Posts by Lee D

Cloudflare dishes up the stats on internet traffic in 2023

Re: IPv6

Yep, has been repeatedly pointed out, they always blamed the old design and "scripts" etc. on the backend.

They've completely redesigned since then, and still nothing.

Re: IPv6

I believe the last time I commented on it was 3 years after I was told it was imminent on a post where I complained that The Reg had been promising it for at least 8 years prior to that. That was a year or so ago.

I've stopped taking any tech advice posted here because they can't do something really quite simple which they keep subtly berating us all for "not doing". Hell, that's if we were ignore that debacle where they tried to post "business" IT topics and the site went to sewage for a good few months until they realised it wasn't their audience at all.

P.S. My own personally-hosted website, email, NTP and other servers have offered IPv6 for over 12 years at least.

Eat your own dogfood, Reg, or stop even joking about it.

Tesla to remote patch 2M vehicles after damning Autopilot safety probe

Re: It's a Smear Campaign Against Musk

The fact that there's a brown sticky smear left after someone pushes Musk is only a consequence of what he's made up of.

Ofcom proposes ban on UK telcos making 'inflation-linked' price hikes mid-contract

I refer you to council tax for the last 50+ years.

Always by the exact maximum they're allowed to put it up, so why bother to call it a maximum at all?

Microsoft Forms feature request still not sorted after SEVEN years

At my new workplace last year, I inherited an horrendous mess of a Google Form creating a Google Sheet which was processed by two Google Extensions, creating an Outlook calendar item to then be processed by PowerAutomate, to send emails and creating Outlook events in people's calendars, but which repeatedly polled them to see if a reminder was needed.

Mostly because Microsoft Forms was so pants.

I replaced the entire thing with a simple PHP form on the intranet because we kept getting disabled because of the Google/Microsoft boundary and the amount of polling going on.

Microsoft Forms is worthless, and Google Forms shouldn't be used for anything intense, just basic consent or survey.

Anything else you have that's a large part of your business process, you really need a proper piece of software. Fudging things in Forms is like running your finance on Excel. Sure you can do it, but you shouldn't.

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

Not from what I just read.

https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment1/freedom-of-speech-for-corporations.html

Also:

"Under the first prong of the test, certain commercial speech is not entitled to protection; the informational function of advertising is the First Amendment concern and if an advertisement does not accurately inform the public about lawful activity, it can be suppressed."

Whoops.

Do corporations even get the right to free speech?

Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970

Re: Time...

I like to operate an NTP server in any significantly-sized network.

It doesn't need to be microsecond-accurate, it doesn't need an expensive GPS card in it, it just needs to be the "one true reference" for all time on your local network, in case Internet goes down.

You can do that with just any device running an NTP server and letting it drift from real-time - it'll just drift back into sync when it's reconnected.

I have used network router for this, I have used VMs for this (VMs don't hold time perfectly well on their own but in concert with an outside NTP upstream server they are fine), I have even exposed an internal NTP server as an NTP pool server for other people to use (because NTP pool has a lovely monitoring feature where it will alert you if your server is uncontactable or getting out of sync with everyone else's in the pool).

You can get MSF modules to pull in an atomic clock radio signal and feed into the NTP server.

You can get GPS modules to do the same.

And you can sync with as many NTP servers as you like, it really doesn't matter.

Then have all your clients refer to that AND other NTP servers (in case it goes down!). Windows allows as many as you like, but doesn't present the option in the GUI.

I normally have all clients using 0.uk.pool.ntp.org and 1.uk.pool.ntp.org (guaranteed to be two different UK NTP Pool servers), time.windows.com AND whatever internal IP (hence not DNS-reliant) I'm running an NTP server on, and that NTP server syncs to a bunch of well-known NTP servers on the Internet.

Plug the damn thing in with a power supply, or failing that some AA eliminator/emulator batteries ( I can't think what they're called, but they're basically an empty battery shell in the same size, with a connector in the middle to attach positive/negative leads of a real PSU).

And then put the power supply ON A UPS.

Swedish Tesla strike goes international as Norwegian and Danish unions join in

Re: I'm actually on Musk's side on this

How do you know that they don't want a union if one doesn't exist that they can join or show support for without losing their job, for instance?

