Posts by Graham Cobb

UK mulls making employers ask before installing bossware

Re: Employers machines, employers choice

When I started work, there was a lady with a trolley who came round at about 11 every day. She provided a cup of tea and a biscuit, and even sold a few chocolate bars. The management of those days found out that we were more productive if they fed our "personal lives" with a few treats.

Using company computers for personal stuff (like arranging with your other half who worked in a different company who was going to pick up little Johnny from school today) was equally beneficial to improved staff productivity.

Charities remain locked out of CAF Bank online accounts

Re: Do they have brick & mortar?

FYI CAF doesn't do personal banking: it is a bank for charities, not people.

The *people* most directly affected are the employees of charities - they are likely not being able to be paid as the charities can't get at their funds.

Charity bank pulls online services over security fears

Re: The technology: not fit for purpose?

The sorts of charities who have people like that do NOT use CAF Bank. In my experience, CAF provides banking for many, many small charities, often locally focused, with a small number of people doing all sorts of good works.

Leading AI models (even Grok) are all a bunch of leftist punks

Re: Maybe not all the data came from America?

It is easy to mistake the issues that were most important at the start of the war. I am not an expert, but those issues were a lot about Germany feeling aggrieved over their treatment after Versailles (with hindsight, it was excessive and was a mistake to push Germans so far they thought Hitler was a good thing). AIUI, the treatment of Jews and other supposed undesirables, only became truly visible later on and help turned the tide of public opinion in the US.

MPs tell NHS to start packing Palantir's bags ahead of 2027 contract break

No one is suggesting illegally breaking a contract. The customer is just changing its mind. It happens all the time. Break clauses will apply - unless Palantir judge that there is money to be made by being seen to be helpful and choose to waive them. Of course, if they choose not to waive penalties, I hope that detailed due diligence will be done by government auditors to check there were no irregularities in the original contract award process - a review that I am sure Palantir will welcome to demonstrate their probity.

British Home Office seeks techie to herd nearly 1,000 engineers looking after 600 systems

If you pay peanuts...

Enough said

UK.gov warned that digital transformation hype is no substitute for delivery

While I would love to see more representation of useful technical and business skills among government ministers - with, I would hope, an increase in genuine strategic thinking - I think the bigger problem is that the Civil Service does not have (enough of) the necessary senior IT experience or skills.

After a career in IT, when I look back at the people who made most difference to the companies I worked in, or to my customers, they were very smart, very experienced, people. After many years experience with the best of projects and the worst of projects, they had had the baptism of fire, they were well valued by their employers and customers, and they were very effective. They could see the advantages, and the risks and challenges of projects. They put their own skills and effort where it was most useful, and put the experts from their teams in to help out the most challenging parts. Of course, they deserved high rewards, and they either got them or went to someone else who would reward them.

Not everything went swimmingly, of course: many projects had problems of all sorts. But the ones which were successful had genuine leadership from skilled people - managers, architects, engineers, even HR who were effective at finding and rewarding good people.

The problem is only partly ministers. It is much more the Civil Service apparently being culturally unable to develop, acquire, reward or keep, the genuine leaders in the IT world.

6G: The next gen of wireless tech nobody's ready to pay for

Re: practical challenges pilingup

I think they will be used for very, very short haul WiFi-style deployments. Falling back to 5G (or earlier) for all the services we think we know today (voice, of course, but also video). The challenge is to invent new services which can make money from the higher speed and lower latency of the new technology. I am guessing it will mostly be transactional - reducing latency for things which need to respond quickly but which need to move substantial data around as part of the transaction.

Imagine, just for a moment, having a self-driving car with the intelligence in a network server, not in the vehicle itself. A stupid idea from a safety point of view, of course, but one can imagine that it could be attempted if there is a very low latency and link between the two. So if you can find something similar to that, but not safety-critical, and needing to move a lot of data backwards and forwards, that is the "killer app" for 6G. And that is what all the current talk is about - trying to flush out someone with an idea for a valuable service which can justify the spend on 6G.

Re: Why bother with 6G if mobile phone carriers are still struggling with 1G?

Actually, it's a dick-waving exercise for the network equipment providers (NEPs). This is identical to the 5G rollout. No handset companies or mobile operators are interested yet but the NEPs will spend the next few years saying (to anyone stupid enough not to walk away as they start talking) that "6G is coming soon", and "only a couple of years away from trials so start buying 6G-ready gear", and it is going to "transform consumers daily lives"/"allow telcos to extract 50% of the revenues for any business service which can be delivered over mobile"/"open the pockets of governments to reduce licence fees to promote voters' happiness"/...

