Posts by Ken Hagan

The UK government isn't spending much taxpayer cash on X

Clearly you missed the bit about "believes" in the post you were replying to and the Hansard quotes further up.

Were telcos tipped off to *that* ancient Telnet bug? Cyber pros say the signs stack up

In the current geopolitical climate, I think "shot down" is more likely to apply to an easily discoverable and easily hacked piece of infrastructure in a country you don't like.

So, while not disputing your many years of experience working with such systems, I'm left wondering whether this is still the case in 2026.

Re: Define use.

"nmap -sV -p 23 --script banner <my whole subnet>"

That would only pick up servers facing the LAN. That's quite different from running a telnet server that accepts connections from the WAN. (There are roughly a million times fewer people in a position to exploit it, for one thing.)

Re: So a low powered "AI" bot

Because no human thought to ask it?

Alternatively, how do you know it didn't? All we really know is that nobody said anything if it did.

Microsoft rolls out Windows 11 26H1, but you can't have it

Actually, the impression I get from the linked article is that it hasn't been rolled out to anyone yet. The hardware isn't on sale and presumably this build was developed on beta samples given to MS by the manufacturers.

Notepad's new Markdown powers served with a side of remote code execution

Re: Ode to Wordpad

And now we have LibreOffice and so Wordpad is not necessary. MS got that right, at least.

Re: the app's core ethos as a lightweight, fast, no-frills program…

So much so that MS should just have added support for UNIX-style line breaks to the standard edit control and let Notepad inherit that.

But what they are more likely to do now is add Coprolite support to that control and revert to the original Notepad implementation. Sigh...

Taiwan tells Uncle Sam its chip ecosystem ain't going anywhere

Re: China has no desire to destroy Taiwan.

Actually, asking a HK native to express an opinion would be rather unkind, don't you think. I mean, the world pretty much *has* ended for anyone who sticks their head above the parapet over there.

Microsoft boffins figured out how to break LLM safety guardrails with one simple prompt

Re: Again, is this "news"

"And as soon as you expect an AI to think for itself, to step outside its training data, or to understand the over-arching theme of some data that's not explicitly referenced in its training... it fails to do so. Because it's simply not capable of doing anything that isn't a simple statistical return value from its training data."

This appears to be exactly the case. A friend of mine recently asked an AI for some links to research papers on several subjects. Where research actually existed, the AI was sort of able to summarise it and provide genuine links. In other words, it was able to regurgitate some of its training data. Where no such research exists, it was confidently making shit up and generating URLs to papers that don't exist. I assume all that was statistically similar to the training data, but since the actual research didn't exist, there was no training data to regurgitate, so it just made shit up.

There is absolutely no intelligence here. If you ask a question, it *will* give an answer. If you then ask for references, it *will* provide some. If the references check out then congratulations, you have just used a flaky search engine to find a previously known result. If the refs don't check out, it probably means the answer was made up and isn't true.

Is the flaky search engine a useful thing? Well maybe. Is it worth $600,000,000,000? Ummm, can I get back to you on that?

Linus Torvalds keeps his ‘fingers and toes’ rule by decreeing next Linux will be version 7.0

Re: Not just Linux

And Windows 10 < Windows 7 because some muppets only bothered to compare the first 9 characters.

And no doubt there were also some fools who thought that Windows 95 (4.0) was older than WfW (3.11) because they only tested the minor version number.

Re: concussion ball?

To be fair, there is no way of running headlong into another person that doesn't come with a significant risk of injury to at least one of you. You either get injured by the padding or by the lack of it.

It's bubble or nothing for Google as search giant looks to plow ~$180B into datacenters this year

1) Um, no. The panels are the same efficiency (at least to start with) so they'll generate just as much waste heat as they would on Earth. What's different is the level of solar irradiation. Also, that irradiation is unfiltered by the atmosphere so I suspect the useful life of each panel will be significantly reduced.

2) I haven't read of any specific proposals for shedding the waste heat. Thermodynamics is a harsh mistress, but maybe Elon is exempt? (Or maybe he likes punishment?)

3) This is probably fair. If we are putting an entire data centre up there, we can probably get the surface area to volume ration down to a level where the lead shielding is proportionately low.

4) Call me skeptical, but except for satellites in exactly the same orbit, following each other around, the problem of pointing your transmitter at a 17,000mph target sounds quite challenging.

Three clues that your LLM may be poisoned with a sleeper-agent back door

Re: Smoke and mirrors

Nah. I'll stick with 1 + 2, thanks.

Amazon can't build AI capacity fast enough, throws another $200B at the problem

Re: *Pop* Go The Weasels

Exactly. This sounds like Amazon are just a little downstream of nVidia. They are spending squillions but as long as there is someone else downstream of them buying capacity, Amazon aren't (necessarily*) the mugs here.

(* Of course, these huge companies have divisions and it is possible, even likely, that one of the mugs is a different division of Amazon.)

Supermarket sorry after facial recognition alert flags right criminal, wrong customer

Re: Ban it

I'm pretty sure that your village store has for centuries been using facial recognition tech to ban customers. All the cameras do is scale it up to supermarket scale.

