The sad thing is people (en masse) have proven time and time again that they don't care about privacy if they can save a buck or thing they are getting something for free. They willingly bury their heads in the sand about the dangers, and then cry and moan when bad things happen that they'd been warned about before.

"If you eat all that candy you're going to get a stomach ache." 2 hours later, "I've got a stomach ache after I ate all the candy, how dare you let me eat all that candy!"

If they truly cared about customer features, and not data mining and such, then the appliance would only work locally within the network without calling home.

Instead, the devices report back to the mother ship, and the apps also, providing a good bit of data to be mined and used for who knows what purpose. And just because it's a good reason now does not mean it will stay that way. How many times does a company get bought out and suddenly all the customer data that was used for one purpose is now used for multiple purposes.

There is no reason the same features could not be implemented via local only "services" that did not report back home. Self discovery, bonjour, other methods could be used to locate the appliances during setup, and then the mobile app and appliance talk to each other, exclusively, enabling all this wonderful functionality the manufacturers are crowing about. But then the companies couldn't siphon off this data behind the scenes.

Not sure I'd agree with "used with permission" in this context.

The real question is whether you accept a perfect recollection and copy of a computer memory to be equivalent to the leaky/lossy human memory when it comes to being influenced, motivated, or otherwise able to draw from what has been seen before. I don't think it's a fair comparison to say humans can be influenced by what they see therefore machines should be allowed the same freedom.

And there are limits within copyright about being too heavily influenced by others' works leading to infringement claims for derivative works. I'll agree it's a money grab, whether by artists, artists' estates, or the people behind the AI tools, or the stock image companies that are probably on the path to be the biggest losers. However, don't forget there is already precedent for work that influences an artist to be enough to lead to the resulting work to be considered derivative. The one that comes to mind is Pharrell and Marvin Gaye's estate, and Pharrell's admission that he tried to copy the "feeling" of one of Marvin Gaye's songs.

And that is kind of my point. If the courts are going to say influence is enough to create a derivative work between humans, then wholesale scanning and analyzing by an algorithm should also be considered a derivative work. If not, then neither should be.

Agreed - the ultimate goal is to profit in some manner. Either directly by producing AI art for money, or building an AI that can be used to sell a service, or indirectly by improving the reputation of the organization, group, devleoper, etc.,

To me it falls apart at each of the 3 levels.

1 - they used copyrighted works without permission ...
2 - for an application the builds on the work contained in the copyrighted works ...
3 - that ultimate creates new works based on what was learned in step 2

By this very process, and given that #3 can't happen without #1, the works created are derivative.

I think they focused on #2 and #3 because it may be easier to make a fair use defense based on #1 alone if that's where they focused the court's attention

If an AI is trained by copying art from a variety of artists, wouldn't that by definition mean that anything that the AI creates by definition is derived from the originals?

And if the AI model can't show what it took from each of the trained images to create what it's final image is, it would be necessary to assume that all artists' works could have influenced the AI, with some element copied in some in some manner, further reinforcing the idea that the AI's work is derived from the work of the original artists.

Finally, if the AI were not trained by anything at all, would the AI be able to create anything close to what it did with the artists' works? Again, the artists' works were necessary for the AI to create its art, again becoming a derivative work.

Consider Pharrell Williams being sued, and losing, for a song that the estate/family of Marvin Gaye claimed was a rip off of one of Marvin Gaye's songs. Pharrell acknowledged he was influenced by it.

This is an oversimplification of everything, but at its heart, given laws around derivative works in copyright, this could be a problem for AIs trained on copying lots of data. This is different than a human seeing it while out and about, here someone or some entity deliberately took copies of images and fed them to an algorithm. That's very different from a human seeing something and being influenced by it.

At first I thought fair use might be a good defense for the AIs, but while the work created is novel and it can be argued it is transformative, how much of the artists' works were used to train the AI. Was it complete images? If so, that may be another issue and it may make it more difficult to argue successfully about fair use.

It will be interesting to watch this court play out and to see what kind of precedent ultimately gets set.

Remember one of the big arguments against right-to-repair trotted out in several hearings was "it's dangerous to let non-authorized persons make repairs." Think of the battery fires!

Clearly it isn't. Question is, were they ever under oath when they made those claims?

So, I see this as either (a) they are hoping someone does something stupid and blows up a battery so they can back up their claims about it being dangerous, or (b) they figure people won't be able to follow the instructions and will break a lot of devices which will end with a combination of supporting their claim that they shouldn't allow these repairs and make people buy new devices they break.

One thing is certain, there's a hook somewhere in all this bait. Time will tell who or what it catches.

I'm on a network where the admins have blocked many/most ad servers for security reasons (ad companies have historically been tricked into serving malware with the ads).

