Posts by PhilipN

Asia-based government spies quietly broke into critical networks across 37 countries

What they actually said :

" high confidence that TGR-STA-1030 is a state-aligned group that operates out of Asia.."

Great! Asia goes from Istanbul to Vladivostok. Whatever hobbies you have guys do NOT make it pub darts.

Firefox makes AI optional, like it probably should have been all along

“when it gets annoying”

Not “if”. Exactly so.

Microsoft's Sinofsky saw Surface fail coming – then hit up Epstein for advice on exit

Ballmer's excuse for writing off $1bn?

Seem to recall this was the occasion instead of admitting it was an unwanted piece of crap he said "We built too many".

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

Are we surprised that AI occasionally sucks?

Loosely related - the original spiderman stuntman who many years ago clambered up the outsides of tall buildings on the end of a rope wanted blokes on the roof holding the other end of the rope, not a machine. Q.E.D.

Musk distracts from struggling car biz with fantastical promise to make 1 million humanoid robots a year

"tasks that are unsafe, repetitive or boring"

Well that covers most of what the human race does every day.

Emmabuntüs DE 6: A newbie-friendly Linux to help those in need

Hats off to these guys

Esp recycling old kit.

But the problem being as we all know you can't just solder in a new diode any more it's got to be the whole PCB (for example) (same as cars but that's another story).

Then it means those of us sourcing old components from Ebay and having them delivered by Airbus are not helping the carbon footprint after all (and no more jokes about African vs. European carrier pigeons, thanks).

Trump promises nuclear datacenter permits in 3 weeks, calls Greenland 'big beautiful ice'

" AI, two years ago, nobody ever heard of the term"

Except Kubrick and then Spielberg who shot the movie. A quarter century ago.

Trump says Americans shouldn't 'pick up the tab' for AI datacenter grid upgrades

Trump says ...

..anything MAGA wants to hear. *

* = no connection with reality.

Historic NASA test towers face their final countdown

Controlled implosion

Curious how to control an IMplosion. Explosives explode outwards - the clue is in the word?

Sam Altman is willing to pay somebody $555,000 a year to keep ChatGPT in line

How about improving what we have already first?

Old news but seasonal visitors said yesterday Google Maps would have sent them on a >one-hour walk to reach us instead of the 10 minutes we told them it would take. Trouble is it is the same story back home where they live in the heart of the metropolis.

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

Tesla?

No - the bloke. Didn't he reckon he knew how to transmit power (i.e. wirelessly) but never got around to demonstrating it?

P.S. I really really can't wait for the World's military to start using the death ray.

US extradites Ukrainian woman accused of hacking meat processing plant for Russia

Anne Sacoolas?

Go on, FBI - do us a favour too.

John Henry still leading the race vs AI in customer service

Re: curious

Look for Leadbelly's version. Multiple instances in fact sometimes John Hardy.

Dylan mentioned the song when making a speech which reveals the Blowin in the Wind melody and structure derives from John Henry

Apple swaps one ex-Google AI chief for another

"continue to innovate .."

Straight out of the Microsoft Book of Cliches to be Repeated at Every Opportunity (copyright S. Ballmer Esq)

Windows 11 needs an XP SP2 moment, says ex-Microsoft engineer

Name like "Dave..."?

In an era of AI, asking for trouble.

Apple’s lousy AI didn’t stop it beating Samsung’s smartphone sales for the first time since 2011

"AI ... will likely provide a further driver of upgrades"

No, it won't

SpaceX loses debut V3 Super Heavy in ground test mishap

Some stupid movie with The Rock - seriously injured he glues himself together with duct tape and bounces back to slaughter the bad guys but only after saying "If you can't fix it with duct tape - you are not using enough duct tape". Only good line in the whole movie.

Why Elon Musk won't ever realize the shareholder-approved Tesla payout

The smaller the small print the more carefully you have to read it

Although in this case the deafening triumphalism with which the World's media were trumpeting the $1T pay package was a dead giveaway.

