Posts by John69

$800 'AI' robot for kids bites the dust along with its maker

I like the idea, but it seems hard to make a law that it is illegal to go broke. I think the law should be that the server code is distributable and licenced to the users in the event of service failure.

The only thing worse than being fired is scammers fooling you into thinking you're fired

Re: an email that appears to be a legal notice

I do not get why every email that matters does not come with a PGP signature. I'm surprised there isn't some sort of law requiring it.

Will passkeys ever replace passwords? Can they?

It seems most of the complains are based on the system being used. I am no expert, and I gave Passkeys a quick test. Using ubuntu and KeePassXC I got a fully backed up and transferable Passkey login to Github in only a few minutes with no hardware or external service required and no confusing multiple systems asking me to do the job.

The real problem is the requirement to have a password backup, but this is not inherent to the Passkey technology but the implementations by the servers.

Re: Just promote the sensible use of passwords, teaching it in schools.

"Some can't cope with anything more complicated than passwords." Passwords are the most difficult to use. The user has to determine if the entity they are talking to is the same as who they talked to last time. HTTPS sort of provides this via a third party, but it is not easy. A system that does not require one to do this should be easier. The dark web manages it with PGP, how can the rest of the world make it so hard?

Re: watch out for MS Authenticator

I think TOTP is the best answer, but you need to back up the code at the point of registration. You save the code below the QR code and back that up securely. You can then always generate the password with something like GNU oauth2.

WordPress bans WP Engine from sponsoring or participating in user groups

If I set up a company called MS Engine and offered Windows Services I suspect Microsoft would have more to say on the matter of trade marks than Mr Mullenweg.

Smart homes may be a bright idea, just not for the dim bulbs who live in 'em

I do not get the smart TV thing. You get nothing from a smart TV you do not get from an old laptop stuffed behind it, and there is loads you do not get. When TVs last longer than streaming services how can they ever really work?

FTC urged to stop tech makers downgrading devices after you've bought them

Re: Car thing

There is spotify car thing, where some people may not be able to listen to music, but what about the actual car thing? [Fisker owners](https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/ev-startup-fisker-files-bankruptcy-2024-06-18/) are finding out about that, and imagine how the UK would have handled it if Rover going bust had bricked all Rover cars? It seems this should be top of the list when it comes to legislation about digital resiliancy.

Brit teachers are getting AI sidekicks to help with marking and lesson plans

This is hardly scratching the surface of the potential. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2403.18105

The cybersecurity QA trifecta of fail that may burn down the world

Why expect them to?

The idea that we should give capitalists all the power, and expect them to act in the best interests of society is completely naive.

The only answer is for us all to run the algorithms to block this stuff, eg. by training our own AIs from Hugging Face on what we want want blocked. Or we could take the power from the capitalists in a more direct way.

Privacy expert put away for 9 years after 'grotesque' cyberstalking campaign

It took this much for action?

Look at the police the wrong way and they will shoot you, but it takes this extent of both grotesque cyberstalking and stupidity before any effective action was taken?

War on Texas law requiring ID to savor smut online heads to Supreme Court

"you can give some unknown 3rd party an image of your driver's license" You could give them an image of someone else's driver's license. The parler hack provides plenty.

How two brothers allegedly swiped $25M in a 12-second Ethereum heist

I could be missing something here, but could not the crypto woo be stripped out of this story leaving "The brothers made an order for $25m of things, the traders bought the things for $25m from the brothers and they never honored the original order". This does not on the face of it seem the most novel model of financial fraud, and it would seem that procedures to prevent have developed over the millenia. Have the crypto traders of today forgotten what the Phoenicians knew of commerce?

Microsoft 365 Copilot 'generally available' – if you can afford 300 seats

Can this be done in open source?

It seems the components are there. With all the models on HuggingFace, libreoffice and the noncommercial text and data mining exception to copyright this shoud be doable and it shoudl be able to eclipse the non-comercial models is they are restricted in what they can use to train.

Google says public data is fair game for training its AIs

Re: This will eventually go to the courts

It is certainly a difference, but not one that makes a difference in IP law.

Scientists think they may have cracked life support for Martian occupation

Re: How about plants ?

Given water, CO2, poo, some microflora and time I would expect to get something to grow. It does not take long for volcanoes to be colonised.

Deepfakes being used in 'sextortion' scams, FBI warns

Is this any different from photoshop?

There was a time when if you saw a photo then what was depicted must have happened. Then photoshop came along and there was a short time when some people could be fooled by a photoshopped image. Then everyone learned and photoshop became an everyday tool.

