Posts by dinsdale54

‘Humans will be a rounding error on the internet’ says Cloudflare exec

Re: It is time

No. Your role in this process is to make their internet access free.

LG kills McAfee pop-up after Windows boss steps in

Re: Just something else to uninstall

There is. It's not trivial.

I don't own any LG products and I don't expect to in the future but this news story made me look up how to disable automatic download of software.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9uefFYe6bM&t=617s

And to install group policy if you are on a basic versions of Windows :

https://windowsforum.com/windows-news.4/how-to-enable-group-policy-editor-on-windows-11-home-step-by-step-guide-for-full-system-control.360840/

Auditors tell UK government to do the math before banking on £45B AI savings

Underpants gnomes

Phase 1) Introduce AI

Phase 2) ?

Phase 3) Profit!

Clingy Virgin Media fined £28M for refusing to take the hint

Re: Supplier

Unfortunately some areas - like mine in a leafy suburb of SW London - are low on Openreach's priority list probably as VM already offer gigabit cable and most people who want it already have it. Full fibre is listed as 'we're building in your area' It has been listed as that for several years.

The best I can get from anybody other than VM is old fashioned FTTC at 76Mbps. Community fibre also bailed and stopped adding infrastructure in our area as well. A mobile company tried to offer me wireless broadband and I declined after I stopped laughing at them and got up off the floor (we've only recently got multi-channel 4G)

I've been with Virginmedia from the Telewest days when the cables were first laid down. On the plus side, it's always been fast and reliable. On the minus side, their customer service is absolute sewage.

Brit supermarket giant triples down on facial recog to nab shoplifters

Re: The first but not the last

I have reported the same guy stealing things from Waitrose to the security guard a number of times. The security chap knows him well but he's the only guard in the store and can't be everywhere.

The local police inform me that they spend time at Sainsbury’s first thing in the morning. Sainsbury's security staff don't start work until a couple of hours after the store opens - DOH.

Insert token to continue, says AI. Yeah, about that...

Re: "Elon Musk is a big Adams fan."

The Dispossessed.

It's an excellent book, being both thought provoking science fiction and simultaneously a 1960s communist wankfest. I learned plenty about recent history from reading it.

Re: "Elon Musk is a big Adams fan."

"Apes don't read philosophy"

"yes they do Otto, they just don't understand it"

I wouldn't have known what an Anarcho-syndicalist commune was without reading Ursula Le Guin

The database that refused to die: How Postgres survived its own creators

Re: Oh Yes

I used many different relational databases in the 90's and the best feature of Ingres was - as you say - that it was mostly a case of 'install it and forget it'. Oracle at the time, while very feature rich, required constant monitoring not to run out of space in any of the myriad of different partitions it had.

The downside was that by the late 90's Ingres was looking VERY outdated, feature wise but embedded in an application is was nice and trouble free.

On a related note, a friend worked as a developer for Ingres (ASK), Informix and Postgres (at Berkeley) at various times. ASK was where all the database nerds ended up. When Computer Associates purchased ASK in 1994 you couldn't find a larger clash of cultures. My friend recounts that after the announcement of the takeover, Oracle had a recruitment van outside ASK within the hour. Sybase had one there a couple of hours after that. By the end of the day, of the ~200 strong development team, only about 20 were left.

Anthropic’s bug-hunting Mythos was greatest marketing stunt ever, says cURL creator

Re: re: Strnberg speaking up about it is the actual marketing going on here.

Definitely marketing hype. Anthropic were clearly targetting the credulous mainstream to get these articles out.

A surefire demonstration of this is that the BBC article is written by Faisal Islam. He's dangerously out of his depth when writing about technology and breathlessly publishes whatever he receives from vendors.

As usual, the subsequent articles on El Reg separated fact from hype.

Classic ASCII game NetHack debuts version 5.0 just 11 years after last major release

I might have got a better degree is it hadn't been for Nethack 3.0

UK drivers' agency shrugs off claims of week-long booking site smashes, blames browser configs

"Works for me - won't investigate"

What a wonderfully poor attitude! That they can't _think_ of any issues just shows they aren't that good at thinking.

FWIW I tried the site. Worked in firefox and brave, not in chrome or edge.

That's a surprise as I've spent the last couple of years encountering an inceasing number of sites that don't work in firefox. It feels like the browser wars all over again.

Growing AI power slurpage prompts MPs to examine low-energy computing

Re: Society is short on efficient, abundant energy

One minor benefit of the disastrous UK energy policy is that we might not waste too much cash on the AI bubble as the UK isn't an affordable location.

