Posts by Brewster's Angle Grinder

Fewer than 3 in 10 register for HMRC's Making Tax Digital shake-up

Re: On the 1752 date

And prior to 1750, the leap day was often the 24th Feb. (If I've got the date right.) With there being two days labelled 24th Feb in a leap year.

Don't you love calendars?

Britain's biggest nuclear site skips competition, hands SAP £33M to start ERP switch

Re: Cowards duped by salesmen

I think Birmingham's reply would be, "Don't use Oracle!"

Call your existing automation ‘zero-token architecture’ to become an instant agentic AI wiz

For a couple of years, I've been calling a set of regexes I wrote an AI. And people buy it.

(It's not entirely a lie, either, as regexes have their origin in work done by Kleene to "describe early artificial neural networks". They're just not LLMs.)

Anthropic: All your zero-days are belong to Mythos

Re: So that's the 'responsible disclosure' version....

Look at the costs and the tech it takes to train these models. Very few people can afford to do this or have access to enough of the right tech.

Maybe PRC. But maybe not. It depends on whether they really have trained their own LLMs or whether have just reverse engineered existing ones.

Claude Code source leak reveals how much info Anthropic can hoover up about you and your system

As I follow it, no. The usual browser sand-boxing applies and it will see only what you show it.

But, as always, if you start installing plugins and extensions then the rules change.

Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right

Re: I've got one of those

I don't think even AI's proponents would claim it's output is production ready. It might superficially work. Sometimes the nits are insignificant and would probably never cause a problem in the real world. But, more often than not, it contains steaming great holes.

Microslop stuffs AI photo restyling powers into OneDrive

Re: Change

People sometimes have nightmares about find themselves naked in public.

Now you can have nightmares about waking up and finding every photo of yourself have been nudified overnight by Copilot.

Country that put backdoors into Cisco routers to spy on world bans foreign routers

"Router makers can apply to the FCC to get on the approved list."

So it's a shakedown.

We tested Intel's new chips for cash-strapped hardcore PC users and they're impressive

Re: Binary Optimization Tool vs Signed Binaries

Presumably they are signed by Intel?

And Firefox and Chrome are moving targets. (But they are probably better optimised anyway.)

Microsoft publishes a workaround for Samsung's C:\ drive woes

And there were we thinking Sony had done something sophisticated, and not the windows equivalent of `chmod 000 /*`

icon ======================================>

Microsoft points at Samsung after Galaxy app bug locks users out of C:\

Re: I only take objection of Windows when...

Sometimes, there are files that will defy that. I managed to create a directory called ` '.` You read that right: a directory whose name is a space followed by an apostrophe followed by a dot. I had to turn off path validation - so `rmdir "\\?\path\ '."`

I've just failed to delete `C:` with `DeleteVolumeMountPoint`/`DefineDosDevice` on Win10.

So either it regressed. Or it must have some sort of driver or kernel-level component to make it happen. But maybe there is a way I haven't thought of.

Nvidia's DLSS 5 promises to bring you out the other side of the uncanny valley

Re: Wrong use of AI

"I used to have a deep dialogue tree with many branches. But then I took an arrow to the knee."

(Mines the mail tunic and cloak... --->)

AFRINIC accuses litigant of trying to ‘paralyse’ it

If Carlsberg did IP addresses...

Idle thoughts:

Currently talking to 172.16.8.3:2223 might mean you're talking to 172.16.8.3:192.168.6.76:1912 That's working. And the difference between ports and hosts has turned out to be unimportant.

So, if I was going to extend the address space, maybe the best way to do it would be to add a "subport" field; i.e. extend the address to the right. So the first 32 bits of the address are the global machine identifier and the rest is a "locally significant identifier". So 172.16.0.1.0:80 means talk to port "0,80" on 172.16.0.1.

Notationally, a fifth dot indicates the new protocol, and missing components to the right are assumed to be zero (out to whatever max size is deemed appropriate). So the gateway can scale to it's need. But conceptually, all we've done is extend the port size. So 256 gateways can be replaced with one.

