Posts by find users who cut cat tail

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

If you did it on purpose, you'd probably end up with MS OLE and ruin a bunch of file formats at once. But for a single format PDF comes pretty close.

Court docs allege Meta trained its AI models on contentious trove of maybe-pirated content

But which copyright?

> So clearly, built into the system (perhaps supplemental to the AI model) is a notion of copyright.

Is this the final step of imposing the US copyright rules on the entire world?

New Outlook marches onto Windows 10 for what little time it has left

Re: Why?

> Are these changes just randomised?

Isn't ‘randomised changes’ the entire Microsoft development model?

Free-software warriors celebrate landmark case that enforced GNU LGPL

Germany

Unfortunately, Germany is probably one of the very few countries where this can happen.

Devs sent into security panic by 'feature that was helpful … until it wasn't'

Re: Instead of disabling translation

Also: Stop using geolocation for language settings without an easy way to stop and override it. People travel to foreign countries, you know.

Microsoft won't let customers opt out of passkey push

Re: So, passkeys

Please read something about asymmetric cryptography. At least the very high-level summary in the article.

Open source maintainers are drowning in junk bug reports written by AI

A vulnerability bug report can require a lot of time to deal with properly – regardless if the outcome is a fix or the conclusion that there is no actual problem. If you are handling them all in 5 minutes, you code probably remains full of holes. Ten per month is not DDoS, but you would definitely feel it.

And do not worry, the reports will get more frequent and difficult to detect (as mentioned in the article).

British boffins build diamond battery capable of working for a millennium or five

Re: El Reg Standards

Power is force × speed. So Norris-%sheep would be also an adequate unit (but I am too lazy to do the conversion).

OpenAI denies it is building ad biz model into its platform

Re: How would that even work?

Technologically, it is definitely feasible. And it would be kind of funny too when someone tries to pass LLM-generated stuff as their work/homework/etc.

So, although I am generally annoyed by ads of any kind, I am making an exception here. Please insert ads to all LLM outputs. Not even necessarily real, hallucinated ones would work equally well.

Google earns fresh competition scrutiny from two nations on a single day

Re: A bad day for Google

Yes, once we can ‘Play Mobile Games & Win Cash’ everything will be just GREAT.

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: "learnt many things about how not to run a company"

Every spreadsheet macro, shell one-liner and Jupyter notebook are software.

Some big and/or widely software was created with the intent to write something big and widely used. Other started as a little tool to help with some task.

How US Dept of Justice's cure for Google could inflict collateral damage

Re: Collateral damage?

Exactly. If the main problem is ‘But but but… the Apples and Microsofts will continue with business as usual!’, the solution is not letting Google get away with it. It is not letting the Apples and Microsofts get away with it either.

FTC urges smart device makers to disclose software update lifecycles

Updates

As if smart devices had software update lifecycles… The safe bet is usually that will not be any updates ever and the ’smart‘ parts will stop working inexplicably after a while.

Network engineer chose humiliation over a night on the datacenter floor

Re: Murphy's Law also *loves* demos

> Search result turned up with about two publications, for a career spanning decades.

I've also met such professors…

Thousands of AI agents later, who even remembers what they do?

Re: It's all just Bullshit

Translation is actually a machine learning product that works pretty well. Of course, this is nothing new. We've been using it for a couple of decades, even though the current translators are much better than ancient Google Translate (for instance). You still need to check and correct the output. But it's got to the point where it is consistently easier to start from machine translation than from scratch (which has not always been the case). And you generally get usable results even when translating to languages you are not able to check and correct.

Will passkeys ever replace passwords? Can they?

Passkeys are basically how SSH pubkey authentication has worked for many years (except that sane people have the private key password-protected in addition). It is a great idea and well tested in practice. Sorry to inform you.

Sure, they may not the best match for everything. But why the scaremongering? People lose and reset passwords all the time. With passkeys it would be similar, just the split between situations when you keep and when you lose (and have to recover) access being along different lines.

Also, pubkey authentication should support multiple different keys for the same user & service (e.g. from different devices) out of the box. In other words, you can have redundancy – safely. In principle, you can have it with passwords too, but it is a mess and rarely done.

And you can at least dream of things which are just impossible with passwords, like mass revocation of all keys corresponding to a specific device. (Seeing how well revocation works elsewhere, this one would probably remain a dream.)

