Posts by Bebu sa Ware

From video games to cyber defense: If you don't think like a hacker, you won't win

one plus one equals two… other ways

(1+i ) × (1-i ) works for me.

Of course doesn't work for Tribbles (or Guinea pigs for that matter.) Or modulo 2 arithmetic.

The novel concept of thinking like your adversary dates from at least Sun Tzu (viz 5th century BCE) if not earlier.

Actually in this context you need not trouble yourself with the undoubted effort required to out·think the adversary, just enough grift to get inside the confined space of the corporate mind of the C-suite to sell them the barest sizzle of the cooked security sausage.

IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

Re: Y2KY Jelly...

Took a while for the penny (1d not 1p) to drop.

Works on whole lot of levels.

The "4 digits fit…" …… well never mind … what's the internet for if not to provide graphic and salacious visual illustrations.:)

I am grateful my coffee cup was already empty…

Fizzer

After a lot of very expensive ffaffing around and putting stickers on PCs not much happened on 1.1.2000 and wouldn't have mattered much as the whole show was on vacation until the second week of January. It was the sort of place that was pretty certain it was still the Century of the Fruitbat and likely consumed the entire annual production of Dried Frog Pills.

The wall controls for the aircon was showing 19990 but the day·of·week [Mon·Fri] and time·of·day were correct (or not as it never grokked daylight saving) so I don't imagine it was ever fixed.

The only Y2K problem I encountered in March was a *really old* SGI workstation whose libc didn't think 2000 was a leap year.

I hope the Regcommentariat had a satisfactory Hogfathers with little sticking your craw other than an aberrant fragment of turkey or sprout^† and that the clouds were spared an earful. But never mind 2026 is shaping up to be even more dismal than 2025. :)

_{† Brussels sprouts: Brassica oleracea—grown for its [debatably] edible buds.}

'PromptQuest' is the worst game of 2025. You play it when trying to make chatbots work

Re: Key phrase

"expecting a random number generator to serve as a clock"

If it periodically serves up two random number H,M (24>H≥0, 60>M≥0) that would be a more useful clock than PromptQuest could be for anything.

Even if randoclock only offerred the two numbers once a day, it would still be correct for a minute each and every day.

Uber and Lyft rolling Baidu robotaxis into London next year

Chinese (PRC) vehicle jam packed with advanced electronics scooting around Whitehall etc…

definitely no clandestine electronic surveillance built in… scouts honour. ;)

Given all the political huff·and·puff over Huawei network kit and 5G telco kit, permitting, nay encouraging, remotely controlled autonomous vehicles chockers with unauditable electronics and software to skulk around your capital just demonstrates the abysmal depths of cluelessness the UK government is able to effortlessly plumb.

Re: WTF does this have to do with Labour....

"But we do all agree that DNS is Corbyn's fault ?"

Possibly the most delicious conspiracy theory on the table so far. ;)

Although his lot might have come up with the shambles of DNSsec if there were any possibility of a neuron between them.

Weren't Corbyn and co. shown the door, escorted through it and out of the building, as it were, for their perceived or real anti·semiticism? Possibly ironic given more recent events.

I can find my own way out.

Humanoid robots are still novelty acts, but investment is surging to make them real tomorrow

industrial robots ≠ humanoid robots

When quoting numbers there is arguably a deceitful sleight of hand conflating the two - in reality almost all industrial robots doing useful things like welding and a few humanoid mechatronic clown acts.

Limited or fixed purpose machines controlled by software containing machine learning components will inevitably become a lot more common. Totally automated warehouses that don't involve humans are completely possible and may make economic sense (or not.)

"human workers have proven reluctant to contribute to their replacement."

Do we think that we might actually be less insightful than the humanoid tat we are attempting to flog to even dafter customers ?

Reads like a gang of grifters who have fallen for their own con.

"Humanoid robots face a long apprenticeship as jesters and novelty acts before they're taken seriously." — The same might be said of their human promoters.

North American air defense troops ready for 70th year of Santa tracking

Re: Something fishy here

"Google Santa Tracker and NORAD. They don't agree!"

I imagine given the geopolitical situation Santa has long employed stealth reindeer and sleigh to avoid any possibility of a "regrettable" incident involving Patriots and a shower of venison.

One real reason AI isn't delivering: Meatbags in manglement

"AI is absolutely better at producing something than incompetent twats."

Could be the OpenAI corporate motto or mission statement.

Even if it were, the incompetent twats would still queue to buy OpenAI Kool·aid.

Re: I may have mentioned this before

"El Reg should start a lottery of some sort on when (not if) the AI crash happens."

A misspelt Chinese knock off of the MSDOG sweater might be a reasonable prize for this "guess the weight wait" competition.

My prediction — first or second week of November 2027… specifically 686 day from today (2025·12·25)

AI faces closing time at the cash buffet

so what is a "digital" transformation?

