Posts by Richard 12

Support tech caught by 'Technician Aura': the bug that only hides when you're watching

Airplane mode

On all recent-ish phones you can turn on airplane mode then re-enable Bluetooth and/or WiFi, leaving only the cellular radio disabled.

Walkie talkies will even trip most RCD/GFD and AFCI/AFDD circuit breakers if "clicked" within a few cm of them. In some cases they'll even trip MCBs.

They have an absolutely massive output, as that initial burst is basically unregulated.

Never use your radio near electronics.

It's one reason the emergency services have been changing over to "mobile phone" technology. The other being encryption, of course. "Police scanners" don't pick up LTE based trunk calls.

Re: Many years ago...

It's to show how important they are.

Less important people use heel lifts.

LTE/5G won't, but in many places the phone will fall back to the older standards as a call is coming in because the LTE/5G can't cope.

Yay.

QUIC will soon be as important as TCP – but it's vastly different

Starting a stream comes after the session is open.

Either end of the connected session can decide exactly how many streams to accept - just because the client wants ten streams doesn't mean the server will accept them. It can trivially say "nope".

Same in the other direction.

Re: The problem is not TCP - is HTTP

QUIC is a competitor to TLS/SSL, not HTTP.

It's swapping out the layer below HTTP.

Re: The problem is not TCP - is HTTP

When you wander into an office building on your phone it's going to lose the LTE signal and pick up the WiFi. Under TCP the connection to the remote server is broken because your IP and port changed from IPv6 on LTE to a NAT'd (possibly CGNAT'd) IPv4.

Session IDs let the user roam from LTE to 3G to WiFi to wired without the application layer having to handle a reconnect and resume. In theory it even allows applications to trunk connections.

So that long-running download doesn't have to be restarted, only a few tens of lost packets resent.

Chrome silently installs a 4 GB local LLM on your computer

Unfortunately that is becoming increasingly difficult, as Chrome takes over the crown once held by Internet Explorer 6

1 in 8 employees totally cool with selling work credentials

Re: IT, take notice

Most laptops too. Windows and macOS do this by default to all WiFi adapters now.

It's a pain, as a lot of single-seat software still ties the licence to a randomly-selected MAC address. When that's the WiFi, you end up having to move the licence to a "new" machine every single day...

It only takes one person

For there to be 13% who know someone who has.

On the other open claw, nobody is going to admit they sold it - even if they did. So the question is probably the best approximation available.

The C-suite figures are both horrifying and as expected, mind. Many of them intend to have moved on to another company before the fecal fan interface occurs.

Microsoft's bad obsession is showing up in shabby services and slipshod software. Here's proof

Re: You have no (almost) excuse to still be on Github

In the real world there always is a central, golden repository.

For example, the one that Linus Torvalds pushes to.

The genius of distributed version control is that everyone who wants to can have a copy of that golden one. That means it can vanish and a new one set up, and all it costs is a few seconds pointing your local copy towards the new shiny. No data will be lost.

This is of course why GitHub et al added those extra things around git - the PR and issues discussions, wiki, Actions etc. Those are the things that keep projects trapped in fluffy handcuffs.

Palantir CEO: 10 percent of the world 'professionally hates us'

Re: "Digital Sovereignty"...What Was That Again??

So they've just declared that they will breach all contracts that aren't with the US DoD.

Not might. Will.

Brit mathematician lets AI agent loose with credit card – cue password leaks, CAPTCHA chaos and more

She knew it would go wrong

That was the point

Far too many people are blindly trusting that the AI will "save them" in some way.

They need clear examples to show that it absolutely will accidentally eat them for breakfast given half a chance.

Usage-based pricing killing your vibe - here's how to roll your own local AI coding agents

Re: cost of the hardware?

For how long though?

The Github $39pcm plan would have cost £1000 in about 34 months. So including electricity and assuming a five year replacement cycle means the local hardware is pretty similar cost.

But the $39 per month plan is gone, replaced by something roughly double the price. Now the local hardware is cheaper after two to three years.

Yet Microsoft are still losing money at the new price. The cost per token is going to rise further. In a year that $39 pcm usage is going to cost much closer to $400 pcm, and your local hardware will be cheaper within six months.

Randomness

"Temperature" means how much random entropy is injected into the model.

In theory zero temperature should make them repeatable, giving the same output for the same input.

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Re: Analogue clocks

The reason analogue clocks are ending is precision.

We used to only really care about the nearest hour. The single pointer on a sundial or similar was plenty.

Then we started caring about the nearest quarter hour, and needed a second pointer. That worked really well.

Now my train leaves at 17:38.

