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* Posts by diodesign

3533 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2011

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

diodesign (Written by Reg staff)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

'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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

'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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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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Samsung’s midrange A54 is lovely, but users won't feel seen

diodesign (Written by Reg staff)

Not AUD

It's in USD, direct from Samsung. You can get it cheaper elsewhere of course.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff)

It is USD but...

Hiya --- FWIW $450 (as in USD) is Samsung's direct price but you can find it discounted elsewhere or part of a plan.

Also we've added in a few more specs for those asking for them. Our 'first look' pieces are more hands-on comment articles about using stuff for the first time as opposed to a detailed review.

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Fedora Project mulls 'privacy preserving' usage telemetry

diodesign (Written by Reg staff)

Re: Stats please

Quick look from 2023 YTD, number of unique readers in that time:

Chrome = 52%, Safari = 24%, Firefox and Edge = 6% each. Rest a mix of mobile view on Android, in-app Safari, Opera, etc.

StatCounter has, for June 2023, global browser usage: Chrome = 63%, Safari = 21%, Edge = 5%, Opera = 3%, and Firefox = 3%.

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Virgin Galactic finally gets its first paying customers to edge of space

diodesign (Written by Reg staff)

Sub plot

You're wrong AC. My uncle's Elon Musk and he says writing words on the internet makes rocket science look easy.

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Google formally accuses monopolist Microsoft of trapping people in its cloud

diodesign (Written by Reg staff)

Microsoft's licensing tax

Yeah, don't worry, we'll get to it -- this article was just to quickly flag up that Google has formally gone to the FTC. We've covered Microsoft's licensing pain previously (see the links in the piece) and we hope to uncover all of it eventually.

One of our editors Paul has been writing about this a lot: feel free to drop him an email <pkunert@theregister.com> and let him know more. Cheers!

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Where's my money?! Now USA Today publisher sues Google over online advertising

diodesign (Written by Reg staff)

Third party cookies

Yeah, the end of those cookies will be like that moment in the Titanic movie when the boat splits in half and tips up. There's those who manage to hang on and those who fall.

It's gonna be like that for publications IMHO. We'll see who prepared for it and who didn't. It's something we've been working on for a while.

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diodesign (Written by Reg staff)

'should serve the ads themselves'

One interesting aspect of this - speaking generally about the online publishing world - is that no one believes each other.

If a vendor goes direct to a B2B publication, books an ad campaign, pays $20,000 for 300,000 ad impressions, and then after a few days or weeks, the publication says, 'ta-da, all done, thanks for the money,' that vendor may be skeptical the ads were actually all served to real humans. Especially when the ads are targeted and we're in an era of ad-blocking.

So the advertiser wants in on the analytics to verify the campaign was truly fulfilled and/or to see it progress in real time. The ads in that case end up being served by or involve a third-party both the advertiser and the publication trust / willing to use.

I'm simplifying here to avoid talking about specific operations, and we're happy with our ad clients, and our ad clients are happy with us, of course. My point is, the industry is a very very long way from placing a banner ad on a page and letting it run its course. It's more complex than most may think.

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Music bosses go after Twitter's unlicensed soundtrack to the tune of $250M

diodesign (Written by Reg staff)

Sounds like

piffle to me.

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Florida man insists he didn't violate the law by keeping Top Secret docs

diodesign (Written by Reg staff)

That's the joke

See title.

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