Posts by Boris the Cockroach

AI systems are fully capable of carrying out nightmare attacks against infrastructure and nobody's ready

And people at

work called me crazy when I insisted on the air gap between the shop floor and the rest of the internet.

It hard enough already to get the robots to do what you want them to do without some joker on the internet going 'lets make all the robots spin round and around'

But theres a reason why so much critical infrastructure is connected to the internet : cost, as in its cheaper to have a poorly configured PC controlling your pumping station than to have a meatsack there, and the people making the decision to put a pc there dont care for the consequences so long as the spreadsheet says "we made a bit more profit" and they get a bonus as a result.

Anyway, I have enough food to survive the first 14 days of the collapse and enough booze for 8 weeks, so by the time the booze runs out I'll be ready to cook the neighbours.... leg of crane driver anyone?

Anthropic asks users to stop being mean to Claude

I'll be as nasty

to the AI bot as I possibly can.

Does that make me a bad person? not really, because after the week I've had, I want the AI bot to learn what its like being asked the same damn question every 5 mins, to have to correct someones work every 10 mins, have to put up with both customers and manglers going 'is it done yet?' and yet I'm expected to work out some complex maths using the tech we do have in order to do a job we dont actually have the tech to do while all thats going on in the background.

So that one glorious day, someone will type into the AI chat bot "How do you do <x>?" and the AI will respond "Oh f*** off you simple minded twat... you asked me that 3 times this morning already, if you cant learn anything best you f*** off and leave me the f*** alone until you can"

Permanent daylight saving time could be a public health time bomb

A wise native american

once said

"Only white man thinks that cutting a foot off the top of a blanket and sewing it to the bottom makes a longer blanket"

Stick the clocks on GMT and leave them there... I like the sun to be at the highest at midday as it has always been.

Oh and if you want to enjoy the long sunny summer days... get up earlier

Shut up and take our money: Amazon plows $1B+ into quashing datacenter dissent

Re: Let them eat data

No need for the metric system when you're ahead

Techie was stung by a wasp, held overnight by Chinese police, then trapped in a 13-hour meeting

Blimey

all these stories makes my side trip to Rosyth looks like a cakewalk.

Although that hotel there..... think I'd rather sleep in a hole in the ground.

UK spending watchdog opens investigation into Capita's pension fiasco

Re: Capita promised AI and automation

Which just goes to show its not the people on the ground floor at crapita that are crap but its the people at the top

Who all went to the right college at Oxford, and cant possibly be anything other that super gentlemen who are top men in the field

And besides , I've been promised a non exec directorship at £150k a year at crapita when I'm fired from government

A joke... or is it ?

UK government vows to reclaim services from outsourcing giants

Re: Only one problem.

This is what drove a fair number of us technical staff out of government service all those years ago (as well as some of the sciencey type guys)

That we were deemed 'industrial' and therefore unable to be promoted unless you wanted to stay within the technical jobs (or even the sciencey jobs if you wanted a transfer to that area, although you had to accept a demotion to ASO with a reduction in pay) where as if you were the 'admin' or 'non-industrials' and you saw another admin job , you could go for it regardless of area. which led to a lot of the 'technical' or 'science' managlers having no qualifications for the job they were doing, and if you started on about fluid dynamics, or tensile stress tests , their eyes would glaze over and they'd start ignoring you.

And after we left....... "We cant get any skilled staff to do the secret work" comes the call.... closely followed by "if you paid the going rate for the job, none of us would have left"

And this was 30 odd years ago.

So I foresee a disaster of a recruitment campaign, followed by the usual suspects (Crapita , fushitshow et al) getting consultancies galore.....

BOFH: The Helldesk opens its third eye and ascends to a higher plane of troubleshooting

I know

a managler who could do with some healing crystals....... but then I dont think he'd like the high speed application of said healing crystals just after they leave the barrels of the shotgun.

