Posts by Bebu sa Ware

AI facial recognition could sink this murder probe

Must be fun being black in America

Not! I wouldn't imagine it is a bundle joy elsewhere either.

The accused has previously been a naughty boy if the online records of the Ohio Dept of Corrections and Rehabilitation were to be believed but on the evidence presented tainted or otherwise I wouldn't hang a dog.

What was it in the old Superman tv series ... Truth, Justice and the American Way? Of course he would now be an undocumented/illegal immigrant to be deported on the next flight to his natal Krypton.* :(

_{* although more likely Rwanda as I recall the planet was in a rather fragmentary state.}

UK council selling the farm (and the fire station) to fund ballooning Oracle project

Re: i360

I-360 is also a US immigration and naturalization service form to apply for the status of someone who Trump would likely want to put on plane to Colombia or wherever.

A future "who me?"

Brighton and Hove, They do IT in house, and has a highly Oracle hostile attitude.

And while our regomised hero, Simon was showing the Oracle pre sales engineer the view from the twelfth floor the poor chap accidentally fell through the window. As Simon again explained to the attending constabulary "I really don't understand how this keeps happening."

Zyxel firewalls borked by buggy update, on-site access required for fix

getting on site with RS232 cables.

One reason I was keen on having this sort of hardware plugged into serial ports on dedicated box on an isolated management network.

Years ago it was a PC with a Boca isa multiport serial adaptor running a minimal install of an early Redhat distro (4.2?) now probably a network KVM switch as a lot of stuff runs to at least VGA and PS2 keyboard.

I would have thought any update would be A/B with a sanity check and watchdog timer set after the update and roll back if the watchdog times out.

Have to wonder with the cutting of staff in the dubious anticipation of replacing the retrenched with AI has meant that the QA monkeys are even getting peanuts.

Looking at the linked stories below this I would have to wonder why anyone would run a proprietary firewall... courageous or foolish?

AI agents? Yes, let's automate all sorts of things that don't actually need it

Re: Human brain

"Now when you ask ChatGPT to calculate the sine, that's a different matter."

Which is the gist.

Humans on the whole couldn't calculate trigometric functions to fifteen places but clearly they have worked how to. Various bits of numerical analysis have reduced these tasks to fairly simple steps that could be performed with a four functional calculator as I believe mathematical tables were produced by teams of human "computers" using mechanical calculators.

Most trig functions' series expansions converge fairly quickly so anyone with a calculator that could perform the four functions to say 20 significant figures could probably knock out 15 places of a sin() in reasonable time.

ChatGPT doesn't know how to calculate a sine because it doesn't know anything but I am surprised that the pattern isn't recognised and off loaded to an online calculator or Mathematica.

Re: Electric scooters have other uses, you know

Like getting perps between petty crime scenes, keeping firemen busy, knocking over pedestrians, and tripping up those with sight problems.

Totally concur.

The typical rider apart from being arrogant and rude, usually has two perfectly usable components of an all terrain vehicle attached to their bum viz legs which they used more often their aforementioned bum would likely be less massive.

Shank's pony got H.sapiens from the the middle of Africa to Tierra del Fuego in a surprisingly few generations so one would have thought Shank's would be more than adequate to pop down to the cornery to buy a litre of milk.

When this blight was introduced into Melbourne some of the more enlightened resident turfed the mechanisms into the Yarra which apart from polluting a river wasn't such a bad idea. Being Melbourne I imagine their streets being littered with these gaudy and ugly objects offended their aesthetic sensibilities rather than any immediately rational motive.

Just today an electric scooter Einstein decided to cool his overheating battery in his freezer and burnt out his apartment† block. Unit Fire: eScooter battery in freezer

_{† unit}

China's DeepSeek just emitted a free challenger to OpenAI's o1 – here's how to use it on your PC

Re: Strawberry

After priming it with "An Eton mess was served at the sock shop" try asking this manufactured stupidity† what is the comparable shoe size.

Why anyone would wish to artificially augment the vast existing natural reservoir of stupidity escapes me.

_{† manu facta stulti}

First all-Indian chips to debut this year, 25 more local designs in the works

India will produce its first chips in 2025 but their first fab doesn't open until 2026?

