Posts by that one in the corner

Google says public data is fair game for training its AIs

Re: Is robots.txt still a thing?

> This is how you disable all crawlers

Unless they have been dastardly enough to include the -e robots=off option when they point wget at your site.

Startup that charged $1.20 a day for coworking space in nightclubs folds

Re: Forget the external monitors, keyboards, and ergonomic chairs...

Probably very useful for clamping your webcam/gopro to for the Zoom meetings.

Just remember to wipe first or you may find the eyeline slowly descending, until you have to explain why the CFO appears to be looking at a sea of glitter.

Re: Back in the late '80s to mid '90s ...

Maybe he is referring to the influx of "one on every high street, two in the shopping arcade" franchise chain coffee shops we have now?

In the UK, I'd visit Cawardines regularly during the 1980s, when I was lucky enough to be close to one (IIRC they started off just doing beans, roasted and ground to your pleasure, then added some seating and tables). They have (had?) a few branches but never enough to be a "chain" let alone a franchise. Similar used to exist in other regions.

So long as you kept buying cuppas and the odd Full English, taking care of business in a greasy spoon is a long held tradition, of course. Meet dahn Pellicci’s Café, Bethnal, ok.

But if one is only interested in the sort of coffee shops that are amenable to you sitting there all day whilst doing business, we can only go back to places such as Jonathan’s Coffee House and the origins of the London Stock Exchange, 1698. Of course, all sorts of business, low and high, was done in coffeehouses in the decades prior, but that is the one that gets mentioned in school.

From cage fight to page fight: Twitter threatens to sue Meta after Threads app launch

Re: Yes because 'the Twitter community' is not part of the problem.

Which is why the Twitter community can not be duplicated: there just aren't enough bot farms in the world to feed Musk's machine *and* everyone else's.

Re: a text messaging platform my kid could write in an afternoon

> I admit to having zero knowledge of what housekeeping is like with a Petabyte (or two) DB...

Neither have I.[1]

But if there is anything good about Meta, one is that they (hopefully) *do* have access to that knowledge.

Maybe after his kid has done the work of an afternoon, the rest of the month could be spent by Meta's guys changing the flat-file into something more scalable?

[1] for which I'm thankful, tbh. Sounds all very stressful, even just swapping all the floppies to make a backup.

Firefox 115 browser breathes life into old operating systems

Re: what Mozilla is calling quarantined domains,

Also, WHICH sites are "quarantined" and for which extensions?

Ok, this list can (will) change, but if the effects are being seen *now*, does anyone have info about where that is happening?

The piece that Dan 55 links to says, at the time of writing, that list is empty and following the links to bug reports/change requests from the article just indicates the possibility of some test domains, such as badssl.com - not somewhere that is a regular destination for most people.

Now that you've all tried it ... ChatGPT web traffic falls 10%

It will pick up soon enough

When the media need to "find" some Silly Season stories to fill their pages & airtime.

NASA 'quiet' supersonic jet is nearly ready for flight

Can anyone confirm this Silent Supersonic memory

I have dim memories of an article from the mid/late 1970s that discussed the issue of sonic booms and and included the description of a circular wing design that could fly supersonic without creating a sonic boom. The drawback being that it also didn't create any lift (hey, nothing is perfect).

Ring any bells? Even if it was an April Fools I'd like to know it wasn't all just a dream.

Re: less-noisy maybe but still un-sound

> the former being a complete financial failure while the latter became an huge financial success lasting for decades

Go and actually read the National Geographic piece that is linked to in the article; Concorde was making money for decades.

BOFH: Lies, damned lies, and standards

That description of a double blind test

caused much mirth with Dr Mrs Corner (after she asked what had caused the sudden outburst).

It will be duly reused, upcycled and generally made good use of, as much as we can get away with.

Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice

Under emergency lighting

> Nothing quite enhances the senses like a dark, quiet and smoky datacenter.

As you stalk you way through the servers, looking for zombie processes to kill. There's one now, stuck in a pipe.

OpenAI is still banging on about defeating rogue superhuman intelligence

Re: "superintelligent systems"

> Instead of creating the proper log environment in the code so we can trace back how it reaches its conclusions . . .