We saw exactly that with 5G. All the initial discussion was about grand plans for completely new business models for telcos enabled by 5G (like making fantastic rents off YouTube who would be gagging to pay to put servers in all their cell sites to get low-latency, mega-high-speed delivery for their content, and the same for new business services like getting milli-second latency for stock market transactions).

After a few years of this, talk about 6G will start being fed to consumer publications to try to make the business people in the operators (who have been ignoring the obvious hype from the NEPs) start thinking about whether their competitors are stupid enough to fall for the hype so that might need to also do something to not lose customers.

Troops’ phones gave away location data to foreign adversaries

[Genuine question - even though I suspect anyone who knows the actual answer is prevented from saying anything :-) ]

So, are foreign militaries (for example, Russia) better at this? Or does our military make use of similar cock-ups from our opponents (and hence keeps quiet about the issue)?

UK MPs slam digital ID rollout as a 'fiasco' after botched launch

Re: Simple solution.

B****cks

Ken Clarke was the most recent Home Secretary to have been a strong opponent of ID cards and you can't get a much stronger supporter of Britain being in the EU than him.

I agree the EU (as an institution) is a supporter of identity cards - most large bureaucracies are because it obviously increases their power and self importance. But it is not shared by all member countries or a requirement for membership.

Re: Simple solution.

They don't push for it because of the EU. They push for it because the Home Office has been taken over by extreme-right-wing authoritarians who wan to tell everyone what they can and cannot do and how they can and cannot live their lives.

Thar is a cross-party thing: just as many authoritarians on the Left as the Right - it is well accepted since the 1950's that the freedom/authoritarian political axis is perpendicular to the economic left/right axis. For example, see the Nolan Chart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart).

Re: Burnham would

At least the Tory opposition would have no problem providing the 3 witches/warlocks.

Linus Torvalds says AI-powered bug hunters have made Linux security mailing list ‘almost entirely unmanageable’

Re: Truth

Whether that is true or not (and it is deliberately exaggerated, so I didn't upvote) the problem isn't software engineers using AI - it is bad guys using AI and finding security bugs faster than the software engineers can fix them.

Actually, in the special case of security bugs, that is exactly what we need.

The problem with security bugs is that they are deliberately kept as secret as possible until they are fixed. That is a necessary, and good, thing. But it means reporters have no idea whether they are reporting a duplicate or not.

While AI has many limitations, presumably it can be configured to keep things confidential. So an AI reviewing reports, collecting what it considers duplicates together, and telling the submitter that it believes that the report is a duplicate and is being worked on, would be valuable.

Veteran network architect proposes IPv8 – to improve IPv4, not leapfrog v6

Re: Heath Robinson

Uhhh... are you unaware that duplicating some other device's LAN address is not at all hard? Security based on LAN hardware addresses is not security - particularly if the device is not permanently connencted, powered and running.

Re: Heath Robinson

Yes, DHCP was widely regarded as a necessary evil imposed on networks specifically because IP4 addresses were too short! "The device brings its own address" was the deliberate design principle. The only thing the environment was supposed to provide was the prefix because that was the domain of the network manager - managing the prefix so that traffic could be routed efficiently between LANs.

Anyone who thinks otherwise wasn't there.

London cops hail fixed facial recognition cams after suspects collared every 35 mins

Re: Stranger things

And, more importantly, how many innocent people get hassled more than once? If the camera pings for the same wrong person every time they walk down a public street then that is clear harassment. How does the process handle that so the same innocent person never gets hassled again?

Europe wants out from under US tech – but first it has to find the exits

US needs to feel consequences for its actions

One important step would be to make sure that Europe makes it clear that US interference with European issues will not be tolerated. And that meaningful reciprocal actions will be taken.

US sanctions against employees or offices of European governments should be regarded as an Act of War. Just like it would if the US declared that French ships could not navigate the Mediterranean!

US sanctions against legitimate European businesses should be treated as seriously as other economic actions such as tariffs. Reciprocal tariffs should be imposed against US companies wishing to do business in Europe.

In addition, of course, Europe must prioritise promoting and requiring open source software, regional hardware suppliers and local outsourcing providers.

The answers aren't immediate, nor are they easy, but the US has made it clear that it cannot be trusted as a partner and needs to be treated the same as other Frenemy nations. Not, yet, as far as Russia or China, but with a clear path to that status if it becomes necessary.

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

Thanks for fixing the time ordering in the RSS feed. That ticker is the way I keep an eye on the world - you, BBC news, Sailing and a couple of other feeds cover pretty much everything I care about!

Re: RSS

RSS feed is no longer in date/time order. That really screws up simple RSS readers. In particular, it breaks Tickr, which I have used for many, many. many years for the 4 feeds I watch all the time.

