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* Posts by cyberdemon

3496 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2010

Don't open that 'copyright infringement' email attachment – it's an infostealer

cyberdemon Silver badge

Re: FFS

Quite easily spoofed? Trivially, because if the extension is .EXE then Windows happily reads the icon from the .EXE file itself..

But that would be fine, so long as it was obvious that the file is an executable presenting with an "Adobe Acrobat" icon, rather than a PDF file.

I wonder if packaging in a ZIP also gets around the "This file was downloaded from the internet, are you sure that you want to open / run it" flag (as well as bypassing any email antivirus filters, as they can't see inside the encrypted zip, even when the trivial password is provided in the email)

cyberdemon Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: FFS

I thought for a second that even a complete numbskull would notice a .EXE and a .DLL in their .ZIP, and think it just a little bit phishy, but then I remembered that WINDOWS HIDES FILE EXTENSIONS BY DEFAULT.

Stop doing that, borkzilla, and you would save a few numbskulls paying customers..

Intel sued over Raptor Lake voltage instability

cyberdemon Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: First world problems

Another reason why filesystem-based redundancy such as that from btrfs, combined with LVM, is catching on.

Euro execs extend net zero timescales amid energy cost and supply crunch

cyberdemon Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: The real inconvenient truth

Agreed. But what I predict is going to happen is something along the lines of the plots of Moonraker / Fallout.

Certain very-rich people (i.e. definitely Zuck, but likely also Musk, Bezos, the usual suspects) have already spent Billions on building their own personal nuclear bunkers (presumably pre-filled with their own personal staff / perfect human seedbanks). These same people are in a position to manipulate world politics towards WWIII, in which all 7 billion of us bar the chosen few will perish. Then they and/or their offspring will emerge a few years later, on their perfect tropical island, which may or may not be long-dead and covered in radioactive ash (no idea how they might plan to deal with that to be fair - it could end up much more Fallout than Moonraker)

cyberdemon Silver badge
Devil

Sponsored by Aggreko

That Net Zero stuff is looking rather expensive and unreliable eh.

Who'd like to buy a big diesel genset in a box then?

UK orders Chinese biz to sell majority stake in Scottish chipmaker

cyberdemon Silver badge

Whack a mole

The only real problem I have with China owning FTDI is what horrors they could sneak into their proprietary Windows drivers, which are automatically downloaded and installed by Windows as soon as a device is plugged in!

But rather than cracking down on ownership of hardware companies, a better strategy would be to tell Borkzilla to stop automatically installing drivers, especially when generic drivers exist which could be shipped with their shitty OS

Schneider Electric ransomware crew demands $125k paid in baguettes

cyberdemon Silver badge
Coat

Why did the ransomware scum demand payment in French Bread?

Because hate baguettes hate ...

Former Facebook lobbyist joins UK comms regulator as non-exec director

cyberdemon Silver badge
Devil

According to the article, he was at Facebook long before Nick Clegg was, and was also a Lib Dem MP before Nick Clegg was. (based on his wikipedia page)

So he could even have been the one who tempted Sir Cleggy to the dark side..

Intel losses hit $16.6B in Q3 and Wall Street is … loving it?

cyberdemon Silver badge
Go

Re: chipzilla no more

Chipsaurus?

Chiplodocus?

Microsoft tries out wooden bit barns to cut construction emissions

cyberdemon Silver badge
Flame

Re: Net zero

MS bitbarns power usage equates to how many Drax power stations?

How many "wooden bitbarns" per minute would they burn?

cyberdemon Silver badge
Flame

Re: Fire Resistance

Wooden datacentres have been tried before...

UK gov report to propose special zones for datacenters, 'AI visas'

cyberdemon Silver badge

> How many doctors have been struck off for an ill-judged tweet, and what did they say?

Here's one from a casual google: https://www.bmj.com/content/386/bmj.q2046 - Apparently they tweeted something agreeing with conspiracy theories about the covid vaccine, and it was judged that this was an abuse of their position of trust as a doctor.

