* Posts by tiggity

3131 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Oct 2015

Whizkids jimmy OpenAI, Google's closed models

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Re: My, what drama

Upvote for the reminders about studying nerve biology & all the hours spent in the Gatty Marine Lab studying action potentials etc.

.. Back when I did "proper" science, before ending up in IT.

Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little

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@ BPontius

A while ago (as her will executor in addition to son) I had to deal with building society bereavement office to close mum's accounts via phone..

Part of the process (despite me already being power of attorney on her accounts due to her being infirm the last few years of her life) involved me answering security questions (from Experian IIRC)

.. However there was no security question as they did not have enough data* on me to produce a valid question.

So it is possible to have a relatively small "stolen information" footprint.

* Side effect is I probably have an awful credit rating, but I don't care about that. The overwhelming majority pf purchases I make are via cash.

tiggity Silver badge

Re: "Statcounter says"

There is no good way to get such information.

As such any numbers have to be taken with a pinch of salt.

Best you can do, is what you are doing, take one "vendor" of browser usage data and see how their numbers change over time.

I do a lot of web browsing with Firefox on a non WIndows OS, but user agent mimics Chrome on Windows, just to get around those badly coded sites that check user agent & say you are not supported (even though you can happily use the site with FF once past lazy browser gatekeeper test). I also complicate matters by having a lot of JS disabled for those aggressively intrusive JS browser tests some sites use (& obviously stuff like google analytics is blocked in my local setup at firewall level).

IP address cannot be relied on, may be 1:1, but typically one to many e.g. at home several of us but all show as having same IP address (between us using Mac, Windows, Linux plus Android & iPhone), if I visited a site from work then hundreds of colleagues would also share that same IP address

EU users can't update 3rd party iOS apps if abroad too long

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Re: Why does anyone buy Apple?

@DS999

Wired headphones are a simple example

Partner uses iPhone & it has no headphone output so needs an adapter on charging point to allow wired headphones.

..Bluetooth headphones not an option so no point suggesting that

Microsoft: Copyright law didn't stop the VCR and shouldn't stop the LLM

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American pie

For those that may not have read this, quite interesting in verbatim chunks of (copyrighted) song lyrics can be regurgitated without needing to use sophisticated prompt engineering (the usual flimsy excuse "AI" companies trot out is that users are essentially "hacking" via super clever prompting to get copyrighted data out)

https://thenextweb.com/news/generative-ai-regurgitates-training-data-copyright-fair-use

Also interesting is this on book text regurgitation

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/06/gpt-4-researchers-tested-leading-ai-models-for-copyright-infringement.html

Almost looks like OpenAI are taking a deliberate "we don't care about copyright" approach, given how badly they performed compared to other competing "AIs"

Meta kills Facebook News in the US and Australia

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Re: “You Must Carry Our Content ... And You Must Pay Us”

Confused by your comment - Private Eye website has links to various social media instances

Their website also has snippets from current issue (so time limited availability) and a few special reports available to read, so not "news free".

Though as a print subscriber I rarely visit the eye website (it's also heavily JS infested, which is another reason to avoid it)

Musk 'texts' Nadella about Windows 11's demands for a Microsoft account

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.. though no password WIFI gives plausible deniability if dubious content were accessed via that WIFI....

Underwater cables in Red Sea damaged months after Houthis 'threatened' to do just that

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Tedious speculation

It could be the Houthis.

It could be an accident.

It could be false flag ops from those wanted to make the Houthis look bad e.g. USA, UK, Israel

It could be a different country wanting to stir up trouble for reasons of their own e.g. China, Russia etc.

Without any firm evidence its all pointless speculation

OpenAI sued, again, for scraping and replicating news stories

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costs

I would be surprised if copyright / attribution was not considered early in the day.

I would be totally not surprised if doing that meant a lot more costs., from quality of input data (copyright / attribution would need to be included) - extra time & money, through to the AI itself, with my limited reading around AI models then it would be extra work & data store size, to link attribution data to a particular text embedding and ripple that back

Google sends Gemini AI back to engineering to adjust its White balance

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Re: works exactly the same as it always has for the UK.

