Posts by Tron

Nip chip smugglers by building trackers into GPUs, US Senator suggests

Re: Nope. Nope nope nope.

Unfortunately, grumpy proles are voting for fascists, whilst the dispirited remainder of the electorate don't bother to vote for less extreme parties. And in fascist regimes, almost every aspect of your life has to be whitelisted by Glorious Leader before you are allowed to do it. It is the opposite of the more laid back regimes we have had in the past, where the state would blacklist what you couldn't do. We are seeing a lot of this in biosecurity and will see more in tech soon.

You could implement geo-verification, but it would be possible to hack it. Perhaps the only way of doing it is to have the chip commit suicide if it wasn't visited by a chip company employee, to reset it and keep it alive for the next few months, and even that might be hackable. It's fairly crazy, but paranoid, fascist regimes demand crazy stuff all the time. Not buying the same jacket as Glorious Leader, not listening to certain music etc.

The latest indications are that a flip from Biden-era bans to sell, sell, sell, may be on the cards. It may be too late to keep China etc hooked on US tech, where the NSA would quite like them to be, though. The Huawei ban and chip bans may already have made self-reliance a priority.

UK Ministry of Defence is spending less with US biz, and more with Europeans

The GCAP is (currently) a British/Italian/Japanese project.

It will be the Eurofighter (Typhoon) replacement, some decades and a few zillion quid down the road.

The F35s will have a kill switch by default. The US will expect to retain control of the software and could simply update it 'over the air' like a Tesla. And then your F35 stops working. So no need a black box under the seat with 'Kill switch. Interfering with this invalidates your warranty' on it.

Tech titans: Wanna secure US AI leadership? Stop giving the world excuses to buy Chinese

Sometimes, by accident, GAFA tells the truth.

Getting everyone on US tech gave the US dominance, particularly with the, ahem, back doors.

Unfortunately, they blew it. The Huawei ban, chips ban and taxiffs gave China and now everyone else a solid rationale for doing it themselves. HarmonyOS, sovereign clouds and all that.

The cat is out of the bag, US dominance (with all those back doors) has taken a falcon punch, and our global internet has taken another big leap towards oblivion.

Ironic that the NSA and internet users both profited from global standards, only to have our pool peed in by US politicians. I guess they never got the memo, or nobody ever explained it to them in short words. So many governments are self-harming nowadays, and we all pay the price.

37signals is completing its on-prem move, deleting its AWS account to save millions

Finally, the penny drops.

You can get TBs of storage for peanuts and completely separate your intranet from the public internet if you avoid cloud storage and SaaS. Lower costs, lower risks, much more resilience. You can put airgapped internet-facing systems on every desk if you want to and still save money. And if your internet facing systems get hacked, they are an easy, fast replacement with no damage to your core systems and data.

If you are lazy and hand over sacks of cash to cloud/SaaS vendors, you have nobody to blame but yourself if they gut you of cash or you get done with malware.

The primary tech security threat is not China, Russia or malware groups, but your own tech people making a daft, lazy decision on how you organise your technology.

As US scientists flee Trump, MP urges Britain to do more to nab them

UK governments have wrecked UK unis, so this is not an option.

The Brexit deal for unis saw them banned from bagging quality foreign students, especially Chinese, who may now have to stay at home and make China great again, rather than improving UK research. The resulting loss of income and caps on fees saw UK uni budgets undermined. UK unis are dropping courses, firing academics and selling assets to survive. Some will go under. Most will drop down the league tables, even the ones operated by UK entities, which they have always seemed to chart surprisingly well in.

Labour are running scared from activist-voter supported* Reform and will cheerfully isolate the UK from foreign talent to avoid attracting the ire of nationalists.

As for the STEM-is-everything-screw-everyone-else mentality of the Gradgrind UK government, STEM courses are expensive and are much more likely to be axed when the screens go red. Courses in the humanities and social sciences are simply cheaper. Ironically GAFA has been offloading STEM-qualified staff as if they were a disease for the last few years, believing their own propaganda - that they can be replaced by AI.

* Almost all Reform supporters vote in the UK (like MAGA supporters in the US). The mainstream parties don't have the ability to inspire large chunks of the electorate who may agree with their policies to actually get out and vote for them, after Brexit made everyone 25%+ poorer, grumpy and distrustful.

