Posts by Fred Dibnah

AI slop pollutes the CVE pipeline with fake vulns

Re: Could be worse

To help someone like me who isn’t a coder or an expert on AI, could you list some examples so we know what to look for? Ta.

UK wants datacenters to pay a fee for grid connection requests

Re: Offshore pirate data centres!

And now, A Walk In The Black Forest.

Citation, please! UK regulator slaps Google with new publishing rules for search

Unfortunately yes, a large percentage of people still use Google search. Partly because Alphabet have paid huge sums to Apple, Mozilla et al and because of Android, but mainly because it's the only search engine most people have heard of. I try to tell people I know to use a different search engine, but they have to have a reason why they should switch and that can take a bit of explaining.

Still, I shouldn't complain. I still use Yahoo! mail :-)

Re: Clown Market Authority strikes again

There is far more to the Internet than forty or so major news sites. Thousands, possibly millions, of people and groups publish original material, and they are losing clicks and income due to Google's (and Bing's, and DDG's) AI summaries. It's a real problem and it needs to be addressed, no matter what your personal view is on particular publishers.

Microsoft reaches for olive branch after public dustup with 0-day researcher

Re: Is this not insanity?

Why would you want an exciting keyboard?

Indra rides off with £1.96B Transport for London ticketing deal as Oyster heads for back-office overhaul

Contractor for TfL

The British English spelling is defence, not defense.

</snark>

London’s BT Tower to get rooftop swimming pool

Re: Is the water

Scon or scoan?

Re: Do you remember when...

Thanks for that rabbit hole. You bastard :-D

However, of relevance to this discussion I’ve discovered that the 1915 One inch OS maps show the route of the water pipe from the Elan Valley dams to Birmingham. The current maps don’t show it, and even at the Elan Visitor Centre there is no information on the pipe’s route. Presumably that’s because it’s now deemed to be critical national infrastructure.

I guess it’s OK to show the dams and reservoirs on the maps because no-one else has any Lancaster bombers.

Re: Do you remember when... re: Copyright

The ‘V’ (dah-dah-dah-daaa) was used as transmitter warm-up, tune-up, and station ident on BBC World Service shortwave transmissions to Europe until the end of the Cold War.

Yahoo! Japan’s owner consolidating 164 OpenStack clusters into one

Yahoo!

The! Register!! Has! Forgotten! How! To! Write! Yahoo!!-Based! Headlines!

'People's Panel' to check if UK wants controversial Digital ID will cost £630K

Re: hooray

Foreign visitors to the British Museum should have free entry, given that most of the exhibits were stolen from their countries.

GOV.UK chatbot gets smarter but slower as LLMs improve

Re: Hang on...

A chatbot accuracy where 1 in 10 queries are answered incorrectly is completely unacceptable when we are dealing with official information.

BBC World Service digital switch backfires as online audience drops

Re: "Some language services that were moved to digital-only distribution"

The BBC still uses NICAM for radio distribution. The hardware was upgraded just a couple of years ago.

Re: Why broadcast is better.

The World Service is broadcast in North America (and in other regions) via public radio stations on AM, FM, and satellite.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-radio-and-tv-12764014

Poland bans camera-packing cars made in China from military bases

My cheap laptop is over 20 years old and still working just fine.

Keir Starmer declares 'months' timeline for social media age clampdown in UK

Re: Age check...

And for our younger viewers: Gail Porter.

Re: A tiny mind juggling too many thoughts?

Upvoted you for calling the PM ‘Mr Starmer’ instead of the ridiculous ‘Sir Kier’ moniker that the BBC and other media uses.

Microsoft engineer speedruns Raspberry Pi magic smoke in five minutes

Re: Keying...

The old Cisco 60-pin serial port connector was pretty awful. The pins were in a rectangle and the D-type shell was not a pronounced D shape and made of thin tin, so it was easy to plug it in upside down. The one time I saw it done (not by me, honest guv) on a powered 2600 router, it didn’t damage the port but it made the shell into an oval shape so it was now impossible to know which way up it should go.

Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

Re: less programs

Fewer

/pedantry

EU won't scrap tech regs just because Washington dislikes them

“The EU has pledged to stand firm against US threats”

Translation: the EU will give in to the USA’s threats. Again.

Vibe coding: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing (Sorry, Linus)

Re: You weren't there, man

You don’t need to know how a car works in order to drive it, but it helps if you want to drive it well.

25 years of meatbags permanently in space on the ISS

Re: One step forward, two steps back!

Or is it?

Marks & Spencer swaps out TCS for fresh helpdesk deal

”UK retailer Marks & Spencer has replaced Tata Consultancy Services as its IT service desk provider following a procurement process that began in January”

When I parse that sentence, it says to me that M&S are now M&S’s IT services provider.

I also chuckled at the photo used on the article - it’s M&S’s Oxford Street store, the listed building they want to demolish and replace with a new one. There’s an ironic parallel with IT in there somewhere.

How do you solve a problem like Discovery?

Re: Better option.

From The Right Stuff film:

Alan Shepard: “That is a spacecraft, sir. We do not refer to it as a ‘capsule’. Spacecraft.”

Apple faces £1.5B payout after losing UK App Store case

Re: Waste of time appealing

IANAL, but I would imagine that lodging an appeal means that Apple can ignore the ruling until the appeal is heard.

Given that the ruling came from a Competition Appeal Tribunal, I hope they also get to hear the appeal and throw Apple out of court.

Schleswig-Holstein waves auf Wiedersehen to Microsoft stack

Re: Yay for Schleswig-Holstein !

Yes, but no-one has ever suffered Death by Impress ;-)

Re: "slush fund"

For more of the story, I recommend this 45 minute documentary ‘The Microsoft-Dilemma - Europe as a Software Colony‘:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=duaYLW7LQvg&pp=ygUbTXVuaWNoIG9wZW4gc291cmNlIHNvZnR3YXJl

Bose kills SoundTouch: Smart speakers go dumb in Feb

Re: You'd be amazed...

True, although other countries have implemented anti-circumvention rules along similar lines to DMCA 1201, under threat of sanctions by the USA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention#

Cory Doctorow has written at length about this.

https://pluralistic.net/tag/dmca-1201/

If the Pye TV is currently in use it will almost certainly have an external UHF aerial which is already able to receive DVB broadcasts, so all they need is a STB with UHF output and an extra coax cable.

Anyone trying to reverse engineer the Bose system is likely to fall foul of DMCA section 1201, particularly if they share their code.

https://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq

"It's really not unreasonable to expect people to know what they're buying."

At what level should they "know what they're buying"?

When they buy a fridge, should they know the about setting the correct temperature and putting food on the correct shelves, or should they know the thermodynamics of the refrigeration cycle?

When they buy a lawn mower, should they know how to add petrol and use it safely, or should they know how the Otto 4-Stroke Cycle works?

Joe and Jane Public already think their home wi-fi is their broadband and Google is the Internet, so IMHO it's reasonable that they expect audio products to just work, without needing to know in detail how the sound comes out.

Sonos

The correct parallel with Bose bricking their hardware isn't the Sonos app debacle, bad as it was. It's what Sonos did five years ago, where they said all their older products would stop working after May 2020, but which they tempered with a truly generous 'offer' of a discount on new hardware if you sent the bricked units to them. Understandably the customer backlash was swift and vigorous and they quickly backtracked, introducing the S1 and S2 apps for controlling older and newer hardware respectively. I still have the email from CEO at the time (see below). I notice that my copy of the email has British English spelling, which is nice :-)

If Bose customers are able to generate a similar amount of noise, perhaps the company will back down (although I doubt it).

"We heard you. We did not get this right from the start. My apologies for that and I wanted to personally assure you of the path forward:

First, rest assured that come May, when we end new software updates for our legacy products, they will continue to work just as they do today. We are not bricking them, we are not forcing them into obsolescence, and we are not taking anything away. Many of you have invested heavily in your Sonos systems, and we intend to honour that investment for as long as possible. Whilst legacy Sonos products won’t get new software features, we pledge to keep them updated with bug fixes and security patches for as long as possible. If we run into something core to the experience that can’t be addressed, we’ll work to offer an alternative solution and let you know about any changes you’ll see in your experience.

