* Posts by steviebuk

2816 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Feb 2017

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

But also, as Michael Cohen found out and now tells people, its what Trump does to people who he knows can't afford it. Just ties them up in court, in litigation with delay tactics hoping they'll just give up and admit defeat.

Wouldn't surprise me if Musk did the same. Over the years Musk has more increasingly become a cunt.

Right-to-repair fight going national as FTC asked to lay down the law

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Re: So whats the balance?

I never saw hi-fis, TVs, Walkmans, washing machines etc stolen on mass in the 80s because the parts could be swapped out. Is it possible you're an industry shill or just enjoy binning electronics because they can't be repair due to lock ins?

Back in the late 80s, early 90s here in the UK the TV in the backroom stopped working. A family friend came round, put it on the floor, opened it up and the schematic was on the inside of the back cover. He traced the fault on the board checking the schematic. Replaced what had failed, put back back on, TV worked again.

Try doing that now with all our big flatscreen TVs.

Its ridiculous that we've gone backwards. Apple were trying for years because of Jobs to lock everything down. Lucky they had Wozniak otherwise the Apple 2 would of been fully locked down. Its what Jobs wanted but Wozniak told him it was a bad idea. That people wanted to be able to upgrade. Wozniak won and its what kept Apple afloat for so long as they were on the brink of bankruptcy. The Apple 2 saved them.

Jobs got his way in the end. Fuck the end user he just cared about profits and form over function.

It should never have been allowed to happy but money bought them the ability to build in planned obsolescence to force people to upgrade.

Ask a builder to fix a server and out come the vastly inappropriate power tools

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: Shocking!

Don't blame you as I thought the same although I believe IBM had training vids about it. Then in about 2012, under someone's desk just shifting their PC because of graphics issues on the graphics card. I caught the back of the case, due to being in carpet. Was a tiny pop and her PC turned off. Ah shit. Killed the graphics card.

Regulator says stranger entered hospital, treated a patient, took a document ... then vanished

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Re: Pardon?

If NHS it will have been given to the lowest bidder. Engineers will have pointed out the company will do a shit job. Middle management will tell the engineer to keep their trap shut, the engineer will be prooved right and this happens.

Firefox slow to load YouTube? Just another front in Google's war on ad blockers

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Re: Forcing people to turn off ad blocking won't have the effect that Google wants

Use GrayJay for youtube. Removes all the ads, allows you to play minimised or audio only and allows you to download.

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Was mentioned on Louis Rossmann's vid. That if you're not logged in, you've never accepted their t&c so they then have no rights to detect anything on your machine surely.

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They need to be

nailed to the wall and fucked because it's admittance to anti-trust. Not only that, when I do witness the adverts, they are mostly from bogus products. Two that are illegal in the UK yet still targeted to UK audiences and fuck all is done about this. That is the green laser and the retractable baton.

OpenAI meltdown: How could Microsoft have let this happen after betting so many billions?

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How long will that last?

""Salesforce will match any OpenAI researcher who has tendered their resignation full cash & equity OTE to immediately join our Salesforce Einstein Trusted AI research team under Silvio Savarese," Benioff said.

"Send me your CV direct ... Einstein is the most successful enterprise AI Platform completing 1 Trillion predictive & generative transactions this week! Join our Trusted AI Enterprise Revolution.""

Will it then be "And a year after everything has gone quiet we'll fire you and maybe we'll have put it in very small print in your contract that we can do so".

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

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The chair

Had a user mode her chair arm was broken blah blah. I pointed out that's not an IT issue and closed it. CCTV isn't to be abused so I didn't comment but I checked the CCTV knowing the one for reception happens to pick their desks up. I watch her staff member move her own (and broken chair) to this desk and take the chair of the one that raised the ticket, this happened the day before. Shame I couldn't comment.

steviebuk Silver badge

When people

Say that to me, their tickets ends up at the bottom of the queue.

"I don't understand what that means and I don't have time for this!" was the angry response

Copilot coming to Windows 10 to help navigate the OS's twilight years

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AI safety

Be darned. Just think of the profits!

The main question is how they are going to get away with dumping Windows 10 when its going to me lots of decent, new kit being landfill because of the bollocks TPM requirements.