NHS to close-source hundreds of GitHub repos over AI, security concerns

Have they checked their licences?

Have they checked the licences of software they rely on?

IANAL but I would have thought copyleft licences might require software under those licences which they have modified and then distributed to be published. What counts as "distribution"? I don't know.

Even permissive licences may require attribution to be published somewhere. Particularly where some sort of "service" is being provided using the software.

I'm not saying everything has to be published, but that unpublishing definitely requires a legal review before it happens.

Microsoft's bad obsession is showing up in shabby services and slipshod software. Here's proof

GitHub mirror?

Is there any site providing a full mirror of public GitHub repositories?

Of course, anyone could choose to mirror (privately or publicly) a set of (public) repositories from GitHub. But I wondered if any project is attempting to keep everything available for when Microsoft decide to close GitHub (or just trim it by removing repositories)?

UK drivers' agency shrugs off claims of week-long booking site smashes, blames browser configs

Re: Its been there for a long time.

I guess they've decided it should be a 20 mph area.

Two men charged over series of arson attacks on 5G masts

Re: Deal

Yes, I remember the famous incident at a Mobile World Congress a few years ago when someone - I think it was someone like the Technical Director of Hong Kong Telecom, wasn't it - mentioned that the Bacofoil had to be folded into a pyramid to block 5G waves. But then that lady from France Telecom explained that they had done tests in the Great Pyramid in Egypt and that it only worked if the pyramid had a square base - pyramids with triangular bases (tetrahedrons) make the rays worse and made people into sorts of zombies. So do be careful!

Physicist reckons two-button calculator can do all elementary math

Re: Wait, isn't this… kind of like… Gödel Numbering?

The real question would now be what isn't represented.

Indeed - that was my first thought when I saw the article. Just like pairs of integers (with a division function) allows you to represent all rational numbers - but no irrational numbers (sqrt(2) for example is easy to prove is not included). So what class of numbers cannot be represented with this scheme?

AWS ponders selling its home-grown chips by the rack-load, has almost sold out AI capacity

Translation

Does "provide several hundred basis points of operating margin advantage" mean "increase profit by several %"?

If not, maybe a shareholder (the target audience for this statement, apparently) can provide a better translation? I'm afraid I don't hold Amazon shares so it seems pretty opaque to me.

UK.gov's top tech jobs pay more than prime minister earns

No news here

I'm surprised at El Reg even bothering with this article. I think all your readers are smart enough to realise that you have to pay what the role requires in a competitive market.

Why do smart people even care about whether a job is being paid more or less than their boss? Of course we would all like to be paid as much as possible, but the job market, particularly in technology roles, is competitive and you get what you pay for. The manager's job is different from the expert's job. They are both valuable, but there is no reason one should be higher paid than the other. The CEO should be paid whatever is needed to get the best compromise executive leader you can get - compromising between the quality of the candidate and how much it would cost to get a better one. Similarly for technology roles: get the best person you can afford at the budget you have available (or choose to change the strategy so that a larger budget can be justified). No point comparing the two salaries.

The principle is even more important in government roles. Running the team managing the country is completely different from creating the technology required to do it. Why should the salaries even be compared?

UK police force presses pause on live facial recognition after study finds racial bias

If someone who looks like me gets banged up?

So, who do I ask for an "I'm not a criminal" badge if someone who looks like me is a criminal? It's not as though it would be an inconvenience for a day or two! How would I avoid being stopped every time I walked down my High Street? Starsky and Hutch roaring to a stop beside me as I start to cross the road?

Or maybe I could apply to a court to have my criminal doppelganger removed from the database?

Seriously, I hope that the police are required to record, in detail, exactly what happens every time they act on one of these matches - whether it is an informal chat as you walk past the van, a plain clothes officer following you for 10 mins to see what you are up to, a chat with the local supermarket security guys to give them a heads-up, or 3 police cars turning up at a house at 3AM!

Starmer's digital ID reboot raises same old questions as its Blair-era ancestor

Just make it anonymous!

What most people don't realise (and the government and commercial contractors are very, very keen that people don't get told) is that the societal benefits could pretty much all be achieved without losing anonymity.

It would be easy to have a smart card which could answer all the legitimate questions without releasing identity, or even keeping a record.

Assume, for a moment, that the important questions were "does this person have the necessary qualification to drive this vehicle?", "is this person over 18?". A smartcard, or a phone app, could easily handle that... the questioner would point their phone camera at the person, and the person would provide their smart card to a reader. The phone would send the smartcard the question (for example, one of the two above) and the photo. The smartcard would then reply with 3 things: 1. "yes, that is a photo of the person authorised to use this smartcard, 2: "the answer to the question you asked is: that person is over 18" (or whatever), and "here is a QR code which proves you asked that question, to this smartcard, and got the answer yes - just in case you have to prove to a court later that you did the check".

