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Comment Re: Hmmmmm... (Score 1) 63

It's pretty close to being an MP3 marked as a BMP, actually. It's the result of taking a reversable transformation of the audio signal that separates out the different perceptible components and then discarding the ones that matter least, and keeping the important ones in a convenient form for accessing them. It's the first step you'd take if you wanted a computer to identify speakers or what they were saying. The only part that's image-related is making the diagram, but getting back to the data is just taking the pixel values.

I suspect that they started using spectrograms in reports at a time when getting back the data from the image would have lost too much quality to printing and scanning to hear anything as quiet as voices, but PDFs with lossless images retain all of that.

Comment Re: Disclosure Timing Drama Part 2.0 (Score 1) 23

I suspect part of it is that the mitigation for DirtyFrag covers it, so everyone who blocked all the modules in question when that had only an incomplete patch probably hasn't unblocked them yet. I think this is the 4th patch for these modules, and only got a new name rather than just "there's still a way to get this code to do the wrong thing" because a different outside team found this one.

Comment Re: Embargo intrigue (Score 1) 44

Yeah, and the person who released the information first was operating in an "if I noticed this, doing only as much as I'm doing, surely attackers would also notice" mode. Possibly some patches these days are sufficiently obvious as to their correctness and also effect that they should first become public as a set of stable releases. This was a kind of special case, as CopyFail was the combination of some code doing something strange with one user not being prepared for it, and fixed the user. If there are other users that also aren't prepared, fixing them isn't going to be subtle.

Comment Re: Gun cam, in a maneuvering jet (Score 1) 83

How shadows and reflections move when you're 10 milies from a mostly flat surface a thousand miles across is legitimately hard to analyze for a visual system that evolved on the ground, especially if you throw in small periodic surface orientation variations. Given how complicated it is to explain rare rainbow-related phenomena like sun dogs, it would be surprising if we'd identified and explained everything that can appear when flying above the ocean.

Comment Re: Founder Guilty Of Negligence (Score 3, Informative) 110

According to the article, they (by way of their cloud provider) had DR backups, which they were able to get restored. But getting offline backups restored takes longer than the SLAs they give their customers and loses some data that hasn't been copied offline yet, which is why they also have backups that are complete and immediately available, using the API key that the attacker -- sorry, AI -- found in a file it wasn't supposed to have access to.

Comment Re: Is anyone already doing this? (Score 1) 64

That works at some intersections. At others, buildings and echoes make it pretty much impossible to tell if the siren you hear is an emergency vehicle about to cross the intersection in front of you where you have a green light, or there's some emergency somewhere else, which is often true. They could still go through red lights, but not at full speed. With the new system, they find that the light is green for them at every intersection, and they don't have to slow down.

Comment Re: That translates into job losses (Score 1) 48

I think what you think of as recipients resenting handouts is commonly misunderstood. People have a basic need to feel like they are doing something worthwhile, which is traditionally fulfilled by them having jobs that pay them an amount that indicates how much other people value the work. Telling people they need handouts, then, indicates that they aren't capable of doing meaningful work. On the other hand, if people see that their work is valuable to people who can't afford to pay them a living wage (for example, daycare providers for retail workers who are parents), they're much more willing for somebody else to provide the money. UBI also helps the perception, in that there's no implication that recipients aren't also capable of getting paid for their work, since it's universal, and that frees people to look for things to do that they personally value but may not have built-in funding.

Of course, none of this helps if no occupations people can do are worthwhile any more because AI just does it better. You still have to worry about a high rate of idleness, even if the people aren't broke, but that's a somewhat different problem.

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