Posts by steviebuk

China shows off machine-gun-toting robot dog and its AI-powered puppy

Re: And they haven't

OK wumao.

Re: Charge! (at the nearest power outlet)

Yep, otherwise you'll get it back to base with a fault and find it states "Needs to be returned to the manufacturer for repairs. Warranty void if opened". Much like a lot of the gear that was used in Afgan. Which is more reason why Right to Repair needs to be sorted.

"Excuse me, can we have a cease fire for a month. We have to send our kit back to be repaired as we're not allowed to repair it in the field. And they don't supply parts."

Re: > a simple mine can work with just a mechanical trigger, and many do

When a war starts, certain countries you know will ignore treaties. China is one of them. Much like Japan in WW2 ignored the Geneva Convention. This will happen again no doubt. I don't ever expect the Taliban would ever honour the Geneva Convention.

Re: > a human to pull the trigger rather than letting robot dogs with machine guns off the leash.

Like the old German s-mine (bouncing betty). So much better to have them not use batteries.

And they haven't

just stolen the robot from Boston Dynamics.

Its pretty much all China does now, rob other peoples tech.

China creates LLM trained to discuss Xi Jinping's philosophies

China created

No they didn't. China stole would be more like it.

The ironic thing here, as with their other LLMs, you can tell they've stolen them from the west. The image AI creation tools. Because its western, attempting to do Chinese, it doesn't understand local colloquialism. So when asked to draw "Duck soup", it draws a duck swimming in soup.

LLMs can write and answer quizzes – but aren't quite ready to disrupt trivia night

Real housewives

No, not porn. The crappy reality show that my partner loves to watch. I got ChatGPT to write 10 quiz questions on it to see if she could answer them as she knows the show so much.

About 4 of them were questions about only one person in the show so the answer was the same 4 times, another 2 were about another person in the show so again, same answer for those 2 questions and about 3 of them the answer was wrong and one of them wasn't really a proper question.

Raspberry Pi sets IPO jam for June

Re: Carving up the Pi

True, unless they did what Facebook did where Zuckerberg, who I dislike, has the controlling voting shares so no one can kick him out and he's free to piss away billions on the pet project that was the Metaverse.

But I doubt they are doing that here so the largest share holding will get to decide what happens. And that looks like it might be ARM who, as we know, are now owned by Softbank. Would not suprise me if we, at some point, see Raspberry Pi sold off to Softbank.

'Little weirdo' shoulder surfer teaches UK cabinet minister a lesson in cybersecurity

Vision Express

Vision Express in town still has their monitors by the window. Was hanging outside once and noticed the user had got up to sort out a customer but left the PC wide open. You could see all the users data so I took a photo. Sadly it was on my old Nokia E71 so it was shitty but still, it was to prove a point. I mentioned it to their head office, they said thanks and I heard no more about it.

About a year later I visit another one of their branches to get new glasses with my partner. The woman serving us said "Sorry, I just have to unlock the screen as we've had new system implemented for security and we're still getting used to it. Always happens when we leave the desk". My partner and I smiled, pretty sure that was because of my "shoulder surfing" incident and the report to head office.

Despite suggesting the other branch that is surrounded by big windows might want to angle their screens away from the window, they never did. Can still see them to this day. Speaking of that, I need to get another photo now I have a good camera phone.

Re: Well older than a decade

https://archive.is/O9HTJ

Bypass the paywall

Microsoft's FOMO after seeing Google AI drove investment in OpenAI

When

"Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took to the stand in 2023 to testify in the US government's antitrust trial against Google." will they hit Microsoft with one with the way they are handling and forcing people onto Windows 11 and, what with the bollocks TPM2 requirement, putting lots of machines into landfill.

Google takes shots at Microsoft for shoddy security record with enterprise apps

Fuck no

"businesses should ditch Exchange and OneDrive for Gmail and Google Drive"

Gsuite or whatever they are calling it now is truly awful. Maybe of use if you're a small company but even then.

Its the pot calling the kettle.

Used to have to use GAM. I mentioned this has/had a massive flaw in it but it still had to be used as there is no other option to manage Google Drive. You setup your GAM connection and its not on your laptop just in a folder. If someone can access that folder to copy, they can now run GAM as you on their laptop with no credentials requiring input. So you can now rob loads of documents or screw up files as daveadmin and Dave gets the blame.

There was also the issue of syncing to Google Drive with only basic audit. However, you could then install Google Drive for Desktop on your own personal PC and sync that to your work account. You can now sync all your documents to your personal device and as Google Drive for Desktop points out "We keep no audits for this app".