I see no reason to think deep fakes will be any different. Once we learn we cannot trust video this will be no different to photoshoping someone head into a sex scene.

I do not believe there is much future for freely available AI image detecting software. The nature of generative adversarial networks means people will just incorporate whatever detection tool in the learning algorithm.

GitHub, Microsoft, OpenAI fail to wriggle out of Copilot copyright lawsuit

Re: Not at all

What CoPilot is learning, and this is the same for all LLMs, is what the most likely next word is given the preceding words. How exactly the output relates to the input in a legal sense is something the courts will decide. How similar that process is to human learning is something we shall all have to figure out.

Online Safety Bill age checks? We won't do 'em, says Wikipedia

Re: The Lords said they felt that "anonymous age verification is possible."

Making more of the lawmakers "presidents or equivalent of the the chartered institutes" will really help correcting with the societal imbalance in representation within the UK.

British industry calls for regulation of autonomous vehicles

Re: We do not want "British" regulations

Historically national regulations come before international ones. Obviously the right international regulations will be better than the right national regulations, but that is no reason not to implement the national regulations before the technology hits the street.

Cyber-snoops broke into US military contractor, stole data, hid for months

Re: If you want to minimize your chances of getting hacked...

The M$/linux debate can go on, but Microsoft Exchange is not military grade security, right?

Rather than take the L, Amazon sues state that dared criticize warehouse safety

Re: Who are their lawyers?

Is it better that people have to work in unsafe environments until every appeal avenue has been exhausted?

DoJ ‘very disappointed’ with probation sentence for Capital One hacker Paige Thompson

Disappointed with whom?

The hacker does porridge, those responsible for security but put all that data in a "cloud bucket" (read a third party computer that was not properly secured) do not. Which is what justice looks like?

Tesla Megapack battery ignites at substation after less than 6 months

Re: Look to Dinorwig

Electric cars totally should be acting as these batteries, while they are sitting plugged in.

US accident investigators want alcohol breathalyzers in all new vehicles

Have they not heard of gloves?

China discovers unknown mineral on the moon, names it Changesite-(Y)

> The highly valuable gas is also extremely useful for cooling quantum machines.

That is any Helium. You do not need Helium 3 for that.

LabMD gets another shot at defamation claim against 'extortionate' infosec biz

Surely if Tiversa was able at access this document then LabMD was as guilty as if the document had been put on bittorrent? If their security was so bad that Tiversa could access the file it was only luck that hackers did not make it available. Like claiming drink driving is fine as long as you do not kill anyone?

Woman forced to sell 4-bed house after crypto exchange wrongly refunded $7.2m

Re: ..and the interest?

They are quite happy to waste everyone else's time and money though. Respect for me, not for thee.

Tesla faces Autopilot lawsuit alleging phantom braking

Or they could have a user operated control, perhaps a pedal, that allowed the driver to determine if it is safe to continue...

California lawmakers approve online privacy law for kids. Which may turn websites into identity checkpoints

Re: Whatever.

Does it "work" in the UK? I have not proved my age to anyone, and use the internets a bit.

Amazon has repackaged surveillance capitalism as reality TV

Re: Apathy is the problem

If in the UK, the ICO has a tool to determine this: https://ico.org.uk/your-data-matters/domestic-cctv-systems-guidance-for-people-being-filmed/

It frequently ends up with "Call the police".

Airbnb turns its anti-partying tech on American lodgers

> Airbnb has said that long-term stays "of 28 days or more" remain its fastest-growing category

Is it only me for whom this is the most worrying thing? Does this not indicate that AirBnB is now an accommodation provider rather than a holiday provider? When I stayed at an AirBnB in NY everyone else there was living there not on holiday.

Excel @ mentions approach general availability on the desktop

Re: Gerrof my lawn!

Quite. What does "assigning of tasks using the @ mention" actually mean? Are people using excel as a task tracking system? Is this a task tracking system for people who's tasks involve excel? Is this an IM client?

I generally thing that if you are using excel for anything that matters you are using the wrong tool, but I am quite sure that using it as a task tracker is wrong.

Facebook hands over chats to cops in abortion case

> a quick search shows me stats of 37% survival rate for babies born at 23 weeks

The number is very context dependent. For comparison, the WHO says 90% to those born under 28 weeks die within the first few days of life in poorer countries. What the number is for a poor woman in a country with one of the highest maternal mortality in west is certainly a question but I would be surprised if it is that high.

