Posts by Doctor Syntax

GitHub hits CTRL-Z, decides it will train its AI with user data after all

Re: Smell that?

it'll likely be arbitrarily reset to "Opted In"

This is US privacy standards. That should be "Not opted out".

Age checks creep into Linux as systemd gets a DOB field

Re: “ditch it”

Glad you noticed.

Re: systemd-free distros

Which law? It's not just whatever law you're thinking of. It's all the other laws going through various legislatures at the minute and all the ones that bandwagon jumpers are going to come up with in the future. Every eejit legislator who thinks ToTC will get him a few votes is coming up with a fresh one, all different and ALL failing to tackle the underlying problems. They'll do that because it's easier that doing the hard work of actually prosecuting real offences against children.

In my career I've been a small part of the investigation into what turned out to have been long running offences by the staff in a children's' home.

Much later, but still a couple of decades ago, I was involved in the IT side of the implementation of a system which was supposed to ensure that the sort of offenders in the Kincora case couldn't get to work with children.

We're still seeing prosecutions which, in one way is good because it means that it's sometimes being taken seriously but not often enough. One recent report of a case told how it wasn't prosecuted earlier because when the police caught escaped victims their reports weren't taken seriously and they were sent back to more abuse.

That angers me. It's a problem that's been recognised for decades, is allowed to continue but in the meantime we have those who should be ensuring that effective action is taken faffing around applying their patent nostrums to the fundamental framework of our economy.

Re: systemd-free distros

We are not dealing with one law, we are dealing with several, all drawn up by different legislatures. You won't be able to pick and choose which one you meet, you'll need to meet all, including the most draconian if only because the least will be too ineffective to achieve the proponents' aims. The consequence will be everyone using a computer, whether or not they're in these jurisdictions will be expected to hand over PII to identify themselves (whatever that may mean - I leave it as an exercise for yourself to work out what it means and how it might be accomplished) to some outfit with no ability to withstand the attention they'll get due to the data the'll be hoarding. That will happen because the OS will implement it universally to avoid getting sued by these tinpot dictators.

I recognise the problem* but this is not the way to solve it. All too often the response to something which is already illegal is to introduce new legislation instead of enforcing that which exists. In this particular instance it looks rather like introducing a technical offence that's easily defined and prosecuted rather than taking the hard route of prosecuting the actual offence, whatever that might be. That's laziness and useless because it fails to tackle the real issues.

The personal computer and the internet are too fundamental to the modern economy to have this sort of nonsense imposed by the technically ignorant to get us itno that situation.

* I spent about a third of my working life as a forensic biologist. It's a branch for FS that deals largely with assaults both physical and sexual. One of the Lab's cases in my time was the Kincora House boys home - look i up. If it had been my office mate who was in court the morning that case arrived rather than the other way about it might have been myself who became the reporting officer. I did help with the scene work as did all the other biologists.

Re: systemd-free distros

You seem to think there is an existing concept of "child account". There isn't. Just user account. If the concept is to be introduced how do you ensure that children only use a child account? How do you ensure that an administrator creates the appropriate account type?

Ah - a solution. All accounts become child accounts, then there's no way round that.

Don't you see this is where it's all going?

That word "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

"All this does is add a data field...."

And if you believe that's where it will stop it's you who doesn't know anything about the real world and, specifically, salami tactics.

Sleepwalkers!

Re: Well that didn't take long.

No thinks, I'll just stick with Sysv and let services be implemented in shell script as befits an Unix-lookalike.

Re: This is purely performative.

And gender, pronouns, species (on the internet evryone should know if you're a dog).

Re: This is purely performative.

The two explanations are not mutually exclusive.

Re: this is what I don't get

"How does that DOB get to the end point internet based services, there is no standardized API like HTML within these laws."

The requirement would for the OS to provide a standard API.

As fro Devuan, the answer there is simple. As a Devuan user I primarily use the Devuan repository. For anything alse, do you think the FOSS community is going to go along with implementing this on any other download mirrors? Really????

Re: It is *not* required

Yet.

