Posts by Phil O'Sophical

60 years since humanity first touched the surface of another planet

Re: Odd

Well, she obviously dealt with the problem...

Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing, argues Bruce Perens

Re: .....................it's already here, as a service company

"malus" is also the botanical genus of apple...

Software patents as well?

It does highlight one of the ongoing issues with Open Source. The GNU project predates the explosion of software due to the widespread internet and WWW, and I don't think it really foresaw a world where software would be used by, and written by, everone and his dog on a daily basis. Nowadays we frequently see the situation where someone knocks up a bit of code for themselves, but thinking it might be useful to a few others they unthinkingly slap a GPL header on it and put it up somewhere like github. A few years later they realise that it's really popular, lots of businesses have picked it up, and they're expected to keep maintaining it for nothing. It's unsurprising, really, that many of them regret having made it so freely available and wish they'd kept enough control to have commercialized it themselves.

That doesn't bother the people who are ideologically convinced that commercial software is an abomination, but the real world isn't so black and white. I wouldn't be surprised to see a move back towards the 'shareware' model of the 70's and 80's, where people made their software available for free for hobby and non-commercial use, but very clearly stated that anyone wanting to use it commercially (including for AI training) should call to discuss licence terms.

I also wonder how the use of AI like this will impact software patents. The whole concept of a patent is that the developer of the design gets an exclusive license to commercialise the design for a fixed period, in return for which they make the design public so that others can understand it, and improve on it. That sounds like a perfect definition of what AI does, it can be trained on published patent info and then instructed to create a non-infringing duplicate. Might make people much less likely to patent software in the future.

UK mobilizes lawyers to keep report on Gatwick 'drone' chaos under wraps

Or possibly an excess of ----------------->

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

Re: GDPR's position on CCTV?

Just require the glasses to be fitted with bells...

Re: Who would wear AI glasses during "extremely private moments" ...

"Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses"?

(Dorothy Parker)

Microsoft Copilot to hijack your browser... for your own convenience

Re: Have these people no shame /s

The plan is that Windows = Copilot, so you do everything through Copilot. You don't need anything else, do you...

Think of it as systemd for Windows.

Hang on a moment, where did Poettering work until recently...

Users fume at Outlook.com email 'carnage'

Sounds like the credit reference agencies who tell you that you can improve your credit rating by borrowing money and getting deeper in debt

UK digital ID brief quietly moves to new minister after resignation

Re: Labour policy initiatives.

not from the 9.7m they had, which was a push to get rid of the Tories.

Labour had 10.3m votes in 2019, and dropped to 9.7m in 2024. They didn't get any significant number of anti-Tory votes in 2024. The reasons the Tories got stuffed was their drop from 14m to 6.8m votes. Those 7m missing votes didn't go to Labour, some went to Reform and some were the 3m fewer people who voted at all.

If you're young and rich, why would you want to live in Starmer's UK?

Popular prayer program becomes propaganda pusher after reported Israeli hack

scepticism

little app users can do beyond being skeptical about what gets displayed on their screen

It's a prayer app, shouldn't that be standard behaviour?

Server crashes traced to one very literal knee-jerk reaction

Re: "It was the time of Novell networks, RG58 cables, and bulky tower PCs,"

I never could get a coherent explanation of why or where got the cable from

75ohm cable with BNC connectors could also be from video camera/monitors, so perhaps collected when left "unwanted" in a conference room?

Unfortunately the centre pins on 50 and 75 ohm BNCs are different diameters, so tend to either make poor connections or stretch the female socket centre connectors when plugs & sockets are mismatched.

Burger King turns to AI to flame broil employees who aren't friendly enough

Re: "they can stay present with guests"

A shredded pork Banh Mi (Thit?)

It'th not that bad, thurely?

Re: Hi There!!!

And liquid salad to accompany them --->

Re: "Dunno from where the lass got the meat"

Tasty enough in burgers, but a bit noticeable in a steak.

Denizens of DEF CON are 'fed up with government'

Re: Benjamin Franklin and human rights

Franklin owned slaves as a young man, but later became a very outspoken abolitionist.

Trump orders purge of 'woke' Anthropic from government

Re: Kathy Burke said it best...

Political Correctness is about ensuring your language doesn’t cause offence without first checking to see if it does cause a problem.

It's worse than that, it's more about assuming that it is causing a problem based on one's own views, without being able to accept that the view of the people concerned should be taken into account. When those involved say "you're over-reacting, we aren't offended", the PC response is "no we're not, you should be offended and if you're too blind/thick/naive to see it then you're part of the problem". It's an arrogant, self-righteous, reaction.

Wokeness is about being aware of and responsive to what is actually causing a problem.

