Posts by Empire of the Pussycat

Financial 'stretch' for UK to join Europe's Starlink rival, says minister

Re: I'm baffled...

The UK's selling off utilities etc. so that they could be loaded up with debt and be bled dry rather than invest.

Endless streams of government 'consultants', revolving doors, jobs for the boys, PPI etc.

The failure to reform things like leasehold, and the ability of the great estates to pass on billions while paying a fraction of the tax most are exposed to.

The common theme is extract from the masses, put nothing back.

I'm on hols in the Spain, smooth roads, low prices, good infrastructure, bins emptied, all things the UK is unable to manage.

Three goes to zero as UK mobile provider suffers voice and text outage

Yep, I dumped Three, central London, no signal.

OVHcloud chief talks up sovereignty discussions with the European Commission

The problem is that if you are a, say, Danish, company and Trump decides to order US companies to cease service/trade to/in Denmark because Trump wants Greenland, you're screwed.

He's repeatedly reneged on his own deals, he doesn't care about US law or the constitution, let alone international law and treaties, Trump and his minions can't be trusted, the US is demonstrably no longer a safe/reliable/honest partner.

Sad times, but it's clear.

China has been reducing reliance for some time and has the scale/will to succeed, the EU has been far too passive, time to wake up and take action, India's protectionism has made it less vulnerable, the rest of the world lacks scale, but can at least try to spread risk rather than becoming client states.

It's not safe to rely on US tech any more, time to invest at home

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/20/technology/us-tech-europe-microsoft-trump-icc.html?unlocked_article_code=1.QU8.Kdfv.TlKKNX9udeIg&smid=url-share

https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-court-a4b4c02751ab84c09718b1b95cbd5db3

The fuckers are even banning Calvin and Hobbes...

https://pen.org/magic-tree-house-author-calvin-and-hobbes-among-hundreds-of-tennessee-book-bans/

ESA's XMM-Newton finds huge filament of missing matter

Re: "the filament clocks at over ten million degrees"

Afaik gas cloud 'temperature' reflects the kinetic energy of the atoms/molecules.

The 'gas' is effectively a vacuum, there's nothing to slow the particles down, just the odd biff when a photon/whatever interacts with one, temperature is high, but energy density is minuscule, no use for making toast.

Aside from the effects of photons, energetic particles, electromagnetic fields, from stars etc., billions of years accelerating whichever way gravity is pointing probably helps build up a bit of speed too.

Pan-galactic spiders

and I, for one, welcome our new arachnid overlords

Florida man expands crypto empire with new wireless service and phone

Being MAGA is self-selecting to be fleeced

Ka-ching for the Trump Crime Family

Spy school dropout: GCHQ intern jailed for swiping classified data

Re: Imagine if he'd hoovered up millions for useless PPE, or....

Skimming, I actually missed the paedo bit, yeah, throw away the key.

Imagine if he'd hoovered up millions for useless PPE, or....

...while PM, lied repeatedly to the country, taken bungs from rich friends, stripped citizens of their rights and caused billions of damage to annual GDP.

Then he'd get far lengthier sentence, oh, er

Yes, he's a dangerous twat and deserved punishment, but there's a serious imbalance in the justice system favouring those with wealth/power/connections.

Meta offered one AI researcher at least $10,000,000 to join up

Take the money, start at 0900, surf the web, drink coffee, natter with other staff, have cake, more coffee, stroll around, head off at 1700, though ideally it'd be 100% work from home.

Odd, if AI is so good, you'd think they use it instead of meatsacks

<word>

AWS forms EU-based cloud unit as customers fret about Trump 2.0

Remember when the USA said, 'don't trust Huawei'...

...because the Chinese government can tell them what to do?

In the age of Trump, the same now applies to every USA-based supplier.

Trump announces $175B for Golden Dome defense shield over America

Re: useless

I'd think a few high altitude thermonuclear blasts would knock holes in any feasible system, even with the best EMP protection, the effects of heavy atmospheric ionisation on RF are going to disable/degrade radar, comms etc.

But Musk et al. can make bigly on this, probably also the Trump Crime Family.

Trump does has one thing in common with 'god', he's only an imaginary friend.

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Surely simpler to stick with correct English

Foreigners will eventually learn to speak it proper like wot we do.

As US vuln-tracking falters, EU enters with its own security bug database

Trump announces tariffs on EU CVEs

Vows to Make America Breached Again

Unending ransomware attacks are a symptom, not the sickness

Re: What "massive disruption" did Harrods experience?

Co-op is nothing to do with Harrods.

My point is that The Register seems to be making things up, it's even using an image of Harrods on the front page.

Re: What "massive disruption" did Harrods experience?

Irrelevant.

Either El Reg knows something, or it's lazy journalism, there's enough of that already on other sites.

This site loses credibility if it publishes nonsense, which'd be a real shame.

What "massive disruption" did Harrods experience?

A few hours where they halted in-store wireless and card payments in staff canteens - I know this from chatting to staff last week.

As a customer, impact was negligible: rewards points didn't credit for a few days, the website wasn't updated with new items for a few days.

If El Reg has details of "massive disruption", spill the beans.

Yolk's on you – eggs break less when they land sideways

I'm eggstatic

Quite eggcessively so.

Back online after 'catastrophic' attack, 4chan says it's too broke for good IT

Oh dear. How sad. Never mind.

Not even a little bit.