Indeed AC

Also UK based.

See lots of articles saying new shiny "AI" X is release, new shiny "AI" Y is released etc.

When what they often mean is available in the US only (yes, I could probably use a US based VPN to investigate them, but frankly CBA as "AI" is usually disappointing)

Please stop pouring the wrong radioactive water into the sea, Fukushima operator told

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I don't think its radioactivity travelling many miles they use as their hands Japan criticism .. that would be a bit silly .. it's potentially contaminated fish from Japanese waters, which is a less silly argument (although assuming reasonable dilution of discharges, still likely to be purely for political reasons)

Boeing-backed air taxi upstart Wisk plans to fly you across town at UberX prices by 2030

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Re: Traffic is easier in the air

Never mind height making an accident more serious.

With autonomous flight & doubtless little in the way of security checks, there is plenty of potential for someone to engineer a crash - and doubtless add lots of extras to make things worse, be that simple explosion to release lots of ball bearings to rain down in a wide area, through to more weaponised stuff like white phosphorous etc.

Depending how poor security is, night not even need a "suicide bomber", miscreant might just be able to load on "bomb" luggage.

Even if passenger in the craft is mandatory & checked by cameras, I'm guessing there would be a (decent survival chance) way out for a parachute equipped miscreant, to avoid "suicide bomber" scenario.

Microsoft veteran on how to blue screen your way to better testing

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"Please do not use sneaky tricks like terminating critical processes like winlogon.exe,"

"These failures get reported through the Watson service as a winlogon.exe crash, which creates confusion among the winlogon.exe team as they try to identify the source of a nonexistent bug."

Well, if there was a guaranteed, way to turn off all telemetry / snooping (and for it to stay off) then that would not be an issue would it....

Though my work machine seems to quite happily give BSOD (waves at Teams, which is trying its best to be the worst of MS current software in terms of massive resource use coupled with frequent catastrophic failures, though its a crowded field, with VS2022 pushing it hard with the recent releases behaving badly)

Staff say Dell's return to office mandate is a stealth layoff, especially for women

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My in office days are far less productive than WFH days as extra interruptions (i.e. outside the scheduled meetings). When WFH I don't get someone randomly coming up and chatting to me when I'm in the middle of a really complex problem (and where it takes a good 15 minutes or so to get fully back in the zone after the (99% of the time irrelevant) interruption). Chatting would be fine - at the appropriate time, e.g. at a "dev dead time", like now when I'm waiting for a big compile, test suite, deploy sequence to run before I can do "manual tests" of my current changeset. Sadly, in the office chats are usually at the wrong time.

Australian supercomputer 'Taingiwilta' comes online this year with [REDACTED] inside

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Re: What can be inferred?

@Spoobistle

Not sure if Australia needs better beer bottles, certainly needs better beer ... (runs away, hoping not to meet one of the (seems like high hundreds of thousands) of Aussies that seem to be couch surfing their way across the UK at any time. Though TBF, lots of Aussies I have met are unimpressed by the local big name Oz brews)

Insider steals 79,000 email addresses at work to promote own business

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""It is important to stress that this information only contained email addresses, it did not contain any bank details, or names and addresses."

Well, it probably did contain some names / name related information.

Many people have email addresses that include their surname and forename (albeit may often be abbreviated forename e.g. Rich instead of Ricard etc.) or surname (plenty of friends I know where a couple share email address for "general" emails so I would email them at something like thesmiths@whatever.com)

So, I'm betting at least some emails could be directly matched to people (given addresses only covered a small area of the UK), or if not precisely matched, could be just one of a handful of people in taht part of the West Midlands.

Cutting kids off from the dark web – the solution can only ever be social

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No Angels

Not all children are angelic little creatures.

If a kid was searching for murder / torture related material it would imply they had an interest in it already, if they were blocked from finding such content* their morbid interest in this area would not magically disappear.

