* Posts by JLV

2252 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013

Buh bye fakers? Amazon tweaks customer product reviews system

JLV

Re: Why would a reseller police positive reviews?

That's a fair question and I'll try to address it from the profit motive.

Because Amazon has reached such high volumes. They are the top dog in online retailing so they have the furthest to fall.

Because online retailing is all about trust and tolerating obvious leeches is a reputational risk.

Because Amazon has a huge stock market valuation and even higher P/E ratio. That P/E is justified by the belief that Amazon can extend into more offerings. Few new Amazon ventures will be safe from a perception of sleaze tolerance.

Amazon has been hit in the press before, from the perspective of how easy it is to conduct transactions to buy reviews. And they are taking the review brokers to court. But in this case, Amazon came off as the aggrieved party. They couldn't exactly know exactly what was fake and I will be the first to say that the risk of nuking real reviews by mistake is a good defense for not just going medieval on anything that smells like a rat (like the guy further down who says he disregards anything above or below a 3).

However, with obvious, repeatedly reported upon, fakers that are still operational, Amazon is a lot more visibly in the know. The products in case are, objectively, scams. The reviewers are all shills and visibly so. Customers have complained about it, been acknowledged, posted about it and you still see the scammers. And Amazon's own cross-referencing system makes it easy to follow the sleaze. If you go to the "Customers Also Bought Items By" on the author's page, you can see the other vendors that are using this pool of the same reviewers and drilling into those products brings up the same disgruntled 1 star reviewers asking why this is allowed to go on.

This is not in need of some fancy undercover investigation on Fiverr.com. Out of a court of law's burden of proof, this is damning evidence of neglect by Amazon.

To put it differently, if, like your question is asking, the neglect is due to a profit motive, rather than say legal uncertainties about how to proceed, then this is a bit like Lenovo's recent problems. How much money are they making from low volume, but obvious scammers, versus how much do they have at risk if it blows up in their face?

Benefit to risk ratio seems overwhelmingly to favor at least getting to plausible deniability, which means shutting down obviously cheating vendors. Purely from a tooth and claw capitalist point of view, not altruism in the least bit.

JLV

"Ruby Programming Professional Made Easy 2nd Edition: Expert Ruby Programming Language Success in a Day for any Computer User (Ruby, HTML, C Programming, ... C++. C, C++ Programming, Computer Program) "

Sam Key - author

Mouthful, eh? Gotta get all those keywords in.

Basically, this guy (and others) are gaming the review system. Put a lot of fake lipstick on your pig and watch the suckers bite because they are buying a 4.5 star, 60+ review jewel (they are "legit" reviews, confirmed purchase and all that).

The first chapter is reasonably well-written. That's after all what will be in the sample download. Past that, it stops abruptly. In this case, book didn't even cover IF THEN logic in Ruby.

Amazon knows this is a scam and does nothing. I don't expect or want them to police the fake reviews. I want them to ban the author entirely, he's just a clever 21st century snake oil salesman. If vendors were punished for using fake reviews, then it would stop pretty quickly (albeit perhaps with new games of spiking fake reviews onto your competitors to get them banned).

This whole Amazon initiative smells like a whitewash exercise to my cynical self.

JLV

Re: BS, there is no will at Amazon, tech won't help.

Sorry, that link leads back here :(

Google

Sam Keys amazon.com

instead. Eye opening.

JLV
Black Helicopters

BS, there is no will at Amazon, tech won't help.

Amazon has lots of good tech to analyze posting history already. For example, they started un-counting reviewers who too-frequently up-vote, or downvote, the same other reviewers years ago. To avoid fanboi effects.

But they have a serious problem with dodgy merchandise reviews and they are doing very little to correct it. 6 months ago, I would have said "sure there are fake reviews, but it's hard to spot reliably". After all, it will be pretty difficult to know if a review was brokered somewhere, right?

Then I bought a book by this guy which totally blew my mind on fraud. The patterns are right there, in Amazon's review system and blindingly obvious. And Amazon does nada.

Sam Keys, he of 52 "programming in a day" books since... Sept 2014. Including, I kid you not "C++ In a Day" and "Android Programming in a Day".

http://www.amazon.com/Sam-Key/e/B00QUBQWQ4/ref=la_B00QUBQWQ4_pg_5?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_82%3AB00QUBQWQ4&page=5&sort=date-desc-rank&ie=UTF8&qid=1434904593

Pattern is always the same:

- book comes out. gets 30-40 reviews in a day or two, right after publication. All 5 star reviews "gosh I am starting to program, this book was a big help".

- 30-50 page book, about $3 typically. Low enough for you to walk away. Contents are amazingly shamefully lightweight - things like no sample app on an Android book.

