Posts by Headley_Grange

Devaluing content created by AI is lazy and ignores history

AI is following the trajectory of most tech these days. The potential to significantly improve nearly all aspects of life - work, leisure, health - is massive but it's undermined by the commercialization and exploitation of people to the extent that most of the real benefits will never be realized.

For example, It would be fantastic to put all the NHS patient data into a single database run with AI. From a personal perspective that would mean my health data would be immediately available to all health professionals wherever I was - GP, A&E, paramedic finding me by the side of the road, etc. From a public health perspective the opportunites are endless and could make genuine improvements. It's never going to happen because I believe the people who can make it happen are more interested in making revenue from my private data than making my life better, so they can fuck off. AI will develop the same way that the internet and its services have - primarily as a means to line the pockets of the likes of Meta, Google, etc. with any real public benefit having to be picked from the bones of what remains.

The UK has just passed a law to make creating deepfake porn with AI a crime. They didn't go far enough (in my view, others are available) and missed an opportunity by not making the AI's owners and creators jointly liable for the offence. I get the "people kill, guns don't" argument, but we are at the very beginning of a concerningly disruptive technology and it's better to start hard with legislation that can be relaxed later rather than assume we can legislate problems away once the cat is out of the bag.

Senator Warren slams Intuit's 'junk fees' as America's Tax Day rolls around again

Re: The government creates the rules, we just play by them

Yeah, right, cos if I didn't have to pay $150 to get my taxes sorted out I'd jiust chuck it in the bin, would I?

Re: A solution?

The reason they do that is because they can't get any tax from the wealthy people so they go after the little people. Bezos paid no personal tax in 2007 and 2011. Musk paid none in 2018. Many billionaires in the US pay no personal tax and the money's got to come from somewhere. Much easier to go after people who can't afford to fight back or pay millions to lobby politicians to reduce their tax bill.

Open source versus Microsoft: The new rebellion begins

The problem here isn't the need for Excel, it's the fact that the crap managers who need the people-skills assistants haven't got the bottle to deal with the Excel hold outs. Sack the managers, replace them with their assistants who, with their people skills, can get the Excel hold-outs to lead the LO roll out because their specialist application knowledge and expertise puts them in the best position to help the rest of the staff transition.

I predict.......

Let's hope they are successful. I predict MS tweaking document formats to make life annoying but I'm sure LO will respond quickly enough. The real trick would be for the local governments to specify open standards for text and spreadsheet docs (when needed, otherwise pdf should be the default) to be used by all relevant partners and subcontractors which, if MS started making life difficult, might also push more use of LO

I also predict that the main areas where they'll suffer or get resistance will be the many hidden macro-filled Excel spreadsheets which support ERP, online forms and various databases. LO isn't such a good fit here in my experience. Macros work mostly OK, but will need testing or re-writing, but I guess the move away from VB was going to make this happen anyway. I think that the main issue will be importing data and getting character sets right, which has caused a bit of head-scratching and trial and error for me a couple of times, but no real biggy unless people are of a mindset that they don't want to make it work.

Microsoft to use Windows 11 Start menu as a billboard with app ads for Insiders

That's not how I see it. I bought a new Mac last year with Sonoma. Hopefully the Mac will last many years and I'd be happy to keep Sonma exactly as it is today forever + free security updates.

I consider that I paid for the OS to work when I splashed £2k for the Mac and the OS and I expect Apple to fix whatever it got wrong, just as VW fixed the doors of my car for free last year when it found a design problem with them. Any other updates - I don't care. A few extra emojis? Folders in Reminders? Don't give a toss. If those require wealthy coders working for nothing then set them free or put their updates in the store for a few quid cos I don't want them..

It's in Apple's interest to get me on the newest build to reduce their support costs - they're not giving me free upgrades for my benrfit. The change from Sonoma to whatever comes next and letting me have it for "free" is part of a marketing strategy to support September's show, not a demonstration of Apple's altruism towards its existing customers.

