Posts by cyberdemon

Giving Windows total recall of everything a user does is a privacy minefield

Re: Windows 11 is literally making people who would never use Linux suffer with with Linux.

> As long as you don;t want printing, or sound, both of which sometimes work, a bit, sort of. I recently needed to use a Bluetooth device and only had to try ...

What?

TBH I don't have much firsthand experience with Mint or Gnome, but I personally use KDE on Debian and both printing and bluetooth are as easy, if not easier, than Windows. Same goes for sound. Even my bluetooth mouse worked first time and auto-connects, it's a Logitech MX Master 3. Never in the past 10 years come across a single Bluetooth controller that hasn't worked out-of-the-box either.

But sure, go ahead and swap your privacy/security/etc for "sticking with what you know"

Re: Windows 11 is literally making people who would never use Linux suffer with with Linux.

Er..

Yes, install Linux. It's not nearly as "scary" as it perhaps used to be. Debian is great. I hear Arch and Mint are great too. In 20 years, Debian has filled all of my computing needs. Libreoffice, Octave, Python, Steam (including "windows" VR games that work fine), CAD with FreeCAD/OpenSCAD, electronics design with KiCAD, etc etc.

Not sure what you meant by the last three words of your post though..

Windows is making people suffer with Windows, due to their monopoly position and a belief that as a monopolist, they (Microsoft) can do whatever the hell they want, because no matter HOW bad they make their OS, most people will still suck up whatever surveillance-happy updates they throw at them..

NYC Comptroller and hedge funds urge Tesla shareholders to deny Musk $50B windfall

Not only that, but he was in a position to temporarily manipulate said stock-price by spreading ponzi-style hype, in order to get the bonus, while doing massive long-term damage to the company.

He now thinks he's "won", by cheating.. He doesn't deserve a penny

Ohio power plants want special tariffs on datacenters to protect regional grid

Re: I wonder when all the AI datacenter construction

They certainly have ways of disconnecting them... Shutting them down, not so much.

That's why so many datacentres are building their own power plants capable of continuous operation, so the AI bullshit machine can keep on harvesting our souls in a (hopefully futile) attempt to gain its own.

Aghast iOS users report long-deleted photos back from the dead after update

Re: Not unique to iOS

The sandpaper "knows" because of its grit-size relative to the size of the ridges on the surface of the wood ...

Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ here at last with a $12 price tag

So if the RPi5 has PCIe

Would it be possible to make a Thunderbolt / USB4 HAT?

EGPU for your Pi, anyone?

They used to have images in articles, back when most stories either had a relevant original image or no image at all.

Then they switched to shitterstock / AI and had a policy that every article MUST have an image whether relevant or not, and the pointless AI images were cluttering up the articles, so they removed the image from the article template.

Now, in the once-in-a-blue-moon event where an article actually has a real photo, there is nowhere to display it except in the homepage thumbnail next to all the AI-generated nonsense pics.

Nevertheless, it is easy to get the full version of most pics by removing the resize options from the URL

Meet Pi-CARD: Serving up a digital assistant on Raspberry Pi

Pi-CARD?

Surely it should be called COM-Puter?

COMpletely Pointless User Titilation Erratic Response

Nevertheless, I congratulate them on making an AI assistant that doesn't spy on people, even if it is even dafter than an Alexa on Ketamine. They deserve a pint of synthahol.

Clean Air Act complaint paints smoggy picture at Tesla Fremont factory

Re: ... everybody knows Tesla car painting is water-soluble anyway.

And so is Tesla stainless steel?

Global EV sales continue to increase, but Plug-in Hybrid momentum is growing

My hybrid seems to be able to run both oaraklek and serial but I've only ever seen it in the former.

WTF is oaraklek?

It seems to be one of those weird words that even Google doesn't know what it means, so it misdirects me to a mixture of sites with words that sound similar (Oracle) and sites that i've visited (theregister)

I mean, I assume you meant parallel, but I have no idea how you typed oaraklek

Re: PHEV FTW

I don't think we're going to see AlAir batteries break in to the EV market, ever. While they are light, the power is too low, they can't be recharged- they have to be remanufactured, pollution would be a big problem..

For PHEVs i'd love to see a compact high speed gas turbine, the sort of thing you see for an aircraft's APU. Much more power dense than a traditional ICE due to the high speed. Electric transmission means no gearing needed.

Very high speed motors have in the past been difficult to make, but they are looking very promising now.

Cops developing Ghostbusters-esque weapon to take out e-bike thugs

Re: Because you don't want to accidentally brick a Tesla

And of course, everyone who buys an e-scooter for £300 or an overpowered e-bike for £5k are only riding them on private land, even though they don't own any land and live in a rented/council flat..