"I think there is something wrong with those statements. Or are chips and fabs a chicken and egg situation?"

My guess is that the design(s) will be first realised in a laboratory fabrication facility which aren't incredibly rare in Universities but aren't exactly industrial scale either.

Even a few in AU I believe but then decades ago we manufactured semiconductors and IC design software etc but that's another (sad) tale.

Europe, UK weigh up how to respond to Trump's proposed tariffs. One WTF or two?

Re: when

EU-UK meeting, and sign preliminary no string attached deal.

Wasn't it at the time Norway or Nothing? Seems like the UK has subsequently had a surfeit of "Nothing."

Jeg lærer å snakke norsk might be worth considering.

Boeing warns of more financial hits from strikes, costlier parts – and Starliner, of course

illegal for any airline to fly to the US unless it is using a Boeing

illegal for any airline to fly to the US unless it is using a Boeing

I could a see an international airport in Baja California and a fast rail link into California being a little earner, and Canada into the East Coast.

A considerable number of prospective passengers probably wish to avoid taking a ticket in the Boeing lottery.

BOFH: How to innosplain your way through an audit

Actually....

a Y2K compliant AI Repurposer as described by Simon is feasible and a mashup of an existing AI service and a bit of scripting to string the bits together would likely work better than Devin, Cognition AI's AI software engineer. I imagine you could flog the Repurposer for less than USD500pcm

AI chatbot startup founder, lawyer wife accused of ripping off investors in $60M fraud

Re: They are presumed innocent

My first thought was "is that not a thing now in those parts?" but the penny dropped that not being black or undocumented probably helps.

_{Ok Valérie didn't exactly disembark from the Mayflower.}

WINE 10 is still not an emulator, but Windows apps won't know the difference

Writing applications for Windows...

you could do worse to write for a Wine (say) target and fiddle later to fix any Windows incompatibilities. You could ship your app with a Wine runtimes to support Linux (Unix), MacOS and Windows.

Ironically you might ultimately say Windows was a kernel implemention of Wine (Windows Is Not Doing Only Wine Services ;)

Re: Soooooo....

Cardfile

Funny that. I am pretty sure it was an example application shipping with Windows 2 or 3 SDK. I seem to recall building it with the Zortech C/C++ v3 compiler.

If you couldn't grab cardfile.exe (and any required DLLs) from an older version of Windows, you might be able to build from the old source. ;)

Re: Does it run on Rasperry Pi 500?

"I can run it in a VirtualBox MSDOS VM, but it'd be nice to have an alternative."

You might be better off looking at MS-DOS emulator like DOSBox and derivatives. One such derivative, DOSBox-X claims it can run dos based Windows 3.x/9x/Me which suggest graphics support should be more than adequate for a purely DOS application. The emulator runs under Windows, Linux (including on ARM processors), MacOS and is open source so other targets are possible (perversely is also runs under MS-DOS.)

You could run an x86 emulator like Bochs and run freedos etc and from the dos run your game. Qemu would also work I imagine.

User said he did nothing that explained his dead PC – does a new motherboard count?

Do you see that I have a rag about my person?

No? Obvious then that I don't do windows. ;)

I only do thems with inodes missus as I lost my rag with Windows nigh on forty year ago.

Why is Big Tech hellbent on making AI opt-out?

"We're going to shovel a load of..."

"We're going to shovel a load of AI services shit into your apps that you never asked for," ... "Enshittification."

I am not saying "services" is a synonym for "shit" ... actually thinking about it, I am. Really iI suppose that was what Cory Doctorow's coinage was defining.

Re: Ownership?

If I have a website with information on a very niche subject and someone else creates an article through AI with information that could only have come from my website do I sue the person who asked for the information, or the AI vendor that scraped it off my website?

I was always under the (mis)understanding that fundamentally one could not own an idea, only the expression of an idea typically in copyright and patents (although I am unclear on those relating to chemical processes.) If you wished to protect an idea then I imagine using trade secret protection would be the obvious route but the obligation to protect that trade secret falls upon you.

Your putative inquirer is to my mind an innocent party.

Assuming your website was public and your conditions of use were consistent with the concept of publication and if the scraping party had ingested your article and recast it much as a Vulture journalist might then I don't think there are really any grounds.