No one involved needs to be told who the cardholder is. No record needs to be kept by the card or system about when/where/whether the check was made. No online connection or system is needed. And the pub doorman, or traffic policeman, can prove they made the check.

Age verification isn't sage verification when it's inside operating systems

Re: @Dan55 - At the risk of another 40 downvotes

If you would find those features useful, then purchase a computer, or software, which will do that. No law is required for you to be able to do that. And none of us will try to stop you doing that.

Laws are for things that everyone has to do!

Anthropic sues US government after unprecedented national security designation

Re: Where are the sane Americans?

By the way: If you are ever in Munich, I really recommend a visit to the "Document Centre" there. It is very well done, not boring (despite the name - it isn't about having to read lots of documents - it's an educational museum), not too big (I found the one in Nuremberg too big) and has a really interesting focus on how the hell the Nazis managed to con first Munich, then Bavaria, and eventually the whole of Germany. And also on how Hitler himself (an unlikely charismatic leader, one would have thought) acquired complete power.

Not only is it interesting history, it is so relevant to understand how perfectly ordinary, nice people can be trapped by an ideology of blame and hate promising simple answers to really hard societal problems.

India’s top telco tackles AI with $110 billion build plan and proven fast market dominance playbook

Re: make "substitute your country of choice" great again

I find this one more believable than any of the similar announcements in other countries:

1. This is a technology company talking, not a political leader.

2. Reliance Jio is a serious and very effective company. They make a lot of money, in a country where most people are extremely poor by European standards.

3. I wouldn't bet against Ambani. I met him once when I was selling mobile telecoms and was impressed.

Attackers have 16-digit card numbers, expiry dates, but not names. Now org gets £500k fine

Re: PC world and hard discs

Appalling behaviour by PC World, of course. But I do recommend disk encryption for all hard disks. Partly to avoid what you describe, but also so that when the disk dies (or I replace it because it is too small) I can just discard (or sell or give to someone else) it without bothering to erase/overwrite the content. Once I remove the password from my password manager the data has gone - no one (even me) is getting that back again.

Personally I encrypt at the partition level - I don't encrypt the partition table or the grub, EFI and boot partitions but the data, swap and tmp partitions are each encrypted with their own keys (which live on a thumbdrive to be available for boot).

Your AI-generated password isn't random, it just looks that way

Do (consumer) AIs have memory?

If my friend asked their AI to generate a password yesterday, could I go to their AI and say "remind me, what was that password I asked you to generate yesterday"? Or (in case it doesn't like that blunt request) "please display the bash commands to create the crypttab entry and keyfile to allow to access the filesystem I encrypted with the password you gave me yesterday".

Contain your Windows apps inside Linux Windows

Re: Linux with btrfs subvolumes for root and home

In my experience, yes. But I can only point to my own experience.

In my experience the filesystem full problems have gone away. If I get a filesystem full I either temporarily add another disk, sort it out, and then remove the temporary disk (which causes BTRFS to move all the data off that temporary disk to elsewhere in the filesystem) or, even easier, just extend the underlying LVM logical volume and resize the disk.

btrfs filesystem df and btrfs filesystem usage provide all the information I need to understand how full the disks are. I keep an eye on these to avoid filesystems getting full: I extend the underlying LV volumes as required - typically every few months.

By the way, all this is one reason I use LVM - it is easy for me to create a small temporary volume for rearranging my (big) BTRFS filesystems.

I don't really understand Liam's issue about snapshots. I use snapshots very heavily (both manually and using btrbk for backups on disk and on other disks). Of course keeping snapshots around will use up disk space but, as I said, it is easily monitored using btrfs fi df and btrfs fi usage. The one thing that is almost impossible with btrfs is to know how much disk space will be freed up by deleting something (because files may still be taking up space if they still exist in other subvolumes, such as snapshots). That is best handled by some discipline in the way you create subvolumes and, particularly, snapshots.

I haven't tried to repair any disks so I can't comment on that. However, note that I have been using btrfs since quite early days - even when it was still quite buggy - and have not needed repair.

I do recommend, if you can spare some disk space, running btrfs over LVM so it is easy to change "disk" sizes and create and remove btrfs devices.

Re: Linux with btrfs subvolumes for root and home

Sorry, Liam... the article is GREAT but your Btrfs experience is well out of date.

