Posts by Michael Wojcik 12268 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Dec 2007
Reminiscent of "COVID-19 is no worse for you than influenza". That bar is set a bit low.
That said, I take Citizen Labs' point: the sturm und drang over TikTok was largely due to people who are uninterested in making similar claims about Facebook. The Reg readership might not be surprised that the two are comparable, but I'm sure many who bought into the Former Fearful Leader's fear-mongering think Facebook is just peaches.
I honestly thought you were talking about beer for a good several seconds. I don't think I've ever seen anyone refer to COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2 (which is what you'd really be "getting" in this case, or more accurately droplets containing SARS-CoV-2 virons) as "Corona" before. Occasionally "coronavirus", I guess, due to the giant spider principle. Maybe it's a regional thing?
For a few years I was able to commute to school and both of my jobs by train and a bit of walking, aside from driving a few miles to and from the train station; or if I didn't feel like driving to the train station, by bus and train and a bit of walking.
Those were good years. I got a lot of reading done. And even in Boston (which has nasty winter weather) I enjoyed having some outdoor time every day.
But since 1998 I've worked from home, which is even better.
Well, yeah. That's where most drownings occur. Go where the market is, man!
It's a straightforward externality. There's no cost to the organization for using these dangerous mechanisms, and using something better would be an additional cost -- at least the cost of changing an existing system or provider.
This situation won't improve until the externality is converted to a direct cost. The only (non-violent) mechanisms for doing that are market forces and regulation. Market forces often don't apply (how many water boards can you choose from?), and have generally failed where the do (because not enough customers care about this sort of thing, and often there's no better choice anyway). So until we regulate against this sort of practice it will continue.
In the case described in the article, it sounds like there ought to be some stiff GDPR fines being handed out. But I'm not holding my breath.
Oh, I know of a number of organizations that take GDPR and other privacy legislation quite seriously, because now there are direct costs associated with violations.
But it's true that many do not. And if the sanctions regimes for these laws -- that is, significant fines against offending organizations -- are not enforced, soon no one will bother.
QR codes are just as bad. For a while I had a web page which just said something along the lines of "if I weren't ethical, you'd be pwnd now", and I'd stick the QR-encoded URL for it in the security presentations I gave internally, just to see who'd bite. But it's like trying to ice-skate uphill.
At least these days a lot of phones will display the decoded URL from a QR code and ask you before following it. Still a stupid technology, though.
While plaintiffs almost always request a jury trial for patent cases in EDTX, researchers such as Iancu and Chung refute the claim that juries are particularly plaintiff-favoring there.
That said, I'm very dubious about the role of the jury in any patent case. I've served on a jury for a criminal trial, and that was difficult enough. I don't think most jurors, even with the best of intentions, are in much of a position to arrive at the correct decision in a patent case.
But the right to a jury trial -- even though it's rarely to the defendant's advantage, and that's whom it's supposed to protect -- is more important than patent abuse. I'll take the latter to protect the former.
USPTO rejects about 50% of the applications it receives each year, despite pressure from elsewhere in government and industry to grant patents. (They publish the annual statistics on their site; I'm not going to bother linking.)
So "just accept[ing] them all" would be a rather dramatic change, even if the behavior of submitters didn't change to follow suit.
Correct, thanks to Heartland v. Kraft. There are various articles explaining this, such as this one.
It's not clear how "patent-friendly" Eastern Texas actually is. While there's certainly a perception that the district favors plaintiffs in patent-infringement cases, some studies, such as Iancu & Chung [2011], refute some of the commonly-cited reasons for its popularity.
I have no opinion about this particular patent. We have conflicting court decisions about it, and the snippets in the article make it difficult to guess whether it really claims anything non-obvious to an ordinary practitioner.
Realistically, it's very unlikely that most people involved with creating and using ransomware will ever suffer any penalties for doing so. The myriad difficulties of attribution, proof of guilt, and jurisdiction make this sort of crime extremely difficult to police.
That also means that threat of prosecution isn't much of a deterrent. Neither, I'm afraid, is refusing to pay. While paying may not be a winning strategy (on average), even a concerted and widespread effort to suppress payment -- through social pressure, evidence against paying, legal penalties,1 or whatever -- will likely still leave a pool of potential victims who will pay that's large enough to be worth the low costs of deploying ransomware.
Beyond that, ransomware is already being spread by botnets and worms, so it will continue to be deployed even if no humans are involved in that process.
It's here to stay.
1As the US government and no doubt others have warned, paying ransoms may violate various laws against funding illegal activity and so forth.
The azusagakuyuki matter doesn't sound like catfishing to me, based on the description in the article, just bog-standard online impersonation -- something that became unremarkable many years ago, in my opinion. Catfishing is a particular species of fraud based on online impersonation. Here the only thing being "fraudulently" obtained by the perpetrator is attention, and the only thing lost by those supplying it are some trivial opportunity costs.
