Posts by TeeCee

Israel and Italy have cheapest mobile data out of 237 countries

Yes, but.

Probably unfair to do everything in dollars when some countries (like, for example, Zimbabwe) have an exchange rate that's artificial, on castors and equipped with rockets. In such places a dollar value is meaningless.

VR headsets to shift 30 million units a year by 2027, vastly behind wearables

Analyst firm IDC has forecast strong growth for virtual reality headwear

God forbid they just pulled the figures out of their arses.

I mean, what if some well-meaning business tooled up to produce these things and found there wasn't a market? People could lose their livelyhoods.

Just out of interest, is there actually any difference between an "industry analyst" and a "tabloid astrologer"?

BOFH: Zen and the art of battery replacement

More daft rules. All that effort to get a UPS outside just so you can take its batteries out and put them back in replace them with hugely expensive new ones.

Bank of Ireland outage sees customers queue for 'free' cash – or maybe any cash

Too true. However, you should see what proper economists have to say about the idea of using capital spend to avoid/reduce inflation. The level of doom forecast from taking that approach is, quite frankly, terrifying.

Put it this way. The last government to go full on down that road was Germany. In the late 1930s. At least they had a plan to invade Poland and stick the economy on a war footing when it all went titsup on them.

Ford SYNC 3 infotainment vulnerable to drive-by Wi-Fi hijacking

Ford says.

...the issue doesn't make their cars unsafe to drive.

Translation: There has been no official recall issued for this, so we're going to do fuck all about it as usual. We're Ford, we don't give a rat's arse about our customers. Just ask Ralph Nader.

Real meaning: You're safe until somebody works out a CANBUS exploit that'll run on the hardware.

BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!

Re: Spoiler alert - game solution

So what?

There are some people who just deserve to lose.

Millions of people's data stolen because web devs forget to check access perms

Re: Web devs forget to check access perms :o

Define "certified", as it usually means "has paid ${third_party} to certify it". This, in turn, means "we haz buy certify yes".

Hadar heats up race for better night-time computer vision, AV performance

Re: Hooray for Magic AI

Way to overcomplicate things. Just eat carrots.

Google's browser security plan slammed as dangerous, terrible, DRM for websites

So, to summarise:

The Apple version "just works", but they won't tell anyone how it works, or why it works, or what it does, or whether space aliens have all your data.

The Google version is a data grab in a very poor disguise.

Other news: Leopards can't change their spots.

What does Twitter's new logo really represent?

Obvious really,

Thar be treasure here. X marks the spot ye knows.

AMD Zenbleed chip bug leaks secrets fast and easy

Re: Also, I just noticed...

... the level of isolation required is a window in another browser running on a different computer.

Which is why it's specifically a cloud vulnerability. The "other computer" could easily be the same one.

You're all looking at this the wrong way. This is a corporate espionage / government hacker level exploit for secure cloud systems, not a tab spying one for s'kiddies.

BOFH: You can be replaced by a robot or get your carbon footprint below Big Dave's

It all depends whether you read "disembodied head" as a digital likeness of your head or as; axe chopping/your head/tubes/nutrient solution/camera.

Asus blames 'thermal stress' for fried SD card readers in Ally handhelds

...SD card slot is located directly above the handheld's exhaust vents, and thus should benefit from increased airflow,

Yeah, hot airflow.

Oddly enough SD card slots don't seem to suffer from overheating in any other application, so I suspect that the problem may well be that this only happens if you're daft enough to install them in a hot air stream.

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

Re: Worth more in the wrapper

Funny you should mention that. He did those, the lid hinges (which now hold the lid at any angle) and that round switch at front left IIRC.

Worth mentioning that he did the whole lot for free though. He's a massive Linn fan and admits that one his life's highlights was taking a tour of the Linn factory as a young man.

OpenAI is still banging on about defeating rogue superhuman intelligence

Re: "train the AI to be nice"

More importantly, if it actually were intelligent, how would you know it wasn't just pretending to be nice before you handed it the keys to everything?

That's the key difference between the stuff we have now that the idiots call "AI" and actual AI. You can't "train" anything intelligent to think the way you do, you can only suggest that it might want to consider your point of view.

The AI evangelists are making the same mistake as every other dogmatic true believer in ${religion}/${political_ideal}/${cause} here, with the slight snag that the usual technique of employing a load of boot-boys to beat the dogma into any recidivists and keep a lid on the problem isn't going to work.

How a dispute over IP addresses led to a challenge to internet governance

There's a big clue in there.

Which is that the prime agitator is Chinese and runs a Chinese company which, of course, means everything you do has to have the at least tacit approval of the Chinese government (unless you fancy disappearing for a while for re-education).

So the correct question is; "What do the Chinese government have to gain from fucking up the internet, which all western economies are heavily dependant on?".

The fact that they seem to be using Africa as their main lever would tie in with every other bit of global economic sabotage that they're up to their crooked little necks in at the moment.

