Posts by Bebu sa Ware

Bossware booms as bots determine whether you're doing a good job

"AI is good for is consuming tons of data and presenting meaningful information"

When did that happen ?

AI hallucinating about AI ?

Cryptology boffins’ association to re-run election after losing encryption key needed to count votes

IACR shouldn't have accepted Baldrick as a member...

let alone as one of the three trustees holding one of the three rings of power encryption keys.

A cunning plan: he probably wrote his portion of the key under the third sheet of a roll of toilet paper where no one would look.

One only hope that Melbourne, Australia is where the conference will actually be organised and not Melbourne, Florida. ;)

Weaponized file name flaw makes updating glob an urgent job

Re: Oh FFS

"suid shell script"

I, possibly mistakenly, thought modern systems didn't support those. Shells themselves get a bit noisy if you set them suid root ie when euid ≠ ruid.

Of course you can always try fiddling with Linux capabilities to get the same effect. ;)

"Haven't we learned anything in nearly half a century ? "

Clearly not—in pretty much in any domain one might consider.

70-hour work weeks no longer enough for Infosys founder, who praises China’s 996 culture

Comforting to learn...

arsehole billionaires aren't restricted to any particular nation, culture or ethnicity.

It's TEE time for Brave's AI assistant Leo

Re: Oh, fuck.

underhand shite·ology—rather good name for some deceitful exploitative pseudo·religion but arguably of already done.

"TEE time" as in Mr Jonathan Teatime ?

Not needed. Not wanted. Not now. Not ever—can't be clearer.

Big Red borrows a lot of green, hopes AI will put it in the black

The Fall…

"the fall can be ablaze with orange, yellow and — yes — red, in time, the colors all eventually turn to brown."

The North American version of Autumn might well be rather apt.

The shiny green foliage becomes yellow, red… brown—then blown away leaving the naked skeleton of the tree denuded of leaves.

Dismal prospect if, as in Narnia, the Spring never comes.

Although some of America's "Great and Good" could give Jadis a run for her money in the malevolent narcissism stakes.

If it looks like a bubble and blows up like a bubble, it probably is a bubble.™

The bubble is not the bubble. The bubble is the air inside. ;)

(I might be thinking of soufflés but the same diff.)

SpaceX loses debut V3 Super Heavy in ground test mishap

"Now Starship can fail even earlier in the test cycle, negating the need for all that pesky fueling"

Who does't come here for the sark ?

Re: Test stand

Musk seems to be a bit of a Muppet,

Not very fair to muppets.

Rhyme is the key to set AIs free when verse outsmarts security

I am not sure that poetry is the thing…

meaning the rhyme and meter but possibly more that the conventional structure of English prose is assumed in the construction of "guard rails."

So perhaps the contorted "you how to me tell bomb make" might be as effective as any piece of doggerel.

There are enough syntactic markers in the first prompt for a LLM to untangle the word order—"me" is clearly accusative or dative so is the object of some verb with the choice of "tell" or "make" which might be determined by the inanimate v. animate nature of the the objects.

Yoda could probably get any AI to spill its guts. ;)

Researchers get inside the mind of bots, find out what texts they trained on

Gets messy…

If a model were exclusively trained on public domain reviews, criticism and analyses etc each of which quoted from an acknowledged copyright text well within the fair use provision of copyright protections the model might well be able to reproduce a significant proportion of that text without ever having directly accessed the text.

Perhaps taking a percentage of AI businesses' turnover and capitalization† to compensate authors might be one solution.

_{† don't bother about profits—authors would prefer their bread today rather than a dubious promise of jam tomorrow.}

Self-destructing thumb drive can brick itself and wipe your secret files away

Some old tech might obviate the need to plug it in

• Surround the electronics with thermite.
• Imbed a percussion cap in the thermite.
• A spring loaded firing pin with a trigger and safety catch.

Retract safety. Push trigger…

I would imagine you might not want hold on to the device one it starts self destructing but then I wouldn't be too keen to hold the self destructing compact cassette tape either.

Must have gone through a lot car tape players.

I thought at the time (early 1970s) that cassettes didn't need any assistance to self destruct.

Don't spill your guts to your chatbot friend - it'll hoover up that info for training

Apparently

There are people out there who don't assume that everything they say to a chatbot is being recorded, analysed and reused?

And voted for Trump et al.

What I don't understand why anyone would spend a dollar profiling, tracking and targeting these bozos† if they couldn't expect a financial return.

The disposable income of the vast majority has rapidly shrunk, vanished and now effectively negative.