Raspberry Pi prepares to boot up a London listing

Re: "We will keep doing the same stuff. Certainly while I'm in charge."

Its how the robot, I mean Zuckerberg hasn't been fired for the shit show and failure that is the metaverse, because he has the controlling shares and vote.

Re: "We will keep doing the same stuff. Certainly while I'm in charge."

Unless he controls the most stock and the controlling votes, he'll just get overuled by the other big share holders.

Is this

Eben Upton wanting to cash out then? Watching it burn and be controlled by the share holders. Watch prices increase etc.

A Chinese crypto farm next to a nuclear missile base? Not on my watch, says Biden

It would make graphics cards cheap again.

Re: Umm...

The CCP aren't exactly the brightest. Even if this company has nothing to do with the CCP (doubt it, as become big over there, even if you're a national company and the CCP wants its bit of your pie), at some point the CCP goons will role in and tell them they need access to their business.

Much like a lot of the Chinese restaurants either just agreed or were forced to house the secret police stations so they could tell escaped Chinese to "Go back to the motherland. We have you're family".

Its all ironic. Attempt to buy land in China and you'll be told to jog on "We don't allow foreigners to buy our land", yet a large abandon shopping mall was looking to be redeveloped in the US, so a Chinese company bought all the land and claimed they'd develop it but didn't. Just sat on the land for years until forced to sell it as the city had had enough.

Similar to this tiktok ban (Its not a ban its just a forced sale). Tiktok IS an issue (and yes we know Facebook etc are just as shit but at least we can talk about this without being made to "disappear"). Bytedance is an indepentant company as the CCP would have you believe, but then why are the CCP so bent out of shape over the sale? If the CCP disagree with this, then just move out of the US market and keep the app. Oh thats right, Tiktok itself is banned in China.

The CCP as they do, are also crying racism, but how many Western apps are allowed in China? Oh that's right, none. So if the app is totally innocent, why does it need so many permissions on devices, why does it have so much tracking and why are the CCP so upset? Could it possibly be its their own siop app and they are upset that they won't be able to spy anymore? Maybe.

Its annoying as China is a nice country and has a rich history. Its just sadly, the CCP have ruined it, actively destroyed its history by smashing monuments up, allowed local villagers to use the brick from the Great Wall of China (until recently, realised their mistake so stopped this, but not before a local villager had plowed a whole in the wall so they didn't have to go round the long way). And actively silence anyone over there that critises the government. The "tank man" was never seen again. The recent man on the bridge protesting was never seen again. The videos that do escape the country, you can even see its own people are getting fed up but can't do anything to resolve it.

I've rambled on now.

US watchdog chases Waymo robocars to catch violations

Re: Oh got to love US tech bros

And think of these cars going down a country farm lane in the UK, they'll be screwed. I doubt they'd even stop and would try and push the other car out their way.

Telegram CEO calls out rival Signal, claiming it has ties to US government

Because Musk is a fuckwhit. He's a shill for so many, especially the CCP. He needs China for his factories so on a video the other day, praised China for its history. Yet totally ignores the fact the CCP destroy Chinese history by actively smashing it all up. Praised its ancient language and ignored that the CCP wanted to get rid of the Chinese language.

Return-to-office mandates had senior employees jumping ship

Re: Why?

But without it, middle managers won't be able to micro manage and won't be able to pretend they are required.

We were glad we had a manage who was really good, let us work from home as much as we wanted as he knew the work would get done. Also helped he preferred working at home as he got more done.

The worst companies are the ones that require you have a camera set up so they can make sure you're in your chair a certain percentage of the day.

The UK reveals it's spending millions on quantum navigation

Does quantum navigation mean

will be there, back, on the way there, on the way back all at once?

I'll get my coat.

UK opens investigation of MoD payroll contractor after confirming attack

Re: "nothing but a fabricated and malicious slander"

The CCP shills are downvoting.

Also the country that was sending over folks to create "Police stations to help citizens sort out their driving license" and not to threaten Chinese citizens that have managed to escape the shitness of the CCP and disguising these police stations.

Brit security guard biz exposes 1.2M files via unprotected database

I've always felt

physical security business' are pony (excluding close protection as most are ex SAS)

Its probably because I thinking of G4S. They are truely awful.

Slightly related are the folks that go repair the cash machines. Knew a guy that was doing it and got told to drive miles right near end of shift . Then one he had to call back to base that "I'm at that cash machine but I can't repair it the police are here". He got told "We don't care just get in there and repair it". He replied "I can't its just been robbed so its a crime scene". Jobs worth managers, back at based micromanaging because "we have to hit targets" mainly so they get the bonus that they won't share with their team.

