* Posts by Malcolm Weir

1037 publicly visible posts • joined 23 May 2007

Google Chrome to shield encryption keys from promised quantum computers

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

H.R. wot? NSM-10 is far less wishy-washy!

The article states "that President Biden last year signed H.R.7535, The Quantum Computing Cybersecurity Preparedness Act".

With all due respect, that's mostly irrelevant, and came about 7 months after something else...:

Which s NOT irrelevant, and is called National Security Memo 10 (NSM-10), also signed last year by the same chap.

Yes, they allude to the same issue, but the latter directs that the NSA *shall* act on the threat, and that everyone else in the US Government *shall* get with the program.

Loads of people up comment-land seem to think that the threat isn't real, or is easily managed. A quick read of NSM-10 suggests that, in the land of crypto-nerds that is Fort Meade, Condition Brown is actuve.

Oh, and someone mentioned "Diamond" in the context of the "Kyber" name. It's actually much more geeky than that: the name comes from Star Wars, where "Kyber Crystals" supposedly power lightsabers. (the "crystals" is morphed into the backronym for Cryptographic Suite for Algebraic Lattices)

Tesla knew Autopilot weakness killed a driver – and didn't fix it, engineers claim

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: Its probably not the cross traffic.

Hmmm.... wouldn't necessarily need legislation. Just have the insurance companies demand performance regulators be in place for lower premiums. Alternatively (and this is legislative) have the registration fees be tied to performance, which doesn't sound such a bad idea, now I come to think on it...!!!

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: "Autopilot"

The idea that (passenger) aircraft are technically capable of taking off on their own is a bit misleading.

Sure modern (passenger) aircraft can set the flaps, shove the throttles to the right place, hold the aircraft pointing in the right direction as it accelerates, rotate, retract gear, retract flaps and climb away.

What they can't do is interact correctly and reliably with the tower(s).

So things like cancelled take-off clearances, orders to cross or vacate the runway, go-arounds for arbitrary reasons, emergency declarations up to and including Maydays, and so on are hard, and need (at present) a human. Especially when the controllers have exotic accents...

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: There is no possible fix

I don't think this is strictly speaking true: there is one strategy that will help enormously, and quite possibly make autonomous vehicles practical.

The problem is that the strategy itself likely isn't really practical! (hence autonomous vehicles won't be).

The solution is to require that every vehicle on the road interacts with each other. We could call it TCAS, for Traffic Collision Avoidance System! Maybe those cameras on poles at intersections could join the party, too.

While there would always be vehicles that didn't interact, at some point we'd have an ecosystem that basically has enough data most of the time. Coupled with robust logic along the lines of "if we're coming up on an intersection AND there's no data about potential cross traffic, engage the 'be extra cautious'" mode.

The other viable approach is much less sexy: designated autonomous vehicle zones. Basically take limited-access roads and allow autonomous vehicles to operate in specific lanes only.

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

With the greatest respect, @Pascal Monett, you are mischaracterizing what an autopilot is. An autopilot *is* a cruise-control type thing; it flies a pre-planned course, and if something happens it drops offline with a cheerful tone to let the humans deal with whatever it is.

Somehow, people have mistakenly decided that "autopilot" is a synonym for "self-driving", which it isn't. Yet when anyone pushes back, the usual response is that the false equivalence is what people have decided is correct, so despite it being blatantly wrong, anyone using the word "autopilot" correctly is actually incorrect.

Not sure why this nonsense continues (I suspect the motoring press have a hand in it), but blaming Tesla's autopilot for behaving precisely like an autopilot is now de rigeur.

Still, Ocenia has always been at war with Eastasia, so there's that.

Charging your iPhone literally costs Apple millions as Batterygate saga slams shut

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Hubris...

As others have suggested, there's really no technical malfeasance here; Apple recognized a problem with legacy devices with newer software and implemented steps to mitigate the issue.

The malfeasance is that, in it's fetish for pretending that Apple hardware is totally fabulous (or "totes fab", as the kids say) and not trumpeting the cleverness of the software in avoiding issues even with your old crud, Apple hid what it was doing, surprising people who expected their beloved shiny to remain in it's immaculate perfection for evah!!!