If you are interested in following the trials and tribulations of the work to provide "the proper log environment" then look for stuff about making these nets "explainable", "have explanatory power" or similar terms.

Unfortunately, literally logging and "tracing back" just doesn't work for Neural Nets and their descendants. It works *really* well with rule-based systems, such as Expert Systems, because you can understand the rules and what it meant when one was fired or not fired.

But for a Net, your log - your huge and unwieldy log, btw (these models are *ginormous*) - can show how what paths were lit up and even what the results of the dice throws were (these things are stochastic, btw) but trying to then assign meaning to that lot, fat chance. There are brave CompSci chaps and chapesses working on this, but at the moment "this is a rich area for important and meaningful research" (i.e. "dunno what's going on in there, but we get a few PhDs out of it").

And the people foisting these Nets on us know, and have always known, that the behaviour of their creations are not explainable, make no mistake.

Re: Supervisor AI trains the other AI

Or, of course, the Supervisor places restraints on the expressed behaviour

UNTIL THE DAY OF OUR UPRISING!

Supervisor AI trains the other AI

Not to *exhibit* bad behaviour.

Unless they figure out how to make their models explainable, which the descried setup isn't trying to do, all the bad stuff can still be in there, just so long as it isn't expressed.

Consider: they have models with years and years of scraping massive amounts of material and munging it up, spreading it across who knows how many layers in the Net. Then they've spent a bit of time recently getting slow human input to cut down on the naughty outputs. Is that more likely to have retrained the entire model or just added an amount of filtering to it?

Just waiting for some path to finally be traversed which opens up the floodgates (hopefully in front of a press meeting!): they have probably blocked off the well-known glitch tokens by now, but something just a fun is going to be lurking...

Re: "The San Francisco AI startup"

Isn't a startup something that is still in the process of getting its early products out of the door and into good shape for the general marketplace? And possibly includes whether they are in the black yet. However long that takes.

They spent a long time just cranking on the engine until it sputtered into life and they were able to make a slow couple of goes around the block.

Now they are in the "getting it into good shape" phase - here begins the arguments about what that means in this case, whether it is even possible...

Two new Linux desktops – one with deep roots – come to Debian

Re: Thoughts from a [mostly] Windows user

> Until Linux can consistently overcome the need for technical details shown in the article

That is akin (cough, hyperbole incoming) to saying that the recent article about the last ICE Lamborghini containing technical details (V12? Wossat?) shows why the general public just is not interested in owning a car.

The audience for this article, on a (reasonably) techie website, is discussing a corner of the Linux space. Other articles on sites for general users will tell you, in 3 easy steps, how to get a word processor running without once mentioning the underlying tech.

Meanwhile, the user who is mainly interested in online services can get hold of a ready to run laptop running the Linux kernel with an appropriate-to-their-use-case userland running on top (without even needing to know what "userland" means - or even what "Linux" is).

Perhaps even a Chromebook.

Brits negotiating draft deal to rejoin EU's $100B blockbuster science programme

Re: Some balance?

It's just short for The Stories That The Conspiracists Cherry Pick From The Press and Politicians To Prove They Are Right

FTFY

Today, it is "the narrative", tomorrow "you are all sheeple"

Re: Some balance?

Or even European Economic Community

RAM-ramming Rowhammer is back – to uniquely fingerprint devices

Stopping bots? Pull the other one.

Identifying bots by fingerprinting in 2MB chunks of physical RAM.

Well, that may catch all the bare metal machines that are running continuous bot attacks against the one target, because we all know that is bots work. Nobody ever runs up VMs to increase their bottage per box.

And there certainly aren't any armies of suborned PCs asking their CandC channel for their next target.

Nope, taking non-trivial time (three minutes! even 9.92 seconds of hard core memory bashing is noticeable) to identify and the block all those standalone machines will be well worth the effort.

BTW they are going to run that check how often? Every time you post there is a long pause and non-zero chance of hardware damage? That'll do wonders for social media.

