Posts by Doctor Syntax

Nanny state discovers Linux, demands it check kids' IDs before booting

Re: Will the community just lay down and get screwed?

That is the company we think they are.

Re: Insert unfocused rage here

"If my next computer asks me for an age to create an account, I type in a random date from the 1970s and move on without a second thought."

And if that were all it would be annoying but not serious but that would be utterly pointless without being able to verify your age. In order to do that you would have to provide whatever is deemed necessary for some company that some US state legislatures thinks are good enough for them. If different states disagree it might be a separate company for each state.

GDPR? So many letters as far as they're concerned.

That's what this is about.

Re: Next, they'll ban people with an address

Have a look for an image of Catshaw Cross.

"There's no need to include apt-get, the law says app store which for Linux is the distro's GUI software package downloader"

This is by far the most informative comment you've made. I doubt you intended it to be, at least not in that way.

It tells you something about the computer-literacy of the sort of people making these proposals.

Why should I, in the UK, have the OS of my computer, used only by myself, have to include this simply to oblige Dan55 and some computer-illiterate US state legislators? And if it's made a legal requirement there it very likely would have to be incorporated because the same distro is available anywhere?

BBC World Service digital switch backfires as online audience drops

Re: 2PAC

If the PACs didn't bother, would you consider this a good thing?

Re: Fundamental blindspot

I think you'll find they call that "cross-promotion"!

Calling things something else is just one of advertising's tools used by advertising tools.

Re: They have no clue

Things done for short term reasons of cost inevitably have long term unwanted consequences.

Re: Fundamental blindspot

"The eejits have never understood the concept of advertising!"

The Beeb is littered with advertising. Advertising its own products, that is. it's not just the slots between them. Go to the BBC News website and you'll find a chunk of it is "news" about storylines or "news" about some new programme. Click on what appears to be a genuine news item and it might well be an advert for a current affairs programme that covers the story.

Definitely they know about advertising.

AI still doesn't work very well, businesses are faking it, and a reckoning is coming

Re: bring it on

Some are grossed out, some can't get enough and positively seek it. Trump would be an example of the latter.

Bank built its own threat hunting agent because vendors can’t keep pace with new threats

80 million a day and 80 million a week? Were they working a one day week?

Gartner suggests Friday afternoon Copilot ban because tired users may be too lazy to check its mistakes

"Gartner analyst Dennis Xu has half-jokingly suggested"

Gartner has (half) a sense of humour! Who knew?

Salesforce stock buyback to saddle company with debt until 2066

Re: so sad

In the UK closing final salary pension schemes was closely related to the Brownomics policy of making the future buy votes by taxing dividends on pension schemes' investments and forcing schemes to take "contribution holidays"* so that more corporation tax could be collected. IIRC there were changes hat took the value of its pension fund into consideration into valuing a company; as companies' pensions schemes were investing in each others' companies this, indirectly reinforced anything changing a company's value, a positive feedback loop.

Once interest rates fell (due to coupling them to inflation based on a measure that excluded housing costs which underwent rampant inflation as a result of the cheap money) the funds were suddenly undervalued and couldn't support final salary schemes. Having introduced the feedback loop to amplify any changes in valuations this gave those valuations a sharp kick downhill with no brakes leading to the crash.

* The employees kept paying but the employers temporarily stopped paying if the funds were over-valued measured against current commitments and interest rates. Removing those payments increased profits.

Re: so sad

More stupid than wicked, Id say. Wicked can achieve things - bad things admittedly - but stupid can't.

Everything needed to make DNA and RNA found in asteroid sample

Re: I'm fairly sure ...

We've known since the 1950s Miller-Urey experiment that the sort of conditions that would have prevailed on the early Earth could synthesise the ingredients of that famous primordial soup. Whether they're also available in asteroids is interesting but far from essential for biogenesis.

The trick steps are assembling RNAs from ribonucleotides. doing it reproducibly by copying, linking it to protein synthesis, doing so with reproducible base-sequence to amino acid mapping and having the proteins catalyse the copying. You need to add on doing it so as to have the proteins catalyse other functions such as harnessing environmental energy sources in a way that can transfer the energy in useful sized quanta for these processes. Then you need to be able to wrap the whole thing up into packages and have the proteins catalyse the various steps to produce the packaging materials. You need to regulate all these operations within the packages. And all that's before we even introduce DNA (all the critical bits of protein synthesis are RNA based: messenger RNA, transfer RNA and ribosomal RNA).

