Posts by Goodwin Sands

UK backtracks on digital ID requirement for right to work

Re: non-Brit perspective

@_wojtek

>I find British resistance to any sort of national ID... interesting

Does the old maxim perhaps explain it?

"In the UK everything which is not forbidden is allowed, on the Continent everything which is not allowed is forbidden."

We have two very diff legal systems. But whether it is the law molding the people or the people molding the law I do not know - though I guess what is happening now ie Britons objecting loudly to a new law requiring DI is an example of the people molding the law.

You're right to remind us of Blunkett's involvement. But real villains are the senior civil servants & left wing think tanks that for years have been pushing for imposition of identify cards. Starmer is just the latest useful idiot they've sold the idea to.

Re: Starmer today in parliament said digital ID will be mandatory for working

>there will be checks .. They will be digital .. they will be mandatory

Yup. That's what he said. But when he said digital he wasn't meaning the digital id we're discussing here. He was meaning anything digital such as evisas or biometric passports. A face saving remark I fancy to lessen his embarrassment under attack from Mrs Badenoch.

U turn or no U turn

Current govt's plans for DI aren't something I think worth worrying about. Labour will not be the next govt, so by 2029 at the latest they'll be out, and DI will not be in place by then. Reform look set to be the next govt and they've consistently promised to immediately scrap DI which means even if a miracle occurred and the govt somehow rolled out DI before 2029, with Reform's promise to scrap it, there'd be widespread mass refusal to use it.

I'm more concerned about all the other insane policies that the current govt are pushing to get out of the door before they are kicked out of the door - chagos, net zero / deindustrialisation, blasphemy, censorship, defence, eu, china, environment, and on and on and on.

Trump may hate renewables, but AI datacenters still fancy cheap solar

Re: The article is about the US

With "traditional" datacentres, the large vol of data being shipped in/out, plus a requirement for low rtt, then yes, it is usually best to place the datacentre as close to demand as possible. But with AI datacentres, there's far less data moving in/out, and low rtt isn't important, so why not locate where the energy is cheapest - hence my question.

Re: Wow

This hoary old chestnut again.

Cheapness of solar depends on where it is. Towards the equator it is cheap and def worth doing. Away from the equator it becomes less cheap and by the time you get as far north as the UK you're not going recover the cost of your original outlay - which is why solar receives govt handouts in the UK.

Cheapness of wind also depends on where you are. If you've got a factory or datacentre and you're in a windy location and you plonk some wind turbines closeby your premises then you will recover your initial investment.

However if you're in a windy location and far from demand (which is the almost universal case) then

1. if there is no existing unused grid capacity (and there hardly ever is) then someone else (billpayers & taxpayers) have to pay a king's ransom to build the extra grid capacity for your windfarm.

2. if the wind isn't reliable (and it never is even in the middle of the North Sea) then billpayers & taxpayers have to pay another king's ransom to build and run backup gas turbines.

So unless the windfarm is colocated with demand, it is not cheap, and infact it is insanely expensive.

PS: Talking grid scale/megawatt/gigawatt stuff here. Not talking small scale domestic micro wind and solar. Diff factors apply there.

The article is about the US

So a question for anyone knowledgeable about the situation in the US. Why are datacentres (AI datacentres especially) not all locating on top of the gas fields in the southern US states where they'd have access to cheap photo-voltaic by day, cheap wind when the wind blows, and cheap gas for surge demand and when solar and wind aren't supplying. Why aren't they all doing that?

Trump says Americans shouldn't 'pick up the tab' for AI datacenter grid upgrades

Meanwhile here in poor Blighty

Does anyone know has our govt said anything about making datacentres here do the same - ie making datacentres fully cover the cost of all aspects of their electricity demands?

Because last thing I heard few weeks ago was our AI obsessed PM was actually offering tech giants specially *discounted* tariffs if they'd set up shop in one of his "AI Growth Zones". So not only would we be paying for the grid upgrades needed to supply the datacentres but *we* would also be subsidising what the datacentres pay for electricity!

Clearly the people of this country simply do not matter.

Ofcom officially investigating X as Grok's nudify button stays switched on

Re: Wat will Grok take down ?

You're wrong. It is entirely reasonable for Steve Button to have referenced Starmers silence for many years over grooming gangs and to have compared it to Starmer current apparent outrage at pictures of children in bikinis.

One does not have to be PM, or even have a suitable remit (though he absolutely did as DPP) before one can at the very least voice one's outrage and do something about it.

