Posts by Pen-y-gors

You probably can't trust your password manager if it's compromised

Firefox?

Obviously only works for websites in FF, but that's fine. 2FA is too much of a faff for anything other than high risk (money, hosting, email)

British Army splashes $86M on AI gear to speed up the battlefield kill chain

Whoops

Get ready for an awful lot of "friendly fire" incidents.

Who remembers the 'incidents' during the Falklands when incoming Exocets were labelled as friendly because they were Fabriqué en France.

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

Past employment had the standard office desk. I'm tall and was having back problems. Maintenance bods made a couple of 3x3 inch blocks to raise the desk up (they drilled small recesses for the legs so it didn't slide off). Worked a treat.

Microsoft sets Copilot agents loose on your OneDrive files

Re: Windows' Search

And it's so frickin' SLOW. Searching for a filename in a directory with a few thousand files in it on an SSD shouldn't take minutes.

Classic version

Thank the gods I upgraded my Office 365 sub to the cheaper, Copilot-free version

Going off at a tangent here... where do you get 'metered connections' in this Year of Our Lord 2026?

Ghost gun legislation casts shadow over 3D printing

Maybe...

Start by banning the sale of most sorts of guns in the state and city? Possession is fine (under the Constitution*), you just can't buy one. Inheriting granpappy's hunting rifle is fine, obvs.

There are approx 4,000,000 'legal' guns in NY state. Will a few plastic ones make a difference?

* What Dat?

Microsoft spends billions on AI, converts just 3.3% of Copilot Chat users

Another planet...

"plans to streamline or even remove some AI features where they don't make sense."

Start with M$ Swiftkey Keyboard. Which now lets you use AI to make pictures. It's an f***ing KEYBOARD! I could see a use-case for some very focussed LLM work that improves auto-corrupt, based on previous typing, but drawing pictures?

Don't forget you can 'downgrade' your Office 365 sub to the non-Copilot 'Classic' - for now at least. A lot cheaper - i.e. the old price.

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

In what crazy world....

do people write code that takes any input and executes it without any form of validation or filtering?

How many search input boxes will execute DROP DATABASE fred ?

Surely a basic precaution is to identify an actual legal road sign (not some random text in the field of view), and only act on 'commands' that are on the official list of valid road signs.

The people developing these systems shouldn't be allowed to carry scissors.

Rackspace tests customer loyalty with brutal email price hike

Proton ?

I've been looking to de-Google my email and I suspect I'll be going to Proton Mail at some stage. Tried it out and there are a few issues over speed and search, but those are a direct result of it being very secure - everything is encrypted on the server. To search content it has to download a copy onto your device.

Prices are comparable - €11/month for business email, €15 for the full suite (1TB cloud, VPN, Calendar, Mail, 2FA authenticator app, password manager) - multiple email addresses included. 30 day free trial - I got a refund when I decided 'not just yet'

Personal prices are £95/year for the full works

Has import from other provider options.

Oh yes, and based in Switzerland!

UK prime minister stares down barrel of ban on social media for kids

Re: Digital ID anyone?

Never mind "the government" - how about Farrage's Gestapo?

Boffins probe commercial AI models, find an entire Harry Potter book

'Fair' use?

The key point about 'fair' use is that it must be fair. e.g. quoting some sentences in a review of a novel. Quoting a paragraph in an academic paper (with full citation). Not for commercial gain (I suspect if someone tried to publish the "2026 Calender of the 365 best quotes from Harry Potter" they'd be in court sooner than they could blink - whereas you'd probably get away with having my favourite HP quote of the day on your Facebook page.

If a college photocopied HP and the Goblet of Fire for every student in a class and used it as an example of poor writing, they'd be in deep doo-doo unless they had some very powerful licensing agreements.

For some reason this doesn't seem to have come up so far in court.

Infinite Machine e-scooter is like the offspring of a Vespa and a Cybertruck

Form over function?

They designed everything from scratch. Why?

How about taking a Vespa (or similar) and working out how to switch to an electric motor and shove in some batteries? The design works. And under £5000

Space-power startup claims it can beam energy to solar farms

Re: A good article .....

Ah, yes, but can hyper-rich 'investors' high on coke and ket actually read? Or care? Anyone with money to spare for this is another argument for a wealth/asset tax, and not at 2% p.a.

But...why?

What's wrong with plopping 200 sq miles of cheap solar PV in some desert to generate 100GW, and pair it with a pumped storage site / loads of very hot salt/sand that you can use at night? Must be more effective than a series of very expensive stages each of which runs at 20-30% efficiency

Amazon-backed X-energy sweet talks investors into another $700M for small modular reactor dream

Decisions, decisions

You come up with a completely new design for something and you have a choice. Utilise Helium as a coolant, an expensive gas that is getting rarer by the day, or salt, which is cheap as chips (and good on chips) and seriously available. What to do, eh?

Bitcoin bandit's £5B bubble bursts as cops wrap seven-year chase

Criminal Assets?

So what happens to the £4.8 billion? Does the UK government keep it? Cash it in and give it to Water Company shareholders?

