Posts by Paul Smith

Blocking stolen phones from the cloud can be done, should be done, won't be done

Re: Easy fix.

LOL!!!

No, my friend, I don't think so. The government *issue* car registration numbers, they don't own them. Once issued, they can't withdraw them, they can't prevent them being used on the roads and they can't re-issue them to anybody else. Even if this wasn't true, do you really want this shower of idiots or their rich sponsors to have the power to decide if you, your parents, siblings, children, friends and acquaintances should be "allowed" to use a phone, or more accurately, be denied the right to use a phone when some unelected individual with no oversight and no fear of consequences decides that some rule has been broken? I am old enough to remember the poll tax riots, and I know that if Thatcher had the power to track IMSI's or IMEI's, she would have used it to punish the protesters and anybody connected with the protesters. Is that really the sort of authority you want to hand over?

Re: "there is no chance of actual industry-wide proactive cooperative problem solving"

That is not democracy, that is a republic. The tyranny of a 'pure' democracy is that if 51% want to speak Latin, then 100% must speak Latin, if 51.9% want to leave the EU, then 100% get shafted. In a republic, all citizens are protected by the rule of law (usually a constitution) that can only be changed by a significant majority. 51% can decide that Latin is the preferred language, but they can't force it on the rest.

Re: Nice idea

B.S!

One copper, one week = £1000 tax payer money.

If a cop nick a scrote who nicked a phone, that is two and a half days of the coppers time between paper work and court time, and the scrote is still back on the street nicking phones the same day. Tell the cops to nick scrotes and the best they can do is two a week.

Nick the bell end who pays scrotes for stolen phones, and you have a whole bunch of scrotes that have to look elsewhere for their drug money, and you have a much better chance of getting a conviction with a custodial sentence that will keep the bell end off the streets.

If you want more cops, then pay more taxes. If you want more safety, then let the cops do their jobs properly instead of letting the red tops tell them what their jobs should be.

BOFH: HR's AI hiring tool is perfectly unbiased – as long as you're us

Re: New Employees....

"It will be rough on those who don't get the job" - Reward them with a "thank you for trying" and possibly even giving actual feedback and you will encourage them to try again. Soon every one benefits (except the pimps of course).

Amazon, Google asked to explain why they were serving ads on sites hosting CSAM

Congress make the laws, not the advertisers. If the honourable senators, or anybody else, believes a given web-sites is illegal, it is within their power to do something about it but until such time as due process is completed, advertisers are free to make as much money from these sites as the want.

An awful lot of FOSS should thank the Academy

Oh crap, you've got a NAN

Stunning!

Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Proposal for new El Reg unit of measure

I propose El Reg adopts the term "Putin-Sized" for describing stupidly large but worthless quantities. Example usage: "Trump claims to have won by a PutinSized margin".

JPMorgan Chase sues scammers following viral 'infinite money glitch'

Wow, something is seriously wrong here.

ATM withdrawals have daily limits. Even very generous daily limits are not going to allow you to withdraw $300,000 dollars in the time it takes to clear a check!

NASA will fly Boeing Starliner crew home with SpaceX, Calamity Capsule deemed too risky

In what way do you think they are divorced? The risk of the shares plummeting because the Starliner crashes and burns and kills two astronauts killed has been removed. Of course that improves the share outlook.

Re: Why continue?

I think Boeing has already burned through a lot of its protectors recently.

'Gay furry hackers' say they've disbanded after raiding Project 2025's Heritage Foundation

Re: So where's the light?

Or 666?

War on Texas law requiring ID to savor smut online heads to Supreme Court

Re: A paradox

Actual Christians follow Christ's advice to "love thy neighbour" and "turn the other cheek". The other camp are the "eye for an eye" and "Do what I tell you or be damned to hellfire".

Suspected radiation alert saboteurs cuffed by cops after sensors disabled

Re: The bigger problem

The whole point of the Arpanet, the parent of the internet, was that it would survive a nuclear catastrophe. Where else would you put sensors designed to detect such a catastrophe?

Boeing's Starliner finds yet another way to not reach space

Re: What was the fault?

Read the article. They needed three supplies for a launch, one failed AND THE REDUNDANT SUPPLY DID NOT ACTIVATE.

IT consultant-cum-developer in court over hiding COVID-19 loan

£21 billion lost to fraud

"It seems that Jastrzebski's case is going to add this to the ever growing list of both financial misconduct and fraud committed by scumbags that exploited the pandemic. It is estimated that £21 billion ($25.96 billion) of public money was lost to fraud, according to the National Audit Office."