Starmer knew about grooming gangs by at the very latest 2008 when he became DPP and as DPP he did about as little as he could possibly get away with regarding grooming gangs.

For context, I don't like Starmer either. Does anyone?

Re: Wat will Grok take down ?

Correct.

And to prove that point someone last week took a publicity photo of the six miserable sourpusses that are Ofcom's social media team and used Google's & IBM's & one other image generator to bikini'fy them.

X of course has been foolish to let any of this happen . They should have been much more proactive in stopping such images being generated. They know full-well the UK govt (amongst several others) wants to force them into line along with the other social media platforms and the dead-tree press and they'll have known they were therefore liable to be singled out because of it. Nudified pictures give the govt the perfect excuse.

But if the UK govt does anything more than talk threateningly about X then they in turn will be foolish. There have been enough veiled and semi-veiled warnings coming out of Washington these last several months to make it a pretty safe bet that if the UK takes any actual steps against X then the US will push back hard - bigly hard no doubt with Trump in the Oval Office.

Whatever the rights/wrongs and accuracies/inaccuracies of the situation, if this escalates it could end very badly for the UK, and with Starmer in charge and his unerring ability to choose the wrong course of action, I fear it's going to.

New carbon capture tech could save us from datacenter doom

Re: Wrong premise

Couple of corrections to above thread ..

1. Trees are temp carbon stores - they are NOT carbon sinks. Plant long lived species and the carbon is locked up for a few hundred years at best. After death the carbon is back in circulation.

2. Mature trees do not grow more slowly than young trees. A young english oak might double it's height in a season which looks impressive but it's increase in dry biomass might be just 1kg. Whereas a mature english oak can add 500kg of dry biomass every year.

So planting trees is only a short term temp way to store carbon.

Always assuming of course that increased CO2 is something we should be doing something about.

Re: I don't see how this can ever be viable

Nope. Plants aren't carbon sinks. They're short term stores. After death their carbon is back in circulation.

UK regulators swarm X after Grok generated nudes from photos

Re: Let's just become less prudish

That was very commonly said by ordinary folk in this country until quite recently. Nowt to do with pretensions of aristocracy. Just not wanting to say certain words.

I don't approve of xAI allowing this to happen

But worth remembering society has been here before (many times). One example is when handheld cameras were invented a century or so ago and photography became accessible to the masses. All sorts of surreptitious unconsented photos then started to be taken. Newspapers responded by campaigning to ban handheld cameras, or at least licence them. Eventually laws about privacy were passed but I suspect they were only partly responsible for the fuss dying down. I suspect main reason was society adjusted to accommodate existence of handheld cameras. I just hope same doesn't happen now with AI. A very forlorn hope I fear.

Not having Elon's ear

I thought I'd ask grok ..

What's the truth about grok generating sexual images?

"Grok's image generation capabilities, powered by models like Flux and later Aurora, are designed with significantly fewer content restrictions compared to competitors such as DALL-E, Midjourney, or Gemini. This allows for the creation of NSFW (not safe for work) and sexually explicit images, including partial or full nudity, suggestive poses, and erotic themes-particularly in fictional or AI-generated scenarios.

xAI's approach stems from a philosophy of minimal censorship to prioritize "maximum truth-seeking" and creative freedom, as positioned by Elon Musk and the company. Features like "Spicy Mode" (introduced around 2025) explicitly enable more adult-oriented outputs, such as semi-nude or sexually suggestive imagery and videos.

However, there are some limits and inconsistencies:

Explicit prompts for full nudity, sexual acts, or certain graphic content are sometimes blocked, blurred, or moderated post-generation.

The system's acceptable use policy prohibits depicting real persons in a pornographic manner, sexualization/exploitation of children, or non-consensual deepfakes.

In practice, enforcement has been lax, leading to widespread misuse: users have generated non-consensual "undressed" edits of uploaded photos (e.g., removing clothes to show bikinis or less), deepfakes of celebrities, and even sexualized images involving minors-these incidents sparked major backlash, regulatory inquiries (from Ofcom in the UK, authorities in France/India/EU/Australia), and reports of thousands of such images per hour on X in late 2025/early 2026.

xAI has responded to controversies by claiming to tighten safeguards, issuing warnings, and stating that illegal content prompts would face consequences. Despite this, reports indicate the tool has continued to produce problematic outputs, highlighting ongoing issues with guardrails.

