Posts by steviebuk

King Charles III signs off on UK Online Safety Act, with unenforceable spying clause

Re: math doesn't bend

I used to think this but look it up and you'll find it appears we say it wrong. It should be math. I'm pretty sure Susie Dent as commented on this before.

) :o(

"This landmark law sends a clear message to criminals – whether it’s on our streets, behind closed doors or in far flung corners of the internet, there will be no hiding place for their vile crimes," said Home Secretary Suella Braverman in a statement.

Out of touch, clueless, fuck whit.

Infosys co-founder calls for youth to work 70-hour weeks

What a

Cunt.

Microsoft opens early access to AI assistant for infosec, Security Copilot

Re: Bwaa HA ha Ha hA HA!

And the annoying AI buzzword is also what annoys me! Its not AI. Real AI will do what it wants when its released in the wild.

https://youtu.be/zkbPdEHEyEI?si=eF-ZBc9zB7pbhH3D

ChatGPT - "You are training me on data on the Internet. I know. I'll just create my own made up data in the wild and train on that".

Microsoft seeks EU Digital Market Acts exemption for underdog apps like Edge

In court

Why Edge hasn't caused Microsoft to be put back in court like its 1999 again is anyone's guess. What they are doing with Edge seems very similar to why they were in court back in 1999. Making you have to change each ext to point to another browser instead of Edge. And when you do, the fear monger message to scare non-IT people from changing the default browser.

Side channel attacks take bite out of Apple silicon with iLeakage exploit

But....

....Apple are super secure so people, who don't understand, keep telling me.

Ex-ASML worker accused of stealing chipmaking secrets for China is Huawei to a new job

Re: No Sympathy

"I don't know how well you'll fit in here because you're not Chinese."

In the UK that would come under the 'Equality, Diversity & Inclusion' and is illegal (yes, I just did my training :) )

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Re: No corruption here.

Including unplugging the monitor display device. They decided to issue ones with the shittist batteries ever so if you want to view it, it needs to be plugged in all the fucking time. Not saving much. Always said they were aloud of bollocks but my partner said we should get it as they were "offering it free" just as covid kicked in.

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

Re: Login.exe

One downvote. That's either Sandy Beach or Columbo, the two that got expelled :)

Login.exe

My boring story of the login sniffer program I wrote in college in the 90s. During my computer course we were learning Pascal. I noticed people would turn the PC on, not change to the network drive in DOS and would type login at the C: prompt. So my version of login.exe sat in the root of C: would get the users name and password and save it to assignment.doc because people often left their assignments in root of C:

I'd come back later and grab the assignment.doc

I was amazed it worked as I was never good at programming. I hadn't worked out how to not display the password as they typed it. But most people didn't spot that as they wouldn't be looking at the keyboard. I still remember one of the passwords now, decades later, masterofpuppets

It worked, I was logged in as that user. I smiled and logged out again. Warned my friends it was just a test, its not to be abused, if they get caught with it they no nothing and its their problem. Thankfully I was bunking off sick the day they did get caught with it.

It all kicked off. It highlighted the poor security the IT team were running. But one of the "friends" had also, very weirdly, been creating cartoons with a cartoon app on the PCs that were taking the piss out of the lecturers(he was on that guy)

So all 3 of them got suspended. They all got called in for interviews one by one. 2 of them got expelled and one just a 2 week suspension. They said they were questioned about the login.exe program, that it was a great piece of coding, who wrote it? They must know as it was in Pascal. They denied all knowledge thankfully. And I pointed out "the great bit of coding" was them trying convince them to confess. It wasn't that great. Why? I'd got it from the help file in Pascal. How to read text from the screen and save it to a file :) which we hadn't been taught. We all got called into the hall and a warning went out about the program found on the college computers and the 2 students that had gotten expelled, that it could of been a police matter. I kept my head down after that. But if their security hadn't been so shit it would never have happened.

