Posts by druck

China’s infosec leads accuse Intel of NSA backdoor, cite chip security flaws

Late to the party

I'm surprised China has taken this long to find out about the IME, it's existence hasn't exactly been kept a secret, and we haven't been anything but vocal about our dislike of the concept.

Amazon makes $500M bet on itty-bitty nuclear reactors to fuel cloud empire

Power containerisation

I'd like to see ready to use SMRs shipped in standard 20ft containers. Put couple in the car park, and there's you energy needs sorted. When they need refuelling, a new one would be delivered and the old one taken away to be dealt with off site.

Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

Except those roles are being replaced by... wait for it - AI!

Yeah right.

WhatsApp may expose the OS you use to run it – which could expose you to crooks

A mote in your eye

I'm so glad that the makers of cryptocurrency wallets, which have an absolutely stellar record for security, now have time to find problems in Meta apps.

Almost as bad as Microsoft dedicating teams to look for Google security issues.

Uncle Sam reportedly considers capping AI chip shipments to Middle East

Oracle style audit

These middle eastern companies need to be subjected to an Oracle style audit, and if a single GPU can't be accounted for, the region damn well ain't getting any more.

Cards Against Humanity campaigns to encourage voting, expose personal data abuse

Re: "We formed a Super PAC and bought the personal voting records of EVERY AMERICAN CITIZEN..."

Wow, democracy is such a chore.

Must be much better in places like Venezuela, where the box is filled in for you, even if you didn't vote, or are dead.

Windows 11 24H2 disk space hoarding a 'reporting error'

AI can't add up

This is what happens when you inflict AI on every aspect of the system.

Britain opens floodgates to US datacenter investment

Re: Energy, what energy?

If you've got a gen 1 make sure you aren't using the original supplier, and hopefully the off switch wont work. Don't let them install a gen 2, as the off switch will work whoever you are with.

China again claims Volt Typhoon cyber-attack crew was invented by the US to discredit it

Hardly. Crowdstrike was a few hours of downtime and some inconvenience, where as China has wholesale syphoned commercial data from tens of thousands of companies, and the entire personnel records for US government departments.

Trump campaign arms up with 'unhackable' phones after Iranian intrusion

They've rebadged...

...some left over EncroChat devices.

Compression? What's that? And why is the network congested and the PCs frozen?

Re: Way Back...

If he was a local councillor he would be used to enormous emails, as the clerks print out documents, get the committee chairs to sign every page, then scan them and email them out to everyone as colossal PDFs.

INC ransomware rebrands to Lynx – same code, new name, still up to no good

Re: Make paying ransom a crime.

No, the only way to stop ransomware is to make the only practical way of paying it a crime - crypto.

FBI created a cryptocurrency so it could watch it being abused

Re: “Looks like entrapment”

There are many dodgy crypto firms sponsoring individual F1 teams.

I just hope the teams get the real money upfront before the crypto bros pull the enviable exit scams.

Tencent builds one NoSQL database to rule all data models

Re: Standards..

Please only wheel that out when it is an actual standard we are talking about. This is just a new proprietary database.

GSA plows ahead with face matching tech despite its own reliability concerns

Re: Requiring live video

You'll probably find logging in with an AI generated deep fake of yourself has a higher success rate than using your own face.

BBC weather glitch shows 13k mph winds in London, 404℃ in Nottingham

Not the MO

This is what you get when you ditch the British Met Office, and get your data feed from the lowest bidder (DTN).

Bitcoin creator suspect says he is not Bitcoin creator suspect

Not surprised

I'm not surprised no one wants to own up to being Satoshi Nakamoto, and forever be known as the creator of the most successful facilitator of digital crime in history, without which ransomware and many other online frauds would never had been viable.

Ransomware gang Trinity joins pile of scumbags targeting healthcare

Re: Ban paying ransom.

Ban crypto, so there is no quick, easy and risk free way to pay or collect, then the entire business model of ransomware, and most other digital fraud, will evaporate overnight.

