Posts by David 132

DIY AI bot farm OpenClaw is a security 'dumpster fire'

Re: Use case?

Just ask Pat Mustard!

Help! Does anyone on the bus know Linux?

Re: Sorry, Not In Service!

>Stuck at rescue prompt means dbus won't even start

The wheels on dbus go round and round, round and round...

OpenClaw patches one-click RCE as security Whac-A-Mole continues

Got to keep that hype-train running until the AI techbros have bled the rest of us dry with increased RAM prices, electricity costs, etc. and cashed out!

Microsoft spends billions on AI, converts just 3.3% of Copilot Chat users

Re: This is amusing

More AI-triggered job-losses and economic destruction, I see.

In this case, the Underpants Gnomes, who would ordinarily be handling the intermediate ("???") step.

Edit: Hah, I left the page open for 40 mins whilst dealing with another issue; this'll teach me to refresh the page before commenting. I see that in the interim, Charlie Clark beat me to a very similar point!

Ah well, I'll leave this up anyway as a testament to my poor commenting-discpline.

Systemd daddy quits Microsoft to prove Linux can be trusted

Re: Honest question

Well, I guess we've found the person responsible for anonymously downvoting all the comments above that dare to criticise Systemd. Keep tilting at those windmills!

Re: Succession?

Gods, no.

Within a week he'd have (badly) reinvented the straws, with his new implementation being 16' long, porous above 220 kelvin, and requiring a complete reformulation of all the drinks in order to maintain compatibility. Reports of severe gum & lip damage from users would be brushed off.

Re: Feature creep

Knew which XKCD that was before I even clicked on it. Good one!

Parachuted - requires networkd, dhcpd, logind, atmosphered, and Flatpakd. Inexplicably fails to work as expected, #WONTFIX.

...and whether he'll share?

Seriously though, I avoid impugning the Reg writers; I think that in this case, the author was just trying to be even-handed and avoid sparking the usual Systemd/Poettering flame-war. And who can blame him?

Re: Feature creep

Bug report: using the command unexpectedly encrypted all my data, my possessions, and even my cat!

Developer Response: Works for me. #WONTFIX.

Beat me to it. Ditto the phrase "leading light" used later - if he is, it's only in the sense that smugglers in Ye Olden Days would set up false navigation lights to lead merchant ships onto the rocks!

Agents gone wild! Companies give untrustworthy bots keys to the kingdom

Long-term thinking?

...AI agents "tend to want to please," and this presents a security problem when they are granted expansive access to highly sensitive corporate info.

"How are we creating and tuning these agents to be suspicious and not be fooled by the same ploys and tactics that humans are fooled with?" he asked...

Confronted with Skynet with its metaphorical finger on the nuclear Armageddon button, or HAL9000 with full control of the vessel... which would you rather deal with, an AI that "wants to please" and obey, or an AI that is suspicious, assumes that you're wrong and it's right, and refuses to comply?

OK, perhaps a silly example, but part of me wonders if enough thought is being given to the fundamentals of AI alignment, given that - if the AI tech-bros' fever-dreams are realised - today's Claude and Grok will become tomorrow's ubiquitous Skynet.

Ah, I'm probably not expressing myself too well. Sucks to be out of coffee!

Crossrail? More like Borkrail...

Re: What's wrong with 'The Circle Line'?

Been there, done that, I'm glad I'm not the only one. Although eventually, I worked it out for myself rather than having someone point it out. I may be slow but I get there in the end :)

Who says Microsoft doesn't innovate?

Give them credit for designing a BSOD screen such that the frowny emoticon :( has its meaning clear whether in landscape or this portrait orientation!

'Ralph Wiggum' loop prompts Claude to vibe-clone commercial software for $10 an hour

Re: Sounds awful

le mi varkiclaflo'i cu culno lo angila

:)

Voyager 2's close encounter with Uranus wasn't in the original plan

Every Futurama fan knows…

…that to stop all the childish jokes, the planet was renamed in the future.

To “Urectum”.

Claude can now disgorge interface elements from other apps

Dorothy Parker, AI analyst 'avant la lettre'

"What Fresh Hell Is This?"

When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

Re: Surely not?

The good news is just around the corner - all the industry needs is a few more tens hundreds of $billions and all the power-generating capacity of each country's national grid - sod the proles, they can shiver while they pay for it - and AI nirvana will be upon us! We're so very close! Aaaaannnnnyyy day now!

Emmabuntüs DE 6: A newbie-friendly Linux to help those in need

Re: ¾

It’s fractionally amusing.

