Posts by druck

CVE fallout: The splintering of the standard vulnerability tracking system has begun

Re: China, some suggestions

I suspect that is "EVER" in the millennial sense of nothing worthwhile existing before the year 2000.

Writing for humans? Perhaps in future we'll write specifically for AI – and be paid for it

Victorian Fraud

The rise of AI is very similar to the popularism of psychics and seances in Victorian times, which through convincing theatrics gave people just enough correct information to fool them in to disregarding the falsehoods, and it took a while to educate everyone of the fundamental fraud behind it.

RISC OS Open plots great escape from 32-bit purgatory

Re: Security?

We don't really need code signing, there are so few developers left we can probably look at the code and put a name to it more easily than we could with a face.

Security shop pwns ransomware gang, passes insider info to authorities

Re: Spinning wheels

FTFY: NOTHING is going to stop ransomware or other digital crime while crypto currency continues to be legal.

50 years ago the last Saturn rocket rolled out of NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building

Re: So, what's developed in the last 50 years?

And lets not forget that also enabled it to launch and service the Hubble telescope.

British govt wants to mainline AI, but its arteries are clogged with legacy tech

What is this bollocks?

The ambition to harness the potential of one of the most significant technological developments of modern times is of course to be welcomed.

Is it fuck. Allowing workshy or incompetent civil servants to use a statistical bullshit generator to further lower the quality of government services is certainly not something to be welcomed.

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Re: Power cycling bigger kit is not a hobby I would endorse

Back in the late 80s were doing non destructive testing of power stations and used a BBC Micro to control the equipment and log results. They told us we could expect anything from 150V to 280V on site, so we got hold of a VariAC the size of a beer barrel and connect an unsuspecting Beeb to it. We managed to turn it right down to just a shade over 100V before it's linear power supply gave up, which was impressive as it wasn't a 110V/240V unit. The hairier test was to see how high it could go, I tentatively raised it to 280V and it seemed fine, nothing getting too hot. I would have been happy to leave it there, but the boss insisted we go to 300V, and after making sure I wasn't going to get blamed for frying it, we turned it up, and it was fine running for over 10 minutes - hardy stuff those old Micros!

Re: Memories

That's why there is still vi

Asahi Linux loses another prominent dev as GPU guru calls it quits

Rust tax

Putting aside all the other trivia in the these comments, the real question is; can someone else step in to continue working on the Asahi GPU code?

Does being written in Rust make it more or less likely to find a volunteer than if it was is plain old C?

Boeing's Starliner future uncertain as NASA weighs next steps

Re: two weeks notice

FTFY: Twenty, five year olds.

Euro semi firms push for 'Chips Act 2.0' to expand beyond manufacturing

Re: EU digital victory gardens

No only is ARM not in the EU, as it is listed on the New York stock excahnge, it now has to plpay by US rules.

The post-quantum cryptography apocalypse will be televised in 10 years, says UK's NCSC

Re: Stick It Up My Backdoor

Saying everyone has 10 years to abandon the existing known safe conventional encryption algorithms, for some unporoven PQC that every security snake oil salesman is hawking, incase the magic unicorn fair dust quantun computers are possible in the future. Now where do you think a backdoor could be introduced into that scenario?

SAP legacy ERP customers still in no rush to adopt latest platform

Re: "You have to have AI"

FTFY: Do you have a typing pool which is high on crack or LSD?

Names, bank info, and more spills from top sperm bank

Missed opportunity.

FTFY: The jizz biz did not immediately respond to The Register's questions about the break-in

IBM scores perfect 10 ... vulnerability in mission-critical OS AIX

Re: Advanced Interactive eXecutive (AIX)

AIX was a bit of pain

It's not called 'aches' for nothing.

Nvidia invests in quantum computing weeks after CEO said it's decades from being useful

Of course the bit about it being all bollocks and never working doesn't enter in to the equation, but then why should quantum be any different to the proceeding hypefeasts of AI and crypto, which sold lots of jumped up graphics cards.

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

Raspberry Pi's for everyone!

Datacenter vacancies hit record low as power shortages stall projects

That's been pretty much written in to UK law now, by designating data centres as critical national infrastructure .

So our lights go out even if the data centre is only producing AI slop.

DeepSeek-R1-beating perf in a 32B package? El Reg digs its claws into Alibaba's QwQ

Re: Finding solutions to differential equations

It doesn’t matter how many parameters the AI has, if they check for a prompt only containing numbers and arthritic operators and feed it to a calculator, it will work far better.

