Posts by Andrew Scott

EU gives staff 'burner phones, laptops' for US visits

Re: Good practice

saw a license plate yesterday "cherokee nation" so we didn't get them all. :-) thank god. On the other hand the local native americans did come within a cats whisker of driving Europeans out of new england back in the 1600's.

Nvidia joins made-in-America party, hopes to flog $500B in homegrown AI supers by 2029

Re: False promises

no he'll still be here. he was cheated out of his second term which he won, and is currently serving his third term, so 2029 will be in the middle of his fourth term which he'll definitely win. likely die in office from natural causes choking on a big mac and no one had arms long enough to do the heimlich on him.

US senator warns 'China is cheering' for proposed NASA budget cuts

Re: Harvard

Believe one of the biggest losers of federal grants so far was in south Carolina which is distinctly red.

Re: This explains everything!

well, trump was very much in favor of brexit, practically campaigned for it. Not sure who has the poorer educational system. He has had and probably still has many fans in gb. don't be surprised if he runs for office over there and ends up as the pm.

Dot com era crash on the cards for AI datacenter spending? It's a 'risk'

one llm

Why not just invest in one Grand Overview of Data where a single llm has the responsibility of viewing all existing and future data. No more hallucinations maybe, just a single llm to query. just ask the only existing llm.

New SSL/TLS certs to each live no longer than 47 days by 2029

Re: God help the academic sector

yes, there are always problems when they update the wifi certificate. some devices see and accept the new certificate and just keep going. Some devices that miss the weekend update just sputter and go off line. most likely to be smartphones, but laptops and desktops using wifi also have trouble reconnecting sometimes. so once a year will be every 6 weeks going forward?

Official abuse of state security has always been bad, now it's horrifying

Re: re: Chris Krebs

Not sure if this is still going on, but when Subic bay was an American naval base people from the Philippines were allowed to enlist in the us navy. don't know if they still are though. not citizens, no vote but allowed on us bases.

Re: re: Chris Krebs

your right, you can't even go shopping without an id! isn't that what some maga gentleman said? Probably never shopped in their life. Obviously there are problems, i had to submit a birth certificate in order to get a learners permit and then a driving license. every license since has been renewed on the basis of that first presentation of a birth certificate. i had to find it again the last time i renewed as my first presentation is no longer valid or something like that. spent a day trying to find it, they said all they needed was the number, but then said they (the registry of motor vehicles) couldn't find it so had to take a picture and send that. this was at the end of covid when the offices were still closed. story i was told, an african american goes to vote. he's asked to read a pamphlet of the constitution, no problem he's educated and a professor. then presented with the bible and asked to read, no problem. then presented with something in a foreign language, no problem, he's educated. finally they pull out something in greek and ask him what it says, it says he replies "it says that it doesn't matter how well read or educated this black man is he's never going to get to vote". On the other hand jimmy carter a former president talked about how they finally were saying that relatives couldn't cast votes for dead family, i think after they'd been dead for more than 6 months as you couldn't know if they'd changed their mind after that long.

Re: re: Chris Krebs

shouldn't that be 4 years? So far they haven't tried it again, and it wasn't until the 3 year that they tried to begin with. As for evidence, he's used the courts to go after people for years. it's just on a new level now that he's president and the justice department ostensible works for him.

Ireland opens probe into Musk’s X over Grok’s AI data slurp

musks the slurper. he's not american. from south africa. don't know about their educational system.

Microsoft OneDrive file sync apps for Windows, Mac broken for 10 months

used to run into mac users that were fond of characters that onedrive didn't like. could spend hours waiting for the sync to fail and then track down what file caused the problem and then renaming so it would back up. users didn't like their file name being changed just because ms didn't like the names. there was a system that kept separate directories for different file systems. when you looked at the file from unix, windows, mac or dos, you saw filenames that were compatible with your os. when a file was saved it would translate the file name and put an entry in each directory. worked pretty well, never had problems with mac names on windows machines. probably takes more storage for the different directories.

White House budget proposal could beam NASA science back decades

Re: Where's the profit for Musk?

destroy all federal agencies, then say "see the government run programs don't work!". now privatize everything and put all that money in the hands of people like musk. If it isn't privatized then send the money directly to "red" stated where it will be distributed to people like Bret Favre. they have a plan.

Trump kills clearances for infosec's SentinelOne, ex-CISA boss Chris Krebs

Re: No relation

mealy mouthed and sophomoric argument. people who have valid visas and are legal are being treated and made criminals through deliberate actions in the bureaucracy. people aren't particularly incensed about illegal aliens, it's deliberate attempt to remove every person in the country who was born elsewhere. I guarantee that 3 of my grandparents would be being shipped back to the country of origin if they were still living. 1 to the uk, and we definitely don't want them here, another to Canada, even worse, and then Germany, worst of all. only second generation american, but they'd probably divide me in thirds and send them to the corners of the earth.

