Posts by tony72

Malicious SIMs can shut down phones, steal files, and drag 5G back to 2G

Hostile SIM

I'm picturing a feisty little SIM card threatening to punch me in the face if I don't put it in my SIM slot and let it mess with my phone.

Azure CTO pastes Doom into Paint one frame at a time

Re: Next

I think Mark Russinovich has earned the right to do some frivolous coding; given how useful the sysinternals tools have been and continue to be every single day, he could spend the rest of his life vibe-coding fart apps, and I'd still consider him pretty much a saint!

New Boeing finally gets going, 15 years after debut

Why ...

... are airliner manufacturers are so imaginative with their product naming, though?

Microsoft cancels Patch Tuesday for some Dell users over surprise shutdowns, overheating devices

That possibly explains it

I had a user yesterday complaining that his laptop fan had been on high basically all day. No new software, not doing anything different. I'll see if that update was installed, but it would seem to be a bit of a coincidence otherwise.

Microsoft rolls out Windows Search updates and they're... quite good

Re: Seems to be already deployed

The trouble with traditional Windows Search (i.e. the search box in File Explorer) is it's never been well documented, and it has some odd defaults. Which is a shame, because it's been one of Windows' best features for a long time, if you could remember how to use it. For example, if you search for "name:foo", it will find "foo_bar.txt" and "foo-bar.nfo" but not "foobar.c" - it's looking for your search term as a delimited entity within the filename. If you want it to behave the way probably most people would expect it to, you need to search for "name:~=foo", which will find also find "foobar.c" - now it's just looking for your search term as a simple substring of the filenames. I guess denizens of El Reg may know that kind of thing, but your average user, not so much.

Rocket Lab buys its way into the satellite big league with $8B Iridium deal

Becoming a pseudo-memestock certainly seems to be paying off for Rocket Lab. Is Iridium then the long-promised Rocket Lab constellation, rather than them building one from scratch, or is Iridium complementary to their own future constellation, I wonder.

Every employee’s password was stored in a single Excel file

Been there, pushed back on that, managed to defuse it without losing my job. CEOs tend to put expediency above all else, that's the trouble, you just have to hope you're working for someone that isn't entirely unreasonable, explain why it's a really bad and unnecessary idea, and hope you've got enough karma saved up.

Gothenburg's self-driving bus trammed on day one

Best case?

A bus service should be a best-case application for autonomous driving, you would think, since it's running a predictable route, so not too impressive. Apparently these busses are running a software stack called Flowride.ai from ADASTEC, which I haven't heard of. From what I can see, it sounds like they use heavily pre-mapped routes, stops and signals etc, so interactions with the trams ought to have been foreseeable. I guess we'll have to wait for the accident report to find out what went wrong.

Space factories edge closer after experimental capsule survives hypersonic landing

I think they are intentionally slipping in human-type errors to let us know (or make us think?) that the articles aren't written by AI.

SpaceX sets date for Starship test that asks: Did we break anything in the upgrade?

Re: takes time and efforts away from fulfilling the HLS contract

Plus it doesn't necessarily need to be that close to a final HLS. It needs to have a working docking port on it, and sufficient hardware for whatever NASA specifically wants to do with it. I notice NASA referred to the Artemis III landers as "lander test articles", which seems to imply that they're not expecting a final product here.

Fingers crossed

There's a lot riding on this flight. If it does not go well, any chance of Artemis III happening on the current, already ambitious schedule pretty much goes out the window. On the other hand, if it goes perfectly, you could start to see a slim chance, of Artemis III happening on time. It would still need a lot to go right, SpaceX would basically have to start metronomically knocking down objectives one after the other without any mis-steps, but it'd be vaguely possible.

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

... is highly intrusive and risks monitoring officers when they are off duty, on rest days, or at home. This presumption of wrongdoing and attack on officer's personal lives is unacceptable.

Yet somehow running facial recognition on everyone walking past a camera and stop-and-searching anyone on the flimsiest of pretexts is okay. Oh, how the turn tables.