Tablet market stalls because there’s not much new worth buying

Re: iPad

Youtube browser is enough. For today's lossless music the sound coming out of the Ipad from Youtube is to my non-audiophile ears perfect. Maybe not as good as coming out of a friend's high end hi-fi (right down to the depleted uranium cables, the lot) but most likely I couldn't tell the difference anyway.

China warns Dutch away from Nexperia as it lets chip exports resume

Re: Pot and kettle

Nope.

Wagging its finger?

What would have happened if it had been an American company? The White House has treated less than that as an act of war.

By the way who remembers that the Netherlands was in China’s bad books for selling submarines to Taiwan? More finger-wagging?

You'll never guess what the most common passwords are. Oh, wait, yes you will

What's Eric Schmidt's Favourite Password?

You know, the "“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place” Eric Schmidt.

Plonker.

Clippy rises from the dead in major update to Copilot and its voice interface

I wanted a deep Scottish accent

Maybe so but then you'd never get to the eleventh floor

China blames US for cyber break-in, claims America is world's biggest bit burglar

Re: Pot - Kettle

"US government providing help including IP" - really? then explain why soon Chinese were driving locally built Mercedes and BMW's (for example).

Re: Pot - Kettle

“ Apple literally taught Foxconn”..??!! Apple has no production skills. Foxconn and its fellow islanders built those skills from around 1980 onwards.

And China did not start from zero. It had an industrial infrastructure - antiquated but massive - long before it became the workshop of the World.

Nvidia's GB10 workstations arrive with 1 petaFLOPS of compute, 128GB of VRAM, and a $3K+ price tag

$3,000 - pffft

Same as a Huawei Mate XT tri-fold* then.

*Yes I KNOW it only folds twice.

OpenAI bans suspected Chinese accounts using ChatGPT to plan surveillance

"believed to be"...."suspected"

And I thought AI and especially OpenAI was so smart but it doesn't know anything more than anybody else.

Amazon turns James Bond into the Man Without the Golden Gun

Won't make any difference

Last Daniel Craig Bond movie I watched both he and his offsider engage for 5 - 10 minutes in a shoot out ... and did not hit a damn thing. UK's prime marksman and woman had better retrain to handle drones.

Jaguar Land Rover engines ready to roar again after weeks-long cyber stall

Re: What does JLR run on?

Mentioned a mate's Discovery in another post here. This concerns onboard software. When his vehicle was delivered the electronics were dead as a dodo. Dealer said they's try to reinstall but if that didn't work the vehicle would have to go back to the factory. Mate lives in Australia....

Re: Hmmm may be

Acc to a mate of mine the Discovery he bought a couple of years ago was made up of parts from all over the Continent which were all finally bolted together in Croatia (or somewhere that way). So what precisely are JLR's plants for and how much of this subsidy is going to domestic suppliers?

ICE plans to scour Facebook, TikTok, X, and even defunct Google+ for illegal immigration leads

Re: Do the ICE enforcers wear an uniform?

Just white sheets with a white pointy head covering

Texas man accidentally shoots cable, brings internet down

Re: "Stray" bullet

Yup. Friend of mine from Kentucky reckoned the main purpose of road signs was target practice.

Britain's policing minister punts facial recog nationwide

What is happening to the country?

Some time ago young guy - OK a miscreant - was caught after 2 months because CCTV caught the registration of the (stolen) car he was driving.

Honestly - young fellow can't boost a car to take his girlfriend out at the weekend without risking arrest? [Shakes head in disbelief}

YouTube coughs up $24.5 million to make Trump 'censorship' case go away

"will fund construction of a ballroom"

You have GOT to be **** joking!

Oh hang on - 2025 .... Oval Office incumbent...... OK

Hunt for RedNovember: Beijing hacked critical orgs in year-long snooping campaign

"no definitive way of determining who is doing the hacking"

And Insikt Group start off drawing attention to a "likely" connection with China then immediately jump to "it IS China".

