If Nicholas Meyer makes a Star Trek show, I may actually be excited about watching it. He did both Star Trek 2 and 6, the best of the movies IMO.
I've never seen Discovery. I'm certainly not going to pay for a streaming service for the purpose of watching one show. And I haven't heard anything positive enough about it to pirate it. I just don't care that much, which is a bit sad considering I've watched every Star Trek show up to this point.
I dunno. They sent Martha Stewart to prison, and she was a famous and wealthy woman who committed a pretty common crime for wealthy insiders. I can't come up with more examples of women CEOs who have gone to prison, but then there aren't very many of them, proportionally.
I believe I've gotten a few spam texts over the years, but so few that I could probably count them on my fingers. I get a lot fewer spam calls these days, also. I used to get two spam calls every day. One of them was reliably at 7:30 in the morning. A loud ship's horn and then "This is your captain speaking..." which went on to suggest I'd won a cruise. The other was notifying me that the warranty on my car had or was about to expire (my car was around 15 years old at the time, and had never had any warranty the entire time I'd owned it). These days, they never seem to leave messages, so I don't know what they're about.
I can't read the article because of the paywall. But I can say I don't even see any caller ID information for 99% of the spam calls I get. All I see is a phone number. It's usually a fake phone number (I assume because it's my area code and prefix plus a random 4), but there's no name associated with it. If my phone company is paying anyone money for the "service" of displaying a fake phone number to me when I get a call, then maybe they should rethink that.
phone companies pay small fees -- typically fractions of pennies -- to databases that store such records. Some of these fees are handed back to the caller.
Knowing nothing else about the problem, I suggest that phone companies stop contracting with databases that hand fees back to the caller, or else make it hurt. If AT&T and Verizon declare a new policy to pay their fee less an amount equivalent to whatever the database hands back to the caller, the practice will end double quick. The database suddenly gets a big incentive to stop those kickbacks, and the profit motive for the scammers dries up. This, without any loss of income on the part of the phone company. The databases can't exist without the patronage of the phone company, so the phone company has a lot of power.
Again, can't it be both, and add on top of that a cover-up (conspiracy) etc to give the legal hounds something to really go after? I mean, Ajit Pai in jail would be true justice, given how hard he's trying to defraud the American people.
Oh, certainly. It's my opinion that Ajit Pai and his pals are both partisan and stupid. (Which works okay if they do it secretly and have passable excuses.) Their behavior also makes them *look* partisan and stupid to an extent that may be beyond acceptable levels. I think they screwed this whole thing up pretty badly, perhaps in part because they underestimated the number of people who would care. They weren't expecting a John Oliver effect, they would likely never imagine that a few R senators would cross the aisle to vote in favor of NN, and they didn't think enough ordinary Americans would understand NN to make it into a midterm campaign issue.
But have they committed a crime? I have absolutely no idea. If they have, then I think it should be investigated and we should throw the book at them. But from my naive perspective, it looks like they're just "being shitty" which isn't really a crime.
It seems to me that the issue is more a combination of incompetence and wishful thinking than it is an FCC conspiracy.
John Oliver asks his viewers to go to the FCC site and post comments supporting net neutrality. To a less-competent sysadmin, that surge of traffic may look like a DDoS. He mentions the possibility and it percolates up to guys like Pai. Pai is thrilled that there is a malicious, technical explanation for this event, because it allows him to dismiss the notion that a significant proportion of people may support net neutrality. Public support for NN doesn't fit within Pai's pre-constructed worldview, so he's more comfortable not facing that possibility.
Bots abuse the FCC comment API to manufacture millions of fake comments against NN. At the time the attack was ongoing, I happened to be looking at the FCC page, trying to make a comment of my own, and I watched the automated comments pouring in. They were coming in at multiple comments per second, all with identical text, and in alphabetical order by the name of the commentor. It was blindingly obvious that someone had just set up a script that created comments from a database of names and addresses. But Pai refuses to investigate, insisting that all of those comments are obviously legitimate. Of course all those comments are real, because they support his pre-constructed worldview. It just makes sense to him.
And after all the incompetence and confirmation bias, after publicly stating a bunch of things that turned out to be bullshit, they don't want to investigate, they don't want anyone else to investigate, and they don't want to provide any information. Because the results will make them look either partisan or stupid. And we'll tolerate a certain amount of either of those things, but there's a chance this would go too far.
the system used to automatically apply brakes in potentially dangerous situations had been disabled
This is utter madness. I would say 'pants on head' crazy but there's something a tiny bit endearing about that phrase, suggesting a gentle kind of crazy. No, this is 'dissociative, dig out your own eyeballs and eat them, psychotic break' insanity.
