to plug this idea as a desirable, economical, and clutter-free, lifestyle choice.

Cloudflare builds an AI to lead AI scraper bots into a horrible maze of junk content

Captcha misery

Two matters arising.

1. CAPTCHAs are becoming an increasing irritant. Some sites, e.g. Yandex, pop up CAPTCHAs frequently while visiting them. Some CAPTCHAs contain elements hard to distinguish. Also, confrontations with sets of images within which one must identify cars, motorcycles, bicycles, buses, stairs, bridges, and so forth, add a tedious and repetitive element to online life.

Unlike irritants imposed by the marketing industry, there is no easy workaround/block. Moreover, when for privacy one uses various tools available within browsers, e.g a user-agent switcher, these can set off 'suspicion' of bot intrusion.

The article mentions that AI controlled scrappers are beginning to find means for circumventing CAPTCHAs; this must lead to increasingly difficult and/or time-consuming challenges for humans. Shall somebody create a browser add-on linked to an AI which is capable of negotiating CAPTCHAs? The human could sit back and ponder 'the meaning of life' whilst a tussle between software comes to its conclusion.

2. Isn't it time to absorb many acronyms in long use, e.g. CAPTCHA, into the language as nouns? Some could merit upper-case first letters (proper-nouns). Text with blocks of capital letters becomes unsightly. Also, each block of letters assumes implied importance compared to the rest of the text. Henceforth, 'captcha'?

The post-quantum cryptography apocalypse will be televised in 10 years, says UK's NCSC

Please clarify

Some issues for people savvy about the internal workings of encryption.

1. Presumably a quantum computer (QC) presented with a stream of digits and no prior expectation of the nature of the encoding algorithm or hint about the content, must work through all known algorithms and possible variations in their parameters until a stop criterion surfaces. The criterion would be recognisable text, numerals, or images. That, assuming the QC itself, or via a link, has AI abilities. The attempt at recognition step must entail delay in the process. Even should the QC just churn out results - these for later analysis - until it runs out of options, it would be tied up on that task and not available for other uses.

That suggests, an organisation archiving confidential/secret information using its own, perhaps a cascade, of encoding algorithms could achieve pretty much impenetrable obfuscation. The main source of weakness, as for other means of confidential data storage, would be human error/malfeasance.

2. When the organisation's data is accessible onsite for live, rather than archival, purposes, multiple persons may have entry to the data. That must entail checking bona fides by gatekeepers to the facility, and/or issuing individuals with passcodes. This offers potential insecurity, but not directly related to the effectiveness of the data's encoding. In this and the previous example, a QC cannot be given sight of the encoded data without some form of 'break-in' to purloin it.

3. Menace from QC inspection appears to be greatest for encoded live information shared among people. Unless one time pads are deployed, these being unsuitable in many circumstances, there must be a common set of encoding algorithms e.g. public key cryptography. In these instances a QC need not, as was necessary in the first item above, speculatively explore many possible algorithms. However, this acts as an incentive for organisations to devise independent semi-public key cryptography.

4. On the basis of the foregoing, and when the true capabilities of QC for decryption are known, considerable effort may be put into understanding how to maximise the cost of decryption (QC time) for enabling security of varying degrees and durations. To be borne in mind is whether there is the potential for QC to become ubiquitous.

Do AI robo-authors qualify for copyright? It's still no, says appeals court

Fine-tune extant law in expectation of making it cohere?

The introduction of digital technologies caused upset within the hitherto stable realm of so-called 'intellectual property' (IP), especially that covered by copyright. Previously, relevant law had changed incrementally in adaptation to minor alterations in circumstance. Also, an immense number of hours were spent in litigation, which often was not initially cut-and-dry and led to case-law precedents. Within this 'logic-chopping' game arose a powerful priesthood as intermediary between lay folk and the increasingly impenetrable divinely ordained abstraction called IP. The game produced delightful conundra such as whether a musical work consisting solely of silence was protected by copyright.