Sure, it would bake in some of the problems IPv4 has and can't do half the fancy things IPv6 can. But it could solve some of the problems - like port churn. If a gateway wants, it can give you a permanent "locally significant identifier" for a certain type of connection. And things behind the gateway can carry on using IPv4. Most notably, a public facing host has the same address for both protocols.

Of course this is never going to happen. It was just an intellectual exercise.

Nanny state discovers Linux, demands it check kids' IDs before booting

Re: Next, they'll ban people with an address

Yeah, I always thought naming it after Scunthorpe left Penistone hard done by.

Re: Comparing fruits

Same.

Playboy and smutty VHSes are nothing like the hardcore material PornHub et al can supply 24/7.

Usenet and early BBS are nothing like the addictive algorithms of TikTok, Facebook, etc...

It's like equating a drop of water with an ocean.

Re: Would any of these dipshits like to suggest...

They don't solve problems. They just write laws. And if you are caught breaking those laws, then the problem is yours.

Re: Next, they'll ban people with an address

I believe this is called the Scunthorpe problem.

Flying cabs, next-gen aircraft cleared for takeoff in 26 states

Re: Maybe

"Fixed wing aircraft can glide to the ground"

This F15 begs to differ.

LibreOffice learns to speak Markdown in version 26.2

What have you tried? I was googling to see if the file format was documented anywhere and there are tools kicking around.

"Most news sites would be insane to allow outbound link tags"

The Guardian does.

(And, IIRC, you don't get HTML here till you get your bronze badge.)

Re: Parkinsons Laws

That corollary is generally referred to as "bikeshedding", after Parkinson's example.

UK government's Shared Services Strategy is entering the danger zone

Why not do it bottom up? Find two similar departments, tell them to buddy up and merge their IT services and processes. Rinse and repeat. Or like, MoD, focus on consolidating internal systems. But, not tying to do too much at once.

Re: Ahhhhh

Sopra Steria clearly thinks it's so blatant there is a good legal case.

AI agents now help attackers, including North Korea, manage their drudge work

"I see you're trying to launder money. Would you like some help with that?"

US state laws push age checks into the operating system

"Is an owner of every tiny forum supposed to monitor their content?"

If it's a tiny forum, it shouldn't be a problem. I get an email to my phone every time someone comments on mine so I can check.

Re: How bizarre

Router OSes is clearly a red herring and not what was intended. But I'm not sure Linux distros are too small to be excluded, especially the big ones.

US struck Iran with copies of its own drones

I'll have what she's having

"We find it difficult to believe that the US couldn't have developed its own one-way attack drone, so perhaps it was just more cost-effective to copy what was already known to work?"

You hit the nail on the head there. The usual suspects would have charged $billions and it would have ended up including a holographic projector to disguise itself by the time everyone had had their say. Much easier to point at an existing model and say "give us some of them". The Iranians gave them the specification.

Firefox 149 beta develops a split personality

Re: They need to fix their profile bug

I'm not aware of the details. But it's sound like there is a switch to do exactly that.

The authors of version x can never be sure what the authors of version x+n might decide to do and how features it doesn't understand might impact the meaning of what it does understand. Downgrading is not a common use case, either. So you can understand why this is "at your own risk".

Britain's creaking courts to use Copilot for transcriptions

AI is becoming "she, who must be obeyed".

UK copper fired after faking keyboard taps using photo frame

Re: Performance measurement

Sometimes you just have to play them at their own game.

DVSA drives up online theory test contract value to £700M with no explanation

A good chaps system is great till bad chaps invade

Deferment leaves you with an empty slot that you're unlikely to be able to book at short notice if the system is working and everybody who wants a test has one booked already.

Allowing an instructor to sort this out by swapping between pupils helped the system run smoothly for a long time. I presume it all went to pot during lockdown. And then the scalpers smelt a money making opportunity.

"Minster, good news! We got a very good deal on driving tests.

