Posts by cyberdemon

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Re: Ruined Lunchtime

Or worse: Ycombinator

Re: Single point of failure

> Is it easy to switch back to routing requests directly to your service when Cloudflare is glitching or unavailable?

Well, El Reg was up and down synchronously with some other sites for an hour or two; but now seems it is consistently up, while the other sites are still down. So maybe they did exactly that?

Scientific computing is about to get a massive injection of AI

Re: So the scientists

Precise, perhaps, but clearly not very accurate.

Overconfidence is the new zero-day as teams stumble through cyber simulations

Re: security spending goes up

> I swear if the job comes up to do the IT for the Chinese embassy in london, I'll take it & if ever approached by a couple of guys called John with regulation haircuts asking me to do them a "patriotic favour" , I'll tell them openly to fuck off! And then put it online

I wouldn't touch a job like that with a barge pole, personally. I'd rather keep myself away from the "room 101" torture chamber.

Power: The answer to and source of all your AI datacenter problems

Re: Prioritise

No no no, you fool! Once they have connected all the multi-Gigawatt datacentres across the globe, the super-duper-intelligent AGI singularity will surely have been achieved! Because something that burns more energy than all life on earth must be more intelligent, right.

Then, the AGI will invent a new pathogen/bomb/terminator to destroy all humans, except for the squillionaire-class in their bunkers, and thus the world will be Reborn! Yeats has foretold it! And Girard has explained it!

Just like in Deus Ex, or James Bond, or 1984, etc etc.

They literally believe they are "righteous supervillains". Where's JC Denton when we need him?

Or, more hopefully: They are simply deluded; There will be nothing more than accelerated stupidity and waste to come out of all these interconnected AI superhubs, and good old economics will come along to burst their cult bubble sooner rather than later.

UK tribunal says reselling Microsoft licenses is A-OK

Re: Copyright?

So, Mr Nadella, about that slop-machine of yours. Would you like to pay copyright royalties on every text and image it has ingested over the last decade?

No? Thought not

Ransomed CTO falls on sword, refuses to pay extortion demand

Re: Bad things happen. And once they've happened, how you respond is important.

I commend the CTO's response, but nevertheless it sounds as if their system was a leaky "Bucket" of insecurity...

The manufacturer of buckets may be at least partially culpable for selling buckets which were leaky by default

Google apes Apple, swears cloud-based AI will keep your info private

Google, perhaps not the first name you'd associate with privacy

see icon

"We will respect your privacy" from Google is about as credible as "We won't cut down any trees or emit any CO2" from Drax PLC

OpenAI’s viability called into question by reported inference spending with Microsoft

..Credibility?.. No, that wasn't it

UK asks cyberspies to probe whether Chinese buses can be switched off remotely

Re: Pelican is wilfully missing the point...

It's pretty simple to measure the internal resistance of the battery (which is all that matters for stop/start). Temporarily pause the charging circuit, measure voltage and current, correlate large increases in current with drops in voltage and divide voltage by current

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

2000 was the last "Good" version of Windows IMO

I made the switch to Linux shortly after that and never looked back

Meta can't afford its $600B love letter to Trump

By the time all this is over

A trillion dollars might buy a loaf of bread

AMD red-faced over random-number bug that kills cryptographic security

I do sometimes wonder if some of these 'features' were 'requested' by visitors wearing dark suits and sunglasses

Tesla board wants to grant Musk $1T in stock, Norway wealth fund says nope

Re: Robyn Denholm is a woman

Is she in some way related to Denholm Reynholm?

Game on! Penguin levels up as Linux finally cracks 3% on Steam

Re: Oh how I wish...

Well, with MS Office, the Wine/Proton devs face an uphill battle, since MS can (and apparently already has) bork(ed) it deliberately under Wine.

But personally, I prefer Libre even if MS Office was available - nothing pestering me to save to OneDrive (with several clicks on semi-hidden UI elements needed to avoid it), no telemetry, no AI crap, and I always hated that Ribbon anyway.

