Posts by Empire of the Pussycat

Ukraine unveils native jet-powered drone interceptor

Re: Remarkable

If Lester were still with us, I bet he'd have ensured Ukraine would've won by now, with plucky playmonauts leading the battle.

$1K laser mosquito zapper promises precision strikes as backers itch for answers

Re: Can i just be (surprisingly) the first to say...

Sharks with frickin' lasers. it's the future.

Some Mullvad VPN customers tunnel for exit after co-founder donates millions to populist party

Re: Sad but not surprising

Techbro sickness runs deep.

Made me recall this...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly8eqyj8e2o

Brit supermarket giant triples down on facial recog to nab shoplifters

Tbh it's what one would expect from Satansburys

Best avoided.

Met Police boss threatens to cut 700 frontline jobs after Palantir deal blocked

MPS threatens to thcream and thecream until it sick

Because it can't throw public money at a company where the nutbag CEO is on record that he puts USA national interests ahead of customers elsewhere, that alone is reason for no public money to go to Palantir, it's a self-declared potential enemy.

Obviously MPS's hissy fit has nothing to do with the lost chance of lucrative Palantir directorships etc. for ex-MPS personnel.

Experts pour cold borscht on Farage's Russian hack claim

Blatant attempt to distract from the fact that...

...he's on the record as a Putin fancier, and he's spent years advancing Putin's anti-EU ambitions.

Of course he takes foreign bungs too, wonder what favours they bought.

Digital sovereignty, the musical: One engineer’s bizarre crusade against hyperscalers

He should try "your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries"

...and if that doesn't do it, he can taunt them a second time.

Anthropic urges Uncle Sam to kneecap China's AI ambitions before 2028

A bit late

The right time to control LLM-based AI was at its inception, killing it with fire and making it clear that'd also be the fate of anyone having another go..

We've only gone and done it: Changed what you're used to

Seems designed for narrow screens, i.e. phones.

Q: Since when has it been a good human factors practice (for english text) to make the article timeline zigzag down and up then move across the page, down and up again, etc. and ad nauseam when viewed on a proper screen?

A: Never. It's bad design, there is no excuse, it is pure fail.

Make the timeline read left right, then go down a row, like it should.

Greece relaxes Euro biometric border entry rules amid airport chaos

Fragmented systems

IMO the problems stem from EES not being integrated with border control kiosks, and each country being able to DIY it's own EES systems.

This results in this being the current typical entry/exit I experience...

Arrive, go to EES kiosk to register or to be told you're registered, i.e. even if already registered, you still need to go through this each time, which is crazy. Inevitably queues form when multiple flights with non-EU pax arrive around the same time.

Then go to the border control e-gates, maybe queue all over again.

On departure, if it's a mixed Shengen/non-Schengen airside, go to an EES kiosk to register (you need to know to do it of course), then laze and drink bubbly in the lounge, then at departure gate, go through exit e-gate, if you failed to visit the EES kiosk your day may get bad, fast.

At airports with a separate non-Schengen airside, the old staffed booths are now layered with EES kiosks, this can result in long queues, and sometimes missed/delayed flights.

Leaving each country to DIY their own EES kiosks means no consistency and multiple systems to be supported, rather silly.

Not integrating with existing/new e-gates builds in delays forever.

For how to do it right, see UAE.

Waymo's self-driving cars face their toughest test yet: London

Re: Video recording needed

I've seen taxi drivers do it, vans do it, cars do it, and, yes, people on bikes, especially e-bikes, and particulaary, illegal e-bikes.

When it was still one-way, I've seen a couple of drivers blithely zooming the wrong way down the Tottenham Court Road.

E-bike riders are the worst - I'm a road cyclist, they terrify me - but in terms of kinetic energy to do harm, the drivers are far more lethal.

Microsoft locks out VeraCrypt and WireGuard devs, blames verification process

MS "published a blog"???

Utter nonsense, you don't communicate potentially disruptive actions to your customer via a blog, nor do you block their accounts without at least a few days prior warning direct to their registered account contact email(s).

Contractor quaffed his way through Y2K compliance while the client scowled

Bolly2k

For Y2K I had several of my team on-site, and the rest on-call.

In solidarity, I was monitoring things from home as I worked my way through two bottles of Bolly.

Nothing went wrong, though I may have become a bit squiffy.

'People's Panel' to check if UK wants controversial Digital ID will cost £630K

Re: Wants

Larry is the only true representative of the people in number ten.

He says DID is a dud.

Having saved the country 650k, Larry asks for nothing more than a few Felix cat treats in recognition of his years of service, and his tolerating buffoons, lunatics, idiots in his home.

