Posts by Dinanziame

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

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

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

Re: It Could Work

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

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

Re: What they really mean.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: What “market share”?

The internet

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

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.

Slap on the wrist

This is a speeding fine for Amazon. Doesn't hurt much, but just enough to get their attention.

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

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.

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

"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.

Meta accused of enrolling undecided EU users in ad-sponsored platform

Re: Like it will make any difference...

In this case, they'd be better be sure they don't get caught. The fines for not complying with DMA regulations are 10% of global turnover, so for Meta that'll be $10B. Fines are doubled for repeated infringement.

Google building datacenter campus on the outskirts of London

Re: Carbon free

It's not entirely wrong — some of the energy inserted into the grid is known to be green, though perhaps produced at a higher price, and companies can pay the higher price for the bragging right of being those who, if not use, at least subsidise this energy production. Ultimately, it's a matter of money — if you want to claim to be green, you need to pay more. This encourages the production of green energy, raises the price for companies that care about being green, and overall encourages using less energy when possible.

How artists can poison their pics with deadly Nightshade to deter AI scrapers

Re: Let the AI wars begin!

I can imagine the Sci-Fi movie of the top assassin, which has become invisible to all CCTVs because the secret society which employs them has poisoned all the AI recognition systems over the years

IT consultant fined for daring to expose shoddy security

Re: Could be worse

This article says: As an IT security consultant, it will be a long time before Cuthbert's reputation is restored and it is possible he will never work in the industry again.

However, it seems their current LinkedIn profile says "Experienced Senior Global Head of Cyber Security Research, skilled in Threat Intelligence"

Google to bring India’s Unified Payments Interface to the world

Re: X Envy?

Google has been in payments for a lot longer than X or Meta — They started about at the same time as Apple Pay, though with varying success due to the fragmented nature of Android. They've also created a dozen different apps to confuse users. India is one of the countries where they have been particularly successful and they've tried expanding on that for some time.

US agencies warn made-in-China drones might help Beijing snoop on the world

It seems that the DJI Fly Android app is not in the Google Play store anymore, and can only be downloaded from their website... There's been a scare before on DJI apps:

Chinese-made drone app in Google Play spooks security researchers

Then again, the iPhone app is still on the Apple Store. I'm sure everything is fine.

Google TAG: Kremlin cyber spies move into malware with a custom backdoor

The victim, we're told, can't open the benign PDF, which appears to be encrypted. It's not, but this usually prompts a return email from the victim saying they can't open the doc. Then the phony email account responds with a link to a "decryption" utility that is actually the SPICA backdoor.

Oh come on

Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse

Wot, no comparison between search engines?

If they study the quality of results of all three engines over a year, I'd have thought they'd at least in passing compare their relative quality

Here's a list of thousands of artists Midjourney's AI is ripping off, creatives claim

Re: Piles of styles

I think the point is that it is possible to recognize a style, whether it is real or a good copy, and that users apparently request for specific styles. Apparently style cannot be copyrighted, but it is an interesting point that an artist can create innovative works in a style that nobody has seen before, and similar works in the same style can flood the market immediately. At this point, there soon won't be a lot of artists who can make any money at all.

YouTube video lag wrongly blamed on its ad-blocking animus

Re: I can smell something... smells a lot like bullshit

You haven't read the article at all, have you? If you update your adblocker to the latest version, or change to a different adblocker, it will run fine.

Google updates Chrome's Incognito Mode data slurp disclaimer in early browser build

The plaintiffs claimed that Google can match Incognito Mode users to visited sites through IP addresses

... and so can your ISP, and the sites themselves, as was already indicated in the text written below.

We'll never know what are the terms of the settlement, but I'd be surprised the plaintiffs got a lot of money for this.

Cloudflare defends firing of staffer for reasons HR could not explain

I also totally see it as possible that they wanted to get rid of somebody — anybody, because they decided the team didn't need to be as big as it was or they had a target to remove 10% of the workforce across the org, or any reason similarly unrelated to performance. Then, getting rid of somebody on the probationary period was much less work than somebody else, precisely because they was no need to build a case or justify anything.

And actually, you could also consider it's nicer to get rid of somebody on the probationary period rather than somebody who's been working for the company for X years. I believe in some countries like Germany, it's even mandatory to first lay off people on the probationary period rather than long-term employees.

China loathes AirDrop so much it's publicized an old flaw in Apple's P2P protocol

Re: AirDrop is a weird thing

I can only assume that somebody wanted to increase engagement numbers. People with such goals don't care if the "engagement" consists in Spam or people angrily yelling at their device.

NASA, Lockheed Martin reveal subtly supersonic X-59 plane

Re: Semitic Plane

Codename "Cyrano"

Why Google is waiving egress fees for disgruntled customers ditching GCP

Re: Can we charge back google...

If you want, they can deduct from your bill for the video you want to watch

Re: Good move, clever PR

It might also be that, considering they are a relatively smaller player, they estimate that waiving egress fees costs them relatively little compared to what it would cost leading players.

Well, yeah?

Just in case you don't know the difference: Google Docs is pretty much a web-only product, so there's no problem whatsoever accessing Google Docs from a virtual desktop running on Azure; you just need a browser. The few Drive-related native apps provided by Google have no such restrictions either. However, Office is still (in part) based on heavy native applications, which Microsoft does not allow running on virtual desktops running on GCP.

Google's TPUs could end up costing it a billion-plus, thanks to this patent challenge

I remember that if it can be shown that the infringement was deliberate, damages are tripled...? Or something like that.

Also, if Google tries to argue that their method is in fact different than that described on the patent, I suppose it might be argued that they started from the patent and changed a few details to make it different (but that's just my common sense argument, so it's probably absolutely the opposite of what's goes in a patent trial)

Watermarks on AI art a futile game of digital hide-and-seek

Re: @AC - How can an article be that long

Private key signing should be able to prove the information is genuine, no? Which means you could at least prove in some cases that the art is AI-generated. Probably not that it is not AI-generated though.

Everyone's suing AI over text and pics. But music? You ain't seen nothing yet

There's a lot of music in the public domain! I'm personally looking forward to Beethoven's 33rd piano sonata and Mozart's 42nd symphony. Maybe AI won't be able to create music based on anything written in the 20th century but I'll survive.

X reverses course on headlines in article links, kinda

The bankers who lent the money are definitely not happy. Maybe the associates he managed to pony up think that his friendship is worth that many billions?

Google to start third-party cookie cull for 30 million Chrome users

Re: If I can stay in no groups?

Well, this alone will certainly not prevent you from seeing ads — you'll need an ad blocker for that one way or another.