Posts by Michael Wojcik

Re: These usually involve someone buying something advertised on Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat

It wasn't clear to me from the article whether these were primarily advertisements or just regular posts, offering (bogus) goods for sale from private sellers, as with e.g. Facebook Marketplace.

I mean, in either case I wouldn't engage – I don't even like buying online from (ostensibly) reputable vendors, if I can find a local source. But policing regular SM posts for scams would be technologically infeasible and potentially cause a lot of false positives. And getting rid of things like Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist would largely destroy the private-individual markets in many areas, now that such things have largely destroyed the newspaper classified ads, flea markets, and the like that came before them.

(Yes, I know there are still newspaper classified ads; I read them every week in our paper. And yes, I know there are still flea markets; there's one that happens weekly not far from here. They are greatly diminished.)

Re: Meanwhile, here in the UK

Hey, there's a lot of boot-putting-in to be done. The police can't investigate every white-collar crime.

Re: Well, seeing as ...

And, of course, it's economically effective. Greatly reducing the cost of approaching each potential victim is obviously a competitive advantage, so simple scams will adopt it.

Seems people are still a bit naive.

Seems people are still people. FTFY.

I'm an ABC'er, Assume nothing, Believe nothing, Challenge everything, seems a lot of people skip these steps.

Perfect vigilance is impossible. While we're playing Dueling Anecdotes, see Cory Doctorow's 2010 account, for example. Or the NCC Group study showing IT services workers are more likely than average to click on phishing links, possibly due to overconfidence.

It says more younger people report being victims of such scams. Since it's self-reported, we don't know whether that correlates to actual victimization rates.

The "digital native" theory has been widely debunked for years.

That said, I've yet to see any methodologically-sound study supporting any claim that any generational cohort is better or worse, on average, at avoiding becoming the victim of fraud. We've had fraud for all of human history and no doubt long before that. Humans are highly susceptible to it – even (in some cases especially) educated people, people who routinely deal with fraud, people who are habitually suspicious, and so on. There are plenty of studies establishing that.

Re: This is why I'm missing out on a lot of stuff

They are just buying a wildly-overpriced baby monitor. They already failed the first test.

Re: This is why I'm missing out on a lot of stuff

For me, subscription is well down on the list of reasons to tell Ring to fuck off, with at least corporate spying, police surveillance, and security risks well higher.

But then I take a dim view of the entire Internet of Unnecessary.

Re: Device no longer working as sold

But, alas, who wants the cost (money, time, stress) of taking them to court over it? And what would you get if you won?

In the US I could see perhaps filing against the new owners in Small Claims Court for the original cost of the device, on the hope that they wouldn't respond and would be hit with a default judgement. So you'd get $400 less the filing costs. Might be worth it just for the lulz. But if you were foolish enough to purchase one of these things in the first place, are you the sort of consumer who'd go even that far?

So the new owners will probably get away with this. Some users won't bother paying – some of them probably aren't even using the monitors anymore. Some will probably suck it up and pay, for a while. Eventually the new owners will stop making a profit on the service and they'll shut it down. Consumers lose, vendor doesn't care.

And despite this happening over and over again, most people Just Don't Learn.

Re: "the sudden imposition of subscription fees"

A Smart House is fine

I wouldn't go that far. Even if you build all the components yourself, you're still increasing complexity and attack surface, and adding new failure modes.

Add features, add risk. That's how the world works. Maybe you're happy with the tradeoff; maybe you're not. Personally, I'd have so little return from a "smart home" (negative return, really, since I find the whole concept annoying) that it'd never be worth it to me.

Re: Cost/Performance

Assume that there is a class of algorithms that are "well designed" of Q machines and, conversely, not well dealt with on transistor machines.

If P≠NP, then this assumption is almost certainly true. Unless the complexity hierarchy collapses, BQP is a thing.

Re: Don't put all your boffins in one basket.