How about this: lets make a machine gun that's just always shooting bullets. It chooses which direction to point, and it's usually right. Sometimes, though, it might point at random civilians, but that's okay, because there will be a man standing nearby who could push a button that makes it stop shooting. If he's paying attention.
If you mistrust your wife so much that you feel like you need to install software on her phone to spy on her, what you should be thinking about is not whether this is legal because you technically part-own the phone. You should be thinking about getting a divorce. You're obviously unhappy, and your paranoia and controlling behavior is probably not making her life any better, either.
The government has passed a law that provides for fines on the order of $23 million (or more, if the business is large). Businesses that are requesting new opt-ins are doing it so they can demonstrate that they have explained what they do with customer data and have obtained explicit permission to do so.
Yeah, it would have been great if these businesses had been doing that all along, but there was no legal requirement for them to do so. They may not have kept records that would allow them to demonstrate compliance. Why would it be a surprise to anybody that businesses are trying to cover their asses to avoid paying fines that could destroy them? This is a completely foreseeable result.
I don't see the math as simple. That's because none of us can see what their path to monetizing this was/is.
I never paid too much attention to MoviePass, but surely part of the plan was that a lot of subscribers would pay their monthly fee but not attend very many movies? Like the gym membership model, where some number of gym members go on contract, pay for their membership, but still never use the gym.
This is good to hear, thanks. I already have an unmanaged 1Gb switch (HP ProCurve) and I'm not sure I see the need for managed. I was thinking I'd start with a new router and access point and phase in other gear as it seemed useful. I don't run anything PoE at the moment, but I'd consider a camera or two.
My main goal is never to go back to a situation where I have to reboot my router every day because it slowed to a crawl or just crapped out (e.g., LinkSys and NetGear). And I'd like to have some light firewall-type capability, at least on the level of iptables, to block certain traffic before it hits my clients.
This is the brand I'd like to go for when I replace my current setup (Apple Airport Express). I haven't done enough research on them yet, but my impression is that Ubiquiti could be a great replacement.
Be prepared to disassemble whatever computer is affected
I know I'm a bit late to this discussion, but I thought this might help. I ran in to this issue some time ago, and now before I put a new hard drive into a computer, I lay it on the flatbed scanner and scan the top of it (and the bottom, if there's anything to see there).
They do put those labels on an incredible amount of stuff. I guess I understand the original intent of the warnings, and it seems like they had good intentions. But there comes a point when they need to re-evaluate the utility. When warning labels are on almost everything you see, they reach a point of semantic satiation, where they lose all meaning.
As a product liability issue, if I were selling physical products in California, I'd be tempted to put a warning label on everything I sold, regardless of whether they said I had to. That way, I can't get caught when it turns out that some chemical that was used in the preparation of some part turns out to be on the bad list...
Libraries commonly measure their capacity for books in shelf feet. In different areas of the library, books may be stored at different densities. In the periodicals section, a collection of journals or magazines may be stored at 30 issues per shelf foot, and in the reference section, maybe they only get 8 volumes per shelf foot.
I did a statistical survey on a library once to estimate the number of books they had. I didn't express it this way in the study, but looking back at the numbers, they had about 15.9 shelf miles of capacity. This was a two story building, fairly densely populated with shelving.
And they work more diligently than the best ad blockers
And that's really weird to me. Outside of intrusive ads, all I should need is a browser setting queryable from JS that means "I don't want auto-playing media content." Then when I go to CNN or somewhere, they should check that value and not play their video because I've told them I don't want it.
Instead, I have a browser extension whose entire purpose is to stop autoplaying media, and sites like CNN seem to keep finding ways to work around the extension and start playing anyway. I don't understand the logic. I've gone to extra effort to make their video not play, which should give them a hint that I don't want to see it. Why would they work so hard to give me something I don't want, when they don't get any reward for doing so?
This is very interesting, thanks for bringing it up. I don't have anything to do with manufacturing, but I had idly imagined this kind of analysis being done. It's cool to discover it's a real thing.
This sounds like a great service. How can I get them to add my IP addresses to their blocking list? I'm blocking them on my end right now, but it would simplify my iptables config if they could just be cut off at the source.
Sure, but the article says nothing about patents. The company is keeping their algorithms secret (the "black box") and without publishing their methods, they can't get a patent; they can only rely on trade secrets. Which means anyone who can reverse engineer it can implement it without penalty.
