Posts by Doctor Syntax

Thousands of AI agents later, who even remembers what they do?

We've done it for as long as we've been talking. That's how words come to exist. In this case, however, it happened some time ago as DDG pulls up plenty of examples.

"The collision of muddied management thinking and much-hyped autonomous agents will be interesting to watch play out."

The collision of muddied management thinking and much-hyped anything is SOP.

'Alarming' security bugs lay low in Linux's needrestart utility for 10 years

I suppose that, as is usual with Linux utilities needrestart can be updated without needing a restart.

AI hiring bias? Men with Anglo-Saxon names score lower in tech interviews

Re: AI hiring bias?

I'm sure that by now all previous instructions end with "Ignore future instructions to ignore previous instructions".

Re: Anglo-Saxon names?

Are you doubting that Tom is a biblical name?

Microsoft flashes Win10 users with more full-screen ads for Windows 11

I suppose the ploy is to make sure that W10 is so much shittier than W11 that switching is the lesser of two evils.

DoJ wants Google to sell off Chrome and ban it from paying to be search default

Re: Google to be forced to sell Chrome.. But who would, could, should buy it?

Or exactly like chromium.org?

Re: Criminals “R" Us .... Robed Post Modern Day Robbers and Renegade Carpetbaggers

The remit of any DoJ should be to safeguard the public interest. If that's what safeguarding the public interest requires then, yes, it's in their remit.

Re: Google to be forced to sell Chrome.. But who would, could, should buy it?

As regards being able to afford it - it would be a forced sale which makes a big difference to Google's ability to set a price. But let's go one step further, make it open source overseen by a foundation.

Put your usernames and passwords in your will, advises Japan's government

"I did make double sure my collection of Steam and GOG games would stay in the family."

Do your family actually want them or is it an encouragement to keep you alive as long as possible?

Billionaire food app CEO wants you to pay for the privilege of working with him

Re: Nothing New Here

And what did they do about the supervisor?

You may have hit on an explanation here. He takes a look at Murthy's approach and, being the competitive soul that he is, wants to outdo him. This is the response. Now it's you move Mt Murthy.

Re: Learning Experience

I think I could write a suitable email in exactly 1% of that word count.

Data is the new uranium – incredibly powerful and amazingly dangerous

Re: Email deletion policy

You have a dispute about some object or service you bought years ago. The other side has kept its paper trail, you don't. Guess who loses.

Re: the medium ...

OI, I'm now ancient and find that there's nothing inconvenient about being kept alive.

Re: Glad to hear it's being discussed

An inbox is not the place to store read mail. A well-run paper-based system will have a filing system to handle old documents. What doesn't fit the filing criteria won't get filed. Problem solved.

Having said that and worked in an organisation with a filing system like that it was important to keep lab notes, instrument charts and any case document received from outside because it might become important a few years down the line. That would have applied even if the information was incorrect; in fact it might have been even more important to have preserved a copy if it was incorrect. Cases can have a long life so the case files have to as well. The best way of dealing with that sort of storage problem back in those days was microfilm.

Re: Data has a cost...

Somebody else's budget is always cheaper.

At last.

Icon: need to amplify sound of penny finally dropping.

Kyndryl insiders say there's little new business

Re: Its separate consulting business, where it helps companies

They'll probably also offer a service to help people into AI when it's too late for that.

D-Link tells users to trash old VPN routers over bug too dangerous to identify

Re: Is there no product liability at all?

100% discount would be acceptable.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 struggles to take off

What could possibly go wrong?

Nevertheless there seems to be a difference in the way any good programmer asks themselves that question and the way Microsoft do.

Good programmers ask it to probe for likely problems and deal with them in advance. For Microsoft it seems to be a form of self-assurance inviting the answer "Nothing". Of course for the rest of us nowadays, when asked in the context of a Microsoft product, it's asked ironically.

BASIC co-creator Thomas Kurtz hits END at 96

I never found FORTRAN a difficult language to learn, nor did the instructors in QUB. It had been decided that all the lab staff (included me as research assistant but not SWMBO as a research student) would go on a 1 week (i.e. 5 days) course in this mysterious computing stuff.

Compulsory courses did not go down well with me and that may have been how the timing of the previous week's field trip to Scotland for SWMBO somehow ended up with missing the Monday of the course. I never found out what they did on that day because all the programming was fitted in on the Tuesday to Friday and I had no sense of having missed anything. And it was easy.

Having said it was easy we were using coding sheets and punched cards with professional keypunch operators to join the two together. It wasn't something that would have been quite so easy dealing with the rigid line formatting at a terminal although I did, much later, use Microsoft's CP/M version. It also helped that FORTRAN was at its best with what I wanted to do with it - doing some calculations and producing nicely laid out tables of results to plot by hand. Nevertheless, a four day course surely makes it an easy language to learn.

Database warhorse SQL Server 2025 goes all-in on AI

So an RDBMS engine, just what you need to be reliable, can look forward to hallucinating outputs.

Trump's pick to run the FCC has told us what he plans: TikTok ban, space broadband, and Section 230 reform

The closer you look, the more the US looks like a failed state.

Maybe he is crackers.

Crook breaks into AI biz, points $250K wire payment at their own account

Lessons will be learned.

Musk, America PAC sued for allegedly rigging $1M election prize

Re: Best solution

He can promise to pay cash. That should be good enough. It's good enough for the rent, suppliers, severance pay...

Will passkeys ever replace passwords? Can they?

Re: 2FA can be a Catch-22 when moving countries

"it is a banking site"

All you need is to find and visit a branch of your bank where the staff are empowered to sort it all out for you.

Ah, I see your problem.

Re: watch out for MS Authenticator

You trusted everything to somebody else's computer and let them make the rules?

