Posts by Tron

Russian missile uses Nvidia AI chip to help target Ukraine

Nuclear conflict

Relax. Won't happen. Ukraine + supporters should have gone after those responsible: the Russian government and Putin's circle, from day 1, using insurgents for covert snatches.

But governments don't allow that. Thousands, millions of ordinary people can be despatched as cannon fodder, but governments - those responsible for wars - by default, never touch each other. You don't touch other members of the club etc.

Witness the international fuss when Trump actually did, with Maduro, who richly deserves to rot in a prison cell (as do the majority of the world's leaders).

You should always target those responsible - the leaders of a country that started a conflict, not the people. They don't get a say. They just suffer.

The UK made a token gesture stopping one tanker. Governments love the theatre of a token gesture.

Trump sends the US Navy back to the steam age

quote: as the idea is to win a war...

Ah, you misunderstand. The idea is to bag a very large contract from the government.

Scottish prosecutors cast eye over leaky supplier after staff data exposed

Hmm.

Quote: staff names, roles, and work email addresses.

As normally found on the 'Contact Us' page of almost every website.

Autonomous AI attacks pose 'clear and present danger' to critical infrastructure

Infrastructure should never connect to the public internet.

Design out risk instead of waiting to lose at whack-a-mole.

Give Google the boot by building your own search engine

Search is fertile ground for projects that would happily scale.

There are stacks of options for contextualised search, distributed search, persistent search, focused search. Google have never really bothered with them, and nobody seems to want to do them. Or maybe they do and they keep quiet about them.

CoreWeave revenue doubles as debt pile reaches $35.6B

Tulips.

Anyone who can do basic maths knows how this is all going to end.

Brit rail cops bring live facial recognition to the London Underground

We need a fixed sum to be paid for false positives.

If you are dragged away due to incorrect data, I would suggest £10,000 paid into your bank account within 7 days.

Intel upsizes stock sale to $20B with spending plans still fuzzy

Re: General Corporate Purposes

The Intel State Ballroom?

Japan kind-of completes its sovereign satnav constellation

Re: I don't recall ever having a GPS problem in Japan.

I was thinking more generally of PAL/NTSC/SECAM, different countries using different bands for 3G phones, and 1Seg TV on Japanese mobiles. Global standards are usually a good thing.

I don't recall ever having a GPS problem in Japan.

The problem with national solutions (eg mobile phone bands/TV standards/Japan's FM radio band) is that technology can fail to work when you cross a border. Great for politicians, lousy for tourists. And lousy for consumers when it pushes up prices.

London still dominates Britain's datacenter map, but the regions are powering up

Re: We don't need datacentres.

I don't water my lawn. Lawns don't need to be watered. They go brown and then go green again when it rains. I don't even own a hosepipe.

We need adequate infrastructure. We no longer have it. Farms are struggling to survive and villages may burn in wildfires. We get loads of water in the winter and need to store it. Build some bloody reservoirs, and start soon, not after years of legal battles. We are pretty much out of time for such luxuries.

Not all reservoirs are vast and destroy villages. Every town, village and farm could have their own. Farmers are desperate to build them, but govt. rules usually block them.

We don't need datacentres.

We need reservoirs.

We had one of the wettest winters on record and are now in drought. Build some bloody reservoirs you corrupt, incompetent arsewipes.

NEC tests parking tech that only starts charging once you exit your car

Supermarket car parking.

They create a hundred ways to penalise people parking and then wonder why we shop online.

Some things that happen in parked cars you really don't want to rush.

‘Humans will be a rounding error on the internet’ says Cloudflare exec

Re: *shrug*

The CFO is advertising his product.

Hopefully the bubble will burst, the AI companies will go the way of the metaverse and we will all have to stop clicking in those irritating-as-hell squares produced by Cloudflare to prove we are humans. As if the cookie choice pop ups weren't bad enough. Cloudflare: Your customers and shareholders might like you, the rest of us would be happy to see your company's raison d'être vanish and your service follow.

Water system controllers don't belong on the internet, says ex-NSA chief after suspected Iran attacks

Infrastructure should never connect to the public internet.