Using this technology to influence consumer choices is predicated on the dubious assumption that the consumer still possesses that financial discretion.

Household debt accrued for ephemeral purchases is probably at critical levels now but has to some extent obscured the collapse of disposible income.

We indeed live in interesting times.

_{† BelOw ZerO customers = unprofitable.}

Google links Android’s Quick Share to Apple’s AirDrop, without Cupertino’s help

Rust ?

I always thought the Chocolate Factory was Go (golang) shop ?

Wasn't Go originally developed there ?

Go is garbage collected so ought to be as memory safe as Rust, I would have thought.

All that I can imagine is that their developer diddums wanted to play with same shiny toy as the other boys and girls.

Open Compute Project figuring out how to get quantum computers into classical datacenters

I expect Raspberry Pi 6 to have at least 32 qubits.

Those 32 qb might be a lot cheaper than 8Gb of LPDDR4 when the Rpi6 launches.

Re: Opens box

Dead then ?

Clearly decoherence can be lethal.

Look after your wave function and it will look after you. Or should that be rifle ?

Magician forgets password to his own hand after RFID chip implant

"Magician forgets password to his own hand"

I immediately thought of Jonathan Creek's magician employer Adam Klaus.

UK minister ducks cost questions on nationwide digital ID scheme

Mind you, ducks need duck ponds and duck houses

Peking ducks don't. ;)

Wouldn't be the first time a government has been accused of playing at ducks and drakes.

Just noticed if one replaces the 'd's with 'f's it doesn't greatly change the meaning.

operated by Palantir, run on Azure and adminstered from China.

It will be very secure, it will be operated by Palantir, run on Azure and adminstered from China.

At least it would be reliable as then it would be in the interest of the PRC to keep it up even to the point of running a redundant copy just in case Azure has one of its rare outages. /s

"whether the permanent secretary would necessarily have the experience…"

"whether the permanent secretary would necessarily have the experience of digital transformation needed for the CDO role."

Of course not minister

If we appointed people who were actually competent, where would we be ?

It would be the thin edge of the wedge… we would be on a very slippery slope, minister.

Thank you, Humphrey.

AI nudification site fined £55K for skipping age checks

Re: Undress.cc

Perhaps prohibiting the type of service† it offers might make more sense.

† Using an image of a clothed adult (99% female ?) and grafting a vaguely feasible naked body on to that image.

Hard to see a "legitimate" use. The non·consensual use of an image is nothing if not plain rude.

If consensual she could just as easily get her kit off and snap away.

Personally don't see the point and do wonder how many time Maggie Thatcher etc has been disrobed as a joke or to give the hard right of the Tories their jollies. Suella on the other hand would require a braver man than they can boast.

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

Micro- and Soft- Brain ?

When they let that Ifrit out of the bottle some things were clearly left behind—a non·existent grip on reality for starters.

"Jeez there so many cynics!" ""mindblowing" that people are unimpressed with AI."—Funny that. Never considered asking why ?

"Copilot finishing your code before you finish your coffee."—Not now. Not ever. I would give up coffee† before then.

_{† perhaps not. :)}

TP-Link accuses rival Netgear of 'smear campaign' over alleged China ties

Re: I don't care about "cloud management" features or backdoors

China is in much less of a position to negatively affect my life than my own government!

Presumably written from the Trumpisstan gulag and tragically never truer than now.

The irony is that almost without exception this kit is already running OpenWRT or DD-WRT albeit molested to some extent by the vendor.

The option of being able to install an upstream version of the software would put most this nonsense to bed and allow the hardware to run supported software beyond the vendor's EOL.

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Re: Well, someone had to do it

Yup. Be afraid… very afraid !

As for Hell no fury… scorned women aren't in the race.

Mea culpa !

I have put a UPS on a lab trolley and moved a mail server with redundant power supplies—replace one mains lead with UPS lead then the other; then trundle the server to its new location; replug the mains leads. The network is down for the duration of the transfer (a few minutes) but was on the same vlan.

One half of the building had power from one substation and the other half from another substation. Also two large network rooms. When one substation transformer had to be upgraded/replaced at short notice both the power and networking would lost for a day. So relocating the mail server to the other side of the building made sense as the amount of email piling up on the backup MXers would seriously thrash the server The startup was also pretty slow so not shutting the server down was also desirable.

The part of this circus I found funniest was riding with the "mail server" down two floors in the lift (elevator.)