This is only a guess, but I bet they call it "black box" not just to be coy, but because it's a machine learning model that even they don't know exactly what it does all the time. But unlike Theranos, I can actually see a scenario where their approach would really work.
Perhaps their probabilistic model suggests that one of the Big Dogs will buy them out... they want Google to buy them.
Yeah, I think you're right. It seems like the best case for them is that they are doing something non-trivial enough that Google can't replicate it immediately and just buys them instead.
You can get a better GPS fix by having a base station at a surveyed point, but this isn't what they're doing, because it would be expensive. There are also corrections you can do based upon atmospheric conditions, but they say that wasn't good enough. They pretty obviously don't want to say how they're doing it, which makes sense for trying to corner the market. But I wonder how novel their methods are, and if they can really stay ahead for long.
They say it's by "sensor fusion" and probabilistic models. The sensors are presumably the accelerometer and maybe the barometer in a cell phone. They could have an idea of the nominal error of a sensor based upon the model of phone. The probabilistic models, I can only guess, come from having many users running the app at once so they can try to reduce the error using many measurements.
Once they narrow the precision of the fix to the size of a lane of traffic, they could start identifying the lane by the behavior of clients in that lane -- if everyone turns off the freeway at this point in this lane, it's probably an exit lane, that sort of thing. And those rules could become much more complex. Like, use a machine learning process and train it on a bunch of well-defined traffic situations.
But, two questions: first, can they compete with companies like Garmin and Google who have tons of money and clients, plus smart people who could try to reverse-engineer these improvements and roll them out basically for free? It could easily be worth it to crush competition. And, if the success of the probabilistic model is based upon having many clients, do they get this level of improvement everywhere, or only in higher-traffic areas like cities?
Used to do that, then cut the listing out and slip it into the sleeve with the 5.25" floppy. So much faster to find a file without having to put each disk in and pull a directory listing. Of course, you had to keep it updated.
I've had this conversation with multiple people in academic/research contexts. We want single sign-on, and we want to reduce the proliferation of accounts that people need, and the suggestion keeps coming up that we use Facebook as authentication for various systems. Now, for the things we're talking about, security is probably not the biggest concern (low-value, low visibility target with access to niche data that most attackers wouldn't know what to do with). But Facebook has no guarantee of a stable API, I have no idea what it would take to get a support contract for authentication, there are any number of institutional policies that would prevent using it,... and the list goes on. People like the idea because it sounds easy, but it's a terrible idea for a lot of reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
If Nicholas Meyer makes a Star Trek show, I may actually be excited about watching it. He did both Star Trek 2 and 6, the best of the movies IMO.
I've never seen Discovery. I'm certainly not going to pay for a streaming service for the purpose of watching one show. And I haven't heard anything positive enough about it to pirate it. I just don't care that much, which is a bit sad considering I've watched every Star Trek show up to this point.
I dunno. They sent Martha Stewart to prison, and she was a famous and wealthy woman who committed a pretty common crime for wealthy insiders. I can't come up with more examples of women CEOs who have gone to prison, but then there aren't very many of them, proportionally.
I believe I've gotten a few spam texts over the years, but so few that I could probably count them on my fingers. I get a lot fewer spam calls these days, also. I used to get two spam calls every day. One of them was reliably at 7:30 in the morning. A loud ship's horn and then "This is your captain speaking..." which went on to suggest I'd won a cruise. The other was notifying me that the warranty on my car had or was about to expire (my car was around 15 years old at the time, and had never had any warranty the entire time I'd owned it). These days, they never seem to leave messages, so I don't know what they're about.
I can't read the article because of the paywall. But I can say I don't even see any caller ID information for 99% of the spam calls I get. All I see is a phone number. It's usually a fake phone number (I assume because it's my area code and prefix plus a random 4), but there's no name associated with it. If my phone company is paying anyone money for the "service" of displaying a fake phone number to me when I get a call, then maybe they should rethink that.
Knowing nothing else about the problem, I suggest that phone companies stop contracting with databases that hand fees back to the caller, or else make it hurt. If AT&T and Verizon declare a new policy to pay their fee less an amount equivalent to whatever the database hands back to the caller, the practice will end double quick. The database suddenly gets a big incentive to stop those kickbacks, and the profit motive for the scammers dries up. This, without any loss of income on the part of the phone company. The databases can't exist without the patronage of the phone company, so the phone company has a lot of power.