Want to pwn a satellite? Turns out it's surprisingly easy

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: the larger the satellite ... the more vulnerable it was

@Bitsminer is spot on! For example, some commercial satellites (especially those that use a ride-share launch vehicle) use a payload bus "derived from" (i.e. virtually identical to) the payload bus used for, say, a MIRV ICBM.

This doesn't magically confer security onto the spacecraft, but it does apply significant oversight from Serious People asking potentially awkward questions.

Google launches $99 a night Hotel Mountain View for hybrid workers

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: Possibly unpopular opinion, but...

Well, perhaps, but it's nothing new: affluent people in The City (of London) used to (and many probably still do) have flats "in town" and live in "the country". Back around the turn of the century the City was a desolate wasteland on weekends, but bustling during the week. For a while there was a thriving pastime in finding places to go out to eat on Fridays and Saturdays (spoiler alert: east of Bishopsgate).

[ Back in the early 1960s, my parents bought a good sized but somewhat run-down house in the not-very-fashionable suburbs close to the far end of the District Line, waited until the kids finished school, sold the suburban house -- which had become much more fashionable and less run-down -- and bought a flat in the Barbican and a house in darkest Oxfordshire, all through the magic of real-estate appreciation and child labor for renovation... ]

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Possibly unpopular opinion, but...

This doesn't sound like such a bad deal.

I mean, suppose you took advantage of remote working during the pandemic and now live in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Driving to Mountain View takes 3 - 4 hours, but that's manageable if you don't have to do it every day -- there are plenty of folks who do this for the weekend, often leaving Thursday night and returning Monday before dawn.

With the Google accommodation plan, you can leave early Tuesday, spend Tuesday and Wednesday night at the G*Hotel for $200, and be home late Thursday. And of course "early Tuesday" and "late Thursday" are fungible quantities. This works out at $800 per month, which is substantially cheaper than trying to buy a crash pad in Silicon Valley, particularly when you factor in the idea that some weeks may only need one night, or none at all.

Of course it's not ideal, but when considered in the light of Bay Area housing, it's not a horrible way to keep your G*Income stream while living remotely.

(I can get hotels just across the bridge from Facebook for ~$150/night, plus the bridge tolls. So $99 isn't bad).

We'd pay good money to see... oh dear, Elon Musk 'needs an MRI scan'

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: If you were unfairly trreated...

Unless you agreed to binding arbitration (like most of Twitter's X employees, reading the X both ways), in which case there is no court to decide anything!

But those sorts of proceedings are usually subjecting to non-disclosure agreements, so no indication of fairness is likely to come from them...

Still, I wonder where you're getting this whacky idea that the offer from Elmo that a judicial proceeding would determine, for the purposes of this "funding" promise, anything??

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

If you were unfairly trreated...

Careful parsing of the "offer":

"If you were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform, we will fund your legal bill. No limit. Please let us know."

... will reveal a pair of sizable loopholes: what if you were _fairly_ treated by your employer due to posting (etc)? And what if you were 'unfairly' treated by your employer for being an ass, which was coincidentally correlated with your posting habits?

(There's also a smaller loophole: the promise is to 'fund' your legal bill. If that the same as paying it? And note there's no indication of the timeline: perhaps you have to fight your fight, win or lose, and eventually, once the (full) legal bill is known, Elmo's Gang will step in...?

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: There's never enough staff...

Ironically, I was thinking about the last time I was an observer of improvised moving systems and lifts that can't do the job... I and and a colleague were doing a retrofit on a rack-mounted airborne payload. Obviously, the thing wasn't unduly heavy, weighing in at about 250lbs or so, but it was big and there was some political delicacy involved (i.e. although the things were built to survive shock, the politics were such that no-one wanted any signs of impact!). Getting them from their normal homes to the retrofit site was easy enough, but they were too big to fit in the elevator, and we were on the 6th floor.

So they were hand-carried up the stairs (with the requisite 4 corners per floor).

... exactly as the Egyptians.

[ As we were in Cairo. And the Egyptians doing the carrying wore uniforms of some kind. ]

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: Agree but...

You forgot the sign saying "Beware of the Leopard!", which is obligatory under the circumstances.