- If you look at the "customers also purchased" link you will see those reviewers typically have reviewed 4-5 other books by Sam.

- Those reviewers have odd posting patterns (often in the dietary supplement field too). They will nearly always post 5 stars ratings, except for the odd 1 star (slag a competitor for pay?). They won't post for months but then they'll do 3-5 reviews in a day.

- Some time later real reviews start coming. "All those upvotes must be fake. Didn't even have a sample program/conditional logic/example". So now the book has 95% 5 stars, 5% of 1 star reviews, nothing in between.

But here's the clincher. I, and other reviewers, have contacted Amazon customer support about Mr Keys and notified them of this abuse. They did get back to me, told me they would investigate but could not comment and ... left things just as they were.

So, bullshit on the idea that Amazon needs smarter algos to flag what they know already but don't want to clean up. Either because it ends up making them money or because their legal dept have told them it would constitute refusal of sale to the publisher and could not stand up in court.

I still buy from Amazon, but they've definitely lost my trust. I noticed this pattern for this publisher, sure, but once you are aware of it, you notice how pervasive it is. His reviewers, and others just like them, are touching many, many products and those are only the really obvious cases. And I really can't forgive Amazon for knowingly looking the other way.

Apple CORED: Boffins reveal password-killer 0-days for iOS and OS X

JLV
Unhappy

we've been here before

Once again, Apple is caught with its pants down despite being based on a BSD OS. As a customer (most certainly not a fanboi), I find this very concerning.

A vulnerability that allows peeking into a password manager? Can't get much worse than that, can we?

They are after all a $700B+ company. Surely, locking down their systems entirely, and not pulling a "geez, hard to fix it, man", like they have been doing with rootpipe. Or doing a mid-90s Microsoft and claiming that integration and ease of use trumps security. For example, let me disable Keychain, at least for certain apps until this is fixed.

Start with the premise that anything that involves authentication or authorization, and does not come from the BSD core needs to reviewed with the most extreme paranoia. Well, the BSD core too, but that's been out there longer.

That would be worth a $1B or 2, surely. Lots of tasty bounties for example.

Rather than splurging $3B on a maker of flashy headphones with questionable acoustics.

Awww, what do I know? Just a dumb user.

Apple to tailor Swift into fully open-source language – for Linux, too

JLV
Happy

thoughts on Swift as a general language?

(good news, always nice to see more language options available, though most peter out quickly enough.)

I keep on meaning to check out Swift myself but haven't gotten around to it.

For those who have wrestled with it already, how is Swift's support for namespaces/module/package names? Had a talk with someone claiming it wasn't very good compared to C#'s. Saw some verbiage claiming both ways on SO, none the wiser for it. Can you differentiate moduleA.someclassname from moduleB.someclassname and use both those classes, easily?

And on a more general note, what are the design features that you disagree with? (besides Apple's parentage if that's not your thing)

Basically, I expect that, like for any software, any documentation will concentrate on Swift's virtues. Any be somewhat silent about its shortcomings.

Sometimes it is good to follow along while knowing which weak points to pay attention to rather than finding out dead ends later.

p.s. Could we have a less disturbing nicer pic of Taylor? They do exist. Still no need for an audio option on this article however ;-)

Closet Queens, Quicksand and Book of Numbers

JLV

Well, to be fair, there are many a book for which I would have benefited from reading such a scalding review. As in, not reading them. Life is short and one doesn't have to be a builder to observe that a roof is leaky.

Google: Our self-driving cars would be tip-top if you meatheads didn’t crash into them

JLV

Re: stealth cyclists

maybe he was a fan of Stephenson's protagonist in Zodiac - "if they can't see they can't hit you" school of thought.

I'd like to know how the google cars compare, statistically, to human drivers for same mileage & same conditions. And let's not forget statistical confidence, mostly wrt sample size.

Bethesda all out for 'Fallout 4', fallout for global productivity foretold in countdown

JLV
Happy

Re: Beyond Hope

Or watch Rambo I again ;-)

Bloodborne & Fallout 4. Bliss. That PS4 may yet come to pass.

VirtualBox 5.0 beta four graduates to become first release candidate

JLV

re. the easy answer

at the risk of surprising you, most of the tools I end up using on my Mac are pretty standard LAMP stack stuff, very little in the way of extra tools.

Macports put most of theml in, not very different from apt-get. You could use Homebrew if that's your thing.

- postgres, virtual box, vagrant, chef, python, git, firefox

My main interaction with the system is the bash shell and the editor and to tell you the truth, I barely notice the difference between a Ubuntu ssh session and being on the Mac.

I did splurge on a text editor, Sublime (also available on Linux), Affinity Designer ($40) - a vector drawing tool and ForkLift, to improve on OSX crappy file manager. And Kaleidoscope, a diff utility. Had I wanted, I probably could have stuck to open source tools for those as well - they can also be installed here and I have vim already.