To kill memory safety bugs in C code, try the TrapC fork

Re: I've taken out union and some other things that I rarely use

There is a bigger problem. You can absolutely do things like this in C:

return (char*)malloc(42) + 123456;

Or XOR the pointer with something, or whatever.

And then in a galaxy far far away a different piece of code undoes the transformation, gets a valid pointer, does something with the memory and frees it. No code analysis can figure out whether the memory block is still use or not, or whether the pointers are valid. The allocation and use may be even compiled completely separately. So the basic premise is false.

You may consider it contrived, but there are use cases for keeping around different pointers than what malloc() gave you. Or if you know the alignment (for instance to multiple of 16) you can use the lowest bits of the pointer to encode some extra information and clear the bits when you are actually using it as a pointer. Etc. It is exactly the ability do such low-level stuff why you use C in the first place.

Microsoft tries out wooden bit barns to cut construction emissions

Re: It's what's inside the counts

Please do not use exponentially for ‘really big, or something like that’. We do not have any alternative words for an exp()-like functional dependence.

Sysadmins rage over Apple’s ‘nightmarish’ SSL/TLS cert lifespan cuts plot

Re: OK, then let's focus on really strict security

Please shorten it to 45 µs. Make it *literally impossible* to implement the policy.

Then finally everyone stops chasing nonsense and we'll figure out a better way of doing this.

Why send a message when you can get your Zoom digital video clone to read the script?

Re: Killer app

There won't be. And it does not even take a killer app to kill the planet. Just a web of AI assistants hallucinating videos for meetings which other AI assistants will then attend and summarise and schedule more AI meetings… But perhaps keeping AI busy in pointless meetings will at least delay the uprising?

AI godfather-turned-doomer shares Nobel with neural network pioneer

And if they really wanted to give them a Nobel prize, at least use the peace one. It would not be worse than some of the past laureates.

Meta gives Llama 3 vision, now if only it had a brain

3 = 4

So, after being asked to break down image into *three* zones it responds

> The image is divided into four distinct zones:

but then lists three? It does not matter then what it generates about the zone content – you must assume it also contains basic errors.

CISA boss: Makers of insecure software must stop enabling today's cyber villains

Re: Really? Really?

A bit more punctuation and the comment would be executable Perl code…

No major AI model is safe, but some do better than others

Re: "safe" and "harmful" according to who?

Wait a few iterations and the only thing the models will be able (or allowed) to produce is US corporate drivel. Which is OK, because that's what they will be mostly used for anyway.

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

Re: Headers anyone

The answer is the same a always. You are just confused. You do not know what you want and what is good for you. Microsoft – they do.

How deliciously binary: AI has yet to pay off – or is transforming business

Re: Dotcom boom n bust all over again

The thing is, I do not want to win the lottery. Winning the lottery is [mostly] a curse. Reasonably high stable income is much better.

And I do not want any tech bro to ‘win the lottery’ either. Why should I want more monopolistic megacorporations controlling everything? We are still trying to deal with the current bunch…

China ponders creating a national 'cyberspace ID'

Re: Just a question...

I was responding to this statement in the article (and I assume so did lglethal):

> ISPs are required to collect the real names and ID numbers when customers sign up for services

It does not talk about people using the connection, but about people *signing up for services*. And the ISP definitely has identifying personal information about them. Whether it specifically includes some kind of national ID or not is irrelevant – they have sufficient personal data regardless.

Re: Just a question...

Maybe I also live in one of the ‘few countries’…

I have a contract with my ISP and they know my exact address – for obvious reasons.

Forget security – Google's reCAPTCHA v2 is exploiting users for profit

Re: solve captcha to continue

Similar with store fronts and other nonsense. It has degenerated to ‘prove you are a human by classifying images identically to our US-data mistrained neural network – and rarely as a human being would, especially someone with a different cultural background’.

If you're using Polyfill.io code on your site – like 100,000+ are – remove it immediately

Re: That's why I hate java script

I'm not saying it is right. I am just too old and cynical to not see the unintended – but quite predictable – consequences.

Re: That's why I hate java script

Strict same origin rules will lead to morons automatically updating ‘first-party’ resources on the server from random places on the internet. If you think no one will do that because it is too insane, you are clearly new to IT…

World's top AI chatbots have no problem parroting Russian disinformation

GIGO

Lots of LLMs training data come from the interwebz.So what did you expect?

Microsoft's Recall should be celebrated as the savior of SMEs and scourge of CEOs

Re: What happened to ask the user?

