Posts by ChrisElvidge

HPE to pursue $4B claim against estate of Mike Lynch over Autonomy acquisition

Re: Puzzled Experts

Look at what happens in (land) tornadoes - house demolished next to another house hardly touched.

Big Tech: Malaysia won't let us set our own rules and that's not fair and makes us grumpy

Or Malaysia to tell Musk (and the rest, possibly) to fuck off - a la Brazil

Microsoft Bing Copilot accuses reporter of crimes he covered

Re: "The public prosecutor's office had rejected criminal charges"

They seem to have forgotten the maxim that 'better that a criminal should go free, rather than an innocent be jailed'.

Microsoft mistake blows up admins' inboxes with fake malware alerts

Re: M$=spam

I've regularly found messages from Microsoft in my spam box on the Outlook server. Unfortunately these are not progressed to my POP3 client..

Microsoft closes Windows 11 upgrade loophole in latest Insider build

Upgrades?

It's about time that their biggest customers (Business and Government) get together and tell Microsoft to stop pissing about with unnecessary hardware requirements and fix all the bugs in current release(s).

Forced binning of capable hardware should be a crime.

Ubuntu 24.04.1 will be late, but fresher kernels are coming

Slackware

Current generally updates to the latest stable kernel about 24 hours after release.

Windows 11 Insider preview brings new Sandbox features and fatter FAT32

fat32format

I've used fat32format.exe since 2012 - https://www.fat32format.com

AI chatbots amplify creation of false memories, boffins reckon – or do they?

US Police allowed to lie?

If the police are allowed to lie in interviews, why should chatbots be prevented from doing the same?

Say 'ahhhh' – AI robots are now gunning for your gums

Optical coherence technology (OCT) scans the patient's mouth using a handheld intraoral scanner,

So this new AI has hands, too?

Japan mandates app to ensure national ID cards aren't forged

Mobile app

"If all goes according to plan, the app should be ready for general release in late August."

Another example of horse/stable door. Why was the "app" not part of the initial specification?

Malaysia is working on an internet 'kill switch', says minister

Kill switch?

Does an "internet kill switch" kill the whole of the internet or just (anti)social media?

Banking transactions (for e.g.) traverse the internet, don't they?

Secure Boot useless on hundreds of PCs from major vendors after key leak

TracFone has agreed to pay the FCC $16 million to end investigations

This has to stop. Ending the investigation before a proper conclusion has been reached obviates the investigation. When do we find out what went wrong? Who gets the money? $16M is not exactly peanuts. Who at TracFone (Vodaphone) will lose their jobs over this?

Kamala Harris's $7M support from LinkedIn founder comes with a request: Fire Lina Khan

Re: Incumbent Joe Biden stepped aside :o

They are all a bunch of Autocrats, they all want to be in a position of dominance. The current bunch of democrats^w politicians are truly shameful, they are the porrsest selection of politicuans that I have ever seen.

'A moose hit me' and other ways people damage their gizmos

Of course

you could always drop it off a North Sea ferry.

Study shock! AI hinders productivity and makes working worse

Am I missing something here?

"Half of respondents were C-suite execs, a quarter worked full time and the remained were freelancers."

So three-quarters of the responders didn't work full time?

Malware crew Stargazers Goblin used 3,000 GitHub accounts to make bank

ChatGPT

I wonder whether these accounts have been ingested by OpenAI/Microsoft into ChatGPT data.

CrowdStrike blames a test software bug for that giant global mess it made

Re: Automation....

Can you blame them a third time?

For advising keeping your Bitlocker keys in their cloud.

SpaceX asks the FAA: 'Can we launch our rockets again, please?'

Nominal

WTF is a nominal landing?

South Korea orders 'Star Wars' lasers to blast Northern drones out of the sky

Strange winds they have in Korea?

In the South they blow North and in the North they blow South?

Founder of Indian ride-share biz Ola calls for 70-hour work week

What! 20 hours a day

whipping the underlings to produce his salary.

I wonder how many hours per day Mrs Sunak works to get her millions.

Brit council gives Oracle another £10M for professional services amid ERP fallout

As I've said before

This is what we want. You'll get paid when you produce it - *working*.

Oracle releases experimental next-gen kernel build

Re: Btrfs

We had ReiserFS some years ago. Pity no-one picked it up after the great imprisonment.

We've banned Chinese telco kit and drones. Next: Mountain bikes?

Re: "its fleet of DJI drones"

I presume it's the software that is seen as a problem. Couldn't the geniuses in the various intelligence agencies find a way to reverse engineer and then replace the included software?

So much for green Google ... Emissions up 48% since 2019

Ask AI how to reduce emissions

AI says "Switch us off."

Switzerland to end 2024 with an analog FM broadcast-killing bang

Re: The fundamental issue with DAB

IMHO the main issue is the amount of power the receivers use. 4xD cells in DAB radios they last days, in FM radios they last weeks.

CISA director: US is 'not afraid' to shout about Big Tech's security failings

Shout about security failings

How about "We'll pay the bills when your product(s) actually deliver!"

Guess how much stored data is ever used or accessed

Windrush

And then there's the unused data the Home Office deleted referencing the "Windrush generation". Seems it would have been better to keep it after all.

