Posts by Cruachan

Microsoft adds Grok – the most unhinged chatbot – to Azure AI buffet

More AI choices on Azure means more I can choose not to use.

NASA keeps ancient Voyager 1 spacecraft alive with Hail Mary thruster fix

Don't feel bad, more than once I've posted something that's upset someone so much that every post I've made in the last 3 months gets a downvote. Trolls gonna troll.

Anyway, a very cheerful Friday afternoon story, the work the Voyager team do is incredible.

Meta's still violating GDPR rules with latest plan to train AI on EU user data, says noyb

They might as well train AI on the things that drunk people shout at traffic rather than on social media posts

Go ahead and ignore Patch Tuesday – it might improve your security

It's all very well saying don't patch, or at least don't patch straight away, IF your systems are well controlled and documented with minimal attack surface, and/or run software that requires specific patch levels. Systems like that should also be inaccessible to users and allowed nowhere near the internet.

However, given that most companies that get compromised do so by stupid users visiting websites that they shouldn't or plugging in USB sticks that they found or any of a dozen other behaviours, client systems are getting patched ASAP.

A company I worked at not that long ago sent out a faux-phishing email as a test of user security, even after some bright spark sent out an all staff email TELLING everyone how clever he was for discovering that it was a test, loads of people still visited the link and got caught out.

The 12 KB that Windows just can't seem to quit

Re: I like

Ah, the old days of playing X-Wing in silence or Wolfenstein 3D with even worse sound through the PC speaker than the appalling German voices you got with a Soundblaster. Plus there were the games that wouldn't run windowed due to lack of memory so had to have a special start-up floppy with the bare minimum of drivers and utilities to make sure they could run.

I do actually use Windows icon files on a semi-regular basis, although not this one very often. When I'm adding programs in to the library in SCCM or whatever they call it this week I always try to use an appropriate icon for scripts etc so that they're easier to find. Iconsextract is a useful tool for this

‘Infuriated’, ‘disappointed' ... Ex-VMware customers explain why they migrated to Nutanix

I worked for a company last year and they openly mocked my virtualisation experience as much of it was with Hyper-V (I work in the public sector a lot and Microsoft offer much more favourable licensing to public sector bodies so it makes sense if you don't need all the features VMware offers). By the end of my 6 month contract, with Broadcom taking the piss on renewal costs and also appalling support from Cisco on their Hyperflex hardware they were seriously starting to look at Hyper-V as an option, as well as a new (at the time) hyperconverged option from Dell that sadly I can't remember the name of at the moment - it was Power something I think but that hardly narrows it down in Dell world.

Broadcom seem to think VMware is like Oracle and they'll get away with it, but moving VMs to a new platform is a lot easier than migrating databases, even if it's still a PITA.

Trump promises protection for TikTok, for which he has a ‘warm spot in my heart’

Re: Ignorant estate agent made president, result for everything is what you'd expect

A new one today

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cze17n02gego

Let's reopen Alcatraz to house our worst criminals, ignoring the fact it would cost a fortune to do so, it cost a fortune to run (3 times the cost per prisoner when it was closed) and is pretty small in terms of capacity anyway. Presumably he saw The Rock or Birdman of Alcatraz on TV over the weekend.

Trump wants to fire quarter of NASA budget into black hole – and not in a good way

Musk's severance payoff

DOGE makes no discernible savings, guts a load of agencies that were investigating Musk and/or his companies and in return for it tanking Tesla, SpaceX gets to go up against a hobbled NASA.

UK's smaller broadband operators face tough road ahead, consolidation possible

Re: Regulator more like collaborator

BT were so shit that I complained to the ombudsman about them to get out of my contract. Made the complaint, got a summary email to confirm "is this your complaint?" and replied as it was completely wrong. They ignored that, found that BT were not in breach of my contract (because they investigated the wrong complaint) and then ignored every attempt I made to correct them.

Sadly all the small suppliers seem to end up getting bought over, I was with Demon (gone), BeUnlimited (gone) and now Origin (very quietly went bust and got bought over by TalkTalk) and am about to move to YouFibre but even at that I've had texts from Openreach telling me that the connection has gone live.

