* Posts by diodesign

3493 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2011

Ukraine cyber spies claim Putin's planes are in peril as sanctions bite

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

A380 was an example for other airlines

Yeah, we meant non-Russian airlines, regarding A380s. The first sentence in that paragraph read:

"...aircraft being pulled apart to repair others, a not-uncommon practice in the aviation industry."

And then the next sentence was: "Some used Airbus A380s, which commenced commercial operations in just 2007, have already been sold for parts."

As in, some other airlines in the aviation industry have sold A380s purely for parts, as an example of this practice in the industry, not specific to Russia. I've removed that sentence to avoid confusion.

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How to give Windows Hello the finger and login as someone on their stolen laptop

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Not that simple

You don't have to reboot the machine into another OS - that's just one way to do it.

You can hotplug a MITM device while the laptop is still on to add a fingerprint and log in as the user. If you can keep the stolen PC powered up, you can log in using this method. That defeats any full disk encryption, including Bitlocker, we're told.

We're checking to what happens if you have Bitlocker and the machine is power cycled. Edit: comments from the researchers added.

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Why have just one firewall when you can fire all the walls?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Oops

Yeah, it's fixed. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot something wrong.

We should run articles through spellcheck, but sometimes we forget.

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Control Altman delete: OpenAI fires CEO, chairman quits

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Deliberate

No, no, we really meant upstart. We use that term a lot. No need for a rewrite.

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IBM pauses advertising on X after ads show up next to antisemitic content

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Hamas

I highly doubt anyone involved with producing this article is of the opinion that Hamas, a blood-thirsty hive of terror bastards, is in any way good.

Also: as I've said before, we're not particularly left or right, this way or that on Trump or Musk, etc. We're just anti-dumb. If you're in a position of power or responsibility, and you're an idiot, we'll call you a moron.

Case in point: for all the criticism made by the left over Brett Kavanaugh's appointment, he's actually made some sound decisions on technology as a US Supreme Court justice. On a personal level, you could find him repulsive, but he ain't a moron and that's how we cover his decisions. We've also been sarcastic about the Biden White House.

And I don't think the article is disingenuous: we've not asserted Musk turned Twitter into a cesspool. We've reported that advertisers, funnily enough, are sensitive about the content around their ads. Happens here as well: people withdrawing ads from stories about hacking, crime, coronavirus, etc.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Magee...

Left the biz before El Reg was barely getting started, and went off to found Inq, which later imploded. I'm sure he's happy wherever he is.

I have no idea what you expect from us here. Musk said something dumb again as advertisers pull their ads because they don't like the content on a site. We're conveying what happened. You can decide whether Elon or IBM is in the right, I don't think we've glided in any particular direction about it in the piece.

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Vote now on who should take the lead in Musk: The Movie

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Neil Breen

First rule of Neil Breen club is, don't talk about Neil Breen.

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HashiCorp's new license is still open source-ish, just with less free lunch

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Technically you're reading technically too much into it, technically speaking.

Technically, see the title. Technically, yours.

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PS: The real answer is that sometimes words are used for emphasis. This is technically one of those times.

Robot mistakes man for box of peppers, kills him

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Sheesh

There you go, there's your ROTM. And I'm not even American, but I been reading the site since 2000. Sometimes the jokes of old don't spring to mind gone 5pm.

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WhatsApp AI happily added guns to chat stickers of Palestinians, but not Israelis

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Moderation

You're in the moderation queue because you appeared (in a few comments) to encourage support for a proscribed terror organization, which makes our UK staff at least uneasy given the legal regime in that country.

Stay on the lawful side, and your comments will make it through. Like your Hamlet.

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Woman jailed after RentaHitman.com assassin turned out to be – surprise – FBI

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Rugar handgun

The prosecution paperwork says 308 but the Feds probably mean 380, yeah.

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Developing AI models or giant GPU clusters? Uncle Sam would like a word

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: GPT-4 is a thing

GPT-3 was a handy reference that we had data on - but yea we'll check against GPT-4 when we can

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'Corrupt' cop jailed for tipping off pal to EncroChat dragnet

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Corrupt cop

We're going purely for the alliteration. It sounds nice. Relax a little.

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Brits make Amazon, Meta stop using third-party data to undercut rivals

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Freudian typo?

Sigh, yes. Brains were very tired on Friday evening. It's fixed.

Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot something wrong.

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Mid-contract telco price hikes must end, Ofcom told

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

What's a specter?

It's a potato-less spectator

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GPS leading your phone astray? We can just fix that in code, startup claims

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: And I need this why?

Ah, well, they're starting with phones and apps but it looks like eventually they want to get into industry - with their SDK in equipment out in the field that doesn't have great GPS accuracy individually but in a network will be better.

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European Commission loves Oracle enough to sign six-year cloud deal

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Largest

Yeah, by richest we mean largest - that's been tweaked now. Don't forget to drop corrections@theregister.com a note if you spot something odd, please.

