* Posts by Dan 55

16351 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

Google confirms Gulf of Mexico renamed to appease Trump – but only in the US

Dan 55 Silver badge

Messing around with the language options, it appears to show the name in your chosen language followed by a translation of the name in America in brackets. No other sea seems to have this treatment.

So even when it's not the Gulf of America, it's reminding you that it's the Gulf of America.

UK government using AI tools to check up on roadworthy testing centers

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You'd think (and I did think) most states have them from the map, but then there are exceptions for non-commercial vehicles and so on so maybe people are unaware.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Make America Grate Again.

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Are our US cousins entirely unfamiliar with the concept of annual car inspections? I understand most states have them.

India's banking on the bank.in domain cleaning up its financial services sector

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Whu has it taken so long to think of this?

Then there are language issues. Taking India as an example, bank.in is all very well. But it does nothing for the Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi, etc equivalents of "bank". Or the people who speak those languages and don't know they're now supposed to use bank.in to find an online bank. [I know English is the de facto official language in India.

Solved by a co-ordinated campaign, on all Indian banks' own websites highlighting bank.in right at the top of the page?

The next question is who gets to choose which of these specially regulated second-level names get "protected" in gTLDs like .com and .info that are global in scope. Which jurisdiction's regulation applies? Does bank (say) get this status for all known languages?

I think global TLDs are a lost cause, probably because they're US managed and "this-is-really-your-bank-honest.com" is freeze peach, that doesn't mean that rules can't be applied to country TLDs.

That's as stupidly naive as saying world poverty can be solved by giving everyone enough money. For starters, when was the last time any of us seen or typed a domain name?

I started typing theregister.com about 10 minutes ago and the browser autocompleted it for me.

I don't know what you think "how the name hierarchy relates to legal management" actually means. A .uk domain name doesn't necessarily mean it's held by an entity based in the UK. co.uk domain names don't *have* to be held by commercial entities, org.uk isn't just for non-profits, etc.

No, but that's because those conditions aren't enforced by the domain registrar. On the other hand there is .ac.uk which does have conditions attached.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Whu has it taken so long to think of this?

Hardly anyone knows how to read a domain name so putting everything under bank.in will also be an exercise in futility. JANET ordering (in.bank.etc) would have been much easier for the user to understand.

Judge says US Treasury ‘more vulnerable to hacking’ since Trump let the DOGE out

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Re: Aye...

I'd guess they also have a source code repo and it's so easy for changes to be accidentality lost in a merge.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: How about rooting out all that corruption at SpaceX?

Meanwhile, across in Tesla, that "bug" where the Model 3's AI4.1 motherboard half fries itself so most of the safety features stop working still hasn't been reported to NIST and Tesla is pretending everything's fine when customers complain, so I'm sure he'll take due care and attention with Federal government data.

Cloudflare hopes to rebuild the Web for the AI age - with itself in the middle

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Unhappy

An offer you can't refuse

Pay the Cloudflare insurance or the AI bots scrape your work.

RIP the open Internet.

Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer

Dan 55 Silver badge
Happy

Re: forget coding language

> > No, you've been brainwashed by CS people who thought that Niklaus Wirth actually knew what he was talking about. He didn't. He doesn't have a frigging clue.

> I thought Edsger Dijkstra coined the "gotos are evil" bit in his structured programming push?

Yeah, he did, but he's dead, and we shouldn't talk ill of the dead. So these days I can only rant about Niklaus Wirth, who took the "structured programming" thing and enforced it in his languages (Pascal and Modula-2), and thus forced his evil on untold generations of poor CS students who had to learn langauges that weren't actually useful for real work.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: forget coding language

Allman all the way.

Although I will begrudgingly use other styles if the code is already written in another style, but they're still wrong.

Dan 55 Silver badge

It seems there's some drama going on, Marcan has deleted his Mastodon account.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Not magical thinking

If someone suggested Zig as being a second kernel language then that might gain more acceptance than Rust.

You can't even use double-linked lists with Rust's borrow checker and the Linux kernel is full of them.

Boeing, Boeing, burned: Over half a billion dollars by Starliner in 2024

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: It should be worse for them.

The christian nationalist faction of the US government want women at home making apple pies.

NASA Ordered to Remove Anything About ‘Women in Leadership’ From Its Websites: Report

"This is a drop everything and reprioritize your day request."

UK Home Office silent on alleged Apple backdoor order

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It's perfectly feasible, they've done it in China. The only difference is the UK won't pay up for datacentre for UK iCloud accounts.

Microsoft 365 price rises are coming – pay up or opt out (if you can find the button)

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Re: No opt-out for new purchases

It used to be part of Office Professional but that's not being sold any more. You have to get Office LTSC or standalone Access ($$$).

