Posts by Mike 16

provide evidence of that truth

Under oath.

Or, they could just perjure themselves. It's not like perjury is completely off the table for either side.

The U.S. is so polarized that if Satan testified to the plans for apocalypse, half the country would believe him while the other half would claim that the whole "prince of lies" things was just a smear. Similarly, if Jesus were to be served a subpoena, he'd be stopped at the border (maybe the one in the third dimension) for being from the Middle East. Or challenged on ID because he doesn't look like his well-known pictures.

Re: What shall we do with a . . . . .

I'll admit I did not read the whole article, but one line early on struck me:

"The Defiant found use in gunnery training"

I'd love to know if the people being trained were actually _in_ the Defiant, or were trying to shoot it down.

Re: Bug fixing and machine learning

I'm not sure that having an AI capable of explaining its actions will be an unalloyed good. When its explanation for why it hit a pedestrian is something like "He was a Ginger", how do you plan on fixing it? We've had millennia to work on that problem with the previous meat-sack implementation, with little to no progress (some would say retrograde) so far.

As for quality in general, as I've said before, in the past I worked on embedded systems that would count as Capital Equipment. "Fit for purpose" was the standard, and the customer did not care if the issue was hardware or software, it was on the manufacturer to eat the cost of the fix, and possibly pay some part of the loss of revenue to the customer.

In the Ginger-hating autopilot case, how would one expect to squeeze the money for getting a better training set out of developers hidden under 7 layers of shell company?

Re: Trademark, not Patent.

Looking for prior art is (mostly) associated with patents. I'm pretty sure the "famous Czech Branching Movie" ("Dream Machines/Computer Lib", Ted Nelson) from 1967 predates the examples mentioned so far, as do the IBM "Programmed Learning" books I first met in 1961 or so.

The issue isn't the technique, but the name. Having a character named Ricky Rat may skate close to the edge, but using the M-words is gonna cost you.

Re: 1984 won't be like 1984, but 2020 will

Pretty standard in tech. People overestimate "progress" * in the short term, and underestimate it in the long term.

* For whatever definition of "progress" is under discussion, whether it is monetization of the limited oxygen supply on Mars, 24-7 observation and recording of everybody (except billionaires and their tame politicians), or the improvement of safeguards beyond "But Fred would never abuse that, and he's the only one who knows the 4-digit PIN"

Re: The researchers hope the bots can also be powered by ultrasound or magnetic fields

So the tiny submarine with the tinier Raquel Welch could be powered by biomimetic Electric Eel cells?

Re: Liability ?

You may be leaning a bit too heavily on Hanlon's Razor, and not enough on Occam's.

If a group is doing something dodgy, and your representatives seem curiously hesitant to address the issue, ignorance is probably somewhere in the mix, but is probably not as relevant as brown envelopes.

Sufficiently advanced cluelessness is indistinguishable from malice.

Re: 300 Baud - much faster than Baudot RTTY

Baudot (Murray) RTTY at 45.45 baud with 7.5 bits/character is slower than 300 baud 10 bits/character, but not _that_ much slower. Yes, I did edit over 300 baud, when there was "bad weather" for 1200. Using DEC's EDIT (then later KED, think: VI, but with slightly less arcane commands). Staying in non-visual mode unless needed, and setting ROWS to something like 4 (rather than 24) when going visual.

At least nobody I ever met tried to use a "visual mode" editor on a Teletype. :-)

Re: why people don't patch

Not to mention that many a "urgent security update" seems to come bundled with some obscure "improvement" that turns out to be "enable a new way of monetizing the user".

Of course, the tech industry is just following the lead of legislatures everywhere with their "urgent national defense (and pork for selected districts)" bundling of laws.

Re: Datacenter fire just a cover story?

I was wondering if someone had recently seen Ocean's 11 (The Rat Pack Version) and thought it could be profitably updated.

(TL;DR Latent hack to casino security is triggered by a widespread power failure. OK, blowing up a major power transmission tower is more dramatic than striking a match under the smoke detector, or maybe wearing particularly natsy cologne.)

