Posts by cyberdemon

Parker Solar Probe sends a "Still Alive" tone back to Earth

Is that surface diameter or corona diameter, and where exactly do we define the edge of either? We won't know until it has completed its mission

Kelvin? But that's an SI unit, far too French.

Nige would take back control and invent a new unit based on the temperature of fag-ash

Microsoft adds another problem to the Windows 11 24H2 naughty list

Re: Reminds me of the defective Server 2022 ISO

I don't know.. It's a case of who can enshittify faster, and in that race, Microsoft might outrun the Googly champ. They have SatNad to guide them through the optimal enshittification route.

Re: Please re-read my post !

> there was absolutely no escape. How would you get around that?

There is no way around that, except maybe by suing Microsoft and forcing them to hand over your key, or if you know a friendly policeman, they can use Microsoft's law enforcement portal to request your key. Indeed there have been instances of thieves/stalkers pretending to be government agents in order to get access to that portal, so BitLocker really is worse than useless

If you were setting up encryption on Linux then it would use a local password only, there is no recovery key as such. If you forget the encryption password then you won't get past the boot screen until you either remember it or reinstall

The difference (and problem) with BitLocker is that it doesn't trust the user to set and remember a strong password that is used nowhere else, so it generates one (the recovery key) and writes it down for you (In the TPM module which is programmed to forget it if you install a new PCIe device, change a BIOS setting or look at it cock-eyed, and in Microsoft's cloud)

I'm not sure what you mean by "start again from scratch" but there are certainly ways to migrate a Firefox user profile (history, bookmarks, etc) from Windows to Linux.

I'm a Debian user for the last 20 years, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who might describe me as an Anorak ;) it has various derivatives to make it more accessible to Microsoft refugees though.

I hear good things about Mint from new users, so that's why I recommended it. There's also LMDE which is Mint without the Ubuntu stuff, that's what I would install if I wanted to try Mint personally.

Re: Reason for windows? I have over 300 games on my gog account

I don't know about Gog, but gaming on Linux via Steam is a breeze these days. Just 'apt install steam' and then settings -> compatibility -> "Enable SteamPlay for all titles". I also have hundreds of old (and new) games, and they generally work flawlessly. I even have VR games released for Windows that work perfectly out of the box. No VM required. Maybe Gog has a similar way to make use of Proton? Look up your old games on protondb.com to see if they work.

Your graphics card sounds like a NVidia one, so on Debian this would be: apt install nvidia-driver. Note that for both nvidia and steam you need to have 'non-free' software enabled in your apt config (this doesn't mean you have to pay, it just means closed-source software)

Edit: Maybe try 'minigalaxy'

Package: minigalaxy; Description: Simple GOG Linux client. Allows you to download and play Linux games from the gog.com game store.

Apparently it will also run Windows games via Wine (which is what Proton is based on) and no doubt there is a way to make it use Proton itself.

Re: Please re-read my post !

BitLocker doesn't apply at the hardware level i.e. you can still install Linux on your 'bricked' laptop by simply deleting the encrypted partition. Most Linux installers will guide you through this, and warn you that you are deleting the original OS and all its data (but that's fine because it is unreadable anyway)

It's unclear who lost out, Argos or Lenovo (one of whom has to re-image and flog a new laptop as 'reconditioned'), but certainty not Microsoft who are the real culprits.

BitLocker is a shit experience all round and just makes Microsoft sound like a ransomware gang! Of course they have your key, and would have given it up to any government agency that asked for it.

IMO this is a deliberate strategy, one of many, to 'punish' those who do not want to be forced to use a Microsoft Account.

If you don't want your life on Microsoft's cloud, you should be using Linux. Maybe give Mint a try?

OneOdio Focus A5: Big battery, budget sound, and a bargain bin price

Re: Getting names wrong

No doubt they'll be expanding into North America with their new subsidiary, "Odio US"

Apple called on to ditch AI headline summaries after BBC debacle

Loser influencers

The losers are the ones who watch their shitty videos all day instead of having a life

Loser influencer, influencer of losers, is how I read it.

