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Comment Otto Frisch. (Score 2) 47

The first company I worked for: Laser-Scan in Cambridge, UK, was founded by Otto Frisch

This from his Autobiography What Little I Remember
Finally the announcement came that the count-down was beginning: now it would be only minutes before the explosion took place. By that time the very first trace of dawn was in the sky. I got out of the car and listened to the count-down, and when the last minute arrived I looked for my dark goggles but couldn't find them. So I sat on the ground in case the explosion blew me over, plugged my ears with my fingers, and looking in the direction away from the explosion as I listened to the end of the count . . . five, four, three, two, one...

And then, without a sound, the sun was shining; or so it looked. The sand hills at the edge of the desert were shimmering in a very bright light, almost colourless and shapeless. The light did not seem to change for a couple of seconds and then began to dim. I turned around, but that object on the horizon which looked like a small sun was still too bright to look at. I kept blinking and trying to take looks, and after another ten seconds or so it had grown and dimmed into something more like a huge oil fire, with a structure that made it look a but like a strawberry. It was slowly rising into the sky from the ground, with which it remained connected by a lengthening grey stem of swirling dust; incongruously, I thought like a red-hot elephant balanced on its trunk. Then, as the cloud of gas cooled and became less red, one could see a blue glow surrounding it, a glow of ionized air; a huge replica of what Harry Daghlian had seen when his assembly went critical and had signalled his death sentence. The object, now clearly what has become so well known as the mushroom cloud, ceased to rise but a second mushroom started to grow out from its top; the inner layers of gas were kept hot by their radioactivity and, being hotter than the rest, broke through from the top and rose to even greater height. It was an awesome spectacle; anyone who has ever seen an atomic explosion will never forget it. And all in complete silence; the bang came minutes later, quite loud though I had plugged my ears, and followed by a low rumble like heavy traffic very far away. I can still hear it.

Submission + - Cloudflare Starts Blocking Pirate Sites For UK Users (torrentfreak.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Internet service providers BT, Virgin Media, Sky, TalkTalk, EE, and Plusnet account for the majority of the UK’s residential internet market and as a result, blocking injunctions previously obtained at the High Court often list these companies as respondents. These so-called “no fault’ injunctions stopped being adversarial a long time ago; ISPs indicate in advance they won’t contest a blocking order against various pirate sites, and typically that’s good enough for the Court to issue an order with which they subsequently comply. For more than 15 years, this has led to blocking being carried out as close to users as possible, with ISPs’ individual blocking measures doing the heavy lifting. A new wave of blocking targeting around 200 pirate site domains came into force yesterday but with the unexpected involvement of a significant new player.

In the latest wave of blocking that seems to have come into force yesterday, close to 200 pirate domains requested by the Motion Picture Association were added to one of the longest pirate site blocking lists in the world. The big change is the unexpected involvement of Cloudflare, which for some users attempting to access the domains added yesterday, displays the [Error 451 — Unavailable for Legal Reasons] notice ... As stated in the notice, Error 451 is returned when a domain is blocked for legal reasons, in this case reasons specific to the UK. [...] In this case there’s no indication of who requested the blocking order, or the authority that issued it. However, from experience we know that the request was made by the studios of the Motion Picture Association and for the same reason the High Court in London was the issuing authority. [...] The issue lies with dynamic injunctions; while a list of domains will appear in the original order (which may or may not be made available), when the MPA concludes that other domains that appear subsequently are linked to the same order, those can be blocked too, but the details are only rarely made public.

From information obtained independently, one candidate is an original order obtained in December 2022 which requested blocking of domains with well known pirate brands including 123movies, fmovies, soap2day, hurawatch, sflix, and onionplay. This leads directly to another unusual issue. The notice linked from Cloudflare doesn’t directly concern Cloudflare. The studios sent the notice to Google after Google agreed to voluntarily remove those domains from its search indexes, if it was provided with a copy of relevant court orders. Notices like these were supplied and the domains were deindexed, and the practice has continued ever since. That raises questions about the nature of Cloudflare’s involvement here and why it links to the order sent to Google; notices sent to Cloudflare are usually submitted to Lumen by Cloudflare itself. That doesn’t appear to be the case here.

Submission + - British Perl guru Matt Trout dead at 42

An anonymous reader writes: British Perl guru Matt Trout dead at 42

Obituary Matt Trout will be missed by many, even though he was a divisive figure who featured several times on The Register.

Trout was a child prodigy and also found his way into the Perl community young – in his own words, "thrust into Perl at the tender age of seventeen by a backup accident". His verdict on the language, from his homepage, spoke to us:

Perl is a wonderful language once you get over the fact that a slightly quirky set of syntax and embedded regular expressions have a tendency to make it look like line noise in the wrong light. Once you're used to it, it's a hell of an expressive dynamically typed language with a huge set of libraries and classes available for it.