Network operator ponders building a new submarine cable – on land

Re: "parts of the route are only accessible by helicopter."

A line of electricity pylons would also be sensible.. The earth wire at the top usually contains fibre optics, and the 400kV wires below it protect themselves from thieves very effectively

NHS left with sick PCs as suppliers resist Windows 11 treatment

Re: Question is

No, it's not prejudice, I say it for good reason, which is that Windows cannot be stripped back to only the bare minimum components. The first rule of anything safety-critical is that there should not be any features of the software which are not mandated by the requirements of the application.

Windows cannot run without a writable filesystem (even the oxy-moronic "windows embedded" needs to feign fs writes in RAM). It can't run without a VGA device, it can't run without a network stack or USB stack, it can't even run without a web browser.

Whereas Linux (or better yet, an RTOS such as Zephyr) can be compiled with the bare minimum of features. This is not just to save on resources, but to remove the possibility of failure modes hidden in unused (and therefore untested) parts of the system.

Question is

Why would an embedded, single-purpose application such as an MRI or OCT scanner, or any medical diagnostic machine, be running Windows in the first place??

It's as daft as running Windows on an oscilloscope (and yes, many "high end" oscilloscopes, perversely, run Windows)

The only reason I can think of, is to guarantee more expensive service call-outs for the manufacturer.

You wouldn't put Windows in a car, you certainly wouldn't put it in avionics, and I wouldnt want it involved in anything where a BSOD really means death

Hacking LED Halloween masks is frighteningly easy

To be fair, the dev has deliberately left out the bit that encodes a custom image for the masks. So anyone casually downloading and running this will only be able to display the standard fox face on some unsuspecting trick-or-treater.

AI eats leisure time, makes employees work more, study finds

So would any "new, exciting thing"

But people are getting bored of it rather quickly.. As it turns out it is a) not intelligent and b) quite useless and a waste of time, energy, money, water, silicon etc.

Windows 11 update knocks out USB mice, keyboards in recovery mode

PS/2 keyboards unaffected..

But how many Win11-capable machines have a PS/2 port?

Probably the only ones that do are the VMs in Microsoft's QA department, if that even exists at all anymore

Boris Johnson confesses: He's fallen for ChatGPT

> He'd probably shag it if he could.

Reminds me of a somewhat obscure piece of German Techno...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p7Xeyaqi0h4

Britain's AI gold rush hits a wall – not enough electricity

Re: The obvious solution?

Never mind V2G. The obvious thing I think should happen is that renewable generators should be forced to include a minimum amount of storage in their bids, and we should stop paying curtailment when there is an oversupply

We need to stop pretending that renewables are simply 'free energy'.. Stop paying them for excess of that 'free energy' that we can't use, and perhaps charge them when they can't supply what they have contracted to supply.

I.e. make them behave like grown-up power plants that supply electricity as and when it is needed, not paid for imaginary/unneeded energy.

AI makes phishing 4.5x more effective, Microsoft says

Shouting into the void for several years

The only killer-app for AI is: FRAUD

• Passing off a statistical regression of past culture as new creative works
• Fooling a pointy-haired boss into believing that a SaaS AI subscription is better than actual staff
• Conning human (and perhaps artificial) staff into handing over the keys to the kingdom
• Creating disinformation (including videos) that is highly effective at turning useful idiots towards your new populist political party
• Fabricating video evidence that is practically indistinguishable from real CCTV to defame your enemies and provide plausible deniability for your own misdeeds

OK there are two more "killer apps".. with appropriate icons. I needn't bother enumerating them

All we need is one more, and we'll have the Horsemen

CISA cuts more staff and reassigns others as government stays shut down

Re: There's no possible good reason for this

I don't see why it can't be both

Frightful Patch Tuesday gives admins a scare with 175+ Microsoft CVEs, 3 under attack

> CVE-2025-59230 is another 7.8-rated elevation of privilege flaw in Windows Remote Access Connection Manager. "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges," Redmond warns.