But then you could rightly ask; what is the point?

Ubuntu 25.10 plans to swap GNU coreutils for Rust

Bloody Rust

Well that's going to massively bloat the development environments of anyone that builds coreutils.

I have one open source project in Rust which I use, it's under 24,000 lines of Rust code, yet it needs 1GB in .cargo and produces 1.2GB of intermediate files, which is obscene.

I recommend any distro based on Ubuntu (like Mint) move to Debian to avoid this nonsense.

We did not have Brave clashing with Rupert Murdoch on our 2025 bingo card, but there it is

You really think the AI bots take any notice of that or robots.txt?

Starliner astronauts' stay drags on as Crew-10 launch scrubs

Re: Scrub

Oh the irony, shipping a ship in a shipping container, also itself on a ship.

A boat is something you can transport on a ship, so that makes it a space boat?

Microsoft quantum breakthrough claims labeled 'unreliable' and 'essentially fraudulent'

Damn

I was going to call bull on this when the news first came out, particularly as it emanated from Microsoft who can't even make conventional computers work properly. But I couldn't be bothered making yet another anti quantum nonsense post, what with all the grief I get from the believers of magic fairy dust unicorns.

Microsoft will kill Remote Desktop soon, insists you'll love replacement

Microsoft warned that the Windows App doesn't work in some environments where proxy servers require proxy/HTTP authentication. Single sign-on (SSO) with Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) is also not supported.

Microsoft Enshitification at it's finest.

Apple has locked me in the same monopolistic cage Microsoft's built for Windows 10 users

Re: users just go along with it because they perceive they have no other choice

I automatically assumed he meant IOS and Linux, as who in their right might would choose to suffer with what Windows has become?

Re: users just go along with it because they perceive they have no other choice

Top posting in a forum? Will Windows users ever learn?

IBM dodges BMC's $1.6B bullet in US as London court slaps down LzLabs

IBM can still litigate

I suspect they haven't culled everyone over 40 in their legal department, and offshored the rest.

Governments can't seem to stop asking for secret backdoors

Only if you really don't understand what it means. That's just a normal https session.

Banking and commerce sites are not E2EE, they use encryption between the user and the server, and the server has access to the decrypted data. E2EE is encryption either encrypted direct user to user communication, or if it does go from user to user via a server, the server cannot access the encrypted data, as only the user have the key.

JetZero teams up with Delta to drag aviation into the future

Re: Flying Wing

It's not the lack of wings which is going to cause problems for the passengers, but with such a wide cabin the outer seats are going to be a long way from the roll axis, and even the gentle manoeuvrers of a passenger aircraft are going to seem like a roller-coaster - sick bags at the ready!

Toronto Zoo ransomware crooks snatch decades of visitor data

Re: The ONLY way to stop ransomware - Criminalize payment

Go after the money crypto, and the ransomware stops.

FTFY

No crypto, no crime.

Scotland now home to Europe's biggest battery as windy storage site fires up

Re: Back of the envelope

It isn't like all our fossil fuel plants will be razed. The ones that are old and with too much maintenance debt eventually will be. Then the ones that are the least efficient or most polluting will be. But the newer or cleaner ones will just go from running 24x7 to running less, to being on "standby" where they can be spun up if there's a really cloudy or still week, or a natural disaster takes out part of the grid.

This just doesn't work in practice; taking a station designed to run continuously and only spinning it up occasionally destroys the economics of the station causing the owners to walk away - unless you are willing to pay more for it to sit idle. The reason it is more than when running is that a refit will give 15 years of life when run continuously, but if started and stopped up to twice a day (as can happen if it is low in the efficiency pecking order), it can burn through it's maintenance allowance of restarts in as little as 2 years. Plus it will be deluged by complaints from locals, as instead of a restart in the middle of the night every 18 months, now people see it emitting yellow smoke every morning as it fires up for a few hours to cover the shortfall of renewables, but never gets up to operating temperature.

Windows 11 adoption picking up speed, but older sibling still ahead

Re: I upgraded from Windows 11 years ago

You'll feel right at home as a former Windows user, when you find that Wayland only supports a fraction of the prevision functionality.

