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Comment Re:Very confused article (Score 1) 98

I share the confusion. No matter how good the plane's clock, the satellite signals need to reach the plane and not be spoofed. Hostile actors can jam the signals or potentially broadcast fakes. better clocks don't help these issues. I'd have thought they'd be working on lower cost better "laser gyros" and such, so that the planes could reliably use internal navigation when the GPS is iffy. But Time Lords wouldn't be the right title for folks working on better / cheaper internal guidance.

Comment Return to yesteryear (Score 5, Interesting) 443

Back in ancient times, like the 1970's, there were companies specializing in "import/export", mostly the import for China->US trade in trinkets, and low end electronics. These companies were put out of business by direct ship to consumer. Their value add was paperwork, warehousing and for the better shops ... some quality control (they actually vetted the supplier, rather than playing Russian roulette with some mostly anonymous figures on the China side.

Going from direct back to intermediaries is going to be disruptive and will cost more. But it wouldn't be the end of the world, and we might have a lot less waste, and perhaps energy savings (surely shipping by the pallet by boat is more efficient than packaging each item in plastic and sending by air mail.

Comment Re:Not quite good enough (Score 4, Insightful) 94

AND POWER. Trying to charge a 85w device with a cable only capable of 5w is a bad joke in poor taste. Sometimes engineers need a little help from Human Factor engineers or Marketing people. None of the various flavors of USB have had consumer-usable naming, and this continues to be a problem and makes a mockery of the EU mandate.

Comment So any articles that are actually technical? (Score 1) 28

Is this a microkernel? Yet another Linux fork?? Perhaps a BSD derivative??? or a derivative of WindRiver???? A real from the ground up brand new OS might be technically interesting, but would seem a bit risky. I appreciate that they and their intended customers really don't give a fig about the technical underpinnings, or (probably) security and lots of other things that users might focus on ... but surely someone, somewhere is pitching a more complete story to folks closer to the hardware than the CEO and advertising and marketing VPs ....

Comment Extra counter productive (Score 0) 100

A former employer of mine used to send tranches of these out regularly. Being slightly paranoid, I kept a VM snapshot available, would instantiate it, check all the links, terminate the VM, and file a security notification form (it was good enough to not be super obviously our internal phish, and I thought it would be helpful to identify the miscreants and notify security about what might well have been an actual phishing attack).

Instead of “thanks, well spotted” that resulted in mandatory “retraining” which was pretty pointless. I had spotted the risk, I had mitigated the risk, and informed the authorities. Sadly, the Powers that Be had a process, and the process had to be followed irrespective of the facts on the ground. Obviously, a next safer step would have been to blocked the external trackers and such, but since the result of such things appeared to be HR demerits, why bother?

It’s not why they are an ex-employer, but it was typical of much of Management’s dysfunctional behavior. Indeed, the training lacked any good ideas about how to actually check the message (e.g. use a safe ephemeral VM, and dispose of it properly ;>).

Comment Re:If she feels that strongly about clarity (Score 1) 241

If she really feels like she needs to make this clear as a legal precedent,.They recorded a sound-alike BEFORE asking her to use her voice..

Unless the facts turn out to be that they leveraged actual recordings of her voice from her films. I have no inside information, do you? What basis do you have for asserting that they hired a sound-alike?

Even if it is the latter, I don’t know that there isn’t existing case-law (IANAL). I do recall HarleyDavidson defended their trademark sound against Japanese clones (and succeeded). It may well be the case that actors likenesses and sound are inherently protected (or at least protectable, perhaps if they have filed appropriately).

Comment Is this new work, or a mashup with Wolfram? (Score 1) 10

Wolfram Alpha https://www.wolframalpha.com/ has specialized math reasoning (descended from Mathematica) for decades. A mashup is exactly what Stephan Wolfram wrote about some time back and is the obvious “next step” up from “simple” language models. If this is a mashup, it represents good progress but seems like it should be made explicit even in a high level article such as this one.

If it isn’t, why is “alpha” in the name?

Comment Hopefully, they will rebuild (Score 4, Interesting) 61

Years back, I visited Toshiba as they were corporate partners with my employer (as were several other Japanese conglomerates). Toshiba engineers were more willing to engage, were easier to work with, and were diligent in their followups.

As a customer of various of their products, I was never disappointed.

I wish them well and hope their new private owners will rebuild.

Comment Re:Donate to the public domain. (Score 2) 138

By the time a small company goes out of business, it is probably too late to mandate an upload. So, change the rules to "When you submit for copyright, you MUST turn a physical copy over to the Library of Congress." Congress should adjust the statutes to mandate this and that the Librarian of Congress SHALL move the bits from storage to a publicly accessible server or servers when notified and validated that the bits are no longer available to the public.

Comment Re:"Wake on LAN" - wirelessly (Score 2) 101

I would think that Apple would not make it overly easy. Perhaps the door is open only while the phone is in a factory fresh state (might even exclude a reset/wiped phone; that is a special factory wipe/embed a factory key in the Secure Enclave?). No doubt not perfect, but a direction that could minimize the attack surface.

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