Posts by Andy Non

Microsoft Windows Firewall complains about Microsoft code

I doubt the AI that wrote the software cares much for software engineering practices.

ChatGPT creates phisher’s paradise by recommending the wrong URLs for major companies

Re: Not fit for purpose

A major update to my mobile this morning added Google Gemini with much fanfare. I immediately disabled it. Don't want any AI shit on my phone.

Norwegian lotto mistakenly told thousands they were filthy rich after math error

Re: The joy of being fat fingered

I once bought a £4 plant from a garden centre, only to discover later they'd charged my card £400. They did swiftly correct the mistake though, thankfully.

Deutsche Bahn train hits 405 km/h without falling to bits

Speed risk

Can't help wondering how safe such ultra-fast trains would be if they hit an obstruction on the line or were deliberately derailed by terrorist acts. Vast lengths of line would need to be actively monitored for any suspicious activity.

Exif marks the spot as fresh version of PNG image standard arrives

What the web needs

is more animated images trying to grab your attention. Sheesh!

SpaceX's Starship explodes again ... while still on the ground

Re: Starship - a poem by Baldrick

You are Basil Brush and I claim my £5

Glazed and confused: Hole lotta highly sensitive data nicked from Krispy Kreme

Doh!

Nuts!

Japan set to join the re-usable rocket club after Honda sticks a landing

Now that's a Honda engine I'd like to put on two wheels! :-)

(Though, got a feeling Wile e Coyote beat me to it)

Penn State boffins create silicon-free two-dimensional computer

Re: Bah!

"one instruction"

Must be the ultimate RISC processor.

Salesforce study finds LLM agents flunk CRM and confidentiality tests

Re: Confidentiality Awareness

"don't use perfect grammer"

Shall we eat grandma?

Shall we eat, grandma?

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

I'll quit firefox

on the day Ublock Origin stops blocking all ads.

Meta offered one AI researcher at least $10,000,000 to join up

Goes to check spam folder...

Nope, no £10m job offers.

But on the plus side my long lost uncle has left me £10m in his will, yay!

Slapped wrists for Financial Conduct Authority staff who emailed work data home

Erm, thanks, I think. I hate office politics but politics at corporate level is well out of my league. There was a feeling of being a pawn in that atmosphere, so I just made the best of the situation and cracked on with writing software. I suppose I could have just told my boss it was mission impossible. That would have just led to an impasse. There would have been no solution to the dilemma at corporate management level. That is where such issues need to be resolved, not locking down employees so hard it prevents them from doing their job. I'm guessing that was the origin of the conflict between the two departments.

On another occasion I was writing some software that used a third party component. I needed to access the vendor's website to view some information and examples of code using their component. However, as their site contained sample program code, it was blocked by our corporate firewall. I wasted an entire working day unable to progress the project any further until I got home and looked up the required information on my home computer. Not an ideal situation.

"workarounds"

At one place I worked at 20+ years ago, corporate security and software development were housed in different buildings and were often at odds with each other at a senior level well beyond my pay grade. I was given the opportunity to do some software development working from home on my own desktop computer. The problem was transferring program source code between my corporate PC and home computer. The work computer was locked down to within an inch of its life with USB ports blocked and no way to use floppy disks, CDs etc. It wasn't possible to email program code by email, even if zipped. It never got past the firewall restrictions. Similarly encrypted files or password protected files were blocked.

However, the company did do a lot of work with data and transferring data via email so: Workaround. I knocked up a little program that converted zip files of my program code into CSV files which had numbers in the range 0 to 255. Innocent looking numeric data which went through the firewall without issue. My little program simply recreated the software source code zip files at the other end. What a faff though. While my boss was very happy with this arrangement, I doubt corporate security would have been so happy, had they ever found out.

Researchers claim spoof-proof random number generator breakthrough

Re: Thought Experiment

I can do a magic trick with fair coins and get them to land heads or tails as I please every time. Neat party trick or for winning free beer. It appears impossible and leaves folks scratching their heads.

Starbucks brews up AI to support baristas instead of replace them

Re: Just an idea

My name? Yeah, it's Mike Hunt.

Half of businesses rethink ditching humans for customer service bots

That is why I ditched my energy supplier. Their customer support was dreadful and it was virtually impossible to communicate with a human; then they had the cheek to spam me with their latest offering... they were branching out into offering broadband too! I nearly fell off my chair laughing. No way, no chance, not a hope in hell.

On the rare occasions I contact customer support

it is usually because it is a tricky problem I've not been able to find a solution to on their help pages, FAQ etc.

Through experience with chat bots and speaking bots, they are utterly useless and either try to direct me to the FAQ which didn't resolve my query, a non-existent web page, or they fail to understand what I am asking and keep asking me to repeat the query using fewer words, or go around in circles trying different tactics none of which resolve my query or simply crash and give me an error message. I can't think of a single occasion where an automated support bot has actually resolved my query.

