Posts by Random person 64 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Aug 2023
Here is video from a woman that has been subject to this, please watch and try to engage some empathy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDQBAGiHHDE
She says that knows that more images will be created in response to objects, so she expects to be punished for her speech.
Is it OK to generate near naked images of 14 year old children or images of women and children with a "donut glaze" on them or an image of a Jewish woman covered with swastikas?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEk_za2_9BU
Quotes from the BBC article
> Ms St Clair's court filing alleges: "X users dug up photos of St Clair fully clothed at 14 years old and requested Grok undress her and put her in a bikini. Grok obliged".
>
> It says the imagery created of Ms St Clair was "de facto non-consensual" but Grok's developers also had "explicit knowledge" of her lack of consent.
>
> It also claims Grok generated an image which put Ms St Clair, who is Jewish, "in a string bikini covered with swastikas".
>
> In response to her complaints, the filing says, the company "retaliated against her, demonetising her X account and generating multitudes more images of her".
According to her and other sources Grok has generated images with women and children with "donut glaze" on them. I leave the reader to work out what the intention of the prompt author was.
https://www.newsweek.com/mom-of-elon-musks-son-goes-scorched-earth-over-groks-naked-images-11311362
https://www.wired.com/story/x-didnt-fix-groks-undressing-problem-it-just-makes-people-pay-for-it/
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/grok-ai-deepfake-porn-elon-musk-1235494809/
Please provide evidence that people were forced into Disguised remuneration schemes. People were told that it was possible to avoid tax. I was a contractor and would have been highly suspicious of any scheme that promised tax-free income. The controversy is that the legislation is retrospective.
https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/The-Loan-Charge-scandal-explained-Everything-you-need-to-know
What about these Chinese statelite images?
https://x.com/lobsterlarryliu/status/1929553048143085807
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3313436/how-ukraines-operation-spiders-web-attack-russia-holds-important-lessons-china
This article by Rueters uses commerical satelite images (Planet Labs) https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/satellite-imagery-shows-ukraine-attack-destroyed-damaged-russian-bombers-2025-06-03/
This article by the opposition web site has links to more commercial satellite images and various Russian pro-war bloggers https://theins.ru/en/news/281769
In the 21st century there are multiple sources of satellite images from multiple countries.
Please provide evidence for your claims.
From an article about Calder Hall decommissioning from 2019.
> The NDA is overseeing work at the site, which is due to be fully decommissioned in 2120 at a cost of more than £70bn.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-49583192
According to this article the decommissioning process has another 95 years to run.
According to Wikipedia decommissioning of Calder Hall started in 2007 and the site will enter safe storage in 2027 (i.e. 20 years later). I presume that the safe storage phase covers the next 93 years.
I have ignored the fact that Calder Hall shut down in 2005.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calder_Hall_nuclear_power_station
If I understand things correctly decommissioning in "easy mode" takes over a century.
Just allowing for a century of inflation suggests that the final costs will be higher than the estimate of £70 billion from 6 years ago.
Please correct my errors.
From an article on this august site in 2016.
> Feds spank Asus with 20-year audit probe for router security blunder
>
> Asus has settled its case with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after hackers pwned nearly 13,000 home routers via an unpatched security flaw.
> ...
> To settle the case, Asus now has to hire independent security testers to run a full audit of its router's firmware, and call them back in every two years for the next two decades to audit what the company is doing with its firmware.
https://www.theregister.com/2016/02/23/asus_router_flaws_settlement/
> 2) The use of "AI" bullshit-generation to find vulnerabilities. Doesn't seem to me to be a huge additional threat, but perhaps AI hallucinations might find vulnerabilities that humans haven't yet spotted? Could well be a Good Thing overall, in that more code vulnerabilities will be discovered sooner.
What is actually happening here and now is that LLMs are being used to create reports for non-existent vulnerabilities. The people doing this either don't know or care that the vulnerabilites don't exist, they just hope to get bounty money with much less effort and skill than is required to find real vulnerabilities.
Curl project's experience of this
https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/07/curl_ai_bug_reports/
Python project's experience
https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/10/ai_slop_bug_reports/
Did you or somebody else purchase a copy of the book? If so there was a payment for the knowledge you gained.
The LLM companies use repositories that contain pirated copies of books within copyright. They do this because they don't want the cost of licensing the books or even buying a single copy of the book.
Why should LLMs have the right to read copyright material for free when people have to pay either with money or via advertising?