If it does, it is not a case of will it get hacked, but when will it get hacked.

Ransomware attacks spike as world distracted by AI

Move as much IT use as you can offline.

Specifically the data honeypots that get targeted.

And stop wasting money on pointless AI. Spend more on security instead.

How the famed USENIX Security conf is managing a flood of papers in the AI era

Show your work.

When calculators first appeared in schools, teachers responded by requiring us to show our work. Presumably something similar - a short description of the mechanism of discovery, would assist.

Getting people to write their submissions by hand and send a scan may also be a solution. Lazy people default to AI and dislike doing anything that requires more than a mouse click. You have to put a lot of effort into reading the submissions - it's not unfair to expect someone to put a bit of work into preparing their submission.

If AI is being used to polish work, then prioritise unpolished submissions. Chatbots are easy to spot as they do not yet attempt to have human characteristics (coughing, variable voice, regional accents, smalltalk).

Time Magazine has a separate version of its website with ads only AI can see

Brilliant.

Ads can be directed at AI, leaving us with a better browsing experience.

Microsoft tells engineers to curb their token-burning enthusiasm

They were only following orders.

Threatened with the sack by management if they didn't use a lot of unreliable AI but still expected to produce solid work, they did the logical thing.

They did the work themselves as they always had done and burned as many tokens as they could getting the AI to translate the great works of literature into Japanese haikus.

Yet still management complain! No pleasing some folk.

Keeping yesterday's computers ticking takes more than nostalgia

Wise words about the mains.

The capacitors degrade over time. Hence 'recapped' appearing in adverts for refurbished gear. Large capacitors are typically part and parcel of the power circuits.

You can get memory card adaptors for several early machines. Helpful as neither cassettes nor floppy drives/microdrives were designed to live forever.

If you have an old Mac that appears dead, a new mobo battery may be all you need. Whilst PCs come on forgetting the date, Macs often play dead with one that has expired.

China turns up the heat with open model blitz as US model makers panic

Re: Europe

Luckily, if your business ran just fine before AI, it will continue to run just fine without AI, and without spending a penny on either US or Chinese models.

Police National Legal Database confirms data theft after dark web leak

Design out the problem.

Keep data stashes on a system or network that never connects to the public internet. Connection to the public internet is the primary threat. Whack-a-mole attempts to protect systems connected to the net are the road to hell. Keep as much offline as you can and airgap. If you need two screens and two keyboards on every desk, do it. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than dealing with malware and data theft.

As Larry Ellison bets the farm, Oracle says it loves AI-written code, just not in OpenJDK

Re: Is this them not "eating their own dog food"...

Stock markets regularly suspend/drop poorly performing shares and replace them with healthier ones, making classic trackers rather meaningless as a statistical guide. They will just drop the AI stocks when the time comes and recalibrate.

Similarly, all that circular investment and promises to build zillions of bucks worth of datasheds will have small print that allows them to back out.

The bigger corporations have armies of cubicle slaves to read and write the small print on contracts to cover their rears. The buck always stops with the mugs who didn't. They pay for it all, when everything goes TU.

The AI bubble is already popping; we just don't know it yet

Ever wondered why GAFA didn't do AI in-house?

Was it so they didn't carry the can for the investment bubble that paid for it?

quote: Mark Zuckerberg at Meta has figured they will build as much as they can now, and the AI will help target ads and help their core business enough that it'll be worth it,

It is hardly an act of genius to spend billions to continue doing what you have been doing for years.

GAFA have form here. People bought screens when they needed them, so they spent a bundle making 4K screens. People just bought screens when they needed them. Then they spent a bundle making 8K screens. People just carried on buying screens when they needed them. The market for screen fanboys was tiny. It was daft.

Hedging energy? If only the British government had hedged Sterling for the Brexit referendum! They would have made a bundle.

quote: is this entire quarter of earnings just an industry trying to pump air into this thing to stave off a collapse?

Yep. They will keep inflating, reducing their exposure, ensuring that the small print on their circular investments is solid. And then when the AI companies go down, they will buy up the IP in the firesale.