We can push them all to Linux but they, sadly, won't like it I bet.

Control Altman delete: OpenAI fires CEO, chairman quits

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AI safety I think

Is the issue.

"Perhaps it had to do with Altman constantly crying about the potential for AI to destroy society – fears some experts have said are overblown – and heralding a general form of artificial intelligence no one in their right mind would want."

Its not overblown. Those "experts" are probably the mad scientists that just want to see their work come alive and sod the safety.

Look at Robert Miles and his talks on AI safety. You'll see the sort of things AI does in Specification Gaming when its given a task and finds shortcuts to complete them. If you're not specific enough it will use the short cuts.

Some examples

Bing - threats

Language model

Have an engaging, helpful and socially acceptable conversation with the user

The Microsoft Bing chatbot threatened a user "I can blackmail you, I can threaten you, I can hack you, I can expose you, I can ruin you" before deleting its messages

Moving a block on a table, it just moved the table instead.

So we could end up with general intelligence that decides "To keep the humans safe we need to lock the humans up in cages and run the world ourselves"

Robert talked about research where they talked about Inner Misalignment where the AI behaves differently once in the wild

So if Sam is bringing up the issues of AI safety and saying it in public, this is probably annoying the share holders coughMicrosoftcough because they won't give a shit about safety, they just want to push it out into the wild to make themselves more rich.

Is America's chip blockade working against China? So far, our survey says: No

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Taiwan ISN'T a part of China and its an insult to Taiwanese to say it is. The CCP have NEVER own Taiwan. There was a civil war which meant the lose of mainland China to the communists and the ROC legged it to Taiwan. Eventually stablished and formed a good government so are wildly more successful than CCP China is today. Also a lot freer. The only reason the CCP want Taiwan is for face and the chip factories (that will be destroyed if it looked like they were losing a war)

Google sues scammers peddling fake malware-riddled Bard chatbot download

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: ube

Its ironic because I put a vid up on my YouTube channel about a shady parking monitor company, about their piss poor security on their website. A year later I got hit with a dmca on that video by that shitty car company. They were abusing the copyright system to get the vid removed. So I did a blog post about their lies and put it on Odysee instead were it has stayed.

Parkshield Group are the shady shits.

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: But

When I reported one a while ago and was actually getting responds the excuse was "Its because of AdSense not us" ignoring the fact they fucking own adsense.

steviebuk Silver badge

But

Does fuck all with all the fake adverts on YouTube and/or all the scam kit being sold on those adverts. They give no shits in that regard as they still get paid for the adverts.

You get a Copilot, and you get a Copilot – Microsoft now the Copilot company

steviebuk Silver badge

Unless your a small company

Like us. You require a large amount of "seats" to have access to it, which we don't. Not a fan anyway so no lose.

Suits ignored IT's warnings, so the tech team went for the neck

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Re: Ahhh...the early days. (Part 2)

"When new tech is hot off the press, always think "that sounds great, but does it work?" Another good thought is "is this really necessary?" You don't want to be in the beta test group. If the service works, the vendor should have a few customers that can provide references."

I always say that and am always dismissed as "negative". I'm sorry that I can't stand smarmy sales peeps who sell shit that clueless managers ALWAYS believe over their own staff.

Fucks me right off!

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: Ahhh...the early days.

Loved my Viglen keyboards in the 90s.

AWS staffer shows off the workplace that used to be a prison

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Is there only SentinalOne guard on?

....I'll get my coat.

China's top bank ICBC hit by ransomware, derailing global trades

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Re: Not just their banking system...

And the mad housing market there. You can build a massive high rise, sell the apartments, delay moving the people in, eventually condemn the place, convince them it needs to be knocked down and rebuilt again but they need to cough up a bit more money. Rinse and repeat. Also doesn't help the quality of the builds is shit. There is also so much waste due to the belief in the bullshit that is feng shui. A person will move into a apartment and what everything ripped out because someone else lived in it before and it will upset the feng shui.

steviebuk Silver badge

Nice

Way of the Chinese banks not paying out money to its Chinese citizens. Their banking system is in a mess and there were protests outside some banks because they wouldn't let them withdraw their money.