I'd be surprised if this was the only such case, but we don't get to see the complete list in order to know. The only complete analysis I can find is from 2014 data: https://www.gmc-uk.org/-/media/documents/analysis-of-cases-resulting-in-doctors-being-suspended-or-erased-from-the-medical-register--63534317.pdf

Of the 119 cases in 2014, 19 were for "clinical issues", 24 were for "inappropriate relations" - 19 of which with a patient, 5 of which with a colleague. 48 were for "dishonesty", under half of which (21) was "in order to obtain employment" - the majority was "in their role as a doctor"

4 were for "breaching professional standards" of which 1 was "watching porn in the office". 16 were for their "personal life" i.e. some sort of crime outside of work. These last two categories are the ones I would expect an ill-judged tweet to fall into.

cyberdemon Silver badge
Devil

> but that is simply because employers are not prepared to pay fair money for the skill.

Sorry but while there apparently is a "Magic Money Tree", there is definitely NOT a "Magic Doctor Tree". Paying more money does NOT mean more doctors/teachers/engineers suddenly appear. All that "more money" does, is shuffle them around. Generally towards the south.

Ask a doctor / builder / engineer "Are you short of work?" The answer will be a resounding NO. Threfore the problem is NOT "People coming over here taking our jobs"

If we wanted more home-grown professionals, we should be subsidising university courses.

We could also do well by not "striking off" people for the smallest mistakes. If it takes a school-leaver 8 years to finish medical school, only to be struck off for an ill-judged tweet (for example) then that is a massive waste. Again I'd rather be treated by a doctor who had previously been struck off than no doctor at all..

cyberdemon Silver badge

Madness

See also: Britishvolt, UK Spaceports, Covid PPE, etc etc. Now it's AI

Name of the game seems to be to get your mate to set up a company in a hype-rich area, then declare massive public spending to make the UK a "world leader" in said area. Dish out a load of public money to your mate, then receive backhanders and wait for a cushy non-exec director job in your retirement. Chicken Dinner

It's truly bizarre the level of unabashed greed and corruption both main parties can get away with. I could understand the self-interested reasons for the previous Tory government backing Brexit and investing in Crypto (short the pound, go long on bitcoin, wreck the economy, profit) but all Labour seen to have done so far is do everything the Tories wanted to do, all the way to Trussonomics (albeit with spending funded more through Tax than Borrowing)

It's as if every party has shifted one step closer to the right. Labour are the new Tories, the Tories are the new Nigel Farage Party, and the Nigel Farage party is the new BNP. So after 14+ years, nothing has changed, we've still got a Tory government.

BTW, another of Kier's Thatcherite policies is keeping (and expanding) the Freeport project (interesting reading in the back of every Private Eye..). I mentioned in another thread that Ratcliffe power station is set to become a Freeport Tax Site. No doubt it'll also be a "special AI zone", too!

cyberdemon Silver badge
Flame

The utterly daft thing is that we are critically short of trained professionals in professions that require proper training, such as medicine, teaching, electrical engineering, etc. And there are lots of very well trained and educated people desperate to work here, who would work extremely hard for not very much because their home just got bombed by Israel or Russia. The ones on the boats are not the peniless uneducated masses some people think they are, but the few wealthy and educated enough to escape their situation at all.. A lot of them COULD work, but I certainly wouldn't pick any who cite AI as their qualification..

But all those types we shut out and bar from working, paying tax and contributing to the economy, while we force them to live in expensive prisons/"hotels" that We the taxpayer pay for.. Plus we already kicked out the ones from Europe that used to work here too (and who were doing a great job).. Why? Because we are greedy and prefer a shortage economy that drives inflation?

Whereas AI graduates, we have far too many of those already. Seems to be the only thing our universities can produce are people who cheat on their coursework. Congratulations you are now an AI graduate...

What would you prefer, a community nurse who's come on a boat from Lebanon, or no community nurse at all, cos we can't find or train any

Whereas if the question is about an AI expert, wherever they've come from, the obvious answer is "None at all, please!"

cyberdemon Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Data Centre Locations

No, let AI use Solar Power and launch it all into the Sun

US Army should ditch tanks for AI drones, says Eric Schmidt

cyberdemon Silver badge
Terminator

Next gen tanks will be unmanned

That is all.

