Posts by Pascal Monett

BBC exterminates AI experiments used to promote Doctor Who

Great pics

I tried Leonardo after an article here on El Reg mentioned it. It's fun to fool around with, but apparently asking Leonardo to put Star Destroyers in the sky above Earth is still subject to some sort of copyright (because I fail to see how it can be a lack of reference material) - the spaceships are triangular, but Star Destroyers they ain't.

That said, I understand - and subscribe to - the notion that AI-generated blurbs on shows published by the BBC should never happen.

Unfortunately, I am also aware that this is reality, and in our current reality, there is nothing AI will not be applied to, whether successful or not.

Live with the times . . .

Intricate mission to de-ice a space telescope is go: Euclid's 'eye' is clear

"scientists now know exactly where the ice formed"

Good, but how did the ice get there in the first place ?

Granted, we're talking about a few nanometers of it. Probably means that somewhere, someone/something ever so slightly fouled up when it came time to prepare the satellite for space. A few too many molecules of water were left inside.

Now my question is : is that humidity gone, or will it redepose itself somewhere and, if so, will anywhere but the mirrors be a problem ?

Twitter's lawsuit against anti-hate-speech crusaders gets SLAPPed out of court

Sorry, but no.

You have no right to try and paint Musk as an advocate of balance.

He's a dick. Don't try to defend him.

One can only dream. This is reality, not Hollywood.

And Charlie Chaplin is long dead . . .

Fujitsu's 30-year-old UK customs system just keeps hanging on

"it might just see off an eighth"

The true measure of a failed UK Government IT project : how many PMs it manages to outlast.

Woz calls out US lawmakers for TikTok ban: 'I don’t like the hypocrisy'

I like the question

But aren't you sawing the branch you're sitting on ?

Tik Tok is not only foreign, it is China. Boooooo !

Google and Facebook are American. U-S-A ! U-S-A ! U-S-A !

Don't you see the difference ?

Boeing top brass stand down amid safety turbulence

Re: Over 25 years of rot

And Boeing has lost it.

It would seem existing entrenched corporate culture means they'll never get it back.

DBA made ten years of data disappear with one misplaced parameter

"Thankfully [..] there were backups"

With actual DBA's around, I should hope so. This was not the modern days of "move fast and break things" which, funnily enough, I don't they use too much as far as critical data is concerned.

At least, I hope so.

Labor watchdog wants SpaceX's gag clauses to disintegrate like its exploding rockets

I disagree. First, the Tribunal des Prud'Hommes is basically free. I know, I've been there on occasion and I've never had to pay a dime.

Second, as soon as the employee brings up the offending clause, the judges (the three of them) waive it away on basis of illegality. The employer has no argument to bring.

Case closed. The whole affair takes 30 minutes max, and the employer is made to to back off and maybe pay reperations if called for.

But of course, I'm talking about what happens in France. I agree that, in the Land of the Free with Justice for All, there will be lawyers involved and those guys up the costs by, lately, $300K/hour.

So yeah, expensive.

"Those would be big no-nos under US law"

Interesting.

In French law, any illegal clause in a business contract is automatically deemed invalid by any tribunal. As a consequence, SpaceX France would have no leg to stand on in front of the Tribunal des Prud'Hommes, where employee/employer litigation takes place.

You don't see endless articles in French newspapers outlining what is illegal in employment contracts.

Why is it necessary for the US Labor watchdog to remind US companies of the law ? Isn't the law supposed to be known ?

Or are there business lawyers who still think that, just because someone signed a contract, the clause that says that the employee's firstborn's soul belongs to the company is valid ?

Apple iPhone AI to be powered by Baidu in China, maybe

Re: Winnie The Pooh

Yeah but, did you see the size of that dictatorship ?

Uncle Sam wants to know how big airlines use passenger data

How interesting

It is thoroughy thrilling to see that the US Government is suddenly very keen on finding out how personal data is used in the US, but doesn't give a flying fig about how everyone else's data in the world is being slurped and abused by US companies.