Missing Thunderbirds footage found in British garden shed

Re: What about the animated?

I grew up on the originals, and watched them again with my children when they were about 6 or 7 just before the new CGI animated series came out - which I was fully prepared to hate. Particularly as a couple of years earlier they had said they preferred the new CGI Thomas the Tank Engine, as the original physical models just didn't look real - I mean really?! But The new Thunderbirds was actually quite good, very exciting and fitted even more action in to the programmes. It made me realise how much the original relied on the lengthy launch sequences of the rescue craft to pad the time out, although I never personally got board of watching those.

Thunderbird for Android is go – at least the beta is

Interleaved posting

complete with bottom-posting

Bottom posting is just as bad as top posting, i.e. leaving a great chunk of the previous post(s) anywhere in the email.

The correct style is interleaved posting, where you interleave your reply beneath the lines in the previous message which make points you are responding to, and snip out any parts which aren't required for context.

AI godfather-turned-doomer shares Nobel with neural network pioneer

Re: If somebody else...

My 9 year old is pretty indistinguishable from an AI chatbot at the moment. He does nothing but watch youtube all day, shovelling stuff in to his head some of which is good factual knowledge, but mostly crap. He loves to jabber on at me about what he's learnt, and if I'm actually listening I'll correct him when he get's things wrong, explaining how stuff works in the real world. He then does a very AI thing by saying sorry, then expanding on what I've just said as if he knew the answer all along, but embellishing it more guess work.

It's very annoying, more than an AI, as I don't care how crap they are as I have no intention of actually using one for any purpose. But I want my son to grow up into a useful human being. Hopefully his continued formal education will allow him to establish a grounding in facts, so he can judge if the torrent of information coming from internet is true or even useful, and not just allow his mind and his mouth run at a million miles an hour regurgitating and embellishing nonsense. There is a possibility that AIs will eventually be able to develop the same way, but I'm not holding my breath.

OpenAI appoints international expansion boss

Expand this

The only international expansion of OpenAI I want to see is content creators from every country on earth suing them for theft of copyright material they scraped and used in the training sets.

Eric Schmidt: Build more AI datacenters, we aren't going to 'hit climate goals anyway'

Where is...

...St Greta and her mates? Why aren't they gluing themselves to these places of energy squanderings?

Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

Re: I'll agree

Every use of colour is carefully chosen to signify a different property of the file, and is extremely useful to identify things quickly.

But that's all lost on you in your dull flat monochrome Windows world, isn't it.

Samsung apologizes for bad financial performance

Re: Design Choices

You can't delete pre-installed apps on any make of android phone, but the customised ui on some might pretend it has.

Google brings better bricking to Androids, to curtail crims

Re: Wrong place, wrong time, every time

If you use fingerprints, you need to be really paranoid about people with cigar cutters.

Quantum computing dreamers face stock market reality check

What they have in common is neither will ever work in the way they claim.

Atos stumbles again as French government says 'non' to purchase of key assets

Friends?

When a UK service company looks like going tits up, we just let a friendly country buy it up and asset strip it.

Trouble is France doesn't seem to have any friends.

Three and Vodafone: We need to merge because our networks are rubbish

Re: So is this why they turned off 2G/EDGE data for consumers?

Many electricity suppliers allow you to sign up for a smart meter only tariff even with a gen 1 meter, but then can't read it. They keep nagging you to upgrade, but remember you swap the chore of reading the meter once a month for the opportunity to play selective availability bingo. Which means if you aren't on the priority register (have under 5s or a health condition) when supply is short on cold cloudy windless days now we have no coal and 3 out of 4 French interconnects aren't working, it might be your meter they turn off when shedding load.

Xfce 4.20 creeps toward Wayland support while Mint 22.1 polishes desktop routine

Re: Is MATE still active?

And this is why I will be sticking with MATE on everything from my Raspberry Pi's to my work laptop. I really don't care if they never touch MATE on Xorg ever again, as long as I never hear they are moving to Wayland "which isn't feature complete, but has the bare minimum to get by".

