Posts by IanRS

OpenAI to flood your eyeballs with visual ads

Re: Donatas Smailys said:

But having bought one washing machine, it is perfectly logical that you still want another.

Musk follows Trump's lead, swaps AI for SI in SpaceX rebrand

Re: Pie is Nice

An elderly relative (a great-aunt, which is a very respectable sounding sort of thing, and she was) once got a a previously prepared meal out of the freezer and served it up with chips. It had been labelled "S pie". She thought it was steak, but it turned out to be strawberry.

Buyer missed one option and got 1% of the cable they needed

Re: Not just IT

I do remember going into a Maplin store (within cycling range from where I lived, if rather a long walk) because I needed a single resistor of a particular value. 3p.

It was once a good electronics part store, then it became an over-priced RC and other toy shop.

That's even better than the famous (originally IBM manuals?) 'This page intentionally left blank."

Packaging for gallium

When doing lab research I once order a small (5g) quantity of gallium from a lab supply company. It arrived in a small heavy duty plastic vial, about 2cm in diameter and 8cm high, only filling the bottom couple of mm. The vial was in a box about 40cm cubed, stuffed with packing peanuts and marked "Do not air freight". Gallium melts at about 30 degC and then dissolves aluminium. Having it leak in a van is one thing, but in an aircraft is quite another.

Commission

I once worked with somebody who had previously worked in a senior position at a distributor which I had also used at a previous position. He had made himself very unpopular with the sales team, but popular with the engineers in the design team (they also had what would now be called a professional services department), when he had the sales commission changed from a percentage of the sales price to a percentage of the profit for project work.

Another senior sales guy, from elsewhere, once told a junior me to never go into sales - I was too honest. He was a very good salesman, but I believe this time he was being very truthful.

Fewer women than ever in UK's 'old boys' club' cyber industry

Little has changed

There was a similar survey a few years ago (see https://www.theregister.com/security/2022/10/15/infosec-still-mostly-a-boys-club/1142961) and while some of the issues such as gender related employment bias or pay gap, are things which ought to have been (but probably aren't) sorted by now, there was one aspect to the earlier survey which surprised me. Over half the respondents thought it was too complex an area to get into, but this was significantly higher for women, 71% of whom thought so, versus 61% of men.I wonder whether this is still the case.

Add one more AI worry to the nightmare scenario: self-replicating prompt injections

Already known about?

This looks to be very similar, conceptually at least, to the researcher that showed worm style propagation through Word documents. https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/07/29/word-worm-crawls-into-copilot-spreads-chaos/5280588

UK government vows to reclaim services from outsourcing giants

Only one problem.

I agree with you that it should be possible to pay the same people that the consultancies use the same rates to do the same job, without the consultancy overhead. Unfortunately all the unions will throw all their toys out of the pram over somebody in a relatively junior civil service banding (because techies with no managerial responsibilities will be considered low rank) gets paid that much compared with the union members at the same band.

Boss bought cheap 'printer' from a catalog and was left without a leg to stand on

Re: Multiples and price-breaks

I came across this recently, on Amazon, 1 item for £12 or a pair for £27. I ordered two singles, and checked the order list carefully.

I wackiest similar case I ever encountered was railway ticket pricing. I spent a couple of months working away and travelling home by train for the weekend, and because I had had a lift for the first trip the return tickets were the 'wrong way round', coming home then going away. Each ticket cost me £9 - it was a long time ago. For the very last trip I only needed a single. "That'll be £10 please." I bought a return.

Techie fixed Wi-Fi dead zone with a drill

WiFi dead zones

I was once on a team setting up a 'collaboration zone' where I was working on the network side, handling switches, firewalls, etc, and most of the cabling. The only parts we did not do were the WiFi access points in the false ceiling as we weren't trusted to climb step ladders. The contractors brought in for that came in, did a survey of signal strength throughout the whole area while moving the WAPS around to give the best coverage, then fastened everything down. Perfectly good professional job. Then another team came in to handle turning all the walls into giant whiteboards.This included putting thin steel sheet backed white plastic coated boards from floor to ceiling on all the partition walls. The steel backing was for sticking magnets to to hold up whatever was needed. The WAPs had ended up, unsurprisingly, down the centre-line passageway of the facility, and now no breakout room had any signal at all.

