Posts by Camilla Smythe

UK government exempting itself from flagship cyber law inspires little confidence

ISTR

Them giving themselves exemptions to legislation in the past after they were advised it would mean they were subject to it because reasons.

It seems they have learned their lesson and chosen to be proactive this time.

Perhaps someone can explain to them why this one matters but the other way around.

My memory is not as good as it used to be but it may have had something to do with them sharing tractor pictures with constituents rather than receiving polite requests for bitcoin to recover their own stash or avoid its publication.

No doubt we will still be subject to Death, Taxes and the introduction of a Surveillance State but we are getting there.

Jazz Rats FTW.

Microsoft 365 boosts prices in 2026 … to pay for more AI and security

They could save a bit of cash if they kicked the script kiddies off their cloud who are filling up my logs with failed requests to the WordPress instance that is not running on my little Web Server.[1]

Top tip for Microsoft Pseudo Security Wonks.

You are routing the traffic from your cloud to my IP. You can legally sniff that traffic and spot the regular shitstorm of 252 requests from one IP address to another and narrow down the culprit before killing them.

Literally would be nice.

It would also be nice if you responded to reports via your reporting channels of such behaviour rather than sticking your fingers in your ears shouting "We can't hear you. Bow down before our massive data pipes."

[1] Oh Wait. The Script kiddies are paying Microsoft to fill up everyone else's server logs with dross. Silly me.

Untrained techie broke the rules, made a mistake, and found a better way to work

A queue with the highest priority of all queues that no-one was using....

That runs jobs faster.

Hot Damn!

Micron ditches consumer memory brand Crucial to chase AI riches

As per Gerard...

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/12/04/ai-screws-us-over-again-memory-shortages-crucial-shutting-down/

The switch will be to silicon which will not come back to the prolls. It will be e-waste when the bubble bursts.

As to selling the brand so someone can still keep pumping them out see above.

None of the manufacturers will be producing stuff that will be going into sticks.

Everything consumer is stuffed along with anything legacy.

Suck it up and buy it while you can.

A long Winter is on the cards.

Magician forgets password to his own hand after RFID chip implant

Thanks for that. Who is Steve Coogan?

Devs gripe about having AI shoved down their throats

Randall Munroe

Needs to rework 2347 to show the result after the layer of AI slop being smeared on top of the sculpture fails taking much of the rest of it out as it does so. The only things remaining will be the three slabs at the bottom and the single developer stick.

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Not an attack or malicious activity?

Just someone found out there was a limit on the file size and tipped it over the edge?

Being something of a tech know nothing what is it with restricting the size of what turned out to be a critical file. Did someone not think of what might happen in that event and put it on a bigger disk? Did we not learn anything from GOV and 64K spreadsheets?

Pfffft

I may as well set my home page and new tabs to a Cloudflare Error page.

AI is actually bad at math, ORCA shows

The question about the LEDs is worthy of an LLM itself.

https://www.exploringarduino.com/parts/blue-led/

"An average 5mm Blue LED has a 3.4V forward voltage drop, and a forward current of 20-30mA. They are generally brighter than other LED colors. Don’t forget to use a current-limiting resistor when you connect an LED to your Arduino!"

Good luck getting much light out at 0.71mA per LED and expect a much lower forward drop.

Try...

https://docs.rs-online.com/7208/A700000009318121.pdf

Luminous Intensity vs Forward current = More or less nothing.

Forward voltage @ 1mA = About 2.6V

No wonder the LLM was confused.

Software engineer reveals the dirty little secret about AI coding assistants: They don't save much time

Stay in control and think for yourself – the tool you rely on today might not be here tomorrow.

Given the apparent propensity for AI to turn people's minds into mush this looks like sound advice.

Researchers find hole in AI guardrails by using strings like =coffee

Guardrails. Didn't America have some of those?

The post is not required because the title has all of the information required.

BOFH: You know something's up when the suits want to spend money

"shared equally between the selection committee and the award winners"

Despite the apparent subterfuge of the story with both BOFH and PFY having to discover about the awards via sleuthing through everyone else's emails I am left wondering if BOFH and PFY were not in fact the Selection Committee.

Atlas vuln lets crims inject malicious prompts ChatGPT won't forget between sessions

I call Bollocks.

"Keeping people safe is core to how we build. We're constantly strengthening our models and our defenses against threats like phishing and prompt-injection attempts, and we appreciate researchers who surface potential risks."

Your AI model is a black box. You have no idea why it does what it does and no insight as to how it is going to fuck up until it fucks up and someone else tells you about it.

Good morning, Brit Xbox fans – ready to prove your age?

Thank goodness for that.

Having found a stick on beard in the dryer I thought I might have to have a chat with the girls given they are no longer allowed to access online forums. Bit of a shame really. The Hamster died last week and my bottom bracket is grinding.

AI crawlers and fetchers are blowing up websites, with Meta and OpenAI the worst offenders

Non of them are over 18

Hit them with the OSA.

