Posts by smudge

Musk distracts from struggling car biz with fantastical promise to make 1 million humanoid robots a year

Optimus, as described by Tesla...

... is "A general purpose, bi-pedal, humanoid robot capable of performing tasks that are unsafe, repetitive or boring."

The ideal audience for Donald Trump, then.

Pope warns flock to raise their faces, protect their voices in fightback against AI

He said what?

He said AI is turning people into "passive consumers of unthought thoughts"

My irony meter has just exploded. Coming from the head of a worldwide, extremely rich organisation that demands blind faith and unthinking obedience from its users, sorry, customers, sorry, marks (no, not St Mark), this is a bit much.

You could rewrite that whole piece to refer to organised religion, not to AI, and it wouldn't need much alteration at all.

Crossrail? More like Borkrail...

Re: What's wrong with 'The Circle Line'?

you could do loops of London by staying on one train (I know a couple of people that claim to have done so, or think that they did so, after one too many).

Was often done by the homeless. Warm, dry, and relatively safe - albeit noisy.

UK border tech budget swells by £100M as Home Office targets small boat crossings

Re: Home Office targets small boat crossings

You do realise that the people smugglers are mostly not in the UK, and even if we knew who they are, we can't just go and arrest them?

That's why we need more co-operation with European governments and then police forces.

"Taking back control"? Quite the opposite!

Marching orders delayed: Veterans' Digital ID off to a slow start

easier and faster?

"Later this year, the digital driving license will be rolled out more widely, enabling people to store their driving license on their phone, making it easier and faster to prove who you are and your driving entitlements," GDS said in a blogpost.

Easier & faster? Than whipping my licence (with a 'c', not an 's') out of my pocket, and showing them my photo on one side and the classes of vehicle I can drive on the other?

Yer 'avin' a larf, aintcha?

CES 2026 worst in show: AI girlfriends, a fridge that won't open unless you talk to it, and more

Voice activated fridge with no handles

Internet outage? You know the drill.

Know it? You'll need the drill :)

UK urged to unplug from US tech giants as digital sovereignty fears grow

Re: Please Do

They're not as good at breaking modern encryption as you think they are.

Maybe not, but - like many other agencies - they will be storing it until they can.

Recent-past data that can be searched automatically can still be incriminating.

Re: Please Do

Personal mail/sever in Europe.

Won't that mean that the NSA is copying everything coming to you and going from you?

Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it

Pot, kettle...

if Hisense and TCL have conducted surveillance in the way the lawsuits accuse them of, they'd potentially be required to share all data with the Chinese Communist Party.

And if they were US companies, they would potentially be required to share all data with the US Government.

Which could be useful next time you want to mount an illegal military assault and kidnapping in another sovereign country. Even if Maduro is a nasty piece of work.

Starlink to lower orbits of thousands of satellites over safety concerns

Re: Horses for Courses--and the course has changed.

it turns out that 22,236 mi (35,786 km for snooty folks) is actually quite a long ways up. This has several implications:

Network latency is one.

Maybe you're too young to have experienced this one, but us oldies remember inter-continental phone calls where you said your bit and then left some dead time, waiting for the response.

Or maybe you forgot, and assumed that the other person wasn't saying anything, and you started up again, only to find yourself talking over their reply. Then they'd hear what you had started saying. So you'd waste precious seconds - those calls were expensive! - re-synching yourselves.

Waymo pings updates to San Francisco fleet to prevent power outage chaos 2.0

Phoning home for a decision?

in cases where its cars have to decide how to proceed through a dark intersection, it may send an additional request back to Waymo HQ for confirmation that its decision is the correct one

How would Waymo HQ know?

Do they have live video of every intersection? But there's been a power failure....

Datacenters planned for Scotland could end up draining a loch of power

Aye. So many opportunities for joined-up government thinking here.

Decouple the price of electricity from that of natural gas. Allow people and industry to pay the real price of their power. Cheaper electricity for the datacentres. "And also for the Jocks, though. Can't have that!"

Look at possible use of the small nuclear power generators that they have been talking about. Could be ideal. Although there are environmental considerations, of course, and it's not clear what the Scottish people's attitude would be. Are you completely anti-nuclear, or just against nuclear weapons?

BTW, "power too cheap to meter" originated in the US in the 1950s, applied to nuclear power generation. Large-scale hydroelectricity in Scotland goes back to the 1920s and 1930s, with smaller schemes before that.

UK minister ducks cost questions on nationwide digital ID scheme

And then let's keep it all on your phone! A small gadget that can easily be stolen (or lost).

Surely it's "accessed by" a phone, not "kept on" a phone???

Re: Kerching!

it is estimated that about 84,000 phones are stolen annually

I was assuming that the digital IDs would be accessible via a phone, not actually held on one?

So, making the necessary assumption that effective user ID and authentication is in place, a phone being stolen shouldn't be too inconvenient. Until you get a new one, you should be able to look it up on someone else's, if you trust them.

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Up and down...

... like you know what :)

14:50 GMT. Using a VPN. Cloudfare connections in Amsterdam, Tokyo, Bucharest are fine one minute, then gone the next.