If the union exists, membership isn't obstructed and nobody joins it, you have a point.

But if the union does get formed and lots of people join it, you're just as wrong as Musk (which is pretty bad!).

And the only way to tell? Allow a union.

It's like those websites who used to always say: "Yeah, our site doesn't work in Opera/Netscape/Firefox because nobody uses it, our website stats show..." and never understood that if people CAN'T use something, you can't use those statistics as if they're proof that they DON'T WANT TO.

I'm anti-union - for completely other reasons[1] - but even I think that an employer that tries to stop a union forming has something to hide. If the workers are truly happy, they'll join the union or not, and that'll be the end of it. A bit more paperwork, maybe a few things jump higher up the agenda, but generally everything will remain the same. Obstructing it and refusing to engage just tells me that Tesla has stuff to hide and is worried what a unionised action would reveal.

[1] - I work in a heavily-unionised industry. My pay has been - without fail - higher than that negotiated by unions for their members. I disagree with some unions "we should all be on equal pay" stuff, because some employees inherently are more valuable than others. And my negotiating a better personal deal shouldn't be used as a trigger to also automatically upgrade everyone across the country doing a similarly-titled job. I've been sworn to NDA for my salary, and I even am still the proud sole-occupier of a payscale created especially for myself in a certain area of a London Borough (after MUCH protest, but I set my price and they either paid that or didn't, and they chose to literally INSTRUCT Borough HR to create a payscale just for me that nobody else has, and the Borough protested like hell because it was so much upheaval and could be so problematic for them across the rest of the Borough). At no point have I been "conned" into thinking I'm earning more either, as I am privy to payroll data in my role even if only incidentally. Also: I don't need union backing to get things done, because if I think something is that wrong, I just raise all the alerts and then move on if nothing is done. I also don't need a union for personal representation. I've literally told HR departments their own obligations under the law before now because they simply weren't aware. I once fought for 3 years to prove that I was doing everything I was supposed to do... on my own... against the entire employer I was working for... including the HR department... including their lawyers... while doing my job... without legal advise... just as a thing to clear my own name out of principle... and then left the day they admitted defeat... after they'd been trying to build a (false, I hasten to add) case against me for dismissal. It was the most fun I ever had.

I've even represented co-workers against the employer that we're both working for on matters rather unrelated to my job. When I sat in on meetings at that co-worker's invitation, there was an immediate 180 about-face in how the employer dealt with them. And the look on the employer's face when they realised that the representation was not some union official or employment lawyer, but me, was priceless. They knew they were in trouble and I wouldn't back down. And not just one instance, not just one co-worker, and not just one employer, either.

Unions should exist. Unions should be available to all. And workers should get a (free) choice of whether they want to join, irrespective of their employer's beliefs on the matter. And I'm someone who has never, and would probably never, join a union even if it was free and acted only in my interests.

Australia building 'top secret' cloud to catch up and link with US, UK intel orgs

And you think things like the Police National Computer and/or the entire Google for Government and/or the existing disparate and individual systems for intelligence don't already have to deal with precisely the same - or greater - risk already?

'Wobbly spacetime' is latest stab at unifying physics

Rule #1:

Don't back bets championed by people with names like Oppenheim in the field of physics...

"Oppenheimer himself had bet ten dollars against George Kistiakowsky's entire month's pay that the bomb would not work at all"

Steam client drops support on macOS, but adds it on Linux

Re: The entire x86-32 platform is declining

About time.

The last 32-bit x86 processor was made in 2011, the last ACTUALLY USABLE one was something like 2004.

If you haven't migrated to 64-bit software (processor change likely not required if purchased in the last 2 decades!) yet, then you have some serious problems.

32-bit-only is dead, and has been for over a decade in terms of production, and 2 decades in reality.

That we're only just removing backwards compatibility TWENTY YEARS LATER is testament to quite how backward people can be in scrapping obsolete hardware that only runs on obsolete operating systems with obsolete software.

It's like wondering why you can't boot a ZX Spectrum (discontinued in 1992) to play titles from twenty years later (2012).

