Posts by illuminatus

UK digital ID may be dead, but its legacy IT problem lives on

Never been a fan of the one ring to bind them all form of digital ID, for a whole bunch of reasons, but at this point is it pertinent to ask about the DVLA issuing digital driver's licences? They have full control over the data, and given that both apple and google have facilities in the wallet, this would actually be a fairly easy thing to provide in the grander scheme of things, with some actual utility for a lot of users.

Meta latest to tell world its AI agent wandered out of test pen

Yet another instalment in the tedious ongoing game of FOMO for arsepieces, just because Zuckerberg can't bear to be Captain Slow.

Kids say they can beat age checks by drawing on a fake mustache

MOUSTACHE

MOUSTACHE

MOUSTACHE

BBC bumps telly tax to £180 as Netflix lurks with cheaper tiers

Does everything have to be "monetisable"?

Every conversation I hear about this usually slips into "but it doesn't offer men anything, so why should I pay?" or "it should stand up in an international marketplace and be like everyone else"

Except those arguments are a bit facile. We don't all have kids, but we pay for schools. We don't all drive, but we pay for roads. Without them, society is less good. The country is just that little bit worse

The BBC is well-thought of internationally, mostly because it's not hamstrung by commercial imperatives and can try to [push the envelope some times, even if the economic conditions to do so are becoming harder. We've seen how that's going in the US with CBS, Paramount and the manoeuvrings with Trump-aligned hangers on. That is not the environment we want find ourselves in here, and it's not inevitable. Subscriptions seem quite seductive, but the economies of nation scale the BBC get do allow cross media things to happen, and very soon, many of those things would disappear. 15 quid a month is a better deal than paying for Netflix, or Apple TV, simply because you get a lot more - and even if you don't allways use it all, the choice is there if you ever do want/need it. you won't get it back when it's gone

Many of the arguments seem to be, inevitably and sadly, economic. But few are asking the bigger question: what if we just talked about the value of the BBC as a public good. Even the arch captilsist Adam Smith said that some things should exist purely for the public benefit. The BBC is one of those, and that's why it should be funded that way.

There are relatively few people in this country whose lives are not touched by it in some fashion - whether watching one of the TV channels, listening to radio, or looking at online content. Now is exactly the right time time for us to be protecting it as a strategic national asset, every bit as important as roads, or rail, or the NHS, because it's good for the cultural health of the nation. I'm becoming increasingly less keen on us being overrun by the offerings of the biggest companies in the world trying to control everything we watch, read, or hear, especially when those same companies are apparently very keen to appease that orange creature squatting over US society right now.

The licence fee is not perfect. But it's the least worst option, and that is why we should be persisting with it

"They could turn off their daytime output and it might well improve the country"

Except it wouldn't - the audience would just find their dreck somewhere else.

Elon Musk merges xAI into SpaceX to spread universal consciousness via a sentient sun

Re: afterlife

Never trust a man who read H2G2 and decided that the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation were the heroes

BBC tapped to stop Britain being baffled by AI

Hmmmmmm

In particular, we want the BBC to support basic and universal skills on the one hand, and on the other to help the public understand AI, engage with it constructively and understand its impacts

I'm not seeing the world "critically" appearing there, as these arguments seem to be predicated on the [not so] charmingly jejune notion that these technologies are essentially benign. I don't really believe that at all, especially not in the end user, consumer space, from the evidence presented to me so far from any number of different sources.

What I do see is some extremely large companies in search of RoI on scarcely credible amounts of money shovelled into projects, desperately trying to crowbar "features" into products where they are neither needed, nor desirable, and where they stretch the definition of the word "tool" to breaking point. Utility is supposed to be positive: a tool is supposed to deliver benefits of speed, efficiency or accuracy when used to perform a task. In far too many cases, this appears not to be true.

There are technologies that do provide benefits, and we should be considering them for adoption. But an onrushing torrent of probabilistic slop sophistry is something that perhaps should not be embraced so enthusiastically. If someone said that the BBC should, like the CLP of the 80s, try to look at the developments with an enquiring, but sceptical mindset, I'd be rather more reassured. But given who's at the helm of DCMS, and the glassy-eyed manic stares of people in government who think that there's a magic "AI" growth tree that will magically solve all their problems, I'm feeling distinctly less than comfortable.

