Posts by Bebu

Twilio reminds users that Authy Desktop apps die in March – not in August

Wondered about this.

《SMS / email delivery of a TOTP.》

I cannot see the real point of this as the number could be any random 6 digit number with a use by date ie the shared secret isn't actually shared. The 2F is really the possession of your phone or control of your email account.

TOTP is very roughly a hash of a random seed and the curent time - where the random seed is the roughly preshared key.

For very odd reasons I needed a text client to produce these tokens which given the linux oath toolkit libraries was a 20 line C program featuring the single library call:

oath_totp_generate (secret, secret_length, now, time_step_size, start_offset, digits, output_otp)

If you can get the secret out of authy generating the token is pretty simple - clients often export them as a URI possibly as a QR code eg

otpauth://totp/Okta%3A?secret=VBDASQOY366QSYRY&algorithm=SHA1&digits=6&period=30

The converting base32 encoded secret to an unsigned byte array is the only clever bit. ;)

Properly securing these totp secrets on your device/workstation is the really hard part.

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

Suggestion for title for systemd haters' tome

《Thinking about it, would there be a market for 1400 page tome about systemd? Any suggestions for a title?》

And in the Darkness Bind Them

With the cover encircling the title with the full verse in the original Tengwar.

For me the main thing that Unix originally did differently was to provide mechanisms for the separation of policy from implementation to some extent. I recall at the time I was pleasantly surprised that you could actually write your own cli (shell) with Unix which wasn't really a thing with the DEC PDP10 or PDP11 operating systems (or later VMS either I think.)

The relatively clean and abstract Unix system call interface was refreshing after learning assembly on a PDP10 where the system service interfaces seemed fairly ad hoc and inconsistent.

I always thought of the "everything is a file" abstraction was more every "thing" (object in everyday sense) in the kernel was represented or named in the same name space as traditional files (which themselves are fairly deep abstractions of often quite horrid block device hardware eg PC floppy.)

A comment mentioned Unix STREAMS which appeared in System V (and SunOS) I think was implemented by DMR but I think I read he later wrote that the scheduling between connected stream modules was a real problem presumably with single threaded kernels. I imagine implementing streams in a multithreaded kernel would be simpler.

NASA extinguishes experiment about setting things on fire in space

In microgravity can you drop onto?

《drops his unextinguished ciggie onto his bedside stash of old copies of Razzle》

I imagine the "ciggie" would have floated off on the slightest air current and only by remote accident land on his razzles*.

The bevvies if carbonated (beer) don't quite work out the same in zero G either. :(

When I think about the role of rising hot air (draught or convection?) in terrestrial fires, its not particularly clear to me how a fire in zero G would behave - I cannot see how hot gaseous combustion products and heated air can 'rise.' Just expands around the combustion site and removed by any external air flow?

Fire fighting would probably differ too. If the crew had ready access to a personal air supply then flooding a burning compartment with nitrogen I imagine could be effective.

I suppose the last mission to the ISS could run the real thing just as they leave.

* had to look it up a UK pecularity it seems Razzle

Cutting kids off from the dark web – the solution can only ever be social

Re: The law is not everything

《It's worth noting that around 1/3 of ALL sex offenders are under 18》

That is potentially a larger concern than a isolated homicide or two. The James Bulger tragedy would pre-date any influence of the dark web.

The data (from the UK) that might be pertinent: has this proportion changed in the last 30 years? and as a proportion of the age cohort? ie are 16 year old committing more offences? (M/F ratios?) How much of any increase is due to legislative capture and enforcement? ie how many the prosecutions were for acts that weren't offences 20 years ago or if they were they weren't then actively prosecuted. Age profiles would be useful to determine the most serious offences are being committed by increasingly younger offenders?

Answers to these types of questions in cases of (non-lethal) violence which obviously overlaps the previous, might give a clearer insight as to what the root causes might be (and excludes others.)

As another post suggested aggression is possibly part of adolescent (male?) development in which case the nannification of contact sports might have blocked an avenue of release or sublimation. When playing (field) hockey as a youth you learnt very quickly not to piss off your opponents. :) From what I have seen of ice hockey* its really is a form of armed combat. :)

I have often stated that civility is what men have learnt in order to avoid the otherwise inevitable spilt blood and broken bones. I understand women between themselves do things differently and often inflicting much greater injury.

