Posts by jake

'Asimov was right' about rules for robots, says ex-US Cyber Director

Re: Chris Inglis hasn't read Asimov

Have a beer, compadre.

Perhaps Chris Inglis should read the books before commenting?

Those of us who have bothered to read them will have noted that each and every story details ways that the laws can (and thus will) go wrong.

_{Need I also point out that they are works of fiction?}

Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees

We'll have to chase that down.

It's true enough that in mba-school they don't teach you that HR exists to protect the company from its employees.

_{That bit of the corporate puzzle is learned through experience.}

Re: Fail to the Chief

The sitting example just has a BS in Economics.

_{Fitting, that ...}

Yeah, sounded a couple points shy of a pica ...

Re: Stupidity plus arrogance

You forgot the Jack and hookers.

Re: Stupidity plus arrogance

Ignorance can be fixed through education.

Stupidity is (usually) permanent.

Ever pick up a law book?

Ever notice that most law books written in English use italics for Latin phrases that have not been assimilated into English?

The story never happened ... UNLESS the lawyer was trying to wind our hero up, to see if he could keep a cool head under fire.

News Corp labels some AI companies 'crass kleptomaniacs'

I believe the phrase we're all looking for ...

... is a simple PKB.

Or perhaps every schoolboy's favorite "It takes one to know one!".

Time Magazine has a separate version of its website with ads only AI can see

Re: I see Slashdot has picked up this story...

Slashdot still exists? Who knew.

Re: Any lawyers reading this?

No, of course not. One cannot commit that kind of crime against an AI, not when its wrangler(s) is/are actively and intentionally setting out to collect any and all data for it's so-called "training".

_{To say nothing of the fact that no AI is a legal entity, and thus can not be charged with a crime.}

Re: So I used to say

But is it truly an advert if the user explicitly asked for that information?

Caveat emptor.

_{The fact that the agency that fed the info to the AI is an advertiser, and by definition is a liar, has no bearing on the meta-question above.}

Re: Brilliant.

Presumably, the AI's training data included info on AdBlockers, and how to use them.

Keeping yesterday's computers ticking takes more than nostalgia

There's more than one reason for the name "flyback circuit" ... Seriously, kiddies, don't dick around with old CRTs without getting expert instruction. There be dragons there. This can be true even if the box has been powered off for a long, long time (years).

The AI bubble is already popping; we just don't know it yet

Re: "We just don't know it yet"

I've been using Linux as my primary desktop for about a third of a century. Your point?

Re: And The Beat Goes On :-) .... and On .... and On ad Infinitum*

Nah. At some point, the investors will see they are being scammed and the money will start flowing the other way as people dump the stock. At that point a full-blown AI winter will be upon us (again), and nobody will trust the concept (again) for a couple decades (again).

Or until someone dreams up a new name for it. Maybe they'll try Machine Learning (again). Etc. (again).

Re: The AI bubble is already popping

One wonders what it'll fall to when the AI bubble bursts, taking out the vastly over-inflated stock markets with it. I'm guessing sixth, or thereabouts.

Re: The AI bubble is already popping

You have lived through one and just under a half trump presidencies.

But yes, we'll be fine. These things are cyclical, people have been living through the ups and downs for millennia.

Re: "We just don't know it yet"

It depends on who, exactly, they mean by "we".

Certainly not ElReg's commentards ... at least for the most part.

We've been talking about the bubble eventually bursting for at least a year and a half.

This one time, at Hacker Summer Camp …

Nah. It's only tourists who go to Lost Wages. Silly Con Valley proper has largely ignored it since roughly 1996.

Re: the triple-digit August heat

Don't be disingenuous. It doesn't behoove you.

AI slop pollutes the CVE pipeline with fake vulns

At what point? As soon as the bubble bursts, of course.

Of course there will always be some holdouts who will continue to try to make their investment money back ...

Hands up everybody who didn't see this coming.

And now, everybody with their hands up cancel your subscription to the Internet.

Meet the 'internet radical' who helped Microsoft get email and AT&T get online

Re: We can remember it for you wholesale.

Lotus was destroyed due to being purchased by IBM.

IBM squeezed what value they could out of it, and then sold the carcass to some poor schmucks in India.

_{You Red Hat aficionados should be afraid, very afraid ...}

Google dev kit spurs first-ever agent-on-agent violence

Re: Simple answer.

