Posts by Ken Y-N

Next week's SpaceX Starship test still needs FAA authorization

Tomorrow's Headline

TRUMP APPOINTS MUSK AS HEAD OF FAA

Fog ransomware channels Musk with demands for work recaps or a trillion bucks

how swiftly government departments can be radically overhauled, where necessary

Surely "how swiftly government departments can be dismantled, where idealogically expedient"

One of the last of Bletchley Park's quiet heroes, Betty Webb, dies at 101

My father too

He was "just" a radio operator and message transcriber, and also did something with the Japanese Enigma that he only ever mentioned once or twice.

Now I'm working in Japan on encryption and related stuff for civvie use only, of course.

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

Re: Well, he was right about

Just look at all those share prices tumbling!

Obviously our wonderful Stock Market is being manipulated by LEFT-WING DEMOCRAT AMERICA-HATING IMMIGANTS.

FAA closes investigations into Blue Origin landing fail, Starship Flight 7 explosion

I read a rocket scientist describe how Starship is doomed

Apparently, as they make it bigger they need to make it lighter otherwise you need more fuel to lift the structure and the extra fuel you put in, so even though flight 8 had a lighter payload since it was bigger the vibration issue remains. Making it sturdier will reduce the payload size so much that there is actually a negative payoff.

They also said that they haven't done any test flights with scale models which would have revealed these issues, but they are now so embedded into NASA plans that SpaceX can keep sucking the government teat.

Google teases AI Mode for search, giving Gemini total control over your results

"Is haggis an animal?"

It's been all over the Scottish web the last couple of days, but thanks to the Haggis Wildlife Foundation and their videos of haggises (haggii?) cavorting in the Highlands, Gemini has finally seen the light and correctly replied "Yes" to the above question.

※ Sadly, yesterday they have fallen to Russian propaganda and it now replies "No"

Penguin, as it's almost as cute as a baby haglet. --->

SpaceX receives FAA blessing for another Starship test

Too late

there's more of a reason for the government to enforce laws and regulations regarding Elon's reckless behavior

The Supreme Court has already ruled that the (shadow) president cannot be held guilty for crimes commited in office.

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

Re: good

As good as Linda Whats-her-name "runs" Xitter?

Are you cooler than ex-Apple design guru Sir Jony Ive?

U2 went downhill from Joshua Tree

I went to see the War tour at the Edinburgh Playhouse, and Bono put on a nice show. They then got too big for their boots and forgot their roots.

Oh, and Really Saying Something is about the blandest Fun Boy Three track, and my juvenile mind is forever imprinted with Bananarama's navels in Venus.

Twin Google flaws allowed researcher to get from YouTube ID to Gmail address in a few easy steps

"we will use every tool at our disposal to stop them from targeting U.S. citizens"

About that for stopping Pig Butchering - according to a pic on Reddit, the CIA has stopped their cybersecurity outreach to senior citizens due to Trump/Musk butchering.

Mushroom cloud because they were sacked too.

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

Disappointed you didn't add a photo of Musk illustrating how high sales will be when (if) FSD gets approved in Europe.

Trump tells Musk to 'go get' Starliner astronauts

I must say I'm liking this new trend of illustrating Musk stories with that photo!

HPE may have bagged $1B order from Elon Musk's X for AI servers

He's recently raised $6 billion from the latest funding round:

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-xai-series-c-funding-round-grok-nvidia-microchips-2024-12

Tesla, Musk double down on $56B payday appeal

Re: Doesn't make sense

Toyota do a lovely clone of the London taxi, but it's ICE (or maybe hybrid). Haven't a clue about automonous plans, but there will still be a need for some drivers for helping old folk in, stowing luggage, etc.

Short-lived bling, dumb smart things, and more: The worst in show from CES 2025

Re: A washing machine

But, the smart washing machine can delay the spin cycle so you can talk comfortably while sitting beside the device.

Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if someone's patented that - that's the sort of dubious idea that my cow-orkers might file to meet their one patent per year assessment.

Japan's wooden satellite exits International Space Station

Chisel help awl Japanese space endevours

It'll spruce up their cata-log-ue once others cedar successes.

Blue Origin's New Glenn will launch any day now – but it better hurry up

"before being trumped by SpaceX"

I suspect they might get trumped, musked and doged next year once Musk starts fiddling with the budget...

