Posts by sarusa

Will passkeys ever replace passwords? Can they?

Seems like a terrible implementaton.

Passkeys seem like someone was thinking really hard that 'passwords are kind of bad' (which is true) and 'what can we do to replace them?' and came up with something even worse after spending like a weekend thinking about it.

I keep getting pestered to use passkeys now, which is very annoying, but guess what? My desktop, very deliberately, has no biometric pass information. I have no cameras or fingerprint readers on it. And am I really going to haul my phone out separately every f@#$ing time I want to log into a website? No, I am not. Do I want to be completely locked out of my critical websites when my phone is lost? No, I do not.

So for me, who has relatively decent password hygiene (keepass with password + deceptively named keyfile), and keypass is moderately convenient for filling things in, this seems like several steps backwards in every way.

Weekends were a mistake, says Infosys co-founder Narayama Murthy

Re: To the grave?

Well, he was speaking in English to an English language TV station (though based in Mumbai) and the Global Leadership Summit is US/Canada. You can see him saying it here at about 2:00 https://x.com/CNBCTV18News/status/1857071977598517498 - 'To the grave' is just an idiom like 'to be doing the needful.'

Rust haters, unite! Fil-C aims to Make C Great Again

Re: A nice personal project, but...

> 16 *byte* atomics, no?

Yes, totally my bad and thanks for pointing that out (have an upvote). I knew it was 16-byte (or would not have complained, 16-bit atomics are fine), but apparently my fingers rebelled at actually typing '16-byte atomics'. Because who would ever?

A nice personal project, but...

Looking at all the caveats on this I don't see any reason you'd use this unless you had a C program that (deep breath) didn't need to co-exist with any other C libraries or ABIs, you didn't care if it ran 2-5x slower, you only needed it on linux, you don't mind that it's using garbage collection, you don't mind 16-bit atomics, you don't mind one guy who named it after himself having complete control over it, etc. etc. and you still didn't want to just rewrite it in something else.

I am sure those use cases exist for some people, but the lack of being able to use existing libraries really makes this a 'why use this instead of another language?' for me personally. Of course he claims some of these will be fixed eventually (and some won't, like the library thing), but we have working alternatives that work now. So this is just an interesting curiosity to me.

Broadcom makes VMware Workstation and Fusion free for everyone

But it's still Broadcom.

And Broadcom are predatory arseholes. There's no way in heck they would do this out any sort of goodness of their black evil corporate hearts. Maybe it's just so they don't have to bother with it any more, but likely there's some catch to this that will pop up eventually, like suddenly making new installs subscription only again.

Staff can't code? No prob. Singapore superapp's LLM whips up apps for them

Well sure?

I can easily crap out new LLM apps in minutes too by forking existing stuff and changing a line of code. How well do their new automatically shat out apps actually work?

... and well, maybe it doesn't even matter? Most of the people deploying them don't seem to care at all. Most LLMs just fountain piss randomly and punters happily guzzle it and the C-levels roll around in and lick up what comes out of them.

So I guess most of the 'AIs' their 'AI' is producing are the usual 'AI' crap, but that crap sells? Hooray?

WordPress forces user conf organizers to share social media credentials, arousing suspicions

Yes, this is hardly a surprise

> But Peterson told The Register she is aware of a "history of Automattic taking actions regarding organizers similar to this."

Yes, they have been customer hating arseholes for decades. When you do business with certain companies like Broadcom, Oracle, Automattic, Facebook, Twitter, anything the Angry Toddler went near, etc. you have to go in holding your nose and knowing they're out to screw you. Then while you're holding your nose your WordPress installation gets hacked again. :p

I do understand that you are upset that the devil you willingly got in bed with is now acting like a devil again and are speaking up about it because you hope it will change something, but no, Boris will repent and become an erudite, well educated scholar and gentleman before Automattic stop being thugs.

On re-reading, I apologize that the tone is so harsh, but I've seen so many 'Oh no, we crawled into the Pit of Endless Venomous Snakes and there were snakes! And they were venomous! And endless! Nobody could have known! One star!' stories lately. If you're holding a WordPress event, you know what they're like.

