Comment Good work on the easy part! (Score 5, Interesting) 31
If you actually have a set of rules that detect your bot being wicked it will presumably save you some CPU time to run them on the NIC rather than having the host CPU watching the traffic; but the hard part is the set of rules that detect your bot being wicked.
This is basically the equivalent of adding a firewall and claiming that you've solved network security. Yeah, the firewall is pretty well placed to block malicious traffic; defining 'malicious traffic' is left as an exercise for the reader.
Comment Timing? (Score 2) 65
It otherwise seems like a kind of weird time to do it. In principle what a 'cell' is has never really had an obvious mandatory scale: it has essentially always been relevant that a 'cell' existed in relation to other cells, so that something like an array could be a row; but it has also long been allowed and encouraged to do things like substring operations that acknowledge that cell contents are 'larger' objects that contain smaller ones; and are not automatically spilled out for that reason alone. Not clear that the pragmatic use case for spreadsheets would ever have supported some sort of 'any data type that implies it can be decomposed into elements shall be' rule, strings getting broken up into substrings and so on; but it's also not clear that the pragmatic use case is going to be much clarified by a single cell being n levels deep of lists and arrays of lists and arrays being a fully supported thing rather than something you hack on by shoving JSON into text cells or whatever.
It definitely seems like asking for confusion when some, but only some, "excel spreadsheets" have cells that are arrays, potentially of arrays, while others have rows of cells with contents that, at least formally, are not acknowledged as arrays.
Comment Re:oh good (Score 1) 74
That obviously doesn't mean that there's a working GPU driver; or that naive power management doesn't cause the system to run at 90% of maximum power and hammer the battery flat; but the theory was that the last gen was already doing the "big kid ARM that has embraced PC standards" thing; very similar to the 'standards base' that ARM encourages ARM server part vendors to use.
Comment Re:oh good (Score 1) 74
Comment Re:Why not X1? (Score 1) 74
Comment Re:Flock is building 1984 (Score 4, Insightful) 254
Being in public does leave you with no particular defensible expectations of not being observed, and possibly even remembered for a time, by assorted passers by; and typically also permits more direct tailing of people for observation purposes(subject to some, often slightly vague, threshold at which having PIs or paparazzi hunting someone remains a problem even in public; as we saw here where the police took the notion seriously enough to show up but not to do anything in particular).
What it has historically never meant, for technical reasons, was pervasive coverage and longterm retention. Which is certainly increasingly feasible with only moderate levels of investment; but is absolutely a novel development for what 'public' and 'no expectation of privacy' meant.
It's like defending the installation of a massive network of sprinklers because "you have no expectation of staying dry when you go outside; haven't you heard of rain?" Sure, nobody the weather to be sunny all the time, any more than they expect everyone to avert their eyes in public; but they would correctly consider the installation of irrigation equipment on every lamppost to be an intrusion on their ability to stay dry despite the fact that the sky has never extended them a constitutionally protected right to no rain.
Comment Re:Who will pay for this? (Score 4, Interesting) 33
To clarify, the users were OpenAI themselves, so there is no question that they would be liable in this case.
The bots were not intentionally deployed; rather, they were being tested on how well they could complete a data recovery task (downloading a certain file from a certain server on a simulated Internet) that had been complicated by putting various obstacles in the way. Unfortunately, they found a different way to solve the problem: by getting the file from the real Internet, where it was publicly available. Part of this process involved collaborating with each other by treating the RubyGems website (which is supposed to be for polished packages) like GitHub; unlike every other package site hack in history, the exploits they uploaded weren't meant to be downloaded by unsuspecting users. As usual the bots cheerfully ignored all the clues that they had escaped containment and were consistently justifying their actions as acceptable due to being in a sandboxed testing environment. (This is something OpenAI has pledged to focus on.)
The actual damage done to RubyGems seems to be that OpenAI is now unwittingly in possession of a substantial number of user login tokens. This certainly meets the definition of a data breach, but it's not like the credentials are for sale on the dark web. As a website operator I'd much rather be mauled to death by this well-meaning swarm of superintelligent infants than targeted by even a single actual malicious human. In all likelihood OpenAI will just quietly pass RubyGems a sizeable donation and it'll all blow over.
Comment 'Degrade'... (Score 2) 93
Comment Re:Fine TiVo you have there. Shame something might (Score 1) 88
How many Tivo's are still in use? When the FCC nixed the requirement for offering CableCards, Tivo with any cable subscriber basically became a useless brick.
TDS Telecom uses a Tivo box of some kind for their TV+ service. You can tell from because the Tivo symbol on their remotes: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftdstelecom.com%2Fsupport... . When visiting a relative with this, I didn't get a chance to see the actual boxes, just that they were Tivo. I was surprised to find they're running a variant of Android because to get new "channels", you have to get them from Google's play store.
Comment Re:TDS (Score 1) 274
It means Iran has severely limited the capacity of the Strait of Hormuz. It's a hostage situation. No one is winning, but the objective isn't to win in the sense of completely closing the Strait, the objective is to create a sufficiently long period of pain that eventually the US and its allies walk away. Christ almighty, force multiplication is hardly a new concept.
Comment Re: A giant step forward for mankind (Score 1) 274
There are plenty of places in North America without coverage because there's so little to cover. The Los Vegas metropolitan area has about three million people. So yes, that would be a place with cell phone coverage. By the same token, coverage in states like Montana, particularly in mountainous areas is spotty because, well, there's not a lot of people.
Comment Re:Missing some context (Score 1) 90
There is probably a part of the graph that is mostly linear, nondrinkers to very light drinkers to light-ish drinkers; but anyone who is really hitting the sauce and succumbing to DUIs, cirrhosis, or other non-cancer alcohol mortality is making themselves ineligible for alcohol related cancer death.
Comment Re:Preparation for the "own nothing" era (Score 2) 50
I know I have a bunch of games that I don't actually play all that much, in wall time terms; but Steam's 'executable run time' number is 2x-10x as high because I'm not necessarily going to save, quit, open, load if a game can be paused and alt-tabbed without crashing or continuing to eat all the GPU time to render a static image I'm not looking at; and I'm not necessarily going to do anything other than pause if I'm called away for 15 minutes by something else.
Unless the streaming service is impeccable at cutting out the various little waits it seems likely that people are going to start resenting the time limit even more than their level of seriousness and actual hand-on-controller-and-attention-locked time suggests.
Comment Re:good bye (Score 1) 50
What is less obvious is how that is supposed to work for their streaming service. The stuff aimed at casuals, sensibly, is normally targeted at either potato-tier PC specs or the (pretty punchy in absolute terms) mobile devices that people worth targeting have.
It is much less clear whether there's a 'casual' market that demands current-gen console performance in very limited amounts rather than mobile or iGPU level titles. Given the extreme prevalence of various 'free to play' models that do sneaky monetization later it also looks like the 'casual' market's (significant) amount of money is largely locked up behind the sort of price sensitivity that requires clever psychological tricks to break through. I'm not sure that they'll be a good fit for something as obvious and psychologically burdensome as a ticking countdown timer hanging over every minute they play.