Having wasted enough of the alphabet in writing this I would say it would be rather more a case of who you were and how much lucre you can throw into the fray given the chronically parlous state of the US judicial system (soon to plumb new depths I hear), the decidedly peculiar intellectual property legislation that the US has enacted pandering to various interests which have been forced upon other nations through the various trade agreements that the current administration now wishes to dishonour.

Re: Good luck

the summary [redacted] of executives - I think "existential reassignment" might lessen the need for redaction here.

Musk torches $500B Stargate AI plan, Altman strikes back

Just a wee spat...

down at the Cauliflower Trust although it's difficult to decide whether these clowns are pinching their lines from Brecht or Jarry but I guess from both with lashings of ham ad-libbing.

"All the world's a stage...one man...the whining school-boy...Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation...Is second childishness and mere oblivion" (As You Like It. act ii scene vii)

Tool touted as 'first AI software engineer' is bad at its job, testers claim

Travelling Circus

«"Cognition AI did not respond to a request for comment." With shitty results like that, no wonder.»

A quick look at the genealogy of Cognition AI from Wiki "Originally the company was focused on cryptocurrency before moving to AI as it became a trend in Silicon Valley following the release of ChatGPT" suggests the outfit is a travelling circus.

Once the rubes who have been paying USD500/month realise they have duped by a lightly warmed over collation of other software and services that doesn't really work, the tent will come down and the clowns will move on to the next big thing.

Tariff uncertainty looms large over budget conscious CIOs

Re: It looks like 1st Feb 2025 for 25% Tariffs

"The Idiot in Chief seemed to think that Spain was the 'S' in BRICS."

The other letters? Britain, Romania (or Ruritania), Italy, Canada and Spain?

Someone should tell this ignorant twat that Ruritania has imposed 500% tariff on all US goods.

These kind of punitive uncompetitive tariffs didn't work all that well in the first half of the 20th century so I don't imagine they will work any better in the first half of the 21st.

OpenAI wants to blow through $500B on AI infrastructure for itself, with help from pals

"This is the beginning of our golden age."

Which I think is close to what the Captain of the Pirate Planet, Zanak announced when they engulfed and destroyed another planet to extract its resources.

But our Masayoshi Son unquestionably meant he expected this insanity was going to be a river of gold flowing into his pockets not yours hence his "our" clearly has unusually restrictive application in this context as in "we billionaires."

Words alone won't get the stars and stripes to Mars

America is going to...

on the list of destinations the Red Planet is pretty much bottom of the list with something more canine being favourite.

At least a Chinese (PRC) expedition wouldn't need to dust off the red dust from their flag. ;)

UK aims to fix government IT with help from AI Humphrey

"Do you think it wise Prime Minister?"

"A very courageous decision Prime Minister"

A very slippery slope indeed.

Looking for footage with some of Sir Humphrey's signature lines I stumbled upon a 5 minute gem "Sir Humphrey speaking Latin".

Really reinforced just how much today's politics have become a complete mockery, easily undermining the satire of Yes [Prime] Minister.

This is how Elon's Department of Government Efficiency will work – overwriting the US Digital Service

"chief magistrate of Venice"

Somehow I don't think any of the Medici would be flattered by even the most oblique comparison with Trump, Musk or the rest of the MAGA rabble.

Indeed if any of them were extant I would be very careful of what I ate and drank, after making such comparison... certainly avoiding dark alleys.

This lot - less il Principe more il Pagliacco.

Trump's freshly minted meme coin passes $10B market cap before he even enters office

The third knock...

These tribulations normally come in threes.

We already had (1) Crypto, now have (2) AI and I dread what the third will be. Certainly isn't that feeble excuse of anything that is to be "the leader of the free world."

The possibles range from daunting to outright horrific.

Developers feared large chaps carrying baseball bats could come to kneecap their ... test account?

Their mistake was...

storing their actual address in their system.

223b Baker Street would be an option but that has existed since the 1930s

24 Leinster Gardens (sort of) exists but of no use to the debt recovery toe cutters.

Mr Six suggests Portmeirion as appropriate address. ;)

Copilot invades Microsoft 365 Personal and Family for an extra three bucks a month

Linux Towers...

