Posts by Christoph

US Marines' latest anti-drone toy is an AI turret that uses regular machine guns

Re: The Terminator ...

Not so much Terminator as Manshonyagger.

Comment in code read 'Dear future me, sorry I wrote this'

My very first ever program, when I got the print-out back I found that I had sent the output to LPO instead of LP0.

Corrected that one punched card and resubmitted, and it worked perfectly.

Judgment day looms for UK's £8.35B Skynet military satellite comms upgrade

"department-wide recruitment and resourcing constraints had created workforce shortages"

Save money by strangling resources so it ends up taking far longer, costing more, and not working properly.

Anthropic is removing its covert code for catching Chinese competitors

Re: The biter bit?

"You're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen." -- Vizzini

Security boss thought MFA would be too much security

Re: Not quite the same but...

Fire alarm test. I come down the stairs to the ground floor. There is a queue of people coming up from the basement, past the window, left and along to the building core, left to the main entry, left to the side door, then left and along outside the building past that window to the evacuation area in the car park.

I step through that line of people, hit the locking bar on the window, step through and head for the car park.

Re: CYA

I once heard of someone implementing a network of ATMs on an ATM network. Though as far as I know they weren't using ATM fonts.

UK school’s network left wide open for invasion, student found

Should have done a Feynman

Leave a prominent note saying "Guess Who?"

No longer just a Copilot, Microsoft's AI wants to take the wheel

Look this thing will be hugely useful

It will keep everything organised for you, take on all the trivial boring tasks, and leave you able to concentrate on the important things.

OK, it may make the occasional minor error - make an appointment for the wrong time, invite the wrong people to a meeting, turn your entire company into a smoking crater in the ground, that sort of thing.

London’s BT Tower to get rooftop swimming pool

Re: Ideas wanted, please add yours below.

But did they have luminous Sundials?

Met Police's Palantir deployment has its own officers watching their backs

Or are Walking while Black.

NASA boss: make Pluto a planet again

Re: exoplanets

He can sit on the Toad stool.

Re: Cleared orbit

But how do you classify the elephants and the turtle?

There's also the problem that for some objects we don't have enough data to classify them - so not only will we not know how many planets the Sun has, we won't even know how many we have found so far!

Plus if Pluto is reclassified as a planet, the USA will insist that it be renamed Trump.

Using the password 'admin123' wasn't as bad as sharing it on Slack

Re: I'm surprised...

It's much better than Vu+}?8wV?5TPy2cLBqc= which absolutely will be written on a post-it note and stuck to a screen, as well as be sent by email because you'll never be able to verbally communicate it.

You don't write it, send it, or verbally communicate it. You paste it in from your password manager program.

Pentagon wants to water down drone program with autonomous subs

There will be a big market for these to ship unconventional trade items across the border from Mexico.

Microsoft gives your Word documents an AI co-author you didn’t ask for

Re: LibreOffice.

LibreOffice has its problems (transferring an Access app to Base is a pain) but with the EU switching to it (and to similar forks) it will hopefully get a massive boost.

Scotland Yard can keep using live facial recognition on people in London, say judges

Re: no one has a reasonable expectation of privacy in public

It is more than reasonable to expect to be able to walk down the street or cross the road or go into a shop or... without being tracked by PC Plod's snoopercams.

If you are a teenager, and especially if you are black, you can expect to be stopped and searched while walking down the street.

The company's biggest security hole lived in the breakroom

Internet -connected coffee machine

Hard-code it to return Error 418 to all enquiries.

Britain spends £180M to work out what time it is

"using state-of-the-art cesium clocks; so accurate that it would take 160 million years for them to drift by just one second."

That's not the time keeping state-of-the-art! The current state of the art is around one second in 30 billion years - longer than the current age of the Universe. And they're working on a way to make them ten times more accurate.

UK watchdog eyes Meta's smart glasses after workers say they 'see everything'

From Orwell's '2027'

They sprang apart. Winston’s entrails seemed to have turned into ice. He could see the white all round the irises of Julia’s eyes. Her face had turned a milky yellow. The smear of rouge that was still on each cheekbone stood out sharply, almost as though unconnected with the skin beneath.

‘You are the dead,’ repeated the iron voice.

‘It was behind the picture,’ breathed Julia.

'No you bloody fool, you're wearing it!' said the iron voice.

The fix inches closer: Iowa moves farm right-to-repair bill forward

"That would break our business model so we demand it be made illegal."

Desktop tech sent to prison for an education on strange places to put tattoos

Re: Hazing = abuse

Compressed air can get into the blood stream and cause an embolism.

Re: Hazing = abuse

I don't think that's a sacking offence. It's a criminal offence.

Crims hit a $20M jackpot via malware-stuffed ATMs

"Program storage has been removed or amended. Contact central bank for the authorisation code to re-enable this machine."

