Posts by jpennycook

Three becomes one as Vodafone buys out merger partner

They're not interested in profit. They're interested in debt, and specifically debt repayments. There's no tax on debt repayments, unlike with dividends.

Signals are grim for Jodrell Bank Observatory after UK science funding decision

Explainer: STFC prioritisation outcomes 2026 to 2030

https://www.ukri.org/publications/explainer-stfc-prioritisation-outcomes/explainer-stfc-prioritisation-outcomes-2026-to-2030/#section-annex:-particle-physics,-astronomy-and-nuclear-physics-(ppan)-project-outcomes-

STFC Total costs 2024-25: £1,040,000,000; 2029-30: £877,000,000

Change vs 2025 to 2026: -15%

Jodrell Bank (among other projects): "e-MERLIN not prioritised for further funding", anticipated funding: "NA"

Then there's the cutbacks at CERN

Re: It isn't just physics

Although in this case, the Conservatives kept increasing the budget for STFC, presumably because they saw some value. Labour have decided it needs to be cut back dramatically.

Re: This is personal

We could drop electricity prices dramatically if gas wasn't used. The National Grid pays whatever the most expensive supplier charges for that time period, and that's almost always the cost of burning gas. More use of renewables + grid scale batteries would mean electricity would become cheaper for everyone.

Re: criminal

The USSR, despite being nearly bankrupt, managed to scrape together enough money to make up the shortfall, so effectively subsidised Helen Sharman. Thatcher always objected to crewed spaceflight for some reason.

Some Mullvad VPN customers tunnel for exit after co-founder donates millions to populist party

Re: Sad but not surprising

I've started calling them flat earther Brexiteers - so many of the people still supporting Brexit seem to be against vaccines, against science, thinking carbon dioxide has what plants crave, etc

They also forget the fossil fuel industry has a load of tax breaks, and they will just export to wherever will pay most, making absolutely no difference to our supply or prices.

> In December 2021, the High Court heard a judicial review regarding the revised strategy. The challenge was brought to the court by three environmental campaigners who argued that the OGA’s interpretation of its legal duty to “maximise economic recovery” of oil and gas had failed to consider public money supporting the oil and gas industry. Ahead of the judicial review, Rowan Smith, a solicitor at Leigh Day, which is representing the campaigners, stated that:

> "The simple point is that the OGA says it can by law ignore the tax breaks received by oil and gas companies when deciding on whether a project will benefit UK taxpayers. Our clients are going to court to establish the opposite."

https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/oil-and-gas-industry-outside-interests/

Musk promises purge after Grok Build caught sending entire repos to the cloud

Re: that rogue programmer

There are many. Mozilla had one that Firefox used. You can contribute to the replacement by using NeoStumbler - this uses BeaconDB

https://beacondb.net/

https://neostumbler.malkki.xyz/user_guide/

Ex-NASA boss points out small flaw in Moon landing plan: No lander

Re: How to land the kitchen sink

The followup to Skylab was the justification for the Space Shuttle. Without that, the Space Shuttle made no sense (the USSR apparently couldn't understand what the Space Shuttle was actually for, especially given how often NASA said they would be launching it)

AI bills are baffling the C-suite after shift to usage-based pricing

replace the C suite with AI

The number of international flights would go down. Also, all those things that would be corruption if mere employees took advantage of them would also reduce.

Security boss thought MFA would be too much security

Re: Not quite the same but...

I remember being on the Central Line when BBC White City had a terrorist threat. Apparently the Tube trains were designed to deal with that sort of thing, so the driver kept going, but skipped the White City stop.

Commodore gets into the phone biz with Sailfish-powered retro 'Callback'

T9 is book

Midjourney pivots from AI image generation to body scanning medical spa where patients bathe in 'golden light'

uploads

This is presumably the prototype for the scanning the techbros will need to upload themselves.

Mozilla warns UK: Breaking VPNs will not magically fix Britain's age-check mess

Re: Wine and steak

What is it about commenters of a certain political leaning that means they use the phrase "wine and steak" on many platforms? It's like they're reading from a script.

See also "WEF" and "15 minute cities"

Datacenter builds could be shielded from judicial review in UK planning reforms

Re: Wine and steak

It's funny, but commenters in local papers also go on about wine and steak in relation to civil servants, council officers, and politicians. It's almost like they are reading from a script.

