Posts by alain williams 2817 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
An AI PC is one that is compliant with the current marketing bullshit.
For most people their current PC is plenty powerful enough to do what they want, so why go to the bother and cost of replacing it. That is good for users but bad for vendors hence the marketing nonsense. This is nothing new.
The world could be a nicer place to live in for everyone if we used our, supposedly, intelligent big brains for mutual benefit. But instead the sociopaths, a minority who only care about themselves, act to disrupt others to persue aims to get themselves more than they need - even to give themselves a luxurious lifestyle.
The really harmful ones are those that get into top political positions. I could name them but some one my list would upset some people.
So now the worry's about Chrome taking over the internet.
And it will serve its makers best interests, eg by crippling the APIs that allow ad-blockers to work.
I just hope that we do not get many web sites that only work properly with a chromium engine -- which might happen if chromium achieves dominance & lazy web developers only test chrome/edge/... Fortunately we will prolly be saved from that as Apple's Safari uses webkit.
Probably the Wright Brothers Medal would be more appropriate.
All programmers need supervision and all programmers need to supervise.
Supervisors or rather managers are part of the problem that is all too often forgotten. Many were never programmers and so do not understand what makes a good environment to program; or of they do their own managers will not let them do the right thing.
A large part of the problem is budgets and timescales. Managers want programs produced in as short a time as possible and as cheaply as possible. The result is that proper design and documentation is not done, testing is skimped.
Some of that is understandable in a competitive environment: if Microsoft had ensured that its products were properly tested someone else would have beaten them to market and they would not be where they are today.
it is still uploaded to Strava's servers. This will make them a target for $EvilEntity to crack and slurp data. Yes this will require effort but if you are the sort of organisation that is seriously after presidents then you will do it.
The other obvious target is the mobile 'phone comms company - this has to track where the 'phone is so that it can route calls.
How safe do you want to be ?
Did not Boris promise that we could fund the NHS £350 million extra a week when we leave the EU ?
frustrated i told them not to bother as i would find an insurance company that could provide a service
The trouble is that your comment will prolly not be fed back to the C-suits who think that AI is a great way of saving money - but who do not realise that it is losing them business.
A lack of regulation was one of the factors behind the Grenfell Tower disaster.
The watering down of financial regulation led to the 2008 bank crash.
So the government is ignoring history to make a quick buck in its term in office but storing up potential liabilities in the longer term future.
Why do we end up with monkeys like this ? Not that the Tories would be any better.
Good advice but readers of el-reg are at an advantage:
• They are aware that their TV is spying on them
• They are technically capable of blocking it at their firewall
Manufacturers do not worry about losing the small numbers of technically aware users - they will make plenty of $£ from the rest of them.
but then realised that it was different from Missing Thunderbirds footage found in British garden shed.
Do remember that there is a big push to having software run in someone's cloud (to generate perpetual income). So what software running locally would need AI hardware ?
The marketing people need to work that one out.
Also: what is the extra energy requirement of this extra hardware -- even if it is not used ?
Under the GDPR scripts from either of these should only be run with the end user's opt-in consent.
If the UK ICO (Information commissioner) was doing its job it would have a field day as almost no web sites do ask consent before running Google scripts. But the fact that everyone does it does not make it legal.
Because there is an access door on the side that was "never" used but could foment fast ingress of water.
Interesting theory but it would need a crew member to "accidentally" leave the door open. Please follow all crew members and see if one of them suddenly retires with unexplained riches.
I love a conspiracy theory as much as the next man. However I think that it is improbable that HPE has the ability to conjure up a storm that sinks one particular boat outside Porticello.
Yes: Mike Lynch & Stephen Chamberlain died a day apart but coincidences do happen.
A system is only as reliable as the weakest component. The more parts there are the more likely that one will break and bring down the whole house of cards.
There is a cost equation to evaluate, which is greater: outsourcing IT to someone's cloud; the cost of not being able to do business when the cloud is not available.
A big unknown is how often said cloud goes down.
You have said what I came here to write.
The trouble with backups is that they are a complete waste of time ... until you need them. Thus the C-suit can not do them (or not do them properly) and no one will notice - until that fateful day.
I fear that the only way of ensuring that they are done (& tested) is by use of a big stick: insurance companies demand proof that they are being done; or government legislation (which will lead to cries of "nanny state"). Anyone any better ideas ?
This is where a bit of enlightened cooperation can pay big dividends. If you are a large VMware user then club together with other large users and fund developers to add whatever you think is missing to open source VMware replacements. It might take a few months and some ££ but you then get what you want and save lots more ££ over years to come.
However it is psychologically hard for the large corporate C-suits to do this - they just see it as making payments when others, not in the paying club, get the results for free -- why should they do that ?
But that is how FLOSS works: some pay, some do not, all benefit.
Why does Meta silence voices in support of Palestine on Instagram and Facebook ? This has been going on for years and is still happening.
This is what many will think, including those at the electoral commission. But it is clear that China thought that putting the effort into getting the data was worth while.
The consequences for some individuals could be great, I read stories on how China issues threats to people in England who have relatives in China.
The consequences for those at the electoral commission will be receiving a memo on security that most will not bother to read.
There is also the notion that as they have now fixed their Microsoft Exchange that all the harm is undone and there is no need to worry. Not true: China still has a list of all voters in the UK and much of the information will not change for years (when did you last move house ?).
They list 30-odd user agents. This is more than a web master should have to worry about. It also does not distinguish when one bot is scraping content for more than one purpose.
A new directive is needed, "Purpose" that could have values like: search-index, human, archive, llm, ... These could then be allowed or disallowed.
At lease ClownStrike has the tissue thin excuse that it needs to get patches out quickly to prevent day-0 exploits. I do not think that this Google update was urgent and thus has no excuse to not go through proper QA.
But for both of them: QA costs money that neither wants to pay for, especially when the cost of damage is paid for by someone else.
What would it cost HMRC to produce its own bespoke system - written from scratch ? How much will it cost to make bespoke changes to S/4HANA (or Oracle or ...) ?
Once done it will not need to do this again; except of course when government changes tax legislation which would trigger changes in whatever it uses.
SAP now insists that everything runs in the SAP cloud. I would feel much happier if my tax records were kept in an HMRC cloud rather than a SAP one.
It requires that Web Site Owners (WSOs) list the different crawlers and specify rules.
Most WSOs do not care what the crawlers care called they just want to control what the content is used for; so indexing might be fine as might humans use as learning material but feeding to an AI might not be. Also should there be some attribution made whenever derived content is displayed somewhere ?
The Consent in Crisis paper kind of talks about this but, as all to often in such papers, does not provide an easy to read summary.
Maybe Automated Content Access Protocol needs to be revived. But this will be objected to by AIs and others who want to continue their free lunch.
We should be asking why something like ClownStrike was considered necessary in the first place. It does not seem to be to just address the weaknesses in MS Windows as there are versions available for Linux and macOS. I have been hearing things about it being required by insurance and compliance.
It would be interesting to see a cost benefit analysis: what does it cost to install vs what does it prevent - especially since it does have a history of causing outages.
I suppose from the PHB point of view this ticks a box as otherwise getting security done right takes time and expertise that a business often does not want to pay for.
This is a third party issue, not Microsoft!
If Microsoft produced secure systems in the first place then add-ons like CrowdStrike would not be needed.
Security is hard, needs work to get right. Even on Linux systems many do not bother to get it right, for instance SE-Linux can stop things working and there is a big temptation to just switch it off. SE-Linux is not a panacea but does make it harder for malware to get in.
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