Much easier to armour something if it doesn't need to contain wet squishy things that need to eat, breathe and shit

Tanks will be replaced by solid-cast robot tanks, with the same horrifying implications as autonomous aerial killer drones.

Datacenter developer says power issues holding up new builds

cyberdemon Silver badge

Re: The problem's not power supply, it's the datacentres

It will have a pre-existing substation going from 25kV at ridiculous Amps at each of the turbogenerators, to 400kV for grid transmission. Maybe a few different voltages in between.

I think that would be retained because grid transformers are bloody expensive and getting harder to acquire. There's no reason it can't run in reverse i.e. taking power off the 400kV grid and outputting 25kV, all that's needed are a few more transformers to take the 25kV down to 400V for datacentre operations and anything else on the site.

Fault current etc is all handled by the switchgear and protection relays found at any substation, regardless of which 'end' it is at. Probably they would do some more upgrades of the substation to connect more local distribution loads, as you point out 2GW is more than even a datacentre the size of the whole site could use, i'd have thought

cyberdemon Silver badge
Devil

Re: The problem's not power supply, it's the datacentres

Yep, and very few "british jobs" created by a datacentre anyway, per £millions investment. Apart from a few security guards and network bods it's all profit for the owners.

At least they have to pay tax on that profit... right?

... Wrong? I hear that the (enormous) site of the former Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station is to be made a "Tax Site" as part of the East Midlands Freeport.

The site obviously has a _massive_ pre-existing Grid connection, and I can see the main use of the site being for datacentres.. I also can't see the use of an inland "freeport" for much other than allowing shady operators to use our 'leccy and our land to make massive profits without paying a penny in tax, and probably also outside of pesky regulations like GDPR etc.

Linus Torvalds: 90% of AI marketing is hype

cyberdemon Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Only 90% ?

OK, sounds plausible. But Why are you posting a "shortened" URL?

I can only imagine it either points to something weird, or you are trying to find the IP addresses of reg commentards. Otherwise surely you would have just posted the straight URL.

cyberdemon Silver badge

Re: Only 90% ?

Linus has gone soft. He'd previously have said what he really thought i.e. 100%, and told the AI companies moaning at his statement (especially nvidia) to go and fuck a duck, but maintaining the world's most popular OS kernel has probably become a lot more expensive in the last decade or two, so he has had to tone down the vitriol a tad to avoid rubbing any bigwigs up the wrong way.. :(

Beijing claims it's found 'underwater lighthouses' that its foes use for espionage

cyberdemon Silver badge
Coat

Re: The fools

Or perhaps they are "sea-weather balloons"

Google reportedly developing an AI agent that can control your browser

cyberdemon Silver badge
Big Brother

Hmm, letting the bugger trundle off and do research might be useful,

Not in an age where you can be made an un-person for "researching" certain topics..

"It wasn't me who clicked on the [insert banned thing here], it was the AI"...

GenAI's dirty secret: It's set to create a mountainous increase in e-waste

cyberdemon Silver badge
Devil

Re: GenAI

I thought [nearly] all LLMs were Generative AI ...

Or did you think "Gen AI" meant "Artificial General Intelligence" aka AGI? That's not a real thing.

UK’s new Minister for Science and Technology comes to US touting Britain's AI benefits

cyberdemon Silver badge
Devil

Re: Done some things, not done others

Don't worry. When Kier Starmer says "AI Benefits", he doesn't mean "AI jobs and datacentres in the UK". He means he'll give any US "AI company" access to the private data of every UK citizen, starting with the NHS and Palantir.

We don't need much energy to export all our data across the atlantic over a few ultrawideband fibre optic cables.

Polish radio station ditches DJs, journalists for AI-generated college kids

cyberdemon Silver badge
Devil

Re: No, but maybe

And doesn't in fact "store" any tracks, but generates completely "new" ones on the fly from all the world's art that it has stolen er, "learned from", and thus avoids paying a penny of royalties to anyone, while it learns your habits and preferences and flogs them to data brokers the world over.

Viable fusion power in a decade? Tokamak Energy dares to dream

cyberdemon Silver badge
WTF?

