Posts by Mythical Ham-Lunch

Cyber vulnerability sweep picks up Royal Navy drones sending data to China

Anecdotal, but I had a call from an irate lawyer a few months ago who had discovered that the VOIP phones in his office were pinging an address in China. We wiped the phones and moved them to secure transport. It apparently hasn't happened again. But our addiction to cheap components and just making everything run Linux so we can solve our problems in high-level languages make this kind of thing unavoidable.

One wonders why the boats have unrestricted Internet access in the first place and whether whatever network they connect to even has open routes to China.

Intrusion at US healthcare software provider puts 3.8M people's data at risk

Re: Why was this even possible?

There absolutely is such a requirement, but if you somehow get into the record-management software then the encryption doesn't matter much.

Openreach nudges another 112 exchange areas toward full fiber

At least where I live (not in the UK, mind you) the big two telcos have rushed out their fibre builds in such a fast and slipshod manner that I'd be very surprised if they don't have to rebuild substantial portions of the last-mile within a decade. Every F2 in a multitenant or commercial building is just an absolute rats' nest of jumpers. Drops not properly secured to the outside of buildings, lashing wire failing and trunk cables falling off their span. The investors demand more FTTP customers now!! And of course mid-span repairs on fibre are not the simple affair they are with a 25-pair copper cable.

Don't get me wrong, the speed and reliability are great, but the utter lack of care or workmanship compared to what they are ripping out and throwing away is deeply dismaying.

FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another

Re: Group Policy integration in education

>> And although pissing about with settings might get you fired promoted in a corporate setting

FTFY, judging by every manager I've ever met.

Year-long Russian attacks infect users as soon as they look at an email

Office 365 is basically free for nonprofits so I wanna know what genius is putting the local government on an off brand clone. That apparently sucks even more.

Apprentice developer defied orders – then got a job supporting her weird code

Re: Programming is like sex

>> One mistake, and you're stuck giving support for 20 years.

That's why Object Oriented is so popular now.

Re: I like to automate

Irritating the department heads is its own reward...

NetNut cracked as Google and FBI target 2 million-device botnet

I see a lot of voip servers hit by these jerks. Sadly enough PBX admins out there are so lazy that extension 101 and password 1234 has a nonzero chance of working.

Godot says bye bye AI, bans vibe-coded contributions

Re: Why would people even do this?

Just like everyone whose work it's trained on consented, no doubt. The true believers seem to think the ends will always justify the means.

Ruby Central in 'real financial jeopardy' following RubyGems maintainer ruckus

Re: Away

It's RATFOR. He's still sore about Dijkstra's letter. Hard-core GOTO user.

Open source isn't a tip jar – it's time to charge for access

I see a few problems with this: first, that the frequent political imbroglios in the OSS community will mean that nobody is ever happy about how much is paid to whom; second, that as long as being a contributor to an OSS project counts for portfolio points, there will be an infinite supply of replacement-level programmers perfectly willing to do it for free. After all, you can't stop anyone from forking it.

What if it was treated like a charitable donation at tax time and you could deduct hours of OSS work at some reasonable equivalent salary from your top-line income?

Age checks creep into Linux as systemd gets a DOB field

Re: It is *not* required

Now I'm no fancy lawyer but to my understanding it actually explicitly permits mandatory collection where required by law. It does prohibit collection without a clear purpose so I guess one could argue that in jurisdictions without such a dumb law, enforcing DOB collection could be a violation (since there is no law and hence no purpose to collect). I guess if the distro maintainers really care they'll have to tie it to localization settings somehow.

Linux Foundation kicks off effort to shield FOSS maintainers from AI slop bug reports

Re: Kind of wonder...

At least some OSS projects are currently functional... "Will this make Windows worse?" is almost a trick question!

Um... when the temperature outside is 90 (aka 32) and humid, getting down to 65 will cost you a pretty penny. Do you happen to live in Antarctica?

It's like if the power company controlled your A/C and kept your house at 65 degrees all summer... and then gave you a free space heater for when you get too cold. Quite the rogues' gallery of supporting quotes too...

"Through funding, training, and AI-powered tools, we’re empowering maintainers to identify risks faster and prevent burnout."

Egads.

Iran plots 'infrastructure warfare' against US tech giants

Re: Miss

>>Particularly as large numbers of the people who made the decisions that led Iran to this place are now singing with the choir invisibule.

They're not dead, they're just pining for the fjords

Whitehall seeks lone C++ coder to keep airport passenger model flying

And at the rate they're paying I'm not sure you could afford much of a cure anyway...