UK's Ajax fighting vehicle arrives – years late and still sending crew to hospital

Questions?

"There are also questions about whether vehicles such as Ajax are vulnerable to drone attacks, of the kind seen against tanks in Ukraine's battles against Russia's invasion. "

Nah, I don't think there are any questions. We know.that drones can destroy T-90M Russian tanks. An AFV will be a doddle. They could glue some metal spikes on it?

OpenAI API moonlights as malware HQ in Microsoft’s latest discovery

Oh yeah?

Seeing a connection to OpenAI's API on your network doesn't exactly scream "compromise."

It would on my network!

UK charity bank CAF branded a 'disaster' after platform migration goes wrong

Test, test and test again

Is this another 'skimped on testing' problem?

Frozen foods supermarket chain deploys facial recognition tech

Insufficient data...

Before I get worked up about this and boycott Iceland (again - the owner was a prominent Tory donor, also very anti-Welsh, despite being based in Cymru) could we please have some numbers?

How many violent assaults against staff happen in Iceland stores every week? What is this as a percentage of customer visits? How does it compare to e.g. assaults on staff in Lidl or W H Smiths (R.I.P)

Yes, even one violent assault is too many, but could the money for this system be better spent in other ways? Is it just an excuse to reduce the number of actual human security staff, i.e. a cost-cutting measure.

We need to know.

UK to buy nuclear-capable F-35As that can't be refueled from RAF tankers

Re-fighting WW2

As always the US military and government are re-fighting the last war-but-one.

You want to drop a big bomb somewhere in the vague area of 1100 miles from your airfield? Buy a dozen F35A for $100 million each

Option B - design and build precision long-distance drones that drop 500kg of explosive 1m from your target. Or better, buy Ukrainian ones which have been tested in combat conditions. Cost? Much less than $100 million.

Re: "In an era of radical uncertainty"

Yes, but... I'm sure making the probe retractable would count as an out of specification modification and add $100 million to the price.

Re: "In an era of radical uncertainty"

"Well, unless you cancel your licence and give up watching live TV" (NB also iPlayer)

Did that several years ago. Return the threats addressed to "the Legal Occupier" as "Not known at this address". At the rate they're going the postage costs will bankrupt the Licence people.

Do you trust Xi with your 'private' browsing data? Apple, Google stores still offer China-based VPNs, report says

Not a problem

The only websites I look at over my Chinese VPN are the one with AI-generated pics of Xi pleasuring himself with under-age donkeys.

Meta offered one AI researcher at least $10,000,000 to join up

No! Pay me!

I have a radical idea that will massively improve all LLM machine extrapolation tools:

Label their training data as factual, opinion, fiction or fantasy

Idea copyright (c) me 2025

Please send licensing cheques (minimum €5 billion each) to the usual address

Take the job. Demand to WFH. Bullshit as long as possible. Eventually get sacked. Result.

Tape, glass, and molecules – the future of archival storage

Re: If you really want your scribbles readable in 3000 CE* ...

Nah, serious longevity is chisel and granite slabs, stored in a large dry cave 1000 ft above sea level in a geologically-stable area.

Yeah. But a much better format would be hexagonal crystals about an inch in diameter and 8-10 inches long.

Re: 'Write only'?

"It uses Azure AI to decode the data stored in glass, saying it makes reading and writing faster"

So will be unreadable in 20 years then.

Remember the Domesday project back in 1986? Data stored on optical discs. Probably still there, but no machines left that can read them.

Serious long term storage requires a simple format which can be easily reverse engineered by aliens from the future. TIFF images, simple UTF32 text. On a medium that can be read with an optical microscope. Even better, engrave it on slabs on granite.

Meta sues 'nudify' app-maker that it claims ran 87k+ Facebook, Instagram ads

Odd

So they're seeking an injunction to stop people posting ads that they accepted money for? Isn't there some sort of implied contract there?

IT chiefs of UK's massive health service urge vendors to make public security pledge

Clueless?

For various reasons, I've recently been doing some work to harden security on a number of pretty non-critical websites that were originally developed 10-20 years ago. They still work fine, they don't hold any sensitive data, but the hackers have got really sneaky over the years. I've been genuinely shocked to see the sort of devious things they're attempting, even before you get to social engineering.

I suspect those in power really have no idea of what this implies. Some hefty investment, obvs, but a change in thinking. Security is not just about blocking attacks, it's about accepting that successful attacks WILL happen at some stage, and building systems to minimise the impact. Does this mean a rethink of the entire network architecture? Probably. Is there money to pay for that - not just in the NHS? I think not.

Yippee

Massive cash injection into the NHS to pay for increased IT security!

What do you mean...? Nope?

Oh, of course, they're putting all the extra cash into paying for more staff. No?

What do you mean, "all the cash is going in profits for private health providers who make donations to Labour ministers"?

Microsoft moved the goalposts once. Will Windows 12 bring another shift?

I still hate Micro$oft

Windows is a sad fact of life for most people.