Men impersonating women in publication is much older than catfishing, of course. We're a few decades away from the Vicar and Virago, and that's just one notable modern instance.
The use of a GAN to alter the photos is a bit noteworthy (though only because it was being done by a private individual for personal satisfaction), but enough patience and GIMP or Photoshop would achieve the same effect.
The purpose of the First Amendment freedom of speech and freedom of the press can only be honestly read as the right of the minority to loudly make statements which the majority would consider either to be lies or to be offensive. Statements accepted as true and unoffensive by the (current) majority need no such protection.
Rubbish. Many people and corporations are all too happy to try to use the power of the state against any expression they dislike, regardless of the popularity of that expression. That's why we have anti-SLAPP statutes, and why we need better ones.
And before some ninny posts myths like "the First Amendment only applies to Congress": if you think that, you're wrong. Courts have consistently held that the First applies when a private party attempts to use the power of the state to suppress (or compel) speech.
#4 should be "Win a mega-lottery and keep the money", which seems to be beyond the capability of most winners. (I'd say that lottery players self-select for poor financial choices, but in moderation I suppose it's an entertainment expense. Not one I'm interested in paying, but then I don't spend a lot of money on opera tickets either, so who am I to judge?)
Those aren't disjoint sets, either.
I've told this story here before, so I'll just summarize: Many years ago I carefully backed all my personal projects up to quarter-inch tape (real work was on a network filesystem which was multiply backed up more or less continuously), then installed an additional hard disk, repartitioned, created filesystems, installed the OS -- and then discovered the tapes were not readable.
the content is tightly controlled
Sure! I'm confident that no one has ever, or will ever, use an Alexa device for anything which is illegal in any jurisdiction. Nor that illegal content will ever be captured and uploaded by a Ring device. Amazon's all about "tightly controlled" content. Why, their store is famous for ensuring the accuracy of every product advertisement.
Yes sir, I have no qualms whatsoever about allowing Amazon unfettered access to my network.
Just unpicklinng one can't run code."
Except when it does. See Marshalling Pickles (AppSecCali 2015).
This has been a well-known issue for over five years. And it's not just Python.
I've managed to avoid it so far -- though I also avoid shopping on Amazon as much as I can, these days, and that helps.
Another obnoxious Amazon quirk: every time I go to check out, they ask if I want a student discount. Every. Damn. Time. I'm not an (enrolled) student, and haven't been since I completed my most recent degree several years ago. Give it the fuck up, Amazon.
Cryptocurrency prices crash, the miners unplug their kit, least efficient first, and, again, sell cards.
The problem in this case is that (apparently, based on the article) the demand here is for Ethereum, which unlike Bitcoin and most other simple cryptocurrencies has use-value: it's used for smart contracts.1 And according to various academic papers I've read, there is an obscene amount of money tied up in Ethereum smart contracts. Losses due to breaking Ethereum exceed $200M, and they represent a relatively small portion of the total Ethereum value.
Apparently -- again per various academic studies I've read -- many of the DApps using Ethereum are doing real data processing for real companies that make real things. Personally I find the idea a bit horrifying, but I guess you can always find someone to try any damn thing.
So Ether (the cryptocurrency based on Ethereum) is in effect somewhat stabilized by this store of value, even if Ether is not technically a "stablecoin".
1Which are neither, of course. Even the founder of Ethereum has disavowed the term.
"Press play on tape #1" Ah, the memories. My first PC game was a cassette-loaded Hunt the Wumpus for the Commodore PET. It was mildly entertaining!
Though some of my friends had Atari 400s or 800s; with those, for games it was just a matter of slapping the cartridge in and powering it on. And if you had the 800, with its dual slots, and the debugger cartridge you could often get the game to boot and then break in the debugger, and then you could have all sorts of fun.
One friend even had the external floppy drive for his 800, and a couple had the Votrax speech synthesizer.
Yes, it's a standard marchen trope. In the Grimms you can find it in "Seven with One Blow", for example.
A decent dictionary of folklore tropes would probably cite older sources. Wouldn't surprise me if it shows up in Marie de France, for example.
I have a vague idea that there's a classical example, but I can't think of it offhand.
(Re Jabberwocky: "He was so terrified his teeth turned white overnight!" Or words to that effect.)
I expect this sort of thing varies widely. I've never had a bad experience with a taxi, minicab, or private-hire in the UK (out of, I dunno, a few dozen trips?), and only once in the US that I can think of -- and that one was really just that the driver got in a shouting match with another driver.
But I've no doubt other people have.
On the other hand, some people have also had bad experiences with Uber. So I'm not convinced that Uber, even aside from its various and egregious flaws as an organization, is actually providing objectively better service as a rule.
Most drivers own cars unsuitable for Uber so have to lease a prius.
