Posts by vtcodger

Amazon rewards loyal Kindle devotees by closing the book on old e-readers

Re: Not a problem with my paper books

If it works satisfactorily for your usage, why do you need (or want) software support?

Hundreds of orgs compromised daily in Microsoft device code phishing attacks

The problem with html email

True enough. Links to evil URIs are a problem for any type of messaging. That's not the problem with HTML email. The potential -- and at times actual -- problem with html email is access to flawed OS APIs via the <script> tag. Text email can't do that.

Shiny ... Me want

Plaintext email has no links to click or code to execute.

A point that was made repeatedly by numerous people back in the 1990s when the HTML email stupidity first came into use. Proving only that it's remarkably hard to discourage a bad idea when said idea is new and shiny.

Why?

Because the bad actors only need AI to be right every now and then.

You and I on the other hand mostly need it to be right always.

Stack Overflow abandons redesign after loyalists criticize it

Re: I still look in

Indeed. I've found that reading the comments on a query at SO results in learning things that I might otherwise miss. I rarely cut and paste code from SO. I use SO to gain understanding for why things work or don't work, not to get a quick pre-packaged answer.

If an AI agent screws up while running your business, there's nobody to sue

Re: Strategically placed scapegoats

Somebody is going to write liability insurance policies covering AI induced catastrophe? My guess -- Not bloody likely.

Anthropic sure has a mess on its hands thanks to that Claude Code source leak

Re: Har, Har!

Nobody ever claimed that AI mongers are a textbook example of balanced, rational thinking.

AI server farms heat up the neighborhood for miles around, paper finds

Temperature measurements

Yes, even some "rural" stations now have substantial paved areas near the sensors where there used to be plants. And some of sites have other problems -- like changing sensor types and locations while still reporting under the same name. There are even cases where the sensor turns out upon close examination to be located in the exhaust stream of air conditioners or other heat sources. And then there's the problem of large areas of the Earth surface -- especially in the mostly ocean Southern Hemisphere -- having little or no regular temperature reporting.

On the other hand, the temperature trends computed from satellite measurements track pretty closely to those computed from surface measurements (about 0.14C per decade).* Maybe the surface measurements aren't all that bad.

Personally, I'm inclined to trust the satellites which have (near) global coverage using the same (complex) instrumentation and not worry much about the thermometers at East Hogheaven don't seem consistent with those down the road at Dismalton Station.

* Although the UAH satellite temperature averages track the surface averages pretty closely** -- both go up and down at the same time -- the satellite values show greater swings. That's attributed -- maybe correctly -- to increased evaporation during warm spells and decreased evaporation in cooler periods. Evaporation magically transfers "heat" from the surface to the troposphere where it reappears when the water vapor condenses or freezes.

** At least for Sea Surface temperatures

Re: Didcot Weather

"I think funsionablew means hydrogen ,,, "

Yes, but what they don't mention except in three point type on page 36 of the spec is that the first generation fusion plants will probably use Deuterium-Tritium fuel. It's easier to get that to "burn" than plain old garden variety Hydrogen. Deuterium may not be a big problem although it's kind of scarce, Roughly 0.015% of Water molecules contain 1 deuterium atom in place of a normal Hydrogen molecule. Tritium on the other hand is really hard to come by. It's radioactive with a half life of about a decade. My impression is that there are no natural sources. I believe that the small amount currently being produced is sort of an unintentional byproduct of some fission reactor designs.

Satellite temperature measurement

A nit -- satellites don't actually measure ground temperature. They measure lower troposphere temperature -- very roughly, the average temperature of the lowest few km of the local atmosphere. They can, and do, detect extremely warm spots -- wildfires, missile launches, but that's done with different satellites.

Re: Didcot Weather

Downvoted because while the assumption that the Earth overall is getting warmer is very likely correct, there is NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER that weather is becoming more violent. Neither is there any particular reason to expect that to happen. In point of fact the scientific consensus is,and always has been, that the affects of planetary warming will mostly be felt in the high latitudes and mostly in the form of warmer Winter nights

And yes you're right that fossil fuels won't last forever, although the supply is probably underestimated. At least that's always been the case in the past. And yes the answer to that is presumably nuclear power although I don't think the issue of where the massive amounts of fissionables and/or fusionables are going to come from has been thought through.