True, when my trusty ol' 17" 2011 MBP needs to be retired I do not look forward to paying Apple's outrageous extra RAM costs and the like, seeing as everything is now soldered on permanently on their newer systems. Or downgrading to a 15" retina.

But otherwise it has been a good purchase, including the hardware holding up quite well despite some significant physical whacks given to it. At this level of hardware, I think the Apple overpricing is about 30% which is tolerable. Well-equipped Windows laptops, starting with 1920+/17" screens, are not cheap by any means.

So, no, your easy answer is not applicable to me. Not to begrudge you your choice of systems, of course ;-) But the assumption that a Mac is lacking in command line usefulness because has a pretty GUI, or because it's primarily marketed to hipsters is not always correct.

p.s. vagrant + virtualbox, now that's is a nice combo.

It's FREE WINDOWS 10 time: 29 July is D-Day, yells Microsoft

JLV

about the different Windows editions...

(I originally had a question about whether I could go 8.1 Pro to 10 Pro, because this article wasn't very clear about that aspect)

These guys have that info:

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-upgrade-to-windows-10-for-free-from-windows-7-or-windows-8-2015-6

I probably won't wait till day 364 to upgrade my laptop, but I won't rush into it either. Cautiously optimistic that they've learned from Windows 8 but others can take point.

p.s. what's with the wording around reserve your copy of Windows 10 bit? are they going to run out? Seems like a fairly transparent ploy to get everyone to upgrade ASAP, possibly quicker than caution warrants.

Password reset sites expose crackable PeopleSoft creds

JLV

Excellent work.

Some questions do come to mind. If by password recovery, you mean the user password recovery pages, does that mean we are talking about using PeopleSoft in stand-alone authentication mode, i.e. its own internal _User_ passwords?

Because it does make sense to hive off authentication to an LDAP server. And I am sure many sites do that. Now, that in no way excuses any of this, but is LDAP mode affected as well is what I'd like to know too.

As a dev with some admin skills on PS I have seen passwords imbedded in the app and wondered about the security implications thereof. Granted, lots of them seem to be somewhat single-purpose technical connection settings, but surely they are better locked down tightly anyways with no risk of privilege escalation somehow.

When you have lots of them used for different things in many moving parts with different technologies, chances are always that an overworked sysadmin doesn't catch, or isn't aware of, all of them. So a production system in which some types of passwords are still still set to the vanilla database? Not surprising at all. A checklist of things to lock down/reset would help.

Airing this out is a good thing. Just because ERP systems are not quite as widely used as consumer-facing tech or network tech doesn't mean that they don't need to be secure. Quite the opposite given their payload (imagine blackmailing a big corporation with a release of the everyone's pay for example).

I hope Oracle takes this in stride, displays some humility, plays nice, listens and... fixes.

Celebrating 20 years of juicy Java. Just don’t mention Android

JLV

Re: Java's only impact.

Upvoted (what's with the OP attributing Pattern necessity to the JVM???), but let's not jump to conclusions too quickly.

Language does matter. If you can, say return function pointers, then you may find whole categories of problems for which Strategy is overkill. Factories? Great, when needed.

Design Patterns holds a special place in my esteem. Reading GoF's book was the first time I truly got how OOP was supposed to work. Most of the other books I had read either started getting lost in deep OO theory without clear rationale for their approach or else immediately fixated on explaining inheritance one more time. First book that clearly got me to think in terms of composition instead.

But, and I believe it might even have been said in that book, do not implement a Pattern lightly. Well-done, it solves a problem. Done willy-nilly, just because everything looks like a nail complicated to your mighty hammer Patterns, it creates horribly messy and convoluted code.

Did some debugging on a failing enterprise SOA-style expense processing system. 1 expense report, with 1 expense line in it => 20 MB trace, 500+ function calls, dozens upon dozens of objects being instantiated. And many, many, Patterns of all stripes, factories foremost. Impossible to track what was going on. (I never did figure it out but ending up diff-ing a successful run log with a failed run log and caught the issue - failing external API call - that way instead).

It wasn't in Java, but OMG did it have Enterprise Java Programmer Here written all over it!

Code composition, which is a lot of what Patterns are about, is an extremely powerful technique. But there is a tension between very clever dynamic code and easily readable code. Stupid fixed procedural code may be dumb, but it can also be easier to read.

Read this guy's "hacker code" vs. "clever code" for example. Wasn't meant to be ironic. If you need the complexity, fine. If you don't, please think twice before reaching for that hammer. Maybe think it through with a unit test instead.

http://csis.pace.edu/~bergin/patterns/ppoop.html

Personally, my main beef with Java is not so much the language itself, as the perception that its culture is not one that values simplicity.

