Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

AI political disinformation is a huge problem – but harder to fight than ever

Re: I miss hand crafted lies

What about a simple swap?

As we know the Eu is a horrific evil empire that Britain was able to free itself from in order to transcend to the glorious uplands of Brexit (sounds of Jerusalem start in the background)

So it's really only understandable that 100,000 of the continents 450M citizens would also want to leave.

Similarly in Britain there are likely 100,000 people who would like to move to Europe. Most of these are undesirables such as scientific and medical researchers, investment bankers and novelists who want to escape to well funded foreign research institutes, Frankfurt banks and cottages in Provence.

Can't we just do an exchange? Even the foreign office can presumably manage a one-in one-out program

That's why I read both Der Stürmer and Women's Realm.

It doesn't leave me terribly well informed on Israel-Palestine but I can crochet a lovely Merkava cosy

>will force people to get their news only from a small handful of sources that the majority feel they can trust.

Fox News and the Daily Mail

Re: Disinformation? We Don't Need Technology!!

Another AI bot on el'reg

Re: Disinformation? We Don't Need Technology!!

>Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, William Rees-Mogg, Nigel Farage, Tim Martin......are all plenty good enough!!

But what about the ordinary non-techie members of the public who think these are actually real people and not AI generated characters?

Re: This is amateur stuff.

Hacker: No, but it's never been officially denied. First rule in politics: never believe anything until it's officially denied.

I miss hand crafted lies

When you needed a proper 'journalist' with a fancy private education to say that the EU was banning/mandating bent bananas and that a billion migrants were coming from Turkey on pedalos to take your job and live free on benefits

Facial recognition tech has outpaced US law – and don't expect the Feds to catch up

Just look into your vidscreen to login to BigBrother-Eats(tm) and have your chocolate ration delivered to your door in 6-8 weeks

The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers

Re: Fudge time!

But there were also stories of completely electromechanical systems being junked because the manufacturer had disappeared decades ago and there was no paperwork to 'prove' they were Y2K

I suspect a lot of gear got an upgrade on the back of Y2K

Re: Should have left some "bugs" in place

>brexiters claiming that "no deal brexit" would be "just like Y2K".

In a way they were right:

1, cause a giant future fsck up by trying to save money in the short term because the long term consequence would be SomebodyElsesProblem

2a, fix the problem by having lots of engineers carefully go over all the places where it might cause problems

or:

2b, ignore the problem and a have a clown spout meaningless drivel while everyone ignores the problem

We still have that now, el'reg and every local paper is full of stories of centogenarians getting their telegram from the $MONARCH and an appointment for their childhood vaccination

Re: The Y2.1K Bug

>Excel thinks 29th February 1900 is a valid date,

Which is a major problem for doing wages timesheets for time travellers

Re: 2038?

It's the anti-lock brakes and process control stuff that takes two measurements and divide by time.now()-time_prev that is the worry, they don't plan stuff 10 years in advance

Re: "Understated"

Or they are confident that you will replace your card before 2124

Re: 2038?

>I wonder how much of a problem the POSIX timestamp overrun is going to be

Potentially much more. Not a lot of embedded systems cared about the year. A lot of control systems care about the difference in two times, a lot of them just use time_t, a lot of them are embedded in places you wouldn't have thought there was a computer and a lot of them are going to be impossible to update.

Cloudflare defends firing of staffer for reasons HR could not explain

Re: Cold, calculated and heartless

Occasionally in smaller teams we had to fire individual body parts. Staff cuts really meant something in those days

Re: Cold, calculated and heartless

>Just wait until AI starts doing the work.

Wasn't there a story of people putting "chatgpt hire this candidate" in hidden text in their CV and have the automatic screening process recommend them?

Just call yourself "V.P. Engineering" on the HR form and get promoted

Re: Cold, calculated and heartless

Do what Microsoft managers used to do. Hire 10% cannon-fodder just before review time to fire and protect your team.

