Posts by Lee D

Insurance giant finds claims rep that gives a damn (it's AI)

Re: "Thank you for your message. I understand your concern,"

I recently had some dealings with OVO and in the process I suspect their entire complaints response emails are AI-generated or copy-paste policy led:

I hope this email finds you well. My name is <name>, and I am one of the Complaints Resolution Advisors at OVO Energy. I wanted to reach out to you personally to let you know that I will be handling your complaint moving forward.

First and foremost, I would like to sincerely apologise for any inconvenience or frustration you may have experienced during this process. Your concerns are incredibly important to us, and I fully understand how unsettling it can be to navigate issues related to your energy services. Please know that I am here to listen and assist you every step of the way.

I want to reassure you that my priority is to resolve your complaint as efficiently and effectively as possible. To ensure we address your concerns thoroughly, I would like to discuss the matter with you directly. If you prefer a callback, please do let me know your preferred date and time, and I will do my utmost to accommodate your schedule.

Your feedback is invaluable to us, and I sincerely appreciate your patience and understanding as we work to resolve your issue. Together, we can find a solution that meets your needs.

Thank you for allowing us the opportunity to address your concerns. I look forward to speaking with you soon.

Warm regards,

---

There then follows a series of emails where various OTHER people at OVO then largely regurgitate my complaint and provide absolutely no useful information or updates whatsoever. One of them "confirmed" I had a smart meter. I know. You fitted it. I told you it's working fine. The complaint has nothing to do with the meter. Each one tries to talk to me like they're a con artist trying to win over some old lady or something, and none of them provide any useful context or updates. It's not even just boilerplate, by the look of it, but they can respond with a bunch of text that takes you a minute or so to read but actually says that they've done nothing so far. I wouldn't be surprised if their agents are using AI to just bat the ticket response further down the queue, in fact.

When even the COMPLAINTS are handled like this, it's no wonder they're regarded as one of the worst companies. It's the one place I expect to speak to an actual human, because to get that far means that the computers aren't doing what they should (what they were told to do, no doubt, but not what they should) and a human needs to actually look at the edge cases and do something about them that's not in a rulebook somewhere.

I hate it and I moved away from them largely because of it.

The irony was that they replaced my old teleswitch meter (which I'd been asking for for TWO YEARS because it's so obsolete, and I couldn't change provider with it in place) with a flash new smart meter. Which worked absolutely flawlessly and fed the correct data instantly back to them and continued to do so. But what happened is that they decided to utterly ignore those numbers for 3 billing cycles. Literally "estimated" bills only when they have the data of every 30 minutes of every day of the last 3 months. So I gave them an ultimatum - the next bill has to be right (not inflated 3 x by imaginary numbers) or I'm leaving. They couldn't get it right, so I left. I'd pretty much had no problem with them until I was actually ABLE to finally leave them, and from that second, they couldn't be bothered to retain me as a customer at all.

It's still ongoing now, 2 months after I transferred to someone else, because despite having refunded me for all that overpayment, they then took ANOTHER payment (even though I'm not supplying them... but apparently I was required to keep the Direct Debit open to get the refund). Which now I've had to file another complaint about to get a refund for. So I've had two emails saying "Your final bill" because of that.

But throughout that process, all I have are what appear to be AI-generated or at least AI-assisted emails that largely waffle about how sorry and warm they are (ironic, for an energy company), but don't actually answer anything. I fear this is the future of complaints handling, even written, and I think we're going to have real problems where these things aren't actually progressing complaints at all but the statistics show that they appear to be.

Like I always say about train delay announcements. You're NOT sorry the train is late. If you were sorry, you'd do something about it and it wouldn't happen again. You can't be sorry 50+ times a day repeatedly on even just a single station, let alone what you're announcing over the whole network. It's faux sentiment while on the backend it's just another date/time statistic that nobody pays any attention to at all.

Have I Been Pwned likely to ban resellers from buying subs, citing 'sh*tty behavior' and onerous support requests

I know of many cybersecurity firms who will happily do a "dark web" check for your passwords, where it's basically just regurgitated HaveIBeenPwned data with their brand on it.

I saw off at least two that my employers insisted I use because they actually didn't do anything that we couldn't do ourselves. Happy to have it as part of a "value-add" on an bigger service for convenience, but they were just reselling us HIBP content that we got in an email before they did.

HIBP has gone far more commercial in recent years, though, and I'm not sure of its utility as a ongoing paid-for service in the future except as part of such larger arrangements, so this might be cutting off his nose to spite his face. But that's for him to decide.

Sigh

Just say no, man.

API / reseller access is this much per month, and we'll notify you of price increases.

Done.

Don't get into discussions about discounts, quotes, refunds, etc. at all if you don't want to provide those.

