Posts by Scott Broukell

NASA solar sail boom demonstrator reaches orbit

Hmmm ... I'm not really sure that the correct technology company is involved in this project.

I'm sorry but shouldn't it be Thales, you know, as in . . . . Tholar Thales.

(*bonus - they could also write the project code in Lisp)

'Slow AI' needed to stop autonomous weapons making humans worse

This - ". . the potential of AI systems to enhance our own worst qualities . ." - So, the plan is to feed all this lovely data (about humans, made by humans, yes the very same humans who are so well known for NEVER EVER having made any cluster-f*cking mistakes throughout our entire history), have humans input the data - and you are expecting what exactly to emerge out the other end?!

Ever heard the phrase "Garbage IN - Garbage OUT".

All right, granted, we do (should) tend to learn, a bit, from our own mistakes. But expecting man-made AI and ML to magically conjure up the answers to all our self-made problems is utterly ludicrous!

It is also a stretch to even believe that the same AI and ML can teach itself and actually correct the errors of our ways, simply because we ourselves are at the very chuffing root of the whole shebang! And any way that would put AI and ML (and whoever is behind it / them) in effing charge of all of us!

Virgin Orbit lays off 85% of staff as funding deal falters

So does this mean that The Great British Space Port will now feature . . . . a replacement bus service ? (maybe a shuttle bus, if you like)

Smugglers busted sneaking tech into China

Is that what's known as "wearable technology" ? (asking for a blue friend of mine)

NASA wants a telescope on the far side of the Moon

@Brewster's Angle Grinder

Wot, yer mean like, black holes (hehe).

In all honesty I'm not sure I can lay claim to total originality here, taking much inspiration from both Dara O'Brien and Ogden Nash, in equal measure.

When the universe came into existence,

It did so with little resistance.

It got tremendously hot and expanded a lot,

And may well have an infinite persistence.

(Scott)

Supreme Court not interested in hearing about NSA's super-snoop schemes

But, but, they need to collect all this data. I mean, how else are they meant to continually improve customer service outcomes? /S

Euro bit barn biz has hot prospect: immersion cooling for colo customers

Well then, if GlobalConnect were to locate such a datacenter in the UK, can I suggest that they do so in Bath.

UK prepares to go it alone on post-Brexit science plan

But, then again, Dr Alice Roberts also said that: "Thisands of yars ago ancient Britons all lived in rind hyses (houses made entirely of rind)".

One can only assume therefore that she was being prescient in actually predicting our post-Brexit impoverishment. So maybe UK science does work proper like after all.

UK PM splits govt department in 4, creates dedicated 'Science and Tech' bit

Wishi Washi Sunak - ensuring the hard working lowly populace receive a share of abso-bloody useless net zero anything, whilst Tory chums coin it in! T'was ever thus.

Google pushes fake abortion clinic ads to lower-income women, report says

M - Make

A - America

G - Gestate

A - Again (and again)

Bank of England won't call it Britcoin but says digital pound 'likely to be needed in future'

Great news! Now all they need to do is to appoint a lead cyber-expert chum like, erm .., Dido Harding, to oversee it and everything will be fine, promise.

Boeing bids the 747 a final, ultimate, conclusive farewell

Bah! Bring back the Vickers Viscount / Vanguard that's what I say! Even the Avro Anson is a perfectly good airframe for short regional hops. Not a big fan of these new fangled jets (grumble grumble). Having said that, the BOAC booking website is a pile of old crock!

Apple sued for promising privacy, failing at it

Fear not citizens, all our personal information is kept very private online. So private in fact, that it is harvested, stored, analysed and monetised by private companies with private share holders from all over the world. Further, that personal information is so valuable that some folks even make a living stealing it and/or trading in it!

As a consumer your expectations regarding privacy will for ever clash with the privacy aspirations of any company/entity, online or otherwise. Those privacy settings, they are very much aspirations on the part of said company/entity. "We at GlobalCorpInc aspire to the theatre of privacy so much so that you schmucks will lap it all up" etc.