> Last month, Meta admitted to torrenting a controversial large dataset known as LibGen, which includes tens of millions of pirated books.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-over-81-7tb-of-pirated-books-to-train-ai-authors-say/
Further coverage at https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-defends-its-vast-book-torrenting-were-just-a-leech-no-proof-of-seeding/
There are so many things to discuss here.
You appear to concentrate on input checks, this is extremely important but it is not the only source of security problems.
You have developed a threat model and you check your code against this security model, this is much better than most of us but have you got a third party to review your security model to see if there are attack surfaces that you had not thought of? Has your code been subject to a security audit?
If you use a compiled language have you checked for Compiler Introduced Security Bugs (CISB)? Your compiler may optimise your security related code away.
If you use an interpreted language how do you ensure that the interpreter on the end user's system is secure?
Bruce Schneier said years ago “Security is a process, not a product.”
Could you provide links to your website so interested parties can look at your product to confirm that it is secure?
Here are links that you may find interesting.
Source of the Bruce Schneier quote https://www.schneier.com/books/secrets-and-lies-pref/
Short USENIX talk on CISB https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLPwy9bnov8
Example of CISB in True Crypt from "Security Now". There are lots of
> We also talked about, and VeraCrypt had fixed and these auditors verified - and you'll remember this one, Leo, where - TrueCrypt is written in C. And the authors were using the memset function, which basically allows - memset is a C function or a library function which allows you to say "Set the following block of memory to this value." And typically it's zero. And so you want to zero out or null a block of sensitive data like the password, or like the master key or something. I mean, and so secure systems are often having to have transient, highly sensitive data, and they're often allocating it dynamically. So you say, "give me a buffer." You ask the operating system for a block of memory. And it says, okay, here's a pointer to the block of the size you requested. You're then able to use that until you free it, that is, you essentially tell the operating system, "I'm done using that block of memory, thank you very much."
> So what the programmers of TrueCrypt did was they were careful, because they don't know what the operating system is going to do with the memory that they give back to it, they were careful to zero it, to write zeroes across the buffer, then return it to the operating system so that memory that might have had something sensitive didn't just go floating around and may be available to somebody else. The C compiler, though, as one of its optimization strategies, is looking for things that don't do anything. And some clever programmer somewhere said, oh, look. This memory is being zeroed and then immediately returned to the operating system. Well, so there's no purpose to zeroing it. That must have just been a mistake. And so the C compiler optimized out.
> Leo: They didn't want to do that.
> Steve: Yeah, that serves no purpose. You've zeroed the memory and given it away.
> Leo: Isn't that a funny error. Wow. Too helpful.
> Steve: Yeah. So there is a secure zero memory function which doesn't have this problem. And so one of the early things that VeraCrypt did was to switch over wherever memset was being used to this secure zero memory function which doesn't risk being optimized to nothing by the compiler.
> And there were too many subtle TrueCrypt kernel driver problems fixed to mention that were fixed by VeraCrypt since it inherited TrueCrypt. And I won't go through them all. I mean, there were just a collection of little subtle things. But the takeaway is these guys, the auditors, really did a nice job. There's no way you could come away from this thinking, wow, this hasn't been scrutinized deeply.
https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-582.htm
The security audit of Vera Crypt from 2020 https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/EN/BSI/Publications/Studies/Veracrypt/Veracrypt.pdf
XKDC on perceived and real threat models "Encryption" - https://xkcd.com/538
You are talking about just moving the vendor lock in from the operating system to the proprietary cloud.
Here are a couple of rhetorical question for you to consider.
You say that you hate the *X Office file format, what format do you use for the files you create in Microsoft 365?
Do you want your local machine to be an appliance or a general purpose computer? A couple of years ago, Corey Doctorow gave a number of talks about the war on general purpose computing.
OpenAI are trying to argue that a guardrail to suppress the incorrect information is sufficient.
The victim of the hallucination objects to presence of the incorrect correlation being present in OpenAI's model. The victim is trying to exercise the right under the GPDR to delete incorrect information.
Using guardrails to suppress the supply of faulty information means that the model operator/owner will need to to have a lookup table of all the known incorrect information stored in the model. The contents of the lookup table will be reactive, this will end up being an example of "Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it" (Jonathan Swift https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/)
What happens if the guardrail for a specific piece of incorrect information is deleted?
LLMs are being "sold" as search engines. Like most technology very few people understand the problems of LLMs and most people are simply not interested enough to come to a view. I know and like a number of people who wouldn't understand the problems if you could persuade them to spend to be interested. If they trust you they may take your word.