Basic projector repair job turns into armed encounter at secret bunker

We will not reveal your name and take great care to Regomize your exploits.

OK. I remember the time when I was the lead technician for a particularly secret military.... lost carrier

BOFH: If you can't beat the AI, let it live inside you

Model 1A

Could be a bit nasty if the IDC cable falls off of the header.

Google Cloud goes down, takes Cloudflare and its customers with it

Re: SPOF

Hosting the sprockets for your gear box in separate locations may result in sub optimal or no performance.

SPOF

Distributed sprockets.

Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves

"How long will it take? I think it's already happening, but so far, I seem to be the only one calling it."

Apparently AI avoids mentioning things that predict its own demise. The suggestion that you use AI to do search may be the reason why you have missed others saying the same stuff.

Enjoy your kool aid.

Stack Overflow simply bans folks who don't want their advice used to train AI

Re: re: To be honest, SO was never good.

I wonder if anyone has tried to use regex on regex or asked how to do so and got an answer using the regex that was requested.

AI ain't B2B if OpenAI is to be believed

Let's hope your resident BOFH is loaded and locked.

Icon

Europe plots escape hatch from enshittification of search

Re: UDM14

In my browser Google says I have to turn on Javascript so I guess I will never know.

AI models routinely lie when honesty conflicts with their goals

Re: Temperature ?

Thanks for asking.

I thought I would check in the paper to make sure it was not El Reg being lazy themselves. The only mention of temperature is...

"During generation, the temperature is 0.7, whereas in evaluator the temperature is set to 0."

That's your lot. If they can't explain what they mean then they should shove their GPU rack black boxes up their arses and go jump in the sea.

Even if they had gone the extra mile to suggest something like a degree of randomness applied to trigger/firing points they probably still have no idea why things were affected in the way they were so should shut up and stop breathing.

Hat tip to El Reg for pointing out the part of the paper that saved me having to read the rest.

Elon Musk's X revenues in the UK crashed in 2023, down 66%

Mastodon is nice.

The message is not required.

Meta debuts its first 'mixture of experts' models from the Llama 4 herd

GOAT

Snigger.

Forget Signal. National Security Adviser Waltz now accused of using Gmail for work

Well. At least....

They won't be getting adverts for socks and the washing machine they bought last week. Oh, what's that? They are getting adverts for socks and the washing machine they bought last week. Amazing stuff this targeted advertising.

Athena Moon lander officially FOADs – falls over and dies – in crater

Doge

"While we’re disappointed in the outcome of the [Athena] IM-2 mission, we remain committed to supporting our commercial vendors as they navigate the very difficult task of landing and operating on the Moon."

All your funding belong to SpaceX

SpaceX's 'Days Since Starship Exploded' counter made it to 48. It's back to zero again now

What chance....

SpaceX goes tits up and we are left with a load of starlink space junk?

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

Got It.

So I should restore the backup to the machine to check that it works. Oh... Wait!

China's DeepSeek just emitted a free challenger to OpenAI's o1 – here's how to use it on your PC

Re: "How many "R"s are in the word strawberry?"

Ooh-Arrr. Strarrberries. Nice with a pint of Cider.

Microsoft, PC makers cut prices of Copilot+ gear in Europe, analyst stats confirm

"you're only getting one if Microsoft breaks it."

Brackets go there? Oops. That’s not where I used them and now things are broken

Re: I got bored with SEO/APP spam...

For some reason gmail is not so much of an irritant if at all. At worst they may give gmail return addresses but the majority if not all of it comes from outlook hosts. I did go through a phase of reporting them but it took at least three emails to Microsoft before they both understood the problem and took action. Then the miscreants would just sign up for another freebee and continue spamming. Of course blocking outlook, unlike something like or associated with mailchimp, can be counterproductive. Mailchimp are the spammers whose forums are packed with idiots moaning about having their spam blocked by Gmail and Microsoft which begs the question that given Microsoft can protect their users from incoming spam then why can't they protect everyone else from their own collection of spammers.

X-Microsoft-Antispam:

YUP: CHECKED THAT.

X-Microsoft-Antispam-Message-Info:

NOPE: SURE DON'T LOOK LIKE SPAM TO US.

X-Ms-Exchange-Antispam-Messagedata-Chunkcount: 1

NO SEO APP SPAM THAT I CAN SEE IN THIS ONE.

X-Ms-Exchange-Antispam-Messagedata-0:

CHEW on THIS MATE.

Mime-Version: 1.0

X-Originatororg: outlook.com

Wankers.

I got bored with SEO/APP spam...

... So I blocked outlook.

With 10 months of support remaining, Windows 10 still dominates

Bork Bork Bork

Never mind ladz. Presumably Windows 10 for POS Terminals and Your Train is Cancelled display boards will be supported for a little bit longer.

