Posts by Alex 72

Network operator ponders building a new submarine cable – on land

Re: Why?

lol starlink, most pros want the bandwidth to be the same regardless of cloud cover or if Elongated ego agrees with what you want to use it for

Re: Why?

The guardian said "submarine cable costs about $40,000 a mile" the potential savings by shortening the route are large, also the plan is not to do this instead of coastal routes but alongside for resilience. There are significant barriers to sustainable security along the route and sustainable maintenance access. But "it's less bonkers than it sounds".

Re: Valuable

Africa has plenty of wealth and parts of the route will be more secure than parts of the USA. The problem is first what is now the UK but both then and now too often refers to itself as England even when it means a union including others, then the USA along with countless others along the way stole a lot of wealth from Africa already. Developing first, the societies that can accept immigration accidentally steal some of the top talent, add in the proxy wars of Russia/China vs US/Europe/Canada and there are enough unstable parts of the continent to make crossing it tricky.

Not on the route but Morocco for example has been a stable monarchy much, much longer than the USA has existed, they are peacefully democratising (albeit slowly) without outside interference, and even though the UK and the rest Europe were awful neighbours, Morocco now welcomes tourists and even migrants from Europe(the continent not the union) including the UK. Lesotho for example has a huge diamond reserve but ordinary people there see none of the benefits of the profits made selling them to this day.

Re: "parts of the route are only accessible by helicopter." so Improve access and build a railway

100% this if 2 for profit entities and however many governments could cooperate. The passenger and cargo carrying across Africa of a reasonable railway using tunnels and viaducts, with appropriate security guarantees from the African union, on top o a viable route for data, might make this workable. It would be good for the environment, and economy, how much less co2 and €£$ would it cost to send a long train of containers close to where they are going vs a diesel truck with no secured route? How much faster would it be when responding to a natural disaster, or even just plain old peaks in demand?

bootnote: Whilst this bundling makes it feasible, whether the requisite cooperation can be achieved, and sustained long enough is an open question, even in a single comparatively stable country this is not always a given, in this scenario it would take some doing.

How do you solve a problem like Discovery?

Get a crawler, convert TACOs Qatari bribe, I mean sky yacht, I mean plane into a shuttle carrier land it a Dullas, strap her on and fly her to Houston use another crawler to put her in a new purpose built facility.

Or take a few million dollars light it on fire give the annoyed Houston reps a corvette and a bottle of dom each to drive around the burning money and just build a replica, it would still be cheaper than moving it without damaging it. Not damaging it would still be less morally reprehensible than wasting all that money.

Hundreds of orgs urge Microsoft: don’t kill off free Windows 10 updates

Re: Nothing In The UK News About This

The BBC reported this at the time of announcement but until the day security updates stop, especially given the chance there will be a way for the uk to get the free year it's not really news. Much like Manufactures stopping supplying parts for older cars everyone knew it was coming even if Microsoft said we wont do that this time honest when the launched Windows 10. If you are interested enough to read the tech pages on the BBC you already know and as for why not just this but general good advice stop reusing passwords patch your software never give out 2fa codes or passwords no matter who a caller on the phone says they are or what they already know about you.... is nopt on the front page of the mainstream news site every time there's a breach well it's probably because people don't read it and it doesn't work just drives traffic to sky news or something.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57443598

Until something akin to the EU right to repair for software comes in (with some requirement that API specs or even code must be public or open sourced if a (publisher/manufacturer/vendor what do OS slingers like to be called? Dysfunctional projects?) stops supporting something they sold in the EU Microsoft will keep doing this

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

NI is not an ID and no one said it was

The assertions were that valid photo ID usually a passport and an NI number has been required after offer to secure an appointment. This means even though you technically don't need a passport if you don't plan to travel everyone has one or at least a drivers license. So unless the scurrilous gossip on here about other reasons the home office might advise a PM to do this are true this is a solution looking for a problem. If you really wanted to move this into the 21st century and save citizens who don't need a passport money UK government could work with apple, google and preferably a FOSS project to come up with secure cross platform system that would allow citizens to add a drivers license, passport 'card' style thing (like the physical ones many EU countries have), or a basic ID like the prove it card those with youthful complexion use to buy alcohol if they don't have a passport. This would give al the benefits without the Orwellian drawbacks, as you would need to have or qualify for the doc already so no new data storage just a secure link to allow you to verify that with a digital wallet.

There are at least two problems with this it's not about checking the right to work or helping citizens with more efficient systems. The other problem is how secure anything built whether the more sensible suggestion put forward here, or the system suggested by Keir’s parroting of home office talking points would be, lets just say its a UK government IT project.

