So social media comments are "News" now?

According to the article they (DARPA) ARE trying to fix PDF:

- Filed 117 disambiguating edits to the international standard for PDF (ISO 32000-2 AKA PDF 2.0), 88 of which have been fully resolved and approved by ISO with solutions publicly available;

- Developed the Arlington PDF Model, the first vendor-neutral, open-source specification-derived, machine and human-readable definition of the PDF data objects;

- Completed a security audit of the International Color Consortium’s (ICC) color profile format used in PDF and many image formats, resulting in updates to the ICC specifications and a move to incorporate machine-readable data descriptions to assist implementers. ICC color profiles are integral to the accurate rendering of images and can be used for malicious purposes, as River Loop Security and the PDF Association describe in this analysis;

- Identified the need and directed the curation of a new PDF file corpus, CC-MAIN-2021-31-PDF-UNTRUNCATED, to support research and format awareness; and
- Generated automatic tests/parsers for coding to address human error and reduce work time from three years to one day.

You pronounce it "check". It's pronounced and used exactly the same way as our North American friends use checks.

Spelling it cheque is useful from my perspective because it disambiguates it from the other meaning of "check".

If the LockingPIckingLawyer has taught me anything, its that physical security is an unsolvable problem, and that's been around a lot longer.

So a survey of "1,000 business leaders who either use or plan to use ChatGPT" found that almost half of them have implemented ChatGPT?

Amazing insight. Did the other half plan to implement ChatGPT?

Or, look up how to turn if off?

1. Open the Watch app on the paired iPhone.
2. Check the bottom of the screen to make sure you're in the My Watch tab.
3. Now tap on Emergency SOS.
4. In the Crash Detection section, tap the toggle labelled “Call After Serious Crash,” and then confirm Turn Off.

Or just turn off that specific feature?

So shouldn't we be mad at the businesses that can't be bothered to unlock the laptops?

So if you have to go into a meeting with you phone off, you, you know, turn it off?

It's a couple of button presses and a menu option.

Except those features aren't actually valued by consumers, regardless of what you say.

In Australia even a pre-paid mobile phone requires some basic ID. You can't have an anonymous mobile phone number, it has to be linked to an identifiable person, hence the ID.

Why they need to retain it in an easily accessible way doesn't really make sense. Should be air-gapped if at all possible.

Would be nice if CEOs prioritised information security in order to prevent breaches. The Optus breach appears to be the result of an unsecured API used for testing. Completely irresponsible for a major Telecom.

The problem is that there doesn't seem to be any real repercussions to large companies for data breaches, so they just don't care.

There is already legislation in place that requires data breaches to be reported to customers. The discussion about telling financial institutions comes about because the Optus data breach included enough points of ID to open a bank account and carry out fraud. The idea is to warn banks that they need to take extra steps to verify the identity of people whose details have been leaked.

Optus has already announced that they will provide one year of credit monitoring. Meanwhile, some Australian states won't let you change driver's license number until you actually suffer identity theft.

"A casual phone conversation in early November sent David Tebbutt scurrying off to deepest Somerset where he discovered a program which could become the last one ever written by a human being.

While the rest of the world has been developing a series of ever higher level languages, two men in Somerset, David James and Scotty Bambury, have quietly created a system which actually removes the need for program coding. Suddenly, programming languages seem a little irrelevant since this system will chomp out bug-free programs on receipt of a program design. Of course, in order that people understand the programs produced, they are listed in Basic, although there is no real reason why they shouldn't be produced in machine code, COBOL, Pascal, or whatever else takes your fancy.

The system not only produces bug free code but it also does it jolly quickly - a matter of a few minutes once the design details have been keyed in. Since it keeps a record of the program design, this can be modified at any time and new programs generated on the spot. This means that, for the first time in his life, the user can change his mind or modify his system without it costing him an arm and a leg. For the first time, too, ordinary people can implement their ideas on a computer without having to worry about expensive `experts' or the rigours of learning to program. Programmers on the other hand should find their jobs enriched, getting their intellectual satisfaction from program design and avoiding the tedium of coding and debugging.

This British system, christened `The Last One' has the potential to make the frustration and delays usually associated with software production things of the past.

It will, of course, challenge existing ideas and attitudes and, I suppose, the data processing industry could be about to receive a small dose of the medicine it has been dishing out to users for years. In other words, those in the DP industry who fail to adapt to the new approach may find themselves out of work. I believe, though, that this system, if made widely available, will lead to a massive expansion of the marketplace resulting in opportunities that will more than make up for any program coding jobs which may disappear."

Personal Computer World 02/81

Four layers of encryption on the face of a coin that is meant as a novelty and is meant to be reasonably easy to decode. What's the problem exactly?