Posts by Doctor Syntax

You probably can't trust your password manager if it's compromised

Re: guide me

Any variety of Keepass

Of all the functions that needs to minimise its attack surface password management must surely be at the top of the list. Keep 'em local. No servers.

NASA's fill-'er-up Moon rocket 'confidence' test sees mixed results

Re: Cryogenics is hard

"The main problem with hydrogen is that it is the smallest atom and can find places to escape through in just about any gasket or flexible material."

Yup. We used to locate leaking joints in the carbon dating system pipework by dribbling a little hydrogen out of a rubber tube over each joint in turn until we found the one that changed the sound of the vac, pump.

Space Cryogenics is hard.

Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

Re: Feed your AI Finnegans Wake

Or Stanley Unwin.

1. I think of Romanesque as rather simple - semi-circular arches and barrel vaulting, say like the White Tower in the Tower of London and Baroque as complex decoration, swirls and C-scrolls. Not exactly Tower Bridge (that's Gothic Revival) but that sort of complexity only less repetitive. A smoothed out version would be Moderne. Perhaps an AI hallucinated the simile.

2. It seems ideal for writing ISO 9001 quality manuals.

Re: There is something deeply unsatisfying about reading words that nobody wrote

A few days ago Liam was describing watching a Red Hat employee having a chatbot summarise a received email and then write a reply. The original sender could have cut out the entire email by having his own chatbot summarise it and write the reply without even sending it.

Secondhand laptop market goes 'mainstream' amid memory crunch

I keep looking at listings for HP Fury - 64Gb memory and space for half a dozen storage devices. Then I realise I don't need that much.

Dutch cops arrest man after sending him confidential files by mistake

It's the police who need a lesson in link etiquette and it's very simple. If you're intending to send an upload link, send an upload link.

BTW, Has anyone seen Ms Streisand around here?

Canada Goose ruffles feathers over 600K record dump, says leak is old news

So if it's an old leak they'll have already notified the customers and any relevant authorities as required by the legislation in the various countries in which they operate. No?

Keir Starmer declares 'months' timeline for social media age clampdown in UK

Re: Speech control

"This is not 'about the children'. "

To a large extent it's about the Daily Wail.

Re: But Doctor Syntax Is Convinced That "More Laws" Is The Correct Approach!

A/C with reading comprehension problem.

Where is the content to justify the title? Please be specific.

I've frequently said exactly the opposite here. The "more laws" approach often overlooks two things:

What they're trying to deal with is usually illegal anyway under existing laws. Quite often the object seems to be to memorialise someone by creating $NAME's Law.

Secondly, you do not discourage people who are already intent on breaking the law by giving them more laws to break.

"The tone throughout Starmer's post is combative, with the PM framing the effort as a willingness to take on Silicon Valley if necessary."

And is he also willing to take on all the legitimate UK business users or VPNs and risk screwing the economy up further?

Oracle vows 'new era' for MySQL as users sharpen their forks

When you only have a hammer everything looks like a nail

I'd guess RDBMS engine developers are very aware of it. I'd also guess that they're aware that they optimise MySQL differently from Postgres. From that I'd also guess that experienced application developers who are aware of both are aware that some applications are better suited to Posgres and some to MySQL.

(Dislosure - my preferred hammer was Informix. It paid the rent for a long time.)

X users howl into the void as timelines fail to load

Somebody included rm -rf / in a post and Grok read it as a prompt.

KPMG partner in Oz turned to AI to pass an exam on... AI

But surely all these firms are telling their staff to use AI. I suppose only customers are to be served slop.

GPT-5 bests human judges in legal smack down

"If judges don't follow the law, there's not much point in having either."

There's an old legal saying "circumstances make cases."

Legislators produce statute law. Judges examine how statute law applies in given circumstances including circumstances which might be inconceivable when the statute law was written.* If comparable circumstances haven't been met before the judge's decisions, reasoned and based on principles established in previous cases, become precedents**, the body of precedents being case law. If Parliament thinks it necessary new statute law is passed to try to keep up with the times.

This duality has been part of English law since the middle ages (about the time of Henry II*** I think) and has been adopted by other legal systems including US law. It's not so much there being no law or judges not following it. It's a matter of judges making new law to allow it to grow into new circumstances.

Anyone in court (apart from the jury who will be sent to the jury room) can see this process in action when one counsel raises an objection to the other's actions. It results in a real 3-way debate between the two sides and the judge as things are hammered out based on existing precedents, I found it the most interesting part of proceedings when it occurred.

* e.g. A company deploys AI do dealing with customers and making agreements with them. Statute law of contract was written long ago.

** depending on the status of the court.

*** He created a limited body of judges who could go round the country hearing cases, limited to help maintain consistency.

Re: Judges

Is this a view based on time spent watching courts at work or reports in the Daily Wail?

Re: From my little knowledge about US-legal...

In some jurisdictions there are small claims procedures dealing with sums which would probably include even a high end TV. Each side pays its own expenses so there's no mileage in a company bringing in an expensive lawyer. If they lose they lose and if they win it's a bit of a pyrrhic victory if they pay their lawyer more than they've saved in damages.