Russia will fork Sailfish OS to shut out pesky Western spooks

JLV

regardless of NSA crimes and misbehavior

Is anyone, especially people living in Russia, going to benefit from using a Putin-sanctioned OS?

This doesn't condone NSA & fives eyes spying in the least, but let's be real, this is like putting the big bad wolf in charge of the little lambs' nursery.

A pox on all their houses, NSA, FSB, Great FireWall of China. And I really would not think much of any OSS organization that in any way collaborated with this lot. Theo de Raadt had the right attitude when the told the US authorities to take a long walk off a short pier in piranha country some years back.

Now, as to a collaboration with more accountable and less aligned governments, such as India or Brazil, for example, yes, I think it would be a good idea not to put all our eggs in the US basket.

Doom is BOOM! BOOM! BACK!

JLV
Thumb Up

Re: This sums up the problem:

ah, yesssss a good dig at Call of Duty.

Took me about 2 hrs watching my health meter regenerate mysteriously, as long as I was patient, to realize that CoD would never equal the visceral paranoia that a Doom or Dark Souls game will engender. Nor the despair that you may not, this time, quite be able to beat the boss in the area where you keep on respawning with almost no ammo.

Ditto Assassin's Creed. And even Skyrim mostly did not measure up to Baldur's Gate in lethality.

Get those kids offa my lawn!

Hacker 3D prints device that can crack a combo lock in 30 seconds

JLV

>The exploit used was old when I was a kid

+1 for seems to be a judicious use of Anonymous Coward ;-)

and informative too.

World of the strange: There will be NINE KINDS of Windows 10

JLV

???

so... I bought a gaming laptop with Win 8.0 Home on it.

Which I upgraded (via MS's hard-to-find upgrade-for-windows, not at all like it belongs in the App Store anywhere...) to Win 8.0 Pro.

Then to 8.1 Pro via update.

Do I get a Win 10 Pro free as part of the throw Win 10 to the adoring masses? Or do I get a Win 10 Home free?

Not to mention (a pet peeve of mine) that, if I were to have a system failure, my Asus laptop would rebuild itself (one hopes) to Windows Home 8 from its system-recover partition. Because I won't have a Win 10 Pro install-capable media.

i.e. all these version certainly make sense, from a revenue point of view. I don't begrudge them, that's a commercial MS decision, take it or leave it.

But they also make it very confusing to track where exactly your particular situation is located in the grand MS master plan if you are an existing customer.

Linux and OSX are much clearer on getting from A to B, in general. And they also don't leave you much guess work on where to start if you are rebuilding a system from scratch after a failure.

MS needs to work on transparency, user rights (as in, what am I entitled to with my past purchase(s) ) and install-from-scratch capable media.

Microsoft's run Azure on Nano server since late 2013

JLV

Re: Well, well

>Colour me surprised.

or blue.

So what would the economic effect of leaving the EU be?

JLV

So... color me a little slow, but are these two outcomes mutually very compatible?

Jane Average voter, in aggregate, votes to leave the EU.

The same Jane Average voter, in all her wisdom, then gives her government the green light* to negotiate a world-wide free trade agreement with everyone?

These are not independent decisions. Free trade is often considered, rightly or wrongly, that's besides the point, as a loss of sovereignty for a country's voters. Precisely the voters who, by this scenario, have opted for a British exit.

* either through another referendum or through general democratic support for that policy

Ex-NSA security bod fanboi: Apple Macs are wide open to malware

JLV

Re: what one hand giveth, the other taketh

What Apple does or does not do with regards to nation-state/unlimited resource bad guys and snoopy laws is best handled by changing laws to allow for a judicious de-fanging of the NSA, CSIS and equivalents.

I don't expect Apple to fix or make me immune to government-level abuse.

I think this is the point of the author of the article as well - harden it to a satisfactory level, not expecting miracles.

When Apple says it won't fix rootpipe on < Yosemite, "cuz it's hard", that's less than acceptable to me as an Apple customer (even if my 2011 Mac happens to support Yosemite, which is not true of everyone's).

When Apple initially blows off customers complaining of Mac Defender issues because, I dunno, it would clash with their squeaky clean hipster Starbucks image, then that sucks too.

When Mac Lion doesn't handle LDAP passwords securely...

You get the idea. Very smart people, lots of good technology to rely on to fix security, but the attitude is lacking.

But hey, if being an Apple customer means that you give them a free pass on security, then be my guest. I suppose that's the difference between a fanboi and a regular customer.

JLV

what one hand giveth, the other taketh

On one side, Apple has the benefit and cleverness of working from the BSD OS family. That means it should be pretty secure in its foundations.