Oh, certainly. It's my opinion that Ajit Pai and his pals are both partisan and stupid. (Which works okay if they do it secretly and have passable excuses.) Their behavior also makes them *look* partisan and stupid to an extent that may be beyond acceptable levels. I think they screwed this whole thing up pretty badly, perhaps in part because they underestimated the number of people who would care. They weren't expecting a John Oliver effect, they would likely never imagine that a few R senators would cross the aisle to vote in favor of NN, and they didn't think enough ordinary Americans would understand NN to make it into a midterm campaign issue.
But have they committed a crime? I have absolutely no idea. If they have, then I think it should be investigated and we should throw the book at them. But from my naive perspective, it looks like they're just "being shitty" which isn't really a crime.
It seems to me that the issue is more a combination of incompetence and wishful thinking than it is an FCC conspiracy.
John Oliver asks his viewers to go to the FCC site and post comments supporting net neutrality. To a less-competent sysadmin, that surge of traffic may look like a DDoS. He mentions the possibility and it percolates up to guys like Pai. Pai is thrilled that there is a malicious, technical explanation for this event, because it allows him to dismiss the notion that a significant proportion of people may support net neutrality. Public support for NN doesn't fit within Pai's pre-constructed worldview, so he's more comfortable not facing that possibility.
Bots abuse the FCC comment API to manufacture millions of fake comments against NN. At the time the attack was ongoing, I happened to be looking at the FCC page, trying to make a comment of my own, and I watched the automated comments pouring in. They were coming in at multiple comments per second, all with identical text, and in alphabetical order by the name of the commentor. It was blindingly obvious that someone had just set up a script that created comments from a database of names and addresses. But Pai refuses to investigate, insisting that all of those comments are obviously legitimate. Of course all those comments are real, because they support his pre-constructed worldview. It just makes sense to him.
And after all the incompetence and confirmation bias, after publicly stating a bunch of things that turned out to be bullshit, they don't want to investigate, they don't want anyone else to investigate, and they don't want to provide any information. Because the results will make them look either partisan or stupid. And we'll tolerate a certain amount of either of those things, but there's a chance this would go too far.
This is utter madness. I would say 'pants on head' crazy but there's something a tiny bit endearing about that phrase, suggesting a gentle kind of crazy. No, this is 'dissociative, dig out your own eyeballs and eat them, psychotic break' insanity.
How about this: lets make a machine gun that's just always shooting bullets. It chooses which direction to point, and it's usually right. Sometimes, though, it might point at random civilians, but that's okay, because there will be a man standing nearby who could push a button that makes it stop shooting. If he's paying attention.
If you mistrust your wife so much that you feel like you need to install software on her phone to spy on her, what you should be thinking about is not whether this is legal because you technically part-own the phone. You should be thinking about getting a divorce. You're obviously unhappy, and your paranoia and controlling behavior is probably not making her life any better, either.
The government has passed a law that provides for fines on the order of $23 million (or more, if the business is large). Businesses that are requesting new opt-ins are doing it so they can demonstrate that they have explained what they do with customer data and have obtained explicit permission to do so.
Yeah, it would have been great if these businesses had been doing that all along, but there was no legal requirement for them to do so. They may not have kept records that would allow them to demonstrate compliance. Why would it be a surprise to anybody that businesses are trying to cover their asses to avoid paying fines that could destroy them? This is a completely foreseeable result.
I never paid too much attention to MoviePass, but surely part of the plan was that a lot of subscribers would pay their monthly fee but not attend very many movies? Like the gym membership model, where some number of gym members go on contract, pay for their membership, but still never use the gym.
This is good to hear, thanks. I already have an unmanaged 1Gb switch (HP ProCurve) and I'm not sure I see the need for managed. I was thinking I'd start with a new router and access point and phase in other gear as it seemed useful. I don't run anything PoE at the moment, but I'd consider a camera or two.
My main goal is never to go back to a situation where I have to reboot my router every day because it slowed to a crawl or just crapped out (e.g., LinkSys and NetGear). And I'd like to have some light firewall-type capability, at least on the level of iptables, to block certain traffic before it hits my clients.
This is the brand I'd like to go for when I replace my current setup (Apple Airport Express). I haven't done enough research on them yet, but my impression is that Ubiquiti could be a great replacement.
I know I'm a bit late to this discussion, but I thought this might help. I ran in to this issue some time ago, and now before I put a new hard drive into a computer, I lay it on the flatbed scanner and scan the top of it (and the bottom, if there's anything to see there).