Re: He meant...

er, It can't and it doesn't.

while we no longer have coal, we are still massively dependent on gas and somewhat-younger dead trees. I have not seen a single day where we have "not fired up any gas plants" - never mind a string of such days in a row.

Don't forget we also have a lot of interconnectors, bringing coal/gas/nuclear power from Europe, although currently three out of four links from France are down, plus one from Norway. I'm sure they are spurious faults, not Russian sabotage.

Go to gridwatch.co.uk, look at the "this year / last year (Day averages)" graph, and find me a day where we have not used gas or biomass.

cyberdemon Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: He meant...

Solar and Wind can never compete with Oil and Gas, because it's neither constant nor dispatchable. Tidal is only marginally more feasible than Fusion. "Long Duration Energy Storage" without an existing mountaintop lake is also about as feasible as Fusion. So if anything, those renewables support the oil and gas industry, by ensuring that we all need gas peaker plants and backup diesel generators. So i'm not surprised to see Big Oil pushing money their way.

I would be surprised to see Big Oil investing in nuclear fission though.

cyberdemon Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: He meant...

Fueled by a Deuterium-Fairydust reaction..

I find it quite depressing actually when I see major investors in Fusion: Shell, Exxon, BP, Total..

They aren't daft, they know full well that Fusion has a snowball's chance in Hell of ever being feasible/scalable/profitable, never mind threatening the oil industry, but they know that it pulls public support and engineering resources away from Fission, which really does pose a threat to their business.

Intern allegedly messed with ByteDance's LLM training cluster

cyberdemon Silver badge
Terminator

"ByteDance has terminated an intern "

Sounds like they've lost more than their internship..

cyberdemon Silver badge
Pint

You win the Internet today :D

Gary Marcus proposes generative AI boycott to push for regulation, tame Silicon Valley

cyberdemon Silver badge
Pint

In other news (waiting for it to be covered by the Reg)

TikTok supposedly sacked an intern for "sabotaging" their AI training. I am curious as to what was done, how it was done, and whether it can be done more widely, rather than just by one heroic intern.. :D

Tesla, Intel, deny they're the foreign company China just accused of making maps that threaten national security

cyberdemon Silver badge
Mushroom

Yes, it has often puzzled me as to why China are quite so paranoid about accurate mapping to the extent that it is almost completely banned

It's as if they are expecting a war (but presumably not a full on nuclear war with the USA/NATO, since the cartographic scrambling doesn't protect against nukes) or at least serious civil unrest in the not so distant future, and they don't want incoming missiles/drones to hit their targets

Richard Branson to take balloon ride to edge of space

cyberdemon Silver badge
Flame

Well, presumably had the Hindenburg been filled with an inert gas, then any fire in the fabric would have been swiftly extinguished by the leaking gas, so yes I think it probably did make a difference ...

Intel hits back at China's accusations it bakes in NSA backdoors

cyberdemon Silver badge
Coat

Re: I don't think Intel is [baking?] backdoors in[to] its products

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/is-the-intel-management-engine-a-backdoor/

Intel says it's not a backdoor. Huawei to doubt them?

Amazon makes $500M bet on itty-bitty nuclear reactors to fuel cloud empire

cyberdemon Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: It’s just a smokescreen for their real plans

Same-hour delivery on Prime Air Ballistic!

Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

cyberdemon Silver badge
Devil

"irreparable harm"

So, let's sue the school and plaster our cheating little scrote all over the national and international news! What's the harm in that eh

Oh, what a feeling: Toyota building robots that get better with practice

cyberdemon Silver badge
Terminator

As a reminder, this is Atlas

I think Will Smith would soil his underpants if he saw that one coming for him

Did they deliberately make that clip as creepy as possible, with the contorted movements (or did it 'learn' those by itself) and "rotate head before rotating body, while keeping gaze fixed dead on target"

Critical default credential in Kubernetes Image Builder allows SSH root access

cyberdemon Silver badge
Devil

Re: I don't get it...

I don't get how something as lazy and wasteful as Kubernetes could ever be exploited either..

