Re: I am confused
BigAI phoned and said they like your plan.
Posts by dmesg
273 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Aug 2016
Prompt injection isn't the bug, AI agent frameworks are
Google meets the neighbors and gets both barrels over its new UK datacenter
AI's cheatin' heart will make you weep
OpenAI admits it was the source of the agent swarm that attacked Hugging Face
Security researchers tricked LLMs into giving them cocaine recipes by abusing role models for prompt injection
They've read the scroll thing! AI helps decipher ancient document charred by Vesuvius
Friday 26th June 2026 01:46 GMT 
This is fabulous!
And to think, they have a library of these scrolls to go through. With luck, it will include works known to exist (from references) but otherwise lost.
I wonder if the new approach is applicable to scriptural texts from the Mideast. It's about time for a new discovery of an ancient document cache.
PRC-linked spies hid inside medical and military networks for more than a year, snooping through Gmail and stealing data
Wednesday 17th June 2026 19:42 GMT 
Why Chikungunya?
There's some logic to looking for mentions of a specific disease in an adversary's communications if you've just had an outbreak of it.
Cyberspace isn't the only arena where actors can launch hard-to-attribute asymmetric attacks. See, for example, the last section of _Six -Legged Soldiers_ by Jeffrey Lockwood, "The Future of Entomological Warfare". [Actually, read the whole book. Lively storytelling of fascinating, often chilling, history.] I don't have the book at hand, but there was mention of a mysterious outbreak of a crop disease in the US, and he tells the tale of "ecoterrorists" threatening to release the medfly in California agriculture areas.
I suspect that, in this specific case, China was looking for evidence the outbreak was something besides a natural occurrence. But the other nefarious stuff? Yeah, that's worrisome. But of course, WE would never think of doing anything like THAT to them. Gentlemen do not read each other's mail, right?
EU's digital sovereignty boo-boo may be the best thing to ever happen to the project
This is your BIOS speaking. Please fix me. Your PC is broken
LibreOffice brands Euro-Office a 'de facto ally' of Microsoft's lock-in strategy
Friday 12th June 2026 20:41 GMT
OOXML, the unstandard
If I recall correctly (from the days when Groklaw was my first news stop), when OOXML was first approved as a standard MS Office was *not* compliant. The committee found that parts of Microsoft's proposal needed work and changed the draft MS provided.
I also recall that there was considerable pushback and skullduggery from MS against any changes, including installing a MS-friendly operative as chair of the committee, who, once the standard was approved, set about quietly tinkering with it over the next few years to re-align it to MS's wishes.
Finally, iirc, the standard specified some behavior as "what MS {product} does in this situation". That's a quote from an old memory, but Groklaw had the exact quote, and the wording had precisely that meaning and directness. Due to time pressure and MS not actually having a written spec of product behavior in some cases (!), the wording actually made it into portions of the approved spec.
If anybody can bring me up to date on the situation, I'd appreciate it. But unless something has substantially changed, OOXML is a spec in name but not fact.
Start spreading the news: Datacenters may face one-year ban in NY
Friday 12th June 2026 19:48 GMT
I live where they want to put them.
Luddite here, then. I live in the rural way-upstate area targeted for not one but several of these monsters, with a total of 11 or so if all proposals go through.
The first one (yes, just that one) would consume as much electricity as New York City.
That new Micron fab going in downstate ... will it suck down that much power? No? Then it's not a worthy comparison.
That first data center would sit just upriver of the Akwesasne Mohawk Reservation. The heat dumped into the St. Lawrence River would have an impact on people already suffering from the environmental effects of living downstream of a Superfund pollution site that's thanks to another era's industry --aluminum -- that rolled in without sufficient safeguards.
When you add in the noise, vibration, exhaust, and aerial warming documented at existing data center sites, you can understand why the Mohawks are organizing against it. And why the Legislature of St. Lawrence County just passed a resolution advising towns and villages (who have permitting jurisdiction) to put a hold on approving data centers.
The state legislature is right in line with that, so good on 'em.
Don't forget, too, that the St. Lawrence river at that point (Massena, NY) is an international boundary, and shortly after flows entirely within Canada. Canada might have something to say about altering the river ecosystem with the heat from even one data center, never mind several.
Many of us who live here choose this place because of its green and pleasant land. We don't need or want the tech bros' new Satanic mills.
Grep this: Microsoft grafts (most) Linux commands onto Windows
Friday 5th June 2026 02:49 GMT
Re: Imitation is the Sincerest form of Flattery
Back in the 90s or so, a fellow grad student was an X Windows maven and had been so for a decade or two. He told me of interviewing at Microsoft back in the DOS-only days, when they knew they wanted a GUI for their OS and apps and were looking into possible ways to do it. They asked a lot of technical feasibility questions. Yeah, that was back in the day when MS could get free consulting by dressing it up as a job interview. Too bad, he said, that they decided to go with a home-brew solution.
