Posts by Adam Foxton

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

Re: We had an issue with a rabbit

He wrote "arrgghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.... splat"?

Maybe he was dictating.

Your graphics card's so fat, it's got its own gravity alert

Re: Premature GPU Droop Syndrome

"PCIalis Express" would make a great name for an anti-droop method

UK's first permanent facial recognition cameras installed in South London

Re: I oppose this

My first time on Jury Duty showed me that a lot of people think like this.

"You could tell he was guilty as he walked in"

"Why would he be in front of the judge if he's innocent?"

"[The defence] is just needlessly poking holes"

Turns out he did do it- there was a heap of evidence in the last two days. But this guy was being convicted the moment he walked through the door.

Cloudflare builds an AI to lead AI scraper bots into a horrible maze of junk content

"Crawler operators ignore the instructions in robots.txt files, or work around CAPTCHAs and web server settings"

Surely this settles the case of if AI training crawlers are legal? If there is a robots.txt file and they ignored it, that's unauthorised use. Regardless of if a human would see it or not (which seems to be a common defence), this has been a recognised standard for machine access for decades.

In practice this won't settle it- lawyers still need years worth of work and corporations need to spend time harvesting investors' money- but in an ideal world shouldn't this be a pretty easy judgement?

RIP Mark Klein, the engineer who exposed US domestic spying ops after wiring it up

Re: Mark Klein. A good man and a true vulture.

Are you honestly suggesting that in 1791 the United States had no experience with State surveillance? Or by governments overstepping their power?

Principles don't change based on technology.

Murder is still murder, whether by knife, musket, or phased plasma rifle in the 40w range. Surveillance is surveillance, whether by steaming open an envelope or by installing beam-splitters in a telephone exchange.

When the government becomes more capable of breaching long-established rights more effectively the correct reaction is not to let them do it.

Satnav systems built for Earth used by Blue Ghost lander as it approached the Moon

Ground Control to Major TomTom

10...9....8...7

This will not only be good for positioning, it'll also greatly improve timing precision and accuracy on the moon without having to carry an atomic clock on a payload.

Rather than add a backdoor, Apple decides to kill iCloud encryption for UK peeps

Re: For the 'If you've done nothing wrong' morons.

"If you've done nothing wrong"

A few short decades ago we chemically castrated a bunch of men- including at least one proper war hero- because they were a bit keen on other, legal-aged men who shared their preferences.

After 9/11 we had whole religions tarred with the brush of being terrorists. Or people who looked like they might be members of that religion.

Jean-Charles de Menezes was an innocent electrician who had absolutely nothing to fear until he was misidentified and shot to death by police- in one of the most tightly surveiled parts of the most tightly surveiled cities in the world.

Even those with nothing to hide, or should have nothing to hide, definitely have plenty to fear.

Why do younger coders struggle to break through the FOSS graybeard barrier?

If you can't make something clever with the ecosystems around RPi, Arduino, ESP32, and the modules you can pull together from AliExpress then you're not smart enough for such a snarky attitude.

40 years ago, classified Shuttle mission foreshadowed Challenger's fatal flaw

Re: Most significant

Three? Not at all. They should have had four! No, they should have had SIXTY.

Two is fine. Nothing should get past the one O-ring. Choose the right O-ring and use it within spec and it'll generally be fine, with the second being a backup in case it isn't. The problem comes when you compromise both simultaneously- three O-rings wouldn't have helped if they were all too cold (as with this and Challenger).

British Museum says ex-contractor 'shut down' IT systems, wreaked havoc

Re: lax procedures

Maybe a communal account for a team? Or an additional account created 'for testing' that just never got deleted?

How to leave the submarine cable cutters all at sea – go Swedish

Re: Practice what you preach?

Germany are part of NATO. And issued an arrest warrant for someone suspected of sabotage.

This isn't Whataboutism, it's a total logical disconnect. "NATO is saying subsea infrastructure is critical, even while they themselves arrest people who attack it? What hypocrisy!"

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Re: Age verification

Okay, so we've got a point of failure here. Or do we?

Maybe we could try age-restricting PAYG SIMs, or making them only able to be topped up online or by credit card. But if, rather than just talking to their parents, a kid has gone to that length to get round your content restrictions, they're going to succeed.

And when all the websites are locked down, when all the devices are hobbled, when every transaction is logged, when you've finally made the Internet safe for children... then, the kids will start sharing photos on USB sticks and this whole puritanical cycle will start again with removable storage.

Oh, wait, schoolkids were sharing porn on removable drives back when the year started with a 1. So this legislation's already been out of date for a quarter century.

