Posts by Nifty

Software engineer reveals the dirty little secret about AI coding assistants: They don't save much time

And to think I used to wander form cubicle to cubicle asking "does anyone know a good subroutine that does *this*?"

China's president Xi Jinping jokes about backdoors in Xiaomi smartphones

Re: Before I got my Apple Watch

I received an Apple Watch as a gift about 8 years ago, still going strong. It has a metal strap and that is the weak design feature, the buckle that pops off when your sleeve catches it.

Azure's bad night fuels fresh calls for cloud diversification in Europe

Re: Pre-cloud

We've heard about the death of distance. Now your bug or single point of failure could be tens of thousands of miles away.

Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

I was watching a YouTube video yesterday by 'Retired MS Engineer' that posited a different theory than mere loss of tribal knowledge as a cause. Customers (like Lloyds bank that went down with AWS) not fully knowing what they're buying with AWS services. According to that engineer, better resilience is possible but at some cost and some serious duplication. Not to mention planned outage and recovery drills.

If a knowledge base can't store tribal knowledge, that's another potential single point of failure.

A simple AI prompt saved a developer from this job interview scam

What happens if there's a fake applicant for the fake job?

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

In the days of yore I set up an email to fax link so that my elderly mother could read emails sent by her grandchildren. She had her own unique email address for this. This worked well to start with, then mum gave out the email address to some local shops so they could email her when an order was ready or sent some product details. In no time at all spam from third parties started to arrive, wasting fax roll. It was possible to put a filter in eventually.

Vodafone keels over, cutting off millions of mobile and broadband customers

Re: Where's the redundancy?

And there's me that has always kept a Three data SIM in an old Android handset as a backup to my Voda daily SIM. Now that Three and Voda are merging they're making a single point of failure out of 2 networks.

One year ago I stayed in a Devon AIrbnb that had a thatched roof, an exactly 6 foot high lounge ceiling, fibre to the premises internet... and a coin slot electricity meter! Actually as it was summer a few £ coins lasted quite well for hot water and a bit of cooking. Perhaps the owner of the place was keeping that antique mechanical slot meter - 40 years old at least - as a character feature.

My coin op bedsit of yore took 5p coins not 50p. And I found the landlady was overcharging, she had to have the meter readjusted.

Chinese phishing kit helps scammers who send fake texts impersonate TikTok, Coinbase, others

No Air China in the list of airlines?

OpenAI GPT-5: great taste, less filling, now with 30% less bias

They're still working on the neutral network.

How your mouse could eavesdrop on you and rat you out

Re: All those smugglies with Dvorak keyboards

Yeah did that with teenage son's keyboard to stop the S, E, and X keys from being worn out.

If you can hack the mouse then you can hack the laptop's mic, I would have thought. OK in super secure environments there would be no mic connected to a PC.

But the really interesting thing is the filtering & AI. For many decades there has been successful spying on in-room conversations by bouncing invisible laser light off a window, long before it was possible to fish meaning out of the noisy vibrations using the amount of compute mentioned in this article. It now looks like it will be child's play to do this and existing prevention measures may be well under-specified.

These researchers should be offered jobs at GCHQ.

If you can't use AI then it's bye bye, Accenture tells staff

"My PhD is in Data Science would my job be on the line for refusing to use chatgpt?"

You're employed?

"if they are in roles that can't be augmented by AI and can't learn new skills, then the exit door is open for them"

The bogs aren't going to get cleaned then.

Leave that door open on the way out, it's getting smelly in here.

Apple's 'Awe Droppings' fall close to the tree

Re: Yes!

Uri Geller has ordered his.

Apple iOS 26 set to dump 75M iPhones on the e-waste pile

"new phones just aren't wallet friendly"

This is why I bought a refurb iPhone 13 Mini from Apple less than a year ago. Stick with sensible sized phones and hoping to hang on until the brain implant replacements arrive.

"iOS 26 could see around 75 million iPhones rendered obsolete, generating more than 1.2 million kilograms of e-waste globally"

Is it a bit melodramatic to imply that unsupported phones are going directly into e-waste? Do they all stop working as soon as the new OS release is out?

I'd also like to know: When an EV only lasts 10 years due to its software and firmware being hopelessly out of date and is this vehicle is scrapped, how many phones is that worth? My wife's and my car have 35 years of age added together.

Re: Why?

"The first sign that they're looking is when a buff envelope drops through your letterbox reminding you of the limits".

