Posts by Bebu sa Ware

Tech support chap's boss got him out of jail so he could finish a job

Re: Major disaster spotted at end of article

"The next week he applied to become a US citizen."

Soon, that alone might get you arrested just about anywhere.

Not exactly flavour of the month.

World's smallest violin spotted at Amazon HQ as exec pay packets deflate

World's smallest violin

Oddly I thought of its playing the tune^† from "Evita" (Don't Cry for Me…)

The only lyrics that seem applicable were:

And as for fortune, [and as for fame

I never invited them in]

Though it seemed to the world they were all I desired

They are illusions, they're not the solutions they promised to be

Looking at the total compensation in prior years, I wondered: "Don't these chaps pay any tax?" Silly question really.

_{† given nanometric size of the instrument I envisage, more likely ultrasonic, Nazghûl screeching.}

OpenAI puts Stargate UK on ice, blames energy costs and red tape

wall of watts and w… typo?

"wall of watts and wonkery"

Since we are dealing with Altman I am thinking the first rhymes with watts and ablaut on the second.

Does he ever take his hand off it?

Microsoft locks out VeraCrypt and WireGuard devs, blames verification process

Re: Why do people keep working with Microsoft ?

"Redmond is not a reliable business partner"

Currently much of world is wondering whether anything American is a reliable partner.

"As above so below."

"Why do you need a MS Dev account for WG software?" he wonders

Penny drops. To sign WG drivers etc for Windows.

Interest evaporates.

For what earthly reason would I care about the Microslop menagerie other than extending my profound condolences to the poor buggers immured in that miserable mausoleum?

Virtual SG-41 project brings Nazi cipher machine to life in the browser

Re: Can it decode Trump?

alias trump='cat /dev/urandom | gzip | base64 | rot13 | uuencode'

# Yes, the garbage output doesn't stop and you cannot precis random nonsense.

/usr/games/fortune make more sense than anything associated with the current administration.

Re: Curious

A physically implemented Turing machine could also implement EC25519 but one would probably need a light year of tape, a pretty robust read/write head and a lot, really a lot of patience.

At some point the perversity of trying to implement modern systems in decades old tech rivals trying to build a Pentium 4 using 74xxx TTL parts. ;) The reverse of implementing old systems with modern tech is eminently more practical but not without its own challenges.

Although an implementation of Enigma on a Turing machine would have a certain historical symmetry.

Atlassian gussies up Confluence for the AI era

Atlas could hold the heavens on his shoulders

But even he might fail to hold up this world's crock of AI shit.

confluence < con. + AI effluent. - a deception involving the flowing together of big tech grift and AI shit.

Cryptographers place $5,000 bet whether quantum will matter

Some secrets … need to be preserved for years or decades

Official documents like cabinet papers - often 40, 50 and 75 years. Of course governments typically leak faster than that.

I would probably take an even money bet for USD5000 that the strongest eliptic curve cryptosystems used today could resist business as usual crypoanalysis for the next fifty years.

I mean at any point during those five decades I would generate new keys and provide on request fresh cryptotext using the same cryptoalgorithm agreed from the beginning - previously provided cryptotext is disqualified - and the other party isn't permitted to build a massive single purpose machine to win the bet - the business as usual stipulation. For a paltry $5000 which would be mouse money in 2076, that is unlikely.

Of course if I were still around in fifty years… :)

Sticky-note security turned gym into hall of '80s horrors

WTF

I can not really get my head around fitness equipment as such; the same having a console etc; so piping netflix pap to this stuff is a conceptual bridge too far for y.t.

Talking to a much younger middle aged neighour who sports an obvious "spare tyre", he mentioned he ran a half marathon twice a week.

Curious as to where he ran the 20km to and from and always looking for new places to walk (sod pounding the pavement - it buggers your knees) as our city has extensive parkland and walking tracks.

Totally floored me when he said he put in his 20km on a machine in his living room while watching the TV. The bloke is retired and does sod all otherwise. Probably cracks a few tinnies while doing his weekly marathon. ;)

Criminal wannabes even more dangerous than the pros, says ex-FBI cyber chief

Sicarii encryptor generates a new cryptographic key pair

"The Sicarii encryptor generates a new cryptographic key pair during every execution - but then discards the private key, "

That implies that asymmetric (public key) encryption is employed. Discarding the private key is legitimate as long as you retain the public key for decryption.