Eggheads crack the code for the perfect soft boil

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Mushroom

Re: "The Register has a long history of breaking egg stories"

In ascending order of danger to life:

Tortilla de patatas

Masala omelette

1.5 MILLION SCOVILLE masala omelette

Dan 55 Silver badge

"Incidentally, The Register has a long history of breaking egg stories."

A minute's silence for Regina Eggbert.

Musk's move fast and break things mantra won't work in US.gov

Dan 55 Silver badge

Anyone can be as half as unsuccessful as Musk if they start with half an emerald mine.

Federal judge tightens DOGE leash over critical Treasury payment system access

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: One of them hasn't even lasted a day

It's strange he resigned, that indicates he felt ashamed after being caught, but that gang of numpties are all openly racist and completely shameless. I mean, his boss does Nazi salutes in front of the entire world.

Democrats demand to know WTF is up with that DOGE server on OPM's network

Dan 55 Silver badge

The White House said yesterday that Trump signed an executive order into law which is not constitutionally allowed. If it happens anyway then the US has gone from a democratic republic to being ruled by royal decree in less than three weeks.

And of course the Democrats aren't up to the job, their main complaint would be that Trump didn't dot i's and cross t's.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Especially as it seems they plugged in an open email relay which now appears to be spamming employees.

Agent P waxes lyrical about 14 years of systemd

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Devil

"(Almost) all in C"

I propose that systemd should be feature frozen and re-written completely in Rust. To keep him busy, because the devil finds work for idle hands.

Robocallers who phoned the FCC pretending to be from the FCC land telco in trouble

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Please please

O2 should open source their AI granny. Or if not, make it a paid service, because I'd pay for it.

Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

Dan 55 Silver badge

Read the comments to this video in the voices of Clarkson, May, and Hammond.

DOGE latest: Citrix supremo has 'read-only' access to US Treasury payment system

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WTF?

Re: Musky Brown Nosers

"My colleagues are getting 15 minute one-on-one check-ins with 19, 20, and 21-year old-college graduates asking to justify their existence."

What? This is what it takes to rip down the government of country which we are constantly told is a beacon of freedom and liberty for the whole world? Why aren't they being dragged out the front door by their ears?

You know something's wrong when Clippy fills you with nostalgia for simpler times

Dan 55 Silver badge

You thought you could turn him off, but he'll be back.

Palantir designed to 'power the West to its obvious innate superiority,' says CEO

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Sir, this is a non-Nazi establishment.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

They're not bothering to hide it now

The road to Hell on Earth is paved with corporate America.

Google torpedoes 'no AI for weapons' rules

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Those are my AI principles

If our shareholders don't like them... well we have others.

Musk’s DOGE ship gets ‘full’ access to Treasury payment system, sinks USAID

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If this isn't a reason for cloud exit I don't know what is.

If you're a non-US business, you can't put business critical info in a cloud owned by any US tech company. They can't be trusted.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Idiots took over

That's entirely the point - they want it to collapse so they can be there to pick up the pieces and make a profit out of each piece.

If they're getting what they want then you can't call them idiots. Psychopaths probably, but not idiots.

Trump scrubs all mention of DEI, gender, climate change from federal websites

Dan 55 Silver badge

The IA is on borrowed time, I don't see the current administration and hangers on wanting to preserve history when they're all about rewriting it.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: This brings back memories

Why does DEI have anything to do with the post you're replying to?

Concerning the OP, this half-hour video is doing the rounds. It was posted two months ago and sounded like a conspiracy theory, then it was spot on about the past two weeks, and now it looks like a roadmap for the future of the US.

Not even Nvidia's Jensen Huang can talk President Tariffs out of chip import taxes

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

Regularly bouncing the stock market

Someone's making a killing with shorts...

Ontario responds to Trump tariff by pitching Starlink deal into the trash

Dan 55 Silver badge

Ontario said they would continue with Starlink if the tariffs were cancelled, the tariffs were cancelled, and they were true to their word.

Presumably if this nonsense starts up again a month from now, Starlink will be re-used as part of the pressure to get the US to back down.

Because it is the US that backed down.

By the way, Trump demanded Mexico put 10,000 troops on the border, seemingly ignorant to the fact they already have 15,000 there. I guess 5,000 were sent home for a nice holiday and Trump celebrated that he got what he wanted.

Humans brought the heat. Earth says we pay the price

Dan 55 Silver badge

The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

As Trump slugs Canada, Mexico and China with tariffs, industry groups hope trade war weapon isn’t pointed at their feet

Dan 55 Silver badge

As the WSJ said, Trump's tariffs are "the dumbest trade war in history"

So Trump has stolen the coveted or perhaps that should be covfefed prize from Brexit.

