Posts by Dinanziame

US AGs: We need law to purge the web of AI-drawn child sex abuse material

Re: There is a question to ask here

I noticed the words "evil desires" from that letter are really very close to "thoughtcrime".

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

Re: Easy win but challenging keep.

Sadly, it probably comes from the fact that competent people rarely want to work for the government. It used to be that civil servant was a very respectable career, and the job security was attractive enough for top minds to devote their life to working for the community. I'm not sure if this cachet is what led to low pay, but one way or another you can now have a much better life working for a private company, so a lot of the people working for the government are those who couldn't get a job anywhere else.

A good society should pay its civil servants well. This is a true investment for the future. Along with teachers, they truly create tomorrow's quality of life.

Big Tech has failed to police Russian disinformation, EC study concludes

I'm not entirely comfortable with the government telling big tech platforms that it is their duty to filter unacceptable discourse along blurry guidelines. Though at least the EU is not supposed to have a strong law protecting free speech. It's rather ironical to see the US government complain that platforms aren't doing enough to police misinformation, considering the government itself is not allowed to do it.

The only thing launched for Amazon's Project Kuiper is a lawsuit

I can't see this lawsuit going anywhere. The idea to sue the company because it didn't contract your favorite supplier is a bit off the wall.

Pokémon Go was a 'success disaster' and Niantic is still chasing another hit

Re: What is with all this past tense?

half the fandom has been alienated by the author

I doubt the effect was very significant: Despite the controversy, Hogwarts Legacy is apparently the best-selling game of the year.

Re: The buzz has worn off

In principle, each game would apply to different people with their gameplay. Personally I thought Ingress's concept of creating links between portals and building up areas was way more interesting than PG, which seems to be just "attack all the gyms" with very little strategy. In particular, in Ingress there was a big incentive in visiting other cities and collecting the portal keys. I don't remember PG has anything similar, but I guess the backstory is more important.

We all scream for ice cream – so why are McDonald's machines always broken?

Re: Limiting choice is anticompetitive

As soon as the gridlock in Congress is fixed!

After injecting pop-up ads for Bing into Windows, Microsoft now bends to Europe on links

If I remember correctly, some text in the DMA would force Apple to make iMessage compatible with RCS, that'll be the day

US Air Force wants $6B to build 2,000 AI-powered drones

Re: "well below"

Indeed. And they have 177 F-22. That's a quarter as much as they initially planned, because the costs were too high. The goal of 2000 units is still impressively high — it's as much as the total number of combat planes they currently have, half of which, surprisingly, seems to be F-16s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_United_States_Air_Force_aircraft

Europe's tough new rules for Big Tech start today. Is anyone ready?

Re: Scary, are we blind to this?

It's fine, Twitter will never obey these rules because Musk is a free speech absolutist!

Dropbox limits ‘all the storage you need’ unlimited plan, blames abusive users

Re: Only YouTube left with infinite storage?

I don't think they ever serve your file unmodified; they probably convert it to a more efficient video format. Good luck getting your encrypted data back afterwards.

Only YouTube left with infinite storage?

I think there's no limit on how many videos you can upload, though it seems there are daily upload limits. I suppose you could upload terabytes of white noise to dick around, but they'll probably delete that and ban the account. It's almost certain that somebody tried.

Hollywood studios agree AI-generated content should not reduce humans' pay or credit

Re: Not good enough

I think in a couple of decades, we'll be able to get movies that are auto-generated on the fly.

Musk's latest X-periments: No more headlines, old posts vanish, block gets banned

Re: "reduce the height of tweets"

I'm reminded of Mao ordering that Chinese farmers would double productivity by planting closer.

Florida Man and associates indicted for conspiracy to steal data, software

bankruptcy law aficionado

I'll reuse that

Google Chrome to shield encryption keys from promised quantum computers

Thus making quantum computers even more useless.

Have you ever suspected your colleague doesn't hope this email finds you well?*

Re: Hands Free..........