The judge rules on law. The jury is normally the tribunal of fact although the judge's summing up will be important.

However, there are exceptions, one being the magistrates' court. The so-called Diplock tribunals in N Ireland were also conducted by a judge acting as tribunal of fact in terrorist cases where there would be fears of intimidation of jurors. However it wasn't simply a case of the judge saying "guilty" or "not guilty" as a jury foreman would. He would give a reasoned verdict and that inevitably would require him to go a bit further than he might have done in a summing up for a jury. We now hear that jury-less trials might be introduced in some classes of cases in England & Wales to try to clear backlogs.

When I've seen the judges making rulings* there have been arguments from both sides both sides with copies of Archbold and other texts thrust upon the judge. It's not so much a matter of what the precedent is but of weighing which of two or more should be followed in those particular circumstances. It's also incumbent on the judge to explain the decision. If the decision is made in a high enough court the decision and its explanation can then become new precedents binding on later judges in similar circumstances.

* This has been about the admissibility of evidence that issuing guidance to a jury.

Digital sovereignty must define itself before it can succeed

Transparent attempt to deflect the argument.

Whataboutism.

"If you use a service or software that stores your data or identity in a place or with people with no legal protection against state interference, you have no privacy or protection from being locked out."

This sentence entangles several different concepts.

For a non-governmental service, server provider access could be demanded by an arm of the state - in civilised societies that would require a search warrant or similar. That's always been the case if you're talking about written on paper. Even for servers running on-prem the same applies. That means that sovereignty below state level is limited but state interference can be restricted to the local state by using a provider which meets the requirements below.

Services provided for a government department is not so likely to be subject to search warrant although there may be circumstances where it could happen - suspected corruption, for instance. For governments the concern is interference from a foreign government, either access to data or sanctions terminating the service. That requires what I outlined in a previous comment: ... it has to be operated by an entity, be that a company, a government department or whatever, constituted in the area, under the area's legislation with an ownership chain entirely within the area and with the law of the area applying to the contracts for services and without interference from any entity outside the area.

While I take the point about quality of software and regulatory requirements I think that's a different matter to provision of sovereign services. The significant issue for software for sovereign services is whether the software can be run in a manner that meets those requirements. It has to be hosted by a provider which fails to meet them, then its unsuitable. Software from a local commercial software house (including bespoke software) could be suitable but the biggest source of suitable software would be FOSS. Note also that any software support provider needs to meet the requirements.

Re: Dream On!

Sovereignty, at least from the state view, be that country or bloc such as the EU it means that the service provider is subject only to the laws of that area to which it's sovereign. That means it has to be operated by an entity, be that a company, a government department or whatever, constituted in the area, under the area's legislation with an ownership chain entirely within the area and with the law of the area applying to the contracts for services and without interference from any entity outside the area.

Outside of the US that excludes Google, Meta and other US service providers. So they can't slurp what they don't see and they can't see what they don't get their hands on. If they want to continue providing sovereign services in that situation they need to find a partner who meets those requirements and set up a franchise with contracts which are suitably arm's length. Perhaps even more than the slurping is ensuring an outside entity can't arbitrarily tell the service provider to stop providing a service.

I appreciate that this is a concept some people find difficult to get their head round but there are such things as sovereign states which make their own laws and rather resent the US's extra-terrioriality

Final step to put new website into production deleted it instead

Always Sainsbury your mistakes otherwise you might get sent to Iceland.

Re: Delete

Move is not safe. A customer had an old file tree under root that we wanted to move out of the way.

mv / $destination

Oops. Caught it too late. Just as bad as rm if it's moved so much that only your shell is working. This was SCO and it had been built with special driver for the multi-serial board. It took hours to get the driver emailed from the vendor.

Re: dd

When ddi-ing an image onto a USB drive there's always a heart-stopping second or ten (at least that;s what it feels like) between pressing return and the LED on the drive starting to blink.

Morrisons to double check before you hit return.

Contain your Windows apps inside Linux Windows

Re: Wayland

"While I can't do anything about Systemd given that it is so contageously widespread"

Yes you can : https://www.devuan.org/

(Other options are also available.

Re: If only Linux had something like hier (7) on FreeBSD

WHoosh?

Try man hier(7) (Linux version)

Re: Put Windows in jail?

I suppose there's a trad-off, at least in perceived risks, between the PC being clobbered by a malicious attack and a Microsoft update. That might depend on how it's used but keeping it entirely off the net eliminates both risks.

Re: Put Windows in jail?

Liam mentions a fake virtual TPM in TFA.

To go one step further, I wonder if it would be possible to strip the Windows down to kernel, drivers and a minimal set of .DLLs so that it's just an API for running Windows applications.

Re: Yuck

Also applications for strongly regulated environments only certified to run under Windows.

An all these categories there's also the possibility thet they only run in obsolete versions of Windows.

" the WinApps config for both Docker and Podman defaults to storing the Windows VM in /var/lib"

If only Linux had a standard place for storing data for such services. It could be called something like /srv

Enforcing piracy policy earned helpdesk worker death threats

Re: Why wasn't the violent idiot fired immediately and the cops called?

