Posts by MOH

Coldplay kiss-cam flap proves we’re already our own surveillance state

Comment section so far just backs up the article.

How to trick ChatGPT into revealing Windows keys? I give up

"the researcher manipulated the AI into thinking it was obligated to respond with the string of characters."

No, the AI didn't "think" anything or feel "obligated".

This lazy anthropomorphism is bad enough in regular news reports about AI, but I expect better from El Reg

Georgia court throws out earlier ruling that relied on fake cases made up by AI

Why does this article not make clear that it's referring to a US state, and not the country?

Cloudflare creates AI crawler tollbooth to pay publishers

That "deal" has been broken for years, with Google increasingly placing larger snippets at the top of the SERPs or in sidebars to discourage users from clicking through.

The whole "AI overview" thing is just taking that practice further, but it's not new.

Given how bad search has become, we must be reaching the point where it's worth considering whether everyone should be blocking both AI and search index bots by default.

There's minimal benefit to sites with real content, at best you'll end up listed on page 3 behind dozens of identically inaccurate pages of AI-harvested dreck.

User demanded a 'wireless' computer and was outraged when its battery died

Oui, c'est vrai

Canva to job candidates: Thou shalt use AI during interviews

This just sounds like a very good reason to stop using any Canva products

AI can spew code, but kids should still suffer like we did, says Raspberry Pi

Can we stop using marketing terms invented by AI CEOs in serious tech journalism?

Please stop with the "hallucinations" and "vibe coding".

It just helps the garbage gain traction and bury the utter nonsense underpinning it all. It's like Blockchain 2.0 but with even more marketing crap

ChatGPT used for evil: Fake IT worker resumes, misinfo, and cyber-op assist

Most of this seems to be the primary use case for ChatGPT?

Meta pauses mobile port tracking tech on Android after researchers cry foul

Re: One rule for them

I'd normally downvote this for the leprechaun comment but the Irish DPC is an absolute disgrace

Virgin Media O2 patches hole that let callers snoop on your coordinates

Square mitre - somebody sat on the bishop's hat

Coinbase extorted for $20M. Support staff bribed. Customers scammed. One hell of a SNAFU

Well at least this is a clear cut case where they should be fined 4% of global turnover for the GDPR breach.

Oh wait, they're based in Ireland?

So it'll be another case of the Irish DPC being sued by Europe before they issue a paltry fine in 8 years.

Cursor AI's own support bot hallucinated its usage policy

Can we please stop using the marketing term "hallucinate" and replace it with the correct technical term, "return garbage"?

Now Windows Longhorn is long gone, witness reflects on Microsoft's OS belly-flop

At least we got those translucent window effects everyone was crying out for

Cloudflare builds an AI to lead AI scraper bots into a horrible maze of junk content

Re: 2 hopes and one is Bob

Bad bot

We did not have Brave clashing with Rupert Murdoch on our 2025 bingo card, but there it is

Can't believe I'm backing Rupert Murdoch over Brave, but this constant AI wholesale theft of content dressed up as "fair use" is garbage.

A win at last: Big blow to AI world in training data copyright scrap

Re: Angels on the head of a pin?

"Although AI's potential may, at present, be 'over-sold', it nevertheless shall greatly impact knowledge-use and education."

Good point. Right now it's churning out garbage that people believe verbatim.

But perhaps there a slight chance tha the utter unreliability might help peoplet learn that believing the first Google result doesn't equate to knowledge.

We can only live in hope

Amazon, Google asked to explain why they were serving ads on sites hosting CSAM

It's almost as if advertising is a giant pyramid scheme where the efficicacy of ads is irrelevant to the beancounters, since the advertising cost will be baked into the product price anyway

So nobody really bothers to check where their ads are shown, because ultimately they're not paying for it

And the general public pay extra for everything to cover the cost of advertising, which also hoovers their personal data, and now apparently fund exploitation sites

Yeah, nothing to see here

SoftBank woos OpenAI with $40B, making Microsoft's $13B look quaint

Re: Gentle

Woo hoo!

You're going to do what to the feature? Microsoft defines what it means by 'deprecation'

Re: I don't mind what they mean by it...

I'd appreciate if they would

AI facial recognition could sink this murder probe

Re: Detective Inspector Artie Ficial reporting for duty.

Nah, the AI will take care of 3D printing the evidence too.

"It looks like you're trying to convict someone, would you like help with that?"

Tool touted as 'first AI software engineer' is bad at its job, testers claim

Sure they did. They just assigned the task of responding to Devin.

Business value from GenAI remains elusive despite IT spending boom

This is the same "distinguished analyst" who told us 7 years ago that millions of jobs would be replaced by AI by 2020.

And 8 years ago that the business value-add of Blockchain would be 176 billion by 2025.

https://venturebeat.com/ai/how-ai-augmentation-will-fuel-net-job-growth-by-2020/

Why do reputable publications keep regurgitating his nonsense?

Ransomware scum make it personal for Reg readers by impersonating tech support

This headline makes no sense, unless I've missed something. How is it specifically Reg related?

Anduril picks Ohio for 5 million square foot autonomous weapon factory

"Arsenal of democracy", you say?

'Savvy' shortcuts produce near-instant speech-to-speech translation of 36 languages

Where did the 4.5 million hours of spoken audio come from?

Facebook parent you say?

Can AWS really fix AI hallucination? We talk to head of Automated Reasoning Byron Cook

Can we just stop using the marketing term "hallucinate" instead of using long-standing terms like garbage out?

Honey co-founder's Pie Adblock called out for copying GPL'd uBlock Origin files

Re: "Honey helps merchants reduce...

That's assuming you can actually find what you want since their search is appalling and shows what they want to sell rather than what you want to biy

Apple auto-opts everyone into having their photos analyzed by AI for landmarks

Privacy aside, surely there are copyright issues with Apple just appropriating everyone's images without any consent or attribution?