Embattled users worn down by privacy options? Let them eat code

You are concerned about cookies, but you use Facebook? --->

About a quarter million Comcast subscribers had their data stolen from debt collector

Re: Two things...

I once went with the cheapest car insurance quote I found on-line, and they sent me the policy details and the date when the first payment of the direct debit would be taken. A week before this date I got a letter from a debt collection agency saying the payment was overdue. I called the insurance company and they apologised for the 'mistake', it was still within the 14 day cooling off period for on-line sales, so I took the opportunity while on the phone to cancel the policy immediately, and went with a reputable firm.

DOJ, Microsoft seize 107 domains used in Russia's Star Blizzard phishing attacks

There's only one domain which needs to be seized to protect Microsoft customers - microsoft.com

Ransomware crew infects 100+ orgs monthly with new MedusaLocker variant

UnpaidMemes

Ban Crypto and they will be UnpaidMemes, along with all the other ransomware crews.

Mega supermarket spots stock discrepancy of tens of millions amid ERP system migration

Re: So-poor-markets

Shopping for one, at least 3 times a week then.

‘Undigestible rate of change’ sees vendor supergroup create ‘The Open Compute of AI’

Avoid indigestion

The only thing it is hard to keep up with about AI is the ever increasing bullshit. The actual product of AI is very easy to understand; plagiarised or factually incorrect text, low quality insecure and buggy code, and freaky artificial looking pictures. The advice, if you have any sense; avoid all of it.

Another OpenAI founder moves to arch-rival Anthropic

Re: Is the AI bubble finally going to burst?

Regardless of the poor quality of the LLM's output or how many safety guardrails they manage to bolt on, the fact is the entire AI bubble is based on the wholesale theft of copyright data from the internet. If any form of 'AI' is to emerge after the inevitable crash, the creators of the model must be able to prove permission and licences to use every last byte of training data.

AI agent promotes itself to sysadmin, trashes boot sequence

O'Really?

Picture command history or it didn't happen!

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

Even if those still functioning computers are getting a bit tired, freed from the Windows cruft, they feel faster than when they were brand new.

Re: Support

There's a difference?

Windows 11 Patch Tuesday preview is a glitchy disaster

Re: Never patch on day 1

When Microsoft insists on mixing critical security patches, general bug fixing and new 'features' in one bundle, you are damned if you do install on day one, and damned if you don't.

The only winners are those who don't play Microsoft's enshitification game.

China trains 100-billion-parameter AI model on home grown infrastructure

What can't it say

Forget about the training, just think of how much computing power will be needed to ensue it doesn't mention the 4^th of June or any A.A. Milne characters.

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

Re: You actually trust ChatGPT?

It's the sort of intern you'd tell not to come back after the first week, if not sooner.

Water and Russian's are not good for servers, I have no opinion either way on Bhuddists.

Raspberry Pi AI Camera takes inferencing load off the CPU

Re: Excellent little camera

I'm still waiting for the Sony STARVIS 2 camera to become available for the Pi. You can still get the first version arducam, but the resolution isn't sufficient.

Forget the Kia Boyz: Crooks could hijack your car with just a smartphone

Re: Connectivity

Car buying MUST NOT HAVE's

1. Any sort of remote app or connectivity that can't be disabled

2. Large touchscreen instead of physical controls

Binance claims it helped to bust Chinese crypto scam app in India

Scooters

Maybe the reason why so many scooters are broken is due to crashes of the exhausted 70 hour a week workers?

Now Dell salespeople must be onsite five days a week

Re: Not a problem

He's got to try that line out on your first, to see if it sounds more plausible when delivered to his wife at 2am, reeking of someone else's perfume.

Victims lose $70K to one single wallet-draining app on Google's Play Store

Re: “The attackers behind the app clearly knew their market well.”

The whole crypto thing looks like it was designed as a scam from top to bottom, so it's hardly surprising they exactly where to hit.