Posts by James R Grinter

How do you solve a problem like Capita?

“Does the government have the management skills …?”

Does Capita have the management skills to run contracts, design the services, and build the technology?

Apparently not.

Changing AI math could reduce the hardware burden, researchers show

Re: Nothing to do with semantics

The abstract I just read says SEMQ stands for “Sensitivity-based Error Minimization Non-Uniform Quantization” (but yes, the “Sem” suggests something else without actually saying it).

It’s interesting you mention JPEG, because at first glance it sounds to me like something akin to the fractal image compression techniques as well.

Met Police, Apple join forces to choke London's stolen phone trade

Re: Are stolen iPhones being reactivated and reused?

My friend’s stolen iPhone, snatched from their hand - at the bus stop - whilst they were texting work to say their bus was delayed, ended up all the way back home in Shenzen (if FindMy is to be believed) after brief stop offs in a local-ish estate and park.

They did try numerous smishing attempts to get the activation lock removed before it took that journey, though. Wired have written about the industry behind that, and laid out some of the financial numbers behind it. I was surprised at even how much an activation locked phone might still be worth,

'Please do not vibe f--- up this software': Broken backups spark AI coding row in rsync project

Re: New bathwater test suite throws out working baby

When I modify code in an existing project, I ensure there is test coverage for the changes and the areas around it.

'It would be good for the world' to slow down AI sprints, Anthropic says

Re: The cynic in me says ...

Isn’t there meant to be a quiet period after they file for IPO? Or has that been scrapped now?

UK's top crime agency hamstrung by legacy IT, watchdog warns

Re: Be careful what you wish for.

> They're managing their risk until the pension lands.

Unfortunately they chose unwisely there, too.

Capita £370M bid 40% under UK.gov estimate for Oracle HR and finance system project, court case reveals

Re: UK Government Contracts

> team of people working full time to complete these highly complex RFQs

Indeed, that’s all these companies really are: bidding machines.

Poland directs officials to ditch Signal in favor of 'secure' state-developed alternative

Re: Couple Of Things....

I think it was actually messages getting written to logs, if the app was no longer installed and therefore no notification being generated.

(But, I had previously thought the app needed to be present to actually decode the message in the notification. See what happens if you get a message - and a notification - whilst the app is being updated, for example)

The big AI companies are going to see their margins disappear

Re: When they have to force people to use it, it's not useful

One might look at the investors of those companies, and at what else they’ve been investing in.

UK govt dept sent a document 'in error.' Now it's being used in a £370M contract lawsuit

But the contracts…

It’s a good thing they have all those contracts in place, to protect sensitive information. We can see here how effective that is.

Locked, stocked, and losing budget: AI vendor lock-in bites back

It never was “just an API migration”

The kludge that is “Prompt Engineering” (or, as some have later rebranded it, “Context Engineering”), means that there will always be extensive work to be done when you change model.

Assuming you have even assembled a test suite (aka “evals”), in order to then keep tweaking the prompt until it sort of works again (for some value of “works”).

It’s as if all of these things are built on a pile of sand.

Oil crisis? What oil crisis? IT spending de-coupled from wider war shock

Who’s right, who’s wrong?

“To say that a business or a technology provider is going to change their plans based on the price of electricity just isn't [true].”

Didn’t I just read last week a story about OpenAI claiming that they were pulling out of building a UK datacentre because of the cost of electricity here?

Ok, so they were probably just looking for any excuse to avoid some of the spending they cannot afford, but still.

Microsoft locks out VeraCrypt and WireGuard devs, blames verification process

Re: MS "published a blog"???

“But the plans were on display…”

“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”

“That’s the display department.”

“With a flashlight.”

Etc.

Palantir CEO claims AI will mean western economies won't need immigration

Re: How many "immigrants" work in the Valley and brought the innovation US is built on?

His co-founder, Peter Thiel, also.

Most devs don't trust AI-generated code, but fail to check it anyway

Re: AI scraping AI, model collapse?

Sounds like an audit point for code traceability.

Linus Torvalds: Stop making an issue out of AI slop in kernel docs – you're not changing anybody's mind

Re: At best

> It is the quality that matters, much more than how it is written.

But it's the quantity that quickly becomes the issue.

The volume of auto-generated anything can easily overwhelm the ability of conscientious humans to check and review it, whether that's documentation, code, or something else.

