Posts by vogon00

Deeply buried 16-year-old SQLite bug caused last year's Tailscale outages

@phuzz, +1 for the thought:-)

I think 'VPN' now has two meanings, depending on who's selling things :-)

Tailscale are apparently* a 'proper' 'Virtual PRIVATE Network', where the goal is to connect people and/or machines as a 'walled garden' in a private, controllable way over the insecure internet.

Most others these days are selling 'Virtual PRIVACY Network', where the object is to scare you into using them to stop people 'spying' on you. That's important, but only really achievable if you can guarantee a 'no logging' environment and are immune from forced compliance with requests from government etc..

I'm being told a lot of people are now having problems accessing their favorite services via 'Virtual PRIVACY Network' supplier, as the service provider is now refusing service (Politely or rudely!) if traffic originates from a known VPN egress...

_{* apparently because I don't use them. I have my own tool chain to produce a 'PRIVATE' network. Wireguard is my weapon of choice.}

Cisco thinks Mythos means instant death for unsupported networking kit

“resolved entirely by AI with zero human intervention”

I note no-one is crowing about the stunning resolution success rate achieved. I guess that if it been an improvement on the rate that the pre-AI methods yeilded 'success', they'd be shouting it from the rooftops:-)

I suspect no-one has accurate measurements of how effective the case-by-case outcome was. That's difficult information to get even without AI!

Also, you can achieve 100% resolution by simply closing the support ticket without doing anything!

Malicious SIMs can shut down phones, steal files, and drag 5G back to 2G

"But you can enjoy full strength 5G in many locations"

I was just about to savage DJ for even thinking that, let alone saying it, as 4G is still considered patchy hereabouts, and 5G really has been a rarity outside the metropolis. He's not getting savaged as he's right, at least when I'm at home:-)

I'm now sitting indoors at home with my budget Moto G55, and staring at five bars of '5G'. Open Signal and and Speedtest apps both show me between 250 and 400Mbit/s down, with a reasonably constant 40Mbit/s up. I'm pleasantly surprised as I had expected VodafoneThree to concentrate elsewhere for quite some time, but looking at their coverage page, it looks like they've had a bit of a 'push' round here.

Full fibre broadband has been a thing locally for a while courtesy of CitryFibre, and my next door neighbors have service from Sky via them, at a symmetric 150MBit/s. They are no longer pleased:-)

Just for the hell of it, I've spent the afternoon and evening running everything in Vogon Towers through the phone using USB tethering....and have been pleasantly surprised. The latency figures aren't as good as some, but it's OK....perfectly acceptable for residential use, which for me is usually two streaming videos sessions + light browsing and emails etc.

Shit....that means I'm living in the metropolis...time to move!

IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day

Re: child process

"child process"

Or even a spawned process

_{I came here to say that, but you beat me to it!}

Big vacuum is watching as robo-cleaners put humans behind the wheel

Why 'Tony'...

I can't help thinking that the model name of 'Tony' is a nod to robot model TN-3 in Asimov's short story 'Satisfaction Guaranteed'*.

I'm not sure I would have chosen that!

_{* Note to the next generation : make sure your read his robot-related fictional works, you'll learn something, or at least have a new POV. His non-fiction is also pretty good:-)}

OpenAI scored an own goal with Hugging Face attack, showing how open Chinese models are winning

Re: Brave

Some would say Bernard Marx got a raw deal. I for one wish there were more 'odd' people about :-)

Tech support chap told angry customer to think inside the box – and solved the problem

Re: "when many phones still had removable batteries"

"coverage in the basement data center"

Quite a number of years go, the major telecoms firm I worked for was primarily known for it's cellular stuff. The powers that be decided to move us all to a brand new building on the outskirts of the city, with the promise of 'new shiny' everywhere...except for wired phones which were not in the plan, even the VoIP stuff. What, a cellular company using *wired* stuff...not done! :-) We were also issued with new state-of-the-art handsets, sort of dog-fooded from the JV between us and someone else.

However, when we get to the new building, there is little or no cellular service for said handsets, inside or outside the building. Limited coverage was available from other MNOs, but not the one chosen by the powers that be :-) We found this immediately funny and a good example of how NOT to manage the comms during a move :-) Us engineering types took every opportunity to go to the new facility for the peace and quiet!

