Posts by Doctor Syntax

FTC interrupts Copyright Office probe to flip out over potential AI fraud, abuse

Re: Free pass

If the conditions of buying the book include that it should not be stored in an electronic retrieval system then copying it into such a system is actionable by definition - unless the condition is, for some reasonable, unenforceable.

Re: Must, not, say

"Feeling old yet?"

All too often.

Nexperia sells Newport Wafer Fab to American chipmaker for $177M

A former Inmos site? SiC transit gloria mundi.

Wanted: Driver for rocket-powered Bloodhound Land Speed Record car

"Sadly, there is little prospect of Team Vulture getting behind the wheel any time soon."

Why not Richard? Nominative determinism rules!

Re: Dumb Project

Agreed. I can't avoid thinking if it's a car it should be driven by its wheels.

His dad should be able to provide some sponsorship.

Monero Project admits thieves stole 6-figure sum from a wallet in mystery breach

Also keep the password offline.

Wipro: Get back to the office for three days a week or else

Re: Letter

Or "our managerial staff are worried for their jobs as they have little to do when you're not there to micromanage"

Woo-hoo, UK ahead of Europe in this at least – enterprise IT automation

Re: A further 40 percent felt overwhelmed by it all...

the latest and greatest "new thing" is probably broken in a couple of dozen edge cases

I can't think of many latest and greatest new things in the last many years as good as this.

"Enterprises today are asking where they can find the right people, how they can upskill and fire them"

You can buy personal info of US military staff from data brokers for just 12 cents a pop

Re: US privacy law incoming then?

Beating up BIg Tech with an election and all that associated expenditure coming up? Blaming the Chinese seems more likely.

Overheating datacenter stopped 2.5 million bank transactions

Reed called it "odd" that such a core system like the handling of authentication for an online bank would be managed by a third-party provider.

If it can be outsourced it will be outsourced. Nothing odd about that these days.

Ireland to develop datacenter powered by fuel cells

"SOFCs are more efficient than gas turbine generators, and the transmisson loss from on-site generators will be minimal compared to power coming from the grid."

Where does the hydrogen come from? If it's from electrolysis you have to consider the transmission losses to the electrolysis plant and the electrolysis itself. Where is the electrolysis plant? if it isn't on-site you have to factor in the energy needed to pump it and, hydrogen being hydrogen, the losses from the joints in the pipework, the replacement of the pipework due to embrittlement etc. If the plant is on-site the transmission losses are the same as you'd have had powering the data centre direct plus an addition to the second order effect of transmission losses incurred in transmitting the energy that's lost in the course of hydrolysis.

If a fuel cell facility helps stabilize the grid then surely this is a matter for the grid operator rather than a grid customer.

"powered initially by gas, moving to hydrogen in future."

Leaving aside the fact that hydrogen is also a gas, powering the fuel cell by natural gas, i.e. methane, is hardly decarbonising the operation compared to using the same gas to fuel a gas turbine-driven generator. The significant question is how is the long-term hydrogen to be obtained? If that involves simply transferring electrical energy from some other source into chemical energy in the form of H2 why not use that electrical energy directly?

Fuel cells and hydrogen make sense (give or take the difficulties of handling hydrogen) where the energy is to be deployed in situations which are intrinsically disconnected from the grid such as vehicles. The only point I can see for a static installation such as a data centre is green-washing.

Hardware hacker: Walling off China from RISC-V ain't such a great idea, Mr President

There's this thing called gravity. The Chinese use it to keep their buildings firmly anchored to the ground. Maybe, for security's sake, the US should ban the Chinese from using that.

Vanishing power feeds, UPS batteries, failover fails... Cloudflare explains that two-day outage

How many data centres is he authorised to call at any one time?

"Repeat after me: An untested backup is a worthless backup."

Also repeat after me: Cloud is just somebody else's computer data centre and they control it.

"We had never tested fully taking the entire PDX-04 facility offline."

That sort of thing is scary; scary enough to duck.

Woman jailed after RentaHitman.com assassin turned out to be – surprise – FBI

Re: I hate to say this, but it's sad that there are homo sapiens so f'in stupid

Even from jail?

ICE faces heat after agents install thousands of personal apps, VPNs on official phones

We've seen this in a number of instances now. Organisations whose role is security are rubbish at securing their own systems.

Okta October breach affected 134 orgs, biz admits

Re: The usual....

Only 134 looks OK until you realise that these customers are businesses relying on Okta for secure ID management. What number of real people are at risk from those 134?

"Okta Security identified that an employee had signed-in to their personal Google profile on the Chrome browser of their Okta-managed laptop,"

How was this possible, given the nature of the company?

Samsung family sells $2B worth of shares to pay inheritance tax bill

It's good to know the business is in safe hands.

Ex-GCHQ software dev jailed for stabbing NSA staffer

Re: Stabby stab

What is "a good guy" doing with a gun in the first place?

That's a question which would be beyond the comprehension of a lot of the US population.

Home of the world's longest pleasure pier joins public sector leak club

A good thing in a way. It didn't include information about the wider public and, given the personal involvement, will encourage them to be more careful in the future when it might be the wider public at risk.

Experience is a dear teacher but there are those that will learn by no other.

Re: So :

Putting it altogether in one place is still a bad thing. And although NI number shouldn't be used for anything other than NI purposes it is, widely, especially by financial institutions.

