Posts by Bebu sa Ware 2770 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Nov 2024
Well, we know who they voted for.
That trust by visitors to the remoter parts of Australia has drawn comments from more than one Coroner.
Out in the vastness of the Australian outback they say you are drawn closer to God. Doubtless but perhap faster and not quite in the way you had envisaged.
a member of staff "did not follow established information security policies."
There are a host of questions in that weaselese.
In this context what is meant exactly by established which in no way means codified, promulgated or published.
Unless staff a regularly inducted, refreshed and tested on current policy - security or otherwise - it is entirely disingenuous to claim any failure on their part is entirely their fault.
Inadequate systems, inadequate support and incompetent (oh, and also inadequate) leadership are invariably the root causes of these systemic failures. That is not going to change soon - or ever - so these failures will recur but those responsible will likely become better at concealment.
Quoting from an ABC Australia article today on the recent 40% correction on the S Korean market:
In the past five weeks, the market has collapsed, shedding almost 40 per cent, and threatening the livelihood of millions of South Koreans.
The writer contends that tech heavy (mainly Samsung SK Hynix) single stock leveraged Exchange Traded Funds† (ETFs) drove the exuberance and now doubts arising from the debt burden of those tech companies and the sector generally are causing serious misgivings if not panic… yet.
† I have no idea what single stock leveraged Exchange Traded Funds are but I assume they are ETFs with all your (nest)eggs in one basket.
Possibly the optimal distraction free creative writing environment. Just enough improvement on the electric typewriter and correction fluid.
Perhaps there is a niche for paper only publishing for the market that want slop free reading and are as ready to part with their cash as the vinyl LP crowd.
With the right inks, watermarks imbedded in the paper that document scanners capture but invisible to human eyes you could serious poison the model or at least prove the copyright violations.
Most books have something like this in their copyright notice:
"No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher."
Patently obvious that OpenAI etc have breached those terms. Even if a "fair dealing" defence could be raised in a few cases the uncontrolled ingestion of humungous quantities of copyright material invalidates any spurious claims to apply that defence universally.
While I have problems with copyright, patents etc especially as they have been extended and embellished by largely US interests, I have vastly greater antipathy towards the Big AI inflicting wholesale destruction of human creativity on all of us.
He would require a whole bookcase and bolted to the wall if he didn't want meet Howards End.
I once visited the Uni library to consult the OED to look up a peculiar word Lawrence Durrell used in a documentary which wasn't in my SOD — literally a whole top to bottom of a bookcase uniquely attached to the wall.
The word which I can't remember was a disappointment and convinced me the Durrells were arguably a bit attached to themselves.
Interesting how many writers in the past handed over serious hard·earned to own the OED — T H White was one. Useful if you have to change a lot of light bulbs I suppose.
In the case of Oracle I might substitute shit for food.
I was reading today that the S.Korean stock market has headed south mostly because of ETFs which like those in the US are heavily contaminated by those highly leveraged and overvalued tech stocks deeply involved in the AI lunacy. Unstable oscillations around the edge of catastrophe?
A threat I think certainly not reassuring. More in the line of "the beatings will continue…"
Nearly thirty years ago I clearly recall expressly saying to a hopeful soul "I don't do Windows" and suggesting they go to the desktop support team - but might as well have been to buggery. Ever so glad I did. ;) Still not keen on ladders either.
Windows was a lost cause pretty much from the outset, certainly desktop Windows.
NT4 wasn't too bad for hanging those pestilent floating licensing dongles off. I got cluey about proprietary Windows only software in the disciplines I was supporting, discovering that many had offered Unix and Linux versions in the past from which you could often extract the Flexlm vendor demon and serve the licenses from a Unix or Linux box.
(You can be pretty sure that the original software vendor had used a contractor to add the "licensing sauce" and even after, or because of, countless M&As, has never been touched again.)
I am certain the Devil runs Hades on Windows… I am confident he would never be short of Windows admins. :)
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry expressed this exact sentiment concerning aircraft in his Terre des Hommes.
"… la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n’y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n’y a plus rien à retrancher."
And later he concluded perhaps with more relevance to the Windows f[l]ailings of Microsoft
"La perfection de l’invention confine ainsi à l’absence d’invention."