Maybe we should check if Benny Hill is somehow still active in heists (Does WFB have Italian branches?)

A byte for the year

Except that when many of these systems were written, a byte (called character at the time) was most likely 6 bits. Even when the term "byte" was introduced, it was defined as "The smallest addressable unit of storage), by which definition I have used machines with 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 16, 24, 32, and 60 bit bytes. Most of those would have no trouble stashing a number > 200 (C'mon, who expects to live past 2100? Other than those who have met pretty spry people in their 90s), but not all. Time is hard.

"Byte" became synonymous with "octet" in the same way the "baud" became (equally erroneously) synonymous with "bit per second" about the time (and probably due to) the proliferation of Personal computing, and the notion that "Every computer in the world works _EXACTLY_ like the S-100 box I built from a kit".

Re: Attempt to blackmail the richest man on the planet, WCGW?

Reminding me of when Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) asks something along the lines of:

"So, you believe ... one of the wealthiest and most powerful men on the planet... is a vigilante who beats criminals to a pulp with his bare hands and your plan is to blackmail him?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1z6o1GIEsQE

Succession Planning

Like that going on currently in the U.S. state of Virginia (named, IIRC, for a certain queen who apparently lacked any such planning)? At the moment, it is likely that the next governor will have, effectively, been drawn by lot, as the Governor, Lt. Governor, and Attorney General are all facing calls for their resignation, and the next in line (Speaker of the house) owes his post to a 1-vote majority, which in term was provided by a tie for one house seat, which was then decided by drawing lots (or flipping a coin, or some such).

Comparison and contrast to some watery tart handing out swords.

There is another system

No, not Guardian, and I don't know if this applies outside the U.S., but IIRC there are at least two "Caller ID" like systems in the U.S. The common or garden Caller ID depends on the information given by the "network" in general, either (ideally) originating at the caller's provider and passed along unmolested, or "just made up" by one of the hops along the line. Think of it like the "From" header on email. "Trust, and don't bother to verify".

The other system is used for "Free calls" ("Callee Pays", 800 etc. "Area Codes" in the U.S.). That info is much more likely to be correct, because one of the main reasons for having an "800 number" in these days of really cheap "long distance" calls is to gather the phone numbers of every caller. This can be used as proof of an "established business relationship", and thus exempt one from "Do Not Call" regulation. I assume there is a similar use for "900" (enhanced services, aka porn-chat) lines. _somebody_ has to know who to bill), and of course "911" emergency services, although the recent 911 call from space indicates there is "room for improvement"

In summary: requiring that a call have "Caller ID" is hardly likely to improve things, since it is almost certainly unreliable, and probably fraudulent. Get an 800 number if you want a (mostly) truthful "origination number". Like most surcharges for "not spitting in the soup", it will cost you...

Re: Disclosure

_Many_ years ago I bought some used tapes to use as scratch. (How many years? 1/2 inch 7-track, OK?). Well, of course I took a look at them first. Mostly wiped, but one had customer data from some financial institution. Actually just what appeared to be records of customer name, street address, branch or maybe department number, some other number too short to be an actual account number, etc.

I wiped it before putting it back in the case.

Before anybody gets huffy about the recklessness of using tapes that had almost certainly been "retired" for too-high error rate, I'll mention that I was a student at the time, and that, unlike some modern storage media, one got immediate indication of write-errors, so the penalty was slightly longer write times and reduced capacity. Each error due to a surface imperfection resulted in a 3.5-inch section of tape being "lost", equivalent to about 2K (out of 2-20 Meg).

Cigarette Butts

So, they had been studying up on Kurt?

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

Wherein the installers (3rd Reich) scattered American Cigarette packets were scattered about to reinforce the notion that the robot weather station was set up by the Allies.

Note also Italian resistance fighters attached Allied-supplied bombs (triggered by sudden drops in light, e.g. from entering a tunnel) to railroad rolling stock in alpine regions. They were labelled as being "tracking devices" attached by the Germans, and warned of dire consequences for anybody tampering with them.

