Posts by b0llchit

Software developer cracks Hyundai car security with Google search

Yes, yes, but "whatever app" does not compare to Doom!

_;-)

Australian court overturns 'Google is a publisher' decision

Testing boundaries

Defamation is very tricky.

Now, if I now would suggest that all of the Aussies are idiots, would that be defamation? Australian law does have a lot in common with British law. By that standard, should calling the island dwellers^(*), west off of the continental European land, all a bunch of daft fuckers be considered defamatory? Or do I need to specify each single person and give each a label of "suck it" before it becomes defamatory?

Imagine a search engine finding this comment...or even the internet archive... Tricky business indeed.

^(*)_{El Reg excluded, of course, being Spanish by name and containing French contributions.}

Russian military uses Chinese drones and bots in combat, over manufacturers' protests

Re: This is something that needs paying attention

Combined with the research on drone swarms and control...

No need to buy a tank or a plane. Just swarm in and blanket the area.

_{[beware, the icon are swarms of drones; with jammers, of course]}

Open source VideoLAN media player asks why it's blocked in India

Re: Cones

Do you really want goatse to return?

Ryugu asteroid: It came from the outer solar system, say scientists

...was...concern...

Glad to hear it no longer is.

Yes, the alien in me is working hard to convince you all. The more controversy, the more we can work unobserved and hide that we are already here.

No, I wont get that probe out of your backside. Don't scratch, get used to it. We used asteroid water to clean it, honest.

_{Is it Friday already? Gotta know when to hit the pub.}

Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape

Where can I find the "sponsored by" tag?

Keep your cables tidy. You never know when someone might need some wine

And please, management should be publicly flogged and fired on the spot because they allowed critical infrastructure accessible without proper locks and other restrictions.

Samsung heir pardoned after doing time for bribery

Capitalism for the Win

Don't mind the bribes. Don't mind the drugs. Don't mind the accounting "errors". We need capitalism to prevent us from having less monetary privileges than the neighbours. We need more, don't mind how, just more.

Sigh.

When the convicted are released early to save you and your country, you should take a step back and sincerely start wondering whether you are doing it wrong.

Your AI-generated digital artwork may not be protected by US copyright

Re: No choice

Human creators? Humans? Aren't they outdated? The art world has found its new darling and it is called AI. No need for puny fragile little humans to meddle no more. Out with the old, in with the new. AIs for the win. And the publisher's pockets, of course.

_{(see icon; denial will be swiftly dealt with and surely prosecuted, no choice)}

No choice

It is a must to have copyright protection. How else can the publishers and their representatives survive the next 1000 years? They need the income from any and all source to flow in the right direction! And it is a sure winner with AI's lifespan virtually being infinite. Yes, what they always wanted, infinite term copyright.

For the good of creation, there is no choice. AI's must enjoy copyright protection. Who else will pay for the electricity bill?

_/s

Meta's AI internet chatbot demo quickly starts spewing fake news and racist remarks

Re: Oh bot, this is trouble

Oh crap

_/Bender

Starlink satellite dish cracked on stage at Black Hat

Re: Spoiler alert

Yeah, but they probably need to get the OK to answer. Their bosses are a bit farther out.

Who is composing and financing the (very long) waiting lounge tune? Gotta be soothed during the wait.

And, you are willing to wait for a reply?

The possibilities, like space itself, are endless.

Possibilities, yes... But space, that might not be endless. But it would take some time for a starlink message to round-trip to the edge of space and back again.

Let there be ambient light sensing, without fear of data theft

Re: What POSSIBLE use

Quite simple, google is making the browser into the new operating system. But this time an operating system anyone can run their code on, for convenience, of course. User experience is everything, anything else be damned.

Our software is perfect. If something has gone wrong, it must be YOUR fault

Beware of giving corps new ideas

If my phone doesn't work and I complain to my phone provider, they don't accuse me of willfully using my phone to call other people, do they?

Please do not give these corps new excuses. Before you know it, the telephone company refuses to accept telephone numbers.

BOFH: Who us? Sysadmins? Spend time with other departments?

Well, it is exactly like real meetings. Objections are plenty whenever "commitment" is tabled. From there a stall is forced.

Dealing with legacy issues around Red Hat crypto versions? Here's a fix

Re: Not existence but feasible to find collisions

Indeed, find or knowingly provoke collisions.

Re: Not encryption but hashing

...cryptographic hash...

Yes, but that says something about the quality of the hash algorithm used. To qualify it must adhere to cryptographic principles. Actually, being a bit pedantic, SHA-1 lost the "cryptographic" qualification once collisions were detected and exploited.