Rackspace runs short of Cloud Files storage in LON region

Re: Move to something else

I know someone who worked for Rackspace (and Google, and a lot of other places).

I think they'd tell you that it was likely all three.

Re: Why have regions?

Because GDPR effectively requires me to have control of my data and never be processed anywhere that's not subject to GDPR or similar regulations.

Yes, storing or moving encrypted data around is "processing".

Though I'm a mathematician and computer scientist and agree with you on this (you should be able to publish all your traffic and your public key on the front page of every newspaper and it not matter), legal requirements mean that you just can't do that for anything that is considered "personal data".

Guess what? Much of the data any company, business, charity, school or organisation stores is "personal data".

And the brief of "processing" is so broad that, no, I can't transmit my data to the US, even temporarily.

That's not what you pay a lot of money to an outside company for.

Should never have got within 90% of capacity, let alone to the point where it errors and active traffic can keep filling it back up.

Brit borough council apologizes for telling website users to disable HTTPS

See comments above.

Yes.

Better load speeds for websites.

Re: Dear editor

HTTPS 86% faster than HTTP

And I'm on a leased line as a full network administrator with no filtering, etc.

Re: Dear editor

HTTPS enforces certain requirements and basically keeps your requests together and the connection open for future requests.

Yes, you can enable certain options on HTTP but they are often server-side and out of your control, and HTTP2 is still in its infancy, basically (HTTP2 on Apache? Literally a mod that is disabled by default).

So, sorry, but if you look, HTTPS is actually faster "in the real world" than HTTP.

You joke, but working in network management, I've had suppliers tell me to "open all ports", port-forward thousands of ports to a device "because they might use them", multiple requests to unfilter all of AWS, Azure, etc. (because they can't be bothered to limit what they use, so they expect you to just "allow" anything from/to an entire CDN), put an exception for antivirus on "Program Files" (er... nope..), "unblock all Youtube domains", and all kinds of other stuff.

One of them even tried to insist that I let all port 80 *outgoing* requests, no matter the destination.

Mate... I work in schools... you're asking me to break the law by removing all web-filtering across the site by doing so. Ain't gonna happen.

No such person should be developing any software or website whatsoever.

There's even less excuse with LetsEncrypt nowadays.

Install an ACME client on the web server, ask for a cert, and you get one signed, downloaded, inserted into your server/certificate store and automatically renewed on a schedule, even on IIS.

UK government rings the death knell for SIM farms

Oh, no, the fraudsters who are using things to commit fraud might be breaking the law if they obtain those things to commit fraud.

Whatever will they do?

Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files

Re: Yet... some people are all in with Google

I use Metallic and have previously used Datto (yuk, spit, not my idea and ATROCIOUSLY terrible product) to do just that.

Re: Yet... some people are all in with Google

My former workplace was a private school whose entire infrastructure is now reliant on Google.

They produce about 1m Google Docs/etc. a year.

All the teaching, back-office, SLT, governors, policies, etc. documents are on Google, all email is on GMail. Over lockdown, everything was Google Meet.

All the clients are Chromebooks for the kids (every child has one), all Chromebook Flex for the classroom desktop computers and laptops (for teaching staff), and the few PCs that still exist are basically pulling everything from Google drives via Google Chrome with Google Docs, etc. because of the need to interact with the Google data.

It costs them almost nothing (Google services and storage are all free for education, the only thing they pay Google for is a managed device licence one-time per device, whether that's a Chromebook or a PC with Flex installed). Some of the machines they deployed Flex on (rather than update to something that could run Windows 11) are now 10 years old.

Shortly before I left (after which they went full-Google), I was told to stop backing up Google into their backup system because "it's Google". Obviously, they'll never lose a single file, ever, right?

I have to say that the Google service actually works rather well. It's rarely down and rarely problematic and very easily manageable (with their desktops and laptops now on Flex it's even easier) and extremely cheap. And, because it's an outside third party... if it goes down, what can you do as an IT guy? Nothing. Maybe send Google a stroppy email, that's about it. Great from an IT management point of view because when it all goes wrong, you can do nothing about it.