Typo watch: 'Millions of emails' for US military sent to .ml addresses in error

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: What ?

If I were a genuine military bod, I'd have an ID card that provides access to commonly needed things. It would probably be called a CAC (so people could refer to CAC Cards in the same vein as ATM Machines). This would include my private key, and would be tied to a database somewhere that has my public key.

The snag is that I can't get a CAC _unless_ I'm a genuine military bod. So if I were trying to send Colonel Eva Vigilent her travel details, I'd have to use plain old unauthenticated email.

In my fantasy world, I'd be able to show up to a National Office of Doing Things (perhaps related to law enforcement/security, perhaps a passport office-type entity, perhaps social security....) and pay something nominal (say, $25 or so) to get a civilian CAC. Hey, they could even join two things together and make a "Passport Card" also a CAC-like thing. I could use it, or not use it, as the occasion warranted.

(I have a US Passport Card, which is only usable as a passport at the land crossings, but it's a solid piece of government-issued ID without my address on it...)

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: The

Blaming Microsoft seems to ignore the energy that the likes of WebTV and then AOL put into unleashing the hordes! And let's not let Prodigy or Compuserve off the hook, either!

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: Whatever.

And of course there is something that _can_ be done (even if it _shouldn't_ be done):

Pressure the US (and US malleable) DNS responders to ignore the ICANN top-level domain servers for ".ML" and instead send them to a custom resolver that recognizes that e.g. "mail.ml" from the US should bounce.

Yeah, that's sucky for the Malian ISP who wants to register "mail.ml" for their own customers, but why be the biggest player in town if you don't throw your weight around!!!

And if you were feeling generous, you could build a gateway that forwards, say, fred@mail.ml.forwarder.com to fred@mail.ml, with a modified "Reply-To:" header! This sort of thing was routine, back in the day before we all got addresses in a pretty unified name space!

(If I recall correctly, we've already seen dodgy cases where TLDs are blocked, possibly for different reasons).

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Last I checked (which was about 2 minutes ago), Unix is a registered trademark of... The Open Group. So if you conform to IEEE 1003.1 and pay some cash, you too can be Unix.

(However, if you're doing gas chromatography, that's a totally different registered mark, and GNU is deffo not that!!!)

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: ChromeOS is a fake linux

I'd agree that ChromeOS is a Linux variant: I went looking for an IMAP client that I didn't detest, couldn't find it in the app store that mysteriously does exist on my Chromebook (despite what the article implied), so I enabled the Linux mode and installed Geary which behaves exactly like Geary so I have no reason to believe a Chromebook in Linux mode is not Linux in any meaningful way!

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: ChromeOS is a fake linux

Hmmm, that's funny... my "travel computer" Chromebook seems to have some aluminum in it and definitely appears to have a 1080p 180-degree folding touchscreen so I can watch cat videos on airplanes! I'm not a huge fan of the keyboard, which is why I have a folding Bluetooth thingy that travels with my Logi trackball mouse, but the system can (and does) drive a second screen if there's one handy and definitely does what I need: the usual travel stuff via websites, and establishing a VPN and Remote Desktop Connection so all my data remains Not With Me.

I'd prefer it if someone didn't steal it on my travels right now, but in a year or so, I'll replace it with the an equivalent at that time. In the meantime, if I do lose it or it gets lost, its cheap enough that I'll just grab another from our IT department (called "Bob") and carry on...

Could it be better? Sure... the keyboard is gray and backlit so you currently can't read the white legends on the keys, which is pretty daft, and it's a 14in machine so the keyboard is smaller than I'd like (next time I'd agonize more over the 14in size/15.6in keyboard/numpad tradeoff!). But it does the job as a remote terminal, and I don't need (or want to pay for) more than that.

SpaceX says, sure, Starship blew up but you can forget about the rest of that lawsuit

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: Florida rockets & the environment

The Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 was an environmental law, so that's pretty strong evidence that environmental lawyers existed...

But perhaps closer to home, Missouri v. Holland, 252 U.S. 416 (1920) was a Supreme Court decision about the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 (the birds won).

The environment has been around for a long time... even before John Muir persuaded Congress to create a National Park (Yosemite) in 1890...