Really? A majority of Uber drivers in the UK use leased Priuses? I refuse to use Uber, but I've never seen any Uber users in the US picked up or dropped off by a Prius. I know the Prius is a popular vehicle in some circles, but this claim is hard for me to believe.
I agree with your larger point that Uber drivers incur various expenses which "at least minimum wage while you're on a run" will not adequately cover. Of course, I'm here in the Land of the Ridiculously Inadequate Minimum Wage (Especially for People Who Might Receive Tips), so I'm inclined to view an employer's claim of "it's a living wage!" with suspicion, if not outright disdain.
Under the "get paid while logged-in model", I collect minimum wage etc for doing absolutely nothing.
And this is why people working for other employers never do any work and suffer no consequences. There's absolutely nothing an employer can do about an unproductive employee (or, in this case, "worker").
Oh, wait.
Could we drop the pretentious "humanities are for losers" bullshit? I know people with liberal-arts degrees who can use a lathe just fine. Two of my degrees are in the humanities, and I'm well-versed in quite a lot of power tools, thanks.
This is one of the particularly pernicious forms of small-mindedness that infects far too much of the IT industry. And it's one of the reasons that most software is utter crap, frankly.
232 x 232 is (232)2 is 264.
You tested 264 iterations of a function "overnight"? Even for "2020s CPU speed" that's ... a lot of iterations. If "overnight" means 12 hours, that's doing more than 4 x 108 trials (which presumably includes verifying the result) each microsecond.
Am I missing something?
Well, Twilio is unlikely to have a SolarWinds-style breach, because they're not distributing code to their customers.
They'll have a SaaS-style breach instead. Pick yer poison.
(On the plus side, telephony is already so absurdly insecure1 that a telephony breach is more "oh, another of these" than "holy crap I was not expecting that".)
Required reading in my CS course, back in the '80s. I still have my copy. It remains as pertinent as it ever was.
That said, development-method schools such as Agile aren't in opposition to most of Brooks's observations. Agile is an attempt to avoid the eponymous problem that Brooks discusses, by keeping schedules very short and flexible (so there's no incentive to try to throw resources at them). A good Agile implementation accommodates the variety of developer roles that Brooks describes by letting teams self-organize rather than treating them as pools of fungible workers. And so on.
Of course, Agile isn't a silver bullet and can certainly be done so badly that it's counterproductive. And there are all sorts of ideas and practices lumped under the Agile category, of varying value; and there's wide agreement that every organization and team have to be free to adapt whatever Agile system they're trying to use to their own requirements.
It only establishes that a Grand Jury has found that sufficient evidence has been provided, showing that a crime may have been committed.
It only establishes that a grand jury was convened, frankly. In the US, Federal accusatory1 grand juries return indictments in nearly all cases.
"Indicted by a grand jury" is an extremely low barrier. Once you've been charged with an eligible crime by an AUSA, you're almost certain to be indicted.
1In the US Federal justice system, there are two types of grand juries: accusatory and investigatory. The latter may be convened for months or years, and in theory exists to compile a body of evidence in a complex case, though in practice they're mostly there to fill a room and pretend to listen when an AUSA occasionally tells them a subpoena has been issued. The former are exercises in rubber-stamping whatever a prosecutor tells them. They rarely have the relevant law explained to them, they can be presented with hearsay and other weak forms of evidence, they don't have to be presented with possibly-exculpatory evidence, etc.
"I need to do X. This thing does X. Any other considerations will require I do more work."
Actually, this explains not only your second question, but probably your first as well. "Hmm, I need to store this data somewhere. Let's see what I can find with a single StackExchange search. Ah, a set of instructions for dumping data into an S3 bucket using a hard-coded key."
A perfectly sensible term, since it refers to an aesthetic and cultural movement called "Modernism" (a proper noun), which takes its name from the concept of "modernism", which, contra Chesterton, is itself a perfectly sensible idea.
Modernism as a concept refers to a conscious recognition of living in a world which is significantly different from its recent historical past. People do not always feel this way; most Europeans did not during the middle ages, for example. There are reams of cultural history documenting and analyzing this shift in social perceptions.
Modernism as an aesthetic movement refers to a number of schools and artists who took it as their mission to represent, explore, and/or encourage ideas and techniques they felt were new, or at any rate a break from the past. (It's not to be confused with the artistic avant garde, though, which in effect sought to take a step further, though that's a very simplistic version of the difference.)
Post-modernism refers to a collection of movements in reaction to Modernism.
The Renaissance didn't involve everyone giving birth, either. Names are not bound to exactly represent their etymologies. Chesterton's observation is a sophomorism.
