Posts by kmorwath

EU-sponsored report says GenAI's 'fair use' defense does not compute

Re: The US innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates

Local phone calls were more expensive than in US but not 'very' expensive. The only issues was to have a local POP, because a non-local call would have been far more expensive. Anyway with phone calls time online was limited because the line needed to be available for calls. Anyway I had Internet in 1997, and ADSL four years later.

Here the relco monopolist had to open equipment to standard ones well before the Internet became appealing for home use, since people wanted faxes and answering machines.

But look at how mobile phones became far more common earlier in Europe than in US, thanks also to a common European standard...

Re: The US innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates

Of course. And meanwhile protect real creativity and real innovation.

> Like they lost out on the interne

Sure, just invented the world wide web a little later - if it was for US "innovation" you would be still using Gopher..

Tech to protect images against AI scrapers can be beaten, researchers show

Re: "If the AI can reproduce the image"

It's like saying JPEG doesn't store the original image but just an approximation of it.

Anyway, EFF just shown on which side it is - money. Indexes and other forms of analytics are very different from AI which is designed to regurgitate contents with a few changes.

Fair use usually allowed for a very limited and partial reproduction of a copyrighted content - how ingesting a whole work is fair use I don't know.

Anyway I believe they are alike those promoting synthetic food, so once they get people reliant on that they achieve a monopoly on production, no matter how bad it is. Once AI killed content creation, people will have no choce but to use AI, and won't think about how bad it is. What world it will be I don't know, but I'm afraid it won't be a good one.

The price of software freedom is eternal politics

Re: "in software, copying does not remove the original,"

Sure, let's take the Linux kernel. There are some, like Torvalds, who are handsomely paid by his masters. They need a kernet they can use wihout having to license one, or write their own. Does Torvalds & C.share their pay with every commiter? Of course not. Nor others who are paid by their companies to contibute because , again, they take advantage of it. Many are exploted without seeing a dime, a few become wealthy.

That's not Marx, that's not socialims, that's "real Communism" or Stalinims, where the Nomenklatura at the top took advantage of those below. That's why they have to brainwash you about "freedom" - but you have no freedom but to give away your code without being paid, lile a slave.

Most FOSS is inherently an anarchist commune - and like every anarchist commune, they can't understand they are just being used by those at the top, and are even happy to be explooited, being brainwahsed to believe so.

There's no better authoritarian systems tha the one were people are actively promoting it.

PS: Linux kernel shows very well how software development became a by-product of other interests. It's being driven by a few molochs who pays its development, not its users. And that's happen for avery FOSS product. That's why software today is far worse than 30 yeras ago - enshittificatio at full speed.

Re: "in software, copying does not remove the original,"

There is no difference. If you can't understand that, it's time to blame yourself and try to grow up.

Basically - it you steal the copyright you tell people it's a wasted effort in creating something that can be copied at will, just because copying it is cheap, while the effort in creating it is not. Might them be overpriced? Sure. Vore with your wallet - don't copy them. If you copy, you show you want them, and can't live without (usually, because you're a freetard. And they know they can overprice them, they just need enough hurdles.

And if you don't pay someone for their work, that's called slavery. FOSS ia about bringing back slavery. Think about it... that's why some people like it so much. Unpaid work, what's better? As long as it's not yours, of course.

Good, now the "year of Destop Linux"....

... is postponed to the next century, if not the next millenium...

"in software, copying does not remove the original,"

That's why copyright exists. Just the freetards can't understand the efforts in writing (or generally creating) something. They just want to satisfy their greed without paying a dime. The alternative of being paid selling software, books, movies, etc. is to find a "master" and become a "servant", just like it happened before the invention of the press. Let's get back to that to fulfill the greed of some, we're already making huge steps back, why not this one too?

Marx is a different thing, but very few lef-wing activits read Das Kapital.... they are moslty decendants of the hippy movement, not tradional socialilsm. People who never really grew up.

ICANN fumes as AFRINIC offers no explanation for annulled election

Sorry ICANN...

... we can non longer find the Nigerian prince who shown up with all those "power of attonrney" documents...

Really - they don't know what happened and who were the people involved?

Hegseth signs flying memo to expand military use of cheap drones in oddball video

Re: manufactured by certain foreign countries

Especially those that transmit to Xi USA troops and bases positions? Doesn't look very clever,

Hegsetg just got a fat bank account in Singapore or Dubai?