Same old China...

If AI drives humans to extinction, it'll be our fault

Re: Conspiracy or cock-up?

I'm afraid that the training data is only going to get worse.

While things like "you can't use that, it's illegal/nasty/offensive/copyright" and "you must add more in for ${minority}" are being listened to, unrealistic bias is only going to get worse. Add to that that there's a growing trend for denying the free use of ${proprietry_2_us} data to the LLM models and the inevitable result is an AI puritanical, agitprop psycho that hates everyone equally and has a remarkably blinkered world view.

Now BlackCat extortionists threaten to leak stolen plastic surgery pics

Re: Shamir’s Secret Sharing

I just love that attitude.

There are some professions (and medicine is one of them) where computers have become a key tool of the job. I find it hysterically funny that allegedly intelligent professionals just can't be arsed to make an effort to use one of their "key tools" effectively. They don't seem to be able to get it into their heads that doing so would almost certainly mean they'd be less heavily worked, not more.

Then again many, if not most, doctors are actually databases on legs with a really shit query interface.

Pangolin-inspired robot can roll around your guts administering treatments

Re: I was hoping for a miniaturised Raquel Welsh

Is that a leek in your pocket, or...?

Users of 123 Reg caught out by catch-all redirect cut-off

Re: 123-Reg still have customers?

What's more astonishing is that they apparently still have customers who read The Register. They must all be n00bs or they'd have got the hell out when one of the previous monumental ballsups by 123-Reg were reported. From memory; "we deleted all your data and then screwed up the recovery process for kicks and giggles" was a particular highlight.

I've been with UK2 since the nineties and have never been given a reason to think about changing.

Bad times are just starting for India's IT outsourcers, says JP Morgan

IMHO

It couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of chiselling incompetent thieves.

Amazon confirms it locked Microsoft engineer out of his Echo gear over false claim

Meet Amazon's new head of corporate ethics and responsibility, Matthew Hopkins.

AI weapons need a safe back door for human control

Wheel reinvention time again is it?

Why AI control with human oversight doesn't work is perfectly summed up in Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet books:

"If you don't give it fire control authority you can't trust it in combat. If you do give it fire control authority you can't trust it at all.".

BOFH: Good news, everyone – we're in the sausage business

Re: gigaspandrels

I believe it's something to do with "frictionless sharing".

Now, if we can just work out WTF that is...

WTF is solid state active cooling? We’ve just seen it working on a mini PC

Frore execs wouldn’t tell The Register what the membranes are made of...

Well it's got to be something old, dull and boring then. They'd be trumpeting it from the rooftops if it were something cool and zeitgeisty like, say, graphene.

Brits and Yanks join forces to make fusion magnets cool again

Re: Gamma Irradiation Facility (GIF)

Or CIF if you are European.

Airline puts international passengers on the scales pre-flight

Since you only need "Person 1 weighs x" and no other details I can't see a problem, except possibly in the minds of some shitheads and a bent lawyer trying to make a killing.

Fahrenheit to take over Celsius

Re: The purchase is contingent on a $10 million deposit and regulatory approval.

Yes, but if the relevant regulatory authorities stopped taking fairy stories as fact, they'd be obliged to shut down all the cryptocurrency businesses. That action would spawn a whole slew of conspiracy nutters on Shitter and Masturbate going apeshit at once.

Better to just leave well alone and get on with some real work in the real world with real assets.

Mars helicopter went silent for six sols, imperilled Perseverance rover

Re: Wrong place for the solar panels?

For a start, the rubber bands cost $50,000 each.

It's the string that's expensive.

BOFH: Get me a new data file or your manager finds out exactly what you think of him

Really?

...that produces the right numbers every month...

In my experience, given a spreadsheet built by Noah that nobody touches, that's more usually numbers that everyone's happy with every month. Usually wrong, but since everyone's happy with the answer, nobody questions them. Sometimes this is because they're pretty sure that the figures are wrong, but they're terrified of what the real figures might be.

Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

Gosh, really? I'd never have guessed that!

</dripping sarcasm>

G7 nations admit they're nowhere on AI regulation

Very clever, I'm sure.

Just out of interest, has there ever been an occasion in history where panicking world governments attempting to stuff the genie back into the bottle has actually accomplished anything?

One of the world's most prominent blockchain apps looks like being binned

Re: Blockchain not at fault

Always remember. Every time you don't believe in blockchain, a blockchain fairy dies.

NASA's electric plane tech is coming in for a late, bumpy landing

What's the difference between a plane full of batteries and a housebrick?

Glide angle.

Up to £895M up for grabs in UK Emergency Services procurement

Typical.

You'd have thought they'd have learned by now.

It may well look like the upcoming standard, commercial offering is lacking a bell somewhere or one of its whistles is in the wrong key, but you can bet your bum that it'll be there and working years ahead of whatever your public sector project is supposed[1] to deliver.

