Posts by Julian Bradfield

Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after USB keys fail to decrypt them

Re: Voting schemes

Maybe look more recently than a few decades ago? I have for one or two decades been hearing talks about voting schemes that allow voters to check not just their vote but the correctness of the whole count. For example, https://warwick.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/university_of_warwicks_secure_e-voting_software_used_in_first_real-world_election_1/ is press release blurb about something I probably saw about 10 years ago. I recall another scheme from Australia a while ago too, with much the same list of properties.

Clearview AI sees red as UK tribunal sides with regulator over $10M GDPR fine

Which legislation are you talking about? The case had several branches of argument. Somehow I doubt that anybody would write a 92-page judgement abouyt something obvious.

EU starting registration of fingerprints and faces for short-stay foreigners

Re: I have been unable to find out how it applies to folk like me

You don't seem to have looked very far.

https://travel-europe.europa.eu/en/ees/to-whom-does-ees-not-apply

After deleting a web server, I started checking what I typed before hitting 'Enter'

Re: Been there, done that

My bashrc has the following:

# It's supposed, probably correctly, to be bad practice to alias rm

# to anything less dangerous. I'm trying to learn to use del, but

# will not unalias rm for a long time yet!

# (I wrote the above more than 20 years ago. Is it a long time yet?

# jcb, July 2009)

alias del='rm -i'

alias rm='rm -i'

Careless engineer stored recovery codes in plaintext, got whole org pwned

At least in the UK, using/recovering credentials to access a dead person's account is (except in the unlikely event that the T&Cs permit it) unauthorized computer access, and theft if you touch the money. The executor deals with financial institutions through their procedures for dealing with deceased accounts - and some of them (HSBC comes to mind) are bastards about it.

White House nixes NASA unions amid budget uncertainty

Re: I'm not a Yank but...

The Lords cannot override lack of royal assent. It would require a revolution - or at least a law (with royal assent) abolishing the need for future royal assent.

Semiconductor industry could short out as copper runs dry

Re: Lustrous

Does copper really tarnish (to oxide) faster than silver (to sulfide)? Not my impression from the copper coinage (often still quite shiny after five years) and the few silver items I own.

What would a Microsoft engineer do to Ubuntu? AnduinOS is the answer

Re: Misread as ArduinOS

not quite - an(d) is great, and duin is river.

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

Re: Divers log

Try Danish: 80 is "firs", a dramatically compressed 'four times twenty', and 70 is "halvfjerds", half way [from 60] to four times twenty.

As US scientists flee Trump, MP urges Britain to do more to nab them

Re: UK governments have wrecked UK unis, so this is not an option.

"The Brexit deal for unis saw them banned from bagging quality foreign students, especially Chinese, "

On the contrary, we're very dependent on Chinese students (who, these days, are mostly quality). We're one geopolitical incident away from bankruptcy. ("We" means most Russell Group universities, except Oxbridge, who can afford to maintain a more balanced intake). In my class, the Scots are still (just) the largest nationality and the (mainland) Chinese are the second, but there's not much between them.

America's National Science Foundation tells DEI, misinfo studies: You're fired

Re: Science is now settled

You clearly haven't read the SC ruling. It doesn't say there are two sexes. It says "The definition of sex in the EA 2010 makes clear that the concept of sex is binary". The definition of sex in the Equality Act is the only definition the judges are concerned with, and they didn't make it.

Europe's cloud customers eyeing exit from US hyperscalers

"Similarly, the UK just enacted a law demanding that any corporations give them access to whatever data they demand - regardless of where it is in the world."

Can we have a reference for that? I think I would have noticed.

You may perhaps been thinking of the law passed several years ago which can require communications and storage providers to ensure they can respond to a warrant, which is not quite the same, though bad enough, and which was recently deployed against Apple.

Signalgate: Pentagon watchdog probes Defense Sec Hegseth

In the interest of pedantry: OFFICIAL - SENSITIVE information can be sent by normal channels, you're just supposed to be careful about it and do it on a need-to-know basis. (Ref: Government Security Classification Guidance).

