Posts by jpennycook

Artemis II astronaut: 'I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working'

Re: Linux,

Is Wondows 11 as good as Windows 10 yet, or is it still catching up?

On a tangent - the Institute of Physics lets members sign up for a mailbox with a physics.org email address as part of the membership fee. Unfortunately, it's M365 through Daisy Communications. They sent everyone a letter saying they were going to withdraw access using Outlook for security reasons, leaving only webmail. It's an amazing coincidence that turning off Outlook app access means they drop to a lower cost tier at Daisy, but IOP insist it's all for security (apparently using Outlook to access M365 must be insecure).

You can now run WSL on Windows 95, in case you're crazy, too

"Not only does that mean security issues may result"

It's DOS, there is no security!

Forget call centers, local energy prices mean Britain's latest offshoring wave is AI projects

Re: Not just about marginal gas pricing

Greenpeace have a plan to deal with high energy prices in the UK: https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/resources/power-shift-report/

We also need more energy storage and improvements to the grid between England (where more energy is consumed) and Scotland (which has loads of spare renewable energy from wind and hydro)

Palantir's NHS future in doubt as ministers eye contract break

Re: Yeah right

but once they ingest the data to train their AI, isn't it free like everything else that goes into AI training?

Google Chrome lacks protection against one of the most basic and common ways to track users online

Re: Useful illustration

Try using the Mullvad browser, that should make you less fingerprintable: https://mullvad.net/en/browser

TZP shows lots of things your browser is leaking: https://arkenfox.github.io/TZP/tzp.html

and the original panopticlick, now called Cover Your Tracks: https://www.eff.org/pages/cover-your-tracks

https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/Appendix-B-Test-Sites-%5BFingerprinting%5D is useful to see how well your protection is working, but does have the caveat:-

> Any probabilities or entropy from test sites are COMPLETE NONSENSE

https://arkenfox.github.io/thorin/items/01aboutfingerprinting.html?view=presenter#50

Cops hand Motorola £25M no-bid deal to keep 2000-era radios alive

Re: The problem is right there...

That would be any sufficiently senior manager or PM

Forking frenzy ensues after Euro-Office launch sparks OnlyOffice backlash

R7 Office

Is that named after the space rocket (and failed ICBM) of the same name, these days replaced by Soyuz?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-7_Semyorka

France buys nuclear supercomputing spinoff Bull from Atos for €404M

You mean like when they bailed out Sinclair and ICL?

I was hoping this might have been about Bull Electrical. The last time I saw their newsletter decades ago, they seemed to have pivoted to weird stuff and legal highs.

'People's Panel' to check if UK wants controversial Digital ID will cost £630K

> "No individual can buy their way in or simply turn up at the event," he added.

1. I have taken part in Council consultations. They usually go on to say that their scheme has been through consultation but deliver what they originally planned.

2. Ordinary people might not be motivated or even available. People who are independently wealthy or backed by a pressure group could get coaching in how to effectively present their case, whilst not needing to take time off work

3. I bet the consultation involves having to travel to London.

4. Many people selected to attend might not be aware of the potential problems, eg someone who owns an ordinary Android or iPhone might not realise that the app is likely to block installation/being run on an aftermarket Android variant (eg GrapheneOS, LineageOS), and not at all for people who have an alternative operating system (eg Sailfish) or for people with dumb phones or no phone at all

5. And will the Government be honest in the consultation and reveal exactly what the app will store? As far as I remember, Germany restricts what can be stored on ID cards because of their experience. Name, age, photo/biometric info, and a unique ID should be enough.

UK wants to know if banning under-16s from social media does anything useful

Re: Banning stuff

and infinite scrolling

The risk of such a trial is that the sample involved will be self-selecting

> The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) will recruit families from across the UK and split them into four groups.

Head-mounted VR hardware will never happen, says Neal Stephenson - who coined the term ‘metaverse’

porn, gambling, and advertising drove the development of the WWW, so if they can't make money from it, then no-one can

Re: "staring at little rectangles in their hands"

Didn't Sir Clive Sinclair say you could run a nuclear power station on a ZX81 (or maybe a Spectrum)? If so, I hope they weren't using RAM packs.

