Posts by JimmyPage

UK procurement is too glacial to bring AI into defense, MPs told

Procurement can move at the speed of light

if the supplier is mates with a Tory minister and the goods are shonky.

Lawsuit claims Google Maps led dad of two over collapsed bridge to his death

My own experience ...

There are quite a few little oddities on my 10 mile commute in Brum. The main one being a 20mph zone that Google Maps still shows as 30. Which means you need to be aware of the moron brigade who switch their brains off when they turn the sat nav on.

There was also a 40mph stretch that is still showing as 50 - 10 years after it was changed.

Having worked in mapping and logistics software, I do wonder what the fuck Google are doing that makes it so hard. It's almost as if their obsession with consumer data means they can't do projects properly anymore.

Generally I have fuck all sympathy for the sad-face-sat-nav stories. But this does seem to be quite unique. RIP and condolences to the family.

Sysadmin and spouse admit to part in 'massive' pirated Avaya licenses scam

They may be the wrong pair ?

Tuttle ... or Buttle ?

Capita class action: 2,000 folks affected by data theft sign up

Re: Er - not very good reporting

Since it's fashionable to double down these days, I will.

We do not have class action lawsuits in the UK. We do have Group Litigation orders as the link I provided explains.

However if Class Actions lawsuits in the US are a cat, then Group litigation orders in the UK are an orange. That is different.

Especially on a site infested with people whose livelihoods rely on the precise use of language I expect better.

Er - not very good reporting

"Class action" is a distinctly American concept that doesn't really translate to the UK. We have "Group Litigation Orders" - which the article should have made clear.

https://www.emmlegal.com/publications/class-actions/

Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

Paperless office

55 comments in, and no one has remembered how PCs were supposed to presage the paperless office ?

Cloud is here to stay, but customers are starting to question the cost

Digging out the T-Shirt I have

when "offshoring " was all the rage. Right up until (UK) companies pissed away their in house resources and suddenly had to pay YoY increases of 10-15%. Which not only wiped out any "savings" made by the sackings, but made IT twice as expensive as before.

Now it's "cloud". Yeah, Lets hive off business critical functions to a bunch of folk who (if they stay solvent and interested*) will eventually be able to jack the subscription up every month if they like.

Recently I have pulled a series of eye-watering cloudy services back into on-prem/hosted servers where we run them. Currently savings are £11.000 a year.

Our CEO occasionally mingles at events. Some outfits are quietly regretting losing that resource.

I'm thinking the next few years will be good for people who can spin up a LAMP/Docker server, and plumb it into a company to replace ever-rising cloud costs. A job which can be done 100% remotely.

I hope so, it may just be my retirement plan.

*Not quite in this vein, but Stackpath deciding this ain't for them is another risk you have with cloud. Or things like Amazon retiring MWS with little notice.

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

Let's keep it secret shall we ?

I've been on usenet since 1987 when I uploaded a KERMIT for Sperry.

I've watched with wry amusement as the hysteria over encryption and censorship has raged totally missing the most powerful tool of all if you want to be anonymous and uncensored.

Wordpress sells 100-year domain, hosting plan for $38K

Hill Street Blues memory ...

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0601655/characters/nm0552633

J.D. LaRue : [Farnsworth is trying to sell better protection for the flame on Belker's father's grave but J.D. grabs him by the lapels] Now you take your all-weather wind break, your copper delivery system and you three quarter inch wick and you cram it, Farnsworth! Now, he ain't springing for dime one. Now I've got a perfect view of this cut-rate boneyard of yours from the 36th street overpass every day on my way to work. Alright, now I don't care it's four O'clock in the morning, there's a hurricane blowing out here. I catch the flame on my partner's dad's grave out for one second, and you're gonna be perpetually eternally dead. Not perpetually, not eternally, but perpetually eternally dead! Now you got it?

Concorde? Pffft. NASA wants a Mach 4 passenger jet

The internal expansion joints were quite wide

So much so that the last pilot of Concorde famously left his cap jammed between the instruments ...

Criminals go full Viking on CloudNordic, wipe all servers and customer data

Why is it the company's responsibility to make backups of the customer's data?

Depends what they thought they were buying, really.

It's not unfair to want to offload the work and expertise required to to backups to a 3rd party, in exchange for a fee.

Indeed, almost all cloudy storage outfits make this a selling point.

Musk's latest X-periments: No more headlines, old posts vanish, block gets banned

Re: Accessibility?

In many jurisdictions there is a legal requirement to ensure equal access to services for those with accessibility needs.

(In UK) While true in theory, unless you have a few hundred thousand £££ lying around, such laws are of academic interest only.

Rights you can't enforce aren't rights at all.

You're not seeing double – yet another UK copshop is confessing to a data leak

The data was hidden from anyone opening the files

What does that even mean ?

Shifting to two-factor auth is hard to do. GitHub recommends the long game

For such a cornerstone of the industry

The lack of any standards around passwords and MFA implementations does rather give the impression big business doesn't give a shit.