I wonder how Spotify will deal with that. This is not a block on the app, or the device, or even the computer, but rather at the network level. If their ads are served by the same servers as their content then it should be fine, but if their ads are served by separate servers that are already on a blocked list then it could be an issue. And not one the user can control unless they switch to a different network, if available, or disable wifi and use mobile data. If they shut down my account for this then so be it, because I won't use my mobile data just for them when wifi is available.

Given the problems with the "new" keyboards and the rise of the "Pro" models replacing real Pro machines, I wonder if this estimate of savings still holds true with today's Macs. 2015 the MBP still had the good keyboards.

$265 to $535 is not a lot over 4 years. That's only $66 to $134 per year. One keyboard glitch a year and the loss of productivity or time spent cleaning/repairing that and that savings is wiped out.

IBM probably has enough metrics and enough machines to see some interesting trends. I'd love to see the savings breakdown on machines by model over the years, and especially how the new models compare to some of the older ones.

As for my bias, in 2015 I was going to do some traveling and needed a small foot print machine. I had planned on getting the slightly cheaper Macbook model, until I got to the store and typed on it. That keyboard was awful!! I ended up getting the 13" MBP because it still had a real keyboard. So happy I went for the real keyboard.

Wasn't he ousted earlier? Might this be a case of sour grapes and a way to get back and give RIM, I mean Blackberry, a bit of a black eye?

The biggest issue with SSH is the inability of the server to enforce policy on the client keys. If I'm wrong, I'd love to be corrected and learn what I've been overlooking.

As it stands, there's no way for the server to reject a key that has no pass phrase, a poor passphrase, or an old pass phrase. Short of over-the-shoulder random audits of users using their keys, there's no way to enforce a policy that sets minimum standards for pass phrases on SSH keys.

To my way of thinking that is one of the bigger areas of risk with and drawbacks of the use of SSH.

Anyone remember the Vadem Clio/Sharp TriPad? I do. For all it's clunkiness, if it wouldn't had such a problem with audio quality that would have been my first "tablet" (back in 2000 or 2001). [Oblig. wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vadem_Clio ] The whine during media playback killed it for me, and I wasn't willing to settle for the price so I ended up returning it. Other than that, and WinCE, it was a very useful device.

I have had the ASuS TF101 plus keyboard now for about a year and I still like it, even if my daughter has taken it over. Plus how many people run the iPad in landscape/vertical using a special case as a stand? I know I do. I can touch type pretty quick on it too (though I prefer it more of a slant then strictly vertical, probably about 60 degrees up from the table). And don't forget about the Lenovo S10-3t convertible? It was the first "laptop" with a touch screen that I've used, and even though the 1024x600 display kills the usability IMO, I still have a hard time putting it up on eBay because I find the touch screen form factor useful in a pinch.

The bottom line is the touch screen laptop is a very usable configuration and I'm surprised it's taken this long to see more of them. I think an almost perfect machine would be something like a macbook air (either 11 or 13 inch), with a quad core i7 (or comparable), 16 gb of RAM, an iPad 3 retina display w/touch for the display, a detachable keyboard (ala Transformer) or possibly rotating keyboard (Vadem Clio, Lenovo Yoga). It should also have 5+ hours of battery life and not get uncomfortably hot. I don't ask for much. :)

So, exit X and all X apps, update, restart X. You've "restarted" the graphical world.

Rebooting the entire machine is just lazy, short of a kernel update, and even then there used to be other options (ksplice, which oracle bought).

From the bulletin:

Adobe released a security upgrade for Adobe Photoshop CS5 and earlier for Windows and Macintosh. This upgrade addresses vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker who successfully exploits these vulnerabilities to take control of the affected system.

Adobe has released Adobe Photoshop CS6, which addresses these vulnerabilities. For users who cannot upgrade to Adobe Photoshop CS6, Adobe recommends users follow security best practices and exercise caution when opening files from unknown or untrusted sources.

Sure sounds like CS5 had upgrade released that addressed these vulnerabilities. I think it also says that released version of CS6 is not vulnerable. Probably marketing people got involved to try and write this to encourage upgrades, which may have backfired a bit.

I wish it was possible to require SSH keys for some (or even all) users to have a passphrase, and enforce this requirement on the server.

As it stands right now, even if you generate a key for someone with a pass phrase, they can remove it easily on the client side and the server has no way of knowing. This means you could have passwordless logins to remote systems. Not good.

At least with modern systems and key agents you can get passwordless ease of use once you log into your local account, and if someone happens to get your private key they don't immediately have instant access to the machines you can log into. You should have a little time to secure the machines. [Think lost/stolen laptop or backup drive.]

Remember these?
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/02/05/22/0150223/icann-director-seeks-court-order-to-review-records
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/02/03/15/1655246/icann-board-spurns-democratic-elections
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/02/10/31/2035207/icann-ditches-public-participation

The problems with ICANN go back a long time. The only thing that seems to be new here is that perhaps, finally, more light is being focused on them and more people are finally taking notice. Sadly, I suspect it's too little, too late.