But the idea that nuclear power plants don't need to be regulated as strictly as commercial aircraft are strikes me as being incredibly optimistic. Perhaps if guaranteed fail-safe designs like Pebble bed reactors become standard, humanity can safely allow bean-counters and sales geniuses to run nuclear plants without strict regulation. But I wouldn't underestimate the capability of those folks to generate catastrophy even where failure seems impossible.

UK manufacturers under cyber fire with 80% reporting attacks

Tis a Puzzlement

Maybe they shouldn't have business-critical stuff exposed to the Internet.

Would that it were that simple. Any business much larger than a roadside fruit and vegetable stand has suppliers and customers and very likely multiple sites. It needs to talk to them and they to it. How would you propose to do that without digital communications? You could use telephone or radio or snail mail or smoke signals or couriers, or homing pigeons or maybe an employee up on the roof with binoculars and semaphore flags. And in a few cases one of those may actually be a decent communication channel. But mostly, you're going to be forced to use the internet despite the attendant risks.

So, how do you handle the risks? I haven't a clue. I don't think anyone does.

Oracle cuts jobs across sales, engineering, security

The Red Queen's Gambit

What need has a software company for Security when they have AI? Off with their heads!!!

Prediction: This will end badly

Surprise! Big Tech has been a bit rubbish at enforcing Australia’s kids social media ban

Re: It’s not hard if you want it

@mihares

While I agree with the sentiment, there are a number of problems with trying to keep the young and impressionable away from toxic social media. To name just a few,

. Everyone seems to have a different definition of "Social Media". Some folks would include You-Tube and Reddit -- sites which actually have a great deal of useful information as well as the usual junk. Really, would you ban a 14 year old trying to repair the family tractor because dad's in the hospital from YouTube?

. Pragmatically, how the hell would a site sincerely trying to comply with laws requiring age "verification" actually verify age. As far as I can see, it simply can't be done in any way that actually works.

. How are kids in rural areas supposed to coordinate on team projects if you don't give them access to computer networks?

(And, BTW, why do we assume that Social Media are a problem only or especially for kids. If you ask me, if potential harm is the criterion, everyone under the age of 113 should be discouraged from using Facebook etc. al..)

Captain Renaut Rides Again

I am shocked, shocked to find that teenagers might lie about their age. Who could possibly have known that might happen?

Humanoid robots one tiny step closer to exterminating autoworkers' jobs

Re: Humanoid robots

Semi-serious answer. It actually looks a bit like something out of Greek Mythology -- half man and half catering cart. (Make up your own story about how that came about but things like that tended to happen if you caught Zeus on a bad day). I suppose humanlike arms make some sort of sense if it's going to be shuffling parts about. But why a head? I should think that it's "eyes" would be better located on its hands.

Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right

Digital Salvation

AI is the new Prestor John?* (At least for management types)

*The great Christian monarch somewhere in the East whose armies were coming any day now to save Christians from Islamic hordes https://globalmiddleages.org/project/international-prester-john-project

AI companies lick their chops as FCC proposes forcing call center onshoring

Yechhh

Assume AI agents can do a half way competent job with routine. "Did you plug it in?", "Did you try turning it on?" level checklists. And also assume that such an AI is actually cheaper than a human (which very likely isn't the case today for a profit seeking AI mongers). In that case, it'll likely happen. And it may be sort of OK. IF, and only if there is a way to escalate to a higher level staffed by capable humans. without undue effort. Which is to say that it might be OK in Europe and maybe East Asia. In the Western hemisphere, Africa and South Asia it'll probably be exactly the sort of shambles Reg readers expect.

Microsoft and Nvidia claim AI can speed approval of new atomic plants

Re: Lets count the victims^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hheros

Might be safer than one would think. Odds are that it wouldn't be capable of getting off the ground.

Digital euro goes full sovereignty mode, US cloud giants not on guest list

First?

"If the EU is the first major market to launch a sovereign digital currency then it could spur all sorts of financial innovation and provide a much-needed economic boost to its companies and citizens,"

China started studying a digital currency a decade ago and started rolling it out in 2019. As far as I can tell, it hasn't been revolutionary. But neither has it been problem plagued. I can't think why the Eurosphere wouldn't be able to do the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_renminbi

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

Re: Smell that?