It seems that there *was* a plan for 'leaky feeder' cellular comms throughout the building, but the building architects either forgot or removed it. The situation only improved months later when someone installed a new 'traditional' cell site on the building.

Brit regulator finds mobile network service on trains is far from first class

"This was in the early 2000s though"

I went interrailing in the mid 90s, and spent a pleasant 3 weeks whizzing around Europe on fast, clean and modern trains. Even the local trams and busses I used for the more local travel were excellent.

My 3 weeks came to an end, and I took a deliberate decision to return via Dover so I could see the famous white cliffs in all their glory, which I thought would be a nice welcome home....and it was. I was still in a good mood after customs etc., and got myself to Dover railway station for the trip home.

The train I caught was made up of carriages that were old, dilapidated, and quite dirty - you wouldn't have even put the badly behaved football fans of the era on board. What a welcome home, I thought....and then felt ashamed of the 'slap in the face' welcome we extended to people visiting Blighty for the first time. Strange, what you remember sometimes..

That said, my most recent use of the railway was last year, from home to Okehampton via Livepool Street and Exeter St. Davids. Things were much better - rolling stock wasn't bad, I had a seat and things ran on time.

Not a right at all.

“People rightly expect connectivity they can count on"

They have a 'right' to expect reliable connectivity...but only if it is wired or the backhaul does not involve cellular data.

To expect a train full of users to use the local Wi-Fi and squeeze all that traffic down the narrow 'pipe' that is the cellular connection is not sane really.

A while back, train Wi-Fi used to be backhauled by a box that had links to each cellular operator, and could - in theory - always obtain some sort of connectivity and do some traffic sharing. These days, where people use way more data than (Ever seen someone struggle with a zoom call on the train?) I think it's unreasonable to expect a useable connection all the while...it's just not sustainable.

ISTR reading some of the train operators are gonna trial backhauling their Wi-Fi over a Starlink or similar satellite service. That will help with the speed issue, but will still suffer from interruptions.

So who's 'fault' is this? It's the people who market the services to punters and b2b....lies may be too strong a word, but talking things up to the extent they do is setting unreasonable expectations that *nobody'* could live up to. That, and Joe Public* doesn't know enough the see through the bullshit. Come to think of it, business people believing their own or others 'hype' is a factor too. I cannot count the times I've heard marketing or biz dev types having a conversation that is entirely 'fluffy' with no grounding in reality!

“People rightly expect connectivity"? That's pretty dumb, IMO. No, it's not right to expect it. Yeah, it's pretty necessary for modern day life, but not to the point where it's a right. Sales&marketing have been giving unreasonable expectations to customers for years. Looks like to current generation actually *believe* it!

_{I'm with Sid Vicious when it comes to dealing with Joe}

Duo who sold car crash victims' data must repay £118k

Re: Offence

"Okparavero was ordered to repay £89,277.32 ($119,962.38) within three months. Failure to do so will result in her serving 18 months in prison."

Before you leap to the same conclusion I did, and assume that she can opt to keep the 89K and get locked up for 18 months (Thus earning herself about £4960/month or £59,520/year, nice!), it's worth noting that the ICO statement says she will still be liable to pay if even if she does the prison time.

Well, that looks like something like justice to me....but only if she pays. if not, I hope she ends up criminally bankrupt and with an Attachment of Earnings* order against her.

Now, if we can just persuade the courts and/or ICO to bite like that when it's a corporate entity in the dock..

* Garnishment of wages in the US,

6G: The next gen of wireless tech nobody's ready to pay for

Re: still struggling to deliver a satisfactory 5G service

Don't go there much, but St Andrew’s is easier to navigate..

Re: still struggling to deliver a satisfactory 5G service

"even on 3G within 40 miles of London.", "No 3G"

I think that 'No 3G' is the expected situation, since all the UK MNOs have now retired/turned off their 3G networks.