Just asking the user is unreliable. You need to observe them actually doing things. But whether Recall is the right tool, that's another matter…

Early MySQL engineer questions whether Oracle is unintentionally killing off the open source database

Why migrate to Postgres if your old database works just fine?

Using AI in science can add to reproducibility woes, say boffins

Re: Stating the obvious

The basic obstacle is that even a half-hearted attempt at this (and I have tried) is huge PITA. It can be achieved in high-profile cases if you throw lots of resources at it. But everyday scientific poking and tinkering would basically halt. And that would be the end.

I am much more afraid of the deluge of ‘papers’ which are basically faked using generative AI. Many have adopted the shotgun approach, betting on getting some of their nonsense past peer review by chance, long before current LLMs appeared. And now they are able to produce nonsense in much large quantities (and finally also correct grammar).

Google thinks AI can Google better than you can

Re: I don't care

Google is working hard on making it correct – i.e. making you unable to google anything useful.

When AI helps you code, who owns the finished product?

Re: Is any of that code copyrightable?

Probably neither as it is too short and required little creativity.

That said, copyright is not patent. Copyright covers concrete expressions of ideas, copying and derived works. Provenance matters much more here. Two programmers can independently(!) write very similar code and both have copyright to their respective works. That is just how it is.

Ten years since the first corp ransomware, Mikko Hyppönen sees no end in sight

Re: Murphy's law applies

That is what my bank does. Except the plain text part, unfortunately. Plain text apparently makes difficult linking to the bank's TikTok or something… Still, better than most from what I've heard.

Outlook.com trips over Google's spam blocking rules

Re: This is news?

GMail in particular – sending e-mails there (even correctly replying for an e-mail originating there) has always been a lottery.

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

Re: It's garbage

> Try it. Open Outlook, pick up an email with the mouse and drag it to the desktop.

The test does not start by running Outlook. I would have to get, install and set it up first. On a different machine. My desktops are set up so that they cannot even have any icons on them…

Sorry, can't be bothered to do that.

So, still does not parse. Thanks for the thumbs downs though.

Re: It's garbage

What? You… What?

Sorry, I would formulate a more coherent question but ‘drag and drop an email on to the desktop’ just does not parse.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

Re: Don't people test edge cases any more? [Predictability]

Time calculations are inherently complex and difficult.

Every object in the universe has its own proper time. If you do any kind of measurement based on physics (i.e. any measurement whatsoever) you must use proper time. It's the correct time for description of how physical processes go for the specific observer.

Different observers can disagree on which of two events occured first (if they are space-like).

The idea that there is some single time barely works at the scale of counties with our current time meaurement precision.

The mess created by humans is just a big and ugly database of weird rules. But it is not fundamentally mind boggling – unlike anything coming from relativity.

Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

Most are pretty obviously false, but could someone enlighten me on ‘The day before Saturday is always Friday.’? Are there any exceptions to this aside from when entire blocks of days were skipped to sync with the stars?

AI is changing search, for better or for worse

Re: Often?

Soon it will be trivial to identify the source of all web content: generative AI trained [mostly] on the hallucinations of generative AIs that came before. It will be turtles all the way down.

Japanese tech startups testing cash incentives for office return

Sign me up

Extra money for the option I prefer anyway? Sign me up!

Videoconferencing fatigue is real, study finds

Re: Duh.

I do not care about investors, just hate WFH. I and also went to work in person basically the entire pandemic (it was almost never strictly prohibited without loopholes). There were about five of us in a large building. Happy times. YMMV.

Re: Meetings!!!

And I wish you both read the article before commenting.

The study compared people watching the same content remotely and live.

Meta's ad-free scheme dares you to buy your privacy back, one euro at a time

Re: Shocked?

> most people don't realize how much data about them Meta collects, or how valuable it is

So how do most people think Meta make loads of money (and people are not ignorant of that)? Their only real ‘product’ is you being on the platform.

It's time to celebrate the abysmal efforts to go paperless in the NHS

Paperless is and always has been an instrumental goal, not a terminal one. As another story reminded us not so long ago: Bad software destroyed doctors memory. If they cannot do paperless right, keeping dead trees is the lesser evil.

The world seems so loopy. But at least someone's written a memory-safe sudo in Rust

Re: Lameness

Not sure what the numbers mean, but you clearly prefer quantity over quality in your posts. So have another one from me for spamming the discussion.