* Posts by Ken Hagan

8486 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

Ken Hagan Gold badge

I presume that the more expensive printers don't have USB interfaces, but the toy ones for SOHO use do. Use that to drive the printer and use a Raspberry Pi to talk to your network. Probably eliminates the risk of the printer ever upgrading its firmware, too.

Ninite to win it: How to rebuild Windows without losing your mind

Ken Hagan Gold badge

I think you need to poke VBox harder. The VBoxSVGA graphics controller will happily run your VM full-screen on a 4K monitor.

Brit soldiers tune radio waves to fry drone swarms for pennies

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: But it has no lasers!

In evolutionary terms, the love is proportionate. A slab of air will absorb a fair amount of UV and the further you go into the IR the larger your optics need to be (and there are other absorption bands there too) so Nature's choice of waveband has a lot going for it. Also, the Sun is quite bright at visible wavelengths but not so much at shorter ones. Various non-human eyes can see bits of spectrum that we can't, but they don't differ much. Stepping outside of biology and into engineering doesn't help much either since any passive sensor is bound by the same constraints.

Tesla's Optimus can't roll without rare earth magnets, and Beijing ain't budging yet

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Black Helicopters

Re: What will China want in return?

"Or stop reading Trump's social media posts."

Maybe "bombastic bob" is Donald's handle on this site?

Bad trip coming for AI hype as humanity tools up to fight back

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Happy

Re: Patent law has been abused for decades.

"Patents were originally about promoting openness."

This is, er, patently obvious if you consider the origin of the name.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Patent law has been abused for decades.

"Don't be surprised if he invalidates all non-US patents withinoutside the US."

FTFY, and no, nothing would surprise me from The Don.

Asia reaches 50 percent IPv6 capability and leads the world in user numbers

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"There’s plenty of room to grow, because the IPv6 number space covers 340 undecillion addresses – 2128 compared to IPv4’s 232. "

Not nit-picking, since I'm not actually sure what the correct answer is, but the above quote is something of a mis-representation.

In IPv4, the addresses are so densely allocated that (ignoring the multicast and experimental blocks) we probably are using more or less every one.

In IPv6, each individual client of an ISP gets a /48 or a /56 prefix and most people probably have only one LAN hanging off that (so they're only using a /64, despite being given 250 or 65000 of them). It's great for routing, but we're never going to fill the space densely like we've done with IPv4. In addition, by no means all of the possible prefixes are assigned for unicast addressing.

I've no idea even how to estimate the number of devices we'd need to have to "pack out" the IPv6 address space, but I suspect its logarithm in base 2 is nearer 56 than 128.

Signalgate chats vanish from CIA chief phone

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Yes, but Al Capone was eventually done for tax evasion.

Pentagon needs China's rare earths, Beijing just put them behind a permit wall. Oops

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Misnomer

The historical record would suggest that communism prevents non-central planning. It does not ensure any (competent) central planning.

Cyber congressman demands answers before CISA gets cut down to size

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Prsident Truss

If the dollar ceases to be the reserve currency of choice, the existing US national debt might become beyond the means of the US economy to service.

Team Trump readies national security card to justify taxing Americans for foreign chips

Ken Hagan Gold badge

How hard is it to compromise chips?

When a chip is designed in the US but fabricated elsewhere, how hard is it to verify (by inspecting a random sample) that the samples match the design?

If this is done, and the malicious fabricator expects it to be done, how hard/costly is it to manufacture a small number of trojan horses and hide them in a large batch?

This approach obviously makes it less likely that a bad chip will be used in a sensitive system. To what extent does that make the technique effectively useless?

What sort of chip (CPU, GPU, other) is the best target for attack?

Trump thinks we can make iPhones in the US just like China. Yeah, right

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: The Elephant in the Room

What happens if two (democratic) countries genuinely disagree about the importance of a particular right or protection? Does one get to impose its view on the other?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: the army of millions of human beings screwing in little screws is going to come to America

I thought they were all emigrating to Canada?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Trump doesn't think

I'd say the second was more likely, but I'd echo the "please don't" comment above. It won't end well.