Google engineer unplugged every fiber they could see and – surprise! – took down a chunk of the G-Cloud

Some people are just incompetent

I once had a plumber come around to fit a new sink. It turned out he had previous been a (Cisco) network engineer, but had given that up. It also turned out he could not fit sinks either.

He had some bits left over when he thought he had finished and fortunately he left them with me when he left. They were for connecting the overflow outlet to the main drainage pipe leading down from the plughole, so if the water level had ever gone too high it would have just poured into the cupboard. To cover the opening in the drainpipe he had bodged a piece of plastic sheet to try to seal the hole.

Audacity audio-editing app no longer looks like it's from the early 2000s

Does it even work?

I start it up, tell it to open an ogg file: nothing. I start a new project and import the ogg file: nothing. I right-click on the ogg file and tell it to open in Audacity 4: nothing.

A mp3 file does open as expected, but if some application has a problem opening one of its supposedly supported document types then I would expect at least an error message. My previous version of Audacity (2.3.3) could open the ogg file with no problem.

Developer given Mission:Impossible - fixing rubbish code that could crash a city - simply chose not to accept it

Re: Go To A

In the early 90s I was working on a summer work project on building an imaging sensor in pure hardware. It was an interesting project but I made the mistake of saying I had some programming experience, and so got moved onto a software project that they did not have anybody available for. I had to port an application written in HP Basic running on an HP workstation to be in HP Basic running on a PC. The two versions of HP Basic were very nearly compatible.

Re: New TheReg Tag "Not Me!"

I once worked in a clean-room facility where there was HF acid stored. The 'emergency rinse' shower within the room had a pull chain which basically opened the bottom of a cubic meter water tank in the ceiling. As far as I know it was never actually needed before the building burned down.

Re: not many politicians have any training

They are also still as relevant as when they were first produced, unfortunately. Unfortunately for the state of the UK government that is, not for for entertainment purposes for which they excel.

MPs tell Brit government: Sort out your tech sovereignty or get left out in the cold

Government policy

This government's policy for any area seems to be "Tax it!!!". This apparently encourage growth, a bit like pruning.

Boffins bet on quantum computers, AI supers to solve fusion fuel dilemma

Reducing the ready-by date from 20 years away...

... to just 20 years away.

Madlad builds homebrew GPU using 8,192 RISC-V chips

Why?

Because I can!

That's enough for some people. It happens to the best of us.

Security boss thought MFA would be too much security

Re: Not quite the same but...

I was once fire warden for the top floor of the office building and we had a small but genuine fire. The building was an L shape, with the main staircase in the centre and emergency exits at the ends. People going down one end found the emergency exit would not open and neither could they get back into the main office from there, so had to push back up a level against the people still coming down, go to the centre and back down. I was one of the last down the central staircase and found the fire doors at the bottom still shut. Everybody had gone through reception which was full of smoke. I pushed the bar - nothing happened. I kicked the bar hard, and it opened on the second try. I raised merry hell with building maintenance afterwards. My scope was just shouting at people to get out, not checking anything worked as it should.

At the same office I suggested to the head of the fire team that all wardens went on an extinguisher training course (having been on one before and knowing they are a useful and often fun few hours). Some of them might learn that you point the extinguisher at what is burning, not send it through the flames above. I was told the only reason that there were extinguishers at all was they were a legal necessity. They were not there to be used.

Massive password-stealing attack hits 75k Fortinet firewalls

Re: Rotate your passwords

Fish are commonly battered, but horses less so.

This is your BIOS speaking. Please fix me. Your PC is broken

Re: Lucky the text didn't default to Chinese

Similar here. When the new Hong Kong airport was being built in the late 90s I was working on one of the major systems. It all ran on the local version of the OS, so Chinese Windows NT 4 was the standard build, and of course we developed on that too to ensure no unexpected surprises. Fortunately it could be switched into displaying everything in English most of the time, but not for the installation process. I could install it from scratch with everything in Chinese except for the single hotkey for each prompt which was a western keyboard character. That was enough of a reminder to remind me what it was asking at each stage.