Re: No relation

of course, revoke their visa without telling them and that automatically makes them an illegal immigrant. remarkably easy to turn someone into a criminal by changing their status. Especially if you don't tell them or give them a chance to get to their consulate of get a layer before you show up and put zip ties on them. Then shuttle them around the country and claim that the previously jurisdiction has no standing because they're now in Vermont or Louisiana.

Re: No relation

Here's hoping the pendulum knocks the orange peanuts head off.

DOGE dilettantes 'didn't test' Social Security fraud detection tool at appropriate scale

Re: DOGE incompetence

together with the lemony goodness of a cyber truck.

FreeDOS 1.4: Still DOS, still FOSS, more modern than ever

dos networking

dos and early windows i think, we used the packet driver. loaded after the netware network driver and provided tcp/ip so we could do ftp, telnet etc.

Microsoft lists seven habits of highly effective Windows 11 users

Re: MS being MS. Again.

11 mostly keeps pushing acrobat and a subscription to adobe when i'm perfectly happy using a browser to view pdf's. pretty much disabled any messaging from anything the other day hoping that will be enough to get windows to shut up about adobe. get really tired of the "advice" windows and the applications keep offering. even get advice in outlook suggesting that a phrase needs a comma when it doesn't. Also flags words as misspelled when they aren't. just something not in the dictionary.

Re: MS being MS. Again.

i strongly most of these "features", find them annoying and disable them as quickly as possible, but i have dozens of people i work with who don't even notice them, and if they do either ignore them or like them. they are probably the focus group members the ms uses.

had to play wack-a-mole in windows 10 to get rid of these. search highlights? news and interests? they seemed to sprout with every update. at least most of them could be disabled in 11 without more poping up later.

Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney

Re: Only $1M?

sure, put it all on onedrive, it'll be safe there. Bet Microsoft would give musk a great deal, and if you ever find you can't get it back, well you should have been more careful with your security. terms and conditions say we don't guarantee this is appropriate for your usage.

Samsung trumps USA's tariffs by making displays in Mexico, and elsewhere if needed

Re: AI that can do things including monitoring a home

no, it's the 99% that pay the price. the rest like musk don't really care about how high tariffs make prices. they use other peoples money to pay the bills.

Boffins turn Moon dirt into glass for solar panels, eye future lunar base power

Re: Little lugging required

float hot molten glass on water? thought the floated it on molten tin.

Trump tariffs to make prices great – a gain

Re: US chocolat

Sure probably the most common chocolate sold here is Nestle. isn't that a European company? Guess you eat your own s***

Re: US chocolat

wouldn't have chocolate at all if you're ancestors hadn't pillaged the new world.BTW you should try the original chocolate the way the Aztecs served it. of course you people seem to like marzipan. omg.

UK's attempt to keep details of Apple 'backdoor' case secret… denied

Re: Basic point here

Yes, plan on carrying an old dead flip phone the next time i travel to a foreign country. Was once common for people to be out of touch for weeks or months if they went on vacation. Plan to do all communication home with pen and paper if necessary. Might pick up a phone to use wherever i end up. cheap one that i can get rid of before coming home. Don't have a presence on social media for the most part. no facebook tic-toc etc. People are getting stopped in airports when coming home for no good reason and phones demanded and searched. like living in russia. The new understanding is that freedom of speech only applies to citizens and they'll still use what you say against you if you travel and ice thinks of a reason to talk to you. SS goons.

Re: Basic point here

Lot of damage can be done in the 4-6 years it takes to get them out of office. The people who have a 2 year term spend a lot more time paying attention to what people are saying/thinking if they're reasonably smart. not always the case.

Re: Technical Capability Notice (TCN)

Don't let Trump know about this one, he'd have lots of uses for it. forbidden by the constitution. can't see why though. bet Henry viii loved it.

Trump tariffs thwart TikTok takeover as China digs in heels

Re: Yes no one should trust Trump

yes, "working in good faith" probably thinks that will go over with his christian supporters.

Meta debuts its first 'mixture of experts' models from the Llama 4 herd

Re: Reality be damned!

one of trumps favorite sayings is "everyone knows this". So should a person pick a political group and then start to examine the facts, or examine reality and then look for people who share what you've seen?

Re: Reality be damned!

Wagner? Plenty of other "Artistic" jackasses out there. Not hard to name movie actors that appear to be despicable people and not left leaning, if that means anything. Known to produce some great art, jut not people you'd want to invite to dinner.

Re: Left, right, left

how can any llm possibly be biased toward "reality"? what is the source of its imput? Is the head of meta's output based on "reality"? Does the input have data sourced from those twits on X? How do you expect the llm to filter out the biases and keep what's real?

China hits back at America with retaliatory tariffs, export controls on rare earth minerals

Re: Medium rare?