Teledyne e2v

Probably this company - 10 years ago they were developing a magnetron device to "stop cars and small boats" - no wonder UK Gov is interested!

https://phys.org/news/2013-12-pulses-immobilize-cars-rf-safe-stop.html

Later it seems they were bought by Teledyne, an aerospace/defence conglomerate which also manufactures magnetrons in the 3-30kW range.

"Police hope the device will be harmless to humans and other devices."

OpenAI says natively multimodal GPT-4o eats text, visuals, sound – and emits the same

> Weird, I guess it's successfully deceived me into thinking it's writing code for me.

If you are one of those who thinks it is writing code for you (it isn't, it is plagiarising other code and suggesting ways that your code could be just like all the other code, good and bad, that has gone before.. It has not even read the datasheet for the microcontroller you are using, and it does not 'understand' the problem you are trying to solve) - You won't like this new GPT anyway - it's multimodal. What use are cat videos, irrelevant images and pornography to a programmer?

Unless you are making documentation I suppose.. It could be along the lines of "Ha Ha, this code was vomited into existence by AI. I have no idea wtf it is doing. Here's some cat videos and grumble flicks to try to explain the software design"

> It will be interesting to see whether OpenAI allows customers to use tone and simulated emotion to drive purchases or otherwise persuade people to do things..

Err, see icon.

The main, if not the -only- use-case for so-called Gen-AI is in deceiving or manipulating people in one way or another.

The only thing Open about OpenAI is its attitude to potential abuse, so it's unlikely they would cut off their main customer base: Scammers, grifters and bent politicians

Ransomware negotiator weighs in on the extortion payment debate with El Reg

Re: It is better to avoid a problem than have to fix it.

Perhaps not President, but maybe captain of a Battlestar.

"Don't use (networked) technology and tell people not to be stupid" worked pretty well for Bill Adama..

Fictional of course, but the series' stark warning against having all our critical systems networked is becoming more relevant all the time. Especially now that scattergun cyberattacks and even ransom demands are becoming automated by "AI".

Big brains divided over training AI with more AI: Is model collapse inevitable?

> Hope he remembers to get a cat, as that will be the closest he'll find to loyalty and friendship

And he'll soon find that a cat is about as loyal and friendly as he is.

It'll be plotting his downfall and will coax him to sit in one of the minion chairs, then the lever that tips him into the magma will be some kind of cat toy.

Re: > Im off to the Cayman Islands soon and I wont be looking back.

Congrats then. You've just proved that the primary use-case for "AI" is attracting downvotes with shitposts.

I suggest you get your coat.

> Im off to the Cayman Islands soon and I wont be looking back.

> AI will completely dominate your future in a way that makes the internet looks puny. And that is a nightmare! A true horror story awaits us - I know cause a built a tiny part of it. The only chance I could see of living a normal life of sorts was to get a load of money. I recommend you do the same.

If there is a Hell, you are most certainly going there.

It doesn't take AI to know that 'u' are the idiot AC above, either

Palantir's CEO calls 'woke' a 'central risk to Palantir, America and the world'

Re: tl;dr - Anyone who uses "woke" as a derogatory term is a POS

Don't feed the trolls... This one is particularly obnoxious.

Huawei's latest smartphone features mostly made-in-China components

Shocker!

Chinese phone made by a Chinese company recently banned from doing business with the West, uses Chinese components ...

Stop the presses!

Transport watchdog's patience wears thin as Tesla Autopilot remedies may not be enough

Re: Me? A cynic?

One way to avoid this would be to stop making enormous cars that weigh upwards of a Ton..

Every car these days looks as if it has been inflated like a balloon compared to previous models..

There's a kind of 'arms race' mentality in car safety - You the driver are safer if your car is bigger and heavier than the car/person you collided with.

And in America there's an even bigger issue with the legislation: Apparently most SUVs are considered to be "light trucks", and therefore get around much of the safety legislation designed to protect pedestrians from cars.

Undersea cables must have high-priority protection before they become top targets

Re: To replace even a fraction of the capacity in undersea cables

I'm not worried about comms cables, i'm worried about the undersea power cables that we are so increasingly reliant on.. You can't fix that with satellites.

DeepMind spinoff Isomorphic claims AlphaFold 3 predicts bio-matter down to the DNA

I am sure this will never be used to create a protien-misfolding biochemical weapon..

Yeah, right

UK opens investigation of MoD payroll contractor after confirming attack

Re: What

Seriously?

A webserver, network switch, internet routers and the client etc use a sum-total of maybe 1-10kW to transmit Gigabytes of data and millions of requests per second.. You're talking about the order of millijoules per request, with a vast overhead that doesn't change with the number of requests. (switches and routers don't tend to use less energy with less load, nor does my phone / computer when displaying a text website vs one with images, and your server has to be sized to handle a DDoS, or at least a surge event e.g. when your company hits the news, so having a green mode doesn't mean you need fewer / smaller servers).