Haul out the Ouija board and perhaps channel the ghosts of Windows past… or better… a proper OS.
A daft statement at best. An engineer would capture or profile running instances zeroing in on the larger memory using components and work on either improving those component's resource use or removing the component component although I suspect Windows is so spaghettified that it would defeat the best engineers (who in any case wouldn't be working for MS.)
AIX as far back as v4 did have a version of the lock command
lock -2000 would lock the (non X11) screen for more than a day [2000 minutes (33h 20')] and xlock for an X11 display.
In practice I think I used the screen command with serial terminals which supported locking although I don't recall that many Unix versions shipped with screen.
I guess much of the internet was built with 24x80 hardware terminals which is another cue for a four Yorkshiremen sketch. (We had a papertape punch for our display, 7 toggle switches for input and edlin…)
These days our zillionaire tech bros masters having "bring your kid to work day" would be expecting your kid "to work" but to be fair I am sure they would provide the empty Cola bottles.
"It would be interesting to try and picture what our industry would be like today, if only Microsoft had embraced parallelism when Inmos and Intel offered it."
Or if Garry Kildall's plane was in dock undergoing an airworthyness on the fateful day Big Blue called.
I recall a fair amount of enthusiasm at the time (1980s?) for the Transputer and Occam but I think part of the problem was so few enthusiasts ever got their hands on the hardware.
Also I suspect a lot of the coding at Microsoft around the i860 time was in assembly - coding a multithreaded application in assembler could be interesting.
Microsoft's development tools were never particularly leading edge - MSC v3 was I think just a lightly warmed over Lattice C. MSC v4 was a little better but very slow. Walter Bright's C compilers† were far faster (and cheaper.) Turbo·C, and Borland's tools generally, likewise.
† I believe Zortech C/C++ was the first native code C++ compiler to support Windows development ie not a preprocessor (cfront.)
I seem to recall a MS Mail server (service?) in the early 1990s that sat on a PC in a machine root with a Unix (super)minicomputer and Unix boxes. I think it talked smtp with a Unix box that acted as the email gateway. I think the already arcane sendmail.cf was even more so dealing with the vagaries of what MS made of rfc821. The gateway forwarded and received email over an Aussie dialup store·and·forward network protocol†.
The good old days — may the memories remain only memories.
† ACSnet. The guilty might have known it as suniii.
Bags were once a schoolboy name for trousers (dacks another.)
So [to] Active Windows drop trousers.
I am sure anyone who has ever dealt with MS gets the picture.
There are plenty of realtime and embedded OSs that would be more suited to this application than any version of Windows. Many are open source and at least one is GPL viz eCos (eCosPro is proprietary) and most will run on fairly basic microcontrollers.
What surprises me is that these screens clearly are presented to the application as a raster graphics display when the displayed data is purely textual and could be described by a terminfo entry and driven through a curses library. A FPGA could convert these large displays into a serial 80 column x 128(?) row VT type terminal screens.
A basic rule: if a thing can do something that it never needs to do, ensure that it really can't. Things† that do stuff that they never need to do cause enough grief in this world as it is.
† And people but disabling them is a little more involved than flicking the write protect switch.
good old fashioned interleaving which multiplies your bandwidth (bytes/sec) by the degree of interleaving but your latency (sec) remains roughly the same.
The usual hack for latency is to interpose one or more levels of faster cache between the storage and system which introduces its own problems if the storage is shared and modifiable.
Old problems in new guises.
I seem to recall a lot the same ground was covered in Curt Schimmel's UNIX Systems for Modern Architectures (1994) which I ought to fish out to re·read.
anyone using those tools (or flex/bison) today would be likely be out of retirement… I don't think that whole class of tools are dealt with outside of theoretical compsci classes nowadays; almost certainly not part of most developer's toolkit.
Lex/yacc would be a shoo-in for the fairly simple syntax (according to grokipedia) of Dibol and well within the capabilities of a lalr parser.
“p” through “y” stumped me until I realised 0b0111_0000 … 0b0111_1001 (0x70 … 0x79) although I must admit I never had to deal with bcd - floating point yes, bcd never; Although I am not sure I was the winner there - ieee 754 made thing a little better but there are still oceans of old data in other formats.
