Posts by Naich

New tool gives CLIs a warm and GUI feeling instead

Re: Might be useful to avoid nuclear bombs going off

tar --help

UK guts planning red tape so datacenters can bypass the neighbors faster

Wimbledon Common, judging by the law firm concerned.

AI heavyweights warn their tech could help terrorists develop bioweapons

Re: AI

Sorry, best I can do is using all the water and boiling the planet in order to put people out of jobs.

6G: The next gen of wireless tech nobody's ready to pay for

Re: still struggling to deliver a satisfactory 5G service

What do you think about the pedestrianisation of the town centre?

EU moderation watchdog says social media giants hate taking down hate speech

By design

"In other words, the platforms appear capable of simultaneously leaving up content they should remove while deleting content they should leave alone, which is an impressive operational achievement even by social media standards."

When you view the value of content purely by how much engagement it gets, this makes sense. They will fight tooth and nail to keep hate speech that gets engagement but not give a shit about anything else.

Datacenter builds could be shielded from judicial review in UK planning reforms

Re: We know what's best for you.

What do you expect them to do? Put a load of gunpowder under the HoC?

X limits hot takes from freeloaders to 50 a day

Mastodon? What's Mastodon?

Seriously - don't tell them about Mastodon. I like the fact that it's small, friendly, and filled with lovely people. I don't want the sort of people who post more than 200 replies a day to know about it.

'People's Panel' to check if UK wants controversial Digital ID will cost £630K

I got an invite. The in-person sessions are in Birmingham on Saturdays and Sundays. You get accommodation, travel, and food paid for. If you complete all the sessions you get paid £550.

Google is to journalism what Vikings were to monks. Now their man will run the BBC

Re: And then we wonder why things are going so badly

On the other hand, who is better placed to shape policies for a good and robust BBC in the rapidly-changing and predatory world of media? You would hope that being employed by the BBC would mean the man will be using his experience to work in the best interests of the coporation, rather than as a trojan horse for his previous employers. Is there any reason to think the latter might be the case?

Using AI to code does not mean your code is more secure

How long until a bad actor gets some backdoored code into a LLM and it starts getting spread everywhere?

HP stuffs OpenAI LLM into new laptops in bid for small biz

So AI takes a summary and writes the full text, which gets sent to people who use AI to summarise the text. Like reverse compression, but you need to incinerate the planet to do it. What an age we live in.

Open source isn't a tip jar – it's time to charge for access

The only way that corporations will start paying is if the code stops flowing. Time for Open Source contributors to form a union and go on strike?

Windows boss promises to heal the operating system's self-inflicted wounds

Microsoft Footgun

It takes real skill in cocking things up this badly - to take a safe monopoly position and then piss off your users so badly they end up creating competition out of a niche alternative. If Microslop had done absoluely nothing other than release security patches for Windows 10 then people would have stuck with them.

It's great news for Linux though, so I shouldn't complain.

Elon Musk wants to build 50 times more chips than the world currently produces, using 'new physics'

"Musk challenged doubters by pointing out Tesla and SpaceX defied critics who predicted electric cars and reusable rockets would not be feasible or economical."

Reusable rockets were around in the early 80s, and electric cars have been around for ever. I guess we wouldn't know these critics because they go to a different school.

Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin applies to launch 51,000 datacenter satellites

The unspeakable in pursuit of the unworkable.

Google offers ‘vibe design’ tool that you can shout at to create a UI

yay

Great, now everyone can crank out shitty annoying UIs in half the time.

Linux PC vendor System76 tries to talk Colorado down over OS age checks

It's a great idea for information slurping companies like Google and Microsoft, who would love to have it mandated that you have to put your personal information into their systems by law.

Crooks compromise WordPress sites to push infostealers via fake CAPTCHA prompts

Wordpress itself is fine, unless you set it up really badly. It's usually a plug-in which is insecure.

Musk's Grok sparks outrage after chatbot makes offensive jibes about football disasters

Re: High time for UK ISPs to pull the plug on Grok

Nope. I'm real. You are just a knob end.

Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing, argues Bruce Perens

Re: .....................it's already here, as a service company

This is satire, yes? So difficult to tell these days.

Popular prayer program becomes propaganda pusher after reported Israeli hack

Re: > ages 7-12

Whataboutism. The Iranians killing children doesn't stop the Americans killing children being equally awful.

Microsoft to auto-launch Copilot in Edge whenever you click a link from Outlook

I use it to download Firefox.

Hardly anybody bought Samsung's last smartphones for AI. It hopes this year's models change that

If I phone someone and I get handed over to an AI, I'm never going to talk to them again.

Elon Musk paints exodus of xAI co-founders as 'evolution'

Re: "It would be impractical to list every missed prediction"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autonomous_Tesla_vehicles_by_Elon_Musk

A partial list there.

SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites

Pipe dream?

More like a crack pipe dream.

