Posts by Throatwarbler Mangrove

Brit rail cops bring live facial recognition to the London Underground

Re: Next up . . .

I am not a number, I am a free man!

Next up . . .

. . . a large white ball will be deployed to each Tube station to apprehend suspects if they attempt to flee. Instead of a big city, London will come to resemble more of a Village.

India’s central bank wants AI to approve loans that humans would reject

Re: "The banks that will win in the AI era will not [...] be the ones that adopt [...] AI"

Just leaving a comment here as a reminder to see how this fascinating conversation continues to develop.

DEF CON dingus suspected of trying to take over Delta in-flight Wi-Fi

Re: Did they actualy jam wifi ?

IANAL, and news is still hard to find, but per Reddit (I know, I know), the "hackers" jammed on-board Wifi and substituted a landing page designed to harvest users' credentials, which could open the perpetrators up to additional fraud charges, plus I'm led to understand that the FAA takes a fairly dim view of interfering with airplane operations. Official news seems to be pending investigation, so the whole event could also be overblown.

Snowflake extortionist admits 165-victim cloud crime spree – and squeezing one target twice

It's like "fly tipping," only electronic.

Samsung and Mousterian move ahead with floating datacenter for Texas

Two words . . .

"Fire torpedoes!"

Microsoft tells engineers to curb their token-burning enthusiasm

Crapilot

I have tried using Copilot within Microsoft's own products to do things like fix formatting throughout a document, and my experience is that it will claim that it's done something that it clearly has not, or it will execute poorly. By contrast, Claude will quickly do the right thing (again, in my experience--put down the torches and pitchforks, please). I can't even imagine using Copilot for coding: best case, you get nothing; worst case, you get something worse. I guess if you're a Microsoft engineer trying to look busy, an agentic coding loop in Copilot could be very helpful; otherwise, one can only imagine what kind of crap you'd wind up with. 0_0

The most famous brand in physical security got pwned by ShinyHunters

I'm not sure if locking up the CEOs will help, but let's give it a shot for science!

Microsoft fiber foul-up cut off Azure California for almost five hours

On the plus side

Copilot was down at the same time yesterday.

UK pumps £708 million into its future fighter jet

Re: Canada and GCAP

For some reason, Canada may believe they need to diversify their defense investments at the present moment.

AI's cheatin' heart will make you weep

Re: Chatbots are Revolting

I'll say, they stink on ice!

Again, how is what you describe different from what a lazy, unethical human would do?

US Marines' latest anti-drone toy is an AI turret that uses regular machine guns

The Terminator ...

... was not a documentary. For one thing, time travel doesn't exist.

LG monitors are using Windows 11 feature to serve adware

Group policy

Open "Edit Group Policy" (gpedit.msc)

Expand Computer Configuration

Expand Administrative Templates

Expand System

Click Device Installation

Double click "Prevent automatic download of applications associated with device metadata" in the panel on the right.

Click Enable

Click Apply

Click OK

I have an older LG monitor, and was unpleasantly surprised to find new software being installed. In addition to the steps above, I removed the LG Monitor Installer application as well.

Ransomware curdles production at Coca-Cola's Fairlife dairy biz

Re: Didn't receive an immediate response

Coca-Cola is probably cheesed off about the incident and are chewing the cud over what to do next.

C'mon, just copy this text string and paste it into your macOS Terminal – it'll fix your computer, honest

The Mac needs a built-in cattleprod

"It looks like you're trying to do something stupid." *ZAP*

Hands off our VPNs, privacy groups tell UK ministers

Re: Capita?

Who knew that Thiel and Asmodeus read The Register?

Re: Capita?

Worse: Palantir.

Zig creator calls Bun’s Claude Rust rewrite ‘unreviewed slop’

For great justice

Take off every Zig!

Re: All this wonderful AI code

Quality doesn't matter, only release velocity!

Astronomers find sugar near the creamy center of the Milky Way (no caramel, though)

All that dark matter . . .

Does this mean that the dark matter in the universe is actually dense dark chocolate and that we're all microscopic ingredients in a vast confectionery? It sounds great . . . until you envision who the Cosmic Baker is baking for. The end of the Universe is nigh once the baking process is complete! Your best hope is to be eaten first! Ia! Shub Niggurath! Ia! Ia!

It's an AI web, and we're just rats in the walls

Re: Time capsule?

I prefer your complaints about ad blockers.

Datacenter MacGyver saved the biggest football match of the year

Value-less prizes

The team could at least have given "George" a FIFA Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

BOFH: Cross-department AI pitches are easier to swallow with a pint in hand

Classic

"You see, I have always struggled with self-love," he admits.

Fortunately, I'd set my coffee down.

Thief posed as Wi-Fi fixing hero, then stole priceless trophy

Re: Really?

Sounds like you're hyper-focused on network security. Some people don't give a shit what's on your computers, they want physical stuff instead.

Fake IT bods on Microsoft Teams coax workers into installing malware

In before . . .

. . . comments describing Teams itself as malware.

IBM teases new rackable mainframes that ‘complete’ the z17 family

This is bullshit!

If it doesn't require a forklift to install, it's not a mainframe!

Hackers shoveled snow for company, were rewarded with network admin access

Shoveling

In my time in IT, I certainly did plenty of shoveling. It weren't snow, however.

Changing AI math could reduce the hardware burden, researchers show

Re: Please don't tell me they use floating point !

I'd be curious to hear your justification of that statement.

