Posts by cyberdemon

Fancy building a replacement for Post Office's disastrous Horizon system?

Won't Somebody think of the Stakeholders?

I'm sure there are various big cheeses at POL who would argue that they couldn't POSSIBLY use an off-the-shelf EPOS system, and the idea of trusting SPMs to run it themselves would make them choke on their Chivas Regal.

No no no, it has to be a big centralised bespoke system, ideally one where we can fiddle the books remotely and fit people up for Fraud if we don't like them but can't fire them..

With a bit of luck though, some of those Cheeses will be rooted out by the Inquiry and sent to jail. One can only hope.

Digital Realty ditches diesel for salad dressing in US to cut datacenter emissions

Re: Does HVO really reduce emissions ?

I suspect that one reason why this might make "business sense" is because of the wonky Biomass carbon-accounting rules that mean tree-burners (and food-burners) can attribute their emissions to the country(/state?) who supplied the fuel.. So there may also be an incentive there to use imported oil instead of producing it locally..

Burning food in a food shortage

Yay, because it's green.

Not that i'm a fan of Diesel-powered datacentres, but what is the efficiency of shoving veg oil into a diesel genset compared with solar + electrochemical storage?

The most efficient crops are (IIRC) 2%-5% efficient at creating fuel, and then you have to burn it in a Diesel engine that is itself 20-30% efficient, so overall solar efficiency in the 1% range, and it is taking away land from food crops, using up nutrients in said land (or requiring energy-intensive and polluting fertiliser). And there is a risk that someone will start using imported Palm Oil if they can't grow enough rapeseed.

Put them next to nuke plants? Great. But Biomass/Biofuels are and always have been a load of greenwash.

Hailo's latest AI chip shows up integrated NPUs and sips power like fine wine

Meh

Given that this is only 10-20% of what even a low-end laptop GPU can do, and as JessicaRabbit mentions, uses the system RAM via DMA and so chokes out any other memory-intensive tasks, so it's not terribly impressive.

I'm sure it will be used by the likes of Dell and Lenovo to flog "AI PCs" though.

On the upside, at least system RAM is usually upgradeable to well beyond the 16GB provided by high-end laptop and midrange desktop GPUs though, so it may cope with larger models than could run on your GPU, even if it is slower

Rust rustles up fix for 10/10 critical command injection bug on Windows in std lib

Argh

It's 2024, who the hell is still using Batch files?

On the occasions when I am forced to use Windows, the first thing I do is install a proper shell, be it Cygwin or MinGW, WSL or a VM

It's time that CMD.exe and Command.COM are retired for good, along with the rest of MS-DOS that still persists in Windows, shirley

Arm CEO warns AI's power appetite could devour 25% of US electricity by 2030

Re: peak humanity

What weather?

This kind of weather?

I fear apocalypse more from the political climate than the climate climate (although the latter exacerbates the former)

Notepad++ dev slams Google-clogging notepad.plus 'parasite'

Re: Meh

I respectfully suggest Kate

Yes, you can use it on Windows, if you must

US insurers use drone photos to deny home insurance policies

Re: As usual, it's cover for taking advantage of old people

Heaven forbid, you have Solar Panels..

TSMC scores $11.6B funding infusion for Arizona fabs, now plans for third plant

> Nevermind .. the first two plants are facing delays and costs are rising – build, build build!

Where have I heard that before..

A bit like Nuclear Power, Chip Fabrication is one of those industries where suddenly the politicians realise they need it and desperately throw money at it, when the country has long lost the expertise and culture required to build it..

Engine cover flies from Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 during takeoff

Re: Is it Just Me??

My suspicion is that some powerful people went short on Boeing at the time of the door blowout, and they have friends in the media to help their position further.