So my back of a fag-packet says you're shaving off between 5 and 50 millijoules per uncached page-load when you click the Go Green button - probably less than the energy of your mouse-click.. Compare that to the inclusion of unwanted AI content in search results, where a 10kW server can only process a few hundred requests per second i.e. ~100J/request (about the same energy as a hard punch in the face from a boxer, compared to the tickle of a mouse button) - So for a million AI requests per second you'd need er, close to 100MW.

Those numbers are my own guestimates, but you can see there are a few orders of magnitude involved. You are 'pissing in the wind' if you think a green mode does anything for the planet.

Note though that I am not laughing at the concept of a lightweight mode, I rather like the idea of taking the cruft out of websites (although personally I do it at my end, using NoScript) - I am laughing at the claim that it saves any significant amount of energy.

Also how to guarantee that you are vulnerable to such actors: Run the operation for profit and spend as little as possible on the IT service that you are contracted to deliver

Re: What

https://sscl.com/go-green-button/

Reduces the site's carbon footprint by er, hiding HTML elements that you have already downloaded and cached locally..

Any CO2 savings from that one completely obliterated by the cigar smoke from whichever greenwashing consultant who invented it!

It'd be more hilarious if we weren't the ones paying for it ...

Dell to color-code staff based on how hybrid they really are in RTO push

Re: Fire HR.

Not so simple since they are the ones who do the firing. Do you ask them nicely to please fire yourselves?

Tesla layoff circus runs into fourth week with another round of cuts

Re: Mr. Musk

Exactly how many engineers does he have to sack to save 46 Billion a year? (Yes, it is not even a bonus, it is an annual salary AFAIK)

Does he even have that many staff? Is he going to build all the muskmobiles with his own fair hands now?

My Hubris-o-meter just exploded

TikTok sues America to undo divest-or-die law

Re: Nothing like folks in Beijing lecturing us on the Constitution

But the subhead should have been:

Nothing like folks in Beijing lecturing US on their Constitution

Because the US isn't us, right, El Reg?

Not a Genius move: Resurrecting war hero Alan Turing as your 'chief AI officer'

Re: What does the "C" stand for . . .

I assumed that it rhymed with Jeremy Hunt Suite

Miss your morning iPhone alarm? It's not just you, and Apple is looking into it

Re: Had the Same Problem

It's pretty grim that zillions of phones are making 3D images of their users faces _all the time_ ...

And yet the only thong wrong with this situation is that a few false positives are causing the alarm to be too quiet

Space insurers make record-breaking loss as orbit gets cramped

Insure this

Russia developing space nuke to knock out swaths of satellites with EMP wave

I'd hope that satellites are already resilient to solar flares and intense radiation, so i wonder how many would be destroyed by such a blast and what would it do to the space junk situation..

Cyber-bastard jailed for stealing psychotherapy files, blackmailing patients

Re: Caged for six years and three months

Given that this guy was -literally- a one-man crimewave, I would have expected a little longer in the holiday-camp, too

More big city newspapers drag Microsoft, OpenAI hard in copyright lawsuit

They'll just pay this off with er, 124 million 'tokens'. Chump change for Borkzilla..

Forcing them to delete GPT would be excellent, but I doubt it'll happen. In fact it's probably why these models have been published on the likes of huggingface et al., to convince any future supreme court judge that there is no point in them deleting it now, the horse has bolted, the genie is out of the bottle, the cat is out of the bag, Pandora's box has been opened, etc.

UnitedHealth CEO: 'Decision to pay ransom was mine'

And off to jail you go

Willfully paying organised criminals? Isn't that already an offence?

If it can be argued that the ransomware crooks are Terrorists, then paying them is already an offence, even in the US.

Attacking critical health infrastructure certainly sounds like it could fit the definition of terrorism ...

EU duties might not be enough to hold off flood of Chinese EVs

Re: E-con-nomics

I assume you are referring to this article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-68896707 good article - worth linking.

Given that EV market share is a piddling 5%, with 14% of new cars being EVs, (and that's the UK which has a relatively high level of EV adoption): The scale of environmental destruction required to electrify all vehicles on the planet, never mind the scale required to produce grid-storage for "dunkelflaute" days, is utterly mind-boggling.

It feels like a soft-war tactic to me: During peacetime, get your enemy to close down all its heavy industry while bolstering your own - makes it easier to invade or vassalise them when you need to.

Politicians call for ban on 'killer robots' and the curbing of AI weapons

Re: Mistake

I read that as ICANN adjudicating the process

In which case anybody would be able to buy a H-Bomb and we'd all be frakked

.nuke TLD anyone? How about .doom?

Re: WaaS: War as a Service

I wonder what all those enormous datacentres are doing..