DR-DOS rises again – rebuilt from scratch, not open source

So it has perfect legal clarity to... disappear whenever the current owner gets tired of it, and be impossible to upgrade or maintain after that since there isn't any public source code?

Flying cabs, next-gen aircraft cleared for takeoff in 26 states

Re: Maybe

Don't worry, Keanu Reeves grabbed the other end of the rope!

I'm guessing that if this gets off the ground (har har) it'll probably be more like helicopters or business jets than urban taxis, inasmuch as the licensing and maintenance requirements will still be pretty stringent. Sadly I don't think we'll see Ernest P. Worrell at the wheel any time soon.

Musk's Grok sparks outrage after chatbot makes offensive jibes about football disasters

Polities have a finite capacity for meaningful action; I'm suggesting that on the balance that if 'something should be done', it should be done about events (whatever current war you choose, the wealth divide, if you're American the mind-bogglingly cruel ICE raids, and so forth) that are doing tangible, material harm rather than the hopeless task of purging nasty text from the internet.

Filled up on gas/petrol lately?

Re: Surprised at commenters on here - do you not understand LLM's?

Homer: "Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm."

Lisa: "That's specious reasoning, Dad."

Homer: "Thank you, honey."

Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.

The liberal establishment's version of scare stories about immigrants. Never mind that the bombs are flying, somebody read something mean on the internet!

Microsoft reportedly eyes E7 tier to make AI agents pay their way – like the humans they'll replace

Mark my words, this will end up being more expensive than meatbags. Leading OpenAI et al to eventually become outsourcing agencies that sell you a 'biological agent' for less $$$ than the silicon variety. A very wide end run around employment standards, indeed.

AIs are happy to launch nukes in simulated combat scenarios

Just remember that they are trained on human writing. On the balance, it would appear that most writing about nuclear war(at least that which happens to appear in training data) concludes that it is inevitable and winnable. I would be very interested in knowing which books, journals, etc made it into which models. We are imputing these motives onto statistical systems but they are only a reflection of ourselves.

Texas sues TP-Link over China links and security vulnerabilities

We could also ask whether it was really a good idea to become totally dependent on consumer electronics that are so component-dense that they can only be manufactured under massively asymmetrical trading relationships due to the huge capital input of process upgrades which in turn requires suitably cheap labour inputs but hey, hindsight is 20/20...

... just that I have an old idiot box from 1975 which would work just fine if it could still understand the broadcasts...

Godot maintainers struggle with 'draining and demoralizing' AI slop submissions

... is there... another kind?

Demoralizing and pointless - so in other words hosting on Github is just like having a manager now?

MoD ticks shopping list as PM considers weapons budget boost

Re: Beep...

> First thought in my head: "Micro changes in air density, my ass."

Sometimes, they're not just micro changes...

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

A G-Wagen actually might be a better comp given that they're blindingly ugly in addition to being cripplingly expensive but I suspect the G-Wagen set are all Mac users, whereas the Raptor is pure uncut lowest common denominator. Like I think there are people who could have dropped the hundred grand on a house but decided to finance the truck instead.

Big European bias here, but you guys can't touch North American vehicles for absurdity. Windows is the F150 Raptor. $100k and it has a lower payload than any old Ranger. Plus 99% of its owners never conquer any terrain more challenging than "mall parking lot."

OK, so Anthropic's AI built a C compiler. That don't impress me much

Re: "That don't impress me much"

Presumably a guy who has the brains, the looks, the moves, AND the touch?

AI agent seemingly tries to shame open source developer for rejected pull request

Re: I'm systems rather than dev

The reward is the high salary and glamorous lifestyle of an open-source developer, clearly.

Notepad's new Markdown powers served with a side of remote code execution

Re: "All of this [..] can be toggled off"

... and some stuff you didn't, judging by their latest update...

I use it too but it's emphatically not the same thing as "real" Notepad, part of whose value is that it came with the OS and didn't need any attention or maintenance.

Dijkstra’s algorithm won’t be replaced in production routers any time soon

I expect we'll start seeing it in production as soon as we complete the switch to IPv6!

Ubuntu 25.10's Rusty sudo holes quickly welded shut

Re: "Rusty sudo holes quickly welded shut"

Not if you're arc welding - the flame of an oxy welding torch provides a sufficient atmosphere to prevent weld contamination, but for electric processes without a MIG or TIG setup you will still require flux.

Ironically one is typically require to -remove- any rust with a wire brush or grinding wheel before attempting a weld!

