Posts by Doctor Syntax

Crypto wallet maker Trezor confirms 13,000 customers' details exposed in logistics breach

I hope for their sake their insurance is adequate and paid up.

BOFH: How our Covid ransomware protocol's Y2K blockchain lowered uptime

Re: "Agentic AI"

Standard operating practice.

Re: Gigafloptule

Surely it would be the number of modules in the flopped projects.

Re: PFY didn't pay attention in Physics class.

?????

It's not as if you're new, here.

"the PFY sighs, makes up a set of numbers, appends believable exponents, adds some fancy sounding units to the end and then sends them to through a script file to convert them into something the Boss can use."

Surely a script could do all of that, not just the last bit.

Five years after quitting a job, developer’s former boss asked for rapid tech support

Re: Well done

"make sure that person can no longer access any part of the network."

Including the power lead.

Microsoft-vendetta hacker has a new zero day that gives system privileges on fully patched Windows

Re: And the hits

Anybody who knows where the bodies are buried is the wrong guy. It seems Microsoft has even more buried bodies than the BOFH so there are probably plenty of people who know about some of them.

Gym rat asks AI agent to book him a class, it hacks a waitlist API to bump him up the list

"The agent apologized,"

It was obviously trained on the old saying that it's easier to apologise afterwards than ask for permission.

Cyber vulnerability sweep picks up Royal Navy drones sending data to China

Re: So Many Questions...

Some of your questions might be answered by the fact that this was picked up on a routine security check. It doesn't say at what point in the procurement process the check was conducted.

Re: bad engineers?

What do you mean? You want to call an outside line?

Re: Or maybe the phones needed time

"more interested in profits and quarterly results than marching in a red army"

Interest is optional, just do what you're told.

They probably had to pay a lot of gold.

NEC tests parking tech that only starts charging once you exit your car

Re: If meta had invented wheel chairs

"Stop ruining useful tech by selling it to fucking weirdos."

That would ruin their market.

Re: So ...

OTOH if you stop to drop off a passenger and drive away will it claim you parked for whatever its minimum duration is?

Water system controllers don't belong on the internet, says ex-NSA chief after suspected Iran attacks

Re: Naivete

The systems presumably still need the same digital communications infrastructure as the "internet".

The systems will need a digital communications infrastructure. Just make it private, It's the sort of thing that used to be done but it would cost more, right up to the point where an attack suddenly makes clear it would have been the cheaper alternative in the long run.

Re: Infrastructure should never connect to the public internet.

It's cheaper than having a private network, an obvious choice if beancounters are in charge.

Microsoft tosses Teams Live chat into its feature graveyard

Re: "Do The Right Thing"

"an established user community for which the software in question provides a perfect solution to a business challenge they are trying to solve."

Why would a user who's put their trust in a vendor who discontinues such a product and go with the new product? Oh, of course - lick-in.

Re: "Do The Right Thing"

"There needs to be some kind of "Corporate Pledge" structure in place for companies like Microsoft - all the big software houses - along the lines of a commitment that if the company decides to stop producing an in-Production software application [and please note, I am talking about ending all development and support for a product, not simply stopping support for an older version], then the company should pledge to releasing the codebase to the OpenSource community."

Escrow

‘Humans will be a rounding error on the internet’ says Cloudflare exec

It's largely a matter definition as to what's human activity. For instance when I logged into my laptop this morning it would, having made some DNS lookups, have checked the time and also for mail on various accounts and any updates due. It found and downloaded a group email asking about a meeting postponed from today. It would have carried on checking and eventually downloaded a reply about the meeting from another committee member. It will continue checking as long as it's running and download any more mails and notifications of updates due. The mails were undoubtedly typed by humans but from my point of view the checking and downloading are done autonomously by the laptop - is that human generated traffic? If I open a browser tab on the BBC News site it will periodically get updates. The material is, I trust, typed by journalists and the pictured taken by photographers but is the traffic between the Beeb's servers & the laptop human generated?

The internet connects machines, not humans. I doubt even Seifert has a direct brain to internet connection. The machines will talk to each other with occasional prompting from us.

How the famed USENIX Security conf is managing a flood of papers in the AI era

"non-existing (possibly hallucinated) references"

Not enough "(pers. comm.)" in the training material.

Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees

Your comment should be stricken through.

European firms afraid of US tech kill switch but haven't made an escape plan

Re: Time.

"There's planning, testing, pilot groups, more testing, fixing issues, user training, more test, more pilot and maybe , just maybe a go live."

So when do you plan to start planning?

The best time to plan was two years ago. The next best time is now.

Re: Time.

"It'll just take place across a decade for most, not a year or two."

Or in an immense hurry - unsuccessfully.

Chinese router vendor denies its firmware contains backdoors – but pauses downloads to fix security issues anyway

No problem

Just set the router to block port 7000....errr

Oh!

Time Magazine has a separate version of its website with ads only AI can see

Re: Brilliant.

Nevertheless,if the advertisers could be persuaded into believing that this is so more cost effective than pushing ads into peoples' faces it sanitises the web and as I'm not going to use AI-based search it's a win-win as far as I'm concerned.