But I'm not sure they realise that they've lumped all their eggs into the one basket. The only saving grace is they didn't also jump down the Jamboard route because that's been killed off by Google already.

It's fabulous when you have a single, integrated, managed, flat system like that - where everything is basically the same. Until it all goes wrong. And then your IT guys have *nothing* they can do about it and, in this case, not even a on-site backup to pull your documents from.

My successor at that school worked with me for many years - and they took over when I left and realised that they just have no money at all, that's why they're doing that and why they denied all reasonable routes to actually progress. Brexit, losing all the international kids, stopping boarding, interest rate rises, etc. has meant that their incomes have tanked. My successor is looking to get out because it will all go wrong one day, which is kind of why I left too. Also because it was literally just the two of us managing 1000 users/devices as well as all the IT and every associated system (access control, CCTV, etc.).

Hilariously, they would often demand Surface tablets, and full Office 365 licensing for everyone, and all kinds of stuff (and have just done that again to my successor), and they've been demanding that for 10+ years from me when I worked there. I was always for it. Strangely it never, ever, once got into actually purchasing anything because it was always vetoed when the costs were quoted. Not just by one person, but by about three successive leaderships when they see the price that other schools are paying for 365, Windows devices, etc. It's not that they *couldn't* afford it, but they are so set in not increasing the IT budget (including staffing!) that they just stagnated and won't ever make the leap out to "normal" IT pricing, and instead waste their money elsewhere instead.

It's worked out fine for them, most annoyingly. But one day it will collapse around their ears, and they can't say they weren't warned.

When you're paying almost zero for the service, it doesn't really matter if it fails, so long as you know that and spend the money where it can join the gaps. It wouldn't work for a business, but a lot of schools are run on that basis (by a short survey I did, to kind of prove my point, one third of schools were Microsoft-only, one third were Google-only, and one third were both).

There's nothing wrong with going all-in on Google. But you want to be backing that up with something. I know when the Internet connection went down, the whole school just stopped as they could do nothing. Their solution: Buy another leased line from another provider. I'm not sure that's the solution you want, especially if the Google end goes off.

Yep, I've seen that before - someone backing up shortcuts or part-files where the rest was in some cloud service that wasn't being backed up.

That's where the second rule of backups pops up - if you have never restored, verified and checked your backups contain all your data, then you don't have any backups.

Nothing.

iCloud was literally just Azure and AWS instances for a decade.

They didn't even bother to pass on the region guarantees - they were using random Azure/AWS instances all over the world and thus wouldn't guarantee where your iCloud data ended up as they didn't know or care.

https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/02/icloud_runs_on_microsoft_azure_and_amazon/

Literally any item that "conjoins" two backups makes them dependent on each other:

- Physical location

- Power source

- Internet connection

- Credit card you signed up to the service with

- The only guy who knows the login

Anything at all.

And though there's no problem with having "dependent" backups, you have to know that and understand what that means when the credit card is blocked or the Internet connection goes off and now both those backups will be inaccessible until you resolve that problem.

But one of above items is most definitely:

- Service provider.

So having two independent data copies in two different continents but BOTH run by Google, say... bam... you just made dependent backups again.

Yet again:

If you have your files in the cloud, that's fine. No problem.

But where's YOUR backup? Not Google's. Not AWS's. But yours. Where's YOUR other location, entirely independent of that cloud service, where you have a full, complete and up-to-date copy of your data?

If you can't answer that question, you don't have a backup.

You could backup to ANOTHER cloud... that's fine. So long as your recognise that the Internet connection is then a shared access to both your backups.

But ONE cloud from ONE provider is ONE backup, no matter how many drives or datacentres it's stored on.

Same way that ONE SAN from ONE provider is ONE backup, no matter how many drives or network cabinets it's stored on.

Tiny11 shrinks Windows 11 23H2 down to pocket size

No, that's just an installer that uses the image which is generated by the scripts I linked to - which just remove the Windows Store apps from the installation wim file.

Fourth article I've read which doesn't actually mention the full-installed size, which seems a pretty huge omission.

The download is about 3.5-4.0Gb but what's the installed size? Not much less than Windows, I'm guessing.