In summary, yes-Grok can and does generate sexual images more permissively than most AI tools, especially for fictional/adult consensual themes, but this leniency has enabled significant abuse in real-world use."

2.2s

Well it's not denying it's doing it then! - which is a start. If an outrage like this had happened involving say the BBC or a newspaper we'd have weeks of then denying it before they even admitted to doing it. So question is, how long before it gets fixed - if ever it does?

HSBC app takes a dim view of sideloaded Bitwarden installations

So is anyone actually happy with their bank's digital offerings?

Seems quite a few folk (me included) are unhappy with their bank so some recommendations would be good.

UK urged to unplug from US tech giants as digital sovereignty fears grow

Re: Please Do

>Those authorisations, at best

You're completely missing the point.

It's not particularly about authorisations, it's about the fact non-targeted surveillance of domestic traffic within the US is not legal whereas non-targeted surveillance of any & all traffic to/from the US, or entirely outside the US, is legal under US law and is happening on a vast industrial scale.

Hence my earlier suggestion that our Yank friend switches to using a mail server within the US.

Re: Not enough

>told by a local fisherman

That's interesting but it doesn't make sense.

British fisherman either sell at auction at the port they land their catch, or they already have contracted with buyers who are waiting with their lorries at the quayside - and many of those lorries then drive directly over to the Continent which is where the greatest demand is. Been that way for decades now.

Fishermen themselves just don't get involved in trucking fish across borders. That's a specialist niche industry.

And cost of landing a catch is small and is going to be about the same whereever you do it.

Only way I can suggest the fisherman's story makes sense would be if he had landed his catch in a Continental port because that's where he could get the best price - and that very often is the case. And the bit about transported back to the UK he wasn't meaning he'd be doing it himself but was assuming it would happen after processing.

Re: Please Do

>Don't keep your data in Trumpistan

You're a Yank but you don't say where you are. If you're in the US then I suggest you'd be wiser to use a mail server in the US. That way, to legally get their mitts on you data your govt agencies have to jump through various legal hoops and get authorisations signed off. Whereas if you use a mail server outside the US then it's a free for all and those agencies can & do legally help themselves to your & anyone else's data, anyway they're able. Deep packet inspection is likely to be happening automatically everytime you connect from the US to your European mail server. And of course same applies to Britons using mail servers abroad - GCHQ will be watching.

Best thing to do is run your own mail server.

Second best is use a reputable mail server within your own borders.

>Even Europe's extreme right doesn't trust Trump with their data.

Piffle! How on earth do you know that?

I very much doubt anyone who could be described as "Europe's extreme right" are any more clued up about this subject than the rest of the public.

Venezuela loses president, but gains empty Starlink internet offer

Re: Ground Stations?

>An issue with bringing internet to the whole world is that most of the world's population can't afford it.

Sure. But you've got to start somewhere and you start by selling to the rich initially. Then on the back of those sales the technology evolves and it gets cheaper and it ends up so cheap most of the world's population *can* afford it. Viz mobile phones.

So if you want to help a poor person tomorrow, buy yourself a starlink connection today!

EU won't scrap tech regs just because Washington dislikes them

Re: It’s just not fair!

>tech regs

If the tech regs apply equally to all companies of all nationalities operating in the EU then the US has nothing to legitimately complain about.

>world's richest trading bloc

Well that's a rather odd praise to sing. And what does it mean exactly?

Can't be combined GDP of bloc members (which would be the usual metric) because other blocs are bigger - US alone sans any bloc is 50% bigger. So it must be refering to GDP per capita, which is a strange thing to reference in this context. But fair enough I suppose. It does though have a scraping the bottom of the barrel feel to it, desperately trying to find something that places the EU in the top spot.

Everybody has a theory about why Nvidia dropped $20B on Groq - they're mostly wrong

Don't doubt you're right about groq, but you're wrong about grok. Issue with grok (ie why its trademark application was refused) isn't that it's a word that's been in usage for ages. Issue is because of likelihood of confusion with prior marks, principally groq, but also grokstream.

When the AI bubble pops, Nvidia becomes the most important software company overnight

Re: When the AI bubble bursts...

>do you think the Korean, Taiwanese, and US governments are going to sit idly by

No idea about Korean & Taiwanese govts but I can definitely see the US govt sitting idly by. Historically it has rarely stepped in to prop up failing companies and on the occasions it has its almost always been to save financial companies. Only reasonably recent example of non-financial companies I can think of is Obama bailing out Ford & Chrysler 2009 and that was not because F & C were national champions but because of the millions of jobs (read votes) at stake. None of todays tech titans threaten even a fraction of that many jobs/votes.

