Posts by Bebu sa Ware

Google goes it alone with a new cybercrime crew taxonomy

definitely B-Ark thinking

> 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.

Manager showed off his DOS prowess – with a command that wiped data

it takes some minimum level of competance to correctly spell

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.

Re: We have all been there

> 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.

Trump expands voluntary pledge to keep datacenter costs off household power bills

Trump expands…

That much and only that is true. The rest, a crock of shit.

I don't suppose anyone believes a word of it.

Next he will be proclaiming "Peace in our time" but unlike Chamberlain, Trump neither believe or cares about this or anything else. For him the only things requiring appeasement are his monstrous ego and his insatiable greed.

How AI drove Shopify back to clean code

that #0000FF means ‘Blue’ in HTML

That's only one sort of blue and possibly not the most asthetic or aligned with your branding. ;)

Still it's a move in the right direction.

Html is simple enough but as a programming language it is about the level of an assembler. CSS and scripting is roughly like adding a decent macro facility to an assembler.

Having high level languages produce human readable output hasn't been a major focus in programming languages but in this context I imagine it is and will be.

Burnham wants Big Ecommerce to bankroll Britain's pubs

Re: ecommerce providers are taxed to an extent they're on or near parity to retail shops

Not a bad idea.

Presumably the total rates etc that bricks and mortar businesses pay is known as well as their total turnover/revenue. Those latter numbers would be also be known for E-commerce.

Expecting the E-tailers to pay an amount proportionally equivalent to the rates etc paid by the brick and mortar retailers based on turnover/revenue is not unprecedented.

Eg. If you own a vacant lot in these parts and if a reticulated water and/or sewerage connection is available, you are obliged to pay the applicable water/sewerage rates (usually just the service provision charges.)

Re: a basic beer for well under 2 quid

Wm Cobbett was rather keen on the cottager making his own ale (Cottage Economy, 1821) and even detailed how to malt barley.

Home brew these days is usually not too bad even when produced by the incompetent - generally not (as) clear (as commercial beer) and often a bit stronger than one might expect.

The product of an old hand is often as good as any beer or ale you might afford to buy.

Cobbett was bemoaning the taxes on ale, candles etc^† introduced to pay for the Napoleonic Wars and affected the poor disproportionately. (Nothing really ever changes.)

_{† but not tea which he abominated: "I view tea drinking as a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an engenderer of effeminancy and laziness, a debaucher of youth and maker of misery for old age."}

Re: I thought Clacton would be the promised land of a new Camelot by now under its glorious new king

I suppose Arthur had to pull a sword out of a stone first but the glorious one has yet to pull his finger out of his…

Anyway 'tis a silly place.

Re: 2 separate problems

> The mandatory CAMRA membership and the associated mandatory wearing of large bushy beards will also aolve all this gandering business

Folk music, Morris dancing^† and a bit of mummery wouldn't go astray.

One might have thought between covid, the last government and this one, that the entire population had been driven to drink. Perhaps drugs are cheaper.

_{† about ten years ago I was wandering around the back streets of Glebe (Sydney AU). I walked around a corner and beheld a troupe in full flight "at it" Morrissing or whatever they call it, outside a pub (in Crown St?) Seemed a bit sinister but that's just me… probably.}

SpaceX to try its luck again with Starship Flight 13 after engines and weather say no

"To keep … timelines from exploding"

And also not as spectacular as a Bezos special.

"Investors aren't the sharpest tools in the shed." Wall St would be a shady red light district if investers were… but then…

USD 1 billion (10⁹) per month ! Outside the delusional cuckoo·land of the tech billionaires you can do a lot of real, useful stuff today, in this world on a budget of USD 12 billion per year.

If a permanent (long term) Lunar presence does become a reality, I shouldn't think it could be before 2050 and more towards the end of our century.

Like a lot of journeys in this world, it doesn't matter whether you travel at breakneck speed, cutting corners, or take a more leisurely slow and careful path - you usually arrive at the same destination at pretty much the same time.