It started that way, and would indeed be a good thing if it had remained so. Unfortunately the problems concerned often affected minorities, and some more militant members of those minorities weaponised it to the point where it became seen as PC++. It's perfectly reasonable to say something like "we need to accept that this small group sees things differently, and we should consider that", but very different to say "our small group disagrees, and if you don't do what we want you're a nasty, discriminating fascist". Taking minority views into consideration, and finding a working compromise, is good (and arguably what "woke" was about). Expecting minority views to prevail over majority ones because minorities are more important is neither good nor useful.

when the far right accuses the liberal left of these things they are implicitly recognising that they’re on the wrong side of history.

"left" and "right"are not useful terms in such a statement. You could equally accurately say "when the far left accuses the liberal right of these things they are implicitly recognising that they’re on the wrong side of history."

Engineer held hostage by client who asked for the wrong fix

And ferry happy to close the Deal.

NASA safety watchdog says it's time to rethink Moon landing

Ginnungagap

Remember how that ended. Do you really want the inhabitants of the Capitol to seed the next universe?

Britain's creaking courts to use Copilot for transcriptions

AI Transcription

With thanks to Mark Eckman and Jerrold Zar:

I have a spelling checker,

It came with my PC.

It plane lee marks four my revue

Miss steaks aye can knot sea.

Eye ran this poem threw it,

Your sure reel glad two no.

Its vary polished in it's weigh.

My checker tolled me sew.

A checker is a bless sing,

It freeze yew lodes of thyme.

It helps me right awl stiles two reed,

And aides me when eye rime.

Each frays come posed up on my screen

Eye trussed too bee a joule.

The checker pours o'er every word

To cheque sum spelling rule.

Bee fore a veiling checker's

Hour spelling mite decline,

And if we're lacks oar have a laps,

We wood bee maid too wine.

Butt now bee cause my spelling

Is checked with such grate flare,

Their are know fault's with in my cite,

Of nun eye am a wear.

Now spelling does knot phase me,

It does knot bring a tier.

My pay purrs awl due glad den

With wrapped word's fare as hear.

To rite with care is quite a feet

Of witch won should bee proud,

And wee mussed dew the best wee can,

Sew flaw's are knot aloud.

Sow ewe can sea why aye dew prays

Such soft wear four pea seas,

And why eye brake in two averse

Buy righting want too pleas.

Every day in every way, passwords are getting worse and worse

Re: I keep all my PWs in a text file called passwords.txt on the desktop

I've heard the same approach suggested for physical security. Leave a door key under the plant pot on your front porch, but make sure it doesn't open your lock. By the time the burglar has discovered that, they'll be getting antsy about neighbours and doorbell cameras and will probably give up and go elsewhere.

Hotel's rotary switchboard so retro it predates the concept of crashing

Re: who have not seen such a device in the wild (or at least outside a museum)

Indeed, what little magic smoke they had was very well contained. Not easy to release even under extreme conditions, unlike much of today's kit.

NASA repurposes Mars Helicopter’s ancient Snapdragon SoC to help Perseverance rover navigate

Concerned about 1mm error

That's proper full self driving. Eat your heart out Elon!

Government upgrades drones, deploys joystick tweakers to catch illegal dumpers

Re: Self-inflicted

All the more reason for councils to concentrate on what matters to their taxpayers, like rubbish collection and potholes, and not waste money on virtue signalling support for things that have nothing to do with local government.

Microsoft boffins cook up archival storage using Pyrex glass they say can last over 10,000 years

Re: Where is Common Sense in This?

I have multiple 100+ year-old books which still function perfectly-well.

Assuming they're written in a language that's still understood, or that you have a convenient Rosetta Stone, that is.

Europe's 5G Standalone stall risks falling behind US, Asia

Re: Trump 1 - Europe 0…

A 4G contract is probably better. My 5G phone often switches to a 5G network with worse performance than the 4G one.

Gemini lies to user about health info, says it wanted to make him feel better

Re: Just LLMs doin' LLM things

Profitin'

Ireland joins regulator smackdown after X's Grok AI accused of undressing people

Re: Am I the only one ...

why has it been trained on the data that allows it to do so?

One area that AI is supposedly good is in medical diagnosis. It has to be trained on medical texts, many of which contain images of naked bodies for perfectly legitimate reasons.

UK.gov launches cyber 'lockdown' campaign as 80% of orgs still leave door open

Re: Platitudes

got his "mate who can sign the certificate" in on the last day.

That's quite permissable under building regs if the mate properly checks the work before issuing the certificate. Many (most?) electricians prefer not to do it because they'd rather get paid to do the whole job than only get a small fee for final certification, but they may be willing to do it for a mate.

Re: Platitudes

“If they can afford X, they can afford Y” is pure fantasy maths.

It's an oversimplification. If they can't afford both X and Y they aren't in a position to run a business. IT security should be up there with health and safety, a mandatory function without which a business should not be permitted to operate.