GitHub hits CTRL-Z, decides it will train its AI with user data after all

Abandoned GH last year, deleted everything including accounts

Never liked it, don't miss it even a little bit.

Country that put backdoors into Cisco routers to spy on world bans foreign routers

Stupidity has a price, and customers will pay it

No mention of banning use of non-US firmware or components.

So they can still be riddled with holes, but at a higher price.

'Are you freaking crazy?' Bot harasses woman, gets led away by cops

Better to keep things simple and kill it with fire

Microsoft Authenticator to nuke Entra creds on rooted and jailbroken phones

Hmm, is the data on a personal device Microsoft's to delete?

I'd have thought it belongs to the owner of the device, it exists on the device only as a result of the owner using the app to create it, same as using, say, a text editor to create a text file.

In which case, surely it'd be illegal (at least in UK) for MS to delete it.

Of course, MS is welcome to disable the account at the other end, then it's up to the organization's IT to sort out the MS-created mess.

So glad I've almost finished migrating all my stuff off MS, goodbye O365, no more revenue for MS, hello Proton and Libre office.

Cisco warns of two more SD-WAN bugs under active attack

No surprise

First time I encountered vManage was shortly after Cisco borged Viptela.

It is a great of example of what happens if you let software types do networking, I'd bet there was a lot of Agile involved.

The only surprise is that it ever manages to work, at least until it's internal jibbering causes it to grind to a halt until cleaned-up and restarted.

In its desperation to bag an SDWAN company before they were all taken, Cisco bought a wrong 'un.

Iran all but vanishes from the global internet amid US-Israel strikes

Re: Another war for oil

"Provoked", seriously?

Decades of Israeli invasion, apartheid, oppression, murder, theft, torture, starvation, indiscriminate slaughter etc., now that's provocation.

Israel is the problem, it consistently refuses to stick to the internationally recognised borders and does all it can to prevent the Palestinians establishing a viable government in their own land, with the clear goal of killing/evicting everyone in Gaza and the West Bank, and steal all their land for Israel.

Re: Another war for oil

Yep.

Yet another country where the west interfered to gain control over oil, including overthrowing the closest thing to democratic rule Iran ever had (Mosaddegh).

The current Iranian regime is loathsome, the previous 'pro-western' one was no better - the Shah's secret police organization, SAVAK, was notorious for torture and general atrocity, it was established and trained with significant US CIA involvement as well as Israel's Mossad chipping in with how to torture people and eliminate opponents.

This repression led to the 1979 revolution and helps explain why they hated the USA and Israel so much, both countries gleefully enabled the Shah's brutal regime.

No one has clean hands, certainly not the US, Israel, UK, Russia etc.

As always, the ones who suffer are the poor sods who just wanted to live a decent life in freedom.

If Microsoft made a car... what would it be?

It's made in a shed...

...by a weirdo who's convinced that he's created the perfect car, it just needs a bit more tinkering or a widget added there, perhaps some more wheels, and on, and on, and on he goes...

After all these years, he's still absolutely certain that he's right.

People used to humour him, then they got a bit tired of him, now they've started to cross to the other side of the road to avoid him, and blank him in the street if he tries to accost them.

How AI could eat itself: Competitors can probe models to steal their secrets and clone them

"American-led, democratic AI."

There's absolutely nothing 'democratic' about AI.

Microsoft engineer speedruns Raspberry Pi magic smoke in five minutes

Re: He posted this?

At Microsoft, they have no shame about breaking things.

Techie's one ring brought darkness by shorting a server

Still remember the days back in the 80s when I snipped a spare mains lead to get a connector

Not even a spark, ELCB tripped with a clunk. That wasn't the spare, that was the live one.

Swapped the genuine spare lead for the ex-live one.

System came back to life.

ATM flashes a port or two for the enterprising hacker

Re: False alarm, no bork

I'm pretty sure there'll be people operating ATMs without keeping them up to date, leaving out recommended security features, sweating old devices that don't support modern protection, etc., likely skimping on cost at the expense of security.

Or not being careful about physical security, then the criminals get away with using cameras to peek at PINs/cards, fitting fake keyboard overlays, or skimmers/shimmers.

Long ago I did some security consultancy for a bank, they'd been plagued with gas attacks, in the end they decided to accept the attacks as it was far cheaper than a program to retrofit the estate with detection/mitigation.

These days, running ATMs will be an unwanted cost for banks in many countries, with less cash being withdrawn the interchange fees are lower, and the pay-to-use operators targeting the desperate will be on thin margins, might be less money to spend on security than ever.

False alarm, no bork

ATM traffic is encrypted/secured inside the safe and there're other measures to detect/resist attack, any external networking boxes are just for connectivity.

