Posts by ExampleOne

UK finally vows to look at 35-year-old Computer Misuse Act

Re: What I said in February 2022 on the Computer Misuse Act ...

Schifreen adds that the deterrent aspect of the initial Act simply isn’t working, as evidenced by the continued rise in cybercrime. “It’s unlikely that increasing the penalties or tweaking the wording of the Act is going to stem the tide,” he said. “Far better than reforming the CMA would perhaps be to give some more resources to Action Fraud, so that they can investigate and prosecute more people. This might then act as a real deterrent.”

Perhaps we should simply ban the use of "no liability" licenses in commercial paid for software.

If a civil engineer builds a bridge and makes a mistake leading to failure and fatalities, they can expect to get dragged over the coals for the mistakes. Why do we so casually let software engineers off the hook?

Check your own databases before asking to see our passport photos, Home Office tells UK cops

Re: But... driving licences

I think the difference here is the LEOs are using FRT to find matches and associated information for those matches. I assume in the DVLA case, the DVLA already have all the associated information and just want the picture to print on the plastic.

BOFH: Deepfake or just an idiot? We'll need an audit to confirm

Re: Very interesting.

The logic is that the password is a point in a suitably vast space. Exhaustively searching that space takes time, lots of time. Potentially years of time. Everytime you change your password, an attacker has to effectively restart their search in case your new password is in the already searched space.

This assumes an attacker is carrying out a dumb exhaustive search, which in practice targeted attackers won't do. There comes a point where kidnapping you, drugging you, and beating you with a wrench until you tell them the password is cheaper than simply brute forcing it!

The AIpocalypse is here for websites as search referrals plunge

If the crawling is so problematic, and easily attributable, set up a robots.txt and take a DMCA case if they continue to crawl.

Given what the courts have ruled counts as an”effective” security measure, this should be a fairly straightforward case.

Seagate still HAMRing away at the 100 TB disk drive decades later

Re: depends on the use case

The current price for spinners is around £20/TB for the largest ones. The price for a 60TB SSD is around £6000 or £100/TB. That is current prices for those SSDs.

Give it another 5 years and presumably they will drop in price. I am not convinced HDD prices will drop as fast, narrowing the price gap. At some point SSDs will overtake spinners on the price metrics.

And yes, I agree tape will continue. The problem for spinners is their niche is slowly shrinking as cheaper SSDs narrow the gap to tape.

60TB flash SSDs are already available at not insane (for commercial use) costs, 120TB is announced (though I haven't found a supplier actually offering them).

I'm not sure how interesting 100TB HDDs are really going to be in 5 years time.

Barclays Bank signs 100k license Copilot deal with Microsoft

Re: 15,000 spare seats

Or MS asked would they renew their 365 subscription with a new bundle that includes copilot.

37signals is completing its on-prem move, deleting its AWS account to save millions

Re: I'm Bearish on "The Cloud" in General, But ...

Even more importantly, no startup in its first couple of years of operation should be making financial decisions based on 3 or 5 year time horizons. 3 and 5 year horizon problems are firmly in the nice to have category when the average life of a startup up is below 18 months.

Re: "Someone Else's Computer" is nonsense

You took a set up spread across 8 rack cabinets and consolidated it into less than 20 systems?

I don’t think the bulk of the savings here were due to the move to cloud.

Top Trump officials text secret Yemen airstrike plans to journo in Signal SNAFU

Why use Signal? To avoid the proper recording of the discussions and to hide them from any formal auditing and review later.

I mean, whatever they used to chant regarding Hillary Clinton using a private email server, there were no actual sanctions aside from the political grand standing. I am not sure the Democrat critics really have much of a leg to stand on, the hypocrisy is rank on both sides here.

Official HP toner not official enough after dodgy update, say users

Re: Criminal Offence under subsection 3?

I doubt the CPS will take the case though.

However, UK law does allow for private criminal prosecutions, though they tend to be rare. This could be a fun one to try and crowdfund!

Why did the Windows 95 setup use Windows 3.1?

Re: A Mess

For Ubuntu I would need to hand feed 50 laptops, at the minimum I would need to run scripts at certain parts. But for Ubuntu I would have no idea how I could do this for a machine that is being delivered to someone's house 200 miles away.

