Posts by TeeCee

Three becomes one as Vodafone buys out merger partner

Re: "targeted synergies."

Yup. Untargeted synergies just float around synergising stuff at random.

There you are, just getting a coffee and bam, you're synergised. Doesn't bear thinking about.

30 years ago, AT&T gave Internet Explorer the default advantage

Re: and it was rubbish!

It also had the advantage of turning up, with the updated Outlook, just as Netscape released its all-singing, all-dancing, all-steaming-turd Communicator package.

I remember saying at the time that if you were asked to guess which was the product of the bloated corporate monolith and which that of the disruptive third party, you'd be wrong.

Moving from Netscape Communicator to IE / Outlook at the time was like getting double the amount of RAM and a liquid helium overclocking job on the CPU.

Cisco close to releasing more AI models, this time for deep networking ops

"AI iz not mak us money. What to do?"

"MOR AI!"

Pope's official prayer app commits cardinal sin, leaks 700K+ users' info

And now The Lesson.

So it came to pass that demon spake unto the darkness in the world the mystic incantation of 1, 719518.

And Lo, it came to pass that the details of all the faithful could be seen by one and all.

And many were sore vexed by this.

And there was much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

And one spake out into the tumult; "Can it not be made that our information be made secret by means of an application update before he of the world and also his dog be aware of them?"

And a great voice replied; "Fear not, for those who seek to exploit My faithful shall suffer My wrath and the full vengeance of The Lord shall fall upon them!"

And the faithful saw that all was good and that the evildoers would be punished.

Vulnerabilities 8:14

OpenAI admits GPT-5.6 occasionally deletes files – but it's an 'honest mistake'

Funny how an "honest mistake" by an AI and "malicious action" by a human look like exactly the same thing and have exactly the same effect.

Brit Scattered Spider duo handed tickets to prison over Transport for London attack

Yes, but some bunch of legal tosspots have turned it into the monopoly "get out of jail free card" excuse du jour, so here we are.

World Cup grudge attackers may have scored Argentine FA access via year-old infostealer infection

...or maybe it's just because their root password was "h4nd0fg0d".

US auto regulators want to kill robotaxi brake pedals

Makes more sense than you think.

Anything new in the future is likely to be brake-by-wire anyway.

An emergency handle to activate same makes way more sense than a brake pedal.

Transport for London keeps Capita behind wheel of road charging ops in £912M extension

...replace Capita's current contracts....with a single deal.

So the people responsible for collecting fines are run by the people who get the money? That should make sure any pesky evidence that they're wrong gets ignored.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Feds freaked over Fable 5 after simple 'fix this code' prompt, not jailbreak, says researcher

And this is why you should never let politicians or public servants get involved with regulating anything technical.

None of them have the slightest clue what it is, what it does or how it works, so any rules they come up with are inevitably going to be a pile of steaming cobblers interpreted and implemented by retarded fascists.

Serious ISS air leak forces NASA astronauts to temporarily take shelter in Dragon capsule

The reason?

Apparently the module has at its base the docking port that the automated Progress supply craft docks at.

This docking happens with a bit of a thump. For some reason[1], the repeated thumping causes the structure to crack.

[1] Utterly shit design, cheaping out on reinforcement / damping at the docking port looks favourite.

FBI warns Kali365 phishing kit is stealing Microsoft OAuth tokens at scale

Once again, the cloud service conundrum.

It really doesn't matter, even slightly, how state of the whizzbang art your security is if you allow gullible lackwits the credentials to pass through it.

Trouble is, that's probably > 80% of your user base.

Windows boot partition runs out of space for Microsoft's May security update

AFAICS the only way this could happen is on recent installions. Anything older will already have an enlarged boot partition from the fix implemented the last time it happened.

So <drumroll> MS themselves are still undersizing the boot partition at install time to this day.

Europe built sovereign clouds to escape US control. Then forgot about the processors

...promising "immunity from extraterritorial laws."

While still trying to screw American companies for not censoring their output to European standards, in defiance of their first amendment rights?

This all looks like a monumentally expensive excuse for the Pot to call the Kettle black.

Google's AI-enabled mouse pointer understands 'this' and 'that'

Motivation

...the system can understand where a user clicks, what they are clicking on, and the likely intent behind the interaction.

Data that advertisers will pay handsomely for, I'm sure.

(Entirely non-evil Satan icon)

NHS England confirms: Palantir staff can access patient data

I don't blame them.

Over the years I have seen many attempts to run systems where those responsible for looking after them do not have access to large chunks of them.