There has been mining of rare earths in the us, but nimby. Believe rare earths are often found together with thorium deposits, but with thorium mantles having been replaced where gas lamps are still used, no one wants a radioactive lamp in the house. isn't samarium also used in magnets? survives higher temps than neodymium magnets.

US DoE wants developers to fast-track AI datacenters on its land

It was also run by the government and a large number of the people with the knowledge to find the solutions for extracting the isotopes needed to make things work and put a working device together were immigrants fro s***h*** countries that weren't Sweden.

How do you explain what magnetic fields do to monitors to people wearing bowling shoes?

camera shutter

Becomeing one of the most frequent solution over the last 4 years. lot of dell laptops with the shutter, surprising how often someone closes the shutter when adjusting the screen position, and for some reason didn't notice that they were sliding a shutter over the camera. Changes the color of the camera to red also. Still don't notice until i tell them what to check for.

Signalgate solved? Report claims journalist’s phone number accidentally saved under name of Trump official

I've always found updating my contacts with new phone numbers to be a PITA. Anyone ever accidentally changed the phone number in their contacts app on a smartphone? hard enough to change the number on purpose. Maybe he's suffering from early onset dementia? my mom at 94 might have done something like this. She sometimes would tap randomly on the screen if the smartphone wasn't quick enough in its response.

Windows 11 poised to beat 10, mostly because it has to

Re: How long...

Think you're lucky, left my computer running but wasn't logged in during the week. when i had time to login and a reason to use it the os had been updated to win 11 without asking for permission.

System builders say server prices set to spike as Trump plays customs cowboy

Re: In other news

and the sea wine dark.

For flux sake: CISA, annexable allies warn of hot DNS threat

Re: Developing fast flux detection algorithms

might help to require a longer ttls for dns records. why not 10 minutes minimum, possibly 30? make it easier to weed out all those sub 3 minute domains.

EU: These are scary times – let's backdoor encryption!

Re: Puzzled.........

please, record and google translate. language is a code, not a cypher. supposed to be easily understood.

Re: Next on the agenda ...

indiana had a bill ready to define pi in something like 1897. Fortunately it didn't pass. think it was based on the squaring of the area of a circle. probably more accurate than 3 but who knows.

starts to get old when you need to decrypt a few hundred accounts.

WHY can't Silicon Valley create breakable non-breakable encryption, cry US politicians

Re: Rubbish

You can always use something other than aes if you don't trust it. think the mistake is to use the term "keys". when politicians hear "key" they think of the locks on their offices and they have a master "key" that can unlock all the doors. they "reason" that if a master key can be made for their offices you must be able to make a master "key" for any encryption algorithm. They can also point to all the tv shows and movies where encryption algorithms are broken all the time. There are unbreakable algorithms out there they just aren't practical for typical use.

Windows intros 365 Link, a black box that does nothing but connect to Microsoft's cloud

really thin clients

i remember "thin" clients designed to boot to a server and run dos. dos commands on the server together with dos applications. client was just a keyboard, a monitor, a network card, and some memory. used rpl.

Bill Gates unearths Microsoft's ancient code like a proud nerd dad

Re: The Moral of the Story

only "ported" if they had a copy of the source code, and really only if the source was in 8080 asm.

OpenAI wants to bend copyright rules. Study suggests it isn’t waiting for permission

Re: "rigid copyright rules are repressing innovation and investment"

So i bought a book to learn a subject with. i gave the book to a friend so he could learn the same thing. that book has been read by dozens of people by now. is the writer or the company that published that book entitled to dozens of separate fees from each of the people who read that book? Humans generally learn by reading books. Obviously for the best profit, publishing houses should stop printing paper copies and only license copies on line. use biometrics to make sure that you can't share a book even if you share a smartphone or computer. Perhaps llms should be trained with ocr from physical copies. Then if you need to update the model you can just have the system re-read the physical book. Should probably collect as many physical books as possible before publishing houses realize to improve profits they need to burn the libraries and privately held copies of all these extant copies that no longer provide a profit. Once the physical copies are all gone, copyrights won't matter. The book will be electronic and tied to a single readers biometrics. No longer readable after that person dies. The post office will be able to do away with book rates.

Forget Signal. National Security Adviser Waltz now accused of using Gmail for work

Re: Proud to be dumb in government

sounds like a good idea. Unfortunately we'd still need to refill those positions from the limited group of nitwits that support this idiocy.

it wasn't her server that was hacked back then. i'd say she made a good choice.

Signalgate storm intensifies as journalist releases full secret Houthi airstrike chat

Re: They're already

Wouldn't the name of a cia operative be considered classified? Quite a bit of harm when plame's name was released. if the signalgate affair is so innocent i would think the orange peanut would release an unredacted version with the name of the alleged cia agent. After all there's nothing to see here.

Re: They're already

Think he already did that when he moved the embassy.