Posts by Androgynous Cupboard

London still dominates Britain's datacenter map, but the regions are powering up

Re: Insane

What he said. Lord knows I don't agree with El Sergio very often, but I certainly do here.

And while we're piling on objections, I forgot to note that the UK has some of the highest electricity prices in the G20 so the economics for siting a datacenter in the UK, let alone London, are questionable. I am very familiar with the latency argument for HFT, but there are only so many banks - and the Docklands is already well supplied with Datacenters.

In short: very high electricity costs, astromically high land costs, high environmental impact (heat in a heat island), negligible job creation and whatever profit remains is offshored. Whatever reasoning process is driving this, it isn't obvious.

Re: Insane

It's not just a carpark, as you probably know.

Cities need jobs and housing - lets take jobs. How many jobs/m2 does a datacenter bring? between 0.2 and 3 staff per MW - so at a proposed 5.2MW, that's between two and fifteen jobs.

Cities generate heat. How much heat does a 5.2MW datacenter generate? Well that's pretty easy - 5.2MW of heat.

I'll leave the maths demonstrating virtually any other use will generate more jobs and less heat as an exercise for the reader.

It doesn't need to be in zone one. Put it in the ****ing countryside.

Insane

To underline the fuckwittery that goes behind this kind of planning, consider that a datacenter has been approved in the Truman Building, a fairly marvellous structure currently housing all sorts of mixed use including pubs and bars - a site that is hugely valuable.

The only way I can imagine this sort of approach is financially viable is that it's a literal land grab: firms are taking advantage of loosened planning and financial incentives to get into a site, where they'll run a datacenter for X years and then flog the lease at a profit. I'd love to know if this is the case, because taking valuable office/retail space and turning it into a datacenter makes no sense to me.

London cops handed victim's new address and number to her stalker, watchdog says

Re: CC

Agree. In a new software system this would be considered a design fault, but because email has worled like this for 50 years we’re just supposed to live with it?

Here’s a starter for ten: if more than five people outside your organisation are CC’d in, display a confirm dialog explaining what will happen and did they mean BCC instead?

Google Earth's AI makeover survives less than one planetary rotation

They've rolled back a bit too far, and we're back to the pre-Copernican geocentric model.

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

Re: Groups!

My first job was maintaining a program in tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of C which had been auto-converted from BASIC. Loads of "if (b_streq(a, "") == true" to check if the string was zero-length, the vast majority of variables were global and, oh yes: liberal use of "goto"

Frankly keeping the BASIC would have been a better option.

FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another

Re: What's the bet ...

Asciidoc FTW. It’s Markdown that works.

Re: Remember the Approval Process for OOXML?

Thank you. I was hoping someone would make this point. OOXML was, first and foremost, an abuse of the standards process. Not the first or the last, but possibly the most egregious.

Europol flags 4,340 'horrific' URLs linked to The Com

Re: Have they produced any real evidence of this?

Damn, you caught us. We just, y’know, had a bit of a Google and read some shit on Reddit.

Europol

Some Mullvad VPN customers tunnel for exit after co-founder donates millions to populist party

Re: Sad but not surprising

Tell them that with one of these you can replace the internals and keep going almost for ever, and these days they won’t be looking at the laptop.

We have fallen a long way since Carnegie and Cadbury.

UK.gov's tech department gets the chop after two years

Re: 'I am not a number'.

Presumably you only pay cash, file your tax return by post and never use the digital passport gates - not even when the queue is shorter?

I'm no fan of government overreach either, but on some topics the readship here does stry beyond luddite into anti-enlightment territory. This is definitely one.

Downvote away, I can take it. I am confident in the knowledge most of them will be sent by second-class post.

Musk promises purge after Grok Build caught sending entire repos to the cloud

Re: Bool would not approve

They need a "disable_disabled_enable_flag_leaves_unconfigured" flag. That would certainly clear things up.

Re: Bool would not approve

Personal preference but I like the default values of any flags I create to be false. If I want the default action to be “do x”, I would tend to name the flag “disable_x”.