Stop Pakistani content at the border, India tells media, tech biz

India is the next China.

And nationalist regimes will do anything they can to break the global internet and build digital borders.

It's really depressing that gullible proles vote autocrats into power, because they just ruin everything.

Users find RISE with SAP service levels below industry standard

We need to walk away from an overpromising, underdelivering industry.

We need to rethink how we use tech. Internal systems and infrastructure should not be connected to the public internet. We should exclude SaaS and Cloud use as both reduce our resilience. Systems connected to the net need to be disposable and replaceable, holding minimal data ephemerally.

We need to go back to using less - minimal - tech, cheaper tech and simpler tech. The more complex a system, the more likely it is to fail. Archive data you do not need live access to on physical media in a locked room. In some cases, don't even use tech if a paper-based system works. This is particularly important in 'Plan B' scenarios that allow us to continue operations during a power outage or hack.

Tech needs to work for us. We are in danger of becoming a funding stream for GAFA, at our own expense. Don't be the next Birmingham council.

We need to take back control of how we use tech and not be led by GAFA or bubbles and scams like AI. Learn to spot industry cons. Data is a risk not an asset. Analysis of big data, BlockChain and 'AI' use are not magic bullets allowing companies to dump competent staff and increase earnings. That is just industry propaganda.

The deployment of tech in a business is fundamental to its successful operation and resilience. It should not be outsourced to industry lobbyists or sales staff. You have to start doing this yourselves and not outsource your decisions to those with a vested interest in charging you a tonne of money for stuff that actually damages your business.

IRS hopes to replace fired enforcement workers with AI

AI is not taking anyone's job.

The job won't now be done to any viable standard, so it has effectively been erased. The deployment of AI hands some cash to GAFA and whitewashes the failure of sacking competent, experienced people who made more cash for the USG than they cost, in a moronic act of ideological showboating. As we found out with Boris and Liz, elect a clown, live in a circus.

Arm says it isn’t worried by tariffs, but won't give guidance for FY'26

Because users are fighting to pay more for AI...

No reason for ARM to do anything other than surf the bubble, as the GAFA lemmings invest tonnes in stuff that we will not pay a penny more for than we did last year. Add an AI surcharge and everyone will just buy less. AI is going to increase overheads for anyone mug enough to join in, without increasing revenue. A bit like the transition to nextG. Lots of extra investment. People spending the same.

Boasting about increasing revenue on licensing (30%) when phone manufacturers are not really making much more (2%) is unwise. Those license fees are 100% dependent on the manufacturers' revenue streams.

It isn't really artificial intelligence. It has only niche value. You are all being conned. But hey, make as much from the bubble whilst you can, with a fast, clean exit strategy for when it deflates.

90-second Newark blackout exposes parlous state of US air traffic control

Re: Painfully similar...

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but when people say 'lessons will be learned', they are lying.

Curl project founder snaps over deluge of time-sucking AI slop bug reports

Stop offering bounties.

If you are Google you have unlimited resources and can deal with AI noise, so let them carry on with the bounties.

When it comes to smaller/FOSS projects, most people will report bugs because it is the right thing to do and because they care about good software.

No bounties, no AI noise.

New Zealand kind-of moves to ban social media for under-16s, require age checks for new accounts

You cannot do this digitally without ID grabbing everyone, STASI style.

If it is left to parents to do, you can prosecute parents who fail to do it effectively. But if you implement any form of online checks, you will be forcing your adult population to submit passport or biometric data to third parties, where it will not be safe, and monitoring everything they do online. Just like China.

Either you trust parents and prosecute them when they fail badly enough or you switch to fascist oversight of absolutely everybody.

There are other options, like having whitelisting filters for kids, but with all of them, it is the same. You trust parents or you become a fascist regime.

The only halfway house I can think of is selling adult ID codes across the counter of stores for cash, without taking personal ID. It wouldn't be 100% but it is not as bad an idea as becoming the KGB.

Top sci-fi convention gets an earful from authors after using AI to screen panelists

Phew!

It's lucky that everyone on the planet has a unique name then, isn't it.

Using AI is the tech equivalent of wearing one of those MAGA hats.

Pentagon declares war on 'outdated' software buying, opens fire on open source

There are three urgent priorities here.