How would you like to lose your money today? Buy my shitcoin! Too new for you? How about an old-fashioned pump-and-dump! Got no money left? Buy this overpriced energy drink it won't help you to get a job! .. No money at all?? Ok just watch some more ads then

Fear of Foxconn reportedly driving possible Nissan, Honda and Mitsubishi merger

Re: You just talk to them with voice commands.

Oh sod off. There's only one thing worse than an iPad on wheels, and that's a sodding Alexa on wheels

China's homebrew Bluetooth alternative is on the march as Beijing pushes universal remotes

Re: So... Bluetooth...

Not to mention, any digital devices you have will be inspected and likely backdoored at the border.

At least 10 years ago where I worked, the company would set up a 'burner' phone/laptop for anyone travelling to China, and forbid them to take any other devices.

Re: Does the S is Starflash stand for SystemD?

IR remotes with their simple, one-way, unencrypted, somewhat interoperable protocol are so last-century.

Besides, if you were going to say something that you didn't want the CCP knowing about, you could (for now..) unplug your telescreen and stay away from smartphones. But if even the TV remote is taking note of what you say so it can dob you in via your neighbour's TV (or yours when you next switch it on) then we might all just give up and accept surveillance by a foreign state.

As the Private Eye put it in their spoof cabinet WhatsApp group: Be careful of what you say in front of the lightbulbs

Re: Stream lossless stereo audio.

And I am sure that the remotes will be accepting signed firmware updates via Bluetooth and er, StarFlash, from the TV, entirely for the benefit of the people of course and nothing at all to do with updating the list of woke words, sentiment analysis or anything like that!

On a possibly related note, i took apart a discarded "IVG Air" vape, and discovered what looks like a digital microphone in a 6-pin metal package (apparently used as a puff sensor, but seems a bit overkill for that purpose), QFN32 microcontroller (could be esp32, can't tell due to no part number), large anonymous SOIC8 (flash? SPI-RAM?) and a large F-shaped trace that looked suspiciously like a PCB antenna, plus the usual charge control IC and transistors. All seemed a bit more than i'd expect for a disposable vape. Maybe it doubles up as a voice control for my TV?

Apple Intelligence summary botches a headline, causing jitters in BBC newsroom

Re: apathy to AI services

No shit.

However, what worries me is that AI is poisoning all of its 'deterministic/reliable/accurate' competitors, especially in areas like Internet Search.

Google and Bing are (deliberately??) Shit, to try to force people into using ChatGPT/Gemimi instead. Search indexing itself has become an impossible task due to an endless stream of machine-generated slop.

Jobs and techniques are being replaced by AI not because it does a good job, but it does a shit job fast, and you can re-roll the RNG until it gives you the bullshit answer you were looking for

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

Re: Paper trails...

> This could've been very dicey with a different manager!

Indeed, if he'd been working for ICL / Fujitsu / the Post Office, there would have been no resetting of the test account, several yachts purchased, and thousands of innocent people wilfully prosecuted.

Oh, wait

Open source maintainers are drowning in junk bug reports written by AI

Re: Just say NO

> They don't have a database of all GPT outputs.

Do you know that for a fact, or is this more of a "surely OpenAI would never do such a thing.."?

They wouldn't need to store everything, forever - just a few weeks worth. And even then, they may be able to filter the interesting stuff.

Besides, seeing what sort of queries it gets asked (and by whom) and which outputs subsequently appear on the Internet is a valuable source of training data, and the size of it is miniscule compared to the original training data. There is no way they would NOT do that, and unless you know for a fact that they don't, it would be very silly of you to trust them not to.

> but there are still laws that would affect them if they did that.

Er, more like laws affecting them if they -didn't-. In the UK at least, they would be expected to keep records of activity - if someone did something naughty with ChatGPT, or if someone complained about its output, the authorities would want a log of recent activity.

Re: Just say NO

Also, I note that GitHub, since their owners also basically own ChatGPT, have access to ChatGPT's database of outputs.

If the fake bugreports were being generated by ChatGPT, then GitHub could say "This bugreport looks very similar to a recent ChatGPT output. Do this again and be banned" - but they don't do that. Why not?