Sectors of commerce and trade dependent upon the rentier economics of (almost) perpetual income from generally ephemeral 'products' are showing desperation (e.g. bizarre shenanigans in Italy over 'pirate' broadcasts of live football matches). Across the swathe of digitally representable supposedly IP products, this essentially most human knowledge and cultural artefacts, rearguard defence against alleged infringement is failing.

There is a broken analogy to plugging a hole in a dyke with a finger ; the dyke can be saved with loss only of a few drops of water, which trickle away harmlessly. However, if the dyke contains copyright digital 'content' then 'one escaped drop' can replicate without bounds.

If that were not bad enough for the rentiers, the appearance of what's termed 'AI' sets a family of large feral cats among a host of plump pigeons. Legal argument over whether an AI can own copyright on its output adds to the absurdity of discussion about controlling the input to AIs during 'training'. Similarly, absurd would be claims to 'rights' over text used to prompt an AI. Lawyers, legislators, and rentiers, may spend happy hours in arguments fitting for the arena of metaphysics, but reality will trample over them. Their time would be better spent examining how knowledge and digital cultural artefacts can be properly placed in the context of market-economics instead of relying upon archaic and easily bypassed monopolistic protections.

As an aside, digital/digitised photographs and visual confections manufactured with the aid of AIs are set to become the centre of attention, as in the topic of the article. Techniques for spotting 'infringing' use of digital images are becoming unreliable now that images so easily may be 'touched up' and metadata removed. Sooner or later, outfits like Getty Images may as well place their entire stock in the public domain. That doesn't mean they should shut up shop entirely because they may be well-placed to sell added-value services relating to provenance, attribution, and linkages.

Apple's alleged UK encryption battle sparks political and privacy backlash

Re: Theatre.............

The security wallahs are so obsessed by complicated algorithms that a simple letter-substitution code could pass-by unbroken.

That is a joke, I think.

Shame on you

You dare suggest that our communal resources should not be whittled to the bone in order to sustain the brave Mr Zelensky and his noble compatriots in their efforts to prevent Russia from reaching its high tide mark in Southern England.

Re: GAFA may have the upper hand here.

Don't count on that. National Socialists stick around until physically ejected.

Nations that overreach merit contempt

The article mentions several sound reasons why some judicial proceedings should be held in camera. This instance is untenable.

The UK has a long history of invoking excessive secrecy. Some readers may recollect the 'Clive Pontin case'. More recently, in a differing context, the (deliberately?) loosely worded Section 12 of the Terrorism Act has been used as a means to intimidate people who have been ordered not to disclose details of their questioning; that under the pain of various penalties; moreover, the Sword of Damocles remains over their heads, sometimes for months pending a decision on charges; meanwhile their 'good behaviour' regarding restrictions is guaranteed.

The Apple TCN clearly is overreach. The matter under discussion is a policy decision of far-flung consequences. A decision affecting UK citizens, perhaps beyond too. The fact of the proposed 'backdoor' being nonsense, something GCHQ and other agencies are aware of, is irrelevant; it would suit just as well, better even, if service providers not fully under UK jurisdiction are forced to abandon robust encryption lest they lose the entire UK market.

Apple first and, doubtless, many more to follow. The instigators of this plan revel in the prospect of all privately held communication devices, including PCs, being rendered incapable of running secure encryption protocols. The downside will be passed to industry and commerce. Consequently, the cost of security breaches, as with banks, will fall to customers.

Bad laws, or those inappropriately applied, must be disobeyed. Individuals and organisations in receipt of TCN orders should immediately reveal the full content. It can be arranged for designated 'whistle-blowers' to spill the beans when outside UK jurisdiction and to remain there until the fuss blows over. It shouldn't take many 'snooks' cocked at authority to drive the point home. Also, should prosecutions arise, 'jury nullification' like that in the Pontin case could occur. However, the prospect of 'nullification' may be much less these days as a result of dumbed-down education, the stultifying effects of long-standing 'austerity', plus the population being cowed by the grossly mishandled Covid-19 epidemic.

