Posts by Bitsminer

Chinese spies told Claude to break into about 30 critical orgs. Some attacks succeeded

Why Claude, and not Ernie?

Seems a bit shortsighted to attack the other side with their own weapon. Makes discovery so much easier.

Wait a minute....

Tablet market stalls because there’s not much new worth buying

2nd laptop screen

Looking at external 2nd screen for a laptop. Too much $$.

Then I pulled a disused Lenovo 10 inch tablet well past the last software update out of a drawer and found a software package that extended the Windows screen to the tablet.

Bonus! No extra expense!

Landfill denied another prize!

Amazon's AI specs aim to stop delivery drivers getting lost between van and porch

Saves them $20k per mis-delivery

In Canada, without photographic proof of delivery, Amazon had to pay CAD$20k in fees and refund for a non delivery.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/amazon-fine-delivery-9.6949078

AI startup Augment scraps 'unsustainable' pricing, users say new model is 10x worse

Second huge increase in six months...

And so it begins.

Frightful Patch Tuesday gives admins a scare with 175+ Microsoft CVEs, 3 under attack

ESU is free

"as you have already backed up your Windows settings, you are eligible for free ESU until Oct 2026". After pressing the enroll button on "updates" page.

Bit of a surprise but OK. I had thought I needed to "chat with the AI" to qualify. Turns out I just needed to backup a few files to OneDrive, using the official tool.

British govt agents demand action after UK mega-cyberattacks surge 50%

Profit...

There's a new investment strategy called #buythebreach.

When a company stock price dips due to a cyber event, buy in at the low price and await the recovery.

Example: Tata Motors is down by 41%.

Example: Crowdstrike dropped 50% last July after their software broke many companies' IT. It's now up more than 100% from that low.

(No I don't participate.)

Vodafone keels over, cutting off millions of mobile and broadband customers

Hopefully, there are no single points of failure...

Of course there is.

It's called management.

Google is very sorry for pulling down COVID misinfo and pledges never to use outside fact-checkers

Re: Politicise Everything

Politics is defined as a small group of people influencing a larger group.

Therefore, everything is politics.

"Get over it," to misquote some influential somebody.

Terminators: AI-driven robot war machines on the march

Re: What is this "DoD"?

DoD d/b/a DoW

Fire up the gas turbines, says US Interior Secretary: We gotta win the AI arms race

Fire them up?

Don't hold your breath.

Lead time on large-scale gas-turbines is 3 or 4 years. Mitsubishi, GE and Siemens all have rapidly growing backlogs and factories already at capacity.

Sky-high budget gap: FAA launches air traffic overhaul, lacks cash to finish it

On a single sheet of paper...

...please provide your complete plan for the invasion of Normandy...

...please provide your budget, schedule and launch for SLS in 36 months...

...please provide your budget and test plans make all Boeing aircraft perfectly safe in the next 12 months...

/s

Frostbyte10 bugs put thousands of refrigerators at major grocery chains at risk

Predictable (daily) password

At least it wasn't frozen.

More than 100 companies are chasing an AI chip gold rush. Few will surive

Mr President...

"We must not allow a mine-shaft gap!'

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need

Unclick

Too many times some popup took control just as I clicked.

So I want to undo that.

If Notepad++ can manage infinite undo then so should windows.

Linux is about to lose a feature – over a personality clash

Need for Governance

When I complained about the lack of technical strategy and governance over the Rust integration issues I was seriously downvoted.

Yet here we are again with more fractures appearing in the structure.

The "toxic behaviors" can clearly be remedied. Linus is example number 1.

The internal interfaces to for device drivers and file systems can be clearly defined and changes approved in a phased way taking different stakeholders into account.

Other unmanageable people can be layered to minimize their blast radius.

Actual evidence for kernel correctness and/or bugs in the form of fullon testing, by independent testers could be adopted.

Feature management could be added to help support legacy hardware while maintaining compatibility.

In short, governance of the features and processes (and people) comprising the kernel and its development.

Yeah. I already hear the complaints. "Too much corporate style overhead."

And the alternative, for a sustainable and improving and growing kernel is what? More of the same?

Just how long will that last?

Tech support team won pay rise for teaching customers how to RTFM

Re: Being able to read and understand technical manuals

And the answer comes from someone who can both read the manual and has the time to compose a response.