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UK govt finds £225M for Isambard-AI supercomputer powered by Nvidia

diodesign Silver badge

Keep it civil

Ah yup, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the civil engineer

Apple swipes left on the last Touch Bar Mac, replaces it with a pricier 14″ model

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Hellorld

Damn, someone else who watches that channel. It's good stuff

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Tesla swerves liability in Autopilot death lawsuit

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Self-driving in real life

It is creepy seeing completely empty self driving cars weaving around SF's streets, automated. I saw one following an Uber driver, who quickly pulled to a stop to let someone out. The Waymo SDC in an instant flicked to the right to go around the Uber and continued on. It was very human-like and very slick.

I was impressed. But that was just one instance on a road it must have been trained on countless times. I can see it all working, if conditions are as they were during training. Which isn't a given. There seems to be little initiative in them.

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Nvidia's accelerated cadence spells trouble for AMD and Intel's AI aspirations

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

History

OK, fine: back in the day, as you say, it issued PC GPUs annually. We're writing in the context of today, and specifically Nvidia's response to AI GPU demand. Lately Nvidia has been on a two-year cadence, as I'm sure you know.

I've tweaked that sentence. If you spot something wrong, do let us know via corrections@theregister.com, please.

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EU threatens X with DSA penalties over spread of Israel-Hamas disinformation

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Letter to Zuck

The letter to Meta is now in the article, with a link. And note: X faces punishment for Hamas-Israel disinfo while Meta could be punished for election-interfering deepfakes.

Meta was also urged to crack down on Hamas-Israel disinformation, but that warning wasn't to the same level as that to X on that front. Subtle difference.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Other sites including Meta

> Didn't notice any mention of multiple platforms in this piece, though

OK here's the deal: the letter to X went out on Tuesday, threatening Musk with fines for allowing this disinfo to spread on Twitter.

Then on Wednesday, our vulture wrote a piece about the X letter. After the article was filed but before it was published, a second letter went out, this time to Meta. That letter to Meta isn't quite the same: it threatens fines over election-related deepfakes. It also reminds Meta to keep a lid on disinfo.

So what we'll do is, update this article with the Meta letter - but it would be wrong to say Meta and X have both been threatened with fines over the Hamas-Israel disinfo, the issue that was the thrust of the story when it was written. X is facing the heat for Mid-East disinfo, and Meta is under fire for deepfakes.

Hope this explains it.

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Comment problem?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Comment problem?

Must just be some internal lag: your comments were automatically processed by our system and weren't manually moderated.

Unless there's an error or a message saying a post is awaiting moderation, you can safely assume it'll go through.

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HTTP/2 'Rapid Reset' zero-day exploited in biggest DDoS deluge seen yet

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Speed

Well, it's novel in that it uses HTTP/2 stream resets and jams as many requests as it can down each TCP connection. Really is limited by the attacker's sending rate. Seems to be enough to overwhelm server-side software.

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Arm patches GPU driver bug exploited by spyware to snoop on targets

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Help me not worry

So far the bug(s) are being used in very targeted attacks by commercial spyware. You're likely not a target.

But you want to apply updates as reasonably soon as you can, as the patches are out there, more details will come out, and others may start using the flaws in a wider fashion.

Right now, no, you're unlikely to be hit.

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Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Australis

It's already fixed - don't forget to drop corrections@theregister.com a line if you spot anything odd, please.

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Oracle's $130M-plus payday still looms on horizon for Larry and Safra

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Re: "Comprised of"

Nah, it's all good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprised_of

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So what if China has 7nm chips now, there's no Huawei it can make them 'at scale'

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: What ?

Late to this party but generally the USA says: if you help someone evade our export controls, we'll blacklist or sanction you next. Or mess with your US operations. Or cut you off from the dollar, the world's de facto currency.

So that's why places like ASML play ball. It's not worth the war with Uncle Sam.

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GNU turns 40: Stallman's baby still not ready for prime time, but hey, there's cake

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

1991

Yup, Linus announced it in August 1991 and version 0.01 came out the following month.

The guy quoted might have meant earlier in the year, or might be misremembering.

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Google promises eternity of updates for Chromebooks – that's a decade for everyone else

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

SUSE LE v ChromeOS

I suspect the "regular automatic updates" is doing some sneaky heavy lifting in Google's assertion, but you might well be right. Google may argue its ChromeOS updates over those 10 years exceed what SUSE LE gives you.

Also, "commits to today" -- in the link you provided, SUSE committed to 13 years in 2009, 2014, and 2018.

Not excusing anyone, just commenting. We'll bear it in mind.

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Chrome, Firefox and more caught with their WebP down, offer hasty patch-up

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

libwebp

We've revised the piece with more details: the flaw is within libwebp, a Google-managed library that processes WebP images.

That same library is present in Firefox, Thunderbird, and other programs. So it's not just Chrome: it's anything using libwebp. Look out for patches and apply them.