"characterizing Putin as a 'fascist dictator' is totally incorrect."

Right, it's a strange mix of nazist and stalinist dictator, looks like the son Molotov and Ribbentrop could conceive. Probably the time spent in East Germany let him appreciate Nazism too, together Communism.

But after all, like Hannah Arendt wrote Nazism and Communism were not that different - some different ideas about economy - but not that much.

Trump looks much more alike Mussolini, I agree - the same lunatic behaviour, the same need to feel appreciated, the same idiotic bombastic megalomania...

CVSS 10 RCE in Wing FTP exploited within 24 hours, security researchers warn

Because MOVEit was much safer...

.... without the FTP protocol.

Here the issue is again automatic desereliazation and execution of untrusted input.

Security company hired a used car salesman to build a website, and it didn't end well

Probably he was meant to steal "for" the company, not "from" the company.... HR should have justified that hiring first.

Thousands of NASA senior staffers expected to quit after budget slashed

Re: Lunatic

They did have the powerful computer of those times. Moreoever they had all that people trained during the war efforts (including the German ones), and not the ones trained on YouTube videos...

"will move from NASA to the commercial sector"

Exactly what the private sector lobbies financing these idiots want.

A horse would be probably a better NASA admibistators. Especially one of those horses that can count - it would be an improvement over Duffy the NASA slayer.

Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

Re: Who will fund the "non-profit" organization?

And are GNOME and Cinammon going to pay for it? The real question is simply this.

Where the money will come from? I didn't see an anwswer yet.

Re: Who will fund the "non-profit" organization?

No, "servo" means slave. A servo-mechanism is a master/slave relationship. You can't escape that. The problem is USAins shoudl stop to think as if . Yes, the ethimolofy is clear. "Serf" itslef was a slave.

Cambridge Dictionary "servitude: the state of being under the control of someone else and of having no freedom"

Merriam-Webster "servitude: a condition in which one lacks liberty especially to determine one's course of action or way of life"

Oxfort Language: "servitude: the state of being a slave or completely subject to someone more powerful."

And in Italian "servo" means "schiavo" - and if you don't want to offend anybody, you have to do it in any language worldwide. So if "master" can't be used, nor "slave", nor "servo".

Who will fund the "non-profit" organization?

Sure, a non-profit developing Firefox would be perfect. Still, non-profit doesn't mean no-money. And where the money would come from?

Google again? If so, Google will ensure Firefox doesn't get in the way of Chrome and web standards Google wants. Or?

The Linux kernel is funded by the many companies that uses it in tehir products, otherwise they would need to spend more to buy licenses or invest in developing their own.

Who needs a web browser and javascript engine - which is not Chrome they already have, for "free"? There are probably bigger chances Chrome becomes a non.profit because of an antitrust ruling, than Mozilla becoming it.

PS: Servo means "slave".... often USain activists show all their ignorance.

One Big Brutal Bill: Ex-NASA brass decry Trump's proposed budget cuts

Re: BBB

The rating the US debt will reach soon...

Samsung acquires Xealth to merge hospital records with data from wearables

Re: Weakest Link

Non need to hack... just raise your insurance costs depending on what the wereable collects... and then deny some treatments because the device tells you didn't follow what it said you to do.

Army and Navy have both asked for right to repair, now Senators want to give it to them

Re: Sooooo...

You mean being able to repair F-35s as needed? You're right...

Exactly! What for you is " billions of dollars in bloated sustainment costs", for someone else means "maximixing shareholder value" and "fatter bonuses and stock options".

Make America Greed Again!

Trump administration announces tariffs that may make plenty of tech more expensive from August 1

The one that when crashes because of bubbles built on greed causes long reach issues? Let's see what happens when many americans feel the full impact of his debt increase and cuts....

Re: "plenty of stuff from Japan"

AFAIK, Canon has already announced large price increases for a lot of its gear. Don't know about the others, but if one did, I guess they think the other will do too.

Trump & C. may believe the importer would pay the tariffs to sustain the idiotic tax cuts of its "bbb", but many USains may find they are going to pay the tax cut for the rich...

Re: One thing is rock solid reliable from the USA

Also, Washington's farewell speech, but one has to read it, since there was no YouTube, luckily.