On the other hand, the company seems to be somewhat relaxed about security considerations. There have generally been more holes found than massive exploitation of said holes, but that seems more related to general insistence of the bad guys to be going after poor ol' Windows users, rather than any innate security attention lavished by Apple.

As Windows keeps on losing market share and as Apple users indicate that they have spare $ to spend, how long will Apple's neglect work out in its favor? It took MS a long time to accumulate a strong reputation as a malware cesspit, but it's taken them even longer to shrug it off and that has cost them plenty.

Not to mention that MS can pretty much point at expectations that users should run an AV and then blame them if something slips through. Apple has left itself no such recourse by hinting at built-in immunity.

Microsoft's secret weapon in browser wars: Mozilla's supercharged Asm.js

JLV
Thumb Up

>I suppose JS' virtue is that it was never designed to have access to much of the local host's resources

You nailed it, upvoted. But this is such a key aspect of JS that it deserves more than grudging appraisal, IMHO.

And to extend this a bit, I hope, but do not expect, that MS has learned not to integrate Edge itself too tightly to the OS. A suitably hands-off and paranoid relationship is all for the best in this case. Firefox and Chrome manage, even on Windows and as a result also release for older Windows too.

p.s. is it just me or is the number of MS Windows articles under El Reg's software section a tad over the top these days?

Boeing 787 software bug can shut down planes' generators IN FLIGHT

JLV
Angel

Let he who has never sinned cast the first stone

>Both the programmer team and the test team should be ....

Yes, I think that is funny and witty as well. But I wouldn't want it actually happening.

I realize that this a critical system, don't get me wrong. But don't expect things from others that you would not expect from yourself.

They should review their procedures to avoid it happening again. The aviation industry's IT has a laudable quality record by the standards of our profession at large.

Excessive penalties in an industry will not attract the kind of people I want to entrust my life to when flying. Fire someone if incompetence and negligence were involved, otherwise just fix it and learn from it, don't play scapegoats.

A big thank you to the QA team for finding this.

JLV

Re: "in practice this one is no big deal."

Correct me if I am wrong in this but as far as I understand, airplanes are very safe because all the flight control software is written independently from specs in triplicate. Then all 3 control programs run concurrently with a majority poll deciding what happens if one program is in disagreement with the rest. So, in theory and pretty much in practice, you can ride out any one bug.

But... this was not on the flight control software, so there would have been no triple redundancy around. Granted, the likelihood is pretty low of this flaw coming into play, but you still have a critical component that is not triple redundant so finding such a flaw is scarier than flight control software proper, isn't it?

The fact that it wasn't likely to be a problem in this particular instance is not a reassurance to the QA and redundancy factors for secondary but critical programs.

On the other hand, the fact that they did find the bug during lab testing is a good sign.

China tackles vital strippers-at-funeral problem

JLV
Joke

>There's a nip in the air.

For the price, one one would have hoped for two.

PICTURE-TASTIC: Microsoft woos devs to HoloLens virtuo-goggs

JLV
Angel

immersive dev environments?

maybe it's just because I was raised on Neuromancer's consensual hallucination memes, but...

what about a system that allowed you to see & interact with multiple command lines, editors, sql prompts and browsers? kinda like a multi-monitor setup on steroids, with just glances left or right switching viewpoints? saw a bit of that for an Oculus demo with someone typing javascript that immediately got rendered in d3 or some other graphical representation.

I don't use IDEs much because I find each subject gets too little screenspace. and I also prefer to interact with specialized tools rather than a do-all IDE. iBut people who use IDEs also have the same challenge - maximizing awareness of multiple views into different system aspects.

Couldn't a properly implemented immersive system allow much better multi-viewpoint workflow, whether based on multiple programs or an enhanced super-IDE metaphor? or just unix desktops?

wouldn't that be the cat's pajamas? if it didn't cause undue eye strain.

heck, I'd settle for a browser that used this instead of tabs.

yeah, yeah, I know we'll be getting yet another 50000 photo-sharing and Candy Crush apps before anything like that comes our way, but we can only dream, no?

Apple to devs: Watch out, don't make the Watch into a, well, a watch

JLV

Re: Well, well, well, well...

>time for DoJ to act

Hyperbole much?

Because there are no other more pressing concerns for the American public.

Than protecting the God-given rights of a minority of affluent early adopters (of a device category of very debatable utility at this point) to choose their watch face on their freely-chosen fringe utility device. No, really, nothing better to do for the DoJ.

"Monopoly within their ecosystem". Do you even know what the definition of a monopoly is? Don't like Apple? Don't buy it. Or maybe you should be counsel for DoJ?

