Posts by David Newall

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

no comments at all

Samsung browser, no comments link, no comment counts, in fact, it looks exactly like a site that supports no commenting. I've only managed to leave this because i typed forums.theregister.com in the address bar.

There's a pop up menu that appears on the left third of the screen which contains arrows that open and close empty space.

The new site is a triumph...

of style over function.

In short, epic failure.

Get rid of the spotty faced kid who thought the nicely working site needed fixing.

Britain's £6B armoured sickener Ajax cleared for duty despite injuring troops

weasel (words)

The majority of soldiers who felt ill during this exercise suffered only temporary symptoms, according to Pollard.

Meaning some soldiers suffer permanent symptoms.

Locked, stocked, and losing budget: AI vendor lock-in bites back

Say it isn't so

OpenAI increased the cost for developers using its flagship GPT-5.2 model from $1.25 per input token in the previous GPT-5.1 to $5.75

maybe per million tokens?

Using the password 'admin123' wasn't as bad as sharing it on Slack

You've been forced to change your password 8 times?

Re: I'm surprised...

Nonsense. NSA recommends using phrases. They are easy to communicate and remember, thus there's no motivation to pin them to a slack board.

With 170,000 English words in common use, correcthorsebatterystaple is one password out of 8.3521E20, and that's before considering spaces, punctuation and capitalisation.

It's much better than Vu+}?8wV?5TPy2cLBqc= which absolutely will be written on a post-it note and stuck to a screen, as well as be sent by email because you'll never be able to verbally communicate it.

The spaghettified DBMS chart that shows Oracle's crown is slowly slipping

PostgreSQL not included

Tell me they aren't measuring RDBMS without saying they're not measuring RDBMS.

Gartner must have a hidden agenda. But I repeat myself.

Windows asks a networking question on a Stratford billboard

Re: I Don't Understand

Windows borkage is crap. When Linux borks, it's classy.

The company's biggest security hole lived in the breakroom

Re: Exactly why!

Most don't come connected to the Internet, and you don't have to plug them into your network or configure the WiFi. If you're looking at VIZIO, look elsewhere.

Google is to journalism what Vikings were to monks. Now their man will run the BBC

Remember Nokia

Nokia owned most of the mobile handset market until an ex-Microsoftie took over and, wilfully, I think, destroyed their business, before returning to Microsoft.

I know Beeb is quite different, yet it sounds disturbingly familiar. He comes from a business that surely was being ironic when they said don't be evil.

AI bug reports went from junk to legit overnight, says Linux kernel czar

I've noticed a huge improvement in ChatGPT since 5.2. Previously, in back-and-forth coding sessions, it would rewrite the code every time it replied: variable names would change slightly, functions would gain or lose parameter types, and so on. I'm no longer seeing that.

Calling out corporate BS? There's a steaming pile to aim for

Re: In the mockery a glob of insipid business speak oozes through.

Don't incentivise; motivate.

Don't gift; give.

Don't yeh nah; no!

Elon Musk wants to build 50 times more chips than the world currently produces, using 'new physics'

Re: Yeah.... right...

He'll get rid of the extreme UV laser hitting drops of tin and use a normal IR laser plus machine learning. That's the kind of forward thinking leadership that got Tesla to level 5 autonomous driving before anyone else.

Pardon? He can't? Oh...

Systemd 260 kills SysV, tells AI not to misbehave

AGENTS.md

contains </email address> so the instructions appear to be actual ai slop. but i repeat myself.

Big moves in Linux filesystems as new bcachefs lands and KDE adds support for Apple's APFS

Do one thing and do it well

What I notice, from reading these comments and bcachefs documents, is how awfully complicated it is. And I think feeping creaturism has been a problem for fs developers for quite a while.

I'm surprised that developers don't go the other way.

Want a filesystem that does RAID? Interpose a RAID layer between fs and media (e.g. mdraid). Want a filesystem that does COW? Interpose a COW layer. Want deduplication? Add a layer for that to the stack. Each layer to do one job but do it well.

ZFS (which succeeds), btrfs (less so), bcachefs, these are complicated because they are complicated.

Re: btrfs vs bcachefs

I have a btrfs filesystem that's currently 99.9% full, it's got a bit slow.

I look forward to reading about it, regomized as Bill in Who Me

Re: btrfs vs bcachefs

Ritchie inflicted C upon the world: a language famed for being so unreadable you couldn't tell what your _own_ code did a few weeks later, let alone anyone else's

I've never heard that said. In almost 40 years working in the language, I've never found it so.