BT chief blames regulations for UK lagging in next-gen network rollout

Telegraph poles

https://www.theguardian.com/money/article/2024/jun/04/internet-provider-brsk-has-blocked-our-homes-view

"It will come as a surprise to many that telegraph poles do not need planning permission, and councils and residents are, indeed, powerless to stop them."

But digging the road up requires permission from the council. Which method will suppliers favour?

Can AI models trained on human speech help us understand dogs?

Do dogs from different countries bark differently?

Are they looking at Mexican dogs with an LLM trained on English?

Do they assume all dogs bark in the same language?

Microsoft Research chief scientist has no issue with Windows Recall

Locality

So Recall is a feature which captures information. It's a local Windows functionality, nothing goes into the cloud, everything's stored locally."

Until MS decide everything goes into the cloud.

Meta algorithms push Black people more toward expensive universities, study finds

I'd like Meta, and all other "social media" to turn off algorithmic delivery of everything. It has been shown (no references) that it makes (e.g.) people researching suicide are shown more pages advocating suicide.

UK may not hit goal of 95% mobile coverage, commons committee warns

Roaming

At home, two 'phones, same model. Lebara SIM gets 4G, 3 SIM gets only 3G.

To solve the problem with 4G/3G, OFCOM should mandate cost-free roaming to (an)other network if 4G not available.

Alternatively, mast sharing. Masts run by a central authority (see TV masts). Networks rent space on masts.

The Canon Cat – remembering the computer that tried to banish mice

Lotus had Symphony for MS-DOS - combined spreadsheet, word processor, database.

Used it extensively in the early '80s on Apricot computers.

AI chip sales predicted to jump by a third this year – then cool off

When will Gartner be replaced by LLM?

Gartner projects that every single enterprise PC sold in 2026 will be an AI PC

Does this depend on every manufacturer making only "AI PCs"?

Parliamentarians urge next UK govt to consider ban on smartphones for under-16s

"Social media" age limits

The problem is not smart phones, it is social media and their algorithms. If the lower age for kids to use social networking is 13 (by their own conditions), turn it into law and prosecute if it can be shown that they allow under-13s onto their site. It only takes one.

By 2030, software developers will be using AI to cut their workload 'in half'

Who changed the code?

"Ashley, the developer in 2030, arrives in the office and immediately notices that some code has changed since yesterday,"

and immediately tries to find out who did what overnight. Where's the change notification?

Bing and Copilot fall from the clouds around the world

Massive fines?

Is now the time to start handing out massive fines to companies who make (or try to make) their offerings an essential to running our businesses (lives) when their offering stops working?

No more licence conditions restricting damages to the 'cost' of the software licence. After all, hardware deemed unsuitable/unsafe at the point of sale can entail large fines.

UK law gives green light to self-driving cars from 2026

Re: Just make sure that it is painted black and the person on it is wearing dark clothes at night

At least they won't get run over by a snow plough.

Microsoft Build 2024 looks like it's more about AI fluff than developer stuff

Re: Fluff

Isn't fluffing something to do with the pron industry?

Alleged $100M dark-web drug kingpin, 23, arrested

Oxycodone

Mild opioid?

See: Dopesick

Slack tweaks its principles in response to user outrage at AI slurping

Industry standard?

"Slack has industry-standard platform-level machine learning models to make the product experience better for customers"

where "industry standard" means "slurp everything"

Aghast iOS users report long-deleted photos back from the dead after update

File recovery

I overwrite a file with random data (e.g. with dd) and then rename the file with a randomly generated filename.

I then delete the file.

Question: can the original file be recovered?

With Asmi 24.04, Ubuntu's never looked so snappy (without the Snaps)

Nimbus

Nimbus theme has decent sized borders.

Brexit border system outage puts perishable goods transport in peril

Re: Common market

And that was the problem. We voted to join the Common Market, and joined the European Union by osmosis.

Re: Blue passports

My new one seems to be almost black IMHO, not the nice blue they used to be before red-ish. C.f Croatia.

Google thinks AI can Google better than you can

Re: Hidden variables revealed

Wasn't that the attraction of the original, amateur beach volleyball?

Grils, b00bs, skimpy 'clothing'.

Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ here at last with a $12 price tag

Re: At last!

Or do as I do. Put the main filesystem on a USB connected SATA drive (Pi <4). That way SD card only gets written when an upgrade includes the boot files - rarely.

Cops developing Ghostbusters-esque weapon to take out e-bike thugs

Re: Because you don't want to accidentally brick a Tesla

No. You only have to be licensed if you want to do it legally. Crooks are not known for respecting the law.

Brit publishers beg Apple not to hurt online ad revenue

AdBlock Plus

"The browser tool is supposed to provide users with a way to remove unwanted portions of web pages – whether those are ads or other content."

Element Hiding Helper for AdBlock Plus already does that (on my system) (+ PiHole obviously).

Nvidia PUE-PUEs datacenter efficiency ratings, calls for application-specific metrics

"The argument effectively boils down to: datacenter metrics should take into account how effectively a facility is able to convert watts into work "

But shouldn't that be "convert watts into _useful_ work"?

Is AI training really useful? Is slurping all that user data useful?