Posts by MiguelC

Microsoft boffins figured out how to break LLM safety guardrails with one simple prompt

Re: AI's just want to be bad

Oh, FFS, AI's don't want anything! They have no will at all, they just exist (and even tis is stretching reality a bit)

Supermarket sorry after facial recognition alert flags right criminal, wrong customer

If you wear a hat with some text saying you're not on the list will the "AI" ignore you? Asking for a friend.

Romanian rail workers accused of bribery turned to ChatGPT for legal tips

Re: I'd love to see an example defence statement

I don't know if it available in Romania, but trial by jury also exists in - at least - some EU countries (although where it does exist it's exceptional, and not as common as in the US)

And what has filibuster to do with legal proceedings?

AWS intruder achieved admin access in under 10 minutes thanks to AI assist, researchers say

Re: Good

Did you even read the article?

X marks the raid: French cops swoop on Musk's Paris ops

Re: "Pavel Durov ofnttat well known moderate service Telegram, has already come out saying France isn't a free country."

Well, he would say that, wouldn't he, considering he was arrested in Paris, after being indicted on twelve charges, including complicity in the distribution of child exploitation material and drug trafficking.

Sword of Damocles hangs over UK military’s Ajax as minister says back it or scrap it

Re: Additional reading

Spending time using the vehicles makes the crew ill, ant that author's point is that they should spend more time there?

In-house techies fixed faults before outsourced help even noticed they'd happened

You knew one easily because real printer repair technicians always tucked their ties inside their shirts

Bork ventures to the Middle of Lidl

Re: Swap out

Their tools are quite good quality and value, I've seen professionals using them

If you're one of the 16,000 Amazon employees getting laid off, read this

Amazon are absolute bastards - I would never work for them

A friend relocated to Czechia to work for them and 2 weeks into it they reneged on the contract offer... absolute bastards, as I said.

Cops put Microsoft Copilot in holding cell after controversial hallucination

Re: Yes and no.

I've had colleagues creating some user panic because of info they got from Google's AI summaries being delivered as "the truth". And those colleagues are technical people, they just seem to lack critical thinking....

Knee-Deep in the CAD: Boffin gets Doom running inside a design modeler

Re: "Really hurts when you get fragged"

Like this?

[sorry about the xitter link, but it's the only one I know about]

Tesla Full Self Driving subscription to rise alongside its capabilities

That caption is absolutely brilliant, it's a welcome journey back to ElReg's glorious feeding-hand-biting times of lore.

[icon: A well deserved one to the author]

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

Re: Trump spews an endless stream of utter rubbish

Well, they are NEW lies... he's been delivering an unstoppable stream of those for some years now

What "Trump says" and "reality" are two distinct, and often opposite, concepts

Sony no longer home of the Bravia as it plans TV biz spin-out to China’s TCL

192/24 sampling means 192kHz/24-bit, not 192kbps (that's the compression bit rate)

MP3s usually use 44.1 kHz or 48KHz/16-bit sampling rates

Concorde at 50: Twice the speed of sound, twice the economic trouble

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ropy

Windows 11, not AI, kick-started the PC upgrade cycle

Re: AI Solitaire

Of course it had to exist... AI is the new rule 34

Re: "businesses discovering that a five-year-old laptop running on borrowed time is not, in fact, a long-term IT strategy."

My 5+ year old work laptop (7th gen i7) was doing perfectly all right, there was absolutely no need for an upgrade but for the lack of TPM

Microsoft veteran explains the one weird trick that made Windows 95 restart faster

So..... what did pressing the Shift key actually do to speed restarting Win95?

Bankrupt scooter startup left one private key to rule them all

Re: steel clamp

I remember when a neighbourhood kid bought an old Fiat Punto and was shown that to open his car's boot you just had to pull a cable underneath it. He then bought one of those locks and duly locked the steering wheel for the night. Next morning he found the car doors unlocked and the steering lock open and waiting for him on the driver's seat. Never found out who did it, but I'd buy him a pint for the laughs!

Teach an AI to write buggy code, and it starts fantasizing about enslaving humans

Re: All Wars and Battles the Enemy has already Lost if in Opposition to the Rise of the Machines ‽ *

No wonder that whenever this gets fed into LLMs they start hallucinating

Re: It's going to be.. ..in your toaster

Aah, so you're a waffle man!

Microsoft teases targeted Copilot removal for admins

STEP 1: PROFIT!!!

heheheh

Techie banned from client site for outage he didn’t cause

Re: “They still banned me from site”

Correction: whenever they found the problem, and whatever it was, they still blamed it on the external guy that wasn't there anymore to defend himself

Stalkerware slinger pleads guilty for selling snooper software to suspicious spouses

Re: I see a golden future...

It depends on how deep his pockets are, the value of the bribe hmm campaign contribution is paramount to DT's willingness to pardon

Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching

Also fine for me using FF - might be some other extension creating problems? I've had trouble over the years with some of them in some sites (Dark Reader was particularly peculiar in many cases)

Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it

Re: "all this is old news"

And how much more did you pay for that vs a similar sized OLED TV? You could also buy a professional range TV monitor that has no smartness whatsoever built-in, but the problem is the same: cost.

My current solution is to have a dumbed-down smart TV that has never been allowed to connect to the internet. And whenever I buy the next one, not needing a connection to properly work will be on top of the requirement list.

Finnish cops grill crew of ship suspected of undersea cable sabotage

re: Putin, Xi and Kim are busy having fun working out how to drag Trump in front of the international court

Not at all, they'll be partying seing as DT just validated foreign interference and unsanctioned international agression for all of them

How Microsoft gave customers what they wanted: An audience with Bill Gates

Re: Off topic somewhat but …

Once I had a cable TV installation crew break a transom window in my flat (the guy got shocked and flew from the ladder into the window). They said they would get in touch to fix it but whenever I contacted the company I was told, over and over, that they would "look into it".

