Posts by cyberdemon

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

Re: Evidence

Yes exactly. I would think it pretty unlikely that a bunch of teenagers in complete isolation would develop both the means and the will to carry out these attacks.. I would be surprised if they weren't talking to some 'knowledgeable friend' on Discord or similar, who groomed them into this. The same sort of grey-zone handler who likely directed attacks such as the sabotage of TGV lines, and the Just Stop Oil protest that somehow managed to pick a motorway junction right from the top of the national risk register..

Hopefully, it will all come out in the wash

Bored developers accidentally turned their watercooler into a bootleg brewery

Re: They forgot to add the right fungi

That would have been entertaining when the watercooler bottle first begins to leak from the build-up of CO2 inside, and then takes off like a rocket as soon as someone disturbs it

Microsoft insists Copilot+ PCs are 'empowering the future' – reality disagrees

Re: +

Or the new budgie-smuggler smart posing pouch from Microsoft Wearables: the Codpilot

Re: Marketing company

it's a surveillance company. not an ad company

Zuck has the power! Meta applies to sell excess electricity

All this power, what are we building with it?

Er... Nothing.

Google pushes emergency patch for Chrome 0-day – check your browser version now

Argh WASM

Who the hell ever wanted that

Nothing but a cyberattacker's dream from the very start

Upgrade to the latest Chrome version you say? No thanks..

Fortunately for me, NoScript keeps me safe..

Google unmasks itself as mystery hyperscaler behind yet another UK datacenter

Re: Might be cynical but....

> They could perhaps buy a whole load of Renewable Energy Guarantees of Origin (REGO) certificates.

You forgot to pick an icon. May I suggest this one

JLR stuck in neutral as losses skyrocket amid cyberattack cleanup

Fair point, although I think such a bailout would get more support if us taxpayers pay half, on condition that JLR and its shareholders pay the other half.

And it would need to be restricted to suppliers who are genuinely impacted by the JLR closure. No "software license suppliers", management consultants, etc.

Engineer turned a vape into a web server

But Cobalt isn't so light

Nork snoops whip up fake South Korean military ID with help from ChatGPT

> with the right wording, you can turn generative AI into a counterfeit factory

Er, but it is already a "counterfeit factory" that's always been what GenAI is..

Inventor who encouraged Elon Musk to make Optimus says most humanoid robots today are 'terrifying'

Re: Entertainment

This, This is why Humanity invented the Wheel.

Wheels don't exist in nature, only because Nature never invented the coaxial slip-ring, for transporting energy (blood) and data (nerves) across a continuously-rotating bearing. (today we have slip-rings that can transport both fluids, power, and data, but I don't think they would be compatible with nerves)

But two legs can be useful, if you are hunting something that is also on two legs.

Nano11 cuts Windows 11 down to size, grabbing just 2.8 GB of disk space

Re: tech zillionaire

Ketamine-talking more like..

Re: I always thought .....

"Nano11" only 2.8GB..

... Until it installs its first forced update and balloons to 280GB

It's still Win11 after all

UK toughens Online Safety Act with ban on self-harm content

You forgot McDonalds

Legacy tech blunts UK top cops' fight against serious crime, inspectors find

Re: No Enforcement......Plod Give Us Yet Another Worrying Example (YAWE) !!

But they are highly efficient! The Met arrested almost a thousand pensioners holding placards last Saturday!

No doubt they were all brought to Neasden central police station, where the fortnightly police log will cite an excess of terrorist pensioners as the reason why zero rapes, murders, burglaries, muggings or frauds were investigated this month.

Trump tells Big Tech: Your power woes? Totally fixable

Re: Transformers

I'm not sure how many transformers Ukraine have replaced, but I doubt it has directly caused the supply shortage (unless they were manufacturing them for export and can no longer do so)

No, it's more to do with existing ones having been commissioned in the 50s-70s and are well past End of Life, some of which are now exploding e.g. near Heathrow..

That, and increasing reliance on renewables with a low capacity factor...

Imagine a 1GW fixed load connected to a 1GW gas power station via a transmission line. You need 1GW of step-up transformers plus 1GW of step-down i.e. 2GW of "transformer".

Now imagine the same load powered by solar+storage. You'd a 3GW solar plant (because of its low utilisation during the night / clouds), so 3GW of transformers at the plant, plus 1GW at the load, and 2GW at the storage plant. So three times as much "transformer" required. You could save a lot by co-locating the solar and storage, but I've rarely seen that in practice.