And all it is really is a bunch of scripts that uninstall unnecessary Windows Store apps and some registry entries to turn things off:

https://github.com/ntdevlabs/tiny11builder

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Musk will try to run for president of some obscure third world country that also, by coincidence, has a large lithium and/or no employment rights.

Neuralink pockets extra VC cash in computer-brain interface quest

Oh, look, Musk lying and producing hyperbolic lies and predictions for something that everyone says is literally nothing like he claims.

That's never happened before.

Why do people still listen to this fool?

Black Friday? More like Blackout Friday for HSBC's online and mobile banking

Re: Mismash

I moved to Monzo for precisely this reason.

They can't fob you off, they have to deal with it themselves.

And given that I set up my account with them by a photo, an ID and entirely online, they can use similar to identify me without having to make a "branch visit" (which wouldn't be possible).

Worst case, they would just write to you, recorded delivery, I imagine. Same as I've had other banks do when I refuse to drive across town during working hours just to identify myself (but yet they're quite happy to speak to me on the phone or process thousands of pounds of payments in my name without the same...).

Have never had cause to contact Monzo because everything I want to do is just in the app. If I can't get to the app, why would I need anything more than it originally took to get an account via the app? It shouldn't.

Because being a long term personal and business customer, I wasn't expecting to be literally LAUGHED AT when I applied for a mortgage from a well-established business partner (that's what a bank is) and long-term personal banking provider.

I would happily go to a more expensive provider that I have a relationship with than go with the cheapest.

But established relations were destroyed in one meeting with them, for a totally without-cause refusal (as proven by a mortgage shop being quite prepared to give me one and couldn't understand what the problem was given my credit record, business income, employment, etc.).

My account was closed within a few months of that, especially given the other incident, and as soon as I could move everything away from them.

"You can get a chequebook on request" is what I see on their accounts, same as several other banks.

But they don't offer it to you automatically any more, and haven't for years.

I haven't used (or seen) a cheque in at least a decade.

My last three employers (covering 15 years or so of my dealing with their accounting systems) who take in millions of pounds a year started refusing cheques 15-20 years ago.

I don't think there's a high-street bank left who issue cheques to account holders any more.

"Compensation time methinks," said one. "Train companies compensate when a train is an hour late… what about for thousands of customers who have important bills to pay/ transactions to do/ work and lives to live and need their banking app!"

Just vote with your feet, man.

I have moved away from every major UK high street bank at one time or another.

NatWest - when they pretended that a Java applet in an HTTP page was "secure" just because it showed a padlock, rather than deploy HTTPS.

HSBC - when they laughed in my face when I applied for a mortgage, so I went next-door to a mortgage shop and got... the exact mortgage I was asking for, no hassle. Also when they overcharged me for a cheque that they DELIBERATELY delayed paying in - in ten years of custom, the ONE cheque that could, in theory, be processed for 48 hours for which the last 10 minutes would incur a fee... that one delayed exactly 48 hours and incurred a fee. None of the thousands I'd paid in before over a decade did so, no delay, nor fee, not once.

Barclays - when they insisted on causing me nothing but hassle when it came to paying in my (Barclays Bank!) university grant cheque into the university branch of Barclays Bank that they opened for me for that express purpose.

...

and so on.

I now deal only with online-only banks (not FirstDirect!) because they have to give me the functions I want to use. And because they have no branches to staff, I get functions to do EVERYTHING I need (open a business account, a joint account, dispute a transaction, etc.) in the app itself.

Sorry, but a bank should not be "down" online nowadays. I can understand "Oh, sorry, we're just pausing scheduled payments for a little while" or "Your balance info may be up to date by up to an hour while we process a backlog", etc. but they shouldn't be DOWN. I should still be able to make payments, get to my account, etc. Anything else is a complete failure to deploy enough redundancy.

Which, weirdly, the online-only banks with only one thousandth of the same resources seem to manage no problem at all.

And the train analogy is very apt. When I started to realise that trains were so unreliable I couldn't use them, I just... stopped using trains entirely. That was many years ago and apart from very rare, non-critical, mid-day journeys into London for leisure (with plenty of backup options), I just never use them.

