Posts by Paul Hovnanian

Lawyer's 6-year-old son uses AI to build copyright infringement generator

This is true. It comes down to IP owners being involved in a pitched battle for consumers eyeball time. Which is the limiting resource in most cases. Invent a new tecnology to produce competing content and the studios will do what they can to stop it. Or acquire it.

Heck, even sitting around the campfire, telling stories may have to be outlawed. Carbon emissions and the risk of forest fires, you know. Now you kids get your noses back in those fondle-slabs.

What we really need is for someone to create a series about a superhero copyright attorney. Who swoops in to serve papers anywhere a violation occurs. And then sue all the people that copy this hero in real life.

Mine's the one with the mask and Batman cape (Oops!). -->

Windows keeps obsolete strings forever to avoid breaking translations

Re: Using 6 words instead of 1

One could always use Professor Farnsworth's Universal Translator.

Soup king Campbell’s parts ways with IT VP after ‘3D-printed chicken’ remarks

The 3D printed rooster.

CISA warns spyware crews are breaking into Signal and WhatsApp accounts

"SS7 won't help for encrypted calls"

You have to make the call. And so a record will be left within the telecoms systems (SS7). We may not be able to read or listen to the message, but the connection data exists. And in spite of all their other shortcomings, our phone companies are amazingly good at tracking calls when there's a fee collection involved.

"At least here in EU all SIMs need to be registered to a person"

Not sure about current law. On my last visit to the EU, I bought a cheap GSM phone and prepaid SIM in Germany. For cash.

And following that, I traveled to Greece. Where a local SIM required my passport number (or other ID).

Funny thing was: I only bought the Greek SIM to avoid outlandish roaming charges. The (anonymous) German SIM still worked, but would have been drained in short order.

Things may have changed in the last decade, but people who prize anonymity are sure to find new loopholes.

The people working at the front lines of Anarchists/Antifa aren't that smart*. The simple solution: One iPhone and one burner.

*But that's why they are called "Useful idiots".

"Signal itself is (probably) pretty secure"

Secure against what? Sure, gov't intelligence may not be able to decrypt your messages. But often what they are doing is "link analysis". Who is talking to whom. This is enough to infiltrate most organizations. And from there, it's just the rubber hose.

This is what the FBI did in a few US cities. Grab protesters off the street, capture their phone IMEIs and trace connections back through the SS7 (notoriously insecure) records. Ring leaders identified.

You might be able to avoid this kind of surveilance by tossing burner phones frequently. But most of the aforementioned are so emotionally attached to their iDevices, that's not a frequent problem.

Moss spores bolted to the ISS exterior laugh in the face of hard vacuum

Meanwhile ..

... our alien progenitors are still watching their experiment to see if the genetic package they launched 4 billion years ago survives.

The jury is still out.

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

Oh well ...

... it will all be fixed in Windows 12 (Code named: Sorry about the AI).

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Re: How do you create a single point of failure for a chunk of the net?

"Solar flares"

Wasn't this one that the BOFH pulled from his list of excuses from time to time?

Kubernetes overlords decide Ingress NGINX isn’t worth saving

Re: Judean People's Front

Judean People's Front ...

Software engineer reveals the dirty little secret about AI coding assistants: They don't save much time

Re: "Tales from the pit"

Stated another way: Being good at maths is a necessary condition for being a good coder. It is not a sufficient condition.

'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it

Re: If only there was an alternative OS

You'll have a terminal. Much like the French Minitel system. Which will communicate with a back end mainframe ... excuse me: Cloud.

We're getting there. Slowly.

Actor couldn’t understand why computer didn’t work when the curtain came down

I thought it was July 4th.

As in "Thank goodness we finally got rid of those pesky colonists."

Robotic lawnmower uses AI to dodge cats, toys

"What happens when you block their internet access?"

Send them a dead cat?

Invisible npm malware pulls a disappearing act – then nicks your tokens

Re: This is a bug in npmjs.org

So, there's a hole in npm's security model that one can drive an aircraft carrier through.

