The BBC World Service is radio-only. There's a cable channel, BBC America, that's available in the US, but this never aired the programme in question. The BBC's on-demand service, BBC iPlayer, isn't available in the US. So there was no legitimate way for anyone in the US to have seen the programme, and the US court should throw the case out.
Company policy requires me to assume that there is another vulnerability that allows an attacker to run method A. It might exist elsewhere in my code or another third-party library that I ship, or it might exist in another application installed on the customer's server that I know nothing about. I could summarise the policy as, "The customer probably will get hacked at some point, but if they do, it won't be because we thought it couldn't happen."
Most of my development is in Java, which doesn't have static linking. If you write public methods A, B and C in a public class D, then compile D into a jar file, then the jar will contain A, B and C. The compiler has no way to know which methods will be called at run time. There are third-party tools that claim to be able to remove unused code, but it seems unwise to use them. Java frameworks use a lot of reflection, and with that in play, there's no foolproof way for static analysis to determine that a class or method will never be used at run time. So you have to monitor the application as it runs, and hope that your integration tests are good enough to make sure that all the code that's really needed runs at least once.
Or just upgrade the vulnerable library, and go back to doing work that customers are happy to pay for.
If the vulnerability is patched in a later version of the library, it's usually easier to upgrade than try to convince the PHBs that it's not exploitable. (Unless the patched version is incompatible with something that we can't upgrade. Been there, done that.) Just because I can't think of a way to exploit it doesn't mean there isn't one. A black hat hacker is usually more motivated to find an exploit than I am.
As well as that, some of our customers run their own security scans, and will ask awkward questions if they find that we've given them something that had known vulnerabilities when we built the release. They don't like having to take our word for it that they're not exploitable.
...vulnerable libraries which have bugs which do not affect the codebase they're used in.
Where I work, we're not allowed to ship third-party libraries with known vulnerabilities. We used to be able to get away with saying that we never called the vulnerable function, but now, we have to assume that an attacker can find a way to run it by automatically chaining exploits together. Of course, having been allowed to not upgrade libraries for so long, we find that having to upgrade them to meet some artificial security deadline means rewriting a lot of ancient code and (possibly) introducing a lot of bugs. Sigh...
...I can see this could be useful for preventing reviews that claim I can't spell or do grammar.
It needs to be opt-in, not opt-out - not only for fear of butchering an author's beautiful sentences, but also because some authors who self-publish in English are successful enough that publishers of books in other languages sometimes pay for the right to publish a translation. Those contracts are usually exclusive, meaning that the author agrees not to let anyone else publish a translation of that book in that language. If Amazon's AI generates one without the author's knowledge, the author could get hit with a breach of contract lawsuit.
I imagine the term was invented in some meeting where a super pedantic engineer was dismissing all other concerns because they were not on his list of "functions", and in desperation the rest of the people said, "geez, ok, look, these are non-functional requirements..."
You could well be right
(My guess is it's because early computers often didn't have any ROM, and to boot them, you had to enter a simple program into the RAM using switches on the front panel. That program would then load a more sophisticated program from tape or punched cards. When computers gained some storage to hold that simple program, the thing that distinguished it from other types of storage was that you couldn't alter it.)
The way someone explained it to me was that "functional" refers to the reason(s) why the system exists. What result is the user or customer trying to achieve? A non-functional requirement is something that the system needs to make it possible or practical to meet a functional requirement, but that would be of no use on its own. A system for administering loans needs an audit trail to comply with the law and to detect and prevent fraud, but there would be no point in having an audit trail on its own.
On the other hand, from the point of view of someone in the audit team, being able to audit the accounts is a functional requirement. Maybe everything is a functional requirement to somebody.
"It can technically rewrite code from an old language like Perl in a new one like Python".
Both languages are from the same vintage. Python is from the early 90s and Perl late 80s. Reminiscent of persistent belief JSON is new yet XML is old.
True, but Perl isn't used for many new projects these days. Python developers are much easier to find than Perl developers, and probably cheaper, which is what this exercise is really about.
The problem was made much worse by the fact that the UK Post Office is allowed to bring its own criminal prosecutions. If they had to do what everyone else does - ask the police to investigate, and the police then have to convince the Crown Prosecution Service that there's a reasonable chance of getting a conviction - many of these cases would've been thrown out for lack of evidence.
I heard about it when it launched, but it doesn't seem to have made much of an impact. I think it was meant to compete with dedicated websites for serialised fiction, like WebNovel and Dreame, and maybe even Wattpad. But you had to pay for episodes with some Amazon-only currency that you couldn't use for anything else, not even other stuff that Amazon sells.
Amazon didn't make it very appealing to writers, either. I write fiction (as a hobby-that-sometimes-pays-for-dinner-or-beers). Amazon might've relaxed the rules since I looked at Vella, but I think I would've had to write something specifically for Vella. They wouldn't accept anything that had been published anywhere else, not even on their other exclusive platform, Kindle Unlimited. (That one's been a runaway success. Maybe they thought it would be easy to replicate with a different reading model.) The Amazon-only money made it hard to work out how much I'd get paid for each chapter or story that a reader read. I didn't bother looking into whether I'd be allowed to publish a Vella-specific story somewhere else after some time. The idea of having to write exclusively for an as-yet-unproven market was enough of a deal breaker on its own.
More telling, perhaps - I'm in various writers' groups on Facebook, with many members who are much more successful than me, and I don't think I've ever seen anyone mention Vella as a viable marketplace for stories.
The announcement of what they did in July says that NLNet has given (or will give) them €26,500, or about US$29,000, which suggests it's rather more than a hobby project.
The photo shows it with shoulder-length hair, which in microgravity is a hazard for getting tangled in things like air vents or the robot's own hands. It could just as easily have been made with short hair, or no hair at all. Or is the newsreader look just for the publicity photos on Earth, and they'll swap the hair for something more practical before launch?
The janitor has the capacity to enter into contracts, because he's an adult human and (presumably) isn't mentally impaired in any way, but he doesn't have the authority to enter into contracts on behalf of his employer.
I don't know exactly how it works with online shopping, but I assume that when you place an order, certain employees or managers have the authority to cancel it within a short time, and if they don't, a contract is formed by default between you and the company. There were a few lawsuits about this in the early days of e-commerce, when database glitches or bad programming caused expensive items to be listed at very low prices, customers ordered them, and the company refused to honour the deal. The company's lawyers argued that the contract didn't come into existence when the user pressed the "buy" button, but rather when the company billed the customer's card, or when the company sent an email to say the order had been accepted.
If a court ever rules that an AI can enter into contracts, then companies that use them will update their rules to make it clear that their AIs don't have the authority to do that.
Amazon are presumably confident that there's no easy way to trick their website into selling you a TV for a dollar, so they just wave everything through. If a company wants to use a chatbot in its sales process, they'll just have to post a disclaimer that either it's not allowed to negotiate on price, or that any discount you persuade it to give you has to be approved by a human. This isn't really any different from bricks-and-mortar shops, where the janitor isn't allowed to sell you anything, or the cashier can help you to decide what to buy, but isn't allowed to sell it at a discount just because you asked nicely.
In many countries, though not in the USA, publishing a work under someone else's name without their permission is an infringement of their moral rights. ("Moral rights" in those countries' IP laws are a specific concept relating to respecting or preserving the wishes or reputation of the creator of a work, not a general theory of how people should behave.)
Friedman might have been able to sue Amazon and/or the author of the fake books for libel, but that would have been time-consuming and expensive, assuming the author even lives in a country that pays any attention to the US courts.
Only God can make random selections.