Of course, having recognised someone you do have to kick out that person rather than the one following and you do have to be willing to back up your ban criteria in court if challenged. But that's true in the village store, too.

Re: Riddle me this

Sounds like an easy game to win. Look up the ownership at Companies House. If it's a single-use company, don't give them the contract. If they aren't even registered at CH, don't give them the contract. If it's Fujitsu, don't give them the contract.

(That third rule is just me engaging in defensive programming, btw.)

Satya Nadella decides Microsoft needs an engineering quality czar

Re: Yay finally

Is it senior level though? Does the quality manager outrank the sales and marketing managers?

GitHub ponders kill switch for pull requests to stop AI slop

Very little to stop a banned sloperator from acquiring a new identity. Perhaps we should call it AI Spam rather than slop. People understand spam and recognise why dealing with it is Hard.

Broadcom 'bulldozes' VMware cloud partners as March deadline looms

Re: Why am I ashamed of my tribe ?

To expand, I mean just that people learn on smaller scale systems and if VMware have nothing in that space and everyone else has something then eventually VMware will be that big expensive thing that only a few greybeards know how to use.

Re: Why am I ashamed of my tribe ?

"The profits for the site is measured in millions per day, which makes both the cost of FT and the whole VMware licensing a rounding error."

I guess El Reg is a funny place, then. There would appear to be a number of such people in this forum in a similar position but the world is finite so I wonder if this is representative of the wider population. If Broadcom want to discard everyone else, that's their choice (but remember that it is in the nature of IT that the smaller cheaper stuff gets better so they may be locking out their own future) but surely there are lots of people who should just be migrating now?

Re: Why am I ashamed of my tribe ?

"some business applications are only certified to run on VMware"

We'll, either you have a serious vendor lock-in problem there or you should send an email to those vendors explaining that the additional costs of VMware will henceforth be added to every single quote they offer you in future and that you are looking for an alternative because you aren't made of money.

I'm not saying you have to dump them now. That would be unrealistic. You should, however, put them on notice. How hard can it be for them to test on a few other platforms?

Re: Have we reached the Stallman event horizon?

I think you are too late for that. The AIs have been trained on social media. Their grasp of reality, humanity and language is ... tenuous.

VirtualBox isn't really owned by Oracle, though. The basic product is FOSS and you don't need the Extension Pack that has the offensive licence.

Still, the OP mentioned "on Linux" and KVM is a reasonable choice there. You might choose VBox if you had to support similar VMs on a range of hosts, I suppose. (For a developer, the use-case of "try this VM on that host" is, perhaps, more common than for the cloud providers who are the unhappy folk in the original article.)

VS Code for Linux may be secretly hoarding trashed files

Re: This is why you shouldn't use Snap

Ah but you can only do that if you first download your developer's particular build system. Every package seems to have its own these days. Then you have to build that. It's turtles all the way down.

Re: Words Which Have No Meaning.......

In the context of this article, "deleted" simply means "no longer cluttering up this machine". There is, or certainly should be, support for that concept.

Next-gen nuclear reactors safe enough to skip full environmental reviews, says Trump admin

To be fair, Trump bears very little resemblance to most of the Republicans I've seen over the last half century (or for that matter most of the Democrats).

But yeah, adopting the "move fast and break things" mindset on nuclear projects probably isn't wise.

Microsoft's Sinofsky saw Surface fail coming – then hit up Epstein for advice on exit

Re: Indicted

I think you may be under-estimating the number of non-business users who hardly ever run non-MS apps, as well as the proportion of CPU time spent in OS-supplied libraries even when the app itself is not ported.

Re: Indicted

Don't forget the Ribbon, which still hasn't caught on outside of MS.

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

Re: Teenage boys will be salivating...

My car has just my eyes. If you use some of that Really Black paint, so that my headlights aren't reflected, then on a dark night I might be fooled.

To my knowledge, nobody has tried these kinds of adversarial attacks on human drivers. Perhaps we should, before setting an unrealistic bar for self-driving vehicles.

Agents gone wild! Companies give untrustworthy bots keys to the kingdom

Re: Long-term thinking?

Anyone putting an AI in charge of anything important is (a) reckless, and (b) legally and morally liable for all that it does.

The sooner we have case law backing this up, the better.

Birmingham City Council's Oracle ERP fiasco now £144M and still not working

Embarrassing for Oracle

I realise that Oracle can't really be blamed for this, but nevertheless when someone says "Oracle" I do immediately think "Brum going bust with a year's crap lying out in the streets".

Probably, because private sector entities have a natural ceiling, above which they go bust. Public sector orgs are much less likely to be declared bankrupt and much more likely to continue employing those responsible when they do.

How one developer used Claude to build a memory-safe extension of C

Re-inventing programming

"Now we not only have to be ourselves clear, but we have to communicate it clearly to an LLM."

Hmm. If only you had some king of special-purpose language designed for passing precisely specified requirements to a machine...

Of course, I suppose you'd need specially-trained people who knew how to use that language.

