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Comment Re:Filming people getting CPR (Score 4, Interesting) 150

We need to stop pretending like it's perfectly OK to film strangers in public. Legal? Sure. Should you be doing it? 9 times out of 10, no.

It's long past time we had a real debate about the law, too. Just because something has been the law for a long time, that doesn't necessarily mean it should remain the law as times change. Clearly there is a difference between the implications of casually observing someone as you pass them in a public street, when you probably forget them again a moment later, and the implications of recording someone with a device that will upload the footage to a system run by a global corporation where it can be permanently stored, shared with other parties, analysed including through image and voice recognition that can potentially identify anyone in the footage, where they were, what they were doing, who they were doing it with, and maybe what they were saying and what they had with them, and then combined with other data sources using any or all of those criteria as search keys in order to build a database at the scale of the entire global population over their entire lifetimes to be used by parties unknown for purposes unknown, all without the consent or maybe even the knowledge of the observed people who might be affected as a result.

I don't claim to know a good answer to the question of what we should allow. Privacy is a serious and deep moral issue with far-reaching implications and it needs more than some random guy on Slashdot posting a comment to explore it properly. But I don't think the answer is to say anything goes anywhere in public either just because it's what the law currently says (laws should evolve to follow moral standards, not the other way around) or because someone likes being able to do that to other people and claims their freedoms would be infringed if they couldn't record whatever they wanted and then do whatever they wanted with the footage. With freedom comes responsibility, including the responsibility to respect the rights and freedoms of others, which some might feel should include more of a right to privacy than the law in some places currently protects.

That all said, people who think it's cool to film other human beings in clear distress or possibly even at the end of their lives just for kicks deserve to spend a long time in a special circle of hell. Losing a friend or family member who was, for example, killed in a car crash is bad enough. Having to relive their final moments over and over because people keep "helpfully" posting the footage they recorded as they drove past is worse. If you're not going to help, just be on your way and let those who are trying to protect a victim or treat a patient get on with it.

Comment Re:Major privacy concerns (Score 1) 79

The escape of medical information is truly well under way already, independent of AI.

In the UK, most medical information will be classified as sensitive personal data, which means it has significant extra protections under our regular data protection law, in addition to the medical ethics implications of breaching patient confidentiality. Letting it escape is a big deal and potentially a serious threat to the business/career of any medical professional who does it. Fortunately the days of people sending that kind of data around over insecure email are finally giving way to more appropriate methods of communication as the technology improves. It's usually governments seeing pound signs and/or businesses who aren't providing direct care to the patients that are pushing for wider distribution (and also those organisations who act as if impossible claims about sanitising the data effectively before releasing it are true).

Comment Re:Pretend to be a customer for a new Subaru (Score 1) 155

I'm serious. I don't fucking pay for ads. Ever.

Good for you! Unfortunately, for a lot of people, having no car isn't really an option, so the answer to what happens next with your strategy is really that all of those people get an inferior product because there's no effective competition or regulation in the market to prevent that, while people like you don't get any product at all.

What should happen is that governments recognise a failure of the market to maintain adequate standards for customers and introduce regulation to enforce minimum acceptable standards accordingly. Whether that actually happens obviously depends on whether your government is more interested in looking out for the people or the businesses.

Comment Re:Engineers start up, MBAs and DEIs close down (Score 1) 126

Harvard did.

As I said, citations needed. Moreover, given you opted to mention Harvard, citations needed to demonstrate that whatever you alleged happened in Harvard (if it did) is also applicable across the other entities you intend to accuse.

DEI is how mediocre people get jobs and college places.

Pete Hegseth stares at you in Moron-lingo. Stop projecting.

Comment Re:Does anyone know what "preview" means? (Score 2) 73

It's actually pretty understandable.

Despite the meme power of a broken login, the bug affects a fallback feature you might well go years without using.

It requires you have PIN/Touch sign in enabled; which if you've enabled that, that means that is how you normally login.
And that works just fine. Nothing is broken there.

What is missing is a "password" icon in the 'fallback' options to "sign in a different way" (using a password, e.g., instead of a PIN or fingerprint.)

So despite being on the login screen, its not actually something you are going to regularly interact with normally, unless you forgot your pin or something. And its hardly something human beta testers are going to think to explicitly test for, every single build. And since the bug is a missing element as opposed to a visibly broken element, well, its easy to fail to notice something you almost never use isn't there.

Meanwhile, clicking where its supposed to be still actually works, so its entirely plausible that you could have automated test scripts that continue to pass if they've been scripted to click at coordinate (X,Y), or to select the password button programmatically by an identifier or something, and then 'expect' something to happen in response, because the button is there and it works just fine, its just missing its texture or something. This would slip past a lot of test frameworks, the button is "in the model", "its active/enabled", "its selectable", "its clickable", and "it fires a click event if you click", "and whatever it is supposed to do happens", and its probably even "visible" (though you can't see it); most likely the icon or texture is missing or unassigned or referencing a transparency by mistake, and its just a "transparent button". So unless you specifically add checks to screen capture and compare a pixel block range to a reference image bitmap or something, you aren't even going to catch it with an automated test.

Tests like THAT do exist and can be written, but its not usually very useful, and the cost to write and maintain such tests with reference images is huge. change an icon or font or background color and a zillion tests need to be updated. Its a difficult balancing act to decide what to test, even for a highly competent QA team.

It's possible it just outright incompetence too... but in this case, for this bug... its pretty understandable.

Comment Re:Core Competency: Lobbying, or engineering? (Score 1) 126

OK, it could be argued the government is the problem in the first place, since laws are a big part of why production here is economically nonviable.

Well, of course. Environmental and anti-trust regulation and workers' protection laws, and all that stuff gets in the way... and let us ignore the cost of living (which is a much larger reason why it is not economically viable to create some stuff without subsidies.)

Comment Re:I have 10 implants and I never had that problem (Score 1) 42

But, you eventually will. Trust me, you will. Time catches up to all.

Best option is to write them down and put them in a bank vault, or similarly secure location. And include the bank identity in your will, which you entrust to a respected legal firm. Make sure that the bank knows what to do with the contents of the safe deposit box if they go belly-up.

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