The human reviewer starts out reviewing it in good faith, discovers that it is garbage, and pushes the whole load back. The perpetrator then complains that they've done the work (never mind the quality, feel the width!) and the reviewers are causing unnecessary delay on the path to capitalism's step 3: Profit!

(Linux, one would hope, should be immune from that. But never underestimate the drive for bragging rights and clout!)

Dorset Council ditching customized SAP for £14M Oracle overhaul

Re: customisation for the fail

And then discover the system doesn’t have the functionality you require, despite what the salesperson (now working elsewhere) said, and what the contract did not include.

Brits to help foot power bill for datacenters under government AI plans

Re: Burst bubble clause

Not everyone considers the Laffer Curve to be an incontestable fact. Tax cuts do not, always, “pay for themselves”.

Amazon complains that Perplexity's agentic shopping bot is a terrible customer

“Unlock new value with agentic AI on AWS”

… is the AWS sales pitch. “AI agents are set to redefine how we work and live.”

Just don’t use it to try and find the best deal, eh?

Pay to play

I mean, how else would a vendor get you to buy their unpronounceable version of the 50+ listings of the same product from the same factory, with the same picture, cluttering up the results? (Obviously Amazon don’t care, they get their cut either way, but perhaps they are all the same seller too.)

Amazon’s everything store is a dumpster fire.

Trust the AI, says new coding manifesto by Kim and Yegge

Vibe grifting

The book is a Swiftian satire, right?

Security biz KnowBe4 hired fake North Korean techie, who got straight to work ... on evil

Re: Inside man series

Which is why I was waiting for a sales pitch at the end of the first coverage of this story that I read.

It just seemed a bit too convenient.

NIST turns to IT consultants to clear National Vulnerability Database backlog

Re: Opensource Security blog post: "Why are vulnerabilities out of control in 2024?"

Yes, but… there are also some signs of vulnerabilities being claimed for what are essentially just bugs (and I’m not referring to the impact of Linux CVEs - https://sigma-star.at/blog/2024/03/linux-kernel-cna/ - maybe the register could dig up some stats for the latter).

Anecdotally, in my own day job, we’ve seen two or three recently filed by a third party (not the software developers), without disclosing to the project, with no attempt at a PoC, and claiming “if you this function incorrect arguments then you get an exception”.

London's famous BT Tower will become a hotel after £275M sale

Re: revolting restaurant more like

When I visited (2015? It was some anniversary or other, and there was a ballot to get the opportunity to visit and dine there), it was being run by Searcy.

Had a nice lunch, as we were slowly rotated.

Datacenter would spoil beautiful view ... of former industrial waste dump

Even Beckton Ski Slope (nee Beckton Gas Works) doesn't really look like a ski slope now: these days it’s just the Beckton Alps, again.

Squid games: 35 security holes still unpatched in proxy after 2 years, now public

In this HTTPS-first world…

What value is anyone still getting out of Squid?

We found it very useful 25+ (time flies…) years ago, but the internet is different now. If I were forward proxying, well, I would be surprised if there were any gains these days from caching. If I were reverse proxying then there are better, more modern technologies.

Huawei's UK tech eviction reportedly caused Sky to fall on mobile customers

Re: Don't keep repeating a lie

Belkin acquired Linksys off Cisco back in 2013.

https://www.theregister.com/2013/01/25/belkin_buys_linksys/

Long-term support for Linux kernels is about to get a lot shorter

It’s about Interface stability

Some of us- those who actually write or run applications- benefit from API stability, and (call me old fashioned) ABI stability.

That’s why the “enterprise” distributions are back-porting instead of continuously updating their kernel versions. Because everyone who isn’t just running a kernel for the sake of it wants to actually be doing something else with their computers.

Of course the resources to do that sustaining engineering effort are not trivial, it’s no great surprise some are pulling that work to behind closed doors. It’s just a shame that the options are being reduced just as commercially sponsored ones are disappearing from public access too.

Apple owes Brit iOS app devs millions from excessively high commission, lawsuit claims

Re: As a small developer

Not to mention developer tools, libraries, operating system updates.

There’s a prevailing attitude (possibly because so much software *is* free at the point of access) that it must cost nothing to provide it.

