Posts by DavCrav2

Windows 95 was too fat to install itself so needed help from the slimmer 3.1

Re: Nothing ever changes

"As it allows the gear stick to be operated at the same time as the indicators"

But what if you want to operate the windscreen wipers at the same time as the gearstick, hmm? What happens then?

Re: Nothing ever changes

You chose the wrong example. The Model T Ford was not copied. However, the placement of

1) Steering wheel,

2) Gear stick

3) Accelerator, brake, clutch,

4) Indicator stalks,

5) Most on-wheeel buttons,

6) On-screen displays,

7) Windscreen wipers,

8) Door handles, window winders,

9) Door locks

are all almost exactly the same in almost all cars, and it was other cars that did that, just not the Model T. There is no reason for the indicator stalk to be on that side of the wheel, but try putting it on the other side if you want your car to stay on the forecourt.

Imgur yanks Brit access to memes as parent company faces fine

Re: Reddit next

Reddit is indeed under investigation for almost exactly the same GDPR offences.

Re: The ICO 'court'

"Good luck with that. It's an American company."

1) MediaLab AI Inc. has other brands that currently operate in the UK.A full withdrawal of all services would be required.

2) MediaLab AI will want to not do business in any country that is a Hague Convention signatory either, I guess?

Enforcement of fines in other jurisdictions is patchy at the moment, but since this is a protecting-children-online related fine, and MediaLab AI is based in California, and California has recently created a similar law, it might be easier than you think. (Enforcement of foreign judgments is not a federal matter in the US.)

Re: Yet more Starmer authoritarian stateism - Oh no it isn't

This isn't the Online Safety Act. It's a GDPR thing. Imgur aren't putting in any measures to try to determine if a user is a child and still sends them targeted ads, which is against GDPR.

Re: The ICO 'court'

You know this isn't about the Online Safety Act, right? A quick Googling reckons the reason the Imgur is in trouble with the ICO is that it:

1) Did not ask users to state their age when signing up

2) Did not use any techniques to estimate or verify users’ ages during account setup

3) Did not ensure children’s profiles are high privacy by default

4) Did show adverts to children, including targeted ads based on age and location

These are GDPR-related and not difficult to comply with, unlike some provisions of the OSA.

Workers: Yes, RTO makes sense. No, we’re not going to do it

"We all have a Loud Alan somewhere"

I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT! OUR OFFICE DOESN'T HAVE A LOUD ALAN!

Google is very sorry for pulling down COVID misinfo and pledges never to use outside fact-checkers

Re: xTube?

CLAIM:

"The Tylenol maker actually responded that NONE of their products are recommended for use during pregnancy."

VERDICT:

False.

Here is a link clearly stating that Trump is making stuff up and that Tylenol is the safest form of pain relief during pregnancy. The site is operated by Kenvue.

OpenSSF warns that open source infrastructure doesn't run on thoughts and prayers

Re: Maybe….

"because gee, Docker’s rate-limiting us again"

I got rate-limited by our own local cloud yesterday because the program I was bug fixing apparently made too many API calls to the test environment.

(Side comment: files called build_banks_v5c_FINAL_2.py don't fill you with confidence.)

Slack threatened to delete nonprofit coding club’s data if it didn’t pay $50k in a week

Re: Slack should ..

"Not quite a tenner a month but long enough established to be well trusted."

Slack has been around for 12 years. Long enough to be trusted?

China slaps 1-hour deadline on reporting serious cyber incidents

"outages that take key government or news websites offline for more than 24 hours."

Yes, I will report within 30 minutes that an outage has happened that will take out a website for the next 24 hours.

What the Plex? Streaming service suffers yet another password spill

"Both Jellyfin and Plex are proprietary software, therefore neither should be used."

Isn't Jellyfish open source and free? At least that's what the Downloads section of their website suggests.

Reg hack attends job interview hosted by AI avatar, struggles to exit uncanny valley

Re: If a prospective candidate expresses concerns about AI-based interviews ...

In the UK at least, you might be on the hook for a discrimination suit.

Interviews have to be conducted fairly in order not to discriminate against protected characteristics. AI has known biases, hence is not fair. The prosecution rests.

If I were a black woman and a company said I was getting an AI interview with AI summary, I'd be writing a quick email asking for a full explanation of how the post-interview was working to avoid AI bias.

Supermarket giant Tesco sues VMware, warns lack of support could disrupt food supply

£2.3bn on £70bn. The profit looks big because it's a giant company, not because it's making a lot of money. The people who own Tesco would be better off pulling out their money and sticking it in an ISA.

If your weekly shop is £100, Tesco could go non-profit and reduce your weekly shop to around £97.