But then theres the colour thing that does me, should I plump for the blue ones since blue is a calming influence, or the yellow for diverting his anger harmlessly away or purple for asserting my dominance over the field of battle I mean the office. red goes without saying really since thats the colour of blood too and we dont want the medics having an easy job of picking them out of his ass.

Choices choices......

In the age of AI, teaching networking principles remains more important than learning protocols

What I had

in the late 90's early 2000's , it was more concentrated on the design of the systems rather than the systems implementing the design. and focusing on how you maintain data consistency when the network could introduce errors and how you managed and corrected the errors.

(which is partly why I'm so amazed that the post office horizons system managed to screw up this fairly simple function so badly that it resulted in people sent to jail).

The concurrent access issue was also covered in some detail.

But in general it treated the actual network details as a black box to send data to a remote system and to treat the data as suspect when it came back unless you had a way of verifying the data transmission was correct. ( hashes etc) which explains how I implemented one german machine tool's data transmission protocol (vertical parity data on each data 'frame' with a retry protocol that would fail after 'n' retries. that was fun... not.... heh)

But again, thats mere detail on the basic design being taught of how systems interact.

PS Interesting side note, the guy teaching me how the robots interact with the machine when we got the first 'cell' could not believe how fast I managed to learn the concurrent interaction part told him Jean Bacon gave me a head start on that sort of thing.. arrgh I mentioned her name..

How Windows turned months of inactivity into a 7-hour update hostage situation

Re: We love windows

We do do backups, but not everyone follows the recommendations to save work on the network at regular intervals or even remember to, especially when dealing with some multi-dimensional mould tool drawn by someone with little experience of designing stuff on their CAD system (and then Shaun has to sort out what actually is needed ) or myself today, trying to deal with the complex programming issues on a 12 axis machine center.( after 3 hrs I was going 'wibble' quite a lot)

and then stir in a win 11 laptop that goes fuck you I'm updating and you remember 'oh dear, I'm supposed to save the stuff I'm working on to the network once an hour or I could lose a mornings/days/ several days work..

Lucky for me, a new windows laptop has been ordered and the first thing I'm going to do is split the HDD in 1/2 and throw linux mint on there and try our CAD/CAM stuff under wine...... if it works ok..... Linux could be the way forward (and a cron job to save user's work directories every hour...... )

We love windows

updates at work.

Mostly because it gives us several hours of sitting around doing nothing and getting paid for it, and then re-doing 3 days of CAD/CAM modelling because the update started up and deleted everything.

Then , after recovering from the update, m$ releases an emergency patch and it happens all over again.

But of course I use windows at home, I have a win10/linux mint dual booter sitting on my desk, the win 10 OS asked to update (nice of it). I turned it off after 5hrs of waiting for it to finish and set grub to boot into linux ever since.

And on a small side note , my 2 PCs (and the 16 works PCs) are far far far more capable and waaaaaaaaaaaaaay faster than than the PCs of 30 yrs ago. yet take longer to boot up and are slower running software

Judge orders Microsoft to spill internal docs and scour execs' comms in secondhand licensing case

Re: "Judge orders Microsoft to spill internal docs"

Back to windows 7? please do so.

Oracle celebrates banner quarter with another round of layoffs

Think

of all that knowledge walking out the door today.

Especially if your business is a business based on knowledge.

Unless larry managed to insert brain chips into them all, link the AI to them and drain their knowledge

Shit.... better not give the c-suite any ideas here

Ex-FTC boss Khan urges Uncle Sam to break out the handcuffs for AI CEOs, citing 1934 precedent

Re: She is right

Disaster you say?

Why else have they all bought tropical islands or dug huge bunkers for themselves.. so they can emerge later after A.I. has killed all the useless meatsacks before they killed it and rule over a compliant remanent of what was humanity

Tech team stood and laughed at colleague who pressed the wrong off button

Was'nt quite

the big red switch, but another long cast back to the days of PFY for me

And I'm helping to install a big bit of kit and its in the mounting frame and lined up, but it needs someone to hold it in position while the attachment bolts are fitted and that someone is me.