Which is ironic when application developers are complaining about sharing any of their income with the app store providers.

I would expect to see any “third-party” app stores being obliged to pay royalties to the platform developers/owners, or else the app developers having to agree financial terms with same. Be careful what you wish for, etc.

CAN do attitude: How thieves steal cars using network bus

Lucky it belonged to someone working in the security field

On the other hand, unlucky that they didn’t already know of the vulnerability.

UNIX co-creator Ken Thompson is a… what user now?

Re: Not shocked

It acquired its OpenGroup Unix certification in 2007, a mere 6 years after public launch, Mac OS X having little technology in common with Mac OS 9 and earlier.

(though a bit longer than 6 years if you were to include the NeXTStep origins, but I’d argue that would be misleading because a lot of work was done by Apple specifically to be capable of passing the certification. Even then, they never attempted to deny its BSD underpinnings either).

Twitter algorithm to be open sourced 'next week,' says Musk

Is it the algorithm that we are actually interested in?

Or is it the implicit bias in the training data?

Unix is dead. Long live Unix!

Re: No "AIX vegans" I presume

Clever people those IBMers. It's easy to spot in any hex output, and if you ever see "0xdeadbeef" in your pointers then you know you've got something wrong.

(Someone has it that it's a play on being 'dead meat' if you end up with a pointer into unallocated memory. But I hadn't heard that before.)

India sets USB-C charging deadline for smartphones

Standard USB-C cables?

Mine’s the 1m passive Thunderbolt 4 cable that I had to buy when a vendor-included TB-3 2m-ish cable meant the monitor continuously cutting in and out.

(Charging via PD was fine throughout though, so there’s that.)

UK bans Chinese CCTV cameras on 'sensitive' government sites

Re: Doing it wrong

If we want to spit-ball possible risks, perhaps you aren’t trying to exfiltrate data, but infiltrate the physical location? What if you could flash a QR code that made the camera keep transmitting an old image, or just go off line for a bit, or something else carefully planned.

Don’t even need to have the camera on the Internet to ensure that regular software updates are applied, any of which could introduce new features, because your organisation security policy undoubtedly requires you to keep software up to date. Especially if they fix disclosed vulnerabilities.

Apple may have to cough up $1bn to Brits in latest iPhone Batterygate claim

Users will complain about anything

I remember when one of my older phones would shutdown with a high percentage of charge left, and of course it turned out the battery was on the way out and could not meet the power demands.

I’m glad they started throttling, as shutting down is far more disruptive than going slow. Though the PMs involved should have thought about the “PR” and had it advise the user to get their battery replaced.

Europe's GDPR coincides with dramatic drop in Android apps

Re: Fuck Google harder

Got to fund the development of the new releases, for existing phone owners, somehow.

Apple's grip on iOS browser engines disallowed under latest draft EU rules

Err, Safari works fine for the user. If the experience was really sub-par Apple wouldn’t be selling us lots of iPhones. Just because it doesn’t implement every latest experimental feature does not make it bad.

I’d posit the restriction on rendering and script interpreters has its origins in preventing developers skirting the App Store rules by disallowing apps that can execute dynamically delivered code (and JIT, necessary for JavaScript performance, requires memory pages to be able to be modified and then marked executable - another feature undesirable for security reasons).

If I wanted a choice of dodgy apps I’d buy a different brand of phone ;-)

JavaScript survey: Most use React but satisfaction low

Re: What do we want? Static typing!

It’s a problem a developer may not have, but you can bet the users will encounter it (unfortunately they won’t know that’s why the page is entirely blank or unresponsive).

NixOS and the changing face of Linux operating systems

Re: Back to the past

Common to a number of London offices of investment banks and, as I understand it, all the fine work of the same person.

Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies: New 'Business' subscription is here

Re: Curious target audience

A lot of dev teams, particularly those who use containerisation in production, will use Docker Desktop as a means to get the run-time Docker tools onto their developers’ machines, to stand up a local copy of their own software for development and debugging. Images for deployment would be built by CI systems (with Docker build, or kaniko, Buildah, etc)

But, as someone else said, it’s a hard task to sell software that is perceived as “free”. Docker Desktop will be a ground-up choice (development teams making their own lives easier) rather than a business-led choice (a technology that improves the bottom line), so if there’s little or no development tools budget - or it has already been allocated to IDEs - then Docker will be SOL.

