Posts by Alan Mackenzie

All your bots are belong to US if you don't play ball, DoD tells Anthropic

Contract doesn't just mean get smaller

> The DPA gives the President ... broad authority to require businesses to accept contracts.

That's a contradiction in terms. A contract is a voluntary agreement. What the text means is enforced work of the unwilling, i.e. slavery.

> the Pentagon was ready and willing to terminate the up to $200 million contract the agency signed with Anthropic

The Pentagon should stick to the agreed terms of their contract. That's what contract means, an agreement. Otherwise, I trust Anthropic would sue them to high heaven for breach.

Legacy systems blamed as ministers promise no repeat of Afghan breach

How many?

Does anybody know how many of these Afghan collaborators have been assassinated?

It's a very valuable lesson, though - Never, ever, trust the British establishment.

Four horsemen of the AI-pocalypse line up capex bigger than Israel's GDP

Re: Railway mania for a digital age.

> It's their money. They can waste it on whatever they want.

If only that were the case. It's not. It's our money too.

It's our money when 64 MB of RAM costs 800€ and rising, rather than 250€, when our electricity bills go up "temporarily" to bridge over the time until the data centres will supposedly start paying.

It's our environment they will be polluting needlessly. It's our infrastructure that is going unmaintained, our healthcare and education which is barely adequate, due to not taxing these vast accumulations of wealth adequately.

And it's our money which will be being mis-invested in supporting these hallucinations.

When the crash comes, as it surely will, many of us will become poorer.

Oracle expects investors to pump $50 billion into its cloud this year alone

What's a mandatory convertible preferred security?

I think in a forum for IT people, it would be good to explain such obtrusive financial jargon (whereas it may be patronising to explain this on a financial forum).

What is mandatory about these securities? Into what can they be converted? Who prefers them? And in what sense are they secure?

Or, in short, what effect will they have on Oracle's owners and investors? My inexpert view is that borrowing a year's revenue for an insolvent customer that likely will never be able to pay is foolhardy.

'Ralph Wiggum' loop prompts Claude to vibe-clone commercial software for $10 an hour

Re: Useless use of cat

I have recently started to use $ cat <source-file> | less as a workaround to get legible text in less. Somebody thought it a great idea to add syntax highlighting to less, including illegible dark blue text on a black background. Using the pipe prevents this syntax highlighting.

If I weren't so lazy, I'd look up the documentation to work out how to disable this illegibility, or even submit a bug report. But the problem, although irritating, isn't sufficiently so to propel me to doing anything about it. Damn!

Microsoft admits Outlook might freeze when saving files to OneDrive

40 years and counting.

Email is not a new technology. It must be around 40 years old, if not more. On my system it just works, and has done for several decades.

What is Microsoft doing that they can't get even such a mature technology working?

Cloudflare CEO threatens to make the Winter Olympics a political football after Italy slugs it with a fine

Re: Confused (again)

> a better way would be to drop resolving for the individual domain from clients originating in Italy rather than everything on an IP globally.

No, that misses the point. The content that is to be blocked belongs to Italian copyright holders and is Italian. Therefore the Italian regulators must be deemed to have worldwide jurisdiction over it.

What's the point of just blocking these copyright violating sites from Italians, when the rest of the world just pirates everything? Not a lot, really. These sites need to be neutralised everywhere.

I'd be prepared to wager that this fine didn't just come out of the blue. Cloudfare would have, at first, been asked politely to come up with a technical solution, and only on them refusing to do so would this IP address blocking have been required. I'd say their 14 million Euro fine is perfectly justified. Likely this fine will be followed up with litigation for damages from the copyright holders, and Cloudfare won't have a leg to stand on. The magnitude of those damages will likely exceed that of the fine.

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

Digital copies of digital originals. Analogue is something else altogether. <Sigh>

Ransomware attacks kept climbing in 2025 as gangs refused to stay dead

New attitudes and new legislation are needed.

Perhaps it is time to stop the processing of personal and other sensitive data on internet connected computers. That is, until the makers of IT systems actually start producing secure systems.

If system operators were required to pay realistic compensation (a few thousand Euros, say), to each victim of personal data "theft", things would very quickly take a turn for the better.

ServiceNow lays out possible co-CEO structure, but says no change imminent

ITSM ??

What does ITSM stand for?

Automakers' AI dreams may run out of road over the next five years

Re: MISRA C

I'm aware of what the argument is. As I pointed out, there are non-negligible costs associated with conforming with MISRA C, just as there are non-negligible costs associated with conforming with the Christian Bible. Where is the evidence for the usefulness of either?

