Including the 1-bit black-and-white versions, nice.
Posts by I am the liquor
526 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Oct 2013
The 12 KB that Windows just can't seem to quit
I didn't see it directly linked in the article, but Raymond provides a gallery of the icons here:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250507-00/?p=111157
British govt agents step in as Harrods becomes third mega retailer under cyberattack
Re: We can't continue to regard these simply as "IT Problems"
It's possible - though not necessarily easy - to quantify this sort of thing in a way that the bean counters can understand.
First, how likely are we to be on the receiving end of a successful cyber attack? Let's say 5% of companies like us have been hit by cyber attacks in the last year. That means there's a 5% probability that we will be a victim in the next year.
What's the impact if we are? Let's say, for the sake of argument, we expect the loss of business, loss of reputation and recovery costs will total $100m.
Thus in an average year, we lose $5m to cyber attacks. That immediately sets a ballpark for the kind of money it would be reasonable to spend on defence.
Suppose the "enhanced monitoring" option reduces the likelihood of a successful attack in any given year from 5% to 4.9%. That's saving you $100k/year. Does the enhanced monitoring option cost less than $100k/year?
Of course coming up with the numbers to put into this calculation is a challenge. Though it becomes easier if you treat them probabilistically rather than trying to nail down a specific number.
The above is very much a broad-strokes illustration of the principle. If you're interested in this sort of thing, I recommend this book:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Measure-Anything-Cybersecurity-Risk/dp/1119892309
The one interview question that will protect you from North Korean fake workers
Re: Dumb Fratboy Stuff
It sounds like you're rather missing the point of the article. It's about North Korean state-sponsored cybercrime. The fatness of the supreme leader, while mentioned in one paragraph, is not the subject of the article. Really not clear how you get from The Register quoting something a VP from CrowdStrike said on a conference panel to "our entire government and its institutions have been taken over by a low grade tabloid."
DARPA to 'radically' rev up mathematics research. Yes, with AI
Bad trip coming for AI hype as humanity tools up to fight back
Re: Copyright is not IP
Yes, it's the sort of thing that gets you remembered, isn't it. After several hundred apparently sensible posts, suddenly UCAP is the one who thinks copyright isn't intellectual property. Everyone has a blind spot, I guess. But this blunder was a serious one - by no means a damp squid.
Today's LLMs craft exploits from patches at lightning speed
Re: Fast patching, and deployment anytime
Never on Friday. You don't want to be in at the weekend when it goes wrong, do you? Safest not to do anything of consequence on Friday. Except firing people, of course. Studies have statistically shown that there's less chance of an incident if you do it at the end of the week.
Trump blinks: 'Substantially' lower China tariffs promised
Uncle Sam kills funding for CVE program. Yes, that CVE program
Guess what happens when ransomware fiends find 'insurance' 'policy' in your files
Re: What people are willing to pay to avoid ...
Furthermore, it's probably only a matter of time before the malware folks start poisoning backups and delaying the encryption and ransomware demands for a week or two. What then Kemosabe?
That's been SOP since ransomware existed, I'm pretty sure. The only way backups help you is if you've been frequently testing them by restoring onto a system that isn't also infected with the ransomware, and verifying that the content of the files can still be read by whatever applications consume them. A fairly tall order.
US senator warns 'China is cheering' for proposed NASA budget cuts
Tech tariff turmoil continues as Trump admin exempts some electronics, then promises to bring taxes back
China ups tariffs on US goods to 125%, calls Trump's war a 'joke'
EU lands 25% counter tariff punch on US, Trump pauses broad import levy hike – China excepted
Re: I have to hand it to Trump...
When you look at the outcome, this idea does seem to hold water. The debate around the idiotic trade deficit formula seems to have been a pretty effective distraction, and now everyone breathes a sigh of relief because that bit of lunacy has been thrown in the bin. The EU backed off from retaliation, even though Trump has still doubled or trebled tariffs on imports from the EU.
The thing that gives me doubts about it is that I'm not convinced it fits with what we know about his psychology, his pathological narcissism. He's not a Boris Johnson, I just can't see him deliberately making himself look ridiculous as a distraction tactic. If there was always a plan to get to where we are now, I doubt that it was Donald's.
Re: Not out of the woods
Update: with the clarification from the White House that the tariff on Chinese goods is 20 percentage points higher than we thought, I now get an overall average tariff rate of 29% (would have been 33% at the start of the week). The highest tariffs the US has imposed on its imports since around 1900.
Not out of the woods
Let's think about what Trump's concession actually amounts to here.
- No change for Mexico or Canada.
- Increased tariff on goods from China.
- No change for most countries on the so-called "reciprocal" tariff list, who remain on 10%.
