Posts by Ken Hagan

UK's seventh prime minister in a decade says he'll ditch digital ID scheme

Re: My problem with Digital ID...

Exactly. Describing this as a Single Point of Failure understates the risk, since (to the bad guys, like Putin and Pooh) it is a single target.

But let's play with some numbers. Assuming a UK population of 10^8, you need pretty astonishing levels of reliability in that 1 system to avoid unacceptable risks of people suddenly finding themselves declared non-persons by all branches of officialdom simultaneously. Whereas ... if you keep several forms of ID separate at the implementation level (in the way that driving licences, passports, NHS stuff, increasingly /aren't/) then fairly achievable levels of reliability in each system make the odds of a simultaneous failure of all of them (for the same victim) almost inconceivable.

We know the systems will fail. How hard is it for a victim to recover when they do?

EU lets wearables wriggle out of user-replaceable battery rules

Re: Future proof?

Easy solution: Stop calling it a battery. Call it a very large capacitor or something.

Re: To be fair...

"Payment apps should rightly refuse to run on a non-standard device that could be running anything."

Plenty of pretty important financial transactions can be done on most banks' websites, using a browser built by an end-user and running on an OS built by an end-user.

Law firm insisted on one password to rule them all

Re: Law Firm Logic

Not if I'm on the jury, it doesn't!

Microsoft cancels Patch Tuesday for some Dell users over surprise shutdowns, overheating devices

No. Vista was truly awful.

I maintained a Vista box that, with creative use of disc cloning and resetting, had effectively only had Vista installed and then updated each month, but no other use. After a few years of this, it eventually became unbootable.

Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

I may be playing to a stereotype here, but on the face of it Ireland has water in abundance, an educated workforce, and good comms links to European customers.

So is this a problem? Can't we just build a load of base load generating capacity (SMRs?) and bank the profits?

MPs tell NHS to start packing Palantir's bags ahead of 2027 contract break

The article implies no such thing. Rather, there is a moment when a break is allowed by the contract and the MPs are suggesting that the NHS should plan ahead so that this is a viable option at that time.

KDE Plasma users face a dire omen of change: 6.6.6 arrives

Re: "Book of Revelations, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, page 115 says that the number is 616"

A proper joke would have used 116 as the inverted form of 911.

Clingy Virgin Media fined £28M for refusing to take the hint

Re: surprise

"The refund more than paid for the 6 month analyst contract."

You should have held out for VM to pay both the refund and the cost of your analyst. The former is money they were never entitled to and the latter is a reasonable cost incurred by you to mitigate their unlawful actions.

Claude Code users complain their chat records are being mysteriously wiped out

Re: Wrong tool for the job

In this case it seems to be the tool blaming the workers.

Oracle E-Business Suite was under attack via critical flaw before the public exploit code was even released

Re: AI reverse engineering?

Surely people have been reverse engineering patches for years?

Even the Secret Service won't use company-issued phones

Couldn't she just have asked the President at the time to declassify that information, thereby allowing her to get off the hook?

Australia investigating five social media giants for not enforcing ban on kids

Re: Social Media

"methods that actually work"

What methods would those be, then?

(I'm not saying they don't exist, but each time I suggest making social media companies liable for the crap they attach their adverts to, I get lots of downvotes, so I'm keen to hear about other ideas.)

Miasma campaign poisons 20-plus npm packages, hunts for developer secrets

Re: good idea

Not really. The whole concept of pulling part of your application from a repository that unknown third parties can write to is fundamentally idiotic. It's ActiveX for compilers. It's leaving the keys under the front doormat.

And numerous people have been saying this for years now, to no apparent effect, so clearly this isn't the "it" that someone needs to say out loud. Perhaps "it" is a court judgement that holds the devs' company liable for negligence when they start pushing infected code on their customers.

UK government wants 'trusted' news sources promoted above the social media noise

Re: better teaching people how to think, instead of what to think.....

Logic is useful, but you also need to start your chain of reasoning from facts, so some way of testing propositions against reality is also needed. Nullus in verba, and all that.

The new database world according to Google: Inexact queries and AI in everything

FTFY

By eval set, Krishnamurthy means "a set of questions that are representative tests that users may have, and what is the right query that is generated associated with it, and then a determination of is this query, is this answer correct or not? a test suite".

Waymo hits the brakes after robotaxis keep missing the signs for freeway construction zones

Re: Trial zone

I think they should use Devon and Cornwall. Start at the coast at some quiet beach. Any vehicle that makes it to a road with a white line in the middle gets a pass.

I don't think so. I think they used to be but the law was changed so that the evidence of a speed camera would be sufficient to put points on your licence.

Windows update leaves third-party Office document launches in limbo

OLE 1 was superseded by OLE 2, which was pretty stable, if rather lightly documented in places. 2 was a subset of COM (soon to be DCOM) and that's still very much a thing.