Seriously, Apple's pointless little control-freakery can be annoying at times. And it is here. But I find the whole notion of iTards being annoyed by their iWatches rather amusing in this instance.

And it's not like Apple users, of which I am one, albeit on more useful gear, don't expect that Apple will, pointlessly or not, hobble direct competition within their own ecosystem.

Those people... can always buy elsewhere. Or, wonder of wonders, actually hold off buying a one-day-battery watch that is not even properly waterproof.

C++ Daddy Bjarne Stroustrup outlines directions for v17

JLV
Thumb Down

Re: Scribd

@Phil - upvote.

Ha, ha, you're better off than me - I've NoScript'ed scribd a long time ago, on the basis that it is unnecessarily obnoxious and intrusive even on a regular webpage. Hate that site.

Either you make your contents available publicly, or you do not. Either way is fine.

Putting it on scribd === FAIL

So this nice writeup appeared as a blank rectangle for me. Yeah, yeah, I could temp allow scribd.js on Noscript. But... it's scribd, that buzzard's not worth feeding.

</curmudgeon>

Cash register maker used same password – 166816 – non-stop since 1990

JLV
Joke

> nearest cucumber

mine's bigger

KABOOM! Billionaire fingers dud valve in ROCKET WIBBLE PRANG BLAST

JLV

Re: Hey Elon

it's only troll bait if you know you're being stupid ;) if you're not aware of that fact, you're not a troll, you're just stupid, which I think covers sciguybm perfectly.

JLV

>he has too much money

It's his money. He earned it.

As far I can see, he has managed to start up a quite successful private sector launch biz, that is lowering cost to orbit, by a lot.

Now he's managing to piggyback experiments to save even more money by salvaging the first stage, but on the back of his regular launches. Icing on the cake, so to speak. Failure? No big deal. Success? Potentially, big deal.

Risk taking? It's not just about risks, it's about payoffs as well. Our governments regularly take big risks with our money. The F35 comes to mind.

Now, I realize it is fashionable to bitch about people with $$$, but if there were more Bill & Melinda Gates foundations & more more Musks, we would be doing better for it. Even, if for any one of those, we get 50x Target Canada CEOs driving their their shareholders' business into the ground and getting massive bonuses along the way.

Rich man's toy? One wishes there were more like him.

p.s. my engineering suggestion? have a cat's cradle/spider web gantry of collapsible cables on the landing area and aim for it. make it so the rocket falls through it on landing but is kept upright afterwards.

Woeful groans over Game of Thrones' spill on piracy sites

JLV
Joke

Re: Spoilers

Eh, don't brag too much.

At the rate he's writing, pretty soon the TV will be the spoilers for the books.

Google whacks CREEPY predictive search up to 11 in cheap Chrome OS beta

JLV

Hey Google

(re screenshot)

how about your "uber-cool interactive financial charts" leaving 2005 behind and not requiring Flash to work anymore?

Hotel Wi-Fi not only hideously expensive – it's horribly insecure

JLV

>hiding in a cave

I suspect the existence of an unsecured rsync is news, yes...

If only due to level of stupidity it shows from the vendor.

And, I agree with another poster, hotels cater to other folks than just infosec geniuses like yourself. Their responsibility to their guests include having a reasonably secure environment.

Google throws a 180 on its plans for Dart language

JLV
Happy

emscripten

I was nosing around online to see if there was a port of dot/Graphviz to render svg, or at least test dot, online. Turns out there had been such a discussion, someone wanted to port it to js. But someone else just chucked emscripten at its codebase and, presto, online graphviz. Impressive.

Tennessee sues FCC: Giving cities free rein to provide their own broadband is 'unlawful'

JLV

Re: Good times, good times, they are a-coming.

>if the Chattanooga voters want the city to run an ISP it should be up to them

Totally agree. This whole make it illegal biz is about as justified as the Federal government being lobbied into not using its purchasing power to negotiate discounts on prescription drugs. I.e. any politician involved with passing/upholding this law should be strung up to lampposts by their testicles. Local cable monopolies by large corporations have not served voters well. Entrenching them in law is a cynical sham.

However, that's not to say there are no risks with municipal governments stepping in. Harrisburg is near/at bankruptcy on a municipal incinerator mess. More local to me, the city of Nanaimo, a rather sleepy little fishing town on Vancouver Island launched a massive convention center. Ernst & Young had advised them to take up the opportunity in hosting conventions due to lack of capacity. Trouble is, E&Y's convention planning business unit was peddling that same advice snake oil all over North America. By the time it was near done, the developers for the matching downtown business hotel saw the writing on the wall - there was no shortage of capacity anymore. They pulled out of the hotel and now Nanaimo has a massive white elephant with insufficient lodging.