They might have said the same thing to the angry guy's subsequent business partner.

Re: Why wasn't the violent idiot fired immediately and the cops called?

Were you truly in a position to distinguish between a nutter and a genuine threat? If you decided that it was a nutter and it wasn't you could have been putting many lives at risk, including your own.

It has to be taken seriously, the consequences are too serious if it's real. The possibility of it being real cannot be dismissed simply because it's something outside your experience. As I keep saying here, experience is a dear teacher. I's better to learn from others' experience and not have to larn from your own.

Re: Reminds me of poor management

Management did nothing, even when shown the posts.

The possible replies to that are "If he did do that would like to be the one answering the police and reporters' questions afterwards?" and "Have you checked with legal?"

If Microsoft made a car... what would it be?

OTOH I sometimes suspect my car is built by Microsoft.

If it thinks* the driver isn't watching the road it will make a warning noise to attract the diver's attention to the dash display where it's showing a message telling the drive to watch the road. This happens particularly at complex road junctions where the driver is trying to take in at least 180° of surrounding roads.

The steering wheel mounted volume control is close to the button to trigger voice activation of the phone. If the latter is accidentally triggered when the handset isn't in the car the central display will show a message telling the drive that no device is connected and ask - while the car is in motion - whether the driver wants to connect one. Either answer seems to bring up some sort of connection dialog which simply doesn't go away by itself, even though the car is in motion and the driver obviously can't safely respond, not even to cancel it.

The collision avoidance system has a mind of its own. Slowing down approaching a T junction it will alert when there's nothing closer than the wall or hedge across the road. When creeping slowly up to the stop line it will slam on the brakes if another vehicle drives across and even stall the engine (and add insult to injury by then telling the driver that the vehicle in front has moved). Ditton for oncoming traffic on the other side of the road although it hasn't (yet) completely stopped or stalled the car. There are multiple pages in the driver's handbook warning of situations where it can make mistakes but the developers seem not to be aware of this being an indication that they've got things wrong.

Much the same goes for the lane awareness system. In particular it seems not to work with the collision avoidance system to realise that the reason that the driver is changing lanes to avoid a parked car; occasionally it will show both collision and lane alerts. On one particular narrow road with a steep camber it has to be restrained from oscillating between ditch and centre line. It has, for no obvious reason, tried to pull the car to the verge on a straight road or to the right towards the next lane on a left hand motorway bend. Like the collision avoidance there are many pages in the handbook explaining how it can make mistakes without this being seen as an indication they've got thongs wrong.

I've never had the courage to engage cruise control but one of the options is to take the current speed limit into consideration irrespective of the number of times the speed limit indicator fails to show anything or shows the wrong speed.

Could Microsoft do worse?

The sad thing is that given my age this might well be the last car I'll ever own and that there's probably no point in even looking at anything else because this is the standard of S/W on any modern car.

* Not entirely anthropomorphism, simply using "it" as an avatar for the development team.

Re: It's a fleet, not one car

It must have been different from another in the fleet.

I had an Ghia-ised Orion as a company car which would try to rip the driver's thumbs off by trying to self straighten cornering under power. Its replacement was a Montego that had the exact opposite problem. A subsequent boss said a group of them hired a Montego Turbo to go to the TT and it put them in ditch; I wasn't at least surprised.

Re: Linux cars...

"deliver few surprises and its passengers to their destination"

Elegance, sheer elegance.

"the third one is located centrally at the back"

More likely at one side. The better hree-wheelers of yore like the Morgan & BSA had the central rear wheel configuration.

Or maybe it is the pgo stick.

Re: Trabant!

OTOH there were a few whose faces were well-known in Yorkshire who just happened to be on hand to turn it back up onto its wheels. It was something of in in-joke.

OK, so Anthropic's AI built a C compiler. That don't impress me much

Re: Spotify

Maybe their best ones have been laid off because they're th most expensive.

Re: "That don't impress me much"

"until these AI can do things they can't even comprehend "

If you want stuff to be reliably useful at some real world task you need to have a degree of confidence in it. To have a degree of confidence requires a degree of comprehension of how to do it.

For the moment what we do comprehend is how, by pattern matching, it will invent non-existent legal case or bibliographic citations. It takes words it recognises associated with the prompt and fits them, apparently appropriately, into recognised patterns to produce realistic but false results.

Re: "That don't impress me much"

Pattern recognition includes seeing faces in clouds or on pieces of toast.

How AI could eat itself: Competitors can probe models to steal their secrets and clone them

Re: Pot, kettle, all black

I have negative sympathy for them.

Anthropic wants comp-sci students to vibe code their way through college

Providing students taught this way are careful to put on their CV it should make filtering job applications easier.

Trump's Genesis Mission gets its first set of 26 sure-to-succeed objectives

Possibly the political heads are going in one direction and the grass roots who know otherwise are sneaking in good idea by the back door. That's assuming it all works. The "assuming" bit has so much work to do i needs its own fusion power.

Skyrora circles Orbex wreckage as UK rocket rival heads for administration

"The company was on that cusp for a while."

Hofstadter's law strikes again.