Man wrongly jailed by facial recognition, lawyer claims

You have nothing to fear citizen

This is a blatant attempt on the part of the perpetrator to interfere with, dupe, obfuscate and distort the findings of a perfectly legitimate computer system going about its everyday business - enforcing the law! How dare he conduct himself in such a manner and in public too! Whats more it is an even worse offence than: "Walking in a 'loud' shirt in a built-up area during the hours of darkness".

Off to jail with him! We don't spend millions of tax payers dollars on these wonderful computer systems only to have people such as this take the micky! Such behaviour simply cannot be allowed to continue.

/S

UK's Guardian newspaper breaks news of ransomware attack on itself

Re: Stay clam everyone and don't picnic!

@Version 1.0 - Oops, I think I should have used the Joke icon. I was trying to make a funny at the expense of the Grauniad's renowned spelling anomalies. Seasonal best wishes to you.

Stay clam everyone and don't picnic!

(see title)

Brit MPs pour cold water on hydrogen as mass replacement for fossil fuels

Addendum: Other political groups/parties would not necessarily be immune or averse to such behaviour either.

Conversely, had any Tory chums or donors already got their snouts and trotters well into piles of hydrogen energy investments, you can be sure that it would be the buzz word de-jour and government (tax payer), funding would go straight in there to pay for consulting hires and oodles of side-loaded, off-shored, accounts would be full to bursting with filthy cash injections! Just saying.

UK's Online Safety Bill drops rules forcing social media to remove 'legal but harmful' content

Social Media - a perfect example, in this digital age, of humans exploiting other humans for profit and gain. Our recorded human history is full of such behaviour. Such exploitative compulsion appears to be hard-wired into our very nature. Dangle the highly addictive shiny shiny digital treats in front of the defenceless masses and we simply cannot ignore the wonderful promises of a better, digital, existence - oh joy!

Social Media offers us absolutely nothing of any meaningful substance or practical use!

And yet here we are, with more sticking-plaster legislation, which I sadly doubt, will prove to be anywhere near fit for purpose and yet it will give the great unwashed masses a sense that the gubermint (whatever the flavour de jour happens to be), is taking real and meaningful action!

I also take issue with the use of the phrase "online safety", as I feel that it provides an entirely false sense of security in what is, in fact, an extremely impersonal and inherently unsafe environment to navigate!

CT scanning tech could put an end to 100ml liquid limit on flights by 2024

@wolftone

My dear old thing the answer is very simple - one just needs to travel exclusively by private jet. Or, failing that, just use the Ultra Prestige First Class airline services - the ones for the pov's who aren't quite billionaires. Many of them send a driver for you as well and it beats standing around with all those awful crowds in those cattle-shed terminals! Plus, you really can get absolutely anything you want through the proper channels that way!

If you're worried about climate change then do what we do and plant some trees after each trip. The children, Jocasta and Ptolemy (bless them), came up with the idea and since there's a few thousand hectares of land in the family around the world, we just send out the locals to do some planting every time we come home.

Glad to be of help, TTFN. Silly you.

/S

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

Poids aren't Real

Just saying.

<insert joke icon>

Apple perfects vendor lock-in with home security kit

Not taking any chances here! So, I am henceforth going to leave my iPhone under a flower pot next to the front porch, whenever I go out.

Musk reportedly wants to gut Twitter workforce by up to 75%

Indeed so, perhaps self-driving twitter bots at that. I mean, what could go wrong?

Papa John's sued for 'wiretap' spying on website mouse clicks, keystrokes

Look that’s all very well but getting all uppity about these matters but this will simply stifle the development of modern AI and ML technologies and their commerce! /s

Remember when you hated to even contemplate the thought of actually going to the shops in order to procure the ingredients for a pizza that you then had to cook yourself!

Well now, with developments in modern AI and ML, very soon you won’t even have to bother with all the hassle of even visiting a fecking website any more!

Food fulfilment factors will automatically know (probably before you even realise it yourself), from traits you exhibit in real-time and which are captured by smart devices in your home, just which flavours and toppings you want right this second!

