Posts by Andy The Hat

Digital overhaul at UK's NS&I bank is £1.3B over budget and 4 years late

From my experience, do they actually have a computer system?

London left buffering as Hyperoptic backup link refuses to boot

Maybe it was a couple of spare pairs in the same cable run ...

UK space sector 'lacks strategic direction,' Lords warn

"a dedicated Space Minister"

That is brilliant job!

Surely not even a UK minister could fail to earn their new salary if their sole responsibility was for checking the presence of space occasionally ...

Colt gets greenlight for £2.5bn London datacenter splurge

"will run entirely on renewable energy through a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA)"

In non-marketing speak:

"We are going to by the electricity we use from the grid".

Head meet tree dying at the alter of AI power generation.

Digital ID is now less about illegal working, more about rummaging through drawers

But that doesn't get used enough to harvest lots of loverly jubbly data.

The first thing you'll notice on the yet-another-new-government-portal website will be the scream of 184 "absolutely essential" cookies being dumped onto your machine followed by the declaration that your data *will* be shared with "trusted third parties".

How do you solve a problem like Discovery?

Re: It must have been transported...

Given the level of activity off our local colony, it appears that unwary floating sea ducks could be under sealed and cease to float.

BBC probe finds AI chatbots mangle nearly half of news summaries

Partially correct.

A mission decision was taken rather than returning them to Earth on an earlier flight or using other means available (eg a specially flown Dragon capsule).

They were not stranded (unable to return) however many rags at the time *did* suggest that was the case.

At the worst they could have risked using the tin can they arrived in ...

UK.gov vows to hack through regulation to get benefit from AI

What a complete load of robots ...

"Milton Keynes Council has won a £781,817 portion of the pot to pilot the licensing of robots that could clean and de-ice pavements."

This doesn't allow for hi-tech maintenance and IT administration overheads, or the funds committed by Milton Keynes council to the project, or the ongoing annual running costs ...

You could just gainfully employ a few people with brooms on basic wage ... or is that a silly idea?

SpaceX's Starship explodes again ... while still on the ground

Why bother testing?

No other spacecraft has ever blown up on the pad because it's all super safe and most people on TikTok think testing is boring, so last year and a complete waste of time.

I presume most of the commentards believe the pad area is empty when these tests happen simply because the siren is too loud...

Mozilla frets about Google's push to build AI into Chrome

Re: Excellent

So many things I don't want or need but will suck my data into an LLM somewhere on planet Google.

UK govt promises digital reform in spending review. We've heard that before

"Digital efficiency"

Yep, another digital sh*t show incoming!

Microsoft slows Windows 11 24H2 Patch Tuesday due to a 'compatibility issue'

reasons ...

Perhaps the issue is the "cause to fail to run on incompatible hardware" incompatibility patch requiring another patch because Win11 still actually works on incompatible hardware by bypassing the patched patches ...

Just let us run it on older hardware, we know it does! We may be mad but you could make money out of us and we could have a stress-free life. Give up the fight!

The UK wants you to sign up for £1B cyber defense force

Re: Refreshing

Here's a load of money Officer, go do AI and cybersecurity stuff. If we reduce the military budget and get rid of most of it we'll be able to spend money protecting the systems we haven't bought ...

Don't get blinded by the emporer's clothes - Orange talks crap, Starmer speaks in parseltongue

"the new Command would protect all military networks from attacks,"

A) the "command" would do no such thing, it would coordinate the purchase of software and hardware from "trusted third parties" and AI companies.

and

B) isn't this software/network hardening supposedly part of GCHQ's remit via the National Cyber Security Center?

SpaceX resets 'Days Since Last Starship Explosion' counter to zero, again

"Spin it all you want, this was a failure."

Criticise all you like, this was a test.

Test fails are as much part of the scenery as test successes otherwise there's no point in testing..

In reality

They couldn't do a door test because the ship was already spinning too fast.

They couldn't do a relight test because the ship had no attitude control.

They couldn't do a heatshield test because they had no reentry attitude control.

Until they sort out why the hotstage damages the engine compartment of a block 2 (but not a block 1), nothing will advance ... but you can't hotstage on a test stand so be prepared for more "failures".

Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves

What does AI learn?

When will AI actually be denegrated to what it is, a glorified search engine and data manipulation tool?

Take in data, manipulate, throw out data.

There is no intelligence, information awareness or analysis of either the accuracy or quality of data ingested. Quantity is king.

Classic GIGO with a positive feedback loop.

Re: "an article I read on Litvenyenko"

Given that Litvinyenko/ Litvenyenko is an Anglicized version of the original Литвиненко, I'm not sure there's any sort of argument to be had about spelling unless you are actually an expert in Russio-Cyrillic to English translation methodologies and semantics.

The Americans can't even spell English properly so what hope has a pseudo translation of a Russian name using a completely different alphabet got?

Stargate to land its first offshore datacenters in the United Arab Emirates

Re: Since when is AI coverage based on distance?

Intelligence is very hard to quantify. But suppose "natural dumbness" is the reciprocal of "artificial intelligence".

Then AI certainly doesn't vary with distance as easily proved by Trump's natural dumbness being massive and equally massive from any viewpoint ...

Trump signs TAKE IT DOWN law meant to stop revenge porn

Re: Hmm

I am aware of someone who had diagnosed prostate cancer within a short time of developing any symptoms (yes they had regular PSA tests) but it was very aggressive and had already moved to the pelvic bones.

The point is that nobody can even try to give a medical history, diagnosis or prognosis from a press report. Each case is different and most of this thread is speculative rubbish.

For my next trick I'll try to work out whether Trump has Dementia or if it's brain rot due to adhesive fumes off the fat brown envelopes he keeps pocketing ...

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

My remember an old Wyse terminal keyboard that I rejigged and hacked into a wooden case to replace the thing on an Amstrad CPC in 198x. Little did I know I was an influencer!

Still have a Compaq unit somewhere that is mechanically great - it doesn't float randomly around the desk because it has a massive nugget of BlackHole-ium in it's base. Just needs converters from AT to USB, doesn't have windows keys, is massive and noisy and ... ok, so it has some disadvantages ...

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

Re: TODO

"I've been using linux since Sarge 3.1, jumped a few distro's then stayed on ubuntu until Gnome classic popped of then jumped to xubuntu.

Once I was confident with linux and all things terminal I then made a VM running Arch, Installed that a few times to get the hang of that then lived in there for a few months to get the quirks out the way and then finally moved over to full on install.

Never looked back and have finally settled in hyprland on Arch with xfce as a fallback if wayland gets all weird"

Isn't this the basic problem? Present that comment to a average user and they'd look at you blankly. Present a USB install of win 11, stick it in the hole and go (give or take signing your life away) and away you go. Choice and variation across what seems to be "Linux" causes basic confusion.

There just needs to be a core install system that is extremely similar across all distros with no big user decisions or distros to decide on - just "Linux".

Everything "tweaky" should be built out from that core *if you want it but it is not necessary*. At the moment, user decisions that impact the basic system happen far too early and are far too confusing for general use.

Windows is currently a turtle, laying on it's back and desperately waggling it's legs in the air, but user confusion is not allowing Linux to take advantage of that situation. Indeed the desperate desire for difference may result in the Linux community directing users to turn over the turtle ...

AWS says Britain needs more nuclear power to feed AI datacenter surge

Re: Yes, but then again, No.

But the electricity price will still be artificially tied to oil price and the Government refuses to remove that tie even though green energy costs production are dropping.

As "net zero" plans and electricity usage is enforced, oil usage will drop, it's barrel cost will naturally balloon because of production efficiency losses and, surprise surprise, the cost of electricity *that everyone will now be forced to buy* will go through the roof.

Maximum profit for a few electricity moguls ... I wonder how many politicians will get directorships and fat brown envelopes?

India ready to greenlight Starlink – as long as it lets New Delhi censor, snoop

No difference to the UK "digital push"

Snooping is interesting.

