Posts by Dr Paul Taylor

Old but gold: Paper tape and punched cards still getting the job done – just about

digital vs physical

The problem with the Library of Alexandria and similar collections was that they collected what was in many cases the only copy of a document, so this was lost when there was a fire or an invasion. (The advantage of clay tablets was that they were improved by fire!)

With digital documents there are many versions, so they should be more durable. Unless (1) the original website owner set permissions that were unfriendly to web crawlers (I've made that mistake) or (2) the entire Web gets commandeered by some Billionnaire, who reduces it to a single copy.

European pols wave their hands about digital sovereignty with broad but vague plan

Far worse than this.

I don't understand why you post as AC and haven't already got far more up-votes.

Britain has been handing over its computing achievements ever since there were any computing machines, particularly in the time of Turing and then in the 1980s when Cambridge (I was there then) was the Wild West of personal computers.

(Even though my EU citizenship has been stolen from me, I cannot think of the UK as being separate from the EU.)

Now we are in the situation where (1) the NHS is handing over my personal health data to Thiel's Palantir --- a mate of the Orange one, (2) many universities and other organisation are handing over my email to M$, which frequently marks it as spam so doesn't delliver it and (3) we are all under relentless pressure to get "smart" phones owned by Google and Apple that spy on their users relentlessly.

So, to pick up your analogies with Covid and Ukraine, (1) instead of lockdown we have "eat out to help out" to ensure that the virus has maximum opportunity to spread as widely as possible and (2) we have asked Путин хуйло to take care of all of our tanks and drones.

AWS forms EU-based cloud unit as customers fret about Trump 2.0

Never mind the CLOUD ACT

Once his Orangeness gets Bezos by the goolies, all this "legal protection" will go to the wall.

Remembering John Young, co-founder of web archive Cryptome

website that looks straight out of the 1990s

You mean one with information that's easily accessed and indexed from the front page, without Javascript that's there to spy on you and show invasive ads?

With Asmi 24.04, Ubuntu's never looked so snappy (without the Snaps)

what's wrong with snaps?

(1) VAST bloat in disk usage. I'm typing this on a laptop with a mere 64GB of disk space. (What? when I was a graduate student, I had use of ONE MEGABYTE of disk on the university computer.) It is divided in three: two system partitions and one for my own stuff, because I like to do clean installs when a new LTS version comes along. Because of Snap, Xubuntu now no longer fits in to 20GB.

(2) Weird restrictions on file access. pdftk is a simple utility for combining PDFs and re-arranging their pages. It only works in my "home" directory, so I have to move stuff into it and then back out, typically leaving a lot of crud around.

Nationwide power outages knock Spain, Portugal offline

La Repubblica

I love the fact that this was reported via the Italian press. When I was studying Italian and had to write altogether four pieces of work, one of them was "Il Giorno del Blackout" (yes, that was the word that La Repubblica used). Every line of my essay had a citation to an Italian newspaper article (mainly La Repubblica, because it uses fairly straightforward language). But the teacher didn't like it. She wanted me to write about some seriously self-indulgent Italian film director. Strange though she could be, she was actually the best language teacher I've had (apart from my partner).

New SSL/TLS certs to each live no longer than 47 days by 2029

Re: God help the academic sector

My experience of various universities is that their Computer Science departments (used to) have brilliant sysadmins running secure top-notch Unix-like systems, whilst the central university IT services have M$ systems run by monkeys. But increasingly university manglement has sacked the CS IT people and imposed their incompetent M$ systems on everybody. Worst bit is that this is purportedly done in the name of "data security".

I have just found out about Putt's Law: "Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand."

EU gives staff 'burner phones, laptops' for US visits

Washington is a far worse adversary than Beijing or Moscow, because people in the rest of the world have voluntarily allowed their computers to be pwned by the American Tech Giants, especially M$ and Google.

Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own

The best way to learn something is to teach it

That seemed to be the understanding amongst the lecturers and grad students when I was a grad student in Cambridge.

I seem to recall my Ancient Greek teacher at school admitting that he was only one step ahead of the class.

So three cheers for Alfred the Great!

British govt wants to mainline AI, but its arteries are clogged with legacy tech

Legacy tech? if only!