I agree that there are many of good uses for LLMs but they are being hugely oversold.
Thanks for repeating Richard Tice's and The Telegraph's claims.
The Biomass system doesn't provide power to the entire airport.
> The 10MW Combined Heating and Power (CHP) system - the largest ‘own use’ renewable energy installation in the UK - will open later this year. Prior to serving T2, due to open in Spring 2014, the biomass energy plant will provide base heating and power to Terminal 5.
https://mediacentre.heathrow.com/pressrelease/detail/4079
"Pension holidays" - we can thank the 1986 Financial Services Act for introducing this idea https://www.professionalpensions.com:8443/feature/2261768/-thatchers-governments-changed-pensions
Every financial advert says that the value of your investments can go down, but pension holidays pretend that values will not go down. Just because a pension fund is currently over funded it does not that the same will be true in 5+ years time.
The 1986 Financial Services Act also stopped employers forcing employees to join the company pension.
We can blame both the Labour and Conservatives for destroying final salary pensions.
Employers were very happy to transfer all the risk to the employees.
Expanding on kmorwath point that sales taxes are regressive.
Person x is homeless and rough sleeps, they spend 99% of their income on food and whatever else gets them through the day. Under your scheme x pays sales tax on 98% of their income.
Person y makes minimum wage. they spend 90% of their income on rent, food. Under your scheme y pays sales tax on 90% of their income.
Person z is CEO of a FTSE and has a total remuneration of £4,196,000 a year, they spend 50% of their salary. They pay sales tax on 50% of their income.
I have simplified this by ignoring ways in which the extremely highly paid will engage in tax avoidance and the poorest will avoid tax via the "informal" economy.
How much of your income do you spend a year? Can you afford for heating, electricity, fuel, food prices to increase by 20-25%?
I expect your solution would be to close down the government.
Why are posting anonymously? You don't have to use a real name. I'm not posting under my real name.
https://peoplemanagingpeople.com/news/average-ceo-uk/
Take from various taxes shown here https://ifs.org.uk/taxlab/taxlab-key-questions/where-does-government-get-its-money
You may find this paper assessing the climate predictions made by Exxon scientists between the 1970s and 2003 against observed values up to 2023.
> Our results show that in private and academic circles since the late 1970s and early 1980s, ExxonMobil predicted global warming correctly and skillfully. Using established statistical techniques, we find that 63 to 83% of the climate projections reported by ExxonMobil scientists were accurate in predicting subsequent global warming. ExxonMobil’s average projected warming was 0.20° ± 0.04°C per decade, which is, within uncertainty, the same as that of independent academic and government projections published between 1970 and 2007.
> ...
> Moreover, we show that ExxonMobil scientists correctly dismissed the possibility of a coming ice age in favor of a “carbon dioxide induced ‘super-interglacial’”; accurately predicted that human-caused global warming would first be detectable in the year 2000 ± 5; and reasonably estimated how much CO2 would lead to dangerous warming.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063#sec-1
This paper is just a comparison between predicted and observed values. It appears that the Exxon models match observations up to 2023, absent other evidence the Exxon models appear to be a starting point for ongoing prediction.
[EDIT - corrected time period of the Exxon research.]
Here's a link to the donation page for Redox OS https://www.redox-os.org/donate/
> Redox is a Unix-like general-purpose microkernel-based operating system written in Rust, aiming to bring the innovations of Rust to a modern microkernel, a full set of programs and be a complete alternative to Linux and BSD.
I'm sure they would welcome your monthly donation.
You may find NixOS will provide what you want, however the builds will be performed locally and you will have to do the work.
I seems that you can do custom kernel builds in NixOS.
There was an article here about NixOS in 2022.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/13/nixos_2211_raccoon/
https://nixos.org/
The majority of households in the UK could have off-street parking. Perhaps you were thinking about London.
Source an article by the RAC Foundation.
> However, with 18 million (65%) of Britain’s 27.6 million households having – or with the potential to have – enough off-street parking to accommodate at least one car or van there is a huge opportunity for charging electric vehicles at home.
>
> Breaking the numbers down:
>
> Wales – 75% of households have – or could have – off-street parking and EV charging
> England – 68%
> Scotland – 63%
> London – 44%
https://www.racfoundation.org/research/mobility/still-standing-still#:~:text=Breaking%20the%20numbers%20down%3A,Scotland%20%E2%80%93%2063%25
Locking yourself into a particular vendor's workflow means that you are locked into using that product and have to accept whatever pricing the vendor decides. The result of this can be seen in this year's 10% price increases for a single Creative Cloud product.
