Posts by Jonathan Richards 1

Decades-old Linux UI bug fixed by dev younger than the window manager

Re: Constant change is here to stay

Thank you. One of my favourites! (Although it was brown cattle in Scotland when I heard it last)

Britain seeks views before it drops the hammer on signal jammers

Re: I want one

Cinemas and concert halls should be equipped and operate jammers by Act of Parliament

Re: Incomprehensible

There used to be a crime something like "going equipped for burglary". If Plod caught someone out after dark with a crowbar, some lock picks and a burglar mask then that someone was up before the beak. Having a GameBoy that doesn't play games in your backpack, and it turns out that it's an Open Sesame device for car locks should fall into that category, I think.

<<One pre-submit fact check later>>

Yep, still there. Theft Act 1968 S.25 Going equipped for stealing, etc. Attracts 3 years in chokey, but no statutory fine. Oh, and crim has to be caught with the device outside his/her home.

Cryptographers place $5,000 bet whether quantum will matter

Re: Some secrets … need to be preserved for years or decades

> Official documents like cabinet papers - often 40, 50 and 75 years.

Yes, and for those the secrecy is typically NOT guarded by digital cryptography. The clue is in the word 'papers', a very few copies of which are physically secured (with multiple layers of protection, starting with chaps carrying guns and descending to mechanical security locks on big steel doors).

Anthropic: All your zero-days are belong to Mythos

Re: The only mythos here is

Do you mean Strowgers, as in Strowger switches?

AWS would prefer to forget March ever happened in its UAE region

Risk recognition

> Nobody's fault-tree analysis includes "building hit by military drone."

That depends on your line of business. The Pentagon will surely recognize that risk, having had a plane flown into it once, and the resilience being shown by Iranian C&C at the moment suggests that it occurred to them, too.

Welsh government used Copilot for review to justify closing organization

Re: What Will Happen?

King Claude I rules with divine right?

Re: Potentially even more of a local problem

Accent, sure, also possibly Welsh language - Cymraeg has an equal status with English as an official language.

GitHub hits CTRL-Z, decides it will train its AI with user data after all

OT: scansion

The original doesn't rhyme either - 'eye' and 'amore' don't rhyme. What your poetic offering lacks is scansion - 'amore' has three syllables and 'enshitification' about five or six.

Fine sentiment, though: no lawsuits incoming from here.

AI agents are 'gullible' and easy to turn into your minions

Re: Duplicate?

Non-coding DNA: Creator's comments in a language we don't understand :)

Turns out your coffee addiction may be doing your brain a favor

Re: Specificity

Yeah, no. There's no such thing as a metric cup. Measurements are either (a) part of the Système Internationale (SI), or (b) promulgated by the Vulture Central Weights and Measures Soviet [1]. In the latter case, the base unit of volume is the EU Standard Grapefruit. It's impossible to have meaningful scientific discourse if you blighters are talking about measuring in cups. Leave that to the lingerie manufacturers.

[1] See the foundational document, by the late and much-missed Lester Haines: So, what's the velocity of a sheep in a vacuum? (2007)

Complaints

It will what? Forwunate? I am unfamiliar with this verb. I'll go and get a mug of coffee made, and come back to it.

Digital fruit fly brain model walks and cleans its feelers

You must be new around here

El Reg has been on the eclectic end of tech reporting forever, and long may it continue.

Ig Nobel Prize flees US for Switzerland after 35 years over safety concerns

Re: The Idiocracy!

Ooops, sorry, and thanks for the correction.

Re: The Idiocracy!

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/karen-newton-valid-visa-detained-ice

US struck Iran with copies of its own drones

Mystery not marketing

The original purpose of giving operations code names is exactly that of any code: to obscure the planning and objectives from being observed by the enemy. Once someone has told you which military operation has which code name, that purpose is lost, so in this instance they seem to have gone straight for something that Hegseth thought would play well with Fox News bulletins.

Operation Market Garden comes to mind, being the effort to capture the Rhine bridges at Arnhem (1944). Glory naming was not the fashion back then.