Does anybody seriously think that having to write 0UL rather than 0 in some arithmetic expression makes the code safer? It definitely makes it more tedious to write, and more tedious to read.

I would have thought that after all this time, evidence for the effectiveness of MISRA C would be forthcoming. Maybe there is some now, I haven't been watching closely. But I suspect not.

Re: MISRA C

Last time I asked on the MISRA C mailing list about any validation of that standard, there came back the answer "none". Nobody could cite any studies showing that software developed with MISRA C was better (for any value of "better") than software developed some other way. Maybe that has changed in the last decade or so.

Given that MISRA C bloats software, which must make it more difficult to maintain, one would expect to need some justification for imposing it on a project. But no, it has become a bible for automotive software development, something that developers are not permitted to question. MISRA C prevents the use of the entire C standard. It is literally programming with a lower level language than (full) C.

Maybe MISRA C really does create better software. I somehow doubt it.

Barts Health seeks High Court block after Clop pillages NHS trust data

Negligence?

> Barts is now one of the highest-profile victims to confirm data exfiltration, joining a growing list of public bodies, universities, and other organizations caught in the blast radius.

It seems abundantly clear that storing personal data on an internet facing computer is unsafe. Given how easy it is to "steal" such data, it would appear to be negligent on the part of the data controllers to store it so accessibly.

How long is it going to be before a victim of such negligence (successfully) sues the data controllers?

DARPA making low-hanging satellites that use air to move

How can this work?

Just where does the energy come from to ionise the air the satellite will be passing through? That would appear to require fuel of some sort.

Geopolitics push European CIOs to think local on cloud

That picture isn't a game of chess.

Black appears not to have a king, unless it's on a8, which wouldn't indicate a high standard of play.

The white king's bishop is on b1 behind a wall of pawns. It couldn't possibly have got there. Maybe this "game" was started with knights and bishops the wrong way round on the board.

White, although undeveloped, appears to be chasing pawns with his queen on the kingside. Again, this doesn't indicate a high standard of play.

At least the board has been placed correctly with regard to white and black squares.

Come on, Register, you can do better than this.

Attacker steals customer data from Brit rail operator LNER during break-in at supplier

Wrong photograph.

LNER railway lines have 25 kV overhead cables, not third rail electrification.

ESA's Solar Orbiter will help space boffins predict destructive coronal ejections

Detection. And then ....?

Sure it's great if we can detect coronal mass ejections early.

But can this early warning message actually be used to protect spacecraft and astronauts at all? It would have been good for this to have been dealt with in the article.

Linux kernel 6.16 lands without any headline features but 38M lines of code

Phoronix estimates ....???

> Phoronix estimates that it has 38.4 million lines of code across over 78,000 files.

Why are they doing this, rather than just counting these lines and files? Surely they have done this, but are somehow lacking confidence in their counting.

To find the number of files, you just need to know the set of extensions used by these files, and:

$ find . -name '*.[ch]' -o -name '*.txt' -o ..... | wc -l

, or (better) on a pristine kernel source tree:

$ find . -type f | wc -l

.

To find the total number of lines:

$ find . -name '*.[ch]' -o -name '*.txt' -o ..... | xargs wc -l | grep total | gawk '{tot += $1}; END {print tot}'

, with the same amendment for the pristine source tree.

When I do the latter on *.c, *.h, and *.txt files in my copy of the 6.12.31 kernel, I get 34,871,763 lines, not a million miles away from the Phoronix estimate.

Brit watchdog says public service TV must 'urgently' join Team YouTube

Re: Interesting implications for the licence fee

> Same as healthy people shouldn't have to pay to fund the NHS, ....

No, it's very different. The NHS and schools are essential services, a necessary part of civilised society. Television is a luxury.

I'm fine sharing the costs of the NHS, schools, (to a certain extent) roads. I'm not fine about sharing the costs of other people's television viewing or attendance at football matches or concerts, or buying music. They're all forms of entertainment, which each person should decide on and pay for him/herself.

Re: 2x

> Suddenly the TV license will be 4x smaller. Or better be a tax to make everyone pay fairly.

That latter system holds in Germany. Every household must pay the license fee (over 200€ a year) regardless of whether they even have a television (or radio).

I don't have such equipment. I don't watch "television" through any online service.

I resent very much having to "pay fairly" as you put it.

Second attack on McLaren Health Care in a year affects 743k people

What was this information doing, being accessible from the Internet?