Anyone who has ever dealt with lawyers will know that, not only are they ignorant of IT, but they stubbornly enforce their ignorance on other people. The ways in which the (civil) justice system insists on handling documents is frankly Dickensian. They care far more about ritual than evidence. You have to add a "statement of truth" to everything, as if that made it "true", and if you get the wording wrong it's "false". Then there are "certificates of service", which prove nothing at all, given that one of the options is "last known address". If the opposing counsel claims that a document was not "served", there is no way of proving that the letter or email arrived and the judge dismisses the associated evidence.

Palantir suggests 'common operating system' for UK govt data

Common operating system

Yeah, why not get all of the world's governments to adopt a "common operating system" for all the data about everyone in the world.

That would make it so much easier for the Orange King! (apologies to the Dutch)

Hang on, we already have it, M$

Official HP toner not official enough after dodgy update, say users

Re: I remember when HP was a good company

I remember that time too.

I have an HP LaserJet 1320 duplex that's still working fine after 21 years, now with a third party toner cartridge in it.

I dread the day when it fails. What manufacturers are recommended nowadays?

The NHS security culture problem is a crisis years in the making

The "initiative to gather patient data into some sort of arrangement to be shared with researchers" was to hand over all of our very personal data to Palantir, owned by Peter Thiel, a mate of The Orange One.

So far as I am aware, this deal was signed off by the Tory "Government" and allowed to go ahead by the new one.

Besides giving all our private stuff to Palantir, the (basically useful) Patient Access website is inaccessible without Google "Capchas" and is now trying to force people to use authentication through Apple or Google.

They might as well have webcams in my GP's surgery connected directly to Trump and Putin!

On the other hand, all of this "multi factor authentication" is totally inappropriate. They're supposed to be looking after my health, not my money! In an emergency, my friends might need fast access to my health records!

Uncle Sam mulls policing social media of all would-be citizens

card-carrying communists

What would Senator Joseph McCarthy have made of the bromance between Путін хуйло and The Orange One?

How Google tracks Android device users before they've even opened an app

Nothing to hide

If you've got nothing to hide, go around naked!

Privacy is a human right, not an admission of guilt.

GDPR

This was precisely what GDPR and its hefty penalties were for. Why haven't they been sued into oblivion?

Microsoft unveils finalized EU Data Boundary as European doubt over US grows

Re: (UK readers) Forget boycotting M&S

More fundamentally, is the UK inside or outside the "EU data boundary", after our catastrophic foolish self-indulgence on 23 June 2016?

Under Trump 2.0, Europe's dependence on US clouds back under the spotlight

Wake up call!

Europe (and the island that flatters itself as a "bridge") are slowly realising that, in the wake of The Orange One, they need to look to their own (and Ukraine's) defence.

Maybe even more slowly they will come to see the need for European "clouds", "social media" and the like.

Zuck, Musk and Bezos are already the Triumvirate of Trumpistan.

It's not as if superior FOSS bug-compatible substitutes for M$ didn't already exist.

verbatim transcripts of interviews

Please don't do this. Edit them for clarity, as well as to get rid of the "ums".

(Actually, Scientific American is particularly bad with this.)

The meaning of parts of this article is actually ambiguous.

Beta of Unix version 2 restored to life

tech museum

I went to the Stasi Museum in Leipzig. It has one or two "specialist" machines, such as one that opens and re-seals letters, but nothing sophisticated. Most of it was stuff that we had in the 1970s. At least ordinary people in the "West" had it, although they probably didn't in the DDR. But none of the stuff would be recognisable to anyone born after Mauerfall.

India's banking on the bank.in domain cleaning up its financial services sector

Re: Why has it taken so long to think of this?

Ignoring most of your offensive post, I just point out that I said "national regulators".

For example, one for Indian banks (bank.in), another for British ones (bank.uk), another for British solicitors and barristers (law.uk) and so on. The proliferation of non-national TLDs is irrelevant.

Keeping the second level domain short (eg not "solicitors-and-barristers.uk") would help to avoid impersonation.

Whu has it taken so long to think of this?

We have had .ac.uk and .edu and similar things for universities in many other countries since the beginning of the Internet.

Why hasn't this been extended to other sectors that have national regulators, banks for a start?

Instead companies (especially banks) create a proliferation of .com addresses so no-one has any idea which ones are genuine and which are scams.

If the hierarchical domain name system had been propertly designed from the start and people were educated in how the name hierarchy relates to legal management, a lot of the scams could have been eliminated.

Google confirms Gulf of Mexico renamed to appease Trump – but only in the US

Little thing called the Constitution

As we have already seen, the US Constitution says no more nor less than what the US Supreme Court says it does. IE that Orange One can do exactly as he pleases. God Help Us.