Election interlopers register 5K+ domains, hope to catch some voting phish
Tuesday 2nd June 2026 18:31 GMT 
GOP plan for democracy -->
I foresee email from a convincing-sounding domain advising voters that polling stations will be open all week, and lines will be shorter if you vote on one of the later days. This is a standard GOP dirty trick, more potent for the data beaches revealing voters' data. [Aside: what do you think the Trump regime's plan for a national voter database is really about? And do you really think it would be adequately secured?]
The new twist is that the email will also have a link to an equally-convincing website where you can "vote by Internet", today even! It will all look very official and ballot-y and may even send you email acknowledging that your vote has been cast.
Remember, Trump's plan, if he can't cheat a win, is to at least throw the result into doubt, and thence chaos that "only I can fix".
Rodent-obsessed developer creates Ratty to bring 3D graphics to the command line
Jury out on whether Americans love or hate datacenters
Monday 18th May 2026 05:05 GMT
Re: Jury is out because the details aren't in
I live in a rural area. It's quite beautiful, and a lot of people move here for the peace and quiet.
Don't fob those damn things off on us. Put them in the cities -- hey, maybe in the harbor where there's lots of water for cooling. Close to the users, so they can see what blithely prompting for funny cat videos or vibing the next cyber security disaster is actually doing to the planet. And hey, what's a little extra noise and heat, eh?
Open source registries don't have enough money to implement basic security
To gain root access at this company, all an intruder had to do was ask nicely
Saturday 16th May 2026 19:34 GMT
Re: Forty years of horror stories
Long ago (Win 3/95 days) in the staff meeting of our uni IT department, the Unix/AIX sysadmin proudly announced that we were now secure since he had just applied the last year's worth of security patches. Riiiight. Horses, barn doors.
The poor security was well known to other staff. The suspicion was he kept security lax because his pr0n collection lived on unmounted server drives, and he wanted to be able to untraceably (ahem) penetrate security and, er, mount the drives from home.
Several students I knew who had friends in the East Coast hacking community told me our school's poor security was well known there too. We were considered a great place for honing one's remote skilz.
Several layers of bureaucracy protected the sysadmin: what with access to everyone's files and email, he was of use in internal political struggles, up the chain to one of the VPs. Eventually the President and Provost were able to get rid of the head of IT. The VP with the IT portfolio, and the sysadmin in question, followed a few months later. What made it special was that, in the opening move, it was the VP that had to go to the office of the IT director and fire him.
UK begins antitrust inquiry into Microsoft's business software ecosystem
Veteran network architect proposes IPv8 – to improve IPv4, not leapfrog v6
The network password was a key plot point in one of the most famous movies of all time
Thursday 7th May 2026 18:29 GMT
”Since it was the weekend, no one was answering their work phones to give him the information he needed.”
Obviously not a company in the US, then. I worked for one place where my boss made it clear that I was mandated to volunteer for on call duty. He could not be made to see the absurdity. And since it was "voluntary", I didn't qualify for the overtime and extra-duty pay that the Union contract specified for on-call employees. It was a while ago so I don't remember how much longer I stayed in that job (it paid well for the area and had some other benefits), but that was the beginning of the end. Especially given some of the horrendous call outs I'd been through that year.
Taiwan cops say student's radio kit brought bullet trains to a standstill
Brace for the patch tsunami: AI is unearthing decades of buried code debt
If the vote you rocked, your personal info can be grokked
Monday 4th May 2026 17:25 GMT
Re: Not to worry
"DoJ wants the rolls to investigate election integrity and how accurate electoral rolls are. Democracy 101 means that only qualified votes should count."
Not only disingenuous but false. What the DOJ says it wants doesn't matter. The power to conduct elections is given to the states by the Constitution. I for one have not heard of a "Democracy 101" document that overrides the Constitution.
You also give yourself away by stating only "qualified" votes count. Again, what "qualified" means is up to the individual states, subject of course to not depriving any citizen of their Constitutional rights. But anyone who's paying any attention knows that "qualified", in the words of a Trump administration mouthpiece, is a euphemistic filter meant to deny voting rights to demographic blocs likely to vote against Trump.
User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave
Sunday 3rd May 2026 06:02 GMT
Re: "of course, we start counting at 12"
The Romans added the extra day (or days, things were a bit looser back then) of a leap year not at the end of February, but after February 23.
A nice description of the matter can be found, appropriately enough, in Time magazine: https://time.com/6588874/leap-year-day-february-29-calendar-date-history-origin/.
Sunday 3rd May 2026 05:38 GMT
Re: Analogue clocks
Actually, there are firsts: they're called minutes. They're called that because they're minute (pronounced my-nyoot) parts of an hour. Seconds get their name because they're minute parts of minutes: second-order small parts of an hour.
Not that this helps the situation any.