This is how much it costs. Like it or lump it. The cancel button is right there if you don't like it.

AI summaries turn real news into nonsense, BBC finds

Re: AI summaries turn real news into nonsense

There are lies, damn lies and statistics.

And AI straddles the latter two.

I like to ask it about the TV series The Good Life.

There is COPIOUS material out there, long established and hasn't changed in decades and they only made a handful of episodes, so you can literally know EVERYTHING that happens in the show just as a casual viewer, let alone a computer being asked to analyse it.

It will gladly make up characters, assign them attributes similar to existing characters, say that an actor played that part even when that actor has never been in the series, deny actors that were in the series ever featured in it. You can make Jerry and Margo have kids just by asking it their names. You can rename the pigs at will. You can have it deny George Cole was ever the bank manager. And so on.

Without any kind of "prompt poisoning", just asking innocent questions, like "Who was Gavin in The Good Life?" and things like that. It will then fight with you about their existence, flip-flopping between them being in it and not, and then argue outright that certain actors played the part, etc.

Just one demo with every new release when someone says "Ah, but Llama v2.0.4037854569 doesn't have that problem" is enough to convince me that AI is just a very fuzzy statistical output at best, and absolute trash at worst.

Re: LLMs cannot summarise

"Often it will drop something in the summary that I look at and decide "no, that bit is important, I really want that in" and I put it back in."

"Then it hallucinates at worst, or uses unreferenced sources at best."

Yeah, that doesn't sound like a reliable tool at all.

Imagine if you passed the text off to an editor or junior to do that and they missed off important bits and made up stuff because you didn't tell it explicitly every time to stick to a single source (and even that, instructions to LLMs are not instructions... they're barely suggestions).

Oxford researchers pull off quantum first with distributed gate teleportation

Re: Physics A Level

"We deterministically teleport a controlled-Z (CZ) gate between two circuit qubits in separate modules, achieving 86% fidelity,"

They managed to transmit a particular logic gate implemented using qubits between here and somewhere else, with an 86% chance that it would be there at the end.

It means they are able to join this bit of a quantum computer with a bit of another quantum computer together. A bit like a distributed server/computation problem - you can make two computers work on the same thing even though they're far apart. However, quantum physics says it doesn't matter how far apart they are anyway. You could literally have computers at opposite ends of the universe and link them like this. That's the old "spooky action at a distance".

They say themselves that until that "chance" is 99.9% it's probably not practically useful (despite the earlier talk about determinism).

Basically, they can wire two quantum computers together at an arbitrary distance with a 14% "signal loss" between them.

(This has been your ELI5 explanation, please don't ask me to make it 100% correct because I can't).

Already three years late, NHS finance system replacement delayed again

Because the absolute minimum I expect - and which is expected of me in my profession - is to deliver projects on time and to budget.

If it was vastly early and cheaper... hell, that's noteworthy.

If it was vastly late and far more expensive... that's noteworthy.

"We did what we correctly planned to do and it happened as expected within our given safety margins" is not news. It's just ordinary operation.

It's the absolute, bare minimum of competency to do that. Everything else is incompetence or over-achieving.

Oracle

Only clicked on the article to find one word.

Found it.

There's ya problem.

T-Mobile goes live with beta of satellite phone service for the US

$15 a month to send a text message?

The only people who use that are going to be the ones stuck on mountains who really SHOULDN'T be cheaping out on their emergency communications at all.

Legacy systems running UK's collector are taxing – in more ways than one

Take those billions.

Buy all the rights to the source code.

Hire some people to do nothing but port the system from one thing to another.

Deploy it on whatever you want.

Copilot+ PCs? Customers just aren't buying it – yet

I would literally pay money for someone to fix the AD Users & Computers / Group Policy bit where when you go to add (GPO) or search for (AD) a computer, it automatically unticks "Computer" every time you go back into the menu. And there's no way to change the default. Ever.

It's literally been there for the entire life of the product and will still be there when Microsoft formally removes that tool due to obsoletion.

(And I often wonder... how does the guy at MS who has to program this tool every single day of his life, thousands of times over, not get so frustrated over it that he just takes ten minutes to fix that part?).

Strangely, I would LITERALLY pay extra to NOT have that junk on my PC.

There's a viable business opportunity there. "Pay us or your computer gets AI!".

However, it never seems to be the case that I can buy the things/features I want (or the option to get rid of them if I don't want).

I'd pay an extra fiver for no dumb TPM restriction stuff to workaround. For giving me the old Start Menu back. For getting rid of CoPilot and IE (and Edge!) once and for all.

But they don't want that. Apparently, somehow, it means too much to them for you to EVEN PAY TO REMOVE THINGS YOU DON'T WANT FROM THEM. Which is ridiculous.

