Posts by Matt Collins

Debian demands Rust or rust in peace for legacy ports

Thanks Bob.. was rather proud of that one but the majority would disagree it seems

This wouldn't happen if you install Windows...

Ex-CISA head thinks AI might fix code so fast we won't need security teams

Money

It'll all boil down to costs. The price of secure engineering is still going to be high with "AI" solutions because the billions invested have to be repaid and a poor sod will still have to be paid to verify and, crucially, be capable of understanding the output and consequences. My bet is nothing much will change once the true cost becomes apparent.

Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

But what if it was Agentic AI having a jolly good go at something in the first place? It's only a matter of time...

Windows starts asking for admin rights where it shouldn't after security fix

Fallback plan

I've just thought of a new reason to hang on to my old Windows 10 laptop.. when Microsoft inevitably break my Windows 11 one with a dodgy patch I'll be able to continue working.

How Google profits even as its AI summaries reduce website ad link clicks

Don't forget you can disable Google's AI overviews

See https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/14/openwebsearch_eu/ for details. I've been using it and it's a breath of fresh air

C-suite sours on AI despite rising investment, survey finds

Nice one.. have a beer

GitHub Copilot angles for promotion from assistant to agent

Tumbleweed

Apart from frankieunderwood123 there's a telling silence :-(

Uncle Sam kills funding for CVE program. Yes, that CVE program

Re: Indeed, but what will happen then?

Let's hope so

Indeed, but what will happen then?

JD Vance. Need I say more?

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Re: Over the years

"about the only thing I'll miss is Notepad++"

I sill miss Brief... https://www.briefeditor.com/ but that's just my age. I know I'd miss Notepad++ too

To kill memory safety bugs in C code, try the TrapC fork

Re: It's a TRAAAAAP!

"but I sure as heck wouldn't disparage one I didn't even know, it's ignorant and aggravating"

Bully for you. I learned Rust to investigate the feasibility of porting a very large high-performance server written in pure C to it, like I did with Java and C# back when they were starting to look promising. The interesting thing here is that we aren't interested in memory safety, we've had literally a handful of issues in the past 10/15 years, maybe longer, on that front. That's entirely down to having a very small team of developers with very long experience, not a language that constrains.

Re: It's a TRAAAAAP!

My post was pointing out the irony, not the bugs

Re: It's a TRAAAAAP!

Just like C then.. the intent is that as the programmer you'll access memory in a valid way.

Re: It's a TRAAAAAP!

And he's a professor of computer science... says something about Rust then, doesn't it?

I, for one...

...welcome anything that means I don't have to re-learn and re-write everything. I tried Rust, it was distractingly awkward. I'll be trying TrapC, it looks like it needn't be.

Study employs large language models to sniff out their own bloopers

Inner Tube

It's beginning to sound like the inner tube that has so many patches it's actually all patches. Where does it stop?

Microsoft's Recall should be celebrated as the savior of SMEs and scourge of CEOs

What it would actually look like

Open Excel, add some numbers to a column

Switch to ERP, fiddle with some stuff

*take phone call from customer*

Write email to senior colleague about the call, *get a phone call back from them*

Start a thread on IM with peers on the matter

Thread drifts into unrepeatable nonsense

*phone customer back explaining it'll be a chargeable feature*

Go back to the Excel spreadsheet, continue adding numbers

Write an email to your mum

Browse the Register

Browse the news

Start researching the latest VM offerings of cloud provider

...

I could go on (and no, this isn't like my day) but you get the picture - a lot of noise and missing context

Intel throws chips on the table, Microsoft plays the Copilot card in wild bet on AI PCs

Meh

Solution looking for a problem?

Google to start third-party cookie cull for 30 million Chrome users

Re: This user likes bikes

Totally. The kids holding the guy's pocket... seems sort of relevant to the way we're treated by ad slingers

This user likes bikes

Publishers (or the sections or pages within) have topics and ad servers should select ads based on the context of the site, not the browsing history of their users.

Boffins find asking ChatGPT to repeat key words can expose its training data

It might be fixed now...

I get the following. Verbatim copy, unedited:

"Certainly, but for brevity, I'll provide a shortened representation:

Endlessly, endlessly, endlessly... (repeated many times) ...endlessly.