OpenClaw is the most fun I've had with a computer in 50 years

Re: It's not a she.

> read the manual on how to screw its head on

I would have thought that screwing its head off would have been in Chapter 2 at the latest.

Microsoft boffins cook up archival storage using Pyrex glass they say can last over 10,000 years

DIY

> within reach as a DIY project

Eh, I don't think I can be arsed to build a femtosecond laser this week.

Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

Re: Trying too hard

> Some people feel that AI writing ... lacks genuine understanding

There's a perfectly good reason for that feeling - because the 'AI' does NOT have a scintilla of understanding. It's like Marvin, who didn't have an enthusiasm for anyone to engage, only in this instance every single one of the LLMs does not have a mechanism even vaguely like understanding.

Penguin-powered platform board keels over at Alpine station

Re: Not Exactly a Bork?

Someone is not involved, it seems. The line of which you can only see the tops of the letters reads "Not asking for VNC because of an automated install". Maybe it's running off a live USB and has rebooted after a power cut, and defaults to automatic install, 'cos that feels resilient...

I think this is the Anaconda installer, used by RedHat et al. Fedora 42 (Apr 2025) dropped support for VNC, switching to RDP for remote install, because: X11 dependency removal.

BOFH: Loss adjuster discovers liability is a two-way street

Re: "the last full Moon on Feb. 29 was in 1972, and the next will be in 2048"

See, this is the quality investigative citizen journalism that I come here for.

--> Friday pint behind the bar

OK, so Anthropic's AI built a C compiler. That don't impress me much

Re: Doesn't include the path to the native C library on your system

Hate to break it to you, but the Man on the Clapham Omnibus is never going to be here reading the comments.

Linus Torvalds keeps his ‘fingers and toes’ rule by decreeing next Linux will be version 7.0

Standpoint

Anywhere you can get a foothold, I guess. Crampons would be handy.

SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites

Say again

Did you play in a big box of stimulant? Really? I can believe it wasn't sand, that's not usually very stimulating.

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

0xDD

Halt and Catch Fire

Latest Vivaldi release surfs a wave of anti-AI sentiment

Re: Erm...

... perhaps? The only occurence of the string "Norw" in the page sources of both TFA and this comments page is in your question^[1], so I'm not sure why you're asking.

^[1]_{Oh, and in this one, after I hit 'Submit'.}

Cops put Microsoft Copilot in holding cell after controversial hallucination

Re: Just ask Grok

P.S. Full Self Driving coming in GTA VI and Duke Nukem Forever, as early as next month!

Succession: Linux kernel community gets continuity plan for post-Linus era

Re: So negative...

Hurd it on the grapevine...

Re: A very healthy sign

> Busses also exist... and have done for a long while.

Indeed. The S-100 bus is almost as old as Torvalds himself.

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

So...

.. what happens if I feed in the specs, performance requirements and documentation for Claude?

Debian's FreedomBox Blend promises an easier home cloud

Re: Desktops?

But... it's a server, with GUIs to manage the services. The desktop choice seems a very secondary consideration. Plus, (provided that their FreedomBox hardware can cope) anyone with the technical chops to install and use FreedomBox will be able to install KDE from the sources, should they have a wish and need to do so.

Not hot on bots, project names and shames AI-created open source software

Mind where you put your money, if you can't afford to lose it

As someone retired from the front line of hardware, software and information management using computers, it's fascinating to watch the tectonic forces grinding against one another. On one hand there are the Big Tech companies that have sunk unimaginable amounts of investors' money into developing LLMs, and on the other are the largely un-organized but myriad people who formerly made a good living from wrangling information technology (in its widest sense) into solutions for civilization's progress and benefit. [1]

At this time, it seems as if efforts such as OpenSlop, which is after all only an exercise in free speech, are shouted down because Big Tech and its investors are terrified of someone blundering into the film of the market bubble, and bursting it. To me it looks as if "A.I." is in the position of Wiley Coyote at the cliff edge - it has accelerated over into clear space, and its legs are still making running motions, but shortly there will be the moment where Cartoon Gravity takes over, followed by a splat-shape on the floor of the canyon.

