Posts by hoola 2345 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Mar 2013
I think the interesting difference between the two technologies - Nuclear and AI is that the first was about political power and the second is about money.
That both are a form of control through completely different starting points. Where AI comes in the push is by a very limited number of huge corporations in a battle for control of data. The care little for the integrity of that data, where it came from or what use the system is put to.
Nuclear was very clear - at the outset it was a weapon. Since it's first use there has been a mutual agreement (in the loosest) or terms between the holders of nuclear weapons so they have not been used. The more recent addition of countries with less stable political systems (although that has been broke with the Orange One more recently) is wobbling the balance.
What I think is the most worrying outcome is once AI starts being used be the military to assist or replace humans in the decision making processes. People have joked on here about the Terminator scenarios and whilst the content of the films is fiction there are significant elements that are true.
The fundamental one being that if there is no human to intervene very quickly when things go off the rails intense escalation is the likely outcome.
From an application perspective you are right. Where the fun and games start is in unstructured file access. Whatever people might think of Windows NTFS permissions are actually very good and if correctly designed at the top of fileshares prevent the awful mess of permissions being modified down the tree.
If one goes back in time actually Novell NSS when integrated with eDirectory was better. The Linux filsystems don't really compare when it comes to permissions at scale. You can bodge with Samba integration but guess what, where does that lead you?
Now take OneDrive that from where I sit I see many of my customers using to replace the traditional home folder? That is simply a 1TB block hole conveniently accessible from Explorer, the web or an application. People also have this misconception that using OneDrive (or any cloud file service) somehow magically backs up your data.
Then we have the abomination of SharePoint/Teams - a bottomless pit of despair with all sorts of stuff put in, obscure ways to find it and a search tool that is useless (well every implementation I have come across is).
Moving forward so much data is being pushed from file servers into SharePoint and Teams then people are surprised when there are issues. Then we have the "Azure FileShare", something whose use case still defeats me as having any benefits. The Achilles heal of so many cloud/online products? The have no concept of gold snapshots so that you can backup open/locked files and get a consistent recovery point.
Hmm, if you are in IT then this is a very large part of the problem and why so much fails.
Too many times IT Management believe they know best, or more often highly skilled techies believe they know best and influence IT Management to go with that route as policy.
All too often nobody even bothers to listen to or make the slightest attempt to engage with departments and users.
The end result - a shambolic mess with huge resistance to do anything. The IT team then blame everyone but themselves for the failing. Whilst suppliers and so an can also cause issues the number one failure point that I see is IT believing they know best and not engaging.
There are certain things that IT has to lead on when it comes to security however if the relationship is already poor then it is an uphill struggle.
This is nothing related to any vendor - it is a fundamental issue I have seen over 25 years of working in IT.
Nope - seen exactly the same, hundreds of row each with a manual calculation.
Unless of course it has been copied from somewhere else and then pasted as values only. Given the people I was working with at the time I don't think this was the case.......
I supposed it depends if you are accessing the IP address and the router has not gone and allowed holes to be drilled through from the outside to support said camera,
Given that "simplicity" but setting something up with a button press appears to outweigh any security concerns is a large part of the mess we are in,
I think that the point that is being overlooked is that it is very little to do with them being Chinese (almost all the IoT stuff is made there anyway) but that people & companies persist in connecting all sorts of stuff to Internet connected networks without a thought.
It is not that long ago that routers started having randomised initial passwords. Then we have the stupidity that huge numbers of people appear to want all these Apps to control shite from their phone,
We are reached the point quite a few years ago where it has become pretty much impossible to protect people from the number one threat - themselves!
This applies to companies as well.
To put some perspective on this the Cloud Providers already have silos for US government contracts........
Why, data segregation and security.
Why the hell have we got into a situation where it appears most other countries are happy to host all the national ICT in is foreign cloud?
My suggested answers:
Cloud Kool-aid salesmen and nice bungs with trips to the US (and elsewhere)
Too many people with no understanding of what they are doing
Rank stupidity at Government (any government) levels.
On the first I know the director of IT at the organisation I worked for got a trip out to "see how it worked"........
Yes and no - what you are talking about is unstructured data.
The real information is held in structured form such as databases. There is only so much you can encrypt and one suspects that in the event of a demand from the NSA (US Government) the options for the end customer will be:
Any data that is accessible will have sucked out already
Consent to the data being handed over
Don't consent and lose all your data because you have breached some T&Cs and have your contract terminated.
With any cloud service getting the data in is the easy bit. Getting it back is rather more complicated, time consuming and costly. The chances are in this situation that you will simply not get it back and go out of business.
The big wins at the start were:
Microsoft already had billions of $ sat in the bank
Amazon was the darling of the US Venture Capital mob who threw millions at them to get billions back in inflated stock valuations.
The likes of Google & Oracle then played catch-up but both had billions ot $ in the bank.
Exactly, most of those who are critical are only seeing this in financial terms, not data security, infrastructure dependencies and political environment.
It is blatantly obvious it will cost more to start with - in that case then the EU needs to do what it does best - throw subsidies at the solution.
Given they have just been let off the hook for criminal prosecution and the fine as part of the deal is lost in the noise I think those accountants have does rather well.
That the company is in a mess with the production is a different matter. The killer is going to be when COMAC are certified in Europe all bets are off. Airlines like Ryanair are not going to wait when there is a cheaper product (= more profit) for the majority of their routes. Airbus will take a hit as well but probably not as big.
And importantly the 1000s of jobs that they allegedly create are only during construction, not operation.