UK asks cyberspies to probe whether Chinese buses can be switched off remotely

Oh really?

"Currently, Ruter can disconnect the bus from the internet by removing the SIM card, as all connectivity to the network goes through this single point. This ensures that we retain local control if necessary,"

It's a bus. How many SIMs can the manufacturer conceal in it? Even allowing for the need for positioning for reliable communications...

MPs urge government to stop Britain's phone theft wave through tech

Plus HOLD THE DAMN THING PROPERLY. It's a *****ing phone, hold it like a ****ing phone, not like a bloody spit tray.

The BBC this week interviewed someone who had had her phone stolen something like five times.

"Nowadays I keep it out of sight and only take it out when I need it.", she moaned. "That's not how it was meant to be.".

The worrying thing is that they let people like that vote, and breed.

Here's an idea... Why don't we plant a tiny explosive charge in every mobile device,

The IDF already thought of that :(

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

Don't tell the boss!

Cybersecurity training, beards, and body fat have something in common, according to the Pentagon. They're not helping the US military fight and win wars.

What do the bloated Commander-in-Chief and his hirsute veep make of this?

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

I can sell them a keyboard

Every now and then it sends out a stream of F1s, and a myriad of help pages start opening up on the screen.

The PC's fan (that's the thing inside the case, not a friend of Plod) starts working overtime, and eventually something breaks and it all stops working.

More electronic waste :(

US gov shutdown leaves IT projects hanging, security defenders a skeleton crew

Re: They won't

The Democrats have turned themselves into a clown show.

You're so lucky to have two of them now!

Britain's policing minister punts facial recog nationwide

Re: How many of those were in error?

It's not the police's fault if those arrested don't get convicted.

But is IS their fault if they don't even get charged.

Not everyone that Plod arrests ends up in a courtroom, you know.

But how many people charged?

At the time it said the two forces have used LFR to make 580 arrests over the previous 12 months.

The number of arrests is meaningless. They could all be innocent people.

What would be more relevant would be the number charged - on its own, and compared to the number arrested.

The number convicted would also be of interest.

Cyber threat-sharing law set to shut down, along with US government

Re: Halloween, government shutdown...

Has tRump redfined the date of Halloween to 1st October?? Missed that on my side of the pond!

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

Re: Oh no it won't...

Just need to keep track of which fingerprint prints you're using for each ID when enrolling it so you can print the right ones out when travelling.

The US system requires all of your fingerprints.

I imagine the EU system will be the same.

(Quite sensible, because it allows for fingers being damaged or amputated.)

Check your own databases before asking to see our passport photos, Home Office tells UK cops

But... driving licences

Seems a bit odd to complain about a few hundred searches in a year, when they routinely make passport photos available to DVLA for driving licences.

Politicos: 'There is a good strong case for government intervention' on JLR cyberattack

Re: Well well well

Uptick for bringing up negligence.

Yes, there's an immediate problem to be dealt with.

Which must be followed by an in-depth investigation of how it happened, and prosecution of anyone who was negligent, refused to spend money on security, ignored the advice they were given, etc etc. Not just at the grunt level, but all the way up the management chain.

Comparisons could be made with the PO Horizon scandal. My understanding there is that the police are waiting until the public inquiry concludes - so as not to influence it - before deciding who should be charged with what.

French jet left circling while Corsican controller caught Zs

Remember that old song of ours?

Long in tooth British heavy metal band Saxon have just had an idea for updating one of their classics.

"We've got a Airbus coming down in the night

There's no power, there's no runway lights

Radio operator, try to get a message through

Tell the flight deck La Corse has no lights

There's no power, what do we do?

Airbus coming down in the night

Try to get a message through"

https://genius.com/Saxon-747-strangers-in-the-night-lyrics

Why Microsoft has the name of an old mouse hidden in its Bluetooth drivers

Why Microsoft has the name of an old mouse hidden in its Bluetooth drivers

Surprised it's not "Mickey".

Campaigners urge EU to mandate 15 years of OS updates

Re: Just Laptops?

I think the argument is that you can update a desktop with new parts if your old CPU isn't supported

And the motherboard and CPU which I have just replaced are not e-waste?

It's the final countdown: Windows 10 hits end of support in less than 30 days

This will, for many users still running Windows 10, require a hardware purchase.

Indeed. Earlier this year, I was at an astronomy weekend here in the UK. At dinner one night, I discovered that the bloke next to me worked for Microsoft.

I told him that I had a new motherboard and CPU waiting to be installed, so that I could move to W11. (I have my reasons.)

To his credit, he immediately slammed his own employer, saying that it was a terrible thing to force onto people, and decrying the waste that would result.

We got on fine after that.

So I now have a redundant ageing mobo and CPU. Won't run W11, but absolutely fine for everything else. Must see if a local computer club or something would like them...

Out-of-band update arrives to clean up Windows reset and recovery mess

The patch is optional – users who haven't encountered the issue don't need to install it.

Eh? What about the vast numbers of users who haven't yet encountered the issue?