Concorde at 50: Twice the speed of sound, twice the economic trouble

Re: HS2 then

"But if you think 100 years ahead, high speed *will* become a thing."

Really? Compare modern transport tech with what was around 100 years ago and tell me that anyone in 1926 had any chance of foreseeing the needs of 1976, let alone 2026. No chance.

Surrender as a service: Microsoft unlocks BitLocker for feds

Re: How can you not use an MS account in Windows these days?

I set up a new Win11 box the other week and had no trouble avoiding the MS account. I doubt MS have any access to the machine but I suppose it is hard to be certain.

Oracle, Michael Dell, named as investors in JV that will run TikTok's US operations

Amusing to think that all this is being done in order that the business in a particular jurisdiction is controlled by someone who is subject to the local legal system.

It'll never catch on.

Ancient telnet bug happily hands out root to attackers

Re: Who still uses environment variables?

I think that's a little unfair. If the configuration is the sort of thing that could be constrained and verified, it is no worse than any other form of IPC. The problem here is "not validating user input" and not the route by which that input has arrived.

Anthropic CEO: Selling H200s to China is like giving nukes to North Korea

"The US currently leads in advanced semiconductor technology and export controls capitalize on the trend of computing power doubling every two years, so while US chip technology continues advancing, China's progress is slowed,"

Umm, the hardware is made in Taiwan using Dutch kit. It looks like whoever said this knows Jack Shit about the industry.

UK prime minister stares down barrel of ban on social media for kids

Re: Another brick in the wall

"I support banning politicians from social media."

I support banning government from social media.

Yes, people should be kept informed of what is happening, but using a medium that started with "dumb everything down and squeeze it into a hundred or so characters" (and hasn't evolved much since) is a really terrible idea.

UK backtracks on digital ID requirement for right to work

If they can make a an ID that is as well-authenticated as a passport for less money than a passport, I think a lot of passport holders will have a legitimate grievance.

If it isn't as good, well, maybe it isn't fit for purpose?

Re: I think it just means they aren't telling you the real reasons

"no one carrying a smartphone will have a good excuse why they can't show them"

The odds of a government sponsored app running on non-stock Android or another non-fruity phone OS are almost zero.

Ofcom keeps X under the microscope despite Grok 'nudify' fix

Re: There's no smoke without the fire

No-one said it was realistic. Maybe it is just like adult porn, only smaller. We wouldn't know, since none of us have seen the material in question.

"Turns out it was a switch"

Maybe.

So someone outside the UK asks Grok to create an image. Grok determines that the image would conflict with UK law. Grok generates the image anyway and (as is its wont) slaps it on X for public view. Is that image visible in the UK?

If so, the switch fails to address most of the complaints from campaigners.

If not, what if someone reposts it, which is obviously pretty straightforward for the person who generated it if they want to be a dick about it. Is it visible now?

If so, this also fails to address most of the complaints.

If not, it is rather more than a switch, since they've apparently wired X to support a "do not show to users in XYZ" feature and it is transitive.

Don’t bother with the retailer’s website, says Google: Gemini can shop for you

I believe Google are talking about "customised upselling" in what they say to sellers. Which of course means they are not on your side if you are the buyer.

Another case, if one were needed, of the dictum that if you aren't paying, you aren't the customer, you are the product.

Boffins probe commercial AI models, find an entire Harry Potter book

Re: Law?

You're thinking of Hammurabi's stele, aren't you, but I dare say there are other, more obscure, examples from those times.

OpenAI putting bandaids on bandaids as prompt injection problems keep festering

Re: Fixing vulnerabilities in an LLM is like...

Has the amanfrommars1 bot discovered the "post anonymously" checkbox? Well, I suppose it's progress of a sort.

Re: Idiots

Nobody is suggesting that they could do better. The nay-sayers are merely pointing out that the better the AI becomes at following instructions, the easier it becomes to trick it into doing something it shouldn't.

This is similar to a child who has never been exposed to bad people. It will learn. It will get better. But until it learns about Good and Evil, it would be stupid to put it in charge of anything important or to expose it to random members of the human race.

The current approach to AI involves adding guardrails. That is, adding traditional algorithmic code to make it sensible. We have 60-plus years of experience that tells us you can't create "sense" with a lot of if-statements. The failure of that approach is why modern AIs don't try to work that way. So we are trying to create guardrails with an approach that has 60 years of failure behind it.

How fucking stupid is that?

UK regulators swarm X after Grok generated nudes from photos

Re: Storm in a teacup

"No, we charge the perpetrator."

I think the point is that many people consider Grok's makers to be an accessory to that perpetrator.

How hard is it for Grok to identify nude pictures? How hard for it to refuse to process, let alone generate, them? How much of a loss of useful function would that be? Why do other providers seem not to have the same problem?

Re: Let's just become less prudish

It's an interesting suggestion but for anyone over the age of 20 it is probably too late to change how their subconscious feels about nudity.

Also, there are plenty of really quite good looking under-20s who still fret about their appearance, fully clothed. This isn't a rational thing. Everyone around them says "Relax. You look great.". It doesn't help. Do you really think you can persuade such people that they don't need to worry about others circulating nude pics?