Europol now latest cops to beg Big Tech to ditch E2EE

Fools

"We need an end to end-to-end encryption or we need a back door that will only be used for good". It won't. But also, you force backdoors into apps, do you really think those crooks will use those apps? No, they'll hire someone to write their own end-to-end encryption and put it in their own app.

End-to-end encryption may be the bane of cops, but they can't close that Pandora's Box

Governments are fools

"We need an end to end-to-end encryption or we need a back door that will only be used for good". It won't. But also, you force backdoors into apps, do you really think those crooks will use those apps? No, they'll hire someone to write their own end-to-end encryption and put it in their own app.

Meta, Spotify break Apple's device fingerprinting rules – new claim

Many years back

in 2008 to access NHS mail you required a cert on your device and the server would verify this (I can't remember the exact details) anyway. This meant only your setup Blackberry could access NHS mail. However if you had an iTouch and set your NHS mail up on that, Apple would send a token to NHS mail to pretend the device was encrypted and authorised. You could now pick up your NHS mail. This was reported at the time, Microsoft were pissed off with Apple and eventually Apple patched it. All fine though as you could ignore the patch and it still carried on working.

And then you have the other issue, when I left my iTouch was still picking up all my e-mails months after. Why? Because someone hadn't bothered to disable my account.

About 3 years back I e-mails NHS.net as we had a phishing attempt come from one of their mailboxes. It wasn't spoofed, it was a compromised NHS.net mailbox. So much for "NHS.net is super secure".

Alibaba Cloud details storage tech that's doubled its VMs per host

All your data our belong to us

That is what the CCP will be say if anyone outside of China decides to use Alibaba Cloud. No doubt they'll be doing it to internal customers as well.

UK lays down fresh legislation banning crummy default device passwords

Re: Default passwords are allowed?

If you target a specific AP, you'll get all the MACs of devices trying to connect to it.

Re: Create 100% reliable passwords.

Had one lady at work write her password on the noticeboard in her office. I smirked a bit as she said "No one can read it, I'm the only one left in the building that can read and write shorthand". And she's right. At the new place I mentioned this story to a new starter to only be asked "What's shorthand?". I felt old.

Never going to happen

China ignores all world laws so all the Chinese shit off Amazon will still have default, easy to guess passwords.

UK government faces £17.5M shortfall from UKCloud liquidation

Re: Ho Hum .....

We had a "consultant" come in at my old place to do whatever it is they wanted him to do (I forget now). He went round the whole IT department asking us what our ideas were etc, so he could get a "better understanding of the project". He then took our ideas, made them his own and presented it to the upper management who thought he was amazing. We were all pissed as our ideas had been ignored every time we mentioned them. When those same ideas came out of the overpaid consultants mouth, they were apparently now gold.

Fucks me right off. Nothing ever changes in IT, its still like this today.

Microsoft teases deepfake AI that's too powerful to release

Too powerful to release

I don't see the point in powerful AI. Powerful enough that you can get it to clean your house, do the hoovering, washing and dinner but nothing more. Keep them basic. Currently watching Humans (which I'm struggling with due to Colin Morgan's piss poor acting). Because they are human form people are refering to them as "slaves" so why don't we then consider washing machines, dish washers, the robots that build cars etc as slaves. If you gave them general inteligency that it would make the point of them pointless. The point being you can use them as a tool, that can work 24/7 (inbetween charging) won't require holidays, won't require leave etc etc. If you give them general inteligency, then we'll be back to square one. A whole bunch of bots that want rights and who won't want to do the above. The whole point of making them is so you can put them in dangerous jobs, making them "powerful" in a general inteligency sense would be pointless.

They can regulate all they want but we've already seen the idiot orange one (Trump) using it during his campaign.

Some smart meters won't be smart at all once 2/3G networks mothballed

Re: Smart?

And has such a shit battery in it, it needs to be always plugged in.

Re: Also

My point was, they have that big massive mast with severial aerials on it, yet still haven't stuck a 5G one on it.

Also

Why, when I took the dog for a work the other day along the farmers fields, and I get to the big massive mobile mast, can I stand next to the mast and still not get cocking 5G!

Always said smart meters were bollocks. They've been misread over the years and unless you take a record the energy companies keep your money. Not only that but the bullshit "Get a smart meter, then we'll never have to send round a meter reader" turns out to be bollocks. We've had one twice in a year and turns out its a legal requirement to check you're not fiddling the meter.

75% of enterprise coders will use AI helpers by 2028. We didn't say productively

Re: Mark my words

Yes. Summer is warmer so we like to summerise then.