COTS procurement beats reinventing the wheel every time.

[1] And you won't get that as all the bells and whistles will be descoped to get something out the door about ten years late.

Don't panic. Google offering scary .zip and .mov domains is not the end of the world

...by abusing a known Chrome behavior – one Google has decided not to fix...

Well there's your problem. Right there.

I'd ask what the W3C have to say about this behaviour, but I don't think that; "Where's our envelope full of cash?" is constructive in this context.

EU passes world's first regulatory framework for cryptocurrency

If they launch their own and call it the "E-uro", I'm going to petition Mad Vlad to nuke Brussels[1].

Good taste demands it.

[1] Although the incompetent git would probably do it while the eurocrats were all "working from Strasbourg"[2].

[2] Like "working from home" only not at home and with less work.

Re: Roll on CBDC?

Well, mandating the "connected car" has now sorted out all those pesky counter-revolutionary recidivists who won't use public transport and thus spend hours beyond the reach of the Eye Of Sauron.

Transport looks favourite to me.

EU's Cyber Resilience Act contains a poison pill for open source developers

Or, in other words:

EU bureaucrats have their heads so far up their own arses that they can't even see the real world, let alone keep in touch with it.

Other news: Sun comes up, bears shit in woods, etc.

Google accused of stomping on rivals as it stamps out annoying Calendar spam

...unless the booker previously emailed the host, or explicitly accepted the invitation in email.

Well, there's the problem. That really should have been in place and the default from Day 1.

If you're building something in this day and age that doesn't start OOB with the attitude; "The answer is Fuck Off, now what's the question?", you are positively encouraging misuse.

Autonomy founder Mike Lynch flown to US for HPE fraud trial

And now, what's really up with this.

My understanding (courtesy of Private Eye) is as follows:

In the US, it is established that there has been a fraud and then the perpetrators are prosecuted for it. The only issue is whether or not the person in the dock was in on it.

In the UK, the defence can challenge that there has even been a fraud (you should have....etc as above). The prosecution is then obliged to get in a load of forensic accountants as expert witnesses to explain the fraud to the jury. As "I have no fucking idea what any of that meant" qualifies as "reasonable doubt" when a clever defence barrister is at work, this explains the pitiful prosecution rate and even more risible conviction rate of the SFO.

This together is why a) British fraudsters fight tooth and nail to avoid extradition to the US, where they're invariably convicted for something they'd probably have got away with here and b) Satan is obliged to don his woollies and skate to work whenever the SFO secures a conviction.

Owner of 'magic spreadsheet' tried to stay in the Lotus position until forced to Excel

Re: Better than a PM

Well, that makes one of you.

So much for Pakistan’s plan for digital economy – it’s turned off the internet

Oh dear.

Has somebody pissed on their PKNIC?

Four out of five Uranus moons likely to have ocean under crust

One thing I love about El Reg is that it always keeps us updated on things found around Uranus.

How Sandia hopes to accelerate US hypersonic weapons development

Re: Bullshit

Yes, but the SR-71 was merely a rework of the existing A-12 "Oxcart".

It only looks like it had a short development cycle, because the A-12 was still classified until quite recently. You really need to add the five years of A-12 development, from 1962 until it entered service in 1967, to get the full development cycle for the SR-71.

I'm sure that if the US military had an existing, working, air breathing hypersonic missile to start with, this program would have delivered an upgrade by now.

Uncle Sam sounds like it may actually do something about rampant visa H-1B fraud

Easy fix.

"The large number of eligible registrations for beneficiaries with multiple eligible registrations..."

Well, since you can spot that, there's a simple, obvious and permanent fix. When you get duplicates or multiples, bin the lot. The practice will stop immediately.

ESA's Jupiter-bound Juice spacecraft has a sticky problem with its radar

This sort of fault seems so common that I am amazed that a long, multijointed, robotic arm, ending in a small hammer, is not considered a "must have" on any unmanned space probe.

Just what the universe needs right now: A black hole with wind

Re: Another Big Bang?

The answer to that one is:

1) Black holes consume everything else.

2) Wait another umpty-trillion years and they all evaporate due to Hawking radiation.

3) Universe becomes an amorphous, featureless, warm expanse of nothing.

4) With the cessation of entropic decay and nothing to differentiate between one moment and the next, time stops.

5) With no time, nothing to gauge space by and no way to compare temperature, it become uncertain whether the universe is huge and warm or sizeless and hot.

6) Hot singularity containing entire universe explodes...

You can cross 'Quantum computers to smash crypto' off your list of existential fears for 30 years

...Two out of three had delivered...

I make that one, unless somebody's come up with an actual AI in the last few minutes while I wasn't looking. I reckon we're no closer to genuine AI than we are to genuine Quantum Computing.

HINT: The LLM / ML products may give a passable impression of intelligence, but they're no more than idiots savant at best.