Posts by I am David Jones

UK.gov withholds £10M payment from Capita over pensions project fiasco, as dispute continues

What went wrong?

Don’t we normally pay out bonuses for poor performance? Because <contracts>?

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

Did they make a profit?

It’d be nice to know how much they initially pocketed from the deal

UK armed forces aims for secure comms via optical satellite links

Re: Difficult to detect?

None of which has anything to do with visibility to the human eye. That was the point I was trying to make.

Difficult to detect?

Because infra-red lasers are non-visible to the human eye compared to a conventional radio-frequency beam which is … er … non-visible to the human eye?

Britain's latest civil servant is a chatbot trained on GOV.UK misery

I just need to shoehorn this in

I really really dislike that they have capitalised gov.uk for their branding. It’s like it triggers a mental camera flash every time I read it.

The latest innovation in UK public transport: Schrödinger's trains

Re: Schrödinger's trains II

Ask for a refund. With luck there’ll be a divide-by-zero error and they’ll pay out ££££££

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

Re: Absolute shit

Having the comments link at the top makes it easier to flame the author without reading the article :)

NASA Inspector fears new spacesuits won’t be ready for Moon landing

Re: robots

If you don’t take any shirts or dishes into space then problem solved!

You too can build a nuclear battery from junk you have lying around the house

Re: Youtuber makes clickbait video

Scintillating, innit?

UK fines Irish Apple outpost over sanctions-busting payments to Russian dev

Thanks

While easy for me to speculate, a brief sentence explaining why the UK has jurisdiction in this case would have been nice. Cheers duck ta.

AFC Ajax drops ball as flaws let hackers play admin with tickets and bans

Re: As one affected individual, a local government worker, put it: "This could harm my career."

Just because certain private information relates to a misdeed does not make it fair game for publication

PwC will say goodbye to staff who aren't convinced about AI

It’s almost poetic

Every consultant and his dog is jumping on the AI bandwagon “to achieve strategic differentiation”.

UK splashes £45M on AI supercomputer to help crack fusion power

Re: AI will not speed things up

You’re too pessimistic. Just imagine how exciting it would be to live in a world where fusion power continually remains a mere 5 years away!!

Campaigners claim NHS Palantir system could be accessed by police and immigration

Illegal and in breach of contract

So technically possible then. I’m sure everyone involved can be trusted not to bend the rules.

Whitehall can't cost digital ID until it decides how to build it

Re: what is T&G B?

…asks the initials guy :)

(It’s Tony and Gordon Broir/Blaiwn.)

SerpApi says Google is the pot calling the kettle black when it comes to scraping

Even though it’s Google, SerpApi deserve to lose

For the unforgivable crime of wilfully ignoring the relevant parts of the DCMA definition (assuming they quoted it correctly): “to avoid, bypass … a technological measure”.

Attackers have 16-digit card numbers, expiry dates, but not names. Now org gets £500k fine

If they were to win, they could avoid the ongoing cost of properly securing customer data, likely far exceeding £500K over time.

Microsoft throws spox under the bus after Parliament testimony on ICC email kerfuffle

There may be full, partial or indeed no correlation between what Microsoft was reported to have said to the ICC and the ‘correction’ that Microsoft has provided to the UK Parliament. The article lacks this crucial information.

Copilot spills the beans, summarizing emails it's not supposed to read

Wow, the urgency to provide a fix is palpable

“A remediation timeline is planned at some point.”

You can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone, says Dutch defense chief

Re: You'd like to think

Beyond contractual assurances, would it even be possible to confirm that a modern aircraft doesn’t have remote kill-switch functionality buried in its code?

Final step to put new website into production deleted it instead

…leaving a sheet of paper setting out your new hourly rates, effective immediately.

Nitrogen ransomware is so broken even the crooks can't unlock your files

Leaving aside the ethical issue of paying ransoms, as it is just 4 bytes that are overwritten isn’t it easily brute-forced?

Lawmakers urge FTC to probe Trump Mobile over 'deceptive' marketing

Re: Grifters gonna grift

People aren’t buying these things. They are showing their fielty. And getting some freebie tat as a “thank you”

Moon hotel startup hopes you get lunar lunacy, drop $1M deposit for 2032 stay

Is a commercial enterprise building a moon hotel a ‘’national space activity”? I don’t think so. National space activities are things done by or at the behest of a nation.