UK splashes £45M on AI supercomputer to help crack fusion power

Now that we measure computing on $PREFIXwatthours we should be able to make a direct comparison between what this consumes over its lifetime and what the finished product, should it exist, produces.

Re: "Or is the “AI” bit just …well …total bollocks?"

I remain unconvinced about that one. Proteins do not start as stretched out chains of amino acids that fold up when released. They're built one amino acid at a time in a specific sequence. As more are added the degrees of freedom of the orientation of each new residue must be very quickly limited. Is guessing really computationally cheaper then emulating the actual process?

Re: Algorithms

With added AI it costs more so it must be better. Obvious, innit?

Flaw in UK's corporate registry let directors rummage through rival records

"they wouldn't just fling code changes to a live Government service like shit to a wall now would they?"

Take, for example, DVLA's vehicle taxation site. DVLA sends a renewal form with a 16 digit code split into 4 fields with spaces between, just like a credit card. The site has a page where the reminder number can be entered. It also has a page where the credit card number can be entered. They both handle 16 digit numbers the same way, right? And they follow the robustness principle,* particularly in entering the numbers the way they're shown in print, right?

Wrong. They handle the two different. The credit card number is handled robustly**, the reference number has a hard limit of 16 characters, including the spaces if entered.

* "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle

** Probably with code taken from an approved example from the credit card numbers would be my guess. Even so, the best sites put the spaces in automatically which DVLA don't.

Re: A trivially-preventable security flaw

If it was fixed that quickly it sounds like a bug.

Age verification isn't sage verification when it's inside operating systems

Re: Why be surprised?

In the UK the parents do their best to close the roads to everyone except themselves for a few hundred metres each side of the school.

Re: @Dan55 - At the risk of another 40 downvotes

"And how do you decide what they can watch or access without supervision on a device without parental controls?"

Like somebody said up-thread, if you want to retrofit something like that, it's your decision. The problem here is that we have legislators in US states (not even federal legislators, for what that's worth) dictating that this S/W goes on every computer. Yes, every computer. If there were California or New York variants made to suit their laws there'd be nothing to prevent someone bringing an out-of-state machine into the jurisdiction or being really evil and downloading an OS from somewhere else. So every OS is going to have to comply.

Why, in the UK, am I going to have to use something that requires me to verify my ID as a user with whoever some US state legislating thicko thinks is appropriate to their neck of the woods? Because that, in their deep ignorance, is what they're demanding.

Re: @Dan55 - At the risk of another 40 downvotes

"First, where is the identity in setting up an account on the device as admin and specifying the child account's age? You won't be able to tell me because there is none."

It's your PII as a user and the child's that some of these legislatures want along with every other user's. If they can't identify each and every user then they can't tell whether that user is under whatever age limit is set in that jurisdiction.

It's no good your arguing that this or that particular jurisdiction is OK because it isn't so extreme. That way you're allowing them to divide and conquer. If this goes ahead every OS, and that means every distro, will have to cover all the use cases including the most restrictive ones or else they're at risk.

That's the problem.

Re: @Dan55 - At the risk of another 40 downvotes

"I see no reason why Google needs to know the parent's real name, address, and credit card number so a parent can enable parental controls on a device that they own."

Neither does anyone else - except Google and the rest. They see a reason. They want you to do it.

Re: @Dan55 - At the risk of another 40 downvotes

My PC doesn't have any under 16s using it. Even if I let my grandchildren use it (they don't need it, they've got their own) they're over 16. Why should it need to have unneeded parental controls grafted into the OS just because some US state legislators are technologically ignorant?

"They don't know how this can be made to happen, but they know it can be if only the industry is made to think about it hard enough."

All they have to do is to commission a proof of concept good enough to stand critical inspection by security experts. Once they've demonstrated that it's possible we'll believe them.

Digital fruit fly brain model walks and cleans its feelers

Re: Um….

The way you read that depends on the time frame of "already". In the context I read that as one when overuse has lead to antibiotic-resistant bacteria being a problem but not yet universal.

Re: Progress that kills most of us

"Humans made the choice which one to do."

So far its all too often a self-interested small group of humans making those choices. Where the rest of us are affected then surely the rest of us should have some say.

Maybe there's such a thing as reading too many books.