A good reference on the concepts of modernism, Modernism, and particularly the period often called "High Modernism" is Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism. There are any number of others, of course. For Post-modernism, the Routledge book of the same title (I forget the author and can't be bothered to look it up) is pretty good. The term was popularized by various architects and by essays such as Jameson's "Post-Modernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism", but I wouldn't go back to those sources; the term drifted too much afterward.
I have to say, I was astonished when I switched to Consumer Cellular ("phones for olds"), and their contact information -- which they splash across pretty much every page of their website -- was correct, useful, and provoked an almost immediate response. Of course customer service is their big selling point.
Compare that with, oh, Computershare; I used their email contact form over a week ago and haven't heard a peep. They say to expect a response in 5 business days, which is still an absurdly long time for a financial firm.
Monarch, heir, pretender?
Though in the US I guess we'd have to use President, VP, and SpeakerOfTheHouse.
When I was at IBM circa 1990, we had an AFS (Andrew File System) setup for our AOS (BSD 4.3 on the PC RT) and AIX systems, and that called its secondary server "vice", if memory serves. I recall various jests about "vice squad", the wages of vice, &c.
To indicate you're from Texas or are using a CB radio?
(I kid, but of course slang and other informal usage tends to change particularly fast, and in most of the US I think "buddy" has largely fallen out of favor. Though that said, Granddaughter Major still refers to me as her "best buddy" and sometimes addresses me thus.)
Some states have drug-diversion programs; others don't. There are a huge number of people in US prisons for drug possession in amounts which are not plausibly "for distribution", and the relevant laws skew very much against drugs more accessible to and popular among poorer and minority populations.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics hasn't bothered updating its "Drug Facts" reports since the 1980s (we wouldn't want too much official information on this scandal), but the NCJRS (also under the US DOJ) has plenty of material on the matter. For example:
Stemen and Rengifo [2012] show that the Kansas diversion law did not significantly reduce incarcerations.
Casey Foundation [2011] shows that while youth incarceration has dropped considerably (about 40%) since the 1990s, "Forty percent [of youth incarcerations] are due to technical violations of probation, drug possession, low-level property offenses, public-order offenses, and status offenses" -- low-threat offenses which should in many or most cases be diverted.
Mooney et al [2018] show that while racial/ethnic disparities in arrest rates have decreased (i.e. become less biased) in California, disparities increase again sharply in the prosecution phase -- producing disparate incarceration rates.
Interesting. When I scheduled my appointment, they said general anesthesia was mandatory. I wonder if this differs by doctor, practice, hospital, state...
In general I prefer local anesthesia just because I dislike being unconscious. Well, I dislike the prospect of being unconscious, and the knowledge that I have been. I can't recall ever disliking the state in the moment, for obvious reasons.
I had Propofol for mine, too. Not like the old days of nitrous oxide and ... whatever injected general anesthetic they were using when I was a kid. There was no "count backwards from 100" or any of that nonsense. The anesthesiologist said "I'm putting you to sleep now" and then "time to wake up!".
It was like she'd flipped a light switch.
A nice experience for surgical procedures that can't be done with local anesthesia. Not something I would ever want to take for any other reason.
The difference is, if your tulip investment crashed, you still owned actual tulip bulbs. If your cryptocurrency of choice crashes, you own nothing.
True, but this article isn't about cryptocurrency, except insofar as the payment was in Ether.1 It's about an NFT, which is something, even if all the use-value is available in other copies.
We (that is, modern global capitalism) have long recognized value in intellectual property, and an NFT is just another certificate of intellectual property, much like a copyright registration or certificate of provenance, for example.
There's also a possible Benjaminian "aura" quale for some people in an NFT, which is an interesting question for aesthetics and critical theory and the psychology of value.
1And Ether is not entirely equivalent to non-stable cryptocurrencies like Blockchain in this regard, because of its foundation in Ethereum, which has use-value through smart-contract processing. Personally I wouldn't be keen on using the stuff, but it's not pure fiat. And there is a lot of money tied up in Ethereum smart contracts.
OK, yes, but joking aside: Department chairs are not necessarily particularly gifted researchers or theorists. A healthy academic department selects a chair1 based on administrative qualities such as management skills, organization, diplomatic skills, fairness (one hopes), and so forth.
Often "department chair" means "tenured faculty member who was seen as the least-bad compromise by enough of the faculty and hasn't yet pissed off the dean too much". Or, of course, "dean's toady", which is at least as common.
Loeb's other non-research qualifications are more significant, and even those should take a back seat to his actual research publication and presentation history, and how those have been received by the field.
And all of that, still, is hardly a reliable indicator. For exhibit A I give you Linus Pauling. Good chemist, lousy nutritionist.
1In the US, at least, the process for this varies by university and college, but is likely to be complicated and fraught. But usually the department members (at least the tenure-stream faculty, though at sensible institutions fixed-term faculty, staff, and even those scum graduate students may have some influence) get to at least vet candidates and create the final list of options.
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