Posts by druck

Fintech outfit Klarna swaps humans for AI by not replacing departing workers

Re: AI couldn't be more incompetent than the humans there

This will affect your credit rating. Check with a ratings agency if the former owner is still showing up as living at the property, if so you can apply to have them removed.

Astronomers back call for review of bonkers rule that means satellite swarms fly without environment checks

Fukushima had considerable defences against tsunami's, unfortunately nature came up with a bigger tsunami than anyone had expected.

CrowdStrike's meltdown didn't dent its market dominance … yet

Cure the disease not the symptoms

Wean yourselves off Windows and rid yourself of the security parasites.

Supermicro delays 10-K filling due to accounting issues

It's Hindenburg Research, trying to make companies crash and burn in flames, so they can make a few bucks.

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

Re: Huge gaps in this history

The Electron didn't have any emulation of MODE 7, you had to make do with either 80x20 text in 2 colours, 40x32 in 4 colours or 20x32 in 16 colours (8 steady colours and 8 flashing).

The reason it was slower than the BBC was the Beeb had dual ported memory allowing both the processor and video chip to access it simultaneously. The Electron only had single ported memory, which meant the CPU was locked out by the video chip for 40 out of every 64 microseconds while the scan line was being read.

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

Re: Good for fun

a) code either works or it doesn't

Wrong, there is far more to code than just whether it produces the right output; what about efficiency, maintainability and security?

Microsoft Bing Copilot accuses reporter of crimes he covered

Even sharing half a last name with them was enough to get the editor of a minor tech rag to print a full apology.

Re: AI _is_ just overhyped statistics

At this point, anybody who trusts so-called "AI" for anything is an idiot. It is a complete waste of energy and compute power.

^^^ This, a million times over ^^^^

Bargain-hunting boss saw his bonus go up in a puff of self-inflicted smoke

The Master wasn't the most convenient shape to sit a monitor on and so I purchased a "Viglen kit" wich consisted of a new main box with a flat top big enough for the monitor, and a separate keyboard on a short (about 2'6") cable.

That must have been before the Master Compact came out, which was a 3 box system out of the box, so to speak.

Benchmarks show even an old Nvidia RTX 3090 is enough to serve LLMs to thousands

Re: Old?

I had an i7-4770 desktop before they stated making us use laptops, best box I ever had, could run all day flat out, no throttling, no fans going mad.

Tech support chap solved knotty disk failure problem by staring at the floor

Re: 1982 was also a good year for Acorn

It did come first and was £100 cheaper, it could be upgraded by soldering in another 16K of chips, but everyone went for the B.

I wanted to name my children Model A and Model B, but the wife insisted on Alexander and Benedict. We stopped at two, so we never had an argument over the next names of Master 128K and Master Compact.

Re: Sandy, Beds

Even better there is a holiday park in the New Forest Hampshire called Sandy Balls!

Microsoft resurrects Windows Recall for upcoming preview

Re: Déjà vu

I did say it wont ever go away:-

https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2024/06/14/microsoft_recall_release_delayed/#c_4879218

This uni thought it would be a good idea to do a phishing test with a fake Ebola scare

Re: > Yes. Passwords are terrible authenticators

So the $5 wrench only has to persuade you to reveal the mast password to the password manager.

China's top Office clone copies Microsoft again – with an inconvenient outage

Re: "Kingsoft has offered users 15 days of free service by way of apology"

What do you mean? Microsoft 365 gives you 15 days a year of downtime for free, well no extra charge!

Body of IT tycoon Mike Lynch recovered after superyacht sinks

Strangely enough I never experienced any turbulence flying directly over the doughnut on finals to runway 27 at Gloucester, maybe they were just being nice.

Slack AI can be tricked into leaking data from private channels via prompt injection

I use ChatGPT almost as often as Google now, it's become a good substitute for Stack Overflow. Do plenty of sanity checks on the output. Don't trust it wholesale.

If you had a work colleague who you needed to ask questions and sometimes they gave you useful information, even though they droned on far too long, but occasionally they told you a complete pack of lies so you couldn't really trust anything they said without checking with another colleague, what would you do?

You would never ask them anything again, and probably avoid any sort of interaction with them.