By all means, let municipalities step in if there is a market failure. There is nothing wrong with competing with the private sector in that case. Indeed, one law I would pass is one forbidding predatory local discounts by Comcast & all after the fact.

But there is a risk involved, both due to insufficient local expertise or to bad advice by specialized consultants fleecers. Me? I smell a golden opportunity for an Acc*nture Municipal ISP Business Unit ;-) to proffer "advice" for example.

What I truly would like to see is effective planning and implementation support for municipalities taking this route - disseminate best practices, at low cost. Cheap broadband can boost an economy and improve living conditions, so a bit of enlightened philanthropy to help along, a la Gates Foundation would be great. Enough local successes should force cable companies to review their strategies.

JLV
Happy

Good times, good times, they are a-coming.

For lobbyists, that is.

Having said that, one thing I would be very concerned with is a local government trying to launch some fancy ISP service, not having a clue and falling flat on its backside at taxpayers' expense.

Not like IT cluster@*&! don't happen at higher levels of government, like state or federal.

But the level of exposure per person can be pretty high if big losses are spread out on a narrow municipal base.

I am pretty sure the answer to that is not a blanket legal prohibition however. Much as it may suit AT&T and sundry.

Bloodborne: An immersively thick cut above its gaming rivals

JLV
Happy

There's a lot of chatter about it coming to PCs. Will probably get it and use my PS3 controller if it does.

But if anything it seems even more harcore than the Souls. No shields or magic? - that's gonna be one tough puppy.

Dear departed Internet Explorer, how I will miss you ... NOT

JLV
Headmaster

>UNinterested, NOT DISinterested

Errr... both meanings exist.

And I would pick 'unbiased' for neutrality myself, in a professional text. Not because you're wrong about that, no. But because readers may not be aware of that use, I wasn't.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disinterested

My self-driving cars may lead to human driver ban, says Tesla's Musk

JLV

Re: >Paul, unless you are a qualified airline pilo

Oh, don't be so condescending, please.

You are right, you need to be very good in a field to understand the fine details & implications of technical issues. However, the general idea, as analyzed by experts, is usually good enough to form an opinion which isn't totally unreasonable. Managers have to do this all the time with techies and some of them are actually good at it (many are not, so your point remains valid as well).

Far as I understand, AF447 had the following problems: sensor failure, pilots unaware of that particular possibility and not trained to compensate for it in a context of limited situational awareness with conflicting sensor readings. Both aspects probably needed addressing. Is that a totally unwarranted conclusion?

Now, I happen to agree with the OP's contention. If the AI knows that it is entering failure mode and throws it back to you well in advance, then OK, by all means the driver can be tapped. She can either park the car by the side of the road & call a taxi. Or she can drive it home. Let's say something like "conditions are too cluttered with pedestrians, can't resolve" in an after-match situation where pedestrians are streaming out of a stadium.

If on the other hand the AI has a split second indication of failure, as in "oh crap, there's no way I am dodging that pedestrian who leaped off the sidewalk", then, no, the OP is correct and there is no benefit to fall back to the driver. She won't have time. (Doesn't mean she shouldn't be allowed to drive the car the rest of time).

But in a car, he's correct that you can't shunt off out-of-envelope conditions to the driver passenger at the last split second, the AI would have to know it's out of its depth and request manual control well in advance.

Commercial pilots may have to take over from autopilot in a split second, but they are already well in the loop when entering critical phases such as takeoff and landing. If it is an unexpected emergency then they are usually at high enough altitude that they have some time to react. I agree with you, he's wrong about his AF447 conclusions, the pilots are the safety fallback, and an isolated disaster does not invalidate the pilots' role. But he's right that civilian drivers shouldn't be put in the same position of critical fallback at short notice, both by timing and by their training.

JLV

Re: autonomous driving license

>Why would I need a licence

Also, would you need to be sober?

JLV

Tech, yes. Legal, ?

Each year our roads see more deaths than in many wars. 1969 in the US? 53,343 says Wikipedia. I.e. more than the entire Vietnam war. They are dropping though - 33561 in 2012.

I agree, not good. But our countries have complex legal frameworks to manage it.

"Normal" traffic deaths are insurance concerns, with mostly predetermined, capped, damages. Consumers are on the hook to pay the premiums. And there is even an accepted way to calculate third party liability and insurance coverage for it.

Special cases, such as drunken or reckless driving can result in fines and jail sentences for the drivers.

Design & manufacturing defects end up with the car manufacturers in the dock. Recalls can be extremely expensive and punitive damages huge. And it can go verrrrry wrong. For example, the Prius's accelerator issue - $1.2B for 37 deaths.