I know you wasted billions on training the damn thing and you're not getting that back because nobody pays for AI... that's your fault.

So give people something that they WOULD pay for... and I'd pay to get rid of quite a lot of junk out of Windows.

Hell, I would literally pay money to resolve single, individual, minor quirks in the OS that would take ten minutes to fix with the source code and which have been present for DECADES. But apparently that's not an option.

Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer

Re: "it would suck"

Okay, here's the issue.

Rust is, effectively, C.

Yes, it has safeguards around certain portions... but the second you have to do certain things (address hardware, assume the structure of an arbitrary data blob coming from a device, etc.) then you have to have that in an unsafe wrapper.

An OS, device drivers, and especially things like DMA - they have to do those "unsafe" kinds of things. So you gain nothing.

Sure it protects against some string abuse here and a small overflow there, and things like that. Undoubtedly. But where it actually matters.. you have to put things in an unsafe block which, by definition, can destroy any assertions made about that code AND the surrounding code (by way of unsafe code potentially modifying believed-safe code nearby in memory).

So some people see it as nothing more than some extra steps that, to be honest, you can remove the appearance of by design and code-styling (e.g. "let's just not play clever tricks with printf", and so on). Which the kernel does a lot of, especially in deep kernel code (there's a kernel printf, for example).

All rewriting the kernel would do is take decades of effort, put off a lot of existing coders (and it's hard to find people willing to maintain things like DMA across entire architectures!), and actually gain you so little that it's not worth it. It would also not be any more secure at all, not in the grand scheme of things. You're basically just putting a worthless cordon around certain parts of the code saying "Here be dragons" but unfortunately, those dragons are a necessary and vital component of modern PC architecture (until we get devices speaking well-defined structured data for all communications and remove DIRECT MEMORY ACCESS so they can't play games with said structures... which hasn't yet happened and would kill performance if it did).

Rust is great for new applications, etc. but I've never seen a significant piece of Rust without at least one unsafe block. And in kernels, it's just dumb.

It's basically just C, but with a large cordon around anything dangerous. It's like wrapping a entire town in cotton wool, but then having to put out the traffic cones around the same sinkholes that we already know are deadly, expanding, move around, appear out of nowhere, and are undermining the "safe" cotton-wool-wrapped people all the time.

Openreach tests 50 Gbps broadband – don’t expect it anytime soon

Re: How does the back end support this?

You've never NOT had a bottleneck, unless you paid for a no-contention ISDN, DSL or a leased line, and even then there are no real 100% guarantees.

So... no different to any other connection you've ever had. Ever.

The line will still "sync" at 40Gb. You might even be able to burst it to that. But you're ultimately sharing the connection with your neighbours, everyone connected to the local exchange, the entire BT backend network, the Internet infrastructure of the UK, etc. So there is no way to guarantee that your 40Gb will give you constant 24/7 maxed out 40Gb without issue. There's nothing that says that, even on a leased-line agreement.

Sync speeds are very different to real-world download speeds, and like everything "fair use policies apply". Which means you're still syncing at 40Gb, but we slowed you down and/or gave other customers priority because it just doesn't scale like that anywhere in the world, on any network.

I have a 10Gbit leased line in work. People have literally asked in meetings why they don't get 10,000 Mbps in Speedtest. They just conveniently forget that they're sharing the network with 1000 other people which means that - at peak - your individual allocation of fair bandwidth is less than you get at home, or on 4G. Of course it is. It has to be.

"So what's the solution?" they say.

Simple. A 10 Terabit leased line, all the scaled up equipment in-between (replacing every switch, router, etc. with a model that can handle the relevant portion of traffic), so that every port has 10Gbit guaranteed dedicated slice of the leased line connection, and you having only a 10Gbit physical bottleneck at your desktop stopping you using all that up and denying it to others. I'm not sure you want to budget for that.

Or you can just share nicely and then not even notice because most people don't use 1% of the available connection on average anyway.

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

I will be in the market for an EV when my (10 year old) car dies and this is going to be my last ever ICE car - I'm definitely buying an EV.

I wouldn't touch a Tesla because of Musk.

I have solar panels and a battery setup that I build and extend myself.

I wouldn't touch a TeslaWall because of Musk.

I live rurally, and my cell service is bad and my DSL is very basic.

I wouldn't touch a Starlink because of Musk (not often I cheer on Bezos, but come on Kuiper!).

That's not changed in all the time I've ever known who Musk was, years before that Thai cave debacle.

I don't know why anyone would want to do business with a corporation who have elevated THAT PARTICULAR GUY to some kind of worshipped-god (because he bankrolls many failing businesses) status.

