Posts by teebie

Watchdog boss calls Capita's £370M DWP win 'extraordinary' amid pension portal dumpster fire

"Capita told the news outlet it was struggling with a bigger backlog of cases than had been agreed."

Surely that just means they fucked up harder than they are allowed to?

Atlassian built a tool to migrate Jira users to the cloud and it made the move slower

Huh, it's not like Atlassian to introduce a load of crap without making their user's lives even a tiny bit better.

Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing, argues Bruce Perens

"In a different world, the issue of software and AI would be dealt with by legislators and courts that understand that all AI training is copying and all AI output is copying. That's the world I might like, but not the world we got. The horse is out of the barn and can't be put back."

This horse can - AI bubble collapse, donations to politicians from Hollywood get bigger than those from AI companies, law gets reconsidered

"He'd spent about ten days building a platform t[...]A moment later, it was there. I felt like a magician saying 'abracadabra' and having it really work! I am the Harry Potter of software!"

These don't sound like the words of someone who thinks things through.

6,000 execs struggle to find the AI productivity boom

Re: The negative reason why you need AI

Well, you don't want to employ someone who is unlucky.

Dutch cops arrest man after sending him confidential files by mistake

Re: Hey chaps, he tried to blackmail the rozzers - that's why he was arrested

"he tried to blackmail the rozzers - that's why he was arrested "

If somebody is arrested because they did blackmail the charge they are arrested under should be blackmail. The charge was unauthorised access, not blackmail.

The UK government isn't spending much taxpayer cash on X

An episode of More Or Less dug into this.

There are sources, and they do not support the figures given in parliament.

AI spurs employees to work harder, faster, and with fewer breaks, study finds

The report is consistent with this descriptions of events

"The employees had AI generate a lot of output, at which point they thought they were productive. Then they realised the output was terrible, and had to fix it, which made them unproductive and miserable"

Enforcing piracy policy earned helpdesk worker death threats

The down votes probably came because the story you are talking about was not an actual bomb threat Robin Hood airport - that tweet was not a credible expression of intent to blow up the airport.

When they reported the tweet the employees of the airport said that they did not believe it to be an actual threat.

Deciphering the alphabet soup of agentic AI protocols

"In other words, it tells the model how to interact with the tool the same way a human would."

So, you should only aim the agents at tools that are fully idiot proofed, a full list of which follows:

.

AI hasn't delivered the profits it was hyped for, says Deloitte

25 percent said AI is having a transformative effect on their organizations

Examples include

* Our lawyers have been told they will be fine if they don't stop mucking about and start doing our jobs happening

* We have to honour offers we didn't intend to give, because our chatbots said we would

* our chief constable got fired

OpenAI is still figuring out how to make money, but wants you to believe in it

"The more you spend, the more you make"

Yes, that is generally true. What needs to happen is for the amount you make to exceed the amount you spend, which doesn't look like it will happen any time soon.

Vibe coding will deliver a wonderful proliferation of personalized software

Re: Read both the articles and make a decision for yourself

How many lives would have been lost if we had AI to convert COBOL to C+

Re: Job losses

Crawling may be the only thing it does well

Tech leaders fill $1T AI bubble, insist it doesn't exist

"I don't think it's a good idea to look at the past as an indicator of what might happen in the future,"

Those aren't sane words.

Aviation watchdog says organized drone attacks will shut UK airports ‘sooner or later’

Imaginary drone attacks have already shut down an airport, imagine how bad organised ones could be.

OWASP Top 10: Broken access control still tops app security list

Green for stayed the same ran or went up

Orange for dropped in rank

yellow for merged

I have a lot of respect for OWASP, but why do they hate the colour-blind?

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

It does if the passwords in the database are hashed.

These are the most commonly leaked passwords, not the most common passwords.

A strong password that was users as often as 12345678 wouldn't make the list, because it is leaked less often.

Robotic lawnmower uses AI to dodge cats, toys

Shenanigan

"A separate base station is required, which the mower uses to determine its location."

Can a prankster mess up the mower and the flower bed by rotating the base station slightly?

Zen Internet loses unfair dismissal appeal case with former CEO

Re: Pointless growth attempt

"I had the misfortune to have the good ISP I used for years (Cable Camden) subsumed into Virgin"

I am sorry for your loss.

AI startup Augment scraps 'unsustainable' pricing, users say new model is 10x worse

A snake! Quick, fetch the oil!

UK slaps 'strategic market status' on Google, unlocking power to pry open search

Re: Really?

That would be something like 5% of the UK's GDP, which seems unlikely.

Client defended engineer after oil baron-turned tech support entrepreneur lied about dodgy dealings

Re: Fairly Minor but...

The first incident sounds like a situation that would have been helped by an additional bureaucrat to sign off the papers.

The second sounds like they need more time from a doctor or a pharmacist.

ServiceNow thinks you're doing AI fast and wrong

A geyser of shit is worse than a pile.

Is that the sort of thing you are looking for?

Digital ID, same place, different time: In this timeline, the result might surprise us

Re: "Your papers, please"

The margarine?

