Posts by matjaggard

Java developers want container security, just not the job that comes with it

Reads headline:

*I wonder if BellSoft by any chance sell hardened docker images*

Gosh, they do!

In-house techies fixed faults before outsourced help even noticed they'd happened

Almost believable

I was with you right up the the contractor waiving a fee - took the story from "incredibly likely" to "apocryphal".

Lawyer's 6-year-old son uses AI to build copyright infringement generator

I think you're wrong, I think despite us not paying them like they'd get in the private sector lawmakers are at least 90% *trying* to do the right thing but sadly the odds are stacked against that outcome. They don't have the tools they need to make the right laws so they have to take advice and that advice generally comes from people with enough money to get to lobby them.

The whole funding model, choice of politicians and lobbying rules all need to change to fix this. Thankfully here in the UK we do the bare minimum of limiting political spending but it needs to go so much further.

'Vibe coding' named Word of the Year. Developers everywhere faceplant

Re: Having tried vibe coding

This is not vibe coding. This is an expert using a new tool like Clause or Copilot.

Having a AI write code for someone who fully understands and problem domain but can't code, and is willing to sit and chat to a tool for hours can produce something pretty good. That's Vibe Coding. Outputs can be functional, you can start a business with it before needing to re-architect at some point. The code is actually pretty well laid out and well written if you can ignore the excess of comments and emojis.

Our current issue is how to deal with this in the longer term. Do you have a moment when it's thrown over to proper devs? We've learned from old methods of testing and hours of Jira ticket writing that throwing things over the wall to the next team doesn't work well but how do we handle this if not?

UK government on the lookout for bargain-priced CTO

I'm very tempted to down vote just because I wish this wasn't true.

Sneaky Mermaid attack in Microsoft 365 Copilot steals data

Re: Not a bug, a feature

Either way the message is clear - it's better to exploit or sell the vulnerability than tell Microsoft.

Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide

This is why my boss chose Macs for my whole department at Barclays - basically IT were less good at locking them down than Windows machines which meant an order of magnitude less time fighting against the Request system to get the software you needed.

RubyGems maintainer quits after Ruby Central takes control of project

Re: While we're here, whatever happened to Ruby on Rails anyway?

My company uses it and we all hate it. It's very fast to get something working and very slow to keep it working because of all the magic it does. Things just magically get changed from camel case to snake case for example, types are impossible to follow and can change as you use them due to the "becomes" keyword, and Robocop is more Nazi than police by default.

Sorry, but DeepSeek didn’t really train its flagship model for $294,000

I think you've all missed the point here. The discussion is about how much compute was used and how much that would cost. The human input is ignored for this discussion and hardware costs aren't massively different between locations because shipping is cheap.

Microsoft open-sources the 6502 BASIC coded by Bill Gates himself

I found a mistake

I found a mistake on line 119 of the main assembly file.

Older developers are down with the vibe coding vibe

I think you might have a touch of confirmation bias in your reading.

I also dislike black boxes in my code but I don't mind LLMs because I know how they work and from experience where they don't. Probabilistic output is not quite the same as a black box.

I've not found it any harder going back to code I've accepted from an LLM vs code I wrote myself. I just don't accept anything bad from the LLM.

AI doesn't solve all problems, probably not more than 5-10% but that doesn't make it useless. It makes it a tool that you can learn to use and those who do will likely succeed more than those who don't in the long term.

Re: But...isn't it all just bollocks? ... Yes it is !!!!

Your logical process there has a mistake. Someone competent enough to spot a mistake might well want to use AI for a number of reasons. For example LLMs are incredibly good at finding salient points in masses of data - documents, code, etc. Given the correct task it can save huge amounts of time and for many problems, checking it is trivial.

Users of PostgreSQL in the cloud say the uptime just ain't up to it

Re: I still fail to see the point

Well in my experience it's because it just works. My app has uptime of 5 nines and I've never had to do anything much with the DB except pay through the nose.

Post Office and Fujitsu execs 'should have known' Horizon IT system was flawed

Individuals

Why are people focused only on individuals who should be dealt with whilst Fujitsu are STILL winning government contracts??! I'm not saying individuals don't need to face justice (but not violence - come on people) but we can't ignore the continuing decisions to pay more and more to Fujitsu.

Former and current Microsofties react to the latest round of layoffs

Re: nobody asked for

I think the use of the phrase "nobody asked for" in saying what Microsoft are doing is to miss how business works. Tech businesses that *just* do what people ask for will fail because anyone can listen to people and produce something that fits their stated needs. The difficulty is fitting their actual needs or doing something brand new that people haven't thought of.

That's where AI is currently and it will change our entire world - especially for developers who need to understand and eventually embrace it or may as well quit.

UK dumps £2.5 billion into fusion pipe dream that's already cost millions

Re: Rewrite needed

The bigger question which isn't even asked here is who will own this? Will we as a nation own (at least some of) the resulting Intellectual Property and/or facilities and companies that this could create?

