Posts by cyberdemon

Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

> This is why I have to dispute your numbers. ;)

I owe you a pint for that!

Yes, I was being generous :P

"At least it's better than TikTok" only goes so far. It is doing its best to be more and more like TikTok.

Re: Good luck

> YouTube's pricing is better than Netflix's and has actually useful content.

YouTube is 1 part useful to 9 parts dross, bilge and bile. It's really not worth paying for IMO.

Some of its videos are "useful" but i'd much rather read an instructional webpage than watch some knobhead witter on about how wonderful he is and trying to plug some shit product he's been paid to promote (in addition to the overt ads) instead of actually teaching me anything about the subject i'm interested in

Then you have the bilge and bilge from the likes of GBN, TalkTV and even worse nutters

And frankly, I refuse to use anybody's recommendation algorithm. They should be paying ME for that.

Just accept donations as a voluntary adblocker sub

Personally, I would happily pay the Reg whatever money they are losing out from me blocking their adverts. More if i'm feeling generous after reading a good BOFH (or even better, SFTW)

But that would have to be voluntary, not a penalty for using an adblocker. If you start doing a youtube and start blocking adblockers, or if you put up a paywall, then i'm offski.

NHS in Wales bets big on Microsoft with deal worth nearly half a billion

Re: How does anyone not see this as being an obscene amount of money?

There was a Panorama last night about the latest Alzheimer's drugs. They have had a very successful trial and are starting the licensing process. Around 200,000 in the UK would be eligible, but the drug currently costs 20k per patient per year, which is a bit steep but a third of the cost of a care home. To put the drug on the NHS would be 4 Billion/year if they couldn't negotiate a better price, and according to NICE it's not affordable.

But spending 0.5 Billion on an IT system to slurp up medical data for a mere 5% of the UK population (Wales has 3 million out of 70 million people in the UK) is value for money, apparently.

Infosys subsidiary named as source of Bank of America data leak

Re: Dependency

> Oh wait...

Err.. Yeah.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/13/infosys_uk_government_contracts/

Couldn't make it up... Crapita, Fujitsu, Infosys.. What next? Give the IT contracts to Randox?

It seems the only qualification needed to win UK government contracts is connection. It's not what you know it's who you know. How many more snouts in the trough? :(

FCC gets tough: Telcos must now tell you when your personal info is stolen

Retrospective?

Do they have to disclose incidents that have already occurred? I guess not?

Neural networks are reportedly helping criminals create cheap virtual fake IDs online

An apt image for the article

https://regmedia.co.uk/2023/10/16/shutterstock_pompeii_and_vesuvius.jpg

The world does currently have a Pompeiian feel to it.. Or more precisely, like the antique land that Shelley imagined. With various Tech Bros vying for the role of Ozymandias.

Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.

'Crash test dummy' smashed VIP demo by offering a helping hand

Re: One of a kind prototypes

No it just means that third respin of the prototype that the engineers had been pushing back on the demo for, finally gets the go ahead!

Also conveniently avoiding what might otherwise have been an underwhelming demo..

CableMod recalls angled GPU power adapters to prevent fiery surprises

Re: 12VHPR is a shit standard

There are a few results for 48VHPWR and it does seem as if it was a thing since at least 2021. Maybe it exists in China, but for whatever reason has not been widely adopted.

This page appears to suggest it may be part of the PCIE5 standard

See https://www.fcpowerup.com/3090ti-pcie-5-0-16pin-48v/

third and fourth images down

Re: 12V is rather unsuitable for 500 odd Watts anyway

Perhaps, but the price of the new standard of PSU would eventually come down, since they no longer have to do the rather difficult job of delivering stable, ripple-free power at 12V 80 odd Amps, without any sense wires etc.

There is so much power electronics already on modern motherboards and GPUs, that the responsibility for power conditioning has already shifted away from the PSU. Power for SSDs etc could come from the motherboard, after all they don't draw much more than a USB port. We could dispense with most of the wires on an ATX connector and have a single 48V rail for GPU and CPUs. We could then move to DC supply for IT, and datacentre servers might not need PSU boxes at all, except for a bit of filtering.

ATX is a dinosaur that dates back to 80s IBM boxen..