NASA boss: make Pluto a planet again

Ironically Ceres was originally classified as a planet. Then we discovered the rest of the asteroid belt, and realised it was more like the other asteroids than the planets, and it was reclassified. Just as Pluto was reclassified once we discovered other large Kuiper belt objects. There is certainly discussion to be had about the actual criteria that were used to reclassify Pluto, which are far from ideal, and if the IAU were to come up with a scientifically rational set of classification rules that reclassified Pluto as a planet, that would be fine, but I find that highly unlikely.

Two men charged over series of arson attacks on 5G masts

Re: Technical insight

Would such a person be bothered if they accidentally torched a 4G mast by mistake? I'm guessing if it looks like a cellular mast of some kind, they would probably consider it fair game.

Microsoft Outlook for iOS still down and out for many after 'service change'

...Microsoft's cloud is more like a tottering Jenga tower than a robust solution

You do get the feeling that Microsoft aren't entirely on top of how all their services interact. I've noticed a few times when there seems to be an issue with one of their services, but you look at the service health page and there are several services having issues, but the one you're looking at isn't amongst them. Hmm.

SpaceX dusts off Falcon Heavy for first flight in 18 months

Re: delayed till 28/04 due to weather

Better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air, than in the air wishing you were on the ground.

Boeing deliveries soar past Airbus for the first time in years, but this is no time to unbuckle your seat belt

Shadow factories

Boeing built up a ton of inventory while the 737 Max was grounded - I remember watching a YouTube video about some of the "shadow factories" where they stored all the planes they were stuck with. So once they could finally start to deliver all that built-up inventory, their deliveries figures will have received a big boost, but it likely doesn't accurately reflect the underlying business performance. From a quick search, it sounds like they were reaching the tail end of the stored inventory during 2025, so figures will probably return to reality in the coming quarters.

Britain seeks views before it drops the hammer on signal jammers

Re: Incomprehensible

It's illegal to use them, but contrary to what the article says, under current laws it's not illegal to possess them. As the article does say, proving someone used such a device to commit a crime is difficult, so being able to prosecute them simply for having the device would make things a lot easier.

Brits are falling out of love with posting every thought online

To be, or not to be

Only 59 percent of respondents now believe that the benefits of being outweigh the risks

Sounds like we're having a full-on existential crisis then.

SystemRescue 13 lands with Linux 6.18 and bcachefs support

Just the thing to troubleshoot the odd grmlin.

Memory-makers' shares are down. Some RAM prices have eased. Blaming Google is not a good idea

Re: Not convinced

There does seem to be a modest easing, according to this Tom's Hardware article. The data they looked at is for specific 32GB DDR5 kits from Amazon, price history via CamelCamelCamel, so it's easily verifiable. However it's hardly a large or sustained change, so I wouldn't personally read much into it.

Say goodbye to budget PCs and smartphones – memory is too expensive now

Anyone remember ...

.. the old "RAM Doubler" utilities from back in the day? I was about to make a joke about them making a comeback, but Google informs me that modern OSs actually use memory compression already. Apparently CPUs got so powerful that it became something worth doing from a performance standpoint, and of course the modern implementation is a long way advanced from those sometimes highly questionable utilities from back in the noughties. You learn something new every day.

UK unveils telecoms charter to curb mid-contract bill shocks

Re: This is weird

Orange still exists?

Rackspace tests customer loyalty with brutal email price hike

Gotta pay off that leveraged buyout debt somehow.

Stop dragging feet on AI nudification ban, UK government told

Re: I'm so tired ...

Clearly you didn't get as far as the second sentence of my post, rendering your reply largely nonsensical.

Re: I'm so tired ...

It probably wouldn't even be a thing if Elon's name wasn't associated with it. Why is all the focus on the platform, and not the people creating the content? The Taylor Swift deepfake furore happened before Grok was in the game, because guess what, anybody can download Easy Diffusion or whatever and produce far more worrisome content than what Grok is allegedly producing, and I doubt that the genie can be put back in the bottle - guardrails on hosted platforms are containment theatre, nothing more. So why obsess about whatever mildly spicy content Grok can create, except that it's given the Elon-haters something new to rant about?