One thing they all had in common was they didn't work for long and when the wheels came off, the time to fix was astronomical due to the overhead of getting someone with both the balls and authority to drive a coach and horses through someone else's security policy.

Taiwan cops say student's radio kit brought bullet trains to a standstill

Re: OK, I'll bite

He's probably a bit loco.

Brit mathematician lets AI agent loose with credit card – cue password leaks, CAPTCHA chaos and more

To err is human.

To make a complete bollocks of everything and royally fuck up your whole life takes an AI.

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Re: Analogue clocks

I read that and looked at my wrist. On there is a, most decidedly digital, small computer that looks like a watch... displaying an extremely convincing analogue dial.

It's all become rather silly really, hasn't it?

Britain's £6B armoured sickener Ajax cleared for duty despite injuring troops

Can't say I'm surprised.

If I was shut inside an APC, unable to see out of the windows and then bounced around an offroad test site, I'm sure I'd puke my guts all over the interior.

Some people are just like that.

Who needs ghost train scares when Windows is such a fright?

Actually, this one is:

Boooooooork!

Future holiday horror: ‘A robot lost my luggage in Tokyo’

Re: Airport robots

Emirates: A robot takes your luggage off in Dubai. You get on your connecting flight while the robot consults its PRNG to ascertain the flight number that gets your luggage.

Microsoft beefs up Remote Desktop security with ... hard-to-read messages

I'd be inclined to give them some stick over this, were it not for the fact that every other bastard on the planet is utterly crap at providing consistent UI scaling and MS are probably one of the best of an awfully bad bunch here.

In this case, at least they actually give a shit and have committed to fixing it.

Also in this case, at least the "Accept" or "Continue" button isn't off screen a theoretical eight monitors away with scrolling disabled, as is more usually the case.

Obsolete Google nag drowns out vital bar information at Swedish concert hall

Best use for a ukelele is as kindling for a guitar fire.

The developer who came in from the cold and melted a mainframe

One day, outdoors having a cigarette with a Data Centre manager in SE Asia who'd just given us "the tour" and whom I knew from working together elsewhere, I asked about the hot and cold aisles:

"So, how much space is running warmer?"

"XYZ square metres".

"How much money does that save?"

"More than you'd think, x thousand dollars a month! TPTB are very impressed."

"What's the total size of the building?"

"XXXXYYYYYYZZZZZZ square metres."

"Right. Given how you've just had to get a lad with a screwdriver to tweak the thermostat to stop us all freezing our balls off in the meeting room, how much would, say, two degrees on the entire building save?"

He left at Warp 10 to do some maths and get more lads with screwdrivers on the case.

Cloudflare previews 'EmDash' – an AI-driven rebuild of WordPress in TypeScript

Compatible with WordPress?

Really? Even down to all the vulns?

Contractor quaffed his way through Y2K compliance while the client scowled

Many years ago...

...a centralised IT operation noticed that not all the entities they served celebrated Christmas and not all their staff did either. So, win-win, get a head start on the end of the year and look like they're respecting other cultures too.

Snag: As things inevitably ground to a halt as little things went wrong in various systems, getting any sensible answers out of the software and hardware support people became ever more difficult as the festive period wore on.

Water company wasted $200k on bad answers from an AI model – so built its own slop filtering system

...chose carbon cloth....due to commercial availability.

So you went with the cheaper option and it didn't work. You validated this decision by asking an AI and it, remarkably unsurprisingly, told you exactly what you wanted to hear, bending the truth to make it the right answer.

I'll bet the prompts you used included guesstimated pricing and heavily hinted that cost was a primary consideration.

TL;DR - You asked a silly question and got a silly answer.

In the name of science: Boffins build fart-tracking undies

American fart research.

I'm guessing the reason it's happening now is Trump?

Inside the datacenter where the day starts with topping up cerebrospinal fluid

Re: Will mankind ever learn that there are some things you do not fuck around with?

The Peking Homunculus. How apt.

When the then UK Gold reran Dr Who series to binge on Saturday morning, the continuity announcer introduced it as; "And now Dr Who. This week's series is The Ta..... hell... nobody ever calls it that... The One With The Giant Rat".

India tests whether AI can stop trains hitting elephants

Re: British Rail Solution?

Are you trumpeting a British success?

AFRINIC accuses litigant of trying to ‘paralyse’ it

The organization has a long history of corruption and dysfunction.

It's African. That's implied by definition.

Smart mirror shows dumb Windows in elevator

It's difficult to know exactly what has caused the issue here.

