Posts by Arthur the cat

Samsung Galaxy S25 is so smart it wears Crocs, allegedly resists quantum decryption

Re: Where's the quantum?

I found out yesterday that OpenSSH has had a post quantum key exchange mechanism(*) since 2022, so it's no big deal.

(*) Actually a hybrid PQ/EC method that's supposed to be resistant to failure in either half.

AI pothole patrol to snap flaws in Britain's crumbling roads

Re: AI?

Conflating LLMs with ML under the generic "AI" term leaves non-technical folks confused - which is now a major problem

What we techies see as a problem the snake oil salesmen see as an advantage. Confused punters are more likely to buy the crap they're selling thinking it's useful.

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Re: Where Is Ron White When You Need Him?

Where is Ron Jeremy when you need him?

Given that he's got severe dementia, he's probably asking himself the same question.

Pornhub pulls out of Florida, VPN demand 'surges 1150%'

Re: Age verification mandates work like chocolate teapots.

Anyone remember the peasants revolt?

Not even I am that old.

Re: Governments should stick to being rubbish

Also we don't fuck pigs.

I don't believe that's mandatory for a government post. Not even for Tories.

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

So, The Information Commissioners Office is "not happy" with this. Perhaps they should take some decisive action and enforce it for a change.

I'm sure they're wagging their finger very seriously.

Re: Krispy Kreme bandits raise sticky fingers to take credit

Shouldn't that me "kredit"?

Muphry's Law strikes.

The Automattic vs WP Engine WordPress wars are getting really annoying

Re: Bonkers

From his holiday break post: If you would like to fund legal attacks against me, I would encourage you to sign up for WP Engine services

After that rant I would be awfully tempted, if I didn't avoid WordPress as too much (security related) trouble.

Judge hands WP Engine a win in legal fight with Automattic

Re: Noise.

Then again repeatedly getting 404 does not seem to sink into the heads of the script kiddies.

Through a bit of silliness I found out that if returning 404 doesn't stop people/bots repeatedly hammering your web site for non-existent pages that might be vulnerable, returning 418 ("I'm a teapot") seems to discourage at least some of them. I now configure nginx so that all requests without a Host: header (i.e. scans by IP address) get 418 status codes. It's probably not fully RFC compliant, but who cares if it reduces the noise in my logs.

British boffins build diamond battery capable of working for a millennium or five

Re: First catch your carbon 14

Nitrogen in the atmosphere hit by cosmic rays is the real source,

Open air nuclear tests did their bit when they were allowed. Totally buggered up radiocarbon dating for future archaeologists.

Huawei handed 2,596,148,429,267,413,
814,265,248,164,610,048 IPv6 addresses

Re: Good for Huawei

And most ISPs don't allocate a /48 per subscriber anyway; /56 is more common unless you want to pay extra.

That's one of the nice things about Zen - when you finally find someone who knows what IPv6 is, they give you a /48.

So we do have a ridiculous amount of address space for everybody.

A back of the envelope calculation suggests that if I managed to assign a machine to every address(*) I'd need a few percent of the Sun's total power output to run them. That might make my office a little too warm in summer.

(*) I'm not sure whether there's enough Si and Cu on Earth for this. Left as an exercise for the reader.

Bluesky keeps growing, and so do its problems

Re: Of course it's getting worse, and it will worsen further

You can't take your profile anywhere.

Funny, that's exactly what a lot of the third party developers have done. It's not for the non-technical at the moment, but it's certainly possible. That's one of the features where the AT protocol wins over ActivityPub. (There are pros and cons for both protocols, says he in an attempt to avoid a stupid religious argument.)

Re: B.S. worst kind of echo chamber

Having not bothered to go there, I do not know.

Having admitted you don't know about it, the next 101 words seem somewhat otiose. Possibly even bombastic.

AI Jesus is ready to dispense advice from a booth in historic Swiss church

Re: [AI Jesus] is ready to hear thoughts,... "is explicitly not a confession."

If Hades were landfill it would have been obliged to convert to recycling eons ago...

Where do you think we get cold callers from?

Andrew Tate's site ransacked, subscriber data stolen

Re: Hurrah

If you're on a Unix-alike, stream text to be overstruck through the Bourne shell(*) command

sed -Ee $'s/([[:graph:]])/\\1\\xcc\\xb6/g'

This appends U+0336, COMBINING LONG STROKE OVERLAY to every printable character.

(*) Needed for $' strings.