I always imagine a finger puppet being non·consensually digitally penetrated.

Re: Pointless

"App that *puts* clothes on women could be useful."

Wouldn't running the more contentious nudify apps backwards do that ?

Sight of Clippy, Internet Explorer scares baby

Re: MSDOG?

The msdog jumper/pullover/sweater reminds one that Microsoft has never really done "design" at any level above kindergarten fingerpainting—if anything their efforts could only be described as the antithesis of elegance.

Obviously a howling affront to pristine asthetic soul of the enfant Wolftone.

Re: A Penguin to the rescue

Clippy could be an incarnation of the Scissorman which would scare any potentially thumb sucking enfant.

The Tux soft toys that I have seen have all been on the chubby side so a tad more cuddly than the rather skeletal Clippy.

Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030

Re: Death March

"People see AI as a kind of Genie in a bottle that will fullfil their wishes."

Perhaps they should read The Brass Bottle by F. Anstey 1900 to see how well that worked out.

Re: this used to be my bag..

"{cough} logic {cough}" —

Caught my eye as it is the {precondition} statement {postcondition} format of weakest precondition semantics.

I imagine "cough" is the peculiar Microsoft predicate that requires nothing and is established by anything. ;)

Re: One more thing

"But if the Windows codebase has, say, 50 million lines of code, translating it to Rust would still require…" 50 engineers ?

Which is pretty close to the plot of the (recently) late Tom Stoppard's 1967 radio play Albert's Bridge. :)

Re: the circle of hell that Dante missed

"the circle of hell that Dante missed."

I always assumed the more obnoxious parts of IT were to be found up Satan's arse — a virtual 11^th Circle as it were.

Which understandably Dante and Virgil quickly passed without further comment or hazard to their immortal souls.

Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’

The choice of "North Star" probably isn't the soundest as the Earth is nearly as wobbly as Microsoft products and has had succession† of Pole stars over the millenia.

I would append to this nonsense "1 manager, 1 hand, 1dick…" — Somehow I don't think these tossers will pull it off… or they will but not the 10⁶ lines of code.

No reflection on Rust or the Rust developer community intended.

_{† or precession. ;)}

Keeping Windows and macOS alive past their sell-by date

Hope Springs Eternal…

MacOS Tiger on Powerbook G4 12" :(

Was still ok until TenFourFox ceased development. OpenBSD installs and runs but the X11 stuff is pretty rough. :)

The original system 2½" IDE drive must be wearing a bit thin by now — I looked at replacing the drive about 15 years ago — the instructions for doing so make the steps required to move the Shuttle from the Smithsonian to Texas seem child's play.

Like a Virgin Airways bot, planning for the very first time

"there are still some question marks around the intelligence of that model."

Indeed !

We are wet with anticipation of the launch of the Ryanair bot. ;)

US punishes China’s ‘dominance’ of legacy chips with zero percent tariffs

I better rush out…

and purchase heaps of 555 and 741 chips — Oh? Not until mid 2027 — I might not still be here by then nor with a little, albeit long overdue, luck, the Orange _iDJ_iT and besides I am not even resident in the Trumpisstan parody of chaotic group sex — there is no evidence that any other western economy is going to follow the delusional US tariff shit show.

Microsoft rushes an out-of-band update for Message Queuing bug

twelve whoopsies of Christmas

Perhaps inspiration for a MS themed version of The Twelve Days of Christmas ?

On the first day of Christmas Microsoft gave to me

a two gigabyte Celeron notebook preinstalled with Windows 11

On the second day of Christmas Microsoft gave to me

an update that completely broke networking.

…

Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

I can see a Snake Oil opportunity here…

flogging ram compressor tat/utilities for Windows that either do sod-all or are lightly warmed over zram/zswap etc…… $49.99 Limited offer.

I recall Windows ≥ Vista would attempt to use any inserted USB flash memory stick to improve performance (ReadyBoost) so I imagine that little nasty is also being dusted off.

Probably not such a problem for Linux/*BSD users. Win11 machines all seem to ship with 16G ram (or did) even as 4×4G on refurbished boxes which is usually more than adequate for these OSs - 8G is usually enough with minimum paging(swapping.)

Interestingly Win10 LTS runs very nicely indeed with 16G even with quite old i3 CPUs and isn't too shabby on 8G.

Windows is testing a new, wider Run dialog box. Here’s how to try it

You can Run…

and you can hide, but you can never escape…

But Hell ! It's worth trying…

Europe gets serious about cutting digital umbilical cord with Uncle Sam's big tech

Re: Thank fuck . . .

"assuming you have no inclinations to conspire against China."

A pretty good assumption for most of the planet, I would have thought — even if only out of apathy.