We really could do with an Ian McNaught-Davis now though.

UK digital ID plan gets a price tag at last – £1.8B

Re: "not everyone has a passport or wants a passport."

Doing a bit of poking around in the government's own data, as of September 2025, there are approx 42.7m active full, driving licences (https://www.data.gov.uk/dataset/d0be1ed2-9907-4ec4-b552-c048f6aec16a/driving-licence-data). There are also 10.4 million provisionals.

According to (https://www.ons.gov.uk/datasets/TS013/editions/2021/versions/3) there are around 45.7m passport holders, as of 2023.

The UK Population estimate according to ONS is 69.5m (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/bulletins/provisionalpopulationestimatefortheuk/latest).

The 2024 population data suggests around 21.4% of the population under 17 (so aren't able to get a provisional licence, but may have a passport) - around 13m (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/bulletins/annualmidyearpopulationestimates/mid2024#age-structure-of-the-population), and there's no reason the believe the 2025 proportion is much bigger.

There are significant overlaps here in many of these sets, so the question of who exactly doesn't have any form of ID at this point is probably not a silly one to ask. How many of these people exist? There will be a significant number, but the next question to ask then is:will having a digital ID be any better for them particularly?

I can see the case for a universal identifier to be able to join some data across these cases for government services, but authorisation across domains still bothers me, along with the obvious possibly of breaches, and possible overreach and feature creep, as well as other concerns about how requests for ID may be used or deployed in future.

Students using ChatGPT beware: Real learning takes legwork, study finds

I believe ....

The most appropriate comment to make at this point is "no fuckin' shit, Sherlock"

Like technical debt, cognitive debt is oh so easy to kick down the road for convenience, but at some point in the future, that debt needs to be addressed. And if you haven't accrued the necessary cognitive skills to pick over information because all you've ever done is outsource your thinking to a thing that can't think, then you're going to get an extremely bitten arse eventually.

Microsoft declares bring your Copilot to work day, usurping IT authority

Opportunities for creativity

There are really only so many ways you can say "fuck right off" to stuff like this, but I'll continue trying to find creative ones to manage it.

Marc Andreessen wades into the UK's Online Safety Act furor

One of those increasingly frequent occasions ...

... these days, when you wish a plague on both houses. The days when I had any lingering respect for Andreessen are long gone, as he seemingly wants to cultivate the vibe of a Bond villain with a liking for pies, and face fuzz, and Ayn Rand tech bro libertarianism (i.e. We can do what the fuck we want, you do what we tell you)

Meanwhile, HMG has decided to go all in on implementing bad legislation from a previous government with little clue about anything, especially towards its end. The first noises from Kyle and his department last year weren't entirely awful, but are starting to sound more and more deranged as the weeks go by.

In the meantime, as is normal, many users find workarounds for bad law, and bad regulation. And what's left is just a confusing mess because hardly anyone in a position of so-called authority seems to know what they're doing.

Plus ça change ...

Brit watchdog says public service TV must 'urgently' join Team YouTube

Call me old fashioned

Maybe it's just me, but funnelling a lot of home grown content (that we have in fact already paid for) onto a service owned by one of the large tech companies that is busy cosying up to a US government rapidly doing the death march towards actual fascism doesn't seem like an altogether tactically sound move. Call me old fashioned, but it would be a bit like, back in 1938, selling the Daily Mirror to Mussolini, or something.

Can't say I'm overly keen on that idea.

Selling your digital soul to use Bluesky's DMs isn't just a bad idea, it's the law*

Re: End of the public internet, mostly

Thing is, given the peculiarities of the British electoral system, it doesn't even need to be that many people who won't roll over. Think how many seats are now very marginal, as of 2024. Most people can just accept it, but those that don't could be statisitcally significant even in comparatively small numbers in the right places.

Breaking the nerd internet: Three overlapping generations of tech history – in one selfie

Re: Bill Gates' OS?