Just like these huge distribution parks, the jobs are based on some arbitrary government figure that that huge developers like Panattoni have managed to get accepted. It is something like 1 job per 100 square meters. Utter bollocks, that is a 10m x 10m square.
One suspects that he wants all the cost savings (financial offsetting and still screwing government subsidies) of having "His" power station whilst at the same time all the benefits of the grid when it goes offline.
As long as the safety remain firmly with the appropriate authorities with out any Zuck interference it should be okay.
Actually it is not. If your car effectively "Emergency Brakes" in the middle of a motorway (or any other high speed road) for no reason then this is called "Check Braking".
If you are doing 70mph and then it decides there is a new 30mph due to a a road above the speed reduction is very aggressive.
If the car that hits you has a dashcam and the distance is reasonable you will have a very hard time proving that it is not your fault.
Sudden braking for no reason is as much a part of the fault of the person in front as it is the person behind.
I know this from personal experience and got stopped by an unmarked traffic car, breath test, searches, the lot.
They made it absolutely clear that this is part of "due care and attention".
The recent VWs also use satnav information for speed limits.
The outcome is that you can be driving at 60 or 70 and for some insane reason it decides the 30 or 40 on a road that crosses your rout is the correct speed limit.
You really have to be aware because it will cheerfully slow up quite quickly. If the car behind hits you then the fault is yours. Braking for no reason "check braking".
If the person behind has a dashcam then there is no dispute.
Twaddle, there millions of people making content that companies like OpenAI, Meta, Google have been stealing for years and now they just want to hoover everything up for their benefit.
The people you mention gave spent their lives creating content. Equally many others you haven't heard of also do the sane
I suspect the EU is the main thorn in his side. This side of the pond there is more focus on the individual's privacy, data handling and attempts at bringing those who try to ignore this to account.
Although the wheels can turn slowly they have been effective in hitting US tech with fines that are large enough to make them blink.
Still not large enough but that is another matter.
Whilst agreeing we are pushing to use Linux more for our product. All well and good but the wheels fall off with monotonous regularity when Windows centric customers have to:
Expand disks with LVM
Troubleshoot snap issues on LVM
View logs (simple you cry, but no) we have an excellent tool in Windows for viewing logs with no Linux equivalen (core install with minimal extras recommended good reason).
Basic connection checks to specific ports, more often than not nc or similar is not installed.
Updates, these get overlooked as there is no real management solution.
Updates breaking stuff because of an obscure dependency. This is something that rarely happens now on Windows.
Not saying this is the best option but it is possible to update to Windows 11 on unsupported hardware.
Based on my testing 2 cores and 4GB ram is the cut off. BIOS boot will work. You appear to need about 15GB of free space otherwise it will have a paddy.
Currently it still gets updated so if the status quo continues it is better than Windows 10 getter progressively further out of date.
Tips:
Use the Media Creation Tool on the actual OS you are updating and select this computers regional settings.
Use Rufus to create new media and select the options you want to make it install.
Run the setup from the USB key Rufus created. This is inside Windows. Not booted from the key. After a lot of frustration on languages this has worked pretty well.
The implication here is that it is on by default. One can disable it.
That is the big problem, assumed consent is now how all these companies operate. Legislation, legal cases and fines are too late, the have already hoovered up so much stuff without consent (or straightforward theft) that it is meaningless.
I think you misunderstood the article. Just because "something is out there" does not mean it is free to be used others.
Let's put some context on this, you create some material, say technical text and earn your living g frome selling it. It is in copyright and may have licenseing associated with the contents.
Someone comes along and sucks the pdf up then gives it away.
You now don't have any money!
In the UK there are currently adverts on the radio proclaiming that Amazon are the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy......
What it does not state is if they are also the largest corporate user of energy and what they do when that renewable energy is not available. It is greenwashing at it's finest.
Loads but that is "Agile"
Does lots of stuff really fast
Deliver something that mostly works
Do more stuff really fast, fix some of the mess from the first release, break some more.
Deliver more new funky features that don't work but PMs are happy,
Rinse and repeat.
Security?????
Nah, who needs to test security, there was a pen test 9 months ago. The fact that this shite did not exist then passes the developers by,
Similar here, Public Sector, Education then Private Sector.
There is this obsession touted by some media forums and then amplified by people who just KNOW that all Public Sector/Civil Servant employees are total wasters, especially if they work from home.
Everything that they think they don't use or consume is a complete waste and in their view those employees add no value to anything.
To most people with these views the only function that the public sector should be doing is emptying the bins.
Perhaps (and maybe this is a bit radical) they could spend a chunk of that money recreating the tax system so that it is not millions of pages with so many holes that those who have money to employ expensive lawyers and accounts actually pay a fair share of the tax take.
The problem is that it has just evolved and every change is simply patched on top of the existing mess.
A bit like Windows in some ways.........
Realistically I supposed they could always just import a kit of parts (all manufactured in the Far East) then just glue and screw them together,
This achieves nothing but a small number of not very skilled jobs, You simply cannot uplift manufacturing on this scale and move it to another country.
It still does not get away from the much deeper situation that whatever the US (or anyone else) thinks, stuff will have to be imported.
For most of the people affected they are not actually going to be in the position to do the much troubleshooting/fixing
They are consumers, not technical users so are reliant on the plethora of shite that a Google search returns,
"Oh I had that problem to an fixed it" - nobody actually says what the fix it
"Uninstall and reinstall"
"Reboot"
"Reinstall Windows"
You may be correct but increasingly all I see is appalling "App-fronted" Web sites that use a mush of code and features scraped off Google. Decent developers who understand what they ate doing are retiring.
What is the norm now is usless script kids playing with React so it looks great but is utterly unusable.
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