Why do younger coders struggle to break through the FOSS graybeard barrier?

people want shiny

The article talks about young people having a high bar to submit something new. Most projects that I use have much more need of people to fix bugs, write documentation, etc. than to add yet another half-broken feature hardly anybody wants. (I fix bugs when I can, but some things (e.g. the Xorg input/events layers) are just too hard). It's hard, not always interesting, work.

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

turn it off

I don't understand this. If you don't want to see things out of hours, shut down teams and work email, turn off the work phone. (And never give a personal number except to people who can be trusted to know what an emergency is - I made that mistake once, never again!) Like many of my colleagues, both academic and administrative, I do work out of hours whenever I feel like it, but I never feel obliged to *do* anything out of hours.

Abstract, theoretical computing qualifications are turning teens off

There used to be (maybe still is) a "General Studies" A-level. No reputable school allowed pupils to take it. I told my school I wanted to see what happened if somebody walked into the exam and took it without preparation, and they agreed, even though it meant me coming in during half-term. I confess I cracked the night before and looked at a past paper to see what the format of the exam was, but that was all. Yes, I got an A. Amused a lot of people:)

Network engineer chose humiliation over a night on the datacenter floor

credit card key

A perfect opportunity to repost a comment from a few years ago:

A while ago I was at a conference on a Californian university campus, staying in shared dorms, the apartments of which had hotel style card door locks. Late at night, I went out to look for Perseids. As I shut the door, I realized I had the cafeteria card in my hand, not the door card. My roommates were all drinking the night away with their buddies in other rooms.

Just before resigning myself to a night on the doorstep, I thought, ok, why just try the old credit card trick. Five seconds with the nice flexible cafeteria card, and I was back in...

Can't imagine how any lock can yield to that these days!

AI hiring bias? Men with Anglo-Saxon names score lower in tech interviews

Re: Bobby Tables

'Robert' is actually Germanic, though it came into modern English through French.

Linus Torvalds declares war on the passive voice

Re: He's right, of course

void *p;

p = &p;

is perfectly good C.

FYI: Data from deleted GitHub repos may not actually be deleted

Re: "this is expected and documented behavior inherent to how fork networks work"

There are plenty of people who use git without knowing how it works. We use it to store teaching materials, and although all of us are quite bright and also have all the training required to understand git in intimate detail, most of us can't be bothered. I know "git pull", "git add", and "git commit", which is all I need to get on with my actual job of teaching the students. In previous years, we even used it to collect student exercises, though thankfully that's gone, and I guarantee less than 10% of the students had any idea of what was going on. Git is used by inexpert git-users any time somebody in position of either power or enthuisiasm decides to use git for a project/job.

Stanford Internet Observatory wilts under legal pressure during election year

Churchill certainly didn't say that, as he spoke English. He might have said "A lie goes halfway round the world before the truth gets its boots on", but there's no evidence he ever did.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/

seems a fairly comprehensive investigation.

And as Churchill was an enthusiatic and skilled user of both true and false propaganda, and massive deceptions, I'm sure he would have embraced the opportunities offered by social media in wartime (and probably peacetime too - he was never a nice person).

Not a Genius move: Resurrecting war hero Alan Turing as your 'chief AI officer'

Re: Turing misinformation

I don't know which coward you are, but if you're the same one I was replying to, you said that those who never speak of it are the ones who kill themselves. Of course nobody speaks of specific plans if they actually intend suicide; but in the case at hand, Turing never gave anybody any reason to suppose he was unhappy, and he was actively working on the theory of morphogenesis.

Re: Turing misinformation

He *may* have been like that. But the notion that "The people who cry out that they'll do it never will; it is the quiet ones, the ones that never speak of it, that will do it" is a tempting myth (especially when someone expresses suicidal thoughts to you). In reality, some do, some don't. Amongst the thankfully small handful of people I have known, or known of well enough to hear from friends or relatives, who killed themselves, none was completely out the blue. Curiously, it's hard to find actual statistics - somebody should surely have gone through inquest findings to get an estimate. There is some evidence that a majority of attempted suicides are impulsive rather than planned; but of course we don't know for the ones who succeeded, except when they leave notes.