When it was added, it might have seemed like a clever addition (especially in the light of the Revolutionary War) but it is already true that a violdnt revolution can overthrow a tyrant and already true that people will find the weapons they if they need them. It didn't have to be cast in quasi-legal form.

Compared to other countries (that don't have a similar right) the US appears to be no more resistant to bad government and significantly less resistant to violent crime.

UK's attempt to keep details of Apple 'backdoor' case secret… denied

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Where in Whitehall is the still small voice of reason?

Is it encrypted? I assumed it was just random gibberish, posted for the look of the thing.

Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Blanket Tariffs...

Accepted, but perhaps the Presidential ballot is not the best one to use for such signalling. Other elections have less disastrous consequences if your principled vote is likely to let in the worst (from your point of view) of the other candidates.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Blanket Tariffs...

"Harris had already lost the vote because of the Biden administration's support for the Israeli attacks"

Possibly true, but breathtakingly depressing given The Orange One's known crawling subservience to Netanyahu.

I suppose it is like all those Green voters, foolishly thinking that a FPTP election still allows them to "vote with their hearts" without the consequence of letting in the guy who most stands for all that their hearts hate.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: don't pay attention to it

"I couldn't walk 100m without seeing at least a half dozen women I'd not be disappointed waking up next to."

Just how big is your bed?

Windows intros 365 Link, a black box that does nothing but connect to Microsoft's cloud

Ken Hagan Gold badge

A Raspberry pi capable of doing everything that this Link can do, plus a large amount of change left over?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

I think that's just a matter of cloning 5000 SD cards for your Raspberry Pis and then supergluing them in place. (Yes, glue it in. The pi, plus case and power supply, is well under 100 of your favoured unit of currency, so it is not the end of the world if you have to replace a few every now and then.) Your physical attack surface is then pretty minimal. It only has to connect to one particular service and run one particular RDP-like application so all 5000 can basically be confined to your internal network. Your software attack surface is then also pretty minimal.

In short, the risk of someone coming in via the thin client here is miniscule compared to the risk of someone phishing or otherwise forcing their way into the full-fat Windows desktop that it is talking to. Yes, that can be maintained with all your Active Directory tools, but it is an ongoing task and not without effort. I would be quite surprised if the Windows VMs didn't take up the vast majority of your time. (By the way, just how many organisations do you know with 5000 seats and no IT staff?)

EU: These are scary times – let's backdoor encryption!

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: I think it is about time

Embed your message in a picture using some steganography. It doesn't need to be clever because you choose a picture that is likely to be reposted on social media without attribution and by a foreigner. Wait for that to happen. Then "innocently" tell your intended correspondent about the amusing post you saw yesterday. You can do that in cleartext. They can tell (from a particular phrase, or time of sending, or your choice of account, or ...) that it is worth pointing their tools at the picture.

They then have your message, which you did not send to them and which they did not receive from you.

What did you think all those cat videos were for?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Future

Three: all internet commerce becomes unsafe. The politicians, realising this, introduce an exemption for commercial sites. Everyone starts using commercial sites to send their secret messages.the politicians amend the exemption to apply only to "major" commercial sites. All others are forced to use (say) Amazon Marketplace. Everyone now notices that, by EU law, most EU commerce is now paying a percentage to a US company.

I expect I cluld go on with this insanity but ... the only winning move is not to play.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"A monkey with guns would do better."

Don't you follow the news? He's busy.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Glad to know

You've got to be pretty dumb to reckon 300k for a job that doesn't actually require any qualifications is chicken-feed, and a particularly bad politician not to realise that 99% of the population would happily swap.

OpenAI wants to bend copyright rules. Study suggests it isn’t waiting for permission

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: at last!

In fairness to the AIs, we actually use the same method to train our own offspring. We don't leave them to drown in a social media swamp. We send them to school and expose them to a controlled curriculum, under professional guidance, and hope that enough of the quality rubs off on them before the exam.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: at last!