"Oh, the trains/banks are terrible" people say, as they reward them with thousands upon thousands of pounds year after year despite being terrible.

I'd really rather be inconvenienced on my own terms and at my own expense than give such places my money.

A bit like my electricity supplier at the moment. They decided to take the mick, they still are taking the mick, so I'm investing gradually in making them obsolete for my purposes - even if it costs me more in the long run. Each month my grid usage goes down. Each month they vastly over-estimate unless I put in a meter reading on the 31st. So each month I put in a meter reading on the 31st, apply for a refund for ANY overpayment, and use all such overpayments to buy more off-grid electricity equipment, which means my next bill is even lower again....

And I made my water supplier fit a water meter. My water bill dropped to 10% of what it was when I did so. Rest assured that if I ever find a practical way to reduce my water usage further, I'm doing it. I'm literally eyeing up a £1000 automatic greywater header-tank system. I'd rather pay £1000 to make them redundant than give them even £100.

Vote with your feet, people.

Attack on direct debit provider London & Zurich leaves customers with 6-figure backlogs

Okay, let's assume that.

Now tell me... why are you operating your business's primary source of income such that you can't cope with a delay on it, can't fund payroll if it doesn't come in immediately, don't have a backup, and all my other points?

My post basically doesn't care whether it's money in or out... you're not operating a business properly if you can't cope with it.

1) Don't operate your business so that a couple of week's delay in payment means you can't make payroll. It's the perfect way to tank a business overnight when all your staff just leave (and perfectly justified in doing so no matter what their contracts say by that point).

2) Have a backup provider wherever possible.

3) If you were banking through a bank and you can't pay direct debits because the provider is down, it would be entirely on the bank to sort that out - or arrange funds for you in the meantime.

4) If your financial provider was compromised - change provider at the first opportunity anyway.

Personally, at this point I'd be on the phone to alternative suppliers and looking at how to change those direct debits to come from another account, and I would only be dealing with L&Z to claw back whatever I'd paid them so far.

Tesla, Musk likely aware of Autopilot deficiencies behind Florida fatality, says judge

Re: My best advice while driving a vehicle

Strange, the law says exactly the same but BOTH hands on the wheel unless there's a driving reason for otherwise (e.g. changing gear or indicating).

It's almost like we don't need fancy tech-barons trying to tell us what they intended when the law is very, very clear, even for Tesla and other automated vehicles.

Microsoft dials back Bing after users manage to recreate Disney logo in fake AI-generated images

Re: Teens can also get Bard to help them learn skills or complete homework

If you want to follow the advice of a relative of mine who is a multi-PhD in education and specialised in the career of teaching for 40+ years, then the answer is:

Don't bother with homework.

In-class, how are they getting GPT answers? They're not. Devices are not allowed.

At home, they are getting those answers elsewhere because THEY HATE HOMEWORK. Everyone does. It is also of limited value educationally precisely because everyone hates it, it's completely unguided and unassisted, it's often nothing more than "more of the same" of what you were just doing in lesson, the environment is unsuitable, the atmosphere is generally not one focused for learning, the marking sucks up far too much time and achieves little, and the progress in the subject because of homework is zero to minimal.

Even the difference between independent (private) and state schools. State schools give you homework on what you just did. Independent schools often call it prep work. It's what you'll be doing NEXT LESSON and is there to get you up-to-speed so you come into lesson with questions and knowing things without wasting the valuable teaching time.

Even that, however, is of limited utility and in almost any study once you eliminate other factors in the average schoolchild's life, "homework" or "prep work" makes almost no difference to educational outcomes.

How about this: If you want to know if a child knows something, ask them independently at a point where they can't run off to a computer to look it up.

As time goes by, using homework to judge status, progress or ability of a child is getting less and less useful, and things like GPT models are a MASSIVE wake-up call that you can't - and many argue never have been able to - judge those kinds of unguided assessments and usefully use their results in your assessments whatsoever.

So long as you don't let them answer the questions by GPT in-lesson or in-exam, school education doesn't really need to change at all. All you need to do is stop with the pointless unguided homework that has no real evidence to justify it already.

