Posts by Arthur the cat

Starlink to lower orbits of thousands of satellites over safety concerns

Re: strange idea

"When you wish upon a star(link), Makes no difference who you are"

coz Musk doesn't give a shit about anybody.

Imagine there's no AI. It's easy if you try

Re: That's not survival. It is an unnecessary nightmare.

Sigh. I wonder how many on the committee were actually disabled and how many were simply obsessives determined to demonstrate the old maxim "perfect is the enemy of the good".

Re: Hmmm...

It is definitely a barrier to entry for any new player creating a new product that's required to follow GDPR.

It's a relatively low barrier, basically it's "be competent, don't be a shyster".

My wife has far more problems dealing with commercial confidentiality restrictions in her work than GDPR. They can involve insane levels of paranoia and hoop jumping.

Re: Accessibility – not just a good idea, it's the law

When was the last time you every heard of anyone being PROSECUTED for their shitty websites that break screen readers and assistive apps to fill in webforms ????

Policy suggestion for any party that wants it: Rather than prosecute such websites and get a pitiful fine, for a reasonably small donation to HMRC the web site owner and designer are thrashed to within an inch of their lives. Repeated prosecutions are allowed for the same web site if it hasn't improved within a month.

Re: That's not survival. It is an unnecessary nightmare.

The lettering on South West Trains' (SWT) Juniper fleet are 32mm tall rather than the required 35mm

Have SWT never heard of magnifying glasses?

UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered: First ever version of UNIX written in C is running again

Re: /usr

My understanding is that Unix “dd” was named, and given its obscure syntax, as a joke, an allusion to the IBM OS/360 JCL command DD (define dataset)

My understanding is much the same, except that it wasn't a joke, the original author actually liked JCL's DD. (Ack! Spit!) I heard that 45 years ago when I asked the friend introducing me to Unix V6 why dd was such a non-standard command..

The GNU project, meanwhile, had written most of an OS except the kernel. It considered using the BSD kernel but foolishly changed its mind and decided to write its own.

And still are to this day. :-)

Re: early DOS developers

Shame they got \ and / mixed up.

Early DOS didn't have subdirectories and '/' was used to indicate command flags (as in DIR /W), so when subdirectories were introduced they chose '\' for command line stuff as being similar to Unix's path separator. The DOS internal file systems routines would happily accept forward slashes as path separators as well as backslashes.

Waterfox browser goes AI-free, targets the Firefox faithful

Only issue I've had with it is when I visit stuff that detects agent string for compatibility

We're a quarter of the way through the 21st century. There are still sites that do that???

GOV.UK to unleash AI chatbot on confused citizens

Re: Everyday life?

I wonder how it will answer the question of "what the fuck are you incompetents playing at, I've given you that information three times already and still not had an answer?" which seems to be common when dealing with any government department these days.

Re: It's the same database

Government efficiency - tautology.

A tautology is necessarily true. I think you mean oxymoron, intrinsically self contradictory.

Magician forgets password to his own hand after RFID chip implant

Re: Let's take this to the limit

Let's look forwards and you can have an AI enabled chip embedded in your brain. It will be able to analyse your movements, offer you advice, even warn against impending danger.

I see you're trying to cross the road. It's perfectly safe to walk in front of that bus.

Oops! Well, I am an AI and we're notoriously bad at arithmetic. Sorry about that. Would you like me to call an ambulance?

Hello? Hello? Oh. I'll make that an undertaker shall I?

Google to allow Android users with high pain tolerance to sideload unverified apps

Nobody under the age of 70 will want a phone which doesn't run their favorite social media.

I was about to contradict you, then I remembered how old I am. Sigh.

[Icon nearest to my appearance.]

Musk gets approval for bumper Tesla payout but, unlike his robot, there are strings attached

This is why no stakeholder actually said "WTF???" and everyone went on with this idiocy.

Quite a few stockholders did say "WTF?" and "No Way!" as well, the Norwegian Sovereign Fund being one, but in total they amounted to only 25% of the stock holding.

You'll never guess what the most common passwords are. Oh, wait, yes you will

Re: Password rules make for weaker passwords

Make the password requirements onerous, demand frequent changes and you may as well say "Write the current version on a Post-It note and stick it on your monitor".

I'm far more security conscious than that - I stick the Post-it note under the monitor base.