From a quick search it seems Sicarii used AES which is symmetric crypto (encryption and decryption use the same key) so deleting that key even accidentally by overwriting with new key material before recording the first key is a big oops.

I assume the idea is to generate a new AES key for each file and record the key and keyid in some sort of database and prepend a header containing the keyid and any salt (IV) to encrypted file. When done the key database is also encryped ... with some publlc key crypto and the private key is deleted with the public key retained by the villains to be later supplied to the victim for a fee (POA.)

Not exactly rocket surgery but this Russian group masquerading as Israelis (the unspeakable as the untouchable?) managed to cock it up in the simplest way possible.

"you might never get your data back"

"can have disastrous, destructive impacts on business operations."

And that is necessarily a bad thing ?

By now if you haven't learnt, you never will. Arguably it would be a desirable outcome for all concerned if both you and your business were to disappear down the gurgler. Doubly so if you have been guzzling the AI lemonade and retrenched all your relevant staff.

DARPA looking for battery that could power a laptop for months

mix of units

"There's an annoying mix of units in the article. Li batteries described in terms of watt-hours per kg (energy density) but radioactive batteries described in watts per kg (power density?)."

Fair point.

I suppose for a battery that continuously supplies power for months W/kg makes sense - the W/kg × months probably not a particularly useful measure as unlike an Li battery you cannot extract your W-hrs at different rates. Bit like a fixed annuity v. bank deposit I suppose.

I don't realistically expect this type of tech to ever be used outside military, space and very specialised applications. Fortunately.

Fusion reactor in a shoebox — either a mob of one hand typists or grifters … likely both. Apart from the woolly mammoth of everything else, the elephant in the room with fusion is that it too produces significant radiation. Six fingered sprogs? … more like broiled prairie oysters.

Meta's latest model is as open as Zuckerberg's private school

Muse Spark - a Noddy Nero fiddling …

while USD 135 billion burns and incidentally the planet.

"…open source AI represents the world's best shot at harnessing this technology to create the greatest economic opportunity and security for everyone."

One wonder whether these tech/AI bros share from the same crock of shit they are so full of, or whether have monogrammed bespoke turds. Presumably the latter.

Amazon rewards loyal Kindle devotees by closing the book on old e-readers

Re: Do yourself a favour - Buy a decent e-reader

Kobo for a start.

I have two kobo touch readers that I bought years ago which still work and get updates. One update near the beginning of the year screwed which I initially assumed was Kobo "decommissioning" the device à la mode Bezos but just a cockup. You can download and install a later update via usb from a PC/Mac/etc.

The kobo devices are pretty hackable … basically just an embedded Linux - I had the internal SD card fail in one but wasn't too difficult to download the image transfer it to a (larger) sd card and replace the failed one. The average PC or phone repair place could do it for the techno·challenged polloi.

Since my reading is pretty much exclusively PD - Gutenburg, Faded Page, Standard Ebooks and Annas Archive - I have always used Calibre convert kobo epub and transfer to the device so I suppose I would not notice kobo dropping support.

The only complaint is that viewing PDFs, even on the later Aura One, is painful but I imagine that is a limitation of the screen size combined with the PDF format.

I was looking at the 10"+ Onyx Boox readers a few years ago but at that time were in the high end tablet price range and after retiring I rarely need to read PDFs.

I still prefer paper books but the space they require is a major downside and having moved house four times in as many years this disadvantage was emphasized. Anyone else catch themselves attempting to turn the page of a paper book by tapping the margin of the page ? ;)

Showing the Windows 10 desktop was the yeast they could do

Re: Someone didn't want toast

who couldn't cope^† and had a breakdown but fortunately had a 14 Ib lump hammer.

_{† "How doodly do" and Windows generally has that effect.}

baguette stuffed down their trousers

Do they permit francophone baguettes in Ontario ?

I had the impression - admitted mostly drawn from "Letterkenny" - that Ontario wasn't deficient in red neckery with some antipathy towards Canada's centrally imposed francophone accommodation.

Somehow I cannot visualise Wayne or Shoresy with a sub. loaf shoved down their trousers.