First, as of now, the US government should stop using software, firmware or any OS that was not written entirely by US government employees with security clearance from before they began coding, who have passed the pro-Trump purity test. Until new software is written, messages can be sent by landline or pigeon. But only if the pigeons have passed the pro-Trump purity test (animal version).

Secondly, the USG is in danger of running short of secure TLAs. A committee should be established as a priority to develop new ones, that can only be used by government employees with security clearance who have passed the pro-Trump purity test. For security reasons, the actual words that the TLAs stand for will remain a state secret.

Thirdly, an immediate audit should take place to ensure that USG employees are not using BIC ballpoint pens. BIC is a French company and France has not yet been annexed by the United States. This is potentially Huawei all over again.

FYI: Most AI spending driven by FOMO, not ROI, CEOs tell IBM, LOL

This is presumably how the South Sea Bubble progressed.

You would have to be running your business very badly, with terrible staff, for AI to be better. But hey, flush away your cash and put off customers with AI 'customer service' if you want to. We'll just sit back, eat the popcorn and be amused by it. AI has already 'helped' Microsoft to ruin Windows further and faster than they already were doing. Eventually 'AI' will just undermine trust in tech generally.

The data centres are money pits from day 1. The built in obsolescence of the tech against the build time, the lack of a business case and the insane cost (increased by taxiffs) to produce something that nobody wants to pay extra for. The only value they have is to express fealty to King Donald so he doesn't trash your sector the way he is all the others.

There will be some niche cases where what is called AI has some value (as a computer/human interface), but nobody will pay extra for it. This is not the next big thing. It isn't what it says on the tin. It's not really artificial intelligence. You've all been conned.

We need to focus instead on using less, simpler tech, in a hybrid with physical/real world stuff that cannot be hacked. On disconnecting internal and infrastructural systems from the public internet/cloud. We need to treat data as a risk rather than an asset. And switch to distributed systems that have fewer data honeypots. So stop being led by GAFA to your local cashpoint, audit your systems and rebuild them using less, simpler, cheaper, but more resilient tech/hybrid models.

Culture comes first in cybersecurity. That puts cybersecurity on the front line in the culture wars

It's not just Trump.

quote: the EU is built of companies that speak English as their internal lingua franca.

I think the Académie Française may disagree on that. Aside from the tax dodging emerald isle on the corner and the bit attached to it, which is both in and out of the EU at the same time, the use of English is regarded by the French as a not entirely necessary evil. The EU might have replaced English with French by now if everyone didn't dislike them quite so much.

The GDPR is the most pointless piece of showboating imaginable, intended primarily to bilk cash in fines from GAFA.

If the EU cared one whit about privacy, my e-mail address and phone number would not have to appear on the front of every package I get from there.

All we get as users is the endless need to click on an 'Allow' button, after working out which one it is, if it is in a foreign language, on every ****ing website we go to, just so we can be sure it works. Yeah, thanks for that. Means a lot. Tossers.

All countries have been intent on establishing digital borders as solid as their land borders for some years now, by an endless torrent of negative reporting on mainstream media (the sort of media that in the UK has not blamed anything at all on Brexit since it happened). Easily pulled strings in evidence there.

They will use 'protecting the kids' to impose state control and surveillance on the internet (passport and biometric ID to prove you are an adult on everything you do). And they will cheerfully block access to foreign websites and services using everything from prepayment of sales tax to blocks on payment services and search censorship. Our global internet is already degrading rapidly and has been for some years.

So although the orange gangster is going to do a lot of damage before someone bumps him off, junk food finishes him off, or the Republican party decides that they don't want to go down in history for entirely destroying the US, he is not alone. They are 'all in it together'. Other nations will just see their own government's take down attempts front and centre, with Trump's as the wallpaper in the background.

The future will be crap. because after several decades, politicians are taking charge again. And as they are the least competent people on the planet, they will have to start wars to cover up their inevitable, approaching failure.

So, climate change + war ahead, and much less internet/cash/tech/joy/happiness.

Infosec guru Schneier worries corp AI will manipulate us

Just require an Off button.

A slider could determine the amount of AI relied upon, but an 'off' button would be preferable.

A Pi PC with no AI and software with Windows file format compatibility might do. And by 'PC' I mean fitting in a PC cage with built-in connectors for hard drives, optical drives and lots of memory. I must get round to playing with my 400 to see how it is. Lack of time and space.

