Posts by Gordon 10

Financial 'stretch' for UK to join Europe's Starlink rival, says minister

Re: the UK might end up as a US territory,

If you wish to lump Starmer and Farage together you can at least point out they have very different agenda's. Farage is a genuine suck up/axis of Fascists. Starmer's into damage limitation.

Atlassian migrated 4 million Postgres databases to shrink AWS bill

Re: batlassian crazy

Based on my observations they are throwing more AI shit against the wall and hoping some sticks than most - so thats where the savings have been pissed up the wall.

*No walls were actually harmed in the making of this tortuous metaphore.

Apple accuses former engineer of taking Vision Pro secrets to Snap

Re: Something Odd about Snaps response to this story

WRONG

Tell me you dont know about US employment law without.....

All but 2 or 3 US states are "termination without cause" states. Which means employees are out the door with 2 weeks notice as long as its not overt descrimination.

Something Odd about Snaps response to this story

Given US employment is so shockingly biased towards the employer and he's been accuses of exfiltrating files directly related to his job, it seems bizarre that Snap hasnt just fired him already.

Which kinda either suggests he's too important to fire OR that there is a kernel of truth in Apple's allegations and Snap are complicit.

Interesting times!

Also - why would any employer want any Tech employee who is this shit at covering his tracks?

Meta calls €200M EU fine over pay-or-consent ad model 'unlawful'

Stop mapping your delusions onto random stories.

'Elevated' moisture reading ignored before Heathrow-closing conflagration, says NESO

Thanks for the additional detail thats not being covered by the national media.

As I suspected all along (I missed the first article) - LHR dont DR test their power supply and they dont have a resilient infrastructure, the rest is moot.

UK to buy nuclear-capable F-35As that can't be refueled from RAF tankers

Re: US has it's finger on the Kill Switch.

Its an essentially meaningless tactical politcal decision that appeases the Orange One and costs the UK nothing. The delivery wont happen until near the end of the decade when we'll know whether the Orange One is "elected" Dictator for Life of not.

Its militarily strategy flawed, though hardly a big deal if they can be used for partial F35B training conversion, so tactically its a wash.

It is however politically tactically astute whilst we wait out the Orange One, who which like it or not Starmer seems pretty good at managing.

Thats meaningless when we rely on the yanks for maintenance of the trident missile that delivers them, and remind me, but havent the last 2 tests been failures? Not to mention the UK SSBN's have a really poor servicability record too?

On your last point RAF Lakenheath - actually a USAF base for the F35A, F22 and multiple other B61 certified US jets - is apparently a designated store for the next generation of the B61 (currently being upgraded with finest US pork barrels) and is 40mi away from Marham.

One supposes the Brit F35A's will stage out of Lakenheath if needed.

Techie went home rather than fix mistake that caused a massive meltdown

Good Old Days

In the good old days of a globally avaiable 24/7 "known unstable" codebase we used to goto the pub on friday lunch time followed by release and checkout on Friday afternoon.

It was not unkown for a release to cause an entire system crash.....odd that

New GitHub Copilot limits push AI users to pricier tiers

Re: Perfect

You do get this stuff is opt-in right? Its virtually impossible to get Dev's to use it if they dont want to.

Snowflake and Databricks bank PostgreSQL acquisitions to bring transactions onto their platforms

The Gartner write up is bollocks

OLTP and Analytics DB's are a false seperation for all but the biggest workloads.

90% of Postgres databases will fit into Databricks / Snowflake with very little problem because the cloud DB's have the horsepower to brute force the performance.

Its solely inertia and cost of change that persists Postgres at this point. The DB's are probably 2nd tier apps that are chugging along for years without change.

Stargate to land its first offshore datacenters in the United Arab Emirates

Ahhh. So its only important to onshore American jobs if you haven't bribed the Orange one. Got it.

Any one else think the AI bubble bursting is going to make the Dot Com bubble look like a blip?

Actors' union complains about Epic Games cloning Darth Vader

Re: A sign of times to come

Methinks you either dont know what the definition of Rentier is or that you are deliberately using it out of context to be a bellend. My betting is on the latter.