For the rare occasions I need to use a word processor it's Libre Office but for tortuous and ultimately futile reasons I also have legitimate Office 2016 installation media and keys, so I am wondering whether it could run under Wine (specifically Codeweavers Crossover.)

I imagine running Windows applications under Wine on Unix/Linux platforms might evade MS AI crap completely and the dreaded monthly Tuesday (inexplicably the blighted autocorrect on my tablet corrected to Turday - if AI develops a sense of humour I shall be worried.)

Re: Proof that marketeers have heads full of air

"Air?" Something more excretory I should think.

"The most interesting piece of feedback we learned is that there are times where our users want to turn off Copilot."

I suspect the chap was being a tad modest... "the most interesting piece of feedback" was likely what the users would like to do with copilot to disable the blight.

A previous comment "shit on a stick" is clue I imagine.

How Windows got to version 3 – an illustrated history

"Kalinina anatomizes the first three Windows versions"

At first glance I had Kalinina atomizes the first three Windows versions. If only ... and all the rest too, please.

Anatomy, as one demonstrator put it, was just Greek for cut (τομία, tomia) up (ἀνα, ana-) ... classicism in a scalpel wielder was remarkable. Atom likewise is just Greek for cannot (a-) be cut. :)

Postmortem might be an equally appropriate description of Kalinina's opus but for the inconvenient truth that subject still haunts us.

"Most people don't remember this period"

"Most people don't remember this period – if they're old enough to have been there, then they're old enough for memories to fade."

Bit like saying "if you can remember the sixties you really weren't there."†

Prior to WfW, Windows and I parted rags. It was just too painful to write non trivial code for, at least without access to undocumented interfaces* that MS happily used for its own applications.

At the time the Win2 and Win3 SDKs were seriously expensive in this part of the world as were the assembler (masm) and C compiler (msc) - no C++ compilers except the cfront based Glockenspiel compiler and Walter Bright's Zortech C/C++ v3 native compiler which I purchased but neither of which were Windows applications (development was basically under DOS.)

"Old enough for memories to fade." - That I live that long. I don't imagine I am likely to forget the enormous amount of wasted time and money invested in MS's pile of steaming horse apples‡.

_{* "Managing Multiple Data Segments Under Microsoft Windows: Part I & Part II" Tim Paterson & Steve Flennikan DDJ v15 (1990) Feb. (#161) p113 and Mar.(#162) p227 Notably: "A little-known alternative ... [whose] description does not appear in the Windows Software Development Kit."}

_{† Attributed to comedian Charlie Fleischer. ‡ Pferdeäpfel.}

Apple solves broken news alerts by turning off the AI

"Perhaps an Apple icon could indicate when Apple Intelligence has intervened in matters"

Strike through would favourite.

CISA: Wow, that election had a lot of foreign trolling. Trump's Homeland Sec pick: And that's none of your concern

'The 2024 election cycle was the "most challenging threat environment" '

And clearly we have failed.

Six vulnerabilities in ubiquitous rsync tool announced and fixed in a day

RustySink?

As noted elsewhere the preponderance of memory safety errors fixed in this release might prompt the rustards to reimplement the application in Rust which wouldn't be a bad thing at all.

RustySink would be as good a name as any.

In these times of huge data volumes rsync's halcyon days might be over (as much the protocol as the application.)

In farewell speech, Biden rails against the tech industrial complex, disinfo dismantling democracy

Mortality is a fine thing...

There should be more of it, in the right places of course but times like this do rather make mortality appear to be a gift of God which I don't doubt it is even if I have my doubts about the donor. :)

Even on the gallows the condemned can look his executioner in the face and claim I no more than precede you which might be why the victim is hooded at that point.

If you saw a £20 note on the pavement would you just leave it there?

Twenty quid is rapidly becoming chump change so probably decline to stoop to acquire it and in any case heaven only knows where it might have been.

Anduril picks Ohio for 5 million square foot autonomous weapon factory

Re: I wish these...people...would leave Tolkien alone.

"An Orc would never lie about his intention to kill and eat you."