Teens maintained a mainframe and it went about as well as you'd imagine

Re: fax Feeding the Beast

Despite the negative press it got, I still have lengthy printouts from my Sinclair ZX (thermal) Printer that look as good as new.

China is using AI to sharpen every link in its attack chain, FBI warns

The problem is not China.

Aside from other state supported and private hackers, the real threat is the vulnerabilities in your own systems.

Your internal systems and all infrastructure services should never touch the public internet. External systems that do touch the net should be air gapped, data light and easily replaceable. Avoid the cloud, keep your storage local and encrypted and only store the bare minimum of data. Data is a risk not an asset. Archive what you don't need live on physical media in locked rooms.

As for AI, self-respecting hackers will soon wise up and return to running their own scripts.

AI infrastructure investment may be $8T shot in the dark

Tulips all over again.

As I pointed out in a different thread, the built-in obsolescence of the hardware, time taken to get functioning, lack of consumer desire to pay extra as the global economy is trashed by Trump, and lack of any killer app means that data centres for AI are money pits from Day 1. There is no business case for them, even without the taxiffs that will ramp up the cost. The less you spend, the less you lose.

Unless you have a pressing need to show fealty to King Donald by flushing billions down the lavvy to make him happy, it is insane to spend anything on the AI bubble/scam.

Keep your cash in your wallet and wait until the AI bubble bursts/deflates and Trump is gone. If every investment option has more red flags than parade day in Beijing, choose none of them and wait it out. There will always be a good deal out there at some point. Wait until it arrives. Sit back and watch the idiots throw their money away.

Red, white, and blew it? Trump tariffs may cost America the AI race

The simple solutions are the best.

Freeze, better still, minimise US investment and expand outside the US. Beyond the taxiff walls you can function fine, buying, selling, even building data centres if you want.

With regard to AI, the built-in obsolescence of the hardware, time taken to get functioning and lack of consumer desire to pay extra, means that AI data centres are money pits from day 1. There is no business case, even without the taxiffs, so the less you spend, the less you lose.

Trump will eventually go after a period of national self-harm. If the US economy is still functioning and the taxiffs go, it may be worth operating in the US again. Until then, instead of just outsourcing manufacture or assembly, outsource most or all of your business operations beyond US taxiff borders. You can't run a business in a circus.

Microsoft tries to knife passwords once and for all - at least for consumers

Windows is no longer an option.

This is the final nail in the coffin. No longer of use. Anything but Windows from here on.

Disney Slack attack wasn't Russian protesters, just a Cali dude with malware

Something to consider next time.

Not sure Russian hacking groups are au fait enough with Western colloquialisms to use the term 'Jack Shit'.

Meta blames Trump tariffs for ballooning AI infra bills

Re: extra sackloads of it cash.

About 3 billion people, mostly for the purpose it was intended, keeping in contact and sharing content with others. Those who use the offered options and don't 'friend' people they do not know or do not like, have no problems with it and appreciate its core features. Problematic users tend to move with trends and are more likely to have switched to more recent services.

But obviously, not you or any hipsters out there who value the image they want to present of themselves to the world, over the day to day use of basic, viable tools.

Nice to see Meta donating to some charitable causes.

Most of us don't want AI damaging the quality of our computing and none of us are going to be willing to pay extra for it. I guess Meta just wants to support the hardware companies by giving them extra sackloads of it cash.

Soviet probe from 1972 set to return to Earth ... in May 2025

If it lands on Trump...

...we will all have to start going to church.

Oregon State University's Open Source Lab is running on fumes

Try Japan or the EU.

The Japanese government would really like to see their unis rise up the league tables and welcome opportunities to host high-profile, high-kudos academic facilities. The EU might want to spend some of their GAFA tax fines offering new homes to high profile US academic projects. The US academic system will suffer under Trump even more than the UK one did courtesy of Brexit. So find a safe harbour for the good stuff abroad. Academics and their research had to leave Germany in the 1930s and America in the 1950s. It happens.

Open source AI hiring bots favor men, leave women hanging by the phone

I'm guessing they are shifting liability by using AI.

I didn't hire this idiot, the AI did.

Nobody running a small business would risk using software for something as important as hiring a new member of staff. I guess nobody in a corporate environment really gives a toss about the company they work for.

TikTok fined €530M after EU user data ends up on servers in China

Tax fines.