One morning I got fed up and faxed the company's CEO complaining about it. A couple of hours later I had a (his?) secretary call me scheduling a glazier's visit for the next day.

The Y2K bug delayed my honeymoon … by 17 years!

Re: I carefully arranged things

I had to work that night (as I've already told), but pay was good. Indeed, it was enough to cover for my well earned vacations in the Maldives, 6 weeks later

Banksy's Limitless limited by Windows Activation

Re: In the same vein.

Well, well, well, as one would say, pictures or it didn't happen!

[better still, a Playmobil reconstruction or it didn't happen]

Zuck buys Chinese AI company Manus that claims it deals in actions, not words

Re: "you want dried leaves in boiling water, with the juice squirted out of a cow?"

I would downvote you, but de gustibus non est disputandum

Or, as a Portuguese saying goes, "you don't argue about taste, you lament it" :)

Crims disconnect Wired subscribers from their privacy, publish deets online

Re: If you replaced that "or" with "and" - then I couldn't imagine it.

The New Yorker and Vanity Fair for me, not currently subscribing to both, but have previously. Not particularly worried about 2 throw-away email addresses, but home address is a bit worse.

When the lights went out, and the shooting started, Y2K started to feel all too real

Re: self-SWATing

A friend was asked at a Spanish-Moroccan border customs if she had any "chocolate" with her. Being a sweet tooth she said she did, only the find herself locked in a small room, surrounded by four female police officers, and stripped down to underwear, while they insisted she'd confess where she hid her stash of drugs. Why the hell did the police think everyone should be aware of local slang for hashish is anyone's guess.

IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

I've already told this more than once, but the tale never gets old - well, it does get one older as years go by, but you get the point :)

That fateful night I was on duty, after a year and a half working on that Y2K project for a large bank.

Midnight passed without a hitch, and around 1 AM I went to the nearest ATM and checked my balance and latest account movements (not an account from the bank I was working for). There was an interest credit of around the equivalent of 3000€. Resisting the urge to withdraw it there and then, I went back, showed the slip to my co-workers and wondered what would happen from then on. At 8 AM, after an uneventful night on the job, I went down and checked my balance again. Without a trace of that earlier payment, it now showed the correct and, unfortunately, much smaller interest deposit...

I bet someone's night was a lot more eventful than mine

Windows is testing a new, wider Run dialog box. Here’s how to try it

I use it, usually to run regedit or some other seldomly used programmes - way faster than scouring the menus for the correct entry

Poisoned WhatsApp API package steals messages and accounts

Re: "bullshit built on blockchain and AI"

Now you're just repeating yourself

Pizza restaurant signage caught serving raw Windows

Re: "bork never sleeps."

Welp, I always liked their music

Like a Virgin Airways bot, planning for the very first time

Small letters to be carefully read

And who's responsible when a passenger loses their flight or is denied boarding on the account of wrong or false information provided by the agent? What happens then? Tough luck... thought so.

BOFH: All through the house, not a creature was stirring except the homicidal vacuum cleaner

My flat is like that owing to the building resulting of the union of two previously existing adjoining buildings, so I have a small 3-step stair leading from one part to the other. The only plus is that it conveniently separates the living area from the bedrooms.

pearOS is a Linux that falls rather close to the Apple tree

pCloud? Not sure I'd fancy that...

[coat please, the p-resistant one]

Cornish recycling drive sows confusion among Reg Standards Bureau

Giving you something like, Knowing that a cornish pasty weights 1 pasty (cornish), it's area is 2 pasty (nipple), and it's height is 1/8 linguine, calculate it's volume in bulgarian airbags and it's density (Whoa, another missing unit??)

X sues to protect Twitter brand Musk has been trying to kill

Is it an X Bluebird?

The CRASH Clock is ticking as satellite congestion in low Earth orbit worsens

At least there's confort in the knowledge that no sane regulator would ever let plane manufacturers self-certify their planes' airworthiness

Workday project at Washington University hits $266M

"more than 90 percent of our cars don't burst spontaneously into flames", said the CEO of Big Car Manufacture;

"more than 90 percent of the houses we built are still standing", said President of House Building Co;

etc.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Re: "The user is not generally aware of all the things [] happening'"

My task was to design a piece of software that would replace a commercial offering we were using that was incompatible with Windows 7 (which we were in the process of upgrading to).

The user showed me how it worked and what they did daily, "press F3 once then type something then press F3 twice and check the values, then press F3 n times", etc. Each time F3 was pressed, the program advanced to the next part of the workflow.

I then asked how to go back to the previous screen in case you wanted to recheck something.

"Well, you press F3 until you get to main screen again and restart pressing F3 until the screen you missed is shown", was the answer.

I looked a bit closer for a second, then pressed F2. And, to the amazement of the user, the previous screen was presented.

So, although the user had been using that program for over 10 years, they had never read the instructions shown at the bottom of every screen!

LastPass hammered with £1.2M fine for 2022 breach fiasco

Re: Blasé approach to security

As I understand it, it wasn't necessarily the same PC. The problem was that LastPass "actively encouraged, senior staff to link their personal and business accounts, so both could be accessed using the same master password". Once having got to the personal account, the attacker was then able to access the linked business account were were kept all those yummy LastPass passwords

Trump's AI 'Genesis Mission' emerges from Land of Confusion

Re: Genesis?

Someone's already thought about that

Electric cars no more likely to flatten you than the noisy ones, study finds

Downvotes? I guess someone didn't like the near miss part and would prefer that I'd been ran over?