I wouldn't be surprised if it is nothing more than an an additional bitfield in my data profile, treated with no more respect than a "do not track" marker in a HTTP request

And, being Microsoft adjacent, it'll likely be arbitrarily reset to "Opted In" every third or fourth Github site code update.

Scammers have virtual smartphones on speed dial for fraud

Really now

Yes -- requiring two different devices for two-factor authentication would probably greatly increase security. But it would also be, in many/most(?)/all(?) cases, a monumental PITA for users. It's unlikely it's going to happen much except maybe in some business use cases where both "devices" are readily accessible to the user.

Age checks creep into Linux as systemd gets a DOB field

Limited practical utility

So, it will only work for kids who can't spell sudo and can't figure out to boot from those age set USB sticks that Johnny down the street sells all comers for five bucks a piece?

Re: systemd-free distros

The point in checking age is simply compliance with what appear to be poorly thought out, feel-good laws. There's no point in railing against software system providers. They're just the messengers. What would be needed to prevent this sort of nonsense would be better lawmakers. Not much chance of THAT I fear.

EU broadcasters say smart TVs and voice assistants are the next gatekeepers

Not so Smart TVs

If my "smart" TVs (We have five scattered around the house) are a representative sample, Big Brother appears to be a mite retarded. Their recommendations appear to have a large degree of randomness changing unpredictably with every user action. And every now and then they alter settings like closed captioning in a random fashion. And one of them simply does something randomly weird like changing channels on its own every hour or three. Another synchs perfectly during boot, runs for maybe 30 seconds, then looses synch andreboots. After which it runs OK. All of them are prone to occasionally posting network related error messages randomly during bootup although none of the other household computing devices -- PCs, tablets, a Chromebook -- seem to have any problems. Could be real network issues, but it sure looks more like race conditions in the code.

Rarely, they appear to become totally confused. Usually, cycling power, restores them to their normal kinda usable state.

All in all, I think I preferred the dumb TVs of the 1980s, True, one had to wait for the CRT to warm up. But that took less time than smart TV boot. There were fewer channels back then. But channel selection was straightforward. Now it involves finding ones way through frequently morphing gaudy, but far from clear, cascading visual menus.

Color me unimpressed.

Russians are posing as Signal support to launch phishing attacks

A sign of Desperation?

Russian agents posing as customer support? That has to be a sign of desperation. In this day and age, I doubt anyone believes there are internet connected sites that provide customer service.

Next month they'll probably be posing as used chariot salesmen. Or trireme repair/refit experts.

Sashiko: AI code review system for the Linux kernel spots bugs humans miss

So who or what found the other 47% ?

Users, presumably

Not a Surprise

I can't tell you how much of my past 65 years have been spent gazing at code that quite clearly SHOULD do one thing, but in practice, does something else entirely. Most humans, me included, simply aren't very good at analyzing code. It seems to me that this MIGHT turn out to be a beneficial and minimally annoying use of "AI". Think of it as compiler diagnostics on steroids.

Of course, it's only going to work in practice if it's cheap to run and doesn't generate an obnoxious number of false positive problem reports.

And it won't help much, if at all, with spec misinterpretation, design, or User Interface problems.

Switzerland built a secure alternative to BGP. The rest of the world hasn't noticed yet

Re: X.400 vs SMTP

Perhaps I misremember or misunderstand, but my impression was that the reason (D)ARPANET was "underspecified" was that no one at the time actually knew how to build a practical real-time packet switching network using the public telephone system for network connectivity. DARPANET was the (distributed) testbed where ideas on how to build such a network were deployed, tweaked, and validated.

Re: can this scale worldwide?

@andy: I don't know why you're being downvoted. "Will it scale? is a legitimate,and quite important, question. If the whole world switched to SCION would it still be possible to get a digital packet from Capetown to Fairbanks quickly and reliably?

Your next car might need 300 GB of RAM, and so will autonomous robots

Re: over 300?