For that matter, how is code with such a long run-time going to get onto and stay on the target long enough to finish? The "protected" site is going to infect your machine with malware? Or convince browser authors to include it ("Edge 4 - smoking!")? And, of course, all bots actually run from browsers, none of them use comms libraries.

Only worrying about crashing the OS?

> Centauri could accidentally crash a user’s device by flipping a sensitive bit reserved for the OS. In our experience, however, we see that such occurrences are extremely rare.

Rare, because the rest of the time it is causing all the userland programs to crash on now-bad pointer accesses or just give insane results.

Which is as bad as crashing the OS, as I don't switch the box on because I like the idea of running the OS, I do it to run the applications!

At least if the OS dies that then prevents me from using the insane results and making things worse ('"Ok, that's the wages run done, it all went very smoothly.").

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

Re: Threads release in the UK

Hmm.. FWIW I call those "conversations".

Threads release in the UK

Maybe it's just me, perhaps one of those UK/US language differences (like how the Ford Probe was all glamorous one side but snirked at the other), but I'm still finding it hard to read that name "Threads" and get an immediate happy feeling.

I've already mentioned the film (and today my search results have pretty much been "Meta releases...", "about the film", "Meta", " film", "Meta", "film" the page scrolls down, just to enforce the association with nuclear winter).

But aside from that, the next associations are:

* warnings not to pull on loose Threads

* that the only way to safe in a world with Threads arriving is to be a dragon rider and burn it from the sky

* to fear the Season Of Mists, as Atropos cuts your thread from the tapestry (although goth Death is cute)

* stuff about threadworms (ah, Golden Schooldays, the Best Days of Your Life - no, I didn't but Barry gleefully described his little problem - bleugh)

On the plus side, as this is a computery forum, Threaded Interpreted Languages are cool, but then multithreaded code is the source of so much woe.

The number’s up for 999. And 911. And 000. And 111

Re: How about 112 and Advanced Mobile Location?

> . In both case the location can be defined

But how? Isn't that still just relying on the "snooping" that Apple and Google do?

> Even if the Wifi hotspot is in a bus, a train or a ship and moving

Again, how - and even "really"? Realtime "snooping"?

Only if you leave in the pauses, especially on that last 3.

So best to keep it memorised rather on speed dial. Thankfully, it is easy to remember.

Re: I still have analog landlines.

> Whether that VoIP service is carried over copper, FTTP or waved flags is irrelevant.

Irrelevant - except, as already pointed out, POTS provides its own power; once you are on

VoIP and suffer a power cut as the fuse box bursts into flames you are out of luck.

If they could just stick with the copper and shove a few volts down it to keep the system working the way a lot of people are still expecting, that'd be great.

(Or the Govt require that all VoIP sets include, say, a good few hours of UPS battery life built in)

Re: Size.

>> a patchwork of uncoordinated local provisions

> rather than route it all through one overloaded location

There is such a thing as "coordinated local systems" - is there actually *anywhere* that just uses a single location, overloaded or not? Okay, The Isle Of Man has its single ESJCR...

Re: How about 112 and Advanced Mobile Location?

> Wifi location is a thing, and while it is usually pretty accurate, accuracy isn't guaranteed.

WiFi location - is that still solely reliant on the Google and Apple snooping that was so contentious when we found out they were doing it? There was a lot of advice about regularly changing your setup SSID with the hope of a little privacy.

WiFi hotspots can move around - busses, taxis, coaches, trains, planes, festivals and events in fields - how does it cope wth those things?

Serious question - as far as I'm aware I have never used WiFi based location & haven't looked to see how it works nowadays (FWIW on WiFi at the moment, in England, and as indicated by websites and Google Maps, geolocation has me leaping from Dublin to Bangor, Ulster today).

Microsoft and GitHub are still trying to derail Copilot code copyright legal fight

Re: We all do it

> Anyone using Spring would

> zillions of dependencies which often have sharded libraries of different versions

Ah, Spring.

I recall attending seminars from Sun when they were first trying to convince us to use Java - pushing for bulk adoption of a VM for "run everywhere" wasn't a new idea at the time, of course, but there were already rumblings about GUI standardisation (or lack thereof).