The important bit here I have bolded.

What you are telling us is you know the MS tools, but don’t really know the Linux tools. Allowing for this, I completely agree Windows is the better choice for you.

Other people, with different skill sets, will draw different conclusions.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

Re: I agree with the majority of the article...

It may be an unpopular stance, and not what you want to hear, but if you are that heavily invested in photoshop and it is a business tool for you, probably your best and only viable option is to pony up the money to Adobe.

Which is just the way Adobe like it. The writing was on the wall about this when they first introduced their subscription licenses!

Linux rolls out the welcome mat for Microsoft's Copilot key

Re: Microsoft makes keyboards?

In general, MS peripherals are, or were, pretty good. Mostly terribly boring, but that is what made them so good.

I have even heard people making informed defence of some of their mobile hardware. The problem here almost always was the software!

Intel sued again over struggling foundry business

Re: "sued yet again by shareholders"

The article seems to imply, in this case, they are suing the board rather than the company with the proceeds going to the company. This seems a reasonable scenario to allow.

Windows 11 market share falls despite Microsoft ad blitz

SteamOS?

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 struggles to take off

“Promoted” being the most important part of that comment regarding scaling. When I was working with AWS, the documentation made clear that auto scaling measured response time in minutes or tens of minutes, not seconds or milliseconds.

Blood boffins build billions of nanobots to battle brain aneurysms without surgery

Surely tumour targeting anti-cancer drugs would also be a major application of this type of technology?

Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model?

McKinsey says 70 percent of companies will deploy some sort of AI tech by 2030

To be honest, I am surprised they don't already.

That said, my definition of AI tech includes statistical pattern recognisers that make decisions which are NOT LLMs. Like SpamAssassin.

So the real question is "What do we mean by AI?" Does it include spam filtering systems? How about search engines? Is spell check an AI function? What about predictive typing? Even basic autocorrect has a modicum of AI to it. Most SatNav routing programs today have AI components.

The thing about good and successful AI products is they don't tend to need to advertise the fact they are AI, because they are so much better at solving whatever problem we buy them for we don't care!

Windows 11 Insider preview brings new Sandbox features and fatter FAT32

So they finally managed to remove the 16bit limits from the FAT creation code?!

This means that many older devices using external can benefit from modern cards even without vfat support, so long as they have a proper 32 bit FAT implementation. I have a camera that meets that criteria.

EU gave CrowdStrike the keys to the Windows kernel, claims Microsoft

Depends on the checksum you use, but the md5sum of zero is NOT zero.

$ md5sum <(echo 0)

897316929176464ebc9ad085f31e7284 /dev/fd/63

Game dev accuses Intel of selling ‘defective’ Raptor Lake CPUs

Re: Can't help feeling

The article seems to be saying it allows the CPU to ask for that, not that it is putting that through the CPU unasked.

If this is correct, than I think it is safe to say the CPU is defective. I do wonder if OEM systems exhibit the same behaviour though, because if they do, this would provide a very obvious avenue to really hurt the OEMs by burning out the CPUs while under warranty.

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

Re: Problems and solutions not welcome

DLUHC could (and should) make this happen by offering the budget for the resources to define the process - in return for a cast iron agreement to adopt them from participating councils. This won't be easy or cheap, but nationally there's no excuse for hundreds of completely different systems and processes.

Most councils will see this as a recipe for getting forced onto a solution that is not fit for purpose and would run a mile from it. "Cast iron agreement to adopt" an unknown solution is an incredibly risky commitment to give, even if they actually trust the DLUHC.

The way Apple, Alphabet implemented DMA rules 'seems to be at odds' with law

I think they already have been warned, what we are seeing is the start of the process of actually fining them. A process that is going to end up in a court room, so they need to do their best to make it legally watertight.

EU-turn! Now Apple says it won't banish Home Screen web apps in Europe

Re: "We have received requests"

Which is to be expected if they have genuinely passed IP68 certification testing, but in no way invalidates the contradiction between claiming waterproof status while excluding water damage from the warranty.

Re: "We have received requests"

They claim IP68 in the marketing material, in the small print they exclude water damage. (Or did when I read it a year ago)

So they just drop the marketing material in the EU and move on.

