Posts by AbeSapian

Congrats, cybercrims: You just fell into a honeypot

I Love It When A Plan Comes Together

"ShinyHunters said that it didn't fall into the honeypot – Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters did."

It was them! It was them! Not us! Them!

Dang. That's a lot of back peddling.

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

Structural battery composites

So instead of having the battery in a pack that can catch fire but give the occupants a chance to escape, you're placing the occupants in a shaped charge explosive device with no chance for escape.

On top of that, now when the battery wears out (and it will) you have to replace the entire car.

How about, instead of distributing the battery, they modularize the battery packs. Then instead of having to sit at a charging station, an automated device could swap the discharged batteries for a fresh, charged pack(s). This would make the process of recharging the battery fit in the same amount of time it takes to fill a tank of gas. This also has the advantage that the swapped out battery packs can be tested for their percent of power loss and packs that frail could be cycled back through the distributor for refurbishment. Cost of the battery swap could be determined by a combination of the relative difference in battery charge and battery wear.

Intel hires ex-Trump fixer as Washington whisperer

Fun to Watch

When they said it was Trump's fixer I was hoping it would be Michael Cohen. Now that would be fun to watch.

How do you solve a problem like Discovery?

Get a Broom

Why don't they just sweep up the remains of Columbia and reassemble it in Huston. It's already disassembled so it will be easier to ship.

OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

Beanie Babies

This, so called, AI has scam written all over it. Without some very substantive changes, particularly with respect to its veracity, LLM is going to collapse like Beanie Babies and take a lot of investors' money with it.

AI crawlers and fetchers are blowing up websites, with Meta and OpenAI the worst offenders

Cyber Attack

How long will it take for the LLM scraper and fetch bots to be reclassified as a cyber attack?

Bots are overwhelming websites with their hunger for AI data

Cyber Attack

At what point does AI scraping constitute a reporable cyber attack?

Willie Sutton

Since Google already scrapes everything under the sun, why don't the AI bots simply scrape Google. It would put an end to a lot of redundant behavior on the web.

When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton is said to have replied, "Because that's where the money is."

Ukraine strikes Russian bomber-maker with hack attack

Schadenfreude

Considering the amount of effort the Russians put into attacking other countries online sites, I can't say I feel the least bit sorry for them.

Elon Musk pukes over pork-filled budget bill with Tesla subsidies on the line

Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum Agree to Have a Battle

I hope the crew on the ISS have a way home while Dumb and Dumber get divorced.

Signalgate: Pentagon watchdog probes Defense Sec Hegseth

Fear Not

Fear not. The investigation will be quashed, buried, and the investigators punished. Welcome to TrumpLand: where alcoholism, drug use, cowardice, and sex offenses are qualifications for the job.

Someone is slipping a hidden backdoor into Juniper routers across the globe, activated by a magic packet

Re: If it is in memory

I've been saying for a while that, with China making all the chips, they could bake the malware right into the hardware.

DEF CON's hacker-in-chief faces fortune in medical bills after paralyzing neck injury

Re: And now, imagine this happens to a nobody

For average people, when health insurance fails, there's crippling debt. After GoFundMe, there's UNDOMedicalDebt.org where you can hope for help.

Welcome to wealthcare in America.

FCC net neutrality rules dead again as appeals court sides with Big Telco

SCOTUS

Let me guess where the Supremes are going to come down on this. I can hardly wait for some more of Alito's tortured logic on the issue.

Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he discovered rm -rf

Does Anyone Remember Xenix?

I didn't need a powerful command to destroy a system - just the OS and a little help from the office power.

A company I worked for put me on a project in which they decided that the user workstations would be X86 boxes running Xenix. I found out, one day, how fragile Xenix is as an operating system. One of the workstations in my test group lost power, Needless to say, it didn't shut down clean. When I started the box up again, the Xenix boot sequence began to analyze every file on the system. I watched in horror as, one by one, the files were analyzed and deleted - leaving me with an absolutely pristine hard drive that had to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Ah, those were the days.

Microsoft starts boiling the Copilot frog: It's not a soup you want to drink at any price

Shoe Event Horizon

This sounds very much like the shoe event horizon postulated in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In this case, it's recursive, redigested information being thrown at consumers in an endless loop burying them in utter nonsense. Eventually you can't filter past the garbage fast enough to prevent the total collapse of the system.

AT&T settles claims it misappropriated subsidies, with partial admission of guilt

Re: So the punishment for fraudulently reporting (so they make more money) is...

Welcome to the oligarchy. Feel free to sit anywhere.

