Posts by Gordon 10

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.

Apple Intelligence turned on by default in upcoming macOS Sequoia 15.3, iOS 18.3

Re: Pretty sure disabling Apple "Intelligence" WILL free the roughly 10 GB it takes up, right?

Good question. The onboard LLM is about 3Gb from memory (this may be the MacOS one) . In the current versions its installed on opt-in. I would hope Apples system engineers talk some sense to the Product teams on this one.

No it wont. Thats a massive oversimplification.

Re: Worrying trend

Counterpoint.

How is this different to whats gone on for years?

Pretty much every function on your phone has an on/off button, inlcuding fundamentals such as GSM radio.

Whether it is default on or off is just quibbling over details. You need to remember that informed/engaged Register Techie usage is a tiny tiny use case.

You missed a nuance. Its currently on the "Pro" and "Pro Max" models.

You're *currently* safe to buy a vanilla iPhone 15 or 16 or their Plus versions.

Re: opting out of Google's various AI widgets

You seem confused.

By definition if you have used *any* of Googles services your data is already on their servers.

What did you actually mean?

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Re: Ban Porn?

Easy.... they'll be trembling from fatigue and RSI.

Re: Bonkers

13 downvotes and only one person tried to say why. They failed - but at least they tried.

As well as no unconstrained right to free speech (p.s. access to porn isn't free speech), neither in the UK or indeed even the US.

Also those crying privacy - this doesnt breach GDPR or the Data Protection Act (which is how GDPR is embedded in UK legislation).

Part of GDPR is if its proportionality. This 99% likely is. It's going to be brave judge who rules against a minimally invasive age check and storage of proven DOB.

PS I do this stuff for a living.

Re: Bonkers

Explain why?

I dont think you have a clue do you?

Copilot invades Microsoft 365 Personal and Family for an extra three bucks a month

I cant see this catching on

The one good thing about 365 Copilot is semi-automated knowledge management. It knows how to find that document you wrote 3 years ago thats buried somewhere on Sharepoint and copy it forward and update it as a draft for your new use case.

Thats really quite powerful - and utterly irrelevant to the average home use as for some reason OneDrive on Personal accounts isn't integrated in the MS Graph API that does all the hard work for the AI in the same way Sharepoint is on Enterprise accounts.

In summary - 365 Copilot without Sharepoint is pants....

Re: So...

Modern comments. Just thiinking about that shit show raises my blood pressure.

Microsoft eggheads say AI can never be made secure – after testing Redmond's own products

Re: Is any non-trivial computer system ever totally utterly secure? Some say yes

Agree with your first point but not your second.

Of course you can sanitise inputs and outputs - these aren't binary things - they are a continuum of risk and damage limitation.

Working for the Dept of the Bleeding obvious

This really makes no sense and the only conclusion you can come to is that no software of reasonable complexity is 100% secure.

Securing an LLM is really no different than securing any other tecnology component that accepts an input. You secure the end point, limit the entry paths and santise the inputs and outputs and test test test.

Yes there are some novel attack vectors - but so was a SQL injection attack once upon a time.

Is this really not just the MS Security team making the case for the next 10 years of their employment and bonuses?

SpaceX resets ‘Days Since Starship Exploded’ counter to zero

Re: And still....

Which particular contract is this and what was the due date and penalties?

AFAIK can see all SpaceX has to do is be better than Boewing which aint hard.

Tim cooking up the dough as his Apple pay rises 18% to $74.6M

In lots of white collar jobs pay and benefits are referred to as compensation. Covers things like Private Healthcare, stock options, pension contributions and the like....

One of my previous employers policies was never to refer to your gross or net salary but always Total Comp (-ensation) - so they could inflate it to some ridiculously large number you would never see or need until you told the recruiter for your next job "my total package is worth X".

Useful of HR to supply it for me ;)

Oooo you're nice.

If I were to use your charming vernacular I think most reasonable Non-AC's would suggest that Tim and Apple are gurgling less Trump turds than the rest of the whole sorry US IT industry.

Thats simple. Cost x Volume. Its always going to be simpler to justifiy an eye watering increase for 1 person versus a meager increase for thousands because guess which one hits the bottom line more?

Its especially easy when you have to look the one person in the eyes vs averting your gaze from the unwashed masses.

Europe hopes Trump trumps Biden's plan for US to play AI gatekeeper

Umm.... what proportion of these chip are manufactured in the US anyway? Can't the EU get them at source from Taiwan etc?

BOFH: Forecasting and the fine art of desktop upgrades

Re: BMS?

Building Management System? HVAC etc?

Tesla, Musk double down on $56B payday appeal

Re: Doesn't make sense

Wrong. Its a matter of nuance, when does a refresh become a new model - there is no hard and fast rule. Highland has multiple panel & styling updates which is unusual for a mid-life refresh and Tesla does a lot more rolling updates than most other manufacturers.

Waiting until a Model 3.1 or Gen 2 to appear to define a new model is petty pedantry - my point stands.

Re: Doesn't make sense

Even as musk denier that's misleading.

The last mainstream model was the Model 3 mid-life refresh - Highland. It's absolutely normal for all manufacturers to do this - albeit Telsa had a much longer time to get to the refresh than most other manufacturers 3-4 year cycle.

The model Y mid-life refresh "Juniper" is going into production now for release this year.

Tesla has 2 big challenges - getting a model 2 into production and replacing model 3 and Y late in this decade.

S and X models are essentially on life support and can/will be ignored.

Cybertruck is a silly ego play.