> Annual prepaid: Increase of £24.09, from £238.42 to £262.51 per year
https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/x-productkb/policy-pricing/subscription-price-increase-2023-individual-plans.html
If people want to avoid being locked in they have accept that other tools are different from Photoshop. This is also true for commercial tools. If an application were too similar to Photoshop, Abode might sue on the grounds of copying their "trade dress". The legal costs would me trivial for Adobe; legal costs for a competitor could be crippling even in the unlikely event that they won.
> I have actually used at least five different diameters of coaxial connectors. Each was technically correct for the application. If someone wants to manufacture something with an odd size of connector I as a consumer can choose to buy it or not. If the manufacturer decides they would do better using a more standard connector than that's also fine.
Customer choice to ensure a common connection worked so well before the EU got involved.\s
It is better for the environment if you don't need to have a separate charge for each item. If a company does not have to provide a power supply it could increase their margin.
From the article
>When the tonneau cover (the protective cover over the truck bed) is closed, it completely obscures the view out the back of the Cybertruck. Even with the cover open, the small rearview mirror is not very usable, some Cybertruck owners noted.
I've read claims that the Cybertruck would not be legal in the UK. I don't know if these claims are correct.
This tweet by Elon Musk seems to disgree with you.
> Starlink has been told by some governments (not Ukraine) to block Russian news sources. We will not do so unless at gunpoint.
>
> Sorry to be a free speech absolutist.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1499976967105433600?s=20
I found this Xit via this article https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-09-14/elon-musk-says-he-s-pro-free-speech-but-fired-twitter-staff-for-comments
You may find this episode on CO2 and greening enlightening https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0jgzxpk
Transcript here https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/107946878
From the transcript
> It's also true that more photosynthesis means more carbon is being taken outta the atmosphere and locked away in plants a process which helps lower the carbon in the atmosphere and slightly offset manmade emissions.
>
> Of course, they can offset a little bit, but they cannot overturn, for example, the human emissions of the CO2. In the atmosphere.
I haven't fixed the transcript.
In 2020 a hosptial doctor ran 22 miles wearing a mask, his O2 levels were at 98-99% throughout.
> “I work in intensive care, I know physiology so I knew that this wasn’t true,” he told CTV News. His goal: to run a 35K (about 21.74 miles) around his hometown of Bradford, U.K., while wearing a face mask and tracking his oxygen levels.
> ...
> Lawton monitored his oxygen levels during his entire run using a pulse oximeter to track actual data of how the mask impacted his breathing. He checked his oxygen levels every half hour during his run, ... “The [reading was] 98 to 99 all the time, completely normal oxygen levels all the way,” he says. Translation: He had no breathing problems during his entire run.
https://www.menshealth.com/fitness/a33521706/face-mask-oxygen-levels-running-myth-coronavirus-doctor-fact-check/
Study of impact of mask wearing on patients with COPD https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9993157/
Do you think that people working in operating theatres for long periods have low oxygen levels?
Apple updated Apple Air Tags AFTER they were released.
> Apple has released a software update for AirTags following concerns they could be used to track people secretly.
>
> AirTags were released in April and were promoted as a way for people to keep track of their belongings.
>
> However, critics warned that the coin-sized tracker could be easily used to monitor someone's real-time location.
>
> Following the update, AirTags will beep if they are away from their owner's iPhone - at a random time between eight and 24 hours - to alert people nearby.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57351554
The audio alerts don't work, if somebody has cut the speaker connections, instructions available on YouTube. It seems to take a couple of minutes.
From Feb 2022
> The latest beta for iOS 15.4 includes new features designed to prevent Apple’s AirTags from being used to stalk people, 9to5Mac reports. Most notably, there’s a new privacy notice during their setup which warns that using AirTags to track someone without their consent could be a crime, and that law enforcement can request details on an unknown AirTags’ owner. “AirTag is Linked To Your Apple ID,” the notice reads.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/23/22947063/airtags-anti-stalking-ios-15-4-beta-4-privacy-notice
Here's the Apple news release for AirTags dated 21st April 2021 https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-introduces-airtag/
Update on the case linked in the article.