UK mulls making employers ask before installing bossware

Re: In Various Ways

There's a further factor. These systems measure inputs. They may even be measuring the wrong inputs - physical activity rather than mental activity. Measuring inputs is no substitute for measuring outputs. It might be easier to do - making good measurements isn't necessarily easy. Who would do the wrong thing because it's easier? Someone who is either too lazy to put the effort into the right thing or somebody who's too incompetent to know any better (the two are not mutually exclusive).

At the very least, if you feel you have to measure inputs, first make sure you understand the process by which inputs lead to outputs and measure the right ones.

Re: ?

"People will act in the way that monitoring measures, whether that is what the job requires or not, for fear of being judged inadequate by the monitoring and punished."

We're really getting into Goodhart's law territory here.

I've known cameras being installed where it was known there was theft. There weren't many such occasions over the years I'd have known about it. One outstanding example caught at least one till operator surreptitiously rolling up notes and hiding them (memory says there was more than one member of staff involved). The business owner must have been extremely incompetent. He wasn't aware he had a problem until the bank rang him up about the state of his account. Hadn't seen receipts didn't match sales, hadn't seen bank account going into the red.

But those were ad hoc installations within a police investigation.

My experience was with the union itself, not the reps. I don't remember who the rep was or even if there was one.

Maybe Bob gets promoted to management to get him somewhere where he can't do any harm. And so it continues.

Interesting set of downvotes from whose with no idea of the circumstances. Briefly, they were:

Union called us out for one day in support of a pay claim.

Afterwards we learned it wasn't even our claim, it was another union's.

Our union was always complicit in maintaining our pay rates less than the others'.

Most members in our organisation then resigned with one issuing a challenge to print his resignation letter in their magazine. They chickened out by claiming they didn't print letters from non-members.

We were small-fry in a group of unions, exploited for our subscriptions and, in this case, withdrawal of labour.

My experience with union membership was that the unions were just out for themselves. In fact the union I was in was out for another union and its members.

Re: Employers machines, employers choice

One reason it's collecting downvotes is that you seem to have misread TFA. It's not about the OS. Given that you missed that it's not surprising that you failed to grok the rest of it.

"It could also mean that rolling out the latest AI-powered workforce optimization suite could become as much an HR exercise as an IT one. "

Anything that gets an extra pair of eyes on this aspect is a good thing.

In fact, it suggests that the whole debate needs turning around. it's not the workforce that needs to be surveilled, it's manglement.

London cops handed victim's new address and number to her stalker, watchdog says

“We are aware that these incidents can have real consequences for victims and have apologised to those affected by these two cases."

Maybe real consequences are also needed for those responsible. Sending victim details to suspects or convicted perpetrators should be a sacking offence. Once the word gets out that that has actually happened it will be more effective than any amount of training.

UK charities count the cost of Beacon CRM cyberattack

First reaction was relief that we (Civic Society) don't use them (nor the CAF bank). Then I realise that as we're members of a federation of Civic Socs we may still be data subjects. Supply chains a re a menace.

Voyager 2 cheats the power budget for another year

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have eked out a little more life for instruments aboard the veteran Voyager 2 probe thanks to a power-saving effort called the "Big Bang."

AI data centre operators please copy.

OpenAI wants teachers and profs to foist their work off on ChatGPT

Re: The Lost Tools of Learning ?

"learning to read critically and to reread to understand material"

In the UK we had the 11+ test to stream pupils into different schools. A great many years ago I took it. One component was Comprehension. There was a short text and questions about it. I couldn't see the point - there were the answers to the questions, sitting there in plain sight. It took many decades and acquaintance with Usenet before I discovered there were people who could fail it.

Re: someone who qualified before about 2021.

The size of the market for undertakers is determined solely by the number who are born. The only difference medicine makes is how long it takes to get from the one to the other.

Dev proves LLMs will run on anything – even a $10 microcontroller

Re: I see your $10 microcontroller

I wonder .... I have a TRS80 somewhere in the garage.

orchestrate local agents for things like managing a user's calendar ... so long as you can put up with the occasional hallucination.

"Your appointments for February 31st are ...."

This one time, at Hacker Summer Camp …

"As the entire security industry descends on Las Vegas"

Entire? Surely it's just the US component & the sub-set of the rest of the world that's able to get visas & is prepared to risk it.

Tennessee congressional hopeful accused of shooting license plate cameras

He must be on target to get elected.

Re: during church???!

No. Read it again.

Meet the 'internet radical' who helped Microsoft get email and AT&T get online

Re: We can remember it for you wholesale.

Ditto Informix. Same schmucks.

Re: From the beginning, we wanted the client for Exchange to

So users wanted clickable links in messages and executable attachments.

A great success. It's spawned a billion CurrencyUnitOfChoice malware industry.

IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day

Re: It's a rare individual...

You need the right connections to get a job like that.

That takes me back to punched card days. Double punching to verify.

Re: Papertape punch

"I just had a manual Hollerith punch on my desk."

You had Hollerith cards?

I just had edge-punched cards, a notch cutter and knitting needles. (https://bregroup.com/store/bookshop/identification-of-hardwoods.-a-microscope-key but do they include the cards?)

NASA puts astronauts’ lives in the hands of Tesla’s flaky Cybertruck

I suppose Montalbano's calculation is that he has a good chance of having moved on by the time the need dor something better becomes evident. Usual manglement approach to cost cutting.