* Posts by Michael Wojcik

12132 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Dec 2007

Feds rethink warrantless search stats and – oh look, a huge drop in numbers

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: "an indispensable tool when it comes to fighting terrorism"

SLA (1973). Bath school massacre (1927). Harper's Ferry raid (1859) – whatever your opinion of Brown's motives and whether the wrongs he wanted to right justified it, that was basically a terrorist attack. Maybe Shay's Rebellion (1786).

some

The American Revolution arguably wasn't a terrorist operation prior to its success, because it didn't have an explicit aim of advancing a political goal through threats of violence, but it wasn't all that far off. You could make a similar argument for some of the above, but the line between "terrorism" and "just regular ol' wide-spread violence and murder" gets blurry.

Even with a strict definition of terrorism it's hard to see how e.g. the SLA, Oklahoma City, Unabomber, and DC sniper attacks don't fit.

That said, Pascal's point that we lack public evidence to support the FBI's claim that they're stopping All The Terrorism seems pretty valid. You want §702? Show us something real. And even then, it needs to be scaled back dramatically.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: "an indispensable tool when it comes to fighting terrorism"

Uh, we've had a whole bunch of terrorist attacks. Sure, most of them were using artisanal home-grown terrorists, but that's just because the USA still makes the best ones.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: NCT

Get a job, Tucker.

OpenAI's ChatGPT may face a copyright quagmire after 'memorizing' these books

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: "The authors note that science fiction and fantasy books dominate the list"

I doubt the effect is significant. There's a vast amount of misinformation, deliberate and accidental, in the "real world" and supposedly factual documents. And that doesn't include pseudo-deliberate (i.e. undesirable gradients emerging from prompt directions that aren't directly about the topic at hand) falsification and hallucination by LLMs, such as Waluigis.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Confidential

ChatGPT is not learning anything – its training is done and it doesn't dynamically update.

Hybrid systems like Microsoft's Sydney can perform searches against current online content, and so even though its weights are no longer being updated, it has that as a secondary learning mechanism. And because it can find records of its own output (in tweets and blog posts and published papers and the like) it even has fragmentary memory.

We already know of cases where people have put proprietary information into LLM prompts, and only recently did OpenAI, for one, introduce an option to not have prompt data saved for ingestion by future systems. I don't know Sydney/Bing offers such an option.

And, of course, information can be revealed inadvertently through correlation. De-anonymization studies show just how much information that was presumed private can be derived this way; that's why differential privacy is A Thing.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Odd how the copyright problem gets swerved.

There are also practical considerations. Publishers, and their lawyers, are going to want strong evidence to show infringement, so they're letting researchers like this team demonstrate how to get it. Also there's a bit of game theory in play: everyone would like someone else to run the first, most expensive case up through the court system, pay for appeals, etc; then everyone else can coast on precedent.

What will likely happen is that one of the industry associations will put together a consortium so costs can be shared, unless the LLM vendors decide to preempt it by offering some kind of licensing agreement. With Microsoft and Alphabet leading the pack on the LLM side, though, the latter seems unlikely to me. They haven't historically shown much inclination to play nicely with others.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Stop anthropomorphizing computers. They hate that.

Oh, please. "Memorized" is a perfectly usable gloss for "created an internal representation of X in its parameter space", which is a very different thing from creating an exact copy. Reducing technical precision in the discussion helps no one.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: A mirror-image legal issue

Yes, getting accurate, complete, and safe instructions for complex procedures is definitely another of the problematic use cases for LLM chatbots. It's maybe worth noting that ChatGPT was created as an improvement on InstructGPT, which itself was created (by introducing an early form of RLHF) from GPT-2 specifically to improve performance in the instruction-giving domain. But we know that ChatGPT often doesn't do well here, and that failure modes (as you suggest) can be quite bad.

