Posts by David 132

Cop who used police system to snoop for info on crook pals sentenced for Computer Misuse Act offenses

Re: They already do!

What, you think the AI was telling porkies?

The rush to judgement was careless, but it could have been rasher...

Microsoft tosses Teams Live chat into its feature graveyard

Re: Experience!

"Today we're excited to take that customer experience to a new level"

"...of Hell."

Snowflake extortionist admits 165-victim cloud crime spree – and squeezing one target twice

...which in turn is like "cow tipping", only with tweezers rather than with three drunk university students.

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

I see Slashdot has picked up this story...

...and with the attention to detail and great editing for which that site is so justly famous, has headlined it "Times Magazine..."

I can't decide whether that implies AI news-regurgitators would do a better job, or that Slashdot itself is now using AI slopmachines to do humans' work.

What fresh hell is this?

(See title.)

HPE extends validity of quoted hardware prices, possibly for months

Another sign that the AI hype bubble is faltering?

This signals that HPE don't think there's much more scope for component prices to rise.

Has the AI hype bubble plateaued (I'm not sure bubbles can plateau, but you know what I mean) and dare we even hope that it's going to pop and allow a return to sanity?

Microsoft tells engineers to curb their token-burning enthusiasm

For some reason the mental image just came to me of the B-Ark survivors in Hitchhiker's Guide deciding to use leaves as currency, and subsequently denuding the trees and causing hyperinflation & environmental catastrophe.

Re: BB!

"Let's circle round and synergize that. And in a very real sense let's throw it up the flagpole and see which key engaged stakeholders salute it."

(and as I typed that, I am having flashbacks. I have heard very, very similar words used by past managers in a non-ironic context...)

Dev proves LLMs will run on anything – even a $10 microcontroller

I have two goats on my property as I play-at-being-a-farmer... in homage to Sir Pterry, one is named Tolliver ("Tolliver Goat", geddit...) and his fellow goat is, of course, Stanley.

They are amazing creatures, goats. I'm with Granny Weatherwax on that.

Re: Image recognition

Here in the States, there's a national haulage company called Swift that has acquired an unfortunate reputation for having inept/careless drivers.

Hence the plethora of backronyms: "Sure Wish I'd Finished Training", "See What I Failed Today", "Swing Wide, It's a F*ing Truck"...

They're a Pain.

"There is another model, called Barista [for] topics pertaining to espresso. "

Oh my god, I just had a nightmare vision of a terrifyingly plausible near-future where some genius realizes it's cost-effective to embed this microcontroller in a certain common kitchen electrical appliance, and furthermore, gives it a specially-created small LLM - Toaster®, which to borrow the author's wording, "can answer questions at roughly twice the performance, but only on topics pertaining to toast and related bread products".

For the record, and getting this in ahead of time: no, I don't want any smegging toast, baps, bagels, crumpets, teacakes... or waffles.

Cloud giants pour nearly $600B into capex as AI demand surges

Re: The fuse has been lit ...

So the current, insane level of CAPEX spending by the likes of Microsoft and Oracle might not be sustainable.

God willing.

(Or for a secular equivalent: "one can only hope"...)

Only if you'll give me an NFT of it in return!!!

Seriously, though, "Cloud giants pour nearly $600B into capex" - what is that, like, 3x DDR5 DIMM kits or one-half of a GeForce graphics card?

This one time, at Hacker Summer Camp …

Re: the triple-digit August heat

°Ra (degrees Rankine) - that scale gives those big impressive numbers that fit the Vegas ethos.

Sci-fi authors Scalzi and Stross decry AI's dystopian impact on their craft

"We have built this new machine that ravenously devours all marine life from krill to whales, then extrudes out mashed mangled fish paste in the shapes of entirely new hitherto-non-existent species of fish! It's so creative! And it only consumes a reservoir of water and enough electricity to power Manhattan every hour!"

Re: Hi, I'm Charlie Stross

What is, in this entropic world of ours?

But yes, I agree. Been reading since the Mike Magee days, may he rest in peace (sidenote: I am, I believe, possibly the only person ever to get a correction in print from Mike, after he twisted my words in an interview and one of our senior VPs shamed him over a pint into admitting that he'd done so, but that's not important right now...) and, with the greatest respect to Drew & the team, I do feel that it's lost a certain je ne sais quoi. Perhaps we're all so inured to online cynicism now, that El Reg's organic flavour of it just can't compete with the hyper-processed, monosodium glutamate-enhanced stuff that's published everywhere else?

Re: "having a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary on the shelf"

...with a more-powerful magnifying glass, or with an electron microscope?

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

Re: Control systems too

With due credit to Sir Pterry..

The first criminal was "Fingers" Mazda, who stole Fire* from the gods.

*He had to fence it. It was too hot†.

†He really got burned on that deal.

Re: Not quite the same (not retired yet)

Ah, that would have been nice, but alas no. At that point I was living solely off my redundancy payout, which was being spent at a frightening rate on canine chemotherapy (it's a long story).

Re: Control systems too

"while singing a traditional song"

I know it's now 30+ years old, but I'd never thought of the Prodigy's Firestarter as "traditional"...

