Posts by I am the liquor

Why the UK public sector still creaks along on COBOL

Re: 'Legacy' does not = 'obsolete' or 'bad'

Until eventually, the one remaining 105-year-old COBOL programmer owns 50% of the government IT budget.

The tiny tech tribe who could change the world tomorrow but won't

Re: One more request

Windows 11 has a setting under Accessibility>Visual effects>Always show scrollbars, which is somewhat effective. MS Word ignores it, obviously, because it's MS Word, but some other applications are better with that setting enabled.

UK uncovers novel Microsoft snooping malware, blames and sanctions GRU cyberspies

Re: send this butcher to meet his inner Prigozhin

Not really, no. I mean you might be right - when Putin goes, there might be an almighty free-for-all, or worse. What I'm saying is, even if there is a relatively orderly transition, the uncontested nature of Putin's personal power will not automatically carry over to the successor. The successor will need to transact with other factions to secure their support. Putin can do what he likes, even if the oligarchs think it's a bad idea. I don't think the successor will have the same freedom. They will have to be the "guy we can do business with" for a while, just like Putin was when he first came to power.

UK to ban ransomware payments by public sector organizations

Re: About time too!

I think there are mechanisms that companies could use, like Articles of Association/corporate charters. There are things that even boards and CEOs can't do, without a public vote of the shareholders at the AGM.

Re: About time too!

Conceivably, they might be able to get money for it from somewhere else. Like being paid by a hostile government, or a competitor of the company being attacked. But for sure, putting M&S offline for a couple of months is a worth a lot more money to M&S than to Kim Jong Un or John Lewis.

Re: About time too!

If someone can prove that you can make yourself less of a target by preemptively committing to not pay ransoms, then laws might be unnecessary. It seems like it could work. The recent attacks all seem to be targeted and bespoke to some degree, not like the old ransomware worms that were completely indiscriminate; there is some effort involved on the part of the attacker. In the absence of any possibility of being paid a ransom, the question will be whether any other revenue streams could justify that effort.

NCA arrests four in connection with UK retail ransomware attacks

Despite being, as you say, "not smart", they still managed to do hundreds of millions of pounds of damage to multiple large companies. That is something of a worry.

Re: How is this sort of thing possible?

This is still a better place to live than Albania, that's something I guess.

Former reality TV star appointed NASA interim administrator

Camacho

And he stepped down at the end of his term!

UK Online Safety Act 'not up to scratch' on misinformation, warn MPs

It died down when the courts rapidly made examples of those arrested, and thousands of counter-protesters started turning out to face down hundreds of rioters.

Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson backs plan to do a Jurassic Park on extinct birds

Colossal Cave Adventure was the game, though apparently Colossal Cavern was the unimaginative name of a real cave that partly inspired it. Presumably named as such because Big Hole was already taken.

How to trick ChatGPT into revealing Windows keys? I give up

Yes, quite. The researchers found a way to obfuscate their prompt so that it would still elicit the desired response from the LLM, but the "guardrails" would no longer recognise it.

Post Office and Fujitsu execs 'should have known' Horizon IT system was flawed

Re: *Which* individuals?

Even if the guilty parties have managed to burn their earlier paper trails, they surely cannot claim ignorance after the problems were made public by Computer Weekly in 2009. Prosecutions continued for 6 years after it was public knowledge that there were problems with Horizon.

Scholars sneaking phrases into papers to fool AI reviewers

Re: Old tricks

The first thing I thought on reading this was I need to update the PDF version of my CV.

Exif marks the spot as fresh version of PNG image standard arrives

If the "P" is "Portable", then surely "pong". Or "porng".

Frozen foods supermarket chain deploys facial recognition tech

Another recent case involving Home Bargains, this unfortunate person accused of stealing toilet rolls: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdr510p7kymo

And another from last month: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-69055945

The latter story mentions Budgens, Sports Direct and Costcutter as other users of Facewatch.

Top AI models - even American ones - parrot Chinese propaganda, report finds

Re: @I am the liquor - Well that's depressing

Of course they don't really care about the plight of the downtrodden Scots. It's just something they think would destabilise or weaken the "old fox".

By the way the UK Defence Journal did not do the research, they've just summarised it in a short article. There is a link in the article to the paper by the Clemson University media forensics group.

Re: Well that's depressing

I should add... if that isn't the case already. Here's an interesting article:

https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/dozens-of-pro-indy-accounts-go-dark-after-israeli-strikes/

The Iranian internet blackout following the recent Israeli bombing revealed that 4% of the twitter discussion on Scottish independence was directly contributed by the Iranian Republican Guard. Scottish independence is a very minor sideshow in terms of global politics, and the IRGC is surely far from the biggest player in the game, so online debate is quite possibly mostly bots and troll farms already.

Well that's depressing

I guess pretty soon the vast majority of AI compute and internet bandwidth will be consumed by various political groups seeking to skew the training data for the next generation of LLMs their way, by sheer volume of propaganda.

Gridlocked: AI's power needs could short-circuit US infrastructure

123 jiggawatts

123GW certainly sounds like a lot, and I wondered how it compares to the US' overall industrial energy usage. So I tried the US Energy Information Administration. It turns out they think a sensible unit to measure such things is quadrillions of BTU. At that point I lost interest in my own question.

(When I regained the will to live, I worked out it's the equivalent of 100 million typical US homes.)

UK to buy nuclear-capable F-35As that can't be refueled from RAF tankers

Re: Decoupling Europes Military from the US should not entail becoming a client of the US

No doubt they'll attack Donna Nook and Holbeach on a regular basis.

Re: Decoupling Europes Military from the US should not entail becoming a client of the US

These jets will never attack anything further away than Cape Wrath, and they have adequate range for that.