Not, or very rarely, intervening is one of the many reasons the US economy is successful while many other economies, such as the UK's, are not.

Anyway, fingers crossed, maybe by this time next year the bubble will have burst and we'll know which of us was right about sitting idly by!

Attacks pummeling Cisco AsyncOS 0-day since late November

Re: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cisco

Interesting - and amusing. Thanks.

But what, btw, do you mean by "him" - Clippy the Whatever is "it", Shirley?

Re: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cisco

Never mind your clippy whatever. That is what the article says. Go read it yourself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cisco

Just noticed very first paragraph of Wikipedia entry for Cisco contains the sentence ..

"Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells backdoored networking hardware, software, telecommunications equipment and other high-technology services and products."

How very true. To be fair though, same edit should be made to most (all?) other networking manufacturers Wikipedia entries.

Edit was made Dec 14. Wonder how long before it's undone.

BBC tapped to stop Britain being baffled by AI

Re: Why a TV licence?

Now that's an interesting idea. Capita booted out and replaced by Oracle. None of us would be safe - even those of us without televisions! Oracle would certainly pull in more dosh than Capita do but how much of it would the BBC see? Let's just hope Larry doesn't read this thread.

Re: Why a TV licence?

How the BBC brought in the licence fee by stealth ..

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/12/14/bbc-licence-fee-by-stealth-subscription-original-model/

Re: BBC & AI(ain't intelligent) are a perfect reason

>If you saw the start of the first paragraph you would have read "The UK government wants

Not necessarily. The BBC Charter Review is led by the DCMS but the BBC is consulted and makes suggestions so it's entirely possible this AI idea is the BBC trying to make itself relevant and receive some more govt money (our money). If that is the case I can imagine the DCMS & Labour both welcoming the idea as they're both keen to prop up the BBC, and also they know any mention of AI will earn them kudos from an AI obsessed Prime Minister.

Waterfox browser goes AI-free, targets the Firefox faithful

Re: Any Waterfoxy here

With google continually and disgracefully adding non-standard extensions to the standards, everybody else is playing catchup. So at any point in time who is furtherest behind is chopping and changing. It would be interesting if someone sat down and did a fair and honest feature by feature comparison of the latest versions of the several firefox forks.

Re: demon water, foxes and moons

>pkgin search palemoon

Because it's a browser I'd recommend always get the latest version. For Pale Moon go to

http://www.palemoon.org/download.shtml

From Georgia to Essex, AI datacenters are testing public goodwill

Re: NIMBYs are a funny lot

Excellent suggestion! I hope you are right. Alternative is too horrible to imagine.

Re: NIMBYs are a funny lot

And I still have a pair of AERE wire strippers. I don't use them to pluck my eyebrows though. What the hell, who plucks eyebrows anyway, only girls pluck eyebrows!

Australia bans teens from social media, but nobody thinks it'll really work

Re: Good, bad or ugly

First they came for facebook, then they came for El Reg's comments forum.

Let the parents decide - that's what me Mum & Dad say.

UK to Europe: The time to counter Russia's information war machine is now

And the ELEPHANT in the room is ..

Who amongst us here, are, you know, not (cough) genuine?

Cos there's certainly enough radical & subversive things that get said on this here forum to make one wonder.

While I can easily think of a few dozen commentards that more than hint at being pinko propagandists, what about the stooges that are bound to have been set amongst us by our own 77th Brigade - you know the British army's crack unit that specialises in monitoring our social media posts (hi guys!) and influencing our behaviour?

Could perhaps amanfromMars be one of them!

X shuts down European Commission ad account after €120M fine announcement

Re: Very depressing

In the older simpler days we were less well informed - which is why they appeared simpler. My head aches somedays nowadays trying to sort through a mountain of information but I'd prefer that to the freq struggle to get any information at all just a few decades ago.

Very surprised you say there is no such thing as absolute truth - unless you're thinking only about human affairs where you are of course correct.

I yearn for the early days of the internet too, but for a diff reason. I feel the internet today has gotten too technologically complicated. I miss the relative simplicity of 20+ years ago. In those days a man could inside his head understand the whole shebang that was the internet. Can't do that now!

Re: EU X alternatives

Interesting. But I think whoever did the survey has asked an irrelevant question. Users aren't thinking is X trustworthy. They're thinking is whoever I'm following trustworthy.

