This is the problem with a lot of longform essay writing. It takes so long to get to the point that unless you wholeheartedly agree from the start you end up skimming. This is why the abstract was invented. I didn't read this article because there is no abstract, and the introduction is obtuse. I have better things to do with my time and brainpower
I agree. This is very frustrating and shows a lack of respect for the reader (not picking on this article, there are many worse examples). I'm not sure it's a necessary part of "longform" medium. One just needs to put their damn point in the first paragraph.
I suspect that there is a tendency for people to use the term "tl;dr" when what they're looking for is "abstract". But I don't know if that's what EliRivers had in mind.
I think it might be one of those cases where you're either a) supposed to know what the author has in mind or b) supposed to get a sense of what he has in mind from the article itself.
Being a former university employee, I think I know what he means, though without a definition it is of course impossible to know for certain.
I wonder if this is a strategic steps following Amazon Echo's nice overtake on speech-based assistant area. Apple is really the pioneer on bringing speech based UI to the masses. Maybe they sense a threat?
With speech-to-text yet struggling on my iPhone to distinguish between what I said and what it figured I said.
Let's spare the ideology, I think the two of them are very much not yet there.
I'm elated though to learn that a meaningful university research got a honorable mention. There should be more searchlight on what's going on behind the closed doors of those hardworking varsity labs.
With speech-to-text yet struggling on my iPhone to distinguish between what I said and what it figured I said.
I have very very good success with speech-to-text. This is for everyday communication using iMessage, not for anything technical. The secret is that I have slightly modified my speech:
Just. Pretend. You. Are. William. Shatner. And. You. Simply. Speak. Staccato. (Ie, with very short pauses between words). Of course you also need good internet connectivity, because all the hard stuff is being done in the cloud.
I find that speaking into my phone is much faster than typing on the tiny keyboard.
Also, there are two parts involved with Siri:
- first is speech to text, parsing individual words
Applying AI to understand troves of persistent/temporary data archive threads in order to learn and reveal patterns and associations in complex datasets of patient encounters can help doctors prevent expensive unnecessary lab tests that need not happen again for another patient. That's conveniently doable for human-computer interaction.
The viscosity of natural language seems to be the insurmountable challenge here. Based on what I've experienced, visual perception by computers and translation between natural languages can permanently earn its success in a matter of time's length less than a decade. Not just speech-to-text because we still have to trick Siri for example by speaking slowly.
It's probably my angle, but it is not a qualifying success when we all yet have a lot of work underway to do.
I suspect Oculus Rift is gunning the high end much like the Apple strategy, so quality and exclusivity is going to be important value proposition. From the company point of view, this is the logical decision, since the Gear VR or Google Cardboard strategy probably won't give them much revenue.
The code released today is an early alpha, yet people say that the quality of the experience when playing the Oculus Store game on the Vive is excellent. That pretty much invalidates that argument.
> quality and exclusivity is going to be important value proposition. From the company point of view, this is the logical decision
Debatable. Developers and customers are becoming more mindful of the value of open systems. If the best developers are not exclusively working on Rift-only games, then Rift gains little by investing in that idea. Exclusivity only works when you have the best people working on your product.
Not to diminish Carmack's significance and genius, but, from waht I can tell from the first minutes of the interview, he knew he was going to be awarded, so je had plenty of time to prepare and rehearse his -- very inspiring, I should say -- speech.
For something like a decade (2004~2005 until 2013), Carmack gave a fluent hours-long speech/discussion/brain-dump at QuakeCon. I doubt a few minutes's speech is something he needs "plenty of time to prepare and rehearse" for at this point.
Carmack's talks are mind-blowing, he just talks off the cuff fluently for two-three hours and it's consistently interesting, it's completely insane. Here's one he gave at SMU in 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOzkUKJCxTw
Even with prep writing a speech that good isn't easy. Easier sure, but that's like the difference between a high wire act and a high wire act with bears waiting to eat your corpse.
That's fair, but I'm willing to bet that anyone who has a chance of receiving an award is well-prepared to give a speech. Executing the speech is difficult whether you are ready or not, and Carmack not only spoke well/fluently, but had a great message that was meaningful because it came from him and also, because it can resonate with anyone really.
Myself, from another country is amused that Apple has managed to manipulate 95% of tech community into thinking that they can't do what the FBI wants because that would create a backdoor.
To anyone whose mind is not clouded by ideology it should be clear that the backdoor already exists and that what Apple is resisting is creating an exploit for it.
For the billionth time, a backdoor exists in an outdated hardware infrastructure. It's not clear if this would even be possible on current generation iPhones, but one surefire way to get Apple to create one is by setting a precedent of law enforcement dictating the actions of phone manufacturers.