Firefox makes AI optional, like it probably should have been all along

It's two separate directories in the Apache configs.

Cursor used agents to write a browser, proving AI can write shoddy code at scale

Here's one for free

I have written a web browser that works:

telnet theregister.com 80

Or if you want to get really fancy:

curl theregister.com

The world is one bad decision away from a silicon ice age

Re: Not at the moment

Do you get paid per downvote?

Tories vow to boot under-16s off social media and ban phones in schools

Of course it's the big bad internet

It's the internet and social media causing depression in kids, not growing inequality, the rise of fascism, and their planet being rendered uninhabitable by people who feel that they don't have enough yachts..

UK regulators swarm X after Grok generated nudes from photos

I don't know about 2025, but X generated $2.5 billion revenue in 2024, so that'll be $250m please. We could fix quite a few potholes with that.

GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger

Re: If it ain't broke....

The proposal is to have it not enabled by default. The proposal is not to remove it, but don't let details stop everyone from getting their pitchforks out.

UK to Europe: The time to counter Russia's information war machine is now

Makes sense

The UK has first-hand knowledge of what happens when a coordinated misinformation campaign with foreign power backers gets a hold - you get things like Brexit. However much money Russia ploughed into it, they certainly got a brilliant return on their investment.

UK tech minister vows more whole-government megadeals after £9B Microsoft pact

Re: Has this ever worked?

It has always worked for Microsoft. Get them hooked on your gear, sorry, get them locked in to your software, and then jack up the price. Still that's a problem for future government, so this lot don't care.

Feeling lonely? Microsoft Copilot can now listen to your every word, watch your screen

Re: Snoopers charter

Thanks to AI, it's been improved so you can be watched constantly.

BT promises 5G Standalone for 99% of the UK by 2030

Re: Good luck with that

It's 99% of the populatrion, not 99% of the land area. Most of the population lives in cities, so the reception in the country can be as crap as they want, as long as there aren't many people living there,

EU funds are flowing into spyware companies, and politicians are demanding answers

You can't spell "Mediocredito Centrale" without "mediocre".

FCC plans to kill Wi-Fi on school buses, hotspots for library patrons

Murica.

Protecting the kids by banning free wifi rather than guns.

After nearly half a century in deep space, every ping from Voyager 1 is a bonus

Re: I never fail to be impressed

Somewhat better than Musky's typical 48 second lifespan missions.

Vibe coding platform Anything arrives, our hands-on suggests caution

AI is amazing

Is there any field where AI can't produce vast amounts of useless gunge? Text, pictures, video and now apps are flooded with uninformed digital slop, pumped out as fast as we can burn up the planet.

Microsoft bolts Copilot Mode onto Edge to chase AI-browser crowd

Call me undaventuous, but if I'm booking paddleboarding, I'd like to get some idea of the company I'm booking with, other than it's the one that paid MS most to go to the top of the AI search results.

X tells the French police 'non' to its request for algorithmic data

They want data about the algorithm, not about users. You either knew that and are being deceptive, or you are so dumb you are incapable of understanding the article.

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

Re: They keep removing features. When was the last time they added one?

I love the idea that a 58 year old is a "cool kid", thanks. I've no problem with anyone using FTP in whatever arcane system they have, but in a browser for general use? Nope.

That's a problem with the site, not the browser.

Re: They keep removing features. When was the last time they added one?

They've removed:

* Ability to turn off javascript

Available in a plugin like Noscript

* Ability to not use tabs

??? Eh? Just don't use them if you don't want to

* User profile manager

Still there.

* Tab groups

Still there,

* The ability to disable cookies

Still there.

* Fine-grained cookie management ("accept/deny this cookie" dialogs)

That's pretty clumsy. You can choose in advance which sort of cookies to allow or deny.

* RSS reader

Plugins are available

* "Save tabs and quit"

Your tabs are saved when you quit.

* Ability to export history

Plugins to do this.

* FTP

It's 2025. No one should be using FTP. No one.

X's new 'encrypted' XChat feature seems no more secure than the failure that came before it

Re: I wonder

He's the smartest man in the White House, and I don't mean that in a good way.

Data watchdog put cops on naughty step for lost CCTV footage

If the consequences for "mislaying" footage is less than the consequences of the footage being seen, then it's a bit of a no brainer to accidentally lose it.

MIT boffins claim liquid sodium battery could one day power aircraft while sucking up CO2

Re: Huge quantities of molten sodium flying through the air?

You could say the same thing about aviation fuel. Anything with a high energy density is going to make a mess if it all gets released at once, whatever the energy source.

Heat it up, I would imagine.

As US scientists flee Trump, MP urges Britain to do more to nab them

Re: DEI

Spending money to create a fairer society and a habitable planet? The horror.

CISA slammed for role in 'censorship industrial complex' as budget faces possible $500M cut

Re: Dumb

He won't be a mistake because the leopard he voted for would never eat HIS face.