Posts by petef

Sovereign AI is 'nonsense,' says Doctorow

Speaking engagement

Cory Doctorow is appearing alongside Jimmy Wales at the Edinburgh Book Festival on 17th August. A live stream will be available which can also be viewed afterwards.

https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles

Re: Don't check that, check this

> The only issue is who gets to decide what are facts and what are fairy tales.

Copilot, of course.

I observed over the shoulder of one user manually counting words of a document.

Apple, Google drag cross-platform texting into the encrypted age

XKCD

Obligatory XKCD: Chat Systems

Google says criminals used AI-built zero-day in planned mass hack spree

Back door

"developers hard-coding a trust exception into the authentication flow"

So it was a back door, either deliberate or forgotten about.

Server-room lock was nothing but a crock

ETI

In the 1970s there was a hobby electronics magazine called ETI. They published a circuit diagram for a lock using a numeric keyboard and a bunch of SCRs. Type the correct sequence of numbers to open the lock. Get one wrong and it resets. What they had failed to anticipate was that pressing all keys simultaneously would also open the lock.

Contracts are in C++26 despite disagreement over their value

/me dusts down copy of Object-Oriented Software Construction.

Lego crams an ASIC in a brick to keep kids interested

Wot no AI?

AlmaLinux gives Btrfs a home after Red Hat kicked it out

Alma and Rocky were plugged as replacements for CentOS. Offering extras, even if they bring perceived benefits, invalidates compatibility.

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

For even more obfuscation I use double ROT13.

Boffins fool a self-driving car by putting mirrors on traffic cones

See Mark Rober's video of a Wile E. Coyote style obstacle fooling a Tesla.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3htsDyQ

Techie ended vendor/client blame game by treating managers like toddlers

When Sybase ran conferences their content was organised into three streams: technical, semi-technical and management.

NASA hacked hardware of camera orbiting Jupiter – and fixed it

Re: Someone at NASA must have had a Dell XPS

I performed the same repair on my MacBook Pro c. 2012. The motherboard went into the oven to reflow the Nvidia GPU.

If you're forced to use Windows 11, here's how to steal some of your time back

Being foist on most users' desktops is not quite the same as most popular.

So you CAN turn an entire car into a video game controller

Re: This is the UK

US English is the lingua franca of the Internet.

Re: it's not all fun and games

CAN can be hacked physically without properly breaking into the car.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/06/can_injection_attack_car_theft/

Billions of cookies up for grabs as experts warn over session security

I'd have thought that necessary cookies are the most valuable to miscreants.

Samsung admits Galaxy devices can leak passwords through clipboard wormhole

Re: Default in Keepass

Not on Samsung.

I've just verified again that its password clearing is ineffective on my Galaxy A25. It does work on my old Moto g22 and other platforms.

Bybit declares war on North Korea's Lazarus crime-ring to regain $1.5B stolen from wallet

"The transaction was manipulated by a sophisticated attack that altered the smart contract logic and masked the signing interface, enabling the attacker to gain control of the ETH cold wallet. As a result, over 400,000 ETH and stETH worth more than $1.5 billion were transferred to an unidentified address."

This is not unique to crypto but whenever I see an attack described as "sophisticated" I read it as "oh yes, we didn't think of that".

And now something fun for a change: Building blocks of life in Bennu asteroid samples

Re: Fun? Challenge accepted.

I'll bite, no way.

The chemicals analysed from Bennu were racemic. If they had originated from Earth, either ejecta or contamination of these experiments, then the enantiomers would be unbalanced. Most of the essential amino acids of (Earth) life are laevorotatory.

I'm not seeking to bamboozle, rather leaving it to the reader to follow up on the technical terms. Chirality is important and simple in some respects but often overlooked.

Donald Trump proposes US govt acquire half of TikTok, which thanks him and restores service

At the time of writing $TRUMP is "worth" $11B and $MELANIA $2B. So that is on track to buy Tik.

Microsoft Edge takes a victory lap with some high-looking usage stats for 2024

I am an Edge user because my company's internal websites insist on it.

For everything else I use a more capable, less encumbered browser.

