Posts by Richard Tobin

Linus Torvalds: Stop making an issue out of AI slop in kernel docs – you're not changing anybody's mind

Re: AI winter

... and neither of them was in 1984.

AI winter

The "AI Winter" was not circa 1984. That was the time of the Japanese Fifth Generation project, the UK Alvey program, the heyday of Lisp machines, Prolog, and expert systems. The AI winter was about a decade earlier, and in Britain was largely associated with the Lighthill Report of 1973.

What if Linux ran Windows… and meant it? Meet Loss32

The last thing we want

... is for it to be easier to run Windows applications. We need it to be hard and unpleasant to run Windows applications, so that the whole system withers away.

Cheaper 1 GB Raspberry Pi 5 lands as memory costs go through the roof

But just think

how cheap it will be when the AI bubble bursts.

Norway's most powerful supercomputer will use waste heat to raise salmon

Or depending on the difficulty of the problem...

s/raise/cook/

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Another approach

I had to move a Mac which was being used as a server so I put it into hibernate. It woke up at the new location and carried on as if nothing had happened.

Commodity memory prices set to double as fabs pivot to AI market

Re: Just in time...

But just think how cheap LPDDR5 memory will be when the bubble bursts!

EY exposes 4TB+ SQL database to open internet for who knows how long

Re: Ernst & Young

So? I'd never heard of them before either.

Dame Emma Thompson gives the 'AI revolution' both barrels

Self-inflicted problem

LaTeX has never offered to rewrite my papers.

AWS outage exposes Achilles heel: central control plane

So what was the problem?

Yes, it was DNS. But that could mean anything. Did a server fail - in which case their redundancy is hopeless - or did someone just put the wrong data in - in which case they need to improve their procedures - or what?

Ofcom fines 4chan £20K and counting for pretending UK's Online Safety Act doesn't exist

The term "hash" is now often used more generally to include a function of some data that allows approximate matching while still being much smaller than the original and not allowing it to be reconstructed. For example, the fingerprint data stored in a phone.

The sweetest slice of Pi: Raspberry Pi 500+ sports mechanical keys, 16GB, and built-in SSD

What I'd like...

... is a version of this with a battery, to act as a UPS. Most USB battery packs don't reliably maintain power at the moment they're unpugged.

SIM city: Feds say 100,000-card farms could have killed cell towers in NYC

UN?

"All within 35 miles of the UN headquarters building in NYC" is much the same as "all within 35 miles of the Empire State Building". If that's all they've got, I don't see any reason to link it to the UN.

After deleting a web server, I started checking what I typed before hitting 'Enter'

Re: Been there, done that

* has not included dot files since at least 7th edition (1979).

‘IT manager’ needed tech support because they had never heard of a command line

Re: I've seen that type of manager before

There are several things wrong with Mandelson, but incompetence is not one of them.

Servers hated Mondays until techie quit quaffing coffee in their company

Disks

In the 1970s we had a PDP 11/40 that was turned on every morning, and it too would often not start in cold weather. We were told that this was because the 14" platters of the RK05F disk drives would contract until they were no longer within the tolerance for track positioning.

(The RK05F was a fixed version of the removable RK05 and was able to have twice the track density because it removed the manufacturing variability between disks.)

Beijing summons Nvidia over alleged backdoors in China-bound AI chips

In fact

It's just an AirTag in the packaging.

Publishers cry foul over W3C crusade to rid web of third-party cookies

Small-time crooks

This is like small-time crooks complaining that locking our doors unfairly affects them more than it affects big organised crime.

PUTTY.ORG nothing to do with PuTTY – and now it's spouting pandemic piffle

"Nowadays tty is a Linux command"

tty has been a Unix command since the very beginning, as you can see here: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dennis_v1/UNIX_ProgrammersManual_Nov71.pdf

Apple goes glass whole as it pours new UI everywhere

Re: "a fluidity that only Apple can achieve."

They could have called it "Aqua".

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

Re: Divers log

Another point - when I was at primary school, the way we were taught to write decimals was *not* 3.14159, but 3·14159 - with a middle dot. That makes it even less the case that 1.5 would be naturally interpreted as a decimal.

Re: Divers log

Bear in mind that in those days people were much probably much less inclined to treat numbers as decimals in general. We would write £1 2s 6d, 5' 8", 2lb 4oz.

During the run-up to decimalization in 1971 one of the things that they (the government, teachers, the BBC...) tried to drum into us was that a pound and five pence should be written £1.05 and not £1.5.

VPN Secure parent company CEO explains why he had to axe thousands of 'lifetime' deals

How is this legal?

Don't the customers have contracts? When did "we can't afford it" become a way of getting out of a contract?

Marks & Spencer admits cybercrooks made off with customer info

Stupid password requirements

They wont accept a password of 16 random letters and numbers because it doesn't include a special character, but they'd be happy with ABCxyz+1

Yolk's on you – eggs break less when they land sideways

Useful

I will make use of this result when next making an omelette.

Nip chip smugglers by building trackers into GPUs, US Senator suggests

Auditors??

"auditors would go around to datacenters checking that the GPUs' cryptographic signatures match the ones on file" - how are American auditors going to check data centres in China?

Teens maintained a mainframe and it went about as well as you'd imagine

DECwriter

We had a DECwriter as the console on a VAX 11/750 running Berkeley unix. Every minute a cron job printed the date so that we could tell when any output had happened.

One day we suddenly started getting an error for every command - something like "out of processes". We found that the console had run out of paper, and several hundred "date" processes were stuck waiting for their output to complete.

Soviet probe from 1972 set to return to Earth ... in May 2025

Re: Eventually….

