Posts by Vincent Ballard

And the winner of the horrible Microsoft Paint sweater is ...

Re: In my best Trump voice...

Mmm, marzipan.

Spanish media sues Meta for ignoring GDPR and harvesting data

Re: Mmmm.....

El Mundo and La Vanguardia maybe, but El País is at most about as far right as Tony Blair.

Law secretly drafted by ChatGPT makes it onto the books

Re: Perhaps ...

I'm not sure that it's really necessary for every MP to read every word of every bill. Surely part of the point of having parties is that that kind of detail work can be centralised? But certainly each party should have a team of lawyers and subject matter experts, whether MPs or not, read each bill carefully and create an internal report.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

GDPR actually gets some teeth

A European data protection agency - any one, including the UK's DPA - will finally issue a fine calculated as a percentage of global revenue.

On a related note, major websites will start defaulting to not setting non-essential cookies.

We challenged you to come up with tech predictions for 2024 (wrong answers only) – here are some favorites so far

Re: Optional

Isn't it "Everyone asks ChatGPT to write and nobody reads"?

FTX crypto-villain Sam Bankman-Fried convicted on all charges

On the other hand, five months from guilty verdict to sentencing seems like an enormous gap.

Meta's ad-free scheme dares you to buy your privacy back, one euro at a time

Re: I thought this was an Onion article

You're a medium?

The battle between open source and 'sort of' open source is as old as software

Re: Bible misquote

No, this wasn't a Jew talking to other Jews in Israel. The quote's from 1 Timothy: it's a Greek-speaking Jew writing to a Greek-speaking Jew in Greek.

Note that that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be interpreted as "all kinds of evil" (where in colloquial English "all kinds" doesn't mean every kind). My post was complementing AC's in that regard, not contradicting it: if I'd spelt it out in detail the error in AC's post is putting the definite article before "root".

Re: Bible misquote

Literally "the love of money is a root of all evils".

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

Re: This is in fact an IT failing

Decimal separators are only the tip of the iceberg. Excel localises the names of all of the inbuilt functions, so if you move a spreadsheet between locales nearly any calculation which involves more than the four basic arithmetic operators will break.

PhD student guilty of 3D-printing 'kamikaze' drone for Islamic State terrorists

Re: Looks like something a 10 year old designed!

Unfortunately?

Chap blew up critical equipment on his first day – but it wasn't his volt

It's not quite that simple. I've seen a nasty burn from 110V mains which must have left a scar, but I accidentally put 230V mains through the palm of my hand a few weeks ago and the burns have already healed with no scar.

Airbus takes its long, thin, plane on a ten-day test campaign

Re: in a 3-3 economy class configuration.

Back in the day only regular travellers had noticed the rear stairs. I would drink a coffee in a bar with a view to the gate, and when the queue for passport control was almost empty I'd join, walk past the long queue for the front stairs to the non-queue for the rear stairs, and be seated within a minute of passport control. I think Ryanair brought back assigned seating because it makes it easier to split people 50/50 between the two sets of stairs.

Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter? Failing to RTFM, electrically

Re: But surely

It's worthy of induction into the El Reg Punnery Hall of Fame.

The means by which that recognition is triggered is, of course, the Hall effect.

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

As they ply their trade upon that far canal.

Windows screensaver left broadcast techie all at sea

The hint was pointing at Norwich Union, now known as Aviva. You can probably guess which city the company is based in.

Re: huh?

Skip back to the third paragraph.

He also got to capture footage of passengers so they could buy a video souvenir of their voyage.

IBM shows off its sense of humor in not-so-funny letter leak

Re: Most established companies have variations on this.

I presume that "magnetic" was a brain fart and you intended to type "pneumatic"?

BOFH: Zen and the art of battery replacement

Re: Danger of escalation alert

Aren't they claiming on the company's building insurance rather than the bike's insurance?

Epic snub by Supreme Court in battle to escape Apple App Store payment prison

"Seriously and irreparably injured"

Similarly, someone with a massive gash in their femoral artery won't be seriously and irreparably injured by a failure to perform emergency surgery, because it's already the way things are.

I'm sure there are aspects to the case which make it not black and white, but that argument from Apple strikes me as obviously ridiculous. The reason for the lawsuit is that Epic argues that "the way things are" is harming them.