- A third of the countries and territories on the "reciprocal" tariff list get their tariffs reduced from various random numbers to 10%.
Before yesterday's change, the average tariff over all US goods imports was something around 30%. Now it's around 25%. Still at least 5 times higher than it's been for the last 4 decades, and the highest for a century.
If you're a Vietnamese exporter, a reduction from 46% to 10% probably seems like a great relief. If you're an American consumer or importer, things have hardly changed for you since last week. You're still paying historically gigantic tariffs on your imported goods. US stock markets are on the slide again this morning, so I guess Wall Street has started to see that.
UK officials insist 'murder prediction tool' algorithms purely abstract
Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs
"Reciprocal tariffs"
Article needs to be fixed. They are not "levies in response to other countries’ import duties." They are levies in response to other countries' trade surpluses with the US.
The main offence committed by most of the countries subject to the highest tariffs is being too poor to afford the sort of high-priced goods that are still manufactured in the US or Europe.
Privacy died last century, the only way to go is off-grid
Signalgate storm intensifies as journalist releases full secret Houthi airstrike chat
Copilot+ PCs? Customers just aren't buying it – yet
Feature phones all the rage as parents try to shield kids from harm
Want to feel old? Excel just entered its 40th year
Re: Spreadsheet Day
Spreadsheet Day? I'm guessing that's 29 February 1900, right?
UK ponders USB-C as common charging standard
Re: A waste of time and taxpayer money
Perhaps "demanded" was the wrong word. "Agreed that it's the obvious thing to do" would be better. The point is that the consultation is not to help make a decision, since the decision is obvious. It's to get collective buy-in in advance of the decision, so when the Daily Mail starts foaming at the mouth about following Brussels' rules, the government has an answer.
Re: A waste of time and taxpayer money
[i]But don't waste our tax money by pretending we're somehow able to make rules anyone will care about anymore.[/i]
I don't think that's what they're wasting money on pretending. Clearly no UK specific rules will come out of this. Everyone knows there's no reasonable discussion to be had and the answer will be USB-C. What the government would like to pretend is that they'll be doing it because industry and the public demanded it, not just because the EU already did it. That's the point of the consultation.
'Newport would look like Dubai' if guy could dumpster dive for lost Bitcoin drive
Re: Additional point.
He would only have made a taxable profit if he had sold the bitcoin, or intentionally given them away. I think even HMRC's lawyers would struggle to keep a straight face while arguing that accidentally throwing the wrong thing in the bin amounts to a deliberate transfer of the asset's value.
Keir Starmer hands ex-Darktrace boss investment minister gig
BBC weather glitch shows 13k mph winds in London, 404℃ in Nottingham
Linus Torvalds declares war on the passive voice
UK Regulatory Innovation Office vows to slash red tape – but we've heard it all before
Re: Tax land, not labor
Here's a question about unified treatment of all income. Would you include inheritance? I.e., get rid of inheritance tax as applied to estates, and instead treat what's received by the heirs as part of their income, taxing it at that point? It seems like this could encourage people to will their estates in a more egalitarian way, wider and more thinly, but maybe there are unintended consequences. You might still need to keep some allowances, like residence nil rate for a family home or business relief for a family business, so they wouldn't have to be chopped into tiny slices or taxed out of existence.
Re: Tax land, not labor
There are two separate things here: unified tax rates across all income, and a flat tax rate. It's the unified rates across all kinds of income that rewards people who work for a living at the expense of those living off assets. There can still be tiered bands. A flat tax rate rewards those with higher income at the expense of those with lower income.
'Hyperscale customer' to take massive datacenter site near London
That it didn't appear on OS maps is certainly a myth - here's an OS map from 1973 that clearly shows the Post Office Tower. But the Reg itself has claimed that it was designated an official secret.
Online media outstrips TV as source of news for the first time in the UK
Feds urge 3D printing industry to end DIY machine guns
If every PC is going to be an AI PC, they better be as good at all the things trad PCs can do
The amber glow of bork illuminates Brighton Station
AI firms propose 'personhood credentials' … to fight AI
Re: EFF
To be fair to the EFF, the paper itself does point out that the model would create a readily-abusable concentration of power in the PHC issuers, and the authors say they are "concerned about these dynamics"... but then just hand-wave it away by more-or-less saying the PHC issuers should try not to be naughty. They've come up with a model that strongly protects against abuse by the consumers of the PHCs, but provides no protection at all on the issuing side. It looks like they've only done half the job.
Microsoft decides it's a good time for bad UI to die
If I read the article correctly, the answer is... semiotics?
Maybe the author is giving us the answer, but the problem is we don't understand the question. It should be straightforward enough to build an artificial intelligence that can determine the question to this answer. I'll volunteer to work on the fjords.