Trump tariffs transform into bigger threats for Mexico, Canada than China

Musk has generously offered to spend what it takes to unseat/primary whoever votes against his puppet-prez. He also has plans to defund the leftie woke DEi-riddled NPR.

(And /s, just in case you didn't notice)

They'll be a lot of people voluntarily and involuntarily getting their coats before he's finished ---->

Supply chain management vendor Blue Yonder succumbs to ransomware

"coffee"!!

But even just "beer" is better.

Here's how a Trump presidency could change the tech industry

Re: Here's how a Trump presidency could change the World

And 10% increases in CO2 output.

To kill memory safety bugs in C code, try the TrapC fork

Re: No terminating '\0'?

Ah yes, I see my misunderstanding and I wasn't thinking at all of the contiguous memory... The comment "TrapC blocked strcpy overwrite, success good" means that it hasn't been trampled by the 'strcpy()' rather than being set to 1 explicitly in the previous 'if' branch. I know, read the code, not the comments!

But, assuming 'success' comes directly after "buffer[]' is incorrect except in perhaps a debug build, as a release build would likely put 'success' in a register, so "Welcome" would not be printed despite the memory overwrite. You've now got a bug of the most annoying type, working in Release but failing in Debug.

To sum up, this is a bad example.

No terminating '\0'?

char buff[8];

...

if(!strcmp(buff,"s3cr8tpw"))

That code implies that there's no NUL character at the end of strings. I can see why it might not be needed if you have a length field somewhere, but that's quite a change.

Also, the next snppet has:

const char* ptr = "Hello World"; // 12 char wide

Shouldn't that be 11?

What might a second term of Trump mean for the US space program?

Re: Elmo rubbing his hands together in glee.

Shirley an *imperial* fuckton - he doesn't want any of that nasty European funcktonnage. (and wouldn't it be a metric fucktonne?)

Icon for what happens when you mix your fucktonnages.

Starlink was offered for free to those hit by Hurricane Helene. It is not entirely free

Re: UK Phone Operators often provide free calls to areas affected by disasters but you need a phone

When I first read about this, it was his helicopters not getting permission to land, so I presumed the choppers were full of StarLink terminals to hand out to deserving plebs, just like traditional mobile service providers (in Japan anyway) have emergency hardware that provides a bridge from mobile services to satellites.

Thinking a bit further, a free terminal and free 30 day service, then pay later for the continued service (basically a free terminal) would also be fair, but - it is Leon we're talking about after all - the reality is as the article points out, more free publicity for his "generosity".

SpaceX Falcon 9 grounded again after second stage hits wrong part of ocean

Re: Ooopsie!

Perhaps it's a "See, we can self-regulate; there's no need for the FAA!", as Leon has been pushing hard to be trump's governmental cost-cutter, and first on the chopping block will be all these pesky agencies that get in the way of his various industries.

Mushroom icon as he and Project 2025 want to nuke democracy.

Red team hacker on how she 'breaks into buildings and pretends to be the bad guy'

Re: Train your users not to trust anyone

At a certain company, legitimate external emails have links to an internal page that lists legitimate external emails - now that's a good phishing route; include the internal URL as almost no-one will verify...

I don't know what pressing Delete will do, but it seems safe enough!

Well, it does

if I go to the Windows Settings app and type in "format", ideally it should then take me to, at least) the options for formatting a storage device, changing date format, selecting a keyboard layout, and possibly even the multi-screen layout dialog?

On Windows 11, it shows me "Region settings", "Set regional format", "Format a volume", etc

Microsoft pulls the plug on WordPad, the world's least favorite text editor

"Donated" my granny's telly for the Beeb

Previously the school only had a single CPM machine, but the maths department got a Beeb but no monitor, so I decided to help out by persuading my granny to let us borrow her telly, which she never watched, to the school.

Cool, more promises of a Universal Translator from Big Tech. This time, Meta – again

Impressive, but impressively wrong

For my quick single sentence try, it translated "cabbages" to "butter" in Japanese, and "strawberries" in French

Threads versus Twitter: Shouldn't we be happy the wheels are falling off antisocial social media?

Re: Freedom is an illusion

Err, since Elmo took the helm the acceptance rate of government requests to remove tweets has actually increased from around 50% to 80%:

https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-orders/

Twitter has performed little or no push-back on these requests partially because Musk has sacked most of the people who used to handle these issues.

