Posts by Doctor Syntax

Amazon, Google asked to explain why they were serving ads on sites hosting CSAM

Re: Why do they host ads?

It's the purpose of business to make money within the law. That's a significant limitation.

If the US Govt doesn't want its ads placed on any given site it's up to them to tell their agents that. That's a separate and more easily dealt with issue then stopping Google placing any other adds there.

France, UAE to drop €50B on AI mega-datacenter. Still nowhere near America’s $500B bet

Re: That's a lot of money...

It's not a regular bit-barn. It's going to be stuffed full of GPUs, NPUs or whatever. Are you the same A/C that missed that point earlier?

Re: One Gigawatt ?

"and how important it is to keep bringing new ones online"

Also how daft it was -and certainly not green - to pause building them.

Re: Build your own infrastructure

"Most digital live and commerce requires data centers and compute power."

TFA makes it clear. These are not for commerce, they're for AI, the latest precipice for lemmings.

Lemmings. Bloody things get under your feet everywhere.

Trump's Dept of Transport hits brakes on Biden’s EV charger build-out

Re: As an EV owner - I say GOOD

Anyone who thinks Trump is in it for anyone but himself and his sycophantic big business pals is an idiot.

I think that's more like it.

Re: Meanwhile at a secret lair somewhere…

It'll work out OK for him. It will be resurrected to only charge Teslas.

Agent P waxes lyrical about 14 years of systemd

Re: I Wrote A Script.......

AgentP?

Re: Not a Hater

For once, bob, your CAPS are pardonable.

Re: So, there's a disconnect

"because even a vaguely techy linux users can write a script"

Not only that, they can test it and single step it if necessary from their terminal's shell.

Re: Reading this makes me cry

The only joke I remember from it was the insurance program trying to sell insurance.

Re: "(Almost) all in C"

Surprised to find that backspace isn't used.

Re: Pipewire!

"Now, if we had a pipewire equivalent for systemd"

We do. Several.

New boss for Roscosmos as Yury Borisov binned

I suppose he was getting fed up with Mump getting all the limelight recently.

Does DOGE have what it takes to actually tackle billions in US govt IT spending?

Re: Head up guys

Dunno about CNN but BBC's report says the judgement ordered destruction of any copies.

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

Re: Backing up the Internet

Oops. M6. Satnav error.

Re: Backing up the Internet

The Lakes end of the M60 would be better still but too far from the bit barn.

Ah, yes. I forgot. Points mean prizes.

Re: Holographic storage?

The great thing about transparent tapes is that you don't need to unspool them. You can just see right through the EOT on the inside of the reel.

Re: No backup existed

The first requirement is always paranoia.

Re: Backing up the Internet

You can't beat a van full of tapes on the M40 for bandwidth.

Re: It takes too long

I had a gig to replace 2 boxes for Y2K. One box was a hot standby, backed up every night from the live system. Errrm - for goodness knows how long the time taken to backup had overrun its timeslot and been killed each morning when cron started up production.

"it seems that to a manager, having the backups is sufficient to tick the box."

This is where the Holywood Protocol comes into its own. The surprise auditor comes along and asks the manager for the ticked box for the last successful restore from backup. Extra points for the last successful full-scale DR exercise..

UK Home Office silent on alleged Apple backdoor order

Re: Who is more stupid? The Home Office or the disgruntled Apple users ?

"It will only catch dumb criminals who can't imagine using a product that Apple does not control."

Not quite. The insecurity inherent in any back door makes every innocent users' data accessible to any agency, criminal ot nation state, that finds it. That is what the US discovered only a few weeks ago but what with moving fast and breaking things that lesson has already been forgotten - to the extent that it was ever learned.

You think the password is the encryption key?

We've been trying to work that one out for years.

Re: This is the Home Office, not the government

"I (and colleagues) work to deliver the will of the secretary of state, no matter how misguided, malformed, or simply stupid their wishes are"

Th HO's core competence seems to be house training Home Secs (apart from the few that don't need it). So effective was it that one of them wrote an account of it in the Times, quite oblivious of what had really happened to him.

Re: The crims

"There is nothing nasty, in my iCloud, it is not my thing."

There may well be other things which you would not wish to be disclosed, indeed are contractually required not to disclose, such as access credentials to online services such as banking.

Re: Same old labour...

This is why I've not voted for either Conservative or Labour since Cameron celebrated the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta with this nonsense in 2015, nor will I as long as they continue with it.

Re: The cost is infinite

Start with Yvette Cooper's.