OpenAI loses another senior figure, disperses safety research team he led

Good news, Bad News

On one hand, corporations will care just as much about AGI safety as they did about LLM safety, which is not at all - or at least just doing little enough that they can pretend they care.

On the other hand, you're not getting AGI from LLM no matter how large you scale it, so we're safe from that till at least another fundamental breakthrough. Yay?

Huawei makes divorce from Android official with HarmonyOS NEXT launch

This is not to defend all the crappy apps on Google Play, especially the ones that are basically just a browser wrapper around the website, but the (Mainland) Chinese app market is just as scammy, if not scammier. Just consider how many of the worst apps on GPlay/iOS Store are (Mainland) Chinese.

This will not help with that. It has nothing to do with improving the quality of apps, just removing the (Mainland) Chinese government (which Huawei is a bulwark of, by Mainland Chinese law) from any dependence on anything gwailo.

(And I keep explicitly using 'Mainland' because I have nothing against Chinese people, just Xi's fascists)

Big browsers are about to throw a wrench in your ad-free paradise

Re: Very funny

I do get your thoughts on this, Liam, and thank you for taking the time to respond. Of course it would be nice if uBOL were also an option on Firefox and whatever Moz is unhappy about with it can be resolved. Since Moz is still happy to supply the full version (uBO) I don't think they have a fundamental problem with the very fact that it blocks ads very well (including on YouTube) like Google does, so there's nothing conceptually worse about uBOL than uBO. Then it's just down to whether it's worth trying to make Moz's extension checker 'AI' happy.

Very funny

So Mozilla flagged the crippled for Google version as being too insecure? That... makes sense to me. Just use the full non-crippled version.

Yes I know your premise was 'wanting to run the exact same thing on both browsers', but that's a bad premise that gives Google exactly what it wanted with this particular bit of Be Evil.

Gary Marcus proposes generative AI boycott to push for regulation, tame Silicon Valley

Nice thought but will never happen

Like everything else, the people who need to do it most are the people least likely to do it. The arseholes who'd abuse generative AI in the first place are the least likely to give a fig about the ethics of it, ever.

PC shipments stuck in neutral despite AI buzz

'AI Buzz'

Gee, and here I am holding off on buying new machines till this pervasive integrated AI shite goes away. Okay, you can neuter the worst of it with registry and gpedit fixes, but the last thing I want is a laptop with an 'AI' button on the keyboard. Even though you can remap it, it would be quite the badge of shame - imagine showing up at a conference with your widdle AI waptop, awwwww. And then being a complete pariah because nobody wants to be near anything running Recall - like being a glasshole.

LinkedIn: If our AI gets something wrong, that's your problem

On the one hand...

On one hand, anyone who uses AI generated crap should be held responsible for reposting that shite without thoroughly checking it for accuracy first. I have no problem with that.

On the other hand, LinkedIn have always been complete scumbags. I remember when their clever thing was stealing all your contacts then sending them email looking like it came from you to get them to sign up. That worked well enough that they got bought by Microsoft, so being complete wankers was a business success (as usual, like Facebook). And now they're training AI on everything you do without opt in. So if they're actively giving people fake crap they know is fake crap as gospel just to boost profits maybe they should share in the blame? A car with a EULA of 'Warning, may randomly catch on fire and explode, we've told you so now we can't be held repsonsible' would not shield you from all responsibility for it. I know, that's crazy talk.

Two years after entering the graphics card game, Intel has nothing to show for it

Their graphics are worse than my 8 year old Nvidia

I just bought a new laptop to replace my 8 years old laptop - it's for productivity, not games, so I didn't really pay attention to the graphics card, just all the other specs (64 GB RAM!). And of course the CPU is much, much faster. Turns out it has Intel Arc graphics.

So just out of curiosity I put some games on it, and... it actually runs them worse than the NVidia mobile card in the 8 year old laptop (it had a discrete mobile card). CPU bound games are of course much faster now, but anything that's fill/poly constrained is slower than on the old laptop!

I'm still quite happy with this for what I bought it for, but if you actually cared about graphics I would never recommend the Intel graphics to anyone.