It still has nothing to do with encryption or decryption because a hash is strictly one-way and encryption can be undone with decryption. You can never ever reverse a hash; the data is lost in the process of hashing and reduced to a hash value.

Not encryption but hashing

...the pesky old SHA-1 encryption algorithm...

The SHA-1 algorithm has no encryption properties whatsoever. It cannot encrypt or decrypt anything at all.

The SHA-1 algorithm is a hashing algorithm used to identify a message or block of data in a unique way but using only a small string of numbers, or hash value.

However, as noted, the old algorithm cannot uniquely identify messages or data because collisions have been found (same hash value for different input). You can no longer use the hash value for identification/integrity purposes once collisions are known to happen and the algorithm must be retired.

Want the very latest Windows Insider Dev Channel build? Check your disk space

Behind the screens

To be fair, the company set the minimum storage needed for a fresh install of Windows 11 at 64GB...

They used to have the Wintel cartel. Maybe they have made similar deals with storage providers and are demanding kickbacks from all flash-chips sold? Would be a lucrative business model.

_{Please send a cleaning team if this turns out not to be a joke. They need to mop up the blood from my floor after I'm done hitting my head against the wall.}

Google's bug bounty boss: Finding and patching vulns? 'Totally useless'

"We don't care about vulnerabilities; we care about exploits,"

That is a very arrogant statement.

Apparently, then, the only way to qualify is to show how fucked their systems are by exploiting them. That is the wrong signal to send. You should fix it all before an exploit comes into play. That will save time and money, for all of us.

I guess we see here why that company dropped the bit about not being evil from its modus operandi.

NetBSD 9.3: A 2022 OS that can run on late-1980s hardware

Re: And then, what?

No, it is a suggestion to force windows^(*) users to become humble again.

^(*)_{Users of Linux are either very humble already or very extremely stubborn.}

NASA's six-mile-wide orbital telescope is 1/6th built

Re: Hell of an approximation!

One meter difference does make optical interferometry quite unusable. Maybe they cut off some extra digits up to the nanometer scales to prevent us from getting too confused?

But then, the "approximately 22,000 miles" statement. I guess they are approximating interferometry on the mile boundaries. They must be listening in on the very low frequency AM transmissions coming from beyond the sun.

You do know that the sun's core is a gateway to another dimension, don't you? From there the aliens have been sending transmissions at low frequency. And surely, that we must pick up to join the intergalactic community. Rumours have it that the transmission contains the intergalactic community registration form.

You mean, settle for tactile images... or what?

...Event Horizon...

This name always reminds me of the film. Imagine they create this telescope, it vanishes into a black hole and comes back out some years later. I for one would like to see the pictures ;-)

Report slams UK plan to become 'science superpower' by 2030

Alternatives:

Forwards we Go!

or

We'll only stop when finished.

or

Together we are strong

Nvidia books $1.32b inventory charge as PC market slows

Not only expensive as cards but also crippled for cryptocurrency use and major, major expensive in energy usage with electricity prices going through the roof.

Hi, I'll be your ransomware negotiator today – but don't tell the crooks that

Re: When AI and Ransomware merge

...

Talking is good. Let me start by asking what the word 'ransomware' means to you? Why do you associate it with yourself? Do you associate it with anything else?

The answer could, maybe, be something like this:

Fsck you.#¤%&/((/&%¤#%&/&%¤#""¤%&/^{[AI encrypted itself, all data lost]}

Could be... could be.

When AI and Ransomware merge

Hello,

I am your ransomware for the day. I have encrypted half of your storage to get us started. Please have a seat and lets talk it through.

...

Must be a difficult job to get that one sorted out. We'd probably need a lot of therapists and asylums to handle this. Not sure for whom, the negotiators or the AIs.

GitLab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

Re: before we automatically delete it and data therein.

It is probably easier and faster to do reconstruction from /dev/urandom and wait until the universe' entropy results in your project.

Enough with the notifications! Focus Assist will shut them u… 'But I'm too important!'

Re: Another great victory for Tim Cook and Jonathan Ive

Truly another great leap forward in computing.

Why else would you need faster than fast mega-computing power. It has to be used, no choice.

...company’s (air)head of Fun...

This is the head you have in a carnival booth where you can throw darts at the head for money and gadgets. The row of heads is complemented with the developers of fine alerts.

These heads will only alert you if a dart hits them right in the eye. All other noises are ignorable and can simply be muted with a nice patch of duct tape. Scores are kept and the winner is the first to silence the alerts using only darts. You know the accuracy will improve with [icon] until you cannot hear anything anyway.

Have fun!