Perhaps if Britain's dual-party (national) socialist government succeeds in meeting all expectations of its WEF masters, there no longer will be jury trials. Just think of the money saved, which can be added to the UK's long-term commitment of funding Ukraine's benevolent and scrupulously honest leaders.

OpenAI asks Uncle Sam to let it scrape everything, stop other countries complaining

Re: While we're at it

How do exclusive rights to exploiting an idea promote innovation?

Re: Hi ! We want to steal everything...

You don't appear to comprehend the simple fact that anything portrayable as a binary digital sequence, once placed in the binary domain, is devoid of monetary value; that despite the amount of money/effort that went into its making. Its value on a different metric could be immense, e.g. cultural worth.

Nevertheless, a digital sequence can have indirect monetary value within a market. Foremost, it establishes the credentials of creative individuals and groups competing for patronage enabling further creative works.

Additionally, it can provide a focus for the sale of 'added value' products and services, e.g. keepsakes and, access via a patronage platform, to the sequence's creator. Another tangential monetary value may lie in applying the content of the sequence to manufacturing physical items (via recipes or blueprints) or aiding the provision of a tangible service (via software); in this circumstance any exclusive 'right' defined by law is rapidly being vitiated, e.g. advanced 3D-printing (from digital recipes) shall abound in cottage industries around the globe; similar technologies are being developed for pharmaceuticals and 'wet' biological concoctions.

Nevertheless, those people who are more strongly motivated by acquiring wealth than indulging their innovative whims further, can strike whilst the iron is hot and create a market for specific tangible and cultural products. Whether they can retain a competitive edge depends upon perceptions of quality and price.

Taken further, a sequence may contain seeds for the creation of new strings of digits, which form the starting point for cultural advance or for marketable goods and services. A process known as 'derivation'. So-called 'ownership rights', other than entitlement to attribution, impede derivation from material and cultural artefacts.

In essence, markets shall persist for tangible goods and services. Economic theory pertaining to supply/demand, scarcity, competition, and price discovery persists. However, intangibles drop from its purview, along with all monopoly entitlements. Anticipate profound shifts in the nature of trade, national economies, individual access to and for use of resources, and personal expectations. I posit these will be driven by former colonial nations unhitching from a yoke of demands, and international conventions, conceived by, and for the benefit of colonial masters.

The most wayward ex-colony of all, the USA, fights tooth and nail to preserve a system of illusory 'rights', initially formalised in the UK, and carefully embroidered by the USA over two and a half centuries. The intellectual and cultural renaissance in the offing will eventually benefit ordinary residents of the USA.

Re: Hi ! We want to steal everything...

How may the EU prevent people in the USA from harvesting whatever they want from the Internet?

Re: Hi ! We want to steal everything...

The USA has its Marines.

Global demise of copyright is an inevitability - explain why not, if you can

I hold no brief for any of the AI production companies. However, should US AI developers be constrained to exist in the pretty walled garden provided by copyright, the fruit on their vines shall wither. The technology could thrive elsewhere. Regardless of whether AI lives up fully to the expectations of entrepreneurs, some aspects of its use evidently shall: one such is as an educational and research tool offering an annotated collection of human culture together with means to service enquiries by drawing from across literature databases; copies of this tool, some perhaps devoted to highly specific domains, can sit on individual computational devices, on more powerful institutional computers, and in 'the cloud'. Anyone imagining AI to be containable within the traditional commercial environment is deluded.

Arising from this is an irony. For instance, take Microsoft (MS), which is in the AI game. It would be difficult for MS to claim high moral ground when condemning 'free loaders' who copy MS software and use it without a licence. Private individuals do this with no prospect of comeback, could not corporate entities independent of MS demand greater 'fair use' of MS products?

Gradually, but at quickening pace, the intellectually stultifying atmosphere arising from the specious concept of 'intellectual property' is being cleansed by multiple individual acts of disobedience to outmoded law. There is a shift in trade from selling digital end-products (on a rigged monopolist market) to seeking patronage for use of skills (individual, and cooperative) in making (and for distributing with added value to zero) digital artefacts. A reckoning awaits for avaricious folk with a deep sense of 'entitlement'. The irony is compounded by the USA, the arch-rentier nation, housing the most powerful of disobedient entities.