Some US Kaspersky customers find their security software replaced by 'UltraAV'

Just What You Deserve at this point

Seriously, if you're still using Kaspersky, you would wake up one day and find your PCs are running 'Pooty Poot's SchlongV - Totally Legit For Sure AV, DA' and you would have no basis for complaint.

And of course they're wildly overcharging you for this spyware when even Windows Defender would work better.

Huawei to dump Windows for PCs in favor of its own HarmonyOS

'its own'

Up till now HarmonyOS has been Android/Linux with (extensive) crap on top, though they still claimed it was 'their own' totally Chinese homegrown OS all along.

Now they're 'replacing' Linux and Android with 'their own' microkernel wink wink wink. So like the Chinese space program it will totally not be mostly 'borrowed' tech from NASA/ESA and this will totally not be Linux/Android with the serial numbers filed off.

The empire of C++ strikes back with Safe C++ blueprint

Those millions of projects are going to be revealed as memory safety disasters needing rework. Which will, yes, be less work than writing them from scratch in Rust, but good luck convincing corporate overlords it even needs to be done. 'We haven't gotten any real complaints and only about six CVEs on that codebase, 8 severity at the most! Why bother?'

Of course, yes, it's better than nothing or (for most C++ programmers) porting to Rust, but immediate impact will be small other than letting people wave it at people who suggest porting to Rust.

Google says replacing C/C++ in firmware with Rust is easy

Rust actually fulfills its promises, which are very limited compared to what Java promised. Rust is a safer C/C++ that runs just as fast and is just as compact. Which are the only reasons we were using C/C++ any more. Because C is pretty unsafe, and C++ is a f#$ing syntax abomination (and I say someone who's made hundreds of thousands of rupees coding it). Rust's big limitation is that every platform has at least C support, and that's not the case for Rust. And if I'm writing a new GUI app on Windows, I would still go to C# (with minimal pcode calls into C++ where necessary), GUI stuff is still UGH. If I'm writing a quick command line utility, I'm still doing Python. But if Rust replaced C/C++ for everything new where I would still write C/C++, it would be a total win.

Java's promises were 1) 'write once run everywhere', which was immediately a lie because no implementations or libraries were identical. 2) Great performance even though it's a VM! Well, this was actually possible, I've done it, but in practice most Java people just crapped out stuff without understanding things like RAM, disk access, memory management, etc, and most Java stuff is noticeably more sloggy and memory piggy than C/C++. The one thing Java absolutely succeeded in being was something they never really trumpeted: it's the new COBOL. It's completely over-verbose, and so tedious to do things in that it's perfect for having legions of incompetent corporate coders working on the same codebase without pooping on each others' feet too much.

Re: Wanna give some examples?

No, I mean you just Donald Trumped (or Elmoed) both comments. Rust is very demonstrably safer than C/C++ while just as fast and giving you the same code size. There is no downside to it other than having to learn Rust, some toolchain issues in some embedded environments, and of course shaking your cane at everyone on your lawn. So you just ominously doomed about vague portents of elder gods lurking behind this degenerate upstart language, and predicted rogue conspiracies would steal the election from you, and then when someone asked for examples you clutched your pearls and collapsed in a heap crying that you'd just been heinously molested. So, I'm guessing you've spent your entire career doing C++ and now you feel threatened?

And I say this as someone who's spent my life doing asm (multiple flavors), BASIC (ditto), C, Pascal, C++, Java (ugh), C#, Python, and now, yes, partly Rust.

Brit teachers are getting AI sidekicks to help with marking and lesson plans

This should be great for history

I look forward to the lessons about the Great Marmot Invasion of 1432 and glorious Queen Fuhgwahd, the first queen of Britain, who played such a crucial role in getting Wales to the Moon first and devolving Narnia's government.

Benign bug in iOS and iPadOS crashes gizmos with just four characters

Aaaaand another parsing error

It's amazing (but not amazing) how many times over the decades parsing errors are crashers. Nobody writing parsers ever seems to think of the worst case scenarios, and then of course someone finds it.