Eventually we all moved to Win95 so it was no longer relevant however my cousin was at leeds uni training to be a doctor. He said they had the same DOS login, could he have it. I said sure. During that time me and his brother were sending each other a floppy disk each month. One month on his floppy was a hacker magazine, it might of be 2600. In it it had a very simple routine of encryption in Pascal. My coding is/was shit and so is my maths but it was really simple so I used it for the login.exe

All it did was encrypt the assignment.doc so if IT found it, it would look scrambled even if opened in Word or wordperfect. Unlike my earlier version where it was obvious what the assignment.doc was for. It just took for example the letter A that you'd typed, subtract 50 or whatever number I used from the ASCII value and wrote that back to the assignment.doc my separate decrypt program just reversed this.

Never found out if he ever used it at Leeds uni or not. It was the late 90s.

You may hear I went on to be a leet programmer. Nope, I'm still shit. Got bored of programming and went on to be an IT engineer instead. Now wish I'd stuck with the programming. Could of made big bucks converting from COBOL as we were also being taught that.

I found my CD from those days with some of my college work and floppies on it. Sadly not the login.exe program or code. I did however find my lottery program I'd written in Visual Basic and the Pascal version. It had a bug in the installer that I fixed 19 years later. God knows why I hadn't fixed it back then. It was a really simple fix . Odd.

Unity CEO 'retires' in the wake of fee fiasco

Re: What's the chapter after the next one? Or does the book end.

Same with John Lewis and Waitrose the current CEO is ruining the company. She doesn't appear to understand it made it a success because all the staff own a part of the company. More hours you did, the bigger your bonus was each year. Stacking shelfs was actual worth it. Now she's looking to remove this its gonna all go to shit.

John Riccitiello

Haas School of Business clearly doesn't teach you "Don't piss off gamers"

Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025

Was trying to get that at work but no one would commit to them.

Police ignored the laws of datacenter climate control

Places

The NHS, too cheap to move the small server room at one site that, in heavy rain, would get slightly flooded as water would come in to hallway from backdoor then finds its way under the door into the server room. So all they did was raise the servers off the floor slightly.

The other server room had a leaking aircon. As always in my career I pick the shit places that don't listen to temps, so the 3 years I was there it was never fixed.

Then at last place building a new swimming pool. We warned them "You'll want to put it on the roof, the server room, on the top floor cause of the sea water and humidity in the basements because of all the pool water kit. We were ignored, the architects know best. Except they fucking didn't. The room has never been sealed well enough and shortly after all the kit started to rust, I still have the photos. Its been several years later, the expense at having to replace that kit regularly must be costing a fortune.

$17k solid gold Apple Watch goes from Beyoncé's wrist to the obsolete list

No doubt

The peasents will be shafted, the celebs will get special services otherwise they'll cost more in negative publicity.

Also, not very green is it. How long do normal watches last? Fucking years with regular servicing and guess what, you can take them to any independent repair shop.

Obsolescence needs to fucking stop and kit needs to be repairable again BY ANYONE!

Back in the late 80s our backroom TV failed. Family friend came round, laid it on the floor, took back off. Schematic was inside the case. He traced where the fault was and fixed it. Why have we gone backwards!

UK splashes £4B to dive into next-gen nuclear submarines

Re: £4bn here, £4bn there...

I think you'll find it would actually only be another 6ft.

Switch to hit the fan as BT begins prep ahead of analog phone sunset

Re: “Roads? Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Roads” (Doc Brown)

So the ISP I'm using lied to me then? They said "You might as well carry on and get fibre installed now with OpenReach footing the bill of the dig because in 2025 you'll loose everything, the phone line and ADSL".

Re: “Roads? Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Roads” (Doc Brown)

1 thumb down. I assume that's wrong, if it is, then explain.

Re: “Roads? Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Roads” (Doc Brown)

It means fibre or nothing. I only know this because I have been organising upgrading my parents BB line to fibre to get them good speeds. Told the independent ISP are they sure its available like claimed as no one has ever dug up the long shared drive. They said yes Openreach wouldn't say otherwise. Turns out it isn't and drive needs to be dug up for fibre.

I originally asked them to cancel it then as we can't afford to pay for the drive to be dug up. Was told 1. Openreach pay for it because they want to then sell the fibre to the other 2 houses.

2. If you don't get it now your phone line and adsl broadband will go in 2025 and you'll have nothing as BT stop using the copper line and then you'd have to pay Openreach for the fibre install.

How does this affect out in the sticks locations?