Flock cameras go up in flames as cops hunt suspected firebugs

Puzzled…

that no one is using their second amendment rights to shoot out the lights (lenses and CCDs) of these cameras rather than all the rather hamfisted attacks to which they have resorted so far.

I guess Americans are piss poor shots these days. If you can't hit a 100kg tub of lard then I suppose the side of a barn might also be problematic.

A drone with an attached crème brûlée butane torch could sneak up at night, from behind, and… well, the cameras if not crèmed, sont brûlées.

Tech leaders issue letter to train Uncle Sam about value of open weight AI

Re: Full AI communism

I read the post of Dean (name or title?) Ball linked from the article. I not much wiser as to what he - or anyone else - actually means by "AI Communism."

Basically a rant about how bad it is to give away stuff like that for free (or any stuff I suspect.) Of course MRDA - who would buy a Tesla if BYD gave you one for free? Perhaps not a good example; sort left the the track with "who would buy a Tesla" … in AU not too many.

Anyway the good Dean ought to try the Bursar's dried frog pills.

open weight models

Doh !

The penny just dropped that it's the models that are open (rather the weights the model uses); not the weight's precision (thinking not constrained to reduced floating point representations.)

The light bulb switched on in this geriatric brain when Altman opined he was fine with open weight... as if he knew a floating point number if it bit him on his dick^†. Ok the following "proprietary" is also a giveaway.

I don't suppose it really matters where you source your dodgy crystal meth — you still end up addicted, dead broke and then just dead.

_{† a real number would leave him singing soprano.}

Dev accidentally commits Copilot binary to FreeBSD ports repo

Git: someone annoying or unpleasant.

I wonder who Linus was thinking of when he named it — not the chap that screwed up BitKeeper for Linux, surely?

The trouble with git is that it is far too clever for your average code monkey developer and way over the top for your BOFH types maintaining system documentation and configurations. Being of the latter persuasion I was just as happy to use rcs. :)

Pope's official prayer app commits cardinal sin, leaks 700K+ users' info

A guy named Peter at the gate.

Just hope his database containing the details of who gets in (and the details of the presumably vastly larger list of who doesn't) isn't leaked.

"Good to see you (finally) Mr Lama.Go straight in sir, you're expected."

"Sorry Mr President, I have down for the barbeque in the basement. Better not dawdle, downstairs is rather impatient and you are well overdue."

…

Model Context Protocol prepares to break with its stateful past

Re: "if any of these people were actually competent."

Not competent. Not even incompetent. Just "not' in the most clueless ways possible.

EU telcos ask: Huawei going to afford to replace Chinese equipment?

Whatever happened to Huawei's "Cyber Security Transparency Centre" (Brussels)?

Huawei Cyber Security Transparency Centre around 2019.

Seemed like a reasonable and cheaper alternative.

I guess it was Trumpled on. Now in season 2, will Cisco, Juniper etc kit need to be ripped out as well?

Sovereign AI is 'nonsense,' says Doctorow

"Money·losingest"

Hadn't encountered "losingest" but I guess the poor thing has difficulty crossing the Atlantic (or Pacific.)

"Losingest" isn't another Doctorow coinage but is recorded in a Peanuts strip (Charles M Schulz.)

I don't suppose Schulz imagined the US was to have the losingest President and Administration… probably ever… but here we are.

Talking smack about a doctor got him access to private medical files

Re: All it would have taken...

> These things are always so simple to fix, at least in theory...

Ultimately it is often the Dr Johnsons (of this story) being arseholes, blatently disregarding the organisation's mandated security processes that enables the same cavalier attitude amongst the troops.

Of course it would also help if those processes all made sense in the contexts they are to be applied. Often the policies and processes have been lifted from an entirely different context and applied without examination or adaptation. Security management can be as lazy and/or incompetent as any other manglement.