Personally I don't think this is solvable for pure large unidirectional transformer models, and even if it is in theory (and I don't see how), complications of interpretability, corrigibility, and the Waluigi Effect probably make it infeasible in practice. The "automatic reference librarian" mode you suggest would be an improvement for most uses, but it's significantly less shiny and demands more cognitive effort from users, which means less use and money for organizations likely to deploy it in public – Google / Microsoft / etc. (It would still probably find a market for domain-specific usage, where existing information-management products do well, for example as a search mechanism for corporate documents.)

Intel to rebrand client chips once Meteor Lake splashes down

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Marketing: why do we need it again

There have been changes in the past which haven't been negative, for example Intel relegating "Pentium" to lower-end CPUs and introducing the "Core" brand back in 2006.

And who exactly cared about the rebranding? Is there any reliable evidence to suggest Intel sold more product because of it?

China has 50 hackers for every FBI cyber agent, says Bureau boss

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: If they want more IT professionals in their employment

Yes. While I don't partake myself,1 the enormous wastefulness and injustice of the Federal government's War on Drugs, and particularly against marijuana, has cost the US tremendously. It's a patently failed policy that needs to be terminated completely.

1I worry it will interfere with my being a sanctimonious know-it-all.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Bad rep

And COINTELPRO never happened, apparently. Trust your G-man implicitly!

Like any other large, bureaucratic institution, the FBI is made up of people, with widely varying beliefs, ethics, and practices. Like any organization tasked with policing or surveillance, it is faced with myriad temptations to expand its power and violate whatever constraints are placed on it; and like any such organization, it has been known to yield to that temptation. Facile generalizations about its beneficence or mendacity don't hold up to any scrutiny. That doesn't mean there isn't quite a lot of room for improvement; neither does it mean that simply getting rid of the thing, and either replacing it wholesale or not replacing it at all, would result in a better world.

Complicated problems rarely have simple solutions.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Yeah, "we see a lot of SYNs" is a mighty feeble excuse for asking for more funding. Who doesn't?

Similarly, the New Yellow Peril argument isn't terribly persuasive. Oh, there are allegedly 50x as many Chinese "hackers" as there are FBI "cyber agents"? What, does China have a large educated population or something? Who would have thought?

We'll just have to make the FBI agents pair-type, NCIS-style. Or, perhaps, come up with reasonable requests for resources backed by real arguments, not the pulling of hair and rending of garments. And maybe lay off the War On Privacy while they're at it.

Misinformation tracker warns 'new generation' of AI-scribed content farms on the rise

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Yeah. It's going to be reading them any less, since I'm already pretty much at zero.

Top Google boffin Hinton quits, warns of AI danger, partly regrets life's work

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

At least Hinton's willing to contemplate revenge effects

... unlike Yann LeCunn, whose recent Twitter rant at Yudkowsky shows just how much of a zealot LeCunn is. Completely unwilling to even consider the possibility he might be wrong, and willing to play the "think of the children" card right off the bat.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

One of the pillars of GPT-4 is that it has a mechanism that mimics human brain's synapses

Uh, citation? Everything I've seen about GPT-4 claims that it's a large unidirectional transformer stack. Nothing about neuromorphic architecture. People have done neuromorphic-transformer hybrids based on GPTs, such as SpikeGPT, but I haven't seen anything credible about that being used in GPT-4. Yes, there's a rectification / activation function (earlier GPTs used GELU, dunno about -4) but that's hardly neuromorphic.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Turing; and Clarke

There have been chatbots winning formal Imitation Game contests for years.

The Imitation Game is a terrible practical measure. It's a useful thought experiment in the philosophy of mind, and as a response to the epistemological scandal.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: My prediction

"AI" is an essentially meaningless term, so there's no such thing as "true AI".

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Dumber and Dumber

More generally, terms like "smart" and "intelligent" aren't productive in sensible, informed discussions about ML and so-called "AI" systems, and even marginally more-specific terms like "sentient" (which is at best a niche attribute anyway) or "sapient" are unlikely to be of any real value. Reasonable ML researchers typically use terms such as "capabilities", which is general and too vague to be a metric but at least avoids some of the misleading connotations.