In my little corner, video conference is far more common than phone calls.

I hope this email finds you

before I do

Two US Navy sailors charged with giving Chinese spies secret military info

Re: the US are such hypocrites

Okay... I'll bite... why is it morally wrong?

I can't speak for the OP, but privacy rights is the most usual complaint. In some cases, when it involves secret technology, it can be considered theft. Just ask yourself what would be the problem if a private company was doing it for the money instead of a government.

Re: the US are such hypocrites

Nobody is claiming spying is morally right — that doesn't mean they won't do it, and the fact they do it doesn't mean they will allow it against themselves. In a football match, both try to score on the opposite goal and tries to prevent the opposite team from scoring. There's no hypocrisy in that.

Google offers to alert netizens when their personal info shows up in Search

Re: New Google service cancelled already?

The blog post says "This tool is available in the U.S. in English to start", so maybe that's what you get unless you're on the left side of the pond...?

Official science: People do less, make more mistakes on Friday afternoons

Re: Actually...

This — The reason we don't push on Friday afternoon is that it might take a lot more time to realize there's a problem and fix it when the whole team is away on Saturday.

Playing instruments, musical talent? Psh, this is the 2020s – Meta has models for that now

Re: A few minutes sampled at 44.1 kHz

Yeah, I find curious that the 44.1 kHz sampling is relevant — music is made of notes. It's like saying that it's harder to generate text when the screen resolution is higher.

Tesla steering problems attract regulator eyes for second time this year

Re: And you report on this because...

The decisions taken by CEOs have frequently more impact than those taken by hundreds of employees, and it can be a lot more difficult to know which are the right decisions. Some CEOs can justifiably claim that their companies have made way more money than their (considerable) total comp, directly thanks to decisions they have made. For instance, Satya Nadella has noticeably improved Microsoft after taking over from Steve Ballmer. Another example is Steve Jobs, who while being a gigantic asshole is widely considered to be responsible for Apple being the most valuable company in the world.

Of course, you have a lot of CEOs who have destroyed their companies with bad decisions — if it was straightforward to be a CEO, anybody could do it, and the pay would be much lower.

Meta says it'll ask Euro peeps nicely before hitting them with personalized ads

Re: Ads?

Their grandmother/mother/daughter/granddaughter presumably use smartphones.

UK watchdog reopens consultation on Microsoft's bid for Activision Blizzard

I think after approval from the US and the EU, it's unlikely that the UK alone can block it. Has there been such precedents?

For that matter, what happens if say Vietnam somehow refuses to approve a merger accepted by all other countries? Brown envelopes?

Farewell, Aeolus: Doomed ESA weather sat reenters atmosphere over Antarctica

Re: Penguins???

Damnit, I wanted to make that joke... Er...

The fools! They'll punch a hike through the ozone layer!!

Twitter's giant throbbing X erected 'without a permit'

Re: I'm just curious...

I'm assuming Twitter will eventually go into chapter 11 to get rid of all these inconvenient bills.

Nobody would ever work on the live server, right? Not intentionally, anyway

One of the most pathetic letter I received was from a film developement business. They had used to send ultra-glossy magazines, boasting the quality of their colors and their crisp detail. This one was a single black and white sheet of paper, acknowledging that they were mostly dying since everything was going digital, but that maybe we still had old films which we'd like more copies of, or perhaps even digital pictures to print, and they were fully ready to do the job. Like receiving a letter from your grandmother in the hospital saying that maybe you can visit her, whenever you have time, while there's still time...?

Re: Don't let that guy work without supervision

"I have a bad feeling about this"

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

There an XKCD for that: https://xkcd.com/1235/

Jury orders Google to pay $340M patent-infringement damages over Chromecast

Re: How does one get such patents in 2010

Yep. Also note that the ruling was done in patent-lawsuit-friendly Texas.

Google toys with internet air-gap for some staff PCs

If I understand correctly, internet is still accessible from the laptops, so engineers can use them to access documentation, and code on the workstation.