Re: Age verification

That's probably the most important point. If someone pays for the Internet access, they should be in control of it and they should have responsibility to secure it. If I want to stop my kids looking at something, it's up to me to stop them. Not Kier Starmer, not whoever these other muppets are, me. I'm their parent, the responsibility is on me.

If I don't know how to protect them, it's my responsibility to find out, not to have everyone else locked out.

Online Safety is not improved by teaching people from an early age to stick their credit card details into sites as readily as they click 'accept all cookies'. Children are not protected by stopping them being able to have conversations with their parents- and adding barriers like this is exactly what this will achieve.

The person with the contract with the ISP should be the one whose age is checked, and who then bears responsibility for what's done by any others they allow to use their connection.

Hands-on jobs to grow fastest, because AI can't touch them

Re: So, what's their record like

Its pattern matching and data analysis. Generation of this sort of report is exactly the sort of thing AI could be of use with.

So let's see the WEF practice what they preach and replace those expensive analysts with ChatGPT. It'll be just as accurate.

Parker Solar Probe sends a "Still Alive" tone back to Earth

A Still Alive message?

This was a triumph!

I'm making a note here: 'Huge success'.

It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.

Apple called on to ditch AI headline summaries after BBC debacle

Re: It's garbage

Just treat it as something that is considered to be deployed by the most senior executive of a company. Hold them- or the entire C-suite- legally responsible.

Wish there was a benchmark for ML safety? Allow us to AILuminate you...

Re: A.I. can never be trusted...

It doesn't need to be.

The group deploying it should be. And they should be held accountable if it errs.

If an Apple AI tells a user an all-fruit diet fights cancer, or a Tesla AI is in charge of a vehicle that crashes, Apple or Tesla's senior executives should be legally responsible as they okayed its deployment.

If an individual utilises it, it should be their legal responsibility.

Nothing else will work. The first jailed C-Suite will quickly ensure that AI is used responsibly by everyone else while not stifling legitimate development.

China's homebrew Bluetooth alternative is on the march as Beijing pushes universal remotes

Re: Stream lossless stereo audio.

"The article doesn't really state whether the audio leaves or enters the device."

It will, don't worry.

$800 'AI' robot for kids bites the dust along with its maker

Even worse, these things are now very publicly 'Off'. People will take that as Safe. They'll receive no updates, and if the kid's bonded with it then they're not going to throw it out.

So now there's a direct, child-trusted and adult-approved, unmonitored link straight to your kids' earholes.

Boeing busted by employee over plans to surveil workers, quickly reverses course

Re: don't go giving them ideas

A Boeing with AI?

That'd be the 737-MAX-HEADROOM

Abandoned US Army 'city under the ice' imaged in serendipitous NASA find

"Hey, has anyone seen Aliens Vs Predator?"

Airbus A380 flew for 300 hours with metre-long tool left inside engine

Re: "as it would pass through the rotating blades during flight"

Ah, but remember Ducks float. And therefore are made of wood, and are therefore witches. Which have gnarled, twisty features.

So twistyness alone cannot determine if something is a duck or not, because the science above says that Witches are Ducks, and witches are twisty.

Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

Re: Why is AI even banned?

This is a piece of work intended to show the student's understanding and/or creative abilities. Their own.

A calculator stops me needing to look up trig tables. It'll do a multiplication for me. It doesn't tell me the method with which to solve the problem, but an AI would. This is a pretty well established line, with graphing calculators being banned because they commonly let students lean on pre-made calculators or equation re-arranging or the like.

Your mum correcting your German homework is absolutely a cheat. The work you're turning in isn't an accurate reflection of your understanding. But if you ask her what the correct spelling is, that's making use of resources available to you. With the second example you recognise a shortcoming and fix it- it's a learning experience.

Spelling and Grammar checkers are absolutely a cheat in language work, because the work submitted isn't based on your understanding. Grammarly is even more of a cheat on language work. On non-language-work a different standard can be applied- spell-checking a Chemistry paper could be okay, because what's being assessed is the student's understanding of Chemistry rather than English.

In sports, if I turned up to a Shot-put with a cannon then claimed a win because mine went further I'd be considered a cheat, and for exactly the same reason- it's not me competing, it's Big Bertha. But if I delivered a Physics paper by cannon, it wouldn't invalidate the Physics paper because that's not evaluated based on how far you threw it. Though it would probably raise a few eyebrows.

Schools (and universities etc) should examine the students and their abilities.

Post-CrowdStrike, Microsoft to discourage use of kernel drivers by security tools

You're missing the point.

This should not have happened. CrowdStrike deliberately broke the safeguards MS had put in place to avoid this. They had a signed, thoroughly tested, Kernel-mode driver... that then ran unsigned, in this case untested, code. And didn't test that to make sure it rejected invalid data.