Elon Musk wants to build 50 times more chips than the world currently produces, using 'new physics'

RE: "I want to live long enough to see the mass driver on the Moon," the 54-year-old said.

Given his stated intention to die on Mars, just not on landing, where the regolith is poisonous and the solar radiation is deadly, this will be interesting

AI still doesn't work very well, businesses are faking it, and a reckoning is coming

Re: Think of the bloody children!

the Trading 212 AI tells me that, after my first payment into my Stocks & Shares ISA, I'm 46% of the way to the target it set me. I've put about £500 in, its target is £119,666, I think it's confused.

Age verification isn't sage verification when it's inside operating systems

Re: Why be surprised?

Don't drive on that road then - or at least give non-motorised road users priority

Switzerland built a secure alternative to BGP. The rest of the world hasn't noticed yet

Re: Is the UK involved at all with SCION?

I like to imagine banks using handcrafted ITU networks and mainframes so obviously wouldn't need such things as the Internet. It would help to explain why some banking apps are so hard to use and inflexible.

Inside the datacenter where the day starts with topping up cerebrospinal fluid

prequel to Dune?

I can't help thinking that this eventually leads to the Butlerian Jihad (if the non-Frank Herbert Dune books are to be believed)

Microsoft veteran Rajesh Jha prepares to retire, triggers yet another reorg

Surely they can replace him with AI!

Nanny state discovers Linux, demands it check kids' IDs before booting

Playboy - the science fiction magazine

Playboy published a lot of science fiction: https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?24780

For example, Arthur C Clarke: https://arthur-clarke-fansite.blogspot.com/2007/05/wind-from-sun-18-stories.html and https://findingaids.library.tamu.edu/index.php/wyps-nq5e-3twh

> Then Ubuntu, Mint, or whoever update the SQL tables in the app store

Do you imagine apt-get getting updated to support ages, especially on a computer used by the whole family? And what if it's being run by a service account, or as part of the system, not by an actual user?

Ig Nobel Prize flees US for Switzerland after 35 years over safety concerns

Please stop, I'm bored!

> One year, a little girl was tasked with stomping on stage to shout "Please stop, I'm bored!" whenever a winner went on for more than a minute.

I thought Miss Sweetypoo was there every year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAnVNXaa5oA

https://improbable.com/tag/miss-sweetie-poo/

NASA watchdog report pokes holes in Artemis lunar lander plans

Re: So......

He promised to die on Mars, just not on landing. I imagine a Mars colony run by Musk would look like the one in the original Total Recall, with the actual workers having the risk of having their air terminated, whilst the corporate fatcats do drugs and prostitutes whilst getting very rich.

Re: Can we please replace the Hubble Space Telescope?

There's nothing saying you can't have both a Hubble replacement and a national pride spacecraft capable of beating China to do something.

However, parking a 14 storey building on the Moon with only a lift to get down to the ground seems daft. I wonder if much ketamine was consumed that day.

UK digital ID brief quietly moves to new minister after resignation

No sign of Finka on two popular streaming apps nor on Bandcamp. I even tried NTS.live and MusicBrainz.org . They must be obscure. Even the band I saw in a village pub who sold me my first band T-shirt is in MusicBrainz.

Fly me to the Moon: NASA reshuffles the Artemis card deck

Re: What is the hard science objective for this mission?

At the end of the day, Congress is responsible for NASA's budget. SLS allows Government money to go to NASA contractors not associated with Trump, and spreads the money across the country. The lander (whichever one is selected), will, as you say, funnel money to Trump supporters and be concentrated in certain areas.

America has signalled that it's not interested in scientific research unless it somehow says that vaccines are dangerous, or that fat is good for you, or that burning oil doesn't cause global warming, so there's an opportunity for the rest of the world to reduce its dependence on America and to fund scientific research tthemselves.

