Posts by MJB7

Deepfake hiccup unmasks suspected digital certificate fraudster

Re: eIDAS

I don't understand. A national ID number is an excellent identifier. It uniquely identifies (names) one particular person. What you can't (safely) do, is use it as a secret, knowledge of which proves you are the person in question.

Linus Torvalds says AI has made 'huge' Linux kernel updates the new normal

Re: Could Noobie devs using AI help contribute?

I strongly disagree with your talented manager. Managing people is an entirely different skill to writing software (or writing documentation, or testing). An effective manager must have some idea of what each of their subordinates does, but they absolutely don't need to be able to do the job as well.

How well this carries over to AI is an entirely different question. An effective manager is not going to be reviewing the changes their subordinates make, line by line but an AI user _absolutely_ needs to be doing that.

Brit Scattered Spider duo handed tickets to prison over Transport for London attack

Re: Sentence != time spent in prison

Sorry. It's the first para which is in error, not the subheading.

Sentence != time spent in prison

The sub-heading claims they will spent five-and-a-half years in prison. The article says they were sentenced to five-and-a-half years. These are not the same thing at all. As they were sentenced to more than four years, they will automatically be released after they have served 40% or 50% of their sentence. (Whether it is 40% or 50% depends on what offence they were sentenced for, and I could be bothered to research that.)

They can be kept in prison for longer for extremely bad behaviour, but I bet they aren't.

Prominent Haskell defector pilloried by anti-AI purists

Re: Speed obsession

"Proper spec"

I have worked with people who were writing safety critical software for diesel engine controllers (for big lorries). They did the "spec, design, test spec, pseudo-code, code, test" cycle. It was very slow and expensive, and it most certainly didn't work first time. It was closer to working first time, and it had fewer latent bugs - but for most development, a faster cycle where you get to discover the spec is wrong is a better idea.

Cerebras risked it all on dinner plate-sized AI accelerators a decade ago. Today it's worth $66B

Maxim 29

The last sentence: go off and read https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-03-08

Icon? Maxim 36: "There is no 'overkill.' There is only 'open fire' and 'I need to reload."

Windows Update is a torture chamber for seldom-used PCs

Re: W10 - W11

"Assuming it is properly managed" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Your approach seems almost entirely sensible, but I bet a lot of places just decide "we'll force an update on this group at this time".

Your approach does need users to read emails from IT, and then think about what they will be doing - which may be asking a lot from them.

One improvement would be to allow them to defer the update by up to 24 hours (to allow for an emergency customer visit).

Your next car might need 300 GB of RAM, and so will autonomous robots

Re: New cars, I've seen them

We test drove an id5 and hated it. Our Kia EV3 is lovely though. It would be even better if it didn't have so many beeps you can't switch off, but that's regulations, not the manufacturer's fault

Users fume at Outlook.com email 'carnage'

Re: Payslips

Sending payslips to a corporate email account doesn't work well for the payslips from your three months gardening leave after you have resigned and been blocked from corporate email. It's also not great for looking back at your payslips from six years ago.

Harvard boffins finally crack the mystery of squeaky sneakers

Final year projects aren't usually led by a postdoctoral researcher (which this was).

Icon: TFA is a report about actual boffinry!

Attackers have 16-digit card numbers, expiry dates, but not names. Now org gets £500k fine

Re: I wonder

I don't think sunk cost fallacy applies here. It would be economically rational to spend £499,999 more to avoid a £500,000 fine. All the previous costs are sunk, and while they might regret spending them, the question is "how much to spend now?".

Actually it's more like "rational to spend £249k for a 50% chance of avoiding a £500k fine", and I suspect an appeal to the Supreme Court would cost more than that.

You probably can't trust your password manager if it's compromised

Re: Blurry lines

"Never" is too strong. I don't actually care if somebody manages to find my ElReg password.

Re: No servers

That works fine if you have one device you want to access your passwords on. I can think of several devices I need my passwords on:

• My personal laptop
• My phone
• My partner's laptop
• My work computer (where I am typing this, and where I had to enter my el-reg password
• Our streaming computer (for driving the telly)

And that doesn't include "a random internet cafe computer if our home burns down". I don't fancy the complexity of backing up a password database across multiple devices.

Market for gear that stops GPUs losing their cool is red hot as Trane gulps down LiquidStack

Wisdom

Remember, the people who make money in a gold-rush are the ones selling shovels. Given that we seem to have reached the limits of increasing MIPS per watt just by making stuff smaller, any increase in compute power is going to be associated with an increase in waste heat. When the AI bubble bursts, people are still going to want compute power, for something. I suppose eventually we will reach a point when we have all the compute power we can use - but I don't expect it in the next 50 years.

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

Re: A counter-example?

Yeah, we use containers to provide defence-in-depth. It's not perfect, but it's a bit more than a speed-bump for an attacker.

Study confirms experience beats youthful enthusiasm

Re: Gender?

Yes, you have missed the point. The point is that having a mixed team (mixed across all variables) is actively better than have a homogenous team. A team that comes at a problem from a variety of different backgrounds is more likely to find a good solution than a team which is entirely homogenous.