I don't think countries on the receiving end should automatically respond with reciprocal tariffs as that would just add to inflation... they should just work on strengthening trade links between each other.

Intel has officially missed the boat for AI in the datacenter

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "Intel has officially missed the boat for AI in the datacenter"

Occam's razor suggests it's just yet another example of Intel not being able to get a new product out there.

Microsoft talks up 'significant capital investments' in AI as sector reacts to DeepSeek

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Can't stop now!

The only thing that can be done is to carry on running forward like Wile E Coyote.

Trump tells Musk to 'go get' Starliner astronauts

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Good timing.

Visiting Germany after the war, the philosopher Hannah Arendt confessed to being “oppressed by a kind of pervasive public stupidity which cannot be trusted to judge correctly the most elementary events ... A great number of Germans,” she wrote, “especially among the more educated, apparently are no longer capable of telling the truth even if they want to.”

From the article Israel and the delusions of Germany’s ‘memory culture’.

Presumably this also happened in the lead up to the war. Just saying that in case anyone here today wants to learn from history.

White House asks millions of govt workers if they would be so kind as to fork right off

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X barely breaking even

It doesn't matter, it's a propaganda tool and as such Musk sees any loss as an investment. If he talks about profit or revenue then it's just for appearance's sake.

Memories fade. Archives burn. All signal eventually becomes noise

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Re: Make copies...

Look at YouTube, videos are disappearing because the account became inactive, in spite of Google previously promising to keep everything online. Google arguably have the time and the money to keep videos but chose not to.

SLAP, Apple, and FLOP: Safari, Chrome at risk of data theft on iPhone, Mac, iPad Silicon

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Firefox?

Only on the Mac though, on an iDevice you just get a reskinned Safari.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Apple Spokeperson ??

It's PR Defcon 1 down in Cupertino, it requires extreme measures.

The curious story of Uncle Sam's HR dept, a hastily set up email server, and fears of another cyber disaster

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Re: Cat's out of the bag.

Elmo's obsession with a fork in the road, again. After screwing Twitter employees, who's going to take him up on it his offer?

You probably have more CIO experience than the incoming White House CIO

Dan 55 Silver badge

P.S. 72 million now have no health insurance

In other countries they'd be out on the streets the next day for that.

Trump eyes up to 100% tariffs on foreign semiconductors, TSMC in crosshairs

Dan 55 Silver badge

He rejected the planes because they transported Colombian citizens in handcuffs, Trump put tariffs on Colombian imports, Colombia ordered reciprocal tariffs, and then once the US changed its plans so they were transported with a minimum of dignity, both sides withdrew tariffs.

If a foreign country expels citizens there's little you can do apart from take them in but you can ensure they're treated like human beings.

Enlightenment reaches 0.27, continuing its quiet but persistent journey

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I followed that for years, it made me feel much better about the code I'm responsible for. While following that thread, I made a mental note...

1. Not buy any product with Tizen.

2. Not use Enlightenment, as either a user or a developer.

An short example amongst many of why not to use it as a developer:

Let me tell about a certain experiment conducted in my corp. Three developers were tasked with creating a certain window application, nothing fancy. They were to do it in qt, some OSX lib (can't remember which) and efl. Neither knew any of those libraries.

Qt guy finished in 3 days; OSX guy finished in 3.5 days; efl guy gave up after 2 weeks.

Let that sink in.

Tech stocks tank as US AI dominance no longer a sure bet

Dan 55 Silver badge

It can't pop soon enough.

‘Serious concerns’ about DWP’s use of AI to read correspondence from benefit claimants

The DWP apparently thinks it can shovel everything into the magic AI machine and it'll do everything for them:

That is the challenge facing the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as correspondence floods in from benefit applicants and claimants – of which there are more than 20 million, including pensioners, in the UK. The DWP thinks it may have found a solution in using artificial intelligence to read it all first – including handwritten missives.

Human reading used to take weeks and could leave the most vulnerable people waiting for too long for help. But “white mail” is an AI that can do the same work in a day and supposedly prioritise the most vulnerable cases for officials to get to first.

By implication, it deprioritises other people, so its accuracy and how it reaches its judgments count, but both matters remain opaque. Despite a ministerial mandate, it is one of numerous public sector algorithms yet to be logged on the transparency register for central government AIs.

[..]

An internal data protection impact assessment said letter writers “do not need to know about their involvement in the initiative”.

The assessment says correspondence can include national insurance numbers, dates of birth, addresses, telephone details, email addresses, details of benefit claims, health information, bank account details, racial and sexual characteristics, and details on children such as their dates of birth and any special needs.

People who work with benefit claimants are now voicing “serious concerns” about how the system handles sensitive personal data.