I think you're thinking of APL.

(1=+⌿0=N∘.|N)⌿N←1+⍳50

Bug that wiped customer data saved the day – and a contract

They switched configuration

UK mobilizes lawyers to keep report on Gatwick 'drone' chaos under wraps

45 minutes redux

This is from the same country who's lie about Iraq being able to launch weapons of mass destruction was key to Bush the Stupid's illegal and disastrous attack.

Microsoft previews tech to ease creation of keyboard-accessible websites

Arrant nonsense

keyboard-enabled websites are easy to write, and always have been. If they are bigger, only insignificantly so. Why am I unsurprised that MS are trying to inveigle their way into this non-issue? Embrace, extend, extinguish, no doubt.

Supposedly big-brained execs are outsourcing decisionmaking to AI

Poor people pay no income tax because they earn too little, and they spend all that they earn just to live. Rich people pay lots of income tax because they earn lots, but spend little of it because they earn more than they can spend. Elimination of income tax helps the rich. Increasing sales tax hurts the poor a lot. It's questionable whether you can increase sales tax enough to offset loss of income tax. Overall, a terrible idea. Just awful.

Iran's cyberwar has begun

Re: Acts of Frustration are a Sign Recognising the Lack of Both Common Sense and Intelligence ‽

That's remarkably erudite and succinct. Who are you and what did you do with the real amanfromMars?

Anthropic to Pentagon: Autonomous weapons could hurt US troops and civilians

It's all in the training

Who could possibly predict the outcome of including Hegseth's and Trump's likenesses as enemies of the state in the training data?

Rogue devs of sideloaded Android apps beg for freedom from Google’s verification regime

Rogue journalist snipes at legitimate developers

I say this because there's nothing in the article to explain why the developers are rogue. Bad el Reg!

ICE watchers say agents used software to threaten and follow them home

USAnia is irretrievable broken

No longer following the rule of law, with a narcissistic bully for president, who steals, commits acts of war, bullies the countries erstwhile friends. That president might leave the oval office but USAnia will never be free of the taint. Any and probably every future president will feel free to do the same and worse.

I will never trust the country again. Truth, justice, not the American way. So sad.

PayPal app code error leaked personal info and a 'few' unauthorized transactions

Re: On-line bank

Good idea transferring from credit card to PayPal and then using PayPal for the purchase. I do that.

I'm not sure about some of the protections that credit cards offer because it is not directly used for the purchase. It is used to transfer money to PayPal. If the item purchased is defective or not delivered, the bank are likely to refuse to reverse the transaction.

If Microsoft made a car... what would it be?

The advertising campaign would be called "where do you want to go today?" It would play "start me up" when you start it. It would never take you where you want to go.

Elon Musk paints exodus of xAI co-founders as 'evolution'

Hey Elon

What part of one big beautiful lie don't you understand?

Yes, backsies: Crypto exchange Bithumb claws back $40B in accidental payments to users

How?

I understood that blockchain transfers required cryptographic signature by the sender. Once in a new wallet, I understood no backsies without the active cooperation of the second party.

Clearly not so, hence, how?

Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter

Re: C language & security

Nah. Real programmers can write Fortran in any language.

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

back pains called

"Leaning over desk"

"Reaching back of cab"

"Fitting AP to ceiling"

Oracle expects investors to pump $50 billion into its cloud this year alone

Beware the licensee terms

They'll probably have the most intricate and comprehensive suite of ai products, a cornucopia of do all and be all for everybody, priced from a pittance for entry-level to a king's ransom for it all.

Most people will pay for entry-level, never knowing that Oracle delivered everything. They'll naively ask the ai the wrong questions using the wrong phrasing, thus trespassing into advanced product territory, and then licence enforcement will pounce, audit usage, discover the usage that was not paid for, and demand the licensee pay for the top level product for every possible seat to avoid prosecution.

Every possible seat will include all employees, from janitorial to the board and all in between. It will include a seat for every customer of the licensee. And for every visitor. That will be how they make the real money.

Phones down, brooms up: HashiCorp co-founder lectures business hopefuls

Re: When Chaps like that, …

Some see a few wasted minutes here, a few there, as small stuff. I see it accumulating to a huge value across hundreds to thousand of workers.

