X

Aggregator

Privacy Commissioner warns the ‘John Smiths’ of the world can acquire ‘digital doppelgangers’

The Register
3 months 1 week ago
Australian government staff mixed medical info for folk who share names and birthdays

Australia’s privacy commissioner has found that government agencies down under didn’t make enough of an effort to protect data describing “digital doppelgangers” – people who share a name and date of birth and whose government records sometimes contain data describing other people.…

Simon Sharwood

CodeSOD: No Limits on Repetition

The Daily WTF
3 months 1 week ago

Just because you get fired doesn't mean that your pull requests are automatically closed. Dallin was in the middle of reviewing a PR by Steve when the email came out announcing that Steve no longer worked at the company.

Let's take a look at that PR, and maybe we can see why.

$originalUndrawn = DecimalHelper::toDecimal($party->limit)->sub(DecimalHelper::toDecimal($party->drawn));

This is the original code, which represents operations on investments. An investment is represented by a note, and belongs to one or more partys. The amount that can be drawn is set by a limit, which can belong to either the party or the note.

What our developer was tasked with doing was allow a note to have no limit. This means changing all the places where the note's limit is checked. So this is what they submitted:

if ($note->limit == null) { $originalUndrawn = DecimalHelper::toDecimal($party->limit)->sub(DecimalHelper::toDecimal($party->drawn)); } else { $originalUndrawn = DecimalHelper::toDecimal($party->limit)->sub(DecimalHelper::toDecimal($party->drawn)); }

You'll note here that the note limit isn't part of calculating the party limits, so both branches do the same thing. And then there's the deeper question of "is a null really the best way to represent this?" especially given that elsewhere in the code they have an "unlimited" flag that disables limit checking.

Now, Steve wasn't let go only for their code- they were just a miserable co-worker who liked to pick fights in pull request comments. So the real highlight of Steve's dismissal was that Dallin got to have a meaningful discussion about the best way to make this change with the rest of the team, and Steve didn't have a chance to disrupt it.

[Advertisement] Keep the plebs out of prod. Restrict NuGet feed privileges with ProGet. Learn more.
Remy Porter

Will Cryptomining Facilities Change Into AI Data Centers?

Slashdot
3 months 1 week ago
To capitalize on the AI boom, many crypto miners "have begun to repurpose parts of their operations into data centers," reports Reuters, "given they already have most of the infrastructure" (including landing and "significant" power resources...) Toronto-based bitcoin miner Bitfarms has enlisted two consultants to explore how it can transform some of its facilities to meet the growing demand for artificial intelligence data centers, it said on Friday... Earlier this month, Riot Platforms launched a review of the potential AI and computing uses for parts of its facility in Navarro County, Texas.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

EditorDavid