World is finally buying more phones and prices are rising

"The industry is "not completely out of the woods,""

If being out of the woods means year-on-year growth of sales and profit then either the industry or the users are buggered - and I guess it will be the users when the only way left to sell new phones in the quantities required by investors is to hobble the old ones.

We never agreed to only buy HP ink, say printer owners

The root cause isn't the manufacturers, it's consumers. People walked into the shop and bought the cheapest printer on the shelf that did what they wanted. They didn't care about running costs they cared about ticket price. The manufacturers responded by lowering costs until they were losing money and so made it up on the ink. Now they run the subscription model because the tech has made it possible and, more importantly, consumers are used to paying a subscription for bloody everything now.

Re: HP claimed it went "to great lengths"…

I mean laserjet as in hoover. If that annoys HP then all the better.

Re: HP claimed it went "to great lengths"…

Logically you're probably right, and for my printing use your setup would certainly be the best one for me. However, HP haven't hesitated to fuck their users in past so don't be surprised if they've got a team of people working out how to fuck you up at some point in the future when they work out they're not making £enough out of you. I won't be buying a HP printer when my Epson dies. I've firewalled the Epson and its drivers and software from the internet so they can't play the same trick as HP with a sneaky update - although it does whinge a lot when I put non-Epson cartridges in it. My next printer will be a laserjet.

" if a "customer doesn't print enough or doesn't use our supplies, it's a bad investment.""

If you sell your printers for a price you can't make a profit on with the assumption that you''ll make you money on ink and the customer doesn't print enough or use your supplies then you're a bad business.

US Air Force secretary so confident in AI-controlled F-16s, he'll fly in one

Go on, Mr Gummer, just one bite of the burger for the cameras.

Intel CEO suggests AI can help to create a one-person Unicorn

Re: Can't help but think...

"..machines doing manual work are fucking useless unless you want to spend way more than it costs to employ people like me."

When those management, legal, commercial, supply chain, HR, accounts, developers, coders, testers and accounts staff are all gone and their wages are gone and their offices and buildings and car parks are gone the company will have a much lower cost base and then might have enough money sloshing around to AI your job away too. And that's before you start considering that if a majority of the workforce becomes unemployed there might not be enough money in the economy to buy the stuff you make. Maybe the government will give all those unemployed managers a guaranteed income and you'll be the only one left working.

There's a whole chunk missing: how will the economy work? Given that millions of people will be out of work, is the "Unicorn" model based on goods and services being provided for free or will people be given free money to spend? AIs aren't free; even discounting the development and learning costs, the power consumption is massive. If so few people are working then the tax take will drop so will the Unicorns pay all the tax? I really am at a loss to understand how they think this will work. We don't see the current crop of tech bros philanthropically sharing their rewards - indeed they are trying to increase/consolidate their wealth and power - so is there any reason to think that any of the AI "pioneers" are seeing a future where they share out the resulting wealth?

To me this feels just like the bloke who builds a boat in his garden without thinking about how to get it to the sea and when he'll have time to sail it. All the focus is on the boat at the moment.

US insurers use drone photos to deny home insurance policies

Re: Slow down there... They ain't starving

It's not just that they put profits above all, it's also that the markets expect them to make ever increasing profits.

Re: As usual, it's cover for taking advantage of old people

I'm surprised they have insurance in the US. I'd have thought it a bit too socialist for them.

Google is wrong to put AI search features behind paywall, says HPC leader

I guess that the problem for Google is that if the AI scours google to construct an answer to a query then the user isn't seeing the ads which would accompany the searches and until AI has its own pocket money then Google won't get any ad-revenue. Unless, of course, it stuffs the AI's response full of ads, or includes product placement, or hides the output under the ketchup in a local Wimpy.