Plenty of film / "TV" content out there with murder & torture content. Same for paintings, books. Not really viable to prevent access to big chunks of culture.

.... and of course, at the end of the day you cannot really take away someone's imagination, thus a disturbed person can fantasize about whatever they like & nobody will ever know.

The concern is that UK government / lawmakers are always on the look out to destroy privacy and introduce ID systems & leap at any excuse ("think of the children" ahoy).

For those outside the UK and / or not familiar with Brianna Ghey case. Ghey was a young male, identifying as female. So not beyond the realms of possibility that Ghey was at some point investigating various trans related content & may have wanted to keep that secret for a while - any idea of privacy like that for young people investigating culturally / personally sensitive areas, would be gone with these privacy destroying plans.

* lets imagine the fantasy world, technologically unfeasible scenario where this happens

Moving to Windows 11 is so easy! You just need to buy a PC that supports it!

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Re: It is easy

Learning new things is great - I have a whole list of hobby related things I want to improve my knowledge of & gradually do so, its enjoyable to me.

Being forced to learn a whole lot of even worse UI is, however, not great - it impairs my productivity in certain situations (Windows is for work use only) until I either lose the old muscle memory and acquire it for changed procedures needed or (the better option) find some registry hacks to regain as much old behaviour as possible so I can get back to normal productivity levels faster.

tiggity Silver badge

Re: I wouldn't worry about it

@Handlebars

"Ai allows us to make funny cat videos without even needing to get a cat."

I have cats and so need for funny cat videos as plenty of daily funny stuff in real time. Thus no need for "AI". Real cats for the win - even ."AI" must bow down before our cat overlords.

It's time we add friction to digital experiences and slow them down

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Re: THIS!!!

Could go for the British made non oblong Nautilus speakers. They are about as non oblong as you can get*

https://www.bowerswilkins.com/en-gb/product/loudspeakers/nautilus-series/nautilus/FP10293P.html

*Yes I want them, no the household budget will not allow it.

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

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Hardware sales

Given the likes of Amazon fire sticks, Amazon Fire TVs, there's also potentially an argument that customers bought into the ad free Prime Video concept to the extent of making hardware purchases in the "Amazon hardware eco-system" that made viewing of Prime video easier on a TV (e.g. not everyone has a smart TV with Prime app installed & so some form of "stick" accessory is a common workaround - customer planned streaming uses can drive choice as to whether to purchase a Roku, Amazon, chromecast etc "stick").

As a side issue, on ad including basic tier, also dumped Dolby Atmos & Dolby Vision (to the chagrin of some folk with high end audio visual systems* apparently )

* Not me, but found out from a friend via a music & tech related mailing list we are both on

Europe's largest caravan club admits wide array of personal data potentially accessed

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"The official line at the beginning was that investigators had been drafted in and there was no evidence to suggest member data was compromised, a stance that has since shifted to open up the possibility of data access. CAMC, however, reported itself to the UK's data watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office, from the outset."

In so many of these cases a lack of honesty & transparency from the outset.

If in doubt, communications assume the worst case data leak scenario & warn customers ASAP

.. If it turns out the actual result was "better" than worse case scenario, then regard that as a bonus.

The BS of "minor incident". gradually unfolding over time to statements along the lines of "Ooh, crown jewels nabbed" gets tedious & irritates customers.

I'm not one of the El Reg readers affected by this, just sick and tired of seeing the same old PR drivel, when customers would be better served by honesty, even if its just "we don't know how bad it is, so assume the worst until we know otherwise"

Leaked memo: Microsoft employees should be using Copilot too

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not a fan

I was using it today (use comes with MS stuff employer signs up to, allegedly all private, no details of code you look at beamed back to MS mothership, we are being encouraged to try it out & see) adding a bit of extra error recording to some SQL Server procs

It did basic "suggesting a completion" OK, e.g. I typed ERROR_L and it suggested ERROR_LINE(), similarly did OK for suggesting ERROR_MESSAGE() etc.