Microserfs ordered back to the office, given 10 days to appeal

This is all about culture war, work from home is seen as woke as it can enable those with caring responsibilities and those who don't live in a big city (often women, minorities and people from less wealthy backgrounds) to be just as performant as those who don't have caring responsibilities and do live in or near big cities. The main problem with this actual step closer to meritocracy is it nullifies allot of the rich white male advantage those in the ascendancy for now in uncle Sam's house depend on. At the same time it makes allot of middle aged and older middle managers either no longer needed in that role or changes how they need to work. Like the cancelling of DEI even in areas wher it has helped outcomes this is pandering and it just so happens to reduce headcount at a time when AI is promising to replace some people or is abubble about to deflate and some Tariffs or something is putting a drag on tech stocks so investors would quite like a reduced headcount so if you are a spinless greedy white man who won't be here in 20 years it's win win.

How Windows 11 is breaking from its bedrock and moving away

I know this is late but what I was referring to is not simply the technical capability to run old apps but the fact that apple took most users with them (admittedly a smaller group than windows users). Not only that other vendors of cross platform and apple targeted software also followed. Microsoft seem able often to deliver the technical capabilities but often release too early with too many bugs or fail to bring hardware or software vendors with them or fail to educate the user base or all of these. This is harder for an organisation that has more variation and does not control the hardware but developing an OS for that ecosystems is the purpose of the Windows unit at Microsoft and they have considerable resources at their disposal. Windows 11 runs on ARM I have run it on am M1 Mac and a raspberry pi but I cant easily buy a cherap arm windows 11 laptop I would want to own and there are no competitively priced arm windows desktops or laptops that can match apple battery life and performance in one package and only a tiny handful that can do one or the other. In that market Windows stays on x86 as its not worth the effort if you arent get the performance or battery life bump or the price drop.

That Is why this is frustrating Microsoft have the capability to do this qualcom, Intel and TSMC have the capability to do this. They aren't doing it.

Re: Windows is a dinosaur

<pedant>

Alligators and crocodiles are crocodilians, they lived alongside dinosaurs but are a distinct group.

</pedant>

It's hard to predict but even code and concepts from Lyons LEO, ICL.. live on in todays tech world so I would say that provided we don't destroy the planet Windows will live on and evolve rather than die out. Whether its AD, or windows server core influencing linux, bsd or something else or whether the client retains widespread use, that I don't know.

There is plenty of evolutionary pressure in the data centre AI, HPC, and other intense workloads still want more power more compute more GPU.... but on the other end operators want commodity hardware and appliances to use less enrgy and run colder but deliver the same capability as before. On the client side people expect mobile devices to just work on cellular and wifi battery life to be 10+ hours and access to the same files across multiple platforms with as much or as little encryption as they choose. More and more they don't want to throw away working hardware they want mobile devices to connect to their Car, TV, door locks and wherever else. Whilst for now many are blissfully unaware of the security omissions and messes this is bringing when that becomes an issue the expect it to be fixed with an update. Not only Microsoft face headwinds in that climate. Laptops and Desktops are expected to work as before but connect to all of this and run colder with less power. Most end user don't want client side AI requiring them to carry a petapascal network in a very heavy latop bag or at least many terabytes of data and a CPU/GPU that is overkill for every other workload.

Unless AI comes up with some USP everyone will need to evolve when the AI bubble deflates.

Apple are not perfect (there’s a phrase doing a lot of heavy lifting), but they managed to go from power to intel and intel to arm whilst still allowing backwards compatibility. In the PC world some low spec stuff may need to be certified to only run the new and not the compatibility layer as entry level pricing and capacity for windows is lower than Mac, but clearly if apple have done it twice there is a path that can work. Radical change in a sensible direction is something I stopped expecting from politics or the Windows bit of Microsoft when I was in High school and I am yet to have this assumption challenged, I would be very happy for this to change but I will not hold my breath.

Junk is the new punk: Why we're falling back in love with retro tech

Re: Why ? Surely no one can't work it out ?

Apple sell tablets and laptops with digital audio out built in (even if you needto use usbc to get it) air pods max cost over £500 they don't 'tweak' for tinny little earbuds. The quality is not as good as the original masters, it is at least as good if not better than CD. Apple get around the not 'tweaking' for earbuds by claiming their earbuds defy physics and can make sounds that require larger drivers, to be fair to them their earbuds are ok but I would take a usbc to 3.5mm plugged into AKG headphones or an amp and decent speakers any day. There are streaming services out there with better quality but most cost more and or have a smaller selection of music. There are cheaper services with larger selections of music but few if any of those match apples quality of content delivery. There might be one or two equals on value but if like me you have had an iPhone for a number of years and shifting would be work before 2025 there was little reason to consider it.

Google games numbers to make AI look less thirsty

Maybe they asked Gemini how much water it uses vs other models, this would be mild given some of the hallucinations reported in testing other LLMs

McDonald's not lovin' it when hacker exposes nuggets of rotten security

This was stupid even for McDonalds

Given the impossible to argue with commercial success with marketing and customer relations of the core business. responding to customer trends handling complaints...