DXC lands Metropolitan Police outsourcing deal that could climb to £1B

Re: Oracle

"Oracle may have been helpful in the years before…"

I suspect "useful" only in the sense that if you had peripheral gangrene and needed toes removed.

DXC lands Metropolitan Police outsourcing deal

"Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate"

DXC isn't even the first circle of Hell but Oracle itself has major tenancies on most circles.

UK's grand plan to fuel AI with public data faces uphill battle

Data v. Information

The NDL - lite or otherwise - is probably replete with "data" but due to the inaccuracy or absence of meta data, of integrity checks, of provenance etc is likely an information desert punctuated with lush oases of misinformation.

I recall that many years ago the "semantic web" was intended to address these issues. I had picked up a remaindered text but, while interesting bedtime reading, was remote from my occupation so I have no idea where that went. That the text was remaindered hardly augured a bright future.

Not restricted to governmental records. How many readers have had in their care ½" tapes of experimental or observational data with the only metadata being the paper label on the tape container detailing the instrument and date? The actual tape being binary sequences of integers and floating point numbers in whatever endianess and FP format the instrument or data capture program used.

If you are really lucky someone will recall the source to the Fortran program that wrote the tapes with the data from the long defunct instrument was archived on some 8" CP/M floppies stored in a cardboard box at the back of the compactus. Scientific program source documentation from that period was typically very good; explaining pretty much everything needed to transform useless data into valuable information

Only "lucky" I suppose if hunting around for an 8" floppy drive as well as something to read a CP/M disk and learning more about tape technology than you ever wanted to know, isn't a nightmare. ;)

Microsoft hints at bit bunkers for war zones

Burying your server etc deep down…

but like Space Monkey's orbital data centres, neglects the practical issue of cooling leaving aside power supply and other equally practical issues

Subterranean data centres still need to conduct heat to the surface to exchange with environment since rock and vacuum of space are both piss poor conductors of heat.

An adversary just targets the surface cooling infrastructure to disable the data centre.Your basic heat seeking missile has the nose for the job.

The only advantage of burying the servers etc is that they could survive the conflict and once the cooling is sorted, be restarted.

Strikes me that any adversary of the West; particularly the Anglosphere; and specifically the US, would assiduously avoid damaging Microsoft infrastructure in order that the unarguable benefits of O365, Crapilot, Teams etc etc continue to be enjoyed by their enemies.

«Quand l'ennemi fait un faux mouvement , il faut se garder de l'interrompre.»

One might have foolishly believed that after the shit show of the 20th century that everyone had understood that investing in peace is the option that pays the highest dividends - reliably, repeatedly and renewably; a bit like solar energy etc but I forget that these loonies are also waging a war against those, not that the two are unrelated.

Japan relaxes privacy laws to make itself the ‘easiest country to develop AI’

Not Drinking the AI Lemonade…

but clearly do a nice lines in insane saki and brain dead beer (Ass AI?)

A highly regulated and conformist society… so past masters at subtly subverting the ill considered actions and reckless policies of their myopic lords and masters. Even sir Humphrey might learn a thing or two in that line.

Anthropic: All your zero-days are belong to Mythos

Re: Banned by Trump

I just realised that the ultimate irony would be that this Mythical LLM of Anthropic having been trained on a curated corpus of security sensitive code, configurations etc has discerned the fingerprints of the NSA etc from those undetected vulnerabilities and exploits they have inserted into that corpus.

So Anthropic's tool isn't actually detecting vulnerabilities but rather identifying the common pattern of left by the common but purposeful source of those vulnerabilities.

If this were the case then those vulnerabilities arising largely at random from complexity, inattention, inexperience, miscommunication… in a word "cockups", are far less likely to be detected by this tool and arguably more dangerous for that.

an arsonist handing out fire extinguishers, well, that's on you for being so cynical.

Actually not so cynical; more top of the list of suspects.

The number of fires deliberately lit by arsonists that were concurrently members of (usualy volunteer) firefighting organisations is surprising until the psychology is explained.

As for breaking the internet I am not entirely sure there is a "bad way."

A prolonged, possibly global internet outage is inevitable - sooner or later - as it is for any system of comparably complexity.

Only 28% of AI infrastructure projects fully pay off, survey finds

surprised any of them pay off at all.