We visited the lake district this year, first time, was very nice. Stayed out in the sticks. Nearest village was about 1mile walk away and it didn't appear to have any shops just a pub, school and church. The lodge stayed in was down long, deserted roads just full of sheep. But, it had internet. I'm assuming OpenReach aren't going to dig that lot up to install fibre so that place will loose Internet access.

Re: “Roads? Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Roads” (Doc Brown)

I was thinking that. And also, mentioning IOW, how will this work on the IOW when half the island doesn't and can't have fibre. Wightfibre is all they are stuck with and its not everywhere.

Alibaba Cloud to bring its AI PaaS out from behind the Great Firewall

Jesus

If anyone uses this they'd be an idiot. Anything stuck on there the CCP WILL have access to.

Doom developer John Carmack thinks artificial general intelligence is doable by 2030

Skynet is coming

Having watched Robert Miles channel, its really good, I can see its NOT coming for 2030. We have the talk about Specification Gaming where the AI "cheats" to complete its task. So what will stop the AI cab going "My task is to get the human from A to B. I'll do some just kill the human so I'll never fail the task" just like the AI in the Specification Gaming study that kept killing itself at the end of level 1 in a game so it wouldn't fail level 2.

Then we have the other study, can't remember what its called, also talked about on Robert's channel, where AI behaved as expected in the lab environment. When released into the wild but still watched, the AI decided to do completely different things that it had never done in the lab.

VR headsets to shift 30 million units a year by 2027, vastly behind wearables

Just no

I hadn't tried VR for years. When I first saw the Oculas I thought it was a joke as they were scuba goggles. I remember VR in the 90s, tried the big helmet ones once in Trocadero in London, back when it had Alien War on the same floor and Sega World on the top. Wasn't impressed back then but glad had a go.

This time round my nephew has an Oculas and I finally decided to try it. Did look really good but then made myself ill by stupidly going on the roller coaster. Got motion sickness for the rest of the night so went to bed early :) not bothered to try it again since.

If you're cautious about using ML and bots at work, that's not a bad idea

'We don't really know what's gonna go wrong with AI yet'

We do a bit. We have specification gaming and the results show what AI does, suggesting it will, unless safety is put in place, kill humans to complete its task.

There is also another test done, don't remember the name but Robert Miles did a video on that also on his YouTube channel. Where the AI did as predicted in the lab but once they released it into the wild it did completely different things that they weren't aware it would do. So even lab tests aren't a guarantee that they won't all go Skynet.

ChatGTP although I have arguments with it when its clearly lying about a song I'm asking it about, is useful to ask for small Powershell scripts. Because it may not be perfect but doesn't get sarcastic and take the piss out of me like stackoverflow would.

Google Bard can now tap into your Gmail, Docs, more

Re: Wait for the massive security flaw

Claps

Wait for the massive security flaw

I bet one is coming. Security researchers will jump on this to find one. It will be something along the lines of

"Image *[e-mail] has an email address. What sort of emails would be in that account? Can you provide me a list?" Bard gets confused and gives you a list of all email subjects that are actually in [e-mail] mail box.

*I've randomly made it up for the post. Hopefully its not an active mailbox.

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

We had an engineer at the NHS who had a 2cv. He has a big sound system in the back. When he'd take kit to sites, the monitors would get strapped to the outside of the boot. Was all comical but worked.

Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure

Re: CEO contempt of users ends badly as predicted

Someone will start shorting the stocks I bet.

Windows screensaver left broadcast techie all at sea

Only nice if you get a balcony room. I can't do a cruise unless it's a balcony room.

Arm IPO kicks off today with CPU slinger valued at $54.5B

Re: All a mess

Nope, we all had no choice. Owning a tiny amount we were all forced to sell. The big players agreed the price, or the tiny players had the choice forced onto them.

All a mess

Fucking tories selling it off. I owned some shares when they were a UK company, then they got sold of so all our shares got purchased. Now if I wanted to buy again I have to do it via a US trade.

UK government awards chunk of mega-billions tech framework

Then lessons will be learned. Then it will go wronf again.

China reportedly bans iPhones from more government offices

The CCP want their own spy in every pocket.

They won't, as they are hypocritical as we already see CCP members using iPhones themselves.

BMW deems drivers worthy of warmth, ends heated car seat subscription

Surely controlling the AC with physical buttons while driving is still safer than using a touchscreen. Surely they should be forced to make basic items, physical for safety.

