* Posts by Dinanziame

916 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Sep 2019

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Poking holes in Google tech bagged bug hunters $10M

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Angel

Re: Alternatively

They already have people paid to do debugging, who are simply not finding those bugs — what's their incentive?

On the other hand, paying your own employees by bug fixed is an excellent way to have a lot of bugs in your software: "I'm going to code myself a minivan this afternoon!"

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Angel

That's still good, I guess? I think we can forget the notion of companies designing secure from the start — good luck with that — so bug bounties are at least a way to find new vulnerabilities, and to give some cash to third-party white hats. They could get better results by raising the bounties, but...

Copilot can't stop emitting violent, sexual images, says Microsoft whistleblower

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Holmes

A pass for what? Giving ridiculous results only exposes you to ridicule. Being woke is not illegal, and definitely more accepted than the tiniest suspicion of being racist. Hell, they might even have staged the whole thing to give themselves some protection in case their AI does return racist results later.

Oh look, cracking down on Big Tech works. Brave, Firefox, Vivaldi surge on iOS

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Meh

Surging how much

If it's surging from 5% to 10% that's very nice. But I suspect it's surging from 0.05% to 0.1%

Trump 'tried to sell Truth Social to Musk' as SPAC deal stalled

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Pirate

Re: How much?

I can only assume they are trying to pump up the numbers before the IPO. Trump is quite good at getting other people to invest in his failed businesses and extract millions from them.

Chinese chap charged with stealing Google’s AI datacenter secrets

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'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

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Devil

Re: Audit checks

I suppose their contacts contain clauses like "we might change the licensing model at any time once you're locked in"?

Google dresses up services for the EU's Digital Markets Act

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Devil

Re: Google, why are you like this?

I think you can count yourself very lucky if they only ask you to reconsider this one time, on the day the change happens. They definitely want users to think of Google as one big blob that provides dozens of services rather than a collection of unrelated services which can easily be replaced by a third party. They don't even feel bad about this — from their point of view, it makes their services better. They think they can provide better results on YouTube if they know what you searched for on Google, and so on.

Not that people will feel reassured by these new rules. A large number of people think that their phone is constantly listening to them just to choose which ads to show them, permissions be damned, with no more evidence than "I talked about cars and then it showed me ads for cars". The fact that DMA makes this explicitly illegal won't convince them.

Indian tech minister vows to stop Google removing local apps from Play Store

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Devil

Re: Choke...

You might want to check out this John Oliver video about people who try to gain your friendship on the internet: Pig Butchering Scams

Note: Even though you are posting a comment on a website and I am answering your comment, this should in no way be interpreted as a social contact. I'm not trying to be your friend!

Apple's Titan(ic) iCar project is dead as self-driving dream fails to materialize

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Holmes

Re: I don't get it

I think they just got conned into following Google in doing something that's way outside their domain. I actually think it makes more sense for Apple to build a self-driving car rather than just doing software, because Apple is primarily a hardware company, not a software company. If they had created something high-quality they could have convinced people to pay double usual prices. By the time they decided to just do the software I think the project was already dead. And when they saw Tesla having to cut prices to fight off competition that was probably the last nail in the coffin.

Admittedly it does not technically make a lot of sense for Google to do self-driving cars either; that was the old Google that would spend billions on a white elephant project just because it sounded cool (They literally had the motto "do cool things that matter" for a while). The current Google is concentrating on raising its stock price, and would never start such a project. I'm actually wondering how long they will keep it around, considering that it's very unlikely to be profitable for a long time, much less reach the kind of profit margins that are considered successful within Google.

OpenAI sued, again, for scraping and replicating news stories

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Alert

Re: So how do you stop this?

I think those models can be really useful to help writing boring stuff, like "write a letter in German to my landlord to complain about this issue with the building". It might help people whose job is to write things, though for the moment they might want to be really careful about fact checking the output, since the models tend to hallucinate. When it comes to automatically answering questions and queries though, I think their ability to put statement of facts into nice-looking sentences is mostly form over function — the form looks high quality, which we tend to think implies that the content is high quality as well, but that's not the case.

Google wants regulators to take Microsoft down a notch before it stifles AI

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Alert

Re: The pot calling the kettle black

Offering features in your cloud that makes it hard to migrate to another cloud is something that all cloud platforms do. But here Microsoft has the particularity that it is using the fact they have a quasi-monopoly in one domain (Windows in enterprise software) to reinforce their position in another domain (cloud), by charging more for Windows licenses if it doesn't run on their cloud. It's the local electricity company saying "we are also an ISP, and if you get another ISP we'll charge you more for electricity".

Google to reboot Gemini image gen in a few weeks after that anti-White race row

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Holmes

White people might be a minority in numbers in the world, but the decision to promote minorities are taken at the country level. And in most countries that promote minorities, White people are the majority.

Microsoft trying to stop Copilot generating fake Putin comments on Navalny's death

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Re: Autonomous cars and other road users

My understanding is that braking lights are supposed to turn on when the deceleration is higher than X m/s^2. That's however not what gas cars do; the lights turn on at the first brush against the brake pedal, and not at all when braking with the engine.