I'll be waiting for the day when the US is going to enshrine in law how US citizens' data is supposed to be protected, then watch as the rest of the world says "and what about us ?".

Vernor Vinge, first author to describe cyberspace and 'The Singularity,' dies at 79

Okay, my turn.

Intelligence is the ability to learn by experience. I do believe that is the first requirement.

However, don't talk to me about LLMs or other AI bullshit. Those machines can only define statistical conclusions after having ingested massive amounts of data. A baby learns to talk by listening to its parents. There are no terabytes of data involved.

You can teach a human being to play chess. You can teach a computer to play chess. Computers today play chess very well. Take the same chess-playing computer and start playing poker and it will fall on its face. Take a human chess player and teach him to play poker, and he'll play.

Intelligence is also versatility. Adaptability. Computers, even with the AI moniker, are not adaptable. They do what their database has taught them. And if you teach them to recognise pictures of cats, then teach them poker, I shudder to imagine what bullshit will ensue when you ask them to qualify if a picture concerns cats, cats playing poker, or a game of poker.

Computers are constrained by what data they have on hand. Humans can infer things from their experience. A human being will be able to determine that is preferable to be nice to other people if one is to live in peace - a computer will have to have that data in its memory banks.Computers do not infer.

I don't know how to define intelligence. I do not have the arrogance to think that I can.

But I can tell when something is not intelligent.

Today's pseudo-AI is not intelligent.

Oh yes, please, argue semantics. I'm glad to see that you're so knowledgeable, except that I'm not seeing you define Intelligence.

The fact that Intelligence has not been defined does not invalidate the fact that what is called "AI" today has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence.

Go read Asimov and tell me what AI is.

"He wasn't out by many years on the AI prediction"

Well, given that we still don't have AI, it would seem that he was.

The statistical analysis machines we have today are not AI, not by a long shot.

Now, by some miracle we might blunder into AI by mistake in the next ten years, but that is the only way he wouldn't be "out by many years".

That said, I doubt very much we'll blunder our way to such a success and, if perchance we do, we might not notice before dismantling the hardware.

3 million doors open to uninvited guests in keycard exploit

Re: The entire industry is a mess

Not a problem, really.

When hotels will be infested with people sleeping nights without paying because they hacked their way in, then hotel owners will pay attnetion because, obviously, lost revenue.

But if this is only a "theoretical" issue, nah, we'll upgrade when we can. Besides, nobody is interested in hacking a Formula One room. It's not like you're going to find a bag full of money, right ?

EU antitrust cops probe Microsoft ties between Entra ID and 365 services

Entra ID

Formerly known as who gives a fuck ?

Argue about it 'till you're blue in the face, it's still just Borkzilla's artificial barrier to entry - one that only lasts until the next update. Or until the next regional, or world-wide complete, fail.

I wouldn't hold my breath over it, it's doomed to fall over some day anyway.

Have fun picking up the pieces.

Whistleblower raises alarm over UK Nursing and Midwifery Council's DB

Re: "Journey of Improvement"

It's just the definition of UK Government IT.

The fact that the Yellow Brick Road is infinite is irrelevant.

Here, look into this absolutely standard pen while I . . <FLASH !>

So, everything all right ? Move along citizen . . .

BOFH: So you want more boardroom tech that no one knows how to use

Oh yeah !

Fit them with those detonator caps, by all means !

Especially Broadcom (but there are many other valid candidates).

Redis tightens its license terms, pleasing basically no one

Open Source developers

Sure, they need to eat like everyone else. No argument there.

But I thought they were contributing code on their free time, meaning they already had a job.

It would appear that I was mistaken. These devs are coding Open-Source full-time and expect to be paid for it.

That wasn't how Open Source started. Maybe it's time to go back to the roots ?

Meta connects Threads to the Fediverse

Re: Forever.

Agreed. One should not forget that, if The Zuck is doing this, it is not in order to make Meta more user-friendly - that is just a side effect.

It is to get Meta's claws and tendrils into everything else, hopefully to the point where Meta will be the one dictating the rules.

Because when you dictate the rules, you dictate how the money flows, eh, Google ?