However I decided to play about with it and type something where there was not a corresponding system function

I tried ERROR_R - instead of doing nothing, it suggested ERROR_ROUTINE() in autocomplete.

It was either hallucinating or some of the training data has included someone's "custom" function of that name, either way fairly useless as a novice coder would be expecting a valid system error related function call (and no, there was not a "custom" ERROR_ROUTINE function in the codebase I was looking at, so it could not have grabbed it from analysis of open files)

Hundreds of workers to space out from NASA's JPL amid budget black hole

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Re: Adapt or die

But of course old houses get periodic repairs, I lived in a house where the "core" was over 200 years old (with ore recent extensions).

But plumbing, wiring etc had been updated over the years.

Biggest pain was the insulation (lack) & dampness compared to a modern build - that could have been remedied, but at a cost (we did not live there long enough to address that as had to move to a larger house for family reasons)

In UK, so this is not unusual, it was on a fairly standard street (not listed, as old buildings are ten a penny in this area, so need to have a few very notable features to get listed here)

UK government plans to spend over £100M on AI ... but copyright code is held up

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regulators

"It plans to spend £10 million ($12.58 million) on upskilling regulators, "

If its anything like the other UK regulators , it will just roll over & do whatever the big companies want.

.. and probably develop a nice "revolving door" between the AI companies & the regulator (look at the farce of UK water (essentially non) regulation for an example)

When it comes to working from home, Register readers are bucking national trends

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Depends

We look after an ill relative who lives with us (she (and us) has own areas of the house for privacy & then shared areas. Partner is retired so at home.). So heating would be on anyway (if required). So when I WFH only extra power use is computer (& same amount of power would be used in the office), as router, APs etc. all on for family member use anyway.

Obviously for some people, without anyone else in their accommodation in "working hours", then home heating is extra carbon (though saving on commute carbon) so there is no easy answer on which option is most "green" - and house insulation etc makes a big difference.

Apart from recent sub zero spell in UK, Winter heating generally only on early morning and then for a while in evening, through most of the day, heating is off (thermostat and timer driven e.g. no point heating coming on at 2 AM when everyone in bed, even if it is cold, so timer overrides thermostat at some parts of the day / night) . So heating not on very much in "working hours" anyway.

.. Though all of us sharing the house, old enough to have grown up in the era of poorly heated houses, ice on the inside of your windows in Winter was not a surprise, so fine with house temperature not being excessively hot (lots of younger friends don't seem happy unless their indoor house temp is in the mid twenties!)

iFixit tears Apple's Vision Pro to pieces

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Cnnot use with glasses so need prescription lens inserts

WTF?

Surely if I'm shelling out huge amounts of money for VR, then, given the "images" presented are all chip generated, it should not be too difficult to electronically apply a transformation so the image is appropriate for whatever prescription the user provides to the VR set. *

.. Given that lots of people wear glasses, and your prescription can change over time, then potentially needs purchase of multiple inserts (unless the VR headset has a ripoff short life span). Inserts are "only" 149$ (so assume will be £149 or above in UK, in usual 1 - 1 or higher mark-up used on currency conversion) so "cheap" by Apple standards (but more than my most recent prescription glasses purchased in 2023)

.. Not that I'm in the market for VR as I can see no compelling reason - there is no "killer app" for VR

* Yes I'm aware this would need additional processing (& simplistically, potentially more / better chips including as I'm sure current hardware is minimum they can get away with) - but we are not exactly talking a low budget product here.

Survey: Over half of undergrads in UK are using AI in university assignments

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Bin the lawyers

We all know there are decent lawyers & others that are just scum of the earth, the latter need to lose their jobs..

Those lawyers that use "AI" (where everyone knows they hallucinate "facts" that are non existent) & then cannot even do rudimentary fact checking (i.e. find the quoted case, check it is relevant to case they are dealing with) need to be disbarred (I bet they still charged exorbitant fees for inept AI use too)

Google flushes cached search results forever

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Taking the ...