Re: 12V is rather unsuitable for 500 odd Watts anyway

Bigger? Not necessarily. The current at the (1.7V, 100s of Amps) output is the same, so the biggest parts don't change. The transistors and input capacitors need to be rated for a higher voltage, but they would be not necessarily be bigger. The input side including connectors and wiring can be smaller, due to the lower current. The size of a SMPS usually goes with its power handling, not voltage, not until you get to high voltages >100V at least, where arcing and creepage become a risk.

12V is rather unsuitable for 500 odd Watts anyway

The onboard switching regulators could just as easily be made to handle 24V or even 48V input, for much less heating of the connectors. But makers of ATX power supplies would be very upset indeed, i suppose

Amazon overcharges shoppers with Buy Box algorithm, fresh lawsuit claims

> "inneresting way to protect makers of shoddy merch.

Don't know if you are in the UK or across the pond, but here, the retailer is responsible for the quality of the goods. So it is themselves who they are protecting, not the manufacturers.

Billions lost to fraud and error during UK's pandemic spending spree

Polarisation of politics means that if two experts disagree, it is impossible to consider that they might both be truthful.

Re: Typical Government Program

Government can have highly successful and efficient large scale programmes. See: NASA, CERN, CEGB

Private companies can have efficient and successful programmes too, though I fail to see how they can serve anything but self-interest.

The real problem comes when government does business with private companies and lets them influence its decision making.

Re: The REAL CRIME

I remain skeptical of both sides of the anti vax debate tbh.

The virus had some clear autoimmune effects that may or may not have been engineered. The same antibodies produced in reaction to the vaccine instead of the virus may have had the same effect, worse in people who had bad inflammatory reactions to covid in the first place.

That does NOT mean that any vaccine was ever deliberately harmful.

The virus, on the other hand, has a lot of respectable people (including the i newspaper for example) questioning its origins and suggesting it may have been created deliberately.

But all the 5G microchips nonsense i personally believe was counter-propaganda designed to further discredit and demonise anybody wearing a tinfoil hat suspicious of the government. It may not have started as such, it could have come from 4chan. But big companies like facebook control what goes er, viral.

Re: Blame the Post Office workers!

What, you mean those bastards who are trousering 8 million pounds per day! The scum

Er, that's not a nice way to talk about messrs Hilton, Britannia, Travelodge et al is it m'lud?

Re: Oops, we stole it

> How much was the test and trace contract? And how well did it work?

About 22 Billion wasn't it? Of which about 1 billion went to Randox. More billions to other dodgy companies that barely existed pre-pandemic (eyes passim)

Work? It collected a lot of data about us all.. Did it do anything to stop the pandemic though?

Re: Oops, we stole it

They changed the law to suit themselves and their cronies, not caring that it suited lots of (other) criminals too.

We plebs on the other hand, were robbed.

Re: Oops, we stole it

Who is the tiger and who is the zoo keeper in your analogy?

I wouldn't class criminal gangs who set up large scale identity frauds as 'innocent wild animals'. Especially not if any of them had any connection whatsoever to the government. Nor could I class the directors of corrupt companies as innocent animals, and some of them definitely DID have government contacts.

Nor would I class the government / police / HMRC as negligent zookeepers who absent-mindedly left the door of the tiger enclosure open.

There was deliberate profiteering at the very top here. The zoo keeper shot and robbed the patrons and blamed the tiger

Re: Oops, we stole it

It wasn't just PPE and other urgent covid related things though, it was all kinds of stuff going through the VIP lane. Multimillion pound IT contracts. Services for prison and probation. Schools contracts.

To hell with all of this anti-corruption malarkey. That's why we left the EU, right?

I've no love for Starmer and his neo-Blairites either, by the way. He just parrots anything the tories say

And if you ARE the authorities? Is it fraud then?

Re: Oops, we stole it

And to the downvoters: Hanlon's razor breaks when incompetence serves malice.

Who benefited from this? Dodgy company owners, shareholders, directors. Principally tory voters. Not workers. (They did benefit from correctly-administered payments not included in this figure.)

The problem wasn't just that the system was broken, it was that the operators of the system knew it was broken and didn't care. They told their mates that the system was broken and that they could fraudulently claim free money from the magic money tree and they would get away with it. And they largely did.

Oops, we stole it

Almost one HS2 worth of dosh has gone missing under the tory regime, and now we'll leave it to Labour to give you the next austerity budget!