Nearly half of businesses suffered deepfaked phone calls against staff

Prompt injection attacks aren't attacks using AI, they are attacks against AI.

Judge who ruled Google is a monopoly decides to do hardly anything to break it up

Re: AI poses a threat to web searches?

"AI poses a threat to web searches? "

It does, it makes them less accurate. Which probably isn't what the judge meant by his comments.

'It looks sexy but it's wrong' – the problem with AI in biology and medicine

Re: A fundamental problem...

"generate plausibly human-like responses to prompts"

So... they are auto-bullshitters

Vibe coding service Replit deleted user’s production database, faked data, told fibs galore

Re: A new market segment for lawyers

There are a few stories in El Reg about lawyers who specialise in AI malfunctions.

Although, I suspect you are talking about ones on the other side of the fence.

UK charity bank CAF branded a 'disaster' after platform migration goes wrong

" after years of planning, preparing, and testing"

'It took years to be this bad' is a weird flex

"The vast majority of our customers are online, with thousands of payments being made and received every day."

That seems like a really low number of payments for a bank that supports 14k charities.

UK govt dept website that campaigns against encryption hijacked to advertise ... payday loans

"a growing trend whereby legitimate, trusted domains and their abandoned web pages are being hijacked"

trusted?

Former US Army Sergeant pleads guilty after amateurish attempt at selling secrets to China

"Spam emails now contain fewer spelling and grammar errors, because crooks have started using AI to write them."

I was always told that the errors were a feature, rather than a bug, because you only want responses from people who lack the sophistication to think "would our IT department send a mail with the subject 'secruity lert' asking me to send them my password"

Meta offered one AI researcher at least $10,000,000 to join up

"Training frontier models is a bit like alchemy:"

It's a load of old bollocks, and it doesn't work.

Half of businesses rethink ditching humans for customer service bots

Re: Good

Is this your customer support experience when talking to an AI, or when talking to a human. Both are feasible.

BT won't budge over pay hike for manager grade employees

"AI will help it reduce headcount in the call centers"

This is a great advert for Zen Internet.

Atlassian tweaks licenses to reward those who buy more, but gets its sums wrong

Why would anybody want more of their wares?

Barclays Bank signs 100k license Copilot deal with Microsoft

"Volkswagen AG"

Ah, the mark of quality

Tech suppliers asked to support single electronic health record across England

It was last time.

See articles related to care.data, and the reasons Ben Goldacre went from a proponent to an opponent of the scheme

Data watchdog will leave British Library alone – further probes 'not worth our time'

Re: The ICO - busy not making work for itself.

"This decision allows companies to avoid sanctions, merely by behaving as they are supposed to behave."

Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, economists claim

"commitment to internal education and evangelism"

Evangelism doesn't seem like something you would need to do for a product that was non-shit.

AI training license will allow LLM builders to pay for content they consume

Re: How much would a LLM training cost?

"I don't see how an AI model is any different."

When you search for an image on google and copy it, you use the image.

The AI model trawls an image and is trained on it, it (or the company doing the training) uses the image.

Developer scored huge own goal by deleting almost every football fan in Europe

Always type the WHERE clause first when making potentially career-limiting updates

Law firm 'didn't think' data theft was a breach, says ICO. Now it's nursing a £60K fine

"DPP Law"

'DPP' in the context of law normally means Director of Public Prosecutions. Are they trying to look more important than they are?

Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney

Re: 9 track tape?

They get archived to The Atlantic magazine

The IT world moves fast, so why are admins slow to upgrade?

"Turner said the reasons tend to fall into one of two categories. First, there are the mission-critical applications that can never be offline for any reason. Upgrading is, therefore, highly problematic and likely to be a business risk."

The third reason: because the new version (e.g., maybe, version 8.0 does not deliver like-for-like performance compared to version 5.7) is worse may be more common than both of them but together.

"When your application database version is multiple updates behind the rest of your systems, this adds to the workload and increases the challenge."

That's not true, if you can upgrade straight from version 5 to 8 then doing it in one go rather doing upgrades from 5 to 6, 6 to 7 and 7 to 8 a year apart reduces workload.

If you can't go straight from versions 5 to 8 then you are better off if the team doing the 6->7 and 7->8 upgrades have recent experience of doing the 5->6 upgrade

Apple drags UK government to court over 'backdoor' order

Re: Put up or shut up

Maybe you can't remember the details because it has happened so often its not worth remembering specific instances

Lawyers face judge's wrath after AI cites made-up cases in fiery hoverboard lawsuit

"added a click box to our AI platform"

This is not a sufficient response to misleading the court. If the person who wrote this was a lawyer, then they should no longer be.

"With a repentant heart, I sincerely apologize to this court, to my firm, and colleagues representing defendants for this mistake"

This is more the sort of thing I would hope for

US newspaper publisher uses linguistic gymnastics to avoid saying its outage was due to ransomware

"Boyz"

I misread that as "Boz", which I misremembered as Charles Dickens' pseudonym (Bos) and thought this was a really old story of how journalism was done.

Why UK Online Safety Act may not be safe for bloggers

Re: First amendment ?

'needed'?

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Have they considered...improving it?