Musk, who is an extremely clever guy, is probably right that we are only a few decades away from safer driving from robots, in aggregate. Will we modify our legal framework to award the same type of damages for wrongful death due to faulty driving, but this time against a rich multinational? I pay about $1400CAD/year to cover my car, BC is costly. If Tesla is driving my car, does that mean they need to put aside money against the risk of my car getting into an accident due to their AI?

i.e. if the car I am driving swipes a little granny riding her bicycle into the ditch and kills her, I could be in big trouble, but I will likely not be paying out millions of dollars. There is a, costly but mandatory, economic mechanism for me to cover most of my remaining risk. If the 50x safer Tesla autopilot does it, what's Tesla's exposure? And where will that money come from? Maybe it should be my insurance, but does that mean politicians will leave the carmaker off the hook and cap damages, because its an AI driver issue rather than any other part of the car? Don't think so.

We do have precedents for this, btw. Air travel has caps on awards against airline companies and I think even aircraft manufacturer caused crashes have not resulted in ultra-massive payouts. The general model is - pay some damages, spend a lot of effort identifying the cause, fix the issue. It works well, air travel is very safe. But it is an optimistic carmaker that thinks they're automatically gonna hop onto that wagon from their current legal exposure.

I suspect maybe it'll start with less litigious locations than North America. Or with long-haul trucks in segregated lanes.

JLV

I heard that already

I strip away the old debris

That hides a shining car

A brilliant red Barchetta

From a better vanished time

I fire up the willing engine

Responding with a roar

Tires spitting gravel

I commit my weekly crime

Wanna stream live TV to your Playstation? Get a Vue of Sony's new stuff

JLV
Meh

And I thought cable was expensive.

Google adds evil-code scanning to Play Store

JLV

Re: Huh?

> How, precisely, is Google scanning the Play Store going to affect the third party marketplaces?

Good point, but if you'll pardon me, an equally interesting question is:

How, precisely, is the fact that the third party marketplaces aren't scanning gonna affect Google Play's sales volume?

Seriously, why should Google care overmuch?

Can't say I am over-impressed with Google if I accept the main contention of this article, that being that they haven't been doing their homework very much on their own store.

Still, color me paranoid, but my Nexus was not rooted and it's only been getting the few apps that I do install from the Play Store. Precisely because my trust is fairly limited. I mean, even if you keep it to just your emails and contacts, that's a fair bit of sensitive stuff, innit?

It should be pretty obvious that installing random software from random sources can occasionally have random results. Anti-virus and malware scanners? Hah! How much have they actually helped in the wild? Take all the AV vendors for Macs - they get few native viruses to play with, but that's no guarantee that they will catch them if they do show up - quite the opposite in fact. They can just slap a "you're protected" message on your screen and collect your $. Remember the guy who had a fake AV on Android a while back?

Honey, I shrunk the Windows footprint

JLV

Re: Don't stop there

>My Win 10 PC boots from cold to login in something near 30 seconds.

OK, but you've presumably only had that PC for a few months under Win 10. Unless I missed something major with Windows 8 or 10's technology, with real world use, how do you expect that to evolve as time passes?

Pristine Windows machines boot quickly. After a few years, not so much - I've often found a reformat and fresh install to do wonders. Another reason for getting a reliable, reinstall-from-scratch-capable Windows license from MS. After all, you've paid for it at this point.

Hopefully, with 10, MS is going to be more aggressive in gaining our trust back, will remember the Lenovo mess and realize that one way to recover that trust is to not let the manufacturer hijack the OS and essential features of it such as re-installations and recoveries.

Personally, I am all for their looking into making their OS lean and mean. If squeezing into tablets are the way to enlightenment, great. All the same, I remember that every Windows release since XP has come with numerous "best ever" promises during the tech preview phases. Promises that have often failed to materialize.

Apple Watch: Wait a minute! This puny wrist-puter costs 17 GRAND?!

JLV

Re: cheapo's cable TV?

My understanding is that you get access to the entire HBO content library. So just wait till S5 is done broadcasting, which is why I put this in June rather than April. Not quite same as a Netflix bulk dump from day 1, but close enough. Otherwise you could bug their faithful subscribers with your spoilers :)

Oh, and reality has since bit me on the butt too - not available in Canada, only US. I knew it sounded too good to be true. One hopes we'll eventually follow suit (but not holding my breath yet).

Musk: 'Tesla's electric Model S cars will be less crap soon. I PROMISE'

JLV

Re: Easy to do

Reasonable assumption.

Maybe you could also tweak the car to go into 'economy mode' (while giving the driver the option to override) in order to ensure safe arrival at the recharging station. Things like powering down anything not strictly necessary, limiting top speed to a maximum efficiency speed envelope.

Bit like my phone does, though I figure there are less non-essential options to optimize significantly, asides from the speed. i.e. the bulk of the work is moving the car forward which is kinda the point.