Re: Just say NO

GitHub: Social Coding

Sounds a lot like Social Media to me. No wonder it is full of crap like this.

LinkedIn is just the same.

Incidentally, both platforms are owned by the one entity that might have a vested interest in destroying Open Source. It's the final step of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

Firefox ditches Do Not Track because nobody was listening anyway

"Do not Track"

Thank you for adding another bit to your tracking datum

British Army zaps drones out of the sky with laser trucks

Also, 15kW is just the -output- of the laser. They don't say what the input power requirement is, but given usual laser efficiencies, it's going to be something of the order of hundreds of kW i.e. a big old Diesel genset in an armoured shipping container

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

Re: El Reg Standards

approximately 10^-14 Norris-sheep by my estimation

Re: Ant Power

Incidentally, there is an archive copy of a deleted Wikipedia page which claims that an Antpower is approximately equal to 15 microwatts

Apparently it is also possible to harvest several antpower out of the modern RF-noisy environment, using little more than an antenna and a Germanium diode..

The question is I suppose, would a robo-ant prefer to carry a leaf-sized dipole antenna or a diamond-encased radioactive source? Probably, the former. Unless it was hunting down a queen ant from the past which was to give birth to its future nemesis, in which case it might need a self-contained, hardened power source.

El Reg Standards

I think the basic problem here is that the Reg Standards Bureau does not cover Power or Energy well..

The closest I can find in terms of derived units would be 0.2715 Norris-Linguine per Truss?

Europe's largest local authority settles on ERP budget 5x original estimate

Re: Oracle ??? Why would you ???

Certainly a contributing factor. But who would suggest they could have picked instead to magically solve all of their ill-defined problems? Fujitsu? IBM? Microsoft? U4BW?

No, as much as I despise Oracle and all of the above alternative bloodsuckers, the problem was to jump into a migration without first completely understanding its organisational implications and technical requirements.

Probably, some overzealous salesperson from the systems integrator and a clueless council director are jointly to blame here

Wubuntu: The lovechild of Windows and Linux nobody asked for

You missed my Troll icon then

> So, if your company laptop doesn't communicate with the endpoint management server, expect awkward questions followed swiftly by a re-install of the corporate Windows build.

That's what VMs are for..

I don't think this is going to make a dent in corporate adoption of Linux, sadly.

Corporate IT bods don't really give a toss what it looks like, (except to the extent that users know where everything is and won't keep calling the Helldesk because they can't find MS Paint - and this distro is not similar enough i.e. identical to Windows for those sorts of users to be happy with it) - What the Corporate IT dept really cares about is Active Directory, Group Policy, how to remotely control what the lusers are allowed to do, and I doubt that this has any more than RHEL does for that.

So no, there is no use case. This is an 'Uncanny Valley' flop which will be universally hated from all directions.

This seems to be designed to extract money from people daft enough to give it a try, while giving nothing to the projects that did all the hard work i.e. KDE, Ubuntu, Linux (and Microsoft, lol). May the lawsuits surge forth.

Re: Though not including FireFox seems odd

Don't say that! Liam would go NUTS if they included THREE browsers!

Re: PSA: Do not donate to this

Anyone donating to this is only donating to Microsoft and their lawyers, after the inevitable lawsuit stops this abomination in its tracks..

Google DeepMind touts AI model for 'better' global weather forecasting

Re: "requires only modest quantities of compute resources"

That depends on how many optimisation steps there are in the geoengineering calculation i.e. "I want THIS weather, where should I spray my cloud seeds to make it happen"

Fission impossible? Meta wants up to 4GW of American atomic power for AI

Re: Geothermal anyone ???

Take a few dozen barrels of high level nuclear waste

Dig a really deep hole

Throw barrels down hole

Hey presto - artificial 'Geothermal'.

Temporary printable tattoos could be the future of EEGs

Re: Definitely proof of concept gear.

That may be deliberate, i.e. 'dithering' to prevent hairs from sytematically blocking the gel spray. If they wobble both the spray and the patient a bit, then it doesn't matter if the hair blocks some spray particles.