It seems that that is for the test kitchens and restaurant crew. McDonalds not only failed to provide the expected security.txt but in the process of contacting the security engineer the researcher was forced to cold call HQ. Forget a bug bounty they barely talked to the researcher at all she had to find the security team on linked in. Then the fixes were incomplete.

Come on McDonalds you're a Fortune 100 Global firm and its 2025.

From PAYE to P45: HMRC staff fired for prying into taxpayer data

The software is older than the staff and they are leaderless

This all shows symptoms of the same thing that comes up on stories about HMRC technology or information handling (cyber security, invasive policies, retention, processing times...) all the time. HMRC lacks a clear grasp of its own processes, data ownership, and lifecycle management. Without fixing these fundamentals, they are stuck in a cycle of failures and incidents. This one is more about Data Governance and culture than strategy but still a symptom of the rudderless approach to information handling which has led to Fujitsu continuing to support code older than many of the staff.

Should UK.gov save money by looking for open source alternatives to Microsoft? You decide

This needs to go beyond Technology

So I agree with the overall message that procurement is part of the problem. I don't think that’s the nub of the issue. When Information technology is done well it is the best application of available technology to solve a problem (often speed up a process or repeat one ad nauseam). To really do this well and know what the minimum requirements are an organisation must know its own processes independent of the current implementation, agree on one version of processes that are applicable across multiple areas, agree who owns the data, and who owns the process. The owners mentioned need to engage with those who must follow the process, internal teams like legal, finance, procurement and HR on how to ensure the process and data processing/storage and the budget to do it in principle meet policy as well as technology teams including developers support/operations personnel. This is all needed before you can start a tech transformation or a pay down of technical debt that actually sticks. Given that some of the welfare and Tax systems were written by ICL with the help of long retired civil servants and in the absence of conspicuous displays of competence at using paper fall backs or objection to harmful central government meddling in local technology issues I am not convinced all of the public sector is anywhere near there today. Without tackling a root and branch review that addresses this any change even if a system is lucky enough to get enough knowledge to be set up correctly will be precarious in the benefits it delivers. If you do not guarantee the knowledge is captured and ownership of data and process is where it ought to be you are always only a step or two from a system which encodes knowledge the organisation needs but no longer has or one that is still doing something no longer required or in an outdated way.

Is there any unique functionality in Microsoft products that the public sector is benefiting from enough to justify £9 billion, I doubt it. Is £9 billion worth it with tech debt that another renewal would give them time to pay down again I doubt even they know but if they ever do this exercise maybe but again I doubt it, there are probably some things that would need time to migrate and some things it makes sense to get right before changing them but going all in on Azure and AI is likely going to cost just as much as has eventually spent on ICL COBOL long after ICL not because it cant or even necessarily doesn't do what its meant to but because it is not well managed. When ICL and Freelance Programmers.. delivered systems that are still in use most if not all were fit for purpose some probably still are I think but I am less confident in Microsoft Commercial Off the Shelf Software and as I said do not believe the knowledge to manage the hardware and software lifecycle exists in the Public sector today

So in summary I can’t say for definite if the UK public sector ought to spend £9 billion on Microsoft, but I don't think they know enogh to answer either.

I started losing my digital privacy in 1974, aged 11

Medical records should be kept but access should be controlled

I agree yes you want medical records kept, patient history is always useful and provided they are only shared with the patient or a doctor or other professional they have consented to be cared for by, and who is not engaged in malpractice, it's not harmful. The hard part is drawing the line on how much anonymised data can be used for research, ensuring that data remains anonymous and managing consent for sharing data when patients are treated elsewhere or researchers want to use data from multiple sources.

and if you keep them for someone's entire lifespan then you should provided they did not object in their lifetime and next of kin explicitly consent or at least don't object probably archive it for future research in the near/medium term and historical value in the long term. Again managing consent, allowing reasonable anonymised research in the public interest, preventing de-anonymisation and deciding the limits of how long parts of it stay private vs when genealogists and historians can have unrestricted access.. is the challenge.

To do any of this effective durable storage, access control, authentication and authorisation are just some of the challenges. I have seen data analytics firms who's job is just this struggle to get everything correct so a group of organisation just trying to provide healthcare, research, treatments, disease, prevention.... Having to do this as an add on with a limited budget I am honestly impressed its only now with ransomware we are starting to see issues and paper records were not being stolen and abused on a massive scale in the past...

I don't know the answer but I don't think its the delete key

Debian 13 'Trixie' arrives: x86-32 and MIPS out, RISC-V in

Re: Sometimes Prdictable is good

I meant windows 11, but you get the idea.