You know those expiring Secure Boot keys that MS are frantically swapping out...?

AI nonsense finds new home as Meta acquires Moltbook

One last throw of the dice...

Maybe Zuckerbitch thinks the AIs might take to his "metaverse" and turn the whole thing around?

Palantir’s lethal AI weaponry deployed to find chairs for US government staff

Looks like AI could be profitable.

Bums on seats is where the cash is.

Iran all but vanishes from the global internet amid US-Israel strikes

...and by sheer coincidence the vast majority of the Scots Nationalist cheerleading accounts on Soshal Meejah have gone silent... just like they always do when Iran shuts down internet access.

Pop music fans literally dying to stream hot new albums – in car crashes, that is

...drivers distracted by the latest Tay-Tay and Drizzy jams.

Bloke called Darwin codified that. It's called "natural selection".

Attacker gets into France's database listing all bank accounts, makes off with 1.2 million records

Let's parler Franglais!

Ne place pas tout votres oeufs dans une basket.

(Avec excuses au Kilometres Kington en retard)

The idea of using a Raspberry Pi to run OpenClaw makes no sense

Seems to be the way.

1) Take product.

2) Sprinkle magic AI pixie dust.

3) Price goes through roof.

4) Profit?

Nitrogen ransomware is so broken even the crooks can't unlock your files

Nitrogen has been around since 2023

That probably rules out vibe-coding and puts this one down to good old-fashioned incompetence.

Data thieves borrow Nike's 'Just Do It' mantra, claim they ran off with 1.4TB

...exposed the details of 72.7 million Under Armour accounts...

Time for new Under Pants.

Surrender as a service: Microsoft unlocks BitLocker for feds

All is as it should be.

If you hold anything at all with a supplier, third-party or escrow service then if presented with a court order for same that entity will hand it over, whether you want them to or not, as they are legally obliged to do so if they are within jurisdiction.

Yes, this does include anything you put in "the cloud".

Take those tinfoil hats off and put them away now.

Bill Gates-backed startup aims to revive Moore's Law with optical transistors

"We're talking thousands of chips. Not tens of thousands of chips."

It's a bit of shame that one thing we've learned the hard way is that to get really good and repeatable quality and reliability in a product, the best approach is high volume automated production.

Microsoft veteran explains the one weird trick that made Windows 95 restart faster

Re: Tagline of the time...

That actually made no difference at all, but the Pentium insisted it was 0.017694532018795643971124509863425 seconds faster.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: "a large US-based aircraft company"

Really? Who do you think designed MCAS?

Eurail passengers taken for a ride as data breach spills passports, bank details

Re: Here's an idea

Unless you can prove that the person responsible both knew of the vulnerability exploited in their systems beforehand and did nothing about it, then they are by definition not guilty of anything.

You cannot hold someone accountable for the illegal actions of a third party.

Now. If you'd suggested that western intelligence agencies should be given a free hand in tracking down those responsible and ensuring that they never trouble anyone, anywhere ever again, I'd be right with you.

Boffins probe commercial AI models, find an entire Harry Potter book

<waves wand>

PLAGIARAMUS!

UK regulators swarm X after Grok generated nudes from photos

These Grok-generated Category C images are then fed into different AI tools to create the most serious Category A videos.

Sounds to me like there are other AIs that are actually responsible for the bit that really breaks the rules and thus should be the primary targets of any action. Probably out of jurisdiction though, hence the focus on grok.

Ring embraces the end of the world, starts using home cameras to track wildfires

Ok. What happens when the AI gets bored of watching bugger all happen for months on end?

Goal-seeking parameters would suggest starting a large fire as a good way of satisfying its mission requirements.

User found two reasons – both of them wrong – to dispute tech support's diagnosis

Had the opposite problem once.

Cabled a place that had a very fussy and self-important manager who had one of those "fishbowl" offices with blinds built into the glazed units.

On completion, he pointed out that there was supposed to be a network port in his office, despite his not having a machine.

"Yes. There it is." says I, pointing at it.

"Don't give me that, it's not connected."

"Yes it is. If you like we can get something to plug in to prove it!".

"Look, I can clearly see that there's no cable running to it. I'm not being taken in by any tricks like that.".

"Ah, right. If you look at your glazed wall units here, you can see a recessed joint between each. This one appears is flush instead, which is where the mini trunking runs down from the ceiling with the cable in it.".

He studied this for a minute: "Yeees, I see now. That's invisible, unless you know what you're looking for. Right then, that's everything.".

With the benefit of hindsight, we should have asked for more money for "invisible" installations.