> A woman found guilty of using an Apple AirTag to track her cheating boyfriend to a bar before repeatedly running him over in a parking lot and killing him in front of bystanders was sentenced Thursday to spend 18 years in prison.
https://lawandcrime.com/crime/apple-airtag-killer-sentenced-to-prison-for-killing-andre-smith-outside-bar/
[UPDATE]
Have a look at this article from Apple Insider.
> Apple's AirTags are being used for stalking, but the problem isn't new, nor remotely exclusive to Apple — and is easier to execute undetected with other inexpensive methods. The real issue is the overall failure of law enforcement to act.
>
> Reports of AirTags being used to stalk people don't give a full picture of the dangers of "stalkerware," and the reports often shift blame entirely onto Apple.
>
> Apple isn't the only one whose tracking devices can facilitate stalking, it's just the highest profile vendor to provide tracking tools.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/12/31/the-airtag-stalking-problem-is-only-partially-apples-problem-its-mostly-law-enforcements
Register article on the case https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/14/airtag_tracking_murder_charge/
You may find this Register article from May 2023 "Apple, Google propose anti-stalking spec for Bluetooth tracker tags" informative https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/02/apple_google_antistalking_bluetooth/
According the linked article and other sources, the Bayesian had a 10 metre keel that could lifted to become a 3 metre keel to allow it to enter shallow harbours.
https://www.ft.com/content/1db169f0-8040-4150-900e-68c9b0174b8d?sharetype=gift
More information here.
> The Bayesian had an extractable keel (an underwater fin) that was almost 10 metres in length when extended and acted as a counterbalance for the vessel.
>
> Its final position will be crucial for investigators to discover.
>
> If it was stowed when the storm hit, it would have made the yacht much less stable.
https://news.sky.com/story/how-is-the-sinking-of-mike-lynchs-bayesian-superyacht-being-investigated-13201245
> One of the nation's best known airline pilots is speaking out on the problems with Boeing's 737 Max jetliner. Retired Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger told a congressional subcommittee Wednesday that an automated flight control system on the 737 Max "was fatally flawed and should never have been approved."
> ...
> Sullenberger says he recently experienced scenarios similar to those facing the pilots of the doomed Ethiopian and Lion Air jetliners in a simulator and says he understands the difficulties they had trying to maintain control of the planes. "Even knowing what was going to happen, I could see how crews could have run out of time and altitude before they could have solved the problems," he said.
> ...
> He and Carey dismissed suggestions that the crashes could not have happened in the U.S., where pilots are required to have a lot of experience and more rigorous training before flying commercial airliners.
>
> "Some (U.S.) crews would have recognized it in time to recover, but some would not have," Carey testified. Sullenberger agreed, saying it's unlikely that more experienced pilots would have had different outcomes, adding, "we shouldn't have to expect pilots to compensate for flawed designs."
https://www.npr.org/2019/06/19/734248714/pilots-criticize-boeing-saying-737-max-should-never-have-been-approved
Do you know more about flying passenger jets than Retired Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger or the president of the Allied Pilots Association?
The penultimate paragraph of the article on "Windows Central" that you linked to reads as follows
> While Windows Recall is powerful, it has also proven controversial. Many raised concerns about the security and privacy implications of such a feature. While the data is all stored locally and is never sent to the cloud, security experts warned that malicious actors could do a lot of damage if they managed to obtain a PC that was logged in. Windows Recall would have essentially placed a plethora of information on a platter, though that proverbial platter would only have been accessible with someone who could log into the PC.
Before you ignore because you believe that I am a Windows fanboi, I have used Linux for years and *nix systems at work more a lot longer.
I hope you find whichever distribution you select useful and helpful in getting things done.
Linux uses magic numbers at the start of the file header. The numbers are defined within the OS. This method is an direct inheritance from Unix.
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/working-with-magic-numbers-in-linux/
Mac so far as I can tell the OS uses file extensions by default but falls back to the magic numbers in the file header. I presume the use of magic numbers comes from the BSD userland that it is based on.
https://eclecticlight.co/2018/04/24/whats-that-using-magic-on-your-mac/
AC>> What I'd like to know is if Fujitsu have an audit trail of who had Remote access to the Horizon system....
Fujitsu's submission to the Phase 3 of the inquiry includes the following
> Fujitsu accepts that it cannot positively exclude the prospect of undocumented use of substantive remote access ...
https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/files/2023-06/SUBS0000025%20-%20Phase%203%20Closing%20Submissions%20on%20behalf%20of%20Fujitsu%20Services%20Limited.pdf
Also
> In fact, staff at Fujitsu, which made and operated the Horizon system, were capable of remotely accessing branch accounts, and had “unrestricted and unaudited” access to those systems, the inquiry heard.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post-offices-horizon-system-failed-a-technical-breakdown
AC>> Or was the shortfall of money caused by a Fujitsu employee taking funds out of the system - so that the end of day reconcilliation of payments made and money in the till, did not match.