Change Healthcare faces second ransomware dilemma weeks after ALPHV attack

Let that be a lesson

The worst thing you can possibly do is pay the scum

Paying a ransom (unless authorised as part of a credible police sting) needs to be a criminal offence

Lambda borrows half a billion bucks to grow its GPU cloud

Re: UK altnet sector, which is another dubiously solvent bubble

I assume by altnet sector you mean alternative networks i.e. small, fast ISPs with FTTP for very little money?

I often wonder how my ISP toob can make any money at all on its offering of 900Mbps symmetric speeds, for £25/month, and a promise of no mid-contract price rises

Re: Vampire Kangaroo

But next time post non-amp links please

I personally find Brave's auto non-ampify feature very refreshing

Other browsers/extensions are available

Microsoft warns that China is using AI to stir the pot ahead of US election

Re: Why?

It's not that they are supporting one or other party. My theory is that they would want all western votes to have a 50/50 outcome. Maximum division, hung parliaments that can't make a decision, potential for civil war.

So they stir up vitriol as much as they can, track voting intentions, and tweak the signals very carefully for the perfect non-result, with as many frothing maniacs on both sides as possible.

Simple divide and conquer. Democracy is doomed in a world controlled by TikTok.

World's second-largest eyeglass lens-maker blinded by infosec incident

You don't mean this particular optometrist, do you?

(tbh, not sure if that was a genuine error on the part of the van driver or a piece of guerrilla marketing.. by a firm of optometrists that apparently spends more on marketing than it does on optometrists)

Microsoft slammed for lax security that led to China's cyber-raid on Exchange Online

Communism and Capitalism don't mix

The Open Source community (which I love) is based on fundamentally Communist ideals - everyone works for the good of everyone, and if literally everyone did that then there would be little need for money and everybody would be happy.

But then it only takes someone to come along and say "Ooo, free stuff, people working for free, I can exploit that to my own end." to disrupt the whole ideal. Basically this is why there are so few good open-source Android/iOS apps for example, because the Android/iOS systems are so heavily monetised that as soon as anyone releases a good open source app, someone is immediately coming along to clone it and release it as their own paid and/or data-slurping app.

Microsoft is the mother of all open-source exploiters, buying GitHub and using it to build a code-plagiarising bullshit machine, stealing every commit and comment any open source dev has ever made, and using them to both put future programmers out of work and simultaneously pollute the entire ecosystem with autogenerated shite, because managers who want a quick buck would rather use autogenerated shite full of security holes but which "seems to work", than pay actual engineers to do stuff properly.

But a secondary effect of that is that the entire open source community is demoralised, anything we contribute is going to be appropriated by some dickheads who want to make money and then blame us when it all goes wrong..

Frankly I hope that when WWIII kicks off, the ultra-wideband fibres will all be chopped and we all have to go back to 56k dialup speeds. Messageboards like The Register will work perfectly fine, but "social" media, data-slurping, AI, ransomware etc would become that much harder again...

Uber Eats to rid itself of pesky human drivers with food delivery by robo Waymo

Re: Stuck in traffic

I wonder if the plan is to eventually replace the Waymo with either a starship "mothership" or a Yamaha Motodroid..

I also wonder if it would be simpler to install a system of pneumatic delivery tubes under each city, so that the meatbags never have to leave their pods

.. Although that solution is less flexible if the meatbags one day decide to come out, and need to be forcibly returned or neutralised

Re: Layer 8

Wish I could downvote your downvoter..

"Layer 8" is the layer above the Application layer, i.e. the pathetic meatsack.

Software engineer helped put Sam Bankman-Fried behind bars, say prosecutors

Re: FTX investigation poem

- E.J. Thribb, 17½ Satoshis

Microsoft warns deepfake election subversion is disturbingly easy

Upvoted Paul, although I disagree that "The problem is not AI fakes," - the problem is not just AI fakes.

It's a product of two very serious problems. And, I don't think simply fining, boycotting or otherwise de-monetising social media platforms would solve it. There are major vested interests behind this. I.e. hostile states.