Especially when the parser starts out simple, then a thousand increasingly complex use cases are stacked on top of it. I'm guessing whatever's looking for "[x]" and [y]:[z] are two separate bits of logic in the parser, both added much later, and the "" parsing sets something the : parsing doesn't expect and it goes right off the end of the string.

This is where fuzz testing helps a lot.

Open source AI helped China catch up to the world, researchers reckon

Seems reasonable?

Mainland Chinese are amazing engineers, can improve almost anything they get their hands on. They are also absolutely terrible at basic science, because that needs creativity which implies being too clever by half, which is politically problematic. Their moon landers and oribiters are the best of stolen NASA and ESA tech. And in this case, their AI is stolen tech with incremental improvements. Which they are absolutely fantastic at.

But it's really not an open source problem. If it weren't open source they'd steal it anyhow, that's what they're the very best at, and have been for 50+ years. That has literally been their government policy.

Users rage as Microsoft announces retirement of Office 365 connectors within Teams

I mean, you were using Teams

You are using the shittiest 'death to productivity' software out there because it's 'free'. They just made your shit a little shittier so they could sell you some more shit (PowerAutomate). Don't complain when you keep a rabid weasel in your bedroom and it bites you.

Selfie-based authentication raises eyebrows among infosec experts

'could be'

> Or ML could be making it safe

And NFTs COULD BE something offered by people other than thieves and hucksters. I'll just be waiting over here...

Cloudflare debuts one-click nuke of web-scraping AI

robots.txt

robots.txt is as useful as 'do not track' flags. They only work for the people you're not worried about. It assumes the people looking at it have any ethical concerns at all, and nobody involved in LMM 'AI' does. The whole model is based on theft, why would they honor your robots.txt?

Indonesian government didn't have backups of ransomwared data, because DR was only an option

Of course you know what happens next...

I think most Reg readers know what happens next when you mandate everything be backed up.

Three years down the road, next big failure: They go to restore backups, and, oops! They don't work because nobody ever tested recovering them. 'You only told us to make backups, and we did!'

I will bet one million rupiah (IDR) on this.

Apple crippled watchOS to corner heart-tracking market, doctors say

So basically...

'Apple changed their stuff and that killed our product.' Well, that happens all the time, across the industry.

I don't know if they're right about the new stuff being worse, hard to say when they're all in the pocket of the company filing the suit. Even if they're right (could be!), Apple has no requirement to give them exactly what they want to make their product work. Companies make their products crappier all the time - just look at Google Search and Windows 11. And there are plenty of heart monitoring devices out there (including their own), so the monopoly thing doesn't really fly.

Polyfill.io owner punches back at 'malicious defamation' amid domain shutdown

'$50M in Funding'

You're going... to build... a Content Delivery Network... that surpasses CloudFlare... with $50M in funding? Even with the USD to yuan conversion rate you're not even going to beat Mega with that little cash.

Of course the whole thing is a lie, like everything else these guys are saying, but you could at least make even lies plausible.

And that's 3 recalls for Tesla Cybertruck in as many months

Elmo Kwalitee

I am amused that there is finally a car out there with even worse build quality than the Tesla Model 3. ... Aaaaand, it's also a Tesla, you kept the prize!

VMware by Broadcom makes its stack easier to live with, as promised

What a deal!

And it will only cause your yearly license fees to go up 2000%! Such a bargain!

Let's take a look at Oracle's love and hate relationship with open source software

'love and hate'

I'd say less 'love and hate' and more 'abusive wife beater who wonders why his slag doesn't have his pint ready yet so he clocks her a few times to show her who's head of household, then next morning vaguely feels he might have done something wrong but him being wrong is just not possible, so he does it again. And maybe next week he splashes his flash cash (which he's taken from the previous woman) around and brings home another tart, rinse and repeat'. But yes, 'love and hate' is certainly shorter.

Wells Fargo fires employees accused of faking keyboard activity to pretend to work

If you were a manager, your top concern would be how to pretend to upper management that you were actually contributing anything useful!

Payoff from AI projects is 'dismal', biz leaders complain

Well what a shock

You invested millions or billions without a single coherent business plan, or often without a business case at all.