Why they hell are you treating 'AI' any differently?

Chipmaker Microchip reveals cyber attack whacked manufacturing capacity

Re: "Defense contractor gets hacked – what's the worst that could happen” ... says Simon

A single line post which actually makes sense - ACCOUNT HACK ALERT!

Rocket Factory Augsburg engine test ends in explosion at SaxaVord spaceport

No, it's rocket engineering.

Looks like they were borrowing from the EV automotive industry.

Missing scissors cause 36 flight cancellations in Japan

Re: The ghost of 9/11 casts a long shadow

It may not get you in the cockpit but if the pilot gets a panicked call from a flight attendant saying that the terrorist is threatening to cut their throat and could then stab a lot more passengers on the plane, what would the pilot do?

Stay locked in the cockpit, no matter what.

Even if they don't hijack an airliner to crash it into something valuable then a mass stabbing incident in the air would still be a major win for the terrorists and would look awful from a security standpoint etc.

It is up to the air marshals to deal with any trouble in the cabin.

Digital wallets can allow purchases with stolen credit cards

Re: Someone is lying

Tokens should be preserved if a card is replaced due to expiry, but if it is because of fraudulent activity they should invalidate everything associated with it.

Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage

Darwin will only be rewarded pre-procreation!

Gentoo Linux to drop Itanium support as Funtoo fork enters 'Hobby Mode'

Re: Now end Windows

It's too late, just like when I left a brace of pheasants in the boot of my car for a week in high summer. Even after being stripped down and professionally cleaned, you could never open the boot again without remembering the stench, so I had to get rid of it and move on to something else.

Multiple flaws in Microsoft macOS apps unpatched despite potential risks

Who is surprised that...

1. Microsoft writes crappy code which requires macOS security features to be disabled run.

2. The crap code can be exploited by 3rd parties, just like on Windows.

3. Microsoft doesn't give a shit because it runs on macOS.

After nearly 3B personal records leak online, Florida data broker confirms it was ransacked by cyber-thieves

Re: Well, yeah

I think it's more down to not spending every waking minute posting comments.

Unicoin hints at potential data meddling after G-Suite compromise

Re: Next Gen? Yeah Right

For crypto 'hacked' is the perfect exist strategy when peddling over valued imaginary currency which they could not possibly back with real assets.

Twitter must pay over half a million to unfairly dismissed Irish exec

It's one thing winning the judgement...

...it's entirely another thing actually getting the payout.

AI stole my job and my work, and the boss didn't know – or care

Plus any AI used for commercial gain, should have to publish the licences and grants of permission on every single piece of data it has been trained on, or the above fine tippled along with deletion and apology.

Still waiting for a Pi 500 and wondering what do this summer?

More portable

I never found the Pi 400 format compelling, as my Raspberry Pi's which aren't headless are sharing monitors and full size keyboards with other machines, and those that are connected to TVs use mini wireless keyboards with trackpads, so no trailing power or HDMI cables.

What I am lacking is a portable solution, i.e. a Pi 5 with a built in keyboard and small screen I take to where my headless Pis are, to checkout any issues. I am happy to mains power it, but if it had a battery, it would also make a good basic laptop.

Microsoft pushing, pushing, pushing Edge in Defender slammed as a 'dark pattern'

Re: Edge for Business

It's OK, if they can't get your data through Edge, there is always Windows Telemetry.

Microsoft patches scary wormable hijack-my-box-via-IPv6 security bug and others

Re: hijack-my-box-via-IPv6 security bug

It can be exploited via IPv6 from another machine on your local network, regardless of whether your ISP supports it. You need to have disabled the IPv6 stack.

Microsoft quality software at it's best.

InSight data suggests plentiful water lies beneath Mars' surface

Re: The American Way...

Yes that's a great way to irrevocably contaminate it.

Linux Foundation wades into AI as Open Model Initiative joins ranks

Re: For the creative community?

Exactly, you can't discuss the licencing of the AI model, without considering the licences of the data which has been scraped to train it.

If permission has not been granted for every single piece of training data, the AI model should not be released under any licence.

AMD won’t patch Sinkclose security bug on older Zen CPUs

Microsoft doesn't care, and if you are running Windows, you've got far bigger problems than this to worry about.