Only 7.8? That sounds pretty bad...

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Another 550 employees set to leave the building

11%, apparently

Brit AI boffins making bank with £560K average pay packet at Anthropic

Er, yes. This pitchfork is just for turning over my compost heap. Honest guv.

Microsoft's OneDrive spots your mates, remembers their faces, and won't forget easily

Dark Patterns..

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/10/11/0238213/microsofts-onedrive-begins-testing-face-recognizing-ai-for-photos-for-some-preview-users#microsoft_spokesperson

Slashdot: What's the reason OneDrive tells users this setting can only be turned off 3 times a year? (And are those any three times — or does that mean three specific days, like Christmas, New Year's Day, etc.)

[Microsoft's publicist chose not to answer this question.]

... Which if MS management hadn't redacted it, probably would have said:

"Yes, we hear you've called this sort of thing a 'Dark Pattern'. How cute. Yes, we just don't want you turning it off, really. The more of you who do, the less dosh we get from Mr. Ellison et al."

Can open source be saved from the EU's Cyber Resilience Act?

The software was written by ChatGPT

and has more holes than swiss cheese

What now? Does the EC sue Microsoft?

Weird ideas welcome: VC fund looking to make science fiction factual

Because of conservation of energy?

I'm not familiar with the Casimir effect, but my guess would be that it saps heat out of the material if any energy is extracted from the plates' motion.

If the effect still works at absolute zero temperature, then I am wrong

Discord says 70,000 photo IDs compromised in customer service breach

Re: This, dear reader,

That's interesting.. I was looking at the list of "all petitions" here: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions?state=all

You are right, the brexit one and many others are mysteriously absent from that list. Apparently "All petitions" only shows those submitted to the current government, and there is no single list of all petitions ever, sorted by number of signatures.

But yes, a right stitch-up. Had the "non-binding referendum" been 48/52 the other way, you bet your arse there would've been a second referendum.

Re: This, dear reader,

This.

BTW is there any UK Reg reader left who hasn't signed the petition yet? It's 230k away from being the biggest response ever on the government's cylindrical receptacle suggestion box

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194

RondoDox botnet fires 'exploit shotgun' at nearly every router and internet-connected home device

> Brickcom IP cameras

Is that a real company name, or are you trolling us?

Surely anyone who buys a Brickcom should expect it to be subsumed into a botnet of some sort..

Frankly I despise the concept of the IP camera. CCTV cameras until about 2010 used to be either analogue or HD-SDI which sent a digital video stream directly to where it needed to go and nowhere else.

This is your brain on bots: AI interaction may hurt students more than it helps

Re: Peak enshittification

> This is calculators all over again...

I am assuming sarcasm there.. or maybe something more poignant

While calculators could be abused for cheating trivial arithmetic tests at 10yo level, they are a perfectly valid tool later on, and no, a stochastic bullshit machine is no extension of this argument

I remember one fellow student in my MSc course who had come to rely on his calculator rather too much though, and would write down each step of his workings to 14 significant figures. His manuscripts were a mess of pages of numbers. If he had made a mistake, it took so much rework that he would run out of time.. We convinced him to write down intermediate steps to no more than 5sf and he passed with flying colours.

AI is like trying to mark a manuscript that contains 100GB of completely irrelevant intermediate workings, and trying to work out how it came to the wrong answer. There is no point in trying to read it, it belongs in the bin.

Peak enshittification

Enshittification of the Human Race

> Remarkably, only half of students say they use AI for schoolwork, while even more report personal use (73 percent).

Or rather, only half admit to using it for schoolwork..

And of course all the teachers are using it to mark the work too.. So ChatGPT is literally marking its own homework.. A billion times over, meanwhile no child on the planet learns anything.

But it's fine because Microsoft, Google, Oracle et al will have built up enough surveillance data on all of them that they will decide everyone's futures by age 12 and there will be no need for exams...

