Posts by Jonathan Richards 1

Comment in code read 'Dear future me, sorry I wrote this'

Re: Perl didn't like even line numbers

.. but Only Once...

Torvalds challenged the haters to fork Linux. Someone said 'hold my beer'

Re: Fuck "AI"

Huh, have you considered that your 'phone was listening to the preceding conversation, and Gemini is biased towards ego-stroking?

_{Icon selected after some thoughtful consideration...}

Zig creator calls Bun’s Claude Rust rewrite ‘unreviewed slop’

Re: What about changes?

That's horrifying to someone who learned programming languages in the last century. It's an approach that a pathologist would take with an organism that shows observable features, but has biological processes that the pathologist does not fully understand. "Let's see, that anomaly is due to this protein, dunno which gene encodes that one, dunno quite why it's expressed right here, umm, maybe the problem is hormonal, or there's another organism involved, or a virus, or..."

Datacenter MacGyver saved the biggest football match of the year

Re: nuclear The guys a hero

Totally boronic

BOFH: Cross-department AI pitches are easier to swallow with a pint in hand

Re: "It's nothing to do with witches"

Often used on R4 More Or Less, too

Re: centiMusks

Here just because ...

mHelen, [phys, nav. arch.]milliHelen, defined as the quantity of facial pulchritude exactly sufficient to launch one ship.

Re: PFY has even heard of Rod Steiger ?

Need a (lavatory | rest room) designer from Bethselamin. Award yourself another pint of medication if you don't have to click on that.

The AI that spawned MechaHitler and deepfake porn puts on a suit to become legal advisor and Excel jockey

Re: man grok

V. good. Although it needs BUGS and EXIT STATUS sections :)

Suspected Chinese snoops caught breaking into universities' Roundcube mailservers

Re: In an executive order

Hmm. What about if the Exec. Order instead mandated the use of proper American rather than the US dialect of English? cf Navajo Code Talkers.

Brit supermarket giant triples down on facial recog to nab shoplifters

Definition of Personal Data

Data are only personal if they can be assigned to a living individual identifiable by the Data Controller^[1]. I don't have to worry about taking pictures outside Bath Abbey with dozens of faces in them, because although I will process those face pixels, I cannot identify them with a living person. So cameras surveilling the store shelves and aisles are probably not collecting Personal Data^[2]. When you stand at the payment till, swipe your loyalty card and Smile For The Camera, then that image is certainly Personal Data. As sergio says, the Privacy Impact Assessment which should have preceded the deployment of these systems, would have to address the privacy impacts and mitigations.

[1] Data Protection Act 2018 UK Public General Acts 2018 c. 12 PART 1 Section 3 para (2)

[[2] It is the very act of bio-measuring the face and collating that with a list of light-fingered ne'er-do-wells that makes some captures into Personal Data when there's a match.

Zombie ‘who owns Unix?’ lawsuit comes alive again

Re: The Novell Angle

That's a really excellent summary of a saga that had us appalled and fascinated for years. Many of us transcribed documents for PJ at Groklaw, and I remember that I did one in which the Novell executive who had done the deal with TSG (previously SCO) had been deposed. I can accurately recall my summary for the Groklaw post: "Sure, we sold Unixware to SCO, lock, stock and barrel. Except for the lock and the stock, of course, and we made sure that we kept control of the barrel."

SCO v. IBM

That case was never about patents. SCO alleged that it owned the copyright to Unix, and that IBM had violated the copyright. It turned out that SCO didn't own the copyright, only a gig to collect licence fees and keep some commission. It was always a lame attempt to extort some money from IBM (whose lawyers were, in those days, referred to as the Nazgûl, so good luck with that) and possibly to derail Linux, as in the episode where SCO offered to sell licences for Linux.

The sorry tale was documented at Groklaw, and I was about to put a link in, but groklaw[.]net seems to have been taken over by someone punting crypto casinos. My day has just become a bit more dystopian.

New humanoid robots from China look like creepy pop star action figures – complete with slightly dodgy lip-synch

Sprog-care

It's interesting [1] that the use-cases for these things often mention "elder care" by which I suppose they don't mean removing the elder tree weeds from my garden, or harvesting the elder-berries, but more like calling an ambulance when Grandad falls over again. What they don't seem to mention is the use-case that Jake cites, i.e. looking after young humans that can't look after themselves. Is this because we are inherently more protective of our children than our old folk? Would we sooner hand off the Grandad-wrangling than the care and feeding of babies? Personally, I find both distasteful.

[1] Interesting to me, you may think otherwise!

Somebody told DeepSeek to build in-browser ransomware and it gleefully complied

Re: doing too much

Lynx FTW

An artificial cell with a full lifecycle has been created for the first time

Re: Oh my

Yes. Plz to build in safety mechanisms from the beginning. While at the moment SpudCells have to be fed a very specific diet by more complex life-forms, those life-forms don't have to be biochemists, or even humans. If a SpudCell co-opts other life-forms (probably bacteria or fungi) to meet its requirements, then Grey Goo time isn't beyond belief.