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice and you have a display of stunning incompetence and probably significant collusion. Just as long the National Audit Office is not using Horizon software. They aren't, are they?

"Tackling Bounce Back Loan misconduct is a key priority for the Insolvency Service."

No, I think you will find that insolvency is the key priority of the Insolvency Service. The clue was in the name.

Senator Warren slams Intuit's 'junk fees' as America's Tax Day rolls around again

It is an ad, and it's not for me.

'nuff said.

Notepad++ dev slams Google-clogging notepad.plus 'parasite'

Re: Always Download Directly From Source?

How many people do you think are going to go to the original site to get a hash so that they can manually check the legitimacy of a download they got from somewhere other then the original site? Even the people who upvoted your answer won't do that.

No joke: FTC boss goes on the Daily Show and is told Apple tried to block her

Re: USA Free Market

That is fine up until the point you need to import something when the price becomes whatever the seller demands, and if they don't value dollars ...

UK health department republishes £330M Palantir contract with fewer ██████

An IT system for £1

What could possibly go wrong?

Swift enters safe mode over gyro issue while NASA preps patch to shake it off

Re: Hot or cold spares?

Solid state gyros are used to determine orientation, not to influence it.

French cloud Scaleway starts renting Alibaba's RISC-V SoC

Using a chip from China

"Using a chip from China – a nation credibly suspected of using its presence in tech supply chains to enable economic espionage – is an interesting way to establish sovereignty and free users from geopolitical constraints."

Obviously safer than to using chips from the USA, a nation categorically proven to use its presence in tech supply chains to enable economic espionage.

SBF likely off the hook for misplaced FTX funds after cops bust SIM swap ring

FTX theft...

"Powell was reportedly arrested in Chicago last week and is being held without bond "

If I had successfully stolen $400 million, I would a) not still be in Chicago in mid-winter and b) have a sufficiently good lawyer that the idea of being denied bail was laughable.

FBI confirms it issued remote kill command to blow out Volt Typhoon's botnet

Re: Thanks for nothing

Why would you presume that they would limit themselves this time?

JetBrains' unremovable AI assistant meets irresistible outcry

Bad grammer is usually an indication that something was written by an actual human.

US Navy sailor swaps sea for cell after accepting bribes from Chinese snoops

Black adder goes forth...

Captain Darling:

So you see, Blackadder, Field Marshall Haig is most anxious to eliminate all these German spies.

General Melchett:

Filthy hun weasels, fighting their dirty underhand war!

Captain Darling:

And fortunately, one of our spies...

General Melchett:

Splendid fellows, brave heroes risking life and limb for Blighty!

OpenAI: 'Impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials'

Straw man argument

The training of the AI is a straw man argument. Using material to train an AI model is not a problem and is *not* a misuse of copyright assuming they have legitimate and legal access to the material in the first place. It is the use of copyrighted material in the output, without permission, payment, or accreditation that is the problem. If openAI can't build a business model that respects other peoples property and rights, then they don't have a business.

China bans export of rare earth processing kit

Re: "unproven spying from Huawei equipment"

If there was any actual evidence that Huawei had done any of the things they are accused of, it would be splashed across every front page on the planet. A decade ago, Snowden proved that US TLA's subverted US companies to do exactly the things Huawei is accused of, and by all appearances, it is still ongoing.

Artificial intelligence is a liability

Re: As You Were

There is enough quality pron to suit all tastes available for free. Why would you want to pay for SI and have to put up with the extra Lorem Ipsum?

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

Sorry, but that is simply not true, get yourself some faster storage. I have a dual boot PC running a 5800X. Cold boot to login, Windows 11 or Ubuntu is five or six seconds with SSD boot disk depending on the password. In 1984, it took longer then that just for the CRT to warm up.

Amazon's game-streamer Twitch to quit South Korea, citing savage network costs

Re: is this better for SK Broadband?

Last time I checked, electricity companies charged me for access to electricity, and charged me for how much I used and charged me at different rates for when I used it. It also charges different rates to the small business next door and the large factory down the road so there is nothing new or original in customer based charging. The toll road doesn't charge based on the contents of the truck but they do charge based on the size and weight of the truck and sometimes on when the truck wants to travel. Telcos are not suggesting charging for the contents of your downloads (cat videos are the same price as pussy videos) but they would like a share based on the size of the download. Why should they have to bare the total cost of upgrading to 1Gig+ fibre to the door just so you can watch an 8K UHD grumble flick? Does it really look much better then 720i?

Government and the latest tech don't mix, says UK civil servant of £11B ESN mess

Clueless

I don't expect elected politicians to be experts at anything other then getting elected, but I have to ask why they are so consistently incapable of surrounding themselves with knowledgeable advisors?