Not a great deal I would have thought at least in conseqences if one were to shove one's fingers through an available opening into either's internals.
I guess you have to be British to contemplate the distinction between two such vastly dissimilar objects and conceivably that twelve paragraphs might be required.
Should be an A level essay topic with full marks to submissions in the form of a sonnet or haiku. The transposition of boaster and tadger might be a start — both are of course dicks.
The platform has been beyond redemption† for so long — certainly pre·dating AI — that rehabilitation is inconceivable.
"A slop tank filled with faux thought leadership posts and generative drivel." — You are being too kind.
Even five years ago the naturally generated slop was mind numbing — a cesspit of incoherent halfwits‡ vomiting their mental sewerage projected by their incessant brain·farts.
† Damned in the vernacular. ‡ Feel free to reduce the fraction.
I reckon you would want to give Amazon a big miss or at least short it (and pray your pension fund isn't in it, up to its neck with this nonsense.)
Even if the technical details were vastly different contemporary market hubris still resembles the Zeitgeist of the roaring 20s immediately preceding October 1929.
> Yeah, let's put all our DBMs on top of a common engine so that a bug in the engine can floor the lot of them.
Putting all your eggs in one basket but as I think Bruce Schneier noted in relation to security eggs, you keep a very close eye on that one basket.
If your common virtual database engine were formally defined and formally verified you might well be in a better position.
All RDBMS fundamentally do much the same things only slightly differently and (often gratuitously) incompatibly which ultimately converge on a layer of abstraction like Turso. Having a separate abstraction for RDBM authentication and authorisation might also make sense — A&A never seemed to be one of their better features.
Always struck me that databases were like operating systems (kernel's resource and concurrency management mostly) … although very shitty operating systems.
I assumed they were surface features but looking closely at the chunks of "rock" along the diaginal running bottom left — top right, in the first image the hexagonal structures look three dimensional like honeycomb or waffles.
Leaving giant Martian killer bees and alien spawn aside, it's not incredibly obvious how these structures might have formed. One mechanism I can imagine is that closely packed bubbles (of mud?) stacked like layers of bubble rafts which formed more hexagonal cells when the inflating gas (fluid) slowly cooled reducing the pressure inside the bubbles. Even that uneducated guess raises a lot more questions than it answers.
I would treat any AI as a beast ferae naturae, with absolute liability of its keepers for any injury done.
Even just permitting a model to run on a platform should attract that liability. The person(s) natural or otherwise that were responsible for acquiring and running an injurious model should get a double helping of the grief.
Of course making platforms responsible for any harm caused by foreseeably hazardous material they host, would be extremely unwelcome by platform owners. Not going to happen while brown envelopes and large denomination banknotes still exist.
Has anyone else noticed that the AI countermeasures which a lot of sites are implementing are functionally fragmenting the internet? Daft browser checks and dafter IP range checks often mean you cannot access the site.
Once things are sufficiently enshittified it will be easy (uncontested) for nations or other regulatory entities to fence off "their internet" from the greater grubbly unwashed internet.
I wouldn't be so sure.
You can also imagine Fujitsu's culture being contaminated and degraded by Amdahl's.
I must admit writing credentials on the underside of the foliage of office potted plants is a new one for me. Pen. testers must devious minds; necessarily so I suppose.
The name or brand of the monitor, computer, keyboard or something in the office was pretty much first cab of the rank in earlier times. Given our *ix hosts all used a single NIS (yellow pages) service anyone could ypcat the passwd map and run it through John the Ripper. I ran it preemptively (once) - pretty horrible.
As head teacher he might have chosen Blackbeard as his password (aka Captain Teach.)
I suspect the lack of critical thinking symptomatic of le malaise américain is augmented by an imaginatory deficit.
I have just noticed the American malady in francophone media "Paroles de scouts : Le malaise américain" — a different sort of buggery altogether.
Space Karen in a skimpy French Maid's outfit is a picture even AI would not wish to contemplate.
I don't think I would want to be in the same kitchen as Chelsea if "she" were anywhere near the knife block given "her" minder is in California, well known home to some of the craziest people on the planet. Once Tau outsources "mindering" to the usual foresaken parts of the world any unfortunate incidents involving knives won't be easy to prosecute. ;)
Wouldn't USD30.00 per house be well over the odds for these services in the US when performed by humans? (I don't mean just the undocumented.)
