Posts by Peter Galbavy

Software engineer reveals the dirty little secret about AI coding assistants: They don't save much time

In other news...

... water is wet.

Meta pauses mobile port tracking tech on Android after researchers cry foul

There is a setting in the standard Android FB app, something like "open links in external browser" and it used to work once, but I noticed that it stopped using an external browser a while back. I assume it's all linked to this privacy breaching, GDPR violation? I doubt they will veer "fix" the bug.

Data watchdog put cops on naughty step for lost CCTV footage

Like Stockwell station 20 odd years ago, right?

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Re: Memories having a secretary

> Can anybody explain how the term "Vice-President" (VP) - I believe meaning "one who acts in place of the President" - became such a low-level position

In regulated (US) companies - banks - the title of VP comes with becoming an "officer" of the company and places more onerous legal controls on you. At least that's how it was explained to me at one of those banks. Then of course in smaller companies the apparent prestige of the title has been carried through as another zero-cost promotion.

BOFH: HR's AI hiring tool is perfectly unbiased – as long as you're us

Re: HR's AI hiring tool

And if you happen to use a Post-It(tm) note, you put your favoured candidate on the segment with the sticky strip and voila!

DJI loosens flight restrictions, decides to trust operators to follow FAA rules

DJIs parochial attitude in imposing no-fly zones when they didn't actual exist and the complete silence over not including their apps in the official Google Play store are the two things that stopped me even considering their newer products, having over the years bought 3 different UAV models. While I am in the EU I was not aware of the change here, simple because I stopped reading the forums and related some time ago.

These changes go some way to making me look again for future business, but until they put the apps up for scrutiny in the relatively independent Google app store, I'll keep ignoring them.

Europe signs off on €10.6B IRIS² satellite broadband deal

The trough is deep and wide on this one.

Panic at the Cisco tech, thanks to ancient IOS syntax helper that outsmarted itself

Re: rm -rf /*

"Read Mail Really Fast all" you mean?

Chinese boffins find way to use diamonds as super-dense and durable storage medium

So, 2TB micro SD cards are how much volume? I am not sure what's novel here - or is it the WORM nature of the feat?

Skyscraper-high sewage plume erupts in Moscow

<quote>Moscow's police attributed the column of crap to "a planned air release after pressure testing during the construction of a gas pipeline."</quote>

This sounds like a voice from a Far Cry or Just Cause game... "emergency demolition of a power station and not rebel related activity".

SuperHTML is here to rescue you from syntax errors, and it's FOSS

I thought this was what hugo was for? markdown to static site...

Drone maker DJI sues Pentagon over ‘Chinese military company’ label

There is still concern - not just mine - that DJI will not publish their control apps via the Google Play store. While this is not evidence of their apps not meeting quality or security requirements, it does smell funny. When asked, the DJI support drones (see what I did there?) just say "download from our web site". Not concerning at all, nope.

UK Ministry of Defence gets into chipmaking game, buys gallium arsenide fab

Quietly. With funny handshakes.

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

Re: In the days before t’interweb…

"how do you remember all this shit?" is a regular enough question that I am thinking of getting cards printed with a reply on it...

Inquiry hears UK government misled MPs over Post Office IT scandal

Re: But as Watson might say

Yep, this is what is puzzling me, and has since I first remember this fiasco starting to come into view; where has the money actually gone?

Accounting exercises are great ways of covering up fraud, theft, laundering and everything else we know and love.

YouTube confirms it'll pull AI fakes in 48 hours if a complaint's upheld

Bet you'll need a google/youtube account to report and that involves agreeing to all their T&Cs and all that wonderful stuff. So you may end up in a worse place than just doing nothing.

Appeals court reanimates lawsuit accusing Meta of hiring bias against US citizens

Cheap bonded serf or better paid free(wo)man? Which would you pick, if only your corporate interests mattered?

Capita says 2023 cyberattack costs a factor as it reports staggering £100M+ loss

Executive pay awards have obviously increased in line with, well, the industry. And not proportional to performance. Of course.