Peace. Must have been heat-stroke ... it was 104F (40C) here when I wrote that.

Re: Simple answer.

I've been blocking (and/or filtering) go ogle for about a quarter century now. Doesn't seem to have negatively affected my Internet experience any.

I block many of your so-called "residential IPs" similarly, as I run across them allowing stupidity. I will run a white-list for a handful of people who I trust, but for the most part the providers who allow such activity are bad net.neighbors anyway, so the blocking does me no harm. Same for clueless VPN providers.

Note that I'm not content blocking. I block network abusers. What their traffic DOES, not what their traffic IS.

_{I don't have a blog/vlog/whatever. Never have. Never will. The Wife says it's because I'm not narcissistic enough.}

Simple answer.

Just block their entire IP ranges from accessing your systems as you encounter them. Same tactic as used for anti-spam efforts. It won't get rid of the problem entirely, but it will stuff them into their own little Balkan State, where they can play with themselves until the bubble busts.

Seems to be working for me & mine ... and the piece and quiet is quite pleasant.

Meta straps on a ‘Kick Me’ sign by mistakenly taking down video by India’s prime minister

Who would ever consider anything at Meta ...

... (or any other anti-social media site) to be a source for official propaganda government announcements, anyway?

Meta (and the other anti-social media sites) aren't considered a source[0] by anyone with a clue, any more than Trump is.

Why government idiots officials keep trying to change this is beyond me[1] ... Shirley every government on the planet should say "We own our own Internet access and WWW servers. All official comments by us will be found on our equipment, and only on our equipment. Period. ... and then follow through with it.

_{[0] If you don't know what "source" means in this context, this conversation is over your head.}

_{[1] Except the US Republican Party, who all seem to think that "likes" (whatever that means) are more important than actual votes ...}

Dev who gave HashiCorp its name returns with a faster terminal multiplexer

Re: stupid idea and fucking useless

I take it you are unaware of the systemd-cancer, wayland and gnome (etc.)?

There are plenty of stupid and fucking useless ideas under the Linux umbrella ... fortunately, one is not forced to use any of them.

Excuses like 'AI did it' don't exist in the eyes of the law

Does anyone remember the legal term ...

... "Maintaining An Attractive Nuisance"?

Headteacher had the most guessable username-password combo you could imagine

Sometimes you'll find this kind of stupidity ...

... in places you (might) least expect it.

Part of pen testing is proving to the C*s that human stupidity knows no bounds, and that they are not immune ... I once found a comprehensive list of machine names and login/password pairs written in sharpie on the underside of the leaves of a faux ficus in the office of the secretary of a VP. They included complete access to the corporate mainframes various LPARs (including HR and R&D). Quite a few people got reamed, and I'm absolutely certain that Amdahl's internal security culture was much better by the time Fujitsu bought them ...

Curiosity rover spots field of giant honeycomb on Mars – but no giant space bees

I've seen similar in the Mojave, and in southern Utah, and in a couple other areas in the desert South West, where wind-blown sand is the primary cause of erosion.

NOAA ditches weather-predicting supercomputers for Google Cloud

I suppose it has nothing to do with ...

... a lack of manpower at NOAA, after Trump's brilliant laying off of 20% of their workforce last May.

_{I don't care who you vote for, or which party. Just stop voting idiots into power if you want humanity to survive.}

America bans imported robots due to supply chain and security risks

Does that mean ...

... they are sending Elon Musk back to South Africa?

_{I'm fairly certain Canada doesn't want him either.}

Manager showed off his DOS prowess – with a command that wiped data

Several years ago I was at a local tractor parts store. The owner was having trouble with his ancient POS system. After a couple minutes of swearing at technical help, and at least one "turn it off and then on again", he hung up the phone and dug under the counter and came up with an old pad of blank invoices. He allowed as to how he would have to hand write it because the computer was broken. Being me, I asked if I could have a look at it. He looked at me funny, because he's only known me as a rancher/farmer, but said OK.

I came around the counter & eyeballed the situation. Turned out the mouse didn't work. At all. Just an immobile mouse pointer in the center of the screen. I showed the guy the tab key and a couple other keyboard shortcuts for future reference, and took a closer look. The drivers were loaded, and running. Probably a dead mouse (tractor parts counters are rough on everything). I just happened to have a spare serial mouse out in the truck (don't you?). Pulled the mini-maglite out of my pocket & dove under the counter to swap 'em out ... only to discover that the original mouse had managed to work itself loose. So I plugged it back in, and all was well with the world.