What to do about it? Block npm from using URLs as dependency sources? Most package managers I've seen will recursively satisfy dependencies. But only from the top level repository or some list of approved sites (mirrors, etc.) I see some talk about this URL thing as being a "neat feature" in some cases. But it may be too dangerous to remain. Particularly as miscreants have discovered and used this loophole.

To all the innocent devs who used this as a shortcut for doing cool stuff without the overhead of checking code into a repository: Sorry. It might just have to go.

Re: This is a bug in npmjs.org

"although 0 dependencies is shown"

grep "dependencies" on every file in the package before running any install scripts.

Hacking LED Halloween masks is frighteningly easy

Re: "BLE enabled mask with a programmable app"

Hundreds of little Jeffrey Epsteins wandering my neighborhood.

Microsoft 365 business customers are running out of places to hide from Copilot

Running out of places to hide

Have you tried the South Pole? -->

Re: Place your bets

Reasonable odds.

Ever since Microsoft dodged that DOJ suit by agreeing to a consent decree. And soon after, entries were found in the registry looking something like NSA_KEY_... And the consent decree had to be overseen by a FISA court judge who had the knowledge (and clearance) to tell people, "Nothing to see here. Move along now."

Microsoft _appears_to_have_been_ compromised for a few decades. In much the same way John Profumo may have been with his teenage mistress. Prove it? That will be difficult. Drop him from a sensitive givernment post? Probably a good idea.

Ceaser's wife must be above reproach.

You have one week to opt out or become fodder for LinkedIn AI training

Time to replace ...

... your actual CV with that one posted by a superhero. Have some fun as you move to separate yourself from LinkedIn.

OpenAI tells Trump to build more power plants or China wins the AI arms race

Re: A New New deal ?

"Private Equity would have already built it quicker, cheaper and more efficiently"

Private Equity isn't stupid (I may be wrong). They aren't going to sign up for infrastructure development unless there's some guarantee that the customer (and revenue) will be there in the long term.

Silicon Valley is more like sports team owners. Build us a new stadium or we'll move your home team across the country. So the politicians build it (to avoid the wrath of the fans) and the team is sold anyway.

How do you solve a problem like Discovery?

Letter of the law

"relocate a space vehicle that has flown a crew"

Do we still have the Mercury capsule that Ham flew in?

Microsoft drops surprise Windows Server patch before weekend downtime

Apropos article graphic ...

... for a Windows repair: A hammer.

Company that made power systems for servers didn’t know why its own machines ran out of juice

Re: How could they not figure out the timing?

They probably knew. But systemd logs are unreadable.

Windows 11 update breaks localhost, prompting mass uninstall workaround

Windows broke localhost?

I hope not. That site has some of the best porn on the Internet.

What exactly did they break?

The name resolution of localhost to the loopback interface? Then just use mouse-potato.com.

The 127.0.0.1 loopback interface (::1 in IPV6)? That's breaking key parts of the network stack. Enquiring minds may want to know what they are doing mucking around in there.

Librephone battles the proprietary binary blob

Re: Of course, *all* we need is a secure baseband unit

Here you go. Of course, you will probably still need the firmware blob, which technically makes it non-FOSS. But it's something we do in Linux all the time* to get WiFi cards running. As I understand it, most of these are basically USB back to the host machine. No DMA access to the host OS or data, so that can be secured/firewalled.

*Whilst holding our nose.

Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company

Have you ...

"Have you unplugged something that really should have remained in place?"

No. But I will forward this article to the night shift cleaning crew.

Climate goals go up in smoke as US datacenters turn to coal

On a related note ...

... I wonder if Washington State, home of Microsoft as well as the Climate Commitment Act will be levying a carbon tax per LLM query soon.

They are getting close to figuring out how to tax cow burps (methane) and adding that to our beef prices already. So this shouldn't be too much of a stretch.

BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch

Re: Saved by apathy?

Accounting rules.

They track capital equipment by asset tags, inventory everything periodically and demand that unused equipment be surplused to get it off the books. We used to run into this all the time. Not so much with PCs, routers and such. But pricier lab equipment that was expensive and difficult to procure if needed again. Due to ... accounting rules.