As I understand it, one has simply to mash a few buttons, and hey presto, a new VM with their software deployed to it. Who cares what black magic goes on while the watt-hour meter spins, someone will have made sure that it's all pukka doodle doo, right? (Sorry where are my pills)

To save on the button mashing, lets have a new VM every time someone pushes a commit! Wheee! Look at that watthourmeter spin!

'Newport would look like Dubai' if guy could dumpster dive for lost Bitcoin drive

cyberdemon Silver badge

Yes, but if you're going to throw it out, you at least take a sledgehammer to it first, right?

Or the less violent and more arty farty approach: Get out your Torx screwdrivers and disassemble it. The platters make nice wind chimes / pigeon deterrents for fruit trees

cyberdemon Silver badge
Devil

Re: How about a compromise...

Rofl.

cyberdemon Silver badge
Pint

Re: B especially

Even if by some miracle, someone finds a hard drive with the matching serial number, platters all rusted and dripping with bin-juice, no doubt there'll be a queue of "data recovery specialists" willing to take the job (hourly rate, paid in advance, of course)

(And here's hoping someone faked the serial number and filled an old hard drive with Rick Astley on loop)

cyberdemon Silver badge
Happy

Ha-Ha

We need a Nelson Muntz icon. Or at least a Popcorn icon.

The council should send him a bill for all their time that he's wasted to date, along with a court order not to bother them again about the matter or else be banned from dealing in crypto assets, as he clearly has an unhealthy obsession with that lost and almost certainly destroyed hard drive.

Keir Starmer tells regulators to chill as Microsoft exec takes wheel of advisory council

cyberdemon Silver badge

Re: We will rip out the bureaucracy

Isn't that the brief of the Department of Administrative Affairs?

We'll get rid of all this excessive bureaucracy, by forming a new government department, tasked with finding all the cruft in all the other departments and er, weeding it out, with a broken toothpick

UK ponders USB-C as common charging standard

cyberdemon Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: but since most of this forum is shockingly authoritarian,

Standardisation is not authoritarian you nitwit.. Nobody is coming to bash down your door and confiscate nonstandard cables/connectors. Nobody is going to stop you selling SCART cables to people who still want them either. Just because we have a standard width for a car doesn't mean you can't drive a classic cadillac around. Just don't expect to find many parking bays big enough.

Similarly nobody is telling anyone that they can't have a wider than standard door frame (or a narrower one) just that they can be sure that a standard sofa will squeeze through a standard door.

But then you are the sort of troll who spouts nonsense FUD like "the EU wants to regulate the size of your banana" etc.

cyberdemon Silver badge
Trollface

Re: If that's how good you are at numbers, no wonder you thought Brexit was a good idea.

Don't feed the trolls. "Justthefacts" is exactly what is missing from its posts. Russian bot if I ever saw one.

cyberdemon Silver badge
Devil

Re: Yes we should, but…

Micro-USB should never have existed and needs to die.

Mini-USB on the other hand, I wish could still be used for low-power, low/no-speed, low-cost devices, because it is that much simpler and more robust than micro-USB.

Norway datacenter dumps diesel diet, goes veggie with biofuel backup

cyberdemon Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Can someone please explain

Go forth and multiply.

Famine is not a thing to be dismissive of. Famine leads to war.

Humans won't be doing much procreation in a radioactive wasteland in the aftermath of WWIII.. The global economy, for all of its faults, is the only thing keeping humanity from blowing itself to radioactive dust. If it collapses, we're all toast

cyberdemon Silver badge
Devil

Re: burning 1,000 liters of HVO will release 195 kg of carbon dioxide,

I suspect that the fertiliser, diesel for tractors, and other processing costs such as hydrogenation release 195kg co2 per 1000l, so burning it still releases 3.6 tons, but there is an assumption/hope/wish that it might one day grow back so that part is crossed out.

Also, this cynical bore wouldn't be at all surprised if someone was mixing the biodiesel with old fashioned dino juice and claiming double carbon credits...

cyberdemon Silver badge
Meh

Can someone please explain

Why killing stuff wot is alive today and burning it to produce heat and co2 is so much better than burning stuff wot died millions of years ago to produce heat and (slightly less if anything) co2?

I realise biodiesel is better than wood pellets from the Amazon, but ultimately you're still burning food, during a global food shortage.