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Nah, some beaches are protected by reefs that prevent boats getting to them (granted, not many if you're prepared to go around the ends of the reef, and if you broaden "boat" to include hovercraft, you're golden!)

Rocky Linux details the loopholes that will help its RHEL rebuild live on

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: To free or not to free

True, albeit with a caveat that its probably a little more nuanced because "countries" and "copyright regulatory regimes" are not precisely the same (usually because of odd definitions of "country" -- looking at you, UK!)

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: To free or not to free

What happens is that RH/IBM petition the court(s) to consolidate the cases, which the court(s) grant because they don't want to be litigating the same stuff repeatedly.

Meta's data-hungry Threads skips over EU but lands in Britain

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

That Mastodon app release notes has a nice snark to it!

Former Twitter employees accuse it of holding up 891 arbitrations

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Not really misunderstood, but not fully understanding!

An ex-employee that agreed to arbitration has to demonstrate willingness to live up to their commitments (i.e., do the arbitration thing), because to do otherwise would give the employer grounds to attack whatever substantive complaint(s) that the employee might have.

So as Twatter refuses to participate in the arbitration, the only action that the employee can ask of a court is to compel Twatter to play ball. They can't ask that the court completely reinvent the contract that agreed to arbitration. The court orders the big T to do submit to arbitration, and if the T refuses and/or fails, Twatter is then in the Shitter of contempt of court.

While all this is going on, of course, the attorneys for both sides are (probably) exploring ways to make the cases go away without involving either arbitration or further court wrangling. The problem for Twitter is that there are so many claims, so getting time from a Twitter attorney to look at a given case and reckon a given settlement offer "makes sense" is extremely difficult; for the attorneys (if not the company) dealing with One Big Case is probably easier than dealing with 2,000 individual ones. Since these same attorneys are also worried about consent decrees, cranky Europeans, aggravated landlords, feisty suppliers, non-Musk shareholder grumbles, etc. its hardly surprising that they're now regretting their initial tactic of compelling arbitration (via a court ruling)...

Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from CentOS source purge

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: What they've achieved

Yeah... once upon a time CentOS (or possibly Fedora) seemed to be the distro(s) that Serious People worked with, because it was basically "the same as" a distro that had commercial support. Red Hat then nuked CentOS as a viable option by making it not "the same as" RHEL, and my entirely unscientific observation is that Serious People departed for Ubuntu.

Regardless what the Red Hat mouthpieces say, this behavior is totally consistent with what the big traditional monoliths like to do; those of us who've seen the likes of AIX or HP/UX or Oracle Linux understand that there really isn't a customer advantage in those island OSs; yes, some of the tools are really neat, but they could just as well have been developed on an open Linux platform as on the semi-proprietary custom OSs.

And even the mouthpiece's own rant doesn't allege that Red Hat _loses_ money from the rebuilds, merely that they don't _profit_ from them. There's no indication that the work that Red Hat does is not justifiable entirely by Red Hat's own business needs, but we're supposed to feel sorry for Red Hat (who capitalize on millions of hours of Other People's work) for their hours of work and sympathize with them that although Red Hat grifts upstream, the grifting downstream by the rebuilders is somehow less grifty!

JP Morgan accidentally deletes evidence in multi-million record retention screwup

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: Sounds Familiar

The oddity of the Clinton emails is that destroying the hard drives with hammers (which I don't think actually happened; the indication is that the files were purged with a thing called BleachBit) is precisely the correct action to take if they did indeed contain sensitive information!

However, the comparison with the Clinton server is apt: IF the deleted records were somehow incriminating, THEN this was a problem. But if they were personal emails (as Clinton alleged) or routine emails that would have been purged by 2021 anyway (the Chase emails), THEN there was no problem, except that it's hard to prove the absence of problem because the data was gone.

In the words of the SEC, "Because the deleted records are unrecoverable, it is unknown – and unknowable – how the lost records may have affected the regulatory investigations."!

[ The boring small print in the SEC statement reveals the rather dull scope of the issue: in June 2019 records created between January 2018 and April of that year were deleted; the law requires that they be kept until January - April 2021, so they were deleted after 14 - 17 months instead of after 36. Clearly this is wrong, but it explains why the penalty is also quite low. ]

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: A different take on that point

Err, dude, you appear to have failed to detect any element of sarcasm!