Even now - he's literally destroying his own and his company's reputations in real-time and the boards of them all are doing nothing about it. Just keep sucking up to him. He's about to tank their sales, and the stats are showing just that, and they still continue. Where's the shareholder's revolt? Where's the denouncement? Nowhere. So I won't do business with those people, any of them.

Until you fix the Musk problem, you can sing for your money. I will literally avoid anything to do with him.

Amazon's Kuiper secures license to take on Starlink in the UK

Until 2 years ago I could only get 4Mbps down and 1Mbps up.

And that was in a major town inside the M25.

I used 4G instead and got about 30/10.

I moved to a rural area (literally an AONB, SSI, etc. miles from the nearest town), and I get 75/20 and the 4G is pretty awful.

I would have Kuiper in a heartbeat if available (same as I would have had Starlink if a certain person wasn't involved in it).

Re: Pathetically slow and overpriced

Shock, horror, it's not a mass-market wired ISP replacement, nor is it really supposed to be.

It's certainly VIABLE to use it like that, but that's not the intended use-case for Starlink or Kuiper, no matter what their marketing department might say.

Yay!

Hurry up.

I would have had Starlink years ago if it hadn't been associated with Musk.

And though Bezos is also your typical billionaire (i.e. sociopath gold hoarder), at least he's not an *absolute* moron to go with it.

I live rurally and I would use this as a lovely backup but also the MOST I can get is 75Mbps DSL. With no plans for fibre... ever... at the moment.

Mega city council's Oracle finance fix faces further delays

Re: Refunds

Like they draw up multi-million pound contracts with a vendor they've chosen that have any kind of back-out clause or refund for non-delivery.

This is government. How are the middle men going to get their 20% if people can just ask for their money back when it goes TEN TIMES over budget with still no product in sight?

Only 1 in 10 Oracle Java users want to stay with Big Red

You know the saying that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM?

I want to know where there isn't an equivalent saying:

Everybody should get fired if they chose Oracle.

UK council selling the farm (and the fire station) to fund ballooning Oracle project

But then you can't possibly profit by being a politician who's a shareholder/adviser of a consultancy that acts as a middleman to a dozen contractors that you force them to use and scrape out the profits to their max based on other's ignorance and take your 20%.

West Sussex population: 885,048

£40m.

That's £45 per-person (not counting ongoing costs) to ... do what? A HR and finance system.

I think they need to implement a much simpler finance system called "not spending money on junk" as well as a long-term strategy called "identify whoever suggested Oracle and make sure they are sacked".

And it's SaaS... the ongoing costs are going to be stupendous.

If only there were existing well-established and proven HR and/or finance systems in use across the world.

Sweden seizes cargo ship after another undersea cable hit in suspected sabotage

Re: You know, bad weather can sink bad ships

Shooting a boat, several of which have been found to be merely incompetent than malicious, and killing all on board is a bit drastic just because your cable in international waters was sliced a little.

What you do is not just leave a cable on the sea-bed and presume it'll work forever, but instead guard it (e.g. robot sub idea as per the article) and then you can just watch anyone who goes near it and seize the vessel if they're not competent or are being malicious.

There aren't enough undersea cables to worry about and a single military ship could just do that and nothing else - especially as they are incredibly important cables.

That nobody has been protecting their cables up until now and we've all only just thought of it (and they haven't done it to other countries or the ones that cross the Pacific and Atlantic) kind of tells you that it's more of a problem that you're not guarding it, and less a problem of having a cable in the ocean generally.

UK telco TalkTalk confirms probe into alleged data grab underway

Re: one of our third-party supplier's systems

Doesn't matter.

No matter what the contract says, it's still TalkTalk's problem from a legal point of view.

Sure, they might be able to sue their contractors AFTER they get sued themselves for failing to meet standards, but they cannot just move liability elsewhere by signing a form.

It's one of the best bits of data protection. You touched the data? Then it's your problem. All the way down the chain. But primarily with the company/person that collected that data in the first place.

Tool touted as 'first AI software engineer' is bad at its job, testers claim

Re: If you want to know why these things will never work well

It's not intelligent.

It's a spam filter trained on a large dataset.

It's literally all it is. Same as a basic keyword search, but a million times more expensive.

Despite all the hype, nonsense and "experts" chiming in, I've not witnessed a single piece of intelligence or actual learning out of any of them (and I have free access to several of them, including their latest experimental models).

If it was intelligent - it wouldn't ever need retraining ever again, it'd be doing it itself, and getting better without any human intervention whatsoever. That's not how they work though.

This is exactly like training a spam filter on the Internet and then querying it's probabilistic tree for answers. Sure, it provides simple answers. But it's not intelligent. And nothing you couldn't find with just a keyword search.

