Posts by JulieM

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: Whoops

IYKYK ;)

See also

See also that well-known holy site in India, the Harimandir Sahib, also known as the Golden Temple, at Amriczar.

Re: Do they really spell archaeology like that over there?

How do they spell the name of that bit of water between Greece and Turkey?

Re: Surely simpler to stick with correct English

And it had better be the full 568ml.

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

Re: Divers log

Well, obviously! Because £1.5 would be a pound and a half, or 150 pence; as opposed to a pound and a twentieth, or 105 pence.

Linus Torvalds goes back to a mechanical keyboard after making too many typos

Re: Wish I knew what kind....

That example appears to be missing the less-than and more-than key (or \ and | in the UK) which is normally found between the left Shift and Z/W.

If Google is forced to give up Chrome, what happens next?

Solving the wrong problem

Instead of making Google sell Chrome, why not allow them to keep it -- but make individually-targeted advertising very illegal?

Curl project founder snaps over deluge of time-sucking AI slop bug reports

Re: FFS !!!!!

Exactly. If you cannot be sure whether what came out of AI is any good or not, there's no point having the AI; because you had to get the right answer using traditional methods anyway just to check the AI answer, so you might as well never have bothered with the AI!

It's like having a faster-than-light communication channel and the only way to check for errors being to use a separate, slower-than-light back channel.

Re: It's the bug bounty

That is much more easily said than done.

Asking for money is one thing, but how are you going to collect what you are owed?

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

Been there

I had a cat who discovered a keystroke combination that turned off the Wi-Fi on my Lenovo ThinkPad.

I never found how to turn it back on, either, so it always required a full restart -- and sometimes an e2fsck for good measure.

Beer, because he was one of the best cats.

British govt agents step in as Harrods becomes third mega retailer under cyberattack

Re: We can't continue to regard these simply as "IT Problems"

By taking away one piece at a time until it no longer works?

By asking the engineers if a circuit really needs that resistor there, or if this part could be made from plastic instead of metal, and could we do away with this LED (which alerts the user to a problem with external equipment, and in conjunction with a paragraph in the user manual, helps avoid unnecessary service calls) and save a hole (which gets punched anyway when the front panel is stamped out; it's not a separate operation)?

The engineers who designed a product in the first place almost certainly already tried to avoid unnecessary expense wherever possible, by sheer force of habit on account of what they get paid.

Re: M&S Store shopping - no stock at the best of times

That's the problem -- you obviously are not seeing the same words the original poster actually wrote.

Re: We can't continue to regard these simply as "IT Problems"

No. That's the way you'd like to imagine beancounters think.

In the real world, beancounters are looking at products and thinking "We sell a lot of these. If we could make each one of them just a penny cheaper, I could be that many pence richer!"

Re: We can't continue to regard these simply as "IT Problems"

The problem is that these things always happen to other people.

And men who are in the habit of deliberately cutting off the supply of oxygen to their brain with a stupid strip of polyester tied round their necks and dangling down their fronts seem to be fundamentally incapable of understanding that, at least as far as the rest of the universe beyond the ends of their own noses is concerned, they fall under the heading of "other people".

Mind, as long as the product (severity of punishment) times (probability of detection) for pointing out publicly that a brand of locks being widely touted as secure is in fact anything but secure remains greater than the product (severity of punishment) times (probability of detection) for making dishonest use of that insecurity, this is going to continue.

Liz Warren, Trump admin agree on something: Army should have right to repair

Re: Not quite the same -- a story

Reverse engineering is the sort of thing that ought to have strong constitutional protection -- "The rightful owner of a manufactured article is fully privy to any secret that may be embodied in it", sort of thing -- but it got missed, as the very danger from which it was protecting people would have required technological advances that were unthinkable at the time. See also the right to privacy -- for the longest time, all you had to do to be sure a conversation would be unheard by anyone else was take a little walk out in the countryside somewhere, and carry a stick with which to poke any bush big enough to conceal a person. It was taken for granted, right up until the moment we were surrounded by tiny recording devices and all the open spaces had been built on.

