Far Cry 4 Humor

Posted on December 28, 2019 by David K.

I’ve been playing through Far Cry 4 again, just because it’s one of my favorite games ever, and I need a break from RDR2 and Witcher 3. I had to stop and note how funny it can be.

In one of the convoy escort missions, you’re supposedly protecting a truck full of books, bound for a library. When you accept the mission, Ajay says, “The pen is mightier than the sword, right?” And the person giving you the mission says, “Sure, but not as mighty as a rocket launcher. Now…” Then, when you meet the truck and driver, she says, “Hurry up, we have places to be, and people to shoot.” She also asks Ajay if he’s read Sun Tzu’s Art of War, among other books, and then concludes that it’s fine, as long as he’s reading. Along the route, she keeps saying things, like, “Knowledge is power, and knowing is half the battle.” The whole thing had me cracking up.

Also, right before this, I opened a loot chest, and got a “user manual” as the treasure, so I was already laughing.

And don’t even get me started about Hurk in Far Cry 5.

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Carl Miller on Twitter: “Here’s a fake news merchant telling me how it actually works.”

Posted on December 16, 2019 by David K.

This is a clip from a report by the BBC that creating, boosting, and then selling fake content has become a real job in other countries. This particular report has an interview with a man from Kosovo, and (thanks to the last election) the work in Russia is now well understood, but I remain convinced there’s an entire industry for it in China. The US is the fake-news chew toy for the rest of the world, and Facebook is ground zero. The election next year is going to be a mess.

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Can end-to-end encrypted systems detect child sexual abuse imagery?

Posted on December 13, 2019 by David K.
A few weeks ago, U.S. Attorney General William Barr joined his counterparts from the U.K. and Australia to publish an open letter addressed to Facebook. The Barr letter represents the latest salvo …
Source: Can end-to-end encrypted systems detect child sexual abuse imagery? I’ve argued that FAANG companies can continuously scan their networks for garbage, but won’t because it’s expensive. Meanwhile, they’re sitting on figurative mountains of cash. A well-respected cryptologist dove into the details of whether or not you could do automatic image recognition in the face of end-to-end cryptology. While that’s an intriguing complication that I’m glad to see people working out, I don’t care about that part. What I do care about is how expensive of a computer process it is. He summarizes thus:
Despite the relatively small size of these problem instances, the overhead of using MPC turns out to be pretty spectacular. Each classification requires several seconds to minutes of actual computation time on a reasonably powerful machine — not a trivial cost, when you consider how many images most providers transmit every second.
So, yes, this can be done. Heck, Facebook does facial recognition all the time on uploaded phots, and suggests peoples’ names to you to check their work, and this is just a subset of the larger problem. Admittedly, the memory sizes to convolute the image into a digital fingerprint surprises me, but, again, it’s simply not beyond the wit of man to do it; it’s a lack of will to spend the money. So they continue to use a small army of meat-space computers to do this, subjecting them to the absolute utter depravity of man, and catching only a fraction of the illegal filth.
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House passes compromise defense bill, creating a Space Force

Posted on December 12, 2019 by David K.

“I will sign this historic defense legislation immediately!” President Donald Trump tweeted.

Source: House passes compromise defense bill, creating a Space Force

“Historic.” “Compromise.” “Space Force.” $738 BILLION. I wish more people on the Right would ask, “BuT hOw WiLl We PaY fOr It?!” when it comes to military spending.

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Daring Fireball: The Other Shoe Drops: Away Fires CEO Steph Korey After Months-Long Search for Her Replacement

Posted on December 10, 2019 by David K.

But one of the strangest things was that while it was ostensibly a story about the company, the actual story felt almost entirely like a hit on Korey, personally. No other executive’s Slack messages were quoted as evidence of the perceived cultural problems.

Source: Daring Fireball: The Other Shoe Drops: Away Fires CEO Steph Korey After Months-Long Search for Her Replacement

I like this take. It feels like it fits all the pieces together.

And I guess that’s why Gruber continues to be a force of nature in the tech media.

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The Keystone Pipeline oil leak is almost 10 times worse than initially thought – CNN

Posted on November 25, 2019 by David K.

The amount of land impacted by an oil spill in North Dakota is almost 10 times larger than initially reported, officials say. The disclosure comes about a month after the Keystone 1 Pipeline leaked about 383,040 gallons of oil.

Source: The Keystone Pipeline oil leak is almost 10 times worse than initially thought – CNN

So I see the oil industry has learned the IT industry’s trick of initially underreporting the severity of breaches. Including the part about doing it by orders of magnitude.

Or maybe they both learned it from the government, which always over-reports economic growth, and under-reports joblessness.