It's very difficult to see arbitrary times on a distant analogue clock with better precision than about ±3 minutes.

Even if the marking are clear, parallax and mechanical wobble reduces the possible display precision of the moving pointer. It's no good if I see the minute hand pointing at 17:36 if the dispatcher along the platform sees 17:38.

DVLA's 14-week driving license fiasco – the tech, people and chatbot trying to clear it

Who decides what's "correct and complete"?

When the DVLA lose the paperwork, how do you prove it?

And if the DVLA claim they asked for more information but didn't actually bother sending the letter - or Royal Mail left it on a shelf for six weeks.

Cleaning up the mess when the DVLA screw up is difficult, because everyone relies on their database. Buttle/Tuttle is just the start.

Several friends have had similar incidents with visas. HMVI lose half the paperwork and the visa gets denied "due to lack of evidence". Despite what the actual law says, there's effectively no recourse whatsoever.

Microsoft releases first big update after Nadella's vow to 'win back fans'

Re: So...

The MS account requirement utterly screws small businesses who want MS365.

Tiny business buys a laptop. During first boot they're forced to create an MS account without realising it.

Once they have a PC, they buy an MS365 subscription tied to their business email because they think they want Word and Excel.

Now they have two MS accounts on the machine and no idea how to get rid of the one they were forced to make during first boot. Their experience of MS365 becomes orders of magnitude more horrific than normal as they have to keep switching between those two accounts all the time. MS365 also keeps insisting that it needs to take over their email hosting, and if they follow that "guidance" it won't work...

Worse, they have no idea that bitlocker was enabled until a bad update requires them to find the recovery key. They now have absolutely no idea which account contains said key.

Or, they use LibreOffice and have none of the above issues.

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

It seems the original contract assumed the suit manufacturer would liase with the lander manufacturers to write the specification for suit/craft interactions.

Predictably, that doesn't appear to have happened. Apparently there's still no specification for what needs to be in the donning/doffing chamber - or even how big it needs to be! This makes it somewhat difficult for BO and SpaceX to even begin designing the lander interiors.

Standards matter - it's why Dragon can dock with the ISS.

AWS plants more tombstones in the application graveyard

It's not your fault

Microsoft's GitHub shifts to metered AI billing amid cost crisis

Re: The free ride is nearly over for so-called AI.

Companies often pay for things that aren't useful as an experiment to find out whether it might be.

On top of that, if something is useful at $10 or $39 per month, it does not follow that anyone will pay $500 or $1000 per month for it - and that's the kind of price rise that must come.

US clarifies mobile hotspots part of foreign router ban despite rarity of American made consumer kit

Re: Commercial

Residential routers are on 24x7 - as are commercial ones.

A single residential router is worth nothing to a miscreant, but a bot net of many thousands of them is very valuable both for DDoS attacks and for attempting to break into something that is valuable. They all come with their own IP, so such things come at you from all sides.

Most people use the router their ISP gave them and rely entirely on that ISP to keep it secure - after all, most people don't know how any of this works and shouldn't need to!

A single serious vulnerability in one of those routers can give an attacker a significant proportion of an ISP's customer base.

UK gov pays public £550 to discuss Digital ID – then bans journalists from the room

Re: Consultations?

I have to fill out a tax return every year.

So I need some method of logging into the HMRC systems to send them my completed tax return and request my refund.

There's also various benefits that most people can claim some of.

How else would I do this?

Of course, none of these required a common "Digital ID", and would in fact be considerably less secure if they did.

To fix this Wi-Fi network, we'll need a crane

O-Levels haven't been a thing for nearly forty years, the last ones happened in 1987!

Giving the "most common" age range would still be useful.

O-Levels/GCSEs are usually at 15-16 years, A-Levels 17-18.

Pass the key, passwords have passed their sell-by date

Re: Companies not listening

Onboarding is an absolute nightmare across the board. Almost everything is actively user-hostile, and the only reason anyone does it at all is because they don't have a choice.

The only exception seems to be TOTP on a smartphone via QR code, but that still means installing a TOTP app - and figuring out how to have a backup.

Re: Companies not listening

Use the spare until the replacement arrives, I guess

You do have a spare, right?

Stale gov.uk pages are feeding AI overviews old data and Brits are believing it

Re: Shit in.....

Google, Bing et al are actively trying to make sure nobody does go to the original sources.

Because when people do that, they might send some ad impressions to someone else!

GitHub opts all CLI users into telemetry collection whether they want it or not

Re: Please stop working against humanity by using github

Why would OP want to increase the running costs of those useful services, when they can burn some minute fraction of Microsoft’s money instead?