As someone in the UK who has a landline, I believe if the authorities wish to "tap" my phone line they still have to apply for a warrant, general connection data is not mandated to be recorded. However, given the current push to "full fibre digital" and "you can't have a phone line with that except if you get a VOIP provider" and "sorry you are on 2G but you cannot transfer your full open payg tariff to 4G so we need you personal details for a contract" is this not pushing those basic levels of communication into a condition where they must be logged as requested by the state? It seems that mail is going to be the only thing left (currently) that requires a warrant to be snooped on. Slippery slopes and all that.

Microsoft pitches pay-to-patch reboot reduction subscription for Windows Server 2025

"Aim for xxx hotpatches per year ... which may require a reboot"

To rewrite that statement:

We "aim to find and patch vulnerabilities or update software xxx times per year" and

We "require a subscription for you to have a hot patch service which may or may not actually be a hot patch ..."

This is MS "helping" customers apparently.

Customers already pay for this software and updates, this is just a change in update methodology. Is this the first step for MS supplying software updates as a subscription model?

How to stay on Windows 10 instead of installing Linux

I may be old and set in my ways ...

but I may be one of those who would just lob £50 at Microsoft to buy those security upgrades that are being developed anyway for LTSC releases for the next few years ... no cost to MS, all profit.

The retail extended support subscription is way too expensive and, unless people decide to upgrade hardware, they are in a no win (sic) situation.

Only other option is a third party attempts to produce security releases as they have with earlier versions ...

UK's attempt to keep details of Apple 'backdoor' case secret… denied

Basic point here

The issue is whether the TCN refers to particular individual(s) who are subject to law enforcement action or whether it is a general requirement.

If it refers to individual(s) then I believe the law says that it should all be kept secret as the ongoing case may be a matter of "national security".

However, if the TCN refers to Apple and it's service in general, with no targeted law enforcement case, then there is no issue of national security *at this time* to address apart from "we can't break it, we might want to break it at some point".

That second scenario is simply untenable - it would open the door to a who plethora of issues where the government demands (and obtains) authoritarian rights over communications, goods, services or individual rights "just because there may be a criminal in the future, think of the children!"

On the issue of AI copyright, Blair Institute favors tech bros over Cool Britannia

Re: Freebies

Why don't you just "identify" as a corporate AI and carry on stealing data? As long as you replicate it badly you can even sell it at a profit by "identifying" as a search engine with ads.

OTF, which backs Tor, Let's Encrypt and more, sues to save its funding from Trump cuts

" this DEI Presidumb – who got the job only for being an entitled white male".

I must disagree, I believe he is orange.

Windows 11 roadmap great for knowing what's coming next week. Not so good for next year

I'm so old that I remember when new things were implemented when the user asked for them and didn't have to second guess the day when unwanted "features" may be rammed down their throats.

UK govt data people not 'technical,' says ex-Downing St data science head

Re: It takes a mix

And:

One to hold the purse strings

One to produce an irrelevant specification

One to check the purse strings are still held

One to write a contract for the correct amount of money in line with purse-string checker.

On to maintain a check on the implementation

One to explain to the government committee why the project will not complete on time

One to complain and reduce the amount of money available because the contract is too expensive and not completing on time

One to open the purse strings because the consultant requires more cash otherwise they can't complete on time and

One to open the purse strings further the contract written didn't actually have a completion date but did have a tie-in to the contractor for 20 years ...

UK's biggest mobile operator starts 3G switchoff, hopes it won't catch out April fools

Great news ...

Nice to know I'm in the 1% who can't get 4G indoors ...

Also nice to know that as someone who has a rolling PAYG SIM with Tescos with about £20 per year credit, I've been offered a expiring monthly contract as "PAYG is not yet available on 4G". Good to know because I will be able to pay monthy for a service I will never completely use and already know I can't use at home ...

I don't want smart I just want emergency phone and text ... and I don't want to swap to one of the dirt cheap tariffs that are 3g based because that would be stupid ...

Political poker? Tariff hunger games? Trump creates havoc for PC industry

"President Trump's ongoing trade war ..."

I see this term quite often but as Trump is unilaterally (for the most part) imposing extra taxes and restrictions on his own people who, we must remember, voted him in to do this stuff, how is that a war?

Is it not more of a drive-by-shoot-yourself-in-the-foot?