Trump’s tariff‑shaped stick can’t beat reality on US chip fabbing

Patience!

Taiwan started flinging money and engineers at semiconductors 40+ years ago. Just give him time. US could reach parity somewhere around - oh, I dunno - 2050 (being optimistic)?

Workers fear for their jobs as JLR's latest shutdown extended

"supporting our customers"

That's a bloody joke for a start. I have (had - my wife still is) been a Jag owner since the early 90's moving to each iteration of the XJ as it came out. And would be doing so today except 5 years ago the dealer said "there won't be another XJ for 2 years and then it will be electric". So if they can give two fingers to the loyal customer I can do the same to them.

Fact is, apart from anything else, their service network was abominable. It got to the point I had to source parts online from other Jaguar shops since the factory did not have them. So not even persevering with the old XJ. Bye-bye JLR it was not fun.

Trump says Michael Dell is part of the team buying TikTok, with Larry Ellison and maybe some Murdochs

"Oracle’s cloud already hosts all traffic to the social network from within the USA."

AS a non-techie I don't get it. If all traffic has to transit systems provided by a US company why is there a national security issue? That is, even though the hosting is supposed to be neutral and transparent (yeah right) what is there to stop Oracle directly throttling personal data of millions of Americans being fed to the Evil Empire and thereby undermining Western security?

Intel and Nvidia sitting in a tree, NVLink-I-N-G

Re: Intel will design PC processors with Nvidia's GPU chiplets inside

Definitely a Trumpish deal as the price for allowing Nvidia to ship more gear to China.

Even fantasy money can buy a lot of power – just ask Larry Ellison

IANA IT guy

I have over the years seen the vitriol applied here to the gent topic of this piece but I have to express admiration for his staying the course for 4 decades.

I said "admiration". I didn't say I like the guy and the only time I visit Delphi is for Virtualbox (which he picked up from a German company).

Trump backpedals as Hyundai factory ICE raid enrages South Korea

Re: Trump backpedals...

Too late. Koreans do not forget.

China turns the screws on Nvidia with antitrust probe

Re: What did they expect?

You have never invested in China, have you?

Bring back your old Mac: 5 ways to refresh the OS on elderly Apples

G4 Mini

Swoon..

Although the last time I fired it up the display output was a bit dodgy.

P.S. Liam is the icing on a thickly marzipanned cake.

We're number 1! America now leads the world in surveillanceware investment

Pall Mall Process

Worth following the links for which thanks, El Reg. This ^ one goes to a page of - ta-da! - the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office not the Brit IT Admin. Impressive roster of subscribers to the deal, but it strikes me as a good way for Uncle Sam to keep track of what other countries are doing so they can ..... (shhh!).

Also check any reference to a think tank : "Atlantic Council is a nonpartisan organization that galvanizes US leadership ...." Oh what a giveaway!

Nano11 cuts Windows 11 down to size, grabbing just 2.8 GB of disk space

Re: Where is nano11?

https://nano11-dev.github.io/

tech zillionaire

Wasn't Elon muttering recently about using AI to write an OS? Or was he sleep-talking?

Would be interesting if only to find out how much bloat AI wrote into the OS.

Especially since Microserfs' outpourings are surely incorporated in the AI dataset, having a deleterious impact on...everything.

Home Office delays £816M English test contract despite market engagement

System to test the English skills?

Since most immigrants from South Asia speak better English than the average Sarf Landoner, Brummie, Geordie etc surely it would take only a fraction of the quoted amount to form them into a language-testing department.

UK government trial of M365 Copilot finds no clear productivity boost

Meeting Summaries are a critical human skill

How else are you going to do a 180 volte face and turn a loose consensus for Plan A into a firm commitment for Plan B?

And who wants to see recorded some of the crap which comes out of people's mouths in meetings?

AI web crawlers are destroying websites in their never-ending hunger for any and all content

Limited data set however hard you try

Storing up future problems for AI. How much of the planet and what we do every day is online?

No wonder searching has already become counter-productive.