M&S warns of £300M dent in profits from cyberattack

Re: A £300million reduction in profits

Exactly. Its gobsmacking that their recovery is taking so long. One can only assume their systems must have been falling to pieces and DR and BCP was non-existence.

Meta's still violating GDPR rules with latest plan to train AI on EU user data, says noyb

Re: Envelopes

Again you display your total ignorance of GDPR compliance programs and your Wiki quotes are irrelevant. For full disclosure I run a GDPR compliance program.

The whole point of a compliance program is NOT to show you are 100% compliant - we all know that is impossible - its to show you have a reasonably robust set of processes carried out against a risk framework.

It doesnt matter if the ICO or another regulator disagrees with your risk framework - the mere fact it exists and you are doing it in a methodical way shows you were trying to achieve compliance with good intent. WHICH IS ALL THAT ULTIMATELY MATTERS from a regulatory process. 99% of Compliance works in the same way.

Bear in GDPR as written is almost totally un-usable on a practical basis without an extensive set of assumptions and practical examples of how to implement. Its written by Lawyers with almost zero concerns for whether its practical to implement, particularly with respect to how technology handles data. This is where the cost of compliance is generally felt - at least during the early stages of legislation where there hasnt been much industry concensus - people have to make some risk based assumptions plus get extensive guidance from the individual regulators.

Add in the fact that GDPR is just a broadbrush (relatively speaking) set of principles set at the EU level. Each EU country (including the UK) has its own national level legislation that enacts those principles AND that is what you have to comply with. Mutli-nationals generally pick one EU countries legislation as their lodestone to comply with, again because thats a very practical and defensible position to take. Some choose country level compliance - thats generally because they are Mahousive, Risk Advserse, have looser corporate structures or a combo of the 3.

There are generally 2 ways to implement GDPR -

1 lip service and weasel words - worked examples - Meta, Data Brokers, Ad Tech, Gambling Tech.

2 take an honest punt at a complex topic.

Most SME sized companies choose 2. They'll tag whomever doesnt move fast enough as a DPO who'll try to make decent fist of it based on whatever small amount of time they are able to devote to it. How that happens is generally based on 3 dimensions.

1. A Data Classification Policy - most decent sized B2B orgs will have one of these already for other purposes (PCI, SOC2 etc)

2. An Asset (application) Catalog - detailing what data an Asset handles.

3. A Processing Purpose Catalog - These can be thought of as Business processes badly skewed by Privacy lawyers.

1. Is where Personal Data comes in. The simplest catalogs classify personal data by example not by definition - into 2 buckets that correspond Lower risk personal data and higher risk personal data. For simplicity most GDPR programs align these to PII (Personally Identifying Information) and SPI (Sensitive Personal Information). Most country regulators will have guiance on this bucketing process many industries have agreed common practises and classifications.

For this reason its material false to claim that PII is an American invention. Its a globally recognised shorthand for saying lower risk personal data.

Now fuck off back to ChatGPT and Wikipedia.

Re: Envelopes

This is fundamentally wrong. You cant say GDPR is nothing to do with PII then go on to say its a subset of the data that GDPR is concerned with - thats a contradiction.

The reality is that that PII and its more sensitive cousin SPI are typically used as Personal Data risk classifiers in most GDPR Compliance programs.

Something you obviously have zero experience of.

Re: Envelopes

Tell me you dont understand GDPR without telling me you dont understand GDPR.

Everything you type is slanted BS.

Post Office finally throttles delayed in-house EPOS project

£400M for a glorified shop and bank EPOS combo?

Not to trivialise the problem but for £400m you could put a Postie on the moon. Thats a ludicrious price for a known problem and solution set.

And yet you have absolutely zero evidence that that is the case. Get in the Bin.

Intuitive Machines blames dim lighting and dodgy data for second lunar faceplant

Re: Plan B.

Ah yes. Now work out a design that achieves that with minimal mass gain and functionality loss, and no complexity gain.

Twonk.

Re: It wasn't always like this...

And your points are totally irrelevant... leaving aside whether they have a decent design the purpose of this exercise is to produce "Model-T" landers from in a vaguely commodity fashion. Not the hand crafted Bentleys you are describing. Its actioning different sides of the Faster, Cheaper, Better triangle.

