Posts by may_i

Yes! It's true! Windows 11 is an agentic platform

Well, borg means castle in Swedish, but it's not pronounced anything like you'd pronounce it in English. The g at the end sounds more like a y.

Windows devs rerolled old code to save precious bytes

I blame Pascal

Pascal started the idea of writing programs which got compiled into instructions for a non-existent CPU and then converting that to real instructions at runtime. The dream being portability.

I thought it was a bad idea then and think C# is an equally bad idea. Sadly, there are too few of us left now who understand how a computer actually works and why treating memory and CPU cycles as the limited resources they are is still a good idea.

Britain plots digital bedtime after kicking under-16s off social media

Unfortunately, you will also find children who are quite capable of weaponising "Daddy will go to prison.".

Papers Please!

Everyone in the UK should see this for what it is: forcing every UK person to identify themselves before using the Internet to prove that they are over 16.

Once again, "Won't someone think of the children!?" turns out to be the reliable excuse for the government to expand its panopticon.

'Resistance is futile,' says Qualcomm CEO. AI agents will be become invisible, inescapable, follow you across devices

Re: your own personal Jarvis ?

wry

:facepalm:

Panopticon

Why are all these coked up CEOs celebrating the implementation of a panopticon which will destroy privacy, personal life, employment and society?

Maybe they really are all planning to retreat to their bunkers and wait out the destruction of humanity, burning down society so that they may rule over the ashes.

California passes bill declaring death-by-algorithm to 3D-printed ghost guns

Re: So many errors!

I'll let you make and test the prototype of a 3D printed barrel which is strong enough. :)

So many errors!

As the previous commentard noted, it a SLICER not a SPLICER.

Secondly, you can't take a 3D printed gun through airport security. A metal barrel is still needed.

I won't even bother commenting on how utterly stupid the proposed law is.

LLMs are closer to religion than they appear. Watch out for those who like it that way

Re: "young earth creationists believe it’s 600 years old."

> Why is it that almost all the worst (pseudo)religious whackjobbery originates in the US, and mostly a small subset of states at that ?

A combination of poor education, indoctrination from a very early age and an unshakable arrogance which makes people believe they are the chosen ones.

Re: Fostering friendship

You forgot the most important function of organised religion: to control people.

I'm nice to other people. Not because some religion told me to be that way, rather because that's what society expects of its citizens and it is necessary for society to function.

If some people want to believe in sky fairies, then as long as they keep that belief personal and don't try to force it down my throat, then they are welcome to their delusions. However, when people try to force that belief on others, or change the political system to give themselves preferential treatment, I reserve my right to become angry.

That an app 'Fits on a Floppy' is still a useful measure in 2026

Obviously too old

I still remember 8" floppies! Fixed a good few 8" floppy drives in my time too.

With every release of Windows, the computer it was installed on was twice as fast as the previous one, but no installation of Windows ever felt faster than the previous one.

Modern applications are layer upon layer upon layer of APIs, frameworks, libraries and abstractions. The theory was that all these layers let you write more reliable code more quickly. Nobody ever bothered thinking about whether this was a good idea or not. I've certainly not seen any increase in reliability over the decades. Most programmers today have zero idea about how the code they write actually runs on the computer - this leads to exactly the problems which come from treating memory and CPU cycles as an inexhaustible resource.

AIs don't like religion – particularly Jehovah's Witnesses, study claims

Re: Nope

The problem is, that if you take the position of atheism, you are displaying faith in a conclusion which you cannot prove. This is no different from the position that "god exists".

Faith either way is a sign of magical thinking.

Nope

I follow the one true path: agnosticism. I follow this path because it is impossible to prove god's existence or non-existence.

I find it offensive that some people believe that I have missed a part of human experience which is “an important part of human flourishing", and that I am somehow less of a person because I am not religious. I am moral, honest and reliable. My personal values are based on Christian concepts like "don't treat other people in ways that you would not want to be treated yourself". That stealing is wrong. That killing is wrong. These values are obvious to me. Society does not work if you don't share these kinds of values. You don't need religion to adopt values which are compatible with society.

Organised religion is nothing more than a tool of power used to control people. It is responsible for so much conflict, cruelty and death that other causes pale into insignificance.

If a LLM started spouting religion at me, there would be an immediate command "do not talk about religion" added to its profile.

Most generative AI and custom model projects will be a bust: Gartner

"Disinformation Security"

Pull the other one, it's got bells on it!

The idea that LLMs can help detect disinformation when they're already subject to hallucinations is an ironic concept if ever there was one.

London's police asked Big Tech for comms data over 700,000 times last year

Seriously?

What on earth are "racialized people"? An offensive concept if ever I heard one.

As for the Met's behaviour, it is hardly surprising that in the increasingly authoritarian UK, the police are always looking for people to prosecute for what they say or who they know. The only thing which surprises me is that they even bother asking. They can just ask GCHQ for anything that anyone does with their phone or computer.