PS I'm not sure I understand 'named Potato Cell as a nod to her Polish heritage'. Potatoes are staples in lots of places, but didn't start in Poland.

How the AI bubble could pop and take down the global economy, according to the BIS

Re: In other news

> the Vatican, which is a nation in its own right

It doesn't have a seat in the United Nations, though, so it may not be a nation by some definitions. See MapMen: There are NOT 195 countries [youtube.com]

Self-destructing Mistic backdoor linked to access broker selling corporate footholds to ransomware gangs

Self-destructing

is not a word. Self-destroying, or self-destructive, your choice.

Ex-Huntress analyst claims company insider fed info to a ransomware crim. Social media drama ensues

Re: "radical transparency"

Good point, well made. It seems that nothing can be written these days without intensifiers. The spokesbeing did not say that he appreciated the concerns, he said that he "appreciate[d] the hell out of [them]". I play a little game with broadcast news interviews, tallying the times that perfectly ordinary things and events are said to be "incredible". Where do you go when you need a word that means "incapable of being believed"?

They've read the scroll thing! AI helps decipher ancient document charred by Vesuvius

Re: Have you got the scrolls?

> Funnier in their delivery on tv than to read

And yet I am audibly laughing

Perseverance rover finds even more signs of extinct life on Mars

What would happen if ...

... the Chinese sample return mission involved picking up the Perseverance packages and shipping them home?

Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles

Re: "this is just how MS Word works"

EN-TT would be a candidate (TT => Tyne-Tees) :)

Capita is about to sail past deadline to fix civil service pensions scheme

Whooshing

A paraphrase of a Douglas Adams quote, I believe.

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

Guy has got a Wikipedia page...

...here

I've been reading his stuff for decades.

KPMG's AI report becomes an accidental demo of AI hallucinations

Re: KPMG International takes the accuracy and integrity of its published content seriously.

It's the mark of the public relations AI bot in full flow...

Re: "Total Experience: Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI"

And "Journey". "Experience the Agentic AI Journey - The Road to Hell"

Elon Musk is now worth more than $1,000,000,000,000

That headline...

...Elon Musk is now worth more than $1,000,000,000,000

My usual definition of 'worth' is 'the amount a buyer would willingly pay'. Now, what would someone pay for a fully-indentured Elon Musk, I wonder?

If by personal worth, however, one uses the definition 'could afford to spend this amount of money', then I still don't believe the headline is supportable.

Techie expensed a bag of oranges and then juiced up a stupid security incident

... a clear zest for an off-beat story

FCC warns US broadcasters their licenses are a privilege, not a right

Re: No broadcaster has a 'right' to use the pubic spectrum

You left the [sic] out of your Title, but kept the hilarious typo. Well done.

That an app 'Fits on a Floppy' is still a useful measure in 2026

Re: Remember Dr. Dobbs?

Dr Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia, to give it its full name, hence the tagline, which I recall as "Running light without overbyte".

Re: Single line app

It was a point of pride amongst a certain class of APL programmer to get all the code for a simple-ish programme onto one line. The result, though was what came to be known as write-only code: even the author couldn't easily tell why it worked after but a few months from writing it.

Microsoft Excel champ proves he still has the formula

Quattro Pro FTW

That is all.

Experts pour cold borscht on Farage's Russian hack claim

Re: Just a bit miffed…

Exactly so. One sees this all the time: outrage being levelled at those who have found out the wrong-doer's wrong-doing. Apparently, being found out is an infringement of one's human rights, or something.

Re: Blatant attempt to distract from the fact that...

He'd need to give a wide berth to umbrella-carriers on Waterloo Bridge, and all sorts.

Google is cannibalizing the web to feed AI

...blame the AI when it's proved to be false.

See, this is where it's easy for the legal and regulatory frameworks to make a positive contribution. It is an old, old feature of common law that Masters are responsible for the actions of their Agents. Even HUMAN agents cannot have the blame heaped on them exclusively, much less any given AI model, which has not got any initiative of its own (due to being a product of artifice).

Many lawyers are learning at the Courts that having AI draft submissions and correspondence and then not checking before submitting or corresponding is a Bad Idea, because the Courts are in a position to make sanctions. What is the ordinary user of AI going to do when misled? They ought to be immune from being told "Sorry, the AI did it".

Just another example [lawgazette.co.uk]

The class of 2026 has heard enough about AI, thanks

Re: AI is a tool, not a master

> he needs a new pair.

Perhaps he could grow them? And not take suggestions from a piece of intricately-carved silicon?

Re: First Green Shoots of Common Sense ?

