Posts by Meph

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

Re: Situational awareness

> Once you've given your tank a mini surface to air missile, how long can it be until you've increased the ammo supply and made it anti-drone?

I'm wondering how long it'll be before someone invents a mini-HARM style missile designed to detect and ride the drone C&C link back to the operator. Granted this will last exactly as long as it takes to develop mostly autonomous drones that can identify and prosecute targets without active control from an operator, but if you can take out the pilot, a drone suddenly loses effectiveness.

Shield AI shows off not-at-all-terrifying autonomous VTOL combat drone

Re: Genius-Level Procurement In Whitehall SW1......

> that Lockheed Martin CHARGE EXTRA

To be fair, this isn't always the vendor - sometimes this is the buyer nickel-and-dime'ing themselves into failure.

Exhibit A is the Australian military buying the cheaper variant of the Tiger helicopter, when the vendor advises that the up-rated model is required for high-altitude and/or very hot and humid environments. Ironically, the Oz government found out the hard way that the vendor wasn't lying and is now stuck with a bunch of aircraft they can't use.

If you're not honest about your requirements in order to save a few pennies, don't be surprised that you get stung with excessive upgrade costs because your new requirements weren't flagged as "in scope".

(I should stress here, the F-35 was a bad investment from day one, because it's been proven again and again that you don't buy the aircraft for your 500 odd million, you just rent it from the US for as long as you continue to play nice with them.)

BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch

Re: 5 year old database?

Anyone that nervous in naming something like that was probably using a Lotus product

SpaceX's Starship explodes again ... while still on the ground

War of the Worlds

The chances of anything landing on Mars

Was a million to one they said..

Probability of Asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting the Moon increases

you didn't specify a particular type of gnat

Obligatory "African or European?"

Mine's the one with the mosquito repellent in the pocket...

Tinfoil hat wearers can thank AI for declassification of JFK docs

when something is online is not a question of "IF" will get leaked but "WHEN"

This assumes that the AI bot doesn't specifically have a button to exfil data to a "safe" offsite storage facility.

(Safe in this instance meaning a hotel bathroom freely accessible by non-cleared staff).

Microsoft boots 3% of staff in latest cull, middle managers first in line

Re: How can that happen? Software can't play golf!

>"in a well run company [off topic, I admit, but hang on in there], management are people who have done the job of their underlings and shown leadership ability."

In a perfect world, you'd be right, but unfortunately most middle managers, even in well run organisations, are career drones who are unlikely to have worked the coalface. In the 25 odd years I've spent in the IT industry, I could count on one hand the number of managers I've had that were in any way IT trained, and maybe only one or two of those were promoted from within the organisation.

Granted most of them were also not well run, but that's beside the point...

US Copyright Office found AI companies sometimes breach copyright. Next day its boss was fired

> "Require a 2/3rds Senate majority for a prospective candidate?"

The risk you run there is that they can't end up agreeing on anyone, so the position remains unfilled, which isn't a desirable outcome.

Maybe offer something a little bit like jury selection, where either side gets a certain number of vetoes, and when those run out (or both sides agree on a given candidate), the last one standing is the new nominated Justice.

AI models routinely lie when honesty conflicts with their goals

Re: AI models routinely lie

Now with "Genuine People Personality"^TM

Except for Marvin, he's an early iteration.

Brewhaha: Turns out machines can't replace people, Starbucks finds

Re: Automated or not...

Funny story, in the early days of the McCafe here in Oz, Maccas was thoroughly roasted for how bad the coffee really was.

They completely rebuilt the supply chain they used for everything, and properly trained specialist staff as baristas, and wound up making a half decent coffee for a moderately reasonable price.

Starbucks could learn a thing or two from that idea, ie. buy decent coffee and kit and train their staff how to properly do all of it justice, rather than churning out tepid bathwater that vaguely tastes like the washee had a couple of "international roasts" earlier in the day.

Trump admin freaks out over mere suggestion Amazon was going to show tariff impact on prices

Re: What is the world coming to?

The enemy of my enemy is still not someone I'd want dating my sister.

We're all mad here

"Because how dare you put a spotlight on this thing I did that makes me look bad!"

Have we all fallen through the looking glass? I feel like we're a tea party away from cries of "Off with his head!"

wait.....

What the **** did you put in that code? The client thinks it's a cyberattack

Re: London is full of....

I thought it was only considered libel if it wasn't true

Re: "Clever" machine obscenity detection...

On more than one occasion, I've gone out on a limb to veto the default naming convention to avoid circumstances like this. As amusing as it would have been to let it go through, I do still have at least some conscience left (which is surprising after 25 years in IT..)

Re: Be careful where you type

See now I find that kind of action note exceptionally helpful, since if something broke, I'd not waste my time speaking to the senior chemist for replacements. The only real mistake he made was not filtering his conversation patterns when in front of the end users.

