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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Oh, certainly. But common language has a term for high latency already, it’s just not speed related. Everyone knows about a laggy connection on a phone or video call.

    Fun fact: TCP has some implicit design considerations around the maximum cost of packet retransmission on a viable link that only works on roughly local planetary scale.
    When NASA started to get out to Mars with the space Internet, they needed to tweak tcp to fit retransmission being proportionally much more expensive and let connections live longer before being “broken”.



  • Yes, to a degree. A VPN protects you from an attacker on the same WiFi network as you and that’s about it.

    Most assaults on your privacy don’t happen like that, and for the most part the attacks that do happen like that are stopped by the website using https and proper modern security.
    The benefit of the VPN is that it puts some of that protection under your control, but only as far as your VPN provider.

    A VPN is about as much protection from most cyber attacks as a gun is.

    They’re not a security tool, they’re a networking tool. They let you do some network stuff securely, and done correctly they can protect from some things, but the point of them is “this looks like a small, simple LAN, but it’s not”.

    It’s much easier to package and sell network tools than security tools, and they’re much more accepted by users, since security tools have a tendency to say “no” a lot, particularly when you might be doing something dumb,and users hate being told no, particularly when they’re doing something dumb.


  • Depends on the vendor for the specifics. In general, they don’t protect against an attacker who has gained persistent privileged access to the machine, only against theft.
    Since the key either can’t leave the tpm or is useless without it (some tpms have one key that it can never return, and will generate a new key and return it encrypted with it’s internal key. This means you get protection but don’t need to worry about storage on the chip), the attacker needs to remain undetected on the server as long as they want to use it, which is difficult for anyone less sophisticated than an advanced persistent threat.

    The Apple system, to its credit, does a degree of user and application validation to use the keys. Generally good for security, but it makes it so if you want to share a key between users you probably won’t be using the secure enclave.

    Most of the trust checks end up being the tpm proving itself to the remote service that’s checking the service. For example, when you use your phones biometrics to log into a website, part of that handshake is the tpm on the phone proving that it’s made by a company to a spec validated by the standards to be secure in the way it’s claiming.


  • Package signing is used to make sure you only get packages from sources you trust.
    Every Linux distro does it and it’s why if you add a new source for packages you get asked to accept a key signature.

    For a long time, the keys used for signing were just files on disk, and you protected them by protecting the server they were on, but they were technically able to be stolen and used to sign malicious packages.

    Some advanced in chip design and cost reductions later, we now have what is often called a “secure enclave”, “trusted platform module”, or a general provider for a non-exportable key.
    It’s a little chip that holds or manages a cryptographic key such that it can’t (or is exceptionally difficult) to get the signing key off the chip or extract it, making it nearly impossible to steal the key without actually physically stealing the server, which is much easier to prevent by putting it in a room with doors, and impossible to do without detection, making a forged package vastly less likely.

    There are services that exist that provide the infrastructure needed to do this, but they cost money and it takes time and money to build it into your system in a way that’s reliable and doesn’t lock you to a vendor if you ever need to switch for whatever reason.

    So I believe this is valve picking up the bill to move archs package infrastructure security up to the top tier.
    It was fine before, but that upgrade is expensive for a volunteer and donation based project and cheap for a high profile company that might legitimately be worried about their use of arch on physical hardware increasing the threat interest.





  • Eeeh, I still think diving into the weeds of the technical is the wrong way to approach it. Their argument is that training isn’t copyright violation, not that sufficient training dilutes the violation.

    Even if trained only on one source, it’s quite unlikely that it would generate copyright infringing output. It would be vastly less intelligible, likely to the point of overtly garbled words and sentences lacking much in the way of grammar.

    If what they’re doing is technically an infringement or how it works is entirely aside from a discussion on if it should be infringement or permitted.


  • Basing your argument around how the model or training system works doesn’t seem like the best way to frame your point to me. It invites a lot of mucking about in the details of how the systems do or don’t work, how humans learn, and what “learning” and “knowledge” actually are.

    I’m a human as far as I know, and it’s trivial for me to regurgitate my training data. I regularly say things that are either directly references to things I’ve heard, or accidentally copy them, sometimes with errors.
    Would you argue that I’m just a statistical collage of the things I’ve experienced, seen or read? My brain has as many copies of my training data in it as the AI model, namely zero, but “Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise sat down for a rousing game of chess with his friend Sherlock Holmes, and then Shakespeare came in dressed like Mickey mouse and said ‘to be or not to be, that is the question, for tis nobler in the heart’ or something”. Direct copies of someone else’s work, as well as multiple copyright infringements.
    I’m also shit at drawing with perspective. It comes across like a drunk toddler trying their hand at cubism.

    Arguing about how the model works or the deficiencies of it to justify treating it differently just invites fixing those issues and repeating the same conversation later. What if we make one that does work how humans do in your opinion? Or it properly actually extracts the information in a way that isn’t just statistically inferred patterns, whatever the distinction there is? Does that suddenly make it different?