I keep my throwaway stuff on Github.

Anthropic's super-scary bug hunting model Mythos is shaping up to be a nothingburger

Re: Mozilla spin

All the code review LLMs moan about variable names, they've had that feature for ages!

The code being scanned has been sent to Anthropic, and they promise* they won't keep it and use it for training.

I've found these code review tools to be a useful first pass - that regularly flips to being an infuriating waste of time.

At the moment I think they're probably worth the price. However, I know that they're being sold well below cost and the break-even price is almost certainly going to be way out of budget.

So I'm never going to put them in CI, and I don't want my team to become reliant on them either.

*_{How would we ever know? Our stolen closed-source code would get used by other Anthropic customers for their closed-source code. Best case is it turns up in the discovery phase of an entirely different lawsuit, long after Anthropic have gone bust.}

One of Europe's sovereign cloud picks may not be so-sovereign after all

Re: I blame the beancounters

Product rather than cost.

Beancounters are happy to buy things that be be resold, especially if you can resell the same thing to the same customer every single month until the customer goes bankrupt.

Re: Just run your own IT, FFS

There are economies of scale, and smaller organisations can't afford the expertise needed.

Local government like small town and parish councils often have one part-time employee, and around 80-90% of the budget is spent on their salary.

There's no way they have the expertise or even the time to look after a single server in a colo, yet this organisation is Government and does have a fair amount of privileged information to protect.

So they must come together and share the cost with many other similar organisations.

At the moment they're all being pushed hard towards MS365 (or sometimes Google Workspace). Those are very expensive (well over £1500 a year) and hand everything to the US Government under the CLOUD Act - so possibly unlawful, but it's unclear. MS365 is difficult to manage, so they have to hire a company to do that too - which means many of those are pushing very hard to resell MS365 and get that juicy password reset money.

Having multiple sovereign options "blessed" by the EU Commission would make it far easier to avoid that trap.

Magnificent irony as Meta staff unhappy about running surveillance software on work PCs

Illegal outside the US

So any AI thus trained will be even more US-centric than they are at the moment.

Making it useless for any non-US customers, other than those whose business is to scam US businesses.

Is that really what they want?

The spaghettified DBMS chart that shows Oracle's crown is slowly slipping

Not even that, because it doesn't tell you anything about the gaps and thus very little about the direction of travel.

Are Oracle within a couple of percentage points of the one above - or the one below? Are they rising towards the one above or falling away from it?

This kind of chart is light on information.

World's blandest man steps down from CEO job to spend more time in tastefully appointed home

A device whose screen swivels around to face the person speaking during a group video call.

Wow. If the best innovation they can publicly mention is to tape an iPad to the top of a 2017 Meeting Owl, then the new guy is the same as the old. Surely it would have been better to say nothing?

I guess business meeting hardware would be a new market for them, but they've historically avoided making any explicitly business oriented products as that might affect their "premium mass-market consumer" reputation.

Unlike the Neo, as extending a little downwards in price is usually a very good idea.

Linux 7.1 will have an optional new NTFS driver

Re: What is this for?

There's a lot of NTFS formatted partitions out there.

Most of them are in PCs running Windows, where the owner has yet to be convinced that they could switch to Linux.

They're not going to want to lose their existing data or spend a lot of time restoring backups onto a different filesystem.

The fewer barriers, the more likely they are to consider trying it.

Server-room lock was nothing but a crock

The usual reset logic seems to be a timer.

Starts in state 0, first button press starts the timer. Any wrong button press puts it into state -1 where all buttons loop back to -1. Timer expiry resets it to state 0.

The final correct button places it into state Unlocked and stops the timer.

Some have an explicit "reset" button as well.

Usually the keypad is the most secure part, of course. It's the rest of the lock that's useless.

Re: ISO certification VS security

Products cannot be ISO900X certified, only processes.

So you can change the concrete to closed cell floatation foam, but you must follow The Process.

Re: ISO certification VS security

You don't want to actually drink a BS 6008 cup of char.

It's about consistency. Once you find a blend you like, it's important that it's similar next year.

I meant to do that! AI vendors shrug off responsibility for vulns

Re: Standard response

A curious game. The only winning move is not to play.

Anthropic squeezes enterprises by ejecting bundled tokens from seat deal

Re: For those rooting for the inevitable bursting of the AI bubble

It depends how soon they crash.

If they crash out this year, then the small to mid-sized useful models, especially the domain-specific ones, will remain available for individual businesses and researchers to run and retrain on-prem or on hired servers.

If it takes much longer than that, the loans will be so huge that we're in 2008 financial crisis zone and the real economy tanks along with them due to banks going bust.

