I was commenting on Google's actions being incongrous in the US, where free speech is a social norm. That it was even part of the constitution of the country, unlike many other countries of the day, was an example of the importance it had in the minds of the Colonists.
--dave
[ I'm eminently aware of the narrowness of US constitutional law! Apologies for going off-topic, but...
It's widely cited in the popular press to excuse unconscionable actions by non-government actors. The assumption seems to be that if the government is prohibited from doing something, everyone else is therefor perfectly free to do it, whether or not it's a good idea. To use a frivolous example from India, it does not follow that if a government is prohibited from strangling random passers-by, that individual devotees of Kali can then take it up as a hobby.]
The full quote is Voltaire's, "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
I'm unimpressed by Google's position: in other countries they push back against restriction on free speech. It seem incongrous to impose speech limitations in the US, which actually has the right to free speech as part of their constitution.
Regrettably, extradition hearings look to see if a case can be made by the prosecutors. If so, the person is shipped off, unless there is an extraordinary issue, like the person is to be executed for jaywalking (;-))
If they're innocent until proven guilty, should the profits of their putative crimes be seized? Or should it wait until after they're convicted, if at all?
He seems to be close to owing more to his lawyers than the sum of what he has and what he claims is his family's. If the cause is the US seizing his assets on the basis of his guilt after charging him with something expensive, then the obvious conclusions follow...
Plea deals are a bug-fix for wasted efforts in the courts, but like many bug-fixes, they contain their own bugs.
If the court process is expensive enough, any organization with money can can almost always bankrupt someone with less money, and thereby force them into accepting a plea deal. If it's officers of the court (prosecutors) it's particularly heinous: they're using the defendant's money against them..
The bug-fix needs a bug-fix, one that isn't subject to being gamed. In Canada we used to have supported programmes for fighting unjust laws, and even unfair convictions. We still have them, but they're done almost completely pro-bono. IMHO, the government of the day seems quite unwilling to pay for anything that advances the cause of justice...
--dave
No, IANAL, I'm just grumpy about at political attacks on and perversion of natural justice.
For an Oracle-brand database, the ability to have 128 cores on the same backplane with the appropriate hardware swappability and cycle speeds.
For a web farm,
much less. Maybe the ability to run it in a couple of 3U boxes: I'd have to spreadsheet it to see.
It should be: around the time of the acquisition the price performance ratio finally got back to where it was with the first SPARCs: ten times the price, 100 times the performance.
A 3U 4-socket T5 machine had about 128 full hardware threads (really: cores) the last time I looked seriously at it. The performance was a bit less than a 32-socket, 4-core-per -socket M9000, the machines I mostly worked with. In those days, I was a capacity planner and performance engineer at Sun Canada.
A lot, but not everything, is still available open-source from SPARC International.
The FSS wouldn't actually mind annoying the populace, but the level of false positives would have required them to dedicate most of their budget to buildings full of humans staring at screens, trying to back-stop the computers.
Anything that doesn't scale will eat your budget, and you won't be able to do the rest of your job.
When it gets close to 99.9997% accuracy or so it will be financially competitive with a security guard with a wand, just checking for weapons (;-))
This keeps coming up, every time someone gets a better algorithm for doing the recognition. The actual problem is that it won't scale, not that it's not accurate enough.
If you have 23 people in a group, and you're comparing something like their face or their birthdays, you have to do 22+21+20+...+1 = 253 comparisons to cover the group. If it's birthdays, there is a 50% probability you'll find a pair with the same birthday. If your facial recognizer is 99.7% accurate, you'll have a 50% chance of getting a false match out of this tiny group.
If you are the NSA or the German FSS, and your recognizer is only accurate 97.35 percent of the time, you'll be getting one false recognition out of about every ten people you scan. When you're looking for any one of several hundred criminals out of an airport full of people, that means you'll be constantly arresting your granny for being an Bader-Meinhoff Gang member (;-))
If you're looking for just one face, yours, and you don't care if a few times it mistakes you for Quaku Breki Kiku, it's fine. If you're trying to run a police state, or even trying to keep problem gamblers out of a casino, it a horrendous waste of your time.
--dave
I ran into this years ago, when Siemens had one of the first recognizers and the FSS tried it out in an airport in Germany. A statistician colleague eventually explained why it kept generating such obviously false matches now matter how they tweaked the program. See also the "birthday paradox" on wikipedia
Libraries and library systems are a major, long-term target of the security services and politicians. Those guys want to know if you read "Steal This Book", or in an older age, "Lady Chatterly's Lover", so they can blackmail you. The library community soon learned that it was smart to meet the most stringent privacy standards set by law. After all, you also can't afford to cheese off Germany and the EU and get tossed out of their market.
Countries who would prefer to have back-doors have a hard time making a case for them, as they don't want be seen publicly trying to convince a company to break a good law.
