Posts by Alan Mackenzie

London cabbies want Sadiq Khan to slam the brakes on robotaxis

How would one pay for a driverless taxi journey?

If there's no driver to take one's money, how does one pay?

Or, in the future, are taxi rides going to be restricted to those with smart phones or bank cards?

Anthropic's super bug-hunting model Mythos is hardcore good at math, as latest vuln under attack shows

Maths?

Those formulas in that picture are a top to bottom mirror image of what might (or might not) be maths. Why go for this ROT-13 quality obfuscation?

Met Police suspends use of phone-hacking software over Russian links

.... through a Cyprus-based holding company.

Maybe if regulatory authorities were to outlaw such shenanigans, and require the beneficial owners of companies to be registered, such things wouldn't happen.

What's gone wrong, anyway? I don't understand. The software the police bought appears to be working properly, and isn't 'phoning home. So where's the problem?

Artificial intelligence must have a new name, says politician who likes renaming bodies of water

Re: España

fbcon is a high quality piece of software. I've been using it as my main working environment for over 25 years. Unlike so much other software, it's functionality is unchanging and dependable. The format of the keyboard layout file is unchanged since the late 1990s; likewise for the font files.

Any terminal is useless without a shell running in it, so I don't see why you've singled out the Linux console here.

Terminals don't support UTF-8, except for input from the keyboard. They support 32-bit Unicode, sometimes called UTF-32. The Linux console does support Unicode, but is limited to 256 or 512 distinct glyphs from the Basic Multilingual Plane, all of which must be half-width (i.e. no East Asian characters, etc.) As I've said, I have enhanced the Linux Console to handle any number of distinct glyphs, also full-width ones, but the kernel team weren't interested in my patch when I submitted it. They just want this console software to die, despite the number of users it has.

I'm not sure how useful Xcompose would be on X used as you propose. If you wanted to type lots of rainy umbrellas (which might be useful in Scotland ;-), it would be worthwhile setting up your keyboard as you say. If you want to type a wide variety of different Unicode code points, having to make an entry for each one before typing it would just slow you down and likely cause confusion.

Re: España

You're confusing Linux (i.e. the Linux console which is part of the kernel) and the complex software based on X-Windows or Wayland. What you wrote applies to the latter only.

A typical Linux keyboard layout _does_ support entering Unicode code points. You hold down the <AltGr> key, and type in the hex code point on the numeric keypad (where a to f are <NumLock> to <Enter>). For most code points this won't do you much good since, apart from on my system, the console can only display 256 or 512 distinct glyphs. On releasing <AltGr> the character (or U+fffd, the replacement character) appears on the screen.

There's also holding down <Alt> and typing in a code point in decimal on the numeric keypad. This only works for characters up to 255.

Composing characters is all very well, but is restricted. If you want to type, say, a rainy umbrella (U+2614 ☔) or the radioactive sign (U+2622 ☢) you need to know the code points (not UTF-8) to enter them. The umbrella and the rain don't exist as separate code points, so they can't be composed. ;-)

Re: Türkiye???

Neither the UN nor any other body has any authority over the English language. This contrasts with languages like French and German which do have such bodies.

Türkiye is not an English name. It can't be typed on an English layout keyboard, and likely can't even be said by an English speaker.

In general, the names of countries and large cities get translated when translating languages. And even when they don't, they're often pronounced differently (?wrongly) in non-native languages. Examples of the latter are Berlin, Koblenz and Hannover in English.

If you're right about Turkey requesting an awkward spelling for its name in English, then that was brass-necked audacity. Shame on those officials who permitted this anomaly and the resulting confusion and difficulties.

Re: España

This does iñdeed work, in particular in Firefox.

Thank you very much!

Türkiye???

Come on, El Reg, the country is called Turkey in the English language.

Otherwise, for consistency's sake, you should refer to Deutschland rather than Germany, Espa~na (don't know how to type that :-() rather than Spain, and so on. As for how Kazakhstan is written in its own language, I haven't a clue.

Why not just stick to English?

London neocloud Nscale takes its $1B loss to Wall Street

Where're the regulators, for crying out loud?

A company with revenues of 100 million dollars and a debt of 1,000 million dollars shouldn't be eligible for listing on a stock exchange. It's broke.

It says it's got 44 Billion dollars of income in a contract, but it's got no money to be able to fulfill its side of its bargain. The other party to this contract, Anthropic, hasn't got any money to pay them, either. It's broke, too. It's all jam tomorrow. Maybe.

No doubt they'll find some fools to buy their newly issued shares. I just hope that my pension funds are not amongst them.

Fedora 45 beta drags the Linux console into the 21st century

I've actually tried to use kmscon ....