If I were the leadership of the PRC and had a clear idea of the challenges the nation will face in the next four decades, I might welcome effective conspiracies.

Oracle's new AI-enhanced support portal leaves users fuming

MOP — My Oriface's Portaloo ?

Every enterprise that mindlessly deploys this steaming pile of AI turds between their business and their (for now) customers is actively shitting on those customers.

How long before it becomes "anything but Oracle…" as though it wasn't already that for other completely distinct piles of crap previously dumped on customers.

What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows

Perhaps the Linux SUX experience

Simple User Experience (S·UX)

From my long experience of dealing with "simple" users the reality is that the vast majority want a static, consistent inferface—pretty much desktop icons for their email thingy, wordprocessor and spreadsheet etc thingies, browser thingy — in most cases you would be (un)lucky to get beyond six applications.

A popup menu for any other applications. Folder icons on desktop seem to be essential too.

Her indoors is definitely in this class. Currently Win 10 esu + Open Shell + Firefox + Betterbird + LibreOffice. Once Win10 finally goes Norwegian Blue, she won't notice the "upgrade" to Linux or FreeBSD environment — although an AI stripped version of Firefox would be on the cards.

Ultimately if most PCs were shipped with a zero cost standard basic Linux SUX environment with the option of a network install of Windows ($0-$Lots) I imagine the polloi in their multitude would stick with SUX. Sometimes the unchanging and boring is desirable — when was the last time you actually had to search for the controls of an electric pop-up toaster ? (Without the ultimate folly of invoking and asking Talkie.)

Hacktivists scrape 86M Spotify tracks, claim their aim is to preserve culture

Re: folk music[ians]. An acceptable genre

Folk Music …………perhaps not.

"download one of their tracks and have it play on repeat overnight"

Perhaps you are thinking that each time an artist's performance in s played it consumes a tiny part of their soul ?

You devil !

Pizza restaurant signage caught serving raw Windows

switch/animate in a way that makes them hard to read

"The digital menu screens are fine. It's the people who configure them to switch/animate in a way that makes them hard to read that are the problem. Having the signs update to strike out anything that is no longer available has saved quite a lot of time, in my experience."

Perhaps the semi static nature of e·paper might be the solution especially that it also now comes in colour.

Even if the backend were some MS crap if the software only used the e·paper for the signage and not for borkage the whole OS could go bsod and the signage would remain.

Some of the bus stop timetables in this part if the world have been replaced with monochrome e·paper which I didn't notice at first until the it updated itself which was a real surprise from a sheet of A4^†.

_{† what the saner parts of the planet use instead of the less sane's preference for quarto.}

"bork never sleeps."

Her music sounds like it… pardon the missing 'j.' ;)

AI is rewriting how power flows through the datacenter

Some of the material is from—

https://www.infineon.com/row/public/documents/corporate/investors/presentations/2025/2025-11-26-power-roadshow-v01-00-en.pdf

Certainly the graphics.

Not much technical detail. I was curious what switching speed (several orders magnitude higher than 50Hz?) was envisaged 1kHz–10kHz? But I guess it is more the speed (μs) of going from conducting to blocking that is at issue.

High voltage DC (cf AC) in the data centre and in the racks could have its interesting moments too.

I was amused about halfway down the pdf at the heading of a graph "Global humanoid market size forecast" and the following figure claiming the typical humanoid would require ~USD450.00 worth of Infineon power semiconductor components.

Google sends Dark Web Report to its dead services graveyard

Re: ACR technology

"a dumb TV they are a premium"

I stopped watching TV once the on screen Covid19 circus started endlessly featuring the usual clueless^† politicians as clowns.

Just before then, being temporarily TV-less due to moving and storage, I found a cheap set top box fed into the HDMI port of a decent 24"/60cm monitor was pretty a decent TV especially when coupled with some older PC speakers with the 3.5mm audio plug.

I don't know if set top boxes are even manufactured today but charity shops often a few in their "computer bits" bin.

_{† what those bozos knew of epidemiology, virology, vaccines and immunology could be stated in one word but nonetheless they insisted on unremittingly spouting pointless nonsense.}

New boss was bad, his attitude was ugly, so the tech team pranked him good

Re: Better prank

just remove the ball

I recall replacing the ball with one, presumably smaller, from another mouse made for a seriously misbehaving desk rodent.

NIST contemplated pulling the pin on NTP servers after blackout caused atomic clock drift

NTP — remind me what the N stands for…

I would have imagined blocking the ports on the network switches through which the time services communicate with the rest of world might have been do·able remotely. Possibly not by a supervising physicist, perhaps by the local network engineer or BoFH.

Tired of sky-high memory prices? Buckle up, we're in this for the long haul

Even 8Gb ddr4 parts are…

getting harder to source and expensive when you do.

