Posts by redpola

AI slop pollutes the CVE pipeline with fake vulns

Hi, AI. For us to even look at all your new defect reports, we are going to need an easily-executed repro case (ideally one click) for each one. That’s to even get to triage.

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

Isn’t this the whole of the COBOL industry?

British Home Office seeks techie to herd nearly 1,000 engineers looking after 600 systems

Re: Expected snarky article...

With those literary skills, you’re amply qualified!

If this were a geek’s chance to actually make all that stuff WORK, that’d be an interesting opportunity, although the salary should be twice what they’re offering.

It seems way more likely that this is role is to take all the blame and attend all the meetings in a nice suit, however.

Experts pour cold borscht on Farage's Russian hack claim

Hilarious that he's so cross about the facts being exposed. Who cares how they became known?

Brit mathematician lets AI agent loose with credit card – cue password leaks, CAPTCHA chaos and more

Re: All of this is just natural selection, for humans.

If evolution were just as you describe, it wouldn’t work.

It also relies on mutation and experimentation. We need both, and either may lead to stronger, better, entities that ultimately lead to the extinction of the previous “best”.

It is not within your gift to state “Trusting AI with your personal information or credit card is also a stupid thing”, because if this mutation is, even by chance, more successful than you, you might become extinct.

Two men charged over series of arson attacks on 5G masts

Re: Deal

Novices. Both types of pyramid can be used to ward off 5G evils if, after folding, they are roughly collapsed and used as a rectal bolus.

Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user

Re: Case of acute cleveritis ?

True story:

I once worked for a large international IT company. We moved into a bigger office, and had to fit out the new premises such that they were suitable for our needs. We installed fast Ethernet everywhere, WiFi, a keycard entry system, a server room, etc. Unfortunately there was an anomaly with the shape of the server room, so there was no space for the roughly-1m-cube UPS that would keep everything running if our main power went down.

So it was installed in a corner of the office, and THEN WALLS WERE BUILT AROUND IT.

That’s right. No access/maintenance door, because that wouldn’t fit in with the aesthetic of the smooth cream walls of the office that surrounded it. The two plasterboard walls that were built to house it were painted and, for all I know, had art hung on them.

Maybe a year on, our power went out. Really out. It was winter and dark and we just had a few emergency lights that stayed on. Not one computer in the building remained powered-up.

We called our IT maintenance company. They asked if we had a UPS. We said yes. They asked where it was. Luckily someone remembered that it was behind a wall. They tore the wall down.

The company that installed this very-expensive industrial UPS had… not connected its batteries. Yeah, that means that they also hadn’t tested the damn thing either.

To absolutely nobody’s surprise, after new batteries were installed (and connected this time), and after the UPS was actually tested, a new wall was built to replace the destroyed one- without an access hatch.

A story as old as computers themselves…

"They're the main data that I care about and haven't backed up."

Amazon rewards loyal Kindle devotees by closing the book on old e-readers

I have three kindle keyboards and two kindle touches. All are about to become useless. Is the 20% per owned device such that I can have a new kindle of my choice at 100% discount? That would be fair. If not, I’m out. I’ll read ebooks on third party hardware.

Junior disobeyed orders and tried untested feature during a live robot demo

Re: The junior kept his job.

Jeopardising investment that might fund the whole project or department or even company? Ignoring an explicit order?

No court is going to make you reinstate him.

No, this is for his manager to handle. Did he learn not to make impetuous decisions? Is he good enough to keep? He obviously thought he was doing the right thing, so has he learned how to go about that now in the right way?

All questions whose answers go into the infinitely-variable matrix that managers use to evaluate staff worth.

How one developer used Claude to build a memory-safe extension of C

Not getting a good feeling…

So, I’ve read this article, and followed the link to his now-unpublished (why?) “The Register on Vibing TrapC in Claude, DeepSeek” post. I’ve also read his entire website…

I’m sorry but this guy does not talk like he knows how to code, nor make a product. He’s also outspoken on the future of coding.

And yet he is creating a tool that is the fundament of coding- a memory-safe programming mechanism.

And he is creating that tool using AI.

And he’s let major bugs into his code base already through a naive trust of his computer pal.

Am I the only one getting the this-is-a-joke-that-will-come-to-nothing feeling?

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

After all these years I STILL cringe when “amperage” is used instead of “current”.