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Re: Autonomous cars and other road users

Eye contact is a plus, though it's not strictly necessary — it doesn't work at night, for example. But on the other hand, we tend to concentrate on what humans do that self-driving cars cannot replicate, like eye contact, and we fail to imagine things that self-driving cars could do that humans couldn't because of their own limitations. For instance, self-driving cars could have a blinking red light on the front of the car meaning "I'm not moving, you go ahead", or multiple other indicators which would be too bothersome for a human to coordinate and trivial to implement on a self-driving car.

Now that I think of it, when eye contact is not possible at night, humans sometimes stop and flash the headlights to indicate "go ahead". I wonder if this has been implemented on self-driving cars.

It's crazy but it's true: Apple rejected Bing for wrong answers about Annie Lennox

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Re: If Google loses, it does not win

I think Google is popular enough that most Apple customers want to use Google, and would complain not having it as the default. I assume they would complain even more if it is clear that Apple switched to Bing in order to receive billions from Microsoft.

Unless Apple goes with creating their own search engine (not entirely impossible, they did just that for Apple Maps), I assume the default search engine will remain Google, and Apple will just get billions less.

Google sends Gemini AI back to engineering to adjust its White balance

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Devil

I assume they remembered the Tay fiasco, and were determined not to fall in the same trap. And AIs have been slammed in the past for only recognizing white people and ignoring other races. Still there's a big jump from "include other races when appropriate" to "refuse to depict white people".

There was probably a judgement that it's preferable to be seen as woke than racist.

Please stop pouring the wrong radioactive water into the sea, Fukushima operator told

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This seems relatively minor, but it's good to know that they're paying attention.

Two days into the Digital Services Act, EU wields it to deepen TikTok probe

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IT Angle

Re: Penalties of up to 6%

Have you missed the multi-billion dollars fines that have been handed out by the EU to various tech companies? What reason would the EU have to not apply such fines to TikTok?

Google open sources file-identifying Magika AI for malware hunters and others

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Windows

Isn't it a bit dangerous to publish your defense tool? Makes it easier for bad actors to figure out how to break them, no?

X accused of taking money from terrorists by selling checkmarks to US enemies

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Stop

Re: More tribal BS,

How are American citizens or businesses supposed to be able to vet every customer?

Banks have had know your customer regulations for a very long time. You just need to work on it, and not fire the whole team charged with doing it.

FCC Commissioner calls for crackdown on Apple's iMessage gatekeeping

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Boffin

Re: Hmmm

If Apple provides the infrastructure for iMessage, don’t they get to say who can access it? Or is it so big now it falls outside of that usual rule of business.

Indeed, it's about size. Nobody cares if a small barely used service makes it hard for competitors to work with it; but if it's one of the largest services around, that's when it starts being a gatekeeper and different rules apply.

For instance, Apple fought the EU's efforts to force open iMessage by pointing out that it is barely used in Europe compared to the US.

UK Cabinet Office hits pause on £9M Microsoft deal

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Devil

Re: Move

The problem was that no consultant can get paid for not migrating to a new platform. Also, choosing not to do something looks like you're not doing anything, which does not look good.

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

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Boffin

Re: Question is...

There are also network effects for large ad businesses. Your ads carry a big bonus if you can guarantee that at least X% of the population see them. For that reason, when you have a large ad business, you have a strong disincentive to offer ad-free tiers. The reason is that when people switch to the ad-free tier, you not only lose the ad revenue, but you can even charge less for ads, because advertisers know that their ads is reaching only part of the population so they are less valuable.

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

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Re: Something I have yet to grok...

It's a joke. It was never not going to be a joke, considering it looks like a 3D model from a 90s video game.

Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

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Angel

Re: It Could Work

Sounds fair... if the websites also get to block you when you don't pay

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Re: What's the first word you think of when someone says "Amazon"?

It's the other way — If somebody says books, I think Amazon.. and if they say Amazon, I think a dozen things, and one of them is books.

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Windows

Good luck

You often see people complain about ads, and claim they'd gladly pay for an ad-free experience if they could. Time to put their money where their mouth is, right?

Not holding my breath.

Meta says risk of account theft after phone number recycling isn't its problem to solve

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Using SMS as a security measure is broken in more than one way. SMS messages are broadcast across the world, and it only takes one corrupt phone company anywhere to intercept them.

CERN is training robot dogs to spot radiation hazards at Large Hadron Collider

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Angel

Might be useful in low radioactivity environment as well

From what I've heard, they have interns whose task is to go do something very quick in the tunnel and run the whole way, because sooner or later they meet the total exposition-per-year threshold for being next to the slightly radioactive machines; and then they are sent back to their home country.

Apple Vision Pro is creating a new generation of glassholes

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They claim to have a passthrough latency of 12ms, which is impressive to be sure. I suppose we'll soon know whether this is good enough to walk around for a long time without barfing. The field of view is severely reduced though, so even if walking around is okayish, driving is not, and will not.

I don't see a lot of people actually using the screen in front to display their eyes, it seems more creepy than useful.

