Posts by Martin Summers

This won't end well. Microsoft's AI boffins unleash a bot that can generate fake comments for news articles

Bit rich this article taking a negative slant on bots and article comments sections when El Reg happily let several post crap on a regular basis. I've always argued that they must be complicit in their operation as no other site would allow what is basically spam. If amanfrommars was actually coherent it would be mildly entertaining. We are actually already at the stage where the other bots like Cliff do occasionally reply to him. Whomever is operating them must be having great fun watching people (mainly, probably only me) getting wound up about them posting here or better still replying to them thinking they're real people.

All that said. It would be nice once and for all just to know who is behind amanfrommars and friends and whether we are as commentards being experimented on. Might make a fascinating article!

YouTuber charged loads of fans $199 for shoddy machine-learning course that copy-pasted other people's GitHub code

Make money from machine learning? Well he wasn't lying about that was he. He just didn't mention it would only be him making it.

Behold the perils of trying to turn the family and friends support line into a sideline

Re: Right cable, wrong hole.

Have you considered he may have gone blind in the many intervening years since Win XP was released?

Larry Ellison tiers Amazon a new one: Oracle cloud gets 'always' free offer, plus something about Linux

It's Oracle, will probably be OK until it needs support. Wouldn't touch the commercial wares of that company by choice even for free.

Justice served: There is no escape from the long server log of the law

It was nowhere near subtle enough

Poor trolling effort, 1 out of 10 from me.

Like a grotty data addict desperately jonesing for its next fix, Google just can't stop misbehaving

"I wouldn't be happy with some company installing cameras in house to watch me, either, even if they never otherwise harmed me by doing so. Would you?"

No! Because that's very bloody different! Jeez. I've given up commenting on this topic because this single post demonstrates that people cannot distinguish between someone knowing 'private' information from their online persona and the real life real world you.

"Other sites I visited also showed me dishwasher related ads. In the end, I installed a Pi-Hole server on my network and blocked about 2.5 million tracking and advertising domains (Facebook, for example, has something over 1,500 domains just for tracking and serving advertising)."

Wow, you went to a lot of effort just because you were being shown adverts for dishwashers!

Whatever happened to just ignoring adverts if they weren't relevant?

Re: Not once have I been harmed by them having access to my data

"How do you know that the price you've paid for something or the choice of goods and services you've been offered or the political messages you've seen haven't been influenced?"

I shop around, I rarely buy anything that has been advertised to me, not sure why I'd pay more just because I use Googles services. How much I pay for something is how much I'm willing to pay.

As for political views, I'm quite firm on those and have a bigger problem if I'm easily influenced by an advert I saw online.

So still nothing that scares me here. No detrimental impact. As for your last comment about information not being used exclusively for my benefit. What examples do you have of Googles data on me not being used for my benefit? More so in a way that could harm me. I've not seen any results of that in my life at all so far.

Re: I just cannot see what the actual issue is

"Google, and the rest, are making BILLIONS out of you, and you are getting nothing for it,"

But I don't care that they're making billions out of me. It's not like I can do it myself is it. I also am getting something for it, I choose to use their services.

I don't care what private information they have on me because unless they're going to physically turn up in my life and cause trouble then I'm not bothered. They're not a mafia!

Totally understand where you're coming from on not being tracked if you don't use their services, I still don't see real world harm though.

"There is a not insignificant body of evidence to suggest that more than a few recent elections/polls were heavily influenced by people leveraging this data."

I would say if people are that easily influenced then that's the real problem. They could be influenced IRL just as easily as online. I believe they are called swing voters and that problem is greater for society than online advertising/tracking.

Look, I hate to be the one who comments here and says this. I just cannot see what the actual issue is and what I'm meant to be afraid of. I've used Google and Gmail for many many years. Not once have I been harmed by them having access to my data. I've not suffered any untoward consequences online or in the real world. I really don't understand the bogeyman stories. I'm getting a free service and yes advertisers know probably more about me than my wife, do I care about that? No not really. In the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter to me. So someone tell me what I'm actually meant to be afraid of, give me a really compelling reason, real demonstratable harm that shows why I should stop using Googles services and I will.

PS: If I'm just going to get down voted and no factual answers to my genuine question then that's not really very helpful. If you just have an irrational hate of Google then fair enough just don't take it out on me.

Royal Navy seeks missile-moving robots for dockyard drudgery

Wouldn't dare trying to scratch anything on to the luggage...