Why Elon Musk won't ever realize the shareholder-approved Tesla payout

A reminder that the board of Tesla stood by as Musk developed the cybertruck, a vehicle not only of limited appeal but which is so unconventional it can not be driven legally in the UK or the EU. In the UK it would require a special test and license. Its design is such that it cannot be modified easily to satisfy vehicle safety laws - it would require fundamental design changes.

The board of Tesla stood by as this vehicle was designed and then built, knowing that it cannot sell in bulk in the EU or UK, a massive market.

Was it arrogance? Naivety? The Musk unreality field?

On the face of it, setting Musk a new goal which is basically unachievable seems like a new era for this board- Musk has to now double down on his lies to bring in new cultists or execute on the new and much more arduous untrodden path of … actually delivering on his bold promises.

UK data regulator defends decision not to investigate MoD Afghan data breach

I get that this is difficult and unusual owing to the sensitivity of the data but

SOMEONE screwed up.

WHO screwed up. HOW they screwed up. WHAT will be done to prevent this again. These are not sensitive data.

Add in that it’s a billion quid of our money and put at risk the material safety of people and the families of people who actively served the UK.

This needs more of a resolution than this.

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

Plus one for Bitwarden. I needed cheap and cross-platform, specifically android and iOS, and I wanted open-source if possible. Bitwarden satisfied my requirements and has been working well for years for myself and my partner (who is technically illiterate but has transitioned all of her passwords into Bitwarden).

Re: Bitwarden is free and perfectly usable.

Then this is a compatibility issue or user error.

Bitwarden iOS has worked for myself and my partner for literally years on a number of generations and types of iOS device (and android and macOS and windows, but that’s not what your comment was about).

It’s cheap (or free if you host your own), open-source, cross-platform and works brilliantly. So let’s add the caveat “if it works for you”, which it does for almost everyone.

Edit: I just looked and there’s just one setting to enable this, Settings->General->Autofill&Passwords. Check Bitwarden and uncheck everything else and it just works. Have you also disabled password management in apps like web browsers etc that might be interfering?

Curl creator mulls nixing bug bounty awards to stop AI slop

The perils (costs) of automated bug finding

A few years ago I was responsible for running automated defect-finding tools (preFIX/preFAST) over a moderately-sized codebase. These tools modelled the code and brute-forced bugs, a lot like fuzzers do today.

The first runs were horrific. Literally thousands of niggly edge cases, each having almost no impact on the user. I tuned the tools to ignore many of these (as a purist, this hurt!) because I knew dropping 5000 defect reports in the database would stop the business for a few weeks to sort out- even just to triage.

I tuned and tuned and eventually got the tools to produce a serviceable number of defect reports that wouldn’t swamp the company.

The problem was - the nature of these defects found by the tools. A defect might read “after the user types ‘bananas’, then on the 41678th loop through this networking stack code, we access memory we don’t own”. These reports were 100% reproducible- they’d been simulated - but they were almost useless.

First, they needed investigation just to understand and triage. Then, the developer would simply hands-down say that it couldn’t happen in the real world (way more than they normally do). After a long conversation where I convinced them that it COULD and indeed HAD happened, they would begin investigating these infernally complex and detailed situations. Often they’d have to dig through many levels of code they were unfamiliar with, meaning talking to other colleagues, so distracting a whole bunch of people; sometimes they would pull on a thread that would take them down a deep rabbit hole which showed up bugs in the underlying architecture, at which point we have system architects involved, aggressively defending their design.

The bottom line is that these bugs were the most expensive bugs to fix I’ve ever come across, for (usually) very little value to the company. Spending resource on them meant we were missing some big user-facing bugs, which was much more visible and consequently painful for everyone involved.

After a few months grappling with making these tools fit into our organisation profitably, I quietly stopped using them.

Nobody noticed.

I did some analysis of defect find and fix rates afterwards (just to make sure I hadn’t goofed!) and there was no noticeable difference between with and without the tools.

My conclusion was that this way of finding defects has a VERY limited application. When you can turn on a tap and find 1000 real, reproducible defects at will, you need to be extremely careful how you action those reports- and my honest feeling is that they’re probably best ignored.

SpaceX's Starship explodes again ... while still on the ground

I wonder when American taxpayers will start demanding actual deliverables from the roadmap Musk took 3bn of their dollars to deliver?

1.5 TB of James Webb Space Telescope data just hit the internet

Jeyhan Kartaltepe understands that where there is one datum, there are several data. Must be a scientist.

VPN Secure parent company CEO explains why he had to axe thousands of 'lifetime' deals

Your comment is ridiculous. If my purchase choice is guided by the vendor telling me something is a “lifetime” service then why shouldn’t I believe that? Why put scepticism above hard facts and a contract?