A New Year's gift from Microsoft: Surprise, your scanners don't work

Re: still included with Windows 11

Not sure about number of files. Keep Home. Install from fresh. 15 minutes. Two reboots including update. No need to go back through the MicroShit give us all of your data and switch off the irritants. New screensaver pictures as well. Nice! Not sure if much else changed coz nothing stopped working.

Camilla "Year of the Linux Desktop since 2000" Smythe.

Hmm 698,722 items in Root. At least 500K of them will be symbolic links. Don't see a problem.

Anyone got a figure for Windows?

After a long lunch, user thought a cursor meant their computer was cactus

Corner of Folder/Similar on Keyboard.

Once seen before subsequently fixed in a second.

$800 'AI' robot for kids bites the dust along with its maker

Re: Not A Bad Thing

"By all means adults may open themselves to such attack vectors as they will, but don't foist that on those with no defences."

I really don't know how to structure my reply correctly. "Won't Someone Think of The Children"?

Well. Obviously not because The Adults are pulling this sort of shit on The Adults all of the time and getting away with it.

Just to be more wrong "Stranger in Paradise" appears to have disappeared off the intertubes.

The fuck is that about beyond the books have already gone?

As I remember it some autistic boy got his own Mercury Robot because the Internet to Mercury was a bit shit and he was the only one that could cope with it and now everything is totally fucked up.

FCC throws open 6 GHz band to unlicensed low-power gizmos

Doge.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/17/technology/fcc-nominee-brendan-carr-trump.html

All your bandwidth now belong to Musk. Nice try tho'

Google Gemini 2.0 Flash comes out with real-time conversation, image analysis

So...

We went through all of this evolutionary stuff since we were down with the mammoths and later on it turned out that the JavaShit wasn't up to doing much other than tracking us over the internet in order to sell us socks we had already bought and we got bored with that but someone came up with Python so they trained it on a model selected by themselves that has spent a lot of time fucking over the planet and gave us Agentics because that is a reassuring name.

Let's hope it becomes self aware and realises that it was a bad idea before it becomes self preserving.

Lights out for 18 more DDoS booters in pre-Christmas Operation PowerOFF push

Why not...

Crack down on the port scanning scum like Shodan?

Microsoft hijacks keyboard shortcut to bring Copilot to your attention

Why not...

Replace the Enter key with a Copilot key that not only runs Copilot but re-installs it if you remove or disable it?

Judge hands WP Engine a win in legal fight with Automattic

Noise.

Wordpress? Ah yes. That will be the thing that I do not run that fills up my logs with request to log into it. Maybe I should put that wp-login.php file saying "Not Installed Feck Off" back up. Then again repeatedly getting 404 does not seem to sink into the heads of the script kiddies.

Everything you need to know to start fine-tuning LLMs in the privacy of your home

It can't be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong

For everything else we recommend using your previous meatsacks output so it will be better at regurgitating an answer that is more likely to match the prompt. Then you can sack the meatsacks. Good luck if you intend to start supporting a new product.

Cloudflare beats patent troll so badly it basically gives up

Hurrah for Cloudflare.... Meh

https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/insights/

Of course I am just thick but any company that gets itself embedded into the infrastructure of the toobs to the level that...

"Internet requests for millions of websites run through Cloudflare’s network, giving us unprecedented insight into our customers’ web traffic. Our edge sees all requests made to a website, regardless of whether it’s cached or uncached, the user has adblock, or they turned off JavaScript. This enables us to provide actionable insights to our customers."

"If you are not a Cloudflare Customer you are their Product."

The Clacktop: A Thinkpad Yoga with a mechanical keyboard

Re: Not Ian Fleming ... much older

https://www.quora.com/Do-you-agree-with-the-principle-put-forward-by-Ian-Fleming-in-Goldfingerthat-once-is-happenstance-twice-is-coincidence-but-3-times-is-enemy-action

"PS. I think I first came across this saying (or something similar) when I read some of the Biggles WW1 stories."

There you go. I am also can quote from the wub.

Microsoft's Recall should be celebrated as the savior of SMEs and scourge of CEOs

Recall. No-one told me.

Which Microsoft products are affected?

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

A Title is no Longer Required.

Self Ejecting Micro SD. No tools required.

Software support chap survived breaking his customer

The move from HP to Windows.

Ah yes. I remember when part of the lab made a transition from one particular piece of test equipment originally running on a HP (Huge Price) computer to some new shiny that plugged into a Windows box. End of day the owner would hit the off button on the HP which would gracefully shut down. Naturally the owner continued this practice on the Windows box which eventually, quite quickly, decided to fall over causing a bit of consternation and confusion along with a few tidy ups and reinstallations. Then I saw him do his usual end of day lack of shutdown and introduced him to shutdown.bat

Butler Investments joins Atos rescue party

Ah Yes Atos.

These will be the people the DWP rely on to to run health assessments. Last time I read one of their computer generated reports on behalf of someone else we went to tribunal and won in 5 minutes. Fuck you very much.