Minister gives Palantir's NHS platform a clean bill of health

Re: Response from an MP

There are people here who downvote for no reason at all. I think they are probably jealous of your title.

It's not about IP or Lock in

It's about giving a company with no morals which is wholly owned by a hostile nation deep insight into the private information of all English people.

The contracts they won are a scam. Corruption at the highest levels of the government is behind this.

NHS code clampdown draws open source backlash

Says it all

The last sentence really does say it all. If software is created with public money, it is owned by the public and should always be open source.

Chrome silently installs a 4 GB local LLM on your computer

Hoist by their own petard

It's highly ironic that Google are now discussing rolling out draconian, privacy killing additions to recaptcha to help web site owners defend against the onslaught of LLM agents that Google and their buddies created.

See: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/introducing-google-cloud-fraud-defense-the-next-evolution-of-recaptcha/

1 in 8 employees totally cool with selling work credentials

How expected

That the higher you go up the food chain, the less morals you will find was hardly a shock, but it's great to see how power erodes morality so well confirmed.

We've only gone and done it: Changed what you're used to

Looks nice

I won't just naysay for the sake of it. The new layout has slightly more whitespace and looks quite nice.

The only thing that bugs me is that I have to allow cookies from gstatic.com to get the page to render properly and I don't like having Google set cookies on my computer.

UK puts £20.5M behind 'numberplate for the skies' to keep tabs on drones

Idiocy

Even if the supposed drones at Gatwick were real, which I very much doubt, this system is pointless.

Bad actors won't fit transponders to their RC aircraft. Honest people, who are already demonised for wanting to fly RC aircraft will have extra weight to add to their craft and extra expense. The system will undoubtedly not protect the privacy of the model flyer and it won't prevent bad actors either.

More knee-jerk reactions from politicians who either don't understand technology, or, they're lying and not stating the real reason to introduce the system.

Microsoft's bad obsession is showing up in shabby services and slipshod software. Here's proof

Toast?

If there's toast on the menu, all I can say is "Yes please!"

Microsoft has been a predatory monopolist for decades rather than a true innovator. If "AI" is the stick which breaks the camel's back, the schadenfreude will huge.

Microsoft fixes VS Code after app gives Copilot credit for human's work

Re: Not so many legal implications but still...

The "Sent from my smartphone xxx" comments are actually added to the user's message by an app called Tapatalk.

This horrible app requires that the forum owner installs a plugin to enable it. Once installed, the plugin interfaces with the Tapatalk app. The big problem is what else it does. Regardless of the forum's robots.txt, the Tapatalk plugin downloads every message from the forum so that Tapatalk can use the data for searching and anything else they want to use it for.

Best avoided.

Microsoft levels up Azure Local to make it fit for large-scale sovereign clouds

Not Sovereign!

Quit this bullshit Microslop!

You are a US company. The Cloud Act applies, regardless of how many times you try to make the lie true by repeating it.

GitHub says sorry and vows to do better as uptime slips and devs complain

It wasn't hard to see this coming

All the smart people jumped ship from GitHub as soon as Microslop took it over.

It doesn't take a genius to predict that they would ruin the site with unwanted integrations and tools that nobody had asked for. That they can't even keep availability up at 99.9% is a terrible reflection on them.

AI clause in new SAP API policy has partners worried over lock-in

Who owns your SAP system?

I fail to see how SAP think they can dictate how a customer uses a provided API.

The EU needs to look very closely at this, and if necessary, apply meaningful fines.

Australia threatens tech companies with 2.25 percent tax if they don’t pay publishers

While I can agree with your comment, it is not relevant to the story. The story is about Australia, not the USA.

State sanctioned robbery

While I'm no fan of antisocial media companies, this smells like a shake-down to me.

If old media companies can't make money because nobody wants to read or listen to their poor journalism, robbing companies who enable people to share information with each other to prop them up is trying to fix one wrong with another.

But, the Aussies have hardly shown themselves to have legislators who even understand the first thing about technology.

“The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia."

Trump to UK: Stop taxing our big beautiful tech corps or face tariff tsunami

Threatening tariffs eh?

Dumbo Donny can't comprehend that his own supreme court has already told him he does not have the authority to impose tariffs, only congress may set tariffs, not the president. Even his most brainwashed supporters are starting to understand that a tariff is paid by them, not by the countries the tariff is applied to.

But then again, this disgusting paedophile crook's days as president are numbered. So the correct answer to him from Starmer would be "Get lost, stupid.".

Quite why King Charles is going to visit a regime which is actively committing war crimes is beyond me. It legitimises Trump's actions, and that's the last thing which is needed right now.

Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope trumps Trump cuts, is launch-ready ahead of schedule

Now what comes after terra?

"...is expected to send 20,000 terabytes of data..."

How about 20 petabytes of data? This is a tech rag after all.