Ford pulls the plug on EV strategy as losses pile up

Which operating conditions favour ice over electric motors

Preserving fish? Making cocktails? Skating?

Re: Series Hybrid

Yes I saw that, was interested until I saw that it had a tiny battery and no plug

Re: Trailer brakes

Not a terrible idea! Could be made self-contained with a force sensor at the trailer hitch, and a simple control loop trying to set the force to zero

Series Hybrid

Replace a small chunk of battery or 'trunk' space with a small* 100kW high speed gas turbine, and leave the electric motor and powertrain the same as the EV model

* gas turbines, the faster they spin, the higher the power density can be. Electric generators need no gearing, any frequency can be rectified to DC and switched to the correct voltage for the battery

Parallel hybrids where the ICE and motor share the same shaft are underpowered as you say. But series hybrids have the power and torque if an EV with the range of an ICE. They are heavy and expensive though, but a pickup doesn't care about that

US regulators crack down on AI playing doctor in healthcare

Crackdown on AI being used to determine eligibility??

Surely it's the ones that make bullshit diagnoses that we should be worried about?

Don't insurance companies routinely employ bullshit generators (be they AI, coin toss, tarot, divination, real human psychopath, or otherwise) to determine whether or not they will pay out?

You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse

Re: Size isn't everything

He meant partitioning such there is a large area of unallocated space, i.e. the filesystem does not use the whole device. The device will only read blocks from the defined filesystem

Mitchell Baker logs off for good as CEO of Firefox maker Mozilla

Somebody call the moderatrix, i'm choking on my coffee

Europe's deepest mine to become Europe's deepest battery

Re: Ok, ok!

The Reg used to be better than the other sites. I've been here quite a long time now.

One thing that still sets it apart though is its excellent forum, where one can get called a Boring Prat by some Anonymous Coward

https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=Enshittification

Re: Ok, ok!

Do you have a source for the 2MWh figure or have you simply changed the unit?

As it happens, I reckon it IS about 2MWh based on the weight and drop, but I haven't found a source for that.

It was an error, but it was not really your error. Your source The Herald also says "2 Megawatts of Storage", as do other news outlets, so I assume it must have been in the press release.

The complaints here are just a general lament at the media's misuse/conflation of scientific terms, especially power vs energy. It's not just the Reg, it's everyone. But the Reg used to be better.

Re: MW of storage?!

Sorry too late to edit. Not 3 times its mass, 1.5% of its mass TNT.

Not so bad, but still a big bang if you dropped it :)

Re: MW of storage?!

Wish I could give you more than one upvote.

Apparently, this thing has "1000s of tonnes" of mass according to their webpage. (having been inside a mere 150 tonne crane, I have to say 'yeah, right', but assuming their marketing droids have any decency then it is at least 1000 tonnes.) m g h says that 1 kg m = 9.81 Joules. So 1000 tonnes is 9810 kJ/m and so at 1444m you have 14 GJ = 4 MWh per 1000 tonnes. Probably more like 2MWh after the efficiency of the gearbox and motor

14 GJ = About the same as 3 tonnes of TNT apparently. So your lump of mass is going to turn into 3 times its weight in TNT if you drop it. :D (well, ok, air resistance. But still a bloody great bang. And in an eathquake zone.)

Leaked memo: Microsoft employees should be using Copilot too

Re: AI, capable

What other functions/access have been granted to the AI bot but not to you? Can you get it to update your balance? Change your user/admin status? Delete things from the wrong account?

Republican senators try to outlaw rules that restrict Wall Street’s use of AI

Re: So how long until

So for predicting a general time series, you wouldn't use Transformer, you'd use a RNN such as LSTM? And you could feed as an additional input, the sentiment analysis from your Transformer?

Icon: He misses Paris

Yes, and the next big crash will be when all the investors have bought into the idea that AI bots can make them unlimited money, and allow them to gamble more and more with no human oversight.

Reminds me of a story from one of my university lecturers years ago.. Some software devs employed by a bank had created the first automated smart learning AI high frequency trading bot. They demoed it to the bankers on the live system, and immediately it started making lots of money. The bankers were impresses but the devs were worried. It kept making more and more money. Too much, too fast. They said perhaps we should switch it off and see what's going on, but the bankers with dollar signs in their eyes said No! Let it run! It's making billions!