To me it seems pretty churlish to shoot down ideas about establishing a presence on the moon, which by definition they must be somewhat far fetched. And please, “doesn’t have ownership rights”? Maybe you want to expand on that bald assertion, starting with explaining who has, and who hasn’t, “ownership rights” on the moon. And the basis for that claim.

Google rekindles relationship with jilted JPEG XL image format

Re: Good thing! You won't have to worry about any new Dilbert comics!

Wtf i came here and learnt he died yesterday. RIP, dear fellow

Trump says Americans shouldn't 'pick up the tab' for AI datacenter grid upgrades

Re: Meanwhile here in poor Blighty

How about getting our government to manage the basics, like oh how about water supply, before they worry about other stuff

Birmingham pauses Oracle relaunch to get staff on board

I don’t know, it seems you need a fucking PhD in “how not to be screwed by IT vendor” and those are hard to come by.

IT vendors who want a mutually beneficial business relationship rather than screwing clients with small print…. where are they?

A comedy of errors. At least there is comfort in knowing that others will learn from these mistakes /s

Techie banned from client site for outage he didn’t cause

Re: Don't blame me - they virtually banned me

Next time try rephrasing: “Don’t do xyz UNLESS blah blah blah”

Re: Sop?

With hindsight, maybe matchsticks were not the best choice of legs….

Apple hopes to save Siri from laughingstock status with infusion of Google Gemini

Heads up: not a good day to be advocating for Grok

Re: weather alerts, call screening, autocorrect, voice assistants, et. al

And now you’re the bad guy for not recognising that they have become AI features. A pint for your woes

Re: Clippy wins

Actually I’ve figured it out. It’s lowering the brightness to compensate for the AI battery drain

Re: Clippy wins

Not to mention auto brightness. That’s like three lines of code for a swanky version, wtf is AI doing?

Brussels plots open source push to pry Europe off Big Tech

1. It is an established messenger service.

2. It’s European

3. It has a non-trivial user base (10 million).

What more should we be looking for, if the aim is help the move away from US dependency?

Whether or not if technically falls in the scope of any particular project, that’s just details.

Except right now it seems they’re not funding/promoting any European projects.

Back right at you: why is supporting Threema a bad idea? Are there better candidates?

NASA decides to bring Crew-11 home early after astronaut health scare

Re: Dental?

I’m no expert but I think “alien impregnation” is where we should be looking. Good luck to him.

Is this going too far in trying to protect privacy?

Where’s Bob? Oh he’s sick.

Technically this is private medical info but pragmatically, in my experience it has always been totally acceptable to explain a worker’s absence as sick leave. So why is it different for astronauts?

Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem

Dogbert does tech support best:

“Hello, I …”

“Shut up and reboot”

“Hey, it work …”

“Shut up and hang up”

Dogbert checks watch, “My average call time is improving”

Why colos are city slickers and hyperscalers are country bumpkins

Is this a fair analogy? High-street stores tend to be found in towns and out-of-town malls tend to be found out of town.

UK regulators swarm X after Grok generated nudes from photos

Re: I don't approve of xAI allowing this to happen

The question is whether it *depicts* a minor. And it’s not hard to ask a member of public / a jury / an expert / a judge “how old do you think that character is”.

Re: I don't approve of xAI allowing this to happen

Too simplistic. I think the scientific jury is out on whether fake CSAM increases or decreases the risk to real children.

The two extremes of thought are

1. Fake CASM can be created without harming children and is therefore an acceptable way for paedophiles to feed their desires without resorting to real CASM.

2. Fake CSAM harms children because it encourages/enables paedophiles to progress to real CSAM.

But the law is clear, all CSAM is illegal.

ISS spacewalk postponed over mystery astronaut malady

It must really suck to get morning sickness every 90 minutes!

Re: Sympathy

Maybe NASA don’t even know - in space no-one can hear you barf

Earlier Horizon rollout could widen net for quashed Post Office convictions

Re: Anecdotal evidence

Well that’s me buggered as my financial wealth requires imaginary numbers

Ultimate camouflage tech mimics octopus in scientific first

Re: A secret cloaking device made out of gold?

Own up now… who gave the 8th like? Tsk

AMD threatens to go medieval on Nvidia with Epyc and Instinct: What we know so far

Re: What has CES become?

To replace your old multi-million dollar neural compute node rack?