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Behringer WING – A complete overview – YouTube

Posted on November 24, 2019 by David K.

Looks like Berhinger has done it again. This board looks like it would be even more of a pleasure to run than the Allen & Heath D-Live, has at least as much capability and capacity, and it’s still less than $4,000.

They reference “mid/side” recording a couple of times. I looked that up. Very interesting. I want to find an excuse to try that out.

Even Behringer’s own video, above, has a lot of technical difficulties, and several sections where the audio from the 2 cameras overlapped. I should have watched this Sweetwater video. Everything they do is awesome.

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ADL International Leadership Award Presented to Sacha Baron Cohen at Never Is Now 2019 – YouTube

Posted on November 22, 2019 by David K.

It’s time to regulate Facebook, Twitter, Google, et. al.

I love just about everything about this, but the money quote, for me, is this, at 15:40…

“… when discussing the difficulty of removing content, Zuckerberg asked “where do you draw the line?” Yes, drawing the line can be difficult. But here’s what he’s really saying: removing more of these lies and conspiracies is just too expensive. These are the richest companies in the world, and they have the best engineers in the world. They could fix these problems if they wanted to.”

In the past couple days, I was mocked on Twitter for making the same argument. I’m convinced there is a small army of astroturfers working for Facebook, who run around telling people that we just don’t understand how hard it is (to remove garbage from the platform), and that it simply can’t be done, and we just have to live with the resulting dumpster fire.

I still say: Bologna.

What needs to happen, and SBC alludes to this in his speech, is that all postings should go through a sanity check before going live. As a 40-year, veteran programmer, I stand by my assertion that it would be possible to scan for a lot of stuff that should just be weeded out: pornography, violence, gore, racial slurs, and knowingly-inaccurate conspiracy theories, like anti-vax, flat earth, faked moon landing, and holocaust denial. The filters could catch 90% of that garbage, especially the egregious stuff. The rest could be marked for further review by human beings, which wouldn’t have to deal with the truly horrific stuff any more.

But here’s the rub: it would take another data center’s worth of kit to do this, which would be bad enough on its own for the sake of cost, but putting all posts through a “cool off period” while they were scanned would also be disastrous to “engagement,” which the company cannot abide, because it would be a massive hit to the bottom line.

That’s why it will never happen on its own. It must be regulated. The problem, of course, is regulatory capture, which is trivial, when you’re one of the 10 largest companies in the world. That’s a whole other ball game, which probably has to be fixed first. Sigh.

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Send us your naked photos: An inside look at Facebook’s misunderstood efforts to tackle revenge porn

Posted on November 18, 2019 by David K.

“What you see is that we will shut this type of content down on our platform, but then people will hop to other platforms and spaces,” Davis said. “What would be great across industry is for us to share intelligence to disable someone from moving from one platform to another.”

Source: Send us your naked photos: An inside look at Facebook’s misunderstood efforts to tackle revenge porn

The very last line should be the takeaway. There are times when I feel I’m too cynical, but life has taught me that I’m usually not cynical enough. And, right now, my spider senses are going crazy.

As a lifetime computer programmer and administrator, I don’t think identifying explicit images is a difficult thing. It’s perhaps one of the most-researched topics in machine learning. Telling me that Facebook can’t identify naked bodies before the images have even finished uploading is ridiculous. Telling me that they won’t deploy another data center’s worth of computers to do so, and instead using idle time when the existing servers aren’t doing anything else… that I’d believe.

Reducing “mistakes” like revenge porn would reduce clicks, and spending money on more computers, and reducing ad impressions, are simply not conducive to making next months revenue predictions, and that might impact someone’s bonus. So it just isn’t going to happen. At this point, they’re doing just enough to avoid lawsuits.

It’s almost like they’re letting their lethargy in dealing with this create a power vacuum where they intend to be the central image warehouse for all of these decisions. Like, if they let this problem metastasize to get the press coverage, then, once they get serious about it, they’ll be able to sell their image-checking solution to other web sites, and become even larger, and responsible for more of the internet’s infrastructure.

It’s almost like Facebook won’t stop until they, or one of their subsidiaries, becomes the internet, and there are no other sites of any importance to visit.

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Truck Spills Dice, Deals 216,000d6 Bludgeoning Damage to Atlanta Freeway

Posted on November 12, 2019 by David K.

Trivium Games claims that this spill amounted to the largest dice roll in history, a record previously held by the United Kingdom for Brexit.

Source: Truck Spills Dice, Deals 216,000d6 Bludgeoning Damage to Atlanta Freeway

This article wins the internet for today. Maybe the week. Heck, maybe the year.

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