This is surely negligence. Why does it seem natural and justifiable to put such sensitive information on the Internet, which experience shows is impossible to secure?

Surely all this info should have been on a private network, air gapped from the Internet? With controlled access. And if that means copying information over on USB sticks (encrypted, of course), so what?

Heck, even if it means people having to use pen and paper, so what? It might seem more expensive, at first, but it would keep people's private information secure, which is one of the foremost requirements of a medical establishment.

When are we going to start seeing directors going to prison for being so casual with private personal information?

Xlibre fork lights a fire under long-dormant X.org development

The ridiculously distracting bullshit analogy (of 3d bunnies, etc.) was originated by Carsten Haitzler himself in the referenced Phoronix thread.

I think it reasonable to assume that an application will be run on a 2d screen/keyboard/mouse, if that was the technology used on the previous run of the program which saved its status file. It is also reasonable to assume that all the monitors used will be unchanged in the same position as last time, so long as the user can fix things on the rare occasion when that isn't the case.

I agree with you that Wayland should support robust standardized window manipulation. That necessarily includes the ability of a program to specify the size and position of each window it uses. The developers of Wayland apparently disagree, thinking that Wayland can work out far better than the program where the windows should go and how big they should be. This is because there may be setups where such settings aren't coherent. I think there's a gap between these developers and real world users, several of whom have made their feelings known in this thread.

Disclaimer: I've not used Wayland. What I've heard about it doesn't incline me to spend time trying it out.

> "If I can position my windows, here's where I'd like them" assumes that the application knows something about the compositor it's running on.

Such as that it's a on a 2d screen controlled by a keyboard and a mouse. Last time I looked, such setups are more common than having code wrapped around 3d bunnies which get eaten by dinosaurs when they are closed.

> I'm open-minded here .....

I think Carsten Haitzler probably thinks he's open minded too. Flat-Earthers are also very open minded, since they are willing to consider the evidence that the Earth isn't round.

> .... because it doesn't really affect me personally, but I'm not convinced that we're losing anything by giving up windows being able to shuffle themselves about. I'd love to have some concrete examples if there are UI design patterns that rely on window manipulation functionality, especially if those patterns are locally optimal means of interacting with the software within whatever domain the program is related to.

Lots of programs need to store their current window layouts so that they can be restored on restarting the computer after a night's sleep. That's an obvious and reasonable requirement. Some programs, for example, will need to open two windows adjacent to each other. (No, I can't give you an example). These are common operations provided by windowing systems since they first existed ~50 years ago. Wayland fails to provide them because it is open-minded.

Wayland is open minded, because it is not insisting that wheels be round. It is anticipating that somebody might want to invent square wheels, so is preventing application programs doing anything which only works with round wheels.

MIT boffins claim liquid sodium battery could one day power aircraft while sucking up CO2

Just where is this Sodium going to be coming from?

Sodium metal doesn't exist in nature - at least, not on the Earth. It will have to be produced by something like electrolysis, at great energy cost.

And if it's going to be liquid metal sodium, it will have to be heated substantially, at even more energy cost.

Then, of course, it's highly inflammable, so there will be safety aspects to consider.

This idea is thus going to do little to combat global warming. A much better idea than sodium powered drones might be no drones. Then we wouldn't need such crazy technology.

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

The salaries paid to highly qualified scientists in Britain are desperately poor.

A family member of mine is such a scientist with a PhD in chemistry, working at a government funded research institute in England. He's on a three year temporary contract, and isn't even earning enough to be able to rent his own flat. A few years ago, he told me that there had been no promotions, and no pay increases for 10 years. Additionally, of course, a recent Tory government cancelled their pension entitlements without compensation.

All that sends a clear message that science in the UK won't make you a comfortable living. The UK establishment clearly doesn't care about science. Not that it's necessarily any better in some EU countries.

Google details plans for 1 MW IT racks exploiting electric vehicle supply chain

1 MW computing racks ....

Madness, sheer madness.

Japan serves Google a cease and desist order over its Android bundling deals

And the punishment?

Google is being required to stop committing the crime, but what about punishing them for breaking the law? If I were to be found guilty of a much lesser crime, say shoplifting, I'd be faced with more than just being required not to do it again.

Hacktivism resurges – but don't be fooled, it's often state-backed goons in masks

.... by using default passwords for internet-accessible programmable logic controllers.

Just what are PLCs accessible from the internet for?

Maybe there'd be less malware and disruption if the default for a computer system was NOT to be on the internet, and only very restricted systems for which there were a good reason would be connected.