Not AI.

""Tasks that seemed straightforward often took days rather than hours, with Devin getting stuck in technical dead-ends or producing overly complex, unusable solutions," the researchers explain in their report. "Even more concerning was Devin’s tendency to press forward with tasks that weren’t actually possible."

As an example, they cited how Devin, when asked to deploy multiple applications to the infrastructure deployment platform Railway, failed to understand this wasn't supported and spent more than a day trying approaches that didn't work and hallucinating non-existent features."

So you mean that as soon as it actually required intelligence and inference, it wasn't able to do things?

Capital One two-day outage leaves customers in free-fall

Re: And this is why...

Banks often deem that you have to bring in your salary in order to get free banking or other concessions from them.

Savings accounts can have horrendous delays in removing your money.

"However, despite this desire for financial simplicity, the average number of bank accounts per person in the UK has risen from 2.5 in 2014 to 2.8 in 2020, with the country now possessing a total of 156 million bank accounts. British consumers now have the most bank accounts in Europe on average – by comparison, Germans have 2.0 bank accounts per person, the Spanish have 1.7, the French 1.4, and Italians 0.9."

Why? Because their systems just work.

Personally, I'd use a credit card and if it's still not working at the time the payment is due, I'd require them to pay the interest and close my account.

BT unplugs plans to turn old cabinets into EV chargepoints

Re: Location

You'd think that would be one of the things you'd survey before you announce 60,000 sites, though, wouldn't you?

Sounds like a BT infrastructure project to me.

60,000 planned and 1 deployed and now we're scrapping it?

Yep, that's BT.

Apple solves broken news alerts by turning off the AI

Re: Why?

It is the absolute bane of modern technology that we can't have simple filters.

I would PAY for being allowed to do:

-sports -elon -musk -trump -spacex -tesla

on just about every website I go on. This one. Reddit. BBC News. all of them.

They're ever-so-interested in tracking what I'm interested in with cookies etc. but at no point are ANY of them interested in letting me REMOVE TOPICS I'M NOT INTERESTED IN.

The only one that even pretends to is Twitter but it also just randomly starts "ticking" things that I've never shown any interest in from it's Interests list for me.

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

For similar reasons I have in my time deployed:

---

A script that activated on a detected fire alarm, which queried the access control databases, correlated them against staff databases and printed out (to two remote thermal printers) a firelist of who should be on site, who has tagged in this morning and who hasn't tagged out. It also emailed a group with the same information.

It was so fast that it actually started printing BEFORE the alarm was audible, and the printers were so fast that by the time you stood up to walk out, you could just tear and take the entire staff list with you.

The company that fitted our access control system tried to buy it off me, because it was infinitely better than their firelist module (which only printed MANUALLY and only onto A4 and we only had laser printers, which by the time they'd warmed up, you'd already burned to death).

---

A complete transparent proxy / filter with routing, load balancing and firewalling for several connections, including multiple DSL modems that were so flaky I included functionality to activate a rely by SMS message to reset the power to the individual modems. My boss used to use it if he was at home and couldn't VPN in, he would text, it would reset the DSL modems, and let him back in.

That operated from an old desktop PC and ran my entire workplace for about 8 years.

(It was actually a challenge - in interview, with two strangely techy people working in non-techy management jobs - they mentioned the organisation's slow connection. I said I could probably solve that. They let me have a quick look in the interview. I realised what the problem was immediately and said I could triple their "speedtest" score overnight if they wanted, and it would only need an old computer to demonstrate how I could do it. And that it would cost nothing.

They hired me (they liked me for other reasons) and first thing on day one, the big boss literally invited me into his office, handed me an old desktop taken from storage (that was about 10 years old and a former secretaries' desktop) and said "Go on then".

So I did. Linux. Apache. Squid. Dan's Guardian. It transparently cached all the CONSTANT requests for the same websites over and over again coming from the network, filtered out a ton of inappropriate usage, freed up the connection, and the speedtest score (which the big boss was running every hour or so, and they got better each time) ended up something like 5 times better than before I started. I also demonstrated that if it went wrong, all they had to do was join the IN and OUT network cables on the machine together with a coupler, and everything would work like it had previously. They absolutely ADORED me for that. They thought it was just hubris and were - in the nicest way - expecting me to fail (but still do my job and have a good laugh about it all) and I blew them out of the water instead.

Later, some obscure kernel patches (to allow multi-interface dead-gateway detection and automatic seamless network gateway load-balancing), additions of power relays, the DSL interface circuits, and a 3G stick (which acted as emergency backup but also for automated text message retrieval via Gammu), etc. as well as an upgrade to a "real" server were allowed.

I've had dozens of projects like that.

