Posts by RockBurner

Brit rail cops bring live facial recognition to the London Underground

Re: We need a fixed sum to be paid for false positives.

Can you imagine the premiums??

Re: Fascination

Lower prices, bigger bungs.

Demoralized developer's desperate hack came back to haunt him on LinkedIn

"... people were often pulled off projects to do some firefighting"

That's SOP* at every company I've ever worked at.

Standard Operating Practise

New Boeing finally gets going, 15 years after debut

Re: Why ...

"... Passenger Enhances Experience ..."

For whom? Other passengers? (might be an interesting flight...). The flight crew? (might also make the flight more interesting... but in a different way!)

OpenAI wants teachers and profs to foist their work off on ChatGPT

The problem is that it will bite "someone" on the arse, not necessarily (in fact very unlikely) the person who actually made the error of using AI to generate whatever they purported to be their own work.

Humans (almost) never learn from the mistakes of others, they have to be bitten themselves (and for preference, immediately after the mistake, if the lesson is to be learnt).

Google Earth's AI makeover survives less than one planetary rotation

Re: for those of use who do not click on X links

Goes for all other social media links too.

Big vacuum is watching as robo-cleaners put humans behind the wheel

Prescience strikes again...

This all reminds me very much of a "Love, Death, and Robots" episode....

Russian spies take their half-click email attack from Zimbra to Outlook

Re: Words cannot

Marketing departments.

DEF CON bans Meta-style 'pervert glasses'

Re: Ah great

It's not so much the people being arseholes per se (there will always be arseholes): It's the handling of the data and where else it's disseminated to that is the real problem that generates the hate for these things.

If it was widely known, and trusted, that the captured data was "only" used for enhancing the glasses-wearer's experience (Augmented Reality), and the data was absolutely NOT used for any other purpose (personal identification, training LLMs, etc etc) then the AR glasses MIGHT be more acceptable.

But instead the main problem with them is the unknown, probably suspect, perceived to be nefarious, use of the data by the capturing organisation(s), which makes a useful tool for those who could benefit from it, a socially unacceptable item.

Airbus keeps an A350 flying for 24 hours

Re: 22 hours feels like a bit of an endurance test

I've done Europe to Chile (and back) twice this year (don't ask).

Melatonin tablets to "keep" you asleep when trying to sleep (either on the plane or after)

lightweight casual clothing to keep comfy (but with something soft to keep warm if the AC is turned down too low)

keep sipping water

Invest in Business Class.

The key is to minimise anything that causes small niggles that prevent you turning off mentally.

Trip 1: Air-France Business Class LHR -> Paris -> Santiago (15 hrs total iirc): Business class, great. (return was the reverse)

Trip 2: Iberia Economy LHR -> Madrid ->< Santiago (15 hrs total) : survivable... but questionable*., Return BA Premium Economy Santiago -> LHR (14.5 hrs iirc) : Bearable, just.

* I had a trapped ulnar nerve for that flight... I think the painkillers I was on for that (which did f-all for the pain) helped make the flight survivable.

AWS customer learns the hard way how even the smallest oversight can be mission-critical

Re: SPF, DKIM, DMARC, PTRs...

Two words doing a lot of heavy lifting there: "Correctly" and "configured"

User swore hacker called General Failure had invaded his PC

Have your users misinterpreted an error message?

I think we should all feel very very blessed indeed if a user even "reads" an error message, let alone attempts any form of comprehension.

Vim text editor game teaches you keyboard shortcuts with ice cream delivery

(h for left, j for down, k for up, and l for right)

Wasn't that the keys for some early BBC or DOS games??

I seem to remember playing something using those keys.... Checkee Egg or Doom? (those are the 2 games I remember playing a lot)

(h for left, j for down, k for up, and l for right)

Weren't those the keys for some early DOS or BBC games?

I seem to remember using them for something... ChuckieEgg or Doom? (not sure, but I do remember playing a lot of ChuckieEgg at school....)

(h for left, j for down, k for up, and l for right)

Wasn't that the keys for some early BBC or DOS games??

I seem to remember playing something using those keys.... Checkee Egg or Doom? (those are the 2 games I remember playing a lot)

US auto regulators want to kill robotaxi brake pedals

I wasn't going to anyway, but this is even more ammunition for the argument never to travel to the US of A (the United States of Anarchy) ever again.

Security boss thought MFA would be too much security

Have you ever been told to make IT worse?

Frequently and often.