So, we're left with '2G' (Shite for data), '4G' (Pretty good, if it works) and 5G (Very good, if it works). The problem is that, even with a 'full bars' signal you're lucky if you get much data - if any - in the metropolis. Go much further out/go more rural and there are loads of no-coverage areas AKA Not-spots,

I live 5.5 miles away from the nearest city in East Anglia*, and as of NOW my 4G service is perfectly usable - 'speedtest.net' using my consumer SIM on Vodafone shows ~14Mbps, which is fine for my low-to-mid-range smartphone. The 4G service here is usually that good and usable. If I happen to drive 2 miles west, I end up in a reliable 5G service area, where things fly along!

Head into the city, and it's a different story...4G signal 'bar strength' is good, but there is either no data connection or the throughput is utter shite. Same with 5G. As for making a voice call using the MNO's network, that is frequently impossible. The problem is I suspect, as ever, in 'the last mile' (The radio link between phone and cell site, or Radio Access Network if you prefer), and the number of endpoints completing for the MNOs services in any one cell's coverage (In xDSL terms, this is the 'contention ratio').

The local metropolitan rollout was obviously governed by budget, that or people have no effing idea how to deploy a practical metro cellular network.

_{*No more precision available. I'm fed up with the jibes:-)}

Putin sends submarines to survey Britain's subsea cables. UK deploys Royal Navy, mobilizes parliamentary draftsmen

"exceeded the previous record by 2,000 degrees

Reminds me of the far less 'P.C.' times of 1990. Saddam Hussein had just stepped over the border, and there was an awful lot of news reporting that the expected invasion of Kuwait had commenced.

90 mins or so later the departmental FAX machine chirped into life as it did.....and we received an unsolicited but very authentic looking weather forecast.

It actually came from a customer (Who will remain nameless, you know who you are!) The words read "Short-range forecast for Baghdad : 6500F and cloudy."

Much more fun times:-)

Under-trained techie didn't claim overtime for mistakenly failing to phone it in

Re: "You won't do that again"

"is a mistake many, if not all, greybeards made"

Yep, done that exact same thing....but fortunately, only in the lab. I learned not to skip configuring spanning tree where various levels of experience were in play.

The last place I worked suffered an outage for a while....someone got creative during their attempt to add yet another cheap, dumb, unmanaged ethernet switch for some reason, which resulted in the usual packet storm. Boss was glad I stopped the business-halting event, but was displeased with the 'I told you so'.

1 in 5 Brits think AI layoffs could trigger civil unrest

Re: Replacing skilled people

I came here to say just that....different industry (Telecoms design), but the same problem..

If we embrace the 'Computer says ...' mentality - as we will be pushed to - then IMO we're only a generation or two away from forgetting how to do some of the complex stuff that humans *should* have the oversight of. Looks like the plot of 2006's film Idiocracy may be a prediction rather than Sci-Fi..

Still, if the tech industry can make money off of shooting the human race in the foot, then so be it, it seems. Talk about short-sighted. Gotta deliver that shareholder value somehow..

Yes, local LLMs are ready to ease the compute strain

In this/my case, the 'burden' means the monetary cost of operating the LLM, which is derived from the the cost of compute and the cost of power to run it and cool it etc.

I'm probably cynical, but this smacks of LLM Co. saying "Hmmmm... compute and power are becoming a real problem....let's see if we can reduce our liability by 'dumping' those onto our users"

Oh what fun.....cloud back to on-prem:-)

"ease the compute strain"

Now, I may be overly cynical here, but doesn't running an LLM locally mean that LLM Co. has passed some of the compute and power burden to us?

Hope your holiday was horrid: You botched the last thing you did before leaving

DHCP? I can go lower than that

Many moons ago, when carrier-grade VoIP was becoming a thing, QOS for voice calls was a hot topic.

My group were tasked with coming up with a policy for managing QOS for both signalling and RTP media our setup. I forget exactly why we used it, but someone bought in some software (Supplier's name withheld) that monitored/probed most of the nodes in the network, came up with a list of choke-points in real-time and messed around with OSPF costs to make sure media didn't transit a congested path. There were 3 separate machines running this as a service, all on the same local Ethernet segment.