You had no frickin' plan or reason or rhyme for any of it other than 'oh everyone says we need AI'.

So of course you are losing your shirt on it.

The only people who make money on LLMs are: 1) The people providing the subscriptions/tech (OpenAI is obviously making out like a bandit), 2) SEO spammers and other generators of 'content', 3) people who don't have to pay for artists any more and can now crap out a new terrible porn game with AI art to put on Steam every week. 4) I'm sure I'm forgetting some other category, but it does not include J Random Corporation who just bought into the hype train.

California upgrade company aims militarized 'Tactical' Cybertruck at police forces

Bwahaha. Please do!

Yes, if I ever have to flee from the bizzies I will pray they are in Sports Futility Vehicles. As you said, there are plenty of hills around here that a Subaru family estate car will happily climb and a Wankpanzer can't. Or I can run through a shallow stream, the Subaru will have no problem, the Deplorean will short out.

I mean, I have no desire to actually be a criminal or flee from the police, but if you hand me this juicy scenario I just can't help but imagine.

Windows 11 tries to escape Windows 10's shadow with AI muscle

Windows '11'

Normally such a giant change in the way Windows works would be accompanied by trumpets and renumbering it to 12. But having seen how absolutely terrible the uptake on 11 has been compared to 10 (and half the people who deliberately upgraded to 11 at the outset, when it really was not bad, are sorely regretting it right now as they have been making it worse every single month) they pretty obviously realized nobody who had a choice would actually upgrade to this steaming turd if they made it a 'new' product - except, you know, the Elmos of the world. There are always some.

Because there is no upside for the user here. The only one who benefits from making the whole OS Clippy is MS, who at some point gets to start slurping up all your training data for unprecedented user experience tracking and constantly nudge you towards using Edge, Office, OneDrive, etc., and now they've got a giant foothold because you just let them do it all. In return, the user gets everything s/he's ever done instantly stolen when they get any data slurping malware because * MS IS STORING ALL YOUR OCR-ED SCREENSHOT TEXT (from the screenshots they are taking of your desktop every 5 seconds) IN PLAIN TEXT IN SQLITE FOR ANYONE TO LOOK AT *. Sorry for all the caps, but they really encapsulates my feelings when I found that out. This how shoddy the whole damn thing is. About what you'd expect from 'AI'.

Google finally addresses those bizarre AI search results

Sure, polish that turd

This is the clearest example of Turd Polishing I've seen this month. Congratulations, Google Search is now not quite as feculent and terrible as it was this month, it has gone back to being as feculent and terrible as it was last month. Now instead of giving you completely wrong AI generated answers up front top and center, Google will go back to deliberately giving you AI generated search spam as your top results (because they get more ad placements when you have to click through wrong results). Wow, what an improvement! Consider your worms replaced with corn.

Well, I guess if you're still using Google Search you deserve all the abuse you get, ditto Google Chrome (where ad-blocker blocking is kicking in now too).

Or you could be a sane person and leave your domestic violence situation, though I know that's not much of an option where your work forces you to use them.

IT worker sued over ‘vengeful’ cyber harassment of policeman who issued a jaywalking ticket

Typical Techbro

Are we sure this guy isn't related to Elmo?

Google’s in-house docs about search ranking leak online, sparking SEO frenzy

Who would have thought!?1

I don't think it should surprise anyone that Google lies their ass off about how their search works.

Mostly just to keep the spammers guessing, but especially the last couple years with it all going to shite and Google embracing the spammers as being more ads to serve up.

By 2030, software developers will be using AI to cut their workload 'in half'

Too imprecise

'Software developers' is far too sloppy and imprecise. It's like 'gamers', which encompases people just happily doing hidden object games, rabid animals doing PvP MOBA, people running around solving problems in The Witness or Baba is You, people RAIDing in MMOs, and people building CPUs in redstone.

On the 'software development' side, I'm sure if you're a code pig (a giant corporation programmer stuck in a cubicle/pigpen mindlessly pounding on a very limited task) LLMs will help a lot, because you're not doing much thinking to start with. Might as well just steal the code of everyone else who's done this before, which the LLM has already eaten, digested, and shat out. Lots of room for time saving here.

