Posts by jokerscrowbar

China finds a previously unknown microbe on its space station

To boldly go…

…And catch mutant space sepsis.

It’s a bug not a feature! Now wash your hands.

Yolk's on you – eggs break less when they land sideways

Conclusion

Using a standardised hens arse hight drop we proved that Chat GPT is not yet smarter than a bird.

Though no thought was given to the dietary variations that can affect shell fracture rates or egg processing variations according to local custom we see this work as definitive until the next one is published in ten minutes.

Apple: Since you care about yOuR pRiVaCy, we'll train our AI on made-up emails

For Training Porpoises

They could ask Apple users to send an eMail with their opinion on Apple Intelligence©️

‘It can go and TRAIN itself’ would be a close summary.

Apple Intelligence turned on by default in upcoming macOS Sequoia 15.3, iOS 18.3

Hey Siri Précis my inbox

‘Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam’

Apple offers to settle 'snooping Siri' lawsuit for an utterly incredible $95M

Re: so it's true

Was there ever any doubt. I know a lot of people dismiss things as conspiracy theory if there’s no Wiki citation but surely everyone has a similar story by now.

We’ve had whistles blown at all the big companies that it’s processed on the device but that some stuff flags up and they all have a listen.

Parker Solar Probe sends a "Still Alive" tone back to Earth

Re: First Response from Parker

Thunderbox - A Postcard From The Sun

Google Timeline location purge causes collateral damage

Re: Let them eat apps.

Thank you for the suggestions.

Siri is set Aus voice 2, The Speak function is set to Aussie Karen and phone Language is set to English (Australian) which works with everything else however the sat nav STILL has Bentest Old Etonian voice.

I can tell you that 600miles driving a Transit Luton in a Force 10 storm was white knuckle enough and sat nav was necessary because all the bridges were closed and river roads flooded but instructions from that received pronouwcsiasstion prick made it like riding with the Devil himself.

Let them eat apps.

There are several apps that do the same job for joggers, dog walkers etc.

Off Topic.

Used my iPhones sat-nav for the first time during the storm and was appalled that the voice is locked on Upper Class Twit instead of Stoned Queensland Girl like my last phone. Anyone know how to change it?

Microsoft teases Copilot Vision, the AI sidekick that judges your tabs

I can’t do that Dave

Until you’ve answered at least three *Sponsored Advertorials and contacted a ‘Hot Widow’ that is just 5 minutes away in Dubai.

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

0118, 999, 881, 999, 119, 725...3 for assistance

The Recycle Bin.

To autonomously empty the excretions of its own making.

Huawei handed 2,596,148,429,267,413,
814,265,248,164,610,048 IPv6 addresses

I wouldn’t say

My ex puts it about but.

She’s had more pokes than an IPv6 network!

GitHub's boast that Copilot produces high-quality code challenged

Re: What will it mean to be a....

I passed my two year Computerised Accounts course with a distinction. Does that qualify me to say that staff at ElReg have been AI enhanced for a while now and none of us even noticed the difference. Their absolutely professional articles are no more or less stinky than usual.

If the cohort in the example only found 25 people that were any good at their job then of course the rest should be using Copidiot…

… to write their job applications to McDonalds.

Employee sues Apple over 'spying' claims tied to mandatory devices

Ker…Ching!

I wonder what the legal fees for time and thinking time would be just for a lawyer to read and understand the standard iPhone user T&Cs let alone an Apple employee contract.

Brits think AI in the workplace is all chat, no bot for now

Re: Off topic but...

You can download an older version like v5.8 of Crap Cleaner and place it as a standalone on the desktop or run it from a thumb drive.

No matter what you do a sneaky update may reinstate the spyware. The trick is to take note of what temp files, notepad files or odd bits of code have been deleted by CC that indicate tweaks have been made and then dive into the system to reset.

Sometimes it’s a miscreant exploit sometimes it’s MS helpfully turning stuff back on but it’s rarely for your benefit.

Starlink gets FCC nod for space calls, but can't dial up full power

Lost In Space

Meanwhile the little satellite symbol that occasionally appears on your shiny new $1200 fondleslab is to tell you that you need to find a payphone.

UK financial regulator slammed for failed tech transformation

Re: Say what?

Was wondering about that and the strange fan grinding phenomena. Unless that’s Blobspeak for Only Fans and Grindr 14 hours a day.

Fallen (off the) Cistern Again

Fapping Constantly Actually

Volunteer DEF CON hackers dive into America's leaky water infrastructure

Re: Surely those 50,000 water systems

Over a thousand separate IT systems running their own protocols and roughly 3% of them are still running windows 7 secured by whatever was pre-installed when they bought it. I’m only half joking.

