Posts by Dinanziame

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?

If that's Elon Musk's plan, he is the most fantastic actor alive. Especially since he complained about and claimed to "expose" the controls exerted by the lizard overlords on Twitter before he bought it.

Help! We are prisoners in a headline factory!

Nice headline on this article

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.

Irony alert: Lawsuit alleging Chrome’s Incognito Mode isn’t will settle on unknown terms

Re: I'm shocked!

Chrome doesn't have a private mode, but an incognito mode. Firefox and Safari have a private mode, and Edge has an InPrivate mode. I don't think they work any differently, but since we're talking about users' perception of the feature, the naming matters.

Lapsus$ teen sentenced to indefinite detention in hospital for Nvidia, GTA cyberattacks

this gang have proved highly manipulative "The crew's tactics included phone-based social engineering".

Like you, I used to think that social engineering required high-level con skills. However, I've since learned that there are scam labor camps in South-East Asia, where people are kidnapped and forced to work on online scams: 7 Months Inside an Online Scam Labor Camp

The implication is that you can kidnap a random Chinese farmer, chain him to a desk with a bunch of phones and a script, and he'll manage to scam people online. No highly-manipulative social engineering skills needed, it's that easy.

"broke into Rockstar Games using an Amazon Firestick, his room's TV, and a phone"

I'm seriously impressed. If it was a movie, I'd be laughing at how unrealistic this is and complaining about clueless writers.

FTC wants to crack down on Big Biz profiting from kids' data

On one hand, I think it should be illegal to monetise kids' data — no opt-in, no T&Cs, no loophole: Illegal.

On the other hand, I'm aware many kids are using their parents' accounts and as a result "their" data is getting monetised. So the fight is a bit of a theatre of shadows.

Mozilla decides Trusted Types is a worthy security feature

Re: Strong Typing

Alternatively, it means El Reg is properly escaping your input so that your &lt; is not interpreted as a < or your &gt; as a >.

Europe classifies three adult sites as worthy of its toughest internet regulations

I suppose the EU will let a website off if the number of users goes significantly below the limit for a few years.

However, users don't need a subscription to access those websites... Or So I've Been Told!™

So they don't have a mechanism to limit the number of their users.

Google coughs up $700M in Play Store antitrust suit

So they are settling the lawsuit with the government, and appealing the ruling with Epic? I guess you got to pick your battles.

Google Pixel gets privacy mode to keep your selfies safe from prying repair techs

Re: I can't see the UK government liking this one bit.

They do

Google pencils in limited third-party cookie purge for January

Re: None

"Should" being the operative word here. I think certain websites have been lazily using third-party cookies for authentication to their own services.

Science fiction writers imagine a future in which AI doesn’t abuse copyright – or their generosity

Short sighted sci-fi

I will never get tired of pointing out that I've read lots of sci-fi stories about people losing their jobs to a robot, and not a single one of them was about a sci-fi writer losing their job to an AI

Epic decision sees jury find Google's Play store is illegal monopoly

Re: Breaking up is hard to do x

I think Chrome was started by Google. And they might have initially bought YouTube and Google Maps, but those have so little in common with what they used to be at the time that I'm willing to attribute the success to Google as well.

Amazon's game-streamer Twitch to quit South Korea, citing savage network costs

Re: is this better for SK Broadband?

The content streamer’s view of “fair” is like Steinway driving a customer’s new piano to the local postal sorting office and saying “Here you go: Get that to Apartment 6, 113 Main Street, thanks. Oh, and we’re only paying you five bucks, considering we’ve brought it most of the way for you.”.

Note that in this case the "post office" has entered a contract with the owner of Apartment 6, 133 Main Street, stating that they will deliver whatever is requested at no extra cost. ISP have customers, and these customers already pay for the traffic. In South Korea, that probably means they pay for optic fiber, which has no problem handling the load.

Considering Twitch apparently had the largest market share of video game streaming in South Korea, it's got to be really bad for them to decide to leave the country. Though there's also the fact that Amazon did a bunch of layoffs, which also affected Twitch. It could be that they were told to improve profitability "or else", and they are complying as best they can, even though that seems rather short-sighted.

Digital memories are disappearing and not even AI or Google can help

Re: Just let it go....

My wife recently asked for pictures from 14 years ago. For a while, I thought we could only get them from a NAS that I disconnected 2-3 years ago for lack of use, but was still keeping in the basement. It turned out that I didn't have a power cable that would fit, and that I would have to buy one somewhere... But then she said that she had somehow posted the pictures to Facebook 8 years back, so we went back to look for that post and found that it was a link to a picasa album, now surviving in Google photos on the account of our son. So the NAS went back to the basement, still containing some unfinished research articles, my old collection of MP3s and possibly the code for my PhD thesis. We already got rid long ago of the server I bought when I was in university, which boasted a whole TB of disk, and which demonstrated its lack of usefulness by not being turned on for so long it wouldn't boot anymore.

US senator claims Google and Apple reveal push notification data to foreign govs

Cool idea bro

Have you talked about it to the NSA?