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

I wonder if you are confusing "GitHub" with `git`

Iran hints it could interfere with submarine cables in the Strait of Hormuz

Re: Yo Ay-Rah, Jerhume Brunnen-G

I never got on with series 4, and lost interest during series 3

'Workforce rebalancing' comes for Kyndryl, and delivery teams are in the firing line

It's AI

> "Kyndryl employed loads of new VPs and they are not affected, just cutting the real workers. I do not know how the company will last with a significantly reduced delivery [capability]."

Those new VPs probably got a chatbot to do something for them, and they're now convinced that AI can replace staff I expect.

To gain root access at this company, all an intruder had to do was ask nicely

Re: common sense needed

When I changed my email address, one "bank" (Trading 212) wanted me to record a video where I showed my passport and read out some things, then send it by email! I suggested this was insecure (as well as probably impossible unless both my and their email providers have huge attachment limits), and that they should use the existing functionality in their app which does something similar when you open an account.

They said no, I closed my account.

NHS England confirms: Palantir staff can access patient data

I bet all the copyright holders thought they had control of music, videos, books, etc until the techbros needed the data. How can we be sure that Palantir isn't using the NHS as a source of training data?

US Army goes green-ish, wants soldiers munching on plant proteins

Ministry of War

I assumed Pet Hegseth would require people in the US Army to capture animals by hand and then slaughter them in order to prove how masculine they were. Real manly Trump-supporting American men wouldn't eat food in a packet, surely.

60% of MD5 password hashes are crackable in under an hour

Re: Biometric verification

I had no idea that TSB was so valuable:-

> Santander agreed a £2.65 billion buyout of TSB from Spanish banking group Sabadell last year, but said the final price paid rose to £2.9 billion on completion.

replacement for usernames and passwords

As long as passwords aren't replaced with 6 digit codes sent by SMS - that's definitely a step backwards. And I expect UK Gov would far prefer that people replace usernames with their digital ID app, especially if you want to use a VPN or anything related to tractors.

Where to buy a non-Apple, non-Google smartphone

Re: Would it be naive to ask for….

But then the UK Gov would have to understand technology, rather than just ringing Google or Microsoft whenever they have a tech query

other app stores are available

https://search.f-droid.org/?q=authenticator&lang=en

https://accrescent.app/

etc.

Unfortunately some banking apps rely on Google Play attestation, so fail even with a locked bootloader. Obviously this drives GrapheneOS mad.

https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compatibility-with-grapheneos/

Also, good luck with getting banking apps working in SailfishOS Android App Support, although I think they have or will incorporate MicroG to slightly increase the chance of apps being happier.

https://sailfishos.app/?category=banking

Re: Support from general commerce?

Both One Login AND Gov Gateway

Re: Support from general commerce?

Have you tried Proton Authenticator? Other authenticator apps that give 6 digit codes changing every 30 seconds are also available.

Ask.com, former home of search butler Jeeves, closes just as conversational search comes back

old man

I remember Lycos after it had stopped crawling, because who needed more than 2000000 web pages in an index. I remember when Yahoo was someone's university project (I seem to remember the host was called akebono but I could be wrong). I remember when Excite was a "concept engine". Infoseek was good, as you could set it to email you when new pages met your requirements. I still remember when Amazon's recommendations were relevant and trustworthy, and when Google wasn't evil. I also remember when domain names were back-to-front, and BEGAN with "uk"

Databricks can't seem to shake authors' copyright claim that could result in 'extraordinary' damages

Without copyright, I would think that most authors and many musicians would give up and not produce anything, and those that don't won't have publishers

Two men charged over series of arson attacks on 5G masts

Re: What I really hate about these folks...

Dunning Kruger

Watch out UK taxpayers: 28,000 HMRC staffers just got an AI copilot

In other words, fine for drafting emails, less so for anything that actually matters

Have they considered using WordPerfect and mail merge?

Ex-AWS legend explains what enterprises need to make AI actually work

"Customers want it hyper-personalized"

I used to like Amazon when it gave good, targetted algorithmic recommendations on which CDs and books to buy, based on a purchase history pre-dating Amazon opening a UK website. Now even the recommendations are full of rubbish and they no longer give details on why they recommend a product, and I ignore them. Similarly for the Bing Images recommendations where they know what I like and what I don't (used to be good, now just so much arty drivel, AI slop, and Instagram guff), and adverts on YouTube (I've told them what I don't like and what categories I might like, but they keep showing those rubbish adverts to me, wasting their customers' money).

It seems that the rise in "AI" has led to a degradation of personalisation.

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