Trump campaign cites Iran election phish claim as evidence leaked docs were stolen

Re: The research dossier was a 271-page document

The first thing any campaign does is find all the dirt on their candidate, so when something gets out, and something will always get out, they've already written the play book on how to spin it.

Google-commissioned report claims early adopters already enjoying fruits of gen-AI labor

Re: Can't help but think...

Exactly.

If your job is producing reams of bullshit to sit unread on the desk of some higher up, an automated AI bullshit generator is a complete godsend.

If however you have to produce something that actually involves quantifiable work, then it is worse than useless.

LLM-driven C-to-Rust. Not just a good idea, a genie eager to escape

Re: Its clearly POSSIBLE

Converting one instruction set to another is a vastly less complex task than one high(ish) level language to another. The crucial difference is the CPU only has to run the code, it doesn't find automatically generated code constructs hard to understand, it doesn't have to try to develop them further, it is also not changing from one ISA to another to try to improve memory safety.

Re: Hilarious

This article is the biggest load of bullshit I've seen on the Register in a long time. I highly suspect it was written by a AI.

It's all drying up: Microsoft to erase 3D Paint from digital store

Re: We're going to need a Microsoft (Windows) graveyard, too

Don't forget Bob, Clippy and of course Zune.

Alibaba Cloud claims K8s service meshes can require more resources than the apps they run

Re: latency 1.7 times lower

I've pulled The Reg up on these idiotic comparisons before.

1.7x lower latency would be better expressed as 59% of the latency.

Techie told 'Bill Gates' Excel is rubbish – and the Microsoft boss had it fixed in 48 hours

Re: 8 floppy disks for Office 97?

Interleaving? How would that work?

Floppies were soft sectored so you could have many smaller sectors for quick random access or fewer larger sectors to get more storage, due to losing less of the track to the inter sector gaps.

My computer science degree had a psychology module, which I thought would be a waste of time, but it was "The Psychology of Social Influence", which was basically how to get people to give you their passwords. X

How to ingeniously and wirelessly inject malware onto someone's nearby Windows PC via Google's Quick Share

Re: fuzzing

Or just forgot to put the fuzzing rule in to generate invalid UTF-8. Hard to believe though as it's one of the most obvious things to try, after null and excessively big strings

Report slams Boeing and NASA over shoddy quality that's delayed SLS blastoff

Re: Historically Boeing has a way of buying lenient trreatment

There is a huge amount of commonality between the A330 and A340, including the wing. Foregoing the centre rear landing gear, while it isn't quite as simple as taking a A330 MRTT off the production line and sticking 4 engines on it, it is not beyond possibility for a customisation job of the scale and cost of the Air Force One program.

Ransomware groups are better at web app security than you, says researcher

Crypto Crime circlejerk.

Stykas was then able to identify several ALPHV victims - including a couple of unicorns in the cryptocurrency space - whom he was able to contact to help them address vulnerabilities and prevent them being ransomed.

I bet they were really grateful. Funny how so many crypto firms loose all the pretend money due to hacking, it couldn't possibly be an exit strategy now could it. Particularly as most of their business is facilitating the very same criminal activity.

Delta: CrowdStrike's offer to help in Falcon meltdown was too little, too late

Re: "CrowdStrike's earlier letter to Delta blamed the airline's 'IT decisions' "

Don't forget they chose Microsoft too - double jeopardy!

Intel's legal troubles mount after plunging stock sparks yet another court battle

Re: "These shareholders want something done about it"

Maybe they think they sue the share price back up?

Raspberry Pi Pico 2 lands with (drum roll) RISC-V cores

Re: Still with the micro-USB that detaches from the board if you look at it the wrong way?

Well, on the RPi 4 and 5 there is no pin swapping going on either. Its USB-C is nothing more than a power connector, and doesn't support more than 5V. But having USB-C is still useful, because it's that much more mechanically robust, and reversible.

That is incorrect, the USB-C port is a fully functioning USB OTG port. With Raspberry Pi OS, it is normally only used for power.

Your victim's Windows PC fully patched? Just force undo its updates and exploit away

I have nightmares about this sort of exploit...

...that they make a version for Linux that downgrades me to Windows.

But luckily I wake up at that point.