The same logic applied to all software: China has just encouraged all countries to demand open or at least auditable source, and builds that can be proven to be from those sources, so customers can be sure that the backdoors aren't in.
Smart customers will insists on open source, so they can check themselves.
The US is looking at chip-and-signature, which is safer for the customer, who go screwed by UK banks claiming that chip and pin was perfect, therefor any losses were the customer's fault.
Courtesy of Ross Anderson, one of the serious researchers in the sucurity world.
My libertarian friend Max and I dealt with CSE in the early 1980s, before the election of Mr. Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives. They were a small group, very interested in the security of PC-class machines (this was the 286 era), and especially of machines sold to External Affairs and other customers who might be the subject of spying by foreign intelligence services.
At the time, TEMPEST was a huge concern, and they helped Max measure the emissions from his machines, and advised us on many other confidentiality concerns. This was understandable: we built ruggedized machines that External Affairs used in embassies around the world!
Looking at what they were concerned about, it was pretty obvious at that time that they didn't think we were living in a panopticon: the big bugbear was insiders, and they wanted to see the Orange Book used everywhere (:-))
Therefor: the rot started no earlier than Mr Mulroney's election in 1984, and probably much later. The budget is probably the best indicator. It was small and static until 2001, then doubled and redoubled in Mr Harper's era, from 2006 onwards.
Ironically, the opposite seems to be true in the NSA, who didn't even use the orange-book security systems they paid (us) to develop. So they got sysdamins walking out the door with thumb-drives of incriminating evidence.
I'm a polite Canadian, and worked much of my career for a "california cowboy company". We were never nice.
In many cases, what probably was meant as tongue-in-cheek comments came across poorly to Canadians and British, sometimes even as assholery or prejudice. I wouldn't expect "nicey nice" from my colleagues or my American cousins, and I'm quite surprised to see people in the US asking for it!
Wikipedia thinks that "Subversion refers to an attempt to transform the established social order and its structures of power, authority, and hierarchy. "
One might consider this superversive, an attempt to restore a social order's power of their security servicer.
Slashdot Mirror
Because they wanted to have electrocuted him?
I was commenting on Google's actions being incongrous in the US, where free speech is a social norm. That it was even part of the constitution of the country, unlike many other countries of the day, was an example of the importance it had in the minds of the Colonists.
--dave ...
[ I'm eminently aware of the narrowness of US constitutional law! Apologies for going off-topic, but
It's widely cited in the popular press to excuse unconscionable actions by non-government actors. The assumption seems to be that if the government is prohibited from doing something, everyone else is therefor perfectly free to do it, whether or not it's a good idea. To use a frivolous example from India, it does not follow that if a government is prohibited from strangling random passers-by, that individual devotees of Kali can then take it up as a hobby.]
The full quote is Voltaire's, "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
I'm unimpressed by Google's position: in other countries they push back against restriction on free speech. It seem incongrous to impose speech limitations in the US, which actually has the right to free speech as part of their constitution.
Very much so... As my father would say, "please attack me for what I said, not something you made up"
Regrettably, extradition hearings look to see if a case can be made by the prosecutors. If so, the person is shipped off, unless there is an extraordinary issue, like the person is to be executed for jaywalking (;-))
If they're innocent until proven guilty, should the profits of their putative crimes be seized? Or should it wait until after they're convicted, if at all?
He seems to be close to owing more to his lawyers than the sum of what he has and what he claims is his family's. If the cause is the US seizing his assets on the basis of his guilt after charging him with something expensive, then the obvious conclusions follow...
Plea deals are a bug-fix for wasted efforts in the courts, but like many bug-fixes, they contain their own bugs.
If the court process is expensive enough, any organization with money can can almost always bankrupt someone with less money, and thereby force them into accepting a plea deal. If it's officers of the court (prosecutors) it's particularly heinous: they're using the defendant's money against them..
The bug-fix needs a bug-fix, one that isn't subject to being gamed. In Canada we used to have supported programmes for fighting unjust laws, and even unfair convictions. We still have them, but they're done almost completely pro-bono. IMHO, the government of the day seems quite unwilling to pay for anything that advances the cause of justice...
--dave
No, IANAL, I'm just grumpy about at political attacks on and perversion of natural justice.
much less. Maybe the ability to run it in a couple of 3U boxes: I'd have to spreadsheet it to see.
Most Oracle employees are salescritters, and run Windows XP on Intel (;-))
It should be: around the time of the acquisition the price performance ratio finally got back to where it was with the first SPARCs: ten times the price, 100 times the performance .
A 3U 4-socket T5 machine had about 128 full hardware threads (really: cores) the last time I looked seriously at it. The performance was a bit less than a 32-socket, 4-core-per -socket M9000, the machines I mostly worked with. In those days, I was a capacity planner and performance engineer at Sun Canada.