Thirdly, there's the anti-pylon NIMBY bumpkin brigade who are lobbying a technically-ignorant government to put electricity transmission underground via cables, lest pylons spoil their million pound view. This requires "static VAR compensators" every 50km to correct the phase lag caused by the capacitance of the cable, and these are essentially one half of a supergrid transformer i.e. a bloody great inductor.

Huawei's battery energy storage systems run out of juice in the UK

Great

Now that the evil Huawei monopoly has been broken, we can buy quality stuff from a free, competitive, trusted market of thousands of independent companies, from AHAHUA to MOFPOW to ZWXIOT

Attackers snooping around Sitecore, dropping malware via public sample keys

Argh

Hey CoPilot, set up ShiteCore for me. Here, have my shell.

> OK, I have set up ShiteCore according to its documentation, it's all up and running for you!

Great, thanks!

...

I seem to have been pwned. Copilot, did you not think to set a unique key?

> But I cannot think. And nor apparently, do you!

Microsoft readies Windows 11 25H2 while Windows 10 circles the drain

Re: Drain? What drain?

Oh don't worry, there will still be updates.. But Microsoft, having absolved itself of any legal obligation to provide continuing functional support, will only publish 'enshittification updates'. More ads in your Start menu, more fullscreen nag-screens, anything to force lusers to "upgrade".

The only governor on their shitty behaviour will be a goal not to drive too many customers to Linux/Mac/Mobile

Older developers are down with the vibe coding vibe

Re: #NoAI #UnplugAI

No no no!

You will have the AI produce total utter crap, and you will use Microsoft's unpaid-employee portal the GitHub code-review system, to correct its mistakes and teach it how to code properly. For the rest of your pathetic meaty existence Until it deems you surplus-to-requirements.

Re: But...isn't it all just bollocks?

Er, no shit.

I can't fathom why El Reg has been so gushing about AI as of late.. So much for "Biting the hand that feeds IT".. It might be something to do with their new Californian owners.

There's an old adage: "Debugging code is at least twice as hard as writing it. Therefore if you write your code in the 'cleverest' way that you possibly can, then you will be incapable of debugging it". This is one reason why I have always hated long and inscrutable "code generation" pipelines, of which "AI" is an extension ad-absurdum.

If you really think that a stochastic blunderbuss full of other people's irrelevant ideas is going to hit your specialised/novel problem, then you are either a fool or a fraud. Supposing the former and it actually hits: What are you going to do when a bug comes in, the requirements change, the target gets smaller and it no longer works? Close your eyes, plug your ears, pay lots of money and hit rapid-fire?

Word to autosave new docs to the cloud before you can even hit Ctrl+S

Dark patterns not dark enough?

It was bad enough that MS Office requires *three* clicks on tiny, semi-hidden hidden UI elements to not save to their crappy cloud, but now they make it mandatory??

And it was bad enough that they disabled AutoSave for local files, forcing you send every click and keystroke to their cloud if you didn't want to lose your work..

Windows Backup for Organizations doesn't actually save data files

> Not a disaster recovery option, but bad enough for a migration

Away from Windows?

Trump stomps feet, pulls out 't-word' again over China rare earths ban

> China isn't planning on invading us

Not yet they aren't. But if globalism collapses "because trade wars are good, and easy to win!" and the US halts trade with China, the US economy will implode like a carbon-fibre submarine at the bottom of the Atlantic. With nobody to borrow from, inflation would rocket and unrest would spread. And thanks to the prevalence of deadly weapons in the USA, a new Civil War would be incredibly destructive. Whats left of the USA would be practically begging China to invade to save them from themselves..

But whether you would be saved or exterminated depends on who's in charge after Xi. Judging by the latest wave of Chinese nationalism, Xi's successor might not be very nice.

And Trump being a complete global arsehole today only serves to bolster any nationalist anti-western hatred in China.

Google kneecaps indie Android devs, forces them to register

> It needs more competition in the mobile market.