Hubble in a death spiral that could end as early as 2028 without a reboost

The USSR couldn't believe what was being claimed for the US space shuttle - both the design and the planned launch cadence were daft. Whether they actually believed it was supposed to be an orbital bomber with amazing cross-range ability or just said that to boost funding for their own shuttle, I don't know, but at least the Soviet shuttle launcher didn't have solid rocket boosters (it used Ukrainian rockets instead), and could be used to launch non-Shuttle payloads (as long as the guidance on those payloads was facing in the right direction). I think it also had ejector seats for the crew.

Lots of Hubbles were launched, but only one was pointed outwards. Currently there are 7 Hubble-class space telescopes in orbit if Wikipedia is to be believed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN

Re: 2028 sounds like a death sentence for Hubble

Given how SpaceX haven't managed to demonstrate getting 19 Starship tankers into orbit, and decided not to go to Mars despire their dear leader saying he would like to die there and promising a landing years ago, I'm not sure SpaceX could get its act together in time.

Hard drives already sold out for this year – AI to blame

Re: Tape

I want my Wafadrive back

Attackers have 16-digit card numbers, expiry dates, but not names. Now org gets £500k fine

Re: PC world and hard discs

Back in the days before AI, scan.co.uk, Overclockers.co.uk, and Argos would happily have sold you storage.

Cabinet Office probes digital ID minister over think tank's journalist investigation

Re: All of them will be out of power before much of this happens.

The OSA was passed under a Conservative Government, and the minister responsible for it is now an MP for Reform UK.

Infosys chair says AI will clean up legacy systems – then make more of them

AI to replace senior management

Why don't senior management propose that, to save money, they replace themselves with AI? After all, LLMs have been trained with the finest MBA material available on the Internet. We'd only need senior management to shake hands with customers/suppliers, take them to football games, and to attend awards ceremonies, and those roles could be outsourced.

You can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone, says Dutch defense chief

glamping

> can't go buy an F-35 on eBay

and that's why you can't stay in one on the Isle of Wight (unlike helicopters and a submarine)

UK council faces data breach claim after mishandling trans complaints

Re: Isn't there some kind of solution to automate this?

Lotus Notes!

Poland bans camera-packing cars made in China from military bases

They seem a bit late, given that China banned Teslas from going near its military bases ages ago

The big FOSS vendors don't eat their own dogfood – they pay for proprietary groupware

Re: Too much ideology makes Liam unproductive

> > Of course, e-mail is doable on unix.

Microsoft used Xenix mail

Taiwan tells Uncle Sam its chip ecosystem ain't going anywhere

Re: Bargaining chip (no pun)

China failed spectacularly to invade mainland Vietnam.

This feels like a protection racket, except that if a significant amount of chip manufacturing moved from Taiwan to USA, China could feel happier about invading (less impact on their own supply chains when Taiwan nukes its own chip factories) and America could feel happier about not providing any defence.

Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter

Re: Gmail First SaaS?

and Yahoo Mail not much later

GitHub ponders kill switch for pull requests to stop AI slop

Microsoft requires everyone to use AI and then turns round and says it needs to restrict AI

NASA delays Artemis II to March after hydrogen leaks bedevil countdown test

also Delta IV Heavy (very exciting when the whole rocket appears to catch fire when launching), and probably every hydrogen rocket ever.

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

Re: Teenage boys will be salivating...

Pedestrians, cyclists, and horse riders will be obliged to wear special tags so they can be recognised, or maybe they will be banned from public highways to protect the poor AI cars.

NS&I's IT car crash considers cutting legacy links to stop the bleeding

Re: The usual suspects

Chip

'Hey! I'm chatting here!' Fugazi answers doom NYC's AI bot

> Fugazi answers doom NYC’s AI bot

Maybe they should ask it for GvsB answers instead.

Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

Re: It is unfortunate, but true

I assumed Venezuela, Greenland, and Iran were attempts to distract the media from Epstein.

Re: It is unfortunate, but true

Georgia, Ukraine, various countries in Africa

Tesla revenue falls for first time as Musk bets big on robots and autonomy

One of John Major's main achievements as Prime Minister was to introduce the Cones Hotline so you could report ghost roadworks where nothing was being done. They closed it because not enough people were contacting them.