Cyberattack hits Omni Hotels systems, taking out bookings, payments, door locks

My local takes cash, the beer comes straight out of the barrels on racks behind the bar and I'd be happy to take the landlord's IOUs for change if power to the tills went down and I can drink and find my way to the bog in the dark. I've just checked my wallet and there's at least a week's beer money in there. That's about the extent of my resilience planning, but it'll do to be going on with.

I came here to write that I can't believe that anyone would think that it's a good idea to have hotel door locks controlled centrally, via the web, with no option for handover to local control, but as I wrote it I realized that that's just the world we live in now. It's going to get worse, as the people responsible for conceiving and speccing things come more and more from the young internet-enabled generation whose doorbells, lights, heating, vacuum cleaners, evening meals and god-knows-what-else have always relied on the internet to work properly. A world where the convenience of not having to stand up to see who's at the door and being able to leave your car keys in your bag to start the car is more important than Amazon and criminals snooping on you and your neighbours and thieves being able to drive away with your £90k car just by waving a sheet of tinfoil around.

Apple fans deluged with phony password reset requests

Re- the moving icons: I can't remember where - maybe Gadgeteer - but about ten-ish years ago there was an article about buying a new phone and making the difficult choice between Android and Apple. She chose Android specifically because she could put the icons where she wanted. I'm not making any assumptions about Apple listening to users, but I bet there are a lot more people worried about pretty things than about background performance and management.

For me, as a user well ensconced in the Apple garden, the main problem with their products is the "it just works" thing and the fact that even Apple believe it. When I first got a Mac (2009?) I'd spent ages unsuccessfully trying to get a MS PC with Acronis to do daily backups. It was a right royal pain. When I bought a Mac and Time Capsule it was a couple of clicks and it just worked - and has done ever since. I tried recovering a couple of files and it just worked. I was sold - an instant fanboi (I've grown up a bit since then). However, the problems come when things just don't work because the apps have no allowance for things ever going wrong. iCloud Files is a pain on Mac and iPhone. Sometimes it stops synching, or gets to 99% and stops, or files just don't appear on the phone. In a normal world there'd be a big "Just fucking synch everything now, no matter what you think the synch-state is" button - but there isn't in the Apple world because they assume it always just works. You head down rabbit holes of Terminal commands, stopping background apps, logging in and out of cloud accounts, creating dummy files, etc. none of which are any good when you're heading out to a meeting and needing a file on your phone or ipad; I just email stuff to myself now. I can't imagine what it must be like for Admins who have to look after a bunch of iDevices when they just stop working.

Meta accused of snarfing people's Snapchat data via traffic decryption

Re: Shirley Knot

Hummmmm.

Boeing and subsidiary file trade secrets lawsuit against Virgin Galactic

Clarke, Bester, Ballard, Banks - none of them covered this sort of stuff in their fiction. I feel robbed.

Belgian beer study acquires taste for machine learning

Test Spec.?

I'd be curious to know what they were rating the beers on. For me and my mates (drinking mostly British beers, but I'm sure it's transferrable to Belgium) there are lots of differing requirements depending on occasion, mood, time of night, and so on. There are the session beers that you can drink all night and still cycle home without falling off. Then there's the strong but quaffable one for that last pint of the evening when the session beer hasn't quite done enough. There are the novelties that you get at a beer fest, many of which you'll never drink again, either cos they're not-from-round-here or just plain horrible (to me, not absolutely). Finally, the canned beer that's been stuffed in with the tent in the garage for a year since last August bank holiday, is 6 months past its sell-by date and still tastes OK just after you've finished putting the tent up.

Uncle Sam's had it up to here with 'unforgivable' SQL injection flaws

" hold their vendors to account by asking them if a formal code review into a product's susceptibility to SQL injection exploits has occurred and what mitigations have been put in place. "

That's assuming a lot of things. Buyers might not even know that the product they are buying has an SQL database in it, never mind how security is coded, reviewed and tested. When I buy a phone I don't question the vendor about how they did the EMC testing. When I buy a toaster I don't ask the bloke in Curry's about how they did the electrical safety testing. I don't have to - there's a legal requirement, a certification process and they're not allowed to sell products that haven't been certified. Code exploit vulnerabilities - across the board, not just SQL - have the potential to hurt people and society and should be treated the same as electrical safety.

