Posts by Adrian 4

It's ba-ack... UK watchdog publishes age verification proposals

Re: "facial age estimation"

The bandwidth necessary to keep the video up to date with 'current' will easily defeat this scheme.

Re: NSFW...

"The powers that be are sold on the idea that AI can magically solve all this."

And this is the danger of the waves of AI-like systems. Stupid politicians believing it can magically solve problems when all it can do is magically create new ones.

What we need is magical AI politicians, carefully safeguarded by giving them neither power nor platforms.

Sam Altman set to rejoin OpenAI as CEO – seemingly with Microsoft's blessing

Re: Mmmmm

Yes. As usual, it's not the technology that's bad but our use of it. Banning the technology is playing whack-a-mole - we'll just find another.

Hardware hacker: Walling off China from RISC-V ain't such a great idea, Mr President

Re: Disagree

It didn't work for thermal cameras.

can't speak for the military, but industry now has better, cheaper, more flexible products from China than from America.

Arm grabs a slice of Raspberry Pi to sweeten relationship with IoT devs

Re: I remember when

I don't have much regard for Python but I thought it was popular because of the wide library support. Kids don't come with BBC BASIC wired in from the womb - they've still got to start by copying from somewhere else, modifying, and then writing from scratch. Maybe some pythonista here could illustrate what you'd need to type in (or, of course, save from a web page) to do something moderately interesting.

I presume there's a clone of BBC BASIC available too .. it's only a clicky link away, isn't ? Kids are used to that from their phone. And then there's stuff like Scratch.

I agree there's a lot more going on to get started but I don't think the new user sees much of it. The only difference is that there are more choices, and that's really down to the school setup.

Re: I remember when

I think administration for school computers is largely outsourced to the local authority and they'll be just as familiar with Pis as Windows, if not more. It's quite a few years since Pi appeared and it'#s only got better, while all Windows has done is eat up the resources of increasingly powerful PCs.

What's the refresh period for school PCs, anyway ? I suspect more than the 2-3 years that businesses need to keep them usable. In fact, it could be surprisingly close to the refresh period of the Pis themselves.

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Re: EMACS

A mere Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping shows VSCode up for the bloated dog it is

Sorry Pat, but it's looking like Arm PCs are inevitable

@Yet Another Anonymous coward

So, they're essentially a windows Chromebook ?

Why are you still on x86 with all that legacy baggage ?

Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law

I might search and watch Youtube vidos intensively for a day on one subject, but then want to return to an 'ordinary' mix because that research is done. The algorithm knows nothing of this. It is unstoppably stupid.

Some would say they already have

Re: Good.

I haven't so far had the nag screen on Brave.

However I do have two other problems :

- Watching youtube in a Patreon window doesn't play. The cursor moves but the picture doesn't, and there's no sound.

- Following the link to watch on youtube works fine

- Watching youtube via a hackaday article gives a black screen

- Following the link from the hackaday article tells me the viseo is blocked

- Finding the video directly on youtube works fine.

I don't know whether this is a problem with Brave or youtube.

Windows 11: The number you have dialed has been disconnected

Re: Built to last

Windows

Windows 3

Windows 3.11

Windows 95

Windows 98

Windows NT

Windows Vista

Windows XP

Windows 7

Windows 8

Windows 10

Windows 11

Windows 12

(apologies if I got some wrong)

Yes, it must be about time for another meaningless renumbering.

How 'AI watermarking' system pushed by Microsoft and Adobe will and won't work

opt-out

Why not put a visible watermark on the image and include an encrypted 'patch' to remove it. Then it's there in any non-conforming application but can be optionally displayed without in a conforming application.

Lawsuit claims Google Maps led dad of two over collapsed bridge to his death

> most importantly the fact that the condition had existed for years, I'm inclined to think Google does deserve some portion of the blame in this case.

And had been notified for 2 years that it was unsafe

Data breach reveals distressing info: People who order pineapple on pizza

You don't need blackhats to do this, you can just improve the reporting policy.

" .. details on 190,000 customers, including an estimated 2,000 politicians and law makers."

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

So, your car needs a keel ?

Portable Large Language Models – not the iPhone 15 – are the future of the smartphone

I imagine it would be like that google thing that keeps popping up unasked and trying to push their services. Unwanted, always wrong, but won't go away.

Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter? Failing to RTFM, electrically

Re: Doubling the amps?

They're journalists.

They're never going to understand the relationship between voltage and current however many times you try.

Don't expect rational explanations until they start employing engineers.

Re: Check the power supply

Fuses blow when currents are too large. Sometimes this is caused by high voltage but it depends on the circuit parameters.

The usual rule is that semiconductors fail to protect expensive fuses.

Google Chrome Privacy Sandbox open to all: Now websites can tap into your habits directly for ads

Re: Sneaky

I use Brave most of the tinme but it does fail, probably when the website demands a popup. I prefer to just forget about such websites. Coercion is no way to make friends.

UK admits 'spy clause' can't be used for scanning encrypted chat – it's not 'feasible'

Re: Dead

No, they're frightened of having to stop using them themselves, instead having to use a proper verified email system that's open to their party whips and future investigations.

I'll see your data loss and raise you a security policy violation

Re: Outlook...

Isn't a web browser a thin client by a different name ?

Judge snuffs man's quest to have AI-created art protected by copyright

Re: Different Place, Different Rules

> Though that clause was meant to benefit those using PaintDeluxe, or OctaMed to create images or music.

Which is analogous. Both those and the "AI" (as urged by the prompt) are merely tools.

Bad software destroyed my doctor's memory

Re: Sometimes the inverse works

No, you won't.