Possibly only about the order of the two. ;)

I find it curious to observe the Flame of the West is be found in land of Mordor where the Shadows lie - at least after the 20^th.

I am not sure whether the Dark Lord could handle Andúril but as one of Cohen the Barbarian's former adversaries noted that Dark Lording wasn't what it used to be.†

One might ponder whether the products of this unfortunately named company are the moral equivalent of the orcs that Melkor/Morgoth is accused of blasphemously creating by sourcery and the perversion of elf captives, in which case the company might have been more accurately named Belegur.

_{† The Last Hero Terry Pratchett.}

Just as your LLM once again goes off the rails, Cisco, Nvidia are at the door smiling

That's one supertanker load of snake oil.

I would consider the decision safe v unsafe is likely to be formally undecidable or at best equivalent to the halting problem.

A bit of basic reasoning might lead one to suspect the if the solution to securing AI/LLM is to clever it up eventually one would end up with something equivalent to human (for want of a better word) intelligence and we all know how gullible otherwise intelligent people can be when social engineering is involved. Advancing beyond that level of (un)intelligence strikes me, dangers aside, rather pointless as ultimately what is it all for or more accurately for whom? Non nobis Domine? ;)

Microsoft eggheads say AI can never be made secure – after testing Redmond's own products

Who'd 'a thunk it?

tonic ld have thought a system with zillions of parameters that processes input in ways that anyone not omniscient can hope to begin to understand would be a doddle to secure. <Not>

I suspect the capability × security product is bounded above with utility likely being a montonic function of capability at least in the range of feasibility, I would expect the utility × security product also to be bounded above.

Possibly refreshing that cloister bells are being tolled by Microsoft insiders although it would be unsurprising if, in the not too distant future, Russinovich et al. were to depart Redmond "to explore exciting new opportunities" as this is often the case when you aren't enthusiastic about imbibing the corporate lemonade.

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

At least Ronnie backed up the NAS.

I once had a "(very) cheap and cheerful" LaCie NAS device connected to the local network (contravening at least a couple of central IT commandments) by a staff member purely to use as a clearing house for WH&S (OH&S) inventories. I only heard* about it because the owner (literally as she putchases it personally from a local whitegoods retailer‡) was healthily paranoid about backups generally and even of the few shares containing this rather ephemeral data which I duely arranged.

Many moons later I notice the scheduled back up of the device failed, investigating found the device had failed. The owner had long before moved the workflow to a organisation wide application so no sweat. The device was totally dead so I was given the carcass for disposal but being curious I later performed a postmortem. Bugger all in them a 2.5" SATA disk and a SOC. Extracted the disk for later examination.

About a week later a researcher who was notoriously lacking in any computing skills admitted he was storing his files on a share he found on the network which had recently vanished. Could I find it?

After a lengthy interrogation I discovered he had over 1Gb stored on the defunct NAS. It was originally just a backup of his PC but thought to have two copies was a waste.

As consequence of his unauthorised use of the device his share wasn't backed up leaving him up the proverbial creek.

Given that it was likely only the SOC that lost its magic smoke I thought it worthwhile to examine the drive.

The patron saint of fools and idiots must be a busy soul but this researcher must have enjoyed his particular favour, On examining the drive with Linux† PC I discovered that the SOC didn't run some obscure embedded OS or use a proprietary file system but a MIPS Linux kernel with an XFS data volume which of course could be mounted on the Linux PC - some sods are born lucky!

In Ronnie's case one has to wonder why anyone, professor or not, is running computational workloads on a file server.

_{* of course it popped up on my network monitoring well before this. ‡ Hardly Normal specifically.† Redhat EL3 or a new EL4 at that time.}

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Re: I hope those VPN services have beefed up their capacity.

«It will be interesting to see if porn mags make a comeback. They pretty much vanished in the UK when the net came along. Probably a boost for sex workers too, as folk switch back to the real deal.»

«I wonder if teenagers will switch back to the real deal too? Maybe a spike in teen pregnancies incoming. Some Brits may be becoming grandparents sooner than they expected.»

Both growth but not quite what the current regime had in mind I suspect.

Once the snake oil merchant realise that AI isn't much use for anything else I am certain the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation will market an affordable† "plastic gal* who is fun to be with."