Vigorous US lobbying reportedly reversed India PC import license scheme

The USTR didn't like it ?

Obviously, anything that gets in the way of US companies is something to be overturned if it cannot be ignored. No surprise there.

That the Indian government found reason to take a step back is a bit surprising, but if the current conditions make the move harmful, that has to mean that, once the conditions have changed, the bill will return and USTR be damned.

You might as well get ready for it. India is growing, and it has already proven it can make its own decisions. The days where the white man could have his way over the southern continents are over.

Euro-cloud consortium CISPE calls for investigation of Broadcom

Capitalism at work

This is the pure evil of capitalism. Broadcom bought VMware to kill it. Everyone said so, everyone feared it, and now it's happening.

All of this because they have every legal right to do this. One might argue that VMware sold out, but as a public company, Broadcom could have initiated a hostile takeover. Much more expensive, but possible.

Maybe the Board at VMware should have thought things through a bit more - or paid less attention to the brown envelopes.

And now, we're here. A product essential to many is being summarily beheaded because some suits deem it is in their interest. Interest which I do not understand, by the way. What good is it to kill the product you spent billions to acquire and is working fine ? The revenue is yours now. Just milk that particular cow and be happy. But no, the guillotine it is.

It's not fair. It's not moral. It's legal.

Enter government meddling, as every True Capitalist calls it, and right now those people are either strangely silent, or adding their voices to the chorus of cries for governmental help.

So it seems that rampant capitalism is not actually a good thing after all . . .

DARPA tasks Northrop Grumman with drafting lunar train blueprints

"figure out what would be necessary for a railroad network on the Moon"

Step 1 : eliminate the incredibly abrasive influence of Moon regolith on railroad tracks.

We'll continue when you've solved that.

Garlic chicken without garlic? Critics think Amazon recipe book was cooked up by AI

"if there is a real Luisa Florence writing these books, we can only apologize"

Why ?

She writes recipies about garlic chicken containing no garlic.

Sorry, that's bullshit. I'm not going to excuse my language. Either you pony up a recipe with garlic, or you invent a fancy title about how your chicken tastes like it has garlic but doesn't.

I'm French. You say the recipe is about garlic chicken, you damn well better have garlic in your recipe.

How to improve Chinese TV? Better censorship, says top tellie-maker

"How to improve Chinese TV"

Please explain why I would want to improve Chinese TV.

We already have fuck all to watch here. The Chinese can go improve their TV at their own leisure.

European Space Agency to measure Earth at millimeter scale

"the Genesis device"

Now say that in Evil Dictator Mode . . .

HashiCorp reportedly considering sale amid growing challenges

"upper management at the software biz are evaluating all the available options"

Translation : they're looking for a position elsewhere.

UK tech titan Mike Lynch's US fraud trial begins today

Boooooring

We already know that HP didn't do it's due diligence, didn't listen to insiders who were ringing the alarm, and went on with the acquisition because the idiot in charge thought it made himself look good.

The whole case should be thrown out on those grounds alone.

Microsoft reseller Bytes says more than 100 undisclosed share trades linked to ex-CEO

"abruptly quit with immediate effect last month"

And he honestly thinks that that will be enough to get him off the hook ?

Or has he abruptly gone on vacation in a non-extradition country as well ?

Because if he hasn't, he'll be speaking with the judge in not too long, I think.

Microsoft promises Copilot will be a 'moneymaker' in the long term

Hey, vastly overpaid CxOs, riddle me this

All you high-falutin' business execs who swear on Sun Tzu, explain to me why :

1) you are willing to not only give your internal company workings to a competitor (Borkzilla is nobody's friend), but are willing to pay for the privilege

2) you have apparently no qualms to hand over such data to a company you cannot trust to either not benefit from it, or not sell that data or use it somewhere else

Is it because, when Borkzilla starts a new branch that does what your company does, you're hoping to get hired as branch manager ?

Good luck with that.

Filipino police free hundreds of slaves toiling in romance scam operation

Re: 9 arrests?