Cook'd: Judge says Apple lied to court in Epic case, asks Feds to mull criminal charges

Don't worry, the Apple fanbois will be along shortly to tell us how not being allowed to leave Apple's walled garden is a good thing.

Back online after 'catastrophic' attack, 4chan says it's too broke for good IT

Important Data?

"vast amounts of important data being stolen."

I'm having difficulty with the concept of there being anything of value on 4chan personally.

Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit that wants to become an addiction

True, there are always a few (take your Focused Inbox and fuck right off Microsoft) but at least the major features and their keyboard shortcuts don't get moved.

This is also something that generally gets covered in "on the job" training or is handled by IT, rather than actually needing to send people on courses or getting trainers in, which is an expense the beancounters will actually see unlike IT time which they think is free and infinite.

Training costs are what will keep anyone from moving. Even in IT, I've seen several companies over the last few years desperate to leave VMware given that their new overlords are taking the piss with licensing costs only to decide at the last minute that either there are features in VMware that the alternatives don't provide or they'll get too much staff pushback and it'll cost too much to retrain them on something new.

Most of the Mac users I encounter are using them for no reason other than they can say they are Mac users (same as how all iPhone users always say iPhone and not phone), although there are always users with legitimate reasons as well, there are apps that work much better on Macs for example or (rarely) don't have Windows versions.

Signalgate lessons learned: If creating a culture of security is the goal, America is screwed

Any active duty personnel who did what Hegseth has done once would lose their clearance instantly and be facing a court-martial, never mind that Trump's entire 2016 campaign was "lock her up".

It would be funny if people's lives weren't at stake, this drunken clown who only has a job because of fealty to Trump is supposed to be in control of the world's biggest military.

Trump blinks: 'Substantially' lower China tariffs promised

Trump doesn't care as long as it helps him. He's not exactly subtle about flouting the law so if MTG is profiting off the stock market fluctuations, he likely is too.

Re: Is 'blink' a euphemism for pump & dump?

I'm glad to say I've never met Trump, but my own experience has always been that only people who are incredibly insecure about their own intelligence feel the need to tell everyone around them how intelligent they are.

California sues President Tariff

Re: Courts and power

It's the only recourse people have as long as Congress and the House are allowing Trump to do what he wants, even if it's a power that is reserved to them. Given what he's already done in the past the threshold to get enough of them to grow a spine and impeach him and actually convict him this time is huge, but I suspect things will change nearer the elections (unless he manages to knobble them too, which I'm sure is on the agenda).

Team Trump readies national security card to justify taxing Americans for foreign chips

Re: Better education from this lot?

And his education secretary that you mentioned repeatedly referred to AI as "A1" recently

https://gizmodo.com/trumps-education-chief-linda-mcmahon-repeatedly-calls-ai-a1-in-school-speech-2000587329

One too many chair shots to the head obviously, or she just really wanted some steak sauce.

Official abuse of state security has always been bad, now it's horrifying

Mark Thomas

This is going back a number of years but I recall Mark Thomas doing a show about UK Intelligence Classification and IIRC we are (were? This was the 90s I think) the only country with a default classification of secret until classified otherwise, whereas most countries were public until classified otherwise.

It's rather worrying that the Five Eyes has been the public face of weakening encryption for so long, although the antics on t'other side of the pond might well mean that particular organisation being gone before long anyway, or at least becoming Four Eyes.

Pentagon celebrates snipping 0.58% from defense budget in IT, DEI cuts

Re: Actually

He was lying?

Trump doubles down, vows to make Chinese imports even more expensive for Americans

Re: what's the deal with retaliatory tariffs?

"The president can impose tariffs on his own without any voting or oversight"

Only in times of "Emergency" which is why he keeps declaring ones that don't exist, the power actually lies with the Senate. Whilst there are some rumblings there at the moment, and there was one vote against the Canadian tariffs that was purely symbolic, they haven't shown any spine there as yet. There are also rumblings about yet another impeachment from Al Green, but again that requires that the House and the Senate regrow spines. At the moment there are 4 GOP senators who have voted against the tariffs but impeachment requires more than a simple majority, if it were to ever reach a senate vote.

