Posts by Ken Hagan

UK still doodling digital pound while Brussels frets over payment sovereignty

Could we just pay a fee and use the Norwegian system?

It would certainly be cheaper than asking Crapita to build one. It would also "work" "today", which is two things you couldn't say for a Crap system.

"benefits payments only being able to be spent on what the government defines as necessities"

A government could already do that by paying benefits in vouchers (instead of cash) and only redeeming those vouchers if presented to a bank by (say) a food retailer. If they did, I think you'd find that other shops stopped accepting them pretty quickly, thereby achieving the desired effect.

Technically easy. Politically impossible.

Re: Digital currency

Possibly true, but somehow I doubt whether those others will be among the early adopters of a digital pound.

UK watchdog eyes Meta's smart glasses after workers say they 'see everything'

Ok Meta, how do I review and delete the data captured by your users? And why should I have to? And are you going to pay my usual hourly rate for doing things that I shouldn't have to do?

Document Foundation urges EU to ditch Excel lock-in for cybersecurity law consultation

Re: OOXML is also an open and ISO standard

I assume that the spreadsheet is one that OpenOffice will read and that respondents can use OO to create their submissions. (I think we'd be hearing much more from them if that weren't the case.)

So, yeah, this is a storm in a tea-cup.

AWS backs Open VSX as Rust survey shows VS Code decline

I'm using VSCode and not noticing any AI, except for some waffle in the release notes every week or two. Where is it?

Re: Well yes, but also no

Given the dismal state of the software industry, I doubt there is very much raw material to train the AI on as far as testing is concerned, so I'm not surprised if AI turns out to be quite crap at this.

But it is still at least 93,000 more extensions than I can imagine a justification for. Yes, there are probably several hundred different programming languages, but Notepad++ manages syntax highlighting for the common ones out-of-the-box, so these VS code extensions must be doing something else. Debugging? Yes, but only for languages that "run" rather than simply specify. Code refactoring? We'll, yes, if you insist (and trust the refactoring) but again probably not for the more obscure languages.

Massive duplication of function caused by not-invented-here syndrome. Ah yes! That'll account for the other 93,000.

AWS says drones hit two of its datacenters in UAE, urges users to move resources to different regions

Re: Can someone clarify this for me?

And Shia and Sunni regard each other as heretics.

Still, I don't think that is the explanation here. The US is still a net importer of oil. Therefore, the Straits of Hormuz can't stay shut for long, but will stay shut as long as the current Iranian regime survives. Therefore it won't. So everyone in the Iranian leadership is basically a dead man walking. So they've nothing to lose and martyrdom starts to look like the rational response.

Re: Obligatory xkcd

Yesterday Trump said that if you even threaten US citizens anywhere in the world then he'll send the military in and kill you. Why, therefore, would he need to have made an evacuation plan?

US struck Iran with copies of its own drones

Re: Proof this was long planned

I think it is unlikely that the Pentagon has not considered the medium term impact on the global oil trade. 20% of that trade runs through the Strait of Hormuz.

So, either the US expects the Strait to re-open within a few weeks or they have a plan B. It seems absurd to imagine that the current Iranian regime would tolerate plan A so regime change would be necessary for that to happen. Plan B involves finding 20% of the world's oil requirements in a space of weeks. Of course, Venezuela is now "friendly" but it seems unlikely that it could ramp up in just a few weeks.

I conclude that the Pentagon planners are going for plan A and regime change is now an essential part of the US strategy, whatever they might be saying in public.

Open source devs consider making hogs pay for every download

Re: This is a classic example

Today? It's because they (the repos) don't know who is doing the pull.

Tomorrow? You could insist on users signing up with an email address but we know how easy it is to acquire a new, free email address. Big Corp can simply maintain a pool of such addresses and teach their Azure pipeline to pick the next address from the pool. Hassle, but I'm sure someone will eventually write a helpful tool to automate that and put said tool on GitHub for everyone to use.

So I think we're back to some heuristics that guess whether this new connection is a returning abuser, and throttling accordingly.

Re: Nice idea...

A temporary ban has the added advantage of looking like an outage at your end. If the miscreants start seeing their business operations disrupted by your (apparent) flakiness then they might (finally) work out that some caching at their end is necessary.

Engineer held hostage by client who asked for the wrong fix

Re: Wasn't the manager that approved the repair required to sign off on it?

Tempting, but I am not a lawyer, as the saying goes, so I'd be wondering whether plan B left me liable for damages caused by downtime or whether I could claim some kind of self-defence.

