Posts by paluster

Claude having artificially intelligent hiccups and access lockouts for over two hours

Conspiracy, whar conspiracy.

Or pwrhaps they've been hacked by the Pentagon for refusing to drop the guardrails.

Accenture down to buy Downdetector as part of $1.2 billion deal

Re: Strange world

I think in this case it's the intention to reduce corporate debt that has raised the share price.

AWS says drones hit two of its datacenters in UAE, urges users to move resources to different regions

Re: Sprinklers!?

Sprinklers in the offices is the most likely scenario. Water isnt just cheap its also non toxic. When I was still working in the data centre we had a huge computer hall and as kit became smaller some of the space was repurposed as people space. They moved the Help Desk in and the sraff were seriously miffed when they realised that if the fire alarms went off for a fire in the computer hall then they only had two minutes to evacuate before the entire zone flooded with inert gas to about seven feet off the ground and nobody had told them.

LibreOffice Online dragged out of the attic, dusted off for another go

FLAs abound

I could have posted this as a reply to several other posts but I thought I'd branch out on my own.

Firstly I think there is room for all the options. I've never used COOL but I have a copy of CODE running in my HomeLab. The issue I have with both is that they run best in conjunction with a "cloud" stack. The recommended deployment of CODE is with Nextcloud. That's a pain because my preferred cloud stack is Owncloud so I end up running both wgich is wasteful.

I can see CODA being useful if you use COOL as a business but you need to have offline capability in some instances. With CODA you have essentially the same UI. Remember that the end users may be members of the general public not IT guys

I'll say right now that I've never liked the ribbon interface. All the office suites I've ever used right back to WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS and StarOffice on an under powered second hand laotop running Linux had proper menus, so I use LibreOffice fir offline work.

Now as for LOOL as far as I recall it didnt force a ribbon UI on you and most importantly it was agnostic about which web server you used (although the reference install used Apache). So there's a use case for on prem deployments that dont want to go to the trouble of running a cloud stack. So COOL when you need the collaborative stuff that comes with Nextcloud and LOOL when you just want to run as much as possible server side and simplify the desktop build. If they keep the ability to run in any vanilla web server then pick your favourite HTTP daemon.

SaaS-pocalypse chatter is doomster pr0n. It would be nice if enterprise IT were boring again

Re: The whole circus is turning into one massive toss·a·thon

Ask each pf the chatbots that question. It will be a good test of what guardrails are in place

It's not the AI

I dont think that it will be AI that dents the AsAService growth. Ut will be when people realise rhat the CLOUD Act doesnt just apply to traditional cloud vendors (Google, Azure, AWS &Oracle). The a t applies to everything stored on servers "owned and mabagwd" by American firms. If you have webmail or your IMAP settings leave the emails on the server then if the provider is American then the Act applies.

In the current climate that is going to make all the magor ERP suppliers except SAP even more unpopular in Europe than they already are. I'm quite surprised that SAP arent pushing that angle yet.

Lenovo shows off snap-together laptop with removable keyboard, screen, and ports

Re: Pounds? Inches?

Its how things were measured before we let a bunch of late 18th century French regicides hi-jack weights and measures.

50 GW of datacenter demand queues up for UK grid access

You have a point. As these will probably all be run by American companies they will all be subject to the CLOUD Act so there are np real benefits to hosting them in the UK

Re: Perhaps sense can prevail - Not likely

And I'd just like to point out that Big Ben isnt the clock or the tower, it's the bell

excess or common sense.

So these idiots want to use the same amount of power as the peak winter usage for the entire country on a regular basis.

"Np" seems the most sensible answer. Or in more detail "come back when you dont need the same amount of power as a medium size city just to run plus half the water in the local reservoir to avoid bursting into flames"

If enough countries did that then the AI megacorps would be screaming at the likes of Nvidia to do their job properly and if that didnt work they might actually sit down and write the code for their little toys more efficently.

Trump orders purge of 'woke' Anthropic from government

Re: Kathy Burke said it best...

And there's your problem in a nutshell. Half the american public cant tsll the difference between "liberal", "socialist" and "left wing" as in extreme left.

Both extreme left and extreme right are viscious potential fascists. Its the "extreme" bit that is important.

If you are one of those that cant tell the difference let me help.

Liberals are centrist or slightly left of centre and believe that people should be left to get on with theur lives but that the state should be there as a backstop.

Socialists are further to the left and believe thar the state should do more to help and to even out inequalities

Extreme left (like extreme right) want to tear everything down and force you to do as you're told

Sopra Steria sues UK government over £958M Capita outsourcing award

Re: As much as I dislike Crapita

Ex civil servant (retired) here.

This rubbish started under the blue mob who were, and still are, utterly convinced that the private sector does everything better. That's absolute bullshit of course since a private company has its attention split between providing a servive and making a profit.