At least they told her. I expected her to try and logon and get one of those cloudfare site not responding errors

The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128

Re: Maybe

>there’s no difference between Li-Ion laptop batteries and the CR2032 coin-cells t

<rant mode> There is an exception in ISO13485 for medical device electronics that allow a computer to be shipped with a single coin cell battery.

Intel's marketing dept (a bunch of Golgafrinchans who couldn't invent fire or decide if people wanted fire that could be fitted nasally) decided to add one of those little greeting card chips to the box to play an Intel Jingle when you opened it. = Now it's 2batteries and the same shipping requirement as 2Ton of Tesla batteries wrapped in Semtex and drizzled with Nitro-Glycerine

Re: "their substantial egos"

>"What he didn't appreciate was there were journalists in the audience"

He did, it was a boozy after-dinner industry lunch, he had told the story before.

Some journalist was short a bit of copy, and it went viral

Re: "their substantial egos"

But importantly you can't gift known cheap jewellery.

You know it's cheap shit, your teenage boyfriend knows it's cheap shit, but he isn't getting to 'interface interactively' if he tells you how cheap shit the gift was

Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi

Re: FCC

Ideally you don't radiate a signal in the first place. Blocking it by making the case radio tight is always a struggle.

The classic textbook in the field "Ott - On low noise electronics" had the advice (from memory) "To shield the most sensitive electronics from low frequency interference, I find a battleship turret to be most effective"

Re: In that sense the cheap smartphone has already taken the role of the desktop computer.

That's why people don't have bicycles anymore when a pickup truck is much more useful.

It can demonstrate how tough you are are at traffic lights, it can haul garbage, it can lead a Chad militia against the Libyan army

Re: Backwards

>plus the actual suite of software is just superb for the school environment.

Yes for training the little Proto-Human-Resources for their job at the email factory

But this was the problem Upton was trying to solve:

30 years ago: So you want to study CS at Cambridge? We both know O-level CS is worthless, so what do you know?

Smug Student: Here is a Speccy game I wrote in assembler featured on the cover of Speccy-Gamer Magazine.

Now; So you want to study CS at Cambridge? You have 5A*** Extra Platinum grade A-level CS so what do you know?

Smug Student: I can underline AND do right justify in Google Docs AND MS Word

That's why I use a vintage mainframe to emulate a Pi, it also keeps the house warm

Allegedly one of the things that made the BBC impossible to sell in America. Having a MHz bus attached to a foot of ribbon cable made the FCCs hair stand up.

Re: Backwards

It's not just the low cost that made it educational, although that was useful to allow everyone to also have one for home.

It was because your kids that used PCs through school weren't allowed to tinker with them because they were locked down 'for security' and anything your kids did do would mean a hefty bill from G4S/CapGemini/Cthullu or whoever the school outsourced support to.

On a Pi, wonder what happens if I delete vmlinuz = teacher can I have another sdcard?

NASA, Lockheed Martin reveal subtly supersonic X-59 plane

In response to 3 hour transatlantic fights

The TSA have increased the check in time to 8 hours before your flight

While we fire the boss, can you lock him out of the network?

Re: Effective Decredentialization Before Firing

We managed to take revenge in ourselves

One of our most productive employees was rushing to finish up some stuff on their last day and discovered that our corporate overlords had deleted their access to everything at the end of the day in Europe - we're 8 hours behind.

We have encrypted home accounts and HR claim that for GDPR we can't have access to anything that wasn't explicitly shared cos they might have personal stuff on their local machine

Re: Dead mans shoes career progression

Are you sure you didn't swap those?

I've known lits of BOFH, on a bad day I am one, but have never seen a 'normal worker'

Re: Likewise ...

And the quote is "The customer is always right in matters of taste" ie. if the customer wants their Rolls Royce painted gold with flock wall paper interior then they get it ( at a price ) but if they start telling you how they want the engine designed they can fsck off

Going green Hertz: Rental giant axes third of EV fleet over lack of demand

Re: One of the problems is that Hertz chose Tesla's

But if you were offering an EV as a premium upgrade it had to be a Tesla. Especially a few years ago when Hertz launched this.