The suggestion to link to the internet archive from Google Search is, shall we say, cheeky (harsher words spring to mind)

That would be a potentially massive uptick in server load for the internet archive - and, as the article pertinently mentions, Google give them no funding.

JetBrains' unremovable AI assistant meets irresistible outcry

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I like my Claude funky

Brit watchdog thinks Google's tweaked Privacy Sandbox still isn't cricket

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Re: Irreconcilable Differences

@johnrobyclayton

The whole problem of targeted advertising is that it is not.

Some shoddy algorithms based on my browsing history think I'm interested in purchasing "X".

Generally I'm not e.g. have previously researched "X" online, and subsequently either purchased it or decided it is not for me.

Classic example is "big ticket white goods" - I'm only interested in a fridge (or whatever) when current one is broken beyond financially viable repair and so a "distress purchase". As its a fairly important bit of (in this e.g. kitchen) kit, I research what's on offer then buy one ASAP (likely to buy in bricks & mortar shop with stock of that item as can get the "distress purchase" home faster that way).

Generally the ads "lag" the research phase, so in this e.g. by the time I start getting fridge ads, I have already purchased one.

The best "targeting" is to serve me ads that reflate to the contents of the web page I am reading at the time, not (badly) guessing what I may be interested in*.

* lots of my interests do not involve online activity, so ad slingers are clueless about e.g. the books I read, my hiking and wildlife watching activities, the sports I play, the clubs / societies I am a member of etc. The "interests" of mine that do leave an online footprint are ironically, those that are quite low down the "pecking order" of my interests. e.g. I'm interested in tech (hence el reg) but I enjoy e.g. hiking outdoors (whatever the weather) a lot more than being stuck in front of a screen. .

Universal Music accuses TikTok of 'intimidation' and threats to replace humans with AI

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Sign me up

Sign me up: A social media platform with no music from Taylor Swift, U2, Coldplay, Rick Astley (I guess that means no Rickrolling twattery then), Sam Smith, Bieber etc. Yes Please!!!!

Only kidding, not really a social media user. Universal may be the biggest music rights co, but there's plenty of other music out there. Though could get interesting if Sony etc all follow the same path.

"Other half" uses social media, I despise the needless soundtracks that people feel the need to add, why not just have no irritating soundtracks (at least she's trained to put headphones in if I'm around and she is on social media sites!).

CBA to research if Universal own rights to "Sound of Silence" to potentially add a riff on that theme.

OpenAI's GPT-4 finally meets its match: Scots Gaelic smashes safety guardrails

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I have played around with "AI" APIs.

In terms of doing a "chatbot" to answer questions.

However the data for answering questions was external to the "AI" for obvious data privacy reasons (used AI to give text embedding based on question then would use text embedding value to find "best matches" from data source)

Ironically one of the things I did was to use the AL to translate questions into English as users from various countries, but documentation in teh test corpus was all in English so needed English for sensible text embedding matches.

So, it should not be a difficult task (though an expense in compute time and delay) to get the English translation and try that to see if guard rail red flags popped up, if OK then run native language query.

.. Obvious drawbacks:

More resources as translation then English call first.

Potentially slower as need to see if English call raises red flags (though could run the 2 concurrently, and only return "native language" results if English call was deemed safe)

tiggity Silver badge

Re: But ... I thought computers didn't do Scottish

When I was at uni in Scotland a long time ago (I'm English but not from "down South")

Was living in a university owned flat with some friends one year/

The local uni employed cleaners would come in once a week.

I had to act as intermediary "translator" between cleaner and a cockney flatmate - neither could understand the other (TBF, not just an accent issue, vernacular used made a difference too - I had picked up plenty of commonly used Scots words / phrases by then as had plenty of Scottish friends (& some Scots in the family) as she dropped a fair few into her general chat , my flatmate had not really got much grasp of Scots though).

.. EastEnders TV show did exist then, but I'm guessing the cleaner had not watched it (or maybe she did, but could still not cope with a distinctly more hardcore accent than on that show)

Web devs fear Apple's iOS shakeup for Europe will be a nightmare for support

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Fully agree.