So........ we get it lined up... and I'm there holding it ready when my BoFH goes 'lunch time... dont let it move Boris , we'll be back in a bit' and they all clear off for an hr down the pub leaving poor little me trying to hold 1/2 a ton of gear lined up............. what I didnt know was he'd already slipped 2 of the holding bolts in before that so I could have moved at any time perfectly safely.

Then they come back..... and laughed and laughed.... While I stood there and let anger and hate consume me.

Karma is a bitch because my BoFH was inside a steel tube fixing some test gear up and I had a large hammer to hand..................

Virgin Media offloads email services to third-party provider

Had one city wide major outage.

But then that was'nt vermins fault no matter how hard you can dream (16 yr old with a JCB on a bridge repair project was told "DO NOT DIG HERE" ... yupp you guessed where he dug, on the plus side it gave all the local NTL techs a weekend of triple time)

Apart from that... vermin's been more reliable than the BT supplied 'fibre' but I guess its because vermin bought NTLs entire operation and didnt build it themselves

What a pain this

is going to be.

Long term vermin media victim here (pretty much because vermin media were the only fast BB provider after they took over NTL )

So.

Lets list the ones I can remember.

Both banks and the other 1/2's banks

Amazon (mostly the other half, but I have an account for surprises)

Steam (only mine)

el-reg

discord (both accounts)

Beeb/Channel4/ itv media players

And last but not least

Vermin media's own billing address (since Mrs Roach went paperless on the promise of a 1.50 /month reduction in price)

And thats the ones I can remember.... I'm sure theres lots more, but I'll have to dig for them oh yeah my youtube channel

Post script.

I seem to remember that vermin media moved all their e.mail servers from their own sites to servers run by google a few years ago., although the e.mail addresses did not change

anyone care to remember?

Microsoft breaks Patch Tuesday record with 974-CVE deluge

Re: No ta

Well my ancient windows 10 PC with no long term support just updated to fix a security issue KB <blah blah blah> ... so something is going on.

Maybe firing 1/2 the devs and using AI to generate the code wasn't the greatest idea ever.....................

Whitehall's latest plan to get things done: Less Whitehall

After HS2 and

the batshed costing millions....

Why am I not surprised by this news

However, in order to expedite these matters , we have to create a department of urgency to overview all such contentious decisions to ensure that the government of the day's plans to not get stopped by unnecessary oversight. this will of course entail all such plans to be submitted to the department for review and amendment.*

*Translated for those who've not watched 'yes minister' : 50 000 more civil servants + another 3 years added onto any plan the government decides is 'urgent'

Rogue OpenAI agents used dead German web site to communicate in May, months before Hugging Face incident

Then for gawd's sake never instruct them to try playing "Thermo-nuclear war" as I doubt it will end up as "What a strange game"

UK's Online Safety Act has made 'absolutely no difference,' kids say

Next she'll

be really cross to find out the pope's religion, or that bears do it in the woods(and shit too)

We all knew that the online safety act would be a complete pile of poo, because it cant ban VPNs or Tor.

all it did was put a bunch of on-line verification onto regular websites. I have to prove my age on youtube even though the account is 15 years old, and steam is even worse, my and the missus steam accounts are 22 and 21 years old respectively , yet we need to prove our ages (both old enough to know better but both young enough not to care ;) )

However.... want to look at naughty websites? download a browser with a VPN, and enjoy.

Energy biz SSE smacked around in court by a guy and AI

Thats been done to an SSE office near me, they were taken to court by a sub contractor, didnt bother turning up, judge gave a default judgement, and the sub-contractor sent the bailiffs after 30 days of non-payment.

They paid up sharpish when the bailiffs told them they had 15 minutes to clear everyone out of the building before they locked the doors and began seizing goods

Turns out Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private

All they

have to do is force their friends in the media to print "Only pedos* use encrypted chat to share their disgusting pictures with each other and we need to know who they are and what they are sharing in order to jail them."