Worked on this problem when they were switching the dams and levies from land-line to 3G control systems. i.e. Less weatherproof and more easily over-ridden.

No matter what tech they use a simple chemical poison in the tributary or a mortar in the floodgate will render it useless

As we saw in Texas, they couldn’t figure a way to stop their pumps from freezing when they were pumping HEATING gas. No genius system is idiot-proof.

EU buyers still shunning pure electric vehicles, prefer hybrids

Re: Plug in hybrids

No I live in the real world with cold mornings, undulating map contours and variable traffic flow. Optimised track ‘soft’ test results for most cars these days are unachievable and real use figures for a car in Kent will differ widely from a car in Gwent.

I found the Nissan Juke and Quashquai were at least usable but wouldn’t want town one. The big Volvo XC was lovely to drive but too expensive to run, The top of the range MG was good but of them all the Kia Exceed the best car for the money.

All, without exception, had fugly interiors with too much bloatware stuck on the dash.

Re: Plug in hybrids

I’ve had 9 different hybrid hire cars for a month at a time this year and only one was any good. The worst, an MG, gave 32 miles range after charging all night and ICE gave about 13mpg due to being underpowered by about 60%, likewise for the rest they’re too heavy and consequently eat brakes and tyres too.

DoJ wants Google to sell off Chrome and ban it from paying to be search default

A simple sale to some faceless offshore consortium for $1 who then lease it back to Alphabet.

Same shit but even shittier.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 struggles to take off

Re: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024

That deserves a pint. Well said.

Euro Fighter Typhoon and Flight Unlimited 3 still running fine on my souped up XP. He said retro-smugly.

Most of the maps/pics they use for this new version are almost as old unless you live in CA.

Apple hit with £3 billion claim of ripping off 40 million UK iCloud users

The basic level of iCloud is free and I used it for years so when I needed to back up and share some larger files I subscribed to the next level, 50GB for 99p a month.

Not a huge amount to pay and I’ll keep it running even though I don’t always need that much storage. Easy enough to cancel.

There is a caveat though. Some images and some audio might get a dropout or two but that’s a problem with every hosting and storage site I’ve ever used probably caused during the upload or download.

As stated above. Which creepy uncles lap are you going to choose to sit on?

FTC drops hammer on unwanted subscriptions with 'click to cancel' rule

Re: Starmer take note.

Had similar experience with a company called Brightside Car Insurance for my father in law.

The Customer Service number was premium rate, on hold for about ten minutes and the script they worked through is timed to add 5 minutes to each step by reading out t&cs etc. Cancellation was simple enough but my call cost 55quid.

Recall the Recall recall? Microsoft thinks it can make that Windows feature palatable

Vista doesn't seem so bad now does it?

NASA, IBM just open sourced an AI climate model so you can fine-tune your own

‘If you can see that hill over in the distance then its going to rain…

…If you cant see it then its already raining’

Google sued for using trademarked Gemini name for AI service

Geminii

Job done.

Atomic clocks are so last epoch, it's time someone nailed down the nuclear clock

But should we set it to GMT, GMT+1 or Local Noon?

AI firms propose 'personhood credentials' … to fight AI

A simple test

A human, by the time they’ve loaded the page, accepted some cookies, found a log in button, zoomed in to the tiny name/password fields, taken a moment to remember the spelling and then typed and hit enter would take slightly longer than the few nanoseconds an LLM would.

Only a dumb robot would ever complete Captcha these days.

What is missing from the web? We're asking for Google

If you just typed Swift main dealer you’d get a whole plethora of Mathew Perry style results.

I for one applaud our caravanning brethren for providing us with mobile chicanes to spice up our journeys. See also Tractors and Hyundai I10s.

Been saying this for years, two additional fields to include relevant and exclude irrelevant details from your search.

eg when searching for

‘Swift Caravans nearest dealer’

exclude

Taylor Swift, Facebook, Sodding Pinned Photographs, blogs, Ornithology.

Include

results within 100 miles from my location.

If a cheesy '80s flick is a good metaphor for how you run projects, something is wrong

“Pain and suffering is the key to all windows“

Angelina Jolie

Is Lenovo a blind spot in US anti-China security measures?

My last two phones have been Apple and my last two laptops Lenovo. The phones cost £1500 more but the difference in quality is that both laptops still work, they bricked my old phone and the 3 year old one has battery issues that ain't worth the repair cost. Who gets the data is negligible as it’s beyond my control

Japan stops measuring train crowding by ease of newspaper readership

The Boris

Percentage of the room needed to give Boris’s Bollocks a swift knee 100 to 0% descending.