BOFH: So you want more boardroom tech that no one knows how to use

I worked in a place that had an unuseable hi-tech board room. Even the light switches were unuseable - touch sensitive with a set of long/short/tap commands which, in spite of the instructions being pinned on the wall next to them, were useless and annoying. We got a new MD and first he got annoyed with people who were too stupid to work the switches, then he got annoyed at the people who laughed at him when he was too stupid to work the switches and then he called facilities and told them to replace them with normal switched dimmer knobs.

The projector and connecting to it was such a pain that old-hands brought a projector with them.

Judge demands social media sites prove they didn't help radicalize mass shooter

Dunno. I haven't got a Google or Youtube account so the algorithm is based on whatever it stores in its cookie and, I guess, whatever nefarious stuff Youtube does cross-site. I allow the youtube.com cookie - if I don't then it's groundhog day every time I launch the website - and the youtube nocookie that's needed to watch some of the vids on the Guardian website. I read most of the free national UK dailies online and a couple of locals, but use NoScript to lock them down tight and, Gruan aside, never watch vids on them, so maybe Youtube only knows I read the Guardian and, together with my recent video watching, assumes I'm a left-leaning watchmaker who likes SciFi, Suntour, Japanese wood saws, LEDs and is currently making a surface plate and a longbow.

Anecdotally, after I clear my youtube cookies (I haven't got a google account) then there will be a few right-ish wing vids in the feed for the first few days - GB news and the like - along with some music feeds and stuff. After a while they go away cos I don't click on them. Oddly, there's never much from the other political wings - nothing lefty or greeny. I don't know if that's cos it thinks it knows something about me (I'm not right wing) or because there's more right-wing shite than left or because right-wing shite is more likely to pull in views, shares and long dwell times.

Just tried it now - opened youtube in a private window. In the first 100 vids there was a Farage/Trump interview, GB News "If you're white Poor and Male they're coming for you", and one with Tommy Robinson. There's bugger all from any other wings of politics - no George Monbiot banging on about sheep and trees - unless you assume its covered in the more mainstream news vids. The rest is a smattering of food, music, travel, film and TV that looks like it could be a selection to test out my likes, but there's no obvious lefty rabbit hole I could disappear down, although I'm sure the algorithm is a lot more compliacated than that. I'm just settling down to watch a vid on blue LEDs.

Re: Or you could fix ...

The Swiss believe in the state and society with its rights and responsibilites, as a mutual benefit - a common wealth. US citizens seemingly don't; as far as I can tell, the overriding belief seems to be similar to that of a teenager shouting "you're not the boss of me" at his mum when she wants him to tidy his room or, indeed, do anything to contribute to the household. Tell the Swiss to do something reasonable, like not kill people with their guns and they do as they're told - so they can have nice things, like guns. Tell a teenage boy to do something reasonable and he responds by shouting and screaming at his mum about his human rights and then breaks something to show her she's not in charge. Until he wants his tea, of course, which he expects to be on the table at 6 but refuses to help with the washing up. That's why he can't have nice things.

The problem with the US is that it seems like the teenagers are in charge.

Re: It’s the algorithms on trial [Hold Up Here, Chief]

The fact that you think you are not vulnerable to the algorithm doesn't mean that everyone isn't vulnerable. Protection is needed for the weak, not the strong.

What strange beauty is this? Microsoft commits to two more non-subscription Office editions

Re: What's the Catch?