"better than average quality comes at a cost"

Whisper it, but it's almost as though traditional publishing houses performed a useful function. One that they have sometimes over-priced perhaps, but a useful function nevertheless.

Amusing also to realise that training an AI on humanity's normal output doesn't work. To have any hope of seeming truly intelligent, you have to train it on our "best behaviour"!

Nvidia GPU roadmap confirms it: Moore’s Law is dead and buried

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Great Scott!

Actually a modern datacenter in 1955 would have been quite a gift to some people.

Nuclear center must replace roof on 70-year-old lab so it can process radioactive waste

Ken Hagan Gold badge

It's a horrible mixture of various isotopes and contaminated with other elements as well, so you'd have some interesting chemistry to do before it would be usable.

(As I understand it, that's why the most likely outcome will be a decision to vitrify it and then bury it somewhere.)

Now Windows Longhorn is long gone, witness reflects on Microsoft's OS belly-flop

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Oh my, FE Brooks would have p**sed himself laughing at this.

He only died in 2022, so he probably did p**s himself laughing.

Aardvark beats groundhogs and supercomputers in weather forecasting

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Hmmm. It's *very* impressive sounding

I doubt anyone knows, or expects to know. A neural net isn't an algorithm. Although the different stages may often be inspired by the kinds of categorisation that humans apply when doing the same task "by hand", there's no hard and fast rule requiring this. You could just start with a layer containing all the raw measurements, end with a layer delivering the time-series of the forecasts for different places, and stick a few layers of "mix it all up" in between and see how you get on.

If it works, it's useful. Eventually, one might study the best of the working models and see if the layers are doing something specific that no-one had thought to try before. It could give you clues that eventually lead to genuine scientific progress. In the meantime, not needing a super-computer to create a forecast might even save you money. (Perhaps not, mind, since you probably do still need something quite chunky for the training.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

True, but probably only on timescales much longer than the re-training time for the model.

Revenge of the nerds: Teachers, professors sue to undo Trump science funding cuts

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "In Texas, in the 2 years fallowing the over turning of Roe..."

source?

I'm not disputing it. I'm just following the rule that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and "1 in 22" is a pretty extraordinary claim for any society outside of wartime.

Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users – including its own employees

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Outlook is my only reason to run windows

If these are old PST files with historical mail, the thing to do is set up an IMAP server (Dovecot on an RPi will do, visible purely over the LAN) and run that old Outlook one last time to copy the entire archive over to that server. It's then accessible to any email client on any OS.

23andMe's genes not strong enough to avoid Chapter 11

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: They must have run out of idiots to give them their DNA

As others have pointed out, the key point is whether or not you were foolish enough to be related to anyone with said 'idiot gene'. Given the number of relatives that the average person has, those aren't good odds

DNA ought to covered by rules on personal info, but since this is a US company I'm not sure that would really help in this case. In short, I think the horse has already bolted for most people in Europe and North America.

Trump orders all government IT contracts consolidated under GSA

Ken Hagan Gold badge

For one thing, it makes it more likely that purchases are consolidated into massive blobs that only a handful of companies are big enough to tender for.

Great news for billionaires. Shit news for any taxpayer.

US Space Force warns Chinese satellites are 'dogfighting' in space

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: ICBMs

So, not mistaken actually. ICBMs are exempt and you just cited the reason why.

Also, I doubt whether the Outer Space Treaty is going to count for much after WW3. The offenders will be either "dead" or "the winner" and there isn't much point in prosecuting either group.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: When it goes to Hell (ie WWIII)

If it makes you feel better, there are nothing like enough nukes to do the job. There are 8 billion of us and while there are concentrations in cities, almost every country has significant numbers in rural or small town settings. In addition, any sane targetting strategy would direct many warheads to military targets, not population centres, because you definitely don't want your enemy's military to survive after you just murdered their friends and families.

Microsoft signed a dodgy driver and now ransomware scum are exploiting it

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Revole the certificate!