Regardless of the safeguards you put in place, someone who bypasses those safeguards can still screw up a system.

It's like the old saying- if you make things idiot-proof the Universe just makes a better idiot.

EU's renewable hydrogen plan needs a 'reality check'

Re: you can't cheat with physics

The Mirai has a range record of 845 miles on a single 6kg fill-up. The range record is at a low speed, but it's just as valid as the tests that give Teslas their best range figures. In normal use they're more than competitive with ICE and BEV vehicles.

That needs a filling time roughly about the same as an ICE car. And there are a few filling stations close to my house- though admittedly we're in an area that's more accepting of the technology than most.

Hydrogen powers some local cars, local busses, and local refuse trucks. The busses and trucks didn't need special weight-limit increases as their BEV equivalents did.

Anyone who thinks it can't be done, and can't be done practically, you're years behind the times. They're here, in the real world, in multiple classes of vehicle, commercially available.

Re: you can't cheat with physics

The 13% of energy that's thrown away doesn't matter to its use as a fuel for vehicles. What matters is how much usable energy can be extracted from it by that vehicle for a given weight and/or volume of fuel, storage, and energy-extraction equipment.

The liquid hydrogen you referred to is around an order of magnitude more energy dense than the best lithium batteries. And can be burned or put through a fuel cell to extract power. That makes it a VERY good fuel.

65 years of NASA's meatball: Original logo lives on despite detractors

Re: Meatball

Surely the appropriate names for the logos would be the 'Meatball' and 'His Noodly Appendage'?

Parliamentarians urge next UK govt to consider ban on smartphones for under-16s

Re: Does not go far enough!

A hole kept warm by burning meteorite debris? Luxury.

NYC Comptroller and hedge funds urge Tesla shareholders to deny Musk $50B windfall

He was told if he did something, he'd get a bonus.

He did the thing.

If there's any way he didn't do the thing, or did the thing in a way that was illegal, deny him it. Really go digging for things.

If there was a conflict, like he set the task and it was trivial (e.g. Musk himself set the terms as $50Bn if the stock price rises $0.000001 while no-one else was present), then investigate that.

But if he legitimately met the terms of the agreement, pay the man.

UK's National Cyber Security Centre entry code cracks up critics

How dare they?

Broadcasting my credit card PIN all over the place?! This is a security nightmare.

UK inertia on LLMs and copyright is 'de facto endorsement'

Value of Data

"If you go too far down a path where it's very hard to obtain data to train models, then all of a sudden, the ability to do so will only be the preserve of very large companies."

What they're saying here is that this data has value, they can see the value of it. So there's something there worth protecting.

Australia’s spies and cops want ‘accountable encryption’ - aka access to backdoors

I don't even need a proof, they can leave the implementation to someone else. I just want them to provide a concept of how they think it could possibly work that encryption is end-to-end secure unless a judge decides it isn't.

As far as I can tell, if we had some sort of magic gate that only allowed the good guys through, we'd have no worries about this sort of thing anyway.

Europe's deepest mine to become Europe's deepest battery

MW of storage?!

MW IS NOT A UNIT OF ENERGY STORAGE.

If this is 2MW for 30 seconds it's not much use. If it's 2MWh then it's barely worth doing compared to battery storage.

Give us a value in MWh or Joules. Barrels of Oil Equivalent. Or reword it to it reducing a maximum of 2MW of power.

Come on, Register, you used to call out other publications for this sort of crap. Be better.

A big pile of Uranium is less polluting and about 10,000,000x more dense a store of energy.

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

Re: Call it molehilling.

I misread that initially as Mohel-ing.

Though that's more removing external than adding .INTERNAL

You might have been phished by the gang that stole North Korea’s lousy rocket tech

Re: Peak macro?

Just because you can't see the need doesn't mean there isn't one.

In MS Office post-2003, Macros already need their own format that explicitly does contain a macro. So any normal DOCX is, by definition, not macro-enabled. Anything else should be treated with suspicion and can be easily automatically recognised and flagged as a potential attack vector.

This seems like the best solution, covering not just your use-case but also the rest of the world.

Software company wins $154k for US Navy's licensing breach

Re: "Bitmanagement [..] disabled the copy protection software on BS Contact Geo"

It doesn't need to phone home. Just verify itself against a key, or a dongle, or a number scribbled on the installation media. Some unique method of identifying individual installations.

If they'd deliberately and knowingly re-used license keys that would have been a completely different scenario to them copying software that had consensually been de-protected by the owner.

Aviation regulators push for more automation so flights can be run by a single pilot

Boeing

A poster child for why we need very tough Corporate Manslaughter laws with the punishments at the top levels of the corporation.

