Posts by I am the liquor

The 12 KB that Windows just can't seem to quit

Including the 1-bit black-and-white versions, nice.

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."

Every challenge is an opportunity

1. Use AI to create a fake company full of fake employees and fake IP.

2. Recruit as many of these norks as you can get.

3. Exploit their high quality work and reasonable wage demands on carefully siloed tasks.

4. Profit.

DARPA to 'radically' rev up mathematics research. Yes, with AI

Re: Maths

If it is an AI generated comment, then they've really improved the quality of their hallucinations.

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

How about "The Worst Wing" or "The West Wingding"

Uncle Sam kills funding for CVE program. Yes, that CVE program

Re: Reasoning

"Reasoning." Hilarious. Well done.

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

I love the poorly educated

...he said back in 2016.

Tech tariff turmoil continues as Trump admin exempts some electronics, then promises to bring taxes back

Re: Lester. Sadly missed

Look how many comments have exactly one downvote on US politics-related articles lately. Someone has too much time on their hands and a fetish for pissing into the wind.

China ups tariffs on US goods to 125%, calls Trump's war a 'joke'

Re: Who has the biggest hands

Comically, the US gov is framing this as a "Clarification of Exceptions", like it's our fault for failing to understand that this was what they meant in the first place, and it's definitely not the case that Mango Mussolini's making it all up as he goes along.

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

Re: How to hunt predators

If we could arrange for the AI to identify people who are likely to be either victims or murderers, but not tell us which, we'd have a very convenient source of narrative tension for when we turn the whole undertaking into a probably quite good TV show.

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.

My worry is that he turns out to be smarter than Trump, or at least more diligent. Imagine how much more damage Trump could be doing if he were intelligent, as well as evil. My god, imagine if he were intelligent, evil, and not constantly distracted by golf.

Privacy died last century, the only way to go is off-grid

The screen size on a paper map is spectacular.

At current rates of progress, it'll probably be at least another 5 years before the average smartphone has a 48" screen.

Signalgate storm intensifies as journalist releases full secret Houthi airstrike chat

Re: They're already

"Not to be used by anyone working at the DoD"?

I guess Hegseth's in the clear on that one.

Copilot+ PCs? Customers just aren't buying it – yet

Re: Black Mirror

Bollocks to Screenwipe, I want a new series of Nathan Barley. I'm imagining he'd be Secretary of Commerce in the Trump administration or something.

Feature phones all the rage as parents try to shield kids from harm

Re: there's dumb and then there's dumb

It appears that 4G uses more power than 2G... comparing the 2G and 4G versions of the Nokia 105, the newer one gets 20% less talk time from a 45% higher capacity battery.

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.

Garmin

Meanwhile, Garmin are still shipping devices with mini-USB, at least 10 years after everyone else switched to micro- or -C. With the impending EU rule I'm guessing these are not ones that charge over the USB cable, but still, come on Garmin.

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.

Upvoted for the link to the plug and socket museum, exactly the sort of thing there should be more of on the internet.

Re: What next?

Given the size of a USB-C connector, I have to say I'm surprised to hear you can pump 10 amps through one.

Re: What next?

Not sure I'd want to use USB-C to charge my power tool batteries. The manufacturer's charger is the cheapest part of the whole system, and has a fan to blow cooling air through the battery, without which they would take much longer to charge safely.

'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

Re: She'll fit right in

Let me get this straight... voting against the less crap party will make them better?

How long do you have to keep voting for the crappier party, before the less crappy one becomes good? More than 14 years, presumably.

Re: She'll fit right in

You could say about most new governments that they only got voted in to get rid of the previous shambles.

BBC weather glitch shows 13k mph winds in London, 404℃ in Nottingham

Re: Severe Weather Changes

More likely the opposite - commie BBC said it was going to be 400°C, but it was only 15, same as yesterday! No such thing as gullible worming.

Linus Torvalds declares war on the passive voice

Re: I'm British...

I would strike the scoundrel sharply on the pate with my cane.

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

Re: If you want the truth...

Sounds like an easy choice. Vote for the one who's not a threat to democracy. At least you'll have the option to vote for someone you like better next time.

Feds urge 3D printing industry to end DIY machine guns

Re: Dubious Conversions

Perhaps they believe this approach can work, but more likely, they think this approach can give sufficient appearance of "doing something" to mollify one group of voters, while not doing so much as to upset another.

If every PC is going to be an AI PC, they better be as good at all the things trad PCs can do

Never understood why you'd want to use a curved TV to watch something that was recorded on a flat piece of film (or sensor).

The amber glow of bork illuminates Brighton Station

Re: Addr = 67 (43h)

Yes, makes sense.

I think the line that starts with "SYNC" is telling us that no trains have been on time at this platform since 1 August 1920.

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.

Re: Opinions are like arseholes…

Opinions are like noses: everyone has one, but given the choice, you'll always pick your own.

Rocket Factory Augsburg breaks down the SaxaVord blowout

Re: "Enjoy the footage"

Unlike your auditors, nature cannot be fooled.

UK tech pioneer Mike Lynch dead at 59

Re: RE: arranged

If I were a member of a "takeout team" who'd murdered someone by running them over on a country road, I'd probably leave the scene, rather than stopping and waiting for the police to arrive.