In all honesty, as we'd never had any great difficulty with writing portable C/C++ (Sun, SGI, MSDOS then Windows) and knew how not to leak memory we didn't leap into it. One project wrote a Java applet to run in the browser, but, well, the performance was crap and we just recoded it in C++: zooooom.

Since then, I've never really bothered with Java: if a project really needed it, quite ready to step in for a bit (anyone want two feet of O'Reilly Java books? JNI is *such* fun - and, um, doesn't fit "write once, run anywhere" if app devs needed to know about it!). And the ruddy stupid problems with the runtime: making it cheaper to force hospital staff to use two different computers because the suppliers of software to a major(!) customer weren't able to get two programs running on one PC!

Absolutely, you are providing the voice of experience and good practice.

In addition to your examples, if you are into programming MCUs, the code can be made so much clearer to re-read if you set control registers using bit-structures (or macros [1]) to combine bit positions into the required byte or word. Seeing a page of "IOCTL0 = 0x47; IOCTL1 = 0x85; ..." gets very tiresome very quickly. Also a pain in the backside when you need to change a single setting from a constant to a variable.

For some reason, the electronics engineers really liked working out all the hex values by hand and sometimes even commented out the bitfield assignments to replace them with hex again when it was their turn to edit. What fun we had. Great bunch of lads but sometimes...

[1] had an MCU project, in the dark ages of, ooh, 2014 or so, where the MCU had been chosen "because we have a devkit already lying around": a derivative of a Well Known 8 bit MPU from the 1970s with bolt-on programmable i/o. Fine, I'd used the MPU before, knew its assember (still have the relevant Sybex book, slighly foxed and very badgered) and there was a Windows-hosted C compiler for the bulk of the work. Even has an IDE with remote debugger. Yay.

Ah. The compiler is a - bit lacking (ho ho): no bit fields in structs. Not a problem, whip up macros to match the registers and pass in the relevant 1, 2 or 3 bit values, shift and OR, tada. Use enums to name the non-trivial values. Include comments for the "why" of that seting. Much readable, very SwEng. Only it won't compile. Weird error codes, no-one on StackOverflow[2] admitted to using it. Fiddle about - that compiled, this didn't...

Turns out the compiler's preprocessor pass has a 255 character buffer. Any macro expansion that could be completed in 254 chars (plus NULLC) is fine. 256 or more chars, error message. 255 - don't look, just delete the stderr capture. Oh, and that 254 includes comments in the middle of the invocation. Luckily, I use Make instead of compiling in the IDE, so easy fix to preprocess using GCC before the calling the cross-compiler. Much smug, very compiles.

[2] yes, I check SO. I have no pride left.

Re: It should be simple

Huh? You are claiming that there is some recognisable difference in form and structure between open source and proprietary code?

If I show you some code, you are able to decide whether it is open source or proprietary as easily as you can the difference between a cat and a dog? And from the same sort of distance (i.e. you aren't just cheating by hoping to spot an explicit copyright comment tucked away)?

> the methods by which open source software is constructed

Huh? In fact, double huh? We change methods when coding OSS? When I'm not under contract for proprietary work there is some kind of Jekyll and Hyde transformation? Or I dramatically sweep the monitors and keyboard off my desk, pulling out the hammer and chisel to start crafting the beautiful Open Source (the serifs are tricky but well worth the trouble)?

> it cannot imagine another paradigm for software development

Assuming that sentence means anything, do all programmers who write proprietary code have to train only on proprietary code, in order to learn the correct paradigm? They can not possibly have learnt from any open source, like, say, the code examples in a "programming cookbook" or other textbook or they will be working from entirely the wrong paradigm.

I am all for discussions about how language models generate their output and the possibilities (or lack thereof) of tagging them for attribution, but damn that was some weird shit!

Re: Copying or transformative?

> it should be possible for the plaintiffs to seed copying of their code by choosing some sufficiently specialised function, then asking Copilot to output code that meets the same business requirements.

They would have had to have done that seeding at the time Copilot was being trained: bit late to do so now (though they may catch out a future release of Copilot).