But I really hate the restrictions on Win 11 upgrade - TPM makes sense, and realistically recommending 1GHz and 2 cores, fine. You want a slow pc, it's your choice. I have an 8-year old laptop, upgraded to 32GB, and has a 2.3GHz 4-core processor, TPM etc. But can't move to Win 11 because it's the wrong sort of i5 CPU. Can't change it because it's soldered in. <swearword> ridiculous.

I have my doubts about some of the workarounds - hacking registry etc.

I think we call their bluff. Stay on Win 10, with lots of layers of security and anti-nasties. See whether suddenly M$ go back to issuing security patches for 10 when the fallout from 'millions of people having their MS Windows computer hacked' headlines start appearing. "17 die when NHS hospital Windows network hacked" - even if they relax the Win 11 conditions there's a lot of people won't want to/bother to/know how to upgrade.

And Win 12 with AI? <rofl>

UK ponders USB-C as common charging standard

Or, what will probably happen in practice, there will be a period when devices have two charging systems. The mandatory USB-C (which will cost about 5 cents to fit) and the new, better, system which will take over over time, and eventually they can stop installing the built-in CD-ROM drive. Oops, sorry, the built-in USB-C port.

Re: Unbundle chargers?

Generally true, but, to be fair, my last phone (18 months ago?) came with a charger - but that's because it was a very fast 66W job.

But the UK standard must have some differences to the EU one, because, you know, Brexit. So there must be consultation to work out which difference can be most expensive and irritating to prove UK superiority and show that Brexit is working.

I hoped I'd get less cynical with a change of government. Sadly we don't seem to have had one since 2010.

I have three devices with magnetic charging. All with different 'connections'. Ho hum.

Re: Mandating a charging standard is idiotic

Aye. And we know what happened when consumers were given a choice of VHS, Betamax and V2000.

Re: Public opinion?

a) Get a tap with a built-in water softener

b) Move to a soft-water area

c) Get a Brita filter jug

But

To which a cynic would suggest that the UK standard will leave the 'ability to evolve' bit out of the standard when they cut and paste the EU version. And insist that the plugs must all display a Union Jack to denote compatibility, minimum size 2cm x 2cm. Because, you know, Brexit....

Ah yes, but...

There's always a but.

I've recently bought a couple of devices that are waterproof, and they both use (different) magnetic USB charging cables so the water doesn't get in. Can you get a waterproof bog-standard USB-C socket?

But life has got easier with USB-C being ubiquitous. Although they can be weird still. I got a phone with a 66W charger (it's great for a rapid charge) but the charger uses a USB-C socket for output, so I need a cable with USB-C at borh ends.

Time to have a clear-out of all the spare chargers and foot-long cables.

DataVita declares sovereignty with 'National Cloud' for UK

data in the UK? Pah!

Given the predilection for UK governments to want to see everyone's data, combined with ignorance* and the resulting tendency to pass impossible legislation to allow that, I have no plans to store any of my data on servers subject to UK law anytime soon. EU is so much safer.

* PPE at Oxford is not a good training for understanding anything technical.**

** Well, understanding anything at all, to be honest.

A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again

Intensive care

Brings to mind the old 'patients always dying in bed 3 in ICU at 8pm' tales - when the cleaner plugged her hoover into the socket used by the heart-lung machine.

Re: I'm alright, Jack.

Radio 2? That's a sacking offence, even if meddling with the electrics isn't.

The future of AI/ML depends on the reality of today – and it's not pretty

How much!!!!

"Microsoft is already spending close to $19 billion a quarter on AI/ML infrastructure"

How? How on earth do you spend that much on a single research development project? For that money you can employ 100,000 'software engineers' duplicating each others' work and give them each a Cray as a desktop PC.

Faulty valve sent Astrobotic's Peregrine lander straight back to Earth's atmosphere

Re: Another helium valve ...

That was the first thing I thought too. Working with helium seems to be very tricky, and it also seems a shame to vent it off into space when it's so scarce.

I'm sure the rocket boffins have thought it all through, but why helium and not some other inert-ish gas. Nitrogen?

Boeing Starliner crew get their ISS sleepover extended

Re: What are the astronauts doing?

Catching up on DIY and housework? Cleaning the windows inside and out? Repainting the solar panels? Vacuuming under the sofa cushions? Washing the curtains? Putting up a few shelves?

Not encouraging

"the team had identified manual maneuvering as putting additional stress on the thrusters"

In other news, Tesla revealed that using the steering wheel in the Model S put additional stress on the wheels, and advised against using it.

The AI arms race could give us the cool without the cruel

Telemarketer tactics

I always find the most satisfying answer is to let them get started then say "Hang on, there's someone at the door - I think it's the parcel I'm expecting. Back in a sec" then just leave them hanging until they give up (often 4-5 minutes)

A variation if they ask for to speak to Mr Penygors is to say "He's just seeing a client out, he'll be with you in a moment" - same result

I believe that this sort of thing is a very socially aware and kind thing to do, as it prevents someone else being irritated by them for a whole 5 minutes. And those minutes of positive karma add up. And more satisfying than asking them if their mother knows they work in organised crime.