You are also making the totally flawed assumption that progress is linear - it never it.

(Im neither for or against these current efforts - just pointing out the massive logical fallacies in your arguments.)

AMD is Ryzen to the SMB occasion with a bundle of baby Epycs

Re: Brand dilution

You arent the droid they are selling to.

Enterprises rate reliablity far higher than benchmark scores. Benchmarks rarely drive enterprise sales - reliablity stats and warrantee's do. EPYC means lower failure rates and better post-sales support and thats all that matters.

To misquote General Brady.

Amateurs study spec sheets.

Professionals study reliability & return stats.

Or to put in software terms - if you arent prioritising your NFR's you're probably doing it wrong.

Tech suppliers asked to support single electronic health record across England

Re: Patient access

You've misunderstood the use case. As have the people switching the system off at night. *Some* use cases not requiring a immediate response, or indeed any response at all should be 24hr, with a review queue if necessary for when the receptionist can be arsed.

Apple: Since you care about yOuR pRiVaCy, we'll train our AI on made-up emails

Re: How do you do, fellow kids?

Not necessarily. Its pretty easy to code only for sent mails not including any previous body text. That covers 90% of email volume with just the edge case of quoting a previous mail to detail with. Its definately not beyond Apple to come up with a solution for this.

Official abuse of state security has always been bad, now it's horrifying

Can we avoid the use of the word "establishment" please? Its as much a tired and lazy trope as Deep State. Power hungry cliques making temporary alliances for the common goal of more power is all it is.

AI entrepreneur sent avatar to argue in court – and the judge shut it down fast

Total Bellend

He keep obscuring the truth in his statement - which is he did not openly notify the judges panel in advance that he was using an AI, which is completely unethical.

Also given he only seems to have been playing with a couple of nights before it can only be seen as a publicity stunt.

If he had any tech skills whatsoever and was taking this seriously he'd have been preparing for weeks or months.

If I was one of those Judges I would have threatened him with contempt, hell I would have loved to give him a night in the cells.

Massive Knob.

'Copilot will remember key details about you' for a 'catered to you' experience

OpenAI

Um.... why would you be surprised that MS use features from OpenAI - its part of their strategic partnership? OpenAI suckle money (or Azure credits) out of the MS corporate teat to build it, then MS spend 3 months or so putting an MS coat of paint on it before releasing it.

UK's attempt to keep details of Apple 'backdoor' case secret… denied

Re: Basic point here

I think you are confusing the UK with the US.

Not to say it can’t happen - it’s just far more likely in the US - regardless of Nationality or Immigration status.

For a start it requires a policeman in the UK, not just border force. Whereas in the US any member of CBP can which massively

increases the odds.

Also though UK police have many flaws, the average UK copper is far better trained and much likely less of an asshole than a US cop, let alone the knuckle dragging scum who work for CBP.

GCHQ intern took top secret spy tool home, now faces prison

Re: Hard truth time

Which conveniently ignores the fact that time and time again people from minorities are discriminated against and NOT given an equal chance - its never been a fair system for THEM. Postive correction Is necessary to correct a flawed system.

It can be proven just by sending a few CV's out that are identical except for the name being brown or white.

Not to be confused with MAFS - you only make that mistake once.

Musk's xAI swallows Musk's X in ego-friendly, all-stock deal

Not quite. He created a new thing that he knew would ride the bubble and then used stock in the new thing to pay off the loans in the old something.

Its just a shell game, with a slightly different valuation and probably some pesky T&C's on the loans eliminated.

UK govt data people not 'technical,' says ex-Downing St data science head

Re: a training program to help civil service technologists become "AI engineers"

Thats fair. But ultimately thats the history of tech in a nutshell, there is no revolution - only evolution rebadged by marketeers.

See also "time-sharing" rebadged as SaaS.

Also - if its useful - does the badge really matter?

Re: a training program to help civil service technologists become "AI engineers"

Overly binary interpretation there.

Just because its hyped doesnt mean there isnt a kernel of value in it.

AI has already delivered more value in 2 years than blockchain has managed in 10.

Its just that the value is probably an order of magnitude less than the investment being thrown about.

As we rush headlong into AI Crash its worth looking back that whilst the DotCom crash had plenty of casualties it left a fair bit of value poking up here and there as well.