As a matter of fact, you're quite possibly wrong: files on legal hold are likely to be in that state because the banks own lawyers (i.e. the legal department) said put them in that state, which may or may not have anything to do with a court system (yet), or indeed an action that the bank might be defending (which is to say that some files get placed in that sort of state because the bank has flagged them as potentially of interest to law enforcement).

But have a nice day!

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: >JP Morgan accidentally deletes evidence

The only thing that suggests (to me) that this is Murphy at work rather than calculated is the process obeyed the "legal hold" protection tag, which is of course the data that they would be most terribly sad to see deleted!

Also, if it were deliberate, being as how banks are such beloved institutions, I would wonder where are the loyal staff eager to protect their wonderful employer but who feel compelled to rat them out?

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: Not even names

Over here in the Land of the Fee direct deposit agreements are structured with a clawback mechanism, so if the bank screwed up (which only happens on weekdays and weekends), they just suck it back,

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: Unique keys

True. I have only 26 letters (including two spaces) in my three first names (and a nice short last name that people usually misspell because ITS IN THE D**M DICTIONARY). But even that confuses a fair number of Westpondians, to the extent where I now simply recite the name of the 41st President, who also had three first names (although just 21 letters): George Herbert Walker Bush.

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: Unique keys

Cue "Goodness Gracious Me" sketch: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06rj0hh

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: Unique keys

Wanda Kershaw must be unhappy.

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: Unique keys

There is little evidence to support the idea that banks hate the fact that Alexander Johnson is commonly known as Boris.

AWS teases mysterious mil-spec 'Snowblade' server

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Garbage marketing blurbiage: "the device meets MIL-STD-810 standards", which means absolutely nothing as 810 is TEST METHOD standard. So as a matter of fact, I'll bet it doesn't meet those standards at all; rather, it has been tested using them.

The 810 standard is what you use to prove that your widget can operate at temperatures between, say, 25C and 27C and be dropped from a height of 1mm and can be subjected to vibration equivalent to someone walking 50m away. You'd use Method 501.5 for the high temp, 502.5 for the low temp, shock is 516.6 and vibration is 514.6. While some of the Methods include handy data points (like what temps you're going to need for Western Australia -- 30C-49C, as it happens), none of them define requirements, only ways to test against requirements.

I also note in general terms (in the "BA Oxon (failed)" vein) that I've seen cases where a manufacturer has asserted their thing has been tested with MIL-STD-810... which turned out to be true, but omitted the fact that it hadn't passed...

Whistleblower claims Uncle Sam is sitting on hoard of alien vehicles and tech

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

I'm glad El Reg retained the significant language: defied _immediate_ explanation. The world is full of things that defy immediate explanation, which is what science does for a living: seek explanations for things that defy explanation.

Not so keen on the claim that "non-zero" materials is somehow statistically significant, unless we have a 100% reliable testing system... perhaps with one of those infallible "computer" machines?

Australia to phase out checks by 2030

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: Cheques are so dead that there are a lot of uncashed cheques in Oz

THIS!! Organizations that send out large numbers of payments love checks and/or cheques, as there is a non-zero percentage of the things that don't get presented or cashed. Compare with electronic payments...

I came across a check (left pond) a while back that was part of closing on a house, for some small amount related to an over-charge on something or other... about $10 or so. They stapled the thing to the last page of a final account summary which was part of a bundle with a cover sheet that asserted that these were for my records, so I filed them...

Of course, by this stage, the check is no longer valid, so in order to collect my $10 I'd have to reach out to the issuer, jump through the hoops, etc etc etc and while I won't go as far as to say it's not worth it, thus far I've had better things to do with my time! Maybe next week, or the week after...?

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: Don't know what you've lost till it's gone.....

FYI two (or more) person authorization for electronic payments is fairly common among more serious banks, often associated with high-value payments...

Watchdog calls for automatic braking to be standard in cars

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: The law of unintended consequences

One wonders why this technique isn't in widespread use today. One suspects 93.7% of drivers who expressed an opinion would stop regardless of AEB...