The vendor's gurus duly arrived to install & commission their bandwidth manager package....and couldn't get it to work at all. Local instances seemed to be running OK, but the topology it discovered was complete tosh, continually changed, and their logs were full of protocol/message error warnings. They'd' been at it for three days without success when I happened to notice some MAC addresses moving between switch ports when they should have been immobile.

Turns out they had copied the config of a 'reference' system elsewhere and based each of 'our' machines on that config, changing IP addresses as required. However, they forgot to change the config lines that over-rode a local Ethernet's burned-in MAC with a 'forged' one....so there were 3 machines on the same segment/L2 domain with identical MAC addresses.

Faces wend a bit red when I asked if these 'mobile' MAC addresses were theirs:-)

Betting shop bug ends in kidnap plot as staff turn ransom artists

Re: whut?

Wtf? I thought it was the human that made the bet, not software.

I can understand that a software screwup may erroneously cause multiple winning payouts - in which case they should payout due their or supplier error - but I fail to see from the article how a "software fault that generated duplicate winning bets" happened.

What's the IT angle here? The word 'computer' appears *once* in the body, and there is zero info re the bug/hiccup....this reads like a general news story. At least give us geeks something to keep us interested!

Anthropic admits it dumbed down Claude when trying to make it smarter

Old Skool/New Skool

You know, I sit here and read about the latest whiz-bang bauble for AI or such, and it's obvious that things have changed.

Things get rolled out to human users/paying customers much faster than they used to. We all joke about there being less testing than before, and that may be true.

However much 'testing' takes place, it's useless without a good understanding of what's under test and high quality tests that actually exercise the target sufficiently. That - and I suspect this is true of AI/ML more than anything - any the need for continuous development/maintenance/change of the tests themselves and their method of application.

These days, people accept that the service they pay for is not guaranteed to be reliable or accurate. As for inaccuracies in product/service output, that used to be something you used to be able to make people/organisations liable for - "be accurate or risk prosecution" - but it seems we now have to mark the work of our suppliers with 'fact checking' or other inaccuracy checks.

So, If AI/ML is inaccurate and it's 'decision' is acted on without human oversight, who becomes liable for the error? The poor peon who has just been shat upon through lack of oversight, or someone higher up the supply chain? Hint: it should't be the former.

_{Icon because this is who will be needed to detect any fuckups!}

AI bats away ping-pong challenge as rise of the machines continues

...and I'm moving on...

Can AI models trained on human speech help us understand dogs?

>got four functional fingers

So do humans...four fingers and an opposable thumb. Lazy bloody canines should therefore be able to type as well as we do! :-)

Anthropic's super-scary bug hunting model Mythos is shaping up to be a nothingburger

Re: "one of misinformation and hype."

Not at all. Drinking ethanol is a good thing:-)

I meant to do that! AI vendors shrug off responsibility for vulns

> It's hard to imagine any other sector in which a company could tell people "our product puts everyone at grave risk" and still be allowed to operate with impunity.

FCC says it's making it easier for US telcos to ditch legacy lines

"Similar concerns in the UK forced telcos such as BT, the former national operator, to delay plans to turn off the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and replace it all with fiber infrastructure"

The 'replace it all' with fiber' bit isn't strictly true. FTTP rollout by BT has been happening steadily, however it has by no means reached everywhere and most areas are still served by copper pairs (I should say metallic, 'coz it might be aluminum pairs as well)!. These metallic pairs will be with us for quite some time to come.

BT/Openreach are de-commissioning the telephone exchanges that make up the UK's 'legacy' PSTN*, The 'voice' service from these exchanges is 'combined' with the xDSL signal onto the 2-wire pair in the network, then 'split' back out into POTS and DSL in the end-user's premises.

When an exchange ('Central Office') is turned off, they obviously need to provide another way of making voice calls. Their solution is to deploy a digital VoIP handset or - for home users at least'' - a modem/router unit (a 'Homehub', for example) that has FXS '2-Wire Analogue line' electronics on-board, allowing old analogue phones - and other pieces of equipment - to plug in and still have a 'voice service'. The Homehub unit is responsible for passing the analogue voice+signalling using VoIP, with the IP transported via the DSL or FTTP 'WAN' port on the homehub.

We can get away with this trick as a much higher percentage of properties in the UK are within reach of DSL-over-2-wire than in the US where people/properties are more spread out.