Well, the inquest is not finished. One can only hope that accomplices will be found during interrogation of everyone they have. The victims will be only too happy to describe the people who beat them, and the nine arrested will certainly be taught that it is in their best interest to cooperate fully.

I am hopeful that more perpetrators will be brought to justice, but let us not kid ourselves : the top level who put the money in this operation will never be bothered.

That annoys me immensely.

Infosec teams must be allowed to fail, argues Gartner

Infosec is one of the hardest IT domains there is

I really think Infosec the hardest area one can work in in IT. You need to juggle with the needs and demands of users and management, while stitching together the failures of the products you didn't choose to use to try and ensure that miscreants inside and out won't make a total dog's breakfast of the whole network.

And every time Borkzilla posts a new update, I'm guessing you just cringe and hope for the best . . .

As if working at Helldesk weren't bad enough, IT helpers now targeted by cybercrims

Re: Helpdeskers are disciplined to be helpful

Meant to be helpful, yes. Stupid, no.

I have trouble understanding how this is supposed to work. Every company I work for has a helpdesk, obviously. The phone number is internal. It is not posted on the Internet. Yes, it is accessible from outside once you know it, but you won't find it in the phone book. Curiously, companies I deal with do not post their Helpdesk number in the Yellow Pages - I wonder why.

Second point, most organizations I work with do not allow users administrative access to their computers. You might manage to get control, by a miracle and a magic wand, but you're still stuck in user space. You can't install anything. The few companies I deal with that leave me a computer with an admin account are companies I cannot work with remotely, and the helpdesk drone knows me by face and name. Someone tries to pose as me by phone ? I wish him good luck.

In short, this whole story stinks of incompetence and lack of proper procedures at the highest levels. There are none of my clients - and I don't work for Fortune 1000 companies - that appear to me to be subject to this kind of shenanigans.

We talk to W3C board vice-chair Robin Berjon about the InterPlanetary File System

Blockchain

DOES. NOT. SCALE.

Explain to me how this is supposed to be a solution in a 7 trillion+ intergalactic population.

McDonald's ordering system suffers McFlurry of tech troubles

Because The Cloud^TM, obviously.

It is impossible today to handle things locally. That's just not how business is done now. You have to have your ordering system, your procurement system and your payroll in The Cloud^TM.

So, when The Cloud^TM fucks up, you're out of business.

Personally, I rather like this result.

IBM CEO pay jumps 23% in 2023, average employee gets 7%

Nothing to complain about

If the Board is stupid enough to shovel a boatload of money to some guy who just points to a direction, it's the Board's problem.

NASA missions are being delayed by oversubscribed, overburdened, and out-of-date supercomputers

"The Space Launch System team alone spends $250,000 a year"

Okay, this is armchair-general level, but if every team spends a quarter of a million per year, I think they could pool together and buy themselves a nice upgrade, no ?

LockBit ransomware kingpin gets 4 years behind bars

"Mikhail Vasiliev took responsibility for his actions"

Yeah, just like a driver who got caught red-handed running a red light is going to recognize that he ran the red light.

Sorry, that does not instill any measure of leniency in my mind.

Let him be extradited to the US after he's done his time in a Canadian jail.

Forget TikTok – Chinese spies want to steal IP by backdooring digital locks

Electronic locks

The only place they should exist is in the tiny safes of cheap hotel rooms, for the occupant to throw his valuables and pray that nobody is going to try anything on the obvious target within the day or three that said occupant is there.

Anywhere else, an electronic lock is a no-go proposal because, if you actually have the need for a safe to put stuff in, the last thing you want is a power outage to keep you from accessing said stuff when you need it. Mechanical locks have made a lot of progress since the days of the Wild West, and there are numerous ways of protecting a safe beyond just the lock on the safe itself.

If your "valuables" (whatever they may be) are worthy of a safe, the go the whole hog. Camera surveillance, multiple locked doors, access via airgapped sas, etc.

Just chucking a safe in a corner of the office isn't secure anyway.

Google gooses Safe Browsing with real-time protection that doesn't leak to ad giant

I already have Safe Browsing, thank you

Safe from Google, that is. NoScript keeps me very safe, an Ublock Origin shores up the walls.