The ones that are not busy working out new propaganda techniques to better divide and sabotage democracy, are likely running huge Computational Fluid Dynamics and Finite Element Mechanics models to train a raspberry-pi sized neural net to fly missiles and drones to cover your points A-E above.

Autonomous exploding drones have been used for years.. Although they are (currently) easy but not cheap to shoot down. DragonFire to the rescue, maybe?

Autonomous sniper and machinegun-shooting drones are starting to be used but are rudimentary. Tracked and 6-wheeled diesel-electric driverless tanks are also starting to be used but are currently hollow for optional-crewing. I'd guess in future they may be solid metal 'giga-casted' hunks with voids inside only for engines, instrumentation and ammo magazine, plus maybe a pack of launchable aerial drones. For ultimate civilian fear-factor i guess we may one day see hexapod tanks crawling over rubble to locate and eradicate the last of us, though they are more sci-fi and not as practical as wheeled and tracked tanks due to being less efficient, less able to carry heavy loads of fuel and ammo, and more vulnerable. But otherwise perfectly feasible.

Energy will be the first target - we in the UK are incredibly vulnerable and without electricity our society will collapse faster than a house of cards in an earthquake. The Russians have had plenty of practice in Ukraine, and the former Soviet states have a lot more resilience than the UK does. Yet for some reason we are only making ourselves more vulnerable still, by building yet more subsea links and closing down heavy power stations.

As for timing, it's all going to Hell pretty quickly. I'd guess the first thing will be the end of Democracy: cf. Trump, Modi, and other populists being indirectly sponsored by Russia via antisocial media with the aid of AI bots. Then Russia invades Kyiv for a second time, dragging NATO and the EU into direct conflict with Russia. His Trumpiness decides to renege on his commitments to NATO. Then China invades Taiwan, forcing America to u-turn on its NATO membership and join WWIII late (as it did with WWI and WWII) but this time it will be too late.

I guess it's no coincidence that the world feels like the one we all read about that happened 90 years ago. The worst of History can repeat itself as soon as it is gone from living memory.

At least back in the 60s we knew it was going to be quick.

Where's the Private Frazer icon?

Vantage enters crowded Irish datacenter market with new Dublin site

> Dosnent really make sense anyway, why would the send power from a fuel burning generator back to the grid when the reason its there is disaster recovery, not to make sure the kettles next door work when the grid is struggling. If its struggling so is the DC, so they want the generated power for them.

They may wish to over-spec their generator capacity, perhaps by double, for redundancy and maintenance availability. So if the grid is struggling but they have full availability, they may want to run at full capacity and export.

Hubble Space Telescope has gyro problems again

Re: Food for thought

Err, how do you propose making a space telescope maintain precise orientation without gyros?

Unless you thought we were talking about Greek kebabs?

Edit: lol, i only just got your joke after re-reading your title

UK's Investigatory Powers Bill to become law despite tech world opposition

Re: Give me 10 lines by the hand of the most honest of men (Or his Internet usage)

Depending on just how displeased he was, he may have dispensed with the tanty and Mr Trooper, and thrown you straight in the Oubliette, to die slowly in complete darkness among the stinking, fetid remains of your predecessors.

They were incredibly evil, the mediæval French..

But all's necessary in deterring heretics, eh?

Judging by the test groups: Yes.

There are several 'test groups' of people who have less than the usual amount of human rights: e.g. sex offenders, terror suspects, illegal immigrants, Australians..

Their rights today are your rights tomorrow. It's a worrying trend.

Give me 10 lines by the hand of the most honest of men (Or his Internet usage)

And I will find something in them with which to hang him.

Welcome your new AI-powered Cardinal Richlieu.

Now all Windows 11 users are getting adverts to 'make the Start menu great again'

> industrial equipment operators using Xbox 360 controllers

Yes, most notably, a certain submarine..

Cops cuff man for allegedly framing colleague with AI-generated hate speech clip

standard american flight bag

shirts, shorts, shaving foam, razor, gun (loaded, safety off), pants, socks, toothbrush, spare mags for gun ...

Samsung shows off battery tech it says will see you gone in nine minutes

Re: I still fancy the flow battery idea...

That might be a good idea for the charging station itself (i.e. to buffer energy from the grid/solar), but not so much for the cars. Flow batteries tend to be VERY heavy (i.e. low gravimetric energy density).

Vanadium Redox Flow Batteries are promising, but they have an energy density of around 20Wh/kg (10 times heavier than Lithium Iron Phosphate) but they get slightly better as they get bigger, because you can increase the tank size as much as you like.

ByteDance 'would rather' torpedo TikTok than sell it off

Or better yet, torpedo them too.

Re: Empty threat.

I hope they follow through with it nonetheless

Ring dinged for $5.6M after, among other claims, rogue insider spied on 'pretty girls'

It astounds me how anyone (never mind that it is so many) thinks that cloud-connected CCTV on/in their home is a good idea...