Semi - I'll pass on making a comment - don't understand the US truck market.

Re: Doesn't make sense

Yes but US-centric retail investors are among the dumbest investors in the world. First to buy into a Tulip bubble and most at risk from it.

Plus since Tesla doesnt pay dividends - when the stock valuation crashes their 401k's are all f*cked.

They are the last people who should be blindly supporting Musk - not as the US election results show - that will stop them doing so.

Stupid is as stupid does.

What happens when someone subpoenas Cloudflare to unmask a blogger? This...

Re: First Amendment

Nope. My original answer applies. The founding philosophy is irrelevant without it being enforced by a legislative framework from some kind of political entity with the power to enforce those rights.

Rights do not exist without the power to enforce respect of them - that's reality.

Anything else is wishful thinking.

Re: First Amendment

Your take is wrong. There are plenty of examples in the US where citizens and non-citizen are treated differently.

Re: First Amendment

Wrong answer.

There are no such things as inalienable rights anywhere and specifically not for freedom of speech. Not even in the US - SoMe myths to the contrary.

By definition rights can only be granted within a legislative framework of a country and by that definition they are always limited in some way, whether absolutists want that accept it or not.

NASA has just two Mars Sample Return mission lander options left

Send Elon up in Starship with a Spade. Return trip wholly optional.

Apple shrugs off BBC complaint with promise to 'further clarify' AI content

Re: The BBC - hardly a paragon of virtue

@VoT - Let us cut to the chase and say it in words you may or may not understand. You are a cock womble.

Re: Legal liability for the output of corporate AI would help here

It can do that too via Siri - so its Libel AND Slander! Win-win!

Re: What's AI for???

Um... its possible to make the AI work in these scenario's. The fact that Apple hasnt made it work is hugely embarrising. This is 101 stuff -the only complexity is scale - which is non-trivial but should be solvable with Apples resources. Unfortunately though the engineering under the skin is looking really well thought out - the Product management and testing is looking appalling.

Not so sure of that. If the BBC took them on in a UK court I think Apple would lose. The Beeb should issue a cease and desist quoting reputational damages.

SpaceX will try satellite deployment on next Starship test

Re: Suborbital

Perhaps they are learning how to avoid pulling a Starliner and having a shitty non-functional piece of crap go to orbit and put astronauts lives at risk?

The point that's completely flying over your head is that SpaceX has a very different mission to Nasa in general and their sub-contractors like Boeing in particular.

SpaceX and Space Karen are about the industrialisation of Space, in particular launch infrastructure because they think they can make a profit and in the longer term own a corporatist dystopian state on Mars. They have done it once with many many iterations of Falcon, now they are doing again but an order of magnitude bigger with Starship/Super Heavy.

Nasa and by extension their subcontractors are Pork Barrel maximisation for the Benefit of All Mankind. They have local political (state level senators and congress critters), scientific and imperialistic goals (federal/international level).

UK watchdog launches inquiry into IBM's HashiCorp acquisition

Error

There is something wrong with the the article. The phase 1 enquiry started on the 30th December- what ever happened in August wasn’t Phae 1 and the link takes you to the SEC merger notification.

Fedora Asahi Remix 41 for Apple Macs is out

Re: Locked out

And? You aint remotely the typical use case.....

Re: Locked out

But why? It's a pretty meaningless distinction when memory demands haven't changed materially in the last decade and plug in storage is so cheap and fast.

You're just now spouting abitrary reasons not to buy a mac you had no intention of buying in the first place.

In theory upgradability is great - in practice for 99.9% of consumers its irrelevant.

Fear of Foxconn reportedly driving possible Nissan, Honda and Mitsubishi merger

Stellantis FTW

Criticise Stellantis all you want but given most of their market is mediocre cars in the first place they've made a decent fist of seeing the direction the market is moving and producing mediocre EV's along side their legacy vehicles.

Rather than the Japanese who have just buried their heads in the sand.

Blue Origin's New Glenn will launch any day now – but it better hurry up

"Finally the economics of reuse is questionable, the refurb cost is not that much less than the scratch build cost, again this can work for companies where they use identical rockets by the dozen but for the scientific missions NASA & ESA specialize in it just does not work."

Really? How come Space Karen has materially changed the cost to orbit per Kg measure then? Where's it coming from if not substantially reduced build and fly costs driven by re-use? (Not a fan of him but SpaceX appear to be a launch machine roughly 50% cheaper than anyone else).

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-space-launches-low-earth-orbit

GitHub's boast that Copilot produces high-quality code challenged

And yet there are notable sucesses in each field who dont meet those bars.... methinks a your example is flawed.

Re: AI assistance

Thats precisely the point, it doesnt always.

Just like Spellcheckers or Grammar checkers, you use them at need knowing they will sometimes be wrong, but they generally offer a quick shortcut for when you cant be arsed.

Like every IT invention ever - ignore the hype and crack on with using it how you see fit. It has a learning curve that's all.

Lets face it - if most IT solutions are shitpits when you dig enough turtles down. The gold standard ones are rare and always have been.

Long story short, you were holding it wrong.

SpaceX claims another Starship success, but fumbles the catch

Re: Any metallurgists lurking?

Could be but not likely. Stainless surface changes colour beautifully at the drop of a hat. People make art with it.

Euro execs extend net zero timescales amid energy cost and supply crunch

And yet the current wars are minor in the grand scheme of things... certainly when put against the emissions of an entire G7 country.

Methinks you are making excuses.....

In spite of all the negativity we are making great strides in Carbon reduction and we've likely already passed peak oil production.