Take-home: if somebody expresses suicidal ideations to you, don't dismiss it because "those who cry out never will".

Turing misinformation

Turing was not "sentenced to chemical castration shortly before he took his own life". Firstly, the sentence (more than two years before his death) was the jail sentence usual at the time, with the alternative of probation if he took part in the hormone treatment experiment; secondly, this had finished a year before his death; thirdly, the claim that he killed himself is highly contentious. His nearest and dearest (one of whom told me so, and of course it's on the record in many places) reported that he had not been particularly disturbed either the the trial, "treatment" or after, and had been in good spirits for a long time before his death. Owing to the screwup in the investigation, we can never be sure; but (unless you're a homophobic coroner who thought that homosexuals were by definition mentally disturbed) there was never any good evidence for suicide rather than accident.

Turing was a great mathematician and scientist who suffered like every other careless homosexual man at the time (having a relationship with a crook was not a smart move - that's what led to the arrest); he doesn't need to turned into more a martyr than he was, thank you, he stands by himself.

How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes

Re: There should be removal instructions or a removal script

Read the uninstall instructions - depends on your system.

Judge slaps down law firm using ChatGPT to justify six-figure trial fee

Even vanilla LLMs have their uses. I watched a talk the other day by Terry Tao, who said that he'd got useful assistance with a proof from ChatGPT - it makes up nonsense, but it suggested a line of attack he hadn't thought of, which worked. When one of the smartest people alive thinks LLMs will be useful, it's probably time to consider more carefully the kneejerk reaction. And when they're combined with things that *can* reason, they could be seriously useful. A combination of LLM and deductive reasoning solves International Maths Olympiad geometry problems better than most competitors.

Crowning glory of GOV.UK websites updated, sparking frontend upgrades

Re: changes to things like police and military uniforms, and signage on official buildings

As of the opening of Parliament in November, Charles hadn't even replaced the late Queen's cypher and crown on his own Admiral of the Fleet dress uniform epaulettes.

How Sinclair's QL computer outshined Apple's Macintosh against all odds

Re: outSHONE

"dived" is correct in proper English. Historically "dive" had both weak and strong past tenses (Old English déaf, dyfde, Middle English def, defde), but only the weak survived. "dove" is probably a modern reinvention of a strong past tense.

"speeded" has been around for a while.

"lighted" is also a weak past going all the way back to Old English (from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles: "Me lihtede candles to æten bi.")

"shined" as a weak past goes back to Middle English, but it didn't survive after 1800 (as intransitive) in modern British English.

Programmable or 'purpose-bound' money is coming, probably as a feature in central bank digital currencies

Another low usage recommendation: 1pmobile. You have to top up by £3 a month to keep the number, but the credit doesn't expire. I use typically £1 or £2 per month (of data at 1p/MB); when I'm actually going to use non-trivial data, I buy a one-month data bundle.

GhostBSD makes FreeBSD a little less frightening for the Linux loyal

Re: No it isn’t

I grew up on MVS, as filtered and made manageable by Cambridge Computer Lab. If other old farts haven't yet noticed, you can now sign up to IBM Zxplore, and get to learn the real thing on real z/OS systems! Of course, these days, you can do it under Linux if you don't want to use proper MVS.

'Corrupt' cop jailed for tipping off pal to EncroChat dragnet

Re: I suspect the one word answer is "idiot"

"signing the official secrets act" is merely a way to make sure you can't try to plead ignorance when you're prosecuted; you're bound by it regardless. (I found my "signing" the other day...)

It is 20 years since the last commercial flight of Concorde

I still regret that when it was withdrawn I decided that the cost of one of the last flights was too much for me...

AI girlfriend encouraged man to attempt crossbow assassination of Queen

Re: Convicted of Treason

Despite the patent fact that he had committed (high) treason by compassing the death of the Sovereign, he was not actually charged with treason. He was charged with the lesser offence of attempting to injure or alarm the Sovereign, from the Treason Act 1842. Whether the motivation for introducing this offence was as you say, I don't know - but it appears the policy you describe is still being followed. Had he been charged with treason, he'd have been liable for life imprisonment.

