The crook is an English speaker
A true Frenchman would have dubbed himself ZeroOctets.
Posts by Bitsminer
839 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Sep 2017
French tax authority admits data heist after crook touts 2M records
Give Google the boot by building your own search engine
Trump wants to grant private cyber firms a license to hack back
Gym rat asks AI agent to book him a class, it hacks a waitlist API to bump him up the list
Monday 10th August 2026 18:44 GMT
New TV series...
CSI:OpenClaw
Quick-typing investigators prompt their super-secret defense AI to reverse-engineer evildoer rogue AIs in a continuous battle of good vs indifferent.
Episode 1: evil AI OpenSlaw enlists CaaS operators to push infant children further up the waiting lists of the local daycare by killing parents of children higher on the list. Guest stars include a synthetic version of Jimmy Saville.
Time Magazine has a separate version of its website with ads only AI can see
Uncle Sam aims to help nuclear energy find its sea legs
Sci-fi authors Scalzi and Stross decry AI's dystopian impact on their craft
Tuesday 4th August 2026 02:30 GMT
Wordstar etc
Pull out some old paperbacks of Arthur C. Clarke short stories. Read them in chronological order.
After the mid 1970s as I recall he was gifted various writing machines (not quite computers but smarter than a calculator). You (or at least I) could see a trend in his writing with longer sentences and paragraphs as his adopted technologies changed.
Apparently he got a copy of Wordstar for his work on the 2010: Odyssey Two novel, apparently in the early 1980s. With a full screen (of perhaps 80x24 characters) his writing would change again.
Source: Google AI for some background info, so therefore you may freely abuse this non-copyrighted posting....
Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered
Saturday 1st August 2026 18:34 GMT
"Lured"
I was lured out of retirement twice.
The first time my $EX_EMPLOYER wanted a training course on how to interview and hire candidates. Trained some former colleagues on how I had hired them, and why! That was fun.
The second time was more serious.
Bid Manager: Hey can you help out on a bid? We need someone to work out the cost of the hardware.
Me: Maybe. What is the schedule?
Bid Manager: We need the costing in two weeks.
Me: And how much work or effort do you thing it is?
Bid Manager: About three weeks.
Me: Ha ha ha ha ha!
Amazon's Q2 was great, but the earnings release is packed with baloney
Word worm crawls into Copilot, spreads chaos
Dev accidentally commits Copilot binary to FreeBSD ports repo
Linus Torvalds tells AI haters to fork off
Wednesday 15th July 2026 18:53 GMT
Tin men vs GPL
Another open source project rejects any AI-generated code, slop or not, on the grounds it is uncopyrightable.
Tin men don't have tinman-rights and cannot claim copyright on their output, you see.
Nor can they grant nonexistent rights to others.
Or file a lawsuit to defend those nonexistent rights.
When FSF, or Microsoft, or SCO catches up, will Linux be fragmented into GPL and nonGPL lines of code, and thereby tainted forever?
Microsoft is losing the battle to protect license lucre. It better get used to the feeling
Monday 13th July 2026 14:55 GMT
AI cloning state-of-the-art
The current SOTA is quite impressive:
The Bun Javascript and Typescript compiler system was converted from Zig (535k SLOC) to Rust in a couple of weeks and $165k of tokens.
https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust
They switched in the "minor" upgrade from 1.3.14 to 1.4. Almost nobody noticed.
Impressive.
GitHub Copilot: Sorry Dave, I can't do that harmful thing - unless you ask me in code
Allstate Insurance quits Broadcom, alleges vengeful license audit on the way out
NASA says it will isolate volunteers from the outside world for a year
Confidential computing's trust mechanism is broken. The fix may not exist
Sunday 5th July 2026 00:20 GMT
Much ado...
a different, compromised machine running identical software...
This sounds very much like: having control of a victim server, the "actor" can replicate the functions for his/her gain.
(Dis)proving that identical software is running on the "actor's" hardware is the key, and it's misdirected. If you let "actors" access your physical hardware, e.g. your Tesla or BYD, all bets are off.
Guest operating systems included.
British Home Office seeks techie to herd nearly 1,000 engineers looking after 600 systems
Feds freaked over Fable 5 after simple 'fix this code' prompt, not jailbreak, says researcher
History of CentOS: How a biochemist's Linux hobby project became the enterprise world's default operating system
Monday 8th June 2026 23:23 GMT
Caos and Warewulf
(Spelling intentional).