Sometimes Prdictable is good

I installed Trixie on release day to a VM I built for a postgrad course and kept using, it upgraded from bullseye and there was no breakage. I also installed it on a dell latitude windows said was not good enough for windows 10 again installed first time no issue, secure boot and UEFI just worked with the graphical installer. On bare metal with Xfce it felt like OS X panther (which I guess hints I'm no spring chicken). This is not a criticism that OS was so stable many mac users did not upgrade till it went out of support, some downgraded newer hardware to that OS whilst apple kept it alive. It's often hard to sell conservatively well put together things as there is no attention grabbing attribute to point to. In the current FOSS market a healthy community with no intention of allowing commercial interests to mess with the FOSS ideals that has provided stable updates for decades and still just works is remarkable in it's own right.

Windows 11 leads as October looms, but millions still cling to Windows 10

Debian 13 (Trixe) is out on Friday

I was vaguely aware of the need to migrate my significant others dell laptop to Linux as it doesn’t meet the standard for win 11.

It has an i7 16gb ram but it’s an older i7 and it has tpm 1.0 so no dice.

I was all set to install Debian bookworm this weekend after backing up her users folder (which involved disabling UAC to do it over the network as me, yes I do know her password but that’s not the point it should work for an admin on a pro edition!)

I was pleasantly surprised upon checking Debian releases to find Trixe (Debian 13) is expected on Friday. So I will put off running the Debian installer selecting xfce installing whisker menu, Qterminal, libreoffice, thunderbird… until Trixe wanders in.

Tux because there is no dinosaur icon

Another one bites the dust as KubeSphere kills open source edition

Two wrongs don't make a Right...

... I agree abusing the trust of FOSS licenses which restrict commercial use and essentially stealing peoples labour is objectionable, but building a community on trust and free access to software for some uses then destroying that trust is not excused by this, and it will likley not be an effective remedy.

So no people should not have 'stolen' the code for commercial projects but taking your ball to go and play with people who will do exactly what you say isn’t going to make you a better person or a better player. In other words this knee jerk reaction seems childish and doomed to failure in commercial terms.

The FOSS core and monetised support or extensions business model, and the free for personal/dev use paid commercial models require more than license terms to enforce them. You need to work in a market that is part of a jurisdiction where your rights will be enforced, detect abuse and deal with it, as well as putting technical barriers in place if you want that to work. I would love to live in a world where giving people access to assets on the internet and trusting them to follow the rules was a safe business model. I am experienced enough and realistic enough to know that we don't live in that world.

Abusing the trust of the community at large because a few bad actors abused the trust of the principal developers is not only not a winning open source business model it is in it's self a misstep.

Also do you hear that keyboard, i think it's being forked.

The TSA likes facial recognition at airports. Passengers and politicians, not so much

An opt out isn't having it both ways

The line 'Politicians want it both ways' seems misleading. You can choose not to accept substitutions when shopping for groceries online, you can choose not to use smart tags when going in toll roads and so on.

In these cases the alternative might not be as fast but in cases like not using a smart tag on a toll road it wil be no worse than it was before and you dont expect to get berated by the cashier or honked at by other drivers throwing change in basket at a toll both where there is a smart tag lane. There can be all kinds of reasons not to want to use a tag, from data privacy similar to this issue to your windscreen space for one having other things there or if they charge a deposit and you hardly ever go through the toll.

In the case of this facial recondition if you come from a group under represented in the data so it is likely to be wrong or your id photo is very old and you have gained/lost weight you might always be queried and its no faster for you, you might have privacy concerns or you may just prefer to have your documents checked by a person. There is no reason not to facilitate this, and there is no reason it should be any slower for you than before facial scanning was introduced. The incentives here for owners and bosses to have staff push people to this are simply that people flowing through the airport faster with fewer staff saves money so unless legislation not only mandates opt outs be allowed but sets criminal or financial penalties for failure there is no incentive to make sure staff actually offer a viable alternative. This leads to low wage workers in understaffed areas being asked to manage the opt outs without the resources to do so because why put them in if there is no penalty when you fail. It's unfair on the those who have poor experiences opting out and it's unfair on the staff being asked to do 10 things and given time for 9.

Users left scrambling for a plan B as Dropbox drops Dropbox Passwords

$2 billion Revenue, a rough time indeed"

"Dropbox has been having a rough time of it lately. The company has subjected staff to several rounds of layoffs, and in October 2024, CEO Drew Houston stated: "We're making more significant cuts in areas where we're over-invested or underperforming."

In calendar 2024, DropBox reported revenue of $2.54 billion, up from $2.5 billion in the prior year. Net income dropped to $452.3 million from $453.6 million. ®"

The sarcasm which is entirely justified here does not quite cover the callousness and lack of attention paid to staff wellbeing or customer satisfaction. The company is making roghly the same as it always was but lets cut staff and drop services so we can grow a few percentage point and make more money for the c suite and share holders.

The advice of others to use Free Open Source Software FOSS solutions like KeePass seems apt as they are paying as much for devs as Dropbox is now and will likely have caused far less trauma.