China’s ‘The US hacks itself to make us look bad’ theorists return with a crypto conspiracy

Seems logical

Gentlemen. Could I just point out that with the current US Administration this entirely batshit crazy conspiracy theory seems entirely plausible

Anthropic to Pentagon: Autonomous weapons could hurt US troops and civilians

Re: American civilians and warfighters

But it is a special skill. I remember seeing an interview with a brirish soldier who had fought in WW2. He said"the german planes came over and we ducked, then our planes came over and the germans ducked, then the american planes came over and we BOTH ducked."

Re: I hate it when reality overtakes the comment section

Therw-s a brilliant scene in Dawn's Early Light where Darren McGavin's character becomes acting president and asks "are we winning?" All the military look at him like he's an idiot since nobody wins a mutually assured destruction scenario. So the argument is stupid because in a nyckear war everybody loses. Wont stop some moron from saying it.

Top cloud providers to outspend Ireland's GDP on AI in 2026

Can we just agree that this is getting bloody silly? Ramp up the schadenfreude for when the bubble bursts. All together now "told you so"

Microsoft to auto-launch Copilot in Edge whenever you click a link from Outlook

Black and white for me, but then I was a system admin cross trained on mainframes, unix and linux, so the choice of software at home was a no brainer. Also it let me buy xheaper kit. I've consistently run ex lease business kit for consumer level costs.

The corporate desktop and supporting servers were wall to wall Microshaft, but that was a different team's problem.

What you have to remember is that most businesses are not in the IT business so they are dependent on other people's decisions. We had a case (and we were in the IT business) when we ported an application from unix to linux. One of the third party components was only fully supported on Solaris (where we were running it) HP-UX (where we had no intention of going) añd Red Hat so that chose the linux distro for us (my preference would have been SLES, but pragmatism won out).

Re: Well that lasted long

"With much thicker cables" and much thicker people

NASA safety watchdog says it's time to rethink Moon landing

So it will all go horriblu wrong and the rocket will blow up at some stage killing the crew.

Trump will then give a lonh rambling speech calling the mission a stunning success and a triumph of american engineering. He will then sneer about how it only happen with him in charge.

In case you haven'r noticed, the lunatics have taken over the asylum.

Orbital datacenters are a pie-in-the-sky idea: Gartner

And then there's the radiation

The other thing they are ignoring is the la k of atmosphere acting as radiation shielding. Airbus recently had to ground their entire fleet for software upgrades because particularly strong solar radiation at 30,000 feet was causing bit flipping. What do they think is going to happen n low to medium earth orbit. Nvidia no doubt expect to charge ten times as much for hardened GPUs. Or we can use current tech. If you think AI hallucinates at sea level, waut until you run one in the full firce of the solar wind.

UK data watchdog fines Reddit £14.47M for letting kids slip past the gate

I agree. If the UK Govsrnmebt wants comprehensive age gating then they should run it. They do after all own the databases that record all the government IDs that you can use.

Unfortunately the OSA was written by the previous lot who were very keen on passing stuff to the private sector so that their old school mates could make even more money.

Euro hosting giant hiking prices by up to 50% from April Fool's Day

its a conspiracy

How about we start a conspiracy theory that this whole AI thing is an enormous scam designed to push up the cost of memory, disk and CPUs/GPUs in order to price everyone except the hyperscalers out of the market.

I'm waiting for the bubble to burst and produce baskets of surplus components marked "slightly used only one stupid owner".

Google digs deep to power AI expansion with 150 MW geothermal deal

Re: But maybe not in the US

AI data centres are liquid cooled

They are in temperate climates but what happens if you build them above the artic circle? Other than an increase in global warming and melting of the ice sheets if you build too many of them.

Of course building them in Antartica works as well although uts a long way to run a cable and there is less obvious geithermal power.

But maybe not in the US

Make Greenland or Iceland particularly attractive. Plenty of geothermal activity close to the surface and you can build your data centre on the edge of an ice sheet and maybe air cool it. I remember seeing a presentation years ago from a firm that had built a centre in Iceland and the speaker was only half joking when he said "if thr computer hall gets hot we just open the windows".

HMRC spares 661 from Making Tax Digital as rollout nears

Re: Naming of people.

HMRC are obviously still in thrall to the Visions & Vakues methodology where you have to call everyone "customers". I remembee getting into an argument with a paeticularly prattish senior manage at work when we wsre messing about with V&V when I referred to users and he smirked and said "you mean cystomers dont you". This was in the context of a police system, so I explained using short words that everyone who used the data was a customer, but I was talking about the control room staff who actually sit there and use the application.