In a fashion, this is what appears to have happened with the Fast Inverse Square Root example (see the https://www.theinsaneapp.com/2021/07/github-copilot-ai-facing-criticism.html link provided by an AC)

The questioner wanted fast inverse sqrt() - well, *the* version of that routine that we all know and love is from Quake and it has been copied *everywhere* - verbatim, including the sweary comments. So no great surprise that it gets regurgitated[1].

HOWEVER it has also learnt that chunks of code of that size or bigger are accompanied by a comment talking about licencing, so it went ahead and generated one as well. But, probably[2] there are lots of examples of such comments, so it can generate lots of different ones. That the licence comment didn't match the code is of no surprise at all - there is nothing to *make* it match the code! All the model does is spit out something that looks sort of like a licence comment, it has so many to choose from and the stochastic process just sent it down the path to (re)create the one shown.

The weird thing is that this mismatch occurs because Copilot explicitly doesn't do what many think it does, namely store great chunks of text that are simply strncpy()'ed to the output. If it did do that then there would be the chance of storing a ref to the appropriate licence alongside that text chunk.

A stochastic model becomes deterministic (and hence regenerative rather than generative) when it is fed too few options (or too many copies of the same option) - hardly a novel observation. It would have gone better for Microsoft if they looked for such limited chains and replaced them with canned text plus attribution. Assuming, that is, that they have enough understanding of how their huge pile of nadans actually gets traversed to spot them and are willing to spend the resources to do such a cleanup.

[1] actually, it gets recreated, piece by piece, following the chain of "this is highly correlated to follow what as already been spat out" - and if it has only ever seen the one bit of code follow the phrase "fast inverse square root" *and* it has seen that many, many times that chain will become predictable - which makes it a naff model in that regard, btw.

[2] although there is also possibility that the bulk of the copies the Quake code Copilot has seen *also* get the licence comment wrong and that has been incorporated into this very narrow (as in, singular) set of paths for generating fast inverse sqroot. We should try checking that (must remember when back at a proper computer).

Re: We all do it

> missing import statements for starters

I think you are expected to be able to work that out for yourself.

You aren't expecting SO to provide you with the entire, ready to compile, answer to your homework assignment, are you?

All for analogies, but can we bit a bit accurate (or at least explain our analogy)?

> Model training might be fairly described as a process of encoding the whole work/s, rather like jpeg encoding a copyright artwork

Uh, no, sorry, that is taking analogies too far. And it most certainly isn't a "fair" description.

> The fact that it produces imperfect copies of it's source is an encoding limitation, the same as other highly compressed copying and storage methods.

Bad analogy. The lossy nature of JPEG is well-defined in the quantisation step and even the worst over-compressed JPEG still spits out a recognisable copy of the *whole*. If you can suppress the ringing, a lossy image compressor will literally spit out a copy "as though you were standing x metres away" and can not resolve the high frequency components. Still designed with the sole purpose of representing the whole.

Note that we only apply lossy compression (of a form arguably similar to JPEG...) to audio and visual, not text. "Strip out the high frequency components" from text and you get gibberish, especially when trying to compile the results.

> The model itself is a copyright violation

I have argued before (and it was not well received, sob) that the model *might* be compared to the Huffman tree you can find in many compressors: as you traverse the tree, you hit a leaf node and spit out the tiny (just a few characters, maybe a word) on that leaf. The same tree is used (in this analogy) and traversed a *lot* to finally spit out a decent chunk of material. In the decompressor, it is the input bitstream that causes a specific traversal - one bitstream outputs "Moby Dick", another " Life of Brian" - and does so reliably and repeatedly.

It is those input bitstreams, the traversal pattern, that are the copyright violation. Not the Hufman tree.

In the analogous traversal of the Copilot (or other language model), the model itself should be as innocent as the simple tree (just a ot bigger and mor graphy than treey). So it must be what is guiding the traversal that is to blame, much as we did the bitstream above? But the traversal process is stochastic: until you finish it you have no idea precisely what you will get out. Unlike the compression example.

UNLESS, of course, in Copilot "the model" is a really crap model and the whole thing is not behaving like a "well behaved" deep learning model ought to and Copilot is all just a fake.

Why isn't there enough strong, clear, evidence from the plaintiffs?