In fact, she and the rest of the government should publish their own encryption keys, and access credentials for any other online services they use, including banking. And no politicians to use the likes of Whatsapp. Anything else is hypocrisy.

MPs voted for them.

It's not supposed to be implemented if it's not feasible so why would they demand it now.

If they think it is feasible to implement a secure back door all they have to do is commission a proof of concept to be picked over by industry-recognised experts. If they can do that and get approval of the experts then they've proved it is feasible. Until they've demonstrated that it is so it remains infeasible.

'Maybe the problem is you' ... Linus Torvalds wades into Linux kernel Rust driver drama

Re: bigger problem......

"how old is he?"

Not very, except, maybe, to a 20-year olf who knows everything.

"Yet, it is being debated, publicly."

It can be debated publicly - in the right place. The right place is the kernel mailing list which is publicly accessible at lkml.org,

Re: Fair comment by Linus

It sounds as if there needs to be an agreement that it's up to the Rust team to maintain C API changes with some means of coordination to ensure the Rust team have notice and an agreed time period to make their changes so that both can be merged together. Martin might have had a good point but went about it in the wrong way.

Having said that, surely the whole point* of an interface (the I in API!) is that it can remain stable whilst the code that implements it changes. I'd have thought that changing an API means that everything** that uses the API, the Rust wrapper being one will need to change with it.

* All too often forgotten these days, especially with GUIs.

** Depending on the extent of the changes

DOGE geek with Treasury payment system access now quits amid racist tweet claims

Re: I agree

Perhaps el Reg would turn off anon postings on these threads. Even better, expose the IDs of the existing posts.

Could you expand a little on that? Such as who's winning and what constitutes a win.

Musk's move fast and break things mantra won't work in US.gov

Re: "25-year-old Marko Elez, who's now in charge of the US Treasury payment system"

Moved fast and broke himself.

I'd guess "forced to resign" was a matter of being rung up out of the blue and told his resignation had been accepted.

Creators demand tech giants fess up and pay for all that AI training data

Despite a tech industry figure insisting that the "original sin" of text and data mining had already occurred and that content creators and legislators should move on.

Not a problem. It's reversible. If you can't pay for what you took just delete the training. All of it. And hose backups.

Microsoft 365 price rises are coming – pay up or opt out (if you can find the button)

Curious minds want to know...just what do Microsoft intend to do with all those arms and legs.

Eggheads crack the code for the perfect soft boil

Hold the Marmite. Eggs and Marmite? That's as bad as mixing tea and milk. Possibly worse.

Re: Delia Smith recipe, modified

Wot - no bacon?

Re: "a total duration of 32 minutes"

I suppose it could be commercialised along the lines of the Teasmaid which will shuffle the eggs between boiling and tepid water. Set the time for breakfast and the eggs are started and then at appropriate times later the toaster and kettle are switched on. The deluxe version can butter the toast.

I still worry that after a few of the 2 minute boiling phases it's going to be something the size of a goose egg that isn't hard boiled.

Coordinates of millions of smartphones feared stolen, sparking yet another lawsuit against data broker

The data we use is already commercially available data collected via smartphone apps, purchased at scale by data brokers or aggregators, then licensed to Gravy Analytics and other organizations like ours."

It is high time people like this were made to regard such data not as valuable but as toxic. If a business like this is sued so many times it's likely to just be bankrupted and nobody gets adequate redress. The senior management and directors should be personally liable for civil suit and also criminally liable. Perhaps that should also extend to the aggregators who licenced it to them. Make the whole supply chain liable.

Openreach tests 50 Gbps broadband – don’t expect it anytime soon

Re: Broadband speed tiers, especially in the modern fiber era is a borderline scam.

"salespeople ... borderline scamming people"

Salespeople are not borderline.

Re: At some point in the distant future

Don't be sceptical. OpenReach will keep rolling out upgrades to those with a decent service. It postpones getting everyone up to a reasonable standard of service irrespective of where they live.

To they that hath shall be given, from they that hath not shall be taken away that little they hath.

Re: How does the back end support this?

Subscribers? That word was verboten even back in the 90s. Customers!

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Re: what a fucking waste of resources

"I can't see anybody wanting to upgrade to linux, they're all small companies using Microsoft 365 mostly"

If by that you mean they're doing everything online then they'd scarcely notice what the client OS is. Why not suggest a trial?

Re: A brief pause, please

"Many years ago, it was fashionable to hate IBM. Big Blue, and all that."

It turned out to be more wisdom than fashion, didn't it?