Boeing 787 radio software safety fix didn't work, says Qatar

90 Minutes to install a patch????

What on Earth are they playing at? You could install a full featured operating system onto a PC in less time than that.

Might it possibly be that they've taken a cue from Microsoft, and they're reinstalling the entire program rather than patching it?

Brits to build ExoMars landing gear after Russia sent packing

Sending corrections.

> ..... and probably as good a reminder as any to use the "send corrections" link rather than posting a comment for such purposes.

This "send corrections" is only available to those who are prepared to allow Google Scripts (aka Google malware) to run on their machines. I block these with NoScript.

I don't understand why The Register does this: it knows who its logged in posters are. If it lets these posters post, why not let them send corrections too?

50 years ago the last Saturn rocket rolled out of NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building

So, what's developed in the last 50 years?

Yes, 50+ years ago, the Saturn rockets worked, taking people to the moon and back again.

50 years later, now, we seem to be stuck with basic engineering issues on a successor to Saturn. What happened to the skills and experience of the 1960s and 1970s that building working rockets has become so difficult once again?

Infoseccers criticize Veeam over critical RCE vulnerability and a failing blacklist

"Blocklist" ???

What's this nonsense with "blocklist"? A blocklist is a list of blocks, such as might be allocated in a file system or any number of similar things.

It took me several minutes to work out what you were talking about. What you were talking about was a BLACKLIST, a word instantly recognised and understood. Particularly when you contrasted it with "whitelist".

We're (mostly) robust adults reading and commenting on the Register. There is nothing whatsoever offensive about "blacklist". Please use it in the future when it's the correct word.

Thanks!

iOS users left refreshing in vain as Microsoft Outlook woes drag on

My email works .....

Email has been a working product for over 40 years. That's adequate time to have got rid of all the bugs, even at Microsoft.

What on Earth can they be playing at? Changing their email software for change's sake?

C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from 'serious attacks'

Re: Nonsense like MISRA to neuter it

MISRA C, last time I asked on their mailing list (which was over a decade ago) was somebody's opinion on what good coding was. There were no studies showing that programs programmed with MISRA were better (for whatever value of better) than those not.

MISRA bloats source code. A simple `if' statement, for example, expands from 2 lines to 4 lines by virtue of the redundant compound statement MISRA imposes. There are worse examples: try to write a MISRA equivalent of a search through a linked list. It takes three lines in C (the first line being the assignment of the search variable to the list pointer). It would take many more in MISRA C. The only argument against that is that MISRA C is rarely used in applications with linked lists. Bloated source code is more difficult to maintain because one is scrolling the source code up and down more.

MISRA C is used in the motor industry like the bible is used in Christianity. It is taken for granted, and one is expected not to question it.

DeepSeek disappears from South Korean app stores over privacy concerns

..... the software breached "local" privacy laws.

No, it most assuredly did not. If anything, it breached NATIONAL privacy laws. South Korea is a nation, not some minor local borough, please.

Ireland's AI minister has never used ChatGPT but swears she'll learn fast

Re: Relievedly

For pity's sake, DON'T "tape a couple of their fingers back". That's physical abuse, and could possibly lead to permanent injury. Robert Schumann, the composer, tried this on noticing how awkward his pinkies were when playing the piano. That was the end of his career as a pianist.

Got a telescope? Bid farewell to ESA's retiring Milky Way mapper

Surely they could have said "deactivated"? Or maybe they meant "pacified". Satellites can get violent. Who knows?

Uncle Sam now targets six landlord giants in war on alleged algorithmic rent fixing

Here we go, once more, yet again.

Nowhere in this despicable account is any mention of getting allegedly illegally fixed rents reduced back to what they should have been. Far less, the restitution of the excess payed by renters over the past years.

No, instead, we get talk about (at least one of) the guilty paying a paltry settlement to a regulator. Cost of doing business.

Until we start seeing substantial gaol sentences for the directors of such firms, this type of criminality will continue.

Public developer spats put bcachefs at risk in Linux

To Liam: Clarification over the state of the Emacs project vis-a-vis CC Mode.

Hello, Liam.

Yes, it is true that I have resigned from the Emacs project, and I have to say I'm not proud of my actions which, together with the actions of others, led to the disagreement which forced me out.

CC Mode, as well as being a part of the Emacs core, is also a stand alone project. I intend to continue running that stand alone project, and will cooperate with the Emacs core maintainers to ensure that bug fixes and fixes for language changes (e.g. the three yearly C++ standard) filter through to Emacs itself.