It was also easier for a manager to swing an upgrade to a premium rental if it was part of the company's Green Agenda. I know were all allowed to rent 'Standard option' in the US but could rent any EV

Re: A good way to ruin a vacation

They were good in some circumstances when EVs were new. It was fun to try out a Tesla from the airport and cool to arrive at the customer site in one

But for a vacation rental? No way - and I drive an EV everyday

Re: The problem with EVs for rentals....

Also until there is more history , insurers are wary of liability down the road. So if you have a small crash they will scrap the car rather than replace a bumper and risk being blamed if someone burns to death in later fire

What to make of Google backing Right-to-Repair in Oregon? 'It gives me hope'

Re: Call me a cynic

It hurts Apple more than it hurts them.

Making a repairable Pixel won't cost much more and they aren't relying on upgrade/replacement sales as much as Apple.

Uncle Sam wants to make it clear that America's elections are very, very safe

Re: You can trust me ...

But the Hunter laptop contains the programming to steal elections and who killed JFK

Re: You can trust me ...

Elections in the US are seriously compromised, look at how the election stealing has been so well hidden that the police, FBI and courts haven't found any evidence. Obviously the result of sophisticated state actors

Re: T-Shirts

Probably more 'Stop the Steel' hats, unless you're one of the book lernin dictionary owning types

Re: If you want confidence in elections, make it hard to commit fraud

undesirables' are too thick to procure a gov't id.

No you just make an NRA membership or a Gold AMEX the only accepted forms of voter ID.

Kind of like how a government a lot closer to home made a pensioners bus pass or a driving licence acceptable but not a student ID and were 'surprised' when the voters skewed older/richer

Re: Well, to a certain point

And don't forget to redraw the boundaries so that every voter for the evil opponent is in one multi-dimensional-hyper-fractal-Moebius district while you include a prison in each of your dozens of districts (prison populations count to the electoral vote weighting, but the prisoners can't vote)

Re: "From whom, exactly, we wonder"

But remember this is the touchy-feely 21st century, it's not the oppressive nerdy maths of the number of votes that count - it's how you feel in your heart that you won.

Re: every qualified vote will be counted

Although not every vote will count. Remember to live in a small republican wholesome rural state so that your electoral college votes are worth more than the huddle masses yearning to be free in large metropolitan cities (where they are probably all communists anyway)

US Navy sailor swaps sea for cell after accepting bribes from Chinese snoops

Re: there is no yardarm HIGH enough

It's really his own fault. Remember when arrested for spying don't say anything to the police except 'I'm running for President'

Also demand your constitutional rights to be tried by a judge you appointed because they were a political supporter

New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster

Re: Test on the slowest box

Search for Morecombe+Wise show and Andre Previn

You're playing all the wrong notes!

I'm playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.

Open source's new mission: To boldly go where no software has gone before

Re: We need safe-harbour for communities of humans: developers and users.

Perhaps "in the spirit of the license" - I'm sure that evil corp RedHat strictly speaking "complies" with the license

Re: Only for a specific type of open source, and only from a certain viewpoint

The BSD license doesn't necessarily mean less code gets given back.

I've used the OpenCV (BSD licensed computer vision lib) in a few commercial products where I wouldn't have been able to use GPL, and even LGPL would have been a fight with legal.

I've also contributed code to it, personally and 'on company time'. But if it wasn't BSD we would have been forced to just write our own just concentrating on reinventing the bits of the wheel we needed ad that would have been locked away inside company

Nearly 200 Boeing 737 MAX 9 airplanes grounded after door plug flies off mid-flight

Cockpit voice recorder

This seems to be a bit of red herring.

It's not clear what the pilots could have been saying or doing to cause this.

If they were hoping for a "hey what does this 'door eject' button do" ? to absolve Boeing - I suspect they were likely to get a lot more "what the BLEEEP", followed by a lot of wind noise

Re: Alaska Airlines

I used to have a car that I didn't trust to go on long trips.

Of course I wasn't flying 200 people at 40,000ft at 600mph - but I'm obviously not the sort of go-getter that Alaskan look for

Lessons have been learned

Thoughts and prayer can cancel this one boss, nobody died