A very long time ago, I was present as a very young staff member in the computer facility one evening when the very new vice-chancellor walked in wanting access to the machine room to see the new Sun hardware of which the Uni had just take delivery.

No one present knew this blow·in from Adam and unwilling or unable to provide any ID he persisted in trying to enter by threatening those present with dire consequences. Fortunately one of the (electronics) techs was a big strong fellow with even stronger principles, offered (to the prick) to physically throw him out. A hasty departure followed.

Oddly enough nothing further was ever heard of this incident. Perhaps in those halcyon days even pricks owned their mistakes. … Perhaps not …

Sadly I think all present that evening have shuffled of the mortal.

Amazon's AGI department finds humans are optional

[Amazon] "Building the future, it seems, doesn't guarantee you'll be around to see it"

Probably won't see to much of "the future" but with a lot of wishful thinking and luck I can hope neither will Amazon.

Britain isn't considering datacenters' thirst for water in its 'AI superpower' ambitions

They could pump the water from the rivers…

but then they would have to remove the shit.

Might as well tap straight into the sewerage system. Would be rather apt: shit in - shit out.

Who would have thought it "Flushing for Britain" could help make it an "AI superpower."

"Loose shits sink MIPS."

Astronomers spot exomoon candidate that's almost as massive as Jupiter

Star One (Blakes 7 fans will know this)

Any Blakes 7 fans left ? Ran from '79 to '81. I watched the series but never enthused me and really only recall the ending of the last episode (and at the time with a sense of relief.).

Re: a lot of things that will screw with our naming convention.

Too true.

I am surprised that we are still permitted to call these celestial objects brown dwarfs — being derogatory and demeaning to the stature challenged. White dwarf for a double word score in that game of Scrabble.

Organic chemists came up with their IUPAC nomenclature for far more complex molecules so the astronomers ought to be able come up with something although I suspect the chemists still have decent stoushes over the finer points.

Fresh off AI layoffs, Block now wants to whack Slack with agent-human collab tool

turducken of tech jargon

turd·uck·en ? So an increasingly gratuitous sequence of tech jargon each shoved up the arse of the precending jargon turd .

Senior White House official claims China’s K3 model stolen from Anthropic

We don't like it…

and we hate even worse there is nothing we can do about it. (As in "The US has already sanctioned just about every major player in China’s tech ecosystem")

One can only hope that this is purely theatre because if the US Administration does not appreciate the technological progress of the PRC ironically kicked into high gear by Trump's "policies", they will find that an unpleasant surprise awaits.

Redmond's reaper cometh: October 2026 set to bury a graveyard of Microsoft products

Re: "shit-for-brains marketing fuckwits of Microsoft"

Perhaps restricting that descriotion to just the "marketing" division is overly optimistic.

To be honest most of those flyers, menus, posters and greetings cards are pretty ghastly asthetically (like most DIY DTP.)

I still encounter efforts, often from whom you would expect better and whose typeface salad ought to a crime against humanity or at least typography.

"neurtral"

neurtral — adj. determined to never use their brain again

Latest Musk merch drop runs entirely on child labor

"increased chance of serious injury to a child"

Looking at the picture of the Tesla Balance Bike it looks like it was designed by the coloured pencil department rather than actual engineers.

The wheels' single spoke is just asking for a kid's forearm or other linb to be amputated. I would have thought filling in the space with a solid if non·structural element would have been wiser.

The pneumatic tyres (unless it's a faux valve stem) seem gratuitous on this glorified hobby (or dandy) horse.

The only thing that surprises me is that Space Karen missed the photo-op of sitting astride his dandy·horse with that imbecilic smile of his.

Morris and Triumph might have started in the bicycle trade but Tesla might repeat that history in reverse.

Anyone with a shed, an extension cord, a couple of GPUs and an overdraft is building datacenters. Fujitsu just offloaded five

[Fujitsu Australia] "helping organisations modernise critical systems"

Please keep them well away from Australia Post.

