Of course you want off-site backups. And everyone has been doing that for decades so I don't see the problem with that.
Streaming replication of databases and the like is pretty much ubiquitous as well.
What exactly did you think all those big cloud services were doing for their managed database offerings?
Have you... heard of backups at all?
If the kind of site that would host this kind of system internally at an organisation like a police service has been catastrophically damaged then you probably have bigger problems than the time it takes to restore a backup.
The British government has some excellent IT people. It's a meme really that Civil Service staff are only there for the jobs for life because they couldn't make it in the private sector. The GDS team in particular have successfully automated a huge variety of government interactions with tens of millions of people and for example are widely regarded as having some of the best UX design and accessibility experts anywhere. Building on that to support other government activity, including internal functions not normally seen by the public, would have made a lot of sense. In the longer term we're going to want people like that dealing with the astronomical challenge of modernising NHS IT.
There are no uninteresting numbers. Like the least interesting story on Slashdot? Smallest = least?
Citations available, but why bother?
One line of APL would have more graphic appeal.
Mod parent Funny. Or please explain the insight rather than the obvious sarcasm.
My attempted joke is in the modified Subject. Many of the AI books I have read for "fun" have been recipe books about creating LLM dishes as the main course. But currently reading one that is more like a book of serving suggestions. "Teaching" how to write "killer" prompts for various effects. The funniest examples are telling the AI to "read" various things and produce short summaries. The AI understands nothing, but it can help the humans understand even less!
Then there's a recursive joke when the AIs start "reading" content written by other AIs. Nothing to the n-th power is still nothing.
(Solution thoughts? Contagious provenance dimensions added to the training data...)
You [TWX] are so cute when you feed the AC troll or sock puppet. Maybe its hairdresser knows for sure, but why should anyone care?
As for the story, the obligatory joke I was looking for is the fresh Subject. Also lots of joke turf around not getting any value from their investments. At least if that "Democratic" is referring to the large-D political "party" in America, they sure ain't bought much influence that I can detect anywhere.
But there is a related joke floating around here, if only I could execute humor in a non-fatal way. Remember the old song "Anything you can do, I can do better!" We need a version that is updated for AI over I, something along the lines of "Anything I can do, AI can do better". There was a followup line in the song that could become "AI can do anything better than I" or "AI can do anything better than you". By pronouncing "AI" as a diphthong (or triphthong?) it may even be possible to preserve the rhythm of the original.
You may (but probably don't) remember some of the tasks the song used for competitive examples. For this story, the AI would be boasting about finding and buying the "best" influencers. (And why hasn't my spell checker yet been updated for that extremely popular "job" title?)
Returning to the Subject joke, I would never be signed up because I'm too politically unreliable. I mostly think the Democrats are full of shite, but it's merely less poisonous shite than the fake Republican shite. "Mostly harmless" is the kindest thing you can say about any American politician these years?
NAK
No, that is NOT what I meant and I am no longer able to credit you for good faith. Just another builder of convenient straw men. Lot of that going around these years.
Maybe that helps explain why I've found it so hard to decide on a new host for my website?
Okay, kind of a shallow comment, though true enough, but it is an opening for one of my favorite axes. We don't know anything about the real scope of the problem. So let's put "sizing the problem" as a preliminary problem to solve and here is a solution approach:
What if there was a website that let the potential victims report the attacks? The basic idea would be to collect lots of data, figure out which attacks are most serious, and then prioritize police resources towards breaking the scammers' various business models. In the case of politically motivated threats, the assessment needs to go beyond the cash value, but the same basic approach applies. First you have to size up the mess before you can start cleaning it up.
I actually imagine it as a kind of iterative analysis. I'm using email spam as a convenient example, though the same basic approach can be extended for other categories. Each round of analysis would be bounced back to the person reporting it, and the reporter would be able to use some human intelligence to help focus on what is going on. Even where the human is failing to understand the threat, that is actually important data about how clever the attack is.
I don't think today's FBI is capable of such an effort, but my local cops are even less up to the task. Best hope would probably be a European organization? So maybe it exists and I just haven't heard about it yet? Or maybe you have a more constructive idea about the destruction of the criminals? (Or more likely on today's Slashdot any response will just be from an angry sock puppet trying to change the subject.)
But are they Russian sock puppets trying to defend their criminal turf, Chinese sock puppets trying to distract from the bad publicity, or just the usual nameless forgettable morons seeking attention?
Solution-oriented thoughts elsewhere.
If I require a function, it is a functional requirement.
If I require something without function, it's a non functional requirement.
No user-servicable parts inside. Refer to qualified service personnel.