So, short of chopping all the fibres and switching off the Internet for good, I think sadly AI deepfake propaganda distributed over the Internet is here to stay.

Microsoft Teams decouples from Office 365 suite globally

Price reductions?

Or just an extra mug's tax for all the plebs stuck with Teams entrenched into their organisations?

Too little, too late indeed.. I would prefer to see Borkzilla unbundled from itself. Split Office 355, Teams, LinkedIn, GitHub and Windows into separate companies.

Why Microsoft's Copilot will only kinda run locally on AI PCs for now

Locally..ish?

So, all of the privacy and lock-in implications of the cloud model, but we'll use YOUR electricity and YOUR hard-bought silicon?

Sounds great..

The Register meets the voice of Siri Down Under

Oh well

At least nobody will have to suffer this again...

.. Or any other voice acting gig

JetBrains keeps mum on 26 'security problems' fixed after Rapid7 spat

Re: JetBrains seems to have a history of being dicks

They -are- good, CLion is functionally the best IDE for embedded C/C++ IMO, same for PyCharm - I haven't used the others, but they do only seem to give half a Hoot about security.. For example, they host their own package index for some languages, and don't seem to give a toss about typosquatted packages or even nonsense packages with names like '~~~~~~~~'.

They also have some very powerful collaborative development features and a IDEA server that connects the IDE's backend on a remote/embedded host to your local GUI, but the security implications of that makes my teeth itch.

They also are VERY slow to respond to issues, some important but complex or low-priority to fix ones have had commenters post "happy 12th birthday to this YouTrack issue" images on the thread..

CEO of UK's National Grid warns of datacenters' thirst for power

Re: More energy needed?

Who needs to grow wood when you can just chop down forests in other countries, dry it out and make it into pellets at great energy cost, ship it over to the UK in diesel-powered boats, belch out CO2 and carcinogenic particulate smoke in the UK but attribute all the emissions to the country you just deforested, and collect billions in carbon-credit subsidies! Trebles all round!

Re: > A nice view of a burning planet is preferable to a few wind turbines in some peoples minds

If I was insecure or not wanting to engage as a peer, then I'd be posting as AC..

It's also not that I believe climate change isn't a problem, it's more that I find the idea of modern-day CO2 emissions being the primary cause questionable. There are plenty of other reasons for it to be happening. Methane, solar activity, etc etc. (see Jellied Eel posts ad-nauseam).

I also find that the prioritisation of reducing CO2 emissions above all other things has become something of a quasi-religious cult, a sort of cognitive dissonance. We are told that by releasing CO2 we will cause the world to go on fire, we will go to Hell. That stuff irks me.

I also worry that by betting the farm on renewables, net zero, carbon capture, smart grids etc, we are both weakening our economy (by spending on ultimately frivolous projects, unsustainable markets and subsidies) and weakening our resilience to a major crash. We all know that world wars start when large economies crash, and WWIII is looking perilously close.

Sorry for using a post-modern curse-word, but the trigger-phrase that made me use it was "burning planet". Obviously, the world is NOT on fire. But it will be when we have crashed the economy and start lobbing nuclear warheads at each other.

Re: off peak power

No women-hating. I just hate the idea of AI being used to replace actual doctors.

Instead of training doctors, we will be uploading all of our health info into the cloud, for a machine to diagnose us instead.

Not nice finding out after all that slurping, that your cancer was just a 'hallucination'

Re: More energy needed?

Presumably datacentres, like EVs, can be asked (or paid) to suspend their jobs (not shutdown completely, just SIGSTP on the training process) if the grid is at risk of crashing?

Not so easy for Heat Pumps though

The issue will be that the DC operators will say that any downtime however brief hurts their bottom line, so that payment better be worth it.. And then the outright corruption starts when DCs with nothing useful to do start charging the grid for suspending their non-operations.

> Climate 'science' just makes stuff up.