They do put those labels on an incredible amount of stuff. I guess I understand the original intent of the warnings, and it seems like they had good intentions. But there comes a point when they need to re-evaluate the utility. When warning labels are on almost everything you see, they reach a point of semantic satiation, where they lose all meaning.
As a product liability issue, if I were selling physical products in California, I'd be tempted to put a warning label on everything I sold, regardless of whether they said I had to. That way, I can't get caught when it turns out that some chemical that was used in the preparation of some part turns out to be on the bad list...
Libraries commonly measure their capacity for books in shelf feet. In different areas of the library, books may be stored at different densities. In the periodicals section, a collection of journals or magazines may be stored at 30 issues per shelf foot, and in the reference section, maybe they only get 8 volumes per shelf foot.
I did a statistical survey on a library once to estimate the number of books they had. I didn't express it this way in the study, but looking back at the numbers, they had about 15.9 shelf miles of capacity. This was a two story building, fairly densely populated with shelving.
And that's really weird to me. Outside of intrusive ads, all I should need is a browser setting queryable from JS that means "I don't want auto-playing media content." Then when I go to CNN or somewhere, they should check that value and not play their video because I've told them I don't want it.
Instead, I have a browser extension whose entire purpose is to stop autoplaying media, and sites like CNN seem to keep finding ways to work around the extension and start playing anyway. I don't understand the logic. I've gone to extra effort to make their video not play, which should give them a hint that I don't want to see it. Why would they work so hard to give me something I don't want, when they don't get any reward for doing so?
This is very interesting, thanks for bringing it up. I don't have anything to do with manufacturing, but I had idly imagined this kind of analysis being done. It's cool to discover it's a real thing.
This sounds like a great service. How can I get them to add my IP addresses to their blocking list? I'm blocking them on my end right now, but it would simplify my iptables config if they could just be cut off at the source.
Sure, but the article says nothing about patents. The company is keeping their algorithms secret (the "black box") and without publishing their methods, they can't get a patent; they can only rely on trade secrets. Which means anyone who can reverse engineer it can implement it without penalty.
This is only a guess, but I bet they call it "black box" not just to be coy, but because it's a machine learning model that even they don't know exactly what it does all the time. But unlike Theranos, I can actually see a scenario where their approach would really work.
Yeah, I think you're right. It seems like the best case for them is that they are doing something non-trivial enough that Google can't replicate it immediately and just buys them instead.
You can get a better GPS fix by having a base station at a surveyed point, but this isn't what they're doing, because it would be expensive. There are also corrections you can do based upon atmospheric conditions, but they say that wasn't good enough. They pretty obviously don't want to say how they're doing it, which makes sense for trying to corner the market. But I wonder how novel their methods are, and if they can really stay ahead for long.
They say it's by "sensor fusion" and probabilistic models. The sensors are presumably the accelerometer and maybe the barometer in a cell phone. They could have an idea of the nominal error of a sensor based upon the model of phone. The probabilistic models, I can only guess, come from having many users running the app at once so they can try to reduce the error using many measurements.
Once they narrow the precision of the fix to the size of a lane of traffic, they could start identifying the lane by the behavior of clients in that lane -- if everyone turns off the freeway at this point in this lane, it's probably an exit lane, that sort of thing. And those rules could become much more complex. Like, use a machine learning process and train it on a bunch of well-defined traffic situations.
But, two questions: first, can they compete with companies like Garmin and Google who have tons of money and clients, plus smart people who could try to reverse-engineer these improvements and roll them out basically for free? It could easily be worth it to crush competition. And, if the success of the probabilistic model is based upon having many clients, do they get this level of improvement everywhere, or only in higher-traffic areas like cities?
Used to do that, then cut the listing out and slip it into the sleeve with the 5.25" floppy. So much faster to find a file without having to put each disk in and pull a directory listing. Of course, you had to keep it updated.
I've had this conversation with multiple people in academic/research contexts. We want single sign-on, and we want to reduce the proliferation of accounts that people need, and the suggestion keeps coming up that we use Facebook as authentication for various systems. Now, for the things we're talking about, security is probably not the biggest concern (low-value, low visibility target with access to niche data that most attackers wouldn't know what to do with). But Facebook has no guarantee of a stable API, I have no idea what it would take to get a support contract for authentication, there are any number of institutional policies that would prevent using it, ... and the list goes on. People like the idea because it sounds easy, but it's a terrible idea for a lot of reasons.