Posts by Jonathon Green

Meta sues 'nudify' app-maker that it claims ran 87k+ Facebook, Instagram ads

Huh?

I’m trying to get my head around the fact that Meta are sueing their customers because their own content moderation mechanisms don’t work.

Truly these are strange times…

Meta calls €200M EU fine over pay-or-consent ad model 'unlawful'

Re: Meta deserves fair compensation for the valuable and innovative services

I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. Although what I think meta the Zuckburghers deserve, and would constitute fair compensation may differ from what they think they deserve.

They probably had fewer face eating leopards in mind for a start…

'Elevated' moisture reading ignored before Heathrow-closing conflagration, says NESO

Re: Heathrow not blameless

“ I'd put money on it that the CEO - had he been awake - wouldn't have decided to close the entire airport for 20 hours when the fire had only been burning for an hour or so.”

You may well be right, but I’d also put money on it that had a decision not to shut down went horribly wrong resulting in wholesale death and/or injury said CEO wouldn’t be in a hurry to step forward and accept responsibility for it. Well, maybe in a mealy mouthed, platitudinous, statement to the press kind of way, but not in an actual personally accepting consequences way…

Cloud lobby warns EU: Clamp down on water rules and we'll evaporate

…but on the other hand it’s a relatively new industry building it’s infrastructure from scratch, and as such requiring it to design in efficient water use now rather than trying to bolt it on later (as is the case for the “legacy” industry sectors) seems entirely sensible.

Elon Musk pukes over pork-filled budget bill with Tesla subsidies on the line

Yes.

BT won't budge over pay hike for manager grade employees

Re: Management is not a specialist skill.

Management absolutely is a specialist skill.

It’s just that (in technical fields at least) it’s orthogonal to the skills of those managed and not neccesarily (or in the tech field often) more valuable or harder to come by, making it doubly stupid and frustrating that management is depressingly often the only career path available to senior technical staff.

The result of this is a middle management class packed with people who (again depressingly often) hate their jobs, aren’t terribly good at them, and get far too involved and “hands on” in the work they’re supposed to be facilitating. I consider myself extremely lucky to have ended my career working for a company who (while not neccesarily perfect in every regard) were prepared to be creative with roles, job titles, and pay scales because I am in no doubt that I would have ended up amongst that number…

Anthropic CEO frets about 20% unemployment from AI, but economists are doubtful

I Can’t quite make my mind up…

…whether this is a warning or a marketing pitch.

Some English hospitals doubt Palantir's utility: We'd 'lose functionality rather than gain it'

Re: No!

My wife and I travelled from Peschira del Garda to Venice and back using Trenitalia’s Frecciarossa service. It both departed and arrived on time in both directions. No little old ladies appeared to be harmed or inconvenienced at any point…

Sci-fi author Neal Stephenson wants AIs fighting AIs so those most fit to live with us survive

Re: Robot Wars

I have a vague recollection of a game/challenge involving two (or more) chunks of code executing concurrently within the shared memory space of a simple virtual machine with the objective being for (human) participants to produce a piece of code which could locate and then disrupt, corrupt, or otherwise disable its “competitors”.

Anyone else remember that, or did I just imagine it or come across it in a work of fiction….?

Hacking US crosswalks to talk like Zuck is as easy as 1234

Re: After the laughing...

Surely you just have to turn it into some sort of underground viral social media thing and thousands of obliging pre-teens will go out and do the (in this case literal) legwork for you…

Trump kills clearances for infosec's SentinelOne, ex-CISA boss Chris Krebs

I like Americans…

…they’re funny!

Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs

Vance is indeed both smarter and crazier.

A more constructive and realistic hope would be for mid term elections to deliver a Congress (both houses) able and willing to haul on the constitutional choke chains…

Re: Please explain

…and to take a further example I own four USA built guitars and a USA built amplifier.

Re: If tariffs are so bad why does the UK / EU etc have so many of them?

The marine diesel engine was quite a big one too.

Re: Please explain

Have you tried making things people want to buy at a price they’re willing to pay?