It also means we're not an affordable location for any energy intensive industry which has already hollowed out our industrial base but hey-ho, you have to see the benefits where you can.

Server-room lock was nothing but a crock

Re: ISO certification VS security

The less generous assessment from a friend who was an ISO9000 consultant was "It won't stop screwups but you'll know whose fault it was"

Not all networks can handle AI traffic – and experts are sounding alarms

Re: Oh, great.

Also internet connectivity.

A small, low traffic forum I read has recently gone members only as AI bot traffic has added several hundred a month to their networking costs. They've had up over 1000 bots scanning the forum simultaneously - 10x the number of logged in users.

Microsoft veteran says some 'broken by update' PCs were already doomed

Not just Windows.

Back in the day my Unix customers were frequently very proud of the uptime on individual systems i.e. "we can't reboot this system yet, we're nearly at 1000 days uptime". I always pointed out that the time to find out whether your system reboots is not when there's been a power outage and half your server farm is rebooting.

Systems that make it easy to apply patches without rebooting (Unix/Linux) make this more serious, there could have been years of patches & updates applied that are working currently but don't work correctly on restart.

Those who 'circle back' and 'synergize' also tend to be crap at their jobs

Re: They probably 'reach out' all the time as well

My educated guess is that they weren't using it in a business meeting.

For those who haven't seen them -

https://www.youtube.com/@Wankernomics

Re: They probably 'reach out' all the time as well

We all have our personal bugbears.

If you use the word "cadence" when not referring to the design software then you need a slap round the chops.

Microsoft Azure CTO set Claude on his 1986 Apple II code, says it found vulns

Re: Who cares?

The tech folks at one of my customers used to refer to being asked to look at various new technologies as "High Life" requests. as their CTO had read about it in British Airways "High Life" magazine on a recent flight.

To his credit if they told their CTO it was a load of bolx he would leave it well alone as they had his complete trust.

Accenture tells staffers: If you want a promotion, use AI at work

Re: working at Accenture

I did a few days work on site at Accenture installing a Unix box some 25 years ago. They were a nice bunch of smart kids straight out of top universities but with very little experience. They were also running production systems for customers so every couple of hours there was a panic and everybody rushed off to fix the urgent problem of the hour.

Most of them were quite clear that they were there for a couple of years to get experience and a big name on their CV.

Oh yes - they didn't have fully working DNS in the office. Reverse DNS lookups failed and that made getting a Unix box on the network really quite tricky. Blank looks when I pointed this out.

Ofcom's grumble-o-meter lights up for EE, TalkTalk, Vodafone

Re: Wrists

Yes, there is a need to complain to ISPs. It's not just thick users as you suggest.

I've been pretty lucky with my ISP but friends with the same ISP half a mile away have not been. They had several years of substandard broadband performance which was down to lack of capacity in the head end equipment. The ISP didn't wish to spend the money to install more line cards. Of course the ISP's initial response was to upsell to a higher bandwidth package.

I know several people who had service well below what they were paying for and the provider showed little interest in fixing the issue. If there's any issue with the cabling between your property and the exchange they are going to put a huge amount of effort in to avoiding fixing it.

Cops put Microsoft Copilot in holding cell after controversial hallucination

Somebody I know asked AI to review a blog post he had written. It told him he had used the word 'Hallucinate' inappropriately. Problem is he hadn't used the word anywhere.

The AI had actually hallucinated the word hallucinate!

Logitech macOS mouse mayhem traced to expired dev certificate

Re: Luckily for me...

I'm on my 5th M720. I really like the feel but they last about 2-3 years. The keyboards last about twice as long.

Recently I installed Logi options s/w for the first time as I needed to re-pair the universal receiver to the keyboard/mouse. Yes, it's possible to break the default pairing if you try hard enough.

This article is a timely reminder to remove the Logi software. A mouse is very high on the list of things that doesn't need to be internet connected.

Palo Alto CEO tips nation-states to weaponize quantum computing by 2029

Man who sells security equipment tells you that all your security equipment will need replacing in three years. News at Ten!

There's currently no evidence QC will ever be a real thing, it's the new fusion. This bozo is just conjuring up the next bogey man to try and keep the coffers full.

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

I've had that at the Square & Compass pub in Dorset - no UK mobile signal obviously, being rural but I did get a French one.

A friend once worked for the national telecom company in a small country in Europe. He informed me that they were a bunch of crooks after they deliberately built mobile 'phone masts along the border near the autoroute so that they could generate roaming charges from everybody driving past their little country.