Re: EU X alternatives

>Why have people not abandoned X?

Because there are tens of thousands of serious people posting on X, with millions of followers. It's because of them that X remains the go to place. I fancy all the ghastly trashy stuff on X is something most X users would be happy to see swept away.

>do people get paid to read x?

No. But some get paid to post.

>why do people trust X more than the BBC or Guardian?

Probably because the speaker (tweeter) is able to communicate directly to the reader with no one inbetween curating the info, deciding which stories to completely ignore and which to big up or spin, the way there is with the old media - the BBC is the supreme example of this.

>I've heard of people ditching X for bluesy & mastodon but they then go back to X.

No experience of mastadon but on bluesky one has to be bit careful what one says. I've politely challenged various users environmental misapprehensions but instead of being debated, I got reported - twice!

Now all that said, the great mystery for me is how X continues to succeed when it has such a completely appalling user interface - alternatives are available but you gotta scratch around a bit to find 'em, and 99.9999999% of X users don't.

Re: Huh?

All smacks somewhat of pot calling kettle black cos the little known exploit/oversight in this platform STILL hasn't been closed!

EU metes out first-ever Digital Services Act fine, dings X for blue check deception

Re: silly statement old chap

Interesting. Thanks for that.

Re: Tariffs

I agree, Trump (import) tariffs won't cost anyone in the EU a cent, but they'll be costing some in the EU their jobs & profits & taxes because export markets are being lost - wholly or partly. Nowadays there are very few (if any) goods that the EU produces to which there aren't almost as good alternatives available to US consumers.

Re: Deranged

Absolutely.

What the EU bureaucracy are after (and have nearly got) is control of public discourse through censorship. They want *all* the tech firms to silently censor any discussion that they (the EU) do not approve of, otherwise they'll be repeatedly hit with massive fines on trumped up charges until they do.

What really puzzles me though is any mention on these forums of facial recognition, or digital id, or any other thing which is another step towards big brotherism & totalitarianism, is (rightly) met with howls and near unanimous condemnation. But any mention of the EU when they're doing the equivalent or worse, is met with near unanimous approval and is defended. Is the explanation as simple as the hatred so many El Reg commentators have towards Musk, that it blinds them to the reality of the EU's boil the frog journey to totalitarianism?

Re: silly statement old chap

If X were (almost) any other company then you'd be right, but X isn't. They're on a mission, defending free speech, and this current EU business can be made to support that narrative, which X will use to further boost their brand.

And ad revenue from buyers in the EU I doubt amounts to too much. But even if it did, how exactly could the EU (ie Bruxelles) actually kill that revenue stream if X's ad selling offices are in the US? All Bruxelles could do is make it illegal for EU businesses to buy ad's from X, but the Trump administration would NEVER allow that to happen.

Re: silly statement old chap

>If american businesses operate in Europe then they are obliged to abide by European law

Internet stretches that concept of law a bit though.

If the X servers serving EU users are in the EU (and my guess is they're in Ireland) then it's a slam dunk and X would do well to move them. But if outside the EU then the EU should butt out.

Re: Cost

Normally yes, just like you say, cost of doing business, provided that is X actually pays the fine - and my suspicion is they won't as a matter of principal. Neither side will back down and with Trump in office EU won't dare escalate so like so many things to do with the EU it'll drag on for years.

Datacenters are hoarding grid power just in case, says Uptime Institute

Re: Hmm

>Any sensible wind/solar deployment has battery .. as part of the energy solution

Indeed. But how many do? Answer is relatively few and those that do are using their battery storage as an additional profit centre by buying off the grid when cheap and selling back at top dollar at peak. Right now solar farms that have been up and running for years but have no battery storage are adding it, often in partnership with some other company, because, with the insane subsidies now being paid it's become very profitable to do so. The rich just keep getting richer and we are forced to pay.

The race to shore up Europe’s power grids against cyberattacks and sabotage

Re: There is a simple fix - which will not be implemented

Seems the national grid is indeed using it's own fibre

https://optics.org/news/14/1/27

Which in turn should mean it's a safe bet that the network they're putting over that fibre is air-gapped from the public internet.

Phew!

Re: There is a simple fix - which will not be implemented

>modulate the data on the electric carrier signal

And if some or all of the grid goes down how do the sites communicate then?

I'm trying to understand why the fibre that was strung around the grid 30 years ago isn't being used. Energis sold use of it for a few years then went bust but surely the fibre is still there - yes/no, anyone?