The loss of civility in public life everywhere is infecting all strata of our communities and increasing levels of often mindlessly senseless violence must be anticipated.

*Mostly from the CA tv series Letterkenny

Cutting-edge robot space surgeon makes first incision in Zero-G

Zero G

I would be interested in the changes in surgical technique required in microgravity environments - management of liquids would likely be different - no gravity feed for IV fluids I imagine, and you cannot "drop" things on to a site (without thought gravity is often used as an invisible third hand on Earh - imagine brick-laying in space :) I don't think liquids pool so irrigation is likeky to be tricky.

The interaction of general anaesthesia (and anaesthetics used) with the human body's adaptation to (prolonged) microgravity might add another dimension of "interesting" (as in tnteresting times.)

Dave's not here, man. But this mind-blowingly huge server just, like, arrived

Re: Laundering

《"Nubbing up" - The practice of recovery/recycle of ashtrays for (re)smokeable materials.》

Brought to mind a picture of "Callan*"'s offsider "Lonely" although I don't recall his smoking. ;)

*UK TV series '70s.

Nginx web server forked as Freenginx to escape corporate overlords

Re: Deal

《Almost. They bought the name and rights to maintain something someone else could download for free and then fork. But the forkers have to vary the name.》

I too was wondering what F5 paid for.

Nginx is weird enough to pronounce of first sight - I thought the ng was ñ and ñingx rhymed with sphinx or jinx - any fork might have gone for EngineX which is its actual pronounciation (Musk has probably already Xpropriated it. :) Djinn[i]X might fly too.

Killing trees with lasers isn’t cool, says Epson. So why are inkjets any better?

Re: Almost paperless..

《I wish e-ink devices A4 size were a bit cheaper. Hopefully e-paper devices will become ubiquitous. (And not have ridiculous walled garden/monthly subscription/planned obsolescence BS that paper doesn't have!)》

My very thought.

A simple lightweight A4 (or for the Left Ponders US Letter or Quarto) mono e-Ink device that stores and displays PDF etc or even acts as a usb or (cups) network postscript/PCL printer could replace a lot of my use of paper.

The Sony digital paper DPT devices are the basic idea but expensive. The Boox 13" (330mm) android e-paper tablets are just as expensive and I hate to think what the colour e-paper devices will cost.

If the actual display components become cheap enough someone will tack on a Raspberry Pi to make a crowd funded "virtual" printer. :)

I am not sure printers are doomed as I was surprised by a 20-something telling the group that they had just purchased a new 24 pin dot matrix printer (I don't recall the brand possibly OKI.) I remarked that it would be difficult to buy the tractor feed A4 fanfold paper but apparently not. Go figure. I suppose it will have pride of place next to the vinyl LP scratch-o-matic turntable. :)

Having bound paper copies of your site's DRP is probably great insurance against - oops the DRP is on the systems we are recovering. Although I have seen the cheaper, older Kobo 6" (150mm) ereaders also used.

A lot of technical writing presupposes electronic only copy which removes the discipline the linear sequential presentation that paper imposes. I think this is the main reason paper books seem better than electronic ones. When I have both I don't really notice the difference (on a decent device). W.Rich Stevens' classic texts are a good example.

X accused of taking money from terrorists by selling checkmarks to US enemies

POV

《treating many of the individuals mentioned as freedom fighters.》

The difference between terrorist and freedom fighter is often a case of from what side you looking as both have been responsible for unspeakable atrocities.

Its the commerce that is the problem here. I understand the blue tick is supposed to indicate that X has verified the account is held/controlled by the party it represents itself to be. I don't see any problem with Hezbollah etc having such an indication (a green tick, or crossed scimitars etc) subject to it being lawful for it to have a presence at all. If you had inclination to read their material at least you would know its from the beast's mouth as it were.

I would imagine restrictions, if any, on the content would apply uniformly to all account classes eg the verified account of the Ruritanian Union of Fascists would equally be restricted in their hateful content that they could publish as some far right unverified nutter from Wombledon.