Re: I'm so tired ...

And you've seen the material causing this hubub, have you? I admit I haven't, because there's no set of keywords that I'd want to enter in my browser in order to see them, so I may be talking out of my arse. But from descriptions I've read, this is mostly hyperbole and exaggeration, and it's only getting such a big deal made out of it because Elon.

I'm so tired ...

... of faux moral outrage.

Space-power startup claims it can beam energy to solar farms

Re: Daft question?

Real Engineering recently did a video on orbital solar. The latter part of the video is about Reflect Orbital, who indeed plan to use mirrors - their concept is to direct sunlight at existing solar farms during their local night, increasing their productive hours, and thus they won't need to build any dedicated receiving stations on the ground. I tend to agree, the conversion losses turning the sunlight into electricity, then into lasers, it just sounds unlikely that that would ever be efficient enough; the mirror thing sounds a bit more likely to be practical. But as the video reveals, there are quite a lot of complications.

Diversion to power datacenters earns Boom Supersonic a ticket to revive fast air transport

Re: I'll take things that didn't happen

Why do you say so? Aeroderivative gas turbines are a thing in power generation, they're in widespread use. If Boom's turbine can provide a benefit either in efficiency or in power density, compared to what's already on the market, then they may indeed have a viable product. True, the article is a little vague about what the advantages of their turbine are, and I didn't watch the video, but I can imagine that a turbine originating from a supersonic jet application would score highly on the power density front.

HSBC spies $207B crater in OpenAI's expansion goals

Re: Making deals with money you don't have

OpenAI is not a publicly traded company though.

Crocs get the Xbox treatment with sole-crushing price of $80

Re: A fool ...

You could get three pairs of these for the price of a single iPhone Pocket sock thing though. Arguably brilliant value.

Vodafone, EE, O2, Three hit with £3B overcharging lawsuit

I'm no lawyer, but I'd guess this lawsuit will fail. Unless the contract states exactly what proportion of the monthly payment goes towards paying off the handset, and that the handset is completely paid off at the end of the original contract term (or some specified period), it's hard to see what the telcos could get nailed with. Maybe you're effectively renting the handset, rather than buying it, and so it's never paid off?

Starlink’s method of dodging solar storms may make it slower, for longer

Re: That's a better option

This. No alternative reaction seems to be proposed in the paper (or mentioned in the article anyway, I confess I haven't read the actual paper), while what SpaceX currently does allows the constellation to continue operating effectively, so I'm not sure what the authors point actually is. SpaceX don't want to raise the orbits of their satellites unless they have to, because it uses propellant and thus shortens the lifespan. But letting them get dragged out of the sky by a bulging upper atmosphere would shorten their lifespans even more, so it seems like a reasonable tradeoff!

Russia’s first autonomous humanoid robot staggers and falls on debut

I get it

You're trying to tempt us into mocking our Russian comrades ... but I'm not going to fall for it.

Tablet market stalls because there’s not much new worth buying

True

I'm keeping my ageing Huawei Mediapad M5 8" going as long as possible, because there just don't seem to be any decent replacements, the 8" tablet niche seems to have been abandoned by most manufacturers. If I saw an 8" that wasn't a downgrade to the Mediapad, particularly in terms of screen and audio, and didn't cost silly money, I'd buy it.

Rocket Lab's Neutron slips to 2026: 'Our aim is to make it to orbit on the first try'

Ironic

It's ironic that vehicles designed to travel so very quickly, always make their way through their development phase more slowly than anyone thinks possible.

UK's Ajax fighting vehicle arrives – years late and still sending crew to hospital

I guess it's telling ...

.. that when I read that this thing is likely going to be $1.1 billion over budget and at least five years late, I thought "not that bad". My expectations have obviously been tempered somewhat.