(I personally wouldn’t begrudge paying for Docker Desktop for Mac if they’d integrate networking on macOS. Having to manually configure and run “tap” is a big annoyance)

SCO v. IBM settlement deal is done, but zombie case shuffles on elsewhere

it’s been a long time since I was actively following this case, but as far as I know the entity calling itself SCO was always unwilling (unable?) to actually divulge this. It was always the nebulous umbrella term “Intellectual Property”.

Sysadmins: Why not simply verify there's no backdoor in every program you install, and thus avoid any cyber-drama?

Re: Linux proves that doesn’t work

Back in the day, we systems programmers built almost every third-party tool ourselves from source. Even the C compiler. But we sure as hell weren’t reading and comprehending all the source, not even checking for common sources of mistakes (printf without format args, popen calls, etc), and you’ve only got to recall Ritchie’s seminal paper Reflections on Trusting Trust to see the elephant in the (GCC) room.

Software is necessarily more complex these days because capabilities are higher and we demand more, and that will almost always involve many more third party dependencies, which in turn may have more. That cat is not going back into the bag, because it’s just not feasible, or wise - trivial string padding routines aside - for a development team to rewrite all those themselves (crypto, maths, graphics, UI, kernel, etc).

The solution isn’t to ditch the “uncontrolled” open source dependencies, either, and go back to commercial (commercial C++ libraries were all the rage in the 90s and early 00s), because we’ve seen with SolarWinds, Kaseya and many others that if you’re a high value target you *will* get attacked and compromised at some point for leverage into other networks. You need to have in place methods to prevent, mitigate or detect it when the time comes.

You can forget your fancy ERP customisations because that's not how it works in the cloud, SAP's Oliver Betz tells users

Re: Tenant isolation ?

At the end of the day, it’s the “configuration vs. customisation” debate. It’s the same thing that gets you stuck on an old release, unable to upgrade because you’ve tweaked it up the wazoo and no one who knows how it works is still working for you (or, those that are, know better than to want to get involved).

ServiceNow, with their SaaS workflow, were already having that challenge with customers over 10 years ago, and as far as I know (I’m no longer working in that orbit) they’ve addressed it by being more restrictive in what you can change/how you can change their stuff.

BBC makes switch to AWS, serverless for new website architecture, observers grumble about the HTML

Re: Not all is well.

Serverless is essentially “I don’t have to patch the OS”.

Which is actually quite an attractive idea, tbh. One less thing to have to keep an eye on, if you’re confident your vendor has the capability. Gripes with AWS aside, I think we can agree that they do.

UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal

Re: Might want to check your facts...

My understanding, reading between the lines and knowing the APIs available, is that they’re both transmitting BLE messages and also registering to listen for them. You might know this as iBeacons.

You can listen for Beacons from your family in the background, the OS APIs make it easy and battery friendly.

You can’t transmit beacons in the background so easily, transmitting also requires more power.

Re: Co-traveller

Cos that approach would obviously be acceptable in an AppStore submission, not to mention burning a 0-day.

Re: Apple and Google have too much control

The world of malware shows why, with many billions more of mobile devices, there’s a need to treat things differently to how we historically did so on personal computers.

(On iPhone, I can prevent an app from having Bluetooth access even if it asks for it. Likewise Location. My Android phone stopped getting updates, but even it had some controls that let a user turn features off. If the App doesn’t then function, well that’s down to differing opinions of the app developer and you, the user. Not much you can do about that, if you cannot write your own or pay someone to do so.)

Auf wiedersehen, pet: UK Deutsche Bank contractors plan to leave rather than take 25% pay cut for IR35 – report

Re: Change Manglement

It isn’t the usual description of IT Infrastructure Change Management, but who knows how the “business” IT has chosen to use the term.

Don't use natwest.co.uk for online banking, Natwest bank tells baffled customer

ISTR NatWest’s forays into investment banking played a part in their downfall.

“ in 1997, NatWest Markets, the corporate and investment banking arm formed in 1992, revealed that a £50m loss had been discovered, revised to £90.5m after further investigations.”

Wikipedia also reminded me that they’d tried to do a merger with Legal & General, which went down like a lead balloon, and seems to have been the final straw.

All worked out well for RBS, in the end, eh? ;-).