EU businesses want a pause on AI regulations so they can cope with unregulated Big Tech players

Re: Yup

I didn't say innovation has stopped. I said there was far more innovation thirty years ago, and far more competition. Today most innovation is not targeted at improving people's life, is aimed at using them more.

Facebook is not innovation. It's exactly just data hoarding and behaviour modificatin using technologies invented before. Without all that social madness, the world would be better.

Google is not innovating since it made public its search engine. Android was bought, and it's still Linux + Java. And then worked hard to stifle innovation and avoid competition.

The Pi took advantage of cheaper hardware. Is it a new CPU? Is it a new OS? Good idea, better than many others, sure, but not incredible innovation - computer boards did exist before. And anyway the Pi, is a UK innovation, not a US one. And many "US" innovations came from Europeans....

> Yet the advancements of web, PC's, Mobile tech, storage, image technology and vastly more would disagree with you.

What advancements? Somewhat faster processors? Somewhat larger RAM and disks? Some more pixels in screens and CMOS sensors? All of them incremental - and we fight vulnerabilities thar aren't really addressed, just "patched".

> gathering it into vast piles and trying to make it useful i

Useful for whom? The citizens, or a small elite who uses it to bend citizens to their will, be it selling more Chinese-made tat, or ensure the rules are written for their exclusive advantage? What do you get back from all the data you let them hoard? A few "free" applications?

It's not processing more data you find more innovation.

> When?

Just look at USA today.... it might collapse, irreversibily. I hope not, but that's where we got.

> The government was caught out imposing the ministry of truth in the US and in Europe

Actually, in US only for now, and in some European countries like Russia or Hungary. And that's exactly what I wish we could avoid.

> beyond they keep trying to find ways of fining the companies

And what government shoud do when companies break the rules voted by the citizens' representatives? When companies got the right to be above the law?

> Do note that these private companies do not have to be used but people CHOOSE to use them.

Often people have no choice - if my bank requires an app and it can work only on a Google or Apple controlled phone, I have no choice. Sure, I could renounce to have a bank account... ooops, my company refuses to pay me with cash or a cheque.

> And as a result we should stop at the horse

If Watt, Stephenson and Benz had analyzed hoarded data only, they would have tried to obtain a horse with six or eight legs, that would eat its own manure. They woudn't have invented the steam engine, the train, or the internal combustion engine and the car. But they would have convinced that six legs horse was possible, and to invest large amount of money to obtain one.

And when "innovation" can have far reaching and devastating effects, it's perfectly right to think *before* than try to repair *later*, when it could be too late. Even if that means some rich people won't get extremely rich in little time, poor lads.

Re: @Codejunky

The Gini index is not irrelevat. Perfect equality won't happen - but as it increases the "social pact" breaks and the society becomes fragmented and dangerous - we've seen it already. US were a far more prosperous society when the inqualituy was lower, and also a far more innovative one. Pilining money at the top restrain innovation, doesn't promote it. Because those at the top start to fear any innovation that could break their privileged position.

Why you no longer see new big companies growing? They are bought *before* they could become a competitor. And often they product are swalloed and disappear. A more equal economy is more competitive and innovative.

Re: Yup

THe EU thinks about the consequence before they happen. US is no longer innovating really - IT was more innovative thirty years ago.

Now most "innovation" is about how to hoard more data and how to use them against citizens to extract as much money as possible without them revolting - and data can allow for "reprogramming" citizens as well, when used cunningly.

Meanwhile unregulaed social network brought western civilazation on the verge of collapse. Ineffctive anti-trust laws created huge molochs with profits that rival with states, and believe they are above any law, and governmentes must abide to their rules, not viceversa. Almost anyone carries with them theier personal spying/tracking device, controlled by two companies only - moreover US ones.

The damage done are under anybody eyes, eyes willingly to see and not blinded by money or selfishness. It's no longer time to let business "move fast and break things" .- because broken things might be very important and then irreparable.

Locking the stable doors after the horse bolted it's increasingly stupid. Especially if you need Heracles then to clean the stable from all the shit left.

Apple tries get €500M EU fine tossed

I got rumors Cook promised a gold statue of Trump if he helps...

Re: don't understand

Apple tries to extract money from every source it can. Extracting money from apps, and in-app sales has extremely high returns. Why let some billons ends only in other's pockets? The largest share of the profits may come from the hardware sales, but those from apps are not irrelevant at all.