Government procedure would be to take that working application and have it reimplemented by their favourite vendor. The result will be completely useless, if it works at all.

rinse and repeat.

If you're Russian to the Moon, expect traffic: Moscow's Putin a lander into orbit

https://xkcd.com/713/

The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice

Re: What is a parking garage?

Luton parkway is the nearest railway station to the airport. It does have a car park, though.

Jury orders Google to pay $340M patent-infringement damages over Chromecast

So it's like a remote control then, except that it goes via an intermediary. Maybe like a remote control with networked room repeaters - they were a thing, weren't they ?

And that's patentable ?

I do hate patents that just implement the same idea using different technologies.

Linux lover consumed a quarter of the network

Re: CDs ?

We people on the fringes didn't have the luxury of direct tcp connections :)

Collect 40 or 50 postings, trim,cut,paste them together (there might have been a tool for this), uudecode, patch, fix the errors, rebuild ..

CDs ?

Debian CDs ?

DIdn't anyone else glue together KILOBYTES of uuencoded Minix patches from Usenet ?

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

> So I walked back down the hill and confiscated the Openreach ladder still leaning against the pole.

Extra points if he's still up the pole

Indian developer fired 90 percent of tech support team, outsourced the job to AI

> Meanwhile, about the story - very suspect, probably just a self-promotional publicity play.

Shortly to be followed by the announcement of an automated support-desk product.

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

While they're at it the could do some other basic built-in verification such as a checksum on bank account numbers so that mistyped entries are detected instead of assigned to another accout,

Banks must have been one of the first organisation to use computers but they still give no indication of understanding the technology.

logging ?

So, the bank guarded against future abuse by setting a trigger on payments to some account. And confused that account with a new, unrelated one. And when that trigger went off .. 3 times in 3 months .. they still didn't investigate. And it was only the failure of the payments forcing the payee to investigate that turned it up ?

Bank should be banned from trading. Clearly incompetent.

Will Flatpak and Snap replace desktop Linux native apps?

Re: Lucky you.

There's also a difference bewtween resources required once, for packaging, and resources required every boot or application start.

The idea that you should repackage every day is also absurd, and if it is done it's done by machine as in a nightly or well-named unstable build

making packages

You suggest that making packages is a great deal of work for the pacvkage maintainer. And no doubt it is.

But some part of that work has to be done by the snap builder. And the cost of effectively translating a package build made for just snap instead of all the viable distributions is pad on every startup by every user. That isn't a good tradeoff.

Re: Performance isn't free...

I have an operating system to support apps.

I don't want to ship large parts of that with the app. At thatv rate I might as well just have a VM supervisor,. not an OS.

It may be that the problem is apps rely on other apps instead of OS services, and they aren't packaged definitively enough.

In that case, those apps need to migrate towards being reliable, properly supported and versioned services instead of half-assed web things.

We don't want to end up with an OS that's maintained like python, do we ?

Re: Performance isn't free...

> I think the main difference is that systemd will actually wait for a buggy app

A log entry will do that. It doesn't need an irritation every time the user shuts down. It's not Windows.

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

Re: UK specific model?er

> but my club has both a hand held gps and marine radio with batteries I can swap (while at sea).errproof

That sounds great ! and useful; if you're unexpectedly attacked by a baby seal too !

Amazon confirms it locked Microsoft engineer out of his Echo gear over false claim

Re: Deserved

> As a M$ engineer he should have been more savvy.

You'll have noticed that neither primary nor backup strategy included a dependency on microsoft.

AI needs a regulatory ecoystem like your car, not a Czar

Artificial

Artificial, in the same sense as artificial flavouring or artificial grass, is what it is. Something that has the appearance of an object, but isn't it. However the term raises higher expectations than that because it's been a target for so long. The current crop isn't what we hoped for, even if it can sneakily be described like that.

A better name for the current effort would probably be Fake Intelligence.

What I think we're really looking for is Machine Intelligence. Actual intelligence that's good for something, but done by machines.

Meta threatens to pull all news from California rather than pay El Reg a penny

Re: Do people really only use Facebook?

> It enables you to skim a few sources to see which is more trustable on a subject.

But then you have to trust the aggregator. Which is unlikely, for anything from Meta.

Re: Do people really only use Facebook?

IME they producer many, many results which are not what I was looking for. And that's not even the promoted stuff.

Fahrenheit to take over Celsius

Re: Charles Ponzi born 100 year too early.

> Cryptocurrencies are imaginary entities.

All currencies are imaginary entities and have been for many years.

BOFH takes a visit to retro computing land

> This can't end well, I hope he's avoiding stairwells and windows...

He's safe while his wallet is getting refilled

You can cross 'Quantum computers to smash crypto' off your list of existential fears for 30 years

Re: How many years away?

Is that a generation of people or a generation of crypto ?

ChatGPT creates mostly insecure code, but won't tell you unless you ask

Re: What a future

> The developer needs some form of unit tests, to ensure the code works, before checking it in for proper testing.

So,. LLMs are rubbish at writing code.

Can they write tests ?

Wrong time to weaken encryption, UK IT chartered institute tells government

Re: It's all somebody else's fault

> Will you fit cameras in all your rooms, continually broadcasting to your local police station?

Access to your communications is an early step, acceptable to people who don't think very hard.

It's frog-boiling.

CAN do attitude: How thieves steal cars using network bus

Re: Why

> The correct solution to unnecessary rear fog lights is an automatic speed limiter to 40 km/h (25 mph) when the rear fog lights are on.

Could do that on the front lamps too.

Re: Easily solvable....

CAN's MAC layer actually involves a wire-or operation to get collision-free operation. Overdriving it is part of the spec.