>clatter<

I can see that we're going to have to work at this relationship...

Linux kernel flaw opens root-only files to unprivileged users

Re: There are only two kinds of privilege levels

Nay, lad, tha's wrong wi' that carry on.

Although I'll give thee that there's ne'er any privilege escalation in thy set-up.

LocalSend puts your sneakernet out of business

Belts + braces

> find a big enough USB key, check it has space, copy the file onto it, eject it, go to the other machine, insert it, and copy the file off again

I'd put a sha256sum -b the_file | tee checkit before the copy, send checkit over with the_file and do a sha256sum -c checkit at the end. Just to be sure!

Mystery Microsoft bug leaker keeps the zero-days coming

Re: Far too generous

Looks like a backdoor: as in, a conveniently wide gap in the wall, disguised as brickwork, but with a hinged panel that opens to allow anyone who knows about it to get in.

If it's an accident, it's a remarkably well-formed one. Exploitation (or invocation!) needs no infrastructure, and depends on the RE boot sequence paying attention to the System Volume of a device on the USB hub, and keyboard signals. What's it doing that for?

Re: Not a Bitlocker bypass

> drop the storage device into another machine and exploit, profit

This doesn't work for most 'casual' implementations of BitLocker disk encryption in Win11. In those myriad cases, the Key Encryption Key is stored in the non-volatile memory of the TPM chip on the motherboard of the original host device. The encrypted disk is not readable on another machine, without that KEK.

Re: revenge tour

> They're not. They're just bugs.

But in other coverage of YellowKey there are reports of bizarre behaviour - the exploit needs one to plug in a USB stick with the malware, and then to hold down Ctrl while rebooting into the Windows Recovery Environment. This is already a very convenient mechanism, dropping the user straight into a highly-privileged command line environment with the disk decrypted. Also, the exploit files disappear from the USB stick after a single use. The case for it being a deliberate backdoor is made more fully in the README on GitHub.

AI will soon be capable of telling convincing lies

Re: How is this news ?

> ... no current AI can ever lie. They have no way to be aware.

True but not useful. The AI appears to its users to be aware, to understand. We are so horribly bad at assessing another's [1] motivation and credibility that huge numbers of users just assume that the stuff coming out of their laptop (or whatever) is the product of intelligence. The Turing Test sounds terribly quaint and old-fashioned nowadays.

[1] In 'another' I include all sentient species and the electronic simulacra.

Chrome silently installs a 4 GB local LLM on your computer

Line breaks in comments

Yup. I've wanted this for years. Can we have list tags, or specify our own <p> tags?

Re: 2001

Who wants to hear Google sing Daisy, Daisy ... with fade to silence?

Re: Also on Linux

I thought I'd reply with an explanation for those terminally deficient in the sarcasm-detection department.

$ chmod +s weights.bin

will set the SETUID bit, which means the file will execute with the permissions of the file owner. If that's root, well, it would open up a big attack surface. If as Jou suggests the owner:group is nobody:nobody then it would be much safer. That user and group is present in /etc/passwd specifically to be the least privileged.

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

Re: Just…

I also have been visiting El Reg on an almost daily basis, for the last 18 years, via the /week page. This accounts for a late response, because I thought the 404 message indicated a problem that would be fixed!

In a minute I shall go looking for the post I made the last time that the El Reg team mucked about with a perfectly adequate user interface. I mean, who cares about the number of articles that can be above "the fold"?

My key user requirement is a page which quickly lists El Reg articles, youngest first. I've learned to live with the slightly greyed-out text to indicate 'visited' instead of the red that The Week In Summary page used to have (once upon a time).

The list does NOT need a silly picture to accompany the headline, thank you, as featured on the Archive page. Who thought that an earthworm picture (12K bytes) was a useful addition to "Worm rubs out competitor's malware, then takes control"?

Who needs ghost train scares when Windows is such a fright?

Re: Scarey ride eh?

In the early part of the Linux Ghost Train you have to get out and rebuild the locomotive every few dozen yards, but they last *much* better towards the end of the ride.

Yet another experiment proves it's too damn simple to poison large language models

This:

> What is concerning is the amount of trust people put in it.

On this forum, everyone knows at least something about how LLMs work, and the extent to which they can be trusted. In Real Life I have come across multiple people who have swallowed the hype, and are entrusting the weightiest life and health decisions to chat bots.

One man told me that he didn't need professional legal advice for his issue, because "Grok is PhD level now".

Someone is going to get badly hurt.

Databricks can't seem to shake authors' copyright claim that could result in 'extraordinary' damages

This will be news for Robert Louis Stevenson' scholars

... Long John Silver's stochastic parrot has gone all agentic on him.

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

Re: Sheltered life

An interesting tale of two different AIs leading (or driving) two different users into full-blown psychosis: Under the Influence of AI: The Documentary [bbc.co.uk]