We tried to keep spares around to extend the life of difficult to maintain equipment. Accounting instated a "5S program" to clean out storage cabinets. We just started referring to 5S as "Same sh*it, stashed someplace sneaky."

Intel's open source future in question as exec says he's done carrying the competition

Re: So...

Hey! I resemble that remark!

Pentagon decrees warfighters don't need 'frequent' cybersecurity training

CUI

Controlled Unclassified Information is an Obama administration creation. Therefore, it must be Evil^tm.

UK police caught slacking off by jamming their keyboards while working from home

Space bar

Just doing some Python development. Honest, boss.

Microsoft declares bring your Copilot to work day, usurping IT authority

So ...

... does Microsoft have a "Bring Gemini to work" day?

Re: providing internally controlled IT systems to corporates

If your only tool is an MS hammer, every problem looks like a thumb.

This was my thought.

IT often objects to BYOD policies due to exfiltration from secure internal networks. To top that off, the Economist has a good article on the "Lethal Trifecta" of LLMs. This overcomes the problem of access to private data (for Microsoft, that is). Once the data is "out" and incorporated into ChatGPT (or whatever), it becomes a simple sales pitch to offer that AI service back to your company instead of those whiny, expensive employees.

Texas man accidentally shoots cable, brings internet down

Re: Aiming, how quaint

"I wonder very much what might be the use for a tool like a gun in urban America."

Self defense. Read Warren v District of Columbia. But not if you are easily upset.

That might have been an instance of very good aim.

Anecdote: Back in my power company days, a service lineman came back from a call. Seems that the fire department needed the power cut to fight a rural house fire. Not willing to wait to wait for one of our employees to make the long drive out, a police officer on scene just shot out the transformer fuse (so it was reported). The lineman dispatched envisioned shattered porcelain and other hardware. But when he arrived, he found that the cop had made a perfect shot, cutting the 1/4 inch thick fuse link in half from about 25 yards, hitting nothing else. With a handgun.

Our lineman was surprised in part at the cop's knowing exactly what to cut.

Come on, Bubba ...

... stick to STOP signs.

Hardware inspector fired for spotting an error he wasn't trained to find

Re: rather than by the end of the metal barrel!

If it smells like chicken, you're holding it wrong.

Perhaps a case of "dead bug" prototyping. Although I'd be pretty hesitant to accept this kind of rework in anything considered production.

Japanese city passes two-hours-a-day smartphone usage ordinance

Re: iZombies and eMissiles.

"The numerous iZombies walking around"

They wrote the screenplay for Shaun of the Dead too early. Or this certainly would have been a scene.

Re: Overreach

"23 additional phones"

Only 12 total are needed at 2 hours per phone per day.

GitHub moves to tighten npm security amid phishing, malware plague

Re: Wrong problem?

Left over "require" statements to support code that may have been pulled out somewhere in the revision history of the application.

A good IDE will highlight unused statements. But not all IDEs are good. Nor are the developers hired on later for maintenance.

Bored developers accidentally turned their watercooler into a bootleg brewery

Re: Many moons ago, when I was gone for a week ...

"A nanosecond of forethought by any Science or Engineering student"

Computer science? Software engineering?

Next thing you know, they'll find Rust in the coolers plumbing.

Alleged Scattered Spider teen cuffed after extortion Bitcoin used to buy games, meals

Hopefully, if they can tie Jubair to specific instances of ransom demands/payments, they can set up a reparations fund for the victims.

After attorneys fees, the reimbursements should come to around tree fiddy.

Google unveils master plan for letting AI shop on your behalf

No thanks

That's my wife's job.

The end of Windows 10 means early Surface Hub hardware will be bricking it

Will they run ...

... systemd?

Senator demands to know status of 'duplicate' Social Security database 'immediately'

Re: Define "database"........................

In my day, #1 and #2 were referred to as the DBMS (Database Management System). The database was a collection of tables, usually linked by some implicit or defined schema, containing the actual information.

You can have a CSV "database" absent the formal data definitions. And smart people will often be able to read and make sense of it.