The same guy taught a year in a private school recently. He was threatened with sacking because they accused him of cheating. Because EVERY ONE of his students got an A. Every. Single. One. He was utterly offended, grabbed the nearest teacher (who hated him), had them get a higher-level exam paper from the stores, asked their entire class to resit the exam with only the other teachers as invigilators, and had no part in the resit exam choice, question, invigilation, sitting or marking. They all passed again. All with A's again. Without the guy anywhere near them whatsoever.

When they tried to apologise, he resigned in disgust anyway at the accusation, he just wanted to prove his innocence first.

When someone like that says that homework is a crock, and has in fact filed dissertations on the subject, it's about time educators started to listen.

P.S. the same guy home-schooled my daughter in ALL SUBJECTS throughout COVID, and she now attends school in a foreign country / language. Last week her teacher called her out for not understanding the language, and demanded to see all her notes because she assumed she must be cheating off her peers. She handed in more notes than anyone else, passed all tests, and replied to her teacher in fluent Spanish when confronted. She is so far ahead of her peers it's not even comparable.

No AI in existence is able to infer or reason. Pretending that it's just a particularly poor example of AI is misunderstanding how these things work.

This thing just averages stuff out, based on superstition ("last time I did this random thing, I was rewarded, so this random thing must be 'better'"). I would say something about pigeons pecking targets or football fans wearing their lucky socks, if you get those analogies.

The result from these things is the original training data, statistically modified based on those superstitions (which are largely random).

There's no way that thing generated that image statistically without that original image being in the training set, and hitting a lot of statistics for keywords like Afghan and girl together.

Copyright law is long-established and very clear:

If you don't have a licence to use an image, then you don't have a right to use an image.

Same for books, audio, movies, software, paintings, etc.

The only exceptions are for fair use (hint: feeding the world into an AI isn't fair use), review, satire, etc.

It's very, very clear what's going to happen, because there is no law to the contrary - if you didn't have the explicit up-front authorised rights from the creators (or their licensees) to suck that content into an AI model, then you weren't legally allowed to do so.

So, tell me:

If you have to control exactly what data you can feed it, double-check its responses with an automated system, and put in safeguards so it doesn't wander off topic, hallucinate, or talk about inappropriate things...

At which point is all of this just fancy heuristics ("human-written rules") and nothing more? Same way that Tesla still has to put in a human-managed blocklist of locations of where the AI goes totally wrong and they just say "Look, override and just drive straight here" (which appears to be a danger in itself!).

And how did it recreate anything Disney unless it was trained on Disney materials? It's not like someone sat and described in intricate detail what Mickey Mouse looked like and it created its own interpretation (which would be valid clean-room reverse engineering for most things anyway). It knew. It had seen it. And that's copyright infringement unless the imagery was licenced to be part of their training database. So who authorised that and what else is in there?

(I mean, I know the answers to all the above, it's pretty much rhetorical).

CompSci teachers panic as Replit pulls the plug on educational IDE

Re: Where have all the grown ups gone ?

I remember one who insisted that we could use Dragon NaturallySpeaking to write all school reports from now on.

The school paid them a fortune to come out, they obviously made a percentage on sales of the software, they did this little brief (very contrived) demo, and then I had the entire teaching and senior staff breathing down my neck telling me how we had to get the software and that this was the future.

"Have you actually used it?" I asked.

They hadn't. I got them a trial copy.

Never heard another word from them.

Re: Where have all the grown ups gone ?

I still enjoy the little factette that Tommy Flowers went to an adult education college in his latter years and got a basic IT course certificate in something that was equally as banal as Works.

Re: Where have all the grown ups gone ?

As someone whose entire career is IT in schools, let me just tell you:

It's been like that for far longer than the 25 years that I've had that from every single school I've ever worked for.

"We have to do X because Y are doing X" is the basis of everything.

Every school has a 3D printer. Guess why. It's little to do with actually making practical use of them, for the vast majority of schools.

Every school copies all the policies, initiatives, software, web services, parent portals etc. that they offer, almost universally because "my other school used this".