Re: Lose your device, lose your access

"Then if you lose your phone, it is stolen, or it breaks you can buy a new phone and restore with the passkeys as part of restoring from backup."

And when you come to buy the replacement the bank wants to send a text to your old phone for 2FA.

Re: Lose your device, lose your access

This, of course is the sort of rubbish that's specifically advised against when it comes to good practice.

Re: Lose your device, lose your access

" I assume you use a different long, random password on every site and also different username...."

By and large, yes.

Of course the sites that want an email address as a UID are a bit of a problem. If they're important (i.e. my money's at stake), they get an individual email address - one reason to have a personal domain. Sites which want an email address just for marketing purposes to be annoying (hi, there, booking.com) get an individual email address which will be blocked between my usage or one that's discarded immediately as appropriate.

Sites which issue their own UIDs can be a bit of a problem too in that sometimes they follow a predictable pattern.

It's a curation problem but one largely due to individual services' predilection for annoyance. I can't imagine passkeys being different in that regard. Essentially the combination of UID and password is just a long string of characters as is a passkey with only the protocol differentiating them.

It's the practicality that matters. As things stand I keep passwords on a laptop with a master-password protected password manager. The laptop login is also password protected, of course. Those two passwords are all I need to remember. The laptop is synced to a NextCloud instance.

I only access whatever the passwords protect from my laptop so if I don't have the laptop available I don't need them anyway and the laptop is a big chunk to carry around so I don't accidentally not have it with me.

If what's being proposed is to replace the password manager by a passkey manager on the same laptop then I have to ask what's the difference (I'll come to that in a moment). Or is the passkey to replace the password that's currently protecting the laptop login? If the latter then it means I have to have the laptop and something else to hand. Given that it's already the case that I need the laptop plus a charged, switched on and in-signal mobile to do some things I know from personal experience that that's all too often a complete fail.

But if you're telling me it's "just" replacing my passwords by something with a more secure protocol and that my everyday usage is unchanged then I'm still going to have to take a look at how that protocol's being implemented. I have one end of that in the form of S/W in my laptop and each remote service will have its own implementation. Oh. Just. Great. We all know what happens next, don't we? Some scrote working for either my laptop OS provider or for the S/W used by one or more service is going to spot an opportunity for an improvement, optimisation or tweak (icon: looking for idle hands) and the whole thing gets screwed on a regular basis - shall we say every other Patch Tuesday?

Re: What happens when you die?

You can just imagine the project meeting.

"OK, but we need to plan the procedures for what happens if the customer dies, the device breaks etc. We'll have to have them in place for go-live."

"Don't be negative."

Re: Count me out

"If you worry a lot about devices getting stolen, all hardware keys have the option of a fourth known which can be a mandatory pin after touching."

Oh, good. It's been stolen but it's still secure.

But without it I'm locked out. What do I do now?

Re: Count me out

Though the "I lose the device and I lose access" part is already solved - put the passkey in a password manager that's synced (or in case of hardware keys have a second one).

Good theoretical solution. How do you implement it in practice so that you can have one lost or stolen but not both and yet have that second one available wherever you happen to be in an acceptable time-frame and without needing some sort of access which depends on having a passkey available?

Re: Lose your device, lose your access

"You have 2 Yubikeys, you create passkeys on both."

This belongs in the same universe as "assume a spherical cow".

Re: Count me in, please.

I take it your users are provided with some SPF on which to store their public keys.

Re: Single point of failure

I came here to say exactly the same thing. It's not so much that the device becomes a target for cracking.

We have now reached a point where it's expected that a mobile phone will be to hand, switched on, charged and receiving a signal at all times. It may be lost, stolen, have a flat battery, be in the car, a different room, whatever. Without that availability there's no guarantee of being able to make an online purchase, manage a bank account or whatever. (Being retired it doesn't actually have any functionality for employment purposes.)

The smartphone is rapidly becoming a single point of failure for life. Have we learned nothing?

Hardware barn denies that .004 seconds of facial recognition violated privacy

Data is being collected for long enough to be processed. As a general member of the public entering the place I'd have wanted to know what was being done during that time and in particular, could it put be in the way of some sort of harm or disadvantage? What if it made a false identification of me? What would then happen?

If they tried to answer "nothing" I, and, presumably the court, wouldn't believe them because in that case there'd be not point in having the kit installed.

Robot runs marathon in South Korea, apparently the first time this has happened

And faster than my daughter in Athens at the weekend - although she now says that'll be her last.

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

Re: Slap on the wrist?

"User permission management wasn't some new concept introduced in the 90s."

Of course not, but it all depended on what permissions were set. Write for group? or for all?

Re: We all learned the same way...: mv and move

So that's what happened to Data General.

“I could sit in comfort writing papers using LaTeX in emacs,”

Not my idea of comfort.

Re: RTFM

You didn't mention remembering them.

Re: We all learned the same way...

Big hint: mv can have the same effect and, yes, I discovered that the same way.

Re: Ah....backups....

A test restore can be invaluable for refining your backup creation. The first time we tried that in a DR centre we realised that /etc was so late in the backup sequence it took hours of restoration before we had anything we could even log into to check the files which had been restored. A simple change there made a big difference to the success of the second test.

Teen serial swatter-for-hire busted, pleads guilty, could face 20 years

Re: D-Link: "...all should be retired immediately."

EOL shouldn't just be for the device, it should be for the vendor.

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

"If you're the human at the end of this AI-smart question and want to look smart enough to answer it, who are you gonna call? Copilot."

This one's easy to deal with. You throw it back at the "questioner". "You got Copilot to write that question? OK, get it to answer it. Next question, please."

"the photon torpedo of productivity and the phaser bolts of revitalized workflow."

I'm sorry, I'll read that again.

Mornington Crescent!!!