supernova87a

Ah yes that's probably it. I'm just remembering it vaguely.

Can news articles/reporters ever quote the actual original court ruling that they use to source their stories? I find it amazingly rare that journalists feel that they should show people where they get the key finding of their story, and rather lazily present their story as if they were the controlling authority and only source of information.

Given how rich the original information is to link to (like, a 200 page PDF ruling), this is a bit of journalistic travesty to leave it out. Compared to how much hearsay they seem to accept as a source in day to day stories, yet go to lengths to name the person's name.

And "For more information on this breaking issue, go to KABC.com!" Yeah, thanks a lot for that in-depth reporting!

Does anyone know where to find the PDF of this one?

Does anyone remember in old-timey puzzle books that you might have read as a kid, the example puzzles (maybe fictional) of how the British postal service would decode people's addresses expressed in rebus form?

Like:

HILL

----

MIKE

----

WOOD

They would say the post office cleverly got it delivered to Mike Underhill, Overwood UK.

I guess that was for a more leisurely, less efficient time.

Is it me, or does the actual referenced ApJL paper, while having all the trappings of a scientific argument and an almost diarrheal collection of assorted physics references, basically boil down to a very extensively wrapped plausibility argument?

Hmm, sorry for that. The story is there, I guess they just changed the URL for some reason:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-iphone-security-theft-pas...

(or maybe it was me with a typo, again apologies)

non paywalled: https://archive.ph/5TjOQ

"...With only an iPhone and its passcode, an interloper can within seconds change the password associated with the iPhone owner’s Apple ID. This would lock the victim out of their account, which includes anything stored in iCloud...

...Once thieves possess both passcode and phone, they can exploit a feature Apple intentionally designed as a convenience: allowing forgetful customers to use their passcode to reset the Apple account password...

...authorities came to believe he was the victim of a group of thieves that target New York bar-goers, launder money via apps and then resell the phones. This particular group is believed to be responsible for more than 30 incidents..."

I wonder how big the pressure/temptation is for a North Korean, hacking for the state (presumably), to escape with a couple hundred coins and defect?

I'm sure the repercussions / penalties must be huge, but then so are the amounts they must be seeing day by day, compared to average standard of living in N. Korea.

Or maybe this is a cadre of military / public conscripted workers who regard this hacking as a patriotic service even?

I was just commenting to a colleague about how ridiculous it is to still have a US payment/checking system that allows "pull" transactions from anyone with your account numbers, rather than a "push" system where you explicitly have to authorize sending money from your bank accounts. Like every other modern country you might think of.

Our ACH system (plus the uncertainty of money clearing, holding periods, fraudulent checks / debits) creates such bad side effects for everyone, this PayPal situation included.

I know there are some efforts to initiate a Fed-administered transfers system, but have no idea how it's going.

We (with US government as a mediating authority) don't seem to be in control of having an effective banking system, and it's just getting more confusing over time.

I wonder what severity / frequency of incidents or regulator awareness required them to actually come out and say that they're issuing a recall, rather than just quietly putting it into an upcoming release like they probably would otherwise do?

Reasonable point, but what makes them have to publish a story on a Saturday, uncorroborated, rather than wait until Monday and get some comment from FB?

Goes to another overall point that, why do they need to get a barest-of-bones story out like this? Is their role simply to convey tidbits of gossip, or actually be act like journalists and investigate what’s true?

> "Meta did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment outside of normal business hours."

Just to air a side gripe, I don't know why journalists and/or editors think statements like this are helpful in the least. Did you ask them 1 hour before your deadline? Was it a week ago?

Are we to gain some better understanding or infer something by your inclusion of this caveat, other than to get a superficial cover-your-ass "we asked them at some vague time we can't be bothered to state, and haven't heard back yet"?

Back to the substantive content, this article can be summarized by the first sentence of it, minus the regurgitated 2/3 of the rest of the story. "We heard someone in some division say their budgets aren't final yet, so we're guessing that more cuts are possible."

Thanks for the point!

Ah, I see, for a test that you'll only run once or rarely, might as well!

If I were to use a mental analogy with numerical methods that you get taught in grad school, isn't this kind of just a problem of identifying where poles are in your functions?

If you're cycling through all possible numbers and seeing where the output might blow up or go pathological, you probably instead (to be efficient about it) test the far limits of the input number range, and then sample the internal space with an adaptive spacing to see where things are changing and whether it's about to go crazy somewhere. Like divide by zero, subtract 2 small numbers etc.? Or analyze the function to see where subtraction (or whatever operation is applicable here) might misbehave? Rather than spend all your compute equally sampling every possible number.

I'm no expert but it seems to be the same type of problem.

On the front page of the site, something that could add to the compelling side-by-side comparison between Filmbox and real film is to show a 3rd image/synced clip, the digital image starting point, without any manipulation. (and hence the value add of Filmbox -- because as it is now of course it looks like the footage is identical, which is your point. But showing 2 basically identical clips doesn't add much).

Maybe show the buildup of layers? That would be really interesting.

I wonder if this gives the tiles any kind of antiseptic (or even other) property to them, unintentionally.