To be fair, the humans providing customer support for Vodafone are only marginally better than bots. Sigh.

Trump guts digital ID rules, claims they help 'illegal aliens' commit fraud

Re: Bankrupt the USA?

Can the ceremony be done with a light sabre?

Google outfoxed by crafty squatters in $1B London HQ's rooftop garden

Maybe its my old Humanities teacher, Mr Fox.

Re: Fox's or Fox'es?

So, flying foxes eh?

China orders trial of aged care robots that can cook, clean, and provide emotional support

Re: Hopefully by then…

Like the Futurama episode where Fry thinks he's entering a phone box and is offered a choice of quick and pleasant or horribly grisly. Not understanding the choice he selects the latter and ends up dodging multiple circular saw blades being thrust at him.

Re: China orders trial of aged care robots

I first read it as they were going to use old robots for the task and I'm thinking, why not new ones?

Re: "provide emotional support"

"robot or a demotivated... "

Marvin: "Here I am, a brain the size of a planet and I'm reduced to wiping a smelly human's arse. "

Chap claims Atari 2600 'absolutely wrecked' ChatGPT at chess

Re: Why?

I once wrote an entire chess engine which played a half decent game. The tricky bit wasn't encoding the rules of chess and the allowed moves, it was writing algorithms to have strategies to win. It adds a new dimension to the game when you have to approach it from this perspective. The program code has to be highly efficient too as it faces an exponentially increasing amount of processing required with each move ahead it analyses. That is the main limiting factor in its ability to play a good game. It sounds like ChatGPT doesn't even have the rules figured out let alone any strategies. Not sure you could train it on chess game records as there are virtually unlimited combinations of piece layouts.

KDE targets Windows 10 'exiles' claiming 'your computer is toast'

(This was intended to be a reply to Nematode)

It's a tricky one. I know most/many Linux users welcome the choice, I do now after using Linux exclusively for a decade. But I remember the first step away from Windows (8.1) and it was tricky, I took the advice of a Linux using friend who suggested KDE Plasma. It was OK, but I eventually switched to Linux Mint Cinnamon. But on first ditching windows I did find the range of Linux alternatives quite bewildering and somewhat off-putting. All I wanted was something that was easy to install, use and maintain and didn't require learning arcane skills. The learning curve for Mint was minimal and the software I used the most was included in the installation: Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, VLC media player etc. The one thing I missed the most was Visual Studio, having earned a crust as a software developer I was in the habit of knocking up software for my own use. The closest replacement was Qt but never really got into it.

Microsoft patches the patch that put Windows 11 in a coma

Coming next week...

A patch for the patch for the patch.

Windows 11 will soon be patches all the way down.

VodafoneThree's a crowd – now comes the hard bit

"Imagine what could happen"

Customer: Hello, I've just received a bill for £3.7 million for data roaming fees in the Antarctic.

Support: Sorry sir, I can see we made an error on your bill, the £3.7 million is for data roaming fees in Spain last weekend where you used 273 terabytes of data.

Customer: But I've never been to Spain!

Support: It is here in black and white. How will you be paying the amount outstanding?

Vodafone were on my blacklist anyway due to their shitty customer service. Now I foresee it going downhill even further and faster.

In the interests of efficiency they'll likely sack most of their combined customer support and replace it with AI bollocks that either doesn't understand what you are asking it or just goes around in circles.

Barclays Bank signs 100k license Copilot deal with Microsoft

Re: I didn't think Barclays could get any worse.

I had a Barclays account for all of three months. When I went into the local branch to open the account all their computers were down, so they filled in several paper based forms. Things went downhill from there. They lost some of the forms and there were delays opening the account. Then there were "issues" with the account itself and Barclays offered to pay me compensation for their ongoing blunders, but they didn't even manage to do that correctly so I closed the account. Good riddance.

Feds gut host behind pig butchering scams that bilked $200M from Americans

I've had lots of scam calls over the years and like to string them along for as long as possible. Eventually they become very rude and hang up on me when they twig I'm playing them. However, one strange call from a young woman doing the "Amazon Prime" scam baffled me. After stringing her along until I was distinctly bored, I made it clear that I knew it was a scam, but instead of being rude and hanging up on me she continued, almost begging me to continue with the scam. I said something extremely rude to her, I could hear the stress in her voice but she still tried to continue. Eventually I hung up. Some time later I wondered if she was one of those captives in a forced labour camp scam centre, under threat to succeed with the scam... or else! I've heard they can face punishment including beatings etc if they don't reach a mandated quota.