Tesla Full Self-Driving 'fails' to notice child-sized objects in testing

Re: Comparison

You're claiming that calling a product "Full Self Driving" doesn't amount to a claim that the thing is fully self driving?

Full-time internet surveillance comes to Cambodia this week

Re: Okay, hypothetical question

That will quickly be detected and removed. It's like the people saying SSH and VPNs are a solution. Last time I went to China for work both of those were unavailable.

This was a proper commercial VPN between a business-y hotel, from a room occupied by someone with a business visa, and a corporate network. It couldn't have been mistaken for someone wanting to watch porn, or some snotty youth wanting to get get banned Netflix.

If you think you've got a simple solution to this, you're wrong. When the Firewall team's necks are on the line for missing leaks, they get very good very quickly.

Rocket Lab goes large with Neutron – a big rocket for big constellations. Oh, and it confirms a merger proposal

Re: Way to go!

As this is El Reg, maybe we should wish them "Ad Astra Tabernamque"!

I'll finish my icon and get my coat.

President Biden to issue executive order on chip shortages as under-pressure silicon world begs for help

Re: Trickle down my arse.

Oh, absolutely. The Free Market lot are absolutely the ones calling for Government intervention.

They might CLAIM to be fans of the free market, but have a look at all the Government market manipulation that they already enjoy and you can see that they're really not all that into it. This is Corporatism, not Capitalism.

Arm at 30: From Cambridge to the world, one plucky British startup changed everything

Re: British?

You've also won the Gold Medal of RTFA.

You can't spell 'electronics' without 'elect': The time for online democracy has come

You missed important points.

Yes, it is technically possible to vote securely. Obviously.

But now figure out how to vote securely, knowing that the voter is an actual voter, and giving that voter the ability to audit both their vote being recorded correctly and counted. And it has to be simple enough that old Mrs Miggins down the road can grasp it.

Now make that system absolutely anonymous, so there's no way someone can make a list of which votes were cast by which voters. And, if the vote is incorrectly recorded, allow it to be updated- again secretly.

Anything short of an auditable secret ballot is going to be screwed with.

Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member

Absolutely.

This is just the sort of change Linux needs. Good forward-thinking changes. Maybe HTML formatting could be brought into the Terminal too, and format-sensitivity so programs know bold arguments are to be taken extra seriously.

I can't wait for them to release a Kernel written in something more advanced, like Java. Come on Linus, get all that hardware-specific rubbish out of the kernel!

Smart fridges are cool, but after a few short years you could be stuck with a big frosty brick in the kitchen

The problem is definitions

If the 'smarts' are held in the Cloud, the device on it's own shouldnt be considered 'smart'.

Interfaces should be documented, 'intelligence' should be built into smart devices.

They may connect to Cloud services (securely, privately) to provide a richer experience. But the core functionality that makes them 'smart' should be accessible with no internet.

Nine million logs of Brits' road journeys spill onto the internet from password-less number-plate camera dashboard

Re: No login details or authentication of any sort was needed to view and search the live system

Blaming and jailing the bosses means people in those positions take these problems seriously.

Fining doesnt work as they dont pay the fine. Firing doesnt work as they can quickly get a new job. Jail time for gross negligence, with a condition that it's not considered 'spent' for 10 years after the event, is something that's indelibly on their record.

Give protection to whistleblowers and try to protect people from false allegations or set-ups. Maybe have punishments increase as a function of time the system has been open and time between them being informed and acting on it.

But they need to get this right every single time. These systems should be installed only where they are so critically necessary, so well regulated and so well tested that teams of people will properly put their necks on the line to create and install them.

Re: No login details or authentication of any sort was needed to view and search the live system

SEVERAL people should go to prison over this.

A couple of Heads of local government, a local chief of police, whoever's in charge of the ANPR system, and whoever approved this contract without taking proper care towards privacy. And also whoever in 3M/Neology who didnt require top-end security as a default for this sort of installation.

Make ANPR politically and commercially impossible to install or maintain unless it is safe and secure.

After all, if the other implementers of this technology have done everything right they have nothing to fear. That's the line they like, isnt it?

Hello, support? What do I click if I want some cash?

Re: Wrong tool for the job.

Why not?

Surprise! Plans for a Brexit version of the EU's Galileo have been delayed

Re: Good

GPS does a lot more than navigate idiots through fields and off cliffs.

It's also used to synchronise timing devices, a key part of things like mobile phones, ST2110 video devices, and even some sensors for underwater use.

Rely on GPS for all that and if the Americans wanted to they could throw those systems out of whack, degrading until they failed.

Other Commentards: What other uses can you think of for GPS?