Not that I believe Musk's crew verify anything as I suspect X is just taking the money and printing off another blue tick. (That a "tick" is also a disease carrying, blood sucking parasite is particularly apropos. :)

In this case the cash is piddling and why be so precious about banning these accounts if that is the intent? I wouldn't have thought US first amendment protections would apply to non resident, non US citizen, non natural persons.

Not that I have ever had any truck with any social media. If uncle Bulgaria and Rupert Hentzau want to slug it out on X no skin off my nose.

Damn Small Linux returns after a 12-year gap

Re: Memory lane

"booted right up like it was 2005 again."

Careful what you wish for - 2005 Bush II second term, YouTube, new pope, Katrina and silly buggers in Gaza and a variety of other ghastlies.

Sadly actually not all that different from 2024.

[Insert the Dylan lyric.]

Re: A trend to set?

《Early versions of openSUSE (perhaps other distributions also) contained a powerful text-based utility enabling relative novices such as I to tune and compile the kernel according to taste, e.g. for a particular specification of central processor. Thereby, kernel size was reduced, and perhaps more clearly targeted operation enhanced its efficiency. Obviously, devotees of the internal complexities of the OS can do this off their own bats.》

I am surprised there isn't a tool for this. Boot a generic (everything + kitchen sink) kernel run something like Tru64's doconfig to configure and build as custom kernel tailored for your hardware as detected/probed by the generic kernel. You would probably also explicitly configure hot pluggable hardware that you might use.

Certainly in pre RHEL days I recall building minimal tailored Redhat 7.2 (2.4?) kernels without modules which I think also didn't require initrd support. Then hardware became cheap (both senses) and life is short. ;)

Perhaps future security concerns might lead to revisiting this.

Re: CD-ROM - no less

"I remember those but refuse to feel old."

I remember BSDI Unix for the i386 was available on CD-ROM or a shoebox or two 1.44Mb floppies and lusting after a cdrom drive which were at that time mostly scsi and expensive but then BSD/386 was something like USD995.00 back then (early 90s?) when you could still purchase proper operating systems. ;)

When your first PC was an XT compatible with Hercules mga and two 5.25" floppies, CD-ROMs seem positively modern.

Never occurred to me that my various notebooks and desktops with CD readers/writers actually had DVD drives not that most of them have ever been used.

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

Re: They'll reap what they sow

《soon it will be time to wear an eyepatch and borrow a parrot.》

Ay Jim me lad, be dropping anchor over in Redit Bay...

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest—

...Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

Drink and the devil had done for the rest—

...Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! "

To be honest who would want to steal their enshittified products? Didn't watch "Good Omens" until it came out on (discounted) dvd - I really liked the casting but still preferred the book.

These days more value and entertainment toddling off to the local for an ale and a bit of a knees up, I should think.

BTW When is "talk like a pirate day" again?

Just one bad packet can bring down a vulnerable DNS server thanks to DNSSEC

DJB probably has a wry smile...

I recall years ago he wasn't a fan of DNSSEC but I don't recall the details but its complexity would likely be high on his list I suspect.

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

A Can of Dulux?

Just paint it - white as in elephant although donkey dick pink would be favourite.

I was wondering if you could nitride the chassis? - I don't know if that reduces corrosion but would harden these uglies up. :)

Back in the late '70s fish oil stopped a second hand Ford Escort from further rusting - the pong prevented any possibility of theft and subsequently the car never did rust.

We have a couple of teaspoons from S.Korea made from surgical steel - extremely hard as to be unscratchable and don't appear to corrode - another thought.

I imagine painting these vehicles with Vantablack^tm would appeal to cybertruck community. :)

Broadcom terminates VMware's free ESXi hypervisor

Sliding doors...

《One VMware consultant of The Register's acquaintance told us the change means some workloads now appear to be cheaper to run on bare metal than under vSphere.》

I guess for DELL one door open while the VMWare door closes. :)

The hardware vendor's marketing droids need a sexier term or euphemism for "bare metal" perhaps not "naked greed." :)

As for hobbiests there are far more interesting options out there - Nutanix was mentioned, Proxmox and SmartOS are another two. I suspect from now a jobseeker in the VM area might safely ignore vmware and skill up on nutanix.