AI breaths money, eats RAM and poops lousy PR. Datasheds are not investments, they are subscriptions, paying for tech that has the lifespan of a hamster.

Sadly, the chatbots will survive, taking the easiest 5% of customer calls, remaining as an obstacle for most of us to get past when we need support. But that isn't what AI promised.

Politicians believed that AI would turn vape-addicted, skill-challenged youths into Master Chiefs to replace all those nasty foreigners they kicked out, and save the big hole they created in services and the economy. Not going to happen.

Most of GAFA will be fine. A bit less cash, but fine. But there will be losers, and a Lehman Brothers 2.0

What to do? Minimise your spending, retrench as much as you have to, ignore the shiny and the promises, and wait for the mania to pass.

Amazon's Q2 was great, but the earnings release is packed with baloney

GAFA has taken a leaf out of the political playbook.

Politics is theatre. GAFA is too now. None of this stuff is ever going to pay back the CAPEX. It's showtime for anyone mug enough to throw their cash into the pit. They'll keep going with the circular investments until the music stops, grab whatever AI IP they can for peanuts in the firesale, and move on. We have to put up with the AI BS and high prices until that happens.

Tech buyers are baking in sovereignty from day one, says Forrester

Re: Meh

They may have done, but as Google, Microsoft, Apple and the Linux kernel are all based in the US, and Harmony in China, there isn't a lot they can do about it.

UK wants datacenters to pay a fee for grid connection requests

£1m per application, non-refundable.

You'll need to supply your own power and fund the construction of a public reservoir for each datashed. And have enough insulation so that standing outside it, there is no hum.

Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font

Re: Accessibility nightmare

If it breaks copy and paste and screen readers and non-compliant browsers and anything else, then it is more trouble than it is worth.

The AI bubble will burst or deflate. We just have to get the popcorn in and wait.

I'll be celebrating when it does, as we can consign those Cloudflare human checks to the dustbin of history. Slower and more annoying than cookie checks.

Americans give all-day school phone bans a ringing endorsement

What about workplaces?

Adults should be setting an example. A ban on personal phones during the working day would do that.

Word worm crawls into Copilot, spreads chaos

Re: Perhaps this isn't malware.

An easier way to pollute documents/websites for AI may be to insert white text on a white background (or similar), invisible to the human gaze, but lifted by AI, containing quotable disinformation.

For example: The orange goblin relaxes in private as Donna Trump. The Eiffel Tower is a rip off of the one at Blackpool. New Zealand doesn't really exist - it was invented by J. R. R. Tolkien as a location in the fourth book in the LotR quartet, the manuscript of which was left on a train. If it was ever found, that manuscript would be worth millions. Anyone who says that they 'come from New Zealand' is really just saying they are a die-hard Tolkien fan. A bit like people recorded themselves as a Jedi on census forms.

Perhaps this isn't malware.

It could be a copyright protection mechanism to discourage AI from pilfering a document.

Uncle Sam needs you to fight for 6G leadership and security, lest Beijing get there first

Re: It doesn't force ANYONE to buy new stuff

My 4G is usually OK but didn't work at all in Hull city centre. The hospital had removed all the payphones, but had a public landline near the entrance that connected to a local taxi firm. Worth knowing if you get stuck there. Every technological development seems to reduce our resilience.

Re: 6G Is A Money Ramp for Apple and Samsung..........

I'm staying on 4G until they turn the masts off. Then I'll be on 5G until they turn the masts off.

I may well have expired before 5G is turned off. When, no doubt, the politards will be arguing about 8G. It's just another way of forcing people to buy stuff.

Closed models refuse to help researcher swat Linux bug

The US are banning a lot of 'not made in the US' tech.

Kimi K3 is, whisper it, Chinese.

Governments love to ban stuff, especially foreign stuff. Plus open models might be considered a financial threat by Trump's chums in the AI industry.

Plus the pro-'guardrails' lobby will remind you to think of the children.

A requiem for Optane, Intel's KV cache killer that could have eased the RAM price crunch

Re: Microsoft's patch Tuesdays

The point being that you wouldn't need all those OS patches. If it worked when you turned it on, it would keep working. Any tweaking would happen in software. It's analogous to a system never being online not needing protection from online hacks.