If you're an actual engineer, LLMs can't help with any of the actual engineering jobs, because those are tradeoffs between the requirements, the desireables, and the consequences and resource tradeoffs of each approach. An LLM has no f@#$ing idea at all about any of that. It will happily give you O(N^3) code which ignores the requirements, because hey, it compiles. Though based on my recent playing around with Llama code helpers, even 'it compiles' or 'it does the right thing' isn't guaranteed.

Basically, no LLM is 'thinking' at all. It is stochastically regurgitating all the things it has seen before. So the more your job involves actual thinking, and the less it involves going on StackExchange and copypasta-ing code snipped and randomly smacking them till they compile, the less threatened you are. And the less LLMs can help you. Like I said, I've been playing with this, and the best it can do for me is a line or two of auto-completion (and it's wrong at least half the time).

China creates LLM trained to discuss Xi Jinping's philosophies

Yeah, this is too dangerous for them.

There's no way they're going to let this loose for everyone (even just in China) to poke at. They're going to need censors scrubbing the output at all times lest the Xi-bot say anything (gasp) non-Xi Jinping Thought approved. And all LLMs so far are very easy to jailbreak - there's no reason why China's would be any better, especially with most of it being 'acquired' technology. So anyone who knows what they're doing with an LLM could make Xi-bot say the funniest, most treasonous things (and the bar is very very low for treason).

Probably their best use for it is to auto-generate his usual rambling, vacuous, pronouncements on every subject under the sun for publishing, saving the real Xi a lot of work. Though he obviously loves to pontificate, so you'd have to strike a safe balance between freeing up his time and taking away his joy of preaching.

I can see other cases where something similar could work better, though. A Trump-bot would likely be more coherent than the real thing, would lie - okay, about the same amount. But would definitely be much less malicious, and at least wouldn't reek of filled diapers. And a Johnson-bot would be pretty much indistinguishable from the real thing for speaking, at least? And wouldn't force your liquor cabinet open and guzzle all the good plonk.

Google takes shots at Microsoft for shoddy security record with enterprise apps

Re: Pot, Kettle

I started (as you can tell from my title) with that, then realized 'You know, I rather *like* pots and kettles' so didn't want to compare them to the feculent arseplosion that is Google or MS in the 2020s.

Pot, Kettle

The yellow turd calling the brown turd a turd. Yes, it's true, but that doesn't make we want to go with the yellow turd because it's turdier.

Cheyenne supercomputer sells at auction for just $480K

$480K

You're going to spend more than that on electricity, maybe the first month!

Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it as a tax write-off

On the way down

This was after the nGage, and after Nokia fought hard against doing anything touch screen because that's a fad (there was the 7710, but that was meh, and they obviously believed much more in things like the N95), so yeah, they were on the way down. And then add Microsoft desperately trying to claw back into smartphones and you've got a 'you got your poop in my puke!' 'no, you got your puke in my poop!' situation.

(There are Nokia branded Android smartphones since, but very meh).

Re: Nokia menus

On my Android and iOS phones, replying to a text is one click away. But for a non-touch screen feature phone I guess they had it about as friction free as it could be.

Elon Musk's latest brainfart is to turn Tesla cars into AWS on wheels

Re: Theft

It's not theft because you don't actually own your Tesla, you're just leasing it! from Tesla who can disable it any time!

(This is more than half tongue in cheek, but yet is true - as far as Elmo is concerned it's still his car, and he can use it how he wants).

Python, Flutter teams latest on the Google chopping block

Well, makes sense

They can deliberately ruin their search results (to make you click through more ads) faster with outsourcing.

Flaws in Chinese keyboard apps leave 750 million users open to snooping, researchers claim

'flaws'

Okay, yeah, sure, that is a totally accidental 'flaw'.

AI spam is winning the battle against search engine quality

Yeah, Google is absolutely doing this on purpose

I've said this for years and never had any actual proof, but Ed's gone through Google emails from a lawsuit and yes... Starting 2019, Google has been purposely degrading their search results to make you click through more bad results so they can show you more ads.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/