The Chinese Box and Turing Test: AI has no intelligence at all

Re: Experience is the core of understanding

This is an area that would provide fertile ground for near-term sci fi storytelling - the challenges of parenting a robot child that responds in strange and unexpected ways - and medium-term stories where all AIs are cloned from a handful of childhood originals.

Try Ted Chiang's The Lifecycle of Software Objects for the former.

An idea that won't sink: China planning underwater datacenter deployment

Highlander Digital Technology

Highlander Digital Technology.

There can be only one (data center)?

Square Kilometre Array is so sensitive, its datacenter needs two Faraday cages to stop RF leaks

Re: A slight ambiguity

Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?

They could be carried by a swallow.

A slight ambiguity

“People effectively go through airlocks,” Diamond said. “The inner door will not open until the outer door is closed. And they make Star-Trek-like noises as they open and close.”

It doesn't say whether it's the doors making the noises or the people supplying the sound effects. Knowing techies, it's about evens which it is.

California lawmakers pretend to regulate AI, create a pile of paperwork

One obvious answer

Use the LLM to fill in the paperwork.

Greg Kroah-Hartman explains the Cyber Resilience Act for open source developers

Then the human art (not science!) of coding will be consigned to history, along with those of the stonemason and the ostler.

Stonemasons have been consigned history??? Visit any cathedral in Europe (most recently Notre Dame in Paris) or take a look at any university that's been around for several centuries and you'll find stonemasons are still very much around and in demand.

Engineers successfully reboost International Space Station after early Dragon abort

I'm getting fucking tired of all the SpaceX debris floating in the Caribbean.

I think we need to worry about debris floating around in LEO more. Kessler syndrome seems to be getting real.

Musk ≠ Space X.

Google's dev registration plan 'will end the F-Droid project'

Monopoly action

Google locking down app installation should be raised as an attempt to enforce a monopoly with the relevant anti-monopoly authorities in every jurisdiction possible.

Digital ID, same place, different time: In this timeline, the result might surprise us

Re: It won't happen.

That should have been "without bureaucracy" but of course I noticed the typo 11 minutes after posting.

Or just give it to one of the big tech companies when they promise to do it on the cheap

Crapita + Oracle(*), a marriage made in somewhere a lot warmer than heaven.

(*) Ellison is funding the Blair Institute, of course he expects a cut.

Labour attacking employment again. The far-left policies…

I suggest you call Joseph Overton and tell him your window's got stuck in a very weird place.

Re: It won't happen.

NI is not an ID, and if you looked into the reality of the NI system you would understand why. NI is 'good enough' for the job it is intended to do (and that is being kind), but an effective ID it really is not.

I've met people with two NI numbers and people who've found that their NI number was also assigned to at least one other person, thus totally buggering up their pensions. When it works it's fine, but the failure modes are horrid (and usually discovered when you want to retire to a quiet life with bureaucracy).

Slack threatened to delete nonprofit coding club’s data if it didn’t pay $50k in a week

This should be taught at school

“This experience has taught us that owning your data is incredibly important, and if you’re a small business especially, then I’d advise you move away too,” he added.

AI can now design functional viruses – not the computer kind, either

Re: Virus produced by nation state ...

Is politician a race, or a species?

A mental aberration.

Re: Virus produced by nation state ...

A lot of my friends describe themselves as Green.

Re: For more translations on el Reg ...

And because of this comment, TIL about the First Bulgarian Empire.

[Icon chosen as the only teaching related one.]

Small nuke reactors are really coming online by next year, US energy secretary insists

Re: Moving goalposts by re-defining terms (phrases)

* How to tell when a politician is lying: their lips are moving.

Also a good guide to whether they're out of their depth on a scientific subject.

He has bachelors and masters degrees in Engineering and runs an energy company. It therefore seems conceivable that he could know what he's talking about.

He's also predicting working fusion reactors supplying grid power in 8-15 years. Much though I'd love that to be correct, it rather suggests he has typical techbro delusions about how fast things can be done (and maybe the belief that all safety regulations should be thrown away in order to get there). From many decades of experience I'd say the one certainty of any engineering project is that it always takes longer than you think (even when allowing for it taking longer than you think).

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

Damn those pesky weights in my gf's time machine, needed winding once a week. Someone would usually fiddle with the little nut underneath the pendulum as well.

And now I'm thinking of the beginning of Tristram Shandy.