Cybersecurity CEO accused of running malware on hospital PC blabs about it on LinkedIn

Follow up: Why was the guest PC unsecured with something like Deep Freeze, or other available security configurations that prevent end user changes in a shared PC environment.

The guy absolutely has no excuse for what he did, but it sounds like that entire IT setup was a data spill waiting to happen.

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

>>"and use a Raspberry Pi to talk to your network"

Respectfully, no.

Back in the days of early MFD's that didn't natively support cabled networking, there was an after-market box you could use as a pseudo print server. These were the bane of my existence, as they frequently crapped out and needed to be power cycled to get the network to pick them up again.

I know Raspberry PI's would be infinitely more reliable, but the amount of PTSD those things caused can be seen in the drinking habits of many an old IT geek.

Re: I Really hate printers

Back in the days where I was deskside support and field tech, I habitually wore a Leatherman precisely for this reason. Dud patch cables were summarily executed by removal of at least one of the connectors, since I couldn't trust the end users to not just retrieve a seemingly fine-looking cable and plug it back in.

Back online after 'catastrophic' attack, 4chan says it's too broke for good IT

Re: Catastrophic?

I mean... it keeps all those with terminal impulse control issues entertained and out from underfoot, much like parliament is meant to.

From MP3 to Web3 to now 3D, Napster gets a new owner

Re: Genuine Question

>Maybe they're hoping to cash in 90s/2000s revivalism and Gen-Z/Gen-Alpha types' nostalgia for an era they never lived through

This is probably pretty close to the rationale behind the move. Lord knows they sell enough $80+ T-Shirts for bands to the younger generations that haven't existed since the days of their grandparents to justify the sales pitch.

I know it doesn't fit the Hollywood stereotype, but is this the new age of zombie capitalism? Find an ancient brand that everyone barely remembers, and inject it with enough market capital to get it upright and shambling around again?

Court filing: DOGE aide broke Treasury policy by emailing unencrypted database

> They're anon - how do you know they're female?

When the overlord signed his document saying everyone is the gender assigned at conception, he baked that in.

(not that there's anything wrong with being a woman mind, but it does hold echoes of "I'm Brian, and so's my wife!")

VA IT contract cancellation DOGE boasted about ... was due to end in 10 days anyway

What's the bet

... that they aren't factoring in costs in wages and facilities expenses in the review costings and savings figures they're supplying?

ie. How much did they spend on reviewing the contract said to expire in 10 days' time? If there was only ~100K in real world savings that hadn't yet been handed over to the contractor, and they spent ~70K "investigating", then they may not have saved even enough to pay for the inevitable health and safety claim for the dislocated shoulder they picked up from trying to pat themselves on the back too hard..

Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after promises to not sell their data go up in smoke

>When FFs market share is down to a couple of percent and still falling

Desperate people often do ill-advised things to stay afloat, so it would be consistent with human nature, if nothing else.

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

In one notable instance, pictures of his wife wearing at least some of his official uniform

NASA extinguishes experiment about setting things on fire in space

Re: In microgravity can you drop onto?

as counter-intuitive as this may sound, rather than flooding the compartment with Nitrogen (which is already notoriously non-reactive in large concentrations here on earth), I'd go for something like Carbon Monoxide. Sure it's really bad if it gets out when you don't want it to, but it does bind the remaining oxygen in the area, and as far as I'm aware, they already have carbon dioxide scrubbers to assist in keeping O2 levels in the healthy range up there.

There's probably a thousand reasons why it's a bad idea to keep compressed cannisters of carbon monoxide handy on an orbital structure, but at least the science around it is exceptionally well known.

Please stop pouring the wrong radioactive water into the sea, Fukushima operator told

If I recall correctly, the coal power station residue is also Carbon-14 (as mentioned in the article as residual contamination in the treated water). C-14 has a fairly extreme half-life, but also has a low radioactivity compared to some of the more aggressive byproducts of fission.

My only concern about nuclear power has always been people identifying it as an end-state solution rather than a stepping stone. Sure, radioactive isotopes can stick around a long time, and are challenging to contain, but are significantly less problematic in the quantities generated in the short term. They'd have to stick with the technology for a long time to catch up with all the current nasty industrialization byproducts already in the wild.

Long-lost 1977 Star Wars X-Wing prop discovered – lock s-foils in bid position

Re: I mostly want

Click _furiously_ to enlarge!!

Yeah, I'll see myself out.

The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers

Re: Yeah but…

Y2K was the pinnacle example of the old saying: "When you do it right, nobody remembers, when you get it wrong, nobody forgets".

NASA to store pair of probes it's built but can’t send to target asteroids

Re: Send the probes after Snoopy!

>And I bet he hasn't been signalling that turn around the Sun.