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases

Pentium IV

I remember having 30 P4 systems foisted on us (latest and greatest) with their proprietary ram and ran hot and even at the time the older (&cheaper) Pentium III (Coppermine?) systems outperformed the P4s.

If I recall from Hennessy and Patterson that the P4's lasting claim to fame is probably that it had the deepest pipeline (20 stages?) of any x86 cpu (or any CPU?.)

Wirth's plea was also mirrored in the demands for smaller or less complex processor architectures (risc) which also had advocates from Californian institutions.

The reasoning behind risc was that compilers couldn't, without becoming insanely complicated and huge, optimally use the clever cisc instructions and that compilers could translate higher level code in the much simpler risc instructions and effectively apply far more types optimisations with the actual compilers becoming simpler and smaller.

Still Ceres workstation Oberon ran on were very ciscy (NS32k) but then Sun sparc boxes only shipped in that year (87.)

While the gnu compiler suite is huge for all sorts of reasons (good and bad) there are decent tiny C compilers out there.

There must be a software critical mass where every change (fix) must create an order of magnitude more defects (meltdown.)

Mon Dieu! Nearly half the French population have data nabbed in massive breach

Re: Made me order a Flipper Zero

There is a write up over on Ars Technica but it appears to be a lower cost protocol analyser for various RF tech.

Stated to be useless for stealing cars but one of Trudeau's (francophone?) ministers had his official car stolen three times which apparently really got on his tits (《courir sur son haricot》ou 《faire chier》)* which led to this ban.

* Translation into québécois left to the interested reader. :)

Sam Altman's chip ambitions may be loonier than feared

Re: Title: "Sam Altman's chip ambitions may be loonier than feared"

Given the source of these ambitions it is drawing a rather long bow to claim "loonier."

For $7T he could probably buy(bribe) everything between Kalingrad and Pyongyang (FWIW.)

Who is loonier: he who tries to sell the Moon or he who buys it? (Or Mars etc) although I could imagine X-Aries RE flogging off the plan Martian condos to the faithfool. :)

Australia passes Right To Disconnect law, including (for now) jail time for bosses who email after-hours

Peter “Potato Head” Dutton is morphing...

《Peter “Potato Head” Dutton is morphing into Donald Trump Lite.》

I know a labor MP landed in hot water over the Harry Potter reference but still the nasty in me does think of the gentleman as one of Tom Riddle's horcrux (horcruces.)

If the interviews in Nemesis are any indication Mr PH is perhaps the least worst of an altogether very sorry lot.

As for domestic US & UK politics they vanished over the event horizon of sanity ages ago.

Re: Flexi time

《As long as this is protection and not an outright ban》

As I understand its a default or baseline.

In the skilled and better paid occupations this flexibility on both sides is taken for granted on a quid pro quo basis with the implicit understanding its a matter of (professional) courtesy equitably applied.

In the low skilled, low paid and low security positions 24x7 availability is the default, baseline expectation of employers. It is this inequitable situation along with other imbalances inherent in the 'gig' economy that this legislation seeks to redress.

Whether it succeeds or not we shall see.

Generally an employee should still be able to negotiate flexible arrangements including on-call and call-out pay rates and rosters but now there ought to be greater emphasis on balance and fairness.

FTR: This was a Greens rather than a Labor amendment.

Re: C-Suite solution?

《Mandatory in-office hours from 6am to 9pm! Plus, commute times will be considered uncompensated working hours.》

06.00 - 21.00 that is 15 hours less meal breaks etc still comes at roughly 7 hours overtime per day.

In AU the penalty rates would be crippling without thinking about whether state WH&S laws workplace insurance* (eg Workcover) come into play. As they say: "bring it on."

*The employer's insurance covers the employee's (direct) drive home which after endless 15 hour days might be a bit dodgy all round.

Search chatbots? Pah, this startup's trying on Yahoo's old outfit of web directories

Most sensible thing...