OTOH, I recall seeing a Smithsonian exhibit of artifacts from at the Great Exhibition (1851, the "Crystal Palace"). One item, from France, was a clock embodying the idea of decimal-based time. The numbers on the face went from 1 to 10. It was ... weird.
The Navy's autonomous carrier-based refueling drone has finally flown
Tuesday 28th April 2026 18:33 GMT
Re: Combination refuelling drone and gunnery practice target?
That's what Hegseth and Trump say. But then they would, wouldn't they?
I give more credence to the authors of a recent article in the Atlantic: "Pentagon leaders’ positive portrayals present an incomplete picture at best, people familiar with intelligence assessments told us. According to those internal estimates, Iran retains two-thirds of its air force, the bulk of its missile-launching capability, and most of its small, fast boats, which can lay mines and harass traffic in the Strait of Hormuz."[1]
That same article gives voice to concerns over the serious draw down of key US munitions.
Consider also who is winning the war, whatever damage has occurred to either side. Do winners beg for negotiations to reopen? Threaten imminent massive destruction ... to force the opponent into reopening negotiations? Then back down and proclaim a unilateral cease fire ... so negotiations can reopen?
[1] "The Pentagon May Not Be Telling Trump the Full Picture About the War". https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/04/iran-war-vance-hegseth-trump/686905/
SUSE's sovereignty pitch meets an inconvenient $6 billion question
To fix this Wi-Fi network, we'll need a crane
Monday 27th April 2026 18:14 GMT
phones have cell signal receivers
... and your laptops don't.
Wi-Fi goes down, phones switch to cell signal for Internet access. At least, that's what happens to me fairly frequently. Case in point: today and yesterday both, I accidentally hit the Off switch on the power for the cable modem and Wi-Fi AP. Computers lost access, phones kept theirs, albeit at much slower data rates.
'Invisible mouse' made a mess of PC rebuild
Monday 20th April 2026 15:52 GMT
Re: Fire hazard
In my second year at college one of the gents in the (single-occupancy room) dorms had a room that was quite literally buried in several inches of detritus of college life. Laundry, papers, books, probably a few pizza boxes. I was told that his previous room had been the same, and to move he just shoveled the floor into trash bags and dumped them in the new room. Ugh.
Support tech caught by 'Technician Aura': the bug that only hides when you're watching
Saturday 18th April 2026 19:59 GMT
A few Sundays ago at our UU service the minister was leading a guided meditation during which he said something to the effect of "receiving a call." At the very moment someone's phone rang. But for it being a quiet moment everyone would have laughed, so the congregation (and minister) all had a good smile.
France’s digital directorate dumping Windows desktops, adopting Linux instead
Digital sovereignty isn't just a buzzword – it's the future
Tuesday 14th April 2026 04:16 GMT
Re: Who's sickest of Trump?
Um, no. His support is eroding: within his party, among influencers that once backed him, and among the public.
There is a record exodus of R representatives as they retire or wish to "spend time with their family". Joe Rogan and Alex Jones have come out against Trump, and they're not alone. Polling puts Trump at or near historic approval lows. Democrats in special elections are running 15 to 20 points ahead of Trump's numbers in their districts and have flipped a good number of seats as a result.
Tech support chap's boss got him out of jail so he could finish a job
Monday 13th April 2026 13:55 GMT
Re: Brentry
I went to see Hawkwind in Ottawa many years back. Dave Brock was doing double duty on both keyboards and guitar. One of the band members had been denied entry. Helluva great show even so, with excellent sound engineering.
Went with a carful of friends, all of us from way-north NY. No border problems for us either direction that night.
Ex-Microsoft engineer believes Azure problems stem from talent exodus
Forking frenzy ensues after Euro-Office launch sparks OnlyOffice backlash
ServiceNow allegedly says salesman 'overachieved' and is not entitled to comp
Wednesday 1st April 2026 00:24 GMT
Re: How to incentivise your salespeople
Same thing goes with real estate, or other commissioned sales. I'd much rather give the sales agent a good commission, and good motivation to sell my house (or in one case, a highly-sought after Martin guitar model), then try to wheedle them into a dispiriting task that sinks to the bottom of their to-do list. Gets ya' good offers, quick. Make the sale and move on.
Turns out your coffee addiction may be doing your brain a favor
Junior disobeyed orders and tried untested feature during a live robot demo
Forget drones – the US Army just took delivery of a self-flying Black Hawk helicopter
It's not a binary choice. Independent boffin builds a ternary CPU on an FPGA
Friday 20th March 2026 01:52 GMT
Re: Confused Old Bunny Here!
The Harvard Mark I had rows of decade switches for manual entry of constants, one constant per row, each row having 24 switches. Twenty four decimal digits of precision -- not bad for the 1940s! Operators would manually set the switches before a program run. There's a detail photo in the Wikipedia article on the Mark I.