A dozen Typhoons would be useless to an F-35 OCU. Pilots have to be trained, and that requires aircraft.

I think the RAF's view is that what weapons they can carry, and how they could be refuelled, are immaterial, because these planes will never leave the OCU. They're being bought purely to save money for the training unit - cheaper to buy, fewer maintenance hours - and will never expect to face anything other than a simulated enemy. The "nuclear-capable" bit is just for political consumption.

Supply chain attacks surge with orgs 'flying blind' about dependencies

Not to worry, just send out a 5-page questionnaire to all your suppliers, that should fix it.

Amazon's Ring can now use AI to 'learn the routines of your residence'

Re: AWS Police

Not entirely convinced that a country being awash with guns is the best possible recipe for a safe and peaceful society.

WD escapes half a billion in patent damages as judge trims award to $1

Re: $500 million to 1 ?

The issues you describe show that there is such a thing as too much democracy. Directly elected judges, and relying on lay juries to set damages both fall into that category I think.

Breaking the nerd internet: Three overlapping generations of tech history – in one selfie

Re: Revised badge rules

I don't think banning is a reliable solution, given it's easy to just sign up again with a new throwaway email address, and perhaps Tor if the Reg blocks IPs. Better I think to let them keep their identity, but don't give them the veneer of respectability that comes from the coveted silver badge, when almost everything they post gets 10x as many downvotes as upvotes.

It would be some improvement to change the rule for the silver badge to require a net 2000 upvotes, with each downvote subtracting 1 from the total.

A while ago I did post a suggestion here that maybe there should be some revised badge rules for these blatant shitposters. No idea if anyone even sees the old discussion forums any more, even though they still work... I can't see any way to navigate to them from the main site.

Experts count staggering costs incurred by UK retail amid cyberattack hell

Re: Rate my breach

Exemption? Perhaps you misread Blazde's original post. There was never any claim that anyone is exempt from business rates. The actual point was the unfairness of a system that ties business taxes to property rental values. If you're selling over a counter, you need to put that counter where the customers are, and that's where rents and therefore business rates are highest. If you're shipping parcels, you're free to go where the rent is cheaper, so you'll get lower business rates. Undeniably, the system gives a disadvantage to business models that involve selling face-to-face in a high street shop.

Re: Rate my breach

The e-commerce firms don't avoid them entirely, they just pay a lot less. Business rates are based on the rental value of property, so a business based on warehouses in the middle of nowhere is bound to have an easier ride than one based on high street shops.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55971003

The AIpocalypse is here for websites as search referrals plunge

Re: Skip "AI" results in firefox

I think you coined the new idiom for what LLMs do. "Hallucination" never seemed like an accurate description, and "confabulation" is too esoteric; "spinning a yam" is nonsensical to the perfect degree.

European consumers are mostly saying 'non' to trading in their old phones

Re: Phone, meet Drill

Perhaps the downvoters favour thermite.

As they're now decommissioning their branch and ATM networks.

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?

That feature was removed in 2016, and then added back in the last couple of months.

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

They did just put tab groups back again very recently, after removing it 9 years ago.

Re: OK, but what now?

Presumably that question will be answered when El Reg publishes the missing second half of the article.

Peep show: 40K IoT cameras worldwide stream secrets to anyone with a browser

Re: It all wears rather thin

Chinese government back doors are rather academic when the front door is left standing open.

BT won't budge over pay hike for manager grade employees

Re: Management is not a specialist skill.

One of the things Fred Brooks advocated in The Mythical Man Month was parallel technical and managerial career ladders, with equivalent rungs being equal in terms of prestige and compensation. Like most of the conclusions in that book, still relevant 50 years later and still just as widely ignored by almost all companies.

Chap claims Atari 2600 'absolutely wrecked' ChatGPT at chess

Re: Slippery Slope

A strange game.

KDE targets Windows 10 'exiles' claiming 'your computer is toast'

Re: Alarmist?

Quite the contrast with the Windows world, where you know it's always Microsoft who'll be responsible for ignoring your bug report.

Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options

Re: Get out your copy of Petzold

PopPad!

https://github.com/yeokm1/programming-win31/tree/master

The version in Chapter 15 is probably the ultimate one.

American science put on starvation diet

Re: two-for-one with quantum computers

Well, you still only get one, but it sort of behaves like you got two as long as you don't look at it.

Mysterious leaker GangExposed outs Conti kingpins in massive ransomware data dump

Re: GangExposed

Disgruntled insider seems very plausible. Would explain why they're not interested in making themselves known to the US government to collect the $10m bounty.

Cybercrime is 'orders of magnitude' larger than state-backed ops, says ex-White House advisor

Re: simplez

A lot of people in an organisation will be involved in dealing with a ransomware attack, and most of them are not paid enough to be an accomplice to a felony. It would be tough to keep it quiet.

Virgin Media O2 patches hole that let callers snoop on your coordinates

Daniel Williams does indeed say 100 square metres:

"...dense urban areas will make use of very many sites (such as small cells, which are often fitted directly to streetlamps) with small coverage areas. Each site in these areas can often cover areas as small as 100m2.

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

Re: I have thoughts. And das Keyboard.

On the IBM buckling spring keyboards, the spring is a pretty significant part of the noise, as is the key "topping out" when you lift your finger off it.

Numeric keypad

Isn't it the phone keypad that's upside down? Phones have 0 after 9 because of how electromechanical phone exchanges worked a hundred years ago, when zero really meant 10.

Numeric keypads are still common on larger laptops that have the space to accommodate them, and personally I still find it useful. (I find the "innovative" placement of insert/delete/home/end/PigUp/PigDn on most laptops more of a frustration.)

Conversely, there is a reasonable choice of desktop keyboards without it. Even a Unicomp Model M!

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