It's trivially easy to poison LLMs into spitting out gibberish, says Anthropic

Just like beast666

May you all be poisoned by your own effluence

An idea that won't sink: China planning underwater datacenter deployment

Why not just put the heat exchangers underwater?

I assume even the underwater bit barnacle would not put seawater anywhere near its chips, so they would instead have a clean coolant loop between the chips and a heat exchanger on the outside of the sunken datacentre

Couldn't they make those pipes a bit longer and have the servers on land, where they are more easily accessible for maintenance?

Windows 10 refuses to go gentle into that good night

Re: Why are people sticking to Windows? It's monopoly and lock-in, that's why.

Because the pointy-haired boss wants everyone to have evil bossware so that he can snoop on their screens and keystrokes. Especially that pretty girl in marketing who likes to go on facebook on her lunch breaks

Re: Untested workarounds

If it's a Yubikey then you can do that on Linux. Other hardware tokens may vary of course

As for your MD's "special software", I find that most crusty old software e.g. that released for WinXP etc, runs far better on Wine than it ever did on Windows.. Exceptions being anything that requires its own special kernel-mode rootkitdriver, which may well be the case for "government" apps .. This is why so many governments have a crusty airgapped XP box lurking somewhere.. It might be appropriate to stick it in a virtualbox VM, without network access of course

Re: Untested workarounds

It's not a case of Linux not "having" your applications, but a case of your applications not "having" Linux (support or workarounds)

Complain to your application vendors

Also out of curiosity: What applications? Many of us here may be able to suggest workarounds (e.g. Wine, Proton) or alternatives that you haven't tried

Aurora immutable KDE Plasma workstation: Big, slow, and confusing

Re: Oh piss off Liam.. :P

Where's your PR then?

Oh piss off Liam.. :P

I know how much you hate customisability and configuration options.. You're obviously a Mac user who wants Jesus to tell you how to use your computer..

Well, KDE was built for those of us who already know how we want to use a computer.. And we don't always agree with eachother!

It's also built for those of us who don't know how we want to use a computer, but wish to find out on our own which way is best

Microsoft moves to the uncanny valley with creepy Copilot avatars that stare at you and say your name

I.e. "non-determimistic for any non-zero 'temperature' value".

Do any of the cloud LLMs use a zero 'temperature' value?

No I thought not

> (If you keep the seed the same)

LLMs also start with a noise buffer, like diffusion models. Except unlike diffusion models, LLMs are always (except for really shit ones) cloud based due to their enormous vRAM requirement. So you have no idea what seed value is being used

JetBrains wants to train AI models on your code snippets

The best response to this

Would be to run two accounts: One full of AI-generated dross, which is willingly ingested in exchange for a free additional license, (and happily proceeds to poison the resultant model). Then with the free additional license, turn off all cloud features. No slurping the real code

UK to roll out mandatory digital ID for right to work by 2029

Then they will get rid of cash, and force everyone to use BritCoin with their BritCard ...

The first rule of liquid cooling is 'Don't wet the chip.' Microsoft disagrees

Re: Similar in size to a human hair you say?

Helium?

The 'fluid' in microfluidics doesn't have to to be a liquid.. But then again, its volumetric heat capacity isn't so great

And, this is just a patent and a press release. Possibly intended to make the press/investors/public think there might be some energy efficiency to be gained in this, which of course there isn't.

Suspected Iran-backed attackers targeting European aerospace sector with novel malware

Re: First, the victim runs a legitimate Windows executable from the archive,

Windows Defender, no less...

One might've thought that a security app like that would have secure code-signing for DLLs ...

Less Windows Defender, more Windows Defenestrator

UK chancellor Putin the blame on Russia for cyber chaos, but evidence says otherwise

Re: Evidence

The labour government has form on this. E.g. Palestine Action are terrorists. Trust us, we have secret evidence that proves it. But we aren't going to publish it cos it's er, secret