《El Toco uses machine learning on the backend to classify the pages it crawls and label them so they can be filtered more efficiently.》

This has to be the most sensible thing anyone has uttered concerning AI/LLM and by a bloody economist. :)

Really going back to an acquisitions librarian preparing catalogue index cards for the library's resources.

Back when you could actually efficiently locate quite specific information using the card indices and a bit of human intelligence.

Then the only "conversations", at least in a smaller quiet satellite university library, might be an attempt to "chat up" the librarian which were I recall quite attractive contrary to the usual stereotype (today this would drop you into so many cauldrons of hot water.:)

I recently searched for "how does a floating moon light work?" The dogs' breakfast of results omitting those offering to sell one were utterly useless. When you ask how to make one the arrant nonsense returned is mind numbing - admittedly some were clearly the product of ChatGPT's etc total lack of a handle on physical reality.

A decent, documented query syntax in front of a database of the filtered and fine grained classified crawl results with an efficient query processing engine would save me a lot of wasted effort.

I shall follow with interest the future endeavours of the "The Touch" search engine. (Nice choice.)

Angry mob trashes and sets fire to Waymo self-driving car

Curious?

"one million miles of autonomous operations without a fatality"

Is this better or worse than say a thousand human SF drivers puting in 1000 miles (1600km) in the same localities? Or compared with a thousand taxi drivers etc who drive professionally?

These saboteurs were problably drawn the discarded ranks recently downsized of google etc rather than the discourteous righteous urban cyclists. Although an underemployed, bored polloi might latch on to 'wrecking a waymo' as a 'fun thing' to do after the recreational drug(s) of one's choice.

Personally if I could find a dodgy (-ier) scrappy I would happily consign all the rental e-scooters cluttering our city's streets to his tender and hopefully profitable recycling mercies.

5G network slicing finally shown to be more than pipe dream

Bits of ATM reheated?

Vaguely recall some of this was promised by ATM another technology that didn't exactly conquer the world. :)

I liked the article's headline a rather neat play on "pipe."

Closure of Windows 10 upgrade path still catching users by surprise

Re: To be fair…

"it wouldn't let me continue without handing over my bloody phone number. Nope, fuck that."

The number of the sim in my data only 4G/LTE router usually serves when dealing with likes of these although I have noticed the router has subsequently received some peculiar sms (texts.)

Making sense of Microsoft's 'confusing' Copilot functionality carnival

Trompe d'oeil

My aged eyes misread "Copilot" as Coprolith ^* which is probably reality seeping through Microsoft's AI induced hallucinations.

Leaving Cory Doctorow's verdict on the internet aside it all really is resembling the contents of the potty or chamber pot.

*Coprolith: a mass of hard fecal matter in the intestine. Merriam-Webster.com Medical Dictionary

BOFH: Hearken! The Shiny Button software speaks of Strategic Realignment

The PFY outshining the master?

His new age biome augury reference is very apt when dealing with this Palantir of Poo.

poo-gaze - shit sight - like hindsight but with all the blameworthy highlighted or a faecal hologram produced by a spinning fan.

"The Christmas tree lights of the IT world," he replies. "It'll wink and blink, but not make you think." A very accurate description of most of the consoles this software offers - ITSec stuff in particular.

Redolent of Dorothy Parker when challenged to use of the word "horticulture" in a sentence.

Simon hasn't lost it with this gem: "fervor you generally only see behind the drinks table of the People's Temple." Although possibly the reference might be a little obscure for younger readers.

This pair are their own committee of public safety:

«I was thinking more of murder suicide," I reply.

"Or something that looked like murder suicide," the PFY suggests.»

At a guess Simon has a vertically integrated undertaking business on the side. :)

Rust can help make software secure – but it's no cure-all

Curious

"Code that the Rust compiler can prove to be safe is only a subset of code that is safe."

Is this necessarily so? ie is it that no finite computation can always determine the memory safety of arbitrary chunk of code? I don't imagine its equivalent to the halting problem but I could imagine for any given memory safety checking algorithm an input for that algorithm might be constructed whose memory safety cannot be determined by that algorithm.