Collabora releases CODE 26.04 as rivalry between FOSS cloudy office suites heats up

HERESY!

"FOSS has always been messy, acrimonious, and reduplicative."

Burn him! Burn the infidel!

London cops bring live facial recognition to West End

The US solution

In the US, some wags have started putting up posters highlighting the copper and rare earth content of Flock cameras to entice certain members of the community to harvest them for parts. Perhaps the UK could try a similar approach.

Cyber offenses now account for around a third of all crime across Asia and South Pacific

Rule 34 applies

Not like that, you perverts. I'm talking about the Charles Stross novel. Perhaps releasing an AI into the wild to assassinate online scammers sounds extreme, but is it really?

Commodore gets into the phone biz with Sailfish-powered retro 'Callback'

Re: Showing Your Contacts List

Username checks out

SQL Server may be too lucrative for Microsoft to ditch, but too legacy to love

Given how conservative most DBAs are and how important SQL databases are to the applications they service, stability is paramount. One also imagines that SQL Server is a mature product and that any new "features" would be a threat to stability. Microsoft can sit back and let the licensing and support dollars flow in.

Flatpak-NG sounds like bad news for systemd refuseniks

Re: Yes, please!

I figured the Flatpak haters and systemd haters would be in the same camp, so Flatpak may as well become dependent on systemd. For myself, I'm pretty neutral on systemd, but I'm generally opposed to Flatpak and Snap for the reason that their packages tend to be so huge compared to a native installation. Perhaps Flatpak-NG will have smaller packages, which would be a worthwhile improvement.

AWS rolls the dice for faster, more efficient networking

Re: algorithm?

The first article linked to in the article above contains more technical information. It's still well above my head, but it contains useful visual aids which helped me understand a bit better what's being done.

This article appears to be the actual technical paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.15261.

Microsoft's worst 'Nightmare' unleashes BitLocker bypass 0-day

Dog bites man?

So, if you have physical access to the system and can make configuration changes, you can bypass Bitlocker? The hell you say.

Five Eyes: Watch out for odd LinkedIn connection requests, China's back on the hunt for state secrets

Re: Well

How fat is--dammit.

Which beloved English storybook character does Xi Jinping definitely not resemble at all?

Trump's AI E-(I)-O could let feds pick winners and losers

Gosh

Remember when Republicans lambasted Obama for subsidizing renewal energy companies because government "shouldn't pick winners"? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Datacenter builders face an impossible quandary: Demand to the left of me, protests to the right

Re: "Demand to the left of me, protests to the right"

As heard on K-Billy's Super Sounds of the Seventies ...

Google explains how it will infuse ads into AI answers

DDG

I've been using Duck Duck Go for years and rarely fire up Google any longer. It's very rare that Google can deliver more relevant results, and the UI keeps getting worse.

Deus ex machina: Half of US Christians trust AI's spiritual advice

On the plus side . . .

AI spiritual advisors are currently incapable of physically molesting their flock, unlike a depressingly large number of their meatbag counterparts.

Plex appeal fades as Lifetime Pass jumps to $750

Eek

I was probably one of the last people to get a $75 Lifetime Pass, and I'm certainly not going to argue about value for that money. The big problem I see with Plex is that they're trying to push people into Plex as a streaming service, promoting that capability over accessing one's own library. There's no ad-free tier, from what I can tell, so if you've paid for a subscription or lifetime pass, you still see ads, which completely kills the appeal for me.

Dutch cops’ shame game works wonders as most wanted scammers now turned in

Re: This is how it should be

I expect that The Netherlands is a higher-trust culture where people are more likely to assist the police because the police are less likely to abuse their authority. Contrast that situation with, say, the United States . . .

In the context of this campaign, I'm curious about how the police got the pictures of the suspected scammers.

I can't find it at all on some articles, and I can't tell whether that's by design.

Poland directs officials to ditch Signal in favor of 'secure' state-developed alternative

Re: Couple Of Things....

Sure, if your phone is otherwise compromised by spyware, or if someone with sufficient resources has physical access to it, you're pretty screwed. In the context of the Polish messaging app, the government is trying to block a particular threat vector, that of phishing via third-party contacts. One expects they can also block the notification vector highlighted in the Forbes article by not allowing notifications containing message data to be displayed by the OS. Can the OS then be hardened enough to prevent 0-click exploits and data capture, along with forensic penetration?

I'm frankly astonished that no government has built a hardened mobile OS version to provide mobile communication capabilities with much greater security. Or maybe they have, and it's classified.

NGINX Rift attackers waste no time targeting exposed servers

Username checks out.

This browser add-in doesn't just hide ads, it tells you to OBEY

Re: Ads

I would add a couple of points:

1) When I've tried to disable ad-blocking on El Reg, it feels like my eyeballs are being raped. The banners and interstitials plastered all over the place are incredibly intrusive. I would be much happier just paying a subscription.

2) Web advertising isn't a fair transaction. My personal information is harvested and resold to parties with whom I have no relationship, entirely without my consent. Since I'm not given a choice in the nature and cost of the transaction, I choose not to engage in it.

EU browser choice rules send millions more users Firefox's way

Re: Firefox

This is true. Firefox for iOS is lacking in features such as plug-in support, making it impossible to install a decent ad blocker, for example. Firefox is also forced to use the Webkit rendering engine, although I'm not sure how big a difference that makes in reality.

Apple, Google drag cross-platform texting into the encrypted age

About damn time

Apple have dragged their feet for years implementing RCS properly.