Trying to make up for their declining economies. GDPR is a con. More of my personal information appears on most of the labels on the front of the parcels I receive, by government mandate.

Brewhaha: Turns out machines can't replace people, Starbucks finds

quote: his first priority should be finalising fair contracts with the 11,000 union baristas

Don't be selfish. Unionised staff should not get a better deal. They should treat all of their workers equally.

Ex-CISA chief decries cuts as Trump demands loyalty above all else

Wikipedia were asking for trouble...

...basing their organisation in a dictatorship.

Maybe Canada can offer a safe harbour for them.

It might be fun if Trump replaces everyone in US security with knuckle-dragging MAGA muppets. Lots more embarrassing leaks.

TAKE IT DOWN Act? Yes, take the act down before it's too late for online speech

Re: You ain't seen nothin' yet

All governments are doing it. They are directly or indirectly taking control of the internet. Game over for web 2.0.

Historical note. When some biting political satire hit the British stage, some by Henry Fielding, the British government responded with the Theatrical Licensing Act. It initiated state censorship of British drama from 1737 until 1968. So don't expect us to get our internet back any time soon.

Hopefully distributed alternatives to website based services will be launched and spread virally (no doubt condemned as 'enemies of the state'). Governments consider themselves to be the farmers and us to be the livestock. Wherever you live, your government is likely to be your enemy, because in most cases, it will do more damage to your day to day life than anyone else. You can best spot the flaw in 'democracy' when all the major parties vote together to screw you over.

Trump admin freaks out over mere suggestion Amazon was going to show tariff impact on prices

Re: America

We went through this with Brexit. International laughing stock. Billions in self-harm. Industries screwed. Massive inflation. Empty spaces on the shelves. Uni budgets crippled.

There is no upside, and it may not even be possible to recover generationally after it happens. It's the same thing - nationalist pricks burning their own house down as they don't like the wallpaper. It is just bigger all ways in America.

As for covering up the taxiff costs, none of the mainstream media in the UK dared blame anything on Brexit and it still doesn't. They blamed it all on Putin and Covid. Lying by omission.

Google goes cold on Europe: Stops making smart thermostats for continental conditions

I wouldn't touch this stuff.

Fair enough if folk want to play with it, but I don't think national infrastructure should connect to the internet and I don't want mine to either.

I have no need or desire to have any 'smart' stuff. Pressing a button with my digit is no big deal. I don't want a smart meter either. If they force one on me, I'll go the full John Noakes on it, and encase it in a repurposed cereal box, so I never have to see it.

There is some value in this tech to assist disabled people, but even then, making your stuff reliant on a third party server or a vendor who embraces built-in obsolescence just doesn't sound like a plan.

Windows profanity filter finally gets a ******* off switch

Re: I am reminded of Eudora

I hadn't thought of Eudora in years. I recall that it worked quite well. I did a check and I have a copy of Eudora Light v.3 on my system from 1997, presumably to read the old messages (although they are in HTML and can be read in Notepad or similar). The application weighed in at 999Kb. No Clippy AI, no bloat, no cloud, no SaaS. Where did we all go so wrong?

EU Chips Act heading for failure, time for Chips Act 2.0

Targets are great.

Politicians set them so they can forget about stuff. The higher the target the more impressive it looks when you set it. You won't be in power when your successors fail to meet it. And they will, as nationalist projects like this always fail. I mean, the EU becoming more resilient by giving money to Intel? Spot the flaw in that.

Market forces and resources decide who makes what, where. The burden is shared and the mutual reliance gives everyone a reason to put a peg on their noses and get on with each other. That's how you maintain a degree of peace in an antagonistic world.

You need to be good at something that other nations need, and you can then plug yourself into the mutual dependency. It doesn't matter what it is, but instead of weaponising it and blocking it, you trade it in return for the stuff that you need. You might not like your trading partners, but you sell stuff to them, they sell stuff to you, and a degree of diplomatic civility is maintained.

We all have some skills, some resources and some manufacturing. So focus on what you are good at, and stay on speaking terms with everyone else. You get global trade and a degree of peace.

Nationwide power outages knock Spain, Portugal offline

We've reached out to Spanish officials with questions, but haven't heard back.

Probably because their power is off.

Maybe there is a TikTok craze - everyone in Iberia hoovering at once. Or maybe a cleaner just unplugged the wrong thing.