Microsoft finally bids farewell to PowerShell 2.0

Re: Attack surface

GUI calls APIs - and an API can be called by any tool that is able to use the proper ABI. API also allows for far better error handling. Having to call scripts instead of APIs is a step backwards, not a step forward...

That's what happen whan you mate Bash and .NET - both bad parents on their own, but the offspring couldn't be anything but awful.

And the worst thing is MS lame developers started to use it in applications too inetead of calling the proper libraries and APIs directly. Exchange became a mess for this reason too - and not only Exchange.

MS had the option to start from scratch and design a better CLI interface - for example, why not something like many SQL ones? Where you can have more statements in the editor, select which one(s) to run, and get output in a separate pane?) - and instead went again for the *nix 1970s teletype UI - really those who don't understand the bad, outdated designs of Unix are doomed to reinvent them, and we will sufer them in secula seculorum.

Massive spike in use of .es domains for phishing abuse

One would think AI...

... could identify domains like ag7sr[.]fjlabpkgcuo[.]es as useless and with very few use - and only criminals ones. But probably selling them is better than investing money to avoid to sell them.

Ousted US copyright chief argues Trump did not have power to remove her

Re: One rule for rich companies

Today you can hide behind the excuse "I'm collecting data to train my AI, sir!"

Re: One rule for rich companies

It's because of Amendment Zero: "Nothing will stand in the way of the rich and powerful to become richer and more poweful".

Cloudflare creates AI crawler tollbooth to pay publishers

Re: Cloudflare-in-the-Middle

Not only that - Cloudflare is attempting to become the hub of all internet traffic - putting it in a very privileged position.

See how it offers cunningly to terminate TLS connections for site owner that are too lazy to setup a Let's Encrypt ACME client to obtain certificates, or can't. So it can see the traffic.

Does this offer means Cloudfllare needs to know which content are accessed?

We migh have escaped the "Microsoft Network" - and maybe a Google one - but are we going to be bound to the Cloudflarenet soon?

Cloudflare-in-the-Middle

Fine, but that means more and more Cloudflare-in-the-Middle, which means a dependency on its services, and routing all trafic through Cloudflare itself.

Which has its own scaring doubts.

Microsoft's on-prem Exchange and Skype for Business Server go subscription-only

Re: Subscription only

This about on-prem servers - where you can delay updates when the financial numbers are not OK, but still get updates. If a subscription means the code is rolled back to a previous versions, and no updates are available, you start to be in trouble.

MS & C. are shifting the entrepreneurial risk from them to their customers. They want a steady cash flow, so they don't have to research & develop new appealing versions, you will have to pay anyway.

And it looks more and more like protection money than anything else.

Anyway, bad timing by Nadella - the current situation is telling more and more customers cutting their ties with Exchange and Outlook is the right move, since Nadella is turning Outlook too into an Electron monster.

Proton bashes Apple and joins antitrust suit that seeks to throw the App Store wide open

Probably, why not? But do you believe Apple will spend its money that way? Especially since malicious apps surface on its store as well....

https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/13/apple_google_chinabased_vpns/

He who is without sin....

VMware must support crucial Dutch govt agency as it migrates off the platform, judge rules

Re: It's not a bridge and it's not an artificial lake

Bridges don't necessarly raise a road/railway level - they can be flat. Anyway being water if the water level changes it would be a canal with locks.

Re: Wrong wider Issue

The same companies that when it's in their interest automatically renew your subscriptions and make very difficult to cancel them? Take Adobe, for example- you can't cancel an expired subcription without renewing it first...

Critics blast Microsoft's limited reprieve for those stuck on Windows 10

"could use Windows Backup to sync their settings to the cloud"

Cui prodest? Why MS wants those data there, in exchange for the extension? Which processing wants to perform on those data - and moreover, one need to setup a MS account.

Microsoft's next Windows 11 update is more 'enablement' than upgrade

Microsoft said "you should test"....

.... not that they tested it well enough.

Nadella fully embraced the open source model - users are guinea pigs.

Uncle Sam wants you – to use memory-safe programming languages

" C is just a high-level assembly language"

No, it is not - otherwise today noone would still use it - how many software is today written in hand-crafted assembly? A lot of CP/M and DOS applications were. As soon as it became not viable programmers switched to other languages.

And were is writtent that C should not evolve to tackle big issues that arose in the past 50 years?