Windows devs rerolled old code to save precious bytes

Re: Compact code

Such tricks were well known back in the day. According to the book Windows Internals, Windows 3.0 used an x86 equivalent of the same trick. It also implemented the bitmap-fiddling BitBlt() API by pushing (argument-dependent) code onto the stack and calling it.

That would cause an access violation now, of course, but such things didn't exist in those days.

Uncle Sam bets $500M that Alphabet spinoff's AI can dig up new semiconductor materials

Popping AI-generated pills?

No-one with even a passing acquaintance with the regulatory processes here would predict that such drugs would be on sale already.

This is your BIOS speaking. Please fix me. Your PC is broken

Perhaps we could train an AI to read them and flag up the ones that aren't bean-counting. Have the half million or so in museums been properly photographed? I suppose not. I wonder how long that would take. It sounds like the sort of thing you'd put a student on. But you could write a phone app and scan the new ones in as they are found. You could also get the computer to solve the jigsaw puzzle when you have dozens of broken ones. (I believe this is already done, at least in some cases.)

Be fair. Punched cards have a parity bit. (That said, cuneiform tablets are still readable a few thousand years later.)

KPMG's AI report becomes an accidental demo of AI hallucinations

Re: Lazy report writers

It can't be the default. It can't be implemented. The methods used by LLMs cannot discriminate between "statistically plausible" and "actually happened". If anything, the former gets greater weight because the latter will only have happened once on the training dataset.

It's a subtle point and it will probably be a trillion or two before the bulk of humanity actually get it, but these are not search engines.The so-called hallucinations are actually the intended behaviour. Those who are determined to anthropomorphize might say that they are creative-by-nature. The rest of us will just say they make shit up

NS&I dangles £220K salary for CEO willing to straighten out £3B IT mess

First up...

They could start by making the website work in Firefox again. It can't be that hard. It worked until a couple of months ago.

If your sex life is dead, you can blame Steve Jobs

Re: Also, you know, correlation ≠ causation.

The natural experiment has so many uncontrolled variables that only a complete fool would regard it as compelling. If this person has a degree, can it be revoked?

AI is making Patch Tuesday (kinda) fun again

Re: Bloody AGILE

"How have we got into a position where it's seen as normal to get a faulty product..."

The definition of what the product (an entire OS in this case) is so humungously vast that there is not a snowball's chance in hell of anyone producing a specification of what "non-faulty" would mean.

A simpler OS, with small tools that each do one thing properly might appear to be the solution here, but I suspect the specification problem would emerge again if you asked how these small tools should interact.

But aside from these theoretical problems, I think the *actual* answer to your question is "We sacked all our testers.".

Brussels' datacenter efficiency scorecard may come with a credit warning

You say that like it's a bad thing

"Matching the scale and pace of US and Chinese datacenter build-outs, the report suggests, is unlikely without structural reform."

If the AI bubble bursts as catastrophically as some predict, matching the scale and pace of US and Chinese losses and write-offs might not be something Europe wants to do.

Meanwhile, on another part of this site, I read that people are already spending one day a week just repairing the damage done by AI.

Department of Work and Pensions' answer to AI job fears is a bot to polish your CV

Re: AI Saves so much time!

The job of the CV is to get you to the point where you start talking to real people. Therefore, by the time they actually get to know you, the tone of the CV will be long forgotten.

It needs to be factually accurate. It helps if it is tuned to the actual job description. It doesn't matter in the slightest if it "sounds like you".

Palantir wins £9M contract to run UK firearms licensing: CIA-backed biz to hold gun, bomb, and poison records

Re: Hypocrisy on Steriods

Are you suggesting using Excel as a kind of database? On these forums?

I'll get my coat before things kick off.

Marvell enters the AI network fray with 102.4 Tbps switch silicon

Re: Thanks Jensen

Nvidea and Marvell both make products that actually work and have very little connection to the AI bubble. When the bubble bursts, both companies will still have all their cash.

The same cannot be said for the actual AI companies. They will find themselves sitting with no cash but a massive pile of hardware that they don't have a profitable use for and which will be out of date in a couple of years.

Assuming a 10 Mbit video stream (good, but not absurd, quality) that's 10 million hours (about a thousand years) of runtime every second. Just how big is your porn collection and just when do you plan to watch it?

Edit: total brain fart, which I will leave in for everyone's amusement. It's 10m seconds not hours, so it's only a few months runtime per second. But I think my point still stands.

Ring gets buzzed by class action for collecting visitors' faces without consent

Re: It is worse than reported...

Thanks for that. If I read it correctly, the doorbell could have a larger carbon footprint than the person behind the door. That's ... ummm ... interesting. (Oh, yeah, and the product is flat-out illegal in the EU.)

I think that would just train the AI to believe that anyone pogo-sticking with a face mask on is SamanthaFA. That may not be the desired outcome.

Trump's AI E-(I)-O could let feds pick winners and losers

Re: Gosh

That Republican party no longer exists.