Oracle VirtualBox licensing tweak lies in wait for the unwary

People don't liek being conned or over charged

The point here is not pay for commercial software no one is pirating this in the scenarios described. The issue is Whilst open source solutions liek KVM, UTM and others exist when it came to convenient desktop software everyone used to use VMWare or Virtual box as they were free and did the job even in a corporate environment of the project was less than three months or you needed a poc you could just use the evaluation. What people object to from Oracle is the bait and switch Java was free under SUN then you only paid if you used for who used then you paid per employees theoretically they can all benefit. Now with Virtual box they changed it so commercial use does not get a free evaluation unless you log in and the buried the change in terms and conditions they know no one reads demanding back pay as if it was used comercially from the moment of download. If a street trades said as meany words as there are in t&Cs very quickly evry time then tweaked the speech and started keeping your wallet or debit card and demanding double or triple the police would shut that down but since Orcale did it with fancy contracts and because regulators in his home market don't tend to push back on this BS it is being allowed to stand.

As I said people don't like being conned

Tesla bets on bot smoke screen as political and market realities bite

This might be Henry Fords script kiddy impersonators Icarus moment. When he invested heviliy in tesla but did not found it or invent anything then sued to be called a founder, there was not only a technological base there to build on there was a vision and willingness to take mass market evs seriously before everyone else did. In the AI space not only are LLMs and other state of the art models not a general purpose AI like the one you would need to deliver what He is selling with Optimus, Optimus isnt even state of the art or market leading. So whilst with tesla making big promises that would never be delivered was annoying it also made analysts look and say they were first to market in the ev space when there were governmnet supports and there was no competition. Now over promising on AI and robots makes analysts look at the man who thinks he is tesla and sapce x appear on the same analysts radar when they have to account for him falling out with the president of the USA, when government supports in major tesla markets are going away and there is competition.

PUTTY.ORG nothing to do with PuTTY – and now it's spouting pandemic piffle

Perhaps denis bider & co are feeling desperate for attention now Microsoft bundled open ssh server/client with windows server/client, showing Microsoft encourage and maybe even tests a free alternative to their product.

VMware reboots its partner program again – and it looks like smaller players are out

Non-renewing partners encouraged to ensure smooth transition for customers who renew

I don't know about you but if I worked at a non renewing partner I would be looking at low and no friction ways to move customers to Open source like Smart OS, ProxMox, KVM, or roll your own Xen and keep selling them support for that. failing that I might be attempting to become a Hyper V or other commercial solution partner like maybe the new citrix Xen thing. Helping Broadcom take customers away that I would not be doing voulntarily, big customers who have other services and want vmware, or customers who insist the must stay on VMWare because tech debt... maybe for the customers sake. Everyone else hell no why would anyone do that.

Sinaloa drug cartel hired a cybersnoop to identify and kill FBI informants

Re: But we dont need free expert advice or CISA funded properly

The private sector is no better, its 2025 and half of those surveyed are still paying ransomware, Viasat a private entity with similar threats breached, Lexis Nexis breached and thats just some of what's known about from this month. This has ben a five alarm fire for so long anyone who's any good at countering it can get a six figure salary to work in cyber and that's still not enough to effectively counter it. As I said The Democrats and Republicans over the decades were complacent enough to get the US here and not everything Biden did was correct but 3 years in public sector or PLC is not that long especially when what you need to modify is individual behaviour in terms of opsec and no there are not nearly enough incidents of leaks to the press to contribute meaningfully to this and both sides are just as bad whether they work for Law enforcement banks or any federal agency (although this might be the first administration to attempt a loyalty test on jobs that are not meant to be political appointments) .

Re: But we dont need free expert advice or CISA funded properly

The point is it was an issue that everyone agreed was an issue, it was not fixed overnight because that’s not how you change the culture of large organisations like say federal agencies. Given the fact this issue has not gone away and can result in such outcomes as well as being only one of a myriad of cyber threats, leads to teh conclusion that cancelling this effort simply because it was Biden who signed it or to pay for tax cuts will likely cost more lives and cash. This is reckless. Whilst I do not absolve the Biden administration in particular or Democrats in general for the state of cyber security in the US at least Biden was trying to fix it and the EO's, appointments, and bills in this area he signed were agreed as the minimum needed by both sides of the aisle. To cut it is let's call it a bold strategy, when everyone trump is picking fights with is scaling up their offensive cyber capability.

But we dont need free expert advice or CISA funded properly

For someone who claims to want to put 'America First' he who must always be orange seems to be wilfully allowing those who serve their country to suffer and die in vein; or perhaps he does not understand the consequences of his actions.

FBI used bitcoin wallet records to peg notorious IntelBroker as UK national

Re: What ? Bitcoin ?

Probably lowers insurance (or stops insurers demanding huge amounts). This would be due to risk reduction via deterrence and recovery. Deterrence: if serious criminal know the notes in an atm have serials recorded they also know; if that money is recovered without being laundered, or whilst in that process of being laundered, and tied to them they will get caught. Recovery: If the money is found even if its been removed from the ATM the bank can claim ownership and recover the funds. Whilst you could if the records are kept and you get a warrant use this to trace where funds used for illicit purposes came from I suspect the purpose is to mitigate the risk of loss of the large sum in the ATM when it is full.