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

Re: 0xDD

what is mc6800?

i win

France to replace US videoconferencing wares with unfortunately named sovereign alternative

portmanteau

Oracle, Michael Dell, named as investors in JV that will run TikTok's US operations

Shouldn't have caved

Should have made their system run on pure web - and surely 95% already is. Then register a new, predictable domain every day, change IP addresses every day. Finally, change the algorithm to boost the clips of Trump acting like a criminal and suppress everything that puts him and his GOP co-conspirators in even a slightly positive light, and finally, change their logo in Usanian market to the bird. Not a bird, but the bird; you know what this is. He'd squawk like the shiny little whit he is, especially when his erstwhile 'friends' realise that impeachment, conviction for treason, and penalty served in Texas (a capital punishment state) is what they need to do.

Oh, and close all their offices in Usania except one, and sack every employee who is not an avowed Republican, giving them senior titles but only pointless work, so that there's somebody in jurisdiction to punish.

Because only a tech giant can stand up to the orange bully.

Icon of a bird, not indicating Linux.

UK trade department put civil servants' feelings first during Windows 11 migration

wrong!

There's a very good reason why everyone uses Windows and Microsoft 365. It's always been that way and we all have expert skills. We don't want to change to something that doesn't come from Redmond. We'd be lost, unable to use it because nothing works the way it should (which is the way we know.)

Pardon? It did? It isn't? When did that happen? Oh no!

Microsoft 365 outage drags on for nearly 10 hours during bad night for North American infra

Cease this nonsense

Yes, one should run one's own mail-server (I do) and, it's not so hard. But, the idea you'd pivot to a different supplier because your current one is down is ridiculous. It takes hours at the least, days more likely, and possibly, depending on existing reputation of the new IP, weeks or months.

Ancient telnet bug happily hands out root to attackers

buggy design

GNU telnetd interpolates values into a command line (a string) that starts /usr/bin/login. This is brittle as login might be changed to introduce new arguments to exploit.

The correct approach is to build an argv array. I'd classify it as a Security 101 blunder.

OpenAI is still figuring out how to make money, but wants you to believe in it

Do LLMs experience time?

I argue not because they "learn" up to a point, after which they merely regurgitate with no mechanism to learn more. I am stunned by what they can do today, but not one whit by their total and complete absence of actual intelligence. Let the learning continue in production and who knows what will emerge.

Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check

Re: I used the copilot!

And yet, chat gpt 5.2 had nothing to offer when i asked it where i should gyre.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: BS

"with FOOF being a rather extreme example"

a Pentium bug?

Judge hints Vizio TV buyers may have rights to source code licensed under GPL

unlikely. without the gpl underpinnings, they might have no (working) software.

perhaps they could negotiate commercial licences from all the authors of the essential applications and libraries, but as the number of such authors increases, so such licences become harder to negotiate. For VIZIO, i suspect it can never happen.

Latest Windows 11 updates may break the OS's most basic bits

Where do you want to go today?

this was the tag line of their Windows 95 advertising campaign. They asked, but obviously had no intention of taking you there. Nothing has changed.

Systemd 259 release candidate flexes musl support – with long list of caveats

Re: Caveat emptor?

I really don't like it either, for philosophical reasons.

From a technical standpoint, it is more powerful and flexible than SysV init scripts, and whenever there are problems I manage to find why and fix them.

I have considered switching from Ubuntu to Devuan, but haven't yet because of inertia.

I might feel more sanguine if agent P didn't work for the masters of EEE.

Developer made one wrong click and sent his AWS bill into the stratosphere

need to put a different spin on it

Russia’s first autonomous humanoid robot staggers and falls on debut

creepy

without the arms

Ironclad OS project popping out Unix-like kernel in a unique mix of languages

"The only other formally verified kernel we're aware of is the seL4 microkernel"

Formally verified, as in TCSEC (a.k.a. DoD Orange book) A division system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computer_System_Evaluation_Criteria:

Examples of A1-class systems are Honeywell's SCOMP, Aesec's GEMSOS, and Boeing's SNS Server. Two that were unevaluated were the production LOCK platform and the cancelled DEC VAX Security Kernel.

Deploying to Amazon's cloud is a pain in the AWS younger devs won't tolerate

Byzantine pricing

For me the red flag is how complicated AWS pricing is. I can't even tell if they are price competitive because they are beyond comparison.

Cybercrooks team up with organized crime to steal pricey cargo

that seems like a lot of work for not really so much money.