As it happens I bought one of these “lifetime” VPN deals for $40 a decade ago and have had a great deal of use out of it. I bought it because it was advertised as a “lifetime” deal and I’d estimate it’s saved me around $1400 over a subscription VPN service over that time. And it’s still going. I must be dreaming.

Fujitsu promised to sit out UK deals ... then Northern Ireland called with £125M

Fujitsu obviously has good tech they can usefully provide to the UK government and it is crazy to exclude them from the pool of potential suppliers. That said, they are still getting away with shocking systematic failures which led to significant human suffering and even suicide.

The question is, what is an adequate remedy for such a large but useful organisation? A big fine is irrelevant. More openness for their process to be inspected? Expensive to police. Throw them out of all UK govt business to act as a deterrent to other similar companies? Less competition and less tech available.

It’s a difficult one. My gut says that all complicit in Horizon should do jail time, minimally.

Microsoft OneDrive file sync apps for Windows, Mac broken for 10 months

OneDrive is already fundamentally broken on Mac as it relies on the underlying filesystem the server runs on to deal with file names. It’s possible to have a perfectly valid file name on Mac that will not sync to the cloud because Windows doesn’t like the file name. In 2025 we can’t name our files just about anything we like and have the computers deal with the underlying filesystems. It’s madness.

The biggest microcode attack in our history is underway

Re: What is this article about again ?

Segway /ˈsɛɡweɪ /

▸ noun trademark a motorized personal vehicle consisting of two wheels mounted side by side beneath a platform that the rider stands on while holding on to handlebars, controlled by the way the rider distributes their weight.

– ORIGIN early 21st century: an invented word based on segue.

Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer

Re: Rust is bad

“ It is trivial to make C the perfect operating system language. And there is no way to make it better”

And you left a deliberate error in that to see if we’d spot it? Or to prove how fallible humans are?

Re: "it would suck"

If there were a strong enough case for it to be compelling he might.

The question is, how strong can we make a case? I’ve read a lot of philosophical debate on this subject recently and literally nobody has asked what problem is solved by switching to Rust. Until that’s quantified the real question of whether it’s worth it can’t be posed.

I get that “perfect” code is “better” but a bug or exploit that is never found may as well not exist.

Tesla's numbers disappoint again ... and the crowd goes wild ... again

Re: an alleged Nazi salute

You understand that “may of been” is just gibberish?

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

Re: Simplest solution

You’re adding a new product to be delivered for free on top of the existing functional product that’s paid for.

In experienced and mature companies this might (and could and should) just pop out for free but most companies are neither. So now you’re are either adding another potentially expensive step to release cycles (or maintaining two source trees?!) or you are demanding the entire company culture changes.

If the company started as a hacky startup there may be legacy ugly code nobody understands and more. You want customers to see that they’re paying for this? They might not like that and use it as leverage to pay less.

As a functionally benign example, consider removing the embarrassing, rude or profane comments in 500k lines of legacy source code so you won’t upset the customer. How can you achieve that without risk? How do you further enforce standards on future source code comments? Now look at non-benign stuff and you’re starting to sense the scale and cost of it.

UK ponders USB-C as common charging standard

Invent the new GB-C standard and rebuild the UK on the back of converter cables, wall warts etc…

WHO-backed meta-study finds no evidence that cellphone radiation causes brain cancer

Re: Sloppy

The side of your head got warm because you were holding a big hot slab of phone to it, and absolutely not through excitation by radio waves of negligible energy.

Microwave ovens are faraday cages, which are very well understood, and do not leak radio waves unless faulty. Do not use faulty microwave ovens.

Your decision to base your lifestyle decisions based on your own invented science sadly does put you firmly in the “those "5G towers are secretly reprogramming our childrens' DNA" crazies” camp whether you concur or not. I get being sceptical and even support it, but when science/physics utterly disproves your standpoint, then that’s the time to back down and admit you were wrong.

Re: From the article:

That article doesn’t contain any of the terms “5g”, “mobile”, “cell”, “WiFi”, “radio”.

I’ve conducted my own study and have ascertained that 100% of people who die of cancer have drunk water all their lives. Avoid water!

Telegram founder and CEO arrested in France

Re: Freedom Internet Technology

Don’t be snippy with Richard Stallman here or he’ll eat a piece of his own foot in protest.