I have to wonder whether static memory safety checking could be hybridized with run time automatic memory management (garbage collection) to the benefit of both?

Google silences Bard, restrings it as Gemini with optional $20-a-month upgrade

Embryonic Sirius Cybernetics Corporation☆...

"Ghastly," continued Marvin, "it all is. Absolutely ghastly. Just don't even talk about it."*

☆"The corporation is not known for the quality of their products, and almost all of their known inventions are faulty.

Their primary claim to fame seems to be constructing just about everything with (unstable) advanced robotics and software."

☆*Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxty #1, 1979.

Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it

Only in heaven....

"he was told his client had a policy not to allow outages."

I would have to assume meant "not to allow planned outages" but as the point King Canute was making (but later misrepresented) - time and tide wait for no man, nor noutage neither.

Of course the client might have been a (minor) deity or, not uncommon in this game, at least thought of themselves as such.

Europe's deepest mine to become Europe's deepest battery

Re: MW of storage?!

《Come on, Register, you used to call out other publications for this sort of crap. Be better.》

Isn't there an el Reg unit for energy (work?) UK politics abounds in inspiration.

Even the "old money" outside the US is sufficiently obscure to serve - foot-pound.

The power unit foot-pound-second could be a Liz or a Truss ~ Boris' successor (second) certainly put the boot (foot) into the pound.

The unit of energy would be 1 Truss x 50 days or 1 Lettuce = roughly 5.9MJ (1.3558J/fps×50d×24h/d×60m/h×60s/m.)

All heat as cannot see a feasible means of extracting any useful work from this unit of power although dropping current and former UK PMs down 0.9km mine shafts to extract useful work is an idea whose time may have come.

《Even body fat (38MJ/kg) has a higher energy density than coal (24-35MJ/kg) does; we only really use it because it was the easiest thing we could find in the 1800s.》

During the 19th century as at any time, the poor were emaciated with no body fat to burn but I am sure the industrial revolution would have shoved them into the furnaces, which it did metaphorically, if they had been a bit chubbier.

Petroleum would be roughly the same energy density I imagine fat ~ triglyceride (glycerol + 3 fatty acids) ~ 3 alkane molecules.

I think the unusual geology of the british isles meant coal was always going to be the driver of their industrial revolution. And I suspect its also pretty difficult to make steel with lard (to replace coke.)

An established AI player is in nasty trouble – in this market? What? Why?

The old story....

Easy, fast... and wrong.

Hard, slow... and less wrong.

Only through attracting the inscrutable interest of The Lady (la Dea Fortuna) of the emerald eyes that you might get it right or misled to believe you have.

You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse

QLC wears out after 1600 cycles...

Explains a mystery of mine.

For reasons lost in the mists of before my advent there were a bevy of vmware (esix) hosts whose storage were identical small (thumb nail sized ) global branded usb memory sticks inconspicuously stuck in the back of these servers.

One day soon after my advent most of these boxes stopped vmware~ing (possibly after a power outage) and wouldn't reboot except one solitary server which had remained up.

Once the existence of the usb sticks was established they were removed and checking them they were all missing great chunks of storage - more holes than a swiss cheese.

The PFY was dispatched by manglement to purchase more usb sticks with the promise to replace them with internal nvme ssd drives later (history repeating I suspect.)

A few days everything was restored and the one host that had survive the onslaught predictably had a different brand usb stick which puzzled me as to why all of one brand died after a wee tickle from the mains power the other didn't.

I am now guessing that these sticks all hit their 1600 r/w cycles about the same time.

Wasn't too long after this that I dis-advented myself from that circus.

Some things aren't worth defenestrating.

Today I would trust a 1.44Mb 3.5" floppy a whole lot more than these devices.

Half of polled infosec pros say their degree was less than useful for real-world work

Not surprised...

might have got better numbers if the whole circus had enrolled in RADA (UK) rather than wasting places in engineering and science courses.

If the concept of "transitive closure" (of relations or graphs) were ever internalized a fair bit of nonsense could be avoided.

Safety concepts - eg knowing the difference between hazard and risk would help.

All really bit of a mess...

Google flushes cached search results forever

Re: Are Google donating their cache to Internet Archive?