Better education may work with some folks, but not all. I read a case recently about a woman who started sending money to her online "boyfriend" but when her own family discovered this they told her it was a scam, but she refused to believe it and sent more money. Eventually she accepted she'd been scammed... but then a stroke of luck... a scam recovery agency contacted her and offered to recover the money she'd sent the scammer, all for hourly investigation fees of course, so... you know where this is going...

China to visit Earth’s ‘quasi-moon’ and bring a chunk of it back home

Re: A diameter of just 40 to 100 meters*

"your parking orbit"

And take some change to pay for said parking. You don't want to get a ticket, the fine might be astronomical.

Victoria's Secret website laid bare for three days after 'security incident'

Got to keep abreast of the situation.

Re: Have the hackers revealed

Sounds like they have gone tits up. Someone must have made a boob.

Poll of 1,000 senior techies: Euro execs mull use of US clouds

"how they blindly walked into this situation"

Maybe it was associated with assuming the US is a valued friend of Western countries and a faithful and trusted ally with a lot of shared values. In light of recent events in the US that 80 year old image has been shaken if not shattered. Trust is hard to earn but easy to destroy.

Europe warns giant e-tailer to stop cheating consumers or face its wrath

So the bottom line is

don't buy anything from Shein. Duly noted.

Trump threatens to add formal Apple Tax on top of the 'Apple tax'

"In less then 4 years time there is another Mr(s) President"

That's a big assumption. As Trump himself said, if you vote for him you'll never need to vote again.

AI ain't B2B if OpenAI is to be believed

"astrological readings"

But,just think of the harm and chaos if an AI gave inaccurate astrological readings that didn't come true?

Trump announces $175B for Golden Dome defense shield over America

Another way around the golden dome

Sneak some warheads into the target country on shipping containers or other sea/land transport and just leave them very well hidden and secure in strategic locations ready to be detonated upon command.

It really doesn't need to be rocket science.

Apple to add fresh accessibility features for 2025

Re: "aging will disable all of us at some point"

"solve puzzle in 30 seconds"

I was enjoying playing "Atomic heart" on the PS5 but it had a mini-game half way in based on the Nokia snake game. It required great dexterity with the left thumb and fast reflexes. I just couldn't respond fast enough to stop the snake going off screen before it grew to the required length. It literally brought the game to an end for me. What a ridiculous way for an otherwise great game to end up being abandoned.

An additional issue I face as on older gamer is my fingers seize up after a little while with intense activity. Some boss fights are far too long and my hands can't cope.

"aging will disable all of us at some point"

This. As I age I find it necessary to wrestle with tiny/vanishing scroll bars, tiny buttons and text. Some of the worst offenders are games developers, I wont even buy many of the latest games on PS5 because not only do they lack accessibility features they don't even provide varying difficulty levels, assuming all players are young, nimble fingered and with fast reflexes. Sometimes an otherwise decent game is brought to a grinding halt part way in due to a compulsory unbeatable boss or a half-baked mini-game which effectively acts as a filter to stop anyone with even minor disabilities from going any further.

DoorDash scam used fake drivers, phantom deliveries to bilk $2.59M

Re: How in the World ...

Perhaps came to light when they tried to give them a driver of the year award.

Uncle Sam claims H-1B fraud crackdown is working as registrations drop 25%

Re: Green card – which is itself a pathway to citizenship and freedom

"why would anyone want to enter the US on a green card at this point in time?"

Maybe better shortened to:

why would anyone want to enter the US on a green card at this point in time?

I was talking to a Canadian the other day who has now cancelled plans to visit the US on a work related matter. He said that in the recent past, if the Canada/US border officials took a dislike to anyone, they just refused entry and told them to go back. Nowadays they are more likely to detain you for an indeterminate period of time.

Plan to keep advanced chips from China with tracking tech gains support in Congress

Maybe MOSSAD will offer

to install something a little extra with every circuit board... if it detects it isn't in a legitimate location then... (Icon)

(No, I'm not being serious, though some MAGA types might relish the idea)

Here's what we know about the DragonForce ransomware that hit Marks & Spencer

Re: "off limits"

Exactly, the slightest poke at the Russian bear may result in you accidentally falling out of a window.

Boffins warn that AI paper mills are swamping science with garbage studies

Re: Way Back...

Fahrenheit 451 ?

OS-busting bug so bad that Microsoft blocks Windows Insider release

This must be the Windows release

codenamed Jenga.

New Zealand kind-of moves to ban social media for under-16s, require age checks for new accounts

Re: You cannot do this digitally without ID grabbing everyone, STASI style.

"selling adult ID codes across the counter of stores for cash"

Not sure that would work. There are plenty of shopkeepers who are willing to sell cigarettes or booze to those who are clearly under-age. Plus there are kids who simply pay a dodgy adult to buy these things for them. There will just be a thriving black market in the ID codes.

Best bet is to

ban social media for those under the age of 100.