Funnily enough, AI models must follow privacy law – including right to be forgotten

Re: Everyone says my data is covered by GDPR but is it?

Citation: Consolidated text: Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation). https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A02016R0679-20160504&qid=1689352839415

Note in particular Article 6: processing is lawful only if one of the enumerated conditions applies. Suppose I post my e-mail and home address on a public forum so that e.g. my friends can send me birthday wishes and you wish to scrape that for training your LLM. That doesn't meet the requirements for consent unless I explicitly authorise that purpose; it's not necessary for any contract between us; it's not something that you're being forced to do by a legal obligation; it's not protecting anyone's vital interests; it's not being carried out in the public interest or as an exercise of official authority; and it's not necessary for any legitimate purpose you have because an LLM can perfectly well be trained without it.

No open door for India's tech workers in any UK trade deal

Re: This isn't the Brexit we voted for.

> Food prices have gone up because of increased energy costs, worse exchange rates, higher transport/import duties as well as Brexit. These factors are largely a result of government policy failures too.

From the general tone of your post I think it's unintentional, but this seems to imply that the first three factors are independent of Brexit. Brexit was a major factor in the value of the pound dropping, and is surely relevant to the duties as well.

They're political designators, not GDP designators

First world: NATO and closely aligned nations. Second world: Warsaw Pact and other communist nations. Third world: non-aligned.

Hacking a Foosball table scored an own goal for naughty engineers

Spoiler alert

In the original Spanish version of Los Misterios de Laura (I haven't seen the Hollywood version and I don't know whether it kept the plots) there's a murder performed by arranging a heavy object to be supported by ice on a shelf above the landline telephone and then phoning the victim when the murderer calculates that the ice will have melted enough and the object is going to be about to fall and keeping them talking for long enough.

Experts scoff at UK Lords' suggestion that AI could one day make battlefield decisions

I'm not sure about your point (b). I distinctly remember from the book Bravo Two Zero that they placed a claymore anti-personnel mine as part of their defences at one point (possibly while they slept) and dug it back up and disarmed it when they moved on. The person who placed it was responsible for digging it up because they knew exactly how they'd placed it.

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Re: Faux AZERTY

I had a colleague who configured his laptop to use a Dvorak layout but didn't change the keycaps. He regarded the inability of anyone else to type anything on it as a bonus.

Re: Paris...

I had a trip to Brussels a few years ago and the day after the trip was a public holiday back home. My boss was agreeable to booking a later return flight, so I managed to actually see some of the sights, in particular the Atomium. If only it didn't require such a coincidence for business travel to be pleasant.

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

Re: Jargon?

You could have more fun with the Oxford English Dictionary's definition 2 of revert (v.): To become conscious again; to regain one's senses.

Re: Uniting the world

FYI, sous vide. Cooking vacuum-packed food in a water bath at a carefully controlled temperature. Good example of where a short phrase aids communication among people in the know.

Re: COP/EOD

I thought it must be a typo for COB (close of business/end of day), but it's repeated so I'm starting to think it's something else.

This typo sparked a Microsoft Azure outage

Re: A large pull request of mechanical changes swapping out API calls.

It's interesting to note that they're doing this now. When I tried to make the same library upgrade on some tooling I'd made, I had to largely abandon it because the changes made to the auth mechanism were so severe that I couldn't figure out whether it was even possible to use the new API. I ended up replacing a fully automated system with a half-manual one. I wonder whether this means that it's now time to try to persuade my boss to allocate some time to revisit the issue and myself that my sanity could survive the attempt.

GitHub code search redesign can't find many fans

If it can find anything at all in code then it's an improvement from the last time I tried to use code search in Github, a few weeks ago. I could literally copy the name of a type from a source file, paste it into the search box, search for it "in this repository", and it would tell me that there were zero instances of that string.

This US national lab turned to AI to hunt rogue nukes

Re: Officially recognised???

They also have a fusion programme in case the emus kick off again.

Re: Officially recognised???

For completeness, there's the subtlety about Russia being the successor state of the USSR for the purposes of the NPT. The other ex-Soviet states with nuclear warheads (Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus) gave then up in exchange for security guarantees from the permanent members of the Security Council (see: Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances).

Cops chase Tesla driver 'dozing' with Autopilot on

Re: Shirley?