Secondly, we heard you on the issue of legacy products and modern products not being able to coexist in your home. We are working on a way to split your system so that modern products work together and get the latest features, whilst legacy products work together and remain in their current state. We’re finalising details on this plan and will share more in the coming weeks.

Whilst we have a lot of great products and features in the pipeline, we want our customers to upgrade to our latest and greatest products when they’re excited by what the new products offer, not because they feel forced to do so. That’s the intent of the Trade Up programme we launched for our loyal customers.

Thank you for being a Sonos customer. Thank you for taking the time to give us your feedback. I hope that you’ll forgive our misstep and let us earn back your trust. Without you, Sonos wouldn't exist and we’ll work harder than ever to earn your loyalty every single day.

If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Sincerely,

Patrick

Patrick Spence

CEO, Sonos"

Workers: Yes, RTO makes sense. No, we’re not going to do it

I don’t normally question why my comments get downvoted - differences of opinion and all that - but I am genuinely baffled why somebody-or-other didn’t like my little (true) anecdote about WFH in the days of dial-up.

Re: Chocolate and orange juice

And yet they are quite OK with mixing peanut and jam (“jelly”).

Same here, same era & circumstances. The only problems I had were running the modem cable across the floor to the master socket, and having to drop the connection every time my partner wanted to use the phone. ISDN solved the second problem.

I get distracted by the chatter of other operators in call centres, sometimes to the point where I can’t understand the operator who is talking to me.

Amazon grounds drone deliveries in Arizona after two crashed into a crane

‘Your Amazon package has been delivered to your neighbouring building site’

UK minister suggests government could ditch 'dangerous' Elon Musk's X

As awful as XTwitter is, it’s an efficient way of pushing messages out to a large number people in one go. Very few visit government websites unless they need a service such as pensions or benefits.

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

Re: Security & Efficiency

TBF the database that IBM produced for the Nazis was pretty efficient.

Campaigners urge UK PM Starmer to dump digital ID wheeze before it's announced

Re: This idiot plan suggests that Labour really doesn't want to get re-elected.

”Lab will be out and Ref will be in, and Ref swear they'll ditch any id scheme”

Well, we all know what happens to pre-election promises once a party is in power, don’t we?

Brit scientists over the Moon after growing tea in lunar soil

Re: Tea..

What’s wrong with being drunk?

Charities warn Ofcom too soft on Online Safety Act violators

TV aerials have been used to receive digital terrestrial TV signals since, um, the 20th century.

US tech giants pledge $42 billion in UK investment as Trump tours Blighty

I agree with Nick.

(I never thought I would write that)

OpenAI says models are programmed to make stuff up instead of admitting ignorance

Re: "Even a wrong answer is right some of the time"

That’s right enough ;-)

Linux Mint picks up the pace with LMDE 7 and Wayland-ready Cinnamon

Re: A bit slow?

Are we discussing Wayland here, or IPv6? ;-)

New cybersecurity rules land for Defense Department contractors

Re: Sidebar - "Department of War"

Trump is mad and bad, but Department of War is a more honest description of what the military does, imho.

Supermarket giant Tesco sues VMware, warns lack of support could disrupt food supply

Re: Popcorn time

Popcorn?

Junk is the new punk: Why we're falling back in love with retro tech

Re: It Never Went Away For Me

Technically yes, but as with physical books you are able to lend, copy and sell the content despite what the Ts&Cs say. I mean, they could send plod round to check you haven’t complied, but I doubt they have ever done that.

“Home taping is killing music” lol.

Re: It Never Went Away For Me

That applied to DVDs but fortunately not to CDs (apart from when Sony tried their rootkit nonsense).

I still have quite a few DVDs, but these days it’s often quicker to torrent the film than sitting through the nag screens and menus on disc.

UK unions want 'worker first' plan for AI as people fear for their jobs

UK

So it’s labour, not labor.