Re: Design Flaw

So, the hardware variant of the "Sufficiently Smart Compiler"

https://prog21.dadgum.com/40.html

Wherein the point is made that the compiler has to not only be sufficiently smart (to take crap-code and re-write it), but also _perfect_, lest a formerly unnoticed inability to deal with a particular corner case result in a trivial change to the source dropping performance in the toilet.

Re: Anti-Vaxers

Why do all these x86-lovers still get all huffy about the VAX? I mean, yeah, it almost defined the term "CISC", what with "Polynomial Evaluate", but at least you could expect to survive having a paper copy of the architectural spec thrown at you. Let's have a little perspective.

Wait, do you mean those following in the wake of Wakefield?

Never mind.

Re: It's a bit like rugby?

I recall reading American Football described (in the 1970's IIRC) as a perfect combination of the two most characteristic aspects of American culture: Violence and Committee Meetings.

Shutdown as negotation

@geoffrey W:

-- What were they thinking when they came up with that mechanism? --

Just as Bill gates did not invent CTRL_ALT_DEL, but did popularize it, there was guy who weaponized the shutdown as the one true way to govern.

Nice thing about recent history is that many of the players are still around, so you might ask him:

@newtgingrich

(I predict, though, that the answer will be somewhere between "The end justifies the means" and "F-you commie rat-bastard")

Not to single out Newt, really. A _lot_ of politicians are lawyers, and most seem to think that "If it is not illegal (yet), it is perfectly OK". Also, a surprising number (at least in the U.S. Congress) of politicians are former cheerleaders

https://www.flocheer.com/articles/5046158-10-political-figures-who-started-as-cheerleaders

and once you have a certain level of physical gymnastics handled, perhaps getting into mental and moral gymnastics is easier.

Re: Not good

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How would the controller know that moving the load N instead of E would put it through the window of the bosses car?

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How about N vs S? Your comment pushed me over the "should I bother to post?" edge, as the article had tickled an old memory about a not-exactly-security issue with a traveling crane. I probably read it on comp.risks, which means "before 2001" when I went cold-turkey.

Anyway, some repair of said crane had resulted in the phases being connected incorrectly. It powered up OK, stopped. Then the repair guy commanded a small movement one direction, but due to the reversed phases, the result was in a small movement the other direction, which the control loop "corrected", leading quickly to full power the opposite of the correct direction. The stop blocks at the (actual, not anticipated) end of the track were not able to halt the mass of the crane traveling at full speed, and it crashed through the wall and landed on a vehicle parked outside. There was speculation at the time whether that vehicle was owned by the electrician who had done the erroneous wiring. Poetic, but unconfirmed.

Re: The so-called "beast" of Revelation was an STD ...

IIRC The identity of the "John" who wrote Revelations is far from settled. The claim that he was actually the Apostle John has been disputed for some time.

Facebook apparently did not enforce their "Real Names" policy at the time.

Re: Probably an access control issue

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have to let the system know which processes are trusted and which are not.

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I thought one of the key principles in the Evil Overlord's Guide to World Domination was to _never_ let any of your "trusted" henchmen know which of them is actually _trusted_ (for now).

Selling security

Some folks on another list have mentioned that the Apple "Privacy" sign is on the side of a Marriott hotel. Odd choice given the Marriott data leak.

Meanwhile, I do believe the Apple ecosystem is (a bit) more secure than most, as long as:

1) They don't get subborned by some TLA

2) You avoid iCloud like the plague.

Problem is, with the rise of authoritarianism, (1) will not last long, and (2) requires constant vigilance to avoid the dark patterns that try to get you to click the "leak all my info, passwords, email, etc. to Apple" link that _looks_ like a "make your device more secure with our guard-unicorn! It even farts rainbows!" button.

Re: Imagine a smart bomb that refuses to explode

Let there be light.

(As "Benson Arizona" plays softly,,,)

Gotta go. My turn to feed the alien (and service the elevator).

Re: It Burns!?

Thank you! The first, definitely. The second, most likely, Should have guessed they were from Hammer.

Thanks again, and Happy New Year!