Re: Yup....This root user was born on 1-Jan-1906!!!!

How do They know you're not a child when you use it? And to forestall a possible answer, how do they know you're not lying?

Re: Yup....This root user was born on 1-Jan-1906!!!!

Feb 30th

Re: Yup....This root user was born on 1-Jan-1906!!!!

I'm quite sure there'd be a library that would implement the age/DoB API by returning a credible but random value on each call. Track tha.

Re: Facebork

"given whats appearing on my farcebok feed, its becoming a sewer instead of a gutter"

You could ditch it, you know.

Re: systemd-free distros

Forget the thin end of this wedge. If you really can't see where this is going you must be one of very few.

Re: systemd-free distros

What are you saying systemd "got wrong"?

How much time have you got?

Fortunately this might be one reason why some distros start looking at it again.

Re: systemd-free distros

"But isn't this what we need - on device age indication (not verification) for child accounts instead of wholesale privacy invasion for everyone in the name of age verification?"

That wouldn't be enough for the ToTC lot. Even if you can't see the possibility, they can: child who's a good deal more competent than parent enters 1991 into DoB field.

Without verification an indication means nothing. If it were introduced without things wouldn't rest there.

Jen Easterly, cybersecurity's 'relentless optimist,' hopes feds come back to RSAC next year

"we're now at a point where you cannot meaningfully have and deploy cyber capabilities without integrating AI"

Id' have thought keeping it out would have been more to the point. If an insider presents the greatest threat, even by carelessness, as we're often told, what about an insider actually inside the system?

Chemists concoct nail polish that lets clawed humans use touch screens

Re: Solving a long-solved problem

Also repair of damaged PCB traces.

Solving a long-solved problem

Conductive paint is still on the market.

Re: Knuckles unknown?

If they really need force several knuckles migh be OK but a hammer is better.

Enterprise PCs are unreliable, unpatched, and unloved compared to Macs

Re: Edge

HSBC? Not surprised. Things have clearly not got better since I ditched them about 20 years ago. I wouldn't have expected them to.

Re: Edge

Ironically - or maybe not - another Chromium patch arrives while I was on this thread. There's a reason why it's one of my last choices for picky web sites.

HP stuffs OpenAI LLM into new laptops in bid for small biz

"In a demo, an HP rep uploaded a sensitive document to a PC and then asked the IQ bot, which is based on OpenAI’s gpt-oss-20b, to analyze it. He then asked it to help him write an overview of a board meeting he was planning. It did both of these tasks quickly and with great detail.

The rep then showed off..." He hadn't been hustled of the door by this time?

LiteLLM loses game of Trivy pursuit, gets compromised

Re: Pick your poison

"an apt metaphor"

Apt, OTOH, will remain trusted.

Remote or not, workers are drifting back toward the city

I hope so too but these little reminders are useful. City-based commuting simply isn't a sustainable way to run an economy no, indeed, a planet.

Re: Doesn't surprise me

Being of a geriatric persuasion myself I'd hate to be commuting into big cities these days. As it happens I was driven to the far side of Manchester the other day. Mancunian Way far worse than I remembered and all those multi-story hives which serve as homes! OTOH we were on the way to an opera and you can't get more metropolitan than that (Glyndebourne and the like excepted) so village living isn't really isolation.

Our driver, BTW, was our daughter who, as I've said before, works at home for a non-UK company which is, it seems, entirely WFH-based - that way they can and do recruit high quality staff world-wide.

I wonder if the sudden increase in petrol prices have already made this report look a bit dated.

Nothing screams casual career pivot like joining the UK Ministry of Defence for a cool £162K

Re: Only for the pension?

Things seem to have changed since my day. It was 1.25% of final salary (as average of last 2 years of service) but taken at 60. Shit salaries, no perks, no bonuses, but shit pensions.

EU broadcasters say smart TVs and voice assistants are the next gatekeepers

Re: Unplugged from the Internet: Not a Workable Option for Many New TVs

"Your Internet connection is not working properly"

Oh, yes it is.