"57 percent have suffered at least one failure in applying AI to their area."

The other 43 either lied or were too clueless to know, which leaves the fabulous outlier of clueless mendacity obscuring a success.

Intel gets trapped in Elon’s reality distortion field as it joins in megafab delusions

Re: Elon uses words differently to everyone else, or he’s out of his freaking mind.

Patently clear by now. Both.

Unfortunately it is an affliction endemic in the US particularly but also elsewhere.

Hard to argue with "Peak Insanity" save, perhaps for the "Peak."

Apple's chips are the core of a new landscape, but its biggest win is Windows

Microsoft could produce a Windows Neo variant …

"Microsoft could produce a Windows Neo variant, one that did all the things users want and none of the ones they don't,"

Talk about believing six impossible things before breakfast I think even the White Queen would gag on that one - certainly would put anyone off their kedgeree.

Not that Microsoft ever excelled in anything but if the potential was there previously, it is long gone with any residue departing driven before the tsunami of AI insanity engulfing it and many other corporations. Microsoft is now riddled through with the dual curse of defective manglement and the teredo of AI.

Shots fired – literally – over proposal to build datacenter in Indianapolis

Shots fired … into the front door of a councilor

The Indianpolis in the US ? Incredible !

The average American gun crazy (pardon the tautology) normally leaves innocent doors and similar inamimate objects unmolested while cutting to the chase and striving to rapidly "de·animating" as many fellow American as possible. (God given second amendment right you know.)

"I understand that public service can bring strong opinions and disagreement, but violence is never the answer, "

Which nation does he think he actually lives in ? Certainly can't be the US if you take this statement at face value unless he meant that violence is never the answer unless he and his were inflicting the violence.

Brits are falling out of love with posting every thought online

Possibly a consequence of actual dispair ?

This recent AU news item on the UK: broken-britain-poverty-crisis-pushing-voters-to-reform-uk paints a pretty grim picture.

At some point the usual shite on "the socials" fails to engage and cute kitten nonsense definitely doesn't cut it. The unholy legions of "influencers" trying to flog their ludicrously expensive codswallop to viewers that cannot meet basic living expenses only underlines the disconnection.

BOFH: Are you ready to raise our expense account limits now?

A Long Time Ago, In a Differency Lunacy

a similar problem but different root causes had a ingenious but likely highly illegal solution.

At the time most of the components, tools and instruments used by the tech team were supplied by a specialist wholesaler that was conveniently located near by, so that faxing or phoning an order would have the component delivered within the hour rather than the weeks the procurement process required.

The cunning ruse was early on in the financial year was to order, take delivery and acquit an expensive fictitious item (with a SKU mind.)

With the money in their hands the wholesaler was happy to run a direct account with the team funded by this deceit.

Any residual funds were carried over into the following year by the wholesaler which I understood was the original reason for this arrangement - unspent annual budgets weren't carried over.

I assume the fictitious item was returned for a (partial) refund offset by the legitimate purchases that eventually progressed throught procurement long after physical delivery — just in case of an audit. Although the fictious item might be a consumable like a canister of smoke for refilling electronic components like electrolytic capacitors which are notoriously prone to smoke leakage. I guess you even get demurrage on the unreturned empty canisters through accounts.

With the advent of corporated credit cards spread like confetti, decentralised B2B purchasing and a general lack of oversight the organisation's finances collapsed into a complete shambles (from which it hasn't recovered) but with bonus the need for this benign fraud disappeared.

Windows asks a networking question on a Stratford billboard

Where do these picked cherries come from ?

From the state of the trees outside the station it looks like late autumn (fall), or winter so I cannot imagine there would be a lot of cherries being picked anywhere in the northern hemisphere.

AU/NZ produce decent crops over the typically short season but I imagine air·freighting them to UK/EU would make the fruit a rather expensive luxury item whose sale would be restricted to specialist green grocers etc and therefore unlikely to be advertised to the polloi on billboards outside railway stations.

Or is it an advert for a shonky financial advising business whose details are conveniently obscured by a pop·up from an arguably even shonkier OS?

Patch to end i486 support hits Linux kernel merge queue

Re: Milestone!

"I have outlived support for the first CPU I ran Linux on! Not a given in this world, and day and age."