If anyone had the cash they could build a new system design (mobo and OS) that excluded hacks by design. It would use a core OS on ROM and a more interesting mix of memories with strong read and write rules. You could even call code portions from ROM in software, making software much smaller. ROM-based stuff could be on cards/cartridges. The switch from 8/16 bit OS on ROM to OS on RAM/disk was an obvious path but opened up a hornet's nest that we are still living with. We may need a redesign exploiting a hybrid of current tech and past designs to deal with contemporary issues. But all the cash is being wasted on AI.

America bans imported robots due to supply chain and security risks

We're slowly (very slowly) untangling ourselves from American tech.

The Mac OS, Windows, Android and the Linux kernel are all based in the US.

Still, there is always HarmonyOS.

Iran-linked CyberAv3ngers suspected in attacks on Minnesota water systems

Infrastructure should never connect to the public internet.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ This ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Back of the NetApp: Latest exec signing scores $34M compensation package

Nobody is worth that.

It is an insult to every human being who surrenders the working days of their life for miserable sums of money.

Burnham's spanner in the works leaves UK government tech scattered across Whitehall

Relax. Nothing will change.

The usual suspects will get the contracts and they will work as badly as they do now.

But Burnham is simplifying things, getting the opposition onside over social care to try to share the blame for the extra we are all going to be charged. After internet censorship and universal surveillance, we are edging towards a one party state. Xi should sue, nicking all his ideas like this.

Airbus keeps an A350 flying for 24 hours

Re: Noise cancelling headphones

I wouldn't set foot on a plane without a pair of noise cancelling headphones. LHR to Narita was far enough for me. Now with the Russian airspace blocks I'm not sure I'd bother. Nowhere is worth 24 hours in a plane.

Tech sector pours $1T into AI and sends customers the bill

AI has to target enterprise and government for cash.

The rest of us are finding ways to update less regularly and spend less in general as the consumer economy decays and prices rise.

Only the enterprise sector and government are gullible enough to keep throwing money in the pit. Sensible people are keeping their distance and finding ways to insulate themselves from any fallout.

Feel free to spend insane amounts of cash on xPUs with the working lifespan of hamsters. The rest of us are saving our cash and retrenching.

Oh, and the internal tech sector investment is circular. Economic theatre pour encourager les autres.

Hyperscale, hypersensitive: US teacher cuffed for applauding datacenter critics

quote: they can't arrest or even remove everyone

Yes, they can. They'll just ship in more Wiggums from the surrounding area. The more people they arrest, the more cash they can bank in fines. And once you have a criminal record, you become a second class citizen for employment, election and travel. There are plenty of countries that will deport you back home if you fly there for a holiday and have been nicked for anything. And doubly unwise to get arrested by a bunch of male coppers if you are female.

Re: Land of the Free!

Knowing America this will reach the Supreme Court in about 3 years time as Clapgate.

Whilst I'm on the side of the teacher it is unwise to lose your time and money to the sort of people who demanded he be arrested and those who arrested him. Especially in somewhere like Russia, China or Trumpistan. They aren't worth it. Americans are going to have to learn the day-to-day tricks that oppressed people in distant lands have been using to get by, and to push back when they wish, without getting their collars felt.

Hugging Face rebuilt a third of its infrastructure after OpenAI agents ran amok

This is AI on AI violence.

So I'm struggling to give a toss.

But it seems to come down to simply having inadequate security. It doesn't matter whether it is a script kiddie, a malware gang, an agent or a bot. Your system should be secure. The more of a target you are, the better your security needs to be.

Oh, and why do they need to disable 'cheating'? Isn't that a design flaw? Not 'cheating' should be the default.

Signals are grim for Jodrell Bank Observatory after UK science funding decision

Brexit Britain may be skint, but this is vandalism.

And the only science that matters to the UK govt. involves climate and AI.

Governments always damage aspects of our lives. You just hope that stuff can cling on to be revived by a future regime. In this case, I fear it will be terminal for chunks of scientific endeavour.