Gene scanner pays $9.8 million to get feds off its back in security flap

The official line

Sound corporate governance practices also ensure alignment with stockholder interests by promoting fairness, transparency, and accountability in business activities among employees, management, and the Board of Directors.

From the Illumina Governance web page.

They clearly omitted customers from the list of stakeholders.

ISS is still leaking air after latest repair efforts fail

Space opera?

In space, no one can let you smoke a cigarette.

Just follow the smoke....

AWS previews Kiro IDE for developers who are over vibe coding

Actually generating code based on a written spec?

Frightening!

Trump tariffs turn techies topsy-turvy as US braces for PC tax

Re: Idiotic tariff nonsense

The only place in the US where coffee can be practically grown is a small area in Hawaii.

We can look forward to a 100,000% increase in productivity of Hawai'ian coffee farms, mostly due to AI.

/s

Scholars sneaking phrases into papers to fool AI reviewers

Re: Code/data confusion

"if it works, it isn't AI."

Upvoted for that one!

Terrible tales of opsec oversights: How cybercrooks get themselves caught

I thought the Russian's were more prone to suicide using a pistol.

They'd shoot themselves in the back of the head. Twice, just to be sure.

FBI used bitcoin wallet records to peg notorious IntelBroker as UK national

...undercover agents purchased a stolen API key

Oh.

Trafficking stolen data is (not) an offence.

As long as you are a good guy.

Xlibre fork lights a fire under long-dormant X.org development

"The Reg FOSS desk is nearing 60..."

Let the children play...

Microsoft testing PC-to-Cloud-PC failover for those times your machine dies or disappears

Re: "ideal when physical machines aren’t usable."

Finally, a use for obsolete and unupgradable Windows 10 PCs!

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

Re: Requires 20 years experience

"Oh my God, it's full of stars!"

UK dumps £2.5 billion into fusion pipe dream that's already cost millions

Re: Electricity from fusion is basically fake

There is a publication from IAEA called "IAEA World Fusion Outlook 2024".

It lists all the public and private organizations experimenting with plasmas and trying to build power plants. There is even one company promising power by 2028.

(I was hoping it would list all the possible reactions under consideration but it doesn't. There is one but it's like $100 or something.)

It's a fascinating read. Most of the commercial information is marketing bumpf, but you can see a lot of scientific bumpf in the national descriptions too.

I would say there are a lot of organizations and a lot of billions of dollars going into this so-called "fake" technology. I suspect it may actually be real.

M&S online ordering system operational 46 days after cyber shutdown

Re: 48 days later...

The sequel is "48 Weeks Later." Nobody is waiting for that one!

Lumma infostealer takedown may have inflicted only a flesh wound as crew keeps pinching and selling data

Lumma reinstates it's C&C after takedown

Cyber crooks can have incident response plans too.

Who woulda thought?

Nvidia is cozying up to China with Shanghai R&D lab plans, Senators cry

Ironic...

...the US senators quoting foreign media (FT, Reuters) and the dreaded New York Times while trying to support US tech.

Cybercrime is 'orders of magnitude' larger than state-backed ops, says ex-White House advisor

[Can't] walk and chew gum at the same time...

A famous dig at US president Ford.

Microsoft dumps AI into Notepad as 'Copilot all the things' mania takes hold in Redmond

Feature Creep

If AI is the answer, what was the question?

AMD puts Intel in rear view mirror with Threadripper Pro 9000 high-end desktop chips

350 watts

Or 0.469 horsepower.

That's a lot of hay.

GitHub Copilot angles for promotion from assistant to agent

Re: Want to start a career in coding?

A downvote from me.

Counterexample: think of all those unemployed S360\Assembler programmers. They're driving taxis now, aren't they? /s

Your complaint (you're not alone, there's hundreds of similar complaints everywhere) is based on at least one assumption: you believe that the appetite of the employer for new/modified code is constant. With "n" developers they get X-amount of code per month. AI lets them get X for cheaper, perhaps far cheaper(*).

But, truly (*), code now costs 1/10 as much. Don't they see that as an advantage, even a market-beating one? The employers can now get 10x the code for the same price and swamp the competition with features, quality and performance in their software or web sites without changing their costs much. Isn't that an advantage?

(*) The 10x AI coding gain is, granted, suspicious and there's varied evidence supporting it. However, even without AI there was always a 10:1 ratio between the gifted and grafted programmers. AI just amplifies this a little.