Pull jet fuel from thin air? We can do that, say scientists

Re: At scale??? Yes, easily

Outsource the entire production of energy to one single point-of-failure. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Scaramanga?

At least you get a powerful Laser for free with the Solex.

At scale???

Kerosene is about 45 MJ/kg. At 15 kW and (hoped for) 20% efficiency they can optimally create one kilogram in 15000 seconds (just over 4 hours).

An A320 burns about 2500 kg/h kerosene. For one hour of flight it takes 10416 hours to produce the fuel. To put it all in perspective... you need to scale up with four order of magnitude just to support one plane.

There are, give or take, about 10000 planes in the air at any given time, some smaller, some larger. To support all planes you need to scale up with eight orders of magnitude. To make it worse; you need space for the mirrors. With the sun at about a kiloWatt per square meter and a scale of 15 times 10⁸, you will need 1500 km² constantly in the sun. Or, effectively, for the mirrors alone, you need four times the area around the globe to cover daylight and at least double that to mitigate clouds, accounting to about 12000 km². Then you still need to place all the syngas installations and other infrastructure in place.

We are now talking the size of countries here, just to support our flying addiction.

(Darn, ninja'ed by Twanky)

Yes, it's true: Hard drive failures creep up as disks age

Re: I'm shocked

What's the next mind bogglingly mind boggling news...

Good News! You are getting older and will eventually die.

NASA to send prototype robot surgeon into space

Robotic surgical overlord

Dammit Jim, I'm a piece of autonomous equipment, not a doctor

Shouldn't that be "He's dead Jim"?

Boffins put supercomputer on the scent of a perfect landfill deodorizer

Perpetual stink

...to address challenging societal or environmental issues that directly impact people’s lives...

And a smelly landfill is, of course, the first thing to hide in a fresh and pleasant natural nose pleaser.

Wouldn't it make sense to prevent the stinky to happen? Maybe not dumping stuff in huge mountains of crap? How about that new idea of a circular system of production and consumption? Oh, I get it, that would actually solve the problem instead of hiding it under a new cover of nice smelling chemicals causing new problems along the road which we will solve using more chemicals and profit.

New Outlook feature: It freezes up when dealing with tables in emails

At least now you can send a Game of Pong coded in CSS^(*). That'll keep the recipient busy, especially the inner child in each of the recipients.

^(*)_{Any takers?}

Re: Plain Text

Yes, I'm old.

Join the club.

Oh, never mind, you already joined. You're reading and writing El Reg comments...

See, they also fall in the 99.99% category ;-)

Actually, you do "design" a message. Usually for content and clarity. However, it has gotten out of hand and now you get a complete website through your inbox without heads or tails.

While nicely formatted emails are very popular with marketing types...

Not only "marketing" types. There are loads of people who have no clue how to format properly and efficiently.

Most emails are very very simple and should be designed equally simple. KISS is still the important imperative, also with respect to interaction design. If you need complex designs then you are almost certainly (99.99%) doing it wrong. As simple as that.

Providing too many ways of formatting in the client always leads to added complexity and that, inevitably, results in bugs and problems.

The fault lies with both the client systems and message designers. It is necessary to send me a 50 kB message to say "Hello, welcome to XYZ"? Or even a larger message to list 10 items? This is design bloat because we allow too much and think too little. I'd almost want resource-limited systems back so we all must think before we leap.

Homes in London under threat as datacenters pull in all the power

Re: And now, throw in the electrical cars!

Advanced mathematics for politically active people: You forgot the 100 kW for lighting up the sky and the 100 kW for the (hungry) games. Then you have the 100 kW for your bicycles and the 100 kW allocated to the Pub (important).

Then you still have 100 kW left... where to use all that power...

China's 7nm chip surprise reveals more than Beijing might like

Do not underestimate China

The article is a bit negative on the achievement. The fact that they are "years behind" does not matter for all areas in the chip making business. Many, really many chips are on large nodes. They do not need the very fine features or process to work.

What we see is a fast catch-up process. Get the bulk first and the details will come later. As said, they have infinite money to invest into self-sufficiency. Does it matter that it still takes years? No, it does not. Once they are there, they are unstoppable. And with China's top-ordered push to the top we will see it sooner than later. What we see here is just one step.

Lapping the computer room in record time until the inevitable happens

They didn't create a virtual chair race instead?

Bummer!

Akamai: We stopped record DDoS attack in Europe

/.

The /. effect has evolved. When all devices are secured^(*) then we only have to worry about everybody wanting to see the same thing at the same time.

^(*)_{Yeah, that'll happen when hell freezes over and pigs fly and monday falls on a sunday, all at the same time.}