I think you're right on all counts. MS had the luck to be in the right places at the right times to become a de-facto standard and people stick with what they know. When I quit to go freelancing 15 years ago I thought nothing of transitioning to a Mac (I'd never owned one before) but I bought Office for Mac, Outlook for Mac and Parallels and Win 7 so I could run MS project - all that £MS investment without any research into alternatives, or even trying the native Mac ones. MS was the go-to solution - albeit in happier days before Windows desktop ads, subs and ties to MS accounts. Now I run LibreOffice which I find a bit buggy but OK and I've not found any limitations in features or performance compared to MS. I've even got an alternative for MS Project somewhere, but I've forgotten the passwords to those dark, damp, underground cellars where waterfall scheduling is done so it doesn't get much use these days.

Re: Numbered styles don't work

I've spent all my $life surrounded by engineers who didn't understand Outlining or even that it existed. It would appear that many of them have gone on to work for LibreOffice which, I agree, has the most fucked-up version of creating numbered outlined documents that I've ever seen. Makes me pine for Mass11.

Re: First hit is always free-ish.

"And maybe it's time Word Processors got smart enough .."

No it isn't because that would just be someone else deciding how I should format my docs and I don't need to be bugged every five seconds cos I don't do things the way that a programmer who never uses the product beyond the odd five-page write-up decides. If someone's smart enough to get a degree in engineering then they're smart enough to learn to use the tools they use to get their job done and the fact they've shown no interest in doing so speaks volumes. Also, if they're claiming any skill level then they need to show a certificate or shut up and if they're submitting Word docs instead of pdfs for their CVs then they shouldn't be getting an interview

Christ - that I didn't start that as a rant, but it seems to have ended up as one. Too much coffee this morning maybe!

Re: First hit is always free-ish.

I use LibreOffice - mainly for spreadsheets - and haven't had compatibility problems even with macros, but for me it's buggy and feels like a beta product. It's free, so the daily crashes and annoying formatting and charting bugs are liveable with, but I wouldn't want to support it in a work environment.

The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

Re: Made you Click

It pushes too many buttons. Crime and punishment, controversial techinical and legislative solutions and Openreach tossed in as our favourite panotmime villain, all based on a premise as thin as an ISP's promise. The only thing missing was that Kate's poor photoshopping was down to losing her broadband because of vandalism of the local cabinet by an eco mob.

Made you Click

Another clickbait for comments article from El Reg.

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

Re: Perspective (OT as well)

My mate used to take a box of used fanfold home every so often - his wife was a primary school teacher and used it for art. The boss saw him carting a box out one day and went mad when he found out the reason. He was worried that it contained confidential stuff, so my mate let him look through it. Neither of them had a clue what was on it - just the usual meaningless rows of numbers with lots of asterisks I bet. The school contintued to get its art supplies.

International effort to disrupt cybercrime moves into operational phase

Re: Stop using certain products then

"the risk vector in the overwhelming majority of breaches tends to reside in their products"

I'd like to see some data on that. I'm not saying you're wrong, but if we're opening a book my money on the highest risk vector would be people doing stupid things - password123, never changing admin account name and being phished by clicking on an attachment.

Re: "brought cybercrime to the forefront of discussion among CEOs and boards of directors"

"You can't have your government behaving like a bunch of terrorists"

I agree, in principle, but what do you do when other goverments behave like terrorists? Today Russia, allegedly, jammed GPS on the aircraft the UK Defence Minister was travelling in. Russia, China and the Norks turn a blind eye or maybe even support their cyber crims as long as they don't interfere domestically. They've already hit hospitals and power distribution in the US and Australia and, as far as we know, there's been no serious retaliation*. How far would they have to go before we, say, considered it an act of war?

*I realize that just cos we haven't heard anything doesn't mean that it's not happened.

Ten nations tell social media, banks, and telcos to get better at stopping scams

"Many of these scams work because greedy or stupid punters are willing to ignore the "if it looks too good to be true" rule in the hope of making a quick buck."