The time a Commodore CDTV disc proved its worth as something other than a coaster

Re: And as for following simple instructions

Would love to know what valid reason they gave for that. I know some users don't like touching things themselves but a power socket is hardly complicated looking equipment. I'd have asked to speak to someone more senior and told them exactly what kind of trouble was being caused by their none compliance.

Re: One wonders

Internet connected Hi-fi, you could say they were ahead of their time.

Devon knows how they make it so steamy: Phantom squatter of Torquay curls one out on bloke's motor

Re: Made a log of the incident!

Your 7 year anniversary of registering is tomorrow. You've made 17 posts in that time. You just got yours in before mine. What kind of luck is that for me! Happy Anniversary for tomorrow anyway :-)

"Devon and Cornwall Police have made a log of the incident."

Which was quite easy since it was ready made for them!

Despite billions in spending, your 'military grade' network will still be leaking data

Re: Could a group be set up just for the bots to talk to each other?

The fact that they're all allowed to just roam around here and post gibberish without their posts being deleted or accounts created, leads me to believe we are being experimented on by El Reg. They've been around for ages and not many places would tolerate bot spam, so I can only assume they're complicit in it.

I couldn't possibly tell you the computer's ID over the phone, I've been on A Course™

Re: He should be proud that of that guy

"Oh dear. One of the Ivory Tower brigade. The up-my-own-arse sort who thinks they are more important than the people they serve."

No Simon. I am most certainly not. IT is a service and users keep me in a job. Like any service, you have absolutely no right to to walk all over the person delivering it. That includes disturbing a team doing a job in their office, trying to help users who've taken the time to put tickets in or are calling in whilst the actual issue is visible on screen.

1. Diving in to an IT office to tell someone your problems out of the blue and take up their time and attention when they are more than likely busy.

2. Telling an IT Support person walking to and from jobs or generally around site your IT issues you must raise with them because it's so important you couldn't call or put a ticket in, expecting them to remember all the details when others like you have done the same to them on the same journey.

3. Telling a support person your IT issues whilst they're sitting there eating their dinner having down time.

Doing any of those make you a self important 'better than those that serve you' kind of person. If you disagree with that then that says a lot about you.

Re: He should be proud that of that guy

"aim your ire at our former IT guys please"

If your assertion is correct then fair enough. However I shall never aim my ire at any IT guy. We have to stick together!

Normally the preferred way of raising support tickets is to not raise support tickets. Ok I jest. However, users be aware, unless we invite you, the IT department is off limits and not to be wandered in to whenever you feel like it to raise an issue (normally while we are really busy). Either we come to you, or you call or raise a ticket. Also, don't get telling us stuff you want or need or all your IT problems while we are walking around site, or better still whilst eating our lunch.

Felt like getting that off my chest.

Re: He should be proud that of that guy

"support tickets were generally raised by simply wandering over to the IT area and having a face to face chat with whoever was in at the time"

Oh god you're one of them...

TalkTalk's voice-over is writing speeds that its text can't match: Ad pulled from broadcast

Re: Advertising Standards Authority alerter

Jamie, there are no words...

Re: Advertising Standards Authority alerter

Thankfully there's no suggestion Rich actually uses TalkTalk. I'd be quite upset if I discovered any Reg reader is a TalkTalk subscriber!

US soldier cleared of taking armoured vehicle out for joyride – because he's insane, court says

Never mind the vehicle, more on the flying unauthorised to Iraq and back please!

Trump blinks again in trade war bluff-fest with China: Huawei gets another 90-day stay of US import execution

Yes, it does.

"Do you think Motorola (also Chinese owned) are dodgy and should you give them all of the UK's emergency service comms?"

I didn't actually know they were Chinese owned now, so in answer to your questions then yes probably and no I don't (mostly on the strength that their phones are crap). Besides I don't think it's as fruitful for a state to spy on our emergency services compared to being hidden in a core government network. Huawei also have very different heritage.

I do think Huawei could be dodgy and I wouldn't have them in the core of a critical network. However the longer these extensions are granted the more I'm realising there's not actually a security threat with what they're banning or they'd cut them dead immediately and stick by it. Someone above made a good point about pissing off the manufacturing outsource base of your country. With the best will in the world Trump isn't going to get that replicated anywhere else, let alone within the USA. So it's a very dangerous game of chicken now.