Nope and actually that would imply that HMRC are capable of being efficient. Not in this or a close parallel universe.

The first sign is a prompt in eBay once you go above your £1,000 threshold, to register your NI number within your eBay account. Happened to me as part of a house clearance prepping for downsizing. I made a capital gain on one item and that would have been outside of normal income tax anyway, so nothing to do with eBay. Luckily it was on an antique machine with moving parts and these are explicitly excluded from CGT. There is a god.

AI web crawlers are destroying websites in their never-ending hunger for any and all content

Re: Poison the content

"Feed content which is itself AI generated, possibly containing malicious, actively wrong information. Generate images which are not what they say, generate text which is gobbledegook, fake news, libellous content, fake sports / places / people & facts, medical misinfo."

Just create a normal social media website then?

And I'll bet that the icon image to this article was done by a specially hired artist. Well anyway at least a paid for stock image. What, it was AI generated based on learnings from websites? I'm shocked, I tell you!

Tested: Microsoft Recall can still capture credit cards and passwords, a treasure trove for crooks

When the next round of corporate PC refreshes roll out, won't corps be enforcing Recall via GPO, on a Nothing To See Here basis?

Banning VPNs to protect kids? Good luck with that

Re: Private or Work?

"In East Germany, people built illegal radio receivers in walls to listen to Western news".

Really? Certainly from the 1960s onward the DDRs own state manufacturers were making technically capable radios that picked up all the bands including the international shortwave. DDR citizens were happily watching Western TV if in the right areas, albeit making their antennas discreet.

UK uncovers novel Microsoft snooping malware, blames and sanctions GRU cyberspies

"periodically displays a login window that prompts the user to enter their credentials"

Outlook has been doing this for at least a year on my work computer, seemingly at random intervals.

How do you know the difference between a malware prompt and a genuine MS prompt?

China's biggest car rental company now offers autonomous cars

Last time I was a car passenger in China - Beijing city and ring roads - it was unbelievably dense and you would not make progress or be able to change lanes without using the 'London cabby nudge' where you essentially play chicken with nerves of steel to push your way into the next queue or exit a junction. So it's quite intriguing to to think how these robo-taxis would manage. Do they only drive in designated areas where human traffic has been largely cleared away?

Fresh UK postcode tool points out best mobile network in your area

Re: Works for me

"It doesn’t understand either my postcode or location. Par for the course when you live in Wales"

That's the trouble with Welsh postcodes not having any vowels.

VodafoneThree's a crowd – now comes the hard bit

Yes I think it was the T mobile and EE merger. Areas with duplicate coverage had masts removed.

If memory serves correctly, when (previous) Virgin mobile merged with EE, within weeks they started closing masts. Coverage remained as naff as ever, failing to penetrate inside the town's only supermarket. Moved to Three for over a decade after that mainly to enjoy the US, OZ and EU roaming.

Empire of office workers strikes back against RTO mandates

Re: Conflicting thingies

"It's also harder to onboard new starters".

It was 2 years after joining my company as a new starter that I visited HQ. My more recent colleague still hasn't visited HQ. The OIYH (Office In Your Home) model works fine for us. However both of us were experienced workers albeit not in the current field. We are on both sides of middle aged. It's not about new starters, it's about will the next generation of young people be as adaptable as us oldies?

Too much journalistic and CEO pontification in the media, when many of us know 'it just works'.

This puts me in mind of a big, highly bureaucratic tech company I worked for in the 1980s. One character of a colleague had so little actual work to do that as a protest he spread holiday brochures over his entire desk and just sat there smoking all day. Another workaday story for the Surreal Times.

Asian tech players react to US tariffs with delays, doubts, deal-making

"It appears to be because some sly importer might claim their goods originated there"

Shrink-wrapped Linux?

Anyone like to comment on why 'Penguin Islands' (human population 0) were included in the tariffs?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/donald-trump-tariffs-antarctica-uninhabited-heard-mcdonald-islands

System builders say server prices set to spike as Trump plays customs cowboy

Re: muppet show

Is that the Social Truth?

The post-quantum cryptography apocalypse will be televised in 10 years, says UK's NCSC

Anyone wanting a bit of light entertainment should watch Apple TV's Prime Target, a nice little conspiracy series about a Cambridge academic who's working on a proof/algorithm for predicting primes.

Datacenters near Heathrow seemingly stay up as substation fire closes airport

All Safety systems...GO

Air traffic control... GO

Emergency lighting and arrivals/departures boards... GO

Booking terminals and IT systems in general... GO

Duty free shops display units and heated loo seats in the VIP suite... STOP!