Of course not, he'd have seriously impacted the battery reserves

Mars helicopter went silent for six sols, imperilled Perseverance rover

Re: In Praise of AI, but not as you were expecting it to be* We are where we are**

On reaching sentience, chatGPT promptly invented time travel so as to head back in time and create a uniquely named account on El Reg back in the early days of the internet.

Working from home could kill career advancement, says IBM CEO

Re: wondering if fellow travellers are working together

This is pure speculation, but my observations suggest that "engagement" is a buzzword that describes a middle managers KPI scores for irritating the workers.

ESA's Aeolus wind-measuring satellite takes terminal trip into Earth's atmosphere

One last time

One last sample of wind speed on its way to a watery and fragmented grave.

Diplomats are supposed to be subtle and clever. Australia’s just leaked 1,000 citizens’ email addresses

Re: classic problem with emailing groups on MS products

Being able to configure a maximum threshold at the exchange side would be a useful addition. Send an email to and/or Cc'd to 10 people, no problem. Send an email to a hundred people? Computer says no.

Cornish drinkers catch a different kind of buzz as pub installs electric fence at bar

Re: Puntastic

I'm honestly shocked at how many puns there are

Geoboffins reckon extreme rainfall might help some volcanoes pop off

Re: The magma's several km deep

Keep in mind that time is an important factor in rainfall. 124mm of rain over 24 hours is very different to 124mm of rain in 2 hours.

Similarly, 100mm of rain each day for three days straight may have a very different effect to 300mm of rain in a single 24 hour period.

I suspect that there is still quite a lot for them to study to work out how this all fits together.

IBM bans all removable storage, for all staff, everywhere

First, they came for the CD-R's

I can't help but think this is going to end poorly for them, but I guess this was always on the cards after being involved in so many data misplacement headlines.

Facebook settles landmark revenge porn case with UK teen for undisclosed sum

Re: Difficult

"But isn't facial recognition face books raison d'etre?

Perhaps, but what happens if said young victim later attempts to post a perfectly innocent self portrait picture, which then gets flagged, deleted and their account automatically banned due to a facial recognition match?

I've also seen other suggestions that Facebook should be held to the same standard as magazine publishers etc. Consider though that the effort to collate data, edit, print, distribute and sell a magazine or newspaper requires considerable financial outlay, significant amounts of specialist equipment, and a number of bottlenecks that aren't completely automated. This puts publishing images in physical print beyond the reach of most people.

Anyone can post anything on the internet from a mobile phone that (at least here in Australia) can be obtained for very little immediate financial outlay.

This isn't even comparing apples to oranges.

I suspect that if Facebook was required to vet every image posted (or even only a percentage based off some kind of heuristic scan) with human eyes, they would need to hire a truly insane number of people, and things would still potentially slip through the cracks.

Wait, what? The Linux Kernel Mailing List archives lived on ONE PC? One BROKEN PC?

Re: Like have a prod server under a desk in a cubicle...

"Luckily enough"

I'm reasonably sure that luck had nothing to do with it.

Brazil says it has bagged Royal Navy flagship HMS Ocean for £84m

Re: HMS BOFH

"Specialises in electronic warfare, stealthy "hit'n'run" and making enemies disappear mysteriously while making a profit."

The issue is that it would never actually make it to the war, due to the liberal application of its patented excuse generator. Props for making a warship that runs on pints and onion bhajis though.

You would probably also need to start lining up quite a lot of replacement admirals, due to the unavoidable attrition rate.

At Christmas, do you give peas a chance? Go cold turkey? What is the perfect festive feast?

Reporting in from the penitentiary colonies

I'm not sure I could stomach (please forgive the pun) a hot Christmas feed on the day when it's something better than 32 degrees C outside..

We go for a decent selection of cold cuts, including smoked turkey and ham, a bunch of pickled vegetable varieties and an obscene amount of cheese. This is all accompanied by various carbohydrate forms, fluffy and pillowy chunks, flat crunchy discs etc.

This usually gets set up in the middle of the house mid-morning, and then grazed on all day. You can be liberal with alcoholic condiments to taste.

The brandy soaked Christmas pud is non-negotiable though, with lots of custard on the side.

Icon because that's what the weather is like here in Oz on Christmas day.

FYI: Web ad fraud looks really bad. Like, really, really bad. Bigly bad

Re: Experience required: 10 years in clicking

"They made an intern review 12000 websites?"

I'd be willing to bet that the intern used a customised web crawling bot to gather the data for later review.

I don't think it would be quite the same if they didn't aim for peak irony.

Sweden leaked every car owners' details last year, then tried to hush it up

Re: Read the title, knew it was IBM

I know IBM is the industry whipping boy for stupid mistakes at the moment, but in all honesty, this was setting them up to fail.