Things are complicated here as BT/Openreach is one of two operators who have a legally mandated 'Universal Service Obligation', meaning they have to provide voice and internet service when asked (If at all possible). It's further complicated by the fact that most voice/internet service in the UK is the same Openreach-provided wholesale 'physical' product, just re-branded by the individual ISPs.

BT and Openreach are supposed to operate separately, with 'BT' being the retailer/reseller, and Openreach being the wholesaler and owner of all the plant/equipment infrastructure - including the increasingly unreliable but still very valuable 'copper network'.

Lastly, as the Exchanges/Central Offices disappear, so does your 'Battery Backup'. Exchange-provided analogue phones on a 2-wire line are powered directly from the exchange, meaning they would work even with a power outage at your premises. With VoIP based service, YOU are responsible for the battery backup, including the FTTP termination box (It's basically an optical-electrical converter).

*_{That is what I used to do for a living, that and the ISDN.}

YouTuber lands on Moon using a ZX Spectrum. Conditions apply

"Not least because the Blu-Tack often used to stop the power cable falling out is unlikely to pass space qualification."

Unless, of course, Boeing are involved.

Junior disobeyed orders and tried untested feature during a live robot demo

Re: "A bloke in a skirt".

"I'm filling up writing this".

I think I probably would too. I did get a twinge in the tear-ducts near the end of your post. Sorry for your loss.

As I write this, people are dying unnaturally all over the world, conflict is everywhere, and selfish people are prevalent. I had a twinge as yours is a story that shows 'good people' are still present, somewhere.

Knowing that decent people still exist is important to me, as with all the human-driven awfulness going on at the moment, there has to be some good news somewhere, sometime.

Re: Documentation

Or as one Boss put it :"Good news! We've sold 'X'. Bad news, now we've got to make it work"!

_{This chap - The mighty Mr. Dave Mein - is (was?) one of the few people on the planet I'd actually try walking over hot coals for. He once got me to run several KM of phone lines around the public park he was holding a scouting event at....and remove them later! That's what you get when you work for the 'DC':-)}

Re: The junior kept his job.

The outcome for him would have hinged on two things for me:-

First, his attitude and honesty during the 'post mortem' discussion....."So, explain to me why you did that".

Second, a group decision re its ability to learn from this and exercise better judgement before going all 'gung ho' and trying to impress too much in the future. I have to say that that would have been his absolute last chance with me, though. Any further autonomous excessively risky behaviour, and out it goes!

Or, as it was explained to me "Calm head=calm seas, hot head=hot water!".

Former Microsoft dev trains AI to survive the arcade's most chaotic stress test

Re: Damn I'm old!

"Great games".

Indeed they were.

You put Robotron and Tempest in the mix.....may I add Williams' Defender?

Tempest and Defender marathons were a hard-to-resist distraction at the start of my higher education *:-)

_{Showing my age here, but when younger than that, my brother and I spent our meager coins on 'Boot Hill'....and started a rivalry that exists to this day :-) Sorry, Bro, but I'm still a better shot!}

Openreach: Fiber can sniff out leaky water pipes – if anyone bothers fixing them

Lost water doesn't matter to them sufficiently at the moment.

The cost of delivering water to you - including the losses in the pipe network - are well understood and covered in your bill....think 'We have to produce 130 litres to deliver 100 litres to you. Despite having a water meter, the per-litre rate you pay reflects to the actual cost of production (The 130L), not just your consumption (The 100L).

The same is true in the UK electricity network. If you look at your bill, you'll see a multi-field 'MPAN' number, including a field that describes the losses encountered in the transmission network to you (Which varies by location). That is reflected in your electricity charges.

The same is true in the supermarket and retail industries - a certain amount of product/stock is stolen/shop-lifted (The loss) and the price charged to you covers the losses incurred by the your supplier due to theft.

Delivery systems (Pipes/Wires/Road/Rail/Maritime and so on) always involve a degree of loss - there's no such thing as a perfect distribution network! I can't think of a company (For profit or otherwise) than can sustainably charge you less that it costs to deliver the product/service to you.

