Posts by teebie

Cop who used police system to snoop for info on crook pals sentenced for Computer Misuse Act offenses

Does 'H' stand for 'Hughes'?

Billing software error sends billion-dollar AWS estimates

"Amazon updated the issue page to indicate that it had identified the root cause "

Was it letting the AI run wild again?

The Star Wars cantina scene shows we need a new hope for the agentic web

"Oh now, the walls of this burgh are keeping the vikings out, whatever are we to do"

Why Amazon hates 'human-in-the-loop' AI governance

Sandwich

"If my agent writes a script that they then run, and it causes an outage, that's still my responsibility.”

We will give you sandwiches

You must eat the sandwiches that we provide

Some of the sandwich filings will be cattle shit

If your breath smells, you will be fired

AI nose uses 'Smell Language Model' to sniff out signs of disease

"Ainos, an AI and biotech company that is developing smell technology,"

Why would you trust a smell technology from a company whose name is pronounced 'Anus'?

AWS hypes continuous agentic DevOps, puts Kiro in your pocket

"Trust is the single biggest barrier to adoption for artificial intelligence systems inside most organizations," said an employee of a company which pretended its servers were taken down by an AI snafu.

Brit competition cops order Google to make search rankings less mysterious

Re: If Google offers the best results...

"Sometimes, I'd rather use Bing" is one of the most damning sentiments known to man.

It's worrying that it's justified.

"Our ranking systems [...] show the most relevant, highest quality results."

This is objectively untrue.

Britain plots digital bedtime after kicking under-16s off social media

"91 percent of parents who responded supported a minimum age of 16 before social media platforms can offer services to children. More than four in five respondents said the risks of social media outweigh the benefits for children, while 88 percent said fewer children would be exposed to inappropriate or harmful content if age restrictions were introduced."

...Fewer than 10% of respondents gave even a moment of thought to how this could go wrong

As Molly Russel's father say, this is taking the easy way out.

Social media in its current form is harmful to children. Also to vulnerable adults, thick adults, people who know thick adults and most other adults using it. The right way to deal with this is to deal with that, not to require age verification to use sites.

The only age verification available will be identity verification (how much are palantir donating?), with the usual problems around data leaks, abused spouses, and political views that don't align with those f oppressive governments.

Met Police boss threatens to cut 700 frontline jobs after Palantir deal blocked

Huh, it's not like Mark Rowley to fail to do his job, try to talk tough, but come across as an idiot who doesn't have a clue what he is talking about.

Surely he's the last person who brings to mind a toddler who has just smeared its own shit over its own face in an effort to make its parent's life harder.

Canonical sends Ubuntu into the AI agent era

"You can run random code, from the internet, on your laptop, without handing it root."

Is that something we want to encourage?

Listen up, England. The Health Secretary is going to be data controller for everyone's Single Patient Record

Someone short-sighted enough to say "I will be making myself legally responsible for a whole criminal behaviour when carries out by any of my 2-million-ish employees" isn't someone that I want to be making these sorts of decisions.

HP customer claims firmware update shoved printer off support cliff

" the availability of certain cloud-connected features may change over time. "

Features such as printing?

Under-trained techie didn't claim overtime for mistakenly failing to phone it in

Re: Ignorance Management

That was Donald Rumsfeld.

If he was stalling for time, then he would make a terrible contestant on Just A Minute.

Sick and wrong: Ontario auditors find doctors' AI note takers routinely blow basic facts

"30 percent of a platform’s evaluation score depended solely on whether they had a domestic presence in Ontario"

Come on Canada, I expect this sort of putting business interests ahead of health a few hundred miles south. You are supposed to do better than this.

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

"We are arresting lots of people" isn't an acceptable reply to "this tool makes you more likely to arrest the wrong person.

This may be the first time I have seen the police give a hint towards numbers of guilty people caught, rather than just arrests.

I count 6 arrests that look to be for good reason, which, given the Met's record for honesty, we can extrapolate to around 4 arrests of guilty people out of 173 arrests.

"Thirty-seven of the total 173 arrests related to those who had breached their court-imposed conditions"

What does 'related to' mean here? Was it 'they were the same colour as the suspect' again?

Kids say they can beat age checks by drawing on a fake mustache

"Parents told Internet Matters that lawmakers need to do more,"

Good parents didn't.

Met Police's Palantir deployment has its own officers watching their backs

I was going to come here to add the traditional "if they have nothing to hide" switcheroo

But that list of corruptions is quite a lot to hide.

AWS keynote hypes AI as magic. Its own engineers tell a different story

"so they're not writing status reports all the time"

that doesn't seem like a problem whose solution is to reduce their amount of dev time

Scotland Yard can keep using live facial recognition on people in London, say judges

"The question is no longer whether we should use Live Facial Recognition - it's why we would choose not to."

Because of the reason the case was raised? Because you don't want to arrest innocent people?

As always, the figures they give are for arrests made (including the mis-identified), and not for convictions.

Palantir's NHS future in doubt as ministers eye contract break

"Ahmed said Palantir [cannot] use the NHS data for its own purposes."

This is odd. I would expect more of a pro-NHS attitude from someone who has so clearly been kicked in the head by a horse.

Stack Overflow abandons redesign after loyalists criticize it

How retro

Listening to users instead of imposing unpopular changes that nobody wants - such an outdated way of doing business that it is eligible to be in a Peter Kay routine.

It's refreshing to see that the concept still exists.

GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

Re: 'Mistake'

In fairness to them, everything they have done since at least 2021 has been a mistake. There is no need for the quote marks.

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

Re: Nobody's fault-tree analysis includes "building hit by drone."

That's fair, knowing how unreliable they can be will be new to some

Brit lawmaker targeted by AI deepfake fails to get answers from US Big Tech

Re: Priorities

"Funny they put so much effort in a case affecting an individual,[...]"

In fairness to the tech companies, they put fuck all effect into fixing this case.

So it's not a case of two-tier enforcement, simply no enforcement.

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?