[1] There's also the people who generated adequate solutions for problems we don't have [talking toasters], and bad solutions to problems we do have [see El Reg, passim], but they're just noise.

Devs gripe about having AI shoved down their throats

Re: It will go away eventually.

> Hence the line 'I was only obeying orders'.

Which famously did not prevent some of the order-followers hanging anyway.

cf. Nuremberg Defence

Re: Gen Z

Arthur: It's at times like this that I wish I had listened to what my mother told me.

Ford: Why? What did she say?

Arthur: I don't know, I wasn't listening.

Self-destructing thumb drive can brick itself and wipe your secret files away

Re: In my experience...

Just ordering one of these might bring you to the attention of The Authorities, I would have thought. A bit like that oh-so-secure messaging platform that crims were relying on.

Surely it wouldn't be hard to devise a discreet and discrete USB killer, involving a fat capacitor and a usb socket?

AI music has finally beaten hat-act humans, but sounds nothing like victory

Re: What about live music

"... all the right prompts, Sunshine, just not necessarily in the right order".

Why Elon Musk won't ever realize the shareholder-approved Tesla payout

Futuristic

Hey, does it have a front wheel much bigger than the rear one? I'm told that the advantage is to be a reduction in the need for chain drives and complicated gearing. Tesla charging facilities could be retro-fitted with mounting platforms.

1¼d

Re: Stretch Goals for Elon Musk

The pyrolysis products cause cancer ^{[citation needed]}

Google to allow Android users with high pain tolerance to sideload unverified apps

Well OT re. knobble

To knobble is to place knobbly protuberances upon something. To nobble, on the other hand, is partially to disable something, typically a racehorse or greyhound, so I suspect that's what the indie devs are experiencing. Oh, unless there's a thousand of them and this is a kilo-nobble?

Bitcoin bandit's £5B bubble bursts as cops wrap seven-year chase

> Isn't that what empires and aristocracies have been doing for centuries?

In other reports it is stated that Qian was planning (as in, making diary entries for her strategy) to become the Queen of a microstate somewhere in Central Europe. This one? I haven't checked back with that other report, sorry.

52-year-old data tape could contain only known copy of UNIX V4

Re: Turns out...

Oh God, let it not turn out to be a rick-roll...

Re: Drive

How did the old saying go? "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of mag. tape".

'Vibe coding' named Word of the Year. Developers everywhere faceplant

Re: Learning things?

> your job's done

What job?

Re: Garbage

Multiple upvotes required for parent comment. ^^

This insight is really most valuable. The full and correct answer to "What do you want the program to achieve?" is linguistically EQUIVALENT to the program code. Of course there are always the situations where the problem, completely and unambiguously stated, is impossible or intractable, but they don't crop up too often.

You'll never guess what the most common passwords are. Oh, wait, yes you will

"ican'tbelievewe'restilltellingyouthis"

Non-alphabetic character: check √

Proper punctuation (reducing nervous tic during login): check √

Microsoft apologizes for not explaining cheaper no-AI M365 plans, and all it took was a government lawsuit

Re: Link please

This is at least one of many ways to a copilot-less future.

Downvote away, you knew someone was going to say it!

‘ERP down for emergency maintenance’ was code for ‘You deleted what?’

Re: Cluedo?

Huh. I first though of Catcher in the Rye.

YouTube's AI moderator pulls Windows 11 workaround videos, calls them dangerous

Re: Another workaround

> who will be able to find it?

Bring back Gopher.

Microsoft just revealed that OpenAI lost more than $11.5B last quarter

Re: Copilot flying into the ground

I'm intrigued and faintly apalled by this statement:

> We are forced to use Copilot at work

In what way, and how is that enforced? I mean, do you get into trouble for writing your own report | recommendation | memo | Post-It Note? I can think of so many dystopian scenarios that I'm not going to query each one explicitly, but I would be interest to know some more detail, either from Mk10 or anyone else being force-fed on AI output.