In-house techies fixed faults before outsourced help even noticed they'd happened

Way back in the 60s the keyholder for a particular device lived well out of town and had no car and no telephone.

The device was the siren to give four minutes warning of a nuclear attack.

Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

Re: Users and printing devices...

The boss insisted we reused old print-outs in the laser printer by printing on the back. This was a false economy anyway as it often didn't work and you had to print again - the extra toner cost more than the paper you saved.

I'm not sure what eventually happened but I suspect someone re-used a sheet of paper that had a staple in it. The replacement drum cost far more than any saving.

Court tosses appeal by hacker who opened port to coke smugglers with malware

The trial was unfair! They used Evidence against me!

Sorry mate, you have to be a politician or extremely rich to get away with that one.

SSL Santa greets London Victoria visitors with a borked update

Re: Roadside billboards

A few years back the £$%^&* Post Office decided to monetise the constant long queues by blaring adverts at them.

They did disappear again, presumably due to the volume of infuriated complaints.

Garmin autopilot lands small aircraft without human assistance

But can they make one that can land on the Hudson river?

Starlink satellite fails, polluting orbit with debris and falling toward Earth

"the release of a small number of trackable low relative velocity objects."

"hundreds" of debris objects associated with the incident were being tracked

So according to Musk, "hundreds" is "a small number".

And how many untrackable objects?

MI6 chief: We'll be as fluent in Python as we are in Russian

Python - because the space between peace and war is significant.

British Airways fears a future where AI agents pick flights and brands get ghosted

what they love doing, which is interacting with customers

Yes, their staff absolutely adore being shouted at in fury by someone demanding they magically make a spare aircraft appear, or wave a wand to move a hurricane away from the destination airport.

Re: Worst case scenario

And don't forget to pre-pay to use the steps!

Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours

Re: Lost for words

Only /tmp [and /var/tmp] require[s] 1777 (== 777 with the T-bit set).

Do applications ever store confidential information in temporary files? I wonder if anyone's ever written something to scan such files?

DARPA making low-hanging satellites that use air to move

Re: How can this work?

It is presumably solar powered, giving effectively unlimited lifetime.

However there is an obvious problem.

The more power you need, the bigger the solar panels have to be.

The bigger the panels are, the more aerodynamic drag there is.

The more aerodynamic drag, the more power you need.

This will require careful balancing!

FCC looks to torch Biden-era cyber rules sparked by Salt Typhoon mess

How dare you expect me to lock the bank's vault door every time I leave the vault? I don't have time for this nonsense!

First stellar Coronal Mass Ejection detected beyond our Sun

Get Lone Star to flip the switch to put the atmosphere back.

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

No, comms across the disc go by clacks.

Smile! Uncle Sam wants to scan your face on the way in – and out

Re: I'm not planning to visit the United Hell Holes any time soon

You are perfectly safe, they would never put you in a crocodile infested facility.

Alligators however . . .

The Chinese Box and Turing Test: AI has no intelligence at all

Seen elsenet: AI is three autocompletes in a trenchcoat

Digital ID is now less about illegal working, more about rummaging through drawers

Re: Let's rebrand Starmer...

he claimed customers were "really excited about it,"

Citizen #666 hasn't quite gone full Trump yet then. They weren't calling him 'sir' with tears in their eyes.

Britain's Ministry of Justice just signed up to ChatGPT Enterprise

Computers administering justice? What could possibly go wrong?

Computers Don't Argue By Gordon R Dickson. 1965!

Microsoft finance slang defines the eternal optimist: The 'hockey stick on wheels'

Fusion power has been on wheels for decades! Always 30 years away.

China's CR450 bullet train clocks 453 km/h in pre-service tests

Absolutely. My first reaction was imagining what might happen if the slightest thing went wrong. If something derailed it that train could demolish acres of buildings down to the foundations.

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

Fax? It'll never replace Telex!

AI boffins teach office supplies to predict your next move

Day 1: Introduce objects that move under your hand when you reach for them.

Day 2: System is hacked so that the objects scuttle out of the way every time you try to grab them.

Can open source be saved from the EU's Cyber Resilience Act?

If the only maintainer of a critical open source program dies, who is going to risk taking over maintaining it and being legally liable for sorting out any existing bugs?

Texas senators cry foul over Smithsonian's pricey Space Shuttle shuffle

I can move it for them far cheaper than that!

I have this trebuchet.

Amazon grounds drone deliveries in Arizona after two crashed into a crane

Re: How to parse this?

To lose one drone, Mr. Bezos, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

US gov shutdown leaves IT projects hanging, security defenders a skeleton crew

speed the entry of AI into the federal workforce

Our AI powered Department of War has just declared war on San Serriffe.