Downward DOGE: Elon Musk keeps revising cost-trimming goals in a familiar pattern

It was never about actually saving any money from the federal budget, Dick Dastardly paid for orange Mutleys second term, keeping him from the pound, to break the federal government and make it depend on musk, I mean space x, more than it does, as well as advantage Tesla. He doesn't care if he kills US democracy in the process. I can't remember who, but someone who knows, said he wants the world to be saved from climate change, but only if he can be the one to save it. He is a toddler asking for praise. Well he certainly found a way to destroy the goodwill and value in Tesla stock, I'll give him that.

Legacy tech is the gift that keeps billing for UK's tax collector

Re: Yet again

Everybody* knows that if we tax wealth properly, simplified all taxes and benefits the money available would be more and the cost of delivery would be lower so the state would give everyone including the very rich and the very poor more value per £/€/$ and spend more of them. For example if government were to in general remove means testing, so that even the wealthy can get free dental for example, or everyone gets free school meals whilst at the same time taxing assets over a threshold and reforming the estate tax to take more from the very wealthy as well as simplify exemptions on the main family home.... there would be more money in the pot, the wealthy would pay more but everyone would get more. The benefits of free school meals and good dental health are well known and would improve the educational attainment and productivity of the people and the cost to the welathy would not be that great in the long term people would likely approve on balance of the changes. This as you have stated would also simplify the Information technology systems reducing the cost to procure maintain and archive them primarily because the system simply automate the same processes which would have been done with Burroghs Adding Machines, slide rules or even mental arithmetic using telephones and paper before online forms and software came about.

The problems with this are simply human behaviour and public understanding. Our political system is not very good at reaching consensus on these things and tends to compromise. There are political decisions taken for example means testing being added so "people who don't need a benefit don't cheat the system" being perceived to be a good thing when in many cases it may be cheaper to let everyone have it as the cost of administering the means test is greater than the cost of just giving everyone the benefit and some of those who don’t need it wont claim it or won't claim it all the time. Other issues with this are the feeling of a need to differentiate a given political party from another even in government the Conservative party may feel they need to not enlarge the sate or not be seen to even if it is the right thing to do in situation X e.g. regulating utilities for public safety proactively when problems can be foreseen and taking in to public ownership utilities which can not easily make a profit but deliver a public good. A Labour government may feel the need to keep a service in public hands that was in the past very specialised but now as a commodity service could be delivered more economically by the private sector e.g. using custom street lighting because we always have even though a standard fitting for LED light sources could go in the same case without causing damage (this is an extreme and fictional example). A simpler example of keeping the state small would be means testing school meals so the number of children getting them is kept down even if the means test administration cost more than the difference in cost to just make them universal (I am not arguing this is the case) in this scenario a government who wanted to appear not to be enlarging the state might choose the means test even if its not efficient and leads to unnecessary waste due to public perception. To add to this every time the governing party changes or a new leader comes in following disillusionment with the previous one there is a perceived need for change to be seen to be done even if there is nothing wrong. This all results in unnecessary complexity which any process using software or not must implement. Hundreds of years of this have got us here and there does not appear to be an appetite to undertake a major review at this point in time. That being as it is there is a limit to what even the best IT project can do to improve things. It is people hardware and software not magic.

*Who cares to find out

Cyber congressman demands answers before CISA gets cut down to size

Prsident Truss

On the UK BBC comedy panel news show Have I got News for You, someone said post the tariff U-Turn, they think of the orange man who hates to loose at golf as "President Truss". A reference to the recent premiership in the UK of Liz Truss who was the British prime minister with the shortest tenure in the history of the office. She had a disaterous budget that crashed the markets and then her own party forced her from office (the UK conservative party a.k.a. the Tories are brutal). Unless the GOP realise that no one else can get out Trumps vote, and not enough of the swing voters he got last time support undermining democracy, so they are on an express route to nowhere. There will be no motivation to depose him and even if they do the GOP would need to grow a spine and stand up to the bully.

If the GOP don't grow a spine and make the tariffs a truss moment there are at least 3 more years of this and the damage that will be done just from not optimally responding to cyber threats will run into billions of dollars. Who knows if he kicks off hyper inflation and topples the US dollar from the status of world reserve currency it might be trillions or whatever comes next.

It's fun making Studio Ghibli-style images with ChatGPT – but intellectual property is no laughing matter

General Ignorance does not help

The fact that outside of IT circles (and even within some of them) people don't understand LLM's and the current generation of "AI" is no more intelligent than an eight ball and a spreadsheet with a bayesian function picking from a larger list of responses based on input makes this harder. To get the electorate or even just the house of commons to stop the government allowing the proposed piracy (AI exemption from copyright), or to convince a jury of harm, individuals need to understand that the "AI" is not creating anything but using statistics to respond to the prompt based on the material it was trained with, in this case copyrighted Ghibli art. With all the marketing hype and the bias of the social media lenses: google (including you-tube), Facebook, twitter et al towards AI its not an easy message to get through.