"This is the way to do it"

"We absolutely can't afford that, find another way"

<creates and deploys something that works and costs nothing>

<becomes the main system for precisely that reason>

<constantly tries to upgrade, replace, budget for the real thing but is always denied>

Ten years later: "How do we manage this now that you're leaving?"

"I don't know. Your problem. It's documented."

Helpdesk software, asset management, access control, visitor management, digital signage, websites, CCTV, you name it, I've been "made to" bodge it because of not having any resources, and then literally it becomes THE MOST IMPORTANT THING EVER and I'm not allowed to turn it off or replace it but also I'm not allowed any money to keep it going, upgrade it, change it for something sensible and manageable, etc.

Foundation model for tabular data slashes training from hours to seconds

I look forward to the first expensive mistake that employees / politicians then try to blame on an unfettered AI tool.

The old IBM adage is still as relevant today as it was when it was written.

And we should not ever allow AI to take the blame here... only the person dumb enough to rely on the AI's answer without doing any analysis of their own.

WordPress drama latest: Leader Matt Mullenweg exiles five contributors

Every now and then you should ask yourself "Do I really want to do business with this type of person?"

And then delete / obsolete / migrate your Twitter / Wordpress / whatever.

They've only gone and made Doom run in a PDF file

For years.

Where have you been? Version 3.02 onwards! 1996 or thereabouts!

There's literally a box of options in the options dialog for it labelled Javascript.

Linus Torvalds offers to build guitar effects pedal for kernel developer

Re: There are only so many ways of clipping a signal.

"Aw, man, come on.... who took the last NOR block? We need it to get the thrusters going. Everyone start looking for it."

Re: There are only so many ways of clipping a signal.

Makes sense. Only one component to design, build, test, certify, replace, and yet it can do everything you need to if you put it in the right arrangement.

If that's the case, I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't a plan to take NOR chips from non-critical circuits to make the critical ones work in an emergency.

Re: There are only so many ways of clipping a signal.

Ironically, I believe either NAND - or - NOR gates can be used to build all Boolean functions.

You don't need both.

Nominet probes network intrusion linked to Ivanti zero-day exploit

Re: Choice wording

Quite.

There is no evidence that I ate all the Christmas chocolates myself.

(chew, chew, munch, swallow).

None whatsoever. No, you can't look in my bin.

Tesla recalls 239,382 vehicles over rearview camera problems

The fact that they have a PCB that can short itself out because of software settings tells you that it's not been designed properly or safely at all.

If a fuse popped (or even better a resettable fuse), fair enough. But the board shouldn't SHORT OUT and cause circuit board damage.

This is the kind of thing that starts fires. But it's far more indicative of a complete lack of quality control AND engineering in the first place.

"Slap in a generic board and hope for the best, we can always patch the software later" is no basis for a vehicle design.

Scammers exploit UK's digital landline switch to swipe cash

Re: Any caller who claimed to be from BT

I don't have a landline phone. I get 0 scam calls.

My mobile phone is set to ring out to silence for any unrecognised contact, and only recognised contacts have ringtones individually set on them.

I get about 1 unknown call a year, from different numbers all the time. I ignore it, they cannot leave a message (voicemail disabled), it never turns out to have been anyone I know or any company I've ever dealt with.

Ironically, I'm also registered with the TPS just in case and have made maybe 3 reports in the last 10 years (still have the same mobile number as I had 18 years ago).

The landline telecoms companies obviously never wanted to do a damn thing about it, would charge extra for Caller ID, would never stop the numbers getting out there somehow, wouldn't shut down persistent spammers (just look at the phone number lookup sites), etc. so I just stopped using their services..

The mobile companies have Caller ID by default and the ability to silence unknown numbers, disable voicemail and block individual contacts, so I kept them for 18 years.

Almost like there's a connection there somewhere.

Re: 'Safely Switched'

I'll give you a hint.

If you have a cordless phone, this was always the case.

The way BT solved it for wired phones isn't a generator at the exchange. There's basically a UPS in the street cabinet now. And that could give out after a few hours, too. The street cabs are running hundreds of watts of adaptors and the only connection back to the exchange is fibre, not power.

So the solution to this is very simple. You do what BT used to do and now still do. You put a UPS on the router/adaptor/whatever else needs powering.

£50, a UPS (one of those in the form of a very thick extension lead), problem solved. Especially in a rural area getting lots of power cuts. Hell, you can even plug an LED light bulb into it so your elderly relative isn't fumbling around in the dark for candles, and it'll keep the wifi up so they can stay browsing on their phones and give people a call via Facetime or Whatsapp (what's that? You think elderly people who grew up being adults in the main home computing era are functionally technically useless as their own grandparents were? Nope... I live in a council retirement estate, basically, and all my neighbours have wifi, mobile phones, Netflix, etc.)