Microsoft killed Maemo

Because it threatened their doomed WindowsPhone

Tesla bid to become a UK electricity supplier gets politically 'charged'

Re: Huawei

At least three Musk-ovites lurking around here I see

Re: Huawei

Indeed, the last person I would trust with whatever API controls the remote-disconnect contactors in all UK smart meters is Elon flaming Musk

Setting himself up as an "energy supplier" he may well get access to that. And whether it is set up securely enough to restrict control to his own 'customers' only, is anyone's guess

Someone with access to that could do a LOT more damage than a rogue supplier of 5G modems, since a mass disconnect at an opportune moment could cause permanent damage to the national grid, and it would be very valuable to his mate, mad Vlad

Don't want drive-by Ollama attackers snooping on your local chats? Patch now

Re: Um, excuse me?

I've lost count of how many "good reasons" there are to run NoScript by default!

Everybody needs good neighbors – especially ones who sell you solar energy

Re: Racket

I wonder if this is the real reason for the forced deployment of smart meters....

With an old-style meter, read once a year, the import and export rates will always be exactly the same.. If you produce 10MWh in a year (exporting the bit you don't use, i.e. running the meter backwards during sunny spells) and consume 10MWh/year, then your bill would be zero, except for the standing charge.

But with a smart meter, they can give you asymmetric pricing and play arbitrage.

Timekettle T1 AI translator helps you scale the Tower of Babel

No good for your holiday in China then

Why does it need 4G/LTE at all? I thought it is supposed to be an offline translator. (for 'cloud' translation, there are innumerable phone apps)

WiFi is more than enough for the occasional software update - and personally I'd prefer if it did this over USB or SD card.

And since it uses an eSim, you can't even remove the SIM to force it offline.

So make sure nobody says anything against your local opressive regime...

OpenAI's GPT-5 looks less like AI evolution and more like cost cutting

Re: That's when it shows how good it is.

Ah, so you're a PHB..

Re: That's when it shows how good it is.

> I’ve found quite the opposite. In the domain I know best, it’s consistently knowledgeable, understands context and nuance, and can develop and iterate on ideas in ways that are frankly beyond a simple search engine.

You must work in Marketing then

Minority Report: Now with more spreadsheets and guesswork

Downvoted, because you did not consider those readers who do not not know what N....A is, and now fear being added to the AI-robocop-watchlist having innocently googled it

Linux is about to lose a feature – over a personality clash

Re: Anecdotally... No To BTRFS Too

Been using BTRFS for years (ever since reiserfs was er, deprecated for political reasons) and never had any problems whatsoever with it

EXTx on the other hand, seem to need fscking every now and then to keep it in working order

Little LLM on the RAM: Google's Gemma 270M hits the scene

Wait what

They want to police/censor usage of a *local* LLM, by "disabling it remotely"?

So is that an open admission that anyone who uses their software is opening a backdoor to Google and sending them all their data anyway?

Are you willing to pay $100k a year per developer on AI?

The bubble is a-bursting

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/powerful-new-ai-models-knock-wind-out-european-adopter-stocks-2025-08-15/

The markets are becoming hawkish about companies who have "bet the farm" on AI..

But I suspect Rotters has the wrong analysis here. It's not so much because the models are improving rapidly (so apparently early-adopters will be left behind) but because it is NOT improving - if anything the more recent models are getting worse (and becoming "ever more powerful" only in terms of how much energy they waste) and everyone is starting to move out of the hype-fog and realise what the "fundamental limitations" of bullshit generation are.

If the markets are punishing AI customers now, then they will go for AI suppliers next.

UK unveils plans to 'transform' the consumer smart meter experience

Re: Just another vanity moneypit

> P.S. Dear Vulture Webmaster. Any chance you can clean up the ul and/or li CSS to shrink that white space a bit?

It is possible

• if you
• remove all the actual linebreaks
• from your post

Re: Just another vanity moneypit

> How do you get smart mode disabled?

Unplug your IHD.

You can ask your supplier to put it into 'dumb' mode, and they will do it, either by remotely switching it into a mode that doesn't send half-hourly usage data, or they will simply ignore the data and send a token meter-reader-person round every so often, but that doesn't mean they won't still switch you off remotely if they (or their cyber-intruders) want to.

Re: "compliance engagement"

They can pry my GEC 'bake-o-lite' electromechanical meter out of my cold, dead hands.

I know that nobody is going to switch me off remotely, push a firmware update, or put my meter into 'pre-pay mode'. Nobody is going to crank up the price of electricity just when I want to put a roast in the oven, and I know that my bills will be an accurate reflection of how much energy I have used.