The moral of this is obvious. I can only repeat what I often say on here: The pivot to digital reduces our resilience. We need to be able to function better when hacked or when the power goes off, because with climate change it will do that more often. So we need to retain real cash. And stuff needs to work manually as a plan B.

Time will tell whether this is an epic fail - a single point of failure that nobody could be arsed to fix, or an epic hack. Either way, this will be one for the textbooks.

Trump’s 145% tariffs could KO tabletop game makers, other small biz, lawsuit claims

I don't think giving money to lawyers will help.

Brave though it is to take on the government, elected politicians can usually ruin your business and make you poor if they choose to. There is always some woolly phrase somewhere that lets them get away with it. It happened in the UK with Brexit (fishermen, almost anyone dependent upon unencumbered imports/exports or migrant labour) and it will happen in the US.

Trump's historic MO is to break something, get some headlines, walk back a little after bagging some goodies, declare victory, and move on to persecute and impoverish someone else.

Companies may have to go on hiatus and wait to see how things work out. Some form of normality may return. If it doesn't, sell the relevant assets, shut down and move on. You are not the first victims of your government and you will not be the last.

Governments consider themselves to have the right to control what you can and cannot do, and to end it on a whim. They consider themselves to be the farmers and us to be the livestock. And the law is configured to make it so. The democracy stuff is good PR but doesn't mean much when push comes to shove. They all behave like dictators and do whatever they can get away with.

Google admits depreciation costs are soaring amid furious bit barn build

There is no business case for AI.

Companies beset by taxiffs, with global growth dying on Trump's altar are not going to pay extra for something they do not trust, do not want, and which is not going to earn them a bean.

In creating AI products, Big Tech has massively increased its overheads, but will not be able to match that with increased income.

If Cloud prices rise to pay for all these rapidly depreciating warehouses full of old servers, users will audit what they are doing, realise that they don't need to do most of it and just switch back to their own cheap-as-chips HDDs and servers. No more geopolitical issues with non-sovereign cloud storage and they will not locking themselves into ever increasing bills from GAFA.

If this is you, audit what you are doing on silicon and see what you can stop doing. Lose the gilded chain that ties you to the cloud. Take back control of your data use and get those costs/risks down. And switch to Windows LTSC before Recall, updates and AI cause you serious problems in the future. Going forward, new tech is likely to be a greater risk than a greater asset. Reduce your risk by limiting use of it.

Ninite to win it: How to rebuild Windows without losing your mind

Don't be elitist.

You never know. There might be someone at MS who isn't a lawyer/sadist and understands that they could massively increase their popularity and bottom line by flogging LTSC retail to anyone who wants it. Heck, they could charge more for it, and people would still buy it. Advertise it as 'Less is more', Windows Pure or Windows Lite. A rare example of Tech giving the punter what they want. And they could continue to persecute the majority of their victims with W11 Clippy AI, despite the inevitable legal and financial risks of flogging baked in AI, Recall and update issues, which will only get worse. It is just a matter of time before this crapware bites those shovelling it on the arse.

India’s services giants brace for impact as US tariffs bite their customers

Taxiffs won't make AI profitable.

Too much risk, too much cost, too little reward. Companies will freeze investment and throttle back, pull out or shut down in higher cost/lower profit areas.

AI is not a medicinal compound for taxiffs. W11 and Clippy AI may drop off the bottom of the priority list for companies. Windows LTSC may be about to become Microsoft's top selling product. Lowest cost, least risk, least hassle.

Hibernate until things settle down. If that is four years, that's fine. Companies can freewheel for four years through Trump, a recession or a war. Stash the cash and concentrate on core operations only.

And this goes for consumers too. Green transition? Nope. Too expensive. Major purchases? Put them off. Tin hats on, hunker down and wait it out. Let the orange imbecile wreck the place, surface when he is gone and everyone starts rebuilding.

M&S takes systems offline as 'cyber incident' lingers

Re: British Library - comms good, actions bad

Some services that are vital for researchers (such as the ESTC) are still offline. Maybe it could have been put back together on dedicated silicon with its own website. Credit to Nikolai Vogler for getting an older version of the ESTC up and running as quickly as he did for researchers to use until the BL manage to get back in the saddle.