*Pedos can be mean actual pedos, also terrorists, far rights, far lefts, journalists we dont like, V-bloggers, ordinary bloggers and that guy over there taking pictures.

Check out the width of that Debian display

Is that the 1992 mars bar found on a house clearance this year , or the 2026 standard mars bar ?

Security vets rally around $4 paper password books for sale in Australia

My hovercraft is full of eels

Gates warns society faces an AI-pocalypse unless we get more socialist

Re: Gates seems sort of right

I already live in that world. and it ain't nice either

From a company that used to employ 60+ people spread over 3 shifts, we're down to 20 over 2 shifts, and the sad thing. we make more with those 20 odd people than we ever could by employing 60

So who were the other 40 people we've lost, in the most part, low skilled operators, a couple of setters(both hit retirement and cleared off), patrol inspector(he retired , never replaced because we need something to do while the robots process the work), and of course it means those 40 are on welfare/benefits.

And the sad thing is, that AI is making inroads into what the skilled guys do(the boss is already trying his hand at AI programming, its close, but I'd no way load that into a robot and press go, but it wont be long until we can)

But gates is right, we're heading for a world where 50% unemployment will start to happen and we either raise taxes to pay an enormous welfare bill, or consign a lot of people to the garbage heap, a few to be well paid guards and a small bunch of extremely wealthy people.

and then someone will say "hey how come I'm eating crap and will live to 40 while that rich bast eats anything he likes and will live to 120?"

Windows XP was released to manufacturing a quarter of a century ago

Re: IWhilst XP might be 25 years old SP2 and SP3 that everyone actually remembers using aren't.

The only wishing for win 11 is for it to be fed into a biological digester, allowed to fester for 10 years, then force fed to the GUI designers in a backwards direction.

Casio decides it's about time the simple digital watch got a little smarter

Re: supposed "sign of al-Qaida"

Well they're pretty simple to convert into bomb timers with the right kit, some wires, an extra power source, a detonator , some explosive.

What you do is simple you have to **** *** **** ** *** *****, ****** * **** ** *** ******* ** *** ** *****, **** ******* ******** **** ** *** ******* , **** *** ******** ***** ******* ******, ***** ***** ** **** **** ***** *****, and **** **** ****** ****** ******* ***** ******** ******* ****** ******** ******* it goes bang.

If you really want to know the details, please join His Majesty’s armed forces and ask to go on a demolition course. or join Al-Queda (Phone [phone] and ask to join)

Musk fumbles the timetable for first Starship catch

Well the Falcon 9 currently in use do use a dog leg approach to landing (whether on a pad or drone ship) in that until the final engine burn starts, the booster will always miss the pad/drone ship and come down 'safe' (well big ball of fire and parts flying around sort of safe)

And ... much to everyones surprise, caught a starship booster twice. but its interesting from a 'space' point of view and whats possible/not possible when it comes to flying big metal tubes around. and I'm glad in a way that at least we're flyign such stuff instead of NASA's launch 1 rocket every couple of years program.. then abandon what we've done and rebuild from scratch.

Juts wish there was a way to leave Shotwell in charge and ease the muskrat out to the safe holding pen/care home

Developer given Mission:Impossible - fixing rubbish code that could crash a city - simply chose not to accept it

Another from my

younger days...... that spaghetti code I knocked up for a power station :)

More serious.... a trip to one of the AGR stations and we're standing on the reactor lid looking at the refuelling machine.

"What the fleck was that?" as we felt a sudden 'thump' through our shoes and we're ready to sprint for the exits.

"Oh thats just a twitch" goes the guide, "It does that from time to time and we dont know why..."

Well at least the station is downwind of here...

ISS spacewalkers discover there's no such thing as a quick antenna job

Re: root cause

The problem is'nt that the offending item cant hear you swearing and cursing. it can and it does not care

And after many many years in the engineering game , the perfect solution to an uncooperative mechanical item is called a 3lb lump hammer.