It's clear to most people with some expertise in the area that unidirectional transformer stacks on the scale of even the biggest LLMs publicly demonstrated so far lack many capabilities which humans display, and in fact that's only to be expected based on their architecture. (It's conceivable that some transformer-based architectures might spontaneously develop arbitrary cognitive capabilities if scaled up large enough and appropriately hyper-parameterized, Boltzmann-brain-fashion – conceivable, but by no means certain. But in any case we aren't near that yet.)

But even if you assign a pretty low paperclipping probability, or probability of AGI in general in a near timeframe, there's already the risks Hinton points to: LLMs are useful for bad actors of various stripes, because they can produce false evidence of decent quality1 and, with proper prompting, implement standard rhetorical techniques well enough to persuade many non-critical audiences. They work well as demagoguery amplifiers. They're also dangerous because they are reasonably good simulators of authoritative sources and careless (one might say venal) actors, notably Microsoft and Google, are pushing them as authoritative. That, too, imperils those who can't or won't attempt to think critically.

1In particular genres, of course. LLMs converge on a sort of median prose style, even modulo style prompting, which is pretty pedestrian; outside of that they're noticeably worse. Still-image generative models do very well with some prompts and less well with others. Video generation is ... a work in progress.

EU legislates disclosure of copyright data used to train AI

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Truly insidious

That RNC advertisement should not be dismissed. It poses a real danger. People will see it and think, well, if this half-assed feeble bullshit is the worst we'll get from generative AI, there's nothing to worry about.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Yes, the pretense that San Francisco is somehow the most difficult place in the world for an AV to operate is prima facie absurd. It's certainly not the hardest place in California – there are plenty of rural areas where online maps will be inaccurate and signage negligible, for example, and where there will be hazards like fallen rock and washouts. It's probably not the most difficult urban area in California; I don't know of a worse one offhand, but there are a lot of them, so that seems statistically likely.

Try running a robo-taxi service in the region around the Mountain Fastness (hey, we have a commercial airport, so theoretically there's demand) and you'd find out that SF is a doddle.

In the UK, as you wrote, rural areas could definitely be a challenge. How are these AVs at negotiating fords? How do they do with blind intersections? Can I take one over Hardknott Pass? (When I were a lad, I spent a few days in Cumbria with my folks. We had a hire car, and my father and I were looking at a map and spotted the pass, so of course we had to drive it. Really very pleasant and not at all difficult, but not being able to see the road past the bonnet of the car was an interesting experience, and the only way you knew of oncoming traffic was the wave of sheep that preceded it. Possibly not accounted for in the AV's model.)

And while I've never driven elsewhere in Europe, my understanding from TV is that the UK is relatively easy.

Hell, even New England is a lot harder to navigate than San Francisco. SF is not that far from Phoenix (beloved of AV firms) in terms of difficulty.

Red Hat layoffs spark calls to unionize, CEO wades in

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Interesting clash between US corporate oligarch feudalism and Liberte, Egality et Fraternite

Oh, do fuck off. Many people in the US are aware of working conditions and regulations in other countries, and their histories (which are far more complex than you suggest).

And the US didn't "abandon" slavery with the 14th Amendment; it nationalized it (and it's been privatizing it again in recent decades).

"naive" indeed.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

And even if you can "get a job the next day", there's no guarantee that changing jobs won't adversely affect you. Maybe the new job isn't as close to your interests; maybe your coworkers or work conditions are less appealing. Maybe you'll have to relocate. Maybe the new employer turns out to be rubbish.

Of course, it might be better, too – but it's a gamble. Some people are risk-averse, and some others ought to be. And whatever happens, there's the cognitive load of taking on a new position in a new organization, and the attendant stress. The "you can always get a new job" (and its extended version "you can always quit and get a new job") philosophy does not realistically assess the costs of doing so, even for high-demand employees.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Stock price

It's the only kind of thinking big investors are interested in, and thus the only kind the board is interested in. They're not going to hire a CEO who doesn't focus on short-term returns.

