Posts by AnoniMouse

Help!

Such weak proposals as are present amongst the copious platitudes will have minimal effect on an emerging world of complex, interconnected systems, many incorporating "AI", globally distributed across separate jurisdictions, with diferent governance regimes,

Unsurprisingly, a woeful lack of understanding.

The speed of light remains unchanged

>> ... the team thinks the SuperSoCC could provide at least 100 times faster performance at the same energy level as CMOS-based chips.

As Conway and Mead articulated clearly decades ago, a critical factor for performance is "distance": the time it takes for a signal to traverse a given distance imposes limits on performance for any given feature size. Even with X-ray lithography we are approaching physical limits of practical feature sizes.

The tech cartel is abusing its monopoly!

Only in a world where "mining" value requires huge amounts of energy to be wasted on pointless computation could we allow an industry sector to unilaterally declare that users will be required to replace perfectly usable hardware and software just in order to maintain the revenue streams of the industry sector.

So Trump talks down TikTok, hugely reducing the value of the brand in the US, and Microsoft gets to buy it at a bargain price.

A triumph for free market economics and the president of its largest global practitioner.

Privacy busting Google and Apple controlling UK policy

Heavens help us if this is a precedent for the future under this lot: UK olicy being dictated by US-based technology companies who pay lip service to privacy whilst striving their utmost to garner every last bit of personal data about users of their technology

This is not about protecting our privacy; it's about ownership: these companies want to own us, for their private, commercial interests.

So the UK will now have to make do with a tracing system which lacks, at Apple and Google's behest, the capability to anayse how and where the virus is spreading.

Big US business: 1; public interest: nil

Expect such companies to be handed major roles in the UK's National Health Service post-COVID and post-Brexit. And lots more of our data.

Keep your friends close but your enemies closer

Not entirely clear which is which but given that the UK technical experts have assessed that any risks from Huawei can be managed, what on earth do the almost universally techincally and scientifically illiterate MPs think that they can usefully add to the discussion?

And all that Android phone data

Presumably that transfer of control will include data relating to roughly half the mobile phones in the UK which run on the Android platform.

Useful datasets CANNOT be truly anonymised

"The information, including medical and genetic records that are said to be anonymised as necessary, will be accessed by NHS practitioners, along with researchers and possibly private companies. "

Only one small, inconvenient difficulty: if the data contains any useful information then, in conjunction with other datasets, it can be de-anonymised.

No woder the health insurance and finance companies are drooling at the proepect of getting hold of OUR personal data! Which they will then be able to use in ways over which we have no control to reduce their risks and increase their profitability.

Whatever happened to the concept of risk-sharing (across a population)?

Without extensive safeguards, this ill-considered initiative will discriminste unfairly against those whose medical and genetic heritage is less fortunate than others'.

There are real limits to silicon technologies

It's all very well to talk of muliple layers (for memory chips) but there are physical limits:

1. Transistors cannot be made much smaller (only a few electrons per gate);

2. Larger chips are more likely to have defects so there is an incentive to minimise the chip's area;

3. So there is a limit to the two-dimensional organisation and sizing of a chip;

4. Use of the third dimension (multiple layers) depends on what those layers are used for: if it's mostly single access memory then only a tiny proportion is active and scaling is feasible; if (highly) parallel processing (or memory access) is the aim then the need for heat dissipation is a severe limitation to the number of active elements per unit volume.

Interesting that wetware, which does operate in 3 dimensions, has inbuilt cooling thanks to cardiovascular circulation.

Currency must be based on TRUST - Facebook???

The prospect of Facebook holding a record of many / most / all of my financial transactions and selling that data to whatever buyer is prepared to pay them for it is more than enought to put me off this particular initiative.

And blockchain technology, although it has been "in development", and even limited real use for years, has yet to prove it is needed for, and capable of supporting electronic transactions on a global scale (and the Bitcoin manifestation of it is an environmental disaster).

Just the tip of the iceberg

Facebook's "flagrant, repeated violations of Americans' privacy" pale into insignificance compared to the global plundering of users' contact details that took place when Facebook acquired WhatsApp and "shared" [contact] data.

This was even more of a privacy-wrecking irony as WhatsApp had set out to help individuals protect their privacy.