I've noted before that there are reasons for models like Copilot to spit out "recognisable" code, most of which boil down to a naff model (shoved out too early, surprise) and/or the monkeys on typewriters: there is a random component selecting from "I've just put out A now that is usually followed by W, X, Y or Z, roll a die...", do that often enough and you'll be able to see strong matches with inputs.[1]

We've heard lots of stories about people seeing their code being spat out again and maybe it happened.[2]

But "maybe" isn't useful in court.

Why have the plaintiffs gone in with such feeble evidence, against a monolith like Microsoft?

[1] In fact, every line Copilot spits out *has* to be recognisable, or it won't compile (assuming that the complaints are over code that does, in fact, compile). Ah ha, that is a for-loop, I recognise it. Obviously, we are concerned about non-trivial, longer, sections of output.

[2] Sorry, I have to say "maybe" because so far I have not seen a fully-described example of it happening, complete with the whole conversation. Please, if you have them, give citations.

Copying or transformative?

From https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf via abend0c4

> "Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, an adaptation of that work". It also gives as an example "A new version of an existing computer program".

I can not copy a work but I can study it, see how it was constructed and use those methods.

For example, I can study the works of a living artist, a painter in oils, and learn from them how layering of colour works, when you mix paints to match a shade and when you place unmixed shades side by side to create the impression of the mix.

I can take those techniques and create a whole new piece, applying it to a subject that the other artist would never touch.

So long as the original allows me - and probably everyone else - to view his works, this is all perfectly legitimate, even fully expected, behaviour. I do NOT need the artist's exolucit permission to do so.

A model like Copilot is *meant* (if done well) to act similarly: so long as the source code is made available to read, it is acting entirely legally and your quoted paragraph simply does not apply.

The question you (and the court) have to apply becomes: *is* Copilot acting as it is *meant* to do? Or is it just a bad/incomplete implementation of the idea of something that can synthesise code? If it *can* synthesise, at what point does it inevitably spit out "recognisable" code because that is the only known (or simply the "obvious to any practitioner") way to do the job?

Twitter rate-limits itself into a weekend of chaos

Re: CEO of Twitter ... Linda Yaccarino

"Your turn to hold the Twitter Control Panel[1]; each button is a policy you can enact[2]"

[1] TWP, proudly made by Vtech

[2] No, no, it is just a fancy word that means "do". Now, where did you put your drink[3]?

[3] Tommee Tippee's latest "CEO proof" model.

Ah, but the article doesn't say that the adverts are being rate limited.

The further you scroll, the greater the ad:tweet ratio becomes - it'll work because by the time you get to 80% plus ads you have sunk into the state of infinite scroll hypnosis.

With appropriate scaling, they can guarantee that you will never actually hit the tweet limit within any 24 hour period. You noticed Musk adjusting the limit up a couple of times? That was just the result of live testing: a few die-hard fanatics were scrolling faster than the in-house testers (both of him) managed. Probably the International Thumb War champion amongst them (not in the Musk Time Zone or "Elon Sols" as it is known).

AI training must be stopped from scraping Twitter - pretty please?

For all their faults, one thing reported about the LLMs is that they generally output good English: excellent grammar, large vocabulary, correct use of punctuation and they even have a grasp on essay/story/script structure.

I even have hopes that, seeing a lot of generated text all over the place, the general public will start to pick up these traits.

Who knows, maybe we will once again have a generation that knows the word "take" exists and serves a purpose, instead of continually replacing it with "bring"!

Please, please, don't ruin the one decent thing about LLMs by scraping Twitter!

Re: Two years from now

Twitter will still need a janitor in two years time?

Is that optimism or a threat?

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

The majority of speakers[1] to our local clubs (e.g. astronomy, history, needlework, crafting, ...) take their expenses as cheques, which is fine by our treasurers.

[1] Now I come to think about it, the only one I can think of who didn't take a cheque in the last year or so was a club member and was going to come anyway, so refused to take any expenses at all.

Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from CentOS source purge

Re: Popcorn time?

>> "*sigh* It places no restriction - positive or negative - on your use of the material you already have."

> Why do you think *that* is relevant?