Charter told to pay $7.3b in damages after cable installer murders grandmother

Re: $7.3 billion for a murder ?

If this was an individual and they were responsible for a murder in Texas they could be killed, and would certainly not get away with paying one years income. Charter is getting away lightly with this fine (that they will never have to actually pay anyway).

Meta accuses data scrapers of taking more than their share

Re: Can a web crawler agree to TOS?

I am not convinced. If the person never visits the site, never sees the TOS, never clicks on "I agree" how do they legally agree to the terms?

Can a web crawler agree to TOS?

If the web site has terms of service that one agrees to to use the site, and a web crawler uses the site, has anyone agreed to the TOS? My understanding is that only persons can form contracts, and web crawlers are not persons.

FBI and MI5 bosses: China cheats and steals at massive scale

Re: S IP mple gix

If your business relies on keeping something secret you really should keep it secret. If someone finds your secret they are not stealing from you.

Tech world may face huge fines if it doesn't scrub CSAM from encrypted chats

Re: Irrelevant really though, isn't it ?

Exactly how widely that will be adopted is a question, but it will certainly be the MO of kiddie porn flingers.

If they can do why do they not tell us how?

"We, and other child safety and tech experts, believe that it is possible to implement end-to-end encryption in a way that preserves users' right to privacy, while ensuring children remain safe online." They believe this, but refuse to say what leads them to believe this. Open source implementations of E2E encryption have been around for ages, if it was possible then they could easily demonstrate it.

Taiwan creates new challenge for tech industry: stern content regulation laws

Re: "Transparency of algorithms used to determine ad placements"

> When platforms decide to take down content, they'll need to list each instance in a _public_ database

California's attempt to protect kids online could end adults' internet anonymity

The "good" result of all this could be switch back to a more decentralised internet

Unless there will be a way of criminalising diaspora or mastodon or whatever, then the big companies will become unusable for most people, and the decentralised solutions will be in a perfect place to take over.

FBI warning: Crooks are using deepfake videos in interviews for remote gigs

What role does the deep fake play?

It is not clear exactly what the deep fake is doing here. Is it just about the ethnicity of the applicant, in that the company would not employ someone who looks Korean or whatever? Or is this pretending to be actual people who put their real identifiable photograph on the web (seriously, who does that in this day and age of scammers scraping the web for photos)? If you are giving out security information just because an applicant looks a bit like a picture on the web deep fakes are the least of your problems.

It seems like if this is a security hole then it has been created by the companies for no good reason.

Totaled Tesla goes up in flames three weeks after crash

Re: Deja vu again

I think the best answer is removable batteries. As well as this issue, it makes the problem of degrading batteries less, makes it quick to change rather than slow to recharge, allows faster adoption as the users do not have to buy the batteries, and makes closed loop recycling easier.

AI's most convincing conversations are not what they seem

Re: The real issue

That does not sound like a definition of sentience. If one made a machine that was functionally identical to the human brain except "you call a function with words and it returns an answer and then everything stops" would that make it non-sentient? We need a usable definition before we make a machine that fits it.

The real issue

It seems this, along with most commentary, is missing the main issue. Few if anyone thinks LaMDA is really a sentient being worthy of rights. The issue is that we do not have the tools to determine if it is or not, so we just come up with unfalsifiable statements that it is not, or what it means to be (both in this and the linked "expert" article). If we cannot distinguish LaMDA from a child who has only been exposed to the trillions of lines of text that LaMDA has been trained on, then we should spend the research money to making sure we do have the tools before we actually build an AI that may be a sentient being worthy of rights.

Businesses brace for quantum computing disruption by end of decade

> Organizations may want to address threats like this by taking steps such as ... increasing the key sizes for current crypto algorithms like AES

And how long is going from 1024 to 4096 bits supposed to gain you once QC come online? A year, a month or a week?

Quantum computing startup probed in report, securities suit

Re: Quantum startups

Not that I like the the people who do this, if we vote for a system that allows people to make money this way can we really complain that some people chose to do so? Should we not "hate" the politicians who let them to it, or the voters who put the politicians in place? But that may get a little closer to home.

Threat of cross-border data tariffs looms over WTO

Re: "taxing e-commerce the same way that [..] physical goods traded internationally"

> Competitiveness is driven by competition not protectionism.

Historically all major economies have used protectionism to become competitive. They generally only go free market fundamentalist once they are globally competitive.

Meta slammed with eight lawsuits claiming social media hurts kids

Re: Social media is killing us

> Social media is one of the worst things to ever have been invented to use the internet

Social media came before the internet, see usenet.