Posts by cyberdemon

Vietnam to collect biometrics - even DNA - for new ID cards

Re: Coming to a govt building near you

Deep fakes at the level of detail you describe, are only possible for rich people and party members.

Us proles are the real target of the biometrics push

Superapp Gojek fine-tunes each new error message for a week. What? Why?

Error cartoons

Usually in Corporate Memphis style. Epitomised by MS Teams and the idiot in the beanie hat with a thought bubble containing a question mark. Oops. Something went wrong! We're working on it!

No you fucking aren't, you contemptuous pile of absolute utter SHITE! Just tell me what the damned error is. Why are you refusing to work this time. I could not care less for a picture of a cute puppy trying to electrocute itself.

Oxide reimagines private cloud as... a 2,500-pound blade server?

Yee haw Jimminy Crickets That's what we here call a Wild Leg!

This website is best read aloud in a redneck cowboy accent

UK Cabinet Office hits pause on £9M Microsoft deal

@sad_loser

> I work in government

I can see how that might have inspired your choice of handle

Re: Move

Very Droll, Sir Humphrey!

Why are the only options data-slurping cloud ones?

Capgemini could migrate them to LibreOffice for much less!

Google open sources file-identifying Magika AI for malware hunters and others

Next week's news

How to defeat Magika by using generative AI to create a random-looking comment block that causes your malware.sh.jpg to be misclassified by Magika as an actual JPEG.

Cutting kids off from the dark web – the solution can only ever be social

Re: The law is not everything

And -especially in the case of teenagers- banning it only makes them want it more. Streisand Effect etc.

Pentagon launches nuke-spotting satellites amid Russian space bomb rumors

If trump had won last time, we might not look forward to anything anymore. WWIII might have proceeded on schedule.

Kriegsminister gibt nicht mehr..

Worried about the impending demise of Windows 10? Google wants you to give ChromeOS Flex a try

Re: Chrome appears to be more or less Andriod

Presumably, Wine would only work on an x86 Chromebook?

Or is there some x86 emulation going on?

In pursuit of artificial general intelligence, Meta adds Broadcom boss Hock Tan to its board

Re: Oops ... another misstep on the way to nowhere good and great

> hid massive trading losses and falsified its revenues to inflate its stock price and conceal its debt. The company collapsed in 2001

Sounds like exactly what Zuck needs!

Re: Not the way to General AI

> It's like an explorer going to a car manufacturer to get a bigger, better, faster, shinier offroad vehicle, while meanwhile not knowing where to go explore.

Or rather, the thing they are looking for is on a different planet, if it exists at all!

(But, the big shiny beast that he buys will allow him to ingest and digest even more of our data, giving him even more power and control over our lives. And I expect that is what he (or at least his board) is really after anyway..)

IT body proposes that AI pros get leashed and licensed to uphold ethics

I read that as IT body proposes AI pros get lashes..

Call the moderatrix again.. This sounds like a good idea!

Airbnb sees AI as its ticket to become a sprawling Big Tech giant

Use AI to generate a bullshit press release about AI, to hopefully fool some gullible private equity funds to bail us out of the hole we're in ...

They made a net loss of 5 Billion, on 10 Billion revenue... How on earth have they managed to spend 15 Billion? They bought some magic beans from the bloke who "invented" a crap voice assistant?

Just because it got foisted on a billion crapple customers, most of whom didn't want it, never intentionally use it and only swear at it when they accidentally trigger it, doesn't make it revolutionary. And it certainty doesn't make this particular clown worth anything to AirBnB! They have done a Yahoo! on this one.

Southern Water cyberattack expected to hit hundreds of thousands of customers

Re: As a Southern Water customer*, When they said "Sorry we leaked your shit"...

> Believe it or not, sewage discharges were far more common before privatisation

You'll forgive me if i say no, i don't believe it, then :)

Do you have a source for that claim?

Re: As a Southern Water customer*, When they said "Sorry we leaked your shit"...

> I worked on investment programme management for one of the largest water companies for a good few years immediately after privatisation

Oh, so it's YOUR fault then?!

How come the water companies were allowed to take on loans, and spend the money on dividends and executive salaries, instead of on investment in infrastructure?

They could have built separate sewage and storm drains like they do in Europe. Population increase could have been *planned for*.

But given that they split a large public body into dozens of regional utility companies, joined-up thinking becomes impossible, and the policymaking work becomes inefficient as is has to be repeated in each region, and nobody is going to waste money building a storm drain if the neighbouring utility isn't bothering.

Ofwat is partially responsible for this farce, but that is what you get with a revolving door between a private sector and its regulator..

Re: As a Southern Water customer*, When they said "Sorry we leaked your shit"...

Public Ownership as an arms-length quango is different from being government run.

A public owned company is still encouraged to maximise profit, sometimes at the expense of well-run public service. See also: The Post Office

But even government departments can still be scandalously awful, I agree. E.g. the Home Office

Re: As a Southern Water customer*, When they said "Sorry we leaked your shit"...

> A house down the road from me was leaking water from the meter pit for about 4 months.

Which side of the meter was leaking?

Re: But of course it was the Thatcher monster

Well, of course there were other monsters around in the circus that was the Thatcher government.

One BBC Radio programme I listened to a while ago said that John Redwood was instrumental in privatising British Gas. He may have done the same for other utilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_privatisation_in_England_and_Wales

The Conservative government of the day had originally proposed water privatisation in 1984 and again in 1986, but strong public feeling against the proposals led to plans being shelved to prevent the issue influencing the 1987 general election.[15][16] Having won the election, the privatisation plan was "resurrected and implemented rapidly"

So it seems little has changed in UK politics. Always implement your most evil and unpopular plans immediately after an election.

As a Southern Water customer*, When they said "Sorry we leaked your shit"...

... I thought they meant it would be floating out to sea. Or polluting a nice chalk stream fishery, or washing up on a sandy beach somewhere.

Now i learn it's all over the bloody Internet too!

* not by choice, of course. As a Public Utility, they have a monopoly on the whole area that they serve. Having such a utility in private hands should never have been allowed. On which ex politician can I place the blame for that? One Margaret Thatcher i would assume

It's time we add friction to digital experiences and slow them down

Re: THIS!!!

> I have to wait for my OpenSCAD model to render. I have to wait for my slicer to finish processing my STL and send it to the printer.

At least you have the luxury of being able to press F5 for a quick render, and get to preview the toolpath in the slicer!

I, of course, use OpenSCAD on the command line, and send the output directly to the printer, so I have to wait hours and waste lots of plastic if I get any geometry wrong.

I plan to waste additional time by dispensing with OpenSCAD entirely, instead typing G-code into the printer manually with a Teletype.

Tom Cruise to the rescue

Watched Mission Impossible 2 the other day. That's 2 hours of my life i'll never get back..

It's er, the one where a pharmaceutical company produces an artificial supervirus and the drug to cure it, by "splicing different viruses together"

Anyway, there was a scene where the company was forced to transfer an enormous amount of money (47 Million Dollars!) to some common/garden terrorists, but it took a comically long time, as if each dollar were being transferred individually.

Long enough for the saviour of scientology to come along and save the day, as he does..

At that speed, Elon Musk would need to wait several months for his pay packet to arrive

Korean eggheads crack Rhysida ransomware and release free decryptor tool

And sad news for anyone stupid enough to pay the scum

One for the south koreans. Geonbae!

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

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

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