Mind you ny faviurite usage was when the railways started saying customer instead of passenget. After all passengers have an exoectation that they are going to travel somewhere. Customers on the other hand......

Founder ditches AWS for Euro stack, finds sovereignty isn't plug-and-play

Re: VPS

You're assuming that he has the skills to run all those servers rather than just being able to use instances run by someone else. To use an IT example, people can use webmail without having a clue how to manage a mail server. To use a non IT example, how many drivers actually know how to maintain a car engine (let alone have the tools to do so).

Palantir spent $25M on CEO flights so Alex Karp could do all the talking

Re: Spot the clue

I wonder if Karp has shares in the firm that supplies the aircraft.

Copilot spills the beans, summarizing emails it's not supposed to read

Re: my email

Its true that you dont know what the recipient, or their system, are going to do with your email, but you should be able to trust the sysrems at your end and apparently in this case you cant.

Of course labels like Confidential have a different meaning in different organisations. In a business context it might just mean financially sensitive but in a government context it has a clearly defined meaning in terms of national security and invokes serious handling constraints. We had to break an account manager from one of our major suppliers of the habit of marking things confidential because of the hastle it caused.

UK government has COMMERCIAL IN CONFIDENCE to cover this use case and that is a Privacy marking, not a Security classification.

Your AI-generated password isn't random, it just looks that way

Re: Can I hear from an actual expert?

Two slightly different things I think. The rule about no repeating characters, or limiting the number of repeats is commonplace. I think you are describing a rule where each character has to be unique. Both limitations fell as if they are increasing the randomness but both actually reduce the entropy.

Personally I prefer the more modern recomendation of stringing several randomly chosen real words togethet.

Texas sues TP-Link over China links and security vulnerabilities

same pld same old

McCarthyism is alive and well and living in Texas. On a more serious note. Repressive regimes always strive to discover or invent external enemies. As far as TP-Link are concerned, all consumer routers are vulnerable becausr new exploits are discovered all the time and most people dont keep the firmware up to date (and most suppliers only provide a couple of years of support on cheap kit). Not in any way unique to TP-Link.

European Parliament bars lawmakers from using AI tools

Re: Egotists

They are talking about officially issued devices. To follow your suggestion they would either have to connect an official device to an unofficial AI system, which should be blocked and logged if you try, or they would need to move the data onto an unofficial device which should also be blocked.

If the IT security team know their stuff and senior management answer "why cant I connect my personal iphone to the system" with "because you cant" then they should be reasonably OK. Remember these are politicians not IT geeks, so the security team has the advantage of superior knowledge and access.

Microsoft throws spox under the bus after Parliament testimony on ICC email kerfuffle

How exacrly did an article on Microsoft and the ICC end upwith a right wing anti govermrnt rant - somewhat off topic surely.

Digital sovereignty must define itself before it can succeed

Re: And, on this topic

All three of the main hyperscalers are offering what they claim are sovereign services. In practice that means data held within the sovereign region and managed locally by locals. Its a start but without proper legal separation it remains to be seen how much protection this offers against the US CLOUD Acy.

UK.gov launches cyber 'lockdown' campaign as 80% of orgs still leave door open

Re: Platitudes

A great many SMEa dont do any of their own IT. They probably rely on a few old desktops or web based office suites. They've probably paid some third party to design and host their website and they are pretty clueless about how it all works. They are , however, quite savvy about whatever their actual business is. Trouble with this site is that most of us do IT for a living so we have a scewed view of peoples skill sets.

Keir Starmer declares 'months' timeline for social media age clampdown in UK

Re: The problem with the 'blame the parents' argument

And yet your generation are now the parents and we are supposed to believe that you are as clueless as your parents were. Seems odd that you were so much more savvy than they were when you (collectively) were kids but you have forgotten it all.

Re: Trying to put age verification on VPN's is deeply silly

I think that they would be targetting public VPNs like NordVPN

Your work VPN is almost certainly a private one with the end point on your corporate firewalls. There is no way for them to regulate that, nor is their any need to do so.

How AI could eat itself: Competitors can probe models to steal their secrets and clone them

Being serious for a moment

Tempting though it is to laugh when the AI children start crying about how mean people are being...a serious question about the fear mongering from the bloke at Google.

If companies, especially in the financial sector, are traing models on "internal, sensitive data" why would they deploy them where a hostile distillation attack was possible? Are US companies really thay stupid?

The big FOSS vendors don't eat their own dogfood – they pay for proprietary groupware

Re: Purisr vs pragmatist

Replying to my own post because an example of what I meant occurred to me.

Back in the day I was working fir the UK government at a major data centre. Although the computer hall held every thing from mainframes to x86 blades running Linux, the corporate dezktop was slightly out of date wall to wall MS Windows with MS Office. One of our main suppliers did a refresh of their own dwsktips abd our account nabager sent us a file in docx firmat. There wasn't a single machine in the building that would load it.