If I were working where older hardware was either sent to recyclers or ewaste I would be stripping the ddr4 out - at least the larger and faster parts - potentially to reuse in newer hardware.

I was looking at refurbished W11 desktops 16Gb (2x8) and realized it would be cheaper to buy those for the ddr4 than purchase new parts.

Ministers confirm breach at UK Foreign Office but details remain murky

It's almost like they don't know what they're doing.

One might say the Foreign Office has perfected that impression.

(As has just about every other branch of government.)

Wouldn't be too concerned…

given the glacial rate than anything gets done in the civil (and I suppose foreign) service these foreign johnnies probably have snaffled the papers detailing the British position in the event of Germany occupying Sudetenland. Not that their knowing that position them would do them much good. As the Czechs might attest.

Red Top = tabloid - the new thing learnt for today. Distinct from a Red Rag but I suppose not always.

UK prepares to wave goodbye to 3G telecoms as tri-hard tech retires

Re: Emergency services calls

Australia was a complete and utter clusterfuck. I was there in the immediate runup.

I wouldn't argue with you on that. Ah… I see you just meant the decommissioning 3G and mandating 4G/VoLTE for voice.

If the chap with his daily 2G Nokia visits Australia he will quickly discover it no-workee and would not have for the last decade.

You need a a compliant 4G/VoLTE phone at a minimum — quite a few global brand phones eg Samsung won't roam for emergency 000 calls and have been or soon will be blocked from all AU networks. Some handsets can be upgraded in software some cannot. Telcos claim that direct imports are responsible but MRDA.

Even at the risk of having to wash my mouth out with carbolic Apple iPhones seem to be the best bet as they have supported VoLTE at least back to the original SE 2016 and don't appear to have the emergency roaming problem.

Re: End Of An Era?? Really??

One man's screw up is another man's yacht.

I wouldn't begrudge that man his yacht if it were named Bayesian.

Sydney Uni data goes walkabout after criminals raid code repo

Re: Data is a risk not an asset.

Perhaps Australian readers can advise us of the local equivalent term for 'numpties'.

We are fairly bi·lingual, fluent in the both left and right pondian lingua anglica as well as our own patois.

So complete fucking numpties would be acceptable.

Totally clueless fucking c—nts/pricks might pass muster for short form versions.

The Australian definite article is both definitive and dismissive.

Re: Data is a risk not an asset.

"Wombat: Someone who drinks and eats all your stuff, then leaves…"

Closer to the canonical:

Wombat: Someone who drinks, eats and roots all your stuff, then leaves…

"pesky data protection officers?"

You would be lucky.

I would imagine those non·entia will have been replaced by equally (in)effectual AI agents.

The question is the answer.

"historical personal data stashed inside one of its online code repositories" ???? Why? Just why?"

The Fucking Sydney Fucking University.†

Nuff said.

_{† They are big on the "The" and require you not to forget it. I would say they were bigger on the fucking but I know they could never find their tackle.}

Infinite Machine e-scooter is like the offspring of a Vespa and a Cybertruck

Re: For watcher's of Dr Who in the 1970s

First glance of the picture I thought it was K9 with his head up his arse. Fug ugly. A bloody dalek has more chic.

The things are apparently soundless so perhaps calling them "The Silence" might be appropriate, their being not the prettiest lifeform in the Whoniverse and of course canonically "Silence Must Fall."

(Unfortunately one doesn't instantly forget these things once out of sight. :)

_{"Very last century" ? — K9 and Sarah Jane made an appearance in the 21st century (2006) School Reunion (S02 E03)}

BOFH: All through the house, not a creature was stirring except the homicidal vacuum cleaner

"he fell down the stairs"

A slight variation on the open window ? Got to keep it fresh for Xmas. ;)

Sounds like Little Jim's line from the Goons — "He's fallen in the water."

Your car’s web browser may be on the road to cyber ruin

Watching an old TV series†…

there was a scene where it was raining and the chap couldn't crank his car over so his Scots housekeeper came out an turned over the engine almost instantly.

(Set around 1924.)

Set me thinking that the modern car stealing toe rag would not stand a chance against these old vehicles. ;) Although the modern bright young things mightn't either, I suppose.

Still — demonstrates how little of the modern jiggery·pokery a functional motor vehicle actually needs.

_{† The Mind of J G Reeder Thames 1969-71 S01 E07 The Troupe}

GOV.UK to unleash AI chatbot on confused citizens

"I've just had a baby, do you know what help I can get?"

In the vein of rock and glue pizza recipes the unfortunate inquirer might be instructed to obtain RU·486 from their local pharmacy. :(

I have a sneaking suspicion that once enshittification has gone fully asymptotic we will discover that well trained multidisciplinary teams perform far more effectively and efficiently in delivering services than these planet killing AI applications. If anyone actually escapes drowning or cooking in the oceans of shit.