When Microsoft made the Windows as a Service pivot

I agree with what you said but you've missed the vital points - the free upgrade from Windows 7 and the inclusion of non-genuine versions as a valid upgrade path.

Whistleblower describes DOGE IT dept rampage at America's labor watchdog

Re: Incompetent vs Nefarious

Hanlon's Razor is one I normally live by but it has sadly been burnt on this particular fire.

Wallbleed vulnerability unearths secrets of China's Great Firewall 125 bytes at a time

I doubt it's that explicit or sinister, Hanlon's Razor is worth remembering.

The issue here is that none* of our MPs have the required technical understanding to properly scrutinise policy. I saw once a finance guy saying that everyone either has power or understanding of how to solve issues, never both. I think it's our popularity contest version of democracy plus the fact that we don't pay MPs enough to attract clever people (unless they're clever enough to know they can help a mate whilst an MP and get a lucrative job afterwards) that causes the issue.

*a guess, not fact checked.

What does it mean to build in security from the ground up?

Re: What it is, exactly, that’s unique about security as a system requirement?

I'd agree with most of that, security is hard.

The first sentence I'm not convinced by. Firstly because using a system in a way not intended is frequently not a security issue and is often very valuable. Secondly it's sometimes the requirements that cause the security issue.

China's DeepSeek just emitted a free challenger to OpenAI's o1 – here's how to use it on your PC

Re: Knowing your Rs from your elbow

That's why they asked similar questions such as how many s's in Mississippi

They've only gone and made Doom run in a PDF file

Re: Is there anywhere Doom has not been implemented?

I assumed it was how you could tell if a machine was Turing-complete.

As someone who's worked on PDF software I can confirm that PDFs have never been and will never be portable. By which I mean that the spec is so complex that no renderers stick to the format - most just copy what Acrobat does and ignore the spec where they vary.

Open source router firmware project OpenWrt ships its own entirely repairable hardware

Re: terribly nice but

I don't think AliExpress itself is an issue, the stores on there vary hugely but almost all of this type of hardware is made in China anyway.

The router you linked to is more expensive, has all ethernet ports at the slower speed (so to get almost equivalent you could buy a cheap gigabit hub) and as far as I can tell it's not FCC compliant, but it does have other great features like the 3 mPCIe interfaces. I think it's really designed for a slightly different use case.

Putin's pro-Trump trolls accuse Harris of poaching rhinos

Who are "they" and what are you talking about?

BBC weather glitch shows 13k mph winds in London, 404℃ in Nottingham

Re: Neptune is jealous

Miles per gallon will be obsolete before it is changed. I do find it frustrating when I can't configure systems to give me distances over a mile in miles but shorter distances in meters.

Campaigners claim 'Privacy Preserving Attribution' in Firefox does the opposite

The article already mentioned that this likely falls foul of GDPR so Europe is out too.

Admins using Windows Server Update Services up in arms as Microsoft deprecates feature

Re: MS seems to have lost it... big time

Everyone is talking with such favourable tone about WSUS but seems to be forgetting what a pain in the arse it was to use. I'm glad I've moved out of Microsoft systems management I feel slightly nauseous thinking back to attempting to patch a Windows server on an air gapped network. Linux made this stuff easy.

Re: Yay

Yes and you don't need to restart the server.

Datacenters bleed watts and cash – all because they're afraid to flip a switch

T series on AWS

Some cloud instances are expected to have worse performance or share more workloads per server. On AWS that's the burstable T series t3 for Intel, t3a for AMD and t4g for ARM. Surely these would be perfect for simple savings on power and cooling for Amazon? Maybe they've done it already.

The empire of C++ strikes back with Safe C++ blueprint

I'm not sure I'd agree with "a lot" because the hardest thing for me as a C-style language developer to learn was the borrowing of data and variables in Rust. I think you'll basically have to rewrite all the C++ code anyway to make it provably safe.

I'm happy if we have a new Safe C++ language to compete with Rust to keep them going in the right direction, but it's not going to be an order of magnitude easier to learn for a traditional C++ developer.

I don't quite get the connection between Rust and "bindings and excess dependencies" surely all languages need bindings - do you mean cross-language bindings because you use some other language elsewhere? Similarly, why would Rust mean excess dependencies - I think Crates that compile in and libraries that you link to are also equivalent to things you'd use in C and others?

Upgrading Linux with Rust looks like a new challenge. It's one of our oldest

Re: Loss of Full Control

You're wrong in your assumptions about loss of control and magic. That's not how Rust works. You are in full control, there's no magic* but you are limited to only doing things that are provably safe.

*Actually all languages have magic. C will magically handle passing arguments to functions using registers and putting things on the stack where needed. Library functions are magic until you read the code but mostly we don't, we rely on a human description.

Re: Why a new language?

But Rust has proven that a Systems Programming Language as you call it can and should have safety features - they just can't be implemented at runtime if you need performance. That is why a completely new language was required, you can't add compile time checks for memory safety for C code because as soon as you call a method, especially one that passes data between threads you can't prove who owns the data and has the right to free it for example. That set of concepts is what people find hard to learn about Rust and that is exactly what's required for provably safe code.