.... on my Gentoo system. It didn't match my expectations.

Mainly, this is to do with its unfortunate use of of libxkbcommon, the X keyboard library. I say unfortunately, because xkb is unfathomably complicated (even its maintainers have given up, saying euphemistically on their website that the documentation is "a work in progress"). By contrast, the Linux console keyboard has equal capability, and is fully described in the wonderful man page for keymaps by Andries Brouwer, unchanged since 1998.

There is only a negligible amount of keyboard documentation in the kmscon man page; essentially it says "you can get a German keyboard by setting the option --xkb-layout=de". That's it. There's no documentation of where this "de" comes from, or how to setup one's custom X-Windows keyboard layout in kmscon. After spending several days of fruitless experimentation and searching of the Web, I came to the conclusion it's not possible.

kmscon's keyboard layout is hard-coded, with the exception of the keys for printable characters. It appears to be impossible to set up <Alt><Fn> to switch VTs (virtual terminals). It appears equally impossible to set up any key sequence to switch to VT13+. As for VT1 - VT12, there is only the clumsy <Ctrl><Alt><Fn> available. As I said, these are hard-coded.

kmscon hijacks a frightening number of key sequences for its own purposes, ones which its maintainers assume no program will ever need. Clearly they're not Emacs users! Amongst those hijacked key sequences are <Shift><Up> and <Shift><Down>, used for scrolling the tty a single line down or up. In fairness, it is possible to unconfigure these key sequences, but that's an arduous job because there are so many of them.

Yes, there is unrestricted Unicode available on this console. But the lack of this on the Linux console is not an accident, it's deliberate policy. Some weeks ago I submitted a patch to the Linux console team to allow the unrestricted use of Unicode on it. An LLM program detected a number of violations of kernel protocols. Other than that, there's no sign anybody actually applied and tried out the patch. The maintainer, Greg Kroah-Hartmann, expressed a positive lack of interest in it, saying that the Linux console is scheduled for removal from the kernel, to be superseded by kmscon. Nobody seems bothered that kmscon might not be up to scratch. :-(

kmscon requires a frightening dependency list of user-space libraries. It is unclear to me how useful it would be in a broken or incomplete system. For example, would it work in a rescue system, or during installation of Gentoo. By contrast, the Linux console is supremely reliable, always working if there's even a running kernel. Nobody has said anything about this.

There is no public mailing list for kmscon, so it is difficult to communicate with its maintainers. There seem to be facilities for Github users, but that's about it.

Most worryingly, kmscon is controlled by RedHat. This is the same RedHat that made Gnome (and much more egregiously, udev) available only under systemd. Once the "competition" from the kernel's console has been removed, they could do the same with kmscon. Does anybody still trust RedHat?

So far, kmscon doesn't appear to have users. I have searched in vain for a review of kmscon from a power user which says "I've been using kmscon for <n> weeks and I'm very happy with it.". I've tried, and failed, to set it up to suit my needs. I don't know what I'll do when the kernel console team removes the console from the kernel. Maybe I'll switch to one of the BSDs, though their consoles aren't much to write home about either.

Oracle celebrates banner quarter with another round of layoffs

Large-scale "restructuring" of its workforce

Please, El Reg, can we get rid of this sickening euphemism "restructuring"? A correct word here would be "reduction".

When you restructure something, say a piece of software, you reorganise the way its pieces interact with eachother, such that it becomes more efficient, easier to extend and debug, etc. If you simply discard bits of a program at random, then see what (if anything) still works, that is not restructuring. It is vandalism.

The same applies to companies. Will whatever structure remains at Oracle be adequate to maintain and enhance their database products? It seems unlikely.

CPython eases Rust requirements as assimilation continues

They're kidding themselves.

Either you have rust in the project or you don't. There's no half-way house.

All Cpython maintainers will soon have to master rust, since they will have to debug other people's rust bugs.

All this "gently, gently, it's optional" is a lie, possibly an insulting one. People aren't that stupid.

It's the same argument about, say, new abstruse features introduced into C++ every three years: "You don't have to use them if you don't want to". A big lie.

UK military wants lasers to stop drone swarms without running out of ammo

What about civil aircraft and satellites?

If you're firing high powered lasers into the sky, sooner or later you're going to down an aeroplane. Or even disable a satellite. Is this really a good idea?

Industry that built the problem offers to sell you the solution

Re: We could pay

"AI" doesn't make any profit. It's sold at a small fraction of its cost, leading to massive losses, particularly at OpenAI and Anthropic.

See Ed Zitron at <https://www.wheresyoured.at>.

Meta's proposed $18B settlement in teen harm case throws YouTube and TikTok under the bus, too

Child abuse

If I were to abuse children, I'd be facing a substantial gaol sentence.