Oh, great. Yet another tech billionaire thinks he can get microblogging right

Looks fine to me

A few of my Instagram friends are already there, and it looks quite nice, although other than the text being above the picture instead of the other way round there seems little difference. I never got Twitter (at least now the Muskrat is clear about the Nazi hell-hole he is making it into) so let's see what happens with Threads.

Apologies for posting something positive; Zuck already knows all about me, sadly, so he's not going to be getting much additional info from me liking even more cat pics.

Twitter rate-limits itself into a weekend of chaos

Wasn't the Muskrat all about spotting bots while trying to get out of buying Twitter? How come now it looks like that he and his team now cannot spot scrapers and has to rely on draconian rate limiting for everyone? Surely he wouldn't be lying?

Last night one of the news magazine programs in Japan covered this latest disaster, and random people on the street were saying they were burning their unverified quota in just 10 minutes. Also, most every local and national government department uses Twitter for emergency notifications, etc, and with the country right in the middle of serious flooding and evacuation notices, with Twitter pining for the fjords word may not be getting out properly.

Microsoft puts profanity filter on %@!#ing Teams transcripts

Re: whose swear words?

Hope you didn't also tell them that there was a fag machine in said pub. I got auto-temp banned from Reddit once for discussing bundles of sticks/Northern delicacies.

Fujitsu admits it fluffed the fix for Japan’s flaky ID card scheme

On the Japanese telly a couple of days ago they had an article about the latest issue - places, even within the same town, can have the same name, or the same kanji but different pronunciation, or people have different ways of writing their address - 1-2-3-4 is actually identical to 一丁目二の三番四号, but the database requires an exact match. One could use the post code which would eliminate 99% of these ambiguities, but the My Number system does not include post codes for whatever reason.

Yes, I was facepalming that they only just realised this, and it will take them another two years to hook up to some master database of official addresses, although that doesn't address the other issue of needing fuzzy matches.

Japan's digital ID card gets emergency review amid data leaks

It's not as bad as it sounds

Most of the processes involved in setting up the system involve manual input, often by third parties. For instance, my health insurance is though a company scheme, so someone in their office has to go through and link the My Number card belonging to N Kenneth A matches their policy holder called K Y-N (don't ask), so cock-ups have come from mixing up people this the same names, or other problems have been a husband and wife applying for their cards but their photos being swapped on their cards.

Real IT problems were earlier in the year with the system for printing out government documents at convenience stores, as there were probably timing errors with two transactions getting mixed up at the back end.

Stanford Internet Observatory raises alarm over 'serious failings with the child protection systems at Twitter'

The subhead says: "Researchers find 100,000 accounts spamming child abuse material"

I don't see that supported in the article or in the links - they only seem to have checked 100,000 tweets and found 40 dodgy image hash matches. Still far too many, of course.

Reddit blackout planned over app-killing API prices

Reddit is Fun on Android user here - can't tell you about traffic, although I do believe it is true that there are a lot of app-using power users and mods.

RIF runs its own ads (which I always thought was a bit cheeky) or a one-off $3 ad-free version. I'd like to say that I'll quit if RIF dies, but I'll probably hang around with the official app, then give up if it's as crap as everyone says. BTW, I use FaceBook, but only though the website on Android, not the app as I don't want Meta as well as Google tracing my every move, as I suspect the official Reddit app might like to do.

Elon Musk finally finds 'someone foolish enough to take the job' of Twitter CEO

Facts, please

You ----------------->

I'm not going to bother looking up who that MAP is, although wasn't Epstein's pal Trump actually unbanned, and I'd rather do without CP searches in my history, but I'm sure I've previously read that CP have actually gone up - Musk may have banned common hash tags, but that's not tackling the core problem, and he sacked most of the moderation teams.

As for the TLAs, well, your boy Musk is actually bending over even further: https://cyber.harvard.edu/story/2023-04/twitter-complying-more-government-demands-under-elon-musk

He also recently insulted someone for asking why he censored Turkish government critics just before their general election: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/05/twitter-musk-censors-turkey-election-erdogan

Tokyo has millions of surplus Wi-Fi access points that should be shared with blockchain, says NTT

Sadly Japan is still excited by blockchain things and the metaverse (I'm sure that Tsukuba forum will be full of that too) and hasn't realised that Elon Musk is a narcistic idiot, etc.

Tesla wins key court battle over Autopilot crash blame

I agree this is a weak case, but having a driving system that can engage in an urban area which is specifically stated as not being suitable for urban driving is a serious mistake too.