Suspected Chinese snoops caught breaking into universities' Roundcube mailservers

Re: A second ingedient is required: M$ Outlook!

"a JavaScript loader stored in the message body executes" - dear god, a thousand times yes. Surely there must be more to it? (30 seconds later) aha. Someone thought it was a good idea to use a regex to parse and sanitize HTML. Sometimes I just despair.

No mention of outlook in the CVE report by the way.

Police intercept tipsy teens after Waymo snitches for shooting Orbeez out of the car

Re: Untrained (Police) Eyes

Sergeant Al Powell from Die Hard would like a word.

New tool gives CLIs a warm and GUI feeling instead

Re: Is this Slashdot?

Er, I remember when slashdot had the same, although that’s going back a bit now.

Godot says bye bye AI, bans vibe-coded contributions

Re: Godot? You should be so lucky

Too subtle by half, Stewart.

My favourite part of the play: Pozzo commands lucky to "Think", then he delivers "a torrent of academic-sounding phrases mixed with pure nonsense" (Wikipedia's wording), after which Vladimir and Estragon regret asking. The AI analogies, they just write themselves.

Connect, disconnect, or just have a lovely beer

Re: It does look like the Disney castle

The staircases spiral the wrong way. If you're sword-fighting your way into a castle, starting at the ground and attacking defenders on higher levels, spiral staircases were curved to favour a right-handed defender against a right-handed attacker. In Neuschwanstein - built, as noted, long after castles were practical - the staircases spiral the other way which gives an attacker the advantage.

That is the only factoid remained lodged in my brain from a visit 30+ years ago - and while it's true the staircases definitely spiral that way, it's the 2020s and we doubt everything so I wonder whether most castles staircases really do spiral the other way? I've never thought to check.

Boffin claims Microsoft's supposed quantum leap does not compute due to 'basic Python errors'

Oh dear, he's back. Abandon reason all those who enter here.

Cloudflare teams up with big browsers to help websites tell welcome from unwelcome visitors

Re: Trying Something New

Steady on. If they try something and it doesn’t work, nothing is lost. If it does work, great. Thats how tech works, how we got SYN flood mitigation, DKIM and so on.

No need to rush to nazi analogies - what do you think this is, the internet?

Re: Yet another ID grab.

Yes, if sucks but the current situation is unsustainable. I suspect it’s something like this or their entire internet disappears behind captcha and login-first.

Thats not to say there aren’t a lot of ways this can go wrong, of course, but I am glad someone is trying something new.

Britain sending Ukraine an extra 30,000 drones – now 150,000 all up

Re: Standard Operating Procedure

Both the North Vietnamese and the Afghans have inflicted defeats on a nuclear armed state, and those are just the first that came to mind.

AI is code – and can't be prompted into being smarter

Re: Dune

Lawks, I have been misled. My omnibus was The Great Dune Trilogy. Now I'm wondering if there's a followup, "The Not Quite As Great Dune Trilogy"

Incidentally while we're on the topic of space opera dross, in my innoncent youth I borrowed the first of L Ron Hubbards "Mission Earth" books from the library. I knew no better, and it had a shiny cover. I'd strongly advise against anyone ever doing the same.

Re: Dune

> since he was widely reputed to be an otherwise terrible writer

I read the trilogy a few years back to see what the fuss was about, and my only problem with your previous sentence is the word "otherwise".

The first one was not bad, but it so rapidly disappeared up its own arse in the second that I finished the trilogy wondering what had just happened.

France and Germany agree to disagree, ditch joint next-gen Euro fighter

Re: As usual, the problem lies with French intransigence

The 15% figure was plucked from the OBR Brexit page, not thin air.

Re: As usual, the problem lies with French intransigence

Sweet summer child. Yes, €100m is a lot. The House of Lords also costs about £100m a year. The UK civil service costs £500,000m a year. Governing is expensive, no matter who does it.