Were is written, for example, that C should not have a managed "sting" type and MUST only use pointers to characters arrays? And one doesn't exclude the other. Just this change would kill a huge class of vulnerabilities. And for a lot of tasks, dabbling with pointers to characters is useless.

Sure, character arrays may have been all you needed when your "UI" were punched cards and teletypes, and most data to be processed were just numbers. That era is gone, long ago. As soon as software became truly interactive, and text processing became more and more complex, that model became utterly inadequate.

This mentality - "never change anything, never improve anything, because I do not want to learn anything new, and don't want to change the way I write code" - is what made IT an incredibile field for profits by criminals.

AI agents get office tasks wrong around 70% of the time, and a lot of them aren't AI at all

Yes, an AI prompting another AI - without the model collapsing!

HALlucination....

Just just the wong example in ST - when Data, Crusher or LaForge ask the ship computer for some complex tasks, that's AI at work. But they do have a whole reactor on their own to power it...

Back in black: Microsoft Blue Screen of Death is going dark

Re: I get lots of them

I used for years Dell computers at work and saw a BSOD once because of a buggy F5 VPN driver. A couple of years ago they have been replaced by HP models to save money, and it became a BSOD festival. Being the OS and software the same, I would say the problem is the hardware. Updating many firmwares and drivers with time reduced the problem.

What I don't understand is why all the "telemetry" they capture doesn't help to fix this bug far quicker.

Re: "ways to make Windows less fragile"

Of course there far less concerns for security back then, and the hardware was what it was available back then. But today it's pretty clear that we need something more to have secure system. Of course a system still have to let people use and share data - but there's a lot that could be done to avoid issues like Crowdstrike.

There has been a lot of researches, and attempts like the Intel one, but nothing came to production. In the past I can understand that peformance improvements were paramount to sell more hardware and software, but today not so much. The fact that MS had to kill still adequate PCs witn Win11 shows how much desperate they are to force people to upgrade.

We got workarounds - VMs, containers - why a modern CPU and OS can't really partition software and applications at the hardware level for better security, when needed? You might wish to run some applications in one partition for easy sharing, others in different partitions for better isolation and security. But still, third party drivers run together the core kernel.... and again, when new CPUs are shown everything they talk about is performance. While data hoarders need more and more perfomance to extract the last drop of users' blood, most other users doesn't really need it, and would benefit more from more secure architectures.

PS: I do not know if The Register has an automatic downvote feature for readers who are critic of their editorial line, or if there are users who spend all the day to track and downvote post from people they don't like, LOL! But really, who cares about votes!

Re: "ways to make Windows less fragile"

Multics had some interesting ideas, others not so much. Of course any previous ideas influence the subsequent ones. Anyway, security can't be only achieved at the software level - hardware support is necessary. Chasing performance only led to non secure designs, or no longer secure ones.

IMHO there were a lot of good ideas in the 80286 protected mode design - and even more so in the 80386 when segments were no longer limited to 64K and pagination made easier managing memory.

But OS designers just used two rings, and used flat memory spaces because it was easier, faster, and it was what OS already used. And decades later, we are still fighting against the same security issues, a lot of which would not be possibile in better, "newer" hardware/software designs. Just nobody is willingly to invest in a new, more modern and secure OS. Especially now that money is made not selling hardware/software, but hoarding as much data as possible, and the less is invested in R&D (but the hoarding itself), the higher the profits.

While people have been brainwashed to think that a 50 yeears old design, and not the best one, is perfect and doesn't need changes. The "Cult of Unix" is alike Scientology (ensure those at the top get richer and richer, exploiting those below), amd just started the IT "dark ages". Maybe one day will see a "renaissance" - but I can't see anyone investing the needed resources soon.

So let's change the kernel error screen color.... that's real innovation!

Re: "ways to make Windows less fragile"

No, install a broken driver in Linux and it does crash as well - again people who believe Linux is "secure by default" don't understand anything about OS or security.

The real problem is the truly outdate two rings model used still today - and the four rings model was dropped exactly because old OS designs - like Linux - can't use it.

If the hardware could segregate the core kernel from other system processes that have higher privileges than user code, but not high as the core kernel, it would be possibie to build far more secure OS.

It looks MS is attempting something alike, but without hardware support.

As long as we keep on relying on OS designed fifty years ago we're not going anywhere, we just pile up workarouds over workarounds.