> this technique won’t work well – or perhaps at all – on longer-haired individuals. Lu told the University of Texas that fixing that is next on the team's to-do list, and that robotic fingers or combs could be incorporated into the printer to separate hair in target areas.

I would have thought that a compressed air jet would do better for separating hair around a point, but what do I know i'm just a commentard.

Eurocops take down 'secure' criminal chat system known as Matrix

Re: In other news.....

I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was a "forced update".. Most people just accept forced updates these days, but I find them obnoxious, just begging for a supply-chain attack especially if you let them install automatically. As I type this, I notice WhatsApp is threatening to stop working in 5 days.. Only a month since its last forced update.

Of course, I know that WhatsApp is swiss cheese and that doesn't stop me using it, because I am not "up to no good". Not that I trust the authorities to act with integrity and uncorrupted justice, but because I don't want to draw their attention to myself - I don't want to be the honest man in Cardinal Richlieu's infamous quote.

So I would avoid anything that is supposed to be "secure" and yet still behaves like WhatsApp (i.e. with closed source, dubious permissions, and forced updates), because otherwise i'm telling someone somewhere that I might be "up to no good" / their enemy, while handing them everything I type.

But should I feel the need to use anything "secure" then it damn well better be properly secure (i.e. i'll compile it myself from source, thanks, along with any unusual dependencies that it pulls in), and deniable, because just using it is going to attract attention from all sorts of agencies.

Gone are the days where everyone uses properly secure communications by default, because they have banned it, and backdoored anything that was secure but got too popular.

Severity of the risk facing the UK is widely underestimated, NCSC annual review warns

Re: Cybersecurity job market

Nobody wants them! That is the state of the Cybersecurity job market. Because everyone knows that the attack surface is near-infinite and a comprehensive defence is near-impossible, and management will resist any attempt at you doing your job, because it mildly inconveniences theirs. Until it all goes wrong of course, in which case they have You to take all the blame.

The job adverts might as well read:

• Urgently Required: Chief Scapegoat
• Pay: Not nearly enough
• Budget: None
• Remit: None
• Job Description: When the shit hits the fan, we need someone to blame. That person is You! Your head will be on the block, You will face prosecution, not us, etc.
• FAQ: Have you already been compromised? Yes, err, I mean we're not telling you until you start the job but the post is URGENTLY required!
• FAQ: Is there any opportunity at all for success? No it's a poison chalice, er I mean a FANTASTIC opportunity!*

* for disaster

Windows 11 market share falls despite Microsoft ad blitz

Re: And Win10 it will remain...

> very little gaming support unless you are willing to fiddle and tweak and sacrifice your firstborn to the Great God Linus. Yes, despite YEARS of faffing about and hundreds of variants Linux is still a PITA to setup if you want to play games and I just can't be arsed

Er, what?

apt install steam (*)

steam -> Settings -> "Enable SteamPlay for all titles"

...

That's it.

* obviously ensure that non-free sources are enabled, and you also may need to enable i386 packages, turning them on is simple: dpkg --add-architecture i386; apt update

Even VR works out of the box. Yes, even with Windows VR games

Submarine cable resilience board announced on same day maybe-cut-by-China Baltic cable repaired

Re: Hanlon's razor

It's also possible that they were planting remote or timed detonation charges.. Very difficult to go and inspect all of the cable to look for anything dodgy.. It will naturally include lumps and bumps such as joint boxes, and a timed shaped charge explosive could be as small as a limpet

One theory is that a sub with a ROV was tailing the freighter, to mask its sonar signature. Such an ROV might have had time to plant something.

We wouldn't know until er.. see icon

TBH just sitting here speculating and getting worried about it is exactly what Putin & chums want us to do. A better idea would be to assume they WILL try something, and build resilience into our infrastructure.

A full scale test of the Black Start procedure would be a good idea IMO (I am skeptical as to whether the grid can be restarted with the proportion of renewables that the government wants us to have...). As would be a few SAM sites along the coast and maybe a Trident missile test. Putin is rattling his sabre so we need to make sure that ours still works.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

Re: Hanlon's razor

It's a public fear tactic, I believe. Not a serious threat.. yet. It's like the Russian "Research Vessel" Yantar which a few days earlier turned on its AIS in the Irish Sea and caused a minor panic.