    You don’t need to get bogged down in the muck of the technical to say that even if you conceed every technical point, we can still say that a non-sentient machine learning system can be held to different standards with regards to copyright law than a sentient person. A person gets to buy a book, read it, and then carry around that information in their head and use it however they want. Not-A-Person does not get to read a book and hold that information without consent of the author.
    Arguing why it’s bad for society for machines to mechanise the production of works inspired by others is more to the point.

    Computers think the same way boats swim. Arguing about the difference between hands and propellers misses the point that you don’t want a shrimp boat in your swimming pool. I don’t care why they’re different, or that it technically did or didn’t violate the “free swim” policy, I care that it ruins the whole thing for the people it exists for in the first place.

    I think all the AI stuff is cool, fun and interesting. I also think that letting it train on everything regardless of the creators wishes has too much opportunity to make everything garbage. Same for letting it produce content that isn’t labeled or cited.
    If they can find a way to do and use the cool stuff without making things worse, they should focus on that.


  • As written the headline is pretty bad, but it seems their argument is that they should be able to train from publicly available copywritten information, like blog posts and social media, and not from private copywritten information like movies or books.

    You can certainly argue that “downloading public copywritten information for the purposes of model training” should be treated differently from “downloading public copywritten information for the intended use of the copyright holder”, but it feels disingenuous to put this comment itself, to which someone has a copyright, into the same category as something not shared publicly like a paid article or a book.

    Personally, I think it’s a lot like search engines. If you make something public someone can analyze it, link to it, or derivative actions, but they can’t copy it and share the copy with others.






  • I am aware of the lists and guidelines, I’ve been linking and quoting them to you. :)

    It’s their report on the standards that highlights that they don’t think there’s a clear distinction between “emoji” and “character”, and that it’s mostly a matter of user expectation.
    Hence some pictograph characters having a default “text” presentation, and some having a default “emoji” presentation. They also clarify that some things with a default “emoji” presentation aren’t in the set of characters people would associate with emoji and shouldn’t be counted if you’re trying.

    I understand what you’re saying, which is that the selection criteria is different for a “language symbol” as opposed to a “pictographic symbol”, so they’re different things.
    I disagree and think that “default presentation” might be a better metric, but that ultimately it’s about user and platform expectations. The same character can be presented “emoji” style or “text” style depending on context.

    In any case, I’d also agree that there’s no viability to the notion that people use the Bitcoin symbol in a way that’s independent of the one meaning that it has, so a colorful cartoony rendition becoming an option doesn’t really fit. “His Christmas gift was $$$” is a sentiment people might express. “The hotel is ₿₿₿” just … Isn’t.


  • Gotcha, so ⌚(U+231A, miscellaneous technical block) isn’t an emoji, despite it clearly being a pictograph, and there are only 80 emoji?

    I feel like this definition isn’t in line with either the lay definition of emoji, nor the technical definition

    Emoji are pictographs (pictorial symbols) that are typically presented in a colorful cartoon form and used inline in text. They represent things such as faces, weather, vehicles and buildings, food and drink, animals and plants, or icons that represent emotions, feelings, or activities.

    People often ask how many emoji are in the Unicode Standard. This question does not have a simple answer, because there is no clear line separating which pictographic characters should be displayed with a typical emoji style.

    Emoji are seriously just Unicode characters that sometimes get rendered as a fancy image. That’s it. There’s an entire bit about how different characters have different conventional presentations and a codified system of “default” for image or “text”.

    The presentation of a given emoji character depends on the environment, whether or not there is an emoji or text presentation selector, and the default presentation style (emoji versus text). In informal environments like texting and chats, it is more appropriate for most emoji characters to appear with a colorful emoji presentation, and only get a text presentation with a text presentation selector. Conversely, in formal environments such as word processing, it is generally better for emoji characters to appear with a text presentation, and only get the colorful emoji presentation with the emoji presentation selector.

    That’s why there’s things like ☣️ and ☣. Same codepoint, but different presentation hints. (I’m assuming that our various systems will do the right thing and capture the presentation hints, otherwise I’m going to look very odd putting the same symbol over and over :-) )



  • There really isn’t a difference between a character and an emoji beyond an emoji being a stylized rendering of a character, or a character whose use is intended as a pictograph.

    https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Introduction

    They’re all just Unicode code points, although I suppose there’s some distinction between the characters with more context specific meaning or the ones that are more apt to modification a la 🧑‍⚕️👩🏿‍⚕️. But you’ve also got 💲 and $, where “bold dollar sign” is often represented as green, but “dollar sign” tends to be represented in contextual style. Is ☣ a character or an emoji? What about the thousands of “other symbols” as defined by the Unicode spec which may or may not have special character renderings depending on your platform and font?

    And yeah, I didn’t know that character existed, so now it’s doubly confusing why anyone is asking for anything. The symbol has meaning, and it’s in the big book of meaningful symbols. Not sure what more they want.