China starts testing national cyber-ID before consultation on the idea closes

Re: Not Clear.....

Just to be on the safe side you should start using white make up and grow a Guido moustache before posting as Mr A Coward in future.

UK Electoral Commission slapped for basic cybersecurity fails

Re: As always

My local town hall peddles the data to any bidder anyway

The issue seems to be that someone got access for free.

Car makers sold people's driving habits, location data for pennies, say US senators

Why would they end it?

They all do it. Ford gives itself permission by telling you about sharing in the vehicle handbook with no explanation of who the third parties also share with, Nissan records you via its cameras etc.

I wouldn't be paranoid to suggest that The Man may also be interested in the data harvested especially as telemetry is routinely used as evidence in court. Years ago owning a motorcycle was a black mark in your government record these days they know if you drive naked while listening to christian metal and thanks to the IoT how often you get your buns toasted.

CrowdStrike Windows patchpocalypse could take weeks to fix, IT admins fear

One major reason for our reliance on single providers is that all the functions are monetised and exclusive.

The wife may write her report on a Mac but her employer pays a subscription to MS and therefore the file has to be converted into a MS Word document for example.

Just to share an mp3 or a photograph with all our household machines involves third party programmes, several different bits of wire, memory cards and often reformatting.

Sharing across devices is hampered by the fact that none of the manufacturer will allow any other make to connect.

Magnify that across a whole planet and it means that one os becomes standard for business and one registry error cripples us all.

Elexon's Insight into UK electricity felled by expired certificate

Safari doesn't give me an option to override the warning about invalid certificates. There’s no ‘Visit Anyway’ option on a classified ads site (hosted via GoDaddy) that went down on the 17th of last month. I doubt the site will survive losing three weeks of ad revenue and sales.

Datacenter demand driven by AI... but constrained by power shortages

They’re planning to slot a data centre into the gap left by a massive steel works here. At least the emissions will be less toxic. The reservoirs and pylons are already in place to service it with the advantage that the infrastructure will be maintained.

The only downside is that to give it any green credentials they would need 200 sq/km of solar panels and a windmill farm the size of a national park or maybe build a reactor in my garden and tell me it’s clean ‘cos it’s irradiated.

A friendly guide to local AI image gen with Stable Diffusion and Automatic1111

Free

https://deepdreamgenerator.com/

I could probably get the MS one to run on my overclocker XP but 3.8gb of RAM is about the limit and the DreamGenerator is free to use anyway. Only one percent of the output is any good but it’s a fun toy. Does anyone still use MS Paint?

Atos's UK auditor raises 'material uncertainty' about future

They’ve syphoned all the cash and left the consultants and minimum wage staff to do the actual work. Now the bills are due the company ceases to exist only to be reborn in a sudden flurry of backhanders.

New governments, new contracts, same old game.

Anthropic tries 'to enable beneficial uses' of AI by government agencies

Re: Covert Investigations

Your intelligent phone will already be primed to tell if you have researched on certain websites and downloaded plans of certain buildings. Anonymous or not the keywords can trigger a search for further red flags in an instant.

Not sure if it then phones everyone in your contact list to tell them you’re a unperson or if your sat nav takes you straight to room 101.

Did you think all those unmarked vans in your street were Amazon Prime deliveries?

Organized crime and domestic violence perps are big buyers of tracking devices

It also doesn't factor the percentage for airtags that have prevented a beating as the tracking proved she really was at her mothers and not out dogging.

New warnings should be printed

Trackers don't kill people. People kill people

Do not microwave your pets, the airtag will explode

Objects in the rearview mirror may be Contract Killers

Starliner to remain docked to the ISS into July – with no new departure date

Re: As good as ...

It only has enough Gaffer Tape for something like 45 days of operation.

Apple Intelligence won't be available in Europe because Tim's terrified of watchdogs

Re: $ecurity $ervices

As the title suggests, AI such as this could be useful to disseminate the huge volume of data and flagging up suspected terror and crime to whichever agency is interested. For example Interpol and other security services.

I daresay the NSA would already be in the loop with Apple but others would need to pay for data on your clandestine activities.

$ecurity $ervices

I suspect that Apple offered to sell your AI flagged data back to EU and this is part of the negotiation. EU has no problem with the cameras and microphones that record everyone and everything inside their cars as they can access this telemetry whenever they like. S’all about the Dollar or in newspeak, Suckurity.