Judge orders NSO to cough up Pegasus super-spyware source code

Re: "It has helped to save thousands of lives over recent years."

I happen to have a magic rock that protects me from tigers.

A visa to fill Australia's empty tech jobs is getting more expensive, but maybe better value

> So signature experiences like a trip to the beach aren't carefree. Your dream of moving here and strolling into the surf every morning is not realistic – but also not out of reach in regional cities where professionals are sometimes loath to settle.

Coincidentally, I arrived back yesterday after my annual jaunt and 6 weeks in Sydney and did almost exactly this. But that's only because I am lucky and privileged enough to have been born there before coming here (being dragged here as a small child) in the 70s and having access to the old family home. Sydney property prices, in any area you may want to actually live in, are insane and make London look reasonable sometimes. On the other hand, a friend who was lucky enough to move out there 10 years ago walked into a better job, paying 2-3x more and the outdoor lifestyle has made her healthier and happier.

Miscreants turn to ad tech to measure malware metrics

Not sure there was ever much of a difference between the two uses given

Bricking it: Do you actually own anything digital?

I still buy CDs (esp in charity shops) and only download un-DRMed music, typically when bought with a record or as a sampler. As for books, I am in the Kindle ecosystem, abandoning Google Books when they unilaterally imposed DRM on titles that the author and publisher said would not be DRMed (later China Mievelle like The City and The City etc). I can backup my Kindle books using open tools like Calibre to protect against corporate avarice, but it's tedious.

Re: Still Waiting for Derry Girls DVD

MakeMKV "shareware" is free for DVDs and paid-after-trial for BluRay (and HD-DVDs - some of us have those left over) - but they keep posting the key for the "beta" in the forums anyway. I paid for the licence too. I prefer ffmpeg CLI for the h265 conversion, but still not finding the right setting for some edge cases (dark red areas as per many horror films). Meh. The BluRays and DVDs (and HD-DVDs) are all in storage for now.

Meta's ad-free scheme dares you to buy your privacy back, one euro at a time

Re: I thought this was an Onion article

anti-social media, perhaps.

Making the problem go away is not the same thing as fixing it

Oh, same same. My home alarm-tied smoke detector is in the upstairs hallway outside the bathroom. At the time it was also linked to a monitoring service.

Cue lodger having a nice hot shower, opens door, alarm goes off. Not fun. She turns it off on the alarm panel and thinks nothing more for a few minutes until the fire brigade turns up with sirens on and all - she opens the front door in her towel and much red face.

The alarm company (an independent and NOT one of the big boys) replaced the detector with one that is not set off by steam or hot air and no issues since.

Local governments aren't businesses – so why are they force-fed business software?

Depends how you look at it...

Local councils can be seen exactly as businesses. Their Chief Execs are the landed gentry or factory owners and their raw materials are the electorate, the work done my employer labour or outsourced to the cheapest or most convenient friend, and they make a lovely return from their estates for their personal aggrandisement. The forecasts and other financials are worked out much the same on a spreadsheet as for any other business.

UK's National Health Service will roll existing Palantir work into patient data platform

If the data is worth that much, even if it's feasible to actually anonymise it (which it is not), then why - apart from corruption and cronyism - is not the NHS or the government selling it directly for the income?

Oh, yeah, sorry - I said corruption and cronyism, didn't I?

Liquid and immersion is the new cool at Supercomputing '22

Apart from the one mention of the Microsoft experiment, very little about heat / energy recovery - and I assume that's on the floor, rather than the lack of coverage in the article.

Some people are missing opportunities to innovate. Oh, no, wait... let someone else innovate and then steal it! Better,

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes's arguments for new trial deemed spurious – just like her tech

Is her argument, basically, "But I'm so pretty!" - dressed in legalese, of course.

Windows Subsystem for Android declared ready for prime time

So Piggly, what shade of lipstick would you like?

UK government in talks with datacenter operators over blackouts

Re: Day tank + bulk storage

I was going to ask much the same thing. Any DC I've worked with had 1 day on site and 7+ days on call from nearby plus prioritised contract for indefinite supply from further storage. Odd if this isn't the case any more.