Indra rides off with £1.96B Transport for London ticketing deal as Oyster heads for back-office overhaul

Tracking

So oyster cards will no longer be anonymous if they are tied to accounts, and with the swipe required at both ends of each journey, everybody's movement through the transport network can be tracked perfectly. This must just be an unintended side effect.

On-call techie decided job was done and hit the bottle – just before his pager went off

Alcohol policy

Where I first worked, quite some time ago, the policy stated that you could not consume alcohol during business hours to the level where it it affected performance. It then went on to state that any alcohol affected performance.

By a strange coincidence, it was at the same company where we had to call in somebody in the middle of the night to diagnose a problem where he was the expert and nobody else could figure it out. Again, a DBA. Again, in Hong Kong. Again, since we had a work hard, play hard attitude while we were out there, he was off shift and completely pissed.

Lego throws its own Hail Mary

Lego age ratings

The Saturn V set is rated 14+, but I gave it to my son for his 6th birthday. The only bit he could not handle on his own involved applying pressure to both sides of the area being constructed where his hands were just not quite big enough to reach. No official Lego set has any 'mature' content so there is no need for a rating on that basis, and in terms of 'this is too complex' I don't see why they have age ratings, unless it is just to give young kids a sense of achievement.

Brit mathematician lets AI agent loose with credit card – cue password leaks, CAPTCHA chaos and more

Wrong woman

AI is more Pandora than Cassandra.

Classic ASCII game NetHack debuts version 5.0 just 11 years after last major release

Nethack 4 was only available on Windows 9.

NASA boss: make Pluto a planet again

Re: Cleared orbit

The orbits of Neptune and Pluto overlap. How can one be cleared and the other not?

Cleared orbit

The exact same argument can be made for Neptune, so either restore Pluto or demote Neptune. Since is it obvious to anybody with any sense (which may exclude international committees) that Neptune really is a planet, then Pluto should be considered one too.

To fix this Wi-Fi network, we'll need a crane

Listen carefully

I once worked in what was then a government owned research centre, before it was privatised and then became a housing estate. The IRA was still active on mainland Britain at the time. The induction covered: this is what a fire alarm sounds like and this is what you do; this is the bomb threat alarm and this is what you do; this is what the incoming mortar attack alarm sounds like and this is what you do. Fortunately the third was never used, but the alert status board at the entrance was occasionally black.

England's school phone ban gets teeth, just in time to bite no one

Re: in my day, teachers regularly confiscated calculators, catapults and god knows what

"Did I give you permission to get up? Sit back at your desk!"

Microsoft tells crusty old kernel drivers to get with the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program

Re: Detection tools?

The powershell command "Get-WmiObject Win32_PnPSignedDriver | select devicename, signer" looks like a good start. "driverquery /si" also shows which drivers are signed, but not by whom.

On a normal desktop system with no weird devices attached I just have two signers, "Microsoft Windows Hardware Compatibility Publisher" and "Microsoft Windows". If anything signed by the former gets disabled, then I only stand to lose my graphics card, printer, webcam and a selection of motherboard on-board elements such as network and sound. It is not an old system.

AWS would prefer to forget March ever happened in its UAE region

Re: given that there is not yet an Amazon standing military force.

Not quite a standing force, but military use by US companies is not unprecedented: https://www.rossperot.com/life-story/iran-hostage-rescue

I used to work for EDS, but not that long ago.

Bigger problems

In my work as a security architect I occasionally get asked by an assurer or auditor why I think running AWS infrastructure in just two availability zones without a second region is enough. The latest was just earlier this week. It shows that they do not understand risk/impact balance outside their own little box. I have to point out that if something can take out two geographically separated data centres simultaneously then the impact is not restricted just to their website, and they probably have bigger problems to worry about. Some of them accept this. Some still think another region would help.

Nothing screams casual career pivot like joining the UK Ministry of Defence for a cool £162K

Cart before horse?

The CDTO is meant to push AI usage?

Should not the CDTO being assessing what goals need to be reached and what technology can be used to get there? AI may or may not be the right tool for the job, but that should be for the CDTO to decide on.