In a stand against authoritarianism, Montana bans TikTok downloads

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

When does the lawsuit happen...?

Reading the comments from the companies and industry groups, I'm going to opine that they don't plan to sue for declaratory judgment, as it's more useful to have a bogeyman law on the books where it doesn't matter -- the whole population of Montana is about the same as that of the Rochester, NY metro area! If Montana actually does anything, I'd expect the victims of that government action to get significant resources to defend themselves, and kill the ludicrous and obviously unconstitutional bill that way.

By contrast, if Congress did the same thing, I'd expect an instant application for an injunction!

Of course, the whole point of this law is a combination of virtue signaling and pushback against marketing from TikTok, i.e. to create a larger fuzzy boundary disfavoring certain types or vehicles of speech.

(There is, of course, a possibility that Apple/Google/California might sue Montana for demanding they limit access to an app, but again I suspect that will wait until Montana tries to do anything about it... the people in Montana that would have to initiate proceedings against Apple/Google are almost certainly less partisan and/or raving loony, so may decline to prosecute the unprosecutable).

Ashlee Vance spills the beans on the secret exciting life of space startups

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: Blue Origin

Space tourism, as defined as a moon lander...

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: Blue Origin

Today's news:

Blue Origin just got a contract to build NASA a moon lander. Yeah, at only $3.4B it's not the largest, but I think claiming Blue Origin isn't a significant player is a little off-base.

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: Blue Origin

Well, except those whole pesky BE-4 things...

Anyway, not sure one can accurately claim that "the orbital launcher is stalled" when:

1) There was an incident last year (Sep 19, 2022, flight NS-23) which grounded that project for investigation (as it should). So is SpaceX "stalled", because Starship/Extra-Bangy-Booster is grounded for investigation, too...

2) NASA handed Blue Origin a New Glenn launch for a Mars launch in 2024 (-ish, obviously), and they did this in February of this year (Feb 10, to be exact).

Blue Origin is generally very, very quiet about most of what they do, unlike the Chief Twit's outfit, but that doesn't mean they aren't doing things!

Autonomy founder Mike Lynch flown to US for HPE fraud trial

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: "On April 21, the High Court refused Dr Lynch's permission to appeal his extradition"

Nope. That's not how the world works!

The case against Lynch is not proven, and won't be until his trial.

But there is _pretty solid evidence_ that Lynch was _possibly engaged_ in fraud, which is why it is appropriate for him to stand trial.

Unlike the UK, the USA has formal procedures to determine if there is enough evidence to support the charges (in the UK, the CPS just decides behind closed doors, which is fine until we ask ourselves why a particular prominent figure didn't get prosecuted...).

Lynch's case was put to a Grand Jury of citizens, which voted to indict, for the reasons that seemed to confuse you.

He will now stand trial, and given the similarity of his case with the case against one of his sidekicks, I'm going to predict he'll be convicted. But until then, he's indicted, and the only way out for him is to stand trial. This is how justice systems work; this is why we have courts.

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: "On April 21, the High Court refused Dr Lynch's permission to appeal his extradition"

Ah, you're presuming (I think incorrectly) that there was only one offense, one cause of action, and one jurisdiction.

Obviously, a criminal case is unrelated to a civil case based on the same acts. So your position seems to be that the damage _only_ took place in the UK, because the civil case concluded that damage _did_ occur in the UK. The UK civil case in no way considered whether additional or separate damage _also_ occurred in the USA, because if HP can be made whole by the case in the UK, why bother (there's no justification for a civil suit to make more-than-whole, and proving damage is a game of arm-waving at the best of times).

I would agree that, had the SFO prosecuted (and, say, lost) then the extradition would have been problematic. But they didn't, so it isn't!

Malc.

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: Interesting...

I'll bet the accused is happy to pay for the security and surveillance, although the US taxpayer would be happy to pay for the same thing... difference is that Lynch can stay at a nice apartment in San Francisco with Doordash/Uber Eats/friends bring him great food, or he can stay at (probably) a convenient 160 miles from the court, which of course adds 5 hours travel time for his attorneys every time they meet...