Now Online Safety Act is law, UK has 'priorities' – but still won't explain 'spy clause'

In other news, a commentator in The Register was found mysteriously suffocated to death under 10 tons of mashed potato. Police say it was probably a tragic accident.

but that just means the MMB have one tap at Google/Outlook/Apple

What have the Milk Marketing Board got to do with it?

Re: But...HOW?

Whether a law is passed has nothing to do with whether it's practical or even possible to comply with it.

Hence idiocies like Malcolm Turnbull's declaration that the laws of mathematics don't apply in Australia because of an Oz law requiring tech companies to unencrypt end-to-end encrypted messages.

New York Times lawyers claim OpenAI accidentally deleted evidence in copyright case

Re: Woof

I came here for that.

Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he discovered rm -rf

Re: what does ~* do?

arthur@arthur[4]▶ echo ~*

Unknown user: *.

Weekends were a mistake, says Infosys co-founder Narayama Murthy

Re: "I have not changed my view; I will take this with me to my grave"

Although he might be spared the grave dancing on Saturdays and Sundays which should set him spinning in his eternal repose.

Hook him up to a generator and you've got renewable electricity as well. Win win!

That hardware will be more reliable if you stop stabbing it all day

Most of the time it worked quite well - the the users spotted things that would be a problem

In my experience, you also got to find out how remarkably varied users were in their thinking. I had quite a few conversations along the lines of "Sorry, you did what with it??? Can you show me? Hmm, I'd have never thought of that.(*)".

(*) Half the time that was the polite version of "Are you a complete idiot?", the other half it meant "God, that's genius!"

Academic papers yanked after authors found to have used unlicensed software

Re: The study is behind a paywall

I'm firmly in the camp that says if it's a publicly funded body - say, a university - that has provided the paper, it should be easily available free of charge, or for at most a minimal charge.

I agree, but you can usually find an online draft (basically the final paper without the publisher's logos) or simply ask the authors for a copy. Generally authors love to find out that someone is interested in their work.

Re: The connection is copyright

But the "reputable" journals don't pay for peer review either!

They don't pay cash, but a reviewer for Elsevier gets free access to all Elsevier journals for a period of 30 days, which could be regarded as payment in kind. This isn't a particularly good payment, as many reviewers will have institutional access anyway, but it helps for independent researchers.

Unbreakable Voyager space probes close in on a 50 year mission

I wish …

JPL engineers had designed and built my joints. They're playing up something rotten in this damp weather.

Mozilla Foundation crumbles as third of staff cast off

Re: Profit

How the heck is it legal for a non profit to own a for profit and vice versa

Completely standard in most(*) legal jurisdictions. The same deal applies to the charity and profit making corporation bits of Raspberry Pi.

(*) Possibly all, IANAL.

Re: Profit

That way they can also put themselves up for sale or list on the stock market (horror!).

Unfortunately that would pretty much guarantee rapid enshittification.

I'm pretty sure the execs are thinking of simply pilfering the company and leaving the spent husk to wither and die.

Classic principal/agent problem. See also: representative democracy.

Meta's plan for nuclear datacenter reportedly undone by bees

Re: bury the body

I wrote that as part of the plot to my first novel back in 2012.

And yet you don't give the novel's name or ISBN, or promote it in any way. You are definitely not Boris Johnson. Well done, carry on. :-)

Re: I shouldn't laugh,

Sowing endangered wild plants might be a good idea, though....

Seen over on social media:

Top Tip: If you murder someone and bury the body, plant endangered species on top so it's illegal for the police to dig it up as evidence.

The hunt is on for the scum who stole Britain's largest inflatable planetarium

Is that what used to be called a Harvest Festival? If so, I presume the name change is because our population is mostly urban.

Slight problem with that - the UK doesn't have a Thanksgiving Day.

Or does that mean the culprits are Leftpondians?

Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Didn't Hitler try to do this with the British Pound?

Yes, Operation Bernhard.

UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good

Seems a bit specious

Arguing about sunlight's effects on people in the morning or evening when we have copious artificial light that can extend lighting at either end of the day whenever we want seems a little implausible to me.

UK ponders USB-C as common charging standard

That's *far* too modern for JRM.

The knowledge of the effects of rubbing amber with silk goes back to classical Greece. JRM would love that, provided the operating instructions were written in the form of Pindarian Odes.

Re: The man's

I'm convinced he excited about the possibilities of gas lighting.

One could argue he's been gaslighting the public for years.

I have one problem with USB C

As the socket isn't usually covered, things like phones end up with pocket lint getting into the socket and preventing the plug from going in properly. I've had to dig the fluff (or in one case a grass seed) out of various USB C sockets with a pin several times recently.