It would be amazing if there were a silver bullet like this that everyone could identify the root cause of companies' woes. And could be reset by flipping a switch.

But I think it's much deeper -- having worked at a couple big companies now, I realize (at least to my limited observations) that the path of a company is set by the deeply ingrained culture that has been established over many years by its founders, by its evolution, its successive leaders, and in fact, the competitive environment in which it operates. Things (good or bad) that last far beyond any one leader.

It manifests in the little incentives that people far below the CEO understand to do their jobs in a certain way, to pursue certain things and decide to drag their feet or ignore certain other things.

If you were hired at a company and worked there for years understanding that if you did <x>, you got <y>, it will be hard to change a whole workforce of that notion, especially when one individual gets beaten back in line if they stray. Even if others want to change just as much. Even if the CEO says to change. It takes years for that info to percolate. Sometimes it never does.

No, sometimes companies need to die in order to be reborn.

I would love to know if there's a $ per spectrum bandwidth overlay that can be made on this chart and if there are any interesting observations from that?

Good engineering culture?

I hope this refers to something behind the scenes that I as a Hotmail/Outlook user am unable to see. Because UI and product-wise, I don't see much evidence at all that someone of a good engineering culture cares about the experience I'm having with the product.

More like a team phoning it in.

In grad school in astronomy, there was a fellow grad student who was extremely excited after a night's observations that he'd discovered something remarkable -- it was a long hoped for distant galaxy that appeared in his images that night, and had all the right spectral signatures because it appeared in different filters, different exposures, and you could see it there in the image files, raw.

Turned out, it was noise / amplifier signal correlated with the adjacent chip dumping overexposed pixels on readout. He was embarrassed after a professor pointed out (after inspecting the files) that it always appeared on the same exact pixel coordinates on the array, but learned his lesson to try to disprove your own observations with independent tests.

I wonder how much some of these unidentified phenomena might be checked for some similar effects. Were the pilots reporting things seen with their eyes, or looking at imaging displays that have been processed. And maybe... were recently illuminated with lasers... hm? There certainly seem to be a pathology of similar reports of "the object never moved in the viewfinder, and would imply the ability to move suddenly at supersonic speeds"

I find it just really endearing that at companies, regardless of how many other issues they have or the dysfunctions and bland corporate culture, there are people who keep the pride of purpose and "olden days / traditions" in their memory and do things like this. Or are able to call on institutional memory of something bygone, that reappears once in a while. (whether it's a big gesture like this or small cultural day-to-day manifestations).

You wonder how pockets of this survive when top management comes and goes, who sometimes only know the company as just some logo or another corporation to be managed, and when workforces go through rounds and rounds of potential layoffs where such knowledge and initiative is generally lost.

Maybe it also helps to be a company that has at least something to do with hardware that leaves a physical history :)

Thanks!

Thanks!

I have a personal anecdote that is maybe related?

I store some spare car/boat batteries in my garage, and you would think that batteries, in their plastic/insulated containers, should be fairly inert or impervious to odd discharge effects.

However, over years, I have noticed that if batteries are left on the bare floor of a garage, they will discharge over time. Something to do with gradual leakage via the plastic contacting ground (and maybe plus humidity) -- there is some conduction going on!

So instead, you have to store them on well-insulating platforms, say styrofoam or acrylic, and they will hold their charge far longer. But this is on the timescale of months -- I wonder how that relates to the timescale these researchers are investigating (and for often used batteries, I would imagine it matters less).

These little parasitic losses that are rarely studied...

I was thinking that there have been swings of what is valued (or trusted) in education and testing (or voting, promoting) to prove that someone has the goods.

At one time it was live oration skill, and then people thought, "maybe that disfavors people who are introverted or whose talent comes from thinking and writing".

Then, at another time, it was thought, "well you have to test because sometimes time pressure and not being able to go away to think about something for as long as you have time to work on it produces something valuable".

Yet another time, "let people do homework to prove their value through effort who don't test well" but now who knows whether they actually were the ones doing the work?

I wonder what this development will produce?

I have been curious about why AM stations exhibit the demographic effect you see (in terms of programming, station ownership, etc).

Is it because of something to do with the licensing of the spectrum, and the cost of buying that? Or because of the restrictions around broadcasting (content and distance) of any given station? Or the cost of equipment to operate?

So interesting that something about how the domain operates that creates a different dynamic of what you hear on the radio in AM vs. FM.

I guess my question is, sure, someone could to lengths to observe the in + out, but does Apple (and the other entity) decline to keep logs such that they at least could not be compelled to give up data that could link the two?

If the RIAA gets a court order to reveal who streamed something, shared illegally, etc. would they be able to comply?

Sure, but not if they wish to keep on operating (i.e. selling things, and manufacturing things as part of their business) legally in that country.

This is basically a VPN for everyone using an Apple device, right? The question I have is whether Apple keeps (or can be compelled by law enforcement to produce) the logs of who you are and what you have browsed?

I was about to comment on the short PhD in "2-and-a-bit years" -- and how the UK expectation for PhD program duration is so different from in the US.

And it wasn't to say that he's a genius. It's that the program is planned to be shorter, and in fact, there's less funding available to go longer even if you wanted to.