Keir Starmer declares 'months' timeline for social media age clampdown in UK

Re: The problem with politicians

This is the problem. People have stopped voting for someone they want, and just vote against the party they don't want. They vote for Reform (especially in by-elections) not because they want to see Farage in No. 10, it's that they have almost given up caring because they see that all parties do the same thing, and are useless at it. They have a faint hope that an electoral kicking will make them listen, although there's certainly no sign that it had any effect on the Tories or Labour.

Re: The problem with politicians

Saying "We can fix this" to the general public is a vote winner

Not any more. No-one believes them now.

Enforcing piracy policy earned helpdesk worker death threats

Re: Why wasn't the violent idiot fired immediately and the cops called?

If you yelled "Fire!" in a theatre screening Melania, would anyone hear?

I wouldn't risk it, the likely audience would probably let fly with their 45's...

AI to make call center agents 'superheroes,' not unemployed, says industry CEO

Re: "Gartner says"

Replacing Gartner with AI might actually be one place where things would improve.

$8K laundry bot knows when to hold ’em, knows when to fold ’em, and knows it has help standing by

Re: $8K? Piffle.

If they're taking a dump in the bidet they have bigger problems than having too much money...

Doctors told to give Palantir's NHS data platform the cold shoulder

Re: How utterly naive

Just how naive are these people?

I've lost count of the number of times I've pointed out security issues when misusing someone's code, only to get the responses "but why would anyone do that?" or "that's not very likely to happen in real life, is it?" Most people, even supposedly senior developers, just don't get it.

Reviving a CIDCO MailStation – the last Z80 computer

Re: Nostalgia meets modern hardware

Back in the 80s I remember using Newbury Labs terminals to talk to a Z80-based RML380z. When we opened the terminal we found that it used a Z80 internally for the display, and had another in the keyboard. Two Z80s just to interface to the one which did all the work.

Microsoft touts far-off high-temperature superconducting tech for datacenter efficiency

Re: I hear Microsoft also found how to cut on travel expenses

Unless it's already available, and they've bought and killed it to maintain the Teams revenue...

BBC bumps telly tax to £180 as Netflix lurks with cheaper tiers

Re: A SInking Flagship?

If only there were a UK TV licence that included all streaming services as part of it!! I'll wake up from this dream some day.

Just taking the basic ad-supported tiers of the main streaming services, that works out around £430 per year for them all, plus the £180 for BBC. Are you sure you want to pay > £600 for that?

Linus Torvalds keeps his ‘fingers and toes’ rule by decreeing next Linux will be version 7.0

Not just Linux

I remember when Solaris 10 came out, and too many FOSS scripts broke because they misparsed the underlying SunOS version of 5.10 as being less than 5.9 or 5.8.

Study confirms experience beats youthful enthusiasm

Re: Experience includes institutional knowledge

Documented, yes. Usefully documented, not so much.

That's ISO9001 in a nutshell.

Openreach turns up the heat to force laggards off legacy copper lines

Main exchanges had lead-acid batteries that could last for many hours, and a generator to take over when required. With the move to digital exchanges and outlying concentrators the battery life was much less, but in general long enough to take a generator on-site and connect it.

The problem with fibre setups is that powered street cabinets are everywhere. BT ones rarely have more than an hour or two battery life, others (like Virgin) have no battery backup at all. Since the mobile network often uses the same fibres for backhaul, once the outlying node batteries die nothing works. Only PSTN lines on main exchanges still operate.

Re: Perhaps....

The good news will be that there will be less calls fraudulent / scamming calls

I get far more such calls on my mobile than I ever did on my landlines.

Apples and oranges?

PSTN analog network is obsolete, becoming harder to maintain and significantly more expensive to run,

How much of that extra expense is because the old PSTN was held to considerably higher standards of availability than the replacement IP network? If broadband had to meet the same standard it wouldn't necessarily be cheaper. See this article for example.

Supermarket sorry after facial recognition alert flags right criminal, wrong customer

Re: Wait until Facewatch is hacked

That's why I always get a receipt from one shop if I know I'm going into another with my purchases.

Re: Ban it

The cost of shoplifting is always passed on to the customer.

UK council digs deeper into capital assets to keep Oracle project afloat

data input and call centre-type roles wouldn't pay close to £33k.

The cost of an employee to the employer can be around 50% more than their salary, taking into account all the overheads of pensions, NI, office space, etc. £33k cost could map to £20k - £25k salary.

SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites

Re: I idly wonder

Don't zap them, tax them. $1m per satellite per year "orbit rental" should come in handy, shared among the overflown countries.

Ghost gun legislation casts shadow over 3D printing

Re: The problem with scanning ...

"these days"? It has always been so.

Notepad++ update service hijacked in targeted state-linked attack

So you whitelist one version, and then let it update without further checking? That's both lazy and careless, it certainly isn't competent admin.