Its the non stop desire of js jockeys (sorry, web developers) to have a web site act with all the power of an app - go away, I want your web site to have as little access to my system as possible & that includes trying to "fingerprint" .my browser)

Personally I would like to see complex stuff in an app, not on a web page.

I would like web pages to be nice and simple & I don't want lots of insecure functionality such as a browser accessing a USB device (FFS, that is deranged - Chrome, I'm looking at you).

.. Happily for me, lots of web sites already fail by default as I have most js off by default, and if a web site does not give me anything useful with js disabled then I don't visit it in future (as js is a huge security risk, and I enable it with caution)

Seen too much i the way of crappy sites, be it XSS vulnerable through to a while ago when lots of sites went to https (playing at "ooh look, we are secure" to non tech / clueless web users) .. yet would make lots of calls to http based URIs, rather defeating the point.

Full disclosure: I have had to write js utilizing web sites to pay the bills, not my preference but various functionality demanded / specified by the paying customers (e.g. must use certain js frameworks that their own dev team are familiar with so they can maintain / alter it after handover). So written as someone who can write js heavy web sites, but would prefer not to!

Simon Willison interview: AI software still needs the human touch

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@Grogan

"If it does somehow work, and you can't follow it or understand it, how are you going to maintain it?"

That could be applied to lots of code where something has been written by other developer(s), and when you discover it, you look at it and just scratch your head... I'm sure, before the days of code reviews, some people deliberately wrote obfuscated code as a job preservation tactic.

US judge rejects spyware slinger NSO's attempt to bin Apple lawsuit

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above the law

TBF NSO are Israel based and Israel has been pretty much above the law* so you can see why they think they are above the law.

NSO should have been less greedy, a blind eye was turned by many Western governments as it was a useful product (not just the "bad guys" that used it), problem was NSO making it available to all and sundry and, beyond that, the stories coming out about the dubious targeting of journalists etc. by "bad guys".**

* e.g. Despite the ICJ "plausible genocide" initial decision recently, the US (& others such as the UK) are still aiding and abetting the genocide rather than putting pressure on to stop it (not providing Israel with bombs might be a good start).

e.g. 2 the number of UN human rights council resolutions against Israel is depressingly large, but to little effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_Nations_resolutions_concerning_Israel

** Though targeting journalists is not exactly unknown for "nice Western" governments / their state actors.

tiggity Silver badge

TBF NSO are Israel based and Israel has been pretty much above the law* so you can see why they think they are above the law.

NSO should have been less greedy, a blind eye was turned by many Western governments as it was a useful product (not just the "bad guys" that used it), problem was NSO making it available to all and sundry and, beyond that, the stories coming out about the dubious targeting of journalists etc. by "bad guys".**

* e.g. Despite the ICJ "plausible genocide" initial decision recently, the US (& others such as the UK) are still aiding and abetting the genocide rather than putting pressure on to stop it (not providing Israel with bombs might be a good start).

e.g. 2 the number of UN human rights council resolutions against Israel is depressingly large, but to little effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_Nations_resolutions_concerning_Israel

** Though targeting journalists is not exactly unknown for "nice Western" governments / their state actors.

Cory Doctorow has a plan to wipe away the enshittification of tech

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Re: Not sure his plans to fix it are realistic

Farmer protests in France: As a UK person, see these reported on so often in the (sadly xenophobic*) UK media that they seem to be a yearly French ritual, rather than an unusual event of note.

* Rank hypocrisy. e.g. Daily Mail, Owner Lord Rothermere is French for "tax management"** purposes, the mail itself is registered in Bermuda last time I checked (for "tax management" ** reasons),

** Use your imagination to guess why such "tax management" is not beneficial to UK tax income.

tiggity Silver badge

Re: Bog Zech?????

Very simplified view on the unions.

A lot of trade relations issues were (and often still are) due to UK mania for CEOs & general high up managers often seemingly selected on the basis that they could start a fight in an empty room, i.e. not people known for negotiation, seeing any view other than their own.