And I'll tell you how I know this works:

I live in a rural area that gets lots of power cuts. 6h40m of outage only the other day.

I brought an antique (20+ years old) UPS with me. I even went to the expense of a new battery (£30) for it.

It can run the router for approximately 20 hours or more.

I also have a backup solar system with 4KWh of batteries. They can power the UPS for literally days if required to, and perpetually through the summer.

And what happens when you power the router off a UPS and you have a blackout? Your Internet stays on. Your Digital Voice (actually just SIP) phone stays on. Because the cabs are still powered, but only for DSL... they no longer want to power every telephony appliance in the entire town in a blackout.

Many's the time that I have carried on gaming online during a complete powercut through the entire town.

Many's the time I didn't even realise the power was out BECAUSE I was gaming or watching a movie in the dark and only realises when I went to switch the light on.

In the blackouts, I still have full access to the Internet via both DSL and 5G (but surprisingly, DSL just doesn't drop out in any power cut I've had, probably because of the Digital Voice requirements nowadays).

Buy yourself and any elderly relative a £50 UPS. Plug the router, a phone charger and a lamp into it. Carry on with your life.

And especially if they are vulnerable enough to use telecare... Redcare etc. are now IP-based services. The replacement is LITERALLY a UPS because the solution was LITERALLY a UPS beforehand anyway (there's a reason telephony and PoE both use 48V and why that's a nice multiple of the 12V you can achieve with standard lead-acid batteries). And if a £50 UPS saves their life... it's worth it. Compared to paying for telecare services to put an EXTRA UPS in every street cabinet in the country just for that for a handful of customers.

The argument of "we must still have traditional powered landlines for all" has come, been lost, and gone decades ago. Buy a UPS. It'll last as long as the mobile base station's UPS, or the DSLAM at the local cabinet's UPS. And that's plenty of time for them to tell someone "My power's gone out, can you come over because I don't know what I'll do if this medical equipment turns off". Which is literally all you need. And electricity providers will literally turn up with individual generators in those instances, it's why you register vulnerable people with your utility providers.

It notes that the caller ID that appears on your phone can be spoofed

"It notes that the caller ID that appears on your phone can be spoofed"

Gosh, if only there was some kind of national telecoms supplier involved, who could stop this overnight if they wanted to....

Yes, it was obvious that was always going to happen.

Even my workplace know that if someone calls up claiming to be from BT, Microsoft, Dell or indeed any other household name, that they are to treat it with suspicion and verify who they are. Hell, we even verify our own chosen suppliers, let alone someone calling from BT when we don't have landlines, etc. that go through BT (except as a middleman).

I bet you get the same for smart meters, for solar installs, for heatpump grants, for anything even vaguely popular or on the news or new. They are probably even all the same scammers, they just choose a random new tagline every now and then. I bet private school parents were getting scams about VAT from last summer and are still getting them now. It's how scams work.

But the trigger is when they ask for money, and your accounts department demand a PO for it and then expect to receive an invoice, and when the invoice comes it doesn't match the supplier details we have on record for our account/company so the money could be going anywhere.

Basic due diligence if you have a company with even a single accounts person on the payroll (oh, that's another one... payroll... pensions... HMRC, etc.).

At home? You just treat everything with suspicion. Even "old" people (i.e. those old enough to have seen faxes come and go, remember landlines pre mobile phones, bought themselves a ZX Spectrum back in the day, etc.) should be suspicious enough nowadays to question this. You're demanding I change my landline and asking for money? No problem. I'll contact my supplier in my own time and talk it through with them. Oh it "doesn't work like that"? I'm afraid it does. That's precisely how it works.

I've even had this from my own bank in previous years. Phones up and demands to talk to me and then demands security details from me before they'll tell me what it's about. Er, no. What do you mean I have to? No I don't. What do you mean I can't call the main bank switchboard and get back through to you by asking for the right person / department? Then we won't be talking at all. What do you mean I have to volunteer important identifying information about my account to the stranger that just called me in order to proceed? That's simply not how this works.

Oddly, I called them back on the main switchboard number, told them this guy was insistent and kept calling but refused to discuss things with me, went through the normal banking verification checks, and THEN GOT PUT THROUGH TO THE SAME GUY. Why couldn't you have just done that?

I also had another at a company who kept phoning my number but wouldn't talk to me because the order it was concerning was in my girlfriend's name. He refused to talk to me (the person who ordered, who paid, who received the delivery, who reported a problem with it etc.) and wouldn't give me any assistance and just kept citing data protection. My girlfriend at the time worked in a hospital and so was not available to jump through hoops to get him to talk to me. After a few hours of back and forth, eventually another guy got through to me and asked if he was speaking to Mr D. "I'm sorry," I said, sarcastically, "I can't tell you that.... data protection". "Ah," said the guy. "I definitely have the right man, then."