That may sound trite and obvious, but, taking the specific case of automobiles, when Ford started offering the Gen 5 (2005) and later Mustang through regular dealerships, with proper factory warranties (and in the case of the UK from 2015 on with the steering wheel in the right place) it actually did rather well…

Re: From the "fact sheet", singling out Blighty

“ After a while we were offered the PT Cruiser, so ugly it rivalled the Edsel.‘

To be fair if you bought a PT Cruiser[1] in Europe it was almost certainly built in Austria, and if you bought it in the USA it would have been built in Mexico…

2 in 5 techies quit over inflexible workplace policies

That’s actually not a bad use of a nominally “in office” day, especially if the management justification for a mandatory “in” day is to build relationships and networks.

Years back I did a few years contract work for a company based in Sweden, I used to fly over to Stockholm regularly to spend some time in the office and the first time I went in I was absolutely gob-smacked to find that every week there was a day when the whole (small, maybe a dozen people) would get together to prepare and cook an actual meal from scratch in the kitchen area, set a table, sit down to eat together like family, and then clear away and wash up together, any management team members present would join in alongside. That could easily take up three hours in total but it was the best, most effective way of getting a team to communicate and build relationships I’ve ever seen…

23andMe's genes not strong enough to avoid Chapter 11

Re: The court will now oversee the sale of 23andMe's assets

“ Having a single person's DNA sequence tells you nothing about your family members if you do not have the said family members DNA to compare it with.”

I suspect that comparison would quite often result in some awkward conversations… :-)

Feds charge three over Molotov attacks on Tesla sites in multiple states

Re: All Dictators die ... eventually ... thank god !!!

“ am astounded by the 'Tribal' bickering by the USA contingent on el Reg !!!”

I’m not. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I like Americans, they’re funny!

France offers US scientists a safe haven from Trump's war on woke

I like Americans…

…they’re funny!

$16B health dept managed finances with single Excel spreadsheet. It hasn’t gone well

I can see why an `excel spreadsheet is a bad idea for this kind of thing…

…it’s just that on the basis of every recent attempt at implementing ERP for large public bodies I’ve seen lately that doesn’t look like a better one.

HPE revenue outlook feels the thump of Trump tariffs

Re: Trump could learn a thing or two from Brexit

People keep saying there was no upside to Brexit (and on the whole I completely agree with that judgement) but it did buy my youngest son (who’d just started a job as a customs clearance agent with FedEx at Stansted Airport) a BMW M3, a wedding, and a nice starter flat on overtime/shift payments… :-)

And let’s not forget…

…that their customers will have less money and face similar uncertainty for exactly the same reasons, and hence will perhaps not be looking to update kit and/or will be looking to cut their maintenance costs.

'Cybertruck ownership comes with ... interesting fan mail'

I remember the cave rescue thing.It seemed strangely ironic that the man who was advocating a 10 foot phallus as the solution was calling somebody else a paedophile…

Trump says US should kill CHIPS Act, use the cash to cut debt

I like Americans…

…they’re funny!

TSMC promises $100B US expansion that Trump hails without clarifying chip tariff threat

So, who’s supplying the hardware for this…

…because those ASML EUV litho machines (and the associated support) weren’t cheap to start with, and they just got 25% more expensive.

US stocks slip as Trump pulls trigger on Canada, Mexico, China tariffs

There’s a reason why so much manufacturing was offshored…

Do the Oligarchy reckon that they can drive down wages and enshittify employment conditions sufficiently to sell domestically produced goods at prices which can undercut current producers even with the advantage of tariffs or is the USAnian consumer just going to have to get used to everything being at least 25% more expensive for the foreseeable future?

I can’t help thinking that’s ultimately going to be tough sell once the reality sets in…

Hisense QLED TVs are just LED TVs, lawsuit claims

Re: Consequences will never be the same.