Lufthansa bans Apple AirTags on checked bags

Re: Who's gonna look for them

I suspect it's more about deniability than Luftwhatever scanning for tags.

Your baggage gets lost, you go and tell them "it's here, look... or at least was at this time". "How do you know that, sir? Using banned tech? We have to destroy it now."

Girls Who Code books 'banned' in some US classrooms

Re: Politics on mailing lists...

You mean how "Smart" cars are never driven by smart people?

Smart thermostat swarms are straining the US grid

I think Economy 7 "solved" this problem decades ago. Surely they can't be that dumb... no, wait, yes they can.

Emma Sleep Company admits checkout cyber attack

They are also very much into sharp practices themselves; A friend ordered one of thier products which was not delivered "next day" as promised, but weeks later. In the meantime the credit company they farm this stuff out to - if you choose that way to pay - refused to acknowledge the late delivery and the rejection of the goods and threatened (in very bad faith) a bad credit rating if she didn't pay the due installments. Since then the unopend product was eventually picked up but Emma washed their hands of the credit issues and now the whole thing is detined for the Ombudsman as Emma blames the credit company, credit company blames Emma and meanwhile my friend is both out of pocket and has "bad creditor" ticked for refusing to pay further installments for a product never accepted.

Yes, GDPR and other legislation is *supposed* to help here, but it hasn't yet.

Simple advice: avoid this lot like the plague that they are.

UK internet pioneer Cliff Stanford has died

Re: Thanks for everything

Yeah, I looked. Some of mine are there but many of the more details / entertaining ones I recall are not. I must have a look in my email archives to see if I saved any,

Re: Thanks for everything

I am assuming this is the sinking floor in Hendon Lane.

The original Demon offices where a converted church hall (42 Hendon Lane) and the large space at the back of the building was slowly transformed into a machine room with aircon etc.

What no-one bothered taking into consideration was the effect that the weight of literal tons of rack mount equipment would have on the old suspended timber floor. It slowly, and then not-so slowly sank. We first noticed when someone asked if the skirting board was badly fitted and was it supposed to be so high off the floor?

Hmm.

I had by then moved on from cable-monkey work (these hand almost single-handedly wired all the rack-mount modems and pop serial cables up to and including the 640 Energis lines) to more esoteric desk bound labour and only was involved in the recovery at second hand. It was a fun time - everything about it was a fun time.

There are many stories. I wonder if my demon.announce posts are still around - we were quite honest about failures in those days.

Thanks for everything

As someone who was one of the initial tenner-a-month group and went to work for Demon Systems in 1994 - Demon Internet didn't have the budget quite yet - I moved into a world of crazyness and long hours and fun. I am not sure any other organisation, in any business sector, had the net growth rate that Demon did for those first few years - 15% *net* new subscribers per month was typical. This meant innovation, expansion, and a stubborness that explempified Cliff in so many ways. He knew how to get the most out of his staff and make us feel it was a privilege, which did wear this something but with hindsight was a wonderful time.

I ended up thinking about UUCP in the shower this morning, probably because of this sad news milling around my mind over the weekend, and thinking that the kids today never had it this good :-)

On a personal level he helped me buy my house and pretty much forced me to pass my driving test and I will be eternally grateful to him for both and so much more.

CompSci boffins claim they can recreate missing lines in log files

Use an AI guessing to train another AI and lie about "evidence". Nice. Just what some politicians need.

Event logs are very often used as evidence - not necessarily the legal kind - to establish the sequence and timing of events, who/what was involved and responsible. Tampering with those event logs is just like any other record tampering, even if it's tied up in a nice red bow and a gift tag that says "With Love from your favourite AI".

THen the side note about logs being used to train AIs is in itself suspicious. If you use fake records to train an AI then all you are doing is reinforcing whatever bias you decided was important to you.

Is there a rotting fish icon?