If all you want to do is manage a household or a small non-tech business, a PC-XT with a 10mb hard drive, MSDOS, a decent word processor (Word Perfect perhaps) and a spreadsheet (Lotus-123 or a shareware clone thereof) and probably a printer (maybe one of the more or less indestructible HP-II,II,IVs) is probably all you need. Except you haven't been able to get repair parts for that XT for a couple of decades. If your computer is a toy (most are) or you want to do audio/image processing you will indeed need more. And if you want the whole rather ghastly, bug-ridden, wildly insecure modern computing shambles, well then, you'll need a LOT more. Plus a significant monthly bill from your ISP. But for a lot of use cases, it's not all that clear "progress" has brought you much besides expense and a whole lot of grief.

There'sa difference between want and need.

One way to cut the demand in half

Why can't my humanoid robot drive my "dumb" car?

That BTW is one of the very few use cases I can think of where a humanoid form factor for a robot seems to make much sense,*

*and even there, wouldn't it make more sense to put the robot "brain" and sensors in the detachable head and mount that head in the middle of the dash when one needs to go somewhere?**

** Yes, I;m channeling Elon here, and Yes, it's probably Yet Another Seriously Flawed Notion (YASFN).

Iran's cyberattack against med tech firm is 'just the beginning'

Re: Forgive me if I'm not convinced about US telling the world they've won and Iran is decimated

You left out the part about altering the tariffs frequently and unpredictably, just to keep those lazy (soon to be) ex allies on their toes.

BBC World Service digital switch backfires as online audience drops

Re: What is the point of providing a World Service broadcast.. by Unicast

But ... but ...but ... Digital is NEW and SHINY. "New and shiny" always tops Old and Faded. </sarc> (And, in fairness, short wave radio can leave a lot to be desired unless the signal is strong and reliable).

AI still doesn't work very well, businesses are faking it, and a reckoning is coming

Re: For now, ignore AI and the mountebanks selling it.

Agree, but I think the strategies suggested in this post are perhaps more about internet security than AI. Not that AI in its current state has much to recommend it.

Agreed

I agree with much of this and upvoted it. AI generated art might useful for many people. But I suspect that if usage wasn't subsidized and true costs (plus profits) had to be paid, the actual usage would be quite minimal. OTOH when one considers the enormous cost of a large scale movie or TV battle or mob scene -- hiring, costuming, coordinating and paying hundreds of even thousands of extras -- it does look like there might be cases where AI is actually cost effective -- at least for images.

Repopulate! Repopulate! Two lost Doctor Who episodes turn up in private collection

Re: "a little more significant than Doctor Who defeating the Daleks"

And don't forget the NSA/CIA. They've probably got complete Dr Who archives. Multiple copies

Those who 'circle back' and 'synergize' also tend to be crap at their jobs

Re: No Surprises

"leveraging cross-functional synergies"

I've been struggling to translate this into English. I think it might (but probably does not) mean. "We really need help from somebody who is not clueless about this subject."

GitHub infuriates students by removing some models from free Copilot plan

Re: Cake ?

My understanding is that bakers of the time caulked seams in their ovens with dough at the beginning of the working day. The thoroughly singed "cake" was scrapped out at the end of the baking day whereupon indigents would pick over it hoping to find some edible material. Could be a myth.

Even if true, I can't quite see an analogy to AI which seems to be somewhat usable on good days even if not remotely cost effective.

Nanny state discovers Linux, demands it check kids' IDs before booting

Inevitably

If there were a standard age file in Linux then Steam could use it too, and suddenly it all starts to make a bit more more sense

Inevitably, in many distributions, age will be installer age at installation time stored as an integer in /etc/age. But on others it will be user age at login time in seconds since epoch. And on red Hat and Debian it'll be in years in floating point. in /usr/local/age. There will be several other variations most of which will be against the law in India and Bolivia because those countries require age to be reported in hours since the birth of Ada Byron (aka Ada Lovelace) on December 10, 1815.*

*And, like the article says, underage users will most likely lie about their age anyway.

Iran plots 'infrastructure warfare' against US tech giants

Selection Criteria

Isn't it likely that the sites were selected on the basis of accessibility to Iranian missiles rather than their strategic importance? Of course, some might turn out to be strategically important as well as nearby.

Your datacenter's power architecture called. It's not happy

Why bother?