P.S. The historic hostility to digital from a small subset of copyright holders like RIAA as well as the conspicuous wealth of some organisations which buy up a lot of copyrights has not helped the chances of getting a sympathetic audience. Even if these individuals and groups could not be further from artists like those at studio Ghibli if they tried.

Oops, they did it again: Microsoft breaks Outlook with another dubious update

Re: Looks like rain

Didn't see this at the time sorry. They are not causal in this, they just make a bad outlook worse, who knows why they claim that is today or what the real motivation is. Things like stopping opposing Russia, gutting CISA, and ignoring international agreements/norms just don't make it easy to argue in the postmortems on major cloud outage caused incidents, that keeping your data or services with US providers is a safe bet. I know a presidenst is term limited but if Microsoft are bad at the same time that could be long enogh to do some damage.

Official abuse of state security has always been bad, now it's horrifying

It's not as bad as the US in the UK... for now

Keir Stamer's government does represent a step away from orange-nepo-babyism, and impunity exemplified in the UK by Boris Johnson. They have not returned to the Blair/Cameron era (which was bad enough in it's own way) where whilst there were many missteps, and some of this abuse, most norms were observed. If/when investigative journalists discovered the misdeeds leaders simply admitted defeat. Either due to inertia, a desire for continuity in civil service, or something else, the UK remains less inclined to observe democratic norms and call out fascism than it was before Boris. I know some people will say the electorate thinks that way, but outside of the ideas of migration and Brexit, which the UK electorate were misled on, people in the UK still support democracy, the rule of law, and facts, even if the government does not. The Tories were worse and it's a two party system so who knows what is next.

Windows 2000 Server named peak Microsoft. Readers say it's all been downhill since Clippy

Microsoft isn't Windows anymore

Sure Bills successors will milk all the money they can from OS sales, but Office365, Teams, Azure (which supports Linux and other OS's on IaaS as well as providing it's own PaaS products) these subscription models are how the firm sees the future. According to SEC filings only 16% of Microsoft income is from Windows.

They have basically given up on desktop computing even as the corporate world firmly has not. Office 365 free works on Firefox or opera on some truly obscure Linux distributions. Yes if you have decades old processes using excel vba macros migrating would be a challenge, and even if you had better alternatives for everything the culture shift would be huge to move a corporations desktop off of windows, but at this point Microsoft isn't the biggest blocker, and would not be materially harmed if it gradually lost the top spot to apple on the desktop, and Linux in the data centre. At some Microsoft acquired outfits in the intel mac era (with macs usually dual booted for windows only stuff) this was the way and the monthly bill to Redmond before acquisition was still massive with office and Azure.

Its a shame because with windows server core and nano, cumulative patches, a willingness to make some of the marmite UI changes optional, and refraining from making peanuts on ads in windows, they could be great even now, and that would be good for Mac/Linux too, the evolutionary pressure would fuel innovation. Its just not a priority as far as I can see.

Tech CEO: Four-day work week didn't hurt or help productivity

Some people like to watch the staff be miserable more than they want to see a sustainable success

Most articles I have read in serious publications and my experience as a contractor, with my productivity and that of colleagues is, flexible, remote working and reduced hours work better for everyone. JP Morgan, Citi Bank, as well as Microsoft and Dell all seemd to back track after the pandemic and either spouted lies to support it or just said because we say. So I suspect the author guessing at motives like investor anxiety or exec mindset and I would add sunk cost fallacy re property portfolios is probably closer to the truth than any argument against it the tech bros or bank CEOs might throw around.

Copyright-ignoring AI scraper bots laugh at robots.txt so the IETF is trying to improve it

Re: The only think that will work....

The load is not negligible in some quiet but important applications e.g. the kind that let you look up information for multiple scenarios, the AI bot's can crash the system or burn through pricing tiers on cloud deployments. This is leaving organisations including public bodies with the bill and having had an AI scrape content without consent. In many cases with published info like that if they asked they could have a csv, JSON or XML without effectively stealing tax money to max out http servers.

Pharmacist accused of using webcams to spy on women in intimate moments at work, home

Healthy governance guys

So some organisations with sensitive personal information represented by the data they hold on staff and in this case patients, don’t need nation state actors to compromise them and sew distrust and chaos. Some can allow it by sheer incompetence or ignorance. Which throws into sharp relief just how reasonable it is for the man who said “I know words, I have the best words”, to cut unpaid advisors and paid staff from the federal agencies working to educate, enable, and enforce compliance with reasonable standards: in information security, for regulated organisations.

Please sir, may we have some Moore? Doesn't look that way

Too much of a meh thing?