Crew-9 splashes down while NASA floats along with Trump and Musk nonsense

they _could_ have used the Starliner capsule

True, but they'd have needed to fit super-clench-resistant seating. Even as a test pilot, I would imagine riding a ship with no ejector seat and was already known to have issues would be more than gluteus-stimulating.

Do AI robo-authors qualify for copyright? It's still no, says appeals court

Maybe there's an ulterior motive to this?

Let me think out loud here ...

Assume it is decided that copyright can be assigned to an AI without prior registration of that copyright (as per current authorship).

Assume someone owns AI System B.

Assume then that Author A uses AI System B to produce some part of their work. System B could then be declared a co-author in copyright terms and could "legitimately" request, via their human owners, a share of Author A's royalties on that work.

To extend that further, any work generated in part by an AI system would earn royalties on the back of the human author's work ...

As a cynic, I could see the big AI companies strong-arming the use of their "AI driven technology" for auto summation, auto-indexing, auto-content or auto-layout design of a document for instance and claiming partial copyright for the AI, thus royalties for the parent company ...

SpaceX Dragon pod arrives at ISS to finally pick up stranded Boeing astronaut pair

Re: Rescue mission in space?

yes but to get such a situation sorted, surely Trump could just pull some strings ...

As Chromecast outage drags on, fix could be days to weeks away

Re: Googleprecation

I accept that Google is wonderful and would never disadvantage ordinary people in any way.

But I do wonder whether the action of selling products with time constrained certificates or baked in reliance on an external web sever which can be killed at will, without telling the customer that the product they have purchased in good faith has a manufacturer controlled end of life date is a legal practise.

Deprecation and not providing support after n years is fair enough but including a time bomb ...?

City council rejects inquiry into £130M Oracle IT disaster

Hmm ...

Let's not have a local investigation into whether there was anything illegal happening within the council structure because:

"On the issue of the possible offenses, I think this council should remember that this is not a court of law, and that those matters are rightly and properly pursued by the council's legal team,"

So, have the council's legal team been instructed to conduct an investigation this with respect to illegalities? It appears not as there has been no local investigation to raise specific legal concerns to be investigated by the legal team. So that's ok then - Procedure 37a subsection 2: "Beware of the Leopard: ensuring one's own arse is well covered before opening the basement door" successfully enacted ...

Has any other project, even some of the gloriously awful military and government ones, actually managed to go 10x overbudget?

Europe's largest council kept auditors in the dark on Oracle rollout fiasco for 10 months

Re: To err is human...

"How many of you still have letters from two decades ago? How about emails?"

I haven't deleted a non-scam email since about 1996 ... and it absolutely saved my bacon in 2000 ...

The issue for me will be with withdrawl of support for .pst files in outlook (that's what we get so no alternatives) as I don't want multi-megabytes of live email database that's mainly cover-my-arse historic.

SpaceX's 'Days Since Starship Exploded' counter made it to 48. It's back to zero again now

Re: Bodge job

There is no evidence released that says the cause of the incident was an engine failure - changing an engine is a red herring.

The issue (harmonic response) caused failure of the fuel system somewhere - downcomer joints, engine manifolds, even tank structure itself and leakage into the attic. The problem is that they may have cured the apparent issue (as demonstrated during the extended static fire) but if the fuel itself acts as a dampener (eg for the main downcomer) then the fuel level may mitigate the problem until it reaches a critical level or be in a certain attitude.

The only way they could even try to stimulate this issue in testing is a full tank test firing, but on a test stand this may not demonstrate the issue (see comments about pogo earlier) - for a start the dynamic forces are different and the vehicle attitude is wrong ... So, unless the fault is a result of minimisation which can be found, or a basic design flaw with the triple downcomer pipe structure (which I believe was used in the last flight and this) the only way to test it is to fly it ...

Microsoft goes native with Copilot. Again

Co-pilot, where is mt data going?

Simple query, "how do I get my printer working?". What then happens?

I assume that the system looks at your machine, takes a full hardware and software inventory, uploads it to the system where your data is absorbed into the Artificial Anus as training data so MS can make more money out of it, then suggests the user should watch a couple of episodes of the IT Crowd to learn how to reset their system?