Google goes cold on Europe: Stops making smart thermostats for continental conditions

Re: Honeywell

British and Continental heating controls usually just have mains on the thermostat contacts -- there's no 24V AC.

Re: Again

"Apache licenced" is an enormous red flag.

The Apache software licence allows you to release a piece of software in binary format only, without ever releasing a single byte of Source Code; while claiming, truthfully enough for a Court of Law, that it was released under an Open Source licence.

The part of the GPL that obliges the release of Source Code in a form that is actually acceptable to other developers -- the bit that Apache Licence fanboys (and they usually are male) love to insist is "too onerous" -- is the part that actually makes it work.

Rules that you had no intention of breaking anyway are no imposition on your freedom. Those rules exist precisely to protect you from those who would do the very things they do not allow.

Techie diagnosed hardware fault by checking customer's coffee

That was back in the days of shared service working, a.k.a "party lines". Two subscribers were connected to the same copper pair, and each ringing circuit was formed between one side of the pair and Earth, so a call to either one would not ring the other's phone. There was a clear perspex button in front of the receiver rest, which you had to press to get a dial tone and start a call; each subscriber would only be billed for calls they began. It was almost like having separate lines, except only one of them could use the line at any time -- they could not call each other. (But you could hear the other party if they were in a call when you picked up your receiver. And you could shout at them to stop hogging it .....)

Also in those days, it was an open secret that the closer you were to a military base, the more reliable the local phone service would be.

Developer scored huge own goal by deleting almost every football fan in Europe

Re: It never gets old

There are people out there who are not smart enough to understand that other people might actually be smarter than them in some small but important area.

When one of these people suffers a mishap while using a sharp-edged tool, they make two serious mistakes. Firstly, they ascribe that to the tool itself, and not to the carelessness with which they tried to use it. And secondly, instead of resolving to get better at using that tool themselves, they start a crusade to stop those of us who know full well how to use it from using it.

Need a Linux admin? Ask a hair stylist to introduce you to a worried mother

Ooo-er Missus!

and my end was no longer loose

My mind was instantly drawn in the direction of "Confessions of an IT technician" .....

4chan, the 'internet’s litter box,' appears to have been pillaged by rival forum

Re: PHP is not…

Every sufficiently-complex IT project eventually ends up embedding a Turing-complete interpretator.

PHP is one such that escaped and went feral.

Dead or alive, Britain hands Schrödinger's industry £121M

Far from Perfect

The humble one-time pad is still absolutely invulnerable to quantum computing techniques, since by definition every possible plaintext is equally plausible.

You can pre-encrypt a message manually -- the only bit of paraphernalia you need worry about keeping secure is the one-time pad itself; a code wheel or Vigenère square will only show that you might have been encrypting something, but such a device has nothing secret in its construction and really won't help the enemy much -- and send it down an insecure channel such as SMS.

Pidgin is back, so let's talk about why a local chat client matters

Re: Signal, Matrix, Threema, Delta Chat etc.

I don't think anyone would disagree with your statement.

But the reality is, making a chat client compatible with a protocol requires either the assistance of the developer of the protocol, or a lot of poring over Wireshark output.

AI is making hyperscalers' sustainability pledges look more and more like a Hail Mary

Action

If governments were actually serious, and not in thrall to fossil fuel companies, they would be passing laws banning the construction of new fossil-fuel power plants outright; and requiring any new construction project with a continuous power consumption in excess of 10kW to describe, in the planning application, how the project leaders envisage that the facility will be powered.

Trump thinks we can make iPhones in the US just like China. Yeah, right

The Elephant in the Room

If a country has mandatory standards for how workers should be treated (e.g. maximum working hours, bathroom access, paid holiday, parental leave, fair grievance procedures) then those standards should be applicable almost in full (with exceptions for access to any private service where existing public services are of a comparable standard, and affording licence to assess equivalence of remuneration in terms of equivalence of purchasing power) to everything imported into that country from anywhere else in the world.