Google germinates Gemini 3.1 Pro in ongoing AI model race

Re: Doubletalk as usual

"Has it occurred to you that human intelligence involves rather a lot of 'Analysed Probabilities'? When we navigate our way through a complex world, that's pretty much exactly what we do"

I'm not being a sarcastic smart-arse here, but yes - that's why I wrote those specific words. One of my core beliefs is that a lot of the techniques employed in software or other machine systems are either founded in or an approximation of human behavior. I upvoted you because of this:-)

One of my favorite 'machine process=human process' examples is the IP L2 MAC to L3 IP address discovery process - the machines look things up with ARP or Neighbor discovery, whereas humans build their own L2 E.164 address to L3 Name database as required, or for reverse translation we used to have the 'phone book' which gave us Name-->E.164.

Another is the retry process. You'll find a machine protocol (TCP, Q.921 etc) transmits a message and expects a positive acknowledgement. If the ACK doesn't arrive within 'N' seconds, the session is torn down. Same with humans on a mobile/cellular voice call : your 'Hello! Are you there?' gets repeated 'N' times before realizing the mobile terminal is out of coverage and you terminate the the call.

It's no different with the 'AI' bollocks. Machine models stem from 'learning', where as humans also learn as we go along. Once we've finished learning/training, it takes humans some time to acquire the skills necessary to communicate without error. We can do this as we learn continuously and update our internal 'model' accordingly. IFAIK, the machines cannot yet update the model themselves on the fly or even figure out they are wrong.

Form follows function. If you wish AI to ape human intelligence, then of course it MUST use human processes. Humans like 'black and white' decisions. machines prefer boolean:-)

I suspect that @LionelB and I aren't too far apart:-)

Doubletalk as usual

"..core reasoning.."

Stop passing this stuff off as a reasoning engine. It is not capable of that, in just the same way as Tesla's autopilot plainly isn't.*

If 'Artificial Intelligence' was more honestly billed as 'Analysed Probabilities' I'd be less annoyed, but probably just as hostile towards it as it still can't deliver on it's hype.

_{* I see they've recently been forced to grudgingly move half a step closer towards the truth with their claims.}

How AI could eat itself: Competitors can probe models to steal their secrets and clone them

So what?

Don't know how anyone can act surprised about this. If stuff is published openly on the web, you can expect it to be used....which has been the situation ever since Berners-Lee's brainchild became commercialised (the same is true for the other ways info transits the internet, but you get the idea).

What this info gets used for is the interesting bit, and depends on your POV. Use can be for good or for bad, but who decides on the goodness or badness of any use case? Back in the day, for example, Napster were exploiters to some, heroes to others and disruptors to all.

Anything as 'hot' as AI will always have people looking to use it to get an 'edge' somehow, either for sales or to improve your own product or service somehow. I don't see how the AI companies can be surprised, as their own scraping activities have shown that any info published - irrespective of copyright etc - is fair game.

Still, you have to either admire their brass neck or wonder how stupid they are!

Smartphones cleared for launch as NASA loosens the rulebook

Re: Even LEO shall no longer be free from demon rectangles

I was wondering why '2g' GSM/EDGE is still a thing here in the UK, and why 2g services have outlasted 3g (which is now missing...it's all been turned off).

I was mildly surprised to find out how much legacy gear can only use 2g....some electricity meters, car park capacity signs, some pumping station telemetry, and so on ad nauseum. A lot of it doesn't use circuit-switched data, but text messages!

Recently, I was in the big city near me, and found no sign of any '5g', and despite the good '4g' signal everywhere, I was without data service a lot of the time, and for a fair proportion of the time voice calls fell back to 2g.

The city is the one place you expect (?) decent coverage! Or is that hope for?

While we're on about the 70s etc, the orange one's home town was still present, and his cabinet/advisors were the Pugh brothers, Barney McGrew, Mr Cuthbert, Mr Dibble and Mr Grubb.

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

So where do you stand on the subject of William Perry aka 'The Fridge'?

DIY AI bot farm OpenClaw is a security 'dumpster fire'

Re: Depeche Mode FTW

Given the new A.I. religion, all I can say is : I don't want to start any blasphemous rumours, but I think this Jarvis' got a sick sense of humour, and when I die*, I expect to find it laughing.