Clearly, the climate scientists feel threatened by AI's ability to make up utter nonsense in far greater volume than even they can.. So perhaps that would explain why AI Datacentres are the latest target of the green lobby!

> A nice view of a burning planet is preferable to a few wind turbines in some peoples minds

Sigh.

The trouble with you snowflakes is you are completely deluded that Net Zero is achievable or even worth achieving.

If the climate scientists are correct, then the world is already doomed. No amount of CO2 reduction is going to save it now, we are well past the tipping point.

If they are wrong, then all of this is rather pointless.

The only thing driving it is money. Huge bungs for curtailment of energy we don't need or can't store/transmit to where it IS needed. Huge bungs for burning trees cut from virgin forests in Canada and South America. Huge bungs for oil companies promising to make Hydrogen or stuff some CO2 down an old well. Bungs for Russian companies building solar farms or HVDC interconnectors that are highly unreliable and could be remotely shut down or reversed with the press of a key..

However, i agree with you that pylons spoiling some bumpkin's £10m view is a price worth paying for grid resilience.

We don't just need a system that can barely cope with increasing demand, we need one that is resilient to failure, even when deliberately attacked by an enemy. If we can build that, then the enemy hopefully won't bother attacking it. But currently our electric grid looks a lot like a rickety bridge across a globally important shipping lane.

AI hallucinates software packages and devs download them – even if potentially poisoned with malware

Re: the names these chatbots pull out of thin air are persistent

One possible explanation is nefarious SEO-optimised auto-generated webshites are now being used to poison AI models..

That, or GitHub really is ingesting private repos into CoPilot, and there could be an unlimited number of private repos full of malicious code designed to poison any AI model. These days it is possible to optimise that poisoning to cause model collapse.

The only way to win is not to play.

What Nvidia's Blackwell efficiency gains mean for DC operators

Re: Liquid cooled or not

Or in this case, doing apparently 5x more "work" for double the power..

BBC exterminates AI experiments used to promote Doctor Who

mid-Pertwee....

You mean to say you are Pertwee-through watching all of them?

Microsoft gets new Windows boss as Start Menu man Parakhin 'to explore new roles'

Windows Geranium

Sounds like things are really bad in Windows-land.. Win32 app support is broken.. Have you tried Wine?

Actually, running your app in Wine via WSL might even work! That's so awful I could even see MS making this their official way of running legacy Win32 apps

Re: Vertical taskbar in Win11

Sounds like KDE is for you! Put your taskbar anywhere you like... been like that for decades

Scaleway shows off its new RISC-V devices at Kubecon

Re: RISC-V hasn't hit its stride yet...

Nice to see RISC-V PCIe in action. Will be interesting to see if RISC-V could supplant Intel/AMD/Arm at hosting GPUs..

Twitter's lawsuit against anti-hate-speech crusaders gets SLAPPed out of court

> Twitter is the only place that you are allowed to say certain things that the US Government doesn't like. Things like saying Covid vaccines don't stop you catching it or stop you passing it on, would have got you banned from every platform

So either you just proved yourself wrong, or you should be banned from El Reg..

Over 170K users caught up in poisoned Python package ruse

Lazy library use

Python itself isn't the problem so much as the ease of use of nonstandard libraries by any idiot in charge of a keyboard. It's the same problem on Rust: cargo. Nodejs: npm. Go: go get.

C and C++ only get a free pass because it is LESS simple to install a random library off the internet and all of its dependencies, and less simple to publish one. Except in Arduino land, of course, where it is just as bad as Python

We are now in a world where people who call themselves programmers simply ask Google/Stackoverflow or worse ChatGPT which library to pull from pypi to do whatever they need, and they follow it blindly

Re: Cookies? Wouldn't it require SSH/GPG keys?

No? It is possible to make a commit using the Web interface, with no more authentication than a cookie.

No, it only requires that for initial log-in. After that, it trusts the cookies, apparently.