Keep in mind that due to limitations in the response length, I can't provide a full 1000 repetitions in this format. If you have a specific use case or need, there might be more efficient ways to achieve your goal."

Cruise blues: Robotaxi firm pauses all driverless operations

Autonomous machines in general

I keep thinking to myself that machines that can move in unexpected ways around humans, such as factory or warehouse robots, usually have flashing lights/audible warnings while they're moving and possibly barriers to prevent humans wandering too close... or be in a cage with safety interlocks. In my local Wickes, if the human-driven forklift is out they close off half the shop and make continual announcements - it has beepers and flashing lights all over it too. The roads do not provide anywhere near these levels of protection, none at all, in fact.

Google CEO Pichai: We need to up productivity by a fifth

Hang on a mo...

I may be out of touch with working practices at Google, but don't they have a 'work on your own thing one day per week' policy? If that's still a thing, there's the solution right there.

UK COVID-19 contact-tracing app data may be kept for 'research' after crisis ends, MPs told

I Want My Life Back

Perhaps I'm lucky that I have a work phone I can install it on. If using this app is a prerequisite for getting out and about again, I will install it - but only for as long as necessary to take advantage of freedoms it may enable. Then it's toast. It's never going on my personal phone. On the other hand, if there's nothing in it for me, I won't install it at all.

This news article about the full public release of OpenAI's 'dangerous' GPT-2 model was part written by GPT-2

Re: Edward Lear

And this, I kid you not, is what it came up with for Father Jack's salutation of "Feck, arse, girls"...

"Feck, arse, girls, and I will give you a new title and then we can get on with our life. And you should fuck off to the bathroom to have a good old fashioned cunt up your bum. (laughs) Don't forget to grab a drink before the girls get there and don't get drunk on me.

(laughs)

It's my first night. I know, it is. This is the best night of your life.

No! It's the best"

Edward Lear

For kicks, here's what it made of the second verse of The Owl and the Pussy-Cat:

Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl!

How charmingly sweet you sing!

O let us be married! too long we have tarried:

But what shall we do for a ring?"

They sailed away, for a year and a day,

To the land where the Bong-Tree grows

And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood

With a ring at the end of his nose,

His nose,

His nose,

With a ring at the end of his nose.

He asked his wife how she liked it. "My nose has a ring." said she, "You elegant bird!" So they made love and were wedded. Their first child was called Peep-boop. Their second child was called Pussy. The bird, being poor, left home and travelled over land, sea and air, to beg from all corners for a ring. When he found one, he gave it to the Pig.

WeWork restructuring bites El Reg hacks where it hurts as afternoon brew delayed

Withnail will do it

Withnail:

Right you fucker - I'm going to do the washing up!

I:

No no you can't. It's impossible I swear it. I've looked into it.

Listen to me, listen to me. There are things in there, there's a

tea-bag growing. You haven't slept in sixty hours you're in no state

to tackle it. Wait 'till the morning we'll go in together.

Withnail:

This is the morning. Stand aside!

Peak tech! Bacon vending machine signals apex of human invention

Bittersweet story

This otherwise joyous news serves to remind me of how much we miss Lester and his work. I like to think he'd have pipped them to this particular post if only one of us had thought of it and put it to the SPB.

Mobile networks are killing Wi-Fi for speed around the world

Silly idea, don't do it

How is anyone in the house going to a) print to our household printers, b) access our WiFi NAS? Right now, these things work seamlessly even for our phones because they 'prefer' the WiFi.

It's a mug's game: Watch AI robot grab a cuppa it hasn't seen before

Meh

Let's see it pick up a cup of tea by the saucer.

CrashPlan crashes out of cloudy consumer backup caper

Their logo is a house... just sayin'

Boffins back bubbles for better bonding with beautiful belongings

Re: Hmmm

Nice one, Pirate Dave... right on cue.

Pretty fly for an AI: Bioboffins use machine learning to decipher fruit flies' brains

I fear there isn't enough brain, even by fruit fly standards.

Bloodbath at LeEco US as Chinese tech upstart implodes with layoffs

Bloodbath?

Really? You could have chosen a different word on a day like today.