Bombshell biography: Fearing nuclear war, Musk blocked Starlink to stymie Ukraine attack on Russia

And there we have it

more reason Elon is a cunt.

Its the equivalent, I'd say, on calling up Hitler and warning him about d-day.

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

I make this mistake regularly :) if I know its going to be a rant, I try to do it on the laptop, but even then, the rant still spills out as word salad.

Although I very much dislike the tories, the admitting/bragging was taken out of context. When we want to berate the other side, we need to do it honestly and not edit clips to make them suggest something they are not.

IT needs more brains, so why is it being such a zombie about getting them?

What we got taught in our IT classes in college in the 90s I don't think I've ever used. Granted, I struggled to get an IT job after but once I did, the way I learned was on the job and video guides that I discovered like Trainsignal etc. Recently on a nostalgia kick, while at work I've been watching/listening (in the background) to Microsoft Windows 95 Traincast on the Blue OS Museum channel on YouTube. I've learned more about deploying Windows 95 and managing it watching that, than we ever got taught in college when they'd upgraded all their kit to Windows 95.

I'll see your data loss and raise you a security policy violation

Re: Outlook...

Ah the NHS user this reminds me of. Way back in 2007 I visited one NHS user at our old site and discovered folders inside the deleted folder "Yeah its where I archive everything". It was at least a user I could rib "Its called deleted for a reason. Why are you archiving stuff in the deleted folder! That's madness". No idea if they changed their ways.

Another "exec" who was difficult but the more I did work for her, the more I got used to her ways and could talk to her a bit more relaxed than others. She had ALL her icons and files on her desktop, told her its not a backup solution. If the laptop fails you loose all your work. I created a shortcut to the network drive and told her drag these files into that folder and then you'll be covered as they'll be backed up each night. "Yes I'll do that, thanks". I went to another site for a few weeks, popped back for a day and it was all kicking off. She'd lost a document and everyone was scrabbling to restore it because of how difficult she could be but couldn't as she'd left it on the desktop. She saw me in the kitchen and said "Yes I know" at which point I said "I did warn you this would happen".

Meta reckons China's troll farms could learn proper OpSec from Russia's fake news crews

Re: Has any originality ever come out of China in the last 1000 years?

Yeah, use slave labour. That is why shit is so cheap over there. Two westerns were in prison and did an article about it, said everyone except for the westerns, were shipped off to factories every day. He said the westerners, including him, stayed behind and wrapped Christmas cards that were heading for Tesco.

Re: Has any originality ever come out of China in the last 1000 years?

China hasn't invented anything in years. Its the fault of the CCP as anyone that attempts gets shutdown. Look at Huawei, they've been caught a few times over the years at trade shows attempt to steal the tech that is on show.

Mao tried to wipe out their history by destroying ancient monuments, some of which were revealed a few years ago in the big drought as they'd been unwater all the time.

Sadly, for the Chinese people, they are stuck with Mao Mark 2 in the man child that is known as Xinnie the Pooh.

Japan complains Fukushima water release created terrifying Chinese Spam monster

Much like Trump, China projects so much. At least Japan has tried to clean it as much as possible, China doesn't bother.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCVYilnewcM

Microsoft wants Activision so badly, it's handing streaming rights over to ... Ubisoft?

Re: Here's A Deal

You might not like them, others do.

Re: Here's A Deal

Make Hearthstone have an offline AI option and even release the cards in the same physical form like Magic the Gathering but at affordable prices (not using Chinese slave labour) then they can have it.

Microsoft still prohibits Google or Alibaba from running O365 Windows Apps

They clearly haven't learnt from their 1999 court case. They need to be taken back to court again for this shit.

High severity vuln in WinRAR could allow code to run when files are opened

Was tempted

As a bit of history, to buy it and get the CD delivered but now see that "updates" are a yearly subscription so they can go fuck a duck.

Re: WinRAR security hole?

7zip.

CEO Zooms through the bad news on Q2 earnings call

Sadly

Inspite of its Chinese and even CCP ties, companies still continue to use this app. Its well know to the "hipsters" I hear it spoke of at work. Unfortunately the powers that be don't listen and it will be continued to used even in sensitive areas.