It's ba-ack... UK watchdog publishes age verification proposals

Swearing is the choice of those with a limited vocabulary.

If you only know one swear word, then your vocabulary is clearly limited.

The true definition of a polylinguist is someone who can swear fluently in multiple languages.

Half a kilo of cosmic nuclear fuel reignites NASA's deep space dreams

Re: significantly lower power degradation over time

88 Year half life means half of it will still be generating heat and power in 88 years time, and half of what's left will still be working 88 years after that, not really much of a constraint.

FBI Director: FISA Section 702 warrant requirement a 'de facto ban'

Re: Warrant phobia

After over 20 years of this they very clearly do not *need* to change anything. If the need was real, the elected politicians that didn't change would have been replaced by elected politicians that did change.

Regrettably, one of the consequences of democracy is that you get the politicians you deserve. The American public is (en masse) happy with lying, spying, fear and corruption and their politicians reflect that.

As the Top500 celebrates its 30th year, with a $5 VM you too can get into the top 10 ... of 1993

Moore's law

The first PC I worked on was a IBM clone ((Olivetti I think) in 1984. It ran an 8086 at 4.77MHz and cost about £1,500 (all in).

Today my home PC is a running a 5800X at 4.7GHz and would cost about £1,500 to build from scratch tomorrow.

Moore's law (double the performance for the same price every 18 months) equates to about 42% per year. 39 years at 42% starting from 1 gives 869,451.64

My current PC is about a million times more powerful then that first one so Moore's law is still holding.

But can it run Cryses?

A raspberry Pi 4 has over 4GFLOPS while a Pi 5 is reported to have over 10GFlops.

Kubernetes' Tim Hockin on a decade of dominance and the future of AI in open source

And the alternative is... ?

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Placement, and replacement.

Irish planning law has insisted for years that meters can be read without having to enter the premises and the sky hasn't fallen in. Perhaps you could suggest something similar to your local councillors.

No corruption here.

Not only will nobody loose their job over this, but I expect everybody involved to still receive their full bonus.

If the Linux Foundation was a software company, it'd be the biggest in the world

Re: Wrong

Linux is obsolete? Are you sure? You do know that "obsolete" means no longer used, and last time I checked, Linux was still being used quite a lot.

Spawn of Satan icon because it looks like a handbag :)

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

They say you get the politicians you deserve.

There is an apocryphal story of the man on the Clapham omnibus being asked if he would vote for a politician being accused of corruption. "Of course", said the man, "if he can't look after himself, how can I expect him to look after me?"

The Tories may be corrupt, but at least they can look after themselves.

The world seems so loopy. But at least someone's written a memory-safe sudo in Rust

Re: Explain

Why are you so keen on pushing the merits of a fifty year old computer from a company that ceased to exist over twenty years ago? This obsessive equine flagellation flagrantly promoting obsolete obscurities lacks relevance to the topics at hand.

Criminals go full Viking on CloudNordic, wipe all servers and customer data

Re: Where are the backups? @AC re:"still writable"

"...the TSM server is the only one that can manipulate the tapes,"

Ever had to deal with a TSM server with a misaligned head that decided to develop another fault?

Google launches $99 a night Hotel Mountain View for hybrid workers

Re: I spy a business opportunity

Security guards on minimum wages are not always as conscientious as their employers might wish.

Cops cuff pregnant woman for carjacking after facial recog gets it wrong, again

"No reason to assume she was a criminal." If you believe that a stranger is simply someone you haven't met yet, then you are right, she is innocent until proven guilty and all that. If, however, you believe a stranger is a threat, and many people including police training officers do, then you get guilt by association laws and a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.

Some US states have guilt by association laws. If a person (even a heavily pregnant person) handled a mobile phone in that turned out to have been stolen (handing it in is still handling it), that is sufficient to allow her to be associated with the original crime.

SEC lawsuit against Terraform Labs and cofounder Do Kwon lives to fight another day

huh?

The US cigarette and tobacco industry revenue in 2022 was $52bn. (https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/market-size/cigarette-tobacco-manufacturing-united-states/).This one single crypto company lost $42 billion all on its own. For a judge to say it can not be compared in importance is ridiculous!

Now Apple takes a bite out of encryption-bypassing 'spy clause' in UK internet law

Re: "Strong" encryption?

Strong encryption is any encryption where the cost in money/time/effort to crack exceeds the value of the information retrieved.

Since the value of the information being protected is variable, the relative strength of the encryption used is also variable. ROT-13 is strong enough to protect my Christmas present shopping list from my children's prying eyes this year, but might not be strong enough next year.