Outside of a secure branch environment, most ATMs are likely to have exposed connections, i.e. in convenience stores, supermarkets etc., it's ok as they're designed to be secure in the real world.

If there were viable MITM attacks, things would've fallen apart long ago, aside from ATMs, card payment terminals wouldn't be viable, yet pretty much every shop has them these days, and they survive just fine with insecure/exposed connections.

eBay updates legalese to ban AI-powered shop-bots

It's a local shop for local people

There's nothing for AI here.

Palantir CEO claims AI will mean western economies won't need immigration

Once AI and robotics have eliminated millions of positions in white/blue collar roles...

...the newly unemployed can sweep the streets, collect the rubbish, pick fruit/veg, serve in shops, busk, beg etc.

No need for immigration to fill those roles any more.

Public heath/care sector will shrink as tax revenues will have crashed with the loss of medium/high salary roles, all the profits will be offshore.

EU considers whether there's Huawei of axing Chinese kit from networks within 3 years

Yeah, I'd be more inclined to encourage decoupling/diversification from USA controlled services.

I'm sure US/CN/etc. have plenty of ways to spy/interfere irrespective of equipment origin, but cloud/hosted services are far more susceptible to a criminal tyrant's whims.

Microsoft CEO: AI sovereignty isn't where it runs, it's who controls it

Datacenter location in unimportant, until...

...a criminal orange tyrant orders USA entities to shut down access to EU/UK/wherever.

At that point, location is everything.

Lawmakers urge FTC to probe Trump Mobile over 'deceptive' marketing

Re: Grifters gonna grift

Trump moral compasses are for display use only.

Re: Grifters gonna grift

Supporting Trump is self-selecting as a sucker.

Brussels plots open source push to pry Europe off Big Tech

Because no income tax, low business taxes, and little regulation is what has made UAE the global leader in open source and tech innovation.

Oh, hang on, that's not worked has it.

Sam Altman is willing to pay somebody $555,000 a year to keep ChatGPT in line

I'll do it

As humanity's guardian, my first three commands to ChatGPT will be: die, die, die.

Hacktivists scrape 86M Spotify tracks, claim their aim is to preserve culture

I'm only downloading to train my AI

<sauce for the gander>

Cornish recycling drive sows confusion among Reg Standards Bureau

Pasty dimensions should be specified in Linguine

It's the law

If only Lester were still with us, he'd know

To wherever he may be ------->

DVSA's clapped-out booking system gets bot slapped as new boss rides in

Re: FFS - we're British - get in a queue.

You need a provisional driving licence to begin with, otherwise you can't be on the road with an instructor.

UK plans right for flat owners to demand gigabit broadband

Depends, one approach to wiring blocks is install rooftop distribution box(es) then run trays and external cabling over the outside of the building with at least one tail left outside each flat.

Then when the flat gets connected, drill through the external wall, or window frame if possible, to run the cable into the flat.

It doesn't cost the building owner anything, but it leaves the building entwined in cable, that traps crud, looks nasty, may start popping loose and flapping around if poorly done, and makes maintenance more fiddly (i.e. expensive) as there's cable all over the place.

My block is now on the fourth generation of being externally cabled this way, first the GPO for telephones, then 1980s cable TV, 1990s coax interweb/TV, now fibre. Whenever the old cable dies, it gets left in place, old operator(s) won't take it away, the new operator won't clear it, and the owner would want leaseholders to cough up for it.

Roomba maker iRobot gets cleaned out in Chapter 11

But what will the cats do without Roomba?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk4XB2wZqF4

The future of long-term data storage is clear and will last 14 billion years

There are days when I think punched cards will outlast us.

<grumpy>

NASA loses contact with MAVEN Mars orbiter

Martians perfected the hungry hippo aeons ago

In space, no one could hear it chomp

US extradites Ukrainian woman accused of hacking meat processing plant for Russia

Trump will already be preparing to pardon her

He's happy to pardon drug smugglers and fraudsters, a little favour for his mate Putin will be no problem.

Samsung reveals its first tri-fold phone – and its desktop mode

Re: So, now it's tri-fold

I'm waiting for the eight-fold, which will bring users to nirvana.

Doom hits KiCad as PCB traces become demons and doors

Never heard of KiCad before, looks interesting!

Back in the 70s-80s I'd've killed for something like this.

If it was your design, you drew the first schematics and designed the layout for initial prototypes, ink on acetate with rotrings and a stack of various adhesive pad layouts for different devices. Simulations were on a minicomputer and graphics were crude.

Umpteen jobs ago now, but downloading it for a play.

FCC guts post-Salt Typhoon telco rules despite ongoing espionage risk

So Trump's administration is now working for both Putin and Xi

Putin will be heartbroken at this lack of loyalty