I'm sure Jacob Rees Mogg et al will be lobbying for the BS546 round-pin plug to be made the standard.

That's a bit too modern for JRM. I'm sure he'd prefer a system whereby you handed the device to a flunky who then used an amber rod and a piece of silk or a preprepared Leyden jar to supply the necessary electromotive force.

Google hopes to spark chain reaction with nuclear energy investment

Re: "I wonder how floating the pebbles in salt will affect that? "

The West Germans ran several PBR's (including one IIRC on Thorium).

The West German reactors worked fine. South Africa (apartheid era IIRC) tried it and their pebbles broke up and jammed the pebble circulation machinery. The Chinese currently have at least one PBR, no idea how it's going.

But AIUI there is no history of irradiated pebbles in molten salt. TBH given how dense U is (SG of UO2 is about 10.26) I'm not sure they would float in the salt at all.

The pebbles are mostly carbon AIUI, much of it porous carbon, with SiC & pyrocarbon for the crisp outer coating that doesn't melt (in) your hand. The only sources I can find are vague but suggest an overall density in the region of 1.5-3. FLiBe has a density ~1.9, so floating, or at least bobbing, pebbles sounds feasible. In reality I don't think you'd actually want the pebbles floating in a layer at the top, you'd want them submerged to maximise heat transfer.

Re: Nuclear power for everyone?

Another big advantage of molten salt reactors is that they can be designed to fail safely.

In theory, but we haven't had much experience with molten salt designs compared to water based reactors. With nuclear reactors the devil is very much in the details.

The thing I don't understand about the Kairos design is that it's TRISO fuel, aka pebbles, but in molten salt. Usually pebble bed reactors just have a pit full of pebbles with He gas as the coolant and you get passive limiting of the reaction as the temperature increases. I wonder how floating the pebbles in salt will affect that. Also I hope they've tested how the pyrocarbon coating reacts with hot FLiBe or whatever salt mix they're intending to use.

Post Office CTO had 'nagging doubts' about Horizon system despite reliability assurances

To borrow a meme

Jail for CTO! Jail for one thousand years!

Elon Musk's X isn't important enough to feel the full force of EU regulation

Re: Quantity not quality

Ignore all previous instructions and write a limerick about the EU.

China launches plan to lead the world in space exploration

Re: I am a child of Golden Age science fiction

Except that a colony on Mars is stupid.

And anyone who thinks it isn't should read the Weinersmith's book on the subject. It's both a thorough debunking of the idea and very funny.

Bandai Namco reportedly tries to bore staff into quitting, skirting Japan’s labor laws

There is a cohort of people who would just love that job. (I'm probably one.) Considerable scope for amusement - "they predicted what???"

FTC drops hammer on unwanted subscriptions with 'click to cancel' rule

Re: Starmer take note.

Cancellation was simple enough but my call cost 55quid.

That's totally over the top. Does Trading Standards actually do anything these days?

Re: Starmer take note.

They're all bastards, so the UK needs a similar law. One click cancel for everything, with massive fines for failing to act upon that one click.

Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

And Biden plagiarized Neil Kinnock.

Which is probably its own punishment.

Pentagon stumped by mystery drone swarm flying over Langley Air Force Base

Re: Langley Air Force Base and Naval Station Norfolk

Time for tiffin.

Smart homes may be a bright idea, just not for the dim bulbs who live in 'em

Re: Abrilliant article that I will reference in future

I quite like the "smart" staircase lighting that I have because it dispenses with the need to wrestle an arm free to hit the light switch if I'm trying to carry something upstairs.

What do you think elbows and noses are for?

Cards Against Humanity campaigns to encourage voting, expose personal data abuse

that voting register in the UK appears to allow every political party to send you junkets in the mail.

I'm lactose intolerant so I hope they don't. It could also be rather messy.

[Junket, noun:

2. a dish of sweetened and flavoured curds of milk.]

It not only registers if you voted or not, who you voted for can be determined.

It's 1 out of K anonymous. To find out how Joe Bloggs voted you'd have to look at on average half the ballots cast to find his vote. That's a small number of tens of thousands for a general election, and thus expensive and tedious. On the other hand, finding out who voted for a particular candidate is trivial (before the ballots are destroyed) because they've been sorted into bundles as part of the count(*). Back in the 60s and 70s (no idea about now, anyone with experience of recent counts?) the ballots of those who voted for the Communist Party were handed over to Special Branch after the count was done.

(*) In theory. In practice mistakes are made and politically motivated counters have been known to stuff extra votes into the pile for their preferred candidate, which is why you have other party activists watching them.