UK privacy watchdog may fine selfie-hoarding Clearview AI £17m... eventually, perhaps

£17m is a small drop in the ocean, unless I've misread it and this is a daily fine until the images are removed, and proveably so, from their trough. This level of fine makes it a viable business model still for them.

Google denies Gmail users an early start to the weekend after problems accessing service

Ah! And I thought my automated SMTP sending from home devices was getting IP blocked today - well, it is, but not for the reason I thought!

IT god exposed as false idol by quirks of Java – until he laid his hands on the server

Re: Not a fan of this one

More often somebody who should be an ingedient in the fast-food industry, but yeah same same...

Research finds consumer-grade IoT devices showing up... on corporate networks

Because a "corporate lightbulb" has to have a different specification to a "consumer" one. Right. Oh, and at least 20x the price, obviously.

Air gaps have been 'shattered’, says new Indian policy on power sector security

Sounds, based purely on the article, like yet more "cargo cult science" (based on Feynman's description) as IT security.

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair: British home computer trailblazer dies aged 81

Thanks for everything

Like many others have said, I almost certainly owe my career and many of my life choices to the influences of Sir Clive - and thank you for those. RIP.

Council culture: Software test leads to absurd local planning SNAFU

What might be interesting is how many approvals would have got through without due process and will not be reversed because they didn't have odd comments on them? Can they link - remember these are demonstrably incompetents - updates back to the junior fallguy/girl?

A bit like burying bad news.

Think you can solve the UK's electric vehicle charging point puzzle? The Ordnance Survey wants to hear about it

"I fail to understand the fucketty fuck why any outfit running charge points uses anything else than a simple contactless debit/credit card for the primary means of payment."

It's simples. All the charging network operators are focusing entirely on market valuation and floatation and M&A and not on providing a service anyone wants to use. Apps allow customer acquisitions and the MBAs know that numbers of customers downloading your app is a great metric for the prospectus.

The UK is running on empty when it comes to electric vehicle charging points

I thought I had stumbled into a BBC comments thread on electric cars for a minute. The rampant, deliberate and mischievous trolling by "gammons" is amazing.

I've been driving electric for about 6 1/2 years now, first an Outlander PHEV, then a Leaf (both on lease) and now a e-Niro (on PCP). Yes, they are expensive - but then all new cars are expensive and what is only just starting is a proper used car market. This is mostly old style Leafs and some others, but it is there. Given the number of "marque" cars in my part of the world, North London, a typical EV is not expensive at all.

The report in this article seems to be balanced, sensible and quite broad and align with my experiences overall. I am lucky enough to have my own driveway, yes, and I rarely use public chargers. There will have to be a shift in availability, pricing and capacity if electric is going to be widely and positively adpoted. At the moment the planning rules allow developers to install "passive" EV charging in new build houses and retail etc. (this basically means the ducting for someone to later actually install cabling and equipment) which is pretty useless as it's a pure tickbox exercise. More "active" installs, required for planning approval, still don't have any other conditions attached. They don't need to be made available, turned on or maintained after build - like a recent tennis club thing near me - a row of chargers for their members, but they are not turned on.

Currently (see what I did there?) EVs work for a portion of the driving population and this report does, very politely, stick the boot in to remind governement and local councils that they will actually have to take positive action if they want things to progress.

Pentagon grounds own report that said China's DJI drones are safe

"So, what recently aroused your suspicions around spyware?"

"Well, they pulled their app, DJI Fly, from the curated Google Play Store (while leaving others there and updatng) ande failed to explain why - instead requiring users to side-load the app via their own website and then requiring updates from iside the app."

UK competition watchdog launches investigation into fake review epidemic across Google and Amazon

Hopefully the CMA will see through the nonsensical veneer, especially from Amazon, about "taking action when we are alerted" as it is effectively impossible to report both fake (or seemingly fake) reviews or sellers contacting reviewers who give honest but negative reviews and offering incentives to remove or edit them. Last time I tried I found a specific email address (for Amazon UK) that in itself was well hidden and then returned "this mailbox is not monitored".