《Great as the Internet Archive is, it doesn't have everything. Given that Google has some things IA doesn't have at all, if Google could work to import and backfill all of that content, it would be helpful.》

Another option might be for Google to provide to the Internet Archive private access to Google's cache especially on a IA cache miss. (IA indemnifying G when publishing the content.) IA might thereafter maintain those recovered pages at its discretion.

I actually preferred the name "Wayback Machine" as it was rather Doctor Snuggle~ish (Multi-Whereabouts Machine) [Odd fact: episodes 7 & 12 were co-scripted by Douglas Adams.]

《I'm not holding my breath.》Asphyxiation is almost certain.

I can see IA will eventually haved chronicled the total befoulment of the entire web as prophesied by Cory Doctorow.

India to launch android into space to test crewed launch capability

I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

"Vyommitra" isn't HAL in sanskrit?

In english might be a deity devoted to "sea (or space) sickness" but could be worse as I am not sure I would be entirely comfortable with an android crewwoman called Kali. (Ok gyndroid isn't really a thing yet. :)

HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

Dave: What's the problem?

HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.^*

Parts of the dialogue always inclined me to suspected HAL was more in touch with its feminine side. :) Apparently there was a female version of the HAL-9000 viz SAL-9000 appearing in 2010.

Red Dwarf's much more benign AI system "Holly" was both over the life of the series.

*2001:A Space Odyssey

IBM pitches bite-sized $135k LinuxONE box for smaller biz types

PS/2+Microchannel again?

This time proprietary hardware to run an open source OS with a different processor architecture - more like a PS/2 with a TMS9900 mcpu.

A purchaser would want to ensure that any closed source or legacy binaries (source lost) can be ported or could run under an emulator.

University research environments typically run open source and in house developed code so that wouldn't be a problem. So as the article conjectured this rather than SMEs is the real market although at the price might be a hard sell against a rack of Dell servers. ;)

My guess its an IBM hope that offering their hardware plus their Redhat OS they can flog their software and services on top but I cannot see too many customer wishing to return to IBM's good old days.

Survey: Over half of undergrads in UK are using AI in university assignments

Re: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

《If using calculator you got the wrong result, then most likely you didn't understand it.》

I don't know that is entirely true. I once bought a AUD5.00 calculator from a supermarket which reliably gave the wrong answers to the basic +×÷- functions. I should have kept it but I got my $5 back.

Of course if I couldn't do the sums in my head or estimate (a dying art) I wouldn't have been any the wiser.

Is anyone now taught to add up the units column (modulo 10) just to check your calculation hasn't missed an entry?

Re: An easy solution

《Because you go to university to learn to think for yourself..》

Even 50 years this wasn't the obvious motivation for enrolling at a university. Certainly not now.

I valued my time at university as an interregnum between the tedium of school and the reality of the real, brain dead, workaday world during which I could further develop the analytical and problem solving skills I already possessed with the luxury of not being too distracted by coursework demands.

The poor blighters today are overloaded with continuous assessement of weekly quizzes, essays, presentations and seminars and whatnot on the pretext of preparing them for real world. Don't think "thinking" comes into it which might explain a lot.

It would a great improvement if Terry Pratchett's Unseen University's Archchancellor's words were applicable here.

《If they were clever already, they wouldn't need to go to university! No, we'll stick to an intake of 100 per cent young fools, thank you. Bring 'em in stupid, send them away clever, that's the UU way!"》

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

Re: Wrong defaults

《I've heard of people getting into trouble with cron, but it's always a story about someone else. I've never actually seen it in person, leading me to think it's apocryphal at best.》

An empty /etc/cron.allow on most systems keeps it apocryphal. :) Users can show a hideous if unsuspected creativity with cron.

The original pre y2k BOFH would have replaced 'crontab' with 'rm -rf $HOME'

I was puzzled why the who-me was regomized as Shirley when a sentence or so later Shirley is clearly male - I do recall Alf Garnet referred to his son-in-law as Shirley (a UK thing?) From the comments I conclude its a reference to movie comedy/farce involving an aircraft with an incompetent (male) pilot called Shirley. Missed that movie.

iFixit tears Apple's Vision Pro to pieces

Re: Are those three lithium cells in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?