Bruce Schneier† in his academic teaching roles at Harvard and the University of Toronto considers this question in a recent grauniad opinion piece: Should you use AI for a task? Here’s a simple way to decide.
In the first paragraph "it will come as no surprise to you that my students regularly use AI to complete their writing assignments. Doing so is a waste of their tuition money" but his following arguments differentiates situations in which he contends that AI might be applied from those where it oughtn't with which the reader may or may not agree.
† a writer I suspect not entirely unknown to the Vulturati. :)
Given the location and the academic's subject, I might have phrased that "a chunk of text displayed in the background colour that the students wouldn't spot."
With the understandable sensitivity of these matters in Loonyland you could be certain some loonier·lander would start ranting "white lies matter."
From what I can determine the PRC's manufacturing has advanced in leaps and bound in terms of quality and cost by leveraging cheaper domestic automation technology (robots.) EV and battery production being prime examples. The Chinese have a looming demographic problem in common with most of the developed world of an aging and declining population which will impact their industrial worker base sooner rather than later.
The US by banning imports of those same robots (and any other foreign robots) is going to have to repeat the development of the Chinese or license the technology (it's not rocket science but it is still non·trivial engineering.) Restricting robot production to the US will inevitably mean higher prices and costs.
More of a self inflicted head shot I suspect.
From what I can determine the PRC's manufacturing has advanced in leaps and bound in terms of quality and cost by leveraging cheaper domestic automation technology (robots.) EV and battery production being prime examples. The Chinese have a looming demographic problem in common with most of the developed world of an aging and declining population which will impact their industrial worker base sooner rather than later.
The US by banning imports of those same robots (and any other foreign robots) is going to have to repeat the development of the Chinese or license the technology (it's not rocket science but it is still non·trivial engineering.) Restricting robot production to the US will inevitably mean higher prices and costs.
More of a self inflicted head shot I suspect.
At the risk of channeling the NRA, the device itself is neither - the user and how the device is used is the differentiator.
Clearly a device's user could use the device both as an accessibility aid and as a glasshole.
Dealing with humans is both difficult and messy at the best of times - before they really try to be truly devious.
If I wanted to conceal cameras on my person today, I would build them into a pair of the airpods that everyone seems to sport these days. Stereo vision (and sound), bluetooth straight into your phone and off to the internet.
I was actually rather disappointed to discover that these glasses don't have a heads·up display. I could see applications for a camera-image processing-display loop such as night vision or hazard recognition and avoidance.
> External Red Team Alliance: EXTRA
You would pay ERTA; even ExtRTA but EXTRA us trying to ram a square peg into a round hole.
You might get away with [L]ADER or [L]AER in French (l'alliance des équipes rouges) if the French use the red/blue nomenclature.
"Microsoft's Solution" invariably an oxymoron.
To see Space Karen mincing down the catwalk in heels would be worth the price of admission.
I would certainly be happy to donate him a pair of Zara Death Pants for the occassion.
I don't think Grok has much of a handle on the English in its "Elon’s ability to captivate audiences with vision edges him out for a fresh, unpredictable vibe.”
If "to edge <someone> out" has the sense of "to displace", the "him" should be "those two (super)models" if it wanted Musk sashaying his butt down the runway.
As it stands Musk his "ability to captivate audiences with vision" displaces himself "for a fresh, unpredictable vibe" (presumably from Mss Campbell or Banks.) If not truth, taste wins the day even on grok.
Conflating to edge out with to have an/the edge I would guess although arguing with AI is more unbecoming than the proverbial arguing with idiots.
> To be fair, so does reality.
As noted in the article.
Not unsurprising as reality selects the ideas, patterns and behaviours that make sense and work reliably in the longer term. The nonsense we endure today is on a collision course with the sledge·hammer of reality. Vide US H&HS under RFKjr.
Amusing to note that Grok is still a very distinctive outlier.
Sounds like a crude question that might apply to a UK politician or his policies. The analogy between a dodgy cassette player and UK politics probably quite apt.