Re: Not quite the same (not retired yet)

I was laid off from a large semiconductor company about 3 years ago. A year after that, my phone rang, and when I answered and identified myself, an exasperated voice on the other end said "David132, we're moving out of your building at the end of the month so you really do need to move the contents of your cubicle to your new location."

When I explained that I had, at that point, been an ex-employee for 12 months there was a very embarrassed silence, followed by a chastened "Oh. Well. Um. Sorry. I'll update the records."

I am still not sure whether to feel anger that (at least one part of) the company hadn't noticed my absence for 12 months, or pride that they had apparently kept my cubicle intact and preserved as a shrine to my greatness for all that time :)

LinkedIn realizes its users have been bathing in AI slop, offers a shower

Re: Quite why LinkedIn still has the draw in terms of having to use it when job hunting is beyond me

Amen!

They were numpties. Purely there to allow my former employer's HR bods to boast that they were "offering a comprehensive support package" to those laid-off. Like the "free year's credit-monitoring services" that companies routinely give to victims of identity theft - sounds good, but amounts to zilch.

Re: Quite why LinkedIn still has the draw in terms of having to use it when job hunting is beyond me

When I was laid off from $BIGTECHCOMPANY a few years ago, one of the few parting gifts given to me was a few months of the services of a career placement company. Their advice could be summed up as:

1) "your resume is far too long - it needs to be 1 page, max - here, we've re-written it for you" (translation: they chopped off all evidence of my 25+ years of software development and tech marketing, and made my resume look like that of a recent college grad)

2) "Unless you have at least 100+ network connections on LinkedIn, recruiters won't even give you a second glance".

Ref that second one - I already had a bare-bones LI profile, mainly for the proverbial shits'n'giggles, with a grand total of maybe 3 network contacts. Prompted by their advice I became one of those annoying people on LinkedIn, pinging everyone I could think of and asking to "connect" with them (i.e., "we exchanged business cards once while both waiting in the Delta lounge at Washington Dulles 10 years ago, can I add you to my network"...)

Didn't seem to make any difference. I think LI is very, very over-rated.

I amuse myself sometimes by mentally composing the most ludicrous, turd-polishing LinkedIn profiles; for example, "I flip burgers at McDonald's and play Counter-Strike in the evenings" would become, on LinkedIn, something like "When not demonstrating a key thought-leadership role in the world of customer-driven retail nutrition, I perform exhaustive testing of interactive three-dimensional virtual simulations..."

I'm sure fellow commentards here have seen LI posts with even higher bullshit:reality ratios...

Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font

Re: Well my chicken is

"Hooray, hooray, for the spinster's sister's daughter"

"To the axeman, all supplicants are the same height..."

Americans give all-day school phone bans a ringing endorsement

Re: The Logistics!

Generally, I believe,the schools have numbered lockers and/or Faraday pouches in which to store the phones during the day.

Perhaps some kids will realize it's not worth the hassle, and just stop bringing their phones to school at all.

Of course, it's easy for me to opine; I am a child of the 80s, those dim and barbaric pre-smartphone years, and there were literally millions of children in my town being kidnapped every single day; there'd be a veritable queue of busses outside the school with cardboard over their windows and "FREE PUPPIES" scrawled on the sides, and those poor children, unable to contact their parents by convenient phone, would be whisked off to their doom - they couldn't even make a hashtag TikTok video about their experience.

Gratuitous sarcasm aside, though, I think a smartphone ban is a good thing on balance. They're a distraction from learning. I still remember having a blackboard eraser thrown with incredible accuracy at my head for the sin of furtively trying to read 101 Dalmatians under my desk lid.

Word worm crawls into Copilot, spreads chaos

Embrace, Extend, Enshittify.

Airbus keeps an A350 flying for 24 hours

Re: Oh yeah

"22 hours locked up in a metal tube with a bunch of fleshbags I can't stand and am not interested in."

Oh, it's not so bad, once they get started on the communal games of I-Spy, and the group singalongs. Who can possibly remain grouchy after 60 renditions of "She'll Be Coming Round The Mountain" or "The Wheels On The Bus"? And of course Father Noel Furlong is the life and soul of the flight...

Britain hopes £7.3M will help electric and hydrogen aircraft take off

You could buy maybe 3 inches of HS2 track for that!

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

Re: Foot meet Gun

About 20 years ago one of the UK banks (Natwest?) ran a smug and sanctimonious advertising campaign about how all their competitors were closing branches that were subsequently "being turned into trendy wine-bars" and how this bank, of course, would never do that.

The high street branch of the bank in question in my town soon closed.

An imaginary glass of trendy wine to anyone who can guess what the site got turned into.

Impostor Chinese models pretend they're Claude

Poor Anthropic & OpenAI

I feel bad for them. They went to all the hard effort of stealing vast quantities of other people's creative work, strip-mining every bit of information they could get their hands on with scant concern for copyright.., and then these rotten, unethical Chinese competitors waltz in and steal their work. It's just not on, is it? What is the world coming to? Tsk, tsk.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint leaves some Linux boxes defenseless after update

"No need, works for me, WONTFIX." -Poettering.