It's not necessarily lack of staff training that's the problem. The staff training might have included extracting data into a spreadsheet. The underlying problem is more likely to be lack of a proper procedure as in Mike 137's post and insistence on a format that precludes any hidden content that might escape initial inspection.

Re: Excel and FoI basics

Plain text. That could cover CSV.

No PDF. No SQLite or other database. I have nothing against either in their place but this is not their place.

The standard you are looking for is plain text where everything is visible for inspection.

Re: Excel and FoI basics

"that, should be extracted into a new document..."

And that new document should be a plain text file.

"...that gets verified"

Verified by someone who knows the difference between a plain text file and a WP document or spreadsheet.

I might stretch a point to allow CSV.

Shock horror – and there goes the network neighborhood

Re: The last time I heard a loud noise and things were restarting...

"(I know this from RTFM'ing not because I've witnessed anything in particular - honest!)"

See EvilAudotor's comment below!

Re: The last time I heard a loud noise and things were restarting...

Good for your company that he had an insurance policy that covered it.

Re: When checking voltages...

Ohmy!

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Re: Crashed a super-computer with Lode Runner clone

"Still it's my one claim to fame, I crashed a supercomputer with Java."

The alternative view is that Java crashed the supercomputer, you just helped it along.

Re: Statistics

Our statistics class was more or less similar. We handled it be turning up a bit later each week so he also turned up a bit later. Then we turned up on time and he wasn't there so we left for good.

Doing research the best way to use statistics was to call on a statistician for advice. Rather like encryption, if you're not a specialist don't try to roll your own.

Re: Support Computer Science professors

I suppose from his PoV it must have been very annoying to teach students at advanced level and then find they were incapable of writing software that behaved consistently from one version to the next.

"and then bang through loads of equations on the board at speed usually missing out a few steps"

This was my experience of (an admittedly small number of) maths teachers. I think, at least in my day, it was characteristic of many teachers and probably is of many of us - including IT support.

Different disciplines require different modes of thinking. It is very difficult to put oneself in the position of someone who doesn't think in that mode. For non-mathematicians following a batch of equations takes time, especially if it involves wrapping the mind around a newly introduced notation, To the mathematician what's quite clear looks like sleight of hand to the rest of us. Not realising this the maths teacher might spend more time than necessary on initial assumptions and still leave the non-mathematician none the wiser when the dust has settled.

Much the same thing applies to parsing a highly inflected language such as Latin, at least for those brought up to speak English.

Re: Depends.

Dialects, not languages.

World leaders ink AI safety pacts while Musk and Sunak engage in awkward bromance

Re: Edited out

After last week's evidence at the Covid inquiry I think we can safely rely on BoJo staying as lon longer Prime Minister.

Re: Ouch!

"Lastly, human beings have fallen for the likes of Musk and Bank-Friedman for millennia."

Hutton's next sentence is unfortunate:

Instead of uncritically lionising all things technological and mathematical, never forget the lessons of undervalued literature and history – the best antidotes to a confused and credulous present.

The best antidote is sufficient technological and mathematical knowledge to see through charlatans and their snake oil. I suspect those who fall hardest for them are those best versed in literature and history.

Re: What?

"given the chaos she initiated"

You're quite wrong on that. She was right all the time and tells everyone so so at every opportunity.

Re: a job-free future

"someone will try to exploit that resentment for political power, with the likely outcome that one of the groups will be harmed"

Both groups harmed is the usual long-term outcome.

Re: A classic pairing

"What the fuck is the prime minister doing there?"

He organised had someone organise it. It's his big photo-opportunity.

Re: Timescales?

"There is no domain of knowledges being formed with propositions, tests and experimentation, just the munging together of scraped content from elsewhere which may, or may not, be accurate and is likely rather biased too."

If the models are recursively trained on the output of models what is the long-term outcome? Do they converge so they all give the same, possibly meaningless, output to every prompt or do they diverge and emit random strings of nonsense?

Re: Timescales?

That raises the question of what useful work they were doing before. And the corollary - how many existing jobs are actually useful?

"the unedifying spectacle of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak interviewing tycoon Elon Musk, the world's richest man"

Would this be more or less unedifying than interviewing his father-in-law about working hours?

We're getting that fry-day feeling... US Army gets hold of drone-cooking microwave rig

We get lots of pheasants straying into the garden. One of these would be very useful.

81K people's sensitive info feared stolen from Hilb after email inboxes ransacked

Who leaves stuff like that on the servers irrespective of whose servers they are?

Apple slams Android as a 'massive tracking device' in internal slides revealed in Google antitrust battle

"because there wasn't a valid alternative engine"

I suppose the rivalry between Apple & Microsoft made a bung impossible Bing invalid.

'Corrupt' cop jailed for tipping off pal to EncroChat dragnet

"So maybe messages were held back 48hrs, or that was how long it took messages to get from collection, filtration and to the relevant LEAs."

Apparently the messages were sent as an overnight download to UK. NCA then filtered it into separate batches for the various units who would have to deal with it. A message intercepted just after the previous download would would be ~24 hours old by the time of the next download so allow some processing time for sorting and her unit to upload their batch onto their own system & 48 hours sounds about right. But depending on the timing of the intercept vs the overnight download schedule it could have been a good bit shorter.

There's an account elsewhere but it would make a good el Reg article.