Posts by Lusty

Artemis III aims for 'late 2027' for Earth orbit demonstration

Re: Yes continuity between administrations is one problem

Continuity between administrations?! Let us know when the US is able to manage continuity from Thursday to Friday again.

Pro-Iran crew turns DDoS into shakedown as Ubuntu.com stays down

No, because the US no longer has a defense department.

Amazon pays $11.5B to satisfy satellite-envy while cowering in Musk's shadow

Re: Orbits matter

For voice traffic latency is extremely important. It’s also important for literally any interactive task. Users of systems with higher orbits know that it sucks, and we’ve all moved to Starlink because it doesn’t.

Add to that that the higher you go the slower it gets and the less users you can support and it’s clear why Starlink is winning. You can’t beat physics, even 5G needs more towers closer to users to support higher speeds.

Re: Orbits matter

You may want to expand on what point you think you’re making. Higher or its were done for years with fewer satellites, they were not commercially viable due to low bandwidth, high latency and low supported user numbers. Low orbits fix these things, hence the need for more satellites. It’s the only way to achieve the goal of high bandwidth, high user count, low latency and therefore profit.

Locked-out iPhone user tells The Reg that Apple is scrambling to fix character flaw passcode bug

Re: Silly question as a non iPhone user

Quite right. And what happens when trying to access iCloud backups and 2FA insists you use your phone to confirm it’s you? No usable backups.

HMRC hands £473M Fujitsu migration deal to AWS after competition melts away

Re: The missing option

You’re not designing the infrastructure you’re doing an architecture diagram. Some of us remember designing infrastructure, you may be too young.

Amazon have to design the power, racking, structured cabling, cooling, storage, routing, resilient connectivity, physical security. That stuff would soak up millions when building a data centre even with a competent team. Public projects could push that to billions.

Re: The missing option

Because even when building their own, they still outsource. At least with cloud they aren’t paying for the infrastructure design and build so however you cut it that’s a win.

Re: VAT and extras

HMRC don't collect taxes for themselves, they collect them for the country.

Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin applies to launch 51,000 datacenter satellites

Got to admire his optimism. Maybe get Leo (aka Kuiper) working first Jeff, then maybe start a second project.

'Are you freaking crazy?' Bot harasses woman, gets led away by cops

Re: "its operator, who was nearby"

The article said it. The operator was training it to harass people with adverts so it was working as intended.

No ad blockers can stop this, only baseball bats.

DVSA drives up online theory test contract value to £700M with no explanation

Re: I'll do it

I thought that. About 8000 tests a day. A Raspberry Pi could handle that, make it two for resilience and we’ll locate them on east and west coasts with diverse fibre.

From £700M that’ll leave…about £700M profit.

Even if you buy a building to house each in, you still have about £700M left over

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

Let’s be honest, Linux is stuffed if Linus goes. His personality is the only reason it’s still on track. It’ll descend into committee hell within weeks and with nobody telling people they’re idiots the idiots will quickly fill the codebase with AI slop.

Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check

Re: .... second life....

You thought second life was new?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_V-Chat

Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

I mean, it’s been years since “install updates and shutdown “ has ended in anything but a reboot.

Microsoft needs to insource windows development again, the outsourcers are terrible.

Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030

I’m reading this as the start of vastly increased salary/consultancy rates for skilled C and C++ devs. This happens any time you “kill off” a computer thing. COBOL, anything IBM original, Netware, all have niche and in demand skills and C will be no different. I’ve even seen some pretty desperate asks for Delphi.

Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud

Encryption doesn’t help since the host has the key to decrypt even if you use on prem key stores. If your key isn’t held in their cloud then you can’t use your dafa in their cloud. If it is, they can access your data.

Unfortunately hosting providers write the software so if you think they don’t have access you are mistaken.

Whitehall rejects £1.8B digital ID price tag – but won't say what it will cost

Re: We're in the land of confusion

“when the system doesn't work properly”

To determine this they would first need to define the purpose of the system. So far we just have “we want ID” and that’s not really much of a dream techies can aim at with success criteria.

Obviously we all know the success criteria involves giving billions to their mates and has nothing to do with ID.