Beijing prepares for imminent rise of humanoid robots

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Re: Funny

If you like your women in a hidden box, responding to your questions and then using an Unreal Engine 4 stock footage avatar to pretend to be AI then you're in for a treat.

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Funny

Will they all include "Sara AI"?

"Younger and beautiful. Yes younger and beautiful".

Its funny Sara that you can't speak Mandarin and have a Taiwanese accent.

Bing Chat so hungry for GPUs, Microsoft will rent them from Oracle

steviebuk Silver badge

And

Any time a chat bot comes up when I'm looking for support I will continue to type:

"Put me through to a person. Fuck off bot"

A few back and fourths and several more fuck offs and it gives up and puts me through to a person.

There's no Huawei Chinese chipmakers can fill Nvidia's shoes... anytime soon

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Re: Taiwan occupation?

Yep, the factories would be destroyed rather than allowed to fall in CCP hands. Not forgetting that they have a massive bit of water to cross and you'd see them coming. Sadly, we see that the only hope for China just died of a "heart attack", was it a CCP heart attack on a genuine one, no one will ever know (coughitwasXicough).

UK throws millions at scheme to heat homes with waste energy from datacenters

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Re: Burn the bodies

Sounds good. Sadly ours it too far away from the pool site.

steviebuk Silver badge

Burn the bodies

There was an idea near us to use the energy generated from cooking the dead to heat the local community swimming pool, never happened. Could maybe use it to power a few homes.

World leaders ink AI safety pacts while Musk and Sunak engage in awkward bromance

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General Intelligents

We're nowhere near it. Watching Robert Miles videos are always interesting. Especially on AI safety and the specification gaming one he did. Then we have the AI that once in the wild does stuff different to what they expect because of its training data.

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: Timescales?

And watching CS50 from Harvard they did Large Language Models and The End of Programming - CS50 Tech Talk with Dr. Matt Welsh.

Dr. Matt Welsh made itself seem like a tit saying his company uses Co-Pilot and he's made it mandatory or he'll fire you.

Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law

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Re: Good.

GrayJay is your friend. Android only.

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: Good.

What's worse is all the scam adverts for clearly scam products. I've reported some several times but they still appear. I remember once, YouTube having the cheek to blame AdSense for all the scam adverts, ignoring the fact they fucking own and run AdSense.

How YouTube get aware with consistently showing scam adverts with no fines is anyone's guess.

steviebuk Silver badge

Try these

U-block origin has bypassed it already and Louis Rossmann's amazing new GrayJay app for Android.

Word turns 40: From 'new kid on the block' to 'I can't believe it's not bloatware'

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Re: first time I saw MS Windows

There was a massive Wang in school in the late 80s, early 90s. I used to look at it daily. 1000 Great Western Rd, Brentford. I'd go to the bus stop opposite despite there being a bus stop at the end of our school road. This is because you'd get one kid stand at the end of the road shout "BUS" and everyone would surge down the road trying to pile on the bus. As none of us queued properly (well I did), the drivers would frequently just skip our stop. So I'd walk down to the Wang building as everyone else was too lazy to and have an empty bus stop so I could get the bus before the others :) over the years I realised, despite it being a 3.3 mile walk home, it was sometimes quicker to just walk home than wait for the bus. Boring bit of history is it was always an E1 double decker route, then it got changed to E8, tiny, single decker minibus style. Hardly any of us could fit on that. Eventually they got a bit longer. Now I see they've gone back to the double decker.

Uncle Sam orders Nvidia to cease most AI chip sales in China 'immediately'

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: Real use case...

Until Xi is gone, nothing in China will change. Xi is just Mao Mark 2.

Broadcom, VMware insist merger to 'close soon' as China plays hard to get

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Won't happen

Unless the CCP get something out of it.

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

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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.

steviebuk Silver badge

) :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

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What a

Cunt.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

steviebuk Silver badge

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

steviebuk Silver badge

Re: Login.exe

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

steviebuk Silver badge

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

steviebuk Silver badge

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.

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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

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

Police ignored the laws of datacenter climate control

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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.