Any Turing-complete machine with sufficient resources can run Grover's algorithm. QCs can be simulated on non-quantum computers.

Algorithms in BQP aren't magic; they're just amenable to computation with a lower time (really number-of-operations) complexity when using qubits. If you have to simulate the qubits, the complexity goes back up, but it's still computable.

Again, that's not how QCs work. But error correction, which is essentially what "noise reduction" means in this context, is indeed still a big problem.

Re: A Promising Technology

it's not clear that ANY of the current crop of Quantum computers actually work

That's incorrect. The quantum-circuit-simulation tests, for example, demonstrate pretty conclusively that QCs work. That is, Google and others have demonstrated QC machines which use quantum algorithms to solve problems using fewer operations than any known classical algorithm would use. What's not clear is whether they've actually achieved quantum advantage, since it's really hard to prove that there isn't a better classical algorithm that wouldn't bring the classical time into the realm of feasibility.

And what's even less clear is whether and when we'll have QCs that offer any sort of economic advantage for any plausible real-world problems; and when that happens, how common such problems will be. It still appears we're a long way away from the quantum cryptocalypse, for example, because being able to economically break a lot of (non-post-quantum) asymmetric-cryptography keys using Shor's algorithm¹ would take big, cheap, fast² QCs, not just usable ones.

¹Or Regev's recent improvement, assuming Regev's assumption of the smoothness conjecture holds.

²"Fast" because "fewer operations" doesn't necessarily mean "done by lunchtime".

Re: Applicable

Sigh. That is not how quantum computers work.

Re: A solution without a problem

You really have no idea what you're talking about, do you?

The broad strokes of "how does one build a Quantum Computer" are easily understood, for a variety of designs, by educated people; there are any number of articles available that explain how the major architectures work, such as this one. Josephson-junction, ion-trap, and laser-atom designs are all working in multiple labs, and research on NMR and photonic designs continues. Obviously the technical details are understood primarily by people actually working in the field, as with any other technical field. Your "conditions" are bogus; they're equivalent to "explain how to build a modern automobile engine, in terms which any mechanical engineer can understand". Few mechanical engineers are experts in flame chemistry or CANBUS or other aspects of automotive engineering, because they're not automotive engineers. It's a different fucking discipline.

As for "how one programs a quantum computer": A number of algorithms in BQP are well-documented, and many are quite straightforward. Actual details of programming are going to depend on the actual machine and its software, just as for any other programming task.

Constructing incoherent decision procedures isn't a persuasive argument; it just demonstrates you're not willing to argue in good faith.

Re: A solution without a problem

Quantum simulation is likely the best use of QC in the foreseeable future. There are potential applications for other problems in BQP, but economically-practical use cases are hard to find.

Nor was he everybody's darling.

Re: Where's Bond?

If the "Global War on Terror" and the government's frequent labeling of "masterminds" has taught us anything, it should be that masterminds are idiots.

Re: What's your definition of "dead"

Mastadon

I've seen so many people spell it this way that I had to check to make sure the developers of the software hadn't deliberately used an unconventional spelling. But it appears they have not.

Re: Going downhill fast, and so is Twitter

outside the USA nobody knows of any cars openly made by GM

Checked with everyone, have you?

I suppose if you're going to parade your ignorance, you might as well tell the band to play loudly.

Re: Mastodon remains the most exciting alternative

I'm glad Mastodon works for some people, but I have to say that I browsed recent posts on a couple of servers that people had recommended, and while there was content relevant to some of my interests, I just couldn't warm to it. Maybe I'm just no longer temperamentally suited to that sort of thing. I was very active on Usenet for several years, but that was a long time ago. These days I find most social media just irritating.

Re: Won't be missed

Rhetoricians were observing this effect long before Twitter existed. I touched on it in a piece I wrote on Usenet for Works and Days twenty years ago. Nearly the speed of conversation, plus the perceived authority and reduced information content¹ of print. It's a tricky combination.

