Posts by veti

Re: Benny Hill

You're saying you have trouble finding pictures of underdressed young women to look at?

Have you considered trying the Internet?

Re: Uses for a Homeland Security Report

Both Homeland Security and NASA have seen budget increases in the past couple of years. The DHS in particular - locking up children, conducting dawn raids on immigrants, putting up hundreds of Secret Service agents at every major golf course in North America... none of these things come cheap, you know.

Well, let's see. He emptied a lot of other people's accounts, in a manner that is trivial to detect if you have access to the records, then - took the key with him on holiday to India, and next thing anyone knows he's "dead" and the accounts can't be accessed.

The timing is suspicious, to say the least.

Of course, since Ernst & Young have evidently hacked the accounts, it's also possible they've helped themselves to the money and set the guy up. But I'm discounting that because E&Y are still here, and their reputation is worth more - despite everything - than the contents of a few crypto wallets.

Re: Mint

I suspect Ubuntu needs Steam far, far more than Steam needs Ubuntu. Why should Valve pay for Linux support, when less than 0.5% of their customers use any kind of Linux?

(Source.)

Re: As a Facebook refusenik I see a time when

Don't worry, we're already past peak Facebook. What we're seeing now is a Facebook that's increasingly desperate to remain relevant.

The press has turned against it, and politicians have followed. Now the politicians are starting - not a minute before time - to talk about treating Facebook as a publisher, rather than allowing it to write its own special rules, as it has for the past 20 years.

Re: Going to hell in a handy basket of apps

If trading some of your (increasingly illusory) privacy gives you a longer and richer life, why do you call it "dumb"?

We've been making trade offs like that since before we were even humans. It's sometimes called "the social contract" - it's the same thing.

Re: AI database

Your example is awful.

Not only is "joy" clearly a name in this context - no English speaker would use the noun like that - but also you can't dismiss the possibility that it's Bob who trains a lot.

What, you think the name "Bob" can't take a feminine pronoun? Much to learn, you have.

Re: Meh.

I was planning to go with "indifference", myself.

But then that's how I've always treated Facebook, so what do I know.

Yes, you are. They canned XP, and that was before they put on the whole song and dance routine about predictable lifecycles. They'll do the same to 7.

Re: Misleading headline

"Galactically speaking", the whole of recorded history - about 10,000 years - is the blink of an eye, though. Exactly how much work should we put into this effort, on the basis that it will continue forever and will very likely never turn up anything even then?

Maybe the others never used radio comms. After all, why would you need it, once you discovered slood?

Re: How many home users *need* the admin password anyway ?

And the other 20% would go to the scrapheap having never been used, because the poor owner had no way to configure them.

Yeah, I can see that generating some bad press.

Re: Blockchain technology in AI database as a means of combating fake news

Why does this comment read like a slightly overwrought bid at beating the Turing test?

Re: iPhone?

To be fair, that's perfectly reasonable.

If you're socialising with someone, on virtually any level, there's an excellent chance that sooner or later you'll find yourselves eating together. It's one of the biggest social rituals we have. When that day comes, you wouldn't want to unwittingly take the poor broccoli-botherer to Hagar's House of Ribs, would you?

Re: I've been caught ...... I must have Asperger's.

We don't know when he was diagnosed with Asperger's, but it must have been a while ago because the condition doesn't exist any longer - it's called ASD now.

It would help to explain why he thought the hacking was harmless fun. But when it comes to 'bullying, intimidation and extortion', I'm inclined to think it would take more than ASD to get him off the hook for that.

Re: "Where's "here"?"

The point I'm getting at is, with kidnapping you need a good degree of certainty that the ransom will be paid. Without that, the economics just don't work. If you can prevent payment in just 75% of cases, nobody will risk kidnapping.

With ransomware, preventing even 95% of payments makes no real difference. So this approach doesn't work. You could try banning cryptocurrency, but I think we all know what that would lead to.

Re: Good hackers aren't always good coders ...

I agree. In the same way, good coders don't generally make good testers, or vice versa.

Breaking things is a fundamentally different skill from making things.

Re: The Cloud...

Only a sysadmin could write that.

To a user, local storage is just as much "other people's computers that they have no control over".

Re: What about the antisocial?

I don't think enforcement is the point. It's just another obstacle to filter out people who are less committed to visiting, and another tripwire that can be used to summarily throw them out of the country if it's expedient to do so.

Nobody cares about or is going to do anything with the information. It's the act of providing it that matters.

Re: "does not make....sense"

One trouble of such systems is that they inevitably depend on the input of many people. Some of those people are aware of what they're doing, others not. Some are consciously or subconsciously trying to manipulate the outcome. Nearly all are manipulating the data, if only to make themselves look better.

All have subtly, or not so subtly, different ideas of what's relevant to the question.

Then all this bullshit gets fed into a system designed by a psychopath to solve a problem that is about four orders of magnitude more complex than anyone concerned realises.

Re: My main regret ...

That's a bit defeatist. Not the conclusion, I think she's completely right that there's no point in her meeting him, but the reasoning.

It is possible to change Trump's mind with science. Bill Gates famously talked him out of being anti-vax. But it's not possible on this specific issue, because it would be politically inconvenient for him to be converted. Truth is irrelevant, all that matters to him is winning.

Re: I was fine with the first indictment

I think that's the idea.

Trump doesn't really want Assange on trial in the US, no telling what sort of embarrassments that might lead to. What he wants is to pose as a tough guy for his followers, provoke the press into attacking him, maybe provoke Congress into impeaching him, and provoke the Europeans into defying him. All of which will play directly to his standard speech about how it's America against the world and no one but him will stand up to them.

Assange himself is irrelevant, nobody except Assange really cares what happens to him. He's become a prop now. Potentially useful for all sorts of people and purposes, but only for what their posturing says to their own voters.

As I've said before, we urgently need camera makers to embed digital signatures at the moment of taking every picture. That would make the easier kinds of fakery easy to spot.

Re: Huawei forward

14th amendment (again):

"The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, [...] shall not be questioned."

Re: Not a big fan of AI

The story says that the AI produces better results - both fewer false positives and false negatives - than the average human radiographer.

Presumably some human radiographers are more skilled than others. Maybe the best of them could still beat the AI, I don't know. But the thing is, not everyone can be screened by "the best" humans. Humans don't scale that way.

But AI does. So if the AI outperforms the average radiographer - which is what the story claims - then it's good enough, and adding a human review step to the process would likely reduce the quality - by introducing delay, and increasing the likelihood of errors (both ways).

Re: Fraud

They don't have to convince a jury. I'm pretty sure Lyft can boot a driver without dragging it through any courts.

Re: Why do politicians want to make everthing overcomplicated.

And, make web hosts legally liable for the behaviour of every bit of code run on their servers...

... or in the visitor's browser...

... hmm, actually that's not as simple as it sounds. Basically, it means every line of Javascript has to be vetted by the hosting company. That's maybe not a bad idea, but it certainly changes the landscape, and not all those changes will be for the better.

For instance, it will hand yet another solid competitive advantage to Google/Amazon/etc., who could maintain their own solid libraries of pre-approved scripts. Good luck to up-and-coming hosts trying to keep up with those.