Benign bug in iOS and iPadOS crashes gizmos with just four characters

Re: Fuzz testing

A test engineer enters a bar, runs a brute force fuzzer against the code, and observes a thousand crashes.

Which should they raise as defect reports, knowing that raising all 1000 defect reports will crash the engineering team for a six months?

Body of IT tycoon Mike Lynch recovered after superyacht sinks

Oh my god, the ship is going down! Let’s get inside and close the door behind us!

Twitter tells advertisers to go fsck themselves, now sues them for fscking the fsck off

Re: Not really understanding the plan

Dammit, Elon! You posted the business plan we wrote that weekend at the beach on the Reg! It looks kinda funny now- were we high?

The problem with his “civil war” stuff is that he’s said it a LOT over the years about a whole range of subjects. It’s his twitter equivalent of “Full Self Driving by the end of this year”, i.e. if you believe it, you’re the mug.

Re: For those for whom Musk is still their idol..

A Musk-debunking playlist that doesn’t have any thunderf00t videos? You have achieved the unachievable!

For added (entertaining and numbers-based) childish whining, thunderf00t’s content features multiple examinations of Musk’s record on telling the truth and behaving rationally.

Are you talking about the guy that’s taking us to Mars?

OpenBSD enthusiast cooks up guide for the technically timid

Re: Thank you Carnat

I can confirm that the now-obsolete manual upgrade process was neither slow nor painful. I once upgraded an old server to the newest version, which I think was through five minor versions. Including downloading all the versions it was less than an hour. Of course now sysupgrade makes it absolutely trivial.

CrowdStrike blames a test software bug for that giant global mess it made

Re: It worked on my machine!

I wonder what proportion of comments on this site are in the “Waa! Apple locks everything down and has too many private APIs in their walled garden!” camp versus those now complaining that third parties have TOO MUCH freedom.

Craig Wright admits he isn't the inventor of Bitcoin after High Court judgment in UK

TIL that crypto keys are mathematically derived from whether I play squash on a Thursday or not.

Re: Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Your joking.

Record labels gang up to sue AI music generator duo into utter oblivion

I imagine RIAA is just squashing these companies to gain control of them. There is definitely a possibility that the AI could be trained with modern (copyright) material- although the only good AI music I’ve heard has been 1940s throwbacks- but how can someone prove ownership of elements used in the creation of the derived work?

Imagine the analogous example in the vast amount of AI generated images trained on, no doubt, the enormous corpus of copyright images on Facebook, insta, Pinterest etc. Proving an individual AI image was created by a model trained on stuff including pages from my sketchbook that I uploaded to instagram is nigh on impossible.

Maybe RIAA want legislation that dictates training materials are logged and catalogued etc.

Techie installed 'user attitude readjustment tool' after getting hammered in a Police station

Re: User attitude readjustment tool

LART is a TLA I haven’t seen for decades! Bravo.

Tesla nearing shareholder vote to grant Musk $46B

His idea of raising advertising revenue is to rant about being blackmailed by advertisers and subsequently telling them to F off.

Wait until you hear what his idea of “delivering what I said I’d deliver” is!

Tesla misses the mark on all fronts in quarter of chaos

Easy to raise Tesla price

All Musk needs to do is stand in an aircraft hangar with a thousand people, announce “At this point, it’s literally crazy to NOT be buying Tesla stock!”* and then have the audience whoop and holler in agreement.

Instant +10% for Tesla.

* or “We will have men on the moon by Q3” or “FSD is in testing and will ship next week” or …

40 years since Elite became the most fun you could have with 22 kilobytes

Dear Register;

When you are using computers to transcribe audio, you must read the generated text just once to check the results. Then you don’t ship glaring errors like “duplicated mass routines” or bizarre repeated stuttering sentences that humans often utter.

Just read it once. Just once. It’s the cheapest QA you can effect.

SEC Twitter hijacked to push fake news of hotly anticipated Bitcoin ETF approval

Re: Remind me who hates the SEC...

Musk knows he can get away with making something Tesla up, announcing it will arrive imminently, then selling off Tesla stock when it pumps. He’s done it over and over, an order of magnitude more than several others are serving lengthy terms in prison for. He doesn’t need to pump crypto.

Tesla, Musk likely aware of Autopilot deficiencies behind Florida fatality, says judge

Re: Overheard at Tesla

“At this point, I know more about cross-traffic than any human alive on the planet.”

(Aside, to engineer) “What’s cross-traffic?”

UK-US data deal could hinge on fate of legal challenges to EU arrangement

Re: Sovereignty

I think you mean are jerbs.