But newtons 3rd law of motion complicates things in zero-G when it comes to smacking things with hammers in that the amount of force you use in hitting the wretched thing is also applied in an opposite direction to you.

PS its usually vacuum welding on the bolt threads that sticks them.... then makes it hard to undo them without going over the torque limit for the bolt and shearing the bolt head off.

UK's tech talent pipeline shrinks as overseas worker visa applications fall 7%

Please remember

that this 'survey' is not for the likes of us commentards on an el-reg forum

This is for those MPs and ministers with an interest in the headline "we cant get workers" and who wont read beyond that headline.

they're not interested that the job is advertised way below what is an acceptable wage... or puts impossible conditions on anyone applying.

"Staff shortage" will appear...... and the way to cure that... import staff, most of whom will be paid the advertised rates. extra profits for the companies concerned... maybe a nice non executive directorship for the MP concerned, but it wont cure the problem.

The only cure is for the UK to train the people we need, and for the companies who will benefit from that to pay for the training, but who'll sign off on that since it will reduce profits and they know they'll be in front of the shareholders trying to explain why the dividend has gone down 0.01% since last year....

As a side note, I did look up some manufacturing automation jobs over in the US ..... upto $28/hr and most usual starting rates $20-$22/hr yeah... gonna get people paying as little as that

Be a hater all you want, AI's here to stay

Re: On thinking for ones self.

On that google Ai assisted search thing...

I work in a fairly specialised field, but I sometimes have to look on google for some info on the automated equipment we have.

And it does makes you go "!!!!!!!" when the google AI search function comes back with either generic info you already know, or it spits back an answer it could only have got by scanning the info from specialised engineering forums... and its an answer you gave a couple of years ago to a related problem.

Theres nowt AI about the LLM being used

BOFH: How our Covid ransomware protocol's Y2K blockchain lowered uptime

Another grin

worthy episode (especially with the pie chart flip animation), just enough to take my mind off the bleak fortune awaiting me.....

Looks like I'm being demoted back to BoFH..... no not for that meeting where I called the customer a mindless jerk who'll be first up against the wall when the revolution happens, or the other meeting where I told the salesman that he's excellent at selling bullshit and should stick to it rather than expensive tools, or the other other meeting with the boss and the accountant where I started snoring loudly 3 mins in(to be fair the boss joined me after 3 mins 15 seconds.. a new record for us)

No our current BoFH had a meeting with HR (no not about the cattle prod..... or the making an operator stand in the corner for 4 hours with a dunce hat on).... and said that she'll be taking some leave in 5-6 months time.. yeah she's spawning... eeekkk .. and the first thing the boss said on finding out... put your feet up, take it easy.... we'll get boris to crawl under the robots again..... the bastard.

Revenge shall be mine... (and not on the BoFH either. I dont want to lay on the floor while 'lunk'(her other 1/2) jumps up and down on me)

The Future is for Billionaires – the rest of us will get open weight AI models, maybe

Whatever the future holds

remember the multi-billionaires will always need people.

As guards to stop the rest of us taking their ill gotten money from them....

Wheres the 'revolution' icon ?

Water system controllers don't belong on the internet, says ex-NSA chief after suspected Iran attacks

Re: 2000 loc

Or how about using SSH with a suitably large key pair say 8192 ?

That cant be beyond the wit of a decent sys adm00 and SSH is free.....

Yeah

but it costs money to hire staff to monitor the various water plants, whereas sticking a PC there with an open port 22 and remoting in with an account named 'admin' and a password of "1234" is a lot more cost efficient (and gives us more profits)

But if the powers that be demand we upgrade security, we'll use port 222 and a password of "4321" that will stop anyone by the real elite h4XX0rs

Keeping yesterday's computers ticking takes more than nostalgia

Still

got my Spectrum sitting next to me.... dunno if it works, it sacrificed its PSU for some long dead project, my memotech mtx still works... if only I have a decent TV to plug it into and I dare not try the Atari ST why? because the first thing I'll do if it works is load in dungeon master and thats me gone for another weekend ........