Well, they probably can. If a manufacturer claims that their TV is 4K resolution then that’s an objectively verifiable claim, and if it turns out it’s got a boring old 1920x1080 panel in it then they can be nailed to the wall. Similarly, if they say it’s capable of displaying a particular brightness level and it can’t then again it an objectively measurable claim, and if they’re challenged on it and can’t demonstrate compliance they’ll be nailed to the wall, likewise for contrast ratios, colour gamuts etc.

In this case the complainant has simply fallen for a bit of marketing bullshit and been disappointed. Sucks to be them, film at eleven…

Someone’s fallen hard for marketing BS here…

As far as I’m aware all LEDs rely on quantum phenomena to do their turning electricity into light thing, and all flat screen displays are pixel based (meaning that they’re made up of a bunch of dots). Ergo any LED TV has as many quantum dots as it has addressable pixels in it’s display panel (possible plus a couple more for status indicators) and every LED TV is a quantum dot TV.

I’ve always assumed that the words “Quantum Dot” in the description of a TV is simply a bullshit marketing term with no objective definition that a piece of hardware can be tested again are. Somebody somewhere may have registered it as a trade mark for their partic7display techno6, but as far as I can see it such a generic term that I can’t I imagine it would be enforceable in practice…

GNOME 48 beta is another nail in X11's coffin

Re: I can feel the downvotes coming! Be gentle.

It’s almost as though different users doing different jobs on different hardware have different requirements/preferences for how they interact with a computer and that forcing a single model upon them in the interests of consistency was a bad idea.

Who would have thought it?

Speaking as a person rather than a standardised unit of productive capacity I’m all in favour of this kind of choice and think it’s long pst time developers finally started writing/designing applications to conform to the UI guidelines of whatever platform/desktop/whatever the user wants to run them on rather than using ever larger hammers to impose The One True Way on their customers…

So no downvote from me.

The Doom-in-a-PDF dev is back – this time with Linux

Re: Coolness aside

‘Call me a boring old fart, but the whole point of PDF was supposed to be that it was as immutable as a paper document, didn't run code in the background, and is pretty safe to open.”

Oh dear sweet, sweet summer child… :-)

I have made quite a decent living over the last 12 years ago out of the fact that if you set out to design a file format specifically to act as a delivery vehicle for malware you’d be hard pressed to “improve” on PDF, and that’s just the documented bits working as designed before you consider the possibility of implementation flaws…

Seriously, have a very quick skim[1] through the specifications…

https://pdfa.org/resource/iso-32000-pdf/#pdf-1

https://pdfa.org/resource/iso-32000-pdf/

…and if it doesn’t make your blood run cold you’re either not looking properly or shouldn’t be working in the IT industry.

[1] Given the size of them more than the most cursory glance would be a big ask, but that should be enough.

UK's new thinking on AI: Unless it's causing serious bother, you can crack on

It’s a matter of spelling…

How long do we give it before Claude becomes clawed? :-)

Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

Re: Shrug

Depends what size and how much performance you’re looking for really…

Even though it’s been around a while the Polestar 2 would be high on my personal shopping list if I was looking to replace my current Leaf E+, if you want something bigger and faster but can’t run to a Porsche Taycan then Hyundai’s Ioniq 5N or the Kia EV6GT are strong contenders.

The Ford Mustang E doesn’t suck either…

Shrug

Once upon a time Tesla had a monopoly on larger, longer range EVs.

Now they don’t and other manufacturers products are (for various reasons, aesthetic, technical, political, and other) looking like a more attractive choice than Tesla’s (rather stale looking these days) offerings.

MuskCo wouldn’t be the first high profile company to come to grief through taking their customer base for granted and if they do fall by the wayside it seems unlikely that they’d be the last…

Film at 11…

Ontario responds to Trump tariff by pitching Starlink deal into the trash

Meanwhile to the South…

I Really hope the good people of Panama haven’t been wasting any time and that they’ve have got the demolition charges on all that lovely expensive canal infrastructure set, wired, and armed in case of unwelcome incursions.

Mega city council's Oracle finance fix faces further delays

“There are plenty of councils whose systems are not in this dire state with regards to finances and auditing, that's not to say that the others are perfect, but they are at least sufficiently functional for the auditors to do their job of ensuring financial probity.”