Turns out someone had got a sign wrong, and the algorithm was optimising how to lose money as fast as possible, which it found very easy indeed!

Re: Wallstreet

Yes. On the one hand it's a tool for consolidating all business into the hands of a wealthy few Davos Men like Warren Buffett.. All your local coffee shops become Starbucks etc.

On the other hand, it's an unregulated casino for cocaine-snorting bankers to gamble with other people's money.

Of course, Warren Buffet still gambles with other people's money.. He just stays off the coke, perhaps.

Re: So how long until

They take random noise, and then perform an n-dimensional gradient-descent along the 'plausibility' axis. Optionally you can throw in a prompt for it to fit to. So they produce what they are told, in a sense. It's garbage-in, garbage-out.

And yes, there are plenty of automated high frequency trading bots that will produce a positive feedback effect on the markets that they are employed to manipulate. And it is almost certainly possible to design a piece of news that looks innocuous to humans but will send the bots into a frenzy.

Microsoft seeks patent for tech to put words into your mouth

Re: Welcome to the Age of Plausible Deniability

FWIW, this is still the Internet, and any of us could be a dog.

What's changed is, if asked to prove that we are or are not a dog, video/audio evidence is no longer sufficient. And thanks to LLMs there's a fair chance that some of us really are dogs bots.

Someone will have an answer, and it will involve increased surveillance and root-of-trust. That someone is probably Microsoft. They would become the Ministry of Truth.

I'm sure they would never, ever, abuse their power as the world's most powerful megacorp, right?

Welcome to the Age of Plausible Deniability

The tape recorder and video camera gave us the "Age of Accountability" where incontrovertible evidence could be produced to expose liars, cheats and criminals

Now, generative AI gives us the Age of Plausible Deniability, where anyone can simply claim that whatever evidence it is must be "fake news", especially if they are powerful enough to be widely believed

Prior Art

Neal Stephenson's "REAMDE" featured a game which did exactly that. That was published in 2011.

Now in 2024, after the boom of generative AI, and audio deepfakes becoming commonplace, this could also be considered "bleedin' obvious" and thus not patentable

SAP hits brakes on Tesla company car deal

Re: Image

> Whoever told to that was a moron. SAP was founded in 1972, more than a quarter of a century after the end of WW2, Hitler and Nazi Germany. And not a difficult fact to check, really.

Apparently the five founders of SAP were all ex-IBM, so perhaps that is what my friend was on about.

Re: Image

Taking a stand against Nazis or Russians is hardly something i would associate with SAP.

Someone once told me that SAP originally started their company by developing a card-index system for Hitler's regime to keep track of ghetto occupants.. No idea if there is any truth to that.

So I don't think SAP cancelled because of Musk's ties to Russia, that would be quite hypocritical. More likely, they cancelled the deal simply because Tesla's build quality and delivery reliability are plummeting, because they are struggling to source the parts from China.

IBM Japan and NTT think they can make datacenter aircon adjust to different workloads

Re: Amazing!

Yep. Who'd'a Thunk it, eh?

The only interesting thing going on here is that apparently all we have to to is drop some buzzwords in to a naff press release, and the poor clueless hacks at El Reg think it must be worth writing a piece about.

Unless Simon Sharwood has actually been sacked and replaced with Simon LLaMa

Re: How does it work currently?

> Is cooling just on or off?

"Inverter" chillers use variable-frequency drives to vary the power output, these have been common for at least 20 years ...

> Is temperature monitor and cooling adjustment a new thing?

No. Move along.

Why is the reg wasting our time with rubbish like this? There have been lots of interesting recent events that I was hoping the Reg would cover, but alas, nothing.

El Reg is turning into Blocks & Files ...

AI models just love escalating conflict to all-out nuclear war

Re: Unsurprising....

> Program AI to play these war games with their goal being to not lose a single 'life': To retain the numbers they start with. Then AI might start focusing on alternatives to throwing numbers away in order to 'win'.

Ah, the theme of many a sci-fi.

Usually, it ends with the AI realising that Humans are the problem.. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we… are the cure.”

Re: Unsurprising....

Our pet language models are built on Internet forums and Facebook comments. How many Gandhis, Mandelas and Kings are there trying to rationally de-escalate Internet flame wars? They just escalate until a Moderator comes along..