No fine can be large enough to compensate for the growing lack of trust in Big Tech that has resulted from Facebook's arrorgance.

This whole topic is mired by pseudo science - on both sides

Higher frequency does not necessarily entail potentially more damaging effects to living matter. Animal life on earth evolved in an environment continually bathed in electromagnetic radiation whose frequencies range from several hundred GHz upwards: sunlight.

Proper assessment of 5G technology and any risks it may pose, enabling informed debate about whether those risks are acceptable (remembering that NOTHING is completely "safe" - ask Edwina).

Trading emotive opinions and cherry-picking snippets of scientific research (mis-)quoted out of context will not help humankind to investigate the 5G opportunity AND mitigate its potential risks.

The genie is out of the bottle

The cost of a chip that enables a "Thing" to connect to a wireless network continues to plummet. "Thngs" are becoming so small and so cheap that measures used by the US (or any other government) to control IT such as mobiles, laptops or even larger (and more expensive) devices will just not scale.

As such "Things" are incorporated into buildings, transport, homes, there is a need to ensure that the desirable characteristics identified by Schneier are fulfilled by the "Things" AND sustainable for the full lifetime of the eaxh "Thing" - which could be decades.

UK Banks don't care about fraud because it's the customers who lose

Regarding : "Unless all banks start working together, including making better use of technology, there will be little progress on tackling card fraud and returning money to customers."

Until banks are forced to accept legal responsibility for the consequences of their inadequate / broken use of technology to interact with customers, resulting in unnecessarily high levels of fraud being perpetrated on their customers, they will do little or nothing to improve matters.

Oh and how is the statement by a UK bank that "We'll also never send you an email asking for your Online Banking details or that include a link to the Online Banking log-in page." consistent with the "Login" or "View your Account" buttons in EVERY email sent by the credit card arm of the SAME UK bank?

Oh, the arrogance of vendors

>> lead malware man at Malwarebytes, said Manchester Police seem to be suffering from a common

>> problem - reliance on custom applications which don't work with other versions of Windows.

Users must realise that they should only be using their PCs for the convenience and enrichment of vendors and should take every opportunity to buy new versions of wares that the vendors are peddling as soon as they become available.

The real fault lies with the vendors, whose strategy in respect of application / device / format compatibility seems to place users, their organisations and the purposes for which they, THE USERS, want to use PCs at the end of their list of priorities. After all, if a user's application / device becomes (or, is made) obsolete, why hey! they'll have to buy a new one. All good for vendor profits.

Multi-vehicle collision avoidance

Algorithms for reliably avoiding collisions between multiple, autonomous (i.e. not centrally controlled) moving vehicles (or, in 3D aircraft) are not plentiful, especially if circumstances where scalablity in numbers of vehicles (beyond two or three) vehicles is necessary.

All the challenges of complexity, with horrendously challenging scalability.

Internet of Trojans

And we are being encouraged to buy these "things" in their millions and connect them to our home networks INSIDE any firewall our routers may have.

Wishful thinking

"Small cost-sensitive internet-of-things developer teams have little incentive to invest in rigorous security testing."

And since most of them will be developed, manufactured and (not) supported in jurisdictions outside the US, effective regulation will be very difficult to achieve.

Wishful thinking

"We can also encourage IoT manufacturers to impose better security in IoT equipment."

The IoT maniufacturers will be driven by competitive pressures to get new features into the market first, not to worry about security or support.

This is a very real challenge: in a world of open Internet access and relatively free trade, it is very difficult to discourage the consumer public from purchasing cheap electronic baubles, sourced from, and (not) supported by vendors in far-off jurisdictions.

Hacking virtual reality

Let's hope the makers have taken security really seriously.

The prospect that a hacker could convince the wearer of a VR headset of a false virtual reality is scary.

Après nous le déluge

Creating IoT security groupings is a sure sign that the tech industry has missed the point.

Billions of Things will be produced by anonyous vendors who have no interest in IoT security and bought as cheap consumer tat by non-techies who have no consciousness of IoT security.

Not enough

"Small organisations account for 92 per cent of cyber attacks, often because of limited resources. "

But in the (near) future it will be Things that will account for the majority of cyber targets, not least because there will be billions of them, with minimal trustworthy source or support. Their operators (including the public) won't be included in schemes like this and their suppliers mostly won't care.