LG kills McAfee pop-up after Windows boss steps in

Re: Windows is just a bloody advertising platform now.

For me, Windows reached its nadir with that whole "<crappy shovelware app X> just got installed! Check it out!" mechanism that plagued Windows 10. It might be on 11 too, for all I know, but I now apply a brutal set of GPOs to every Windows box I (...am forced to...) build, so haven't seen it recently.

On the subject of this LG thing, though, the blame isn't all with LG. Someone at McAfee must have thought, "we're being offered an opportunity by LG to advertise our AV software via unsolicited popup when users connect their new monitor... that sounds really good and effective, and will definitely bring us happy keen customers, and won't tarnish our brand at all..." (ok, ok, I admit, it's probably not possible to tarnish their brand any more than it is). Who was that person, and why are they not in the stocks somewhere being pelted with fruit?

Amazon's AGI department finds humans are optional

I had an Amazon delivery yesterday; the app popped up "your delivery is 10 stops away" with a helpful map showing its location... in the ocean between Venezuela and Puerto Rico.

Either the driver was using a GPS spoofer, or the app was having a bad day (possibly due to vibe coding)... or my name is Karl Stromberg and I inhabit a sub-ocean lair guarded by henchmen.

No, it's not #3.

GNOME can look like Windows – and Flashback can do it without extensions

I see things like this more as a ploy for the home user market - specifically, those elderly-or-technologically-clueless relatives that we've all had to support at one time or another.

If Dear Old Mum spends her entire time in the web browser, it shouldn't matter whether the OS around it is Windows, Linux, Mac, or whatever - but small visual differences can confuse such people (I speak from experience), and so the more the Linux box can be themed to look like Windows, the better. All the familiarity of Windows 11, but no Windows Updates or Patch Tuesday with the associated borkage... win/win.

LG monitors are using Windows 11 feature to serve adware

Re: Hardware installing programs

We trust that the USB header cable on the case does, in fact, merely route to a passive set of ports on the front/top/side of the case. As such cables have done since, ooh, 1999 or so.

But what a wonderful thing it would be, for those of an MBA-type mindset, if it also included a storage-class device to install "carefully curated" "promotional" software "from us and trusted partners" when plugged in, eh?

Microsoft 365 calendars become spy drop boxes in HOLLOWGRAPH campaign

In light of this article, I've just glanced at May 13th 2050 in my corporate Outlook calendar.

No sign of this malware's activity (our IT dept is pretty on-the-ball wrt threats) but I was disproportionately depressed to see that I have a Staff meeting at 11AM on that day. I do wish colleagues would learn to set the "recurrence ends" date when creating new meetings. Either that, or my frail old age is going to be even more tedious and unproductive than anticipated :)

Connecting AI agents to outside services explodes the risk radius

Teddington Lock, I believe.

Pronounced "Throatwarbler-Mangrove".

Windows Server Update Services buckle under Microsoft's metadata mountain

Re: So let me get this right.

"If it ain't broke, break it, then move it to Azure and make it an Opex revenue stream and tell customers it's new and improved"

Ransomware curdles production at Coca-Cola's Fairlife dairy biz

Re: ultra-filtered milk

What are Coca-cola doing with milk?

Much the same thing, I suspect, that Raven Sable, AKA Famine, was doing with the Newtrition Corporation in Good Omens.

"Two years of Newtrition investment and research had produced CHOW™. CHOW™ contained spun, plaited, and woven protein molecules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes; no-cal sweeteners; mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous materials, colourings, and flavourings. The end result was a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and secondly the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman..."

Re: another choice

"We're on the emergency backup supply. Dogs' milk."

"Dogs' milk??"

"Nothing wrong with dogs' milk. Full of goodness. Full of vitamins. Full of marrowbone jelly. Plus, it lasts much longer than other types of milk."

"Why?"

"'Cos no bugger'll drink it."

Re: Didn't receive an immediate response

Au Lait off the milk puns!

Billing software error sends billion-dollar AWS estimates

Re: Upcoming price leak?

To be fair to AWS, they just signed a contract to purchase a single matched pair of 32GB DIMMs, and they need to find the money to pay for them. The sums talked about here will get them most of the way there.

Tech support chap told angry customer to think inside the box – and solved the problem

Re: Molly guards

Username checks out!

Re: Not an equipment issue, but...

>Did he have a Clue By Four...

Ah, the LART. Now there's a term I haven't heard in a long, long time.

Windows 10 refuses to die, and the security bill is coming due

And as another perceptive commentard pointed out elsewhere here earlier this week: offering ongoing security support for W10 in this way has the happy effect, from Microsoft's PoV, of normalising software subscriptions and getting consumers used to the idea of perpetual payments.

Software bloat? This elevator needs an 8 GB Core i5

Re: Principles (again)

You must be really, really fun at parties!

Re: Principles (again)

Yeah, using MS Windows on an elevator is just wrong on every level, but no doubt there's a storey involved.

Big Blue thinks small, again, with POWER tower

Re: "now in deskside form"...

At the AIX Systems Support Centre in the mid-80s, we had a number of Thinkpad Power Series 850 systems

Mid-90s, possibly?