Actually to recreate in the plastic proxy the activities portrayed on porntube you could probably run the required LLM and generate the audio and motions involved on a Raspberry Pi 5.

_{†I am sure Dyson too could produce a really great ride but then it also wouldn't be affordable. *or guy etc etc}

Re: The solution depends on the problem

UK lacks a great firewall of China.

One can only begin to imagine the enormity of the resulting cockup if the current clowns were to implement the Great British Firewall which would probably have to draw the line down the Irish sea err... because of another G.B. cockup.

I really don't think prepubertal children would be anything other than bored by the general run of stereotyped non violent erotica but I think teenagers at the beginning of their sexual life are more at risk from exposure to inappropriate behaviours and unrealistic expectations portrayed in this material but who are also the ones that are more likely to have the knowledge to circumvent any of these types of restrictions.

In this latter case the answer is, as it will always be, sex and relationship education with open and frank discussion of these matters between parents and their offspring.

Clearly they hadn't buried Mary Whitehouse deep enough as it would appear her unpacified spirit is abroad animating the soulless legislators of the realm.

If they really want kids to not see naked titties

Then they must ensure the kiddywinks are bottle fed. ;)

Rather than the rest of us.

_{Did they ever have the breast is best campaign in England? Hard to imagine so.}

Even modest makeup can thwart facial recognition

Re: Gait recognition

common detective... stories

Memorably at the end of The Usual Suspects the disabled con man Roger Kint (Spacey) hobbles out custody on to the street, straightens up a walks briskly away and gets into a waiting car.

A pair of crutches would work too and I think Sherlock Holmes used these and other prostheses in his disguises.

Perhaps there is a market for disposable latex face masks that make you look like somebody like you but not you? ;)

NATO's newest member comes out swinging following latest Baltic Sea cable attack

Re: US Navy

«"I don't know zilch about Hersch"

You don't know zilch about Hersch? Or you meant to say you know zilch about Hersch?»

I actually parsed this as "I don't [even] know zilch about ..."

Zilch being defined as near nothing as makes no difference but isn't common in all Englishes which might lead the reader to substitute something like 'shit' based on the context and the idiom "I don't know shit about..."

SEC sues Elon Musk for allegedly screwing investors out of $150M before Twitter takeover

Re: Mr Musk has done nothing wrong and everyone sees this sham for what it is

Some lawyers are clearly in the wrong business

Those representing the wealthy and powerful are now little more than court jesters (otherwise known as fools) and I am not just thinking of Rudy Giuliani whose liquified brains were visibly leaking from his ear and down the side of head when speaking during Trump's 2020 post election debacle.

Not quite a Limerick.

Interesting (end) rhyme scheme

_{Like many billionaires} /_{Musk bought dodgy shares}/_{In a company called Twitter}/_{That as X did not glitter}/_{Hopefully he'll get twenty years}

_{Musk bought the Blue Bird}/_{So he could be widely heard}/_{Much fraudulent omission} /_{Drew the ire of the commision}/_{Twenty years in not enough for such a turd}

I imagine he will easily walk away from this and our only hope is that down the track he goes all peculiar and becomes an extreme recluse like Howard Hughes. If he keeps up the intake of his "Special K" he may not be a long term resident of this planet although drinking the Maga lemonade is likely far more toxic.

UK businesses eye AI as the cheaper, non-whining alternative to actual staff

"do more with less"

Inevitably that really crystallizes a less with less for the poor sods that count as their long suffering clients or customers.

At the rate they slapping on this shit all over the shop they may have import merde across the Channel to make up for a domestic shortfall.

Intel Capital next into the chip giant's trebuchet, to be shot as far over the wall as possible

Vermont Pumpkin Chuckin' Competition?

After they have hurled Intel Capital into the outer darkness I wonder if the now leaner Intel might drag their trebuchet over to Vermont to compete against the other trebuchet teams?

The record for a pumpkin over 2.67kg (5 lbs) is 268m (879ft) but I imagine with the dead weight of a venture capital vehicle and the desired distancing the Intel Trebuchet could better that record.

Trebuchets apparently have names bestowed on them by their constructors. Theirs might have been baptized Itanium. ;)