I think it's the last commercial coding project he worked on for Microsoft. Ah, the luxury of the 100x8 row LCD display back then ...

Boffins warn that AI paper mills are swamping science with garbage studies

Re: Shit "research"

All of this, plus reviewers themselves are often now under greater pressure in their own institutions to "be more productive", where that means churning out more metric-friendly work (funding and impact measures, for example), or just under more pressure in universities that are coming under fire for a bunch of reasons.

And at higher levels of management, both in institutions and government, the resistance to this is minimal.

Palantir suggests 'common operating system' for UK govt data

Re: He's not entirely wrong.

Yes, he's right about a common environment, but we absolutely should not be letting another major US company get further tied in with critical infrastructure, least of all one of Thiel's

Cheap 'n' simple sign trickery will bamboozle self-driving cars, fresh research claims

You can sort of see where this might head. Things like mandatory signs might end up containing beacons that passing cars can read passively, in addition to the visual cues for human users.

And I'm betting that given Tesla's increased reliance on visual sensing for its stuff, as opposed to some other manufacturers, it makes them more vulnerable here.

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

from a 16 upgrader

Don't worry about it too much. I've just gone from a 14 pro max to a 16 pro max (processor, camera and RAM improvements are nice to have). When I installed the iOS 18.2.1 upgrade on the new phone, Apple Intelligence was there, but off by default. It is literally one toggle to disc hit, and I made sure it was still that way when doing the 18.3 RC update last night. I am much less keen on having it switched by default, but it's very easy to disable. There are also per app "Learn from this app" hooks on iOS for Apple Intelligence/Siri in settings that you may wish to check, but I think there's not a lot point in them being on or off either way if you've switched it off globally.

Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor arrive in time for Christmas

Re: Keyboard layout

I always understood the "sh" was specifically to remind you the #! was to mark which "shell" you were using

Re: Keyboard layout

Which now just makes me think of old shell scripting guides talking about the first line of a script and the #! "shebang" at the start

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

Two birds, one stone

Let's see if it can drive a Tesla.

Hopefully into a wall. In a fireball

Amazon already has a colossal ads business and will extend it to Prime Video in January

So ... I have two options

Option 1: Retain the Prime subscription, but just delete the Prime Video app from my devices. I don't use the Prime bits of other services like Kindle, Audible, or Music so I'm not losing anything in particular by junking that. I keep the delivery bits.

Option 2: Ditch Prime entirely. Makes sense because I don't watch much on Prime anyway. I'm finding I'm generally using Amazon less anyway: I just don't need to buy very much stuff I don't really need in the normal course of things - so the amount I'm paying doesn't offset what I'd be paying in delivery charges.

Either way, Amazon trying to make me pay extra for a service I'd already paid for isn't making me want to use it any more. Quite the opposite. Mind you, the options suggested by others just to throw their own little spanners in the works make me swell with pride at the lovely contrariness of people here. Least I've got a week or two to decide which to do for my part.

Y2K quick-fix crick? 1920s come roaring back after mystery blip at UK's vehicle licensing agency

1920s?

(insert Brexit gag here)

Halfords invents radio signals that don't travel at the speed of light

Re: If DAB is faster than FM

Even better, the lag from FM varies between Digital TV and Dab. So you can play the same snatch of audio with a beautiful double echo if they're all on the same station.

They terrrk err jerrrbs! Vodafone replaces 2,600 roles with '600 bots' in bid to shrink €48bn debt

Sounds like they're all from Hull...

Tor blimey, Auntie! BBC launches dedicated dark web mirror site

Don't forget how piss poor it is if you don't listen to the national radio networks and are predominantly local.

Who are the last people you'd expect to spill thousands of student records? A computer science dept? What a fantastic guess

Actually, given some of the computer scientists I've met, I'd say it was the first place I'd look.

Three UK goes TITSUP*: Down and out for 10 hours and counting

much the same for me in north Yorks and durham. Service seems ok for me now in durham city.

How bad is Catalina? It's almost Apple Maps bad: MacOS 10.15 pushes Cupertino's low bar for code quality lower still

Well...