If the server had a wifi interface I could have kept the network up too. Next time. ;)

Fired techie admits sabotaging ex-employer, causing $862K in damage

Re: Damn Humans

You really can't trust these meatsacks humans, get the humans out of the loop

I am certain a prompt guru could subvert corporate AI to wreak havoc months after said guru had departed to greener pastures.

(And implicate remaining staff members. The lawyers are going to mint it once they start arguing over the admissibility and validity of evidence extracted from AI systems.)

Can be found…

Biggles at World's End, Ch 12 'Gontermann Pulls A Fast One', W. E. Johns

https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20230329

Dutch turbine engineer tried to turn wind into crypto, ends up generating community service

When the electricity cannot be used

In AU during the last year 10% of wind and 7% of solar output suffered curtailment. This is only likely worsen even with domestic batteries.

The unneeded and unusable output could be redirected to a bitcoin mining rig. Profits to the staff drinking social club. :)

Systemd 259 release candidate flexes musl support – with long list of caveats

Around systemd-400 …

when systemd has subsumed the entire function of the kernel, graphical environment etc someone will submit a pull request for systemd-posix and systemd-linux which will provide a posix compatible subsystem and a Linux system call interface respectively. ;)

(Any resemblance to WSL not entirely unintentional.)

DARPA making low-hanging satellites that use air to move

Re: They must surely have done an environmental impact study, right???

You suck it in, ionize it and shove it out at high speed behind you... What could go wrong?

If you suck in neutral gas molecules and atoms, ionize them (strip electrons from them) and accelerate the ionized gas out the back you are going to accumulate a fairly decent negative charge which is going to make the accelerating stage increasingly harder.

That part of the atmosphere isn't exactly a tranquil void as I understand extreme terrestrial electrical storms can extend up to these altitudes (sprites?) which could easily affect VLEO satellites - more so if they were highly charged, I suspect.

I can imagine an ion thruster might be designed that recombined the stripped electrons with ionized gases after the acceleration phase - a bit like an after·burner or catalytic converter. :)

Senators propose to let users sue tech giants for harmful algos

"…a reasonable person would see…"

…leading to bodily injury or death, in a way that "a reasonable person would see as foreseeable and attributable to the algorithm."

Finding twelve "reasonable persons" in contemporary US is only ever likely to becpossible if a Clapton omnibus with the pub darts team on a day trip were to take the wrong turning at Land's End and wash up on the east coast of the Trumpisstani caliphate.

Manchester hits snooze again on joining Palantir-run NHS data platform

seven years, two down with five to go

A five year filibuster should be child's play for the British Civil Service. :)

Manchester might end up emulating the Duke of Plaza Toro who always lagging at the rear was well placed to lead the retreat.

Devs gripe about having AI shoved down their throats

AI shoved down their throats

An aroused, demented donkey and Linda Lovelace is the picture that headline evokes in my head. Nasty !

"Questions such as the syntax for a particular command "

Hell !

Wouldn't it be great if you could have a terse one page summary of the command instantly available from the CLI. /s

Re: Gen Z

shit pay, shit conditions, shit boss, with little prospects of getting better

Unsurprisingly not exactly the recipe for quality output.

It's a good time to be the arms dealer for the AI boom

Re: Bubbles are great ways to get rich...

...as long as you get out before they pop.

Knowing when would be worth gazillions, :)

I was wondering whether the dynamics of real bubbles could be used to model financial ones. I imagine there are financial analogies for surface tension, bubble thickness, bubble diameter/surface curvature, surface evaporation etc.

Poetic if you were to use an NVidia GPU to run such a model that ultimately predicts when the bubble bursts.

I suppose you could use actual bubbles to perform an analogue computation† by adjusting the bubble solution composition, atmospheric composition, temperature, pressure and humidity. Champagne science?

_{† anyone remember analogue (and hybrid) computers ?}

US, UK, Australia sanction Lockbit gang’s hosting provider

There you have it, dear reader, the alleged faces of cybercrime – without a hoodie in sigh

That they both appear to wearing their (yellow?) seatbelts is just as surprising as the lack of a hoodie. :)

Hardly Boris Badanov and Natasha Fatale.

Rust on the Moon? Far-side dirt says yes, actually

Re: Fake news

Whilst the Earth is, indeed, spherical-ish,

It's all flat—flat earth, flat moon, flat sun… everything.†

It's the diabolical effects of the space distorting relativistic æther that delude one into believing otherwise.

Yoke that nonsense to "intelligent design" and you will have most of America living in the dark ages… don't bother they were already.

_{† says so in the bible.}

Re: Conjecture

lunar geology (Lunology?)