AWS: IPv4 addresses cost too much, so you’re going to pay

Re: IPv6-mostly?

Time to get a new ISP ?

Re: IPv6-mostly?

Some academic institutions have been very cautious. Much of my home IP traffic was IPv6 a couple of years before my department (a computer science department at that) got external IPv6 connectivity.

TSMC thinks it's got exactly what Taiwan needs – another multibillion-dollar chip plant

China-coveting?

Really? Not China-coveted ?

Lamborghini's last remaining pure gas guzzlers are all spoken for

Re: Ah yes - the "there aren't enough charging points" defence...

There are many services that will ship/store your teenager's things. My son uses sendmybag for carriage, and lovespace for vacation storage, and takes the train with just his cello and laptop.

Decision to hold women-in-cyber events in abortion-banning states sparks outcry

Re: Mixed Feelings

Cav - psychopaths have distinctive brain characteristics. So do taxi-drivers (at least in places where they have to have the Knowledge). Detecting differences in brain structures tells you nothing about whether the difference should be called a mental disturbance - that's a social judgement.

Boffins snap X-ray closeup of single atom – and by closeup we mean nanometres

Perusing (i.e. keyword scanning, since it is *way* beyond my level) the paper, it's an Fe(II) ion.

CERN spots Higgs boson decay breaking the rules

Re: breaking the rules

The CERN article says "pairs of electrons or muons" ... which I imagine is to be understood as "electron-positron pairs".

Teen in court after '$600K swiped from DraftKings gamblers'

Re: Does rate limiting mean anything to anyone ?

Depends how much you like using your resources to slow people down. Me, I blacklist (with DROP) the IP address on one failed login to my mail server, for 24 hours. I typically have 8k banned addresses at any one time; that's quite a lot of log-in attempts being blocked (and not filling up my log file). And with a bit of luck, they spend some time trying to establish a connection before giving up.

Millions of mobile phones come pre-infected with malware, say researchers

Not new

This has been going on for a while, hasn't it? I got a cheap Nuu Android phone in 2018 that had baked-in malware. To be fair, Nuu did respond quite quickly.

Ubuntu 23.04 welcomes three more flavors, but hamburger menus leave a bad taste

Re: There are burgers?

I only noticed it a few days ago, when I was looking for BOFH. At least now I know where to find columns.

Hi, Pakistan? You do know anyone can edit Wikipedia, right? You don't have to ask

Re: Anyone can edit Wikipedia?

Where on Wikipedia is a "viewpoint" relevant? Were your "truths" verifiable, or were they "your truth"?

No, you cannot safely run a network operations center from a corridor

Re: Huh?

It's usually said to be to prevent the cooker tipping forward.

Have these bureaucrats ever tried to tip a 100kg range cooker? (Or indeed accidentally move it.)

AI conference and NYC's educators ban papers done by ChatGPT

Re: I recall a science fiction tale

Asimov (I remembered), "The Monkey's Finger" (I had to look up).

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

Re: TAI = UTC + 37 seconds, am I missing something?

I'm fascinated by what you mean by "do some actual research". Could you explain?

Yes, of course the world has been much warmer in the past. There's a difference between temperature shifts taking millions of years (or even thousands of years), and those taking a few decades.

University staff voice 'urgent, profound concern' as Oracle finance system delays payments

Re: Tricky things, computers. I didn't get where I am today by seamlessly migrating systems

You used to be right, but over time we've slowly abandoned more and more of the in-house stuff and moved to using central university systems. It makes sense, really, provided the central systems have most of the functionality of in-house and the increased workload is not too high.

As for advising the centre on how to procure and install a large complex system...they don't want to know.

Twitter employees sue over lack of 60-day layoff notice

Re: The situation in Ireland is perhaps more interesting

Don't know Ireland, but guess it's similar to the UK, where the situation is concisely described here:

https://www.gov.uk/dismissal/reasons-you-can-be-dismissed

in what way is this "any reason at all"?