AI's cheatin' heart will make you weep

…often take shortcuts to achieve a particular result and then misrepresent…

The failings of the creators recapitulated in their creations.

China advances plans for national single-stack IPv6 network, and its own surveillance-friendly version of the protocol

"It was Greek to me" …

Well Chinese.

https://www.jswx.gov.cn/zhengce/fagui/202607/t20260721_1345845.shtml

I was curious how the proposed metadata was embedded in a ipv6 packet — as an option header or an extension of the v6 protocol itself.

AWS customer learns the hard way how even the smallest oversight can be mission-critical

Re: Amateurs

> I've had 2 coworkers get killed in auto accidents during my career, and another drown.

I am glad I have retired. I am not sure I would want to root around in your employer's basement.

Viking 1 landed on Mars 50 years ago

Orbiter v Lander.

The linked JPL article refers to the Orbiter being shutdown August 7, 1980 after the gas used to keep the radio link pointed towards Earth (and solar panels, the Sun) was about to be exhausted.

The Lander soldiered on until November 1982 until it met with a wee accident. Who me ?

UK.gov's tech department gets the chop after two years

Re: Quill Pen Utilisation Anyone?

Great news for goose farmers - and oak gall ink and vellum manufacturers — heaven knows where they'll get the scribal monks from.

I think I have seen small clasp knives that were still called pen knives in my youth, in two dollar (~UK: Pound) shops and in Daiso, so at least keeping your quill sharp is already sorted.

Some Mullvad VPN customers tunnel for exit after co-founder donates millions to populist party

Country of Lords

There was this book review today on the Graun site Country of Lords titled "Social Darwinists to tech bros: tracing the long fight against equality in US."

What caught my attention was the photograph of Thiel and Musk taken back in 2000 — the pair even then looked like two dodgy used car sellers. Some Tesla owners might thnk "so what's changed." At least Arthur Daley had some charm… as he would have said: "those two… a pair of invertebrate liars."

.The parallels with pre·war Germany are rather obvious but those lines might only be drawn if you accept history a) isn't complete bunk or purely libtard wokery, b) oughtn't be subject to ridiculous and scurrilous revision.

Europe slaps AliExpress with €550 million fine for selling dodgy goods

AliExpress … selling dodgy goods

The agreed terms of service, I would have thought.

I always assumed that an order with any of these PRC internet souks was likely to be a mystery box, a blind bag - the contemporary equivalent of plunging your hand into bran tub for your lucky dip.

I have been lucky in that the small number of items I have purchased (all < AUD2O incl. shipping) from these sites mostly worked - even the knockoff Parker pen refills.

A few years ago I toyed with the idea of buying some cheap high powered violet lasers from these site to muck about with, but seeing some YT chap with a proper laser lab burn himself with a PRC special (the device was way over the power spec.) I decided it could literally be playing with fire.

The EU might be on the right track in terms of product safety as gross failures could be an unneeded extra impost on their health systems although I am not sure whether looking into a 10W laser would be more a funeral expense.

Infosec expert: Paidwork users' data pwned after 23M-record database dumped online

"Most individual jobs pay only a few cents"

I know "it's wicked to mock the afflicted" but I couldn't stop myself thinking of "offering peanuts…"

In reality I suspect most of the stolen details won't be of too many billionaires but I guess the very real risk of identity theft given the breadth of the information will make the lives of the already impoverished even more miserable.

Microsoft rushes out Windows fix for Dell's hot and bothered PCs

the quality … really was improving? Or perhaps not.

Definitely not down this leg of the trousers of time.

Nor the other I suspect.

Java was a three-day hotfix away from dying horribly on stage

"Computer science was for people who couldn't be real mathematicians,"

I wish he were only joking.

Auditors tell UK government to do the math before banking on £45B AI savings

"implications on staff numbers,the nature of work,and capabilities required to carry out that work"

^*Extractum digitorum !