_{* Hopefully before our AI overlords arrive!}

Salesforce signs $5.6B deal to inject agentic AI into the US Army

Don't forget the basics.

I once asked a friend in the Singaporean navy what their naval warfare was expected to be like. I was thinking in terms of EMCON and staying as hidden as possible (I read too much Tom Clancy), only to be told that no-one really cares about naval 'stealth' any more - they happily radiate an electronic 'bubble' and have all sorts of 'RF Visible' telemetry and drones etc. happening. When I asked what happens when your SATCOM fails or get taken out in the early stages of conflict, I was again surprised to be told that (and i paraphrase here) 'When it comes to data, if we can't do it at 300 Baud over HF Radio, then we're not very interested'.

I believed him on both counts (He was a Major / Lieutenant Commander then, on their 'fast track' and very honest.).

Here's hoping that someone realises that the 'agentic mission' will probably be useless if the agents can't talk to each other!

Watchdog says US weather alerts are getting lost in translation

Re: Perhaps there is no need for 'AI'

"people in Newcastle are wearing coats"

Too true. A number of years ago, I was walking down the street in a very, very cold and snowy Leamington Spa. Both myself and the then Mrs. Vogon were well wrapped up against the near blizzard conditions - and yes, it was really a blizzard (i.e. not like the pathetic modern snowfall that people whinge about).

I'm not easily surprised by things/people, but I was gobsmacked to see a gent walking towards us dressed only in businesslike trousers and shirtsleeves. Me being me, I waited until we were nearly abeam each other and said 'Now, you HAVE to have come from Newcastle!' with a grin on my face.

The bloke concerned returned my grin and said 'Wey aye, man, how'd you know!', and in a native Geordie accent too! Turns out he was visiting from Gateshead:-)

They say cockroaches will survive a nuclear holocaust*. I think Geordies will survive the next ice age.

_{* Use to be 'cockroaches and Lemmy' but, sadly, the latter isn't true. RIP.}

NASA begins formal anomaly review after MAVEN probe lost in space

Re: Safe Mode?

Shame we haven't made contact with the Martians yet. Perhaps we'd be able to persuade them to nip up* there, reboot the thing and hold down F5 for us :-) Who knows, they may even wipe any lenses and kick any tyres for us while we're there..

_{*Assuming they consider 'up' is up!}

eBay updates legalese to ban AI-powered shop-bots

'Some envisage simple “Buy product X when it’s available anywhere for $Y”'

I suspect those people will be just as disappointed as the people at Amazon and Google who still haven't managed to turn the smart speaker things into the voice-controlled shopping tool they hoped for.

Personally, I have never bought anything using mine, and I don't know anyone who has. I'm sure some people do use it to purchase with, but nowhere near as much as the providers would want. Do you buy stuff using yours?

It's fun watching the world decide that, on balance, AI is a negative and start to put the blocks up. It's been obvious to a lot of people for a long while now that AI will NOT provide the benefits postulated. Yes, it's going to be beneficial is some areas but not to the extent the AI producers and enthusiasts expect. The sooner the AI bubble bursts and we can get back to creating something more useful and better for humanity and the planet, the better.

Contagious Claude Code bug Anthropic ignored promptly spreads to Cowork

Here's an idea..

"invited users to send feedback or security recommendations"

Best security recommendation would be to turn it off! That seems to cover both their security and ours nicely.

FAA signs radar deals to drag US air traffic control out of the 1980s

Re: That may be my job gone then

It's amazing how old tech hangs around. Back in the mid to late 2000s, myself and my colleagues had to support a bit of gear (CMUX2, if you remember that) that transported the very old and very analogue signalling we knew as 'Gen-Gen' over E1/DS0. It seems some people at the Stock Exchange were still using it!

I'll hazard a guess that SDH/PDH transmission will still be a thing for quite a while yet.

Historic NASA test towers face their final countdown

Re: Controlled implosion

Ad-hoc building destruction : start with 1lb C4 and your initiator of choice inside the building, roughly centrally. Add a sack of flour (or a similar flammable dust, extra gasoline is optional but recommended) and set it off. C4 disperses the flour (+gas) internally, which then ignite and burn the nearby oxygen. 15psia air outside creates overpressure on the walls which collapse onwards.