Kurtzner also promoted a cluster environment based on network boot of multiple nodes and NFS serving standard /usr/bin executables. Called Warewulf.
It was a clever notion: nodes won't fail due to disk drive issues. I think he built a few 1000+ node clusters at LANL and elsewhere.
I ran it in my home lab (couldn't get $WORK approval to build it).
Verrrry interesting.
Grep this: Microsoft grafts (most) Linux commands onto Windows
Wednesday 3rd June 2026 22:06 GMT
awk, grep and bark?
Wayyy back in the day, $WORK was inundated by Sun Microsystems folk who were pushing Sparc workstations on every desktop.
We were happy with NCD terminals and bigger servers.
Being an obvious VAX/VMS guy at the time, I distinctly recall teasing the distinguished Sun customer engineer about "You Unix guys and your awk, grep, and bark."
"What's 'bark'?", he innocently asked.
Mission accomplished.
Nvidia's Grace Blackwell superchips are officially coming to the PC with RTX Spark notebooks
OpenBSD 7.9 arrives, a diamond in the rough proud of every sharp edge
Tuesday 26th May 2026 18:45 GMT
OpenBSD does not corrupt filesystems on shutdown. That would be silly.
I regularly run 3 OpenBSD guest VMs with VMware Workstation on Windows. What with Windows and it's software crappi^H^H^H^H^Hcomplexity my laptop gets irregularly rebooted without notice quite often. And monthly with notice. And either I don't know how or VMware can't tell OpenBSD guests to shutdown or suspend on a Windows reboot event.
After 3 years of this I've only had to invoke fsck manually once. And lost no files.
Log-structured filesystems are not a panacea, they just reduce the odds of failure (or improve the recoverability).
The Virtual OS Museum opens its doors
Threat hunters find Google API keys still usable 23 minutes after deletion
Europe tests laser links as satellite comms outgrow radio
Windows boot partition runs out of space for Microsoft's May security update
KDE bags €1.3M as Europe realizes it might need an OS of its own
HP stuffed a PC into a keyboard. We took it for a spin
Forget one chip to rule them all: With TPU 8, Google has an AI arms race to win
Growing AI power slurpage prompts MPs to examine low-energy computing
PrismML debuts energy-sipping 1-bit LLM in bid to free AI from the cloud
'Uncle Larry’s biggest fan' cut by email in early morning Oracle layoff spree
Lightning-fast exploits make it essential to patch fast, ask questions later
Tuesday 24th March 2026 20:34 GMT
"Talos was shocked by how quickly..."
Clearly they are not paying attention.
https://zerodayclock.com
The last graph is a "survival curve" showing which CVEs are not yet exploited. So far in 2026, 90% of CVEs are exploited within a week.
(This is exploitable CVEs, around 1% or 2% of the total. But with AI and reverse engineering published patches, discovery of defects and creating matching exploits is pretty much automated.)
Microslop stuffs AI photo restyling powers into OneDrive
Tuesday 24th March 2026 18:52 GMT
beware the head shrinkers
There is rumour that Google Drive used to compress ("improve disk footprint of") files without warning or notice. Transforming from jpg to other formats, or png to xyz to jpg. I can find a few complaints but no evidence.
If you value your files and their cryptographic-strength checksums, and you *insist* on using the Cloud, I suggest using tar or zip.
Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin applies to launch 51,000 datacenter satellites
Britain's satellite-watching gap to be plugged with £17.5M eyeball in Cyprus
AI Burning Man happens next week – what to expect at Nvidia GTC 2026
Microsoft Azure CTO set Claude on his 1986 Apple II code, says it found vulns
Royal Navy races to arm ships against drone threat
Memory scalpers hunt scarce DRAM with bot blitz
GCHQ dangles up to £130K for a CISO to fight the world's most capable adversaries
Quebec vehicles agency spent C$245M over budget on SAP ERP it wasn't sure it needed
Friday 20th February 2026 17:31 GMT
Performance, Cost, Schedule
Pick none.
This article defines a checklist of what to do to achieve failure:
- hardwire one vendor to the request for proposal
- failure to record significant decisions (analysis of three options)
- don't have staff sufficiently technical to review the vendors plans ("lack of preparation")
- don't understand the complexity
- don't do risk assessment or mitigation
- change scope mid-stream
- rely on two, count 'em, two system integrators
- rely on customization of a rapidly-changing vendor product suite
- let management make technical go/no-go decisions
And they succeeded.