Yet Meta expects to get away with a barely noticeable slap-on-the-wrist fine, with no guilt presumed.

The USA: the best justice money can buy.

Salesforce partners not seeing meaningful revenue from Agentforce AI platform, report says

Partners?

What on Earth is meant by "partners" here?

A partner is another person/company who has the same aims as the first person/company, likely with complementary attributes/skills, and works together with him/it.

Employees are not partners. Neither are customers. Both have different, conflicting aims.

If the author here means customers, then she should write that. If Salesforce really has enough partners to be worth taking a survey of them, it would be helpful to outline why it needs so many.

EU and UK officially blame Russian spies for cyberattack on Poland's power grid

What does Russia say about all this?

It's normal journalistic practice to get both sides of a story. Has the Reg been in touch with the Russian Embassy to get their side of this story?

KDE Plasma users face a dire omen of change: 6.6.6 arrives

Red Hat and the desktop

> It's designed by youngsters who don't know how to use Windows and don't care.

> They all live in terminal windows anyway. RH is a nest of Vim fans.

> All they want is easy rapid terminal windows and a bunch of phone-style apps.

Given this, it's frightening how much power and influence Red Hat has over the desktop. They acquired this not by accident, but by forcing software such as systemd on people who didn't really want it. Software such as pulseaudio, Wayland, and what Gnome has become (compared with what it once was). Most, if not all "controversial" GNU/Linux software seems to stem from RH.

It is currently not too difficult to avoid all this Red Hat SW. But I get the feeling RH is consciously aiming to make it more difficult as time goes by. I can't think of any examples of RH expanding choice and configurability, and quite a few of them restricting these things.

EU puts 'addictive' design of Facebook, Instagram under the DSA microscope

Fines of up to $x billion.

They're all very well, but does the commission have the power to require Facebook to clean up its act? That would appear to be more urgent and important.

SAP makes it easier for customers to shop for legacy product support, ending EU antitrust probe

No punishment.

This really gets my goat. A large enterprise like SAP can defraud its customers with impunity, and when an unreasonably cumbersome process eventually pins down its illegality, all they have to do is change their ways a little.

If I were to do anything similar, on a much smaller scale, I'd be facing gaol time.

Google found liable for bad AI Overview results. Let's play Truth Or Consequences

This article could have been hallucinated by an LLM.

There are no details in this article: a link to court's determination, the identities of the persuers, dates, anything. Just the fact it happened in Munich.

Why? Is this real?

Anthropic recruits army to sell Claude to nonprofits

150 million dollars?

Just whose money will this 150 million dollars come from?

Swift thinking buys NASA observatory a little more time before re-entry

American English.

> ...into early fall.

You've just got to laugh, sometimes.

Anthropic’s Stainless steal tightens grip on AI dev tooling

Funding

Just whose money did they use to buy this company?

'Dirty Frag' Linux flaw one-ups CopyFail with no patches and public root exploit

Linux kernel modules

My Linux kernel is configured without modules. Every driver needed to run my machine is compiled in. I don't use an initramfs either.

I've always maintained that, sooner or later, modules will constitute a security problem.

That sooner or later is now.

Meta fights Ofcom over how many billions count as billions

A waste of the court's time

Isn't there a principle under English law that potential legal cases can only be adjudicated when they become actual?

I hope the judicial review judges will judge this review to be premature. That it will only become relevant when such a fine is actually imposed.

I would also hope (but wouldn't expect) the court to rule Meta in contempt of court for attempting to get a reassurance that it can't get meaningful fines imposed on it, and thus can (continue to) ignore the law.

We've only gone and done it: Changed what you're used to

A second system, missing elegance

The former Register was elegant. The current one is no longer so. Feature after feature has been heaped upon it, lots of "good ideas", such that the result is an incoherent jumble. It seems like an archetypal "second system" as described by Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man Month.

It appears to be full of bugs, as reported by many posters. Here's another one: In a comments list, type <Ctrl>f and a search string. Instead of finding the desired string, it goes to a dead content-free page, and one cannot go back again easily. This was in Firefox 140.10.1 in GNU/Linux.

Please, Vultures, reconsider these changes. Eliminating technical debt does NOT force the elimination of elegance.

Attackers are cashing in on fresh 'CopyFail' Linux flaw

Has it been fixed? If so, in which kernel versions, please.

Surely an organ like The Register could give some actual concrete information about failing and fixed versions.

Inference is giving AI chip startups a second chance to make their mark

Re: Big words the author doesn't seem to understand.

Then Mr. Webster is wrong. "Inflection" means "non-bending", no doubt from the Latin. What etymology does it give for its slack use of "point of inflection"?