Elon Musk's X revenues in the UK crashed in 2023, down 66%

It's as if idiot took a chainsaw to the business

<BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ>

DARPA to 'radically' rev up mathematics research. Yes, with AI

The exponent will be 0.01

Converging bigly

Elon Musk makes another cut – to his time at DOGE

The "waste and fraud" he claims to have stopped

Is dwarfed by the waste, fraud, criminality, constitution trampling, self-serving, slaughter, and destruction that he and his chums have gleefully participated in so far, with much more to come.

Perhaps they'll all end up like Sutler in V for Vendetta, he'd certainly be their kind of guy.

Trump tariffs thwart TikTok takeover as China digs in heels

Invade Gaza

<some text>

EU may target US tech giants in tariff response

Re: Hmm

"...to negotiate with Trump already so some see it as a success...".

The majority would have negotiated anyway, or were already negotiating, there was absolutely no need for Trump to impose tariffs in this way.

He did it solely to get himself in the spotlight, and at the expense of investors, business and jobs everywhere, including the USA, the only 'success' was to Trump's ego and the suckers who believe him.

Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after

Re: Why did it take two hours?

Duh, really?

Why did it take two hours?

Not tested, but you get the idea

#!/bin/bash

#report file value by email every hour

while true

do

cat thefilewithavalue | mail -s "file value" [e-mail]

sleep 3600

done

Home Office haunted by 25-year-old asylum system

We need an enquiry

So that lessons can be learned.

Accenture: DOGE's federal procurement review is hurting our sales

Every cloud etc.

some text

Feds charge three over Molotov attacks on Tesla sites in multiple states

Capitol rioters were terrorists by that definition

I look forward to the FBI taking action against their leader.

Nvidia invests in quantum computing weeks after CEO said it's decades from being useful

QC is in a superposition of useful and not useful, eventually it'll collapse

Much like the CEO

As Chromecast outage drags on, fix could be days to weeks away

Re: They forgot

Apple holds multiple patents on that.

Apple drags UK government to court over 'backdoor' order

Surely a logical backdoor already exists

Apple has total control over IOS and IOS updates, and how/when they are distributed, including the E2E implementation.

Apple knows the device user's ID.

If it chooses to do so, Apple is free to create a tailored IOS update to be delivered to a designated user.

E2E depends on keys accessible to the software running on the iThing, it must be possible to leak the keys and/or create a covert side channel affecting only the designated user, without affecting E2E for any other user.

Only way to avoid that would be to never update the iThing, which leaves it open to all future vulnerabilities exploited by NSO et al.

Pain in the neck of course.

Are you cooler than ex-Apple design guru Sir Jony Ive?

Re: No Hawkwind?

As a child of the 50's, I have the perspective to say for sure that Ive's not cool enough for Hawkwind.

I still treasure my Space Ritual vinyl, which by pure coincidence I'm listening to at this moment.

Microsoft declutters Windows 11 File Explorer in the name of Euro privacy

Now let me put the taskbar where I want it

Grrr

Time to make C the COBOL of this century

Re: A non-IT pleb can read COBOL

Motorola's VERSAdos 68000 structured assembler let you use a few control constructs, if, for, while, etc. and expressions. Of course it converted these to the appropriate machine code at assembly time. It had many other nice features controlled by source directives.

It was good for making code a more readable/structured, and a total pain in the neck when switching development platforms to one without such a clever assembler meant ploughing through all the source to rewrite those bits.

Reclassification is making US tech job losses look worse than they are

Re: There is worse to come

He'll solve that by shutting down the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Then make up his own numbers, they'll be the best numbers. bigly.

Trump 'waved a white flag to Chinese hackers' as Homeland Security axed cyber advisory boards

Make America Weaker Again

Just please don't show the orange criminal's picture, we've suffered enough.

Trump's freshly minted meme coin passes $10B market cap

MAGA is a selection process for chumps

Once Trump has identified the chumps, he can milk them.

It's a great business model, possibly the only successful one he's ever come up with.

Sage Copilot grounded briefly to fix AI misbehavior

LLM AI: insecure by design

LLM "AI" is probabilistic.

Security needs to be deterministic.

Any LLM AI with multiple customers' data is probably going to be insecure.

Nvidia upgrades tiny Jetson Orin Nano dev kits for the holidays

Re: specs

'When I click on "Purchase Now" ... I get "This site can’t be reached"'

It's probably an AI hallucination.

British boffins build diamond battery capable of working for a millennium or five

Re: Battery?

In the good old days there were plutonium powered pacemakers...

https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/miscellaneous/pacemaker.html

NHS would be hit by 'significant' costs if UK loses EU data status, warn Lords

Because brexiters handed Palantir an easy way in.

Re: Surely this cannot be true

Because it wasn't true.

It just another brexiter lie.

Brexiters lie more than Trump, and he lies bigly.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot wobbles like Jell-o, according to Hubble snaps

Re: It's been picking up broadcasts of Trumpjibberjabber

It'll be renamed the Bigly Red Spot.

It's been picking up broadcasts of Trumpjibberjabber

Shaking with laughter.

Fore-get about privacy, golf tech biz leaves 32M data records on the fairway

Golfers?

Fuck 'em.

Red team hacker on how she 'breaks into buildings and pretends to be the bad guy'

Re: "We had found the credentials for their corporate Wi-Fi network in the trash [...]" Seriously?

The point is that this was clearly an amateur/incompetent target - that's assuming they didn't just make it up.

Bragging about it is like a mugger boasting about how hard they are for beating up a toddler.

"We had found the credentials for their corporate Wi-Fi network in the trash [...]" Seriously?

'Corporate WiFi' secured by static credentials and no NAC? Was it the local cafe?

Bragging about 'hacking' such a soft target seems embarrassing.