Europe, UK weigh up how to respond to Trump's proposed tariffs. One WTF or two?

Re: We are stronger together

Columbia (and Brasil, sort of) have also shown two fingers to the Orange One.

Re: We are stronger together

Mexico (where I happen to be on holiday at the moment) Is taking advantage of the Orange hostility by creating 35,000 new jobs. I am sure that Canada and Europe will also benefit from the voluntary refugees.

Free-software warriors celebrate landmark case that enforced GNU LGPL

Got one

I have had a Fritz!Box 7360 for ten years and I think it's great.

When the phone and broadband come in on the same wire, the same device should handle them both (router and cordless phone and answering machine combined), which Fritz!Box does. It sends me an email whenever there's an incoming call, so I can pick up messages when I'm out. It has more diagnostics than I understand.

It could be even better if its operating system were fully open-sourced, so that people could improve it.

But I hope this legal action doesn't harm the company or their product

NASA's lunar Roomba set to suck up Moon dirt for study

Re: If it works as designed...

Perplexity.AI says: "Hubert Cecil Booth may have coined the term "vacuum cleaner". Booth was a British engineer who invented one of the first powered vacuum cleaners in 1901, creating a large horse-drawn machine that used suction to clean carpets and floors."

Elon Musk's galactic ego sows chaos in European politics

Fall of the (Roman) Republic

After the Romans threw out their last king (Tarquinius Superbus=Arrogant) in 509 BCE, they invented a pretty clever constitution, with TWO annually elected consuls, whose main job was to keep an eye on each other.

Then they accidentally acquired an empire, by sending out ex-consuls as generals.

The result was to create men who were bigger than the (city) state.

Things started to fall apart with Sulla in the early first century BCE. Then in the mid century it got serious, with the First Triumvirate of Caesar, Pompey and Crassus, who were so rich that they could corner the market in slaves/gladiators to create their own armies.

"Rubicon" by Tom Holland is an excellent account of this.

We are now seeing the beginning of the same process in the US, with the Tech Giants starting to become bigger than the state. We can almost name the new American Triumvirs.

25 years on from Y2K, let's all be glad it happened way back then

Ariane flight V88

I wasn't at the bitface in Y2K but salute those who were.

The only issue that I saw myself was a few emails dates 19100, probably because Perl's "year" 2000 is 100 not 00.

But in a different context, this unexpected additional character could have caused disaster.

It was a similar trivial thing that was the root cause of the Ariane rocket explosion

Honored guest Bork visits Warsaw, Poland

Warsaw's Palace of Culture and Science

The Palace of Culture was a "gift" from Joseph Stalin, maybe in recompense for when the Red Army watched from over the river while the Nazis flattened the city.

It was said that the best thing about the Palace of Culture was that it was the one place in Warsaw where you couldn't see the Palace of Culture.

I went there in 1994, when the Palace of Culture was the only skyscraper. I went again in 2013, when it looked like Manhatten.

I asked my Polish colleague which he preferred. He replied, "which do you prefer, Cholera or Typhoid?"

UK ICO not happy with Google's plans to allow device fingerprinting

Re: Google analytics should be under the spotlight

I have Google Analytics permanently blocked in NoScript, apparently without ill effect.

Please can we have a more detailed explanation of how "fingerprinting" is done and how we can obstruct it.

Put your usernames and passwords in your will, advises Japan's government

public wills

After Probate has been granted, wills in England & Wales are available for public inspection. (Scotland has its own legal system, which may be different, but probably not.)

Beware that banks will block incoming as well as outgoing payments as soon as you tell them that someone has died, so if you're an Executor, don't tell them until you've finished doing absolutely everything else with probate.

Putting these pieces of advice together, it's a bad idea to include passwords in wills.

Sysadmins rage over Apple’s ‘nightmarish’ SSL/TLS cert lifespan cuts plot

Cookies too?

How about restricting the lifetime of cookies too?

Oh no, Apple and Google wouldn't like that, because they would be able to collect so much info about us plebs.

Chucking out all but selected cookies after a day would be a simple solution. DOes anyone know of a browser plug-in that does this?

A working Turing Machine hits Lego Ideas

Reminds you of when computers were actually still fun!

Microsoft mistake blows up admins' inboxes with fake malware alerts

M$=spam

Whereas in the past universities ran on Unix-like machines with RFC-compliant emails, in recent years M$ has invaded.