Microsoft 365 outage drags on for nearly 10 hours during bad night for North American infra

Re: Microsoft 365 needs a re-brand :-)

They'll have come full circle back to perfection when they reach Office 97, then.

Re: Was this the reason The Register's forums were down?

I encountered glitches with these forums yesterday, but not 404s. Instead I found one or two stories that had "8 comments", yet when I clicked to view the comments, there were none there and it was prompting me to add the "first" comment.

And the other persistent problem is voting on comments, only to start seeing the "Oops! Alert the Moderatrix - the coders need whipping" error and find that all of my votes disappear when I refresh the page.

Ah well. It is the time-honoured right of commentards to grumble about something they're getting free, gratis, and for nothing.

A pint for the Reg team as it's POETs Day!

Windows fails to tip the scales in grocery store deployment

Re: image missing

Thank you. I’d assumed it was just me, or rather my browser, which for obvious reasons is adblocked and scriptblocked up the wazoo, and does occasionally block the wrong things.

MIT boffins create device that 'paints' iridescent structural color in real time

Colour me impressed.

I thought such technology was just a pigment of my imagination.

But it turns out to be possible. Hue knew?

Sony no longer home of the Bravia as it plans TV biz spin-out to China’s TCL

Ah, but is the liquid nitrogen organic, and is the tank it’s in hewn from a rare hardwood, with the woodgrains aligned all in the same direction, using low-oxygen gold screws to hold it together?

If not, then you are no audiophile, and I say “good day” to you, sir.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy goes wobbly on AI bubble possibility

Re: When tech scams go too well.

I think that when the music stops and the bubble pops, someone somewhere is going to be left the proud owner of a datacenter in the middle of nowhere, stuffed full of (the contemporary equivalent of, in terms of value) racks of Core 2 Duos and Geforce 3 cards.

And I fear it'll be the taxpayer.

Warwickshire school to reopen after cyberattack crippled IT

Re: Well, Schools are for Learning

The Monsanto-sponsored genetics teaching lab, on the other hand... it wasn't so much the pigs' wings that alarmed, mind you, but the ovipositor and venomous stinger.

Re: the school lost access to infrastructure "essential for the safe operation of the school

>maybe a return to first principles

And indeed also, maybe a return to first principals, if you'll pardon the Americanism - the gentleman in the icon would soon whip things into shape.

Windows 11 shutdown bug forces Microsoft into out-of-band damage control

Re: Here we go again

"Dog Bites Man".

Re: No off switch?

The really unsettling part is the way that the PC now sings "Daisy, Daisy" as it shuts down.

Re: Times like this

Don’t feel smug/safe just yet; I have Windows 10 on a Thinkpad here and it refuses to hibernate or shut down, merely blanking the screen & returning to the lock screen when I press a key.

The fix in my case was to upgrade it to the latest Mint, prompted by the favourable review here in the Reg a few days ago.

Ready for a newbie-friendly Linux? Mint team officially releases v 22.3, 'Zena'

Re: painless

I did exactly this, but found that everything I tried to run in Wine 11 - all game titles rated “Platinum” on the Wine app compatibility database - crashed with an Unexpected Error.

Very odd.

Civilization in DOSBox works perfectly, though :)

Re: Not so painless

I installed this version of Mint from the ISO using Ventoy last night, onto a Thinkpad T14 whose installation of Windows 10 has been sickly for a while; from the Live CD desktop I used Gdisk to shrink the Windows partition, then installed. All went flawlessly.

The only oddity I noticed is that, when Setup asked me to choose my location, several of the entries in the list were curiously-formed - for example, “Portland i Oregon” [sic] was selectable, but the adjacent “Portland Oregon” wasn’t. A minor glitch.

S Twatter: When text-to-speech goes down the drain

Re: Gude Moaning

Belated addendum... I recently discovered this gem (cue Irish readers rolling their eyes at how slow I am): Frank Kelly's 1983 skit on the "12 Days of Christmas", also featuring Dermot Morgan. I admit, I didn't know that the two of them had worked together before Father Ted.

Frank Kelly as Gobnait O'Lunacy

Icon - DRINK!

Re: Gude Moaning

Oh, absolutely. Just as Frank Kelly's turn as the vocabulary-limited alcoholic Father Jack is even more amusing when you know that he was in real life a serious theatre actor, and an accomplished writer.

A family member of mine worked for a large vendor of accounting software back in the early 2000s. She sent me a recording from their annual sales conference in the US, where the newly-hired French director of sales was on-stage, passionately urging the audience to “Focus! We must focus! Focus, all!”… with, ‘ow you say, ze same unfortunate mispronunciation as in your comment. He was bemused at the gales of sniggering and barely-suppressed laughter from the audience but ploughed on regardless.