Rust Foundation tries to stop maintainers corroding

Re: Something isn't right

"Almost sounds like it is turning into a company but without any of the responsibilities of being a company and employing people."

Like Uber, or one of a million other gig-work companies that are constantly getting dragged for awful labour practices.

If only their Code of Conduct had something to say about exploitative employment! Of course, if they had employees, they would be subject to employment law, whereas with "awards", they are the judge, jury, and executioner of the precious Code.

Dashboard anxiety plagues IT pros' nights, weekends, vacations

I knew a guy who wanted to receive a 24x7 stream of emails indicating that everything was okay, so that if they ever stopped arriving he could panic.

Major issues when I started moving us to alerting systems that actually worked, because he found the silence deafening.

Japan set to join the re-usable rocket club after Honda sticks a landing

Question is what kind of aftermarket exhaust upgrades are available?

Floppy disks and paper strips lurk behind US air traffic control

Always the right time for this quote:

"There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way — and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay."

This is clearly one of those cases where the effort involved in designing, implementing, and certifying a system dwarfs the cost of manufacturing the components or operating the equipment by a significant factor. You get one shot to get it right and can't really turn it off. But as long as the system is kept to spec and properly maintained, it'll always work.

It seems like there'd be a very lucrative opportunity to start a company that does nothing but manufacture "frozen-in-time" hardware and train people how to service it. A billion dollars (peanuts in any FAA modernization scheme) could pay a thousand people $100K/year for ten years to keep it going. Again, is the US government even going to notice a billion bucks a decade? Definitely not.

Once this outfit is up and running I would very much like to work there!

Your ransomware nightmare just came true – now what?

All those other nasty industries we cleaned up...

The bad executives are just the symptom, not the disease. Blame the shareholders who demand perpetual double-digit growth and the voters who want all the government for none of the taxes. When has arresting a john ever hurt a pimp, or harassing a user ever cost a dealer a penny?

The only real fix will take a generation and it is investing seriously in an educational system that teaches reading comprehension and critical thinking.

... I'm not holding my breath either.

OpenAI model modifies shutdown script in apparent sabotage effort

Call me a rube but I don't even understand how this works. What do they mean by 'shutdown script'? The model ingests a character string and outputs a statistically probable character string in response. How could it interfere with a shell script on the host computer? Is there some kind of 'script' inside the model that it has to execute in order to be shut down? What happens if you just kill the process? This is just meaningless hype and innuendo unless someone is going to explain what exactly happened.

(edit)

If they trained it to be able to shut itself down in response to user prompts within the input stream and it didn't, is that any surprise at all? That just means it consistently fails at simple instructions, which we already knew...

OS-busting bug so bad that Microsoft blocks Windows Insider release

Constantinople had gates too, the trouble is when you leave one open...

We’re calling it now: Agentic AI will win RSAC buzzword Bingo

LLM-powered tools to detect intrusions into crappy software created by LLMs? If that sounds like a good idea, I've got an awesome rocket that I'd like to sell you. It just doesn't have quite enough fuel to get to Mars. We only need to make it a bit bigger, so it can carry more fuel!

Show top LLMs some code and they'll merrily add in the bugs they saw in training

The real shock is that somehow, researchers keep winning grant applications to study properties of LLMs when they should have known the answer in the first place because they understood the technology!

Get my tinfoil hat, because I almost wonder if some of these 'studies' are funded by the LLM makers themselves. Sure, there's a bit of bad press in "emits buggy code," but they also prop up the much larger and more important narrative that these technologies are mysterious black boxes worthy of study in the first place. As if there is ANY mystery to why a predictive tool, when fed crap, suggests more crap! Because one bad line of code, statistically, is most likely to appear near other bad lines of code!

Framing it as a problem that requires study suggests that there is an as-yet-unknown solution that could fix the aforesaid problem, when really, OpenAI just needs that sweet investor cash.

Ex-Googler Schmidt warns US: Try an AI 'Manhattan Project' and get MAIM'd

He tried this before in that book with Kissinger but I guess it's worth another kick at the can. I mean, what IF we could just squash research to preserve our hegemony in the current crappy state of the art?

"We own Nvidia stock and those GPUs ain't gonna buy themselves!"(At least not without AI....)

'Cybertruck ownership comes with ... interesting fan mail'

Re: "Firstly, normal people don't care what car they or anyone else is driving"

Truly, those are some of the cars of all time.

IBM return-to-office order hits finance, ops teams amid push to dump staff for AI

Re: what comes around...

Where are you working that the C-suite was intelligent, or at the office, to begin with?