There is a Computerphile episode about the technical failures.
Here is a summary of the problems from The Guardian article referenced above.
> As early as 2001, McDonnell’s team had found “hundreds” of bugs. A full list has never been produced, but successive vindications of post office operators have revealed the sort of problems that arose. One, named the “Dalmellington Bug”, after the village in Scotland where a post office operator first fell prey to it, would see the screen freeze as the user was attempting to confirm receipt of cash. Each time the user pressed “enter” on the frozen screen, it would silently update the record. In Dalmellington, that bug created a £24,000 discrepancy, which the Post Office tried to hold the post office operator responsible for.
>
> Another bug, called the Callendar Square bug – again named after the first branch found to have been affected by it – created duplicate transactions due to an error in the database underpinning the system: despite being clear duplicates, the post office operator was again held responsible for the errors.
Horizon is a Point Of Sale system i.e. part of the accounting system. Accounting transactions are supposed to be immutable. This was true for paper-based systems.
If you make a mistake in an accounting system you are supposed to back out of the incorrect transaction and create a new transaction. This is why when there has been a problem completing a sale in a shop you are given the receipt showing that the transaction has not completed or a receipt showing that the transaction has been cancelled.
a
The Post Office spent years claiming that remote alternation of records was only possible with sub-postmaster approval. It turns out that records could be altered without leaving any trace. The changes should have been recorded and there should have been a formal process to alter the accounting records.
When you make a change in a database there it is usually recorded in the transaction log. The transaction logs are usually retained for a few days. So far as I can tell changes to Horizon records were not recorded.
From July 2023
> Sir Wyn gives determination on Post Office disclosure failings
> 14 July 2023
> ...
> Sir Wyn Williams has announced today that all future Inquiry requests for evidence to the Post Office will carry a notice under Section 21 of the Inquiries Act 2005, which he said “carries a threat of a criminal sanction” (including a sentence of up to 51 weeks’ imprisonment).
https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/news/sir-wyn-gives-determination-post-office-disclosure-failings
Also https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/post-office-inquiry-jail-threat-over-disclosure-failures/5116672.article
I don't know what the process would be IF the inquiry decides it is appropriate.
Are you happy that your data is locked in by your vendors?
You can use tools like Dark Table to process and manage RAW camera images, e.g. NEF, CR2, RW2. A number of the file formats you mention are cross platform, e.g. PDF, PHP. Some of the file formats you refer to can be opened and managed in Linux tools e.g. the Adobe file formats.
If I remember correctly, Cannon stopped supporting the RAW file format in the earlier pro cameras.
I try to use file formats that allow me to use my data on whatever platform I want, rather than being locked in one.
No operating system is the answer to everybody's needs.
> The Post Office Horizon scandal public inquiry heard that staff working at Fujitsu’s Software Support Centre (SCC), which provides third-line tech support to Post Office branches, had “unrestricted and unauditable” remote access to branch accounts.
> ..
> ... “There is no functionality in Horizon for either a branch, Post Office or Fujitsu to edit, manipulate or remove transaction data once it has been recorded in a branch’s accounts.” The Post Office only admitted it was in fact possible when it was left with no choice, during a High Court case in 2019.
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366537376/Fujitsu-staff-had-unrestricted-and-unauditable-remote-access-to-Post-Office-branch-systems
If you listen to the BBC radio series or read the long series of articles in "Computer Weekly" or read Nick Wallis' book you will get some answers to your questions.
Also suggest that you look at the Horizon internal report at the inquiry website. The report was produced in 2001. Fujitsu took full ownership of ICL in 1998. Here is a paragraph from the internal report.
> Whoever wrote this code clearly has no understanding of elementary mathematics or the most basic rules of programming.
https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-11/FUJ00080690%20Report%20on%20the%20EPOSS%20PinICL%20Task%20Force%2014052001.pdf
A quick search for "autokey wayland" finds this page https://luxagraf.net/src/replacing-autokey-wayland-plain-text-snippets
There seems that there is or was some work to port autokey to Wayland perhaps you could see if you can help. https://github.com/autokey/autokey/discussions/866
There may be some alternatives that run on Wayland. https://medium.com/@canadaduane/key-remapping-in-linux-2021-edition-47320999d2aa
I don't have direct experience of any of these.