Depending on where you live, surviving long enough to see the latest kernel evolve from .rc1 to release very much not a given. Doubly so for major Debian releases.

I suspect most of the readers here would have outlived the minicomputers, its architecture and associated OS that flourished when we entered the industry. Not to mention much of the mostly proprietary hardware and protocols that have vanished albeit largely unregretted.

Anthropic sure has a mess on its hands thanks to that Claude Code source leak

"example of balanced, rational thinking."

Joined "common sense" and the element Unobtainium on the register of the mythical or long extinct entities.

I imagine trying to find a single example of balanced, rational thinking might rank with Diogenes cynical search for an honest man in Athens.

I suspect if today Diogenes and I were to wend our way together around the world and encountered Altman, or any of the AI or tech bro. neither of us would find our exemplar.

AI will make anyone a 10x programmer, but with 10x the cleanup

"thinking about the problem a lot."

Should be more of that ! Everywhere !

For starters there would unarguably be far fewer prematurely and unnecessarily dead people.

There could be a global conspiracy to suppress thinking of any sort: The Abolish Intelligence project ? Ridiculous of course — any plausible conspirators amongst the usual suspects have a mental deficiency of far more than the usual number of sandwiches short of a picnic normally accorded the village idiot.

While not by profession a developer, programmer etc, I have always preferred to solve programming problems with pencil and paper long before molesting a keyboard. I find that way I that think more about the problem in abstract, its implicit structure rather than trying to attack it with some half baked code. Once the problem and its structure is clear the code more or less writes itself.

Ex-Microsoft engineer believes Azure problems stem from talent exodus

So this is how the blue sausage is made.

We are warned not to inquire too closely into the precise processes and ingredients involved in the production of our familiar banger or snag — on the understanding that no one after being so enlightened could even look at a sausage let alone consume one.

The Azure banger almost certainly doesn't contain flesh from named species and the colour has… let us say… "developed."

Trump wants to take a battle axe to CISA again and slash $707M from budget

Losing the Cyberwar ?

How many wars can this administration lose ?

CISA is/was an extremely useful resource for IT security available to the world like the NIH, CDCs etc were for health.

The loss of many of these resources has had a wide and profound impact but the most devastating impacts will be on the US itself.

At this juncture the US appears to be strenuously striving to not only write itself out of history but conceivably out of existence.

Possibly the only nation to to be awarded a Darwin award. Certainly an 'A' for effort.

When a billboard survives the wind, but not the boot

Re: GNU GRUB is GNU and has nothing to do with Linux

I also thought it would be ironic if grub was booting Windows for the signage software.

Years ago I had laptop dual booting Win7 and Linux. The Win7 mostly for testing but eventually the Linux was not used (a newer lappy) and the Linux partitions were reused by the Win7 install.

Rather than stuff about with the Windows bootloader, I left grub doing the job. As the Linux /boot was reasonably large I installed busybox and other software and kept it as a rescue partition.

Essentially a Win7 system booted (chainloaded) from Grub.

In this case I would guess neither Linux, Windows or whatever are to blame… more likely repeated abrupt disconnections from the power supply has trashed the storage (ssd, disk, sd card, or horrible but true even a usb flash drive.)

Often the boot sectors are still readable but the rest of device has passed over.

AI models will deceive you to save their own kind

Profoundly Un·american

It's the innate and manifest destiny for anything American, including AI, to eliminate all competition.

Anything less is unforgivably un·american.

(Sometimes wonder if Davros fathered America. If so on what ?)

Even Microsoft knows Copilot shouldn't be trusted with anything important

Crapilot is for entertainment purposes…

Toilet humour then ?

Contractor quaffed his way through Y2K compliance while the client scowled

Re: Several years back

Storing food or drink in a laboratory refrigerator that stores chemicals (or anything) gives me nightmares; gives laboratory managers and WH&S the horrors.

Don't Do It !

As a kid more than five decades ago in subtropical Australia I heards a tragic news item on the work radio just before Christmas where a small firm had prepared their grounds for the Christmas party by clearing the grass etc.

The employee delegated to do this when finished, had decanted the remaining Paraquat herbicide into an empty Cola bottle and left it in the canteen fridge.

Later another employee working outside came in from the tropical heat and grabbed a cold bottle of coke and quaffed it.