¹No tone of voice, prosody, body language; often much less knowledge about interlocutors and situational context – basically a loss of social-linguistic factors such as footing and framing, plus all the paralinguistic signals.

It's still there.

So is MySpace. So is Something Awful, which though less well-known played a larger role in Internet cultural history than MySpace; it hasn't had any new front-page content in three years (essentially since Kyanka sold it) but the site is still there. It can take a long time to completely wipe out an Internet site with a community.

And, as another commentator pointed out, many of the users seem to be unable to kick the habit. I ignore Twitter myself, but I read a lot of technical articles that refer to things (announcements of papers in pre-print, arguments over theoretical questions, etc) posted there.

Re: A stupid idea

Specifically, people will believe what they want to believe. A perceptibly-watermarked deepfake video that "proves" some conspiracy theory will be hailed by believers regardless of the watermark. They'll just say the watermark was added afterward by the Forces of Evil.

It's a small minority who even explicitly attempt to evaluate evidence and account for their own biases when considering arguments, and all the evidence from methodologically-sound psychological studies (and history) supports the claim that no human can be perfectly vigilant, or even mostly vigilant, when it comes to doing so.

Re: A stupid idea

it should be possible to prove in some cases that the image was AI generated by specific systems

OK, so propose a system for doing so. Is it robust against digital image manipulation, including noise addition and removal, blurring and sharpening, cropping, etc? Is it robust against the classic point-a-camera-at-the-screen technique? Remember that the same approaches used to create imperceptible watermarks are often useful for invalidating imperceptible watermarks, and removing perceptible watermarks by interpolating a close-enough match to the original image data is something machine-learning approaches are already good at.

A cryptographically-signed watermark is easily defeated (bypass confirmation) by trivially altering it. If the watermark detector ignores watermarks that fail signature verification, then you just alter the watermark in a genuinely-watermarked image and, presto, it's no longer detected as watermarked.

You can't make the watermark harder to spoof without making it easier to break. That's the whole point of the paper.

Re: Is it just me...

Every modal dialog is a user-interface smell. (I want to tell software what to do; I don't want it to force me to answer its questions.) Every additional prompt is an annoyance.

For people who like the feature, fine, leave it there for them. For the rest of us, give us a way to turn the goddamned thing off.

Re: Why...

"Beta testing" implies someone looks at the results of the "tests".

Microsoft's current development practice is to implement any feature that comes into their pretty little heads, no matter how idiotic or obnoxious, and foist it on users, often with one of those grating messages like "Hold on a moment – we're making Teams even better!". They're optimizing for punchability.

Re: separate URL and search boxes

My car has a separate steering wheel and brake pedal. Dedicated controls? So primitive!

Re: Self-reinforcing

Pale Moon is my default browser (except on Android, where it's Vivaldi). I haven't had problems with it in recent years.

There are sites that don't work properly except under Chromium-based browsers. For those I used to use Comodo Dragon, but Comodo made their add-ons mandatory, so I've been switching to Vivaldi for my Chromium-based work. Been using Pale Moon and Vivaldi on my work laptop for a while now and that's all been good. My personal machine still has Pale Moon and Dragon, as I haven't gotten around to replacing Dragon there.

Re: Why I Use Vivaldi

It could mean many things, due to the lack of context, but my guess is OP meant that Gecko isn't suitable for building dedicated applications on top of a canned rendering engine, like Electron is.

Personally, I think those things are abominations.

Re: Lost the plot

Agreed. I've never bought a Pi, and never really contemplated doing so; if I had more space for projects and time to spend on them I might well get one, but as it is I don't really have any justification for it.

But I see articles in places like Hackaday all the time where people have done something interesting with a Pi as the controller or whatnot. Clearly they're working for a lot of folks, so I don't see any reason to complain.

That is not what "fascism" means. If you want to persuade, learn to use terminology correctly.

Re: Pure performative politics

I don't know about "far worse", but I'd certainly agree with "no better, and probably worse".