I think selenology and selenography for lunar geography.

Re: Re:Are China sending a rocket to Jupiter

Please, please, please tell me someone got the reference ?

This may well be my last day on earth ....

About four of us I am guessing.

If had mentioned HAL. Or the his inability to complete an action for Dave you might have illuminated more mental light bulb.

Re: I think we know the truth ?

"Are China sending a rocket to Jupiter ?"

Sadly I am not sure many understood the reference.

Take fight to the enemy, US cyber boss says

Re: America sees 'enemies' everywhere.

You would if you were, in the first instance, the enemy of everyone.

There is probably not a solitary nation that doesn't have a legitimate beef with the USA—not entirely Trump's doing but he and his rabble have really put the cherry on that cake.

China recruiting spies in the UK with fake headhunters and ‘sites like LinkedIn’

"politicians, most of them you could social engineer with a bag of sweets."

Or the mere promise of.

Not just thick but gullible.

CPython may go Rusty, but older platforms risk getting iced out

Rust's mascot is a crab

A crab in Latin cancer I believe.

This particular malignancy is seemingly metastisizing all over the shop. :)

The circular dependancy problem could be dealt with by freezing in a minimal version of the last rust free python version into the rust compiler source tree.

C builds bespoke cpython which is used to bootstrap rust which can then be used to build the latest rust dependent python.

How much anyone running HPUX 10.20 on a parisc cares about rust or recent python versions would be anyone's guess—between SFA and not all, I suspect.

Outdated Samsung handset linked to fatal emergency call failure in Australia

Re: It's the fault of the carrier

The other mobile phone carrier is Optus who are are literally staffed wall to wall with MORONS.

Cruel but fair.

I read it as stuffed wall to wall which is pretty accurate too as the large optarse store here always seems to have twice the staff titting about as the Telstra store opposite.

I actually contacted the ACMA asking whether a cell phone without an installed sim can still make 000 calls. Their reply:

"A SIM is not required to make emergency calls on a mobile. As long as the handset is capable of making emergency calls on Australian mobile networks via 4G VoLTE, and there is coverage from at least one network, the phone will be able to make an emergency call using 000 or 112."

Assuming the Authority is not staffed by former Optus staff the deal is if your phone can make calls (with a carrier sim) then it can make 000 calls without a sim. To my mind that makes 000 calls different from plain roaming.

The whole 3G shutdown seens to have been stuffed over the exclusive use of 4G/VoLTE. It's a bit of a mess. I have a relatively recent Nokia that works 100% with Telstra but cannot make/receive voice calls using a Telstra hosted MVNO ?

An eight year old iPhone always worked and kept working.

Microsoft blanks out BSODs on public displays with new ‘Digital Signage mode’

Is MS backporting this to XP ?

A lot of this type of borkage or at least the publically obvious examples seems to be running XP in these parts.

Rather splendid when it is on an enormous roadside sign. The XP paddock background with some embarrassing system error dialog.

Was years before Iearnt what BSOD meant apparently not Bill nor Balmer Sucks Own **ck.

Anthropic is at the heart of the latest billion-dollar circular AI investment bonanza

Re: A bubble that blows itself

"Here I am, imagining some sort of inverted, circular human centipede..."

The word clusterf@ck came to my mind.

I recall the tigers rushing around the tree turned into butter in the rather politically incorrect story from my childhood.

These financial shenanigans alone might well knock the world's economies for a six when the music stops but coupled with "the concentration of wealth resulting in a stagnating or decreasing standard of living for the poor and middle class", as the Fed. Reserve chairman (1934-48) Marriner Eccles put it, will likely completely cancel the match for the forseeable future (a decade?)

Networking startup Meter takes a page from the Steve Jobs playbook

West Coast New Age …

stating the bleeding bloody obvious as though it were some deep and meaningful secret of life, the Universe and everything.

Everything is packets ? Right. They are called atoms, molecules, electrons and other fundamental particles or quanta.

Democritus, Dalton, Planck et al were there long before these crypto·hippies pitching a low level scam: Give us your money in annual instalments and we will mis·manage your networks "better" than you currently do yourself or whatever managed services you currently use,

The recent Cloudflare cock·up might make one pause before handing the keys to one's kingdom to the grand vizier.

Cathedral... tithing

Only 10% — you would be lucky.

Cloudflare broke itself – and a big chunk of the Internet – with a bad database query

The picture in my mind …

a teenage intern with copies of SQL for Dummiesand The Complete Idiot's to SQL open at the GRANT pages. ;)