I think "the certificate" in this case is the same one that signs all other third party drivers and it hasn't actually been compromised.

The correct solution is to teach Windows to recognise this particular driver, which apparently MS have already done in the case of Win11. (Kinda odd that Win10 has missed out on that. Are they trying to blackmail us into upgradjng or something?)

Oh Brother. Printer giant denies dirty toner tricks as users cry foul

Ken Hagan Gold badge

I rely on incompetence. My HP printer would (it tells me) just love to download the latest firmware but when I pushed the OK button it muttered something about a download failure and gave up.

So ... would like to be evil but too crap to actually be so.

Worry not. China's on the line saying AGI still a long way off

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Generative AI models have passed the Turing Test ...

It would be mildly impressive to see an AI that could even attempt answers to the average IQ test, let alone score 100. In my experience, these tests have all sorts of question types: verbal, numerical, and visual.

Can you scan images into ChatGPT and ask it to draw the next in the sequence?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Generative AI models have passed the Turing Test ...

I keep reading this claim, but the link takes me to a paywall so I can't see the evidence.

Meanwhile, the evidence that I can see suggests that ChatGPT and its ilk cease to be convincing if you actually bother to ask related questions or demand some sane levels of consistency from one question to the next.

Obviously there are some people who also struggle with this, but I prefer to summarise that by ssying that they fail the Turing Test. I'm not prepard to lower the bar just because a few of my fellow Homo sapiens are ... a bit thick.

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

Ken Hagan Gold badge

That's a big phone bill, right there.

Tech jobs are now white-collar trades that need apprentices, not a career crawl

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Give me one solid reason...

It sounds like avoiding big companies is a good idea. Management there seems to be mostly by professional managers and that's always a risk. With SMEs, you're much more likely to have a boss who either understands your job or understands the /need/ for your job (and that's why they hired you).

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"one wonders if the mangerial ranks have selection biases that attract sociopaths more than mere competence."

If I were an incompotent sociopath, I'd probably be reluctant to hire or promote anyone who might bring compotence or social graces to the management team.

So, yeah, possibly a selection bias there.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"must have 10 years commercial experience in"

Means: the person we've just lost had this experience and we'd like a drop-in replacement, please.

Microsoft's updated Windows battery indicator rollout runs out of juice

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: FFS.

It's also culturally colour-blind, since in China red is the good colour and green is the bad one.

But yeah, colour-blindness is a thing and UI designers ought to know that colour should never be the /only/ way that a message is conveyed to an end-user.

The software UK techies need to protect themselves now Apple's ADP won’t

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: You don't need alternatives

Yes, but if you have to get a court order to get the keys for each person then you can't go on a population-wide fishing expedition. You also give away the fact that you are interested in a particular person.

Rather than add a backdoor, Apple decides to kill iCloud encryption for UK peeps

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Without an understanding

Presumably also no discussion of the numerous leads (generated by existing investigative methods) that the police are unable to follow because of a lack of resources.

uBlock Origin dead for many as Google purges Manifest v2 extensions

Ken Hagan Gold badge

IME, the thing that really boosts your browser speed is not downloading all those shitty bits that uBlock, er, blocks. If Chrome wants to voluntarily rule itself out as a candidate then that's fine by me.

Linux royalty backs adoption of Rust for kernel code, says its rise is inevitable

Ken Hagan Gold badge

That, as I understand it, is a rewrite starting from a blank sheet of paper. Writing a kernel in Rust would also be OK and efforts are underway. What is problematical is adding Rust to an existing GPL project and then "taking away" the GPL at the end when none of the origonal code remains. The trouble is that all of the intermediate phases had your Rust code under a GPL licence.

I'm not enough of a lawyer to say how hard it would be to develop under two licences. I think VLC's x264 code does that, but it isn't FOSS.

Added: I am enough of a Reg reader to know that the kernel has not migrated to GPL3 because it would be Hard. That sounds to me like it might be a relevant observation.