The items will be baked and a droid will be dispatched straight to you with all the items you enjoy and crave. This will all be timed to arrive, hot and ready to eat, at your door in the same instant that you yourself have the urge to contact your favourite food vendor! Wow, just wow!

It’s the future, it’s here already, eat and enjoy! Eat and enjoy!

Founder of cybersecurity firm Acronis is afraid of his own vacuum cleaner

Ironic then that the very internet itself is in fact the largest vacuum cleaner ever imagined!

Sucking up all our personal data crumbs every second of every day!

Grand Theft Auto 6 maker confirms source code, vids stolen in cyber-heist

Most unfortunate. Still, I hope the good folk over at Rockstar Games don't beat themselves up over it . . . . oh wait!

Government buyers take 22 months on average to procure tech

Trussed me, for I have a plan: Nadine Dorries and Lady Harding (and some really nice whizzo chums), are going to develop this oven-ready, block-chain, algorithm Web App thingy that uses ML and AI and any other old IT buzzword shit that is doing the rounds at the moment, and it will solve procurment problems at a stroke!

It will all be delivered under budget and delivered in record time and also deliver wads of lovely cash to said chums!

Delivery wil be all important in order to make delivery work and delivering this crock of shit will mean that you know exactly what you are going to get delivered from this all-new Trussed-worthy administration! So concentrate really hard on the delivery and maybe not so much the end product will ya!

Mozilla finds 18 of 25 popular reproductive health apps share your data

Hmmm . . . just how long might it be, ahead of the next US presidential election, before certain republican states seriously consider giving a month old fetus the vote? You can vote just the same ways your mom and dad vote too! Now ain't that a thing!

World record for strongest steady magnetic field 'broken' by Chinese team

Hmmm . . . seems like a very attractive field of research.

(mines the one with the NorthPole logo on it)

Microsoft's fix for 'data damage' risk hits PC performance

Is it just me, or, for too many years now, have M$ opertaing systems and their updates merely been sticking plaster, upon sticking plaster, upon sti.... (you get the idea). Is their apparent osbsession with "fun stuff" and "user convenience" to blame perhaps? I appreciate that with the constantly changing variety of hardware available there is no doubt a significant challenge to find a level playing field that fits all. But the thing is that there is very little in life that ever "fits all". Personally I would much rather have less, or indeed no, bells and whistles, but instead a stable, secure platform to work with and that requires the bare minimum of tinkering about with once it is up and running. Perhaps that might be called Win11 Lite - I dunno.

Bloke robbed of $800,000 in cryptocurrency by fake wallet app wants payback from Google

Caveat Emptor

Nothing is completely safe about internet-based communications and/or apps downloaded therein. Yes, Google (and others), probably do take some measures to try and reduce such instances, but I would argue that the end user must always conduct their own due diligence in such matters. Your device/phone/laptop already contains so much information about you and your finances etc. these days - are you just going to allow anything that takes your fancy to have access to all of that data! Fakery has already been around for thousands of years and it thrives in this digital age!

I've been fired, says engineer who claimed Google chatbot was sentient

I feel it is very wrong to rush to judgement in this case. I mean, whenever I type something into Google 99% of the time it comes up with EXACTLY what I was thinking about! How do you explain that then!

Pentester says he broke into datacenter via hidden route running behind toilets

Maybe some engineers requested they build it that way, you know, just for the sake of convenience.

Alternatively, it may perfectly demonstrate the way in which bean-couters consider proper security as a drain on finances.

Meta now involved in making metalevel standards for the metaverse

Now that you've all got your blindfolds on, can anyone see where I'm going with this?

Tesla Autopilot accounts for 70% of driver assist crashes, says US traffic safety body

A - Advanced

D - Driver

A - Accident

S - System

Just saying.

Tweaks to IPv4 could free up 'hundreds of millions of addresses'

Party Line

When I were a nipper the family telephone line was a party line, shared with the house next door. I mean it's just an idea that I'm putting out there, but, shared IPv4 addresses anybody? You know, just for the lowly plebs you understand, nuffin important like. No?