Jesus, one letter mistake, I'd hate to be around you when someone spills a bit of milk.

Mark my words

It will lead to another Horizon scandal. People are using it to summerise reports and emails and not checking the results. We are testing CoPilot that summerises meetings. It claimed I said something during the meeting that was never said.

Years to come, people will use that as evidence. "Well the AI said you said it"

The likes of DWP will abuse it to summerise benefit checks and miss something critical causing a death.

Its still shit

My partner watches Real Housewives and knows it so well said it would be her specialist subject. So as a bit of fun I said I'd ask ChatGPT for some quiz questions and answers. 10 questions, about 4 had same answer and only 2 or 3 were actually right. The others were just wrong and it made shit up.

Re: Overhype

I fucking hate Gartner. I can't remember the full story now but was related to Equifax. Something about them praising them then they had the massive data breach.

Re: Let’s hope it improves

True. One thing I do find them useful for, well ChatGPT 3.5 anyway, is take some code I'm unsure what its doing and give it the code and its quite good at telling me what each bit is doing.

Change Healthcare’s ransomware attack costs edge toward $1B so far

It was probably close to $1, if finance where involved. NEVER let finance run IT.

Intern with superuser access 'promoted' himself to CEO

Dave Plummer

Dave said when he was an intern at Microsoft another intern in his same office, if I'm remembering the story right, tried to stick in some backdoor code with the piece he'd been given to do. But as its all reviewed it never got threw and the intern never came back.

Local councils struggle with ill-fitting software despite spending billions with suppliers

Because

They don't fucking listen to their engineers!

"The tales outlined in the paper will be familiar to readers of The Register. Something of a worst-case exemplar is Birmingham City Council's implementation of Oracle HR, finance and procurement.

The implementation budget has ballooned from £20 million to £131 million (from $25 million to $165 million), as the council failed to successfully create adaptations to make the software fit its needs. The council now plans to re-implement Oracle out of the box. In the meantime it is paying £5.1 million ($6.44 million) for a third party solution to plug the gap."

Because you chose Oracle. Your engineers probably told you that was a mistake and no doubt, no doubt at all, you fucking ignored them. Oracle charge an arm and a leg and love to randomly audit.

Post Office slapped down for late disclosure of documents in Horizon scandal inquiry

Jason Beer KC

Needs an award for having to deal with a lot of the idiot and clearly blocking people giving evidence. People who, shockingly still work for Post Office despite clearly being shit.

Throughout, having listened to some of the statements, its been not only a culture of "Don't rock the boat", which is why they've gotten away with it for so long, but also appears alot of them jumped aboard, happily, the rocking boat so they could keep a job and send people to prison with no real evidence. To make them feel like a "security expert" or "tv detective" because they know they are shit yet the Post Office was allowing them to get away with it to stop the Post Office loosing face.

What's worse, and surely this now requires a prison sentence, is one of the Post Office lawyers, telling them in an email it would be a good idea to NOT leave a paper trail and speak to their insurers via phone so they'll be no record of the phone call in case "it ever gets out to the public". If not a prison sentence he needs to loose his law licence (assume we have that in the UK?)

Microsoft warns that China is using AI to stir the pot ahead of US election

Re: Why?

You do realise Trump also tried to ban TikTok but now because "the Dems" decided to act (and its not a ban) Trump is now against a ban.

Re: Why?

Jesus. You'll be one of those MAGA supporters who piss their life savings away on Trumps SPAC. Go ahead and do it, buy up his stock and watch it all disappear when he dumps his large stake in 6 months, tanking the company, tanking the stock and making all his followers a lot, lot poorer.

Re: Why?

And regarding the "boarder" they created a bipartisan deal, that was written by Republicans and the strikest ever yet the Orange idiot told his equal idiot followers and congress bods to block it so he could campaign on it, so they did. Again, his followers are such idiots they ignore the fact a deal to "fix the boarder" was about to go ahead, until their Orange friend ruined it. They'll now loose out because he'll be going to prison and the Republicans will be decimated in November.

Re: Why?

Trump took lots of money from China during his term. He did a deal to get Ivanka some nice patents from China (I don't know why consider China never honours any patents). He barks on camera about China because he knows its what his idiots followers want and will believe, but in the background he was taking China's money. Winnie the Pooh knows he can control the big orange idiot, which is why he'd want him in power. The other idea is to create chaos unmongsts the populous of the USA, in the hope it causes America to destory itself, so that Winie The Pooh can take the land.

Chrome Enterprise Premium promises extra security – for a fee

Re: $72 per user per year...

"Companies with more money than sense are."

You mean "Companies with managers with more dense than sense are".