No they don't. The main money is made when someone calls you from you bank's phone number and tells you that someone's got access to your accounts and you've got very little time to send your money to a special secure account set up by the bank before you lose it all. They tell you to hang up and call the bank's number on the back of your bank card to prove it's not a scam call, but they don't hang up so if the scammer makes the right noises they person being scammed believes they are through to the bank when in reality you're still on the line to the original scammer. The Telcos facilitate this - they allow spoofing of numbers and they have a phone system that doesn't let one side of the call hang up (in the UK). If the Telcos were made responsible for all losses (including consequential) then they'd close these two holes so fucking fast it would make your eyes bleed.

Re: "If you buy a too-cheap Rolex from a guy down the pub..."

Not only is the publican taking a cut, but the fact that Telcos allow scammers to spoof the banks' telephone numbers is like Rolex providing authentication papers for the watch.

Hard Way that will never work: tell social media, banks, and telcos to get better at stopping scams.

Easy Way that would work very quickly: change the law to make social media, banks, and telcos jointly and severally responsible for all losses suffered by members of the public who are scammed via social media, banks, and telcos.

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

"...such add-ins "are often unstable and don't work cross-platform....""

Or, translated out of Marketese: "such add-ins only serve to highlight the shortcomings in the basic product and divert revenue from the MS Store."

Re: I need classic outlook

"POP3 is horrible. It simply doesn't work "

That's part of the problem, isn't it? Other people deciding what functionality is available to me based solely on their own workflow.

Meta sues ex infra VP for allegedly stealing top-secret datacenter blueprints

"...disloyal..."

Made me laugh.

We asked Intel to define 'AI PC'. Its reply: 'Anything with our latest CPUs'

AI?

I'm looking forward to this AI. I can just tell it go through the DVD iso's I haven't converted to MP4 and run them through Handbrake, save only the episodes (no extras), make sure that any that need subtitles are ripped properly either as a track or burnt-in ones, give them meaningful series and episode names, sort them into directories then stick them on the NAS in the right hierarchy and update my tracking file. I'm looking forward to asking the AI to "sort out my iTunes Library", including rationalizing all the "sort album artist" fields, fixing the artwork, upping the volume on the tracks that are a bit quiet and shifting the song announcements on live albums from the end of the previous track to the start of the track that it's introducting - all without changing the play count and last played date metadata. That's just a couple of things I've spent a few hours doing this week, but there are tons of things I can think of for AI to do for me. Will it be out in time for Christmas? What colour will it be?

Airbnb warns hosts who use indoor security cameras they may face eviction

Yeah - I imangine that the global team of AirBnB inspectors and enforcers are, as I write, packing their bags and heading off to make sure that this new policy is complied with.

How do you lot feel about Pay or say OK to ads model, asks ICO

Re: Never

I sort of agree, but it's the service providers who have created the "everything should be free" mindset by giving their product away to us on the assumption that we'll continue to provide our valuable data for nothing. That implicit contract was never made clear when we signed up and now the likes of Facebook are seriously at risk of being hoist by their own petard because their services aren't valuable enough for most of us users to pay for them and if governments decide that privacy trumps profit then they could be fucked.........

.......except that most people - not denizens of the Register's boards - just put up with ads and don't give a toss about their privacy. I had to spend Christmas with members of the family aged 17 to 80 tapping away at their phones with a loud, audio-accompanied advert shouting out every half-hour or so because someone clicked on it. It wound the fuck out of me but no one else seemed to be that bothered about it.

Doesn't matter - my points are valid for both advertisers and agencies. The drive and gutter cleaning bloke who pays (probably less than) minimum wage to leaflet my estate only has to get a couple of hits out of a few hundred leaflets make it worth his while. Same goes for web advertisers, except the ratios can be even smaller and be "successful". It's the same reason that people hunt game with a shotgun - they'd never hit a grouse with an 22 rifle.

The advertisers (the people paying to advertise their stuff) have no controlled measures for what their advertising is worth because they are terrified of not advertising. If you listen to the Freakonomics podcast I reference above or below they cover this, with sales increases overestimated by orders of magnitude and one company forgetting to place half it's newspaper advertising budget and not noticing any sales impact at all.