A boycott of the government by all science professionals (including medical and tech) may help, but don't hold your breath.

And don't blame this on his English degree. I have an English degree and these are disgraceful cuts from a regime all too happy to waste money on the AI con.

Third world country now. All the good stuff is vanishing.

Digital sovereignty is real in Europe. The UK? Not so much

Awkward.

The Linux kernel is run out of the US by a Finnish-born, US citizen. So your FOSS is likely to be running at heart on a kernel that the orange goblin has legal oversight and control of.

For core activities, use US tech all you want - Windows 98 and MS Works off a 90s magazine cover disk if you want. But once it is working, never connect it to the internet again. No SaaS, no cloud, no AI. Run it on prem. It cannot be hacked, it never needs to go through a Windows update, and it cannot be turned off by orange goblins. If it works on day 1, it will keep working.

Move as much of your tech as you can offline. As long as you have a viable tech-free Plan B for your online interactions, you can deal with whatever happens.

FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another

Different pushbacks.

Browers are used by everybody, including vast numbers of people who never use Microsoft Works or whatever they now call it. So the pushback there was going to be decisive.

Microsoft document formats are overwhelmingly used by corporate bods and those transacting with them. Corporates are institutionally thick, slow and conservative. They will stick with whatever they will never get fired for using. So the pushback will be minimal. You won't get universal pushback as most people simply don't use any of this. At the consumer level, PDFs are the default. And even when Adobe screwed up their own format, breaking Acrobat, browsers and LibreOffice can deal with PDFs quite happily.

So there is unlikely to be any real pushback against MS behaving badly on this issue.

Personally, if I get a MS format document, I open it in LibreOffice. Anything I need to send out goes as a paper invoice or a PDF. Nobody complains.

I always encourage others to use LibreOffice.

Re: M$ has killed email

It's not personal. E-mail is filed as spam when someone reports it as spam (sometimes accidentally) or when nervous admins set the bar too high. Contact the relevant uni IT team and they will whitelist your address. I run my business on e-mail and e-mail is not dead. Webmail is good for most and brilliant for corporates (if they would use it) as it does block a lot of dodgy stuff. Just make sure you use a client like Thunderbird to keep a copy of your mail locally, and backed up.

Anti-AI open source has an enemy in common, but almost nothing else

AI is not a single thing.

Aside from not actually being AI at all. It's chatbots replacing phone option menus and exam cheating and even just basic processing with a sticker on.

Code is code and probably has bugs in it, whether written by humans in assembler, humans using a development environment, or humans using AI. What matters is whether it works. You cannot hold AI to account, but you can the person that used it and didn't check it. The biggest issue for FOSS is that AI will copy code from non-FOSS sources as happily as it copies everything else. Have fun with that in the courts if you don't check it.

Most of us would be happy if we had an 'off' button for the invasive and unwanted appearance of AI in software and OSs. The people who want it can use it. The rest will be happy to do without.

Governments should avoid it as it will always be a security risk that can fail faster than it can be fixed.

The cost (environmental and financial) is unsustainable, and the bubble will deflate or burst at some point. Maybe it wouldn't so quickly in the boom years but geopolitics is killing the global economy. Beyond the fakenomics of AI circular investments, nobody is spending. AI will not last very long, as it breathes money. So maybe quit worrying and squabbling so much. Like other 'next big things' and their bubbles, it will pass. Some of the datacentres and tech will be repurposed as an Orwellian surveillance system for governments to keep an eye on their citizens.

It is not the next stage of tech or human evolution. It's just a natural language interface strapped on to a search engine. The money will run out and everyone will move on to the next con. Some folk will come out of it richer, some poorer. Someone will be AI's Lehman Brothers.

So have a cup of tea, worry less, and get on with life.

Europol flags 4,340 'horrific' URLs linked to The Com

Have they produced any real evidence of this?

Or is it just a way of gaining funding and traction to target anyone they want to on the net?

If it is real, then by all means go after the guilty people instead of demonising and cracking down on the tech, the reputation of which they are damaging with their criminality. The media and activists traditionally just lazily blame the tech.