…and many of them are probably looking at the likes of Birmingham in terror as the platforms which their current (stable, reliable, satisfactory) solutions were built on have been end-of-lifed by vendors leaving them faced with either exorbitant fees for extended support or simply having the plug pulled.

UK biz dept overspent by £208M prepping to pay workers hurt in Post Office IT scandal

Re: "first implemented by ICL, a UK technology company later bought by Fujitsu"

It would be unfair to mention one without the other.

It started out as ICL Pathway’s crock of shit and while Fujitsu had 15 years to fix it, didn’t, and doubled down by conspiring with the POst Office to pervert the course of justice it seems only fair to give the original architects their fair share of the credit…

WFH with privacy? 85% of Brit bosses snoop on staff

Well, there’s a worrying statistic…

‘85 percent of business leaders have a "hard time knowing for sure that their people are being productive.”’

Really?

So 85% of business leaders don’t know what the core objectives of the organisations they claim to be the leaders of are or whether those objectives gives are being met??

And the *workforce* are supposed to be the problem???

If I were a shareholder in one of those businesses I’d be very worried about that statistic, and it wouldn’t be the workforce I’d be asking awkward questions about come AGM time…

Boom's XB-1 jet nails supersonic flight for first time

Re: Petty

“ The guys(?) talking about nanometers were referencing their reproductive appendages.‘

Measured with a manometer?

Shove your office mandates, people still prefer working from home

Re: I didn't learn in-person. There's no merit to this.

This does of course also apply to those advocating a return to the office as The One True Way…

“I made good friends at work”

I can see how that might work for people working in the biomedicine sector but the Frankenstein thing just isn’t an option for most of us… :-)

Intel, AMD engineers rush to save Linux 6.13 after dodgy Microsoft code change

My guess would be that it was reviewed, but not by the right people…

Pornhub lockdown and fact-free Zuckbots – welcome to 2025

Re: "honesty is the best policy"

It’s not about whether Trump (or whoever) *knows what honesty is, it’s about whether they *care*w hat honesty is when faced with the opportunity for a shit load of money and/or the opportunity to excercise massive personal power with very little responsibility or consequences. And I think we know what the answer to that is…

They've only gone and made Doom run in a PDF file

Re: An industry insider comments...

Pretty sure that PDF constitutes a Turing complete programming language even without the dirty little secret which is JavaScript (or the Lisp/Postscript like function interpreter)…

“ robbing me from the illusion that PDFs were benign in terms of safety.”

This is a joke right?

I owe 12 years of gainful employment (up until my retirement just before Christmas) to the fact that if you custom designed a file format to act as a malware delivery vehicle you’d probably end up with PDF…

Apple and Meta trade barbs over interoperability requests

Buying into the iThing infrastructure and swallowing the Apple Kool-Aid was always something of a pact with the devil but you know what?

I knew that when I wrote the cheques. I looked at the alternatives, I signed the cheques anyway, and I’ll still take Apples blend of seamless experience and barely concealed avarice over Google and X’s brands of clunky enshitification every time.

China's homebrew Bluetooth alternative is on the march as Beijing pushes universal remotes

[shrug] Giving the Chinese state access to my relentlessly vanilla tastes in media consumption seems like a small price to pay for either juggling 4 remotes or relying on Logitech (and potentially supplying them with similar information) to continue to support an occasionally slightly wayward third party solution (Harmony) they don’t sell any more…

Re: So... Bluetooth...

[shrug] Giving the Chinese state access to my relentlessly vanilla tastes in media consumption seems like a small price to pay for either juggling 4 remotes or relying on Logitech to continue to support an occasionally slightly wayward third party solution they don’t sell any more…

US military grounds entire Osprey tiltrotor fleet over safety concerns

Re: An interesting concept

…and had stubby wings which provided a good chunk of lift in forward flight.

Europe glances Russia's way after Baltic Sea data cables severed

Re: Why would they bother?

[Shrug] Just a quick, dirty, relatively low cost move in a continuing campaign of low grade disruption and destabilisation….