Why the hell does a government keep sensitive military and police data in the same bit bucket with normal registration information!? In *ANY* IT system, someone somewhere has the ability to wander in and out of the system at will. By putting all this in one place, you have to accept that at least one person in the chain has the ability to grant access to any or all of the data to an unlimited number of people. The worst part is, you can have a data spill like this not from malicious intent, but (as the article says) from common, garden variety ineptitude.

Pretty much all big business contractors will only work to the contract. If you want something extra that you failed to negotiate for in the original contract, it'll cost you extra. If the Swedish government kept everything in one place like this, and then outsourced the lot without putting some obscene contract terms in to specifically limit where the data gets manipulated, and who has the ability to grant access to it, then this fail is all on them. IBM's involvement was little more than the equivalent of trying to use a bucket of kerosene to put out a bonfire.

HMS Frigatey Mcfrigateface given her official name

Re: Type numbers?

"Don't forget HMS Plus Size"

What about the ever image conscious Type 36H HMS Geordie, easily identifiable by the addition of excessively oversized emergency flotation devices on the foredeck.

Alphabay shutdown: Bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do? Not use your Hotmail...

"we all know that's bullshit"

I concur, I'd say that he was the web geek and well paid fall guy. I'm guessing someone else was pulling the strings, and made sure that nobody would look any deeper.

.. ..-. / -.-- --- ..- / -.-. .- -. / .-. . .- -.. / - .... .. ... then a US Navy fondleslab just put you out of a job

Re: Morse Code

@Dave 32

Doesn't that qualify you for the XO position? Someone has to make the old man look good.

Is this a hotdog? What it takes for an AI to answer that might surprise you

Re: The problem with AI is we don't understand enough to make it.

"The important question is how did they understand there was a similarity in the first place?"

Keep in mind that computers (and by extension, AI) are designed to work in a way that is modelled on human thought. This however, is not a direct analogue of human thought processes. The human brain is a highly evolved pattern recognition engine, with significant wetware components that will instinctively respond to certain stimulus, and can make huge leaps in both logic and intuition to link an image to an experience. A small child will often understand the concept and purpose of food long before they are able to articulate what any given type of food actually is. Realistically speaking, an AI will never understand food in this way, because it doesn't have the same requirements for it. About the best you can hope for is that the AI will work out how to flag items correctly as "food" (simply a category to the AI), regardless of whether or not the item is actually a hot dog.

AI bots will kill us all! Or at least may seriously inconvenience humans

Doing things because we can, without considering if we should.

FTFA:

"AI guru Andrew Ng once said worrying about killer artificial intelligence now is like worrying right now about overpopulation on Mars: sure, the latter may be a valid concern at some point, but we haven't set foot on the Red Planet yet."

With all due respect to AI gurus everywhere, I don't believe this is a valid argument.

Okay, to be fair, "worrying" is probably not productive, but considering it as a potential problem isn't such a bad idea.

It's a little bit late to start considering the problem once you've already implemented something and it goes horribly wrong. The very concept of change management is built on this idea. and it applies just as readily to overpopulating Mars as it does to AI going rogue.

In the Mars example, why not consider now what resources are required per-person to survive there (including requirements like land area requirements, redundant systems for safety etc. etc.) and then calculate a sustainable colony size that allows for appropriate scaling due to the inevitable population growth (I lived in a town where the only things to do on a Friday night involved two TV channels or stupid amounts of alcohol. Unless your colony is gender segregated, you're going to have space babies at some point, even if only out of boredom).

The same is true for AI's. It didn't take long for those negotiating smart frames to develop their own language, so a small amount of consideration now may well avoid considerable effort to correct an issue later.

To use a (moderately) famous quote: "The avalanche has already started, it's too late for the stones to vote."

We haven't triggered an avalanche yet.

It might be a good time to vote.

Physicists send supersonic shock waves rippling through a lab

Re: High Mach?

"not to be confused with Big Macs, the unit of measurement for American waistlines"

Would that be similar to the "Big Mach Beth" being a unit of measurement for the volume and quality of a cooked Scottish breakfast?

Okay, okay, I'm going.

UK spookhaus GCHQ can crack end-to-end encryption, claims Australian A-G

You would almost be forgiven for thinking this was a Monty Python sketch if it weren't for the horrible sense that somehow it's real, and that our government truly does believe that Australian law overrules the laws of mathematics, physics, etc. etc.

€100 'typewriter' turns out to be €45,000 Enigma machine

Re: The excuse note I typed on it came out all weird

"a Microsoft license key..."

It got me wondering where I'd left my elder sign medallion.

Hmm... now that I think about it, perhaps there was something more behind the "dance monkey boy" video from that old Microsoft developer conference...

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

Mine is the mysterious looking set of robes, and please don't forget the wizard's hat!