Turns out they didn't actually need to verify who I was in order to send me a packet of parts missing from a very expensive purchase.

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

Yet again;

Mass messages need to go to a minimum of one human unrelated to the backend for approval.

Who should then select a handful of customers at random and investigate any anomaly (e.g. being offered car insurance refunds when you don't have car insurance).

This should be standard practice for any email which could end up in more than a dozen customer's inboxes.

I remember once receiving a letter from a LAWYER. It was the only car insurance claim I'd ever made and they represented the other guy's insurance and they were frustrated at the delay in processing the claim (i.e. nothing whatsoever to do with me, take it up with my insurer). It was all very threatening and obviously designed to have me on the phone to my insurer in a panic to have them resolve the situation. It threatened to take action directly against me, file for the full cost of the claim to myself personally, etc. I told them where to go. Not least because I had agreed no such figure... and if you did expect payment from me I'd do my own investigation and claim process at great length and I'd want to see the £18,000 (including £9000 for a replacement courtesy car for a couple of days) justified.

Anyway... the letter they wrote was intended to tell me that they were pursing me personally for that £18,000 and that I had to pay it immediately and that if I did pay £18,000 they'd consider it full settlement of the claim. Except... that's not what they wrote. The letter was obviously mail-merged and the box for the amount and expected payment was significantly less. £0.00p.

In my rebuttal (where I basically told them to take it up with my insurer's or I'd dig into why it's £18,000 for a small dent and a taxi), I offered, as a gesture of goodwill, to write them a cheque for this full stated amount in their letter in complete settlement, as written.

They didn't take me up on the offer. They just went away and my insurer settled things in their own time.

And my next insurance renewal was actually cheaper (which I still can't fathom).

The lesson: If you're going to just mail-merge stuff to hundreds of people with a standard form letter... have someone real and human check the output before you pop it in the post.

Tired of begging, Microsoft now trying to trick users into thinking Bing is Google

Re: If Bing suddenly opens…

The only time I ever use Edge is to read Exchange admin delivery reports and some other admin functions (like searching for results across everyone's mailbox, etc.) because... for some weird reason... Microsoft FORCE you to use Bing to access them, download them and even use a local app to open the resulting file which only works via Edge.

Basically, unless you make me use Edge with no other choice, I'm not touching it.

This should be hint enough that you're DOING SOMETHING WRONG, but MS have never cared about that.

When your product is so good, you have to pretend to be your larger competitor via deceptive practices to get people to use it.

MS haven't changed in decades, I don't know why anyone uses their stuff by choice. Especially where it concerns completely optional and replaceable things like a web browser, etc.

Telemetry data from 800K VW Group EVs exposed online

Re: I'll give you my old car keys when you pry it from my cold, dead hands

82% of all new car sales in a single EU country by last May already doesn't sound like "longer than your remaining lifespan".

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferturliuk/2024/05/24/how-norway-increased-evs-to-82-of-new-car-sales-vs-76-in-the-us/

Just because the US lags doesn't mean that the rest of the world is waiting for them to take the lead.

Most countries in the world have instigated ICE bans by 2030 or 2035 at the latest.

Unless you're at death's door, you're going to see majority-EV on the road (not just new sales) in your lifetime, guaranteed.

Re: I'll give you my old car keys when you pry it from my cold, dead hands

Good luck when fuel hits $10/£5 a litre because the bottom falls out of that market as the rest of the world goes EV.

Boffins carve up C so code can be converted to Rust

"You can't convert all C to Rust, so we made a crippled C that isn't compatible with C or Rust, but which you can then convert to Rust, and it doesn't work for all C".

Yeah, I don't really see the use case here.

How about this:

- If people are using pointer arithmetic, it's for a reason. And Rust won't be able to do a damn thing differently or any more securely about that.

- If you want people to write inherently safe code, you can't write it in C *at any point*. We have any number of languages for that.

- You cannot write safe code that interacts with devices, computer buses or the majority of hardware directly. It's just not possible. The only fix for that? To radically change hardware architectures to return only well-formed descriptive device identifiers with a set protocol for communicating with them (i.e. no memory addresses, no DMA, etc.).

Until we change all the BIOS/UEFI, PCIe etc. specifications to allow arbitrary device detection and communication at bus speed using only, say, JSON or XML or similar languages, you're still going to need to write those bits in C (as they have to make assumptions about what the underlying bits mean and directly access memory), and that means you can't write them memory-safely in any language at all, ever, whatsoever.