I will no longer be participating directly in the development of the Emacs core, that's all.

Incidentally, there are new modes based on Tree Sitter in Emacs which are faster (usually, but not always) than the corresponding CC Mode modes, and though they still have rough edges, it's not inconcievable that these new modes will someday supersede CC Mode and other traditional major modes entirely.

Emacs continues to be a useful and supremely user friendly (as contrasted with beginner friendly) program.

The NPU: Neural processing unit or needless pricey upsell?

Re: What does "upsell" (noun) mean?

Many thanks!

What does "upsell" (noun) mean?

Upsell (noun)? I've never encountered the word before. Is it part of some USAmerican dialect?

It made it hard for me to tick one of the three boxes on the quiz.

To kill memory safety bugs in C code, try the TrapC fork

Re: This'll be down voted...

I'm not down voting you, but I'm curious - don't you use any scripting languages for the small problems which crop up, day to day? Something like bash, or AWK, or Python, or Perl?

For example, to count the total size of files in a directory, using bash and AWK would look something like this:

ls -lrt | awk 'tot += $5; END {print tot}'

. I don't doubt you could code this in Fortran, but it would be much longer, more tedious, and more error prone to write.

Re: I've taken out union and some other things that I rarely use

I think union is little used, and will continue to be little used. MISRA frowns on it, for one.

In that (rare) 400,000 line project with lots of unions, you'll just have to go through it getting rid of them, one by one. Or stick with C. So what? The developer of this language has experience in embedded systems, where there are indeed some legitimate uses of union. There will surely be some adequate replacement for it.

As for that big chunk of memory you need to zap, if you declare it in a function (I'm guessing here), it will be freed as part of leaving that function. What's the big deal?

It sounds good to me. I think we should wait for the language to become available before anybody condemns it.

Re: Variable Names : Case Sensitivity

Having lots and lots of ways to spell a single variable is worse.

AMD teases its GPU biz 'approaching the scale' of CPU operations

Re: 4-bit Floating point?

Thanks for the elucidation!

So this 4-bit floating point can contain just the following values: 0, 0.125, 0.25, 0.5, 1, and their negatives. About the only sensible arithmetic you could do on these would be comparison, and (to a very restricted extent) multiplication and subtraction. The overflow and underflow bits (if such exist on this architecture) will be in constant use.

Maybe it's no wonder that current "AI" can produce such wacky results.

4-bit Floating point?

There was a reference in the article to 4-bit or 6-bit floating point. What does this mean?

A 4-bit data structure has just 16 possible values. This is a bit constrained even for an integer. How many of these 4 bits are the exponent, and how many the significant digits?

I can't help wondering whether some marketing fantasy has entered here.

Sketchy financials send Supermicro auditors running for the hills

2020 .... "widespread accounting violations," .... $17.5 million .... without admitting wrongdoing.

Here we go again. Firms breaking the law and settling with a corrupt judiciary without admitting guilt.

Maybe, just maybe, if the directors had been properly prosecuted back then, and replaced (one way or another), the firm wouldn't be in the mess it's currently in.

Just how badly do company directors in the USA have to break the law before actually being charged and hauled up into court?

UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good

There's no such thing as "daylight saving time" in the UK

"DST" is a purely American term. In Britain it's called summer time. The article is about Britain. Why use the (somewhat ridiculous) American term?

Bitwarden's FOSS halo slips as new SDK requirement locks down freedoms

Re: The balance tipped.

> Never contribute to a FOSS project that asks you to sign over your copyright.

I would advise rather the opposite. A project that requires you to sign over your copyright, such as GNU, is serious about remaining free. That's providing the pertinent licence is also seriously free, such as GPL2+ or GPL3+. The GNU project has serious lawyers on its staff.

What exactly are you planning on doing, should some large corporation violate your retained copyright? Invest your life savings in (possibly) travelling to the USA, living there, hiring expensive copyright lawyers and initiating procedings? Not really. You'd have little alternative but to roll over and do nothing.

UK's Sellafield nuke waste processing plant fined £333K for infosec blunders

Here we go, yet again.

This penalty isn't even a slap on the wrist for an entity the size of "Sellafield Ltd." (which I've never heard of, despite being aware of what they do and where). The radioactive waste they are dealing with is seriously nasty stuff. How come the directors are not facing gaol sentences?

There might as well not be any laws mandating data security if this is all that happens when they are broken. The judge has effectively said "Just carry on doing what you've been doing, and don't worry too much about it".