Posts by Valeyard

Coinbase confirms insiders handed over data of 70K users

Offshored support staff paid peanuts, bribed at a similarly vast discount to give over customer details

tale as old as time

US tech titans rejoice in $600B Saudi shopping spree

Re: For the Saudis,maybe , maybe not

I wonder if the Saudis are just being the Middle Man here and that those processors might end up being pushed on elsewhere ?

if you're talking about Russia then they'll have to undercut India for that dirty little market

Computacenter IT guy let girlfriend into Deutsche Bank server rooms, says fired whistleblower

silicon valley

"Dinesh, Your hacker girlfriend wouldn't happen to know the model of our router, would she?"

"yes she complimented us on our choice"

"oh fuck"

'I see you're running a local LLM. Would you like some help with that?'

subscription model

anyone can bullshit their way through something, but it takes AI to do it with such authority and confidence, I aspire to that level of barefaced confident delivery when blagging

Disney Slack attack wasn't Russian protesters, just a Cali dude with malware

Who said that question even came up during trial?

Ex-Meta exec tells Senate Zuck dangled US citizen data in bid to enter China

if he'll do it for one side...

china realising if zuck is that easily ready to sell american's data then they'd not like him to give him all the chinese data after all for the same reason

GCHQ intern took top secret spy tool home, now faces prison

Re: Posh / Entitled

I'm currently in the royal signals / IT crossover myself and have a few colleagues in the same venn diagram.

None of us are posh though, and those of us that went down the officer route did it for the slightly increased pay and because it seemed interesting rather than because we were in any way privileged (If anything my Northern Irish accent and their scouse ones are quite the opposite of your stereotype). If people self-select not to try out for AOSB because they think it's only for posh people then that's their lookout, that's not a way of thinking that the army in any way promotes (a very small number of exclusive regiments notwithstanding). It's more about throwing yourself around obstacle courses without a care for common sense, running until you vomit your lungs up and showing some awareness for the world around you.

Others (in the combat support arms especially) either reject or back out of the officer role/route because it takes you far away from the hands-on technical roles you probably joined up for in the first place. Same in regular life where you go from dev to management and look jealously at your direct reports having fun in an IDE while you're attending meetings about next year's budget and living in excel hell.

Being in a non-commissioned officer role is the best of both worlds and is often a very conscious decision that shouldn't be translated to any sort of bias. Some people likes sales and excel, some people like tech and just want a senior role in that specific arena.

US Army’s laser obsession continues with yet another drone-zapper deal

zoolander

Drones are so hot right now

DoorDash sued for allegedly branding customer a fraudster after delivery photo query

corporate doordash...

If you're spending millions on doordash perhaps it's time to hire your own driver or have one of your staff get a bit extra in their paypacket for takeout duties

Amazon to kill off local Alexa processing, all voice requests shipped to the cloud

Re: For the blind

My mother is blind and could probably benefit from a voice activated assistant.

how nice of you to care about your mother and be so considerate and respectful toward her

to spare anyone listening in to the GBNews fuelled rantings of a 92 year old.

oh nevermind, hope that's out of your system now and gets you lots of internet points.

Imagine if older relatives knew what people were saying about them in public to look cool in front of their friends, it's a crazy side effect of social media

Apple drags UK government to court over 'backdoor' order

Re: Communists...

and yet our country is opposing Russia at the moment, what's yours doing?

Incoming deputy boss of Homeland Security says America's top cyber-agency needs to be reined in

Re: There are still some people in El Reg's homeland

I was thinking the exact same thing. Just launching straight into all these acronyms and personalities from the US without even enough context to build up a guess.

And yet the article about Northern Ireland police names being leaked came with all sorts of qualifiers about the fact that there is a bit of historical conflict there, as if we living in the UK really needed to be told that

Suppose we know who the target audience is now

Looks like paywalls are coming soon to a subreddit near you

Re: So this is my take

there'll be no takes because no one's going to pay to post a comment either, they'll all move to another subreddit

2 charged over alleged New IRA terrorism activity linked to cops' spilled data

Re: And..

Some people shoehorn US politics into everything I swear. There are lots of conversations to be had around the complicated and eventful NI situation on its own without this.