Claims emerge that Citrix has doubled price of month-to-month partner licenses

"flexible monthly model introduces [..] uncertainty into the business."

And there we have it. Citrix is not interested in serving its customers, it is interested in getting fixed revenue every month for life.

You're in business, Citrix. Uncertainty is what you live with.

Deal with it, or get a government job.

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

"They have that kind of money"

And very little sense to go with it, apparently.

Normal, it's an ad agency. There's no intelligence there.

Record breach of French government exposes up to 43 million people's data

"up to 43 million citizens [..] dating back 20 years"

Well that's just about every citizen of working age since modern records exist.

So . . . I'm in there somewhere !

Ten nations tell social media, banks, and telcos to get better at stopping scams

"making it easier to recover money lost to scams"

I don't know what is going on on social media, I don't have any account. But, here in France, there is a platform called LeBonCoin (the Good Corner) that allows people to sell stuff they don't want any more. It's basically a nation-wide garage sale. Prices are reasonable because it's not Ebay, so people who want to gouge find their offerings languguishing.

But the important part is since LBC integrated a secure payment system. It's not secure as far as banks are concerned (well, not any more than elsewhere), it's secure as far as the user is concerned. When I purchase an item on LBC, I can use its payment system or I can pay directly. If I choose LBC's system, I pay the money to LBC. LBC then notifies the seller that the money has been paid and the seller can send the item. When I receive the item, I notify LBC which then releases the money to the seller.

If I'm the one selling, the system works in reverse, of course.

There is obviously the case where the buyer lies about receiving the item, I don't know what LBC does about that but, when I am selling via LBC, I am specifically encouraged to send the item with postal trace - so I'm guessing if the buyer tries to stiff me, LBC will contact La Poste and get the record of that item.

In any case, I've never heard of wiespread problems or scams on LBC. I think the payment system has a lot to do with it. Maybe that sort of system should be widely copied on other platforms ?

From quantum AI to photonics, what OpenAI’s latest hire tells us about its future

"it'll take [..] about a million physical qubits just to compete with modern GPUs"

Sorry, why ?

We have been repeatedly told that the quantum computer resolves all possible values in one go. I am aware that modern GPUs have more than a million transistors, but I am not aware that anybody has yet drawn an equivalence between how many transistors are needed to equal a qubit.

Now, all of a sudden, a million physical qubits are needed to equal a single Nvidia GPU ?

When the best anyone can do at the moment in a lab are 1000 qubit computers, it looks like quantum cumputing is looking weaker by the year.

The NSA would do well to set up a 1000-GPU system to crack encryption, rather than wait for quantum.

Cryptocurrency laundryman gets hung out to dry

Re: Land of Freedom and Opportunity

Or just the stupidity of thinking that the Bitcoin public ledger was invisible to the FBI.

'Chemical cat' on the loose in Japanese city

Looks like Curiosity did it again

Poor little kitty.

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

"Microsoft has warned that those days will be coming to an end"

Sure.

Here's a warning to Microsoft : you do not dictate how millions of your customers work.

You've already tried and failed before. I expect you will fail again, big time. Millions of companies have processes that depend on COM + Outlook. You pull that rug out from beneath them and you're looking for massive pain in the PR department, and, who knows ? That just might be the drop that pushes a fair portion to other solutions. Mail + COM is not entirely unfeasible in the Open Source area. there's going to be a lot of upheaval by 2029.

You keep on acting as if you dictate the terms. You have erected this wall for no good reason. I'm looking forward to seeing you crashing head-first into it.

Japan's first private satellite launch imitates SpaceX's giant explosions

I can't get the video to work

In Firefox it didn't want to go. Said "can't find MIME format" or somesuch.

Tried in Brave, no cigar. Seamonkey didn't like it either.

So I copied the URL to my work PC and tried with Chrome. Still no go.

What format are you people using for even Chrome to not agree ?

P.S. : all my browsers are up to date and have no trouble viewing videos on YouTube or elsewhere, like this one.