Harvard duo hacks Meta Ray-Bans to dox strangers on sight in seconds

Already Doxed

Everything about me was dumped to the dark web by Equifax, and again by Experian. What more can they do to me?

NASA switches off Voyager 2 plasma instrument to stretch out juice

The Biggest Impediment to Interstellar Travel

The Voyager space craft for all their longevity and the terrific science they provided, also demonstrate the biggest impediment to interstellar travel - electrical power. Machines could be created to store and revive frozen genetic material to grow a colony on arrival to a new planet. But without the electrical power to operate the machines, the ship would arrive a a frozen block of ice with no means to animate the colonists or guide the ship.

The Voyager craft used radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) to generate electricity. These have lasted for 50 years but are running out of power - and the space craft have only just left the heliosphere. The RTGs are powered by fission. Packing additional fuel for the journey won't work because the stored fuel will decay just as fast as the fuel generating power.

Fusion isn't the answer either since it also requires a supply of fuel that would last the entire journey. Far too much to be able to carry. And solar cells won't work in interstellar space, too far from any sufficient light source.

Absent some form of warp or wormhole drive, humanity is stuck in our own solar system for a long time to come.

NASA, Boeing opt to fly leaky thruster as-is for first crewed Starliner CST-100 mission

Given Boeing's Recent History

Is this really a good idea? Don't take your helmet off guys.

Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

A Different Deterrent

Have they considered explosive manhole covers?

Palantir wins US Army contract for battlefield AI

They Did See Captain America: The Winter Soldier, right?

"Project Insight requires insight."

Elon Musk can't wriggle out of SEC Twitter fraud inquiry

I Feel For You ...

When a poor guy is investigated, he's stripped naked and his body cavities are probed.

When a rich guy is scrutinized, it's harassment.

I've suffered a critical failure in my empathizer compensator.

Tesla sues Swedish government after worker rebellion cripples car biz

Thank You Sweden

Thank you Sweden for slapping that spoiled brat, Musk, down. It's been long overdue.

Now maybe turn your attention to Jeff Bezos as well. He could use a good heart to heart.

Thank You

Thank you The Register for finally calling X what it really is -Musk's personal social media site.

Midjourney, DeviantArt face lawsuit over AI-made art

It Isn't Just Art

Not only is pictorial art being used to produce images "in the style of", but it's happening to music, novels, short stories, plays, screen plays, etc. It's the whole creative market. Besides streaming residuals, the actors' strike is about is their images being scanned to be used to generate performances without just compensation. Anyone that creates is at risk of having their body of work stolen and used without permission and compensation.

It's one thing when someone searches for an image to look at. It's quite another when they download it, tweak it, and upload it as their own work. That's what DMCA is all about. The entire movie industry exists because of intellectual property rights. All of that can be destroyed by unethical use of generative AI.

People have a right to profit from their work. What these generative AI products are doing amounts to theft.

TransUnion reckons big dump of stolen customer data came from someone else

Credit Locked Since 2017

Ever since Equifax dumped all my information on the dark web I've kept my credit locked. After that, all the other breaches have pretty much become redundant.

Cop warrant orders Ring to cough up footage from inside this guy's home

Time to Revise Their Corporate Structure

It looks like most of Ring's corporate structure can now be replaced by a bunch of tech savvy lawyers. I suspect all they'll be doing from now on is processing search warrants.

Ransomware crooks steal 3m+ patients' medical records, personal info

Equifax

Equifax donated my entire credit information and history to the dark web years ago (why are they still in business). I froze my credit then. Lately Experion decided to make their contribution to identity theft. Between the two of these monsters, what can a measly hospital do? It's to the point where it's hardly worth mentioning any more.

Scottish space upstart's rocket crashes into the drink

Points of Order

1) Maybe this was really planned as payback for all those Viking raids.

2) I thought most rocket launches took place near the equator to take advantage of gravity and the Earth's rotation. And ...

3) Using their glossy sales video when talking about their unplanned flight path was cold Reg - real cold.

Re: No such thing as failure

It's just a learning experience.

Weird robot breaks down in middle of House of Lords hearing on AI art

Ai-Da Will Not Pass The Turing Test

While Ai-Da will not pass the Turing Test, I found this presentation fascinating. Ai-Da is a crude tool. I say that not to denigrate the thousands of man-hours that went into her creation but because all tools start out that way.

What I found most interesting was the analogy of the camera that cropped up midway through the video. Some artists tried to throw their sabot at the camera to prove that it could never be used to create "ART". Others adopted the camera wholeheartedly to demonstrate that the new medium could be used to capture great drama and beauty in light and shadow. They were the ones that made photography into an art form of its own and proved the saboteurs wrong.