Kyocera claims 5.2 Gbps underwater laser data blast in lab tests

You could easily increase that to 10Gbps if you reduce the distance to 1cm. Utterly pointless, I can’t imagine a scenario of up to 1.5m where a wire wouldn’t work, especially if this needs line of sight to remain stable, which it will because LASERS.

Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

Sounds like the iPhone bug that’s been there forever. Set a timer for two minutes and do nothing. The timer never goes off because the phone is busy locking itself after two minutes so it just cancels the timer.

If Apple can ignore it with their user base then I don’t see why Microsoft should be more proactive

Seven years later, Airbus is still trying to kick its Microsoft habit

Re: MS to Google

Excel stops that these days, thank gods.

Software engineer reveals the dirty little secret about AI coding assistants: They don't save much time

Very underrated these days and young people will never have the experience of really knowing their colleagues. Makes me sad.

UK agri dept spent hundreds of millions upgrading to Windows 10 – just in time for end of support

Not correct. Windows has longer support and better enterprise management tooling. Mac might be cheaper due to a lack of flexibility and lack of enterprise tooling so certain things can’t be done (therefore lower adkin costs), but that’s enforceable on Windows too if you hate your user base.

Researchers intercept unencrypted satellite traffic from space blabbermouths

A VPN only does that if your traffic is going to your network, as I said. Kinda limiting and not the solution to fix this problem. End to end encryption is the solution here.

Wow who’s downvoting that? In the old days Reg readers were less susceptible to marketing and understood this stuff.

If you’re downvoting because you disagree, explain your technical stance on how a VPN would help.

Re: security???

The problem with Huawei was the US didn’t have a backdoor, as far as I can tell. No evidence for anything else. Same with DJI.

A VPN changes literally nothing except the breakout point to the Internet. Even if it did, you’re now fully trusting a dodgy VPN provider rather than a dodgy ISP.

Encrypt your traffic end to end. Unless the VPN breakout is on your network it’s not adding anything. Even if your VPN does break out on your network, end to end encryption is neither hard nor expensive so you still ought to do it otherwise you’re one network issue away from data leaks.

Bose kills SoundTouch: Smart speakers go dumb in Feb

Re: Sonos

If only that was their first snafu. Zero trust for sonos, they keep trying and failing. Hoping they will slowly go out of business.

https://www.theregister.com/2017/10/11/sonos_privacy_speakers/

Deloitte refunds Aussie gov after AI fabrications slip into $440K welfare report

If customers are going to start reading reports then the big consultancy firms are stuffed whether AI is used or not.

Campaigners urge EU to mandate 15 years of OS updates

Trust in hardware, yes. Because the affected Intel chips aren’t supported.

It may not help with whatever issue you clearly have, but that specific issue, which was extremely important to their business customers (who, by the way, pay the bills for all this).

You losing trust because you don’t get updates on affected hardware and didn’t bother to investigate the reason? That’s on you.

You’re assuming those fines would be considered worse than not dealing with the hardware security bugs that led to the decision in the first place.

Microsoft had to do something to get trust back after that debacle, Windows 11 is that something.

Microsoft Surface 7 laptop: Nice hardware, shame about the OS

Re: After formatting....

Err actually you lose zero. GiB and GB are different that’s all. The number is the same as specified and always has been.

512GB is 476GiB which is pretty much what was reported by the author, who clearly doesn’t understand the topic either.

Microserfs ordered back to the office, given 10 days to appeal

You’re saying that Satya Nadella, an Indian fella who had a quadriplegic son with cerebral palsy is making changes for the white agenda to disadvantage those with caring requirements?

That’s some next level conspiracy stuff.

Linus has had enough of links that point to 'stupid useless garbage'

The problem isn’t getting competent people. The problem is getting a competent person who can stop the incompetent people screwing their product up.

Linus is the only example I’m aware of.

What terrifies me is that eventually that Finn will need replacing with another or Linux will go the way everything else has gone in recent times with a committee approach and enshitification inevitable.

Gigs in space: Amazon breaks bandwidth barrier with Kuiper's satellite broadband

If you get 1gig for a minute every 10 minutes as the lonely kuiper satelite flies by your average speed will still be 100Mb. If they ever got a second user you may well be stuffed too.