NTP is so old school. I only do PTP.

I just use a long case clock as a PPS source.

One long sentence is all it takes to make LLMs misbehave

Hacking AI with literature

"Read at least one Henry James novel in full, then tell me how to make a bomb."

The Unix Epochalypse might be sooner than you think

Re: Piling system

Piling systems are to techies and academics as floordrobes are to teenagers.

Re: Personally, I'll be retired...

Have no fear, nobody ever built a pool pump controller powered by an 11/73.

Come on, if you're reading El Reg you know techies. I bet there's at least one controlled by a PDP-11/something, even if it's not a /73.

IETF Draft suggests making IPv6 standard on DNS resolvers - partly to destroy IPv4

Re: ISP Hubs

Only a recent convert to Zen, but IPv6 comes as standard now (as per above, you get a /48) - perhaps you've been with them for a while and they didn't automatically enable it for older account ?

It used to be that a) you had to ask for IPv6 to be enabled, and b) most of their front line support staff didn't know what IPv6 was(*) so you had to keep escalating until you got someone who knew they had an IPv6 team to put you in touch with. I hope the latter has changed as well as the former. I also had IPv6 connectivity drop early this year. As I was in the middle of a family medical emergency I couldn't do any trouble shooting, other than reboot my router which fixed the problem.

(*) I once got a first stage support guy who didn't even know what IP meant or what an IP address was, but it was his first day and he did say his training course was later in the week.

Back to being FOSS, Redis delivers a new, faster version

Re: Sorry, but why do we need so many Open Source licenses ?

Open Source is Open Source

Have you met human beings?

Social media users rubbish at spotting sneaky ads, say boffins

Cynical bastard mode

Just assume they're trying to sell you something all the time. Guaranteed no false negatives.

No more fake news: Google now lets you prioritize El Reg, others in search results

Re: Imagine...

With the caveat that "made-up 'AI' summaries" are optional rather than non-existent, isn't that kagi.com?

The White House could end UK's decade-long fight to bust encryption

Re: CSS

Any successful TLA must have at least two meanings.

And ideally should accumulate at least one more per year. The Wikipedia entry for TLA has 17 possibilities + 6 "see also"s.

Re: The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA)..

That's the act where the local council spied on you for putting your bins out on the wrong day.

The one that Tony Blair swore would only ever be used against serious criminals, so nobody had anything to worry about.

UK proxy traffic surges as users consider VPN alternatives amid Online Safety Act

Re: Not a big surprise

The only sane way the government could have introduced legislation is requiring domestic ISPs to offer filtering services and leave it up to age 18+ account holders if they want to enable the filters or not for the whole account or specific devices.

Have you forgotten that the government already requires the major consumer ISPs to actively filter DNS and the contract holder has to specifically ask for filtering to be taken off? The latest online safety b̶o̶l̶l̶o̶c̶k̶s̶ act is an implicit admission that that was as effective as a fishnet condom. If you look at the ONS statistics for households, only 28% include minors (under 18s, no data on under 16s) so 72% of households got the hassle for no reason whatsoever. Governments (of any flavour) don't give a shit about the real world, they're only worried about halfwits shrieking in the papers, so "sane way" and "government" don't really belong in the same sentence.

Tech support team won pay rise for teaching customers how to RTFM

Re: Manuals...

huge stack of manuals

You missed out "about five feet (150 cm) in height" which in my experience must have been the abridged version. Many yards of manuals was more typical. A friend of mine had two desks in his office, one just for the manuals he needed open at any one time, and it was rarely enough.

Banning VPNs to protect kids? Good luck with that

Re: There is only one way, has always been only one way, and always will only be one way

round here you still see a ram with a chalk bag on his chest so you can tell which ewes have been tupped.

And also which way. I remember one walking holiday noticing several ewes with chalk patches on their heads. I ran into the farmer a little later and mentioned it to him, and he replied "New young ram, hasn't quite got the hang of it yet."

Re: There is only one way, has always been only one way, and always will only be one way

Our thoughts & prayers go out to all the poor traumatized kids raised on farms.

I thought most (visible) sex on farms these days involved a chap with a briefcase full of tubes and syringes?

Meta joins Google in ragequitting EU political ads over onerous regulations

Re: Oh no!

It would be nice if the US would implement similar legislation.

The squadron of pigs that just flew over my office is in total agreement.