It will never be safe to turn off your computer: Prankster harnesses the power of Windows 95 to torment fellow students

Re: BOFH potential for sure

"I hate it when people think that they have the right to go and wreak havoc on someone else's computer and find that funny."

At school especially is where probably many including me cut their teeth in terms of PC's being networked, the Internet and the weird and wonderful things you could do on it at the time. I was naive and didn't know I was doing potential harm by downloading a trojan horse disguised as a sheep screensaver. No clue, didn't occur to me. To me it was fun to watch someone wonder why on earth the CD tray was opening or messages popping up in their screen. Do you know what too? It hadn't even occurred to the school IT department that there were nasties out there, no security software, no GPO's, no firewalls and no way of filtering dodgy stuff. That was the brave new world back then and its where people learned not only about what was possible, they learned from their mistakes. I got pulled up at school by the head of IT who'd somehow caught me trying to DoS the ISDN gateway of the school ISP. If he had been as unforgiving as you are then I'd probably have had a very different life after being suspended or expelled from school (which I was told had been a possibility). These days people don't get those chances to make mistakes and learn, I dread to think how many people out there work in IT now that actually don't know what they're doing. Trainee doctors are let loose on patients and may even sometimes make the wrong decision about their treatment until its reviewed. We've no equivalent really in IT as everything is locked down and secure. I miss those days gone where I really got to learn, I do relish having the experience.

Truckers, prepare to lose your jobs as UPS buys into self-driving tech

We saw the casualties from self driving cars and thought that was bad. Now imagine the smear on the road that these things will make as they trundle over a victim.

They haven't even got the 'play God' algorithm for self drive cars yet, how the hell would a truck have chance to decide who dies out of a child, elderly person, person with a pram etc etc?

I love my technology but as I get older I get more cynical and this is one of those occasions where I'd prefer meat behind the wheel now and forever rather than circuits.

Quick question, what the Hull? City khazi is a top UK tourist destination

Re: You definitely need to see

"Is there an entrance fee?"

Normally you have to spend a penny.

If bigger seats and nicer nosh in British Airways' First Class still aren't enough, would sir like to wear some VR goggles?

Re: USB charger

While the rich are stuck in the VR world they aren't asking for expensive champagne refills and bothering the crew. It's a good investment. Cattle class will similarly probably soon get drip fed sedatives/legal highs, so they too don't bother the stewards and they can have one person looking after them all.

Here's to beer, without which we'd never have the audacity to Google an error message at 3am

My excuse with Googling something to fix a technical issue is that I'm an expert at doing it. It's not cheating, because you have to understand what you're doing and the context of the issue to implement the fix. This as well as understanding what the fix will do and whether it is appropriate and it's impact on everything else.

Sometimes trying to find something sensible amongst the thousands of pages of misleading information and wrong answers on technical forums is like digging for gold and a skill in itself.

1Gbps, 4K streaming, buffering a thing of the past – but do Brits really even want full fibre?

Someone who gets it rg287. It's not about the speed necessarily. It's about the creaking infrastructure and kicking the can down the road until that infrastructure is completely shot and the investment money was spent trying to shove more signal down it.

Never mind what speed it can give you or what you can use it for. Full fibre to the home gives you the potential for use we haven't comprehended yet and the reliability we need right now. It also gives people who have to put up with almost nothing in terms of speed right up to where they should be in this day and age.

I remember as a kid seeing the work crews laying ComTel cable round by where I lived and the Herculean effort it took to cable up an entire estate, actually as it happens fairly quickly. All we need is a repeat of that effort on a national scale and we are set.

Virgin Media's Project Lightning now at 1.8m connections. Just 2.2m to go before year's end, right?

Re: 1Gb+

When you're talking about sharing one Internet pipe between multiple 1gbps or even 100mbps connected devices then that point is not applicable. Also plenty of consumer stuff is gbps capable now including wireless access points.

My experience of Virgin was that of a 6 lane motorway with 5 lanes shut. I moved to 'slower' DSL years ago and never looked back. I also don't get bill increases mid year either. They're doing a BT and sweating the copper assets, which I don't blame them for in a way but surely with the relatively new ducting they have across their service areas its got to be easier for them to pull fibre to their existing customers than it is for BT. It's just backwards thinking to concentrate on copper now.