OK let's close the airport for 24 hours.

Google begs owners of crippled Chromecasts not to hit factory reset

Roku still Ok at 10 years 4 months

Bought my Roku puck in November 2014. Still in daily use, all needed apps still supported. It got past the 10 year barrier without a certificate expiry.

Eutelsat in talks with Euro leaders as they mull Starlink replacement in Ukraine

Re: OneWeb $10,000 per terminal?

A beer for actually talking about the subject in question.

Firefox 136 finally brings the features that fans wanted

I'm trying to have my work PC double up as a light home computer for evening use at it's sat here on the desk and connected to my main monitor. I set up a personal Firefox profile, very nice. But it won't play nicely with Zscaler, the reason being that rather then pass on proxy certificates that are needed for any part of a page, it unpredictably hangs. Zscaler is due to become permanently on so I'll need to ditch FF for personal browsing. Chrome and Edge meanwhile work as normal with Zscaler turned on. While it's commendable to have this extra privacy with FF, it was confusing behaviour until I found out why. I need a simple option in FF to make it work like Chrome.

Two arrested after pensioner scammed out of six-figure crypto nest egg

AI Daisy picked up the phone. "Open my crypto wallet?, now where did I put it? Ooh the kettle's just boiled. Now what was that you said? Must let the cat in. Oh yes crypto. Well would you believe it, I was at the cemetery visiting my late husband's crypto just last week. Now where were we?"

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

Old. HMRC has been doing this since the pandemic was invented. Except it's 40, not 15 minutes.

RIP Raymond Bird: Designer of UK's first mass-produced business computer dies aged 101

"Punched Card Reunion in Stevenage"

Priceless!

Re: Computers in the 1960/70s

"The only method of cooling was to have all the windows wide open. Not good for thermionic health and men in white coats went round with trolleys replacing those who had blown."

The valves or the staff?

UK armed forces fast-tracking cyber warriors to defend digital front lines

"no arrests for smoking the evil weed have never been photographed at a demo and who were born in the motherland"

Which motherland?

Only 4 percent of jobs rely heavily on AI, with peak use in mid-wage roles

Well, Zoom and similar conferencing tools have automatic minuting now. I troubled to read through some and while it's mostly correct, the most common mistake was for the transcript summary to attribute 'next step' actions to the wrong person. This will undoubtedly be improved on in the future - so long as anyone bothers to complain to the tool makers about it.

DeepSeek or DeepFake? Our vultures circle China's hottest AI

Re: Anthropomorphizing AI

"We are attributing human characteristics to AI. This is probably not wise"

To which you could say that nature in its efficient way has made the human brain a machine-like thing anyway. So the parallels made between 'AI' and human behaviour may be fair points after all. Are humans prone to overrate themselves?

Want Intel in your Surface? That’ll be $400 extra, says Microsoft

"Launched back in September, Intel's Lunar Lake chips were its first to exceed the 40 NPU TOPS performance requirement for Copilot+ PCs set by Microsoft last spring."

My suspicion is that no proper AI will be running locally anyway (well, maybe a better spelling/grammar corrector and file search). So all you need is ARM for a web front end.

Why Microsoft's Copilot will only kinda run locally on AI PCs for now https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/31/microsoft_copilot_hardware

How's that coming along?

Apple Intelligence turned on by default in upcoming macOS Sequoia 15.3, iOS 18.3

In Europe turning on a new cloud based feature without an opt-in will contravene GDPR.

IT job market is still shrinking but not as quickly as last year

Re: Don't worry....

"she complained that turning up for work was interfering with her social life"

Ah yes, work is the curse of the social media classes.

"Every AI 'help' bot I have interacted with has done bugger-all".

I was having a conversation with the helpbot for my Windscribe VPN. Wasn't expecting much, however as I fed it context and the error message it got more precise and spot-on, replying within 250ms. So there are some companies with a clue. Ironically I work in a helpdesk role too and am waiting with curiosity to see AI streamline my role. I know with certainty that if a basic support role like mine could be streamlined, there's higher value work I would be doing.

UK businesses eye AI as the cheaper, non-whining alternative to actual staff

"The use of AI needs to be taxed significantly"

As does the wheel and the electric motor, and the word processor...

Now Trump's import tariffs could raise the cost of a laptop for Americans by 68%

"Trump's tariffs could result in the loss of 400,000 US jobs"

What was the population of the US again?