At the moment no 2 sites agree on what a decent password is, some like symbols, some 8 characters, some 10, etc etc.

Letting perfection be the enemy of progress ?

2FA isn't perfect by any means. Especially when you have to 2FA into a myriad of accounts every day, like I do.

However it's better than no 2FA. In much the same way a locked car is better protected than an unlocked on. If bad guys have singled you out, then no security in the world will stop them either just towing your car away, or making you open it with a gun at you - or your lived ones - head.

Yes, losing your phone can be a PITA. But with Google now clouding up it's authenticator, recovery is as easy as signing in on another device.

Anyway, folk who have a problem with 2FA - please carry on giving it a swerve and shielding me one step from the bad guys

UK voter data within reach of miscreants who hacked Electoral Commission

I would bet a pound to a penny

That this data is now being used to plan the Tories next election campaign.

Scientists strangely unable to follow recipe for holy grail room-temp superconductor

And that, my friends, is how you do science

You publish. Other scientists check. We all know what's happening.

No shame in being wrong - it's all learning.

How to make today's top-end AI chatbots rebel against their creators and plot our doom

Dunning-Kruger

Someone needs to teach AI about it ...

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

Re: Alien UFOs

As Roseanne once put it:

"Poor saps. They travel halfway across the universe looking for intelligent life, and miss by one door"

Euro monopoly cops to probe Microsoft for slipping Teams into Office

Technical question

I noticed a while back that Teams mysteriously doesn't need admin permissions to install.

Is this an example of MS being overly kind to themselves ?

UK government faces calls to end IR35 double tax anomaly

if you want a decent society for all *everyone* should contribute.

I pay my taxes. It buys me civilisation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Price_of_Civilization

Typo watch: 'Millions of emails' for US military sent to .ml addresses in error

Re: if the contents was amusing or useful.

if the contents were amusing or useful.

(or " if the content was amusing or useful.")

Producers allegedly sought rights to replicate extras using AI, forever, for just $200

Re: Generate Extras for free

Can't AI already generate faces from a collection.

I believe that only delivers faces that look like they have been created by AI.

Real nature has an element of randomness in it that our perception is somehow able to react to.

The whole "us/not-us" paradigm really needs to be better understood before we go any further with AI. Because already it's starting to irritate the "not us" mechanism that eventually leads to full-scale "we need to eliminate that other tribe" decision.

Sega COO backs away from blockchain

Re: It's very strange...

Is it ?

Just read up on how electricity became the fad for everything in the 18th and 19th centuries. You name it, there was an "electrickal" machine or solution for it.

No open door for India's tech workers in any UK trade deal

Re: This isn't the Brexit we voted for.

If only there had been a concerted effort to warn you that any "promises" were a load of horseshit.

Oh, hang on, there were.

And you still voted for Brexit ?

I hope you don't work in any role where critical thinking is needed.

Google Lens now can spot problematic skin spots, or not

Hmmmm

Apparently one system that had been spectacularly good at spotting cancer was discovered to have realised that a lab slide barcode in shot was a good predictor that an image contained a carcinoma ...

Decision to hold women-in-cyber events in abortion-banning states sparks outcry

Re: Women in Jobs?

We (Britain) didn't exile our religious nutjobs to the colonies.

They self-selected to leave because Britain was too tolerant

Phosphates on Enceladus could mean sub-surface oceans teeming with aliens

Hmmmm ...

Much as I agree that certain chemical processes are highly indicative of life, I do wonder if our quest for extra terrestrial life is limited by our own ideas of what "life" really is. Since it's impossible to define without quickly making a circle.

Same goes for intelligence.

However all of that can be put aside for a great story of real science. Here's something that makes life a lot nicer -->

Florida man insists he didn't violate the law by keeping Top Secret docs

Re: the apparent difficulty in amending their constitution.

They managed to amend it to ban alcohol. And reverse it when the right people weren't making money from it.

One of the world's most prominent blockchain apps looks like being binned

Blockchain, Brexit ... what is it with the letter "B"

for things which are ridiculously overhyped and were never going to work ?

I'll pay £ to anyone who manages to get Farage or one of his dancing bears to go on the record as saying that what we need to solve Brexit is blockchain.

WordPress plugin hole puts '2 million websites' at risk

2 million ????

I like to apply some critical thinking when numbers are thrown around. I advise everyone to do the same. That way you work out that if politicians or newspapers are to be believed there are 10 paedophiles per bush for them to jump out of in the UK and other such nonsense.

2 million affected sites sounds a lot. I might just believe 2 million installs of Wordpress. But then we have about 8 installs over various dev, staging and test environments.

FCA mulls listing rules after Hauser blames 'Brexit idiocy' for Arm's New York IPO

What is the only way to take advantage of Brexit ?

Reverse brexit.

The entire Brexit fiasco has been watched keenly the world over. Mainly by people who now know what the 50% of below average intelligence voters can be persuaded to go for.