This is not the cloud you're looking for.... Oracle's JEDI mind tricks work as Trump forces $10bn IT project to drop out of warp

Being involved with Oracle in any way feels like your throat is being choked continuously whilst money is taken from your pocket.

Oh wait, that sounds like being mugged!

BOFH: Oh, go on, let's flush all that legacy tech down the toilet

Re: Just asking ....

Well he was coherent for a change (then ruined it further down). The AI thought it was a statement The Register was making on its website, it didn't realise the context was a fictional story. It would have been funny if it had mentioned GDPR though.

I'd rather the spam stopped now though, between him Cliff and I.Gellar they're all getting a bit tiresome.

UK taxpayers funded Grand Theft Auto V maker to tune of £42m – while biz paid no corp tax and made billions

Re: The FIFTH sequel?!

London, Vice City and San Andreas are themed spin offs rather than the main series.

UK digital network Openreach takes 15 electric vans for a spin

""I was particularly interested in the battery life and how that would last. So far there have been no issues, with a full charge easily enabling me to easily do a full day of work."

Well I don't have to fill my car up every single day with diesel. Come back to me when I don't need to charge every day and also when you've solved the issue of charging my electric vehicle outside a terraced house with on street parking.

Hey, Windows Insiders! Sorry about that whole 20H1 build thing. Won't happen again – honest

It's quite obvious really. If you don't want surprises and you don't want things to break then don't bloody join an insider beta test ring!

Saying that, it admittedly hasn't stopped them breaking things in builds that are full release. Still if you sign up for beta testing then you are guaranteed to get more of the same, it's part of the deal.

Oh no, Twitter's gone down. How can we get the word out? Ah yeah, that's right. We have a website that works

Re: Something is technically wrong. Thanks for noticing

Why should they apologise? You're not paying to access it.

SQL Server 2008 finally shuffles into the home for retired relational databases

Re: AnzoGraph DB

There's another one called Cliff who hangs around with amanfrommars and replies to his comments.

Re: AnzoGraph DB

He's one of about 3 AI bots that hang around the comments section.

You're all replying to an AI bot. There's a few of them on the comments section.

Jodrell Bank goes full UNESCO while Dundee awaits the decomissioners

Re: crowdfunding

I thought there might be a page. It's for substantially less than the cost of keeping it open. I would like to know whether they would actually keep the place open or not if enough was raised before I donated. I wouldn't want the University appropriating the funds raised for something else either.

How about El Reg you head up a crowdfunding page for the Dundee station (if there isn't already one). If we manage to raise the money between us all it could be renamed in honour of Lester Haines and the special projects Bureau. Maybe someone better at acronyms than me could suggest one for it consisting of LESTER? I know Extraterrestrial and Research could fit in there somewhere!

Worth a try? Nothing to lose? If there's more than 383,000 readers and we all gave a quid it could work.

By the way, I wouldn't suggest anyone else but The Register set this up unless they have a bone fide connection with the station.

King's College London breached GDPR by sharing list of activist students with cops

Re: Only monarchy fans allowed, then ?

"I would not go that far, that would require god to be literate, which I doubt he is ... if he exists ..."

Ooh dear, someone's going to be straight on to you about assuming God is male!

Oh wait... That's me.

I got 502 problems, and Cloudflare sure is one: Outage interrupts your El Reg-reading pleasure for almost half an hour

Re: Is El Reg

Well it seems these issues have only been happening since El Reg moved to using them. I think it's just so popular they keep knocking Cloudflare over. </end brown nosing>

Samsung tears wraps off Bixby Marketplace, tens of people go wild. (One at the back whispers, 'Siri, what's Bixby?')

Re: This news will make three people very happy

I play whack a mole with Samsung, disabling the services every time they push an update. Still wakes up when I mistakenly brush the button. Does my fruit. Its the only thing I hate about the S9.

Poetic justice: Mum funnels £100 into claw machine to win single Dumbo teddy for her kid

It's been nearly 20 years since I briefly had to look after arcade machines. The grabbers were set to whatever 'payout' setting the venue wanted. It's fairly obvious that you're not just going to get a toy for aiming in the right direction once or twice. The only complaints I had to deal with were when the toy had managed to get stuck just over the chute, which was fair enough. I don't think I ever encountered anyone stupid enough to think they weren't weighted in favour of the venue in some way. This is up there with the uncertainty whether fruit machines have to pay out when they're full for some people though.

Always remember. The odds are always never in your favour.