AI slop hits new high as fake country artist goes to #1 on Billboard digital songs chart

When an AI band can make it to number one on a Billboard chart [...] it's an insult to the human artists who rank lower.

Most music that's released is slop, that's the reality. Derivative, unimaginative, forgettable drivel, 99% of it. Up until now, it's been human generated slop, but it's really no surprise to find that AI generated slop is quickly reaching par with the other kind. And the AI generated stuff only gets better from here, so if you're a mediocre musician, this is your sign that you're about to get found out. I don't think it's an insult to the human artists; what's happening, or about to happen, is simply a re-valuing of human-generated slop - it's much harder to pretend that generic crap is anything special when AI can generate better with but a few clicks.

SpaceX and Musk called on to rescue China's Shenzhou-20 crew

SpaceX and Musk called on to rescue China's Shenzhou-20 crew

Called on - by some rando on X, who almost certainly wasn't being serious - a low bar indeed to justify a headline on El Reg. I suppose it's an excuse to discuss the feasibility of such an endeavour, regardless the obvious 0% chance of it happening.

Google imagines out of this world AI - running on orbital datacenters

Re: …er, all of this on EARTH ORBIT?

A healthy dose of scepticism is indeed warranted here. However powering datacentres on Earth is becoming a huge issue, and the availability of "free power" in orbit makes it something that I don't completely dismiss out of hand. Probably you're not just going to take existing server equipment as-is and punt it into orbit, that won't work - they aren't built to be mass-efficient or particularly energy-efficient. You're going to select or design components with energy- and mass-efficiency as a top priority, and your physical form factor could be very different. An obvious option would be to base them on something like a Starlink satellite - a Starlink V2 Mini is estimated to cost around $800,000 dollars to manufacture, and generate around 73.4kW with its solar panels, so that could be your envelope - how much and what type of compute can you achieve with 70kW and 800kg of mass? Launch costs per satellite if you made them exactly the size and mass of Starlinks would be a further $680,000 per satellite on Falcon 9 to LEO, that should come down once Starship is in the game, but that'd have to be factored in. It doesn't seem like an entirely crazy idea to me though, I can totally see Falcon 9s blasting off and deploying an entire orbiting datacentre's worth of flat-packed "computellites" in one go. Maybe there are niche workloads that would benefit particularly from being done in space.

Trump turnabout sees him re-nominate amateur astronaut Jared Isaacman to run NASA

I suspect Sean Duffy's blatant attempt at personal empire building didn't go down at all well with Trump or his inner circle; several White House sources have been reported as saying that Duffy totally overplayed his hand, and everybody is angry with him. So that will have opened the door back up for Isaacman, who has many influential supporters.

Tesla board wants to grant Musk $1T in stock, Norway wealth fund says nope

Have you actually looked at the package? As with the previous package, Tesla would have to achieve hugely ambitious milestones in order for Elon to get his shares. Market cap of $8.5 trillion. Operating profit of $400 billion. 20 million Tesla vehicles on the road. 10 million FSD subscriptions. Etc, etc. It's not as if he's asking for a handout. If Tesla hits even a few of those milestones, *all* Tesla investors will do extremely well. Which is why most supported the previous comp package, and I suspect will support this one too. In a world where CEOs commonly get massively rewarded for failure and cutting jobs, *more* CEOs should have their compensation tied to ambitious success targets like Elon.

Cybercrooks getting violent more often to secure big payouts in Europe

That's the downside of self-custody - you may be secure from hackers, but you are susceptible to the old $5 wrench attack.

Keeping the lights on takes up nearly all police IT spending in England and Wales

Plans for investing in AI and service transformation held up

Well, that's terrible. I can't wait for the police to start using AI for everything. I mean, what could go wrong?

ESA tests bacterial powder to feed Moon and Mars crews

... fermented with air (split into hydrogen and oxygen via electricity)

Okay, I'm historically bad at chemistry, but I'm pretty sure that air does not work that way. Should that not be water rather than air?