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5234386-al-green-donald-trump-impeachment/

UK's attempt to keep details of Apple 'backdoor' case secret… denied

It pains me to be on the same side as Apple, but the insistence of multiple Governments and agencies that there is a safe way to backdoor encryption despite all the evidence and outcry from anyone who knows anything about security needs to be challenged until they get the message. It's all very well for MPs, they gave themselves an exemption to RIPA but the culture of "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" from the Home Office needs to end.

Trump fires NSA boss, deputy

Re: What did they really expect?

"It doesn't need a charismatic leader. It jus needs enough people ready to bent and serve one - usually in their own interestes, or at least is what they think."

That's what is happening, if congress and the senate actually had a spine he wouldn't be getting away with it. Mitch McConnell seems to have belatedly realised what a monster he's created but it might be too late. Likewise the Roberts Supreme Court.

I'm assuming that FOX News' leading expert on cyber security is about to be appointed, it certainly won't be anyone qualified for the job unless they are also a Trump loyalist.

Forget Signal. National Security Adviser Waltz now accused of using Gmail for work

A few months ago I saw an episode of NCIS and mocked it online as one character had a classified undercover assignment that he couldn't tell his team leader about, and so left a crime scene to maintain his cover. Said team leader found him and the agency director discussing the classified assignment over a meal in a diner, not in a SCIF.

I take back my previous mocking as it seems now that this is accepted US Government policy for handling classified intelligence.

Musk's xAI swallows Musk's X in ego-friendly, all-stock deal

Re: AI trained "exclusively" on X

Oh look, another Musk apologist posting anonymously.

"A lot of people are saying..." is also the way that Mango Mussolini reports every conspiracy theory going.

Re: AI trained "exclusively" on X

I am in no way defending AI, but Grok has been reporting Mush as the biggest source of disinformation on Twitter, just ahead of, you guessed it, Trump.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/elon-musk-s-own-ai-chatbot-has-turned-on-him-and-says-he-s-spreading-misinformation/ar-AA1B9D1m

I'm sure an update to "correct" that is on the way soon though.

Judge halts DOGE's union personal data grab at OPM, Treasury, Education

Re: I'm not sure that the "judicial" branch really understands that the data has long flown the

"if you can do something illegal before the court has a chance to issue a ruling you can get away with it?"

That's the argument they're trying to make on the deportation case essentially, the Judge only verbally told them turn the planes around and didn't put it in writing so they interpreted that as carry on.

No doubt we'll see a flurry of posts from Mango Mussolini (Mark Kermode's new nickname for him which I find very funny) about how radical left this Judge is soon.

Trump orders all government IT contracts consolidated under GSA

Yeah, consolidating public sector purchasing through a single framework was a roaring success in the UK and didn't lead to massive price gouging by the companies involved.

Brit supermarket finds breaking up is hard to do as Walmart-Asda divorce stretches into fourth year

I was a student and working for Asda when Walmart bought them. The "US Customer Service" model was shoved down our throats despite every single person, especially the checkout operators, saying UK customers don't want that, some want to talk and some don't. All ignored, told to do it anyway, then told not to say "we told you so" when customer complaints went through the roof, all along the lines of "tell your staff to shut up and leave me alone and just scan my shopping."

They weren't the only company to think that UK customers wanted US customer service, but certainly one of the biggest and most resistant to accepting it wasn't a good idea.

City council rejects inquiry into £130M Oracle IT disaster

Re: Hmm ...

"Has any other project, even some of the gloriously awful military and government ones, actually managed to go 10x overbudget?"

Only 4x over budget and 7 years late (at the moment) but the only operational fiasco ferry sprang a leak this week after 2 whole months of service , so give it time and it could get there - the second ferry is still under construction.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr7218d50m0o

Re: "I assume intelligent people working in councils."