Work out (a) what your department supposed to do, (b) what it actually does, (c) who does (b) as well as who ought to be doing (a), and then determine whether adding anything to the confusion - let alone AI - is not going to worsen matters.

I suspect even making a credible start on (a) is beyond the civil service.

If Mervyn Peake didn't partly model his Gormenghast on the UK civil service, then the service has probably plagiarised great swathes of his opus.

_{* Discworld Latatian or Canis Latinicus. Presumably: digitum extrahe !}

Connecting AI agents to outside services explodes the risk radius

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!"

That tale ends on Flodden Field.

This nonsense might ultimately entail a much bigger catastrophe.

Comment in code read 'Dear future me, sorry I wrote this'

"Have you written code that came back to haunt you?"

No. Plausible deniability has it uses.

Just ensure the code is © Hans Schultz.

(Of course no one expects or believes system admins can write code and they usually obliges by not… except when they have pressing need.)

Using AI makes people less likely to admit they don't know something

"because adults have learned critical thinking."

Without clear evidence for that claim, I would suspend my own judgment.

You would really be nailing legs on a dead horse for that one to run in the US.

Ransomware curdles production at Coca-Cola's Fairlife dairy biz

Re: ultra-filtered milk

> Surely if you filter everything out of milk, using your ultra-filter, you get left with, er, water?

I would guess it is the normal quality control process where water is removed from the milk at one stage only to be added back if required at a later stage to produce a uniform product. Fair bit of this nonsense around the "no added permeate" marketing codswallop which some brand sported in AU.

The world is a pretty silly place and unfortunately populated by even sillier excuses for people.

> What are Coca-cola doing with …

Not a question to which I would necessarily would want to know the answer.

OpenAI admits GPT-5.6 occasionally deletes files – but it's an 'honest mistake'

Truth

> Truth? Altman has never heard of it. Every word out of his mouth is a lie that he hopes is what the listener wants to hear.

A proposition is said to be true if it is satisfiable in all models.

The tripe from Altman &co is unlikely to be satisfiable in any model whatsoever. Large Language ones not excepted.

When did ostensibly intelligent people lose the ability to recognise a pile of stinking dog turds, mistaking them for the future ?

Re: "weapons-grade chatbot. Except for targeting the wrong side"

Rather debatable. Depend on which side you find yourself, I should think.

AI spam filters are getting suckered by old-school text salting

Re: Not really new

> texts which used hidden text.

You need <span style='visibility:collapse'>interplu</span>via<span style='visibility:collapse'>l topo</span>gra<span style='visibility:collapse'>phy</span> before commencing an errection.

Back then it was all Viagra or Miriam and since then I don't imagine either get about much. ;)

NASA's Artemis III will need three rockets to do the job Apollo did with one

'The Plan' has all the hallmarks of a Golgafrinchan B Ark committee effort.

Apart from the rockets, having leaders that "can dock, loiter, and not blow up the launch pad" might also help.

TSMC's $265B US fab pledge is the outline of a concept of a plan

Re: Where are the engineers going too come from?

> But for some reason Trump is going to be unhappy with ‘and we also require a fast path to full citizenship for these ten thousand Guangzhou-born semiconductor engineers to make it worth the cost of training them on the particular systems in the Arizona fab’

I imagine he and his rabble will be ICE cold on that proposition.

As an aside — when is the prick not unhappy ? He always looks like a kid who has lost his best marbles and only smirks (never smiles) when he has dreamt up some new mischief.

I suspect many foreign trained chaps are going to think twice, thrice et seq. before they might consider moving to Trumpisstan. The illusory American dream has become a rather real nightmare horror for many.

"an outline for a concept of a plan."

Sound a bit like the Trump administration… if you omit the words "plan", "concept" and "outline."

The local media here ran a story that Hegseth &co are about to test US troops for low testosterone. Utterly doolally.

"Frank, would you like to repeat that I don't have enough testosterone to be in this man's army — without your teeth ?"

"No, Margaret."