Sorry, I apparently wasn't clear. Blaming Tesco for their "high" (actually very low) profits is my problem with the poster. I know the supermarkets don't treat their suppliers well at all, but they are evidently not doing this to pad their bottom line, whereas Broadcom definitely are. They are in a cut-throat industry with razor-thin margins, and more or less every penny that Tesco squeezes from its suppliers is passed on to the public.

If Tesco is £1 higher on the weekly shop than Sainsbury's, they will lose customers. People compare individual pennies when choosing where to shop. If Tesco ran a campaign saying that they were going to fairly pay dairy farmers and so 4 pints of milk was now going to cost £2.50 rather than (around) £1.50, they would lose a lot of money and custom.

"In a time when the cost of food and various things have skyrocketed, somehow Tesco managed to record a £2.3 billion profit in 2024 which was already up from the ~£800 million the year before. And that's before taking COVID in to account."

That's because Tesco is a very large company. Its total revenue is closing on £70bn, so you are looking at a 3% profit margin. Broadcom on the other hand took in around $50bn (so much less than Tesco) and had a profit of $13bn (so much more than Tesco).

Hate Broadcom, not Tesco.

Hyundai: Want cyber-secure car locks? That'll be £49, please

Re: Banning? The idiots in government strike again

"Using that logic, any locksmith going to answer a call is doing likewise."

Any locksmith going to a call has a reasonable excuse. However, if a locksmith is stopped wandering around a neighbourhood other than their own at 3am, not on a call, but carrying a full set of lockpicks, they might have some explaining to do.

Prohibition never works, but that didn't stop the UK's Online Safety Act

Re: The Online Safety Act only protects children, it does not limit adult freedoms.

Did you honestly just cite the US Supreme Court as anything other than a joke? Have you been following the news? And what, pray tell, does that have to do with the UK OSA?

Nobody is saying that the OSA isn't legal. We're saying it's *stupid*. There's a difference.

Real estate agents use the power of AI to command plumbing, layout to disappear

Re: You think ...

"I'd think El Reg was more at risk for republishing pictures than they are for the originals."

Unlikely. There are, unsurprisingly, strong protections in place for investigative journalism in the case of fair use of images that show, if not a crime, then certainly unscrupulous behaviour that needs to be more widely known.

On the other hand, using misleading images when selling property in the UK would be a bold strategy.

Microsoft eventually realized the world isn't just the Northern Hemisphere

Re: Oh, whoopee doo

We are creating a new standard here. We are just trying to get Americans to adopt one of the two more reasonable standard in widespread use throughout literally everywhere else in the world.

Amnesty slams Elon Musk's X for 'central role' in fueling 2024 UK riots

"However, the law does not cover content that is harmful but not illegal."

Well, by definition, obviously the law does not ban content that is not illegal. I mean, literally that's what the word 'illegal' means.

Trump teases ‘approximately’ 100 percent tariff for imported semiconductors

Re: You?

Also, it gets better. Since his threatened tariff is 100%, he wants to be able to present a bill to the manufacturer for the total value of all imports into the US, which would be insanely high. There would be zero reason to ever pay it, since it would instantly bankrupt a company.

Radio geeks reveal how to access crucial hurricane data after US Department of Defense cut it off

Re: Nerds: 1 – Trump Administration: 0

"Just let those interested to do it."

Remind me: who is the collection of people interested in not being killed by a hurricane? Is it everybody?

Re: Nerds: 1 – Trump Administration: 0

"In which as per the first poster- nerds get what they want (yey) and Trumps admin gets to make cuts and remove the gov from something others will do happily!"

Another way of saying that the Trump admin destroys something and people who don't want to die have to pick up the pieces and spend their own time and money replacing what was originally done much more effectively? So Trump can make a tax cut for billionaires? Yippee!

Maybe we can create some kind of system where people who want small government are blocked from accessing hurricane wornings made with these data?

FCC dives in to sink Chinese grip on undersea internet cables

"The US can dictate legislation out to 12 miles from their coastline. Other than that, it is international waters and US law does not apply."

I cannot see any possible reason why you would lay an undersea cable 13 miles off the coast of Hawaii or Oregon unless you were planning on laying it to Hawaii or Oregon. So they just mean that they will blanket deny any cable construction that terminates in the US from these groups.

Junior developer's code worked in tests, destroyed data in production

I was building a meeting scheduler for my department using Microsoft Power Automate (I know) and when someone cancels a meeting, you would like to blank the attendee field and open up the slot again. For some reason, although you can manually set a Person field to null, you cannot using Power Automate, because reasons. So when I tried to set the field to null, what happened was the system searched the database looking for the closest person to null, and now someone with the surname Nulli started getting dozens of meeting emails and calendar invites.