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

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Yes, this is definitely something we should be very concerned about, right after every other actual problem is fixed.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

I suspect for many of the legislators this is the plan. Pass a virtue-signaling (for the reactionaries) law, knowing that in practice it will be ineffective so people won't be up in arms about its revenge effects. There will be the occasional wrist-slapping fine to show it's "working".

There's bread, and then there's circus. This is circus.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: What is deemed harmful to kids ?

I attended and taught at a university on the fringe of the Bible Belt, and let me assure you there are a great many young people in the US who do, in all seriousness, consult religious websites. These were kids who ascribed to one flavor or another of Christianity, but I'm sure the same is true of many other faiths. Even teenagers are quite capable of being True Believers – even when such beliefs contradict others they hold. (Rationalizing cognitive dissonance is a skill most people master early.)

Once again, much of the Reg commentariat seem to have trouble grasping the idea that Not Everyone Is You.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

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

Cut 'em apart and count the rings, duh.

No more feature updates for Windows 10 – current version is final

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Truly, certainly not

I generally click the button1 and start typing, but about 30%-50% of the time it doesn't work – keyboard input is just ignored. I have to mouse away, click the desktop, and try again. I have no idea how they managed to screw that up so badly, but it happens on both my work and personal machines, so it's something to do with my configuration.

WIMP GUIs are ill-conceived and abysmally implemented in so many ways (modal dialogs, focus stealing, z-order issues, ...), but Windows always seems to go the extra mile.

1I used to use Ctrl-Esc rather than screwing about with non-keyboard controls, but the Win10 "start" button doesn't grab focus successfully when Microsoft's misnamed "X Mouse" feature (i.e. implicit focus) is enabled, so Ctrl-Esc is not reliable.

Microsoft tackles SaaSy URL sprawl, dumping its dotcom in favor of cloud.microsoft

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Cloud schmoud

2025: Microsoft announces all their public URLs will be changed to "ai.microsoft".

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

If only they'd thought to come out with a product family named "Microsoft .NET"; then "microsoft.net" would be a memorable domain for them to use.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Why could they not be bothered to set up everything they need as subdomains of microsoft.com in the first place?

Because marketers love domain names the way flies love shit?

It's true that Microsoft has a huge problem with URLs, or really a number of problems. They've never really understood the concept, as anyone who uses Sharepoint (the worst information system ever invented by allegedly intelligent beings) knows. And like many corporations they've indulged in an addiction to acquiring idiotic domains, as you noted. But, really, using a word-TLD? The tackiest solution possible? What techie doesn't think word TLDs were an obnoxious cash grab by IANA and essentially useless?

Tokyo has millions of surplus Wi-Fi access points that should be shared with blockchain, says NTT

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: I have a hammer, everything is nails

Whoosh.

ChatGPT hasn't been around for long and Nvidia already wants to put a leash on it

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Let me guess

It's more like an expert system.

A quick look at the NeMo Guardrails info in NVIDIA's technical blog post shows it's just a framework for writing rules in Colang, a data-flow language NVIDIA invented for this sort of thing. You basically tell it "if the input matches this pattern, do this thing", where "pattern" is a fairly expressive DSL. But there's no magic here, and frankly my initial guess is that if you have programmatic access to a NeMo-protected system (so you can drive a lot of queries) you'd be able to train an adversarial model pretty quickly to simulate its guardrails and then look for holes.

And, of course, it's up to the application developer to design good guardrails in the first place, and that's an area where very few developers are likely to show much expertise.

So this is likely to be used reactively: "Oh, someone just made our bot do a Bad Thing, so write another guardrail to prevent that specific prompt". No magic, no silver bullet.

(That said, a smart organization deploying an LLM-based service would do the adversarial modeling first, and use it GAN-style to create a set of guardrails. That's likely to be more successful than an economically-feasible human-authored set.)

UK watchdog blocks Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Wrong solution to the problem

What does it profit a man to gain free delivery for a month, and lose his own soul?