Google says it did not train its AI chatbot Bard on your private emails

The Vulture Strikes Back - a ChatGPT superhero movie synopsys

The Register’s Vulture is a fearless investigative journalist who exposes the dark secrets of the tech industry. He has a loyal following of readers who appreciate his witty and sarcastic style, but also a horde of enemies who want to silence him. Among them are the corrupt executives of Nominet, the registry that runs the .uk domain, who have been abusing their power and mismanaging funds for years.

When The Vulture publishes a series of articles revealing Nominet’s scandals, he becomes a target of a vicious smear campaign orchestrated by the registry’s board. They hire hackers, trolls and bots to flood The Register’s website with fake news, spam and insults, hoping to discredit The Vulture and drive away his audience. They also try to hack into his personal accounts and devices, threatening his privacy and security.

But The Vulture is not easily intimidated. He decides to fight back with his own weapons: his sharp pen, his loyal colleagues and his faithful commenters. Together, they form a resistance movement against Nominet’s tyranny, using their skills, knowledge and humor to expose their lies, sabotage their plans and rally public support. Along the way, they discover that Nominet is not the only enemy they have to face: there are other sinister forces behind the scenes, pulling the strings and manipulating the tech world for their own nefarious purposes.

Will The Vulture and his allies be able to stop Nominet and its allies from destroying the internet as we know it? Will they be able to protect their freedom of speech and information? And will they be able to survive the onslaught of angry fanboys, trolls and haters who disagree with their opinions?

Find out in The Vulture Strikes Back: a thrilling, hilarious and action-packed superhero movie that will make you laugh, cry and cheer for The Register’s Vulture and his commenters.

China launches yet another crackdown on social media

A rip-off of NVidia's I Am AI

This is the only thing I could think of watching that:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/about-nvidia/i-am-ai/

The voice-over even seemed like it was voiced by a text-to-speech engine.

99 year old man says cryptocurrency is for idiots

Theoretical house to tent

Versus the reality of your future Moon Lambo turning into Kim Jong Un's stockpile of --->

Larry Ellison mea culpa as traffic cop stops Big Red boss on own island

"the island had become his petri dish of experimentation on health, wellness and sustainability"

So where does a Corvette fit in? Is it running on pineapple bio-diesel?

Cops chase Tesla driver 'dozing' with Autopilot on

Re: "whether the car has an in-cabin camera"

An EU directive (yay Brexit???) coming into force soon says that all driver monitoring must be processed locally and deleted as soon as handled, but I'm not sure how it handles that it still has to send out a signal that can be logged such as DRIVER_SLEEPING, DRIVER_INATTENTIVE, DRIVER_WATCHING_PR0NHUB...

GM, etc, along with an all-cabin camera, have a camera mounted in the dash pointing straight at the driver, and it can handle Near Infra-Red, so it can see through sunglasses and do all that fancy eye-tracking stuff. However, Tesla only has one non-IR camera mounted below the rear-view mirror that covers all the cabin, so at best they can only see one eyeball, I would guess. Even so, it should be more than possible to detect the driver lying back, or whatever, but as we see elsewhere, features seem more important that safety in Tesla.

Neuralink's AI brain chip could be in humans within six months claims Elon Musk

Self-trepanning?

"The wearer has to drill a hole into their skull"

I think I'll give that bit a hard pass.

Tetchy trainee turned the lights down low to teach turgid lecturer a lesson

They had put the screen out front as the lecturer had lost his voice, but they should have known better than to put the CRT before the hoarse.

Japan to change laws that require use of floppy disks

His sense of humour on English Twitter is not bad either:

https://twitter.com/konotaromp/status/1557560605690585088?s=20&t=eHPNO2jF8zsB8kNlgF7j2w

Just you wait. We are getting ready to fix the date for preparatory meeting to discuss how we are going to draw a scheme for the Most Advanced Digital Hanko System Development Schedule Planning Committee.

https://twitter.com/konotaromp/status/1557554908575870977?s=20&t=eHPNO2jF8zsB8kNlgF7j2w

C’mon, there is no analogue thing left in our remarkably advanced society.

Oops, my fax machine is jamming!

Taser maker offers electric-shock drones to stop school shootings

Finding one-armed guards

Perhaps we could rehabilitate old one-armed bandits?

Mine's the one with a sleeve sewn up.