Re: While we're at it

The patent office? Excellent.

There are other ways for giving credit for invention. Also, just think of the number of lawyers to dispatch for useful labour, such as digging ditches.

Re: Hi ! We want to steal everything...

You omit mentioning that the stuff people wish to 'steal' is sold at a price arbitrarily determined by the vendor. This despite digital 'content' lacking intrinsic scarcity, and anyway, lying around on the Internet for anyone with nous to discover and copy.

Analogy with genuine 'theft' of tangible objects breaks down immediately. You may refuse to sell someone your Rembrandt, this regardless of the price offered. If someone steals the painting, you are derived of its use as an ornament. Only one person at a time can possess it.

Suppose the thief is a kindly soul and returns the Rembrandt to you. Further, imagine the thief possesses technology enabling manufacture of perfect copies of a painting; copies indistinguishable by all known physical and chemical tests. The thief distributes copies among his acquaintances. You have lost nothing other than indisputable evidence of your painting's provenance.

It should be obvious where this leads.

We did not have Brave clashing with Rupert Murdoch on our 2025 bingo card, but there it is

Reminds me of another litigious nuisance

In the latter decades of the 20th century, Robert Maxwell (aka Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch), a wheeler/dealer in publishing, was famous for suing anybody who criticised him. Litigation was a tool to prevent gossip about his nasty nature and dodgy business transactions becoming widely known. A repeated victim of Ján Hoch's malice was the satirical magazine 'Private Eye'.

Ján Hoch managed to keep the lid on his despicable character until his death. He drowned at sea in 1991. He fell, or was pushed, off his private yacht; nobody was inclined to probe deeply. Immediately upon hearing of Hoch's death, news media offered a deluge of no-holds-barred revelations. It was an orgy of joyful release after the bully's death.

Maybe, there is something about owning newspapers and publishing houses which brings out the basest instincts. Murdoch has not as yet fallen into the water, so we can't know whether those who malign him are knaves or truth-tellers. However, Murdoch's frequent visits to 10 Downing Street raised speculation about his motivations, particularly so in the long period during which he hobnobbed with Mr (call me Sir Tony) Blair.

A disrespectful person penned the following fantasy about Rupert Murdoch's much anticipated encounter with St Peter.

-----

St Peter: What do you think qualifies you for a place in Heaven?

Murdoch: I am very rich. That is, I didn't bury my talents. Jesus will confirm that.

St Peter: Correction, you were very rich. Don't you recall something about a camel and the eye of a needle?

Murdoch: I didn't have much time to hang around in churches.

St Peter: That hardly helps, does it? Try another tack.

Murdoch: I persuaded British politicians to do the right thing.

St Peter: You mean you bought British politicians. Anyway, what was the "right thing"?

Murdoch: It was grasping that dissemination of news and entertainment should only be in the hands of those propagating decent values. That must surely be God's wish?

St Peter: Do you mean the 'News of the World' and various morally dubious tacky channels available through Sky TV? Oh, come to think of it, up here we did enjoy 'Eurotrash'. However, you have said nothing yet to justify a place in Heaven. On the contrary, you are displaying the qualities of a carpetbagger and 'wide-boy'.

Murdoch: Oh, you have misunderstood my intention. I thought you would expect an honest man to be open about his sins and reticent over his appealing qualities.

St Peter: Far too reticent. We have nothing favourable about you on file. Yet that could be an oversight. Tell me, have you ever done a simple act of kindness unconnected with making money? For instance, taking in a stray kitten.

Murdoch: (a very long silence)

NARRATOR: We must leave it there because Murdoch has gone into catatonic trance whilst dredging through the murky depths of his memory.

101 fun things to do with a locked Kindle e-reader

Overzealous protection of 'content' is counterproductive

Amazon's attempt to further lockdown books its subscribers believe they have bought entitlement to store and read by any means they find convenient, may damage Amazon's reputation and e-book sales.