And the needle continues to move. I hear that even Donald's first veep was opposed to the (now cancelled) slush fund proposal. Truly, the modern Republican party has only one member now. Everyone else who thinks they are a Republican is just too dumb to have noticed.

Another bug hunter leaks Microsoft exploits in defiance of company’s handling of vulnerability disclosures

ActiveGIT?

So instead of using command line git to clone a repo, check a README file, add such extensions as I see fit, apparently I can have all that done automatically.

And apparently this turns out to be a security problem?

Thirty years after ActiveX and these clueless fuckwits are still making the same mistakes?

There are no words...

Listen up, England. The Health Secretary is going to be data controller for everyone's Single Patient Record

why only one?

Why can individual GPs not remain the data controller for their patients?

Government could provide the mechanism (ie, buy the software) without being the ones that use it. As long as an agreed set of protocols are used, you could even have several providers. (Ho ho!) But no. Apparently we need a big fucking database, managed by a foreign company, with clueless Arts graduates providing the only legal assurance that it is secure.

Edit: I say "ho ho", but specifying interfaces and having multiple interoperable implementations is how you create quality software. Sadly, the current generation of vibe coders don't even understand how wrong they are on this point.

Don’t repeat 5G mistakes with 6G, plead mobile operators

Re: Pointless.

From the article:

"If they can deploy 6G by means of software upgrades in the 5G legacy frequency bands, it will limit the required 6G investment, and will facilitate faster 6G rollouts."

Perhaps they are listening and maybe even learning.

Edit: Of course, this assumes that software updates are available for your handset at that time.

LLMs are closer to religion than they appear. Watch out for those who like it that way

Re: Fostering friendship

Are they the same 72 virgins for each martyr, or do they get a set each? In the latter case, what species are they, since I doubt the human race could muster the numbers, tbh.

QEMU mulls relaxing AI contribution ban

Re: Ah QEMU

I got tired of VirtualBox breaking with every Debian update, so I switched to QEMU/KVM. I don't doubt your experiences but I suspect that both of us are in a minority since both products appear to be liked by most of their users.

FCC warns US broadcasters their licenses are a privilege, not a right

Re: SO how can the FCC do anything if they don't have a full "board" ?

" A direct violation of the FCC charter, as passed by Congress."

With hindsight it is clear that the Framers never imagined that Congress would just go along with being used as a floor wipe, and yet here we are! Perhaps November will bring a fresh approach. Perhaps not.

Utah tells porn sites to take the P out of VPNs, and it's their fault that they can't

Re: The usual snide jab

Disappointingly, I'm not finding "trustworthymedia" on that page.

California may let Linux bypass age check

Surely there will be a browser extension that lets you control your age? Well, maybe not for Chrome or Safari or Edge, but you get the idea.

HP customer claims firmware update shoved printer off support cliff

"Great, let's normalise the tactics scammers use when they ring you up for tech support stuff...."

But, HP *are* scammers! Haven't you read the rest of the comments here?

Feds unwittingly leak pilots' pre-crash conversation

Re: its called the mile high club for a reason

I can't see how divorce proceedings would be relevant if one party has gone down with the plane.

AI will soon be capable of telling convincing lies

Re: Models always have a bit of trouble following instructions precisely.

I disagree. We're reading it wrongly.

"Models always have a bit of trouble following instructions precisely. The surprise lay in the fact that the model knew it had used a forbidden technique, then proceeded to cover its tracks."

The model knew nothing of the sort, but had been trained extensively on examples where the use of certain techniques resulted in the output being marked wrong. However, using the technique and then covering its tracks was not faulted.

So the model learned "Don't get caught.".

It followed its instructions to the letter.

The instructions weren't good enough.

AI eyes scanning for bugs create a worrisome Linux security trend

Windows...

"If you think that AI can't reverse engineer closed source, you're in for a surprise."

If you think Windows is closed source, you have a second surprise waiting for you. I do not believe that the usual suspect nation state actors do not have fairly up-to-date source code for Windows and Office.

Minor edits to AI skills can make agents go rogue

Re: If AI is downloading skills on an as-needed basis under its own volition

Sounds like how most people seem to use app stores.

Maybe we need a reviews system for these "skill" things. 5 stars for "It did what I wanted, didn't do anything I didn't want, and 3 days later I still have money in my bank account.".

Re: Oh no, not again

The security problem is both obvious and older than the people who are falling for it.

The cure is Darwinian. I hope you aren't squeamish because, oh yes, there's going to be blood. Lots.

A Russian speaker and jailbroken Gemini went on a hacking spree and emptied at least one MAGA victim's crypto wallets

Re: So Now Reg Writers are Quoting "Security Professionals" without Challenging Lies

Some of us do make exactly that complaint, and it is becoming ever more urgent that decision makers realise the non-intelligence of these systems before they hand over serious power to them.

A reminder: we have half a trillion dollars invested up front in this shit and still no-one has demonstrated an application that is profitable (without using fraudulent accounting). This is not a sustainable situation.