zimmie

HBCan said:

Bayer... as in Bayer filter.  An RGB pattern filter over the camera's sensor.  One color filter per pixel... Red, Green, or Blue.  The image colour data is captured and interpolated for the neighbouring pixels to produce a full colour image.  Virtually all commercial colour sensors employ a Bayer filter solution otherwise you would require three sensors to be used... one per colour.  Not easily implemented in such compact environments as a beam splitting prism would be required too.  Creator of the Bayer filter.... Bryce Bayer... who worked with Eastman Kodak.  Died in 2012 I believe. 

Sure, but the Bayer pattern is naturally a tiled series of squares with two green, one red, one blue photosite per four pixels. Lines up nicely with Pentile display subpixel arrangements. So what in the world is "Quad Bayer"?

Did a little research, and it turns out it's a Sony variant of the normal Bayer pattern. They turn each photosite into four separate, smaller photosites, then average their values as a way of reducing amplification noise. Thus, the "50 megapixels" is a lie. It has 50 million photosites, but they operate in clusters of four, producing one output pixel value which is still only one channel. It's the equivalent of a 12.5 megapixel sensor.

Still no idea what Octa PD is supposed to be.

d.j. adequate said:

“ 50-MP Octa PD Quad Bayer wide camera”

That sure is a lens with a lot of words. I wish I knew what they meant. 

Well, I know PD stands for Pumpe Düse, and Octa tells me there are eight of them. Quad, so four cylinders, which means two unit injectors per cylinder. Or maybe it's four per cylinder, two cylinders. Not sure.

Never heard of the Bayer cycle before, though. Also not entirely clear on why you would want direct-injection diesel in a camera.

(I'm joking, in case that wasn't abundantly clear. I, too, would like some kind of description of what all of these terms mean in the context of cameras.)

M1 Pro and M1 Max? Called the names, though I was wrong on the memory configuration. I expected the Pro to offer off-package (but still soldered to the logic board) RAM.

I do wish either was available in a Mac mini. I don't need a laptop now, but could use a beefier desktop.

elijahg said:

"Confusion" was not the issue. Apple of course would say it is because to do otherwise would be an admission that the feature was toxic and entirely contradictory to their public privacy stance. Privacy organisations and governments weren't "confused", they could foresee the potential privacy consequences. Apple knows full well the pushback was due to their public "what's happens on your phone stays on your phone" stance, the polar opposite to scanning phones for CSAM - and the potential for further encroachment on privacy.

Confusion absolutely is the issue. Today, Apple employees have the technical capability to view images you upload to iCloud. With the CSAM scanning, they would no longer have the technical capability to do so. That would be a substantial improvement to the current situation.

beowulfschmidt said:

AppleInsider said:

The EU's plan goes further in that it also looks for organized crime and terrorist activity.

I hate to be the one to say "I told you so", but I bloody well told you so.

When the capability exists, overreaching governments will exploit it.

Spotlight literally exists to index all content on the phone. That capability has existed for over a decade. Why haven't we seen any governmental attempt to force reporting if that index shows any document or message containing "bomb" and "president" or "minister", for example?



I still think they should carve iCloud photo sync off into a separate tool, and make it clear the CSAM scanning is only part of that tool. If you want no CSAM scanning on your device, just delete the ability to sync photos to iCloud. Done. Solves everybody's complaints.

dewme said:

zimmie said:

dewme said:

The concept behind Facebook is glorious if all people were nice. But all people aren’t nice. Some people are evil. Facebook has found a way to monetize evil and reap incalculable financial rewards from doing so. But as many others have said, if Facebook wasn’t doing it someone else would. The social media genie can never be put back in the bottle.

Is it, though? The concept behind Facebook was to rate female Harvard students' hotness.

dewme said:

GeorgeBMac said:

22july2013 said:

AppleUfmyI said:

For six hours we were able to have meaningful in person conversations.   Maybe we need to start a GoFundMe for the poor IT guy that blew it today?  It was probably his last day.  

I think that IT guy will never make that mistake again, so he would be a great employee now.

The one forbidden word for surgeons and network engineers is:   "Ooops!"

I can only imagine the "conversations" going on today between FaceBook engineers, managers, etc...

The blame game will have reached new, unheard of levels by now....

It does seen odd that they would not employ some sort of checkpointing scheme on their configuration database to allow them to roll back to the last known good state. This is a very common technique for high availability systems and even some individual products, e.g., take a snapshot of the configuration settings before performing a software or firmware update. While I have zero love for Facebook, I'm sure that its stakeholders don't appreciate the financial losses incurred during the protracted downtime.

They do have the ability to undo changes ... at the level of the management platform. When the management platform can no longer reach the device to manage it, it needs manual intervention to restore that communication. Then the configuration can be restored to what it was before the change. They also lost external access to the management platform, but that's simple enough to fix (if somebody doesn't confirm the change, roll it back automatically). The access from the management to the managed devices is more difficult.

Good information. That makes sense. So they basically severed the primary communication link between the management platform and the managed devices. So what they also needed was a remote out-of-band communication channel, or what they probably ended up doing, a bunch of engineers with laptops and a bunch of physical security keys to bypass the badge readers protecting the servers. Interesting cascading failure mode.

That's just it. They had an out-of-band channel to connect to the devices and fix them ... but that channel became unreachable when all the DNS servers took themselves offline. They depended too much on systems that "can't ever all go down at once", only to be caught flat-footed when they all went down at once.