Call me a Luddite or looney, but it seems the problems of erp, crm and websites are alot like admin from before computers were used (accounting, contacts e.g. rolladex or cal lists, and type setting). The solutions widely used sap, dynamics, wordpress, IIS with ASP .net links to a bloated cms, are by comparison to the most efficient system very intensive on compute power and storage for that matter. Would it not make sense if businesses whos core mission is not AI invested in optimising their processes to use a few well documented systems as possible so that they can replace racks of servers with a single server and either use the extra capacity for the few instances where AI is justified, rent it out or downsize server rooms, or if on public cloud migrate to more efficient clouds that use less resources and cost less. So that in the few cases where AI is justified or being researched there is capacity and everyone else is not inflating another tech bubble? In this scenario do we need faster hoter more expensive systems or simply more efficient iterations of what we have?

Windows 11 poised to beat 10, mostly because it has to

what a waste

The amount of perfectly good hardware that will be destructively disposed of go to landfill and flood ebay, which will be perfectly capable of running win 11 without AI and could have the tpm via pcmcia, pci or usb if it actually makes a difference to successful attacks, which will all work with the workarounds and can all run linux is criminal. I mean I might buy a few on ebay but its bad for client organisations, its bad for the environment, with trumps tariffs its going to sour relationships with vendors due to the massive cost vendors will likely make less money off of deals their customers like less than the deals they could have had last year and charged less for with more profit. I work in software support and I have never been happier not to be involved with hardware.

Windows intros 365 Link, a black box that does nothing but connect to Microsoft's cloud

The convenice/brand tax here is huge

Anything that can run Linux with a browser in kiosk mode including a raspberry pi would be fine for this boot straight to login window and delete any session stuff when switched off you could even setup kerberos, PAM and have the Linux login prompt log users into Microsft 365 so they can open email, teams or their pc for way, way less money. Less than 1/4 of the price.

P.S. Captives, sorry Customers who cannot upgrade to win 11 on a decent number (say a few hundred min) of existing desktops could get Ubuntu, Debian or even redhat with support for 5 years and a consultant to set it up, send less kit to landfill, and still save money.

i bet some people still pay though.

On the issue of AI copyright, Blair Institute favors tech bros over Cool Britannia

Re: Blair? A former PM who could receive greater accolades from history than Johnson?

If your point that all copyright holders are unreasonably rent seeking is assumed. The moral reaction to.a dispute where nether side is fully in the right and compromise seems necessary can not be to just pick a side and say these rules don't apply to this group because there is profit in it and it is complicated.

P.S. I do not accept the premise that all copyright holders are unreasonably rent seeking. Take the example of someone investing the effort to write a book and a firm publishing it, where those who want to read it are willing to pay. It seems self evident this is acceptable and there must be a mechanism to allow rights holders to prevent plagiarism or unfair use. The point that current rules might be balanced more in favor of large rights holders who can renew or inherit rights might not be completely discounted as quickly however, it could be argues this is less likley the intention of the legislation and more likely the result of large rights holding companies having more lawyers and lobbyists on their side.

What an embarassment

This on top of the UK government proposals harms the credability of the UK on the world stage, from the time of Alan Turing, through writing the IT Infrastructure Library the UK led in technology but ceded profits to the US. Now we have ceded the intellectual and moral high ground in pursuit of profit. This decision is the most criminal act of foreign policy since the Iraq war and akin to Queen Elizabeth I sanctioning piracy. This basically says if you have the capability to run a big model go steal whatever you want. Whilst there is no physical violence likely to be involved this is as aggressive as allowing 16th century 'privateers' if not more so given the speed with which AI models can consume training data, and the aggregate value of copyrighted work the UK seems to want to allow to be abused in this way. I have no doubt that if the UK gains some advantage by this a treaty will be negotiated saying its ok we did it historically but now everyone must stop like eventually happened with piracy.

RISC OS Open plots great escape from 32-bit purgatory

Re: Security?

If there is no answer from the questioner, I guess code signing would be the logical solution. Who funds and maintains the PKI, I don't know. This might be tricky to do without messing with the openness, not impossible, but like everything not trivial on a meager budget.

EU OS drafts a locked-down Linux blueprint for Eurocrats

Re: Perfect for running the Laundy

so fork 9 front and finish webfs you'll get alot more than stateless clients but you can have those too

OTF, which backs Tor, Let's Encrypt and more, sues to save its funding from Trump cuts

Re: Open Source has a USGov achilles heel

I am native to a small foggy island off the main European continent so not directly harm to me.

I was referring to harm to the economy/people of the USA, whether that would in the long run harm the rest of the planet is less clear. If the US continue to head in an authoritarian direction I see your point it could be said leadership shifting away from there might not be harmful but desirable, depending where it shifts to.

I do find it hard to see what direction the US will take in the next financial quarter, this makes working out if the US will return to operating within expected parameters after a second term of hateful orange. So long term it does seem to be a question: will it be harm if the US looses leadership?