I don't want my system data uploaded - if details of system configurations are made available to all and sundry beyond my firewall (even "accidentally") it could display an attack surface or provide data to advertisers.

So how do I stop that trawl happening? Does GDPR "legitimate interest" not include the right to refuse to have data uploaded unless the user consents to it - assuming if it is personal and, in my opinion, software configurations of machines could be very personal - eg finding drivers or hardware identifiers for Blow-Up Brenda and Vibrating Vicky?

How the collapse of local cloud provider caused biz continuity issues in UK government

Cloud collapse ...

Cost lots of money.

Company worth little, but you could by it cheap as a going concern. It would keep things running for you and potentially save money in the long term.

Why have the Government let it fold if it's that important?

Something strange going on here unless it's a demonstration of how we should feed the MS/AWS pigs at the trough and not doing things ourselves ...

Hisense QLED TVs are just LED TVs, lawsuit claims

Re: Some weird doublethink here

A restaurant had a load of bottles of house wine unsold and needed to move them. They pushed them on their menus and took some money off and still couldn't sell them. Nobody wanted cheap plonk.

Then, at someone's suggestion, they doubled the price.

All was sold with rave reviews of the product from customers.

No difference, just buyer expectation of what it should be like based on external factors (eg the price).

As long as the claim means nothing tangible you are in the clear. Is a quantum dot as per the MIT patent, the Samsung patent, the Sony patent, the LG patent ... or is it just a panel made of very small substrate LEDs (in the marketing sense of quantum=small, dot=small) or conversely, a technological step in LEDs (as in quantum leap=big step, dot=LED pixel)?

Personally I think the claimants are pissing into the wind with this.

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

Re: Hey!

Some beans and some more beans. Isn't that a very small casserole?

Microsoft trims more CPUs from Windows 11 compatibility list

There is a fundamental difference between hardware required to run it and "hardware requirement" to run it with it's full and entire mashup of "apps" (is it just me that hates that word?)

Simply issuing a "minimum hardware spec" for the system to run (which was what they always did, if somewhat unrealistically) with a conditional set of extra requirements to support things like higher security protocols would have got them out of a huge crock of excrement.

As it is, they are shown to be issuing hardware requirements that are patently false for most cases and, I would suggest, deliberately misleading customers and misusing a dominant market position.

Google binning SMS MFA at last and replacing it with QR codes

Re: What about all the people who don't have smartphones?

Surprisingly I don't need an app to wipe my arse ...

UK government insiders say AI datacenters may be a pricey white elephant

Re: There is no business case for the investment amounts that have been mooted.

"Better invest my pension in the publishers of Razzle, Fiesta and the like, or the companies mailing them out in brown envelopes....

Note for overseas readers: Probably best not to search for those publications on a work computer. Not only will the themes cause all enterprise filtering and monitoring to sound the klaxon, you might be very disappointed in these exceptionally down-market journals."

I always thought they were the bottom end of the market too ...

Google confirms Gulf of Mexico renamed to appease Trump – but only in the US

Perhaps the time is right ?

I keep getting Spitting Image "Is a Nut Running the Country?" flashbacks but they now involve decaying fruit ...

Their recent effort was poor because everyone was just hopelessly dull but currently there's so much potential to stab and twist the satirical knife ...

US freezes foreign aid, halting cybersecurity defense and policy funds for allies

Re: if it forces European leaders into self sufficiency

It's ok, we'll dump all the snake-oil Cisco crap for better Huawei stuff as the US balance of payments obviously doesn't need our tax dollars ...

Mega UK datacenter greenlit, but we still don't know who's moving in

Re: Why the obfuscation?

Come now. Some people are just so cynical and can never see the positives in such initiatives. There is one ... somewhere ...

Court rules FISA Section 702 surveillance of US resident was unconstitutional

"... If confirmed as DNI, I will uphold Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights while maintaining vital national security tools like Section 702 to ensure the safety and freedom of the American people."

A Trump appointment meaning "the safety and freedom of the American people except anyone recognising, actively acting on behalf of or supporting in any way those identifying as LQBTQ+, non-american citizens or unbelievers as per the words preached by the Lord High Marshal 'till Underverse comes!"