It doesn't matter that it took a few days (at great expense, i'm sure) to repair it, the point is it made people afraid of what they could/might do.

e.g. it's much more difficult to repair an underwater high voltage power cable. Or indeed a gas pipeline

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

Re: Add it Cortana

CoPilot for Windows RT on Surface?

Or maybe CoPilot for Windows RG

Brits think AI in the workplace is all chat, no bot for now

Re: Off topic but...

> does anyone know of a superior site with instructions of how to tame win11 telemetry and successfully remove all the crap and bloat that comes with a new windows device?

Err...

You know what we're going to say to that. See icon.

Install a Linux distro (personally I love Debian, but Ubuntu and Arch are great for new users) and then install Steam. Then go to Settings -> Compatibility -> Enable SteamPlay for all titles.

All your old school (and new school) games are available there.

Just been happily playing the latest Stalker 2 on proton. Almost everything works flawlessly out of the box now. Windows is obsolete, there is no longer any reason to use it.

In the very, very rare case where I have found a Windows game on Steam that doesn't play on Linux in Proton, Steam have refunded it for me.

Both KDE and GNOME to offer official distros

Re: KDE FTW

It's in debian sid (the distribution) i.e. if I want it I can install it at a stroke, I don't have to compile from source. But my point to Liam was, KDE doesn't force me to have it, so you can't blame KDE for having too many browsers...

Re: KDE FTW

> > although i'm not sure what three Web browsers he is on about

> So you didn't try it, then?

I tried it - on MY systems, which are KDE-full (debian) but not "KDE-OS"

Falkon: Never heard of it and don't have it on my (debian) desktop. I guess it's part of the KDE OS that you are talking about (which I have not tried, I have no need to) but is obviously NOT part of KDE - it's just a "lightweight web browser written in Qt" according to Apt, and it has no dependencies from or to KDE.

Angelfish: Ok, it's a KDE app by the looks of it, but again it is not installed on my system (even though I have kde-full) so it's not part of the desktop environment, it's an "app" for it, maintained by KDE. I don't have to have it, because I use Debian, and not some read-only blob for my /usr

Konqueror is indeed part of KDE and used to be its default file browser before Dolphin appeared.. It has its occasional uses e.g. its "fish" protocol (file access over SSH)

I don't like the idea of "grumpy prima donnas" telling open source authors/maintainers to remove functionality from their software just because it is "already covered" by someone else's (shit in their opinion, naturally) software

> Don't ask "why would you want that?" Don't say "oh we don't support that." Don't tell people "don't do it that way." FIX IT.

Absolutely - but GNOME does this ALL THE TIME. And so does Apple, and Microsoft. The reason I love KDE is BECAUSE I have the choice to do things how I want, because it is a 'powerful' desktop environment with lots and lots of configurable options for me.

You like vertical titlebars eh? Right-click on your existing titlebar -> Configure Window Manager -> Window Decorations -> Theme.. There is at least one theme that I think does what you want: "NoMansSky"

KDE FTW

Article, there's an article?

It's kind of really just a "first post" though, right?

Personally I've been using KDE (on Debian Sid) for 20 years... I really can't fathom why anyone would prefer GNOME, but each to their own. Such is the beauty of FOSS...

KDE certainly went through a rough patch with version 4, where they had a stable, polished and powerful KDE3.5 and completely rehashed it, got rid of DCOP which was great, moved to something more compatible with Gnome, which sucked

I used Trinity for a while, while they fixed it, but fix it they did and I am very happy with the current iteration of Plasma Desktop

I'm one of those people who Liam moans about who thinks it's perfectly fine to have four different text editors and two kinds of version number (see, I did read Liam's post!) although i'm not sure what three Web browsers he is on about (unless he means Konqueror, Firefox and Chromium which is what I have on my menu, but is not a fair criticism since two of those are not part of KDE)

As a Debian user, I also see absolutely nothing wrong with offering ISO images for Stable, Testing, Unstable and Develop

Brits are scrolling away from X and aren't that interested in AI

In other fucking news

> Chin up tiger! You've still got the El Reg commentariat, and if there's one thing guaranteed to turn that frown upside-down, it's... ah, no, actually. You're fucked.