SNARK to Maximum

Im going to go out on a limb here and suggest there is nothing in Laura's background that suggests she's qualified to work in Data and AI. Her CV screams Academia to Thinktank to Govt with no real work experience herself.

She appears to be part of the problem, not the solution.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-laura-gilbert/details/experience/

M4 MacBook Air keeps ports modular, locks tight – still a headache to repair

Re: Good news

Really? You sure?

You get there is a difference between US Companies and the US Govt right, and a difference between say... Apple and ...ooh Telsa.

Apple's alleged UK encryption battle sparks political and privacy backlash

Re: US trying to push other countries around?

Your point may have been better framed by pointing out that the US has been guilty of identical behaviour multiple times before, not the least with the Patriot act which forbids discussing the existence of a Data Seizure subpoena.

As well intentioned as the US congresscritters are, I wonder how many of them have protested against the Patriot act clauses?

Eight days later, Microsoft Outlook users still struggle on iOS devices

Re: Dump Outlook and replace it

The Naughties called and they want their email client opinions back. For 99% of people including most users of iOS devices Mail is a commodity tool and standards are irrelevant. Are Thunderbird fanbois the same as Linux on the Desktop fanbois? A big cross over surely?

A Blessing

Since the Outlook native apps on iOS are a bag of shite compared to the Web Client - this outage seems rather like a blessing than a curse.

Here's the ugliest global-warming chart you'll ever need to see

Re: Just another alarmist global warming rant

@Joe. You're dangerously misinformed about China, possibly ideologically so - its decarbonising faster that its carbonising.

Microsoft wants to quit building Army VR goggles, hand contract to Anduril

Apple have missed a trick here

The Vision Pro already has Army pork barrel pricing. All they need to do is paint it olive and all that lovely DoD port will flow their way....

After Copilot trial, government staff rated Microsoft's AI less useful than expected

Treasury Security

Its unclear what the treasury security requirements and concerns are. Ultimately vanilla pre-trained Copilot is just another cloud service sitting in Azure/365 tenant and has the same access levels as every other 365 related service that inherits user permissions.

If your already using 365 or an Azure tenant the physical and logical security risks are unchanged UNLESS you are worried it exposes Security by obscurity issues where joe pleb users has access to finance and hr docs in an open sharepoint - but thats a PR problem not a pure security one.

There are obvious more complliance related concerns concerning appopropriate usage and adoption but thats just change management.

You are a BOFH and I claim my £5.

Boom's XB-1 jet nails supersonic flight for first time

Re: USA USA USA

Not sure where you get 20% of range from. Its irrelevant for the demonstrator and Overture should have comparable range to Conky.

"Overture is designed to fly 4,250 nautical miles. At this max range, Overture can fly nonstop on routes like New York to Frankfurt or Tokyo to Seattle."

Re: USA USA USA

As it should be if we want to have a hope in hell of staving off climate change.

Sweden seizes cargo ship after another undersea cable hit in suspected sabotage

Re: Once is Happenstance, Twice is Coincidence

Counterpoint - why do something so obvious?

But are they accidents....

Interestingly there's some suggestion from the Yanks that these incidents are being over-egged. These pre-date Trump.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/01/19/russia-baltic-undersea-cables-accidents-sabotage/

Someone is slipping a hidden backdoor into Juniper routers across the globe, activated by a magic packet

Wynne Jones on Strictly.

...given his antics of the weekend I reckon this is Wynne Jones. Backdoors, Magic Packets, Spitroasts - they all follow the same theme.

UK telco TalkTalk confirms probe into alleged data grab underway

Am I the only one thinking....

... that by a limited 3rd party Vendor, they are underplaying something major like a Cloud CRM or Database breach?

Me Cynical? Surely not!

Presumably at 9 years post Dildo the entire management collective memory has been erased. Rather like a goldfish discovering a bowl ornament for the first time. Oooo look a Data Breach..<short time passes>...Ooo look a Databreach

How to leave the submarine cable cutters all at sea – go Swedish

Re: What a load of bollocks

Eh? You're an AC. Any downvoting is by definition not personal and merely a result of a shitty take in the downvoters eyes.