Comment Re:Category Problems (Score 1) 23

Bruce Schneier posted this today:
Where AI Provides Value
If you’ve worried that AI might take your job, deprive you of your livelihood, or maybe even replace your role in society, it probably feels good to see the latest AI tools fail spectacularly. If AI recommends glue as a pizza topping, then you’re safe for another day.

But the fact remains that AI already has definite advantages over even the most skilled humans, and knowing where these advantages arise—and where they don’t—will be key to adapting to the AI-infused workforce.

AI will often not be as effective as a human doing the same job. It won’t always know more or be more accurate. And it definitely won’t always be fairer or more reliable. But it may still be used whenever it has an advantage over humans in one of four dimensions: speed, scale, scope and sophistication. Understanding these dimensions is the key to understanding AI-human replacement.

Submission + - Android Open Source Is Becoming a Controlled Experiment (reclaimthenet.org)

alternative_right writes: Google’s latest move to withhold crucial components from the Android 16 source release has sent ripples through the privacy and custom ROM communities, reviving fears that the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is being quietly hollowed out.

While the company insists AOSP isn’t being discontinued, its actions are telling a different story for developers who rely on Pixel devices as their foundation.

Comment Re:We did the same during WW2 ... (Score 2) 184

I believe the CEO of General Motors was made a Lt Gen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Knudsen was president of the Chevrolet Division of General Motors from 1924 to 1937 and was president of General Motors from 1937 to 1940.
His experience and success as a key senior manager in the operations sides of Ford Motor Company and then General Motors led the Franklin Roosevelt administration to commission him directly as a lieutenant general in the United States Army to help lead the United States' war materiel production efforts for World War II.

Comment Bandwidth (Score 1) 20

Engineers decided it would be fastest to fly physical hard drives with data into the country, since transferring huge volumes of data over the internet could take months.

Andrew S. Tanenbaum's quote circa 1985:
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

And the Obligatory XKCD

Submission + - Facial recognition error sees woman accused of theft (bbc.co.uk)

alanw writes: Home Bargains introduces facial recognition camers, woman pays for toilet rolls, Home Bargains mistakenly submits an allegation that she shoplifted them to Facewatch, next time she tries to enter an HB store she is escorted out with no reason given.

"As soon as I stepped my foot over the threshold of the door, they were radioing each other and they all surrounded me and were like 'you need to leave the store'," she said.

Madeleine Stone, senior advocacy officer at the civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, said they had been contacted by more than 35 people who have complained of being wrongly placed on facial recognition watchlists.

"They're being wrongly flagged as criminals," Ms Stone said.

"They've given no due process, kicked out of stores. This is having a really serious impact."

"Historically in Britain, we have a history that you are innocent until proven guilty but when an algorithm, a camera and a facial recognition system gets involved, you are guilty."

Comment Re: It seems (Score 2) 159

We know that it had a loud bang and compressor stall roughly at V1. We know the pilots issued a mayday ...

Where does this knowledge come from? I'd expect pprune to mention these things, but there's no mention of Compressor Stall there. There IS, however a user called Compresser_Stall who has commented in the thread. All the broken character encoding suggests that it's been copied and pasted from elsewhere. From an AI, perhaps?

Comment Re:That's not news (Score 4, Interesting) 80

John Brunner's 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar
The title is an allusion to a thought experiment in which it was calculated that all the human beings in the world could fit shoulder to shoulder on the Isle of Wight; given population growth, Brunner expanded this to the island of Zanzibar.

Comment UK "Life Sentence" may be only 15 years in prison (Score 1) 45

See this random example from yesterday, top of Duck Duck Go's News search
A Cambridge man who strangled a former flatmate to death over an argument about a passport has been handed a life sentence.
https://www.cambridge-news.co....
On Friday (June 6) he was jailed for life at the same court, and told he will serve a minimum of 16 years.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/art...
A man who stabbed a teenager to death ... sentenced to at least 15 years in prison

Comment Re:Maybe I am soft on crime (Score 1) 45

Bruce Hyman was a barrister (he also produced an episode of Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and may have been a speech writer for a UK Prime Minister). Representing a client in a divorce case, he forged an email and sent it to his client's husband, expecting it to then be produced in court. He then accused him of submitting a faked judgment to the court. It all unravelled and he was sentenced to 12 months in jail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://legalfamily.wordpress....

Comment Official judgment (Score 1) 45

Official judgment

The referrals arise out of the actual or suspected use by lawyers of generative artificial
intelligence tools to produce written legal arguments or witness statements which are
not then checked, so that false information (typically a fake citation or quotation) is put
before the court. The facts of these cases raise concerns about the competence and
conduct of the individual lawyers who have been referred to this court. They raise
broader areas of concern however as to the adequacy of the training, supervision and
regulation of those who practice before the courts, and as to the practical steps taken by
those with responsibilities in those areas to ensure that lawyers who conduct litigation
understand and comply with their professional and ethical responsibilities and their
duties to the court.

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