OK, first off, you have to read this amazing judgement about whether Walker's Sensations Poppadoms count as a potato-based snack for VAT purposes. Like most judgements, it is written in fairly plain and accessible language. The arguments are easy to follow and it even manages to throw in a little humour. But if you read closely, you'll see there are a few instances where an errant question-mark pops up: From context, it is pretty clear the word should be "flour" but is rendered as "?our" - …
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A group of authors are suing various vendors of Large Language Model AIs. The authors claim that the AIs are trained on material which infringes their copyright. Is that likely? Well, let's take a quick look at the evidence presented. First up, Meta's LLaMA Paper. It describes how the LLM was trained: We include two book corpora in our training dataset: the Gutenberg Project, which contains books that are in the public domain, and the Books3 section of ThePile (Gao et al., 2020) OK,…
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How will law, regulation and ethics govern a future of fast-changing technologies? Focuses on the practical difficulties of applying law, policy and ethical structures to emergent technologies both now and in the future. Covers crucial current issues such as big data ethics, ubiquitous surveillance and the Internet of Things, and disruptive technologies such as autonomous vehicles, DIY genetics and robot agents. Asks where law might go next and how to regulate new-phase technology such …
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Back when I worked for an ISP, my employer paid for me to have broadband. I was expected to work from home a few days a month and they needed their workers to have high-bandwidth connectivity. Because it was a business expense, we all received BIG SCARY WARNINGS that the broadband was only to be used for work. Absolutely no domestic use allowed. *nudge nudge wink wink* Of course, everyone ignored that directive and used it for web-surfing after-hours. Was that theft? Our employer paid the…
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A former advisor to the Prime Minister was recently convicted on charges of downloading indecent images of underage girls. I don't want to go into detail about whether or not his punishment is adequate, but I would like to talk about this curious remark made by the Judge during his sentencing: beginning today and lasting for two years, you are prohibited from using any device capable of accessing the internet unless it has the capacity to retain and display the history of internet use and you …
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Earlier this week I appeared on BBC Radio 4's "You And Yours" to talk about the scourge of SMS Spam. You can listen to it on their website - or, if it has expired, I've grabbed an audio clip for your listening pleasure. 🔊 💾 Download this audio file. I've asked the Direct Marketing Associate to create a "Do Not Text" list - so that people can opt-out of spam SMS. They already operate the Mail Preference Service and the Telephone Preference Service for opting out of junk mail and ca…
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The UK has the notion of a "strict liability" law. If you are caught with a picture of child abuse - you're guilty of a crime. It doesn't matter if it was sent to you unsolicited, or misaddressed. Possession is the crime and there are no mitigating circumstances. On that cheery note, let's consider Twitter's new image embedding functionality. If your friends post a photo onto Twitter, you will see it in your timeline automatically. No need to click on anything. (As an aside, that's a…
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For reasons best known to themselves, certain sections of the entertainment industries seem to believe that bolting the stable door shutting down The Pirate Bay will stop all piracy. It's as though they think that people won't be able to use a proxy, circumvent the Cleanfeed block, or simply use a search engine to find another torrent site. Build Your Own Pirate Bay? Proxying is a very simple concept. Alice is forbidden from speaking to Bob. Alice can speak to Eve. Eve can…
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As Twitter now have a UK office, I thought I would see what data they hold about me. Thanks to the UK's Data Protection act, it's really simple to request the information. I wasn't expecting a whole CD's worth of information - like Facebook provides users - but what I did get surprised me. Twitter UK has no control or responsibility over the user information in the Twitter service and cannot respond to these sorts of requests. So, I was rather surprised to see Privacy International…
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UPDATE! I have reached a settlement with Sky. Update: 16 March, 2011. They have finally paid up! tl;dr Sky News stole my copyrighted work and distributed it without credit or payment. I asked them to pay £1,500. They refused. Full Story During the recent O2 brouhaha I recorded a video showing how the issue could affect people. I deliberately gave it the standard YouTube licence rather than the Creative Commons licence. Later that evening, I was alerted to the fact that Sky News had …
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A few months ago I was contacted by dodgy timeshare merchants Club Lacosta. Being slightly disturbed by their weasely words and reputation for dishonesty, I recorded the call. Listen to the call on iPadio. The iPadio service died several years ago. There are no backups. I'll admit, it's not the most cutting edge piece of investigative journalism. To create the recording, I placed the rep on hold, dialed iPadio, then conferenced the two calls together. Hey presto - the call was recorded. O…
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