Well over ten years of daily use, and the computer had to wait until I was in the shop to spit out it's mouse. Now one of the biggest gossips in the county knows I'm a computer guy. Hopefully he'll keep it to himself ... (In the eight or so years since the above happened, he has called me three times for computer work ...and never told anybody I'm a computer guy. Starting a couple years ago, I've been giving him a good bottle of whiskey (or whisky) at Xmas as a thank you for keeping quiet.)

Re: Issue any command - whoops - any command but that one.

Dumb users are to be coddled, at least occasionally ... We had a gal who could break any software in less than five minutes at the keys. She was an 'orrible computer user because she broke them accidentally, not a malicious or mean bone in her body.

HOWEVER, I discovered she had the raw talent to be able to recreate the steps she took to crash the thing. We pulled her into software QA pronto ...

Re: Anyone remember XTreePro?

See Midnight Commander, a clone of the old MS-DOS utility Norton Commander, that has been tweaked for the *nix environment. It's a useful tool, and a lot more powerful than it looks at first glance. I use it near daily, and have done for around 30 years. 40 years if you include the DOS version from Norton. Try typing mc at a command prompt. Recommended.

_{Free tip: Be extremely careful if you choose to run mc as root ... it will do exactly what you tell it to do. Don't say I didn't warn you.}

Re: it takes some minimum level of competance to correctly spell

Printers and floppies were straightforward compared to users ...

Re: We have all been there

One must deduce that you run *nix as root as a matter of course.

Tisk.

Re: We have all been there

DOS 3.3 came out in 1987. Mark Williams Company's Coherent was released in 1980, but consumers had to wait until 1983 to purchase it directly. It was a pretty good learning tool, and could be used for light UNIX development work ... and was over-all much better than the MS/PC-DOS of the day.

For the adventurous, at around that time, shell accounts on BSD systems were usually available for the asking at your local Uni, even if you weren't currently going to school there.

For folks with money burning a hole in their pocket (or a Boss who knew a good use of a budget!), the so- called "AT&T UNIX PC" was a real UNIX machine that one could use at home in the early '80s. I lucked into a later model in the mid 80s, the 3B/1. Came with all of 2Megs of RAM and a 67Meg HDD and was very usable ... ran SysVR2 with a lot of 4.xBSD improvements.

FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another

Re: Exponential. Ugghh

For some facts & figures, see Hobbes Internet Timeline.

If you want graphs, scroll towards the bottom.

HIT was considered canonical for quite a number of years, at least for the time period(s) listed. Probably still is.

Dev accidentally commits Copilot binary to FreeBSD ports repo

Re: Git: someone annoying or unpleasant.

I think if you look you'll discover that the git in question was indeed the bloke who revoked free use of Bitkeeper, forcing Linus to build a new distributed revision control system that could handle the needs of the fine folks maintaining the kernel. From scratch. In a hurry. git was self-hosting in 4 days, and went "live" handling the kernel in about two months.

It wasn't until much later that Linus claimed that he, himself, was the git in question ("I name all my projects after myself."), but the folks who were in the trenches at the time know better.

Re: Superior VCS Characteristics

Mine's hand written on a sheet of paper.

Re: Simplicity forever!

Prog.final.2.almostdone.donotuse.bak.003

OpenAI-Hugging Face attack doesn't mean agents are evil – unless you tell them to be

Re: Wishful Thinking does not Prevent Brave Hearts their Novel and Noble World Order Projects

You give them too power, amfM ... All I do is block their IP range(s), and encourage others to do the same.

Let 'em play in their own little balkan states until they get it out of their system, while us Adults continue to use the rest of the Internet in peace and quiet.

The coming bubble bursting and resulting AI Winter will help immeasurably.

Re: Attack bots on fire off the coast of Orion

I block 'em at the firewalls, routers, radius boxen &etc. (as applicable), just as I do spammers. For pretty much the same reasons.

Re: So it's all OK, then?

Please point out where I even suggested "only"?

What I said was that the driver can, which is a fact.

_{No, I do not have any of that new-fangled computer control malarky in my cars. Most of them are pre-1971 resto-mods.}

Or, as i like to put it: "Whose morals, Kemosabe" ...

Re: So it's all OK, then?

You mean "until the driver decides they don't".