Meanwhile UK imports and exports are down 15% due to Brexit. We are, all of us, financially worse off than we were ten years ago. Everything is more expensive (relative to income). Services are worse. People are angrier. I feel it, I’m sure you feel it. The best we can hope for now is managed decline.

And our American friends aren’t interested. You might think the world revolves around the UK but it doesn’t. Everyone has has their own problems.

Re: As usual, the problem lies with French intransigence

Oooh, that Starmer - Brexit was going so well until he took over. What we need is a PM who was a leaver to the bone, no trade-offs, no compromise... gee, I wonder if we could get Liz Truss back?

"Nimbly". Never has a word been less apt.

Re: Nervous pilots. - frigates

They say that the military is always fully prepared for the previous war.

Ivanti tells Sentry customers to patch now as critical bugs hit 10.0 and 9.9

Based on so many of these recently, the quickest way to fall victim to a remote exploit is to install software that claims to prevent it.

A look through the watchtower labs writeup is informative. They're... unimpressed, and with good reason.

Quite honestly, it feels like there has been no thought given to security whatsoever - I write Java day in, day out and if I ever felt the need to put Runtime.exec on the end of a webservice, or any sort of dynamic call into a random class using reflection, there would be internal alarm bells ringing before I'd sat down to write the first line. This isn't even subtle - it's basic, basic stuff. 0/10 Ivanti, FOAD.

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

Re: Built different

Possibly one of the oddest comments ever seen on this site.

'Please do not vibe f--- up this software': Broken backups spark AI coding row in rsync project

That’s potentially a bit harsh. A gap in the test suite is precisely where you would find new bugs. Fixes in that area are, by definition, in areas that are going to be less well covered, and so can lead to more bugs.

You don’t need AI for any of this. However if it’s AI that found the original problem, it’s going to get some of the blame for the later bugs.

Not defending AI, but this is what test-driven development looks like.

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

Surely “G” stands for “gone”?

UK lawmakers call on government to ditch Palantir NHS contract

Re: Exactly 60 minutes

I can deal with the page layout, I can deal with the comments.

What I can't abide is the typesetting barbarity of formatting 90% of the article in bold text (eg this one).

ALTHOUGH, I SUPPOSE IT COULD STILL BE WORSE

Zig creator seeks 'uncompromising perfection' before blessing 1.0

Re: Why should I care

I’ve seen Zig mentioned a few times, not just here but as the language used by various projects I’ve stumbled across. So I appreciate understanding the background to it, just as I do for projects in Ruby, Go and other languages in that category.

Experts pour cold borscht on Farage's Russian hack claim

Re: An asset to Russia

They're missing from my list because I've got actual work to do, I can't spend my day writing comments.

The UK is not perfect, but it is not unredeemable. Things could be better, they could be an awful lot worse. We agree that Reform are going to make it worse, and we agree (I think) that focusing on £4K of council tax and ignoring larger issues is a distraction; We differ on who the baddie is; you think it's the civil service, I think it's that group of elderly men that enjoy influence and power and didn't like sharing it with Brussels - Farage, Rothermere, Bamford from JCB etc ad infinitum. Fine. Yo do you.

Re: An asset to Russia

Note the "eg". Other charts are available.

Zach Polanski was hauled over the coals for £4,000 of council tax, Angela Rayner lost her job for £40,000 of stamp duty and the ex Mr Nicola Sturgeon is looking at jail for £400,000 of fraud. Nigel Farage took a £5,000,000 gift and didn't declare it. Donald Trump is alleged to have made $1,4000,000,000 off the presidency in his first year. Like I said, small beer.

Re: An asset to Russia

You can be sure that "serious problems with object permanence" is one issue that will never plague El Reg - we'd serialize everything to disk.

Re: An asset to Russia

You know, if you reined in your hyperbolic tendencies you might come across as a bit more useful - some of your points are good, but you add way too much salt.

There are literally charts of corruption - see eg https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025/index/gbr where the UK is 20 out of 182. So not only is it on the charts, it's not doing too badly.