It is more than an inconvenience to withdraw money out of your savings to cover your outgoings because you employer has not managed to pay you.
> By law (Employment Rights Act 1996), your employer must pay your wages on your agreed pay day.
>
> If an employer does not pay on time, it can:
> * affect an employee's financial security and wellbeing
> * damage the working relationship
> * lead to legal action
https://www.acas.org.uk/if-your-wages-are-not-paid
There can be many reasons why somebody might not have a spare month's salary available to cover their employer's error.
Finally it appears that this isn't the first month that this problem has occured, from the article.
> The Register asked the council why it was necessary to create a group for very serious problems which might leave staff struggling for day to day money, and how many service desk calls were placed in this group in the last three months.
I'm not a fan of SMR, but ...
> Both public and private institutions are actively participating in efforts to bring SMR technology to fruition within this decade. Russia’s Akademik Lomonosov, the world’s first floating nuclear power plant that began commercial operation in May 2020, is producing energy from two 35 MW(e) SMRs. Other SMRs are under construction or in the licensing stage in Argentina, Canada, China, Russia, South Korea and the United States of America.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/what-are-small-modular-reactors-smrs
There is one SMR in operation and it appears that others are on the way.
You are assuming that the experiments prove that thorium reactors work and don't find any problems. What happens if it takes 15 or 20 years to build commercial throium reactors?
Perhaps you could read the actual Royal Society report rather than Toby Young's view.
I have only read the Executive Summary which includes this paragraph.
> In 2050 Great Britain’s demand for electricity could be met by wind and solar energy supported by large-scale storage.
https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/large-scale-electricity-storage/Large-scale-electricity-storage-report.pdf
Some context about the "The Daily Sceptic".
> The Daily Sceptic is a blog created by British commentator Toby Young. It has published misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines[9] and climate change denial.[16]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Sceptic
https://www.desmog.com/toby-young/
> In August 2021, China announced the completion of its first experimental thorium-based nuclear reactor. Built in the middle of the Gobi Desert in the country’s north, the reactor over the next few years will undergo testing. If the experiment proves successful, Beijing plans to construct another reactor potentially capable of generating electricity for more than 100 000 homes.
> ...
> “To meet growing energy demand and achieve global climate objectives, the world is looking for alternative sustainable and reliable energy technologies. Thorium may become one of those,” concluded Clément Hill, Section Head at the IAEA. “We will continue our research to deliver credible and science-based results for those interested in working with thorium.”
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/thoriums-long-term-potential-in-nuclear-energy-new-iaea-analysis
Thorium reactors may be an option in a decade, but is clearly not available now.
Blockchain had not been invented when the Horizon system was developed and rolled out.
> The British Post Office scandal is a series of miscarriages of justice which, between 1999 and 2015 ...
> The Horizon accounting system was developed by ICL Pathway, owned by the Japanese company Fujitsu. In 1999, the Post Office started to roll out the new software to its branches and sub-post offices ...
> Horizon is the outcome of the Pathway project, and a procurement process that commenced in August 1994 ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
> The domain name bitcoin.org was registered on 18 August 2008.[16] On 31 October 2008, a link to a white paper authored by Satoshi Nakamoto titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System was posted to a cryptography mailing list
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
Note that both sides of the transaction and the ledger are under the control of the Post Office.
It is likely that at least some of the problems would not have occurred if the transactions were ACID compliant. Computerphile did a video about this, search for "Post Office Horizon Scandal - Computerphile" for more information.
If are trying to be ironic, I suggest that you mark your posts as such because it is very likely that cryptobros would say exactly the same but without irony.
> Back in Victorian England, around ¾ of food on sale had been tampered with in some way, bread being the worst culprit. Items like ash, sand, chalk and alum, among others, were used to bulk out the bread and make it look whiter and bigger for less money. Obviously, this reduced the nutritional quality of the bread and significantly increased the risk of diarrhoea and illness, which could in turn cause further problems across a community.
https://www.hillbrush.com/en-gb/insights/the-victorians
Example of problems with meat in US in 10906
> In 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a book which exposed the filthy conditions of Chicago slaughterhouses. Sinclair wrote the book while living in Chicago; he talked to workers and their families and his focus was the plight of the workers. However, the book turned people away from "tubercular beef" instead of turning them socialist like Sinclair wanted.[10] The book was a best seller and the public outcry prompted President Theodore Roosevelt to send officials to investigate.[10] Their “report was so shocking that its publication would ‘be well-nigh ruinous to our export trade in meat’”.[11] This report, Neill-Reynolds, underscored the terrible conditions illustrated by Sinclair.[12] It indicated a need for "'a drastic and thorogooing [sic]' federal inspection of all stockyards, packinghouses and their products".[12] The Jungle, combined with the shocking reports of the Neill-Reynolds Report (published June 1906) proved to be the final push to help the Pure Food and Drug Act move quickly through congress.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_history_of_food_regulation_in_the_United_States
I suggest that you research why the FDA was created.