Meta says risk of account theft after phone number recycling isn't its problem to solve

Setting aside the questions around SMS 2FA (which I don't think is the core of the problem here), the question is "Who is responsible for a user maintaining correct contact details?".

As I see it, the complaint seems to be Meta provided the password reset details to the contact details the user asked them to provide them to. Why can Meta be held liable if the user fails to update those contact details? I am pretty sure we have seen similar stories when domain names have been recycled, and the new owner of the domain started receiving email for the previous owner. I know I still receive post for previous residents of my current home, some of whom last lived here over 20 years ago!

ANZ Bank test drives GitHub Copilot – and finds AI does give a helping hand

It won’t be a popular point, but… if the reported gain in productivity of 40% is correct, this is the single best investment they could make.

Doing some basic math, $39 per user per month is break even for a developer being paid $1000 a month if it gives a 4% improvement in productivity. They are claiming a productivity boost 10x that. Though it isn’t mentioned, I suspect they are using developers paid a lot more than $1000 a month.

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

Re: Screw the Hoi Polloi!

Run a cable across the pavement? So who is liable when someone trips over the cable? We may not like the reality we live in with ambulance chasing lawyers, but it is a bad idea to ignore it when formulating national policy.

Ok, so you dealt with the lawyers… how about the copper thieves who come down the street in the middle of the night and steal all the cables?

Or the pram pushers trying to push a pram along that pavement? Are we really convicnced that making pushing prams and pushchairs difficult is really a great policy?

Epic decision sees jury find Google's Play store is illegal monopoly

Re: confused

They lost against Apple because the judge ruled that the iPhone App Store was not a monopoly because the market should be defined as all smartphones.

The jury here have decided that Google Play Store is a monopoly, which at least implies they disagree with the Apple case judge on the question of how the market is defined.

Will anybody save Linux on Itanium? Absolutely not

Re: like video games localization

Is a wine/proton port a "native port"? I suspect for the ideologues, it isn't.

My take is that an officially supported wine/proton port is effectively a native linux port of the game, so long as the developer is willing to commit to addressing issues that arise only on wine/proton. I don't dictate the game engine, why should I refuse to accept a usable stable set of libraries over the API they speak?

In quest to defeat Euro red-tape, Apple said it had three Safari browsers – not one

Re: The title is no longer required.

Except the European Commission, by entering Apples own marketing material, turn this argument into “if it works, you face prosecution across the EU (and beyond) for false advertising”. Add to that, anyone who bought an Apple device since the false advertising now has a case against Apple as well.

So yes, there may be a 1 in 1000 chance it works, which is better than a 0 in 1000 chance, but that only holds if you ignore the risk of it backfiring.

This looks a spectacularly silly argument to advance.

Qualcomm and Iridium's satellite link-up loses signal

Re: Translation

Yes, for a tiny minority of people, this is a feature worth paying a premium for. But it is a tiny minority. Most phone OEMs probably would prefer to wait for a working standards based solution than invest any effort into integrating a solution the overwhelming majority of their customer base don’t have care about. Once the working standards based solution arrives, they do the work, and they can be reasonably confident that work won’t be hostage to a single vendor.

Microsoft does not want ValueLicensing CEO anywhere near its confidentiality ring

Re: MS is a monopoly

The depends on how the market is defined.

The fact someone can choose to opt out of a market completely does not mean that market can't be a monopoly.

Microsoft makes some certification exams open book

I strongly agree with this, for one simple reason: "How do you do X?" questions, unless they are trivia, should really be answered "I google to find the correct process in the official docs, and follow them"

A poster child for this I have been asked in an interview was "How do you restore an Active Directory backup with the entire computer network offline?" As an interviewer, I would be seriously worried by any candidate who could answer that correctly and accurately in detail without prompts!

After years of fighting Right to Repair, Apple U-turns-ish in California

Does not require that manufactures allow repair shops to disable security features

So, basically, if Apple implement "security features" to prevent non-Apple parts working, repair shops would not be allowed to disable those features, and would have to use Apple parts, at whatever excessive price Apple charge?

Focuses on manufacturer obligations to support authorized repair channels

Who authorizes "authorized repair channels"?

Call me cynical, but surely those two caveats basically neuter the entire proposal?