You can see the fads come and go - digital cameras, IT Suites, pupil devices, music Mac suites, iPads, 3D printers, Raspberry Pi's, and now they're talking AI (but they want to see what other schools are doing first....)

There is vanishingly little uniqueness or initiative in modern schools (and I've worked primary, secondary and further, state and independent, large, small, urban, rural, etc.).

Even down to which of the thousands of app you have to sign up to and deploy.

And generally it means that - unless you're copying the other place's entire business practices, staffing, etc. - you end up with a substandard product that nobody knows how to use properly.

If one more person tells me how certain London schools are making massive use of Apple Macs, iPads, and I have to explain that of course they are - they're sponsored by Apple, precisely to run courses, precisely to draw you in, precisely to make you go back to your school and buy Apple where you don't get ANY of their privileges or benefits that that school get (basically they are an Apple repair centre), I will insert an iPad in them. The largest model I can find.

This filters down to every member of staff. One music teacher *insisted* that "at school X we don't have to sign in to the Macs and deal with keychains". So I contacted school X's IT department, and was roundly told what nonsense that was. When I asked what made them get Macs and their software (because of course I was made to make sure we were doing EVERYTHING like they did it!), I was told that "Oh, the head visited this other school and they had it all so we had to get it."

There's little innovation in education, and very, very little tailoring to their own circumstances. Let teachers and senior management loose and every school would be a carbon-copy of every other even if one's a huge college with hundreds of highly-educated career-long staff, and the other was a tiny primary with no money and only two young teachers hired from the NQT schemes.

For example, if one more person tells me that we "have to" have full AutoCAD and Photoshop, when there isn't a single qualified (even unofficially) member of staff capable of manipulating that software to do anything useful, I may well find a way to design a hidden room with photoshopped camouflage somewhere in the school, and imprison them in it for all eternity.

Remembering the time Windows accidentally sent Poland to the bottom of the sea

Maybe if we all just starting ditching weird and 30-minute timezones and things like daylight saving time, we could just have 24 possibilities, named by "+1", "+2", etc. and solve the problem once and for all.

As it is Microsoft don't care about non-US timezones very much (and it's usually the cause of a lot of problems if you try to remove en-US everywhere even if you're not using it), but having to select "London" rather than "GMT + 0" is an annoyance I could really do without.

Capita scores £239M contract to manage mega public sector pension scheme

Re: WTF

It's not incompetence, it's corruption.

They aren't dumb - they know exactly what they are doing, and getting some lovely backhanders somewhere for it. Or they have shares, or whatever.

Nobody who was merely incompetent would be dumb enough to do this. They are instead incredibly competent, will be making money and chums hand over fist, are doing it explicitly and deliberately, and know PRECISELY that they will get away with it long enough to be profitable because there is no oversight and what oversight there is will be complicit anyway.

Every facet of Capita's, and similar company's, work is predicated on this happening. Bids are made so that someone goes "Oh well, guess we'll have to use Capita *again*, because nobody else is bidding on this incredibly dumb, specific, doomed-to-fail, over-priced project that we change the specs to every week".

I have to say, since passing the age 40, I've totally given up caring because there is nobody in power, or with any chance of power, that will end this. Capita etc. will continue on for centuries like this, and never be brought to account, and successions of multiple governments of all colours will all do exactly the same once they get into power too.

It simply doesn't matter how bad these providers, or politicians, are any more. Nothing changes. Nothing ever stops. Things just move from one hive of corruption to the next.

We've got a layer of people in charge, behind a glass ceiling, who couldn't care less and are in it only for personal profit.

Capita was founded in 1984 with the express purpose of being this company that they are. Nothing's changed, they've just got bigger and with more fingers in more pies. In 2006 the chairman resigned because of links to donations to Labour, etc. Nothing changes. It's a personal profit machine and nobody with the power to do so will shut it down. Same for countless dozens of other quangos.

Telco CEO quits after admitting she needs to carry rivals' SIM cards to stay in touch

Re: DR Strategy

Quite. How else are you going to yell at people to fix your network if your network is down?

To be honest, it's dumb that they would have to drive across the nation to reset switches and routers, too.

Those points should have an entirely independent access to them, to allow that to happen remotely and electronically.