You may find this video from ComputerPhile of use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBJm9ZYqL10
As you say this was a solved problem at the time.
The inquiry evidence includes an internal Fujitsu report about the project https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-11/FUJ00080690%20Report%20on%20the%20EPOSS%20PinICL%20Task%20Force%2014052001.pdf
Section 7.3 has a couple of problematic code. One of of the examples is a function to invert the sign of a number (i.e. -1 to 1 or -1 to 1). The report states that the function could be refactored to "d = -d".
Public Function ReverseSign(d)
If d < 0 Then
d = Abs(d)
Else
d = d - (d *2)
End If
ReverseSign = d
End Function
Apparently this code is in Visual Basic 6 which seems where the max int is 65,535, what will happen if the function is passed a value of 33,000?
See this article for the general reader for some information.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post-offices-horizon-system-failed-a-technical-breakdown
Also see the large number articles in "Computer Weekly, here is an example
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366537376/Fujitsu-staff-had-unrestricted-and-unauditable-remote-access-to-Post-Office-branch-systems
National Grid thinks that they will be able to cope.
In this video a representative of National Grid is asked if the Grid can cope with increased numbers of EVs, they replied with a single word "Yes". She also mentions that people switching to LED light bulbs has significantly reduced UK power demands and National Grid have plans to build more capacity.
https://youtu.be/LeHakmL6eEc?t=2200
Here is National Grid's page on this topic.
> Can the UK grid cope with the extra demand from electric cars?
>
> As electric vehicles (EVs) become more widespread, one of the most common questions we’re asked is ‘How will the electricity grid handle the additional demand for electricity when more people are charging EVs?’
>
> The transition to EVs is happening … and we’re ready
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero-stories/can-grid-cope-extra-demand-electric-cars
Forbes article
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmorris/2021/11/13/electricity-grids-can-handle-electric-vehicles-easily--they-just-need-proper-management/?sh=754a417b7862
Why has participation been delayed?
> The House of Commons library on why entry into Horizon was delayed because of problems with Northern Ireland Protocol.
>
> Why has participation been delayed?
>
> The declaration agreed alongside the TCA stated that the protocols on participation would be adopted by the Specialised Committee “at the earliest opportunity to allow their implementation as soon as possible”.
>
> The EU adopted its long term budget in December 2020 and the legislation for the programmes in April and May 2021.
>
> Meetings of the various governance bodies for the TCA were initially delayed because the agreement was not fully applied by the UK and EU until 1 May. Although most have since met, the Specialised Committee for EU programmes has yet to do so.
>
> The European Commissioner for Research and Innovation, Mariya Gabriel has suggested that other wider political issues between the UK and EU would need to be settled before UK association to EU programmes could be formalised. She referred specifically to differences over UK implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol of the Withdrawal Agreement.
>
> UK exclusion from the Horizon Europe programme is among options reportedly being considered by the EU as retaliation if the UK uses the Article 16 provision to suspend aspects of the Northern Ireland Protocol. It was reported in October 2021 that France was also seeking to link the granting of fishing licenses to approval of UK involvement in EU programmes.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/is-the-uk-still-participating-in-eu-programmes/
ChatGPT has been seen to hallucinate citations in addition to content.
" ... 55% of the GPT-3.5 citations but just 18% of the GPT-4 citations are fabricated. Likewise, 43% of the real (non-fabricated) GPT-3.5 citations but just 24% of the real GPT-4 citations include substantive citation errors. Although GPT-4 is a major improvement over GPT-3.5, problems remain."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-41032-5 (Abstract only)
More examples
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33841672
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-asked-chatgpt-provide-citations-hallucinated-its-sources-street
https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(23)00401-1/fulltext
Plus this notorious example https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/23/two-us-lawyers-fined-submitting-fake-court-citations-chatgpt
You can find more information if you do a search for "chatgpt hallucinate citations".
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