It might be worthwhile spending the extra money on a plain monitor and a Pi running OSMC, TVHeadEnd, MythTV or the like.

Microslop stuffs AI photo restyling powers into OneDrive

It looks like the memo "We are reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points" hasn't arrived yet. Or is it a case of taking a long time to turn a super-tanker?

Country that put backdoors into Cisco routers to spy on world bans foreign routers

I'm sure it won't be too difficult to set up a small factory to insert imported boards into imported cases and put them into locally made packaging.

Windows boss promises to heal the operating system's self-inflicted wounds

Re: Trapped.

I'm not sure about this. Where data sovereignty becomes a concern US software and services are being looked at askance. If big user categories - governments, for instance, take the view that stuff has to be run on non-MS platforms then this is going to rsult in

a) It's not longer what people have to use

b) It's not a preferred platform to drive expensive equipment. Existing users will be stuck with it but many of them will already be stuck with unsupported versions of Windows.

c) Application vendors will be presented with a changing market to which they will need to adapt or lose to competitors who do.

d) People are discovering there are options.

The days of sticking it to the user base may be on the way out.

Despite my long established position of preferring Linux and anything FOSS to Microsoft and anything propitiatory I think it's possible the message may really have got through. I thought the fact that Suleyman was moved a few weeks ago might have been significant, that he was the one behind the push of Copilot into everything and that being promoted to look for "superintelligence he was being moved somewhere where he couldn't do any more damage but they'd just not told him.

They can't be unaware of the digital sovereignty trend that's appearing outside of the US and that it will be a push towards FOSS. They may also realise that home users are increasingly being set up with one or other FOSS office suites on their new Windows laptops. The increase in H/W prices - ironically driven by the AI they've been so keen on - is going to dampen the replacements that the W11 games were supposed to have stimulated and that may lead to existing PCs being refreshed with Linux installs. All of a sudden the market's belief that nobody got fired for buying Microsoft is looking a bit frail.

CERN eggheads burn AI into silicon to stem data deluge

Re: Science needs better funding and higher policy urgency

It's just an A/C who doesn't even know that building the experiment is part of doing the experiment.

Re: Science needs better funding and higher policy urgency

The folks at CERN are pretty good at finding things. Some folk on the Register seem unable even to find the Wikipedia article on the High Luminosity Collider. It's not surprising, then, that they post A/C

Elon Musk wants to build 50 times more chips than the world currently produces, using 'new physics'

Re: New Physics

I think the explanation's simpler than that. The old physics won't deliver so he needs new physics. It will also finally enable the fully self-driving car.

Re: So....

The Register commentator seldom does.

Re: So....

I'm not sure his investors are normal people.

Re: A Terawatt of compute.. In Space.

" It doesn't do to keep all your eggs in one basket."

It does if you accept that that's the only basket you're going to get and you'd better look after it.

Re: Peak Musk...

"He was quite particular about the distinction between Iain Banks and Iain M Banks"

No, if Musk says it was Iain Banks then Iain Banks it must have been. Just ask Grok.

Who needs helium when you have new physics?

Smooth criminals talking their way into cloud environments, Google says

I wonder how vulnerable chatbot hell-desk substitutes might be.

The drone swarm is coming, and NATO air defenses are too expensive to cope

Re: This report is bizarre

The way things are going if you today have a stock of 100 000 cheap and efficient combat drones, in five months you will have used them all.

Re: 'Be scared' sells newspapers

"The orange muppet didnt inform anyone in advance."

Of course he did. He may not have made any courtesy calls. He certainly didn't try to build an alliance. But the build-up was itself informative.

NASA sets 'impossible' ground rules for relocation of 'flown space vehicle'

Time is the critical factor here. Turning a draft RFP into a real one takes time. The proposals have to be evaluated. Questions have to be asked of them. Questions need to be answered. At some point it becomes too late to award a contract before Trump's out, hopefully replaced by someone in possession of some marbles - maybe even a full set.

Re: Isn't This The Point?

"I don't think that a vast cost to move the shuttle intact will be any deterrent"

All that has to be done is drag out the planning until he's gone.