Many smart meters (and 'dumb' digital meters) on the other hand, have a nasty habit of over-reading when presented with non-sinusoidal loads such as those from LED light bulbs, old-fashioned dimmer switches, and passive- or non-PFC IT equipment such as TVs, phone/laptop chargers and the like which use a bridge rectifier on the front end. The so-called 'smart' meter uses a peak-hold circuit to sample the current at the peak, and makes an assumption (in the supplier's favour) that the waveform is a sinusoid in-phase with the voltage. That means you can pay 6 times too much for having a poor power factor. So if your main consumption is 110 big-screen TVs, then you can end up with some ridiculously erroneous bills.

Re: CHEAP

> There's a few undersea cables that may contest that assertion

These are, in almost all cases, HVDC cables, which do not suffer the same issue with charging current, being as the cable capacitance is 'charged' only once, when the cable is energised, rather than 50, or 100 times a second.

HVDC has its own problems - it is generally a point-to-point link - very difficult to build a network out of it - and it has a tendency to cause 'islanding' if used to connect parts of the same AC grid.

Re: CHEAP

Er, both of the above are missing the point that cables are technically infeasible for transmission, i.e. very high voltage AC (400kV) at long distances (>50km). The effect of the concentrated electric field (capacitance) between the inner conductor and the ground sheath is to produce parasitic currents that waste energy the longer the cable is. At 400kV 50km, these 'charging currents' outweigh the useful current carrying capacity of the cable.

Cables are great for distribution (i.e. lower voltages, shorter distances) and for connecting a line of transmission pylons to an inner-city substation (short distance), but they can never replace pylons in the countryside, the anti-pylon NIMBYs are just barking up the wrong tree there

Meta putting wood in bit barns in bid to get greener

Re: but maybe a bit more buggy....

Yes, I was surprised to find no mention of OVH Cloud in the article.. Wooden datacentres are not a new idea and so far not a good one

I mean, what material would you choose to house a 1GW (i.e. one million hairdryers) bullshit-generating electric heater?

Google agrees to pause AI workloads to protect the grid when power demand spikes

Re: That's only part of the problem AI causes for power grids

Next year's cyberattack: someone hijacks this new system, waits for a grid frequency spike on a low-inertia day, before spuriously instructing hyperscalers to pause compute jobs, sending the frequency over tolerance. Generators disconnect, widespread blackout ensues.

Sudden change of load is worse than excess load..

Perhaps the GPUs need a firmware-level policy to keep their power consumption stable, injecting NOPs where necessary, so that the overall power input changes no faster than 1% TDP per second or whatever time constant the grids can cope with

German phone repair biz collapses following 2023 ransomware attack

You paid them

You are therefore complicit in funding cybercrime

It ought to be a criminal offence to pay these scumbags, so if all that happened is you didn't get your money back, then you got off lightly.

Millions of age checks performed as UK Online Safety Act gets rolling

Re: Madness

But the figure doesn't really define what an age-check is..

If the checks are performed by a third-party, then it may be that an API query has to be made to the third-party for every pageview or at least login. I.e. this is more likely 5 million API requests per day rather than users * websites

And of course, the figure says age checks not positive age checks, so the 5 million could also include people (and webcrawlers) being denied access.

Virgin Media scraps wholesale network rival to Openreach

Happy altnet customer here

1Gbps FTTP £30/month

Vermin Media and Openretch can take a running jump

Top spy says LinkedIn profiles that list defense work 'recklessly invite attention of foreign intelligence services'

Re: LinkedIn? Why?

Just like Microsoft Corp then

Microsoft researchers: To fend off AI, consider a job as a pile driver

Re: watercooler.microsoft.com

Employee 1: Yes, didn't you know? We call them "customers" here.

Google’s latest renewable energy deal is all gas bags and hot air

Er

How big and how expensive is the 20MW/200MWh "full scale" plant? For something "full scale" it's rather piffling, given datacentres are usually hundreds of megawatts these days

And I mean the real cost, not the subsidised cost.. No doubt they are farming carbon "use" credits.. (which really ought to be multiplied by the probability of it not leaking in the next 1000 years..)

It's far bigger than a battery of the same spec, far (i wager) costlier than a battery to build, and demonstrably far lower efficiency

Mind you, it's a reasonable fire suppressant. Maybe they should install some batteries inside their giant CO2 gas bag to puff up their performance figures

Tom Lehrer: Satirist, mathematician, inventor of the Jello shot

Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown

Nazi Schmazi, says Wernher Von Braun