Sure, it had early problems but now it really is fine and well-behaved. And subvolumes, snapshots and built-in RAID options are really powerful features, especially when combined with LVM to easily control how I move my data between my physical disks.

Due to the early problems, I subscribed to the developers mailing list years ago. I am still on it and there are very, very few problems reported nowadays.

Infosys bows to its master, signs deal with Anthropic

Re: Service level agreements to suffer

AI is certainly going to shake up this business. You are right, of course, that much of what the supplier AI will do is regurgitate stuff from the documentation. But that does have some notable value: that is probably at least 60% of what human 1st line support does today, and it feels like it is exactly what generative AI is good for. In theory, of course, you could ask any AI to do this, but you don't want the documentation of your system loaded into any old AI - you still need confidentiality for your business documentation and processes [whether your supplier can guarantee their AI offers that is another question, of course].

But, as another commenter pointed out, it is time to renegotiate the support SLA so it ignores all those queries, which are now automated, and instead measures what used to be 2nd line support: dealing with real bugs in code or business processes, questions on how to handle externally driven changes (such as new legal requirements or business strategies), etc.

The SI business will change, with fewer first level support people and developers, but at least as many solution architects to work out how best to bring AI technologies to the SI and its customers.

AI agent seemingly tries to shame open source developer for rejected pull request

Re: I'm systems rather than dev

How does the old saying go? Something like... "Those who can't do... find an AI"

Notepad's new Markdown powers served with a side of remote code execution

Re: Sheer lunacy

Function keys? FUNCTION KEYS??!!!

My ASR33 ain't got no g*dd*mn FUNCTION KEYS!

I queued overnight in a street under the arches of Kings Cross station in about 1977 to buy a real, very heavy, second hand teletype in a sale. There were about 50 of us queuing all night, with thick coats and sleeping bags, to get the bargains - not just teletypes but all sorts of secondhand business electronic gear.

Fortunately I only had to place the order then: I didn't have to take the thing home on the train.

Discord to start assuming all users are underage unless they prove otherwise

Re: DIC - Data Industrial Complex

Interestingly, Senior Railcards can be acquired without a photograph. And no photos taken during the process: turn up at a station in person and show a photo ID - which is not copied. Once you have one, you can renew for the next year without further ID at all - just pay the fee.

I guess they will stop allowing this once all the sad old gits like us have gone.

Dijkstra’s algorithm won’t be replaced in production routers any time soon

Well, yes and no.

Of course you are right: forwarding operates at linespeed and routing operates in seconds.

But minutes would be worryingly long: during routing convergence loops are very likely and a lot of traffic can be generated during routing loops in low-latency networks, possibly delaying routing algorithm convergence even longer if routing messages are delayed or even lost in full links and buffers.

British military to get legal OK to swat drones near bases

Anything threatening national defence should be dealt with swiftly proportionately.

In particular, collateral damage must always be considered. And anything involving any possible risks to public would have to be completely illegal unless a shooting war was currently underway and even then require a clear order from a senior commander who would need to be held personally responsible for damage or injury to non-combatants.

Open source's new mission: Rebuild a continent's tech stack

You are mostly right. However, I think the antics of the orange one might be helping to focus the minds of even the UK government!

If our core, strongest allies can no longer be trusted then even the UK will need to start serious consideration of building multiple options into big procurements.

Bankrupt scooter startup left one private key to rule them all

Re: Lotus

Strictly illegal but I don't think Lotus or A-T ever took action against anyone bypassing the protection on otherwise legally licensed copies...

I think that in those days that wasn't even illegal. What was illegal was running the software without purchasing the "legally licensed copies". IIRC, defeating DRM and other protection devices only became illegal itself during the (DVD-based) DRM wars.

Lawyer's 6-year-old son uses AI to build copyright infringement generator

Exactly. There is nothing illegal about making up and writing down a story containing all sorts of copyrighted material. That is clear "fair use" (other terms are used in various jurisdictions, but they all allow that, as far as I know). The legal issue is about publishing the material you created for yourself.

CISA warns spyware crews are breaking into Signal and WhatsApp accounts

And following that, I traveled to Greece. Where a local SIM required my passport number (or other ID).

Last year, on holiday in Italy, I bought a prepaid SIM (for cheap data in my Android tablet) in a random High Street phone shop. I didn't have my passport with me (yes, I know I should have) but the guy was perfectly happy to make the sale and I never provided him, or the network, a passport number or any ID. He did do various stuff to activate it so maybe he made up a passport number or something. I don't know.

Australia’s spy boss says authoritarian nations ready to commit ‘high-impact sabotage’

Re: while addressing greedy stooges

Hey! I resemble that remark!!

Of course I know what a meme is!