This in turn typically led to similar more aggressive approach from the unions, so creating a death spiral of intransigence, counter productive to the health of the industry affected.

As for railway unions - you do realise most of the RMT (Mick Lynch union) members are primarily relatively low paid staff cleaners, ticket staff, etc. Most "high paid" staff e.g. drivers, are in ASLEF. Not that drivers are overpaid, a safety critical job, customer lives at stake & still massively less well paid than an MP (& drivers get mandatory, frequent drink & drugs tests & failure = dismissal, would love to see that applied to MPs!). Most of the disputes are over working conditions issues, e.g. removing guards from trains saves money by shedding jobs (so more cash to shareholders) but this is at the risk of safety. Similar issues have involved working hours / shift plans of staff that can affect safety (knackered staff not conducive to safe railways).

We need to get away from the idea that manual labour is unskilled and should be badly paid, plenty of it needs a lot of skill but the rewards are dismal, train drivers a rare exception in getting decent pay for a "blue collar" job.

I know some drivers, I would not like the job, unsociable hours, a lot of time away from family, peoples lives dependent on your actions - not to mention the zero tolerance drink and drug tests, no chance of risking a couple of pints the night before a shift as blood alcohol fail levels really low, so quite an impact on social life if you like meeting pals in the pub for a beer or 2.(& no chance of getting away with illegal recreational drugs for those so inclined, plus fairly harsh on a variety of prescription meds too on their tests)

BOFH: Looks like you're writing an email. Fancy telling your colleague to #$%^ off?

tiggity Silver badge

Re: cleaning alcohol

Getting things past the accountant.

Once, years back, worked at a place where could claim for meals when working offsite (e.g. at a customer for a few days), but they would not let you claim for alcoholic drinks.

Though they did happily sign off my restaurant expenses, they obviously lacked beer knowledge, & assumed instances of "Lucky Buddha" were part of the meal side dishes (can't 100%remember if it was a Chinese or Thai restaurant, probably Thai even though the beer is Chinese)

Though, Lucky Buddha was not exactly the greatest tasting drink, but honour meant efforts had to be made to sneak alcohol past the accountants with such a pointlessly petty rule.

tiggity Silver badge

Re: "coloured pencil office"

@Elongated Muskrat

That is either ultra cheap avocado, or very expensive butter, or you use a massive amount of butter on your toast!

.. as this is further complicated because an "opened" avocado does not keep that long before it goes off, but an opened pack of butter keeps for months... Or are we assuming a massive toast fest to ensure avocado used rapidly?

Wait, hold on, everyone – Mozilla thinks Apple, Google, Microsoft should play fair

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Re: Amazed that FF isn't used more

@Draco

"Especially since browsers often lie to websites to get them to work."

Indeed, my FF (using a user agent switcher extension) runs with a chrome user agent by default, just to get around those lazy websites that do user agent text test instead of browser functionality test to reject users.

Microsoft's plucky challengers, Bing and Edge, might gain DMA exemptions

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Edge

Have they changed how Windows behaves?

Despite having a (non Edge) browser set as the default, there were various scenarios where Windows would open things with Edge anyway via search / Cortana! (probably due to use of the dodgy "magic" microsoft-edge prefix added to urls & Windows using Edge to launch those)

So, unless this has changed, Edge should be included as highly likely that (beyond initial near compulsory run of Edge to install an alternative browser, giving essentially 100% of Windows users running Edge at least once) that Edge will be fired up at some point due to the dubious microsoft-edge special prefix handling..

eBay tells 1,000 employees their days at company are numbered

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Re: How many ?

Probably not a huge amount on the pure "tech" side, however given they sell in many countries & so a lot of different rules apply with respect to trading & financial services (maybe financial service rules a reason they made eBay less wholly PayPal reliant? Just a guess as I have never worked at eBay but the dropping PayPal like a hot potato move did seem mike it might be based on regulatory framework implications) and so need plenty of staff to keep on top of that and ensure relevant legislation is followed in what eBay does (e.g. in UK, will soon need to give your NI number if you make income from selling tat online, so eBay will have to implement that* )

* they may have already, I tend to donate stuff to charity rather than flog it on eBay so use the site rarely, mainly to buy old no longer manufactured things that are hard to obtain outside of eBay (or similar) or scouring charity shops.