DIY AI bot farm OpenClaw is a security 'dumpster fire'

Re: Scaling recipes

Actually, scaling recipes properly is a bit of an art; it's not just "halve the quantities of everything". To start with, you probably need a bit more liquid than that would suggest, because there will be proportionately more evaporation during cooking. Then there's the problem that popped up on my bluesky feed recently - a recipe that called for "three quarters of an egg".

A tool that can deal with all these issues could have some minor utility.

Icon: Cooking is just applied chemistry.

For once, Supermicro has dodged drama and just delivered datacenters

Word salad

"GPU-based systems used for AI applications delivered 84 percent of Q2 revenue, up up 151 percent year-over-year, and accounted for 90 percent of revenue."

Why the doubled "up"? More to the point, was it 84% of revenue or 90% of revenue?

NS&I's IT car crash considers cutting legacy links to stop the bleeding

Licence

The rule is "c" for the noun, "s" for the verb. The mnemonic I learnt is "advice" vs "advise", and it's easy to distinguish those two because the pronunciation is different.

Trump says he got a deal for rare earths in Greenland, but they won't come easy

Re: Rare earth buffet party pack

Thank you, I'm right-pondian but have been in Germany for ten years and completely missed that reference!

Broker who sold malware to the FBI set for sentencing

Re: EDR

You have no privacy when using a corporate device these days in the USA

FTFY. Some of us live in civilized countries with moderately effective privacy laws. (Having citizens that can remember the Stasi and the Gestapo helps.)

Moon hotel startup hopes you get lunar lunacy, drop $1M deposit for 2032 stay

Re: Alternatively ...

August is one of the least likely months to get any meltwater - it's the middle of winter.

The real difference between the moon and the dry valleys is that you can survive outside for tens of minutes without any protective equipment at all in the latter

The Y2K bug delayed my honeymoon … by 17 years!

Re: Y2K Was a nothingburger, Y2.1K is The Big One

Any grandchildren I have might still be working in Y2.1K, great-grand children certainly will be. Great-great-grandchildren will probably still be at school. I suppose you might get to great-great- if you were older than me, and your children reproduced faster,

The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

Old tech

When I first joined my present employer (I got five years off for good behaviour), it was a Cambridge startup but had already been going more than a decade. It's still in active development, but now some of the current code is older than some of the people developing it (one person found a commit made on the day they were born).

Imagine there's no AI. It's easy if you try

Re: Structural battery composites

" for a successfull crossover from oil to electrical you NEEDED to be able to change the battery and keep going in no longer than it takes to fill at a station."

[citation needed]

We've just switched from a diesel to electric car. At the beginning of December we drove from southern Germany to London. It took about three charges (one of which was overnight). Each of the charges took quite a lot longer than filling a tank - but it didn't make the journey noticeably longer. For day to day usage we just charge at home (not an option if you don't have your own garage I accept).

Starlink satellite fails, polluting orbit with debris and falling toward Earth

Re: Dilbert's pointy-haired boss?

Unless it was a battery that ruptured because the software commanded something which shorted it out. Or it was a tank with a heater that the software boiled dry. Or it ruptured because the software started shaking the bird at something's resonant frequency. Lots of ways for software could cause the problem.

And don't get me started on the ways that software gets asked to fix up problems in the hardware. (Yes, I've been an embedded programmer. How did you guess?)

Space-power startup claims it can beam energy to solar farms

Euro, UK, or US plug

When you say "Euro", do you mean French, German, Swiss, or Italian? (They are all different, and those are just the ones I know about.)

Re: Useless - no more lecce car mandates

Um, maybe. Quite a lot of people are starting to buy electric cars because they are cheaper to run (if you can charge at home). Also they don't fall foul of low emission zones.

... and BYD etc are going to make them even more attractive.

700+ self-hosted Gits battered in 0-day attacks with no fix imminent

Re: "700+ self-hosted Gits"

You know the author of git is on record as describing himself as egotistical, which is why he names software after himself: linux and git.

BOFH: Forward-facing AI brand experience meets forward-facing combustion risk management

Re: Be prepared!

Have you tried looking in Switzerland? There are an awful lot of them there. Some are even in uniform.

AWS builds a DNS backstop to allow changes when its notoriously flaky US East region wobbles

Testing?

I don't see how you can properly test this until us-east-1 throws a wobbly. It's a worthy effort, but I won't get really excited until it is seen to work.

Ubuntu 25.10's Rusty sudo holes quickly welded shut

Comparing CVE rates

> sudo-rs has 5 low severity CVEs in it's entire 2.5 year history: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord/SearchResults?query=sudo-rs

> During that time alone 3 high severity CVEs have been announced in the original sudo

That is the important metric. If sudo-rs has fewer bugs than sudo, then it's worthwhile. I had honestly not expected that result though; I had expected that old code like sudo would have had most of the bugs flushed out by now.

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

Switzerland _was_ quite expensive?

I live in Germany near the Swiss border. Roaming in Switzerland is still quite expensive (for calls). I pay €1.49 per minute for outgoing calls to Germany and €0,69 for incoming calls. Data is included on my contract though. Fortunately I mostly use Signal/WhatsApp when I talk to people.