Amazon is not alone in deluded thinking about the degree to which it is able to control customer behaviour and to protect what it deems as its property or its 'right' to vend on behalf of somebody else. Film streaming services like Netflix, HBO, and others, not only guard their walled gardens, but also fragment them according to geographical regions; the latter ploy arising because they acquiesce to the demands of publishers/makers for geographical division of 'rights'; collectively the streaming outlets could put an end to that nonsense by refusing to display 'content' restricted in said manner.

Anyway, restrictions irksome to paying customers encourage workarounds. In the absence of these barriers, some of Amazon's magically replenishable e-book stock may evaporate copies, which further reproduce beyond Amazon's control. Given that some evaporation is inevitable for digital products, the matter boils down to comparing Amazon's income with and without particular barriers: pragmatism in the face of reality.

Setting aside the faux market value for digital books, the core of the business reduces to providing added value to ephemeral purchases: convenience, a broad and well constructed catalogue, thoughtful reviews, early availability of new digital products, etc. Competing e-content sellers should bear in mind that 'added value' is the key competitive element of their businesses.

Apple drags UK government to court over 'backdoor' order

Request to the IPT

When adjudicating Apple's objection to HM's Government demand for access to its customers' encrypted data, please probe into the following.

With regard to overall national security, to protecting UK residents from terrorism, and to reducing criminal exploitation of children and vulnerable adults, ascertain the quality of evidence supporting the assertion that the benefits of breakable-encryption outweigh those of absolutely respecting privacy.

To that end, government advocates should be required to produce statistics. For example, have estimates been made of the numbers of crimes in various categories which would have been thwarted had breaking encryption (Apple's or anyone else's) been possible? This requires examining records of crimes known to have involved encrypted communication and relating each to the outcome, i.e. criminal conviction or no progress.

There is more delving that can be done, but the point is that unsubstantiated opinions from political office holders, or from glib experts, do not constitute evidence. Given that the IPT is a quasi-judicial body, it should approach its task with forensic exactitude.

Free Software Foundation rides to defend AGPLv3 against Neo4j license add-ons

Re: Who owns Copyright in Copyright?

Copyright, reformulated and incorporated into British statute in 1709/10, has become a tightly-tangled-knot consisting of multiple strands, many of which are bifurcations of preexisting ones. The law, by statute amendment and by judicial case-law, has become so complicated and far-reaching that many individuals and businesses to which it applies stumble like blind folk unless they are accompanied by lawyers; even that may offer little guarantee of safety. Originally defined in statute to encompass printed works, its complexity has increased as it extended to cover other means of information representation. In conjunction with patent law, it is an utter mess, and offers paradise for nitpicking lawyers.

Copyright nowadays has the characteristics of terminally bad law: lack of comprehensibility by those to whom it applies, increasing willingness to disobey it, and a losing battle to enforce it. Just like recently repealed laws covering witchcraft, copyright is predicated upon a false abstraction: in this case, conflating ideas, and their representation, with physical property.

The current legal spat demonstrates a 'reduction to absurdity'. The question "Who owns Copyright in Copyright?" brilliantly sums up the stupidity.

Scientists create woolly ma-mouse by looking at mean genes from the Pleistocene

Boring

Can we not make politicians of intelligence, sound education, and integrity, non-extinct?

Signal will withdraw from Sweden if encryption-busting laws take effect

Workarounds?

Signal is distributed free of charge. What would prevent people from downloading the software from foreign sites and using it?

More worrisome shall be attacks upon VPN services. At present, VPNs are under scrutiny from copyright rentiers, these wishing to oblige VPN providers to block access to sites deemed to infringe upon their God-given 'rights'. Presumably, various state security agencies would like the ability to decrypt the traffic. Combined, these lobbies are powerful.

Regarding subscriptions to banned (or voluntarily withdrawn) services, shall there be an upsurge in use of non-legal-tender for transactions? For example, alt-coinage and shopping vouchers (e.g. Amazon).