Microsoft hires energy mavericks in quest for nuclear-powered datacenters

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In the UK Rolls Royce (RR) make the PWRs for UK navy.

They have long been based in Derby and many of their nuclear research facilities are there (not all as you may expect in some isolated area of the UK ).

In UK terms Derby is a reasonable sized city... With weapons grade uranium around due to RR work. So even though the PWRs are designed for the navy, there is "attractive to terrorists" uranium in a UK civilian area.

.. RR also do SMRs, which as Grey_Kiwi mentioned, features a less "terrorist attractive" fuel source and so is OK for non military use / sale..

Also worth noting RR were, shall we say as politely as possible, rather "cavalier", with some of their radioactive waste dumping in Derbyshire, so although they are a major employer in the Derbyshire region they are not well liked by many.

CISA boss swatted: 'While my own experience was certainly harrowing, it was unfortunately not unique'

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For non US readers

CISA = Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency

As even though it's a tech site cannot guarantee non US folk will know every US tech related US govt. agency

Boffins eyeball computer vision costs, find humans are cheaper for oversight chores

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Even if cheaper, does not mean better

I have had to deal with a few "AI" customer services chatbots. *

Even worse than dealing with a cheap outsourced "knowledge worker"** on the other end of the chat. So quite a low bar.

Unless the increased number of calls where customer just gives up when dealing with "AI" bots gets translated to better performance metrics (e.g. instead of flagging it as an unresolved call they flag it as resolved if customer gives up with the whole flawed process)

* The last time I gave up on the "AI" bot and went to the nearest bricks & mortar store instance (fortunately less than 10 miles away) & talked with an actual person to resolve my issue. But that is not always an option.

** Not getting at the people doing that job, they are dealing with irritated people due to product / service being useless in some way, & even worse they are usually constrained to follow a "script", sapping any enthusiasm for independent creative problem solving (knew some UK based call centre people & they were explicitly not allowed to jump straight to solving the problem (in cases when they figured it out quickly from customer's initial comments) - they had to go through a proscribed set of Q&A steps first - and their calls were all recorded so not worth the (job disciplinary offence) risk of being helpful & cutting out the needless Q&A section)

Legacy tech shoots down Ministry of Defence's supply chain improvements

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Also worth a mention of the nice revolving door between people high up in the forces (plus some senior civil servants in the MOD who are also not wishing to miss out on the gravy train) & companies the MOD does a lot of business with.

This is from years ago, but general thrust of the reporting still relevant (covers other areas, not just defence)

https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/revolving-doors.pdf

AI PC hype seems to be making PCs better – in hardware terms, at least

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Do I need "AI" on my computer

For what use?

To offer to "improve" a photograph I have taken of relatives? If Aunty Sue wants "AI" to conceal her grey hairs, remove some wrinkles / lbs that's her choice & she can do it (or get someone else to)- I'm just going to be uploading and then emailing photos I took at a family meetup - I'm not a "tweaker" of photos (Cromwell - warts and all approach here, but to photos instead of art).

Maybe an "AI" will offer to "improve" my grammar, spelling, writing style etc when I type a document. My writing has lots of flaws but I would sooner have a letter of mine where the recipient can tell it was written by me rather than it having a soulless, homogenized "recommended style".

Do I want copilot code suggestions to improve my dev work? Currently no as (I have played with it) it can suggest some very iffy looking code (TBF, occasionally OKish looking code too) & critically you have no idea what licence implications (if any) applies to the code fragments it suggests, which is the deal breaker (commercial software lawyers are risk averse and really like to know there's no licence issues as they live in fear of licenced code sneaking in & that then forcing reveal of proprietary money making code)