Top job MS. Top job me for not testing it properly.

Suspected Chinese cybersnoop grounded in Italy after US tipoff

Re: Stupid enough to travel?

"*Back in 1998, a drugged up USMC pilot collided with a cable car in Italy. He caused the deaths of 20 people. This is known as the Cermis Massacre in Italy.

The Americans flew him out of Italy to avoid any form of justice.

You commit these crimes as an American, and America will give you slap on the back.*"

I could not find any reference to drug use. Citation?

On the other hand, I did find reference to the fact that NATO treaties state that the pilot should be tried in the US, not Italy, which is why he was tried in the US, and found guilty of a lesser charge but acquitted of manslaughter. The fact that he was acquitted is more a statement about the US legal system than anything else, but also because there were a number of other issues with the instructions. There were questions about how high the deck should be set, which probably led to some (possibly unwarranted) doubt.

Re: In other news...

Two Italians you mean. They generally double up. Preferably have the same first name, to make things easier.

"Xu's family, who traveled from Shanghai with the alleged cyberspy, argued that since they were able to secure a visa to travel to Italy, they were confused about why Xu was arrested."

Yes. I can just imagine the conversation now.

"Guv, someone on our wanted list has just asked for a visa. Shall we let him in, and then arrest him when he gets here?"

"No, of course not. That would confuse the family."

Iranian ransomware crew reemerges, promises big bucks for attacks on US or Israel

Both sides...

Do the hackers understand that, in a ceasefire, just because *you* think your hacking attacks on the other party are not a violation, *they* also have to think that?

Given that Iran has just said that state hacking of another state is now fine, the US can respond either with offensive hacking of its own or indeed kinetically. Lots of people throughout the world consider cyberattacks to be equivalent to physical attacks. If the US responds by dropping a few missiles on the roofs of a bunch of offices where the hackers operate, that could well be seen as a reasonable response.

LLMs can hoover up data from books, judge rules

Re: Input is output

"That one copy might be passed around, but reproduction is out."

Which is why they explicitly claim to have destroyed the original after scanning. There's no reproduction, there's a conversion. You could argue that there's a reproduction in the time in between scanning and destroying, but if you do that then reading the book is a violation, because a copy is reproduced temporarily in the access consciousness of the brain. I'm not saying whether I agree with the judgment, but I think this is not a correct way to argue against it.

"That said, if they've already bought a copy, and then use a pirate copy simply to avoid the need to pick apart the physical copy, I'm not so sure there's a problem, as long as they're not using both copies."

This is an issue as well. When you buy a book you do not also buy an e-book. Taking your book, scanning it, pulping the physical version, and then inputting it into your LLM is the transformative process. WIthout your scanning and pulping you are just buying a book and stealing an e-book.

Purchasing a book does not give you an irrevocable licence to the words in any form you fancy. If you buy a copy of a book then lose it, you cannot (legally) pirate it online to make up for it.

US Navy backs right to repair after $13B carrier crew left half-fed by contractor-locked ovens

Re: UK's F35 engines

Not right now, at least. Turkey got booted out of the F-35 programme because it bought some Russian equipment, and the US decided to keep* the $1.4bn Turkey had already paid for the jets they didn't get.

* Technically discussions about compensation are ongoing, but have been for 6 years.

BT won't budge over pay hike for manager grade employees

"Revenue down, pay rises down, payments to shareholders and the board up, business is good for some !"

Profits up, 12% after tax or more than 20% before tax. Dividend up 2%. Pay up by 1%+£1000, which unless you are on above £100k/year is more than 2%. Seems like business is better for the staff than the shareholders there.

Good news for BT then. BT's total dividend was around 8p per share. Total outstanding shares are 9.78bn, so total dividend is £780m, approximately.

BT has a total workforce of around 91,000, so unless they are being paid £8.5k each on average, BT spends way more on staff salaries than dividend.

Human knocks down woman in hit-and-run. Then driverless Cruise car parks on top of her

Re: Interesting that the police

I created an account just to reply to this with correct medical information.

For crush injuries where the crush has been in place for less than 15 minutes, so any normal car accident, release the crush. For crushes of more than 15 minutes it depends on whether medical help is forthcoming. If not, try to staunch the blood flow above the injury and then release. (Read up on this if you are likely to be places with no medical help.)

The point is that crushes can cause a toxin build up. Releasing the crush restores blood flow and then you get a rush of toxins around the body. If you run someone over, move the car ASAP. There is no benefit to leaving the person trapped under the car. Unless, of course, this involves you running over them again with another set of wheels. Don't do that. You wouldn't have said "I just dropped a concrete block on someone's leg. I'll just leave it there while I wait for the ambulance." Cars are the same.