Even if they do, it probably only works on the frequencies that Californian police cars use.

Financial authorities fine UK bank nearly $60m for platform migration disaster

Re: subject for investigation

Baader-Meinhof? What do German terrorists have to do with it?

Just 22% of techies in UK aged 50 or older, says Chartered Institute for IT

Re: Less qualified?

You're not actually disagreeing with me, because you say there was "computer science". The poster I replied to claimed to have started in computing before there was "computer science", which means no later than 1953 (and I suspect that the term wasn't invented for Cambridge's Dip. Comp. Sci. but is actually older).

Re: Less qualified?

That means you must have started in the late 1940s or at the very latest the early 1950s, which puts you in your late 80s, so your experience isn't going to be the same as those in the 50-65 range that the article is talking about.

Google's Dart language soon won't take null for an answer

Re: NULL is just the pointer analog to NaN

It's changing the type system. Instead of relying on documentation to know whether a value can be null or not, the type will be explicit about whether it can be null or not, and if it can be null then you'll have to handle the null vs non-null cases or get a compile-time error.

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

Re: Experts are always Experts of legacy systems

I don't know how Twitter's backend is architected, but it's conceivable that non-parameterised queries and queries with predictable parameters (such as the one specifically referred to, whose only parameter is the user ID) could be fetches of pre-generated documents.

UK government set to extract hospital data to Palantir system without patient consent

Re: Hidden backlog

In functional democracies, the government is a tool of society.

Re: Law degree

I missed Badenoch's second degree, but Prentis and Jenrick are not in my list because they're ministers who attend cabinet rather than cabinet ministers. (Although admittedly the main reason that I made the cutoff there was because my coffee break is finite).

Law degree

Look at who in the current cabinet *does* have a law degree (Raab, Braverman, Dowden) and ask yourself whether it's really useful. Braverman is particularly interesting: quite aside from the extremely recent scandals about security violations and her ministry keeping asylum seekers in illegal conditions, she was Attorney General in September 2020 when the UK government said it was going to break international law "in a limited way".

BOFH: Who us? Sysadmins? Spend time with other departments?

Re: No fenestration?

Didn't Chekhov have something to say about powdered glass? Or maybe that's been saved for the sequel.

Upgrading what might be the world's oldest running Linux install

Re: Trusty and devious mule

They both have their uses. In particular, the ability to use PuTTY without installing was great when I was travelling for several months and had to ssh back to my home machine from random web cafés to check my mail.

(Obviously there was some risk involved, but I assessed that the risk of web café operators being savvy enough to not only log the keyboard but also sniff the keyfile on my USB stick or launch a hacked PuTTY when I tried to run the one on my USB stick was low enough to be acceptable).

Brute force and whiskey: The solution to all life's problems

Re: The linked story to that wannabe rocket company

He claimed to believe that. Whether he did, or whether it was a convenient fiction to cover up the fact that he knew there was land because he'd been told about it by Basque fishermen is still debated AFAIK.

Ex-spymaster and fellow Brexiteers' emails leaked by suspected Russian op

Re: Russian government's favourite playbook

I agree that your first post made a good point, and that your doping example was pertinent, but I think you're missing Anonymous Coward's point. You said (direct quote) "the Russians have done a lot of hacking email archives around controversial subjects in order to either cause general trouble or distract from their own wrongdoings." AC's point, as I understand it, is (rephrased):

We live in an era when the PM can hold a press conference about new laws, and break them himself within a couple of hours of the press conference; when photographic evidence leaks, he blatantly lies about it and gets away with lying about it. How can a leak of some e-mails in which about political campaigners allegedly coordinate lying to the public be controversial against such a background?

Re: Is there a reason not to publish…

Given the context, it seems slightly irresponsible to publish the URL without also reminding people to assume that it's more malware-laden than the average website, and to take appropriate precautions.

Beware the fury of a database developer torn from tables and SQL

Re: Just a quick question.

I added a build step to spell-check the texts in our l10n files and produce a report on any words which weren't recognised. That's how I learnt that my Italian colleague consistently bodged the accent on più (more).

The sad state of Linux desktop diversity: 21 environments, just 2 designs

Re: So what should a a 21st century UI look like?

LibreOffice is the name of the project, not the application. Its DTP application is called Writer.