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MOXIE microwaved Mars air into oxygen, but now it's time for a breather

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Fuhgeddaboudit

Don't read too much into that bit. We've now simplified it in the piece. It's just extracting O from CO2.

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Microsoft to shield paid-up Copilot customers from any AI copyright brawls it starts

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

'a huge problem from any lawsuit is the enormous amount of time it sucks up from everyone involved'

I think everyone knows this.

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Microsoft: China stole secret key that unlocked US govt email from crash debug dump

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: No hardware, no secuirity.

I am also surprised by what seems to have been a lack of HSM but maybe Microsoft couldn't get that to scale, or didn't trust any HSM, and also wanted it all on their own stack.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Caused the crash?

That's an interesting thought. But what is equally likely to have happened (IMHO) is that an engineer - a site-reliability engineer, perhaps - was targeted and crash dumps sought out to find bugs in Microsoft products and services that could be exploitable.

Just hunt through dumps that have some kind of memory corruption, and you may find flaws that can be exploited to achieve remote or local code execution rather than a crash.

Or they just got lucky.

Edit: They might also have scoured dumps for sensitive stuff that wasn't redacted -- keys and passwords, etc.

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What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Slow? I think not.

Oi, we wrote about that forking site in 2021, thankyouverymuch.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/14/sweary_four_word_map/

It's even in the more-stories list in the middle of the article. Consider yourself tsk'd.

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Microsoft ain't happy with Russia-led UN cybercrime treaty

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

More like

It's taken this long for people to take it seriously, perhaps.

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China's top EV battery maker announced a breakthrough, but top boffin isn't convinced

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Oops!

Yeah, empty and full should be the other way around. We missed that in the edit as we were focusing on other aspects of the story.

It's fixed now. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com please if you spot stuff like that - helps us fix things right away.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Oops, just words the wrong way around

Yeah, should be empty to full. It's fixed. Don't forget to drop us a note to corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong. Think of it as a bug report for us to patch.

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You can now fine-tune OpenAI's GPT-3.5 for specific tasks – it may even beat GPT-4

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Yeesh, tough crowd

Hey, I think you should give us more credit.

We've extensively reported on OpenAI's failings as well as other LLM makers; we've said in the piece GPT-4 regresses in certain cases; and arguably GPT-4 is more advanced and powerful than GPT-3 - though that doesn't (of course) make either model terribly reliable and safe.

I've made the situation clearer in the piece with a couple of tweaks. Feedback is great, we try to have a thick skin, and we always try to maintain a healthy level of skepticism in articles, but that marketing jibe... ow! :)

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Cruise self-driving taxi gets wheels stuck in wet cement

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

'pile up'

Yeah, we meant a back up of traffic, not pile up. It's fixed now. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong.

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Not call: Open source gurus urge you to dump Zoom

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: 30 hours?!

Yeah, oops - should be 30 minutes. It's now fixed. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot something wrong, so that we don't have to fish out feedback from long threads.

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Red Hat redeploys one of its main desktop developers

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: A small headline suggestion

Everyone reading The Reg knows IBM owns Red Hat these days.

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Humans stressed out by content moderation? Just use AI, says OpenAI

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Oi

(For the avoidance of doubt: no one paid for this article in the way you're suggesting. See Register archives for our coverage of OpenAI's failings.)

There's a good chance your VPN is vulnerable to privacy-menacing TunnelCrack attack

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Not everyone is as savvy

It's newsworthy in that it's research accepted by Usenix and vendors have responded to it. Also not everyone is savvy enough to realize the implications of 'don't route LAN connections via tunnel'.

So, yeah, we thought it was a neat little trick and something for people to be aware of. If it was deemed WONTFIX by developers and the attack was too esoteric, we would have ignored it.

And also, we're careful not to say it's the breaking of encryption or anything like that, and that secure connections are still secure.

If it's not news to you, that's great. But that doesn't make it not newsworthy.

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Say hello to Downfall, another data-leaking security hole in several years of Intel chips

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Planned Obsolescence

I'm sure Intel wasn't complaining too much when the Meltdown-Spectre landed, and various banks and corporations ordered a load of new silicon to replace their insecure chips. Or so I heard.

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Astronaut-menacing sunstorm spotted rippling across inner solar system

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: observed from Earth, Moon, and Mars simultaneously, really?

Ah come on, you know what we mean. They picked up the same event.

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AWS is running a 96-core, 192-thread, custom Xeon server

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Two socket

Yeah, that makes sense (as we said in the piece) but it's such a strange way for AWS to market this "custom" silicon if that's the case.

And we've asked Amazon, which it isn't being entirely clear. We'll get to the bottom of it.

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Under CISA pressure collab, Microsoft makes cloud security logs available for free

diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: "forging tokens"

That's how Microsoft described, but yeah, if you're interested in the specifics, they're in the linked-blog.

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