Think Arthur Bostrom in “‘Allo, ‘Allo”, but in a suit :)

Fast Pair, loose security: Bluetooth accessories open to silent hijack

Re: Couple Of Things To Think About.............

That's no penguin, Mukherjee, that's just an innocent nun out for a pleasure-cruise on a narrow-boat.

Icon: "stand back, there may be a large rabbit dropping" -->

Re: On the positive side . . .

So many possibilities for “music that will get them the stink-eye from other passengers”. In order of evil:

* Macarena / Lambada

* the Horst-Wessel-Lied

* the Jim’ll Fix It theme

Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk…

Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check

Why did I read that in the voice of James May?

Wikimedia’s 25th birthday gift: Letting more AIs scour pages volunteers created

Re: Wikipedia is quite good

I've made grammatical corrections on pages before now - for example, fixing a sentence that began "The the artist..." - and had it reverted by one of the wikipedia clique shortly thereafter. So now, I rarely bother.

Wine 11 runs Windows apps in Linux and macOS better than ever

Re: Wine 11.0 Tuesday

Same point as me, Dan... but one anonymous downvoter thinks he knows better...

Re: Wine 11.0 Tuesday

In the rewrite it also gained, dare I say, an Americanism.

“Delivered [X] Tuesday” versus the (to me, at least) British construction, “delivered [x] on Tuesday”.

Windows App forgets how to log in with first security update of the year

Re: Luckily nothing important was affected.

I fear you're too optimistic. There is too much money invested in cloud now, and the "outsource everything and you can save money by getting rid of those grubby IT nerds" salespitch is too compelling to the MBA types.

But, we'll see.

Developer writes script to throw AI out of Windows

Re: Merge

Microsoft has a habit of "accidentally" breaking all these 3rd-party tweaks, purely in the interest of "security" you understand.

It used to be possible to remove the annoying banner in the Settings application that touts Microsoft Points, kindly offers to "reset" your PC (specifically, by setting Edge back as your default browser), and so on. No more, alas, but if anyone here knows differently, please tell.

Re: I miss when the FIND DOCUMENT feature was a DIR command.

Amen.

When searching for a filename in Windows didn't automatically send your search out to the web. "Here's Bing web results for 'accounts q1-2025.xls'!"

Re: I keep wondering...

[This Comment Best Viewed Using Netscape Navigator at 800x600]

<blink>Me Too!</blink>

[Click Here For My Web Ring]

Flippancy aside, I agree. Social media, manipulating us with the dopamine-hit of likes & upvotes, and using our self-esteem as currency, has a lot to answer for.

I'm a relative newby to the 'net, having first wandered on in 1992-ish, but I look back on those days of Usenet and the Monochrome BBS with wistful nostalgia. And yes, I'm aware that the latter is still running, albeit a shadow of its former glory; I still log on every year or so for old times' sake.

PC shipments set to hit the buffers as AI guzzles memory

Ah, thanks AI.

The grift that keeps on giving.

Mall display crashes the vibe with Windows activation nag

“Windows For Digital Signage”

-no activation messages or other system dialogs; messages are logged and/or echoed over the network;

-no BSODs - ditto;

-power saving & screen blanking turned off by default;

-no “screen tips” or “Candy Crush just got installed! Check it out!” shite.

You’re welcome, Microsoft. Feel free to send me a cheque, made out to “Someone Who Pointed Out What Should Have Been The Bloody Obvious To Us”.

QR codes a powerful new phishing weapon in hands of Pyongyang cyberspies

Re: QR codes are an obvious security hole

The built-in one on iOS, for a start. Just pops up the URL overlaid on the camera image, and asks if I want to open it with <default browser>.

I have zero experience of Android since about 2018; does it not have the same behaviour?

Linus Torvalds: Stop making an issue out of AI slop in kernel docs – you're not changing anybody's mind

Re: At the risk of annoying the linuxocracy, I wouldn't score him too high on diplomacy.

Yeah, I realised my mistake subsequently (thanks for the downvote, by the way) but as I said - am on a cocktail of anti-flu medicines right now, basically whatever I can find in the medicine cabinet, so don't expect my memory or memory or memory to work properly. And my memory's shot, too.

CES 2026 worst in show: AI girlfriends, a fridge that won't open unless you talk to it, and more

Re: Sometimes you have to

You know you can just empty an ashtray into your cup for the same effect at a fraction of the cost, right?

Edit: Ha. I see /u/Cyberdemon had pretty much the same snarky response as me, simultaneously. What's that maxim? "Great minds think alike... ...and fools seldom differ" :)