In the latter case, investors will be so spooked that only the models that can be usefully retrained on desktop workstation hardware will remain in existence.

So for the industry to survive, it must die very quickly.

Re: Anthropic seems really desperate for more money

In most industries we kill a product or even entire brand once it becomes clear or even likely that the minimum profitable price (possibly bundled with something else) is too high for enough customers to actually pay.

It's been blantantly obvious for a very long time that they need to add at least one if not two zeroes to their prices to merely cover their borrowing costs, let alone ongoing running costs.

There's no way they can make a profit without bankrupting nearly all their customers, and that's not even a short-term plan.

IPv6 carried half of internet traffic – for one day, according to Google

Re: Still not ready for regular DNS use

Mobile phone networks worldwide are mostly v6 only.

The UK and USA wired ISPs are mostly v4 only and using CGNAT, because it was cheaper than upgrading their existing "free" router estate. (Which they're now having to upgrade anyway. Except in the US, where it's now illegal to upgrade routers)

In the rest of the world, older ISPs tend to be v4 only while smaller ISPs are v6 only.

Virtual servers from the "big cloud" providers are mostly v6 only with a translation front end, because v4 is expensive. Colo/on-prem seems to be a mix of v4 and dual-stack.

ISPs and cloud providers are translating in both directions.

We're still in the transition period, and will be for at least another decade.

Re: IPv6 introduced new problems, so slow uptake shouldn't be curious or confusing

The committee did.

In fact, most of the complexity came from the fact they did listen to that feedback and put in ways to do it. Translation, autoconf, etc. Probably too many options.

The only reason IPv4 still exists on the global Internet is that ISPs decided to CGNAT your NAT instead of using the much simpler v4 to v6 address translation that's in the standard.

I have no idea why they went that way, as CGNAT is way more complicated and has a lot of unwanted sideeffects.

But then, I'm still seeing customers insisting on static IPv4 addresses and cursing that they need to manually set a number in everything. They still refuse to DHCP because "they need to know the IP". Yet they absolutely don't, it just causes them pain.

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

You cannot

After a power-cycle or firmware update, you must unlock using the onscreen pin or password before any external devices will connect.

I don't think FaceID or fingerprint reader work either until you've unlocked it once. (Certainly this is the case on Android)

I am wondering how the OP is going to install this update, given that it cannot be unlocked. Maybe there is a force firmware update if booted in the recovery/wipe mode.

Opsec oopsie: Dutch navy frigate location outed by mailing it a Bluetooth tracker

Exactly

The Captain has full control over the AIS beacon, radar reflectors, active radar etc and can "go dark" or transmit misleading information (different ship name, somewhat inaccurate position) should it be operationally desirable.

That control is the important part.

Users complain that UK Azure is having capacity problems

Re: blaming "AI"?

The GPUs need CPUs with lots of RAM, the boxes need to go in a rack somewhere, they need huge amounts of power and data interconnect, and huge amounts of non-volatile storage.

And all that consumes unimaginably huge amounts of money.

Which means everything else falls by the wayside.

Capita won disastrous UK pensions gig after acing performance checks

Re: Doubt there are any “tennis shots” actually

Surely all you need is to include previous cost overrun and underdelivery weightings.

If previous similar contracts had a 500% cost overrun, their bid price is multiplied before comparison.

If previous contracts were underdelivered, it is reasonable to expect this one will be as well.

Procurement rules already include risk weightings for these, so use them!

Attention, gamers: The FAA wants YOU to be an air traffic controller

The FAA generally requires first-time applicants to be under 31

Well, there's a major part of the problem.

In 2025 only 13% of the US population fell into the 20-30 age group, so their pool is really quite small.

Worse, very few people can afford to burn the waiting time at the start of their careers, as they don't have the buffer from existing or previous jobs to tide them over.

South Korea introduces universal basic mobile data access

Re: Universal basic mobile data access?

If I go with VM, (shudder), has anyone successfully escaped from a contract with them citing inadequate service?

Yes, but it wasn't easy and relied on consumer protection law. It should be much easier now though.

Except you're a landlord, and thus may not get consumer protection at all and may even be forced onto a Vermin Business plan.

Electronics industry says FCC's foreign-made router policy is a bit of a mesh

Re: That's So Last Week

This FCC router policy is indeed banning "foreign assembled".

However, there is an explicit statement saying they might let you import if you promise to start manufacturing them in the USA "soon". (And an implication that greasing appropriate palms might also work.)

Worse, even existing hardware only gets a pass for a short time (I think two years, might be three).

It's why the industry has started screaming, because right now there are (counts on fingers) none.