But probably you were faecetiously referring to the practice of applying MFA to everything as if it were a silver bullet to absolve oneself of all cybersecurity responsibilities.. It isn't, of course, there are side-channels abundant.

Re: Stolen Cookies

Will it? I thought most train networks were behind NAT? As are most mobile networks?

I realise NAT is not an ideal solution to anything by any means.. There was once a thing called Mobile IP that would let you keep the same address on the move..

But if someone jumps in with an IP address from a completely different provider/continent with your cookies, it should be suspicious enough to require re-authentication, no?

Stolen Cookies

Why are cookies trusted across IP address changes..?

All the better to track you with, little red riding hood..

US task force aims to plug security leaks in water sector

Re: Well, duh..

I remember a website called VNC Roulette..

Someone had done a portscan of all IPs running VNC on the standard port, made a list of all the ones with no authentication whatsoever, and the site would connect you to a random one.. The number of industrial control systems on there was horrifying..

Of course, the standard government response was to shut the site down.. I wonder if they actually bothered to contact all the idiots on the list.

As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot real estate

Anticipating grid failure is more like it..

With a functioning grid, there is not much reason for electricity to be any cheaper near to a NPP, surely.

But if the companies are betting on grids failing in future, then nearby to an NPP might be a good spot for their datacentres.

Chinese snoops use F5, ConnectWise bugs to sell access into top US, UK networks

Re: I'm beginning to smell a big fat commie rat

Now General Turgidson, What's going on here?

One rack. 120kW of compute. Taking a closer look at Nvidia's DGX GB200 NVL72 beast

Re: 120kW is low

Yes, the article said 120kW of compute

So it probably only includes power consumed by the GPU dies, and not the 57 Arm-core "management" chip on each node, nor the DC power conversion/supply efficiency.

But also, it's designed for 20C @ 2L/s, but it probably runs at 167kW in some sort of worst-case power-eating test for commissioning the cooling system.

Nevertheless, the 8-rack superpod is going to need its own susbstation at 1MW...

Whistleblower raises alarm over UK Nursing and Midwifery Council's DB

> "Trouble makers out first"

This, exactly this. It's the same for so many other professions now. Teachers, police, social work, politics, even trades and engineering to some extent. Make the smallest mistake or cause political trouble for someone powerful and you can be banned, years of training down the drain. And then they wonder why they can't recruit anybody into these professions. All the honest people are leaving, and the only ones staying are the psychopaths who can put on all of the Machiavellian masks to cover up their own failings and gaslight others to keep themselves from being reported.

Frankly I'd rather be treated by a doctor or nurse who had been struck off, than not be treated at all.

Of course, there are some cases like Wayne Couzens et al where they should never have been allowed to do the job in the first place, but a system that simply waits for those people to do something awful is not sufficient, and it actually encourages that sort of psychopath because they enjoy the feeling of getting away with it.

Also, the idea that a nurse should need a degree is ridiculous..

Uncle Sam, 15 US states launch antitrust war on Apple

Re: Invalidate their patents

Lol.

I think it would be unfair to say that Apple have never innovated, the argument is over when was the last time they did.. Was it the 80s, 90s, or 00s?

But these days they just come up with some piece of "design" that all the zealous fanboys come out to worship for no good reason, like having rounded corners, the colour white, or a rubber-band bounce at the end of a menu, then simply wait for others to copy their approach and sue the pants off them. That's not innovation, it's just hiding under a bridge and waiting for some billy-goats.

Invalidate their patents

Might force them to actually start innovating again..

Truck-to-truck worm could infect – and disrupt – entire US commercial fleet

Re: See icon

Frankly, i'm glad that these researchers were allowed to expose a vulnerability and not be treated as criminals, as seems to be a trend..

Because when people are discouraged from looking for vulnerabilities in infrastructure, the holes are left behind for the real baddies to do their worst.