Introducing NTFSplus – because just one NTFS driver for Linux is never enough

I think the bigger issue is that nobody cared.

Most people don't want much from a filesystem other than accessing files, directories and a few permissions.

Basing it on a full relational database is a solution looking for a problem. If your data is structured enough for that to be useful you are probably already using ...... a relational database. If you want to find a file then a find or DIR command is usually plenty.

Sounds like an academic project got out of control to me.

ChatGPT: Why do most of your users ask for help writing – prose, not code?

What's with the 'nowadays' :)

My boss 30 years ago - a good guy - had a reputation for not reading beyond the first sentence of an email. We would litter more complex emails with comments such as 'still here, boss?' "Hang in there boss" "Nearly done, boss" etc.

He wasn't unusual in that respect.

Three goes to zero as UK mobile provider suffers voice and text outage

Re: Three fiddy

I love being with three! It reminds me of my times in remote, desolate parts of the world, totally disconnected from civilization. And all this from the centre of Surbiton

If it can’t double our money, we’re not building it, Intel Products chief says

The average gross margin of all the companies on NASDAQ exceeds 50% for the last 15 years. It's normally around 60%.

"At least double your money" was the starting point for projects in every tech company I've ever worked for.

Barclays Bank signs 100k license Copilot deal with Microsoft

Almost certainly.

Hey $BIGCUSTOMER, how would you like to license $SHINYTHING for £30 a month per seat?

$BIGCUSTOMER: "No, what a complete waste of money"

OK, $BIGCUSTOMER, how about we drop your Windows and O365 renewal by £35 a month, include $SHINYTHING for £30 and put out a nice press release?

$BIGCUSTOMER: Done. You can even use my name in a press release!

Been there, done that. More than once.

Ex-Meta exec: Copyright consent obligation = end of AI biz

Re: Analogy

If you aren't permanently depriving the owner of their vehicle then it's not theft which is why there's a specific offence in the UK of Taking and Driving Away/Taking Without Consent. It's almost as though the law already realises that CONSENT IS IMPORTANT.

What the AI industry is doing is the equivalent of joyriding in your car and objecting to being asked to get permission from you first.

No-boom supersonic flights could slide through US skies soon

Tell me you haven't flown on Concorde without tellimg me you haven't flown on Concorde :lol:

The seats were plenty comfortable with loads of legroom. Headroom was limited but that's wasn't a problem once you are sitting down. The wine list was rather good. I don't recall any Foie Gras or caviar but I did have a decent steak - although obviously not as good as at Peter Luger the night before.

In 1998 my ticket was ~£800 London to New York, coming back on Concorde. Demand was quite low for the early flight back hence the good deal.

Need cash? Your IPv4 stash can now be collateral for $100M loans

Re: If the orange eejit gets a whiff of this...

A customer I used to deal with had a class A. Their chief technologist had decided in the early 90s that the internet was going to be a "big thing" and simply wrote and asked for one. It also meant that at the time I was dealing with them - late 90s - all the desktops in the company had a valid internet facing IP address!

It looks like they have sold off a lot of their space already, keeping a mere few hundred thousand addresses for their own use.

Europe's largest council kept auditors in the dark on Oracle rollout fiasco for 10 months

Re: The real truth ?

The spec is the spec.

It's what has been agreed to be delivered. If you change the spec then you are changing the contract - that doesn't usually come for free.

In the early part of my career I worked for a company that supplied systems to local government written in Oracle. The system was decently complex and did what it said on the tin. Most councils took it as is, or with a few customizations which were generally done on a T&M basis.

The couple of councils who asked for extensive customization were back using the standard system within a few years. They discovered that they weren't actually as special as they thought and the costs of maintaining a customized version outweighed any predicted benefits.

The quality of IT departments at the councils was a mixed bag. Some were pretty good while some didn't really have anybody who knew what they were doing. There were very few Oracle skills there. Somebody who actually got good at Oracle would likely be off for a better paying job pretty soon.

Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer

Re: "it would suck"

A company I used to work for rewrote/ported its OS from a hand-rolled kernel to BSD. There was over 15 years of development work in the original and it took over 10 years before they had feature parity in the new one. It was a fair bit smaller than Linux.

As you say it's a HUGE amount of work. If you are relying on a small number of people, some working in their spare time to do this work you had better make a pretty good case for doing it.

Tool touted as 'first AI software engineer' is bad at its job, testers claim

Re: well...

Junior engineers may learn from their mistakes and become senior engineers.

That doesn't really happen with LLMs.