Indeed! :-D

Maybe Heyrick would like to read my favourite fucking doomscroll probable fucking russian fucking propaganda site:

https://londonlovesbusiness.com/world-news/

Interesting thing about that "news" site is that its articles go back to just before brexit, June 24th sitting on page 3981 of 4304 pages of "business "news""..

I stopped taking it seriously a long time ago, but like the former TV channel RT, it does give a perspective on what Vlad Putin and his GRU wants us in the UK to think. Twatter and other "fucking news" outlets do too of course, but with more 'noise' so you can't tell what's propaganda and what isn't, whereas it's much easier to tell on LLB (and RT) because it pretty much all is

Cloudy with a chance of GPU bills: AI's energy appetite has CIOs sweating

WTF is CIO?

I had to google it.

Apparently it means "IT Director"

Ransom gang claims attack on NHS Alder Hey Children's Hospital

Re: No mercy for vermin who attack healthcare

Tell that to the IDF..

By April, WHO had verified 906 attacks on healthcare in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, and Lebanon.[5] As of June 2024, according to WHO, Israel has attacked 464 health care facilities, killed 727 health care workers, injured 933 health care workers, and damaged or destroyed 113 ambulances [6]

Not to mention the number of children's hospitals blown up by Mad Vlad

Not trying to minimise the ransom scum here obviously, but just pointing out the much larger scale scummery coming from Israel and Russia that everyone seems to want to forget about these days

Tbh i'd guess this latest cyber scummery is probably linked to the above, i.e. either coming from Russia in revenge for the UK's support for Ukraine, or from Iran in revenge for the UK's support for Israel

EU buyers still shunning pure electric vehicles, prefer hybrids

Re: Electric cars don’t add much to load

Have you never heard of "Rush Hour" ? The evening one comes right before the peak electricity usage due to cooking dinner and heating houses. And the morning one comes right after a lot of showers and kettles too.

And as soon as someone makes chargers "talk to eachother", someone will say something very mean and nasty to them and cause them to stop working.

Google sues Pixel engineer who allegedly posted trade secrets online

Re: Photos are still on Twitter

>I can no longer read twitter without an account it seems

I never could read Twatter posts without an account, so I never bothered, until I discovered Nitter. Substitute x.xom for a Nitter instance such as xcancel.com

i.e. https://xcancel.com/_harshitroy/with_replies

Microsoft hits back at claims it slurps your Word, Excel files to train AI models

Re: Let's say that Microsoft is lying...

+> Fairly easy to show that it's leaving your PC

Is it?

Wouldn't it be using the same encrypted channel as all the other "telemetry" that it sends?

And with a Copilot+ PC, it won't even need to send the raw data, it will just send a low-rank adaptation matrix which lossily and noisily encodes everything you have ever typed or displayed on your screen. It is literally the difference between you and the average user, encoded as a LoRA. Everything they need for both training and surveillance, but without the pesky legal issues.

Investors just can't pull the plug despite datacenters facing AI power crunch

AI is asset heavy

Ok, it takes a lot of expensive energy, but that is nothing compared to the cost fungible value of land and equipment.

Yes, equipment depreciates value, but maybe the coke snorting gamblers-with-other-peoples-money are betting on China invading Taiwan next year, in which case the equipment will appreciate value..

They are probably also betting on repurposing the same equipment for mining whatever meme-coin comes next to serve as a currency in the fallout shelters after all our pound notes and dollar bills become worth less than sheets of bog roll..

First-ever UEFI bootkit for Linux in the works, experts say

Oh Noes!!

We're all Doomed! DOoOmeD!

Need to run for the hills, batten down the hatches, and install secure boot keys that only er, Microsoft, controls the private keys for.

Then we'll be totally secure!