India's Moon mission pulled off another trick: an experimental orbital sequel

Sometimes, it is rocket science

40 years of Turbo Pascal, the coding dinosaur that revolutionized IDEs

I think you need a bronze or silver badge to use HTML, and otherwise you can't link.

https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rni/papers/realprg.html

UK competition watchdog wins appeal – investigation into Apple will go on

The CMA had previously opted not to open an investigation during a market study, so it does not have the power to do so now.

Well that was a stupid argument. Markets change, the situation evolves. The fact that something used to be fine doesn't mean it's fine now, particularly in matters of anti trust.

Regulator says stranger entered hospital, treated a patient, took a document ... then vanished

Maybe he was looking for the one-armed man who killed his wife?

Meta sued by privacy group over pay up or click OK model

Obvious next steps

Facebook will soon realize that the worse the ads are, the more people will pay!

We all know where this is going

Tesla sues Swedish government after worker rebellion cripples car biz

It's impressive to see unions developing their full power. Sometimes you wish it would happen more often.

Couldn't happen to a nicer CEO, too

Tesla, Musk likely aware of Autopilot deficiencies behind Florida fatality, says judge

Re: Stating the obvious

This is why Tesla never claimed the technology was fully autonomous

O RLY?

"a Model S and Model X, at this point, can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person." — Elon Musk in 2016 (YouTube link)

Fired OpenAI boss Sam Altman may join Microsoft

Re: Microsoft's investment was mainly in kind

It will depend on how many scientists he can persuade him to follow him to MS whether it has a chance of taking off

Reportedly, 80% of OpenAI employees have signed a letter stating they will follow him unless the board resigns.

CEO of self-driving cab outfit Cruise parks his career

Re: Self driving cars.

Of course it solves problems. Self-driving cars have the potential to vastly reduce the number of accidents (they probably already have less accidents than human drivers, but they get more scrutiny). They also allow people to concentrate on doing more interesting things than driving in traffic, like reading or sleeping or anything they want. On average, American drivers spend two years of their life driving, which is a real waste of time.

I think it's important to note that Waymo has been working far longer on the problem, seen far less accidents, and are still operating.

UK won't rush to regulate AI, says first-ever minister for digital brainboxes

Good luck regulating anything anyway

It's going to take at least a decade before we figure out what can be regulated and how. Success will likely be partial, like the enforcement of copyright laws.

Google Workspace weaknesses allow plaintext password theft

Not really, that's the point of LSASS accepting such a credential provider in the first place. This fits the cloudy model that everything important is done through the online services, and it doesn't matter which machine you use to access them because there's nothing important on the machine itself.

Meta's fix for teen online mental health? Hold Apple and Google responsible

Re: Support for a federal law? Eh? It already exists.

My kid receives instructions from teachers about homework and upcoming tests by a combination of Microsoft Teams and WhatsApp.

X fails to remove hate speech over Israel-Gaza conflict

X has taken action on hundreds of thousands of posts in the first month

In other words, one every eight seconds. I can only suppose that the automated systems are unable to start, the rater team has been laid off, and there is one single temp somewhere in the bowels of the company who has to take down each post manually. Which explains why 99% of the hate is still up.

Google dragged to UK watchdog over Chrome's upcoming IP address cloaking

Re: Stalking

The thing is that Google would be happy about such a regulation. They are in the absolute best position to show ads to non-tracked users based purely on the query they just entered.

Meta, YouTube face criminal spying complaints in Ireland

I'm unconvinced that this has any chance. Criminal complaints have a much higher bar to pass to be confirmed by courts. This feels like a publicity stunt.

I think a determinant point for YouTube will be whether the script which detects the adblocker does in fact send the information back to the server. If yes, then there can be a claim of spying — it's getting information about the user, which is the domain of GDPR. If the code just prevents the videos from playing without sending anything back, then it's just code which controls how the page is displayed, part of the page requested by the user, executed by the browser controlled by the user. You might as well sue about the bandwidth costs caused by ads that you didn't request.

Child psychiatrist jailed after making pornographic AI deep-fakes of kids

Re: Hands up if anyone reading this is the least bit surprised.

We shall have to do something about it (see icon).

Just wait until they stopped supervising him at 111, and he immediately commits a new crime!!1!

Scarlett Johansson sics lawyers on AI biz that cloned her for an ad

This has nothing to do with the Streisand effect, which is about keeping something hidden or secret — It's closer to a copyright/trademark issue. There's not much difference between Scarlett Johansson going after AI copies and Louis Vuitton going after fake handbags.

Google ends partnership to build four San Francisco GoogleBurbs

Looks like they really can't convince their employees to get back to the office in California. It might be different for Europe and the US — people in Europe tend to live in smaller places that do not have room for an office, but with a small commute, and Americans live in large houses with a two-hour commute on the highway.

Alphabet CEO testifies in Google Search trial: We pay billions to keep Apple at bay

I see a loophole here — as long as Google managed to keep their intentions of the record, they could do whatever they want? The EU approach is simpler on this: they rule companies to be a monopoly, no matter whether they intended it out not...

I'm confused by the whole discussion. Google is paying billions so that Apple puts them as default search engine, no one disputes the facts. This is either legal or illegal. I don't understand the need to bring up discussions from years ago on the value of this or the effect of that.

Ex-NSA techie pleads guilty to selling state secrets to Russia

Re: Security Engineer, indeed

Good point. A number of "security engineers" do nothing else than applying basic checks and give access rights accordingly.