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Comment Re:Previous attempt at this lasted 6 years (Score 1) 109

I was assuming it was based essentially on existing digital camera hardware with an extra authentication or signing step at the point the image is written to storage. That's how these products have worked up to now. Of course if the camera manufacturers are investing big bucks in developing a secure system from the ground up, my assumptions are wrong. But I don't see any indication that's what is being offered here.

Comment Re: Previous attempt at this lasted 6 years (Score 1) 109

That's right, I am assuming the connection from the sensor to the rest of the camera electronics is not part of the secure system. I think that's a fair assumption, as CCD or CMOS sensors are relatively simple devices and don't have room or time for cryptographic processing at the moment the image is recorded and read out. Even if not, the point remains that you could leave the electronic parts untouched and just project in the image you want to record.

Comment Re:Previous attempt at this lasted 6 years (Score 1) 109

But you don't have to crack the TPM or the secure enclave. You just have to replace the camera sensor with a custom device that outputs the image you want, and if necessary set the camera's date and time or fake some GPS signals. You could even keep the hardware untouched and use a slide duplicator attachment to make an authenticated copy of any image you want.
AI

'What Kind of Bubble Is AI?' (locusmag.com) 100

"Of course AI is a bubble," argues tech activist/blogger/science fiction author Cory Doctorow.

The real question is what happens when it bursts?

Doctorow examines history — the "irrational exuberance" of the dotcom bubble, 2008's financial derivatives, NFTs, and even cryptocurrency. ("A few programmers were trained in Rust... but otherwise, the residue from crypto is a lot of bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.") So would an AI bubble leave anything useful behind? The largest of these models are incredibly expensive. They're expensive to make, with billions spent acquiring training data, labelling it, and running it through massive computing arrays to turn it into models. Even more important, these models are expensive to run.... Do the potential paying customers for these large models add up to enough money to keep the servers on? That's the 13 trillion dollar question, and the answer is the difference between WorldCom and Enron, or dotcoms and cryptocurrency. Though I don't have a certain answer to this question, I am skeptical.

AI decision support is potentially valuable to practitioners. Accountants might value an AI tool's ability to draft a tax return. Radiologists might value the AI's guess about whether an X-ray suggests a cancerous mass. But with AIs' tendency to "hallucinate" and confabulate, there's an increasing recognition that these AI judgments require a "human in the loop" to carefully review their judgments... There just aren't that many customers for a product that makes their own high-stakes projects betÂter, but more expensive. There are many low-stakes applications — say, selling kids access to a cheap subscription that generates pictures of their RPG characters in action — but they don't pay much. The universe of low-stakes, high-dollar applications for AI is so small that I can't think of anything that belongs in it.

There are some promising avenues, like "federated learning," that hypothetically combine a lot of commodity consumer hardware to replicate some of the features of those big, capital-intensive models from the bubble's beneficiaries. It may be that — as with the interregnum after the dotcom bust — AI practitioners will use their all-expenses-paid education in PyTorch and TensorFlow (AI's answer to Perl and Python) to push the limits on federated learning and small-scale AI models to new places, driven by playfulness, scientific curiosity, and a desire to solve real problems. There will also be a lot more people who understand statistical analysis at scale and how to wrangle large amounts of data. There will be a lot of people who know PyTorch and TensorFlow, too — both of these are "open source" projects, but are effectively controlled by Meta and Google, respectively. Perhaps they'll be wrestled away from their corporate owners, forked and made more broadly applicable, after those corporate behemoths move on from their money-losing Big AI bets.

Our policymakers are putting a lot of energy into thinking about what they'll do if the AI bubble doesn't pop — wrangling about "AI ethics" and "AI safety." But — as with all the previous tech bubbles — very few people are talking about what we'll be able to salvage when the bubble is over.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.
AI

Meta's New Rule: If Your Political Ad Uses AI Trickery, You Must Confess (techxplore.com) 110

Press2ToContinue writes: Starting next year, Meta will play the role of a strict schoolteacher for political ads, making them fess up if they've used AI to tweak images or sounds. This new 'honesty policy' will kick in worldwide on Facebook and Instagram, aiming to prevent voters from being duped by digitally doctored candidates or made-up events. Meanwhile, Microsoft is jumping on the integrity bandwagon, rolling out anti-tampering tech and a support squad to shield elections from AI mischief.

Comment Drug addiction is a medical condition... right? (Score 2) 265

For many years advocates of more liberal drug policy have argued that addiction should be treated as a medical condition. And we're always told that mental illness should be seen as just another illness -- you wouldn't stigmatize or blame someone for having a broken arm, so you shouldn't do so if they are schizophrenic.

Well, isn't this the logical outcome? If a medical condition is severe enough to destroy your quality of life, and it isn't curable, then in some countries you have the option of assisted suicide. Why would you refuse that to someone whose condition is being addicted, if that's just another medical condition?

Comment Re:Roundabouts (Score 1) 93

Hmm, you say a roundabout takes more space than a 4-way light *for the same amount of traffic*.

If that's true, it implies that roundabouts aren't that good after all? Since I thought their advantage was handling a higher volume of traffic. Like for example, if you put a four-way intersection with traffic lights it can handle an average flow of ten cars per minute, but a roundabout could take twenty cars per minute. In other words, greater throughput. (I don't know what the true numbers are.)

Perhaps the throughput is the same but a roundabout reduces the average time for a car to clear the junction -- in other words, same throughput but improved latency?

Comment Re:Uh wut? (Score 4, Insightful) 35

I do remember back in the day Google was known for its contrarian approach. Consultants would tell you that for an "enterprise" data centre you needed expensive servers, redundant power supplies on each unit, RAID on each unit in case a disk failed, ECC memory and so on. But Google decided to get the reliability at the large scale, throwing together large numbers of cheap systems with off-the-shelf parts and if one of them fails, well you just leave it there and use the remaining ones.

Nowdays it's conventional wisdom that servers should be "cattle, not pets". Perhaps in even in 1999 the smart people knew that. Perhaps I am setting up a straw man with these "consultants" who wanted an expensive, gold-plated approach. For sure it would have happened anyway without Google. But this guy did have to swim against the current.

Comment Re:SambaX was buggy and horrible (Score 2) 46

Samba is only configured one way, via the smb.conf file.

Runtime control can be done via smbcontrol, but the base config file is always smb.conf.

When using local uses passwords *must* be separate as the SMB protocol and Linux passwords use completely different crypto.

Of course if you want synchronised passwords just add the Linux machine into the Active Directory Domain using Samba's winbind and users and passwords are identical of course.

Comment Re:SambaX was buggy and horrible (Score 2) 46

This is completely incorrect.

Microsoft do not concern themselves with what SMB versions Samba supports when considering maintenance. At all.

As it should be IMHO. We match current versions of Windows and only keep SMB1 around in an "off-by-default" state for customers who can't or won't update old Windows / DOS clients.

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