Fortunately my personal (non corporate) laptop ran SUSE Linux with the latest version of OpwnOffice, so I loaded the file, saved it back as a doc file and called it score one for FOSS. This was a major hardware and software vender but the chap just saved the file in the default firmat and sent it.

Re: Purisr vs pragmatist

For the record I didnt say you needed MSOffice, I said you would need to save files in MSOffice formats if you wanted to exchange them with other people. Good luck negotiating a special file format for your contacts. The vast majority of people and companies just cling to whatever format was set up at install time.

Back when I was still working for a living that was initially the .doc formats and later the docx formats.

Purisr vs pragmatist

If you live and work in the real world rather than in a FOSS bubble you have to accept that most of the planet uses proprietary software at least at the desktop level. You can use LibreOffice and ProjectLibre on your desktop (and I do) but if you want to exchange files with othe4 people you are going to have to save them in Mcrosoft formats Likewise when it comes to communication half the world runs on Teams and WharsApp,, so you either use gateways and risk compatibility problems or bite the bullet and run the software (maybe in WINE). Or you could install clients on your phone since that is probably Android or Apple.

Re: Global lock-in

Ut you are still using teams and frankly if you want to guarantee compatibility you are better off just running the software somewhere

Re: Some extremely fortunate pooches feast on eye fillet :)

And more to the point they were probably running software that only ran on VMS

Only one in five Euro datacenters AI-ready as builders battle land and labor blues

Re: AI ready

A le to handle and sustain very high power requirements, so scary amounts of backup generator, together with frankly silly amounts of liquid cooling. All this with enormous amounts of spare floor space, assuming the current workload isnt going away. Frankly I'm not at all surprised that most current data centres aren't ready

River project swims against the Wayland tide with modular window management

Re: When it gets to the point where you can use 'export DISPLAY=remotebox.lan:0.0' let me know

You cant really blame them they obviously all grew up in a desktop only world and the fact that X windows uses client and server the opposite way round from eveybody else probably broke tjem.

I take your point about redirection. I've used ssh -X more times than I could possibly count to run graphical programs on rsmote servers. I do worry that going forward the choice of Linux distros for servers may be constrained by whether you can rip out Wayland and install x.org rather than by whether the rest of yhe system is up to snuff.

Notepad's new Markdown powers served with a side of remote code execution

Re: the app's core ethos as a lightweight, fast, no-frills program…

You have to remember that modern day scripts cant actually write scripts.

I accept your point about hand coding HTML back in the Jurassic era, I did it myself and the simpler the editor the bettet.

Notepad really did the job for admins because every good admin knows that if you have to do things repeatedly you put the commands in a shell script, regardless of what OS yiu are using. I've done that on two different mainframe systems, Solaris, Linux and Windows Server over the years.

VMware scores early win in Siemens software licensing dispute

Overreach?

If the contract does say that all disputes are to be settled in Germany then the court is wrong. This is a civil case so where the violatipn took place isirrelevant. Mind you US courts have a habit of deluding themselves that their local laws and tjeir jurisdiction are spmehow universal.

As far as the case iz concerned it is possible that Siemens had significant amounts of evaluation copies that they were seeking to licence. There is also the interesting questipn of how, or even whether, you licence software on an off line backup machine. I've noticed before that US and European companies sometimes have different opinions on that.

Oh yes and Broadcom are a bunch of crooks so I hope they lose.

Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter

betes noires

Deploy early, rely on the end users to do your beta testing and fix tge errors later if you can be botgered. If your bank deplyed barely tested crud that messed up your account you'd be livud so why is it OK for you to do it?

Full disclosure, I spent my entire computing career working on real time operational support systems for the blue light communitu. Every thing we deployed had to work as expected from day one and go on working 24/7 because sometimes luves really did depend on it. Our test cycle was two or three times longer than the industry average, but our error rates in deployed code were only one tenth of the average.

CISA orders federal agencies to rip out EOL edge kit before cybercrooks move in

Re: Wrong approach

Also for this sort of high end kit suuport includes hardware support like it does for a server. On the really top end kit designed to handle very high levels of traffic key functions are off loaded to one or more ASICs and there comes a time, usually about 20 years down the line when nobody is making the components any more

UK names Barnsley as first Tech Town to see whether AI can fix... well, anything

Re: same old same old

Beg to differ. Sunak was orn in southampton in hamshire. Since said town is on the south coast he couldnt be more of a bloody southerner if he tried.

SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites

would it even work?

I refer the honourable members to the recent problems experienced by airbus at 30,000 feet. How much random bit flipping are you going to get in medium earth orbit in the full force of the solar wind?