Stop muddying the issue; we need focus right now to keep this from happening.
The backdoor exists on new hardware, too; the firmware of the secure enclave can be updated in place by Apple without expunging key material.
Even if you close this one backdoor, others exist; the fact is you can only pick two of:
- Platform DRM.
- Implicit Trust of Vendor-Signed Software & Entitlements.
- Robust Security Ecosystem.
As long as Apple can push applications with arbitrary entitlements to devices, or encrypted OS updates unreadable by 3rd-parties, and no mechanisms exists to verify that it's only ever used responsibility, there are serious, dangerous backdoors.
On the other hand, law enforcement's "backdoor" requires judicial review in the light of day.
I'd take the DoJ's precedent in this case over Apple's any day of the week.
If the DoJ/FBI then tries to shove pre-emptive crypto backdoors from congress, that's a different battle, and one I'm happy to fight. However, siding with Apple now muddies the real issues at stake and may undermine our negotiating position when it comes to the general crypto debate.
The real issue is that I have a fucking right to have my device be secure against the government. It's funny how you can only make sense of your argument when you get down in the weeds and lose sight of the big picture.
I'm not OP, but the gist of his argument is you cannot be secure against the government if you cannot be secure against Apple first. If Apple continues to force people to trust it, the government will subvert this trust via legal means.
I find the argument quite congent. It's not getting lost in the weeeds, but generalizing the problem; instead of just fixing this bug, why not go ahead and fix the whole class of possible bugs?
> The backdoor exists on new hardware, too; the firmware of the secure enclave can be updated in place by Apple without expunging key material.
Can you point me to any material documentation of this fact? Because I've been following this whole thing very closely and there's not been one word of this being fact as far as I've seen.
"I have no clue where they got the idea that changing SPE firmware will destroy keys. SPE FW is just a signed blob on iOS System Part" - John Kelley (Embedded Security @ Apple)
The focus should be to prevent the government from denying phone manufacturers the right to build bulletproof encryption into their phones. We want bullet proof encryption because the internet is an open book and people are sick of their privacy being compromised.
Consider this future scenario:
FBI: "Dear Apple, can you help us unlock this iPhone like last time?"
Apple: "No can do. It uses our latest build which is bullet proof. No backdoors possible. We'll give you all the information we have related to the account holder though."
FBI: "Dang. Thanks for info."
And that's how it should be. That's what we should be fighting for. It seems to me by fighting this current issue for Apple's right not to bust open its exploit, we've jumped the gun. It's confusing matters, and now we have polls showing half of voters want Apple to "help fight terrorism rather than not help fight terrorism".
That's the media's influence/lack of understanding/lack of objectivity, and we don't have any control over that. You're right that we should be able to focus on the right of manufacturers to delivery encryption and privacy to customers and the right of customers to have that, but every time we make that point, Comey and his dregs repeat "it's only for one phone!" So we have to start from there.
This is not a decent way to behave for honest and competent technologist. You know that you are yourself muddying the issue. I understand why you do it.. but seriously.. doing it this way? What is wrong with you?
I am seriously concerned with the way people are treating this thing. The way I see it is a bit like "I really don't want the feds to be able decrypt data on phones - so I will falsify a bunch of arguments."
For others who started thinking about what other options would be available: http://www.wordfind.com/ends-with/id/, but at 169/yr at 101domains (didn't do much shopping) it is too expensive for a lark. I mean what could I do with val.id? https://domainr.com/val.id
Looks like "Okusi Associates" have done what you suggest and bought most words ending in "id" - it costs less than 3USD/year. Pity.
Edit: Nope, got my conversion wrong. One registrar lists a fee of 275000 INR and many multiples of that for "short" domain names. Very glad I looked up what the thousands seperator was in Indonesia before clicking buy.
How much control does the Indonesian government have over the registrars? I note that my favourite registrar, Gandi, can't do .id. Do you recommend any in particular?
And just plain criminals, with political motives or not - passing a law never stopped those. "It would be unfortunate if the data from your lost iPhone somehow got leaked..."
A note: the mouse position and acceleration seems to not be mapped correctly. It is often separated away from my local desktop mouse position. Maybe because the screen resolution is different?
I'm having the same issue. It makes it difficult to do anything, because I would need to move my actual mouse pointer past the edge of my monitor to get to any of the icons or start menu with the virtual mouse.
My first laptop was a 10 year old hand me down Windows 95 laptop (literally, as old as me) that I used just to play Space Cadet Pinball. I can't believe they took it out of Windows 98; what a great game haha
I like to think that's more due to the total thickness of the camera unit, not so much the lens. That, or the required distance between the lens and sensor. Either way, it's a bad design decision, one they're embarrassed of themselves (it's edited out on sideways images of the device on apple's website)