Re: How to prosecute?

yeah you're right, but before they decided to go forward with any of that the intelligence apparatus would kick in first to see just how interesting you are to them

Re: And..

yeah, see the border commission. they don't want some of the more trigger-happy northern elements of the IRA either, Slab Murphy etc al were barely tolerated by IRA leadership and were very against gerry adams. no one wanted south armagh (even the south, look at what dundalk was like just because of the proximity) but in the end the north didn't want caches that much closer to belfast so very reluctantly kept it but were approaching the south with the hypothetical of a landswap for an equivalent protestant area caught on their side of the border.

Re: How to prosecute?

You're going to charge someone under the terrorism act for possession of data you yourself made public??

people have been arrested for having police numberplates scribbled down on paper which falls under the same thing

the big factor is that they're suspected New IRA, then it becomes information likely to be useful to terrorists, and if you're already "suspected" of being in the NIRA then they actually know you are and this is something tangible that they can get to stick.

you or I probably wouldn't get done for possessing it but they'd take a very good look at you first which is why it's best not to go near

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

one of ours luckily has only 1 relevant comparable source in its training data from some other company's coding task, which helpfully specifies they have to name a variable a certain name (which then doesnt get used) so i look out for that variable

Another has some automation required and the AI just assumes the names of locators which clearly don't exist but it's not opening an application to find locators it's a glorified chatbot, so it looks fine but won't run

Other ones i use ambiguous writing which a human would understand and I got a bit cheeky with a rogue instruction with the font set to the same colour as the background which gets blindly copy-pasted into the prompt

Even if they got past all that (they don't) the next interview is for them to walk me through the code so it's a nice timesaver but they'd get caught at the next stage anyway (and it prevents me from being rude when I inevitably unmask them after taking time out of my busy day)

4% is far far higher than I would have imagined.

so far the only people using AI that I've seen in industry have been a certain subset of job candidates trying to cheat their way through the take-home technical tasks. Easily caught because the tasks I've given are designed to fool AI and be done properly by a human and the cheaters never even check to see if their code executes properly.

UK aims to fix government IT with help from AI Humphrey

It would be wonderful if this worked

and one step closer to a real robo-Humphrey for the day-to-day which one can optionally set to full Malcolm Tucker mode when things are starting to hit the fan PR-wise and the politicians need to be "managed"

Although I do see the usual crowd in the news complaining already about the choice of name (as if half of them didn't have to use their favourite tax-dodging search engine to figure out what the name meant first)

TSMC pauses production after strong earthquake hits Taiwan

Geological incidents are a near-daily occurrence in Taiwan, as are geopolitical rumblings

This doesn't strike me as ideal. The UK has boring seismic activity and boring-if-miserable-to-humans weather, surely our complete lack of any character apart from being a bit grey would make us a better choice

Pornhub lockdown and fact-free Zuckbots – welcome to 2025

Re: Porn no big deal and no IDs

that was just downright creepy to read

UK unveils plans to mainline AI into the veins of the nation

such a professional statement

nothing like a fucking heroin addiction reference released from government office

Mail-out madness as insurer offers refunds to customers in error

I knew this happened when my missus let out a "fuck's sake hastings" from across the room

Database tables of student, teacher info stolen from PowerSchool in cyberattack

"compromised credential"

how much are you betting that it's the default admin password

AI spending spree continues as Microsoft commits $80B for 2025

Re: AI and Bitcoin

luckily at my work they've erred on the side of security and prevented any AI tooling to be used within the company

still tarting our product up with useless AI offerings from a new overpaid AI team though when we're woefully short of regular devs

AI and Bitcoin

The two things boiling the planet for nothing more than powering a hype machine. make me ashamed to be associated with IT (And yet tend to be the two topics people always bring up with anyone in IT)

Cost of Gelsinger's ambition proves too much for Intel

Re: Unacceptable

TSMC is Taiwan's bargaining chip. "come near us and we're flooding the place with seawater or blowing it sky-high!"

putting all of our eggs in that basket is evermore crazy

Australia passes law to keep under-16s off social media – good luck with that, mate

yeah i know an 80 year old woman who gets my bus every day. gets lumped in with the "i don't know computers" crowd

she was remote working in the 80s in the north of england sending data cassettes down to london by courier

the law itself is pretty much a token gesture, but it's the parents themselves who should be bothering to raise their kids in the first place

kids haven't been interested in facebook in 5+ years grandad ;)

Apple's backwards design mistake and the reversed capacitor

same thing was evident in my CD32, I'd read the capacitor should be one way round but when I was recapping it even the guides on the mainboard were incorrect