"back then, he could separate male from female anesthetized flies in a dish at dozens to hundreds per hour"

Per hour? The damn things kept waking up long before then. I found they could bestunned (possibly) by a gentle knock on the head with a seeker. That made it a bit easier. Then there was the time somebody (not me) left the bung out of the bottom of the anaesthetiser and all his flies just came out and flew everywhere. Given the number of flies in the average lab population one emulated fly doe look a bit sparse, even if it were possible to emulate it in real time.

Microsoft points at Samsung after Galaxy app bug locks users out of C:\

If it's going into the system vendor's app store it's up to that vendor to ensure that it isn't requiring it doesn't actually need.

I'd assumed that line was irony. The answer's simple, of course: it's Windows. It doesn't have the user-based permissions system that a multi-user system takes for granted.

West Sussex's Oracle rollout pushed back again as costs balloon 15 times

Establish a stop cost. If the bill reaches a certain amount the contract ceases and everything above the original contract amount gets refunded.

Re: A Correction To The Title?

No, don't hide the key fact.

Outsourcer Telus admits to attack – may have lost a petabyte of data to ShinyHunters

According to the linked article the Salesloft breach was heft of OAuth tokens. Please explain to me again how involving a 3rd party (or longer) supply chain provides better security than a strong UID/password combination that carries out all validation on the protected computer and how a chain can be stronger than its weakest link. For avoidance of doubt an email address is not a strong UID.

Horizon redress still a mess, MPs say – and Fujitsu hasn't paid a penny

Re: If they wait long enough ...

Retired isn't beyond liability. They can die in jail if need be.

"My expenses after a trip used to take half an hour."

My expenses claims used to take an infinite amount of time. The bastards always seemed to find some IR rule that said it couldn't be paid. One of the many reasons I finally quit.

"you can produce everything pertinent with a few searches."

Until the hard drive it was on dies. Or it was burnt to CD and the claimant's latest laptop doesn't have a CD drive. Digital records canand do get lost.

Jury out on whether Americans love or hate datacenters

If I read you right it's not so much the DC employment as the other businesses who want close connectivity. That sounds good if it works out but will they all be in places that attract such businesses?

"When it comes to energy costs for consumers, 38 percent indicated they thought the AI hothouses had a negative effect. We are surprised this figure isn't greater,"

Given that only 25% had read or heard much about DCs and as many nothing at all this isn't in the least surprising.

Those who 'circle back' and 'synergize' also tend to be crap at their jobs

Re: I would punt…

"after a liquid lunch"

Or, possibly, far too much coffee (not that I ever touch the stuff myself).

Re: They probably 'reach out' all the time as well

Even when using it in relation to harmonic or rhythmic cadences?

Re: They probably 'reach out' all the time as well

In today's world reaching out ought to me enough to get cancelled by the woke.

"People who scored higher on the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale tended to perform worse on tests measuring analytical thinking, cognitive reflection, and fluid intelligence."

"Analytical thinking" is fine. "Cognitive reflection", border-line but surely "fluid intelligence" must be one of their test phrases that escaped and was slotted in to see what the paper's audience made of it.

They mention a feedback loop. The worst feedback loop isn't that, it's the fact that those who fall for the bullshit are the ones that get promoted to spout more of it themselves, the rest of us are in the awkward squad. I've long held what I call the workers and wankers hypothesis of how employees divide. Each type, in charge, will appoint and promote its own but there's a distinct risk that a wanker will get promoted by mistake and when that happens the business is doomed because they'll eventually take over and there'll be nobody left to do the work.

BOFH: What physics defines as impossible, sales calls a challenge

I've carried one of those, or something similar myself. As little as possible, of course.

Re: A rehortical question:

In defence of salesmen, as a customer I always found Leitz microscope salesmen knew their stuff and at least some of them had been service techs. They made a point of visiting on a regular basis although it was unlikely that they'd make a sale on any particular occasion. On one occasion in my QUB days we mentioned that SWMBO's x10 objective wasn't parfocal with the x40. He pertly dismantled it, changed the spacing of the internal elements and used some of her nail varnish to lock the internal threads.

Rather later, after we'd lost our entire lab equipment in a fire we had more or less carte blanche to get back up and running ASAP if not sooner. The day after the fire, a Sunday, I ended up ringing his successor from home to work out out a big order with the paperwork to be sorted out later. I don't know whose orders he managed to divert to us but we had a delivery almost before we'd sorted out a place in the surviving part of the building in which to put stuff.

Re: Sales

Too big to tow behind the tractor?

'Are you freaking crazy?' Bot harasses woman, gets led away by cops

Or an alleged self-driving car

Re: A good swift kick

Mark them as Xcreta.