Of course your pencil has to have a hexagonal cross·section. I found your standard Faber or red/black Staedtler HB was ideal. I have a feeling that the Staedtlers were sold under another name in AU when I was a schoolboy.
Good Omens' Crowley had a Blaupunkt cassette player in his 1926 black Bentley but as he bemoaned "all tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into Best of Queen† albums."
† I suspect in AU it would be a "best of Men at Work" album (or Redgum.)
The "certain age" meaning that any increment on that age is not certain.
All rather daunting now that ⅔ of "The Goodies" have now moved on to the afterlife footlights.
Just recently a I stumbled upon more than 10 metres of cassette tape freshly deposited from a moving car on the roadside - brought back teenage memories. ;)
Obviously there are cars - old enough to have cassette players - being driven by people who have cassttes to play. Curiously until last year charity shops usually had boxes of tapes (which no one wanted) - now they have vanished. Same thing happened with vinyl LPs 10–15 years ago.
The first and last word in the above pretty much flag the problem.
"an organization has gone all-in with Microsoft, the unified management offered by Defender for Endpoint on Linux can be difficult to resist."
Going all-in with Microsoft speaks to lack of reason, of judgment, of shame and of any sense of self preservation. Allowing MS - as an afterthought - to fuck over your Linux boxes isn't likely soil your grubby soul any further.
Unfortunately MS isn't alone in this. Comparable Linux offerings from other major venders (at least five years ago) were merely slightly warmed over Windows versions rebuilt for Linux/Unix typically using the Windows privilege & (lack of) security model which causes all sorts of problems† in itself. When you look inside the binaries you often found it had an embedded python interpretor or similar and text strings indicating the software's shady Windowy origins.
† one file scanning agent running as root (uid=0) crossing into an NFS file system would chuck a complete wobbly when it couldn't access the files or directories.
They even rate a WikiP page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidents_at_Six_Flags_parks.
When things go wrong at these type of places it is invariably a matter for the coroner.
I have never had any difficulty avoiding these "attractions" — if I want an adrenaline hit I'll grab an EpiPen®.
> Well blow me down if just about every word in English isn't derived from some word or phrase in Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Norman French, French, Dutch, Flemish, German, the Celtic languages, Greek, Hindi, Sanskrit ..
Well we could plunder Tolkien's Middle Earth (some more) for a suitable collection of horrors and villains. eg Nazgul for NK, Sauron for CN (not Smaug as the CN are allergic to dragons),…
I always thought IT/SEC wasn't particularly endowed with deep thinkers — definitely B-Ark thinking here.
In any other endeavour you would construct a taxononomy based on the origin, structure and function of the specimen.
"Threat actors" — I suppose these one handed typists tossers have to change hand some time — might be classified more usefully on who, what, where and how they are targeting and to what end. Deciding who is responsible and their geographic location might only be determined after the fact.
So you cannot FROMAT a floppy. .:)
DOS always muddied the water by conflating the physical formatting of the media and disk partitioning with the construction of a file system.
I recall tormatting floppies even pre-formatted ones before use was advisable as it would pick up defective diskettes and "adjust" for any differences between the manufacturers formatting process and your disk drive's "peculiarities."
Floppy disks (and drives) would have taken a close second place to printers for a the privilege of being the greatest bane of the BoFH's life. Even outside the dismal MS ecosystem floppies had quite diverse uses from boot disks for various computers, network hardware boot and configs, lab instruments etc.
> C:\>dir a:
> C:\>del *.*
Just shows the un-unix evil of having disjoint file systems ;)
Each file system being being assigned a device letter and working directory.
C:\ A:
A:\ cd xyz
A:\XYZ> C:
C:\> DEL A:*.* REM will delete files in the working directory on drive A viz A:\XYZ
Back in the days of msdos 3.3, I just joined the drives under C:\ - not so important for the floppies but for another 3 or 4 hard disk partitions the only sane way. Most (~all) of the code I was mucking about with, was for Unix systems which didn't grok drive letters. An undocumented dos call allowed setting the switch char to '—' and path separator to '/' which largely completed the illusion… until I could get a real *ix system. :)
Strikes me that the only command an apprentice manglement apparatchik knew was del *.* speaks volumes of the destructive mindset of the whole accursed boiling.