Altnets told to stop digging and start stuffing fiber through abandoned pipes

Re: Asbestos

Or we could just build roads that are designed to have a variety of utility ducts run in parallel for the entirety of their length that do not require digging up the road to access them

If they were that easy to access, someone would steal the cabling.

The Register gets its claws on Huawei’s bonkers tri-fold phone

Re: Let down by Android?

My wife has a Samsung Fold 4 and every time she shows me a picture or video I say why don't you unfold it so I can see it on the big screen, but she can't as the app restarts and looses where it is.

She's said she's not getting another foldable, as its far too expensive for the actual amount of use the big screen gets.

How nice that state-of-the-art LLMs reveal their reasoning ... for miscreants to exploit

Re: Soundness

I'm sorry, I should have skipped the analogy, and just called you deluded.

Re: Soundness

If you were around at the time the TV was invented, you would be swearing there were little people living in the magic box.

Non-biz Skype kicks the bucket on May 5

As one old lady said in 1971 about decimalisation; "why couldn't they wait until all the old people have died".

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

Re: Trump can solve this

You are aware he is tearing up even the current insufficient regulation of crypto and has unbanned previously sanctioned mixers.

After all, just look who he votes alongside in the UN these days.

Windows 11 24H2 goes back to the drawing board over AutoCAD 2022 glitch

Each release worse than the last, no doubt due to the increasing use of AI generated code slop.

Framework guns for cheap laptops with upgradeable alternative

Re: $899 is not cheap

I'm browsing from a 11 year old Asus 11" i3 laptop which is comparable to that HP. It would have gone in the bin long ago if I hadn't wiped Windows and put Linux Mint on it. It's main drawback is a fixed 4GB of memory, I have lots of tabs open in FF so it's using 3GB of RAM and has another 3GB in the SSD swap, so 8GB would be much better, but it does for browsing in front of the TV and ssh'ing in to my Pi's.

Microsoft's updated Windows battery indicator rollout runs out of juice

Re: FFS.

The order can help, but when approaching from a distance at night, colour is also very useful...

UK traffic lights have a reflective white border rectangle, making it possible to tell at night if the top or bottom light is illuminated.

Hurrah! AI won't destroy developer or DBA jobs

Re: Yeah, 'AI' can't do engineering

If you eliminate the junior developer roles, where is the next generation of senior developers going to come from?

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

Re: Why I stopped buying HP

Then you've never flow Air New Zealand. They are good.

Nice to know, we'll be doing an entire lap of the globe with them soon.

I am slightly concerned that a number of their B787s are grounded due to engine problems, as I don't want to miss out on the sky couch on the 16 hour first leg of the return flight.

If you don't use an inkjet at least a couple of times every week, it will clog, so it is the wrong technology for you.

Laser printers can power up, print a page in seconds, and be switched off again without wasting a grain of toner.

Two arrested after pensioner scammed out of six-figure crypto nest egg

Not really, over 18 months up to last summer I held the maximum of £50,000 of premium bonds, and the winnings averaged out to about 3% to 3.5% APR where as even instant access savings accounts were paying over 4%. Obviously I didn't get any of the larger prizes, in fact I've never won more than £700 in one draw, nor last time when I had the maximum amount before I bought a house 16 years ago and it was supposed to slightly more generous then.

Plus the £1 bond my neighbour bought the year before I was born, and gifted to my mother for me, has won sod all, not even a shilling as it was back then.

Dark mode might be burning more juice than you think

Re: And have these idiots...

And even dark mode hardly ever uses truck black, because its uncomfortable or too harsh.

I like my dark mode to actually be dark instead of a light grey on dark grey smush. So when using the DarkReader browser plugin I set brightness -20% and contrast +20%, so the background is black. I can then turn down the monitor brightness so it is not so harsh.

DXC paid 50% more than original contract value for disastrous public sector Oracle project

Re: "UK should develop its own system"

I would say then lets start a company to make such a thing, but there are two problems; first if any ERP or integrator got a sniff of what you are doing they would either try to sue you out of existence, or buy and bury you. Second; as a small company you wont get considered for any local or national government work with out a long history of disastrous failures behind and ahead of you. How else could you describe the usual suspects.

Trump can't quickly or easily kill the CHIPS Act, but he can fire the workers funded by it

Re: CHIPS Act is $280 billion

After Tesla of course.

Type-safe C-killer Delphi hits 30, but a replacement has risen

Re: Compared to Delphi, FPC and Lazarus are a joke

It's the King's English these days.