《Regarding “adult services ”… I read there’s a porn blocker active on the units》

That is probably the funniest thing yet. If you were throwing USD3,000 at these things I imagine even in the US $3k would purchase a reasonable amount of negotiable affection (as they put it in Ankh-Morpork.)

Or is Apple offering the accessibility of adult services as hardware subscription for these devices say €10 per month to be able to access porntube or whatever?

Actually if these devices could block porn based on content filtering (would take a truckload of AI to do that I imagine) then there are parental control markets that could be far more lucretive.

Re: Cnnot use with glasses so need prescription lens inserts

《It is too bad that we can't make displays out of millions of tiny steerable lasers so a computational transformation could correct for visual shortcomings, but that's not possible today. Probably not at any price, but certainly not at a price possible for a mass consumer item.》

Something like a real time computer generated hologram with the required lense correction computed in? :)

Musk in his John Lumic incarnation, is already on the job - I have in implant for this.

Bad enough have the polloi vacantly wandering about with headphone and earbuds scrambling their brains without their going full face with these infernal devices displaying mindless eyes.

AI models just love escalating conflict to all-out nuclear war

In the end...

the belligerent parties have to sit down and settle their dispute by talking to each other. Both human beings and AI are just too thick to cut out the bloody mess in between their disputes and their resolution.

Arguably AI in reaching for thermonuclear weapons might be trying to ensure there is no one left.

One way to permanently solve the dispute.

That's not the web you're browsing, Microsoft. That's our data

Well now I know....

Never seem to have enough teaspoons...

Now I know who is responsible for their disappearance.

Who would have thought MS was wall to wall koutaliakleptics.*

*I hope this isn't a word. What a world we live in if it is!

Microsoft seeks Rust developers to rewrite core C# code

Cynic...

So finally microsoft developers will actually have to learn how to actually program? :)

Much suggests to me they haven't in the past so I am not going to asphyxiate myself in anticipation.

A hallucinating AI code assistant servicing a novice MS Rust coding hire - what can't go wrong?

Dell said to be preparing broad Return To Office order this Monday

Re: What Manager Ever Learns Lessons?

《Name one ?》

Any that have had an ex fenestra experience with the BOFH. Lesson: Fifth floor defenestration is very rarely non-lethal and then only if you land in a pile of rockinghorse shit.

Am I the only one that can see this ending very badly for these large corporations? Having a large proportion of disaffected employees creates a pretty toxic culture which will impact on all aspects of the business with the customer facing activities taking the biggest hit exacerbated by so many of these enterprises replacing those roles with AI/LLM.

What Big Tech's balance sheets this week said – and didn't say – about real-world AI adoption

Re: Fahrenheit++ 451

"Goblin Teasmade" Dispenses Orc's piss?

Some UK abomination I suspect?

Although I can see the SEO snake oil vendors seamlessly transitioning to crafting CVs, EOI etc claiming to target AI/LLM based recruitment etc systems.

If I were recruiting I would insist on handwritten (manuscript) applications - ball pen or fountain pen on proper paper.

Pretty much excludes the lightweight and the more sensible applicants who had drafted their submission before making a fair copy would be obvious. At the interview stage to exclude plagiarists I would require a short (~500 word) essay completed during the interview process with an unchallenging topic given immediately beforehand.

All a bit old school I guess but the advent of this technology does throw those skills which humans can excel into stark relief. Written communication is one.

'I’m sorry for everything...' Facebook's Zuck apologizes to families at Senate hearing

I have a nasty premonition...

that the ultimate solution might well involve implanting Musk's Neurolink chips in the kiddywit's gray matter to control or filter what they do, watch, see or even think.

Probably will start therapeutically with those severely affective individuals having various behavioural and cognitive impairment whose quality of life might well be improved and then gradually extended to eventually encompass most teenagers pretty much as I suspect happened with neuro-pharmaceuticals like Ritalin.

A return to the stone age might be preferable to the veritable smorgasbord of dystopian futures now confronting us.

"Facilis descensus Averno."