Trying to lump so many different services together is not a good idea. Some systems are much easier to secure when standalone. Cobbling them with more complex/interactive services makes everything as vulnerable as the weakest link.

Europe hits Meta, Apple with €700M in fines for flouting DMA

Let us congratulate the EU on their Pyrrhic victory.

This is as unwise as the Democrats forcing Trump to win or go to jail. Look how that turned out.

Trump is a bully and an attention whore, and the EU have just thrown him a big fat opportunity to cause havoc.

Idiots.

Ex-NSA chief warns AI devs: Don’t repeat infosec’s early-day screwups

This may not be possible.

Tech could have had a lot of security baked in from day one, with better coding practices, better development tools, much more use of underlying layers of firmware, siloing of permissions and protecting areas of memory so that legit software or malware could only ever be the froth on the top of the tech pint. In part this didn't happen because a lot of these security tweaks had been patented, and couldn't be used. That is down to the abuse of patents by big tech, as much as laziness. Modern 'SbD' stuff often isn't. MFA just makes stuff more fragile, entirely dependent upon the most stolen and easily dropped piece of kit in history. Or, worse, biometrics. You can change a password easier than your eyes.

And of course Microsoft could properly test their bloody updates before they flush them into the wild.

But gAI is a completely different type of tech. It's not code or hardware based, but data based, and user generated data at that. Almost all of it obsolete, irrelevant or dodgy. There isn't enough quality data out there to build an LLM. The best AI will simply copy human prejudices. You can tweak it to remove them but you are playing whack-a-mole.

The whole 'guardrails' BS is just politicians pretending to be able to sanitise it in language the proles can understand.

As for other AI systems. I'm not sure they will ever be more than trending towards reliable, the way graphs can trend towards zero without ever getting there. In enterprise systems and anything important, AI should never be used. If it is, and it goes wrong at widescale, whomever authorised its use should be held liable with very large fines and very long prison sentences.

As it says on the tin of all AI, this is experimental. Use it at your peril. It will never work to the level that it has been oversold - reliable magic. And it should never be relied upon for anything important without human oversight.

Two CISA officials jump ship, both proud of pushing for Secure by Design software

I doubt Trump knows the first thing about internet security.

Presumably he is taking 'advice' from someone. As he seems to be ticking a lot of boxes on Putin's wish list for damaging the US, perhaps the FBI or CIA can examine who that someone is (before they get sacked, to save a few bucks).

US to slap up to 3,521% tariffs on SE Asian solar imports – especially you, Cambodia

Please dump cheap green tech in the UK.

We are skint now and have the highest power bills in Europe. Buy one get one free, bulk discounts, whatever, we are up for it.

Bad trip coming for AI hype as humanity tools up to fight back

Patent law has been abused for decades.

Tech companies use it to lock out innovation until their patent lawyers can make them an offer they cannot refuse. It was never intended to do that. All it was supposed to do was see that IP creators were rewarded. It needs reforming to allow for fair use on a sliding scale linked to profit. But you won't get any useful intervention out of King Donald. Don't be surprised if he invalidates all non-US patents within the US.

ChatGPT burns tens of millions of Softbank dollars listening to you thanking it

Tulips...Darien...South Sea...Railways...dot coms,,,the Metaverse...NFTs...

If you miss this one, there will always be another money pit.

AI may be the best yet, as an AI can burn through other peoples money without human intervention, faster than ever before.

How to stay on Windows 10 instead of installing Linux

LTSC sounds like a better version of the original.

It makes W10 sound palatable.

It would be nice if a vendor was able to legally flog LTSC PCs to all and sundry as new/used PCs, sharing the cost of multiple licenses.

America's National Science Foundation tells DEI, misinfo studies: You're fired

Typo alert.

Shouldn't that read 'Trump maladministration'?

As for 'protected characteristics'. I feel I should assist here and point out that Trump voters are wildly underrepresented when it comes to getting grants for advanced STEM research, despite being 100% American. Many of them are itching to get some NSF cash to study intelligent design and produce some hard data on prayer outcomes, yet their applications are rejected. Is this a government-funded NSF war on white, working-class Christians? Shocking. Time surely for America to go 'back to basics' and embrace its core values, redirecting funding there. They can leave the stuff about self-adaptive processors, intelligent networks, inherently secure platforms and distributed DNS systems to us weird godless foreigners, whilst they fund the important research on 'science with American characteristics'.