Part of the deal when you're an IT worker in a non-IT market company. (and often even when the company IS in an IT related market)

UK school’s network left wide open for invasion, student found

Re: Graduated from school

The "Prom" is a big thing in US movies and TV shows, it's hardly a surprise that other parts of the world will see that and eventually want to have something similar.

Whether it's a good thing or not for the students (given the anecdotes....), a good party is (almost) never a bad thing.

The new database world according to Google: Inexact queries and AI in everything

I just bankrupted Mecca....

Logitech knows when to fold 'em

Looks like yet again Logitech have created a "reverse-ergonomic" nightmare.

Shirley I can't be the only person to think that something that folds FLATTER for storage would be better than it folding THICKER and more bulky for storage/transport??

Given the lack of imagery on the article I was actually envisioning some sort of origami-esque device that popped into 3-dimensionality from a flattened form. THAT would be clever and would probably sell far better.

If your sex life is dead, you can blame Steve Jobs

Re: The bait of the clicks

If I read the article correctly.... the rate WAS declining anyway, (for various other reasons), it's just that in AT&T zones the rate declined a tad faster. (allegedly)

Malware dev tries to steal Claude users' secrets, writes npm slop, leaks own GitHub private token

AI is the new security threat vector

??

Certainly looking that way to me (a non security person). Given Claude's propensity for copying files back to insecure sandboxes and now things like this, I believe there's a good argument that AI use in a business environment is going to become synonymous with installing those funky browser "toolbars" that was all the rage way back when.

America's top cyber-defense agency left a GitHub repo open with passwords, keys, tokens – and incredibly obvious filenames

Yahoo?

People still have yahoo emails?

<desperately trying to remember if I had one....>

Feature freeze for Python 3.15 as first beta released

Re: Guess I'll have to wait for version 4

Just starting into Python myself (after 20 years PHP dev) and I couldn't agree more.

I'll reserve judgement on the usefulness until after I've progressed further.

We've only gone and done it: Changed what you're used to

The account and burger menus also swap sides between "desktop" and "mobile" window widths, which, although it doesn't really affect me... is just.... nonsensical.

The more I look, the more it seems to be a GUI that's been crammed together in the last month of a 6 month project by a fresh PFY who hasn't yet heard of Browserstack or fluid design.

Agreed - definitely need to allow the browser to control the anchor tag colours so that visited links are displayed differently.

Re: Oh dear

There's no need to get cruel and unusual....

Microsoft's bad obsession is showing up in shabby services and slipshod software. Here's proof

Re: What actually IS an AI?

There's nothing "inadvertent" about it.

SpaceX rocket set for unintentional Moon landing – well, a piece of it anyway

Well - if we're really gong to get pedantic.... MACH numbers are dependant on the density of the medium.

IE, the "speed of sound" is different at high atlitude than it is at low altitude, due to the density of the gaseous soup we call "atmosphere".

So - even if the mph or kph figure can be stated directly, the MACH number hasn't been stated "well" (I was going to use accurately, but it's an approximation anyway), because they haven't given the correlatory altitude*.

Given the Moon's lower gravitational pull, IF it had an atmosphere, the density of said atmosphere at any given altitude would not the same as that on Earth....

Yet another experiment proves it's too damn simple to poison large language models

"Would someone really do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?"

Welcome to the internet, I see you are completely new to this media format.

To answer your questions, in order, "yes", and "yes".

For more information see: well, the internet.

Trump admin pays wind developers to quit, back fossil fuel projects

Re: So to deliver value to the US taxpayer....

He doesn't like soup.

Vintage chatbot lives in the past like an elderly relative

I don't think that word means what you think it means....

"... Duvenaud also explained that his team is interested in using Talkie to study cultural change. "For instance, we can use these models to try to understand how a law would have been interpreted at the time it was written, based on the implicit assumptions and meaning of language at the time," ... "

Please correct me if I'm wrong here.... but LLMs (to my understanding) have no concept of what words "mean". They just statistically group anonymous tokens.

If so - then this sentence is not just wrong, it's farcical.

30 ClawHub skills secretly turn AI agents into a crypto swarm

Early iteration of a hegemonising swarm? (albeit with a motive other than 'just' growing itself)

To fix this Wi-Fi network, we'll need a crane

Re: It is quite simple.

Kids can "normalise" (yes, with an 's') virtually anything. Which is not always a good thing.