MongoDB takes a swing at PostgreSQL after claiming wins against rival

Unconvinced

I'm really not sure Mongo is as popular as they think it is. Having used both MongoDB and relational database for years the problems of each system are many and varied.

For us it took ages to get user friendly results from Mongo due to the eventually-consistent nature of the default config but in return our production downtime was zero for several years whereas the relational database needed a proxy in front to handle updates without downtime and mistakes happened. But generally I feel that most data works well being saved in an atomic commit across tables.

Techie told 'Bill Gates' Excel is rubbish – and the Microsoft boss had it fixed in 48 hours

Re: i8088

If AMD had not been around then someone else would have got there but not until Intel made masses of cash. There wouldn't have been enough incentive for Intel to compete and so they would have become complacent and someone else (potentially even ARM) would have beaten them by the late 90s I think.

Incidentally, can someone ensure this happens to nVidia sometime soon please?

Users call on Microsoft to update Outlook's friendly name feature

Grammar

I noticed that you put [sic] after the pluralised form of the company name "Microsoft are ..." - I don't understand this, surely a company is made up of many people who are collectively making a decision. I don't think it's a good idea to see a company as a single non-human entity which is implied if you write "Microsoft is ...".

DARPA suggests turning old C code automatically into Rust – using AI, of course

Re: The software industry keeps digging its own grave

I don't understand why all the commentards are so against this concept. Human + AI make a pretty good combination for some tasks and I don't see why this wouldn't be one of those tasks. AI can likely translate 90% of the code to safe Rust, humans can review places where it fails or where it outputs unsafe code (the advantage of Rust being that unsafe code is labelled as such). This is an easier task for AI than static code analysis because where the AI fails in code analysis there's nothing to indicate to the human where the failure might be.

CrowdStrike meets Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong will

Re: Canary Deployment

Actually Crowdstrike does have exactly this type of system - customers tend to opt for earlier releases using test systems. However CS allow some updates to skip that process and this was one of those. Many customers only found out about this skipping when their systems crashed.

Oracle's Java pricing brews bitter taste, subscribers spill over to OpenJDK

Re: Defies belief

They couldn't come up with the "wrong" conclusion due to who this report was funded by.

I'm not saying Oracle have done anything right ever, but this report is just propaganda funded by Azul.

Microsoft 365 remains 'degraded' as Azure outage resolved

Honestly, who do you think reads The Register? We know what a cloud is!

Bake an LLM with custom prompts into your app? Sure! Here's how to get started

Re: Another tip for integrating LLMs into your project

But experimentation (or "stuffing an LLM shaped peg into any hole you can find) is how most innovation happens. I personally love it currently.

A really good example is Pulumi AI - makes learning this excellent alternative to Terraform much easier.

Another is energy supplier Octopus who are using LLM to gather information and write emails which are then edited or checked by humans before being sent out to customers.

Google finally addresses those bizarre AI search results

Re: You DO eat rocks as food.

Can we really call the base of a pizza a "pie"?

Amazon's latest 'flex' VMs promise savings for your burstiest apps

Factual inaccuracy

The instances actually start at 8GB RAM and have a 4:1 ratio of memory GB to vCPUs.

Re: T instances

Yes, I'm not sure why The Register didn't comment on that. They're similar but not the same - for example no burst pricing it seems. The question in my mind remains "why didn't they just make this T5i or similar?"

VMware giving away Workstation Pro, Fusion Pro free for personal use

Re: Great chance to get some free experience

I'm not sure it's very valuable. Anything you do with these can never be used for making money. I'm not sure about other people but even on personal projects I'm always aware that my work could be valuable but if I started on one of these products I never can. Even a document I create inside a VM could never be used for business purposes presumably.

Hey, Reddit. Quick question. All those clicks on my ads. Were they actually real?

Re: The good clickAI

In the short and medium term, clicking blindly on all ads will just give money from mostly smaller companies to Google and Facebook.

I do commit ad fraud constantly, assuming the description in the article is correct - I click on adverts for companies I dislike (mostly temu currently) and on some adverts in apps that I do like. I never buy stuff from ads though - with the exception of Google Shopping which is frustratingly helpful.

SpiNNcloud Systems unveils Arm-based 'neuromorphic supercomputer'

That's slow

I was working on this as an undergraduate at the University of Manchester in 2006. It's surprising that the technology hasn't developed faster - I thought it was an excellent idea at the time.

Prof asks court to protect his Unfollow Everything 2.0 extension from Facebook's ire

Re: No need to make it better...

I recommend the BBC podcast on the subject called "The Gatekeepers"

Elon Musk's latest brainfart is to turn Tesla cars into AWS on wheels

I was always confused by the F@H client as to why it insisted on keeping the workload ready to go when I wanted to use the computer.

Presumably Elon would automate completely shutting down the workload when you switch the car on and loading it or a new workload when you switch it off again? It's easier to tell when the compute is needed for the main purpose in a car than it is on a PC, or especially on a server.