This would appear to be a non-rigorous dictionary, the sort that would also define a "quantum leap" as a "massive jump", and a "paedophile" as a "child-abuser".

The problems with misusing technical terms like this include making the speaker/writer appear pompous and ignorant, and also diluting and eventually removing the meaning altogether from these precise terms. This is the process illustrated by George Orwell in his novel 1984, where he gave the example of "free" no longer being allowed to mean free software, but only "a dog being free of fleas".

Perhaps you could suggest some alternative term to use for the point in the uptake of LLMs when the curve stops bending upwards and instead starts bending downwards.

Big words the author doesn't seem to understand.

An "inflection point", by definition, is a point on a curve where the curvature is zero. It doesn't mean "starting to do something very good" any more than "quantum leap" does.

I think, up till now, the adoption of "AI" has been growing, such that the graph of adoption against time has been curved upwards. If we have passed an inflection point, then it will now be curved downwards and growing ever more slowly, thus approaching a steady state, a saturated and stable market, such as we have seen with PCs and smart phones.

Is this really happening with "AI" yet?

Agents hooked into GitHub can steal creds – but Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft haven't warned users

100, 500, 1337???

So that's how many dollars researchers get paid for uncovering critical security vulnerabilities. This is truly pathetic. You could increase these sums by a factor of 100, and they wouldn't be unreasonably high.

The researchers could surely make much more by selling to the dark side. It's likely this has already happened lots of times.

Amazon rewards loyal Kindle devotees by closing the book on old e-readers

"Unprotected" content

DRM doesn't protect content. The said content was never in any danger in the first place. What it does is _restrict_ the use of content.

What you meant, I think, was that the content can be extracted free from restriction. Which is only reasonable, considering you bought it.

OpenInfra General Manager talks sovereignty, governments deploying tech 'kill switches'

The word "leverage"

This word was used correctly in the article, twice in fact.

Excellent, Register!

Don't open that WhatsApp message, Microsoft warns

Employee training tops the list ????

No, actually, it doesn't. Installing a sane email system, one which doesn't provide the flaw of directly running programs arriving by email, has got to take priority.

Failing that, setting options to prevent the running of such programs has got to be possible.

Saying "training tops the list" is unjustly to transfer the blame for the situation from Microsoft to the users.

Contracts are in C++26 despite disagreement over their value

Garbage collection: [Making it Work for Real]

> .... and 30 years after Java (which introduced the idea of "you don't have to care so much about memory" in a compiled language).

Actually the idea of garbage collection was first implemented more like 70 years ago in Lisp, which has been a compiled language for most of that time.

Myth: "You don't have to use it"

> You do not have to use it - but I can see some fields in where contracts are welcome!

You are forced to "use" it when the person whose code you're fixing has used it. "You don't have to use it" is as insidious as "I have nothing to hide".

The different C++ languages

And here we go again, a new C++ standard yet more complicated than its predecessors. It has long reached a stage where the language is too complicated for any but a few to learn thoroughly. So each user learns but a subset of the language.

The problem is, that different users learn different subsets, even if subtly so. So a large C++ program (are there any others?) is programmed in many different languages. That can't generate an expectation of a reliable efficient program.

AI bug reports went from junk to legit overnight, says Linux kernel czar

Inflection point ???

What on Earth do people mean when they say "inflection point". It must be some highly figurative meaning.

The correct mathematical meaning is a point on a curve where the curvature is zero. More or less, where d2y/dx2 is zero.

There is an inflection point on the Nuremberg U-Bahn (underground railway) at the station Weißer Turm. The track is curving one way at the south-west end of the platform, and in the other way at the north-east end and is straight at a point between.

It is not good that a mathematical term with a precise meaning is being degraded by being misused in the way demonstrated in this article.

Dell slims down business laptops, fattens up cooling and battery life

Details, please?

How much will these machines cost, and how little RAM and SSD storage will they have?

Payment biz pulls plug on open source charity after KYC spat

Re: Wait, What?

It is quite likely the request from the payment processor was couched in vague language, and attempts to clarify it failed. As though the PP wanted to demand the usernames/passwords, but in a plausibly deniable fashion. "We understood" might be an accurate statement of the FSFE's situation.

AI for software developers is in a 'dangerous state'

Re: Phuture

I was taught long division well, some decades ago, and can still do it without difficulty. I don't know if it's still taught in primary schools.

This ability helps immensely in understanding what division is and what the numbers mean, rather than just being meaningless digits on a calculator display. Maybe the people in charge of Birmingham and West Sussex (was it?) Councils' computer systems had never learned arithmetic properly.

One of these days, the lights are going to go out. Perhaps the ability to do arithmetic will come in handy then.

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.