Microsoft revives DOS-era Edit in a modern shell

I have no memory of this place....

(Youtube)

Ex-NSA bad-guy hunter listened to Scattered Spider's fake help-desk calls: 'Those guys are good'

TARGET pronounced Tar-gey.

US Transpo Sec wants air traffic control rebuild in 3 years, asks Congress for blank check

Three years?

I think the integration testing would last three years.

And when it's time to turn it all on, do you go "incremental" or "big-bang"?

Just wondering what years not to fly.

Trump wants to fire quarter of NASA budget into black hole – and not in a good way

but..but...Titan

I just hope they don't cancel the Dragonfly mission to Titan.

An atomic-powered helicopter on a moon of Saturn. Can't beat that for creativity!

Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

I never drink coffee...

...when reading The Register.

Pentagon needs China's rare earths, Beijing just put them behind a permit wall. Oops

Trump administration should have...

Woulda, shoulda, coulda.

Google's got a hot cloud infosec startup, a new unified platform — and its eye on Microsoft's $20B+ security biz

"exposure management"?

WTF?

Museum digs up Digital Equipment Corporation's dusty digital equipment

Re: VMS was where I started

Former $WORK had a contract with ESA and communication was by VAX email over DECnet over X.25.

$WORK had an office in Switzerland, because timezones, and ESA were always amazed we could get one-day turnaround on document updates. The Magic was simple: emailing documents and comments from the Swiss office back to Canada where the timezones mismatched sufficiently that work was done essentially "overnight".

But. Our Swiss office could not interact with ESA and our head-office at the same time; there was no equivalent to a "jump box" or "gateway" in X.25. They had to manually switch the X.25 DECnet link between connecting to home office or connecting to ESA. Which was OK most of the time, except when it they left both links on at the same time. Both DECnets would be trying to route packets to multiple duplicate addresses. Ooops!

Microsoft tastes the unexpected consequences of tariffs on time

Lenovo video

I had the occasion to make a warranty claim on my laptop with Lenovo. The cooling fans were sounding like something between Clarkson's fart and an F16 on takeoff.

Only a video would adequately demonstrate the sound. I included a quick shot of the serial number just to validate my claim.

Can't make a text description of that. Or can you?

DeepSeek can be gently persuaded to spit out malware code

Re: Malware code ....

PHP

Nvidia won the AI training race, but inference is still anyone's game

Need for speed

The Cerebras service (free for casual use but with only a couple of models available) is very, very fast. Especially compared to commercial Nvidia-equipped CPU+GPU services.

I compare it to a video terminal versus a punch-card deck. With a fast response you can re-compose or revise your prompt quickly. With a punch-card deck you lose your train of thought, and you've probably wandered off to do something else.

If the same or similar LLMs are available on comparable platforms, then speed wins every time. If mixture-of-experts and chain-of-thought models get popular, speed is even more important.

Things are looking down for cutting-edge cosmic observatories

...the coolest particles in astrophysics.

I saw what you did there.

TSMC promises $100B US expansion that Trump hails without clarifying chip tariff threat

Re: Bullshit numbers again...

where are these 20+ thousand people going to come from?

OpenAI of course.

After clash over Rust in Linux, now Asahi lead quits distro, slams Linus' kernel leadership

[Rust is] the wrong tool for solving the problems that Linux has

What Linux needs is not a new language but better governance. Or psychological help. Or both.

The fact that Linus (or other leadership, a word I use in a very loose sense), does not have a longer-term migration/adoption plan for alternative technologies like Rust, or the means to communicate a firm "no" when people start pushing for one, are two of the many big issues Linux faces.

Some very big corporations rely on the continued success of the kernel developers to deliver working code. I'm very surprised they haven't gotten their mitts on the kernel leadership for a little meeting. We call it a "Come to Jesus" meeting in my part of the world.

Tick tock.

Yup, AMD's Elba and Giglio definitely sound like they work corporate security

Does what?

After reading the article, and the linked press release, I still don't get it.

The Pensando chip is embedded, sorry, "melted into" the switch and that makes it "AI-native". Huh.

But what is at the other end of the switch port? Another Pensando-based DPU? Is this just another way to sell more expensive, er, "data centre fabric"? Two for the price of three?

Intel sinks $19B into the red, kills Falcon Shores GPUs, delays Clearwater Forest Xeons

"...our world class design,"

If you have to say "world class design", it probably isn't.