UK police force presses pause on live facial recognition after study finds racial bias

Re: May not be a racial bias at all

That is not a racial bias, it is a lighting level bias. Read the 2nd half of my post.

May not be a racial bias at all

If you consider the brightness range of an image of say a causasian face under good lighting you will get a significant difference in brightness levels (e.g. in the HSB colour model) over different parts of the face. If you do the same with e.g. an African/Carribean face there will also be a range, but the range low and high levels will obvious be lower brightness, and the range may well be narrower too. e.g. If the darkest pixel is half the brightness of the brightest pixel in each case, the darker image has a lower range, hence lower contrast. This gives the pattern matching algorithm a lower signal strength and worse signal-to-noise ratio in the latter case.

If a trial was run with the same group of purely 'white' people, once in good lighting and again in dim lighting with no exposure compensation, leading to a similar brightness drop, would you not expect the false positive rate to be higher in the second case?

It is no more than "Who is that?", "I'm not sure as I cannot see them clearly enough."

UK blinks on AI copyright carve-out after star-studded revolt

Your loss

Because once the UK is known as en environment which permits AI theft of copyright works, no author, artist, or other creative designer whose work can be represented on a computer will want to allow their work to be published here. I would consider the loss of much 'modern art' as no great problem, but peoples' taste varies and somebody would regret any part of what we lost.

Those who 'circle back' and 'synergize' also tend to be crap at their jobs

Re: Shhhh!

Back in the late 1980s I was at a big printing expo at the Birmingham NEC. There were some amazing quality colour printers, which were quite rare back then as dot matrix with a four colour ribbon was the best most people got to see, and also some newspaper production line printers. These were only run in full speed demonstration mode for very short periods and not very often. The output was such high volume that it had to be cleared off the stand within a couple of minutes, which is why the normal output collector had been replaced with a large wheely bin.

Re: North Star.

'Polar' must be used because "equality!" North implies a bias again southerners, and we wouldn't want that, would we?

Brits fear AI will strip the human touch from public services

Please wait, your call is important to us

That sort of human contact?

Reviving a CIDCO MailStation – the last Z80 computer

Re: Nostalgia meets modern hardware

It would have been about then that my father worked for Newbury Labs. I remember going in with him one weekend when he had to get something done, going to the engineering test lab and being shown the inside of one of the terminals with its covers off. "Don't touch that bit, it is at 40,000V". That was one of the then new colour terminals. The monochrome ones ran at a mere 25kV or so.

Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter

Re: "Which of your bêtes noires did we miss?"

MY precious!

Microsoft engineer speedruns Raspberry Pi magic smoke in five minutes

Just a single instruction needed: HCF

BOFH: Eight pints of a lager and a management breakthrough

Verschlimmbessern

A lovely German word meaning to try to make things better but to really end up making them worse.

Great language - has a single word for everything, although it might be 17 syllables long

Google to foist Gemini pane on Chrome users in automated browsing push

It is spelled "AI Pain"

But if you are an AI Pro/Ultra subscriber I suppose you enjoy the masochism, in tango form or otherwise.

Majority of CEOs report zero payoff from AI splurge

Re: GOOD

Lucky you.

I recently had to sit through an hour long collection of video-based presentations on various DEI topics. The training system would not let you skip any of the video - you had to watch it start to end - otherwise it refused to present the end of section questions and you had to replay the video, from the start.

ERP isn't dead yet – but most execs are planning the wake

Redundant or irrelevent?

If you have "agentic ERP [with] autonomous, AI-driven decision-making", then how many CxOs become unnecessary?

Warwickshire school to reopen after cyberattack crippled IT

Fire Alarm as a Service?

Who on earth has a fire alarm system which relies on other bits of IT?

Trigger alarm, bell rings, everybody goes outside is all it really needs. A large environment, such as a school, will benefit from having a zoned system, but other than being able to tell the fire engine driver which end of the school to aim for, it is not really necessary, and even then should be self-contained.

CES 2026 worst in show: AI girlfriends, a fridge that won't open unless you talk to it, and more

Maybe not all bad

"We cannot guarantee the security of your personal information."

Full marks for honesty at least. How many other companies provide the same level of 'service' but do not include it as a described feature?