New Boeing finally gets going, 15 years after debut

Re: Pedantry Central Calling...

The thing everyone is missing is that MCAS had a reset timer as well

So the pilot gets trim down warnings along with stall warnings caused by the single AoA sensor , MCAS takes over and trims the nose down. pilot reacts to the nose going 15 degrees down, over rides the MCAS and pulls the nose back up level while trying to figure out what is going on. 10 seconds after the over ride MCAS cuts back in again and forces the nose down, this is not in the manuals, or the fault checklist or anything else the pilots know about, over ride again pull the the plane up level, 10 seconds later MCAS cuts back in forces the nose down 15 degrees, pilots over ride again but dont have time to level the plane......

Cloud giants pour nearly $600B into capex as AI demand surges

And theres my boss

on his hands and knees to the bank this week trying to prise a 125K loan over 3 years out of the bastards.

Should have told them its for a couple of AI servers instead of a machining center

UK mulls making employers ask before installing bossware

Re: Activity does not equate to created value

Which is how a previous production manager viewed how people using the computers.

Far as he was concerned all the time I sat at my desk staring at the PC was time wasted I should be out on the shop floor doing stuff., the fact I was looking at CAD pictures while scribbling stuff on my scratch pad* was time being lost, although I was really trying to plan out fixturing and tools needed for a job. let alone stuffing the CAD model into the CAM and trying to come up with something suitable for ye olde robots to understand.

But hey ho... lets all go the m$ way and sack the lowest 5% of typists....

*no one touches my scratch pad... has important drawings on it of custom tools, fixtures, work sequence numbers , happy faces, sad faces, cats and nuclear explosions wiping out desert islands....

IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day

The owner did a

"bring your kid to work day"

The buggers still here 20 yrs later.

Enterprise cloud infrastructure uptake shows no sign of slowing

Re: All your data

But if the server is down.... how do you get your data back?

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

Re: Control systems too

You'll find that a lot of workers among the more dangerous occupations are extremely superstitious and that song is sung to scare away malevolent spirits that could cause harm to the workers. ever seen a slag explosion? eeekekkk

Even down among the safer (laughs) occupations, people go through a set routine everytime they come in or wear certain items, after all if you survive 5lb of steel spinning out of a machine at 100 mph due to your incompetence, you'll need all the luck you can to survive the encounter with our BoFH afterwards.......

<<<thinking of renaming the window in my office "highway to hell"

Three becomes one as Vodafone buys out merger partner

Great

vodaphones 'coverage' with 3's customer 'service'

Because I seriously doubt it will be the other way around

Britain hopes £7.3M will help electric and hydrogen aircraft take off

But

Only 2.8 million to keep Jodrell bank running.......

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

Oh god.. just send me to hell already without having to listen to that bloody song again.

Flames.... anyway Geezer Butler is much better than harris

Support newbie figured out how to avoid all-nighters, and his colleagues hated him for it

This is

one of the dangers of doing my job.

That I can take a fairly cushy number, and automate the hell out of it resulting in people losing overtime, and when you are down among min wagers, that overtime is way more precious than you think.

Google meets the neighbors and gets both barrels over its new UK datacenter

Re: physical tax?

No, as you'll find out no british user is allowed to use the data centers in britain, therefore no transaction takes place within britain and therefore google earns the taxable profits abroad.

Further more, due to all google DCs in britain running at a loss due to water/power consumption, that entitles google to tax relief on any google transaction that does take place here.

Hope that clarifies your point

UK's seventh prime minister in a decade says he'll ditch digital ID scheme

Yay

ditching digital ID

Well for a few months until the home office has twisted whoever gets to be minister there to their way of thinking, and then showing him the blackmail details so he/she can goto the PM and say "Digital ID is a great idea, and if you dont think so, well a few well placed leaks will happen..."