Frankly, I'm happy to pay for shipping when I can't find a supplier other than Amazon, and explicitly snub their damned appeals to sign up for Prime.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Our Version of Capitalism

When we moved and stopped paying for a cable television subscription a few years ago, it was around $250/month. That included Internet service, but now our combined Internet and streaming subscriptions is only around $130/month. (And it'd be less if it were just me here, since I could dispense with most of them, and would. Particularly those bastards at WBD.)

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Disagree

UK bans an American company from acquiring another American company. Yes I can see this being effective. Unless the 2 entities have a uk office, there’s not a jot the CMA can do about it except moan.

Always good to read a well-supported argument from an expert. Perhaps you know of one?

Spain gets EU cash to test next gen network, and US 'scrum for 6G' already under way

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: " How much better do mobile networks really have to be by 2030-ish?"

I cannot think of a single use case that matters to me in the slightest where 5G would make a difference.

Even 4G makes very little difference in my life; I wouldn't miss it if it went away.

Elizabeth Holmes is not going to prison – for the moment

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

The no-fly list is a giant pile of crap, and "Elizabeth Holmes" doesn't seem like a particularly unusual name. Just have her surrender her passport; that should make leaving by commercial air travel sufficiently difficult. (If she can get a forged passport, she can get one under a different name, so the no-fly would still be useless.)

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: said to have booked a one-way ticket to Mexico soon after she was found guilty.

For that matter, isn't surrendering your passport generally a condition of bail? Maybe that's just on television.

Amazon, Bing, Wikipedia make EU's list of 'Very Large' platforms

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Seems risky. Do its customers know shit from Shinola?

South Korea prosecutes Terraform Labs co-founder Daniel Shin

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: The difference is...

And that's why the industrialized nations have regulations regarding investment schemes and vehicles, and people and organizations which offer investment schemes and vehicles that fail to comply with those regulations are breaking the law. Oh, they say it's "novel" and "disruptive" and "we don't think your regulations apply"? Tell it to the judge.

Let's take a closer look at these claims of anti-ransomware SSDs

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: I do not change them so if they ever change something bad has happened.

There are a number of ransomware techniques that try to avoid basic detection methods, such as only encrypting certain types of files or encrypting files in a random order. That sort of approach might eventually trigger detection but possibly late enough that some damage would already be done. But of course earlier detection is always better.

There are also ransomware strains which hook the filesystem and decrypt on the fly to remain unnoticed until all files and recent backups are encrypted, and then spring the trap. So checking canaries through direct disk access is better – but of course gets more complicated with more-sophisticated storage systems. (Here checking backups routinely on an isolated, dedicated system – preferably automatically – can help detect "stealth" ransomware.)

It's the usual arms race. As with any arms race, though, even if you don't have great defenses against the state of the art, protecting yourself from the run of the mill is a good idea and gives you some breathing room for worrying about a really sophisticated attacker.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: "AI" marketing

There's no way a microcontroller is running anything like a big ML model, so even by today's weak-sauce standards there's no "AI" here. There might be some processing of some sliding window of telemetry data by a canned model of some sort that's amenable to processing by a relatively low-power processor in an embedded system, such as an HMM. So, yeah, this is some arrant-nonsense marketing.

American private equity can't wait to gobble up Euro stalwart Software AG

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Sounds like the

Anytime an American “group” buys anything, it’s about making money, fast. Fuck everything and anyone, history, values, customs etc. etc.

Not always.

US venture firms such as Golden Gate provided the capital that bought the Micro Focus unit away from Merant in 2001, unwinding the disastrous Intersolv merger of 1998. Merant was already in a tailspin in 2001, and Micro Focus thrived, paid back Golden Gate, went public again, and eventually bought the remains of Merant (by buying Serena in 2016, after Serena bought Merant in 2004).

That was a Good Thing for Micro Focus. I was there. It also allowed Micro Focus to buy Borland, part of Compuware, and the CORBA vendors, and to merge with Attachmate Group – and it kept those products alive (with a handful of exceptions they're all still around), which as we all know is often not the case after ISV M&As. And keeping the products available, supported, and updated 1 is what really matters to customers.