Had he not fought extradition so hard, though, it's likely that he could have got slightly less onerous bail conditions (e.g. no armed guards!!!)

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: "On April 21, the High Court refused Dr Lynch's permission to appeal his extradition"

@Falmari...

I don't believe you're correct as to the regulation point: a US company relied on representations by a UK company which were fraudulent. Yes, the issue of fraudulent company accounts is a purely UK issue with respect to UK company laws, but this isn't an issue of "did Autonomy break UK regulations by filing faked accounts?" but rather "did Autonomy con HP into paying too much money for the company by generating a fake set of books?"

HP, of course, is well aware of UK accounting regulations and policies, having UK subsidiaries (a quick search indicates about 4 HPE ones, and 26 HP ones). So it is entirely reasonable to conclude that, although faking the audit would be a criminal matter _in the UK only_, using the faked audit to fraudulently close a deal with a US one is very much a US issue and one in which HP might legitimately conclude that the audited UK accounts were reliable.

I certainly agree that there are issues as to why Lynch didn't get prosecuted in the UK, but there is more than one crime at issue here. If the US was trying Lynch for cooking the books, I would agree that that would inappropriate... but he isn't. He is being prosecuted for a crime that, effectively, took place in Palo Alto, CA: the representations made by Lynch to HP in order to personally pocket a lot of cash.

However, on a technical point, hearsay is NOT generally admissible in a US court. Or rather, "out-of-court statement offered to prove the truth of whatever it asserts, which is then offered in evidence to prove the truth of the matter" (i.e. hearsay) isn't, although there are exceptions (death-bed declarations and so on). Of course, there are (minor) differences in the Federal Rules of Evidence with regards to criminal vs civil trials, and the issue of immunity from prosecution, and that's why in the USA civil trials will typically be stayed pending the resolution of the criminal case.

There's a press release here https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/michael-richard-lynch-former-ceo-autonomy-corporation-makes-appearance-federal-court that describes the outline of the case against him. You'll see it just asserts that Lynch cooked the books to show a higher value and prospects than were supportable, but does not go into detail as to how the cooking occurred!

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: "On April 21, the High Court refused Dr Lynch's permission to appeal his extradition"

Nope. That's not how audits work.

If an auditor says "show me the such-and-such file" and gets handed a work of fiction, that is the audited faking the audit.

Yes, the auditor _should_ catch the fiction/fakery, but there is a difference between failing to catch a fraud and creating fraudulent documentation to pass an audit.

The issue with Autonomy, and why Deloitte got fined, is that Autonomy faked their paper trail and Deloitte didn't catch it when they should have done. So fraud and negligence, respectively.

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: "On April 21, the High Court refused Dr Lynch's permission to appeal his extradition"

This seems a little "little England"! From what we know from earlier Autonomy legal adventures:

1) Autonomy faked their audit, and Deloitte got fined £15M by the (UK's) Financial Reporting Council for not catching it.

2) Autonomy's CFO was tried and convicted of fraud, and had his sentence upheld on appeal. Yes, this was in the US, but the record in that case is pretty solid evidence that Lynch was possibly engaged in fraud against a California company (called HP).

3) The UK's High Court determined (in a civil suit) that Lynch fraudulently cooked the books so HP would give him lots of money! Fraud is a criminal matter (too), so Lynch should face criminal charges somewhere, and the UK's SFO decided not to pursue them, while the US has large chunks of the necessary prosecution record from the CFO's trial and appeal..

There are plenty of highly-questionable extradition cases. This does not seem to be one, and has only dragged out this long because of Lynch's cash.

The first real robot war is coming: Machine versus lawyer

Malcolm Weir Silver badge

Re: I tried ChatGPT for an engineering question

To be slightly more accurate: ChatGPT was quick to provide you with things that looked like answers. It wasn't interested in answering the question, rather it was setup to give you something that reads like it answers the question.

In a very close parallel, I was working with a colleague to identify a replacement CPU. They created a great spreadsheet that listed all the features of a number of candidates, but omitted anything about power dissipating (mostly because this isn't usually provided by the manufacturers). But that's our gating requirement: we cannot produce more than X watts because the cooling system can't handle it. ChatGPT is like that colleague: not understanding that there are some immovable objects!