M$ strips the RFC-compliant Received: lines and adds hundreds of lines of its own garbage and randomly labels messages as spam.

One academic email forum to which I have belonged for ages got shifted to a M$ institution. Now I can't ignore my spam folder because half the messages from that list end up there.

That is, even when their authors' direct messages arrive in the standard mailbox.

M$ breaks everything.

BOFH: The true gravity of the Boss and the 3-coffee problem

Erdős Pál

"A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems."

DARPA suggests turning old C code automatically into Rust – using AI, of course

Re: Recursive code fixes

All this sounds like trying to solve the Halting Problem using AI, aka snake oil.

Breaking the economy of trust: How busts affect malware gangs

terminology

Please explain what part "affiliates" and "operatives" play.

Google DeepMind's latest models kinda sorta take silver at Math Olympiad

IMO

solving the six advanced mathematics problems faced by competitors in this year's IMO

IMO problems are not "advanced" --- they're strictly school level mathematics. They're just fiendishly difficult problems using school-level mathematics.

But if you pull all your hair out and finally discover the highly contorted idea behind the problem, the frustrating thing is, you just think, "Oh, so what was the point of that? --- I haven't improved my understanding of anything."

More frustrating is that there are people with academic jobs who continue through their entire academic careers just doing fiendishly difficult IMO problems and calling it "mathematics". Somebody told me that there's even a word in Russian for such people, but unfortunately I can't remember it.

At least if AI can knock of problems like that then the people who think such things are mathematics will finally be knocked off their pedestals and there might be academic jobs for conceptual mathematics

Ada and Zangemann: Fancy reading your kids a book about FOSS?

Re: £?

I couldn't find it using the ISBN13 given on https://nostarch.com/ada-zangemann

However, by searching for your name I did find it, for example on https://uk.bookshop.org with 9781718503205

£?

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be available from the online bookshops that I have tried on the right hand side of the pond.

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

Single global point of failure

As a 40-year Unix/.../Linux user, I am enjoying (the rare English sunshine and) the Schadenfreude of the disruption to M$ users.

It has taken a while for me today to extract what actually happened from all the stuff on the news reports.

So someone in this company made a blunder and triggered automatic download to millions of Very Important Computers across the Globe.

The thing that was downloaded was not itself malware, but it caused enormous disruption.

Of course the malware groups in certain significant countries and the autocrats of those countries are taking notes.

All they need to do is to infiltrate their Nasty into this company, which will obligingly install it in Very Important Computers across the Globe.

I am surprised that nobody here has commented on how frightening this is!

Stack Overflow simply bans folks who don't want their advice used to train AI

s/your/you're/g

AI Catholic 'priest' defrocked after recommending Gatorade baptism

Re: Bringing AI into religion?

I was waiting for the mention of Douglas Adams, who invented the Galaxy-Wide-Web. And then the electric monk

BASICally still alive: Classic language celebrates 60 years with new code and old quirks

Re: BASIC

No, "the determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language."

Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal, from DATAMATION, July 1983, pp. 263-265 (Readers' Forum).

BASIC

Breeds Awful Spaghetti Illegible Code.

DIE!!

Not a Genius move: Resurrecting war hero Alan Turing as your 'chief AI officer'

Re: Turing misinformation

Well said, Julian.

But I have a sneaking suspicion that Turing would have seen the funny side.

On the other hand, he would be less impressed by the ease with which AI systems can be tricked into talking absolute gibberish or, worse, random far-right rants.

A gay great-grand-student of Turing's.

Qt Ubuntu 24.04 betas show that there's room to innovate

Re: Snaps still don't work

Today I did a routine "apt update" on my little laptop, but it jammed because it ran out of disk space. When I searched for what was taking the most space, it was all HUGE snap directory trees, in several places in the filesystem.

I'm going to have to switch another distro if I can't re-install (X)Ubuntu WITHOUT snap. Any suggestions?

Solar eclipse darkened skies, dampened internet traffic

Space station video

would have been better if (a) the view had been zoomed out and (b) the American woman had shut up.

Musk burns bridges in Brazil after calling for senior judge to be impeached

Brazil vs US

Brazil dealt with Bolsonaro's coup plans. The famous American "justice" system, cf George Floyd, has failed to deal with The Orange One. Come November we'll see the consequences. God help us all. (And I'm a devout Atheist.)