Handily my mobile provider still thinks the UK is part of the EU, so I get free calls, and more data than I can use when I go back.

Chinese gang used ArcGIS as a backdoor for a year – and no one noticed

Re: Pots and kettles

It's called "freedom of speech". ElReg doesn't have the resources to investigate every account to see if they are a shill account or not, so they let them all stand. They _will_ remove accounts that expose them to legal risk, but this one doesn't.

Square Kilometre Array is so sensitive, its datacenter needs two Faraday cages to stop RF leaks

Re: Are they are two separate cages?

Phones, watches, other electronic devices? I expect there will be a ban on bringing powered-on electronics to the site (unless suitably shielded). I'm not sure that EVs are going to be worse than spark-ignited engines (petrol), but compression-ignition (diesel) should be better. I think the main defence against lookie-loos is the "800km from Perth" - that 500 miles is not uninhabited, but there isn't a lot there either.

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

Re: My NTP-AD default...

> South-western Germany, (not Bavaria)

Waves from Baden-Württemburg (specifically Südbaden - plenty of people here still bitter about the merger)

Torvalds blasts tardy kernel dev: Your 'garbage' RISC-V patches are 'making the world worse'

Re: "at least he didn't drop the F-bomb"

He's a Finn, however his mother tongue is not Finish. It's Swedish.

And he can probably swear in three languages.

'Elevated' moisture reading ignored before Heathrow-closing conflagration, says NESO

Re: Broken Britain

The nationalized period includes about 26 years before the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. That Act may have lead to an awful lot of "Health and Safety gone mad" stories - but it also led to a dramatic drop in the number of deaths and injuries from accidents. I'd like to see a graph of "death rate vs time", and I would not be surprised to see an uptick after 31 January 1995. The trouble of course is that railway deaths tend to be very "lumpy", so it's hard to see a signal in amongst the random noise.

Cosmoe: New C++ toolkit for building native Wayland apps

112 lines?

That's not small, that's microscopic (unless each one is 1MB long - but each #included header file has to go on it's own line...)

Wolfspeed to file for Chapter 11 in deal cutting 70% of debt

Re: Utterly criminal

I don't see how ordinary people's lives will be ruined at all. It appears that the big lenders will convert their loans into equity, so will win big if WolfSpeed eventually becomes profitable, or will lose if it eventually folds (more likely). The big lenders should be big enough to make their own decisions about whether the risks of lending $1B are worth the rewards. Small creditors (the small firm that cleans the offices, the stationery supplier, etc) will continue to get paid. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some redundancies, but that's always a risk, particularly when you work for a hi-tech company.

As to "no company should be allowed to exist to the point of a billion in debt and unable to pay", that's pretty much already the law - if the directors believe the company will be unable to meet their obligations as they fall due, the company is insolvent and must be wound up. That is true if the company is $1B in debt, or $1 in debt. If you mean, no company should be allowed to go $1B in debt, remember that $1B is pretty much table-stakes if you want to build a semiconductor fab.

LastOS slaps neon paint on Linux Mint and dares you to run Photoshop

Re: When will we stop trying to get Windows?

"Surely the only people who switch to Linux are those that actually want to?"

Or are switched by their children. I am seriously considering switching my mother (94) over to a Linux distro. She needs Chrome, and access to Whatsapp - and that's probably all. It needs a very, very, Windows-like UI. Different system calls are entirely irrelevant.

Krebs throws himself on the grenade, resigns from SentinelOne after Trump revokes clearances

Re: Be consistent in your lying :)

I am pretty sure that because Congress certified the election results, Biden was president, even if the election results were false (spoiler: they weren't).

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

Re: Customizations

No, no, no. en.gb-oxendict ftw!

(It's a horrible word, but when I need it, it's spelt "colourize".)

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

Re: The only verified backup is one that you have restored from

Nonsense. If you want proper long-term archival material, the only choice is baked clay tablets ... and we can still read them 5000 years later. (Shame it's mostly tax records)

How Windows got to version 3 – an illustrated history

Re: Brilliant!

"Cut and paste" don't come from paper tape (though patching may do). They come from graphical layout where pictures and typed text were "cut" (with scissors) and "pasted" (with glue) into a layout before reproduction. ("copy" was a quite a _lot_ more difficult in those days).

Blue Origin postpones New Glenn's maiden flight to January 12

Upvoting the accurate information - not the delay :-(

Brackets go there? Oops. That’s not where I used them and now things are broken

Re: Any system...

EVERY system has a TEST environment. Some people are lucky enough to have the luxury of a separate production environment too.

Judge hands WP Engine a win in legal fight with Automattic

Re: WPEngine 'likely to prevail'...

My guess is that his lawyers _have_ been telling him this all along ... but he doesn't want to listen.

SBF's right-hand woman praised for testimony – and jailed for two years

Re: Sneaking suspicion...

I don't think that is fair. It was in reply to "hers [sic] being the prettiest she got off lightly" - now that you can apply your rule to.