Re: An asset to Russia

> There's a very easy explanation for that. Corruption in this country is off the charts

No, it’s just not. It’s non-zero that’s for sure, and higher than we want. But on a global scale, corruption in the UK is small beer. Although you can bet that’s the first thing that would change under a Reform government. .

Bezos rocket fell short after cryogenic leak cut engine thrust

“off-nominal thermal condition”

Someone has spent a considerable amount of effort there to find a more obtuse way of saying “frozen”. Well done to that middle manager!

Google explains how it will infuse ads into AI answers

Re: DDG

I think it was Liam Proven of this parish that steered me towards Kagi. $7 a month, but on balance I think it's worth it. DDG was, regrettably, fairly shit.

Burnham backlash: UK Digital ID plans in peril if Manchester mayor succeeds Starmer

Re: Burnham would come to dunce inane

Pick your poison.

Either you've got an ID card that can identify you with a single number, which is open to abuse.

Or you've got an NI number, drivers license number, NHS number etc, all of which can also identify you and all of which are equally open to abuse - and that's if you're lucky. If you're not lucky you've got none of these, and the Home Office will deport you without a second thought despite the fact you've been living in the UK since Windrush.

There's plenty to worry about with an ID card scheme, but the current situation isn't exactly roses.

Europe tests laser links as satellite comms outgrow radio

Re: Good luck.

One solution to the pigeon problem is to massively increase the wattage of the laser.

Do fear the Reaper - stealer swipes macOS users' passwords, wallets, then backdoors them

co.com

My first thought is - why did registry.co.com let them register this domain in the first place? Might be an interesting follow up question. For evil to flourish, etc.

KDE bags €1.3M as Europe realizes it might need an OS of its own

2036 will be the year of Linux on the Desktop!

I sincerely hope that in ten years time we will be able to point to Trump's misrule and the ICC shenanigans and say that was the point when it all started to go wrong for Google, Amazon and Microsoft - and that Palantir will be an historical footnote.

Apple, Google drag cross-platform texting into the encrypted age

Re: E2EE -- More Misdirection!

> But the plain text is still on all end points!!

Well, duh. If it wasn't you wouldn't be able to read the message.

If you're implying the message is also stored decrypted on the device, well that's different. I don't have any inside knowledge on how Messages works internally, although it seems unlikely as Apple (for all their flaws) are not stupid. Although obviously once a device is compromised with a rootkit, all bets are off.

macOS 27 threatens to bury Time Capsule, FOSS brings a shovel

Re: rsync

Fond as I am of rsync, the macOS backup system is very impressive. The UI, the versioning, the expunging of old backups. It’s taken them close on a decade to get right, but now it runs and I don’t have to think about it.

We've only gone and done it: Changed what you're used to

I have beeen through quite a few site redesigns, and the only constant is people immediately whinging about how everyone involved was an idiot and they want everything back the way it was. At the very least the font size is too big or small and there is always, always too much white space - the poor little lambs. Sudden onset headaches or seizures are also not uncommon.

Withholding judgement but I thoroughly approve of the new font. Clean and modern and readable. Surprised no dark mode as part of the rework. but easy enough to add later. Otherwise TBD but echoing the “it’s fairly mild as redesigns go” view above.

Where to buy a non-Apple, non-Google smartphone

A UK passport or driver's licence is not a requirement if you've got a credit card associated with your Apple account.

When I upgraded iOS recently I didn't have to supply anything - it simply noted a credit card was associated with my account so my age was verified.

UK drivers' agency shrugs off claims of week-long booking site smashes, blames browser configs

Ah, a shit captcha

Works here on Safari and Firefox, not Chrome. And it's 100% a server-side issue - a request is sent, no response received.

The captcha is only a bit odd (Cloudflare's hCaptcha), but I suspect the culprint is literally staring us in the face: "the website you are visiting is protected and accelerated by Imperva". I'm taking issue with "accelerated".