Sheesh!!! Is there a point to all this? From what I've seen, AI looks to be kinda cute but more or less useless except perhaps for the entertainment industry. Build a few research centers to explore quietly and objectively whether AI has any practical, cost effective uses, let Disney et.al. see if it makes movies/TV production cheaper/better and move on to trying to solve real world problems like getting a reasonable standard of living for everyone on the planet that wants it, and the practice of electing absolutely horrible human beings to political office.

Would it really make all that much difference in the long run to anyone except Sam Altman if humanity held off on AI for a few decades?

Flying cabs, next-gen aircraft cleared for takeoff in 26 states

I'm still waiting for my personal James Bond jetpack...

Those things were/are kind of heavy. Which makes landing kind of like jumping off a porch with a sack of concrete on your back. How are your knees? healthy? Jet packs can maybe fix that for you.

Maybe

There are a bunch of potential problems -- pilot training, lack of obstruction free landing zones, weather, congestion, traffic control, insurance .... But the biggie is simply broken cars (mostly) stop, broken aircraft (mostly) drop. Aircraft falling out of the sky tend to be hard on both the payload and anything/anybody in the impact area. That said, some amount of airial taxi traffic will probably happen. I doubt it'll be particularly cheap. And the vehicles are going to have to be maintained like aircraft, not in the haphazard way cars are.

LibreOffice learns to speak Markdown in version 26.2

Re: Learning

Knock a clue into a recruiter? Doesn't that depend on the dubious assumption that recruiters are educatable? It also fails to recognize which party has control of the dialog.

Parkinsons Laws

I once, in a former life at a very large semiconductor company, sat in a meeting to discuss a presentation that a Very Senior Executive was due to give, where an entire hour was spent discussing what color and size the heading on a powerpoint slide should be

One of the corollaries to Parkinson's Law (C. Northcote Parkinson, 1957 -- Work Expands to Fill the Time Available) is the Law of Inverse Proportionality The time spent debating an issue is inversely proportional to its objective importance.

Royal Navy races to arm ships against drone threat

Re: RFI?

Interesting thought, but No -- that's not realistic.

This is presumably a shipboard system. That means it has to compact, operate off ship power, not interfere with other shipboard systems, operate in the Arctic in winter as well as the Persian Gulf in Summer, tolerate high humidity, survive salt water spray, and a bunch of other things. Not only that, I was told back in the day, that, in practice, pretty much every ship in the US Navy is unique. No two ships have exactly the same equipment complement or layout. Every install is custom. I expect the same is true of the royal navy.

Then there's the issue of installation. Probably has to be done in a shipyard. Which means scheduling time in the yard. For every ship in the navy. And getting the ships -- some of which may be on the other side of the planet back to the yard in an orderly and timely fashion.

Ans there's the matter of training the crew to use the system. Probably requires simulators and course materials and instructors that have some idea how the thing works.

And I won't even go into the issues on the production side of manufacturing and quality testing a bunch of units in a hurry.

Overall, weeks sounds like wishful thinking.

US state laws push age checks into the operating system

Request For Information

"must collect and store the age or date of birth for each user account"

Hmmm. Anyone have any idea how old lpadmin is? How about root?

Is there some sort of penalty for an incorrect answer?

Brits fear AI will strip the human touch from public services

Aliienation

Required reading: Franz Kafka -- The Castle. (Might be downloadable at https://dn790009.ca.archive.org/0/items/castle01kafk/castle01kafk.pdf)

Dealing with "Customer Service is already all too often a Kafkaesque experience. I can't imagine that AI will make it any better.

Moreover it will probably degenerate eventually into a "My AI will work out something with your AI" situation often yielding truly absurd results.

Firefox taps Anthropic AI bug hunter, but rancid RAM still flipping bits

Re: alternative truth

Error Correcting Code (ECC) memory requires a significant number of additional bits per word. The internet tells me 8 for 64 bit word. (Is that really how it's usually implemented?), Plus additional circuitry for checking and correcting? Is that likely to happen in the midst of a RAM shortage caused by our current race toward mediocrity?

But just restoring the parity bit that Microsoft talked RAM mongers into dropping three or four decades ago when expensive RAM was impeding deployment of GUIs would be a step in the right direction. Probably won't happen though if it looks like checking parity will reveal modern ram to be a bit flaky at times.