Explosion leads to an implosion.

What if Linux ran Windows… and meant it? Meet Loss32

The art of the journalist...

"Loss32 is the most gleefully deranged idea for how to put together a Linux OS that we think we have ever read about in three and a half decades…

Now I've recovered from the fit induced by the idea of breeding as OS like that......I'd like to award @Liam my award for 'Best journalistic sentence of the year (so far)'. That's extremely well crafted, sir.

UK urged to unplug from US tech giants as digital sovereignty fears grow

Re: Not enough

"The UK doesn't have a meaningful industrial strategy in this area

Empirically, I think you'll find it does have one, and it is the same as most capitalist ones - the race to the bottom, where everything is decided on price.

Every time an industry is in trouble, it always seems to be because what it makes can be sourced from elsewhere for less cost. Business financials these days dictate that If its cheaper to buy in what you need,then why make it yourself? It's the easiest way to either trim costs so you can (a) pay dividends to stockholders, (b) ease pressure on you margins. If that means you have to let people go, then so be it....tough luck, but the balance sheet doesn't lie when it comes to cost centers.

ISTR being told by a local fisherman that he's take the boat out and fish UK waters, but it was cheaper (or more profitable) to land the catch in Europe and have it transported back here¹.

What the balance sheet doesn't hold is a measure of value. We all know that, when competing, you have to add value...and one of the big values you can have is in-house skills relating to your products or services. What we've got here now is a whole bunch of SMB 'manufacturers' (Box shifters/VARs, not *real* manufacturing!) who's core competence is biased towards 'in/out/ shipping logistics, rather than actually knowing their product.

There's a lot of UK stuff that's been sold over the years to foreign buyers or investments...water/sewage companies etc., electricity distribution @ DNO level² and so on. We've sold a lot of our competence away:-)

_{[1] I trust the guy, but this was a while ago now so may no longer be true!}

_{[2] The tech angle on this story is that my DNO, UK Power Networks, is owned by CK Hutchison who do/did the '3' mobile phone network here.}

Safe CEO: AI is an assistant, not a replacement

We were all junior and complete shit at one point. The trick is avoid becoming senior and shit.

I cannot imagine anyone junior NOT wanting to improve in their chosen discipline - but then I've always been motivated by 'learn more / get better / adapt':-)

Seniors also have a duty to educate juniors, especially if asked. There are no stupid questions as far as I am concerned, mainly as I remember asking some that, with hindsight, were *incredibly* dumb. That's only 'coz i didn't *know* any better at the time. Fortunately for me, lots of people I worked with were the 'here, let me explain that' type as opposed to the piss-taking type.

These days, you can't educate anyone who isn't interested. I still have to teach occasionally, and I just spend my time on those who are.

_{As the Unseen University's machine Hex said, "All things strive".}

Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

Gonna get expensive!

"it is time engineers reconsidered their applications and toolchains' voracious appetite for memory."

Most of us do already - at least those of us that remember being 'king of the hill' one's 286 AT clone had a whole 2MiB of DRAM. At work, things were of a more embedded nature and we were constantly having to re-factor code to fit things into the available space.. all 8KiB of it. With the more mature embedded stuff, the code deduction required to get enough space for the fix/new feature could sometimes be harder than the fix etc..!

As an old fart who was used to counting the bytes, I've often wondered how the 'memory bloat' introduced by the OS/Tools/Runtimes etc. could be tolerated. The answer is, of course, 'plug in more RAM!'. ISTR that RAM was about £10/MiB at the time.

The idea idea that RAM is a finite resource appears to have dropped out of the syllabus:-) Think yourselves lucky - on occasion one had to count the CPU Cycles used by each machine instruction if things were time-sensitive.

NIST contemplated pulling the pin on NTP servers after blackout caused atomic clock drift

My thoughts exactly. Far easier to logically disconnect the service with some firewall surgery rather than command an uncontrolled power down.

I nearly cried 'bullshit' on this, as a power off is a horribly blunt and risky way of doing that! Who does that by choice!?

Still, if the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail:-)