Certainly if I were on the jury that would be an easy question to answer, but not everyone on a jury is as smart as me. :)

Re: idiots

Is that the US spelling or the UK one?

AIs are happy to launch nukes in simulated combat scenarios

If you just hit all the fertiliser plants, that might do it on its own. It would take a year or two, but the world's population probably isn't supportable without chemical fertiliser.

Another single-minded approach might be to knock out the electricity system. How many facilities can actually run with no electricity at all? Fewer than you might think.

That said, Putin has been trying to do that in Ukraine for several years now and it seems to be harder than you might think.

That era may soon be passing. SLBM platforms are large, slow moving and fairly easy to destroy if you know where they are. That last point has been almost impossible for over half a century but science moves on, autonomous drone subs are now a thing, and humanity has rather a lot riding on an assumption that SLBMs cannot ever be stopped.

Say goodbye to budget PCs and smartphones – memory is too expensive now

Re: Anyone remember ...

It has always been possible to type faster than Word could keep up with, particularly if you are an old fogey who knows all the keyboard shortcuts. I wonder how long it will be before the same is true of "notepad" (may the true Notepad rest in peace).

Re: Recycle / re-use?

Until MS "accidentally" use a compiler switch that uses instructions added in later CPUs.

Re: Funny

You mean "AI PC killed by AI"? Yeah, that's quite funny.

LLMs killed the privacy star, we can't rewind, we've gone too far

Re: Anonimity and privacy are not the same thing

To be fair, if law enforcement can't tell who you are, it is less likely that they'll arrest you. Statistically you are likely to be outside their jurisdiction, so it isn't even worth trying.

Discord drama delays age verification debut until the second half of 2026

Re: FutureCast

"The system will work out their age based on account signals, including the account's age, whether a payment method is on file, what type of servers a user belongs to, and other "general patterns of account activity." And that'll be it."

Well lad, starting in late 2026, no-one was able to set up a new account without being immediately pigeon-holed as a vulnerable teenager. So no-one new joined. So eventually even the existing users got bored and the whole operation just faded into obscurity.

Not so much shooting yourself in the foot as slowly suffocating yourself, but equally effective.

Hubble in a death spiral that could end as early as 2028 without a reboost

Is it small enough to burn up on the way down, or are we looking at a hazard here?

Linus Torvalds: Someone ‘more competent who isn't afraid of numbers past the teens’ will take over Linux one day

Smooth merge window

"where I don't have to bisect boot failures on any of my machines"

That's a pretty rough definition of "smooth".

Healthcare security: Write login details on whiteboard, hope for the best

Re: Conflicts of Interest

I'm surprised by the 2 downvotes. Do these people think that a system that takes half an hour to log you in is performing reasonably? Or do they have some other reason for downvoting?

UK to demand social platforms take down abusive intimate images within 48 hours

"You get the thing taken down first, THEN track down the poster with the cooperation of the platform/ISP."

Or, more likely, THEN discover that the poster lives thousands of miles away and there is not a snowball's chance in hell of you ever seeing them in court.

Even the takedown action depends on the hosting site having enough of a presence in your country that it cares about your laws. I predict that eventually we'll work this out and the global internet will be replaced by several smaller ones, within which there is a reasonable chance of being able to compel compliance with local law. Until then, expect no improvement in social media and no end to politicians sounding off on the subject.

AI chatbots waffle on GOV.UK queries, then get facts wrong when told to zip it

Funny how you've attracted upvotes and downvotes for this but you didn't actually say which country you are living in. It appears that crap government is a universal phenomenon.

Still, be careful what you wish for...

Agile Manifesto turns 25 – just in time for vibe coding to test it

Re: You Keep Using That Word

"Software development is primarily a knowledge gaining exercise and is not about managing preplanned work."

You mean it's "research" not "development"?

I'm inclined to agree. By the time you actually have a good understanding of the detailed requirements, you've probably got a working program.

OpenClaw is the most fun I've had with a computer in 50 years

Re: memories

Training on curated datasets is what we do with non-AIs in schools.

EFF policy says bots can code but humans must write the docs

Re: Worst of Both Worlds?

There are many problems for which a decent description would require rich text, formulae, tables and diagrams. Please don't try to use ASCII art in a code comment for this. Use the proper tool for the job.

Feel free to add code comments that cross reference the proper document.

Oh look, I've just re-invented Literate Programming. Don't worry though, it'll never catch on.

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.