A lot, but not everything, is still available open-source from SPARC International.
--dave
Ha! The more I hear about the NSA the more I think they have lost their minds.
The FSS wouldn't actually mind annoying the populace, but the level of false positives would have required them to dedicate most of their budget to buildings full of humans staring at screens, trying to back-stop the computers.
Anything that doesn't scale will eat your budget, and you won't be able to do the rest of your job.
When it gets close to 99.9997% accuracy or so it will be financially competitive with a security guard with a wand, just checking for weapons (;-))
This keeps coming up, every time someone gets a better algorithm for doing the recognition. The actual problem is that it won't scale , not that it's not accurate enough.
If you have 23 people in a group, and you're comparing something like their face or their birthdays, you have to do 22+21+20+...+1 = 253 comparisons to cover the group. If it's birthdays, there is a 50% probability you'll find a pair with the same birthday. If your facial recognizer is 99.7% accurate, you'll have a 50% chance of getting a false match out of this tiny group.
If you are the NSA or the German FSS, and your recognizer is only accurate 97.35 percent of the time, you'll be getting one false recognition out of about every ten people you scan. When you're looking for any one of several hundred criminals out of an airport full of people, that means you'll be constantly arresting your granny for being an Bader-Meinhoff Gang member (;-))
If you're looking for just one face, yours, and you don't care if a few times it mistakes you for Quaku Breki Kiku, it's fine. If you're trying to run a police state, or even trying to keep problem gamblers out of a casino, it a horrendous waste of your time.
--dave
I ran into this years ago, when Siemens had one of the first recognizers and the FSS tried it out in an airport in Germany. A statistician colleague eventually explained why it kept generating such obviously false matches now matter how they tweaked the program. See also the "birthday paradox" on wikipedia
Libraries and library systems are a major, long-term target of the security services and politicians. Those guys want to know if you read "Steal This Book", or in an older age, "Lady Chatterly's Lover", so they can blackmail you. The library community soon learned that it was smart to meet the most stringent privacy standards set by law. After all, you also can't afford to cheese off Germany and the EU and get tossed out of their market.
Countries who would prefer to have back-doors have a hard time making a case for them, as they don't want be seen publicly trying to convince a company to break a good law.
The same logic applied to all software: China has just encouraged all countries to demand open or at least auditable source, and builds that can be proven to be from those sources, so customers can be sure that the backdoors aren't in.
Smart customers will insists on open source, so they can check themselves.
Chip and pin has been broken in Europe since soon after it was introduced: see https://www.lightbluetouchpape...
The US is looking at chip-and-signature, which is safer for the customer , who go screwed by UK banks claiming that chip and pin was perfect, therefor any losses were the customer's fault.
Courtesy of Ross Anderson, one of the serious researchers in the sucurity world.
My libertarian friend Max and I dealt with CSE in the early 1980s, before the election of Mr. Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives. They were a small group, very interested in the security of PC-class machines (this was the 286 era), and especially of machines sold to External Affairs and other customers who might be the subject of spying by foreign intelligence services.
At the time, TEMPEST was a huge concern, and they helped Max measure the emissions from his machines, and advised us on many other confidentiality concerns. This was understandable: we built ruggedized machines that External Affairs used in embassies around the world!
Looking at what they were concerned about, it was pretty obvious at that time that they didn't think we were living in a panopticon: the big bugbear was insiders, and they wanted to see the Orange Book used everywhere (:-))
Therefor: the rot started no earlier than Mr Mulroney's election in 1984, and probably much later. The budget is probably the best indicator. It was small and static until 2001, then doubled and redoubled in Mr Harper's era, from 2006 onwards.
Ironically, the opposite seems to be true in the NSA, who didn't even use the orange-book security systems they paid (us) to develop. So they got sysdamins walking out the door with thumb-drives of incriminating evidence.
I suspect many PHBs can't even tell specification from implementation (;-))
Honeywell once tried to make that claim, thinking that they were in Minneapolis. Alas, it's prohibited in Canada, where we were doing business (;-))
I'm a polite Canadian, and worked much of my career for a "california cowboy company". We were never nice.
In many cases, what probably was meant as tongue-in-cheek comments came across poorly to Canadians and British, sometimes even as assholery or prejudice. I wouldn't expect "nicey nice" from my colleagues or my American cousins, and I'm quite surprised to see people in the US asking for it!
s/of/over/
Wikipedia thinks that "Subversion refers to an attempt to transform the established social order and its structures of power, authority, and hierarchy. "
One might consider this superversive, an attempt to restore a social order's power of their security servicer.
When I said "honour bound", I didn't necessarily mean it wasn't the dishonor heaped on a politician by his opponents (;-))
Huh? Mr Harper is a Conservative, so it's more like Mr. Nixon.