I ran lots of the betas, and of course there were issues there - they were betas after all. And it's not like they haven't been saying that 32 bit support was going. If you were prepared for this, then that part's not a big deal

Catalina has been installed now on my both work and home machines (work got a late beta a couple of weeks before realise, my one a bi earlier - it's usyaslly sensible to hold off the Mac OS bets until around 4 or 5 revisions in, usually around early- mid august; by then they seem to put most major plumbing changes in ) and is generally solid. My only issue has been there since mid-summer - manually syncing photos libraries to an iPhone, because I don't want to use iCloud photos, thanks. And it's an issue that has cropped up on earlier os versions too. My phone is actually running the 13.2 beta now, and is actually fairly solid. I think the phone stuff was generally better than last years cycle tbh, even allowing for the reminders issue, which in fairness they did flag quite heavily in the dev docs for the betas

BBC said it'll pull radio streams from TuneIn to slurp more of your data but nobody noticed till Amazon put its foot in it

Verschlimbesserung

Apparently, if you looking in a German dictionary, under the word

Verschlimbesserung

it says: replacing iPlayer Radio with Sounds.

Brit government WLTM one Chief Digi Info Officer

...someone in mind

by the name of Cummings. He's interested in a job share with his current role of Grand Vizier. He'd like to keep his existing office with the scorpion pit and spikes, obviously.

Two years ago, 123-Reg and NamesCo decided to register millions of .uk domains for customers without asking them. They just got the renewal reminders...

Re: Shopping cart

Well, I may not have many domains to play with, but I've just moved them all out to another provider. So ner :)

Brit MPs: Our policies are crap and the political process is in tatters, but it's Twitter's fault, OK?

Re: No s##t Sherlock...

According to the government's own figures (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/812844/Income_Tax_Liabilities_Statistics_June_2019.pdf)

"The Top 1% (broadlyall Additional Rate taxpayers) had 12.3% of total income in 2016-17 and were liable for 28.1% of total income tax.**

Now, what proportion of the total tax take is income tax? Well, according to parliament documents (https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/CBP-8513)

"UK government raises over £785 billion a year in receipts – income from taxes and other sources – equivalent to around 37% of GDP. The majority are from three main sources: income tax, National Insurance contributions (NICs) and value added tax (VAT). Together these raise over £460 billion. Income tax contributes £192 billion."

So, about 6.9% of the total tax yield.Or, if you want to use the 460bn figure, 11.7%

Cloud, internet biz will take a Yellowhammer to the head in 'worst case' no-deal Brexit

Re: What's in a name?

Made by the French, n'oubliez pas!

We checked and yup, it's no longer 2001. And yet you can pwn a Windows box via Notepad.exe

Re: Is this why a "notepad" app doesn't come with Android?

To.make notes?

Y'know how everyone hated it when tuition fees went up? Cutting them now could harm science, say UK Lords

Re: Bah!

And it's all the more ironic that most of the decisions about this are being made by governments with little or no scientific background at all. There are quite a lot of PPE graduates in here: general studies for the chinless.

The second paragraph is bang on the money though. I've a science degree, but think the way arts is funded, and opportunities restricted to the wealthiest is depressingly and predictably scandalous.

Re: Bah!

Pah. Engineering arriviste! ;)

Neuroscientist used brainhack. It's super effective! Oh, and disturbingly easy

Re: Let them dopamine themselves to death

You are Thomas Malthus, and I claim my £5.

Re: Let me be the first to call this over hypes BS

"we don't yet understand how the brain works"

From a purely practical standpoint, as long as you can replicate the perceived behaviour, you don't need to know how the process works at a deep level. That's why it's so very dangerous.

The Register taps a foot with boffins under the Lovell Telescope at Bluedot Festival

Re: a quick moan (not that quick)

I went to the first Bluedot in 2016, but haven't been since. It has certainly expanded.