One thing I haven't seen either is people asking angrily if the wearer is recording a video, which I remember was a feature of Google Glass. Maybe it pays to be second.

An established AI player is in nasty trouble – in this market? What? Why?

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Yeah, there's a bunch of people who've been doing AI for years who've been completely blindsided by GenAI. Not that what they were doing was necessarily useless, but what they do is definitely not trendy anymore, so sometimes everybody just runs away from them.

CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator

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Joke

I'll be honest...

This kind of makes it sound like researchers are running out of things to do.

Credits to The Onion

Still no love for JPEG XL: Browser maker love-in snubs next-gen image format

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Re: Put in on cruise control, lay back, lay off, and reap the dividends.

Not sure it's really related to this story, but it's an interesting insight on the clusterfuck that Boeing has become, thanks!

Google flushes cached search results forever

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Angel

Re: What they really mean.

Well to be fair it's not like you're paying them anything, right?

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Meh

To be honest, I thought that had gone long ago, when the cached result link stopped being shown right under the search results. I never knew it had moved to the "about this result" screen.

I suppose so few people knew about it that the utilization was very low, and that's why it's going away? I can't imagine it costs a lot to maintain...

Deepfake CFO tricks Hong Kong biz out of $25 million

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Re: Root cause

I think you have too high expectations of safety mechanisms in financial institutions. Very often, the only thing that prevents an employee from transferring money to their own account is the fact that everything is logged and they would get caught.

Universal Music accuses TikTok of 'intimidation' and threats to replace humans with AI

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Re: Uncle Sam wants to dismantle TikTok.

I think YouTube already has a system that's supposed to prevent you from watching certain videos from another website. Not sure if it works though.

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Trollface

TikTok's counter is that its platform lets a billion people access music for free

I can totally see this being a convincing argument with Universal

Japanese government finally bids sayonara to the 3.5" floppy disk

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Happy

Old regulations

Roughly six years ago, our business was asked to provide some data to a government body. They did not request floppy disks; sending CSV files by email was fine. However, they still wanted two copies.

Competition is decreasing in enterprise IT – and you’ll be poorer and dumber for it

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Re: Monies

Just like the prices charged by companies to customers for their products, the salary earned by workers is not determined by the value they bring, but by how hard they are to replace.

The price you pay for a server is not proportional to the money you'll make with it. The salary of an employee is not proportional to how profitable they are to the company. Miners earn about the same in a coal mine or a diamond mine.

Europe forces Apple to give its citizens some choice over iOS browser engine, app store

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Re: "developers must provide Apple a stand-by letter of credit [...] of €1,000,000"

Well, marketplace developers. That's hardly going to be a problem for serious companies wishing to develop an alternative to the app store.

Boeing goes boing: 757 loses a wheel while taxiing down the runway

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Re: potato potato

Oh ouch. Common mistake, but still: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombia

It's important to note this is not a language thing, Colombia is the official word in English just as it is in Spanish. And yes, it's almost the same, but Oakland and Auckland are different cities in very different places, and should not be confused either.

Google settles with Singular Computing over claims of stolen AI chip tech

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Meh

Re: Patents

Singular Computing seems to have a barebone website, but no wikipedia page. They don't seem to have accomplished much out of their patents, apart from whatever sum Google paid them to fuck off.

Apple's on-device gen AI for the iPhone should surprise no-one. The way it does it might

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Angel

Apple is not a software company

And they are not aiming to become one. However they feel the need to pretend.

Wait, hold on, everyone – Mozilla thinks Apple, Google, Microsoft should play fair

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Re: What “market share”?

The internet

France fines Amazon €32M for watching staff so much they'd have to 'justify each break'

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Re: Slap on the wrist

It would be a very brave tech company these days who would try to change the mind of European regulators. Billion-dollar fines have been regularly meted out, and new regulations are coming up fast.

What I meant is that the fine is, all things considered, appropriate for the size of the business and the gravity of the infraction. A small company would have been fined in thousands rather than millions, because it is calculated as a reminder to be careful without actually hurting the business much.

Apple has botched 3D for decades. So good luck with the Vision Pro, Tim

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Devil

And even with the hardware in place, what's the killer app besides games?

Well, Meta thinks that business meetings are better virtually than through a video screen, though I think the tech will need to get much better before that is true.

Other than that, who knows? Once we have really good AR, maybe people will prefer to walk with AR glasses rather than looking at their cell phones, for Terminator-style heads-up display. Or maybe Minority-report handwave interfaces will be found to be cool to read documents and work on some projects. Possibly art? If everything else fails, there's always porn.

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The bigger problem is that it's not clear there's a lot of appeal to wear a device on your head. So far, it's only video games that have had some modest success. The day may come where a Metaverse-like experience is considered better than a simple screen, but we're probably at least a decade away.

Tech world won't have long to fall in line when EU signs off on AI Act

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Devil

"Regulating products is fine. But [regulating] R&D is ridiculous."

I can hardly assume that academics and enthusiasts tinkering in their labs and homes would be impacted by this regulation? Corporations mass-launching "beta services" to the public definitely should though. Possibly, the EU will go the DSA/DMA route and just clearly state which global tech companies this applies to.

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