Just ask Wiggle Chain Reaction Cycles

https://engage.oracle.com/kirklands/items/online-sports-retailer-wiggle-uses-oracle-to-support-double-digit-growth

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/31/wiggle_it_infrastructure_sale/

This sort of thing is constant in the public sector though, constant re-orgs of the NHS/police/fire services etc with no thought to IT or contracts. See also the ESN fiasco with replacing radios with 4G and the move to national rather than regional police and fire services in Scotland.

Trump administration threatens tariffs for any nation that dares to tax Big Tech

Re: I dont know, this seems pretty simple to me...

Tell DOGE that the Reg is a US Government department and they'll take the chainsaw to it, lack of understanding is clearly no impediment to them (case in point being the 150 year olds they claim are getting benefits).

Not even in Scotland, where we tend to be rather proud of our artists etc, is McGonagall celebrated much. Billy Connolly did read "The Tay Bridge Disaster" on his World Tour of Scotland TV show when visiting Dundee though.

Someone's been watching The Untouchables

He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He puts one of yours in the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.

Al Capone would approve of the tactics, and the tax evasion, even if that's what eventually brought him down.

Binned off staff, slashed stock options. What's next? Ah yes, bigger C-suite bonuses

It's always amusing to watch "tech bros" or whatever the term is this week. They always start off with "we do things differently" and they love the "move fast and break things" mantra that somehow is still considered acceptable in silicon valley (and in the US Government at the moment, but that's for another thread) but as soon as the company gets to a certain size they behave like every other big company. The "fat" is always trimmed from anything that might be considered useful to the world and lines the pockets of the select few. Online safety (no fact checking and minimal if any moderation, just community notes meaning unpaid users are trying to do the job that they should be doing) vs actual safety at companies like Boeing, but the culture is largely the same.

Elon Musk calls for International Space Station to be deorbited by 2027

Re: How surprising

He's never had to, much like Trump, because he's always had Daddy's money and so people don't say no to him or publicly disagree with him when he talks bollocks.

Expert diver says submersible is useless and a publicity stunt for cave rescue as caves are too narrow even for divers in SCUBA gear. Diver publicly accused of being a paedophile based on his appearance.

Twitter employee points out Musk's lack of understanding of how the site is coded. Employee fired via twitter.

Astronaut points out that Musk's claim that Biden left the astronauts stranded for political reasons is "a lie". Musk calls astronaut an idiot, then ignores him when the astronaut gives a calm and reasoned explanation of why Musk is wrong.

There's 3 examples, and I'm willing to bet with a bit of research that there are hundreds more. Musk and Trump live is a bubble where sycophants agree with them and anyone who doesn't is "radical left".

Judge says US Treasury ‘more vulnerable to hacking’ since Trump let the DOGE out

Re: In Australia, Space Karen would have his arse in a sling, cooling his heels in a cell.

Shows how bad the law is in the US. Anyone else calling someone "pedo guy" based on their appearance (and daring to call out Musk's ignorance) would lose their case in short order. Musk won his and very quickly. His overlord if he was anyone else would also have had at least a night in the cells for contempt for referring to the judge in his trial in the terms that he did so often.

As we know though, in MAGA land corruption is defined as "doesn't agree with Trump", which would actually make Trump himself corrupt given how often he contradicts himself.

Does DOGE have what it takes to actually tackle billions in US govt IT spending?

Won't be long before the SEC is in the firing line as they're investigating Musk's twitter purchase again.

Let's not pretend that there is anything but self-interest in what Musk is doing. One of the first targets was the FAA, who SpaceX have clashed with frequently. No doubt some if it is just chaos because they can do it, and some is malice towards their enemies and detractors (Removing the T from LGBT on all Federal websites was no doubt targeted at his daughter who wants nothing to do with him), but ultimately they all want less regulation so they can make even more money.

Musk's move fast and break things mantra won't work in US.gov

Re: You're overthinking it

Dennis Hopper in Speed: "Poor people are crazy, Jack. I'm eccentric." Billy Connolly said of himself that when he was a school kid he was described as daft. Now that he's rich and famous he comes from a dysfunctional family and has abandonment issues.