You're seriously saying "if you haven't needed reset and recovery then you don't need the patch."?

"Wait until it fails, and then you'll know you need it." :)

US spy chief claims UK backed down over Apple backdoor demand

Re: Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I smell a rat...

US: "drop your mandate, which will make Apple look good and will generally get positive PR. In return we'll give you access to that same data through our existing back channels"

Nothing new. It is well known that NSA and GCHQ have long got around the pesky laws about spying on their own citizens by swapping the information on each other's citizens that they just happen to hoover up.

Reciprocate, please!

"the UK has agreed to drop its mandate for Apple to provide a 'backdoor' that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens and encroached on our civil liberties."

Fine. Now how about the US legislation that can compel US companies to hand over data no matter where collected, where stored, or to whom it refers?

Facial recognition works better in the lab than on the street, researchers show

Facial recognition works better in the lab than on the street

Icon says it all.

From PAYE to P45: HMRC staff fired for prying into taxpayer data

Blurring the lines

Since the pandemic, staff have been more likely to blur the lines between official data and personal devices.

They are only following the example set by those at the top of government!

You've got drought: UK gov suggests you save water by deleting old emails

it's not immediately clear how big an impact clearing out your spam folder will really have.

It will, of course, have an adverse effect.

Because it will cause the values of some bits to be changed, to reflect the deletions that you have made. (The images or emails will not be changed.)

And that, of course, will use up more energy than leaving the items alone.

Hyundai: Want cyber-secure car locks? That'll be £49, please

Re: Why is it so insecure?

Also key rollover should be random but paired car to key fob.

So how would that cope with the common situation where more than one key fob is used - independently but with one key used much more than the other?

Come to think of it, how does it work nowadays?

UK secretly allows facial recognition scans of passport, immigration databases

Re: SNAFU

What law are the police currently in breach off?

Well, I'd be interested to see the written statement telling us what purposes our passport or immigration photographs would be used for. I had a quick look but couldn't find anything.

Possible violations of data privacy legislation there.

Although it's probably weasel words like "verificaton of identity for government purposes" - which would cover just about everything :(

NASA boss calls for nuclear reactor on the Moon

Re: Space Race!

Here we go again, like it's 1961!

Do we have to "do the other things" again?

I never worked out what they actually were.

Trump calls for Intel CEO's head over alleged China links

Who?

For those of us who don't follow the industry so closely, it would have been useful to tell us a little more about the man's background, instead of abruptly introducing him simply as "Tan" in the fourth paragraph.

Microsoft eventually realized the world isn't just the Northern Hemisphere

Re: Oh, whoopee doo

Perhaps a universal date format should be default: YYYY-MM-DD (yes, it's an option, but let's make it the Default!).

ISO 8601.

Millions of age checks performed as UK Online Safety Act gets rolling

many citizens are opting to share their details to access age-restricted content.

Or "many citizens are opting to share someone's details to access age-restricted content"?

NASA faces brain drain as thousands exit under voluntary resignation scheme

I used to work alongside a team from BT Global Services, when BT had a permanently-running voluntary redundancy (VR) programme.

It was, of course, the best, most-employable staff who applied for VR - usually after they had found another job.

Microsoft admits it 'cannot guarantee' data sovereignty

Re: Where does this leave Microsoft telemetry ?

I'm sure that if anyone actually read Microsoft's terms and conditions, they'd find that using Windows implicitly grants MS the right to slurp telemetry from them.

Coldplay kiss-cam flap proves we’re already our own surveillance state

Re: What's ironic

What's ironic is that if they'd just reacted like normal people when they found themselves on the big screen, they would have escaped scrutiny.

Depends. If it was a gig local to where they lived, then it's very possible that someone else would recognise them.

But maybe they were away "on a business trip"....

UK tech minister negotiated nothing with Google. He may get even less than that

And I note that you post anonymously, so you're so proud, are you ?

More likely they just want to keep their job.

Windows 11 migration heats up... on desktops

Re: fingerprinting OS

BUT, that probably needs Adobe Digition Editions programme. I am on Linux. The programme is not available on Linux or Chromebooks.

My wife has just bought a Windows 11 laptop, to replace her 14 year old Tosh which was running (very slowly) Windows 10.

And she tells me that Adobe Digital Editions does not run on it, even though Win11 has been out for years. I haven't looked at her machine yet, but I see that other people do seem to be having problems.

Pass me the meths, please.

US to deny visas to foreign officials it says 'censor' social media

Re: Thanks but no thanks

It's ok Mr Rubio, your country has been on my DO NOT FLY list for over a decade already. I do not travel to countries who fingerprint innocent visitors at the border like a facist police state.

You know that the EU is soon going to do that for vistors from outside of the EU?

I have no idea where you are, but just in case you need to know...

ASUS to chase business PC market with free AI, or no AI - because nobody knows what to do with it

Really strong USB ports make a difference too by reducing the need for motherboard replacements

Until M$ decide that they won't support a perfectly good CPU any more.

So I have a new ASUS mobo in its box sitting beside me, just waiting for the CPU to arrive.

Yes, I know - Linux - but I have my reasons.