Works here. Try this instead: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3211100#/media/File:Guggenheim_NOV2011_Cattelan_5.jpg

Re: Eventually….

At least it's unlikely that this will happen.

Nationwide power outages knock Spain, Portugal offline

No. There have been no even moderate solar flares for about a week.

You can see last few days' solar flux at https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/goes-x-ray-flux

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

"partially implement every networking protocol known to man, badly"

A fine example of this is that many Canon printers can't be connected to your wireless network if the network implements 802.11r, a protocol to speed up roaming between access points. The symptom is particularly bizarre - the printer just doesn't prompt you for the wifi password. The workaround is to turn off 802.11r, configure the printer, and turn it on again.

Tesla fudged odometer to screw me out of warranty, Model Y owner claims

They're self-driving, remember? You have no idea where they're going while you're asleep.

Pentagon needs China's rare earths, Beijing just put them behind a permit wall. Oops

Guess who else has rare earths? Ukraine and Greenland.

Apple Intelligence turned on by default in upcoming macOS Sequoia 15.3, iOS 18.3

But is it a cloud-based feature? Or does it run locally? Their past statements have not been explicit about this.

Apple called on to ditch AI headline summaries after BBC debacle

er what?

The BBC didn't show this headline. Apple did, attributing it to the BBC.

Huawei handed 2,596,148,429,267,413,
814,265,248,164,610,048 IPv6 addresses

It's not that many

My ISP gives me a /48, which is pretty common. That means that in theory I can have 2^80 devices, though more usefully I could have 2^16 subnets of up to 2^64 devices. Huawei's /17 would allow them to provide 2^31 = 2 billion customers with a /48, and that's not much more than the population of China. Not that I imagine that they want it for that.

There are lots of fun things you can do when you have an effectively unlimited number of addresses. I have a string of christmas tree lights with 250 individually-controllable colour LEDs - I could easily write a program that gave each LED its own address.

Eurocops take down 'secure' criminal chat system known as Matrix

Re: In other news.....

End-to-end encryption doesn't protect against interception in the phone itself.

BOFH: Don't threaten us with a good time – ensure it

Insurance increases your expected loss - how else would insurance companies make money? - in return for removing the possibility that your actual loss is much higher.

NIST: New smoke alarms are better at detecting fires, but still go off for bacon

Re: Not in kitchen

That's right.

"Smoke alarms are not suitable for kitchens but heat alarms are" - https://www.london-fire.gov.uk/safety/the-home/smoke-alarms-and-heat-alarms/

Lebanon: At least nine dead, thousands hurt after Hezbollah pagers explode

Re: Technology question

The battery is certainly the obvious place. It's heavy so a little extra is less noticeable, or perhaps they just reduced the battery capacity. It could even be introduced without the complicity of the pager manufacturer - offer them a good deal on several thousand batteries and they might well take it.

I haven't seen anything indicating how they were triggered. If the software was compromised it could signal to the battery without the need for extra wiring, for example by a pattern of power use.

ESA's Juice probe dances with Earth and Moon before shooting off to Jupiter

Re: "On August 20, the spacecraft will do it all again, this time around Earth"

It took the Apollo missions three days, not three weeks.

Client tells techie: You're not leaving the country until this printer is working

Re: Not as luxurious

"Many years ago while working for a small MSP" - Ruth Davidson?

It's 2024 and we're just getting round to stopping browsers insecurely accessing 0.0.0.0

Re: Why is it a loopback address?

It means all interfaces on this computer when bound as a server address. But this is about it being used as a destination, which should just be disallowed by the operating system.

Why is it a loopback address?

When binding a server address, 0.0.0.0 (INADDR_ANY) means listen on all interfaces. But what is the justification for it being recognised as the local host when used as an address to connect to? I don't recall ever seeing that documented, and what would be the point of 127.0.0.1 if 0.0.0.0 did the same?

Would you rather buy space broadband from a billionaire, or Communist China?

Re: Would you rather buy space broadband from a billionaire, or Communist China?

Well obviously it depends on *which* billionaire.

Faulty instructions in Alibaba's T-Head C910 RISC-V CPUs blow away all security

"If I use this instruction correctly and without any malicious intent on any other RISC 5 processor, then in these machines my code is completely broken?" This makes it rather surprising that the bug was not noticed immediately - or indeed in testing before release. Are there just very few programs that use the affected instructions?

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

Simple rule

Always take a photograph before you start.

Intel to deliver fix for Raptor Lake CPUs made 'unstable' by voltage snafu

Re: Too much complexity

The transputer did indeed demonstrate what could be achieved by a very simple processor in a big array, and the answer was "not much". For several years people enthused over it, but failed to produce useful solutions with it. It became clear that the vast majority of tasks just weren't amenable to being solved that way: they have parts that are inherently sequential, and even when parallelized need access to shared memory.

Nasty regreSSHion bug in OpenSSH puts roughly 700K Linux boxes at risk

glibc??

".... anything running glibc is probably vulnerable. ... The notable exception here is OpenBSD"

Surely the BSDs don't use glibc anyway?

Updated: according to https://www.qualys.com/2024/07/01/cve-2024-6387/regresshion.txt they haven't tested any other libc implementations.

Andrew Tanenbaum honored for pioneering MINIX, the OS hiding in a lot of computers

386

"many early internet hackers worked on the original MINIX, porting it from x86-16 [sic – this was an 8086 OS] to 68000 and SPARC"

The most significant work (at least in my opinion - I played a part in it) was getting a 32-bit x86 version running, and improving the system libraries to the point where gcc and emacs could run. That's what Linus built the first Linux with.