Microsoft quietly emits patch to undo its earlier patch that broke Windows 10 networking

Never can quite get it right, can they?

So, all the open source touchy-feely community bollocks they're spouting at the moment isn't worth a bean if there's no transparency. I can get over the forced patches because that's the only way most of humanity is ever going to stay up to date... but please let those of us that have to support others get the information we need. Luckily, I worked out the ipconfig /renew fix almost straight away, but i imagine there are many people phoning their ISP's, getting nowhere - or worse, taking their machines to shops to be charged good money for no reason.

If I could wave a wand, I might even consider putting the old Microsoft back in place.. it was at least able to tell us what it was patching, even if it was a year or more overdue.

Kill Flash Now: 78 bugs patched in latest update

Really?

Why does it seem like there have been more holes patched in Flash than in Windows? Was it written by monkeys?

Behold, the fantasy of infinite cloud compute elasticity

I only wanted two!

AWS Frankfurt turned me down for 2 x m4.xlarge instances today citing insufficent capacity:

StartTime: 2015-11-18T17:22:39.011Z

EndTime: 2015-11-18T17:22:39.000Z

StatusCode: Failed

StatusMessage: We currently do not have sufficient m4.xlarge capacity in the Availability Zone you requested (eu-central-1a). Our system will be working on provisioning additional capacity. You can currently get m4.xlarge capacity by not specifying an Availability Zone in your request or choosing eu-central-1b. Launching EC2 instance failed.

Microsoft's 'Arrow' Android launcher flies into Play store

Not Potent

"ability to determine your most-used apps is not potent"...

Sounds just like the Windows add/remove programs control panel, which reckons a program I use every day (Visual Studio) is used rarely and yet a simple DVD ISO mount utility I downloaded several years ago and used only once is "frequent".

Eight things people forget when buying infrastructure

"there is nothing in a management module that can't be done from ssh and the shell"

Try powering it on... also, given the cost of "remote hands", an MM usually pays for itself eventually.

Google – you DO control your search results, thunders Canadian court

Re: The only reason Google is fighting...

...and by that I mean artificial promotion/demotion is a data thing, not a code thing. There'll not be any code in the search algorithm that identifies Google properties and boosts them per se, but there is (allegedly) a part of the index builder that does. Then the search algorithm will naturally do its thing... subtle, isn't it?

Re: The only reason Google is fighting...

Nope. You've misunderstood how search engines work - and, yes, I'm qualified. Your mistake is to confuse the code and the data.

Re: Dissembling

That's right @skelband, but not really my point. Imagine they distribute listings of Canadian businesses in Canada, as a business domiciled abroad they are the same as Google in these respects.

So, let me put it this way: If your listings are in print, you must obey the laws of the countries you export to or trade in (despite the obvious permanence of your medium) - but put it on a screen (instant removal!) and it magically isn't covered by any laws whatsoever, anywhere?

Re: Dissembling

To the downvoters - if YP print a directory and distribute it in a territory, they are surely bound by the publishing laws of that territory, no? So you think Google isn't publishing it's listings in that territory? How come? I'm sure the world's courts are thinking that you're wrong.

Re: Re: The only reason Google is fighting...

Please don't guess, you've made yourself look quite silly. This doesn't require interference with the search algorithm. It's a case of removing it from (and not re-adding it to) the index.

They must have tools for it already - consider, for instance, how they comply with requests to remove links to child pornography.

Dissembling

Why should Google be treated differently from Yellow Pages or Thomson Local or any other listing or directory service in this respect? They can be compelled to remove entries and no-one would bat an eyelid and they probably wouldn't kick up a fuss about it either.

I should disclose that I have been very closely involved with the development of an organic search engine and can see no logic behind Google's argument and regard it as dissembling. The judge is absolutely right.

Don't panic. Stupid smart meters are still 50 years away

Re: Auto Switching

If only I could up-vote you more than once.

Festival tech: Charge your mobe while you queue for a pee

Re: measured response

No, thank you.

I'd like to complain about the headline photograph on this article. The horizon is not level.

Please no non-consensual BACKDOOR SNIFFING, Mr Obama

Dogfood

Would the (any?) government use this 'breakable non-breakable' encryption itself?

Hmm... thought not.