Faulty logic = inaccurate reporting

There is all the difference in the world between " genetically modified foods [being] good for human health and the environment" and there being "no substantiated evidence of a difference in risks to human health between current commercially available genetically engineered (GE) crops and conventionally bred crops", as was actually stated in the report.

Most importantly, nothing in the report even attempts to state that all future GM/GE products will be risk-free.

As nature shows repeatedly, once genetic material appears in the wild it is virtually impossible to reverse that appearance.

IoT - Internet of Targets

A consumer boom, delivering cheap, already compromised or readily compromisable "things" into a large proportion of the nation's homes, cars, buildings, ...

What could possibly go wrong?

Happy New Year!

Shame about the paywall

The continuing practice of publicly funded academics publishing their papers behind paywalls is reminiscent of the medieval church in which the clergy used Latin and physical screens to maintain their loftiness over the general public.

A whiff of hypocrisy?

And presumbly Google also wants to warn users about the impact on their privacy of accessing Web Sites which, even though acceessed via HTTPS, are riddled with DoubleClick GoogleAnalytics and other Google SpyWare?

Not all Vodafone customers are benefiting

>> "Our customers are benefiting from the significant investments we are making in high speed mobile and fixed networks," he added.

Not true for Demon Internet customers, for whom Vodafone has repeatedly failed to provide information about the future of Demon broadband and email services.

Duh!

"Windows XP market share declining less than Win 8.x or 7"

Not surprising, since Win XP is not (generally) subject to the embrace of Windows update, showering installations with unwanted Win10 upgrades.

>> This was also the quarter that Voda re-launched itself back into Blighty's fixed-line broadband market.

>> The company currently has just 70,000 subscribers in the UK, compared with an overall base of 10

>> million across the rest of the group.

Vodafone could make a start at making themselves attractive to new customers by paying some proper attention to existing Demon internet customes, who have been disgracefully ignored by a succession of owners, but are now Vodafone's responsibility.

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There is no such thing as de-identified data

Join anoymised data with a few other data sets, stir in a big data lake and, hey presto, all (well, strictly, much will be revealed.

The myth of data anonymisation needs to be debunked forthwith.

So Google Ads all delivered via HTTPS. Web browsing slows down because of all those HTTPS connects. And - guess who - Google have just the answer: QUIC. How fortunate for ... Google.

HTTPS-only is a mixed blessing, since it protects the bad as well as the good: it will be all the easier for barbed Ads to reach their targets.

One way traffic?

>> The measure's being promoted as a productivity-enhancer,

>> especially for those making lengthy journeys to the North.

Or even those travelling FROM the North.

Will it be an in-place upgrade?

"The question of 'what version are you running' will cease to make sense"

Oh yes it will, unless MS offer absolutely seamless, in-place upgrade and guaranteed backwards compatibility for applications.

Installing an OS is only the start: then there is all the hassle of installing and configuring the OS _and_ all the applications.

HDR based on a false premise

In the real world, human eyesight operates on a limited dynamic range - that's the purpose of the pupils, to adjust the aperture in response to different light levels. So one result of HDR will be to make our pupils work harder. Further, the brain's visual processing will, in practice, mask small variations in levels that are not the focus of attention - cf. preceptual masking in audio chains.

HDR will, no doubt, be a vehicle for gimmicky effects not otherwise achievable, but is this really "progress"? Or necessary (other than to sustain TV manufacturers' revenues)? And what did hppen to 3D TV?

The writing is on the wall

>> The huge great problem is $/GB. New disk technologies such as shingling,

>> TDMR and HAMR are upping areal density per platter and bringing down

>> cost/GB faster than NAND technology can.

Disc technologies are heading towards their last gasp. HMR and TDMR have tahen FAR longer to bring to market than predcted. They are not just shrinks, but new technologies; and no follow-ons are apparent to follow in their wake. The fundamental limitations are a) domain size; and b) discs are 2 dimensional.

3D flash on the other hand is only just getting started. Already stacking 100 layers is believed to be feasible. That's equivalent to 11 years growth in capacity at 40% CAGR. Noone is envisaging HDD technologies continuing to improve at anything like that rate.