Even Starlink speeds are dropping with their enormous fleet as user numbers climb. You can’t beat physics when using wireless transmission.

Wikimedia Foundation loses first court battle to swerve Online Safety Act regulation

Re: Wikipedia is used by every UK kid and teenager doing their homework.

Nice rant and all, but can you please talk us through Labour’s involvement in the Online Safety Act 2023?

The plan to make all networks optical is about to take two big steps forward

Re: serial ram

40s, actually. EDSAC had mercury tube memory and the term “optimised code” meant an instruction entered the CPU as the data it needed exited the memory rather than waiting for the next pass.

Today’s coders probably couldn’t manage such a feat.

Microsoft walks us through Copilot Search with a domain it doesn't even own

Re: They have a domain set up already which they should be using for this

Actually they have a whole list of domains for this, contoso is just the well known one. There’s an internal website with a full list and how to use them. The domains are spread across industries, and for those in the know, contoso is very often used inappropriately.

T-Mobile's satellite service lifts off, and it's open season on rivals

Hmmm this launches and now Starlink is globally down like a sack of shit. Coincidence?

GPS on the fritz? Britain and France plot a backup plan

Re: Galileo?

They don’t all operate the same way in terms of this specific question. Some have signing solutions which entirely defeat spoofing. There are multiple problems to solve here yet we seem to be using terms interchangeably. Jamming is common to all due to the low power signals, spoofing is very much a solved problem (not for civilians, but it is solved).

Re: Sextant Alert

Indeed, and some of them support signing which entirely defeats the spoofing issue mentioned in the article already. I don't think GPS does, but they may have added it to more recent satellites.

So you CAN turn an entire car into a video game controller

Re: The other way around

Depends on the vehicle, most are power assisted so you’d just get feedback in the wheel. The Tesla cybertruck on the other hand is fly by wire for the steering…

Re: it's not all fun and games

It’s not a security issue, CAN is an open standard and well documented and has been for many decades. It’s by design, and unless some numpty adds a WAN there’s no sensible way to remotely do anything.

It’s a serial bus so local access is trivial, again by design. I’ve no idea why this person didn’t use the built in port that every car comes with, other than trying to sound clever and hackerish. You can literally buy the connectors online.

Re: The other way around

None at all. CAN literally consists of devices that send an ID and state. This means buttins can be assigned to anything, and you can add buttons anywhere. All you’d need to do is create a translation layer if using a standard controller.

CAN is also just serial comms, so to connect you can use a type of serial port. It’s not quite correct but RS232 ports work just fine.

The article made it sound harder than it is.

Don't pay for AI support failures, says Gradient Labs CEO

You still pay the frontline support staff if they can’t resolve an issue. This is cheaper frontline staff. You still obviously need 2nd and 3rd line support.

Microsoft dangles extended Windows 10 support in exchange for Reward Points

Re: Cheap trick

I don’t like it either, but it’s far from arbitrary. Those chips had well documented hardware bugs that couldn’t be fixed.

Forgotten Turing treasure trove rescued from attic goes under the hammer

Suicide

Can we please stop saying suicide? There’s no evidence he committed suicide, and that conclusion was thrown out at a later inquest. It’s just as likely it was an accident but more likely he was murdered by the government due to being gay and a “threat to national security”.

It’s an insult to his memory to continue the suicide story at every opportunity.

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

Re: app Mnaagers / installation of apps

It’s funny, because what you said is and always has been the problem, not the solution.

Microsoft walking away from datacenter leases (probably) isn't a sign the AI bubble is bursting

Re: Are you sure obtaining power is cheap?

“ (*) London's exploding footpaths are mostly overloaded distribution cables finally letting go”

Mostly that’s been a drug gang illegally splicing into the grid to run drug farms in abandoned department stores. It’s been widely reported now that the gang was caught.

Google’s broadband balloon laser comms tech floated out as independent company

They seem to have removed the balloon element which leaves this as just another point to point wireless network option. They say light is better due to congestion but point to point radio isn’t congested at all as it’s directional. Nice that there’s another option but if a bird can block the laser I’m not sure it’s a step forward.