"Unfortunately, candidates will have to take a flight to Melbourne to sit them."

Altman: You think AI is wasted energy? Try raising 100 billion humans

Re: Hey, look over there ...

Sorry, I'll only look over there if it's a three-headed monkey.

"And [GPUs] do break a lot, still."

And they'll break even more, when exposed to cosmic rays.

UK council faces data breach claim after mishandling trans complaints

Re: Soooo

"Assuming there was no onward disclosure"

Like forwarding them to the political campaign group the "Free Speech Union"...?

That's why I had option (a).

But they are her lawyers, not the court; I don't see any problem with redacting information they shouldn't see. She could add a note explaining what she had done, pending the arrival of correctly redacted documents from the council.

Or, better yet, as they are her lawyers, she could seek legal advice from them on how to best handle it...

The responsible thing would have been either to (a) wait for fresh copies properly redacted by the council, or (b) redact them herself. But certainly not further disseminate information she clearly knew was private.

SerpApi says Google is the pot calling the kettle black when it comes to scraping

Digital Enclosure acts

It's less piracy than digital colonialism (or a digital enclosures acts). We can turn up and claim resources used by nomadic hippies. But we then in put place property laws / digital fences that prevent others stealing what we have stolen.

HMRC spares 661 from Making Tax Digital as rollout nears

We will save time by making you do more work.

Your AI-generated password isn't random, it just looks that way

Randomness just means unpredictable

By your argument, a pack of cards can never be shuffled in a way that's "truly random", because they never produce a repeated symbol.

As I note above, banning repeated symbols is not an efficient way to encode your randomness---for the same entropy you need a much longer password---but it could still be perfectly random and achieve the same entropy as in an encoding which permits repetition.

Part of the trouble, here, is that good definitions of randomness are hard to come, and it's quite feasible to get very predictable strings to pass the statistical tests for randomness.

Re: Can I hear from an actual expert?

You're right that, if you're generating an n-character password from an alphabet of size s, your naive entropy has gone from s^n to s!-(s-n)!.

But clearly, you've blown a lot of entropy by doing that (I can't be bother to work out how much.) And do you really think the AI is shuffling the alphabet using a cryptographically secure source of randomness and then giving you the first n characters, rather than gently jiggling a pattern it's learnt?

Re: Kinda obvious...

Let's hope everybody locks accounts after n failed attempts to log in. (For small values of n.)

Keir Starmer declares 'months' timeline for social media age clampdown in UK

But everybody would rather campaign against it, full stop, rather than campaign to have it happen in a sensible way.

Re: Limit VPNs how exactly?

I imagine, any VPN offering services in the UK will be required to do age verification. If not, you're blocked* (and prosecuted if you have a legal presence in the UK).

* A DNS block I imagine.

River project swims against the Wayland tide with modular window management

Re: When it gets to the point where you can use 'export DISPLAY=remotebox.lan:0.0' let me know

"ONE RIDICULOUSLY GARGANTUAN FLAW in Wayland's basic design...missing the split between client and server that allows you to run the client on one piece of hardware, and the UI on another, over a regular network connection"

I'm old enough to have done that. And old enough to remember the CPU did all the graphics calculations and the memory in your video card was only slightly faster than main memory. Modern machines have a very different architecture. You're asking people to more-or-less switch off GPU acceleration (modulo bodged hacks to get some of that performance back) just for a niche use case.

GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability

If you're going to be like that, five 9s could be 0.0099999%

DWP considers chatbot work coaches as AI-fueled job losses loom

Re: Mass Dickensian destitution inbound?

The unemployed are required to do 35hrs per week of applying for jobs that are all but guaranteed to reject them (and all of whom are swamped with applications). So that's bordering on the digital workhouse.

Bots are taking over the internet and AI users are to blame

Re: Humanity writing its own epitaph

"Aye. Not strapping into a yoke and pulling the plough themselves, but using a horse to do the work?! Plain lazy! And that's most folk."

Not yet. Give it time.