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

Re: ChromeOS is a fake linux

Anything that uses the Linux Kernel is part of the "Linux world"

The vast majority of the Linux world is Android users then. Not sure what kind of ethics they have

US adds Euro spyware makers to export naughty list

Re: Who's fault is it?

Claims of a device or system being secure should be considered the same as a house or building being called secure. You can work to make things more secure, but ultimately it's impossible for anything to be 100% secure, for a device to be hack-proof or for a house to be burglar-proof. And if you insist on making things even more secure, they eventually become unusable due to the restrictions you need to place on them.

This AI is better than you at figuring out where a street pic was taken just by looking at it

Re: Geoguess - play for free

You mean, the only free game is the one that is over immediately so you don't have to spend any of your precious time to play it?

Re: Once again, powerful pattern matching being dressed up as "AI"

That's not the image recognition problem, that's Google trying to maximize how much money they make from the query.

We will find you and we will sue you, Twitter tells 4 mystery alleged data-scrapers

Re: Four IP Addresses

Also, if the traffic from four IP addresses can put a strain on Twitter servers, then their infrastructure is on even worse state than I thought. Even if these IP addresses are on optic fibers, I'd expect the total traffic they can download to be insignificant for Twitter.

Google, DeepMind accused of 'stealing the internet' to create Bard AI chatbot

Is it so different from indexing the web for their search engine though?

Obscure internet boutique Amazon sues EU for calling it a Very Large Online Platform

Re: Hmm

Do tell us

I'm not sure on what basis they are suing. My understanding is that list was declared as simple fiat by regulators, and that they don't have to justify shit.

Almost all classic US video games 'critically endangered'

Hardware is a problem too

I remember playing those oldies from my youth. Very often you could not play them on a modern computer, or, frustratingly, you could play it until the single timed sequence in the game — e.g. crossing a labyrinth without being caught by enemies — which due to the increase in processor speed had to be done perfectly in the 0.1 seconds before you got caught. Yes, I mean you, Space Quest V.

Google says public data is fair game for training its AIs

Re: Didn't Google News get banned in some places for doing this?

Not banned, but some countries said that they had to pay the news sites. Depending on the countries and the details, they've paid up (Australia, France) or closed Google News (Spain). In Canada, it seems a new law says they have to pay to include news sites in search results, and if I understand correctly they've said they were going to filter them out completely.

Re: This will eventually go to the courts

Search engines already return snippets with their results, which has landed them in trouble with news sites. Results of ancillary copyright laws are mixed. It's going to be a long time before we have clarity on what should be legal, and it's the wild west yntil then

Meta's data-hungry Threads skips over EU but lands in Britain

Watch or for the DMA

There's a lot of interesting stuff in the DMA. From what I understand, it also forces messaging systems to interoperate in the long term, and it forces Google to share data with other search engines.

Google accused of ripping off advertisers with video ads no one saw. Now, the expert view

Re: Facebook cutting off news

Presumably Facebook doesn't think it makes a difference either, which is why they won't be doing it anymore

Supreme Court says Genius' song lyric copying claim against Google wasn't smart

You just create a robots.txt file at the root of your website, containing these two lines:

------------------

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Microsoft's Activision fight with FTC turned up a Blizzard of docs: Here's your summary

Seems to me allowing the merger to go forward requires a lot of promises of what they'll do years from now. It's not clear to me what's the advantage to anybody of letting this happen.

First pushback against EU's Digital Services Act and it's not Google

For Americans, it's essentially a copy of Zappos. At some point, there was a German business man who created a bunch of online companies by hiring people, giving them money, and telling them to copy <successful US company> but in Germany. I believe Zalando is one of them.

Google bug bounties inch closer to Microsoft's payouts

There are a few companies, Google included, who pay a security team to look into vulnerabilities, their own and also others'. But also, I think for people who specialize in that it's not so difficult; if I recall correctly some people are regulars of these bounties.