If malware via monitor cables is a matter of national security, this might be the gadget for you

Well - if the device is going to remain in any way relevant, then it's firmware would (presumably) need to be updateable. There's your access point for telemetry to the mothership, backdoor snooping, and potential uber-hacker access point all in one. :D

Stale gov.uk pages are feeding AI overviews old data and Brits are believing it

You think any AI is capable of distinguishing the state of any piece of information it digests?? (old, new, genuine, fake, deliberately misleading, joking, threatening, pacifying.... etc etc)

It's all grist to the mill, that's (one of) the problem(s).

Vibe coding upstart Lovable denies data leak, cites 'intentional behavior,' then throws HackerOne under the bus

Just ask applicants how much they know about vibe-coding and then ask them to write a complete function/method down on a piece of paper. (doesn't matter what it does, as long as they can write one, preferably in your language of choice)

Blue Origin nails the landing, but puts the payload satellite in the wrong orbit

Re: Applause for the subhead

They tried, but it got stuck in the hedge.

Microsoft sends Outlook Lite to the great inbox in the sky as memory costs skyrocket

Not enough AI agents to re-factor the Lite codebase to include AI "tools" or the required data-mining I would imagine.

South Korea introduces universal basic mobile data access

Re: Universal basic mobile data access?

To answer the 4G question: I have a EE 4g Unlimited Data sim and a 4G Router. I think the access is charged at about £30 per month (it's bundled in with other sims on my account).

Extra details:

I've had an EE contract continuously for over 20 years which enables me to do a moderate amount of bargaining.

I currently run 3 sims (phone, mobile hot-spot, router: all "sim-only" type contracts) for about £70 per month with some favourable discounts.

There's a 4G mast within sight of the router (across an open field approximately 1/2 mile away), and I'm using an extra passive aerial to improve signal.

The 4G connection "can be" flaky if the weather is being odd*, but is otherwise reliable enough for my other half to be on Teams calls pretty much constantly during the day, If I have a Teams call it works fine. We don't have an extra-high-def TV so stream standard definition films and tv programs without too much issue.

Speedtest just now :

Ping: 40ms

Download: 72.38 Mbps

Upload: 19.18 Mpbs

Download latency: 241

Upload latency: 110

When we moved in, I called BT to enquire about services and they estimated the best they could do was approximately 2Mbps either way over the phone lines; due to being over 4km from the nearest relevant exchange. When I asked for what I can do to improve that, his response was "Move". (very helpful). (Funnily enough, approximately 3 miles from Chichester, like another poster)

* Which causes the TV streaming services to fail to load properly, although I think that might be more to do with the complicated wi-fi setup here: solid internal walls means powerline network extenders over older mains circuits... not the most reliable. A more modern house with up to date wiring might have less issues.

Re: Universal basic mobile data access?

If that's true - where's the form for joining the "class-action" suing OpenReach for not providing such to the many thousands of homes* that don't have FttP?

* yours truly's current abode included, despite being less than 100 yards from a fibre junction box.

Showing the Windows 10 desktop was the yeast they could do

It just wasn't a grower.

Welsh government used Copilot for review to justify closing organization

Was going to post the same. My experience of CoPilot transcripts (from Teams calls) shows them to be highly inaccurate.

Go for a walk, man: Sony's drive to create a car parked by partner Honda

Very interesting comment, given that Honda were once the "agitator" in that scenario in the car and motorcycle world, in the 1960s/70s. They've suffered the same fate (obsolescence) as they pushed onto UK and European vehicle manufacturers.

Some could call that karma, but tbh, it's just the way the world works.

Calling out corporate BS? There's a steaming pile to aim for

"There is no crime in using butteriness instead of low latency touch enabled graphical user interface responsiveness"

Yes, yes there is, and if you can't see it, then you're just as guilty of it.

Telling an AI model that it’s an expert programmer makes it a worse programmer

Re: So they are becoming more human?

Why are my ears burning....

Openreach: Fiber can sniff out leaky water pipes – if anyone bothers fixing them

"That all depends on whether the torpid privatized water firms in England and Wales view detecting leaks as a priority."

Any that don't should be automatically receiving a "cease-and-desist" from the government and the controlling board disbanded.

Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

Re: Verbose mode

To be honest - I don't think you're talking to "engineers".

(sounds more like a delegation from the crayon eaters to me...)

Notepad's new Markdown powers served with a side of remote code execution

Re: Ha ha ha ha ha

I give you "The Happytime Murders"

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1308728/

Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office

Re: Gullible!

I once had two motorcycles of the same model, one red, the second blue, otherwise nigh on identical. The red one was definitely faster.