WhatsApp finally fixes View Once flaw that allowed theft of supposedly vanishing pics

Dilbert on Camera Phone Banning

The sad tale of the Alpha massacre

I've done that. We had personal Interactive Unix workstations. The owner of another WS asked me to remove the account I had there to free up space. I deleted my /home/me but left my /etc/passwd entry, changing the home field in there to / so that I could still log in. Unfortunately the owner then proceeded to invoke the remove user admin script blithely accepting all the "are you sure?" prompts. Well it certainly freed up space. 15 5¼" disks were needed to reinstall.

Hide the keyboard – it's the only way to keep this software running

I remember many years ago ETI published a design for an electronic lock keypad. You needed to press keys in order to perform the unlock. Get one wrong and it reset. However looking at the circuit I could see that if all keys were pressed simultaneously that would unlock it.

Samsung phone users under attack, Google warns

Here are two sites that show phones or wearables for each affected Exynos.

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

https://www.kimovil.com/en/list-smartphones-by-processor-group/exynos-9820

Big browsers are about to throw a wrench in your ad-free paradise

Opera has built in ad blocking for several years. They have just announced Opera One R2. It will continue to support Manifest V2 extensions beyond the expected June 2025 cutoff. UBlock Origin [full fat] is explicitly mentioned.

https://blogs.opera.com/news/2024/10/opera-support-manifest-v2-ad-blocking/

AI 'bubble' will burst 99 percent of players, says Baidu CEO

Does Fujitsu's fingering of false information include Horizon?

Open source LLM tool primed to sniff out Python zero-days

The Ragflow issue was the use of eval() not one of the seven highlighted types.

After 3 years, Windows 11 has more than half Windows 10's market share

Think of the copilot

For many, Windows 10 is just fine.

But, but AI.

Microsoft rolls out one Teams app to rule them all

Re: Why can't they fix

You are being kind in limiting your list of Teams failings.

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

Re: The fault's with Microsoft

People who normally watch Sky?

EU's renewable hydrogen plan needs a 'reality check'

Re: Full circle?

You can think of it as an energy store. Electrolyse when the wind is blowing.

Latest Ghostscript vulnerability haunts experts as the next big breach enabler

Obligatory XKCD

Perseverance pays off as Mars rover's SHERLOC brought back from the brink

Obligatory XKCD 695

Biden bans Kaspersky: No more sales, updates in US

Consider what you are paying for, especially in the context of security of your machines. Can you be certain that you are getting a bona fide product? Likely != certain.

Tiny solid-state battery promises to pack a punch in pocket gadgets

Re: Capacity

My comment about Rayovac 13 was a reply to the figures for a CR2032 and so I adopted the same parameters.

Battery University is an extensive resource for all things about batteries.

Re: Capacity

A Rayovac 13 zinc air button cell is typically used in heading aids.

Its data sheet has 136 h at 2 mA and average 1.25 V giving 340 mWh. Volume is 0.26 cc implying 1300 Wh/L.

Venerable ICQ messaging service to end operations in June

Obligatory XKCD

Bing and Copilot fall from the clouds around the world

DuckDuckGone

Microsoft, Google do a victory lap around passkeys

"As of 2023, that number had increased 3,378 percent to more than 4,000 per second." [from 115]

So it could have been worse, it might have been 3379%.

Torvalds intentionally complicates his use of indentation in Linux Kconfig

Postel's Law considered harmful

Postel's Law which whilst admirable in 1980 has since become discouraged for reasons of security.

Judge refuses to Ctrl-Z divorce order made by a misclick

What AC says.

My take when I read about this in The Times was that (a) a divorce was being sought, they intended to establish finances before completion and (b) the computer made it easier but it would also have happened if shifting papers.

Some 300,000 IPs vulnerable to this Loop DoS attack

TFTP on the public Internet. That's a thing?

World-plus-dog booted out of Facebook, Instagram, Threads

Re: They have a point...

Earlier this morning they let me register with my surname of '); DROP TABLE Students;--

Psst … wanna jailbreak ChatGPT? Thousands of malicious prompts for sale

"We have not yet detected any malware operating in this manner" - sounds like the bad guys are doing a good job then.

Microsoft admits issues with Windows 10 patch almost 2 months after release

Re: My system is slow. …

A slightly less hairy solution is to add a couple of registry keys to turn off Copilot.

NASA, Lockheed Martin reveal subtly supersonic X-59 plane

> Instead pilots will see through what NASA calls the "eXternal Vision System," a 4K monitor fed by a set of high-resolution video cameras.

The SPV (admittedly a land vehicle not available until 2068) used a video screen for the backward-facing driver.