Can AWS really fix AI hallucination? We talk to head of Automated Reasoning Byron Cook

The legal profession is already filled with databases of existing legal cases with extensive search facilities.

The correct answer from AI should be "I don't have a fucking clue, how about you go and consult one of the existing, competent legal databases run by actual lawyers?"

It's like your overconfident bullshitting mate down the pub whose ability to make shit up was killed by the advent of google (this definitely wasn't me, of course not)

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

Re: So WiFi only for client connections. Really?

I doubt it as well.

This is why I purchased a Turris Omnia. The chunky CPU specs allow close to line speed (1gbps) routing. My previous home router couldn't handle the 250mbps connection I had at the time.

Hardly ANY reviews of home WiFi routers seem to mention the actual routing performance, just the WiFi bandwidth. A budget router may well not have the necessary CPU horsepower for faster internet connections.

AI hiring bias? Men with Anglo-Saxon names score lower in tech interviews

Re: You can't add arbitrary data to remove bias.

Yup.

In the mid 80s a schoolmate visited Manchester - possibly UMIST - and brought back an alternative prospectus put out by the students. There was a Q&A section for one of the engineering courses and one question was :

Q: Is there any sex discrimination?

A: No, she was not discriminated against.

Reaction Engines' hypersonic hopes stall as funding fizzles out

Re: They were always so bad at funding.

And like the Junkers engine, the Metrovick was powerful but unreliable. Whittle's original 1930 patent shows an axial compressor but the optimal solution on paper isn't always the most practical.

Wanted. Top infosec pros willing to defend Britain on shabby salaries

Those numbers seem low even if it's not London.

A relative started on 40K straight out of University as a junior dev and was on 60K within 18 months. That was 5 years ago.

Crypto scams rake in $5.6B a year for cyberscum lowlifes, FBI says

Re: Friend got scammed....

While learning about security is a sensible precursor to getting in to crypto, I'd start with considering the complete lack of any value to start with.

A friend is a greybeard programmer and at least 20 years older than anybody else he works with. All his team were in on crypto except him. At their last meeting he discovered that every one of them was out a decent amount of money from their 'investments' I think the smallest loss was about £8000 up to >£30,000. Somewhere somebody made money from them but the net is a large amount of energy was expended to move money from them to somebody else.

At least Charles Ponzi had a believeable story he was touting around the markets. Crypto doesn't even have that.

FTC urged to stop tech makers downgrading devices after you've bought them

That was my approach however the movies I purchased on google play have been nerfed and can't be played in a browser at anything higher than 480p anymore. Oh well, I guess I can find an HD copy on torrent somewhere so I can watch what I actually paid for.

Admins wonder if the cloud was such a good idea after all

Re: "CIOs cannot turn their back on cloud."

Gartner generally aren't wrong because they ask their customers what they plan on doing, then write a report saying 'this is what everybody wil be doing'

The people they interviewed then have an 'independent' report to support doing exactly what they were already planning on doing.

Nice work if you can get it.

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

Re: apostrophes for fun and profit

Personally I'd say the book is only being read by a single pedant.

Historically this goes all the way back to Which Tyler - the leader of the pedants' revolt.

Elexon's Insight into UK electricity felled by expired certificate

From Gridwatch - which I like because of the dials :

UPDATE

Tuesday 9th July

The TLS certificate on https://data.exelon.co.uk has expired, rendering their website and its data inaccessible

Regards Webmaster @ templar.co.uk

ITER delays first plasma for world's biggest fusion power rig by a decade

Re: 50 vs 500

Also doesn't include the power needed for containment - the 6,000 tonne magnet for example.

As fusion was "30 years away" when I was young (30 years ago) I will remain skeptical.

Former Fujitsu engineer apologizes for role in Post Office IT scandal

Re: Possibly controversial opinion...

I agree with some of this. He does seem to actually be trying to answer questions and isn't suffering from the intermittently faulty memory of many of the witnesses.

However on the technical side - which I guess is why most of us are here - the issue I have, and this was the same with his colleague Anne Chambers, is the clear assumption that the system was working fine and if they couldn't find a problem in the data after a cursory check then there wasn't a problem and it was somebody else's fault. To find bugs you have to actually go looking for them.

The whole culture of the PO and ICL/Fujitsu seems to have been to see everybody else as the problem when a good hard look in the mirror was needed.

British Airways blames T5 luggage chaos on fault 'outside of our control'

Re: Attention customers

On the plus side, at least these bags got delayed due to a fault, not just because the baggage handlers couldn't be bothered to load the bags onto the plane and fucked off home - I'm looking at you, Firenze airport.