Hallucinating ChatGPT finds a role playing Dungeons & Dragons

Interestingly this was my first thought for a good application of chatgpt, with a human DM keeping factual statements correct.

The hallucinations aren’t a problem in NPC conversations, because the NPC could just be wrong!

it's hard to wrangle but the sodding thing goes off in some wild directions, sometimes.

Only sometimes? So it is marginally more predictable than a human player?

80% of execs regret calling employees back to the office

Overall, only 9 percent of those surveyed have moved away and not subsequently returned, it said.

Given how long moving typically takes, and the fact that many people won’t have really believed that they would never have to come back to the office, isn’t 9% a fairly high number to have actually moved three years on?

Sarah Silverman, novelists sue OpenAI for scraping their books to train ChatGPT

Re: OED

Transformative, possibly, but surely all the LLM output is derivative work of the training corpus?

Former Twitter employees accuse it of holding up 891 arbitrations

The company tried to insist on arbitration, won, and got upset when the class retaliated by using an automatic arbitration filing system.

The company then went to court to try and set aside the enforced arbitration process in favour of a class action. The judge was not amused.

Supreme Court says Genius' song lyric copying claim against Google wasn't smart

While I completely accept they should not be allowed to enforce copyright they don't own, surely they have a copyright on their presentation of the lyrics: In this case, surely there is a "spark of creativity" to the "REDHANDED" morse code message which would be potentially worthy of copyright protection.

I mean, if a dictionary (or API!) is copyrightable because the presentation of the content has a "spark of creativity" to it, I'm failing to see how a hidden message in a bit stream is not.

In this case, that could probably be dismissed as insufficient to be protected.

Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams

The potential problem is not the with-holding the code, it's terminating subscription agreements for of end users who exercise their GPL rights. This is basically exactly the same legal argument advanced by GRSec, and it was called out as GPL violation then. Why is it not being called out the same now? Or were all the claims then FUD?

Truthfully until this particular model is legislated, we won't know if it breaches the GPL. If it IS legislated, and it DOES breach the GPL, RH and IBM are in a massive world of pain, as anyone who contributed anything to any GPL component of RHEL would have standing to sue. Including Oracle and Microsoft. Essentially, this is potentially a massive gift to those opposed to Linux.

Doesn’t this mean Red Hat are potentially getting sued for GPL violation by Oracle? I mean, Oracle contribute to the Linux kernel so should have standing?

These Microsoft Office security signatures are 'practically worthless'

Microsoft, they claim, acknowledged the findings and awarded a bug bounty, but "has decided that the vulnerabilities do not require immediate attention."

Perhaps MS telemetry tells MS that no one actually uses the signing functionality in OOXML documents anyway?

I have seen "password protected" documents from time to time, but never a digitally signed one. Once digital signatures are involved, IME, it's always been PDFs.

Google HR hounds threaten 'next steps' for slackers not coming in 3 days a week

Re: It's in the employment contract

It does happen.

I worked for a company that had an office move constrained by staff pointing out that moving office was a material change to their contracts.

Google changes email authentication after spoof shows a bad delivery for UPS

Re: Bug/Vulnerability or just bad implementation?

But Google should not be trusting the message headers.

In the scenario you outline, MS have allowed an account to relay for a sender domain that is not validated to the account. This would be a problem in O365, as it allows any customer to masquerade as any other customer!

Now we can argue that Google should have rejected because the DKIM signing key was wrong, but that is a problem with DMARC or BIMI, but if the policy is “one of two”, you can’t fault Google for correctly applying a one of two policy.

Re: Bug/Vulnerability or just bad implementation?

What happened in Office 365? It sounds like ups.com currently, or at some point, used Office 365 as a mail host leading to Office 365 SPF records. Any Office 365 customer would be able to send from the same servers. This is not a flaw in SPF so much as a scenario it simply was never designed to deal with.

How the bad actors were able to set up to send from ups.com through office 365 is probably a more interesting question.

Elon Musk hit with insider trading claims over his Dogecoin crypto-hype

Re: Wouldn't this require

While the law of the land might not, in the U.K. at least it would probably fall foul of the FCA rules of conduct, especially if he is lying to do so.

It is only insider trading if he knew his actions in advance and planned for them.