The ticket and the wristband are connected - they recommended you keep your ticket to allow you to cancel lost/stolen wristbands and get replacements with less fuss. The phone app is fairly explicit about this (or at least I inferred as much from the way the information was presented) I wasn't hugely concerned, because they already have most the information on the wristband from your ticket anyway. It's not such a bad idea because it cuts down the amount of floating cash and opportunistic theft connected to that. You could claim back any remaining balance in your account from Tuesday, which was a quick job if you'd registered; you could choose to donate all/some/none of that remained to nominated charities. (the refund takes around 3-5 working days to process, apparently, when I did my request, and the money's now back in my bank account)

My principal problem wasn't payment, which largely worked ok for me, but the rather hit and miss nature of the "mission log" feature. The contact points didn't make it clear whether the registration had worked or not (a visual, not just audio alarm would be nice), and I can see why having some of the is data is useful- -it helps them to see how busy venues are getting at particular times, and is probably useful for crowd flow and planning purposes. Given how much busier people said this year's event was than previous (some truth in that), and some had mentioned crowding, that's probably useful data to have if they can make it more reliable. It's the first year they've run this, so I'm expecting when they do it again (and they will), that they will learn some lesion form his year. It might actually be easier to use bacons at venues to record attendances and capacity as most hand their phones with me anyway.

Re: Good festival...but...

I left at around 1am form the weekend parking site on Batemill Lane.No hassles whatsoever, But the main entrance was a bit chaotic.

UK Home Secretary doubles down on cops' deeply flawed facial recognition trials

Right...

"I back the police in looking at technology and trialling it,"

Even when it's expensive and doesn't work.

ESPECIALLY when it's expensive and doesn't work.

Metropolitan Police's facial recognition tech not only crap, but also of dubious legality – report

Re: It's in its infancy, but it will improve

Ah, the wisdom of crowds...

Re: It's in its infancy, but it will improve

"30 seconds out of your day to provide ID and carry on"

Then multiply by all the times you will be asked to do it, by every person and their dog, because it's "30 seconds out of your day". Feature creep's a bitch.

Former UK PM Tony Blair urges governments to sort out online ID

I was a supporter of the NO2ID campaign back during the late noughties (I literally have the t-shirt). While I don't have an issue with ID per se, the main issue I saw with it here was the relationship it assumed between citizen and state, and about the ownership of and responsibility for personal data. This was the sort of thing that other countries, with explicit constitutional protections for citizens, struggled less with.

So, for example, in the Blunkett bill that went before parliament, you had the fairly nasty combination of: the government owns your data, and can prosecute you if your data is found to be incorrect or false. Conversely however, if you discovered your data was not correct, the government were under no obligation to change it (though could conceivably prosecute you if they _then_ decided the data was wrong, even if you'd told them so a priori). Without primary legislation that prevented authorities compelling users to carry id tokens at all times, or compelling them them to produce ID while going about lawful business, the scheme always smelled nasty to me. I was extremely wary of the feature creep that had happened (despite promises to the contrary) in RIPA oversight and powers.

PowerPoint to start telling you that your presentation is bad and you should feel bad

Re: Spice it up a bit

Oooh! Powerpoint context roulette...

1. pick six words

2. choose a word form the list at random.

3. you must display the first image suggestion provided

Re: As I was told

Really? It's not that hard at all if you train yourself to do it.

UK's GDS head Kevin Cunnington leaves to tell world+dog how (not) to do digital

Could you pin a tail on that coat and call it an easel*?

*I know, that's deliberate.

It's all in the wrist: Your fitness tracker could be as much about data warfare as your welfare

Re: @Splurg The Barbarian - No, no, no, no, no!

"they would/could/might develop an algorithm that recognizes spoofed data."

Costing them time and money. and not guaranteeing accuracy. The pissing in the data pool idea is actually a good one, especially if people do it to differing degrees at different times, because there's no pattern - almost like the brownian motion of bullshit. Brownian motion is perfect for that, as it's a great way to generate actual randomness, and that is difficult to filter out.

10 PRINT Memorial in New Hampshire marks the birthplace of BASIC

Can't remember where I once read...

but wasn't Bill Gates' last commercial software project the BASIC on the TRS Model 100 lcd screen laptop?