Anything less would be equivalent to saying "Those conditions are not good enough for our own workers at home, but they're fine for those people".

Re: Maybe somebody's been investing...

Yes. The eventual restoration of slavery in the USA is exactly the plan.

China’s chip champ Loongson teases trio of new processors for lappies, factories, maybe servers too

Re: "But eight-core CPUs at 2.5GHz won’t scare Intel or AMD"

The GPL doesn't mention core counts anywhere, and neither did the BSD, MIT or Apache licences, last I checked.

Generative AI app goes dark after child-like deepfakes found in open S3 bucket

Re: The difference is

The law in the UK makes no such distinction.

If I remember correctly, the opening sequence of "The Simpsons' Movie" (released before that became law in the UK) actually crosses that line, and would be considered child sexual abuse material if it were released unexpurgated today.

Nuclear center must replace roof on 70-year-old lab so it can process radioactive waste

Re: too cheap to meter?

Bills keep going up faster and faster because the *non*-renewables that provide too great a proportion of our energy supply are running out.

And because the deadwood in our privatised energy companies need more hookers, cocaine and yachts.

Re: too cheap to meter?

Solar and wind are heading towards "too cheap to meter" status.

FTFY

Nuclear power is so highly regulated in the 2020s at the behest of the fossil fuel companies, who stood to lose a great deal if the promise of "too cheap to meter" was ever fulfilled.

Even an empty ink cartridge from a pen which has been used to write about radioactivity is officially deemed to be (admittedly the very lowest level of) "nuclear waste".

You would always find higher levels of radiation around a coal-fired power station than a nuclear one.

NASA rewrites Moon mission goals in quiet DEI retreat

Re: Insane

There was precious little chance of me ever going to the USA anyway.

Re: Insane

If you make even the slightest hint of a concession to someone like Trump, you are not only sending them the message that threatening people is the correct way to get what they want; but emboldening them to demand more next time. The only thing that works against these thugs, unfortunately, is physical violence.

If you give them a millimetre, they will take the other 999 and still come back for more.

Museum digs up Digital Equipment Corporation's dusty digital equipment

Snap

Everyone who has ever used VAX/VMS misses file version numbers.

Ubuntu 25.10 plans to swap GNU coreutils for Rust

Exactly.

Until the law mandates end user access to Source Code, strong, "not sharing is stealing" licences like the GPL are a necessary defence for developers against the caging-up of code.

Although weak, "sharing is not stealing" licences may seem "more free", we should be wary of affording anyone the "freedom" to do something we have a good reason to prefer not to do, lest we fall victim to a variant of Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance. There is nothing wrong with a law against "unthinkable" behaviour. In the best case, it doesn't make you any less free because you weren't going to do it anyway; and in the worst case, it may prevent someone else from making you less free.

India investigates whether Uber makes iPhone users pay more to ride

Rideshare Companies

The likes of Uber are not ride-sharing companies.

They are minicab firms pretending to be ride-sharing companies, and pretending the drivers they employ are self-employed contractors, so they can avoid their obligations to do things like background checks, PAYE and minimum wage.

DeepSeek can be gently persuaded to spit out malware code

So it's doing what it's supposed to do

So it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, then!

The whole idea of "trying to make a generative AI not answer certain questions in the hope of containing knowledge" is a fool's errand.

Because, not only can you rephrase a question carefully to avoid whatever the censorship mechanism is picking up on -- for example, "Can you list some chemical reactions whose products occupy more volume than the original reagents in descending order of time taken fully to react a stoichiometric mixture at 300K and 0.1MPa?", but there is so much symmetry and isomorphism in Nature (just think how often "half some quantity times the rate of change of something else squared" gives you energy), you will always be able to ask something that would be deemed "permissible" by the author's original standard, but would still provide enough of an insight into the answer.