The merger with the software side of HP was definitely shakier, but again the products were kept alive.

And then OpenText bought MF this year, and shareholders made some money, and those products continue to be available and developed. Acquisition is always worrying but so far things seem encouraging.

Business is often ugly, it's true. But that doesn't mean taking a company private is always the road to ruin. Merant under Greenfield was a basket case and being taken private saved Micro Focus. Running a business takes money and when a public software firm is struggling to keep shareholders happy, an acquisition is probably going to happen regardless. So taking what looks like the best opportunity2 is not failure or capitulation.

(While I was on the inside for all of the Micro Focus saga, everything here is public information or opinion.)

1MF is sometimes accused of being a software retirement home, but nearly all the product lines – even ones with relatively small market share that are overshadowed by our own competing products – have regular updates with fixes, enhancements, and new features. Visual COBOL is the flagship COBOL product, but ACU and RM still have a regular release cycle. Visibroker is the flagship ORB, but Orbix gets updates too. ArcSight is the flagship but Sentinel is still getting refreshes. And so on.

2Of course this will be a gamble. It's a type of stopping problem, like the Secretary Problem.

Department of Homeland Security bets on AI to help handle China

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

There was no failure of imagination

avoid falling victim to "failures of imagination" – like the US did prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks

This is one of the most annoying, if not particularly pernicious, myths surrounding 9/11. There was no "failure of imagination". The attacks were not only entirely foreseeable but a direct evolution of earlier aircraft hijackings and other attacks such as the 1993 WTC bombing. It was anticipated by the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen (2001), which revolved around a plot to hijack an airliner and crash it into the WTC, FFS. It had not only been imagined two years earlier, but put in a widely-seen spinoff of a popular television show. That's about as successful as imagination gets.

The 9/11 attacks partially succeeded because US intelligence operations had moved too heavily away from HUMINT to SIGINT, and because practices were poor, particularly around inter-agency coordination. (Whether the DHS boondoggle has improved that is still an open question. Personally I think the DHS is a mistake, but it's very difficult to evaluate these things with any accuracy.)

SentinelOne sticks generative AI into its stuff because 2023 gotta 2023

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

It's a floor wax and a desert topping!

2016: Hey, how about this "blockchain" stuff? Pretty maximally annoyingly overhyped technology, right?

2023: Hold my beer.

With a mighty hand, and an outstretched arm, Musk scraps Pope's blue tick

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Good

One of the things, certainly, but it's not like they don't complain about things that have happened. DeSantis complains about children learning things from books, for example, and that's happened on occasion. Might even happen again. I mean, not in Florida, but in places where there are still sane people.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: If the vatican is a country

Technically the Holy See is the country, of which the Pope is sovereign and thus head of state. Vatican City is just its dominion.

Autonomy's Mike Lynch loses battle against extradition to the US on fraud charges

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: I wonder

Due to the OpenText acquisition I don't have more-recent figures handy, but in the FY2021 Annual Report, the IM&G portfolio, which includes IDOL (the former Autonomy product) claimed around $390M in revenue. It's not broken down by product, though, and there are heavy hitters such as Vertica in that portfolio, so... you probably won't find out from published information.

It'll be interesting to see how it does under OpenText, where there's more of a relationship to their traditional product line, but also possibly more overlap with it.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Weak case and due diligence not done

I'll just note that HP's (Apotheker's) foolishness and incompetence does not, from a legal standpoint, excuse any fraud committed by officers of Autonomy. They can both be in the wrong.

So that shouldn't affect whether Lynch is convicted.

That said, I think Lynch should be tried in the UK (on the criminal charges; he already lost the civil case), and if convicted punished there. And I'd be in favor of dropping the whole thing except that seems rather unfair to Hussain, who after all is in prison already and was hardly solely responsible for whatever fraud did occur.

The real pity is that none of this blew back on Apotheker and the HP board that backed him. If I were an HP shareholder I'd be far more angry at them.