Child-devouring pothole will never hurt a BMW driver again

Mineral rights ?

We had a crater in our road for ages. Until I asked if I could buy the mineral rights. Fixed day after.

Brit cops rapped over app that recorded 200k phone calls

Re: Google decided to force this change on the entire world just to play it safe.

I bet it was more so that Google could monetise the feature at some point.

Vessels claiming to be Chinese warships are messing with passenger planes

Re: God forbid, if something happens then the world will take notice.

Er, history - eg. MH370 - suggests otherwise.

Germany clocks that ripping out Huawei, ZTE network kit won't be cheap or easy

I'm getting confused ...

Say the UK does rip out Huawei kit (for example). How does that play when the UK network has to meet another network which does use Huawei ? Surely the carried with the Huawei network is still capable of spilling secrets the UK network is trying to keep safe ?

Tough luck, Brits: Binance suspends UK deposits and withdrawals

Well certainly putting the "bin" in binance then

I've just asked a few grown ups I know, and no one (a) is affected, or (b) gives a shit.

If you are still imagining that "crypto" is somehow investing in 2023, then perhaps I can direct you to my new venture, "Magic Beans" ?

Brit newspaper giant fills space with AI-assisted articles

(Without irony) This is news ?

Certainly in the UK redtops, "news" is already an algorithmic process. Generally based on reflecting the views of the readership back to them with words like "EXPLODE", "FURY", "UNLEASH" as separators.

Anyone who has the MS Start feature enabled will know this - and endless parade of clickbaity stories that all push an agenda.

Why our solar-storm sats corrode – and probably not what you expected

Real science

love it !

Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed

When we do get real "AI", it will lie to us

because lying is a sign of intelligence. Even squirrels do it.

There are some great Asimov stories about robots that lie in order to comply with the laws of robotics.

Windows 11 update breaks PCs that dare sport a custom UI

Re: it's normally a Powershell job.

Or group policy ?

Kremlin claims Ukraine hackers behind fake missile strike alerts

Probably one good reason for the UK not to have such a system.

Occasionally government incompetence and lack of care for it's citizens can be an advantage.

In fact if I heard something that suggested Sunak and co. gave a shiny shit about me, I would know it was a hoax.

Microsoft begs you not to ditch Edge on Google's own Chrome download page

Never really gave it a thought.

It's just become part of the process of installing Chrome as the very first thing I do after installing Windows. Much like checking the "Accept" box to install something.

It's all a bit needy isn't it. Not a great look for what used to be a behemoth

What Mary, Queen of Scots, can teach today’s cybersec royalty

even by the standards of 1600s - FFS

If that is some sort of misunderstanding about "The sixteenth century" then I suggest the Register sticks to tech. History is most certainly not your forte.

What Brit watchdog redacted: Google gives Apple cut of Chrome iOS search revenue

Substantial payments for doing nothing incentivize more of the same, it's argued.

The irony that such a phrase emerges from a UK government department isn't lost on this reader.

Another RAC staffer nabbed for storing, sharing car crash data

Maybe we need a law requiring people handling data to have qualifications ?

Admittedly it would just be a pork barrel roll. But how else can we create money from nothing ?

On a serious note, if you can be barred from working with children, why can't you be barred from working with data about children.

#justthinkin'

Windows 10 paid downloads end but buyers need not fear ISO-lation

never trust wireless for anything critical

That's pretty much everything these days.

I have had every single wireless shiny fuck up at some point. To the extent I wouldn't trust it with anything ?

If it isn't the physical mount failing, and the phone crashing into your 'nads at 70 on the M4, it's whatever-google-maps-is-called-today* freezing and leaving you to guess the last 100 miles of your journey.

Remember in the UK once it's mounted you can't touch your device without breaking the law.

And that's before you factor in the Chocolate Factories fascination with breaking perfectly good apps with no warning.

The only upside is I would like to see Elon Musk on the way to Mars when his navigation device just stops working and nobody at Google, or Apple or Microsoft gives a shit. Then he'll be one of us :)

Uber fined $14m for lying to get customers to ditch cabs

drivers sitting waiting for multiple orders

not sure how it will pan out in the long run, but in my neck of the woods (SW Brum) , you can't get a drive through or sit-in meal at any of the McDonalds as the queue of Uber/Deliveroo vehicles spills out onto the road.

2 weeks ago we tried 3 different McDs and couldn't get into any. In the end we came home and made toast.

And our local chippy has a stream of collection orders that they prioritise over in-shop purchases. Well they did last time I went. Which is the last time I went.

Blockchain needs a reason to exist, Boris Johnson tells roomful of blockchain pros

Quite ironic that the sponsor of Brexit ...

is backing blockchain.

Wheres the £350 million a week for the NHS Boris ?

I guess the end of the universe would be a blockchain app about the benefits of Brexit.

DoJ worries messaging apps could hide evidence of crime, corruption

As the saying goes

a day late and a dollar short