A large part of me feels nothing but schadenfreude, the US was either too stupid not to vote for Trump or too lazy/indifferent or whatever else to actually get out and vote and now they have a democratically elected idiot in charge who only listens to the last person who spoke and is too stupid and arrogant to even pretend to filter the thoughts in his head.

Sadly the global consequences are huge. We're looking at trade wars, forced relocation of an entire people so that he can redevelop their home as a resort, an abandonment and denial of any attempts to control climate change and a host of other issues. And in Musk's case, this is almost entirely because he has a daughter who is transgender and wants nothing to do with him, so he's declared war on the "woke hive mind virus" as he calls it.

Supreme Court to hear TikTok's appeal against law that would force it to shut, or sell

Any time the argument for/against social media pops up I am reminded of this clip from Person of Interest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZfQymnABxQ

Government agencies needed more information about people and couldn't figure out how to get it, until they realised most people would give it away willingly.

Given that the owner of FB's biggest rival is currently pulling Trump's strings, it makes perfect sense. Twitter will be a major threat when Trump and Musk inevitably fall out, because neither one of them is ever wrong in their own eyes.

Vodafone and Three permitted to tie the knot – if they promise to behave

Moved from 3 to id (one of their MVNOs) a few years ago. Coverage good, service shite was my 3 experience as soon as they moved the support out of the UK. We shall see what happens, O2 are the only other viable option for me as I'm having nothing to do with BT/EE on general principle after having been a BT broadband customer some years ago (not through choice, no other FTTC providers at my exchange at the time).

Abstract, theoretical computing qualifications are turning teens off

Re: WYF!

Thinking about it I'm pretty sure it was COMAL at school, but I used BASIC at home where I also had a BBC Micro and in those days typing in games yourself from a book or a magazine was a thing. A very frustrating thing due to it being very hard sometimes to tell if the printed symbol was a comma or full stop etc and there being no internet to check the errata, but it was a thing.

Re: WYF!

Shows how well I remember it!

Think there were some fundamentals in Standard Grade, and the programming was in BASIC because as someone mentioned, it was on BBC Micros. Might have been some COMAL as well as there were a lot of similarities.

Re: WYF!

Things must have changed (or are different in Scotland) because when I sat my Higher Computing in the 90s (GCSE equivalent) it was mostly programming (in Turbo Pascal IIRC) and when I went to Uni (Strathclyde) it was all programming and maths. There was actually a lot of backlash from the students because the vast majority of courses, despite their names, were just programming in different languages. E.g. the class on Compilers was just programming in C, Object-Oriented Programming was just coding in Eiffel rather than concepts of OO programming (Java was new at the time and not the dominant language) and most classes used Scheme (A Lisp derivative demo language that was free to license for Universities).

I remember a lot of calls for more classes in computing fundamentals like networking and Operating Systems, so they might have taken those on board and gone too far the other way.

All bark, no bite? Musk's DOGE unlikely to have any real power

Always funny to see Musk talking about a waste of money when he bought one of the world's most recognisable brands and renamed it "X", which of course no one calls it. At least he decided the name himself though, wonder how much the coloured pencil consultants scammed Standard Life Aberdeen for to become ABRDN.

Microsoft has reached $1M giveaway levels of desperation to attract users to Bing

ChatGPT is absolutely useless, I'd always assumed when we did get "AI" (which this isn't, but that's for another thread) it would do more than parse a few results from my search and put "certainly!" at the start.

I do actually use Bing, for 2 reasons. One is Google has got worse and worse for actual results being hidden below ads, and the other is I use MS Rewards to get Game Pass free on my Xbox. Much of my searching is done for work anyway, looking up PowerShell command syntax and the like.

Reaction Engines' hypersonic hopes stall as funding fizzles out

James Follett

Remember discovering the SABRE engine concept through his novel of the same name, it's a very interesting idea. Ironically in the novel much of the tech that went in to the SABRE (They called the spaceplane SABRE as well as the engines) was acquired from companies that went bust trying to develop a prototype or had decided it was a white elephant and had published their work openly.