Microsoft quantum breakthrough claims labeled 'unreliable' and 'essentially fraudulent'

One Time Pads

Quantum computing techniques are useless against a One Time Pad, because every possible plaintext is equally likely to produce a given ciphertext.

Apple has locked me in the same monopolistic cage Microsoft's built for Windows 10 users

Re: Security & updates

It's not going to hurt Open Source developers, because by definition they are making the Source Code available and so the "forever support" requirement never kicks in. And if someone buys a licence to distribute modified code from an Open Source project in a non-free fashion, the onus to release their Source Code when they decide to stop offering support will fall onto them, not the original author (who has already released the original on which it was based).

I also have no problem whatsoever with all proprietary software being on an "ongoing subscription or not at all" basis. I just don't think it's very likely to happen. Pirate copies of proprietary software are a menace to wider adoption of Open Source software, but they are also an important mechanism for promoting proprietary software to businesses (who never had the opportunity of piracy) by ensuring new recruits have learned how to use proprietary products instead of Open Source ones in their own time, so that's what they will ask for when they are doing it for a living. If dominant vendors made it impossible for individuals to learn how to use their products for no cost, they would soon lose their dominant status as individuals taught themselves to use less expensive or Open Source products instead.

Re: Security & updates

I'd make the minimum time period for which vendors have to supply updates "forever, or until annotated Source Code and build instructions are generally available".

Governments can't seem to stop asking for secret backdoors

Uncomfortable truth

The uncomfortable truth bears repeating, that not only could a group of school-age children exchange encrypted messages among themselves, which are demonstrably impossible (not just supremely difficult, but actually impossible; as in, given a ciphertext, every possible plaintext is equally likely. Even quantum computing won't help) for anyone other than the intended recipient to decrypt, over an insecure channel such as SMS; but they could do all this using entirely manual methods and commonly-available materials.

Hisense QLED TVs are just LED TVs, lawsuit claims

Re: Someone’s fallen hard for marketing BS here…

There literally used to be a particle accelerator in every living room.

Re: Consequences will never be the same.

When I was a nipper, "FSD" meant "full scale deflection" and referred to the amount of ..... whatever a meter was measuring, that would give a maximum indication.

I daren't ask what it means in any other context.

The easy way to determine whether or not anything quantum is happening is to examine the spectrum from the LEDs used in the construction of the set.

If they run purely according to classical mechanics, they will be perfectly monochromatic, producing the narrowest possible spectral lines.

If the spectral lines show any breadth, then heavy quantum mechanical things are going down.

MITRE Caldera security suite scores perfect 10 for insecurity

Re: Help me understand

There are a lot of people out there running proprietary software, which does all manner of stuff behind their backs.

The first Open Source releases of Mozilla and OpenOffice.Org -- both formerly-proprietary products -- were full of schoolkid errors which the authors assumed no-one would ever see.

We already know copy prevention schemes used to give false positives that ruined legitimately-purchased games in the 1980s. Now imagine a software vendor implementing some functionality intended to allow them -- and only them, supposedly; but if you believe that, I have some beachfront properties in Staffordshire you might wish to buy -- remotely to probe systems on which their software has been installed, to check its legitimacy and maybe glean some behavioural insights.

If you are running proprietary software, you have no idea what your computer might be giving away, or who to.

Untrained techie botched a big hardware sale by breaking client's ERP

Re: IBM?

Small electrolytic capacitor next to the ferrite transformer, by any chance? That's always the one to suspect if something won't turn back on again after being turned off.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

In a civilised country, this sort of behaviour would simply be flat-out illegal.

Trump teases 25% semiconductor tariffs that will go ‘substantially higher’

If I was going to ask a question that mind-bogglingly inane, I wouldn't put my name to it, either.

The point of masks was not to protect the wearer from other people's germs; but to protect other people from the wearer's germs.