Clearview AI wants its facial-recognition tech in banks, schools, etc

"The potential of facial recognition technology to make our communities safer and commerce secure is just beginning to be realized" - Yes, and do you all remember how "digital technologies" made the same promises at the start of the century. And yet, here we are, some twenty years later, with consequentially far higher and ever increasing levels of financial/identity fraud and scamming on-line! Where software patches and updates are rolled out on a near daily basis!

No, Clearview (et al), I think that you, and others like you, simply want to protect businesses, their data sets and their profitability. I don't believe that this offers any real benefit to customers, but you will no doubt pull off the same illusory trick, so often used before, to fool everyone into letting you harvest all that lovely personal data! Only then to become evil gate-keepers of our individual daily drudgery.

Lonestar plans to put datacenters in the Moon's lava tubes

It's the year 8031 and here, on The Register, is the latest episode in our long running series "On Call". This week we find out about an intrepid semi-simulant IT droid called Krayton (not it's real name), some backups and an awful lot of shear lunacy! . . .

Banks talk big cloud game but few have migrated over 30% of apps

Well, I suppose it is the way of the furure. Personally I would be happier if I were fully confident that my bank had thoroughly tested and resilient pen and paper (and pocket calculator) Backup Plan for when the cloudiness goes off-line for a bit of a rest, as it were.

I mean IRL clouds do have a tendancy to burst etc. Fingers crossed everyone.

Just saying.

Your data's auctioned off up to 987 times a day, NGO reports

Question: Is my personal information kept private on-line?

Answer: Yes, your personal information is kept private on-line. It is harvested, stored, analysed and monetised by private companies for private profit and the benefit of private investors. Happy now?

Researchers find 134 flaws in the way Word, PDFs, handle scripts

Sod the security, we wan't convenience and ease of use and shinny shinny things! Twas ever thus.

MIT's thin plastic speakers fall flat. And that's by design

So, when they present their findings in a paper to those gathered at the annual conference of the society for audiological innovation . . . they won't actually need a speaker.

Amazon opens MASSIVE AI speech dataset so Alexa can speak your language

Note to self:

Noate Tu Seylf - Wyen inthye huse suche devise es seyn, I doth speyk æn Elde Englyshe tongues fram now on then.

IoT biz Insteon goes silent, smart home gear plays dumb

Have you tried turning it Insteoff and Insteon again?

NHS England seeks £240m data platform to tackle COVID recovery

Question: Is my personal data private?

Answer: Yes, your personal data is private. It is harvested, stored, analysed and monetised by private companies for private profit and the benefit of private investors.

So there you go! (not just applicable to the realm of health care either.)

Fintech platform flaw could have allowed bank transfers, exposed data

Just asking

Especially in the case of banking / fintech etc. is there not a very strong case for demanding that such digital infrastructure undergo a comprehensive, independent, testing phase prior to being permitted to go live? In order to bring such potential disasters to light before they can happen!

Are there not machine learning models and wotnot that could allow such testing to be both rapid and very thorough and free from prying human eyes - if there are any security issues with that?

(goes back to counting groats with an abacus)

Outsourcing firm Serco wins £212m UK Test and Trace deal

But it's not just "wound up", how silly! - it's a transformative inertial conclusivity programme - which requires agility and paying con$ultant$ to think outside the box with a lot of specialist technical responses, all of which needs to be properly aligned, going forwards.

Machine-learning models more powerful, toxic than ever

Machine learning helps us learn about machines, when there are 7+ Billion soft and squidgy humans who seem to be in an endless loop, frequently repeating the mistakes that they made in the past.

Put the output from the latter into the machines designed and built by humans and you get what exactly at the end of it?

UK, EU regulators probe Google and Meta's 'Jedi Blue' ad deal

Re: What Consumers?

@Helstrom - I think perhaps that the word you are loking for may be: Victim, not so much "consumer".