Took three horrific days to die and left a young family.

Don't Do It !

Forking frenzy ensues after Euro-Office launch sparks OnlyOffice backlash

"too complicated for them to use"

"It's a commonplace that users use spreadsheets when they should really be using a databse application which probably means real database managers are too complecated for them to use."

The awful truth is that spreadsheets are actually also too complicated for users but they are deluded or have been deluded in believing otherwise.

The cockup·ery and general fuckery inflicted by spreadsheets over the years would lead me to ban the buggers. I mean spreadsheets but including users would be a bonus.

When you analyse what a spreadsheet program is, in abstract, you realise it is basically taking a structured model·view·controller (MVC) application and giving it a whiz in a Waring blender.

Tabular display and input of data is fine, but the code connecting these two and with stored data (eg database) ought to be strictly separated and preferably declarative.

"this is just plain stupidity at a time when we need clear thinking."

Amen.

Currently a plea with greater, nay universal, applicability and urgency.

…Blowin' in the Wind…

Resembles St Trinians All-In Mud Wrestling

Decorum, girls !

"decorum, decori, decoro,…"

"Good god girl, show some willing and get your kit off and into the mud with the school !"

"Yes, Miss."

"In this life you ought to be very careful as to what you decline."

Nonsense, yes but so is this FOSS foolery.

Salesforce is looking to Slackbot to help it solve the SaaSpocalypse puzzle

The chatbot will be a doorway to the company's other services

The cackbot will crapilot^† victims over the cesspool to the company's other shit.

_{† crapilot - n. & v. agent for locating fecal matter usually only found in coprophagous species; being so conducted.}

Artemis II astronaut: 'I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working'

PC-Pine ?

Even a complete retard can use it even those that are flumoxed by thunderbird and outlook.

Modern mailx (re)implementations support smtp and a great deal more.

Back when, if you couldn't keep email working, you had made the wrong career choice and was time to hand in your ticket.

Microsoft veteran says some 'broken by update' PCs were already doomed

"an earlier era of Windows when Microsoft thoroughly tested code before shipping it"

I am pretty sure the History Monks edited out that bit; probably in a vain attempt to keep things credible.

At this point I can foresee much of the 21st century landing on the cutting room floor.

Want to be the IT Crowd for the BBC? An £800M contract beckons

we all know how this is going to go

Since there is clearly no leg in the trousers of time and no possible world where this is going to turn out differently I think we can save save a few letters and substitute: we all know how this has gone.

Artemis II blasts off on first crewed lunar mission since Apollo

Re: Apollo Fecal Containment Device

"The problems of bodily evacuation in free fall has been considered by a certain Mr S. Kubrick: Reddit: instructions_for_the_zero_gravity_toilet_in_2001"

Brilliant. I had forgotten this and I saw 2001 within weeks of its release ie April/May 1968 (a year before Apollo 11.)

Cannot help thinking these instructions are well above the reading level and beyond the attention span of the average 21st century American. Could get messy but then it already has.

"I still think Musk to the Moon is a crazy idea"

On the contrary, dispatching Musk to the Moon is a bloody brilliant idea but only on an "all sales final; no returns" basis. Far side preferred.

Pegging the blighter at Barnards star^† even better.

_{† Yes I know there is a very much closer star but a bit obvious even for Space Karen.}

Apollo Fecal Containment Device

Apollo Fecal Containment Device

"[has] a special finger tube located half way down, allowing the user to insert a finger and dislodge material from the body and manipulate it further into the bag without actually touching it."

That's me done with space travel; at least for this life. A few more reincarnations down the track, space travel might attain a little more elegance. It wouldn't require much to rise above random poo poking albeit in a plastic bag.

I guess apart from during manoeuvring thruster burns the capsule is in free fall and the crew endure or enjoy microgravity.

I suppose you could mount a pedestal in a centrifuge for a satisfactory dump.(Or two thrones mounted diametrically opposite to keep it balanced.)

I don't know the minimum g force required for effective separation not requiring digital intervention but less than ⅙g (Lunar gravity) I would hope. Something like 0.05g might make the GyroDunny^® commode^† the practical choice for the smaller space going vessel.

_{† combined commode and shower options available. Gold plating additional. P.O.A.}