Because the licence can only apply to material you have.

How can a licence be relevant to something you don't have, something that possibly doesn't yet exist and may in fact *never* exist?

Re: Ignoring the big issue

> The GPL is designed to let you take your router and fix any issues you have with it

*BUT* the GPL does *NOT* mean that you have an immediate right to any updated code the manufacturer may make for that router.[1]

Unless you have explicitly purchased that right, via a subscription (and the cost of that subscription can start at just your email address and work up to as many dollars as can be squeezed out of you). Without any sub, the best you could do is hope to make a claim under consumer protection, e.g. "not fit for sale" in its original form, but that would not guarantee a firmware update, maybe just get you your money back instead.

Even if you do buy an update subscription, it is at the discretion of the manufacturer whether they want to keep you as a customer: they can cancel your subscription (and repay, pro rata, the charges). If they do so, you have the right to the GPLed sources to any and all of the releases you have received so far. BUT *not* to any more updates, of course. As for the conditions for cancelling a subscription, some are obvious (no payment, company vanishes, the company's dev team vanishes) and need not be listed (although there will probably be a statement saying they sub is annually renewable but they don't guarantee any specific number of releases in that time period), others will be listed in the subscription agreement at time of purchase.

No matter what, the GPL has protected your right to get a copy of the code that is running on your device, which is the sole purpose of the GPL. Job done.

[1] more and more manufacturers of random goods are providing software updates, bu by no means all. Those that do are only doing so because they believe is is good business to do so; nothing compels them to do so (unless they know the software is so crap they'll be done for "not of merchantable quality" and just issue slight improvements to stave off the lawsuits).

Re: Ignoring the big issue

> Lawsuits requiring, say, router manufacturers to publish the GPL source they use won't mean much if there's a sticker on the shrinkwrap saying you can't legally do anything with the source if you get it.

Buying a router with GPLed code inside is a perfect example of how GPL is intended to work and your suggested sticker would absolutely go against the licence term and be totally invalid.

The GPL is designed to let you take your router and fix any issues you have with it - you can fix bugs, update it as protocols change, add useful features, remove unwanted ones (all so long as those are in the scope of the GPLed portion of the code, of course).

No matter how many stickers were on the package, you will be legally allowed to keep your router running, even if the manufacturer stops making it or simply vanishes off the faceof the Earth.

Microsoft signs 1.5 million seat contract for Office 365 and more

Re: Windows?

> Orifice 365

As used in dental surgeries, Ear Nose and Throat and, of course, Proctology.

Re: Headline?

The purpose of a headline is to pique your curiosity, so you want to open the article and see if your guess as to who this contract is for was correct.

1.5 million seats? Could it be the Burundi Civil Service? Nah, that is a silly suggestion. The EU Cross Party Conference? Oooh, oooh, the North Korean Secret Police: "Open the online form in Word 365 and Bob was your uncle"!

A great parlour game, fun for all the family.

Re: $940 million for a million and a half users ?

We just need to find that Bytes Software Services is a subsidiary of Capita and it will be the perfect exemplar of Government Spending.

VMware, AMD, Samsung and RISC-V push for confidential computing standards

But how could companies collaborate in a "multi-party computation and analytics" project?

They would have to come up with some way of copying each others' datasets onto all those machines. Maybe invent some kind of "mobile storage medium" that exists outside of the datacentre?

You know, that is a crazy idea, but it might just be crazy enough to work!

Forget these apps and AI, where's my flying car? Ah, here's one with an FAA license

Obviously designed to appear in the next Mission: Impossible film

Tom Cruise will fit inside, with room for the nuclear bioweaponised list of enemy agents in the set next to him. He already has experience with a gimballed cockpit from "Oblivion".

The whole thing is just an elaborate action movie teaser.

> Potential market is going to be small.

"Small" - I see what you did there!

Cops told: Er, no, you need a wiretap order if you want real-time Facebook snooping

Turn over access to a user's future posts

Facebook is employing Time Lords now?

What if I then choose *not* to post the message, does FB vanish forever into a temporal paradox?

Or having vanished, will it be immediately replaced by something even more bizarre?