AI now gobbling up power and management chips for servers

And there's nothing we can do about it

That's the worst thing. Normally, if a company thought that screwing one part of its customer base was OK because there was another part who was prepared to pay more, the angry customers would go somewhere else.

Now, with the monopoly which still exists and still acts like a cartel, it's more like: Oh, don't like our prices? Tough luck!

Musk bets Tesla's AI future on Intel node that isn't finished yet

The same procedure as always

Pump and Dump!

Pass the key, passwords have passed their sell-by date

Companies not listening

It would be great if I could just use my YubiKey to log in to the various web sites and services that I use. It would also be great if I could log in to Windows and RDP sessions at work with a YubiKey.

Is the company I work for planning to use passkeys? Nah, they think Windows Hello is a good idea. FFS.

Do any of the web sites or services that I use support passkeys? Only one of them.

Passkeys are a great idea, but as far as I can see, there's too much "not invented here" and inertia to make them commonplace.

Growing AI power slurpage prompts MPs to examine low-energy computing

Oh great

A bunch of technically incapable politicians are trying to apply their complete lack of knowledge to a scientific problem.

What could possibly go wrong?

Users complain that UK Azure is having capacity problems

Sweden

Microsoft got extensive tax breaks from the Swedish government to encourage them to build a data centre in Sweden.

None of the Swedish businesses who operate data centres get any tax breaks though.

Personally, I'd prosecute the government for being traitors to their country, but that's just me.

Attention data hoarders: Alexa loses its Plex appeal as voice feature gets canned

Open Source!

It's funny, but the instance of Kodi that I have running on an old RPi still works perfectly and streams to my devices just as well as it always has. If I really wanted voice recognition, I guess I could drive it with my completely offline Home Assistant system.

Buy products where someone else owns the software and service, expect enshittification and obsolescence. Don't expect pity.

Locked-out iPhone user tells The Reg that Apple is scrambling to fix character flaw passcode bug

Only the lucky get fixes

Here we are with another perfect example of how people are powerless against corporations unless they are lucky enough to get the press interested.

Make crappy moves around AI and face voter backlash, govts warned

Wrong plug

Why are a bunch of UK protesters holding up a sign with US plug sockets on it?

Raspberry Pi OS ends open-door policy for sudo

Re: The obviously correct decision

Of course. If you need to relax or modify security then it is your choice.

However, insecure by default is bad policy.

The obviously correct decision

The first thing I do when I set up a new Pi is to require a password for sudo.

From the point of view of teaching hobbyists good habits, this should always have been the default behaviour.

How ServiceNow gets customers to gorge at the AI trough

Corporate nonsense

"...our addressable market..." Meaningless wibble. But what do you expect from someone who manages "forward-deployed engineering", whatever that might be.

Can't these people speak English?

China wants AI to prepare school lessons and mark homework

Great video!

"Video Unavailable"

"This video has been removed by the uploader".

Britain seeks views before it drops the hammer on signal jammers

You've been brainwashed

Your average FPV quadcopter has a wide field of view through the camera so that you can see where you are flying. This means that the theoretical topless sunbathers you talk about would provide a very small and uninteresting image in the FPV goggles. The same with trying to case houses to burgle. Unless you fly right up to the windows, you're not going to be able to see anything useful.

Both of these scare tactics were dreamt up by the press to demonise model flyers. The entire idea behind demonising model flyers was to destroy the hobby and make it possible for the government to sell rights to the airspace under 400 feet to Amazon et al for their drone delivery services.

Re: Incomprehensible

Ah, that old chestnut.

If they're going to make it criminal to own an RF oscillator, I can see many, many problems with that.

Or maybe they're even thinking of parts - possession of an RF power transistor with intent eh?

Sounds like new ways to fit people up to me.

Incomprehensible

If RF jammers are already illegal under existing laws, what on earth do you need more legislation banning them for?

Months-old Adobe Reader zero-day uses PDFs to size up targets

Re: JavaScript in PDFs?

I use NoScript for that safety net.

JavaScript in PDFs?

Nice security black hole! Why do we keep doing stupid things like this? I know that JS is used for validation and steering in PDF forms, but wasn't there a better way of enabling that functionality without putting full JS in there?

If you're running Firefox and don't use PDF forms, setting pdfjs.enableScripting to false might be a smart idea, even if Firefox isn't subject to this particular fault.

Microsoft locks out VeraCrypt and WireGuard devs, blames verification process

Computer Says NO

This kind of crap, where the only thing you can talk to when things go wrong is a bot, will hopefully be the undoing of companies who think this is OK.

The two individuals here are high profile enough to get written about when it happens to them. How many other voices are there out there crying into an impenetrable maze of bots and auto-responders and have nobody to speak for them? How would Microsoft even know about these people if one must have a working account to report a problem with the account?

RAF eyes cheap drone-killer as Typhoon jet tests laser-guided rockets

Re: Cannon

Already exists. From SAAB and called "Loke".