Put your usernames and passwords in your will, advises Japan's government

Re: deathbox

oh yeah, i was replying to the guy above you though

Re: deathbox

i don't get why i'd tell you where it is?

the only person who could get their hands on it or know where it is is my wife and she could have my passwords if she asked anyway. if you're getting at what i think you are then i think if someone was robbing my house a slip of paper wouldn't get your average smackhead's attention with the usual electronics people have around being the headlines.

deathbox

I have a "deathbox" which is a fireproof lockbox with my basic usernames and passwords (email etc) and then my bitwarden username and master password for everything else. All bundled up alongside will, insurance docs, a list of bills that are in my name that'd need changing etc just to reduce the admin in that first couple of weeks.

I've worked in too many banks and call centres as a younger man having to deal with stressed widows trying to untangle someone's life and being charged for months of subscriptions without realising they were active and trying to deal with getting those refunded etc and blundering through it all when they're not exactly in a decent frame of mind anyway

Intel: Our finances are in the toilet, we're laying off 15K, but the free coffee is back!

Re: Caffeine is the key here

coffee beans*, roasted, ground plus hot water.

Mr la-de-dah, coffee to me is Lidl's finest instant granules.

And the coffee you bring into the office for other people to also use is Lidl's cheapest instant granules

Arecibo telescope might have failed because of weak sockets

Goldeneye

I heard the brits had sent their top double-o agent who caused all sorts of chaos to the telescope but he's a maverick who gets results and it's to be expected

Bandai Namco reportedly tries to bore staff into quitting, skirting Japan’s labor laws

I'll take that in the spirit of humour that it is hopefully intended

I've worked in frozen chicken factories where lifers have spent 30 years smelling of chicken at sub zero temperatures for minimum wage, worked at the roadside pouring hot tar in sweltering weather and I'm not quite so spoiled as to turn my nose up at this offer when i've a family to feed

people complain about these jobs but is the pay the same? If I was paid a dev salary to count paperclips I'd consider myself set for life

Datacenter CEO faked top-tier IT reliability cert to snag $10.7M SEC deal, DoJ claims

"Yesterday's charges make clear that the Criminal Division will not tolerate fraud schemes that threaten the security of the government's electronic data."

6 years of tolerating this very fraud scheme notwithstanding, of course

Fore-get about privacy, golf tech biz leaves 32M data records on the fairway

Re: ###

Your phone OS is a single point of virtually ALL your personal data.

if you choose it to be; my nokia 2660 can't be lumped into that statement. In fact a deep analysis of my phone will only show the outgoing and incoming calls will have a 100% correlation with when my wife went into one shop while i went into another and we had to find each other again afterwards.

How to spot a North Korean agent before they get comfy inside payroll

Re: VMs

Well yes because that would certainly be an unusual situation that isn't at all relevant to the article

the article talked about the employee themselves installing remote access applications onto a company-owned machine

Amazon CEO wants his staff back in the office full time

Re: flatten the hierarchy

true but a shit manager's a shit manager whereever they are, and it's pot luck as to which one is going to stay (I'd argue micromanagers are more likely to play the game of office politics and sucking up)

flatten the hierarchy

translated as managers having to give less time to more direct reports

WhatsApp still working on making View Once chats actually disappear for all

2nd phone

these aren't to be relied upon. if they can be viewed they can be photo'd or filmed with a secondary device anyway, no light hacking required

Telegram founder and CEO arrested in France

what do french presidents have to do with this?

Deadbeat dad faked his own death by hacking government databases

Re: Is it hacking?

The system was not designed to make alive people dead unless actually dead.

the front's not supposed to fall off!

Brit tech mogul Mike Lynch missing after yacht sinks off Sicily amid storms

Re: Give it rest!

Plest gets it and is infinitely more eloquent about it than I could be...

What are you talking about? I said "briefly" and I also mentioned I'm a father so that image in particular hit home to me, none of that is controversial

Even so why must you protect the funny memes even after reading about that?

Virtue signalling, Christ that's a reach

While everyone focuses on disrespectful conspiracy theories the story of a mother briefly losing her 1 year old under violent waves in the sea made this really hit home how awful it is.

I wonder what the conditions were before this or if any warning was given, if it was particularly inclement I know I wouldn't have been there. Been camping with a toddler and noped out to a local B&B for a night when a yellow weather warning hit for a storm and returned the next day when it calmed down. There always has to be a line where you say "this has been nice but the holiday's on hold now"