Ai-Da is a very early stage of AI. There are other forms of machine learning out there that are more sophisticated in their use of data analysis. However, they've also graphically demonstrated the age old computer science adage; Garbage In - Garbage Out. The question of "what is art" has been challenged again. I didn't see examples of Ai-Da's art. But I suspect most of the oxygen will be taken up with whether it's original or derivative.

Australian wasps threaten another passenger plane, with help from COVID-19

Clues

Have they considered the red flags that the Navy uses on jets for the arming pins that have to be removed before flight?

Paper batteries on the cards to power IoT and smart labels

Not to Rain on Their Parade

Didn't Alessandro Volta pretty much do the same thing in 1792?

Govt suggests Brits should hand passports to social media companies

Are They High?

Do they not read the news?

Beware the techie who takes things literally

Bad, Bad, Very Bad, Not Good

I'm not sure how it works in the UK but Frank would be in the Bog of Eternal Stench in the US. Retribution and restitution would be the order of the day. If I got the story right, Frank deleted everything. But the parts that Frank wrote belonged to the company. Frank might have been right to delete the shareware portion since the company didn't own that. But the portion that Frank wrote belonged to the company. Deleting that portion was a crime punishable both civilly and criminally.

Frank overstepped his authority.

Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'

Master / Slave

So instead of Master / Slave, we should use something like Leader / Prisoners With Jobs?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prz4jfSX_Qg

We have some sad news about Facebook. It has returned to the internet after six-hour mega outage

I love the Register

I love reading The Register because I always learn something - even if it's something I'll never use.

On a personal note: I was not even aware of the Facebook outage until I read this article. What does that tell you?

What can the 1944 OSS manual teach us before we all return to sabotage the office?

You Scared the CIA

Apparently your article scared the CIA because they pulled down the link to the PDF. I had to find it on another site with a google search.

After searching the CIA site a couple of times, I wonder who will be knocking on my door next.

They were not the cloud you were looking for, insists Amazon Web Services in unsealed JEDI protest

Garden of Earthly Delights

As a long time Microshaft user, I suspect the DoD will find that the demo (see Garden of Earthly Delights) will not match the delivered product (see Dante's Inferno). MS has a long history of ignoring product bugs that affect usability or performance.

One does not simply shove elephants on a ballet shoe point and call it an acceptable measure of pressure

Knickers

Well! Somebody has their knickers in a knot. Is there a Reg Standard Unit for that?

Biden projected to be the next US President, Microsoft joins rest of world in telling Trump: It looks like... you're fired

To The Editor

The name of the party is The Democratic Party. When referring to the party's nominee, the correct phrase is Democratic contender. Calling the nominee the Democrat contender is a right wing trope to denigrate the Democratic party.

In reference to the party one is the Democratic contender or Democratic nominee.

An individual may be referred to as a Democrat.

But if you wish, the Republicans may be referred to as:

republicans,

Repugnants,

Repubs,

Repugs,

or a$$ hats.

Feeling saucy? Microsoft would like you to use .NET 5.0 'go live' release in production to track down 'critical bugs'

Yet Another .Net

Is this yet another incompatible release of the .Net framework? MS doesn't seem to understand the concept of upward compatibility. How many tons of this crap do I have to carry around with me?

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

What's in a Name

My preferred handle is Microshaft.

"He Who Must Not Be Named" was taken. Besides, it's too wordy.

Land Where Ideas Go To Die

Not A Bug It's A Feature.

Smithfield for Software

There's a black hole lurking within 1,000 light years of Earth – and you can see stars circling it with the naked eye

No Planetary Nebula

I'm not an astronomer, but I think the lack of a planetary nebula suggests the black hole is very old. It's either been swallowed by the black hole, or the companion stars leaving nothing visible.

Re: Starman on his way...?

Now we know why Elon launched that Tesla. So Tom Cruise could have a cool car to save us from the black hole in.

Get in the lake, Sparky: Databricks touts new ingestion file sources

They Missed a Bet

Instead of data lakes, they should have called it Pensieve.

Good news, everyone: The US military says it will be ethically minded about how it develops AI

Success Stories Every One

Colossus: The Forbin Project

HAL 9000

Sky Net

I feel safer already. What could possibly go wrong?

Come on baby light me on fire: McDonald's to sell 'Quarter Pounder' scented candles

Which Is Worse

Which is worse, Goop Lab's vagina scented candle or a McDonald's Quarter Pounder scented candle.

We report, you decide.

Fed-up air safety bods ban A350 pilots from enjoying cockpit coffees

Fate is the Hunter

Apparently they've never seen the movie Fate is the Hunter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fate_Is_the_Hunter_(film)