Oh wait, it's AI training so copyright is irrelevant.

Microsoft Edge takes a victory lap with some high-looking usage stats for 2024

Yup. I accidentally clicked on something on the start menu that opened Edge on a new W11 machine.

Which then immediately triggered a modal popup with multiple tabs asking me to agree to various T+C's or import data which I had no intention of agreeing to.

It ignored attempts to close it with Alt-F4 or from the taskbar.Had to kill it with Powershell.

It's pretty pathetic and desperate, like much of MS these days.

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

Re: Telling it like it is.

If you Google "Ryan's Daughter" it helpfully gives you an "overview" that's it's "A behind the scenes look at the making of the film "Ryan's Daughter" '

Musk's lawyer asks SEC to quit pestering the shy and retiring billionaire

Ironically I can't read the name Spiro in this context without thinking of Spyros from Billions

GitHub's boast that Copilot produces high-quality code challenged

Did Copilot produce that “high quality“ graph that doesn't add up?

This seemed suspicious:

" GitHub's inadequately explained graph that shows 60.8 percent of developers using Copilot passed all ten unit tests while only 39.2 percent of developers not using Copilot passed all the tests."

Bit of a coincidence that they add to 100? I thought maybe they'd meant the of those who passed all the tests, 60.8% used Copilot

In fact, the graph in the linked GitHub blog post shows that of those not using Copilot, 39.2% passed all the tests and 62.2% didn't. Out of 101.4%.

Meanwhile, of those who did use Copilot, a total of 98.6% did or didn't pass all tests.

It's possibly the percentage are supposed to add vertically, but that's crap presentation.

Either way that graph looks like AI produced garbage.

Billionaire food app CEO wants you to pay for the privilege of working with him

So he basically wants someone to pay him for the pleasure of his company?

Isn't there a word for that.?

Killer app for AI is still years away, says industry analyst

The same "Distinguished VP Analyst" at Gartner predicted 6 years ago that:

"The year 2020 will be a pivotal one in AI-related employment dynamics — Gartner predicts 2.3 million jobs will be created and 1.8 jobs will be eliminated."

https://venturebeat.com/ai/how-ai-augmentation-will-fuel-net-job-growth-by-2020/

How much do these people get paid for churning out endless tat?

And why haven't they been replaced by AI yet?

It's the one thing it's actually good for

Perplexity AI decries News Corp's 'simply false' data scraping claims

If I rewrote this and every other Reg article with mild paraphrasing along the lines of:

"AI newcomers Perplexity have responded to a legal claim that they're stealing content from..."

and then based my business on publishing that content, I'd (rightly) get sued.

Mind you they should be sued just for the sickening tone of that blog post alone

Google's Rust belts bugs out of Android, helps kill off unsafe code substantially

"Google says..."

Nothing to see here then

EU kicks off an inquiry into Google's AI model

Well it's the Irish DPC so the result is pretty much a foregone conclusion that Google did nothing wrong.

At least until the rest of the European DPCs sue the Irish one to actually do their job and it gets reopened in five years. That's how it usually goes anyway.

If HDMI screen rips aren't good enough for you pirates, DeCENC is another way to beat web video DRM

Re: and the like is doomed

That's been the case for decades now.

I don't think the companies care

Gartner mages: Payback from office AI expected in around two years

The one thing that could definitely be completely replaced by AI with absolute no downside, no loss of accuracy or reliability, is Gartner.

Actually, may that's already happened, given their spokesperson is A Preset

Security biz KnowBe4 hired fake North Korean techie, who got straight to work ... on evil

Re: Is not even theReg safe from the pronoun police :o

Do pronouns work differently in North Korea?

Hello? Emergency services? I'd like to report a wrong number

What happened when the person with the mobile dialed 91?

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

Re: Simple rule

You have been eaten by a grue

Kamala Harris's $7M support from LinkedIn founder comes with a request: Fire Lina Khan

Re: Incumbent Joe Biden stepped aside :o

Do troll farms get paid extra for working on weekends?

Europol says mobile roaming tech is making its job too hard

Won't somebody please...

This is a fairly poor effort by Europol.

They didn't even bother to make a "think of the children" argument.

Surely they could have raised the spectre of roaming paedophiles to their case?

British Airways blames T5 luggage chaos on fault 'outside of our control'

They used to have enough staff to do it manually?

But now that everything is computerised they can do the whole thing with less staff and more profits, and so it all works fine.

Except that the remaining staff are probably constantly overworked anyway ( but hey, profits!), and when the system goes down there aren't remotely enough people to make it work manually

Snowflake breach snowballs as more victims, perps, come forward

48 years in jail for copyright infringement??!

Risk of installing dodgy extensions from Chrome store way worse than Google's letting on, study suggests

Re: 1% of installs are malware is terrible

This. 1% of a ludicrously high number of installs is a very high number.

I can't be bothered trying to find a reliable source for the overall number of installs, but the very fact that a Google mouthpiece has chosen to express it as a seemingly low percentage instead of an outright count is enough to know it's bad

That PowerShell 'fix' for your root cert 'problem' is a malware loader in disguise

With an attitude like that you're bound to fall for a scam sooner rather than later

Researchers find Meta's withdrawal of misinformation tool hard to swallow

"Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs, said CrowdTangle was a degrading tool."

More accurately, Facebook is a degrading tool.

Clearview AI reaches 'creative' settlement with privacy suit plaintiffs: A conditional IOU

I fail to see how letting the company go bust from legal costs wouldn't have been a better solution?

They pay the price for scraping people's data, the product built from that data goes nowhere, seems like a win.

Oh. Except of course the lawyers bringing the class action suit would never get paid. Can't have that.