Posts by Bitsminer

Microsoft Azure CTO set Claude on his 1986 Apple II code, says it found vulns

Re: Who cares?

Also known as MBM.

Management by magazine.

Royal Navy races to arm ships against drone threat

Re: You owe me a new keyboard!

"I never drink coffee while reading The Register."

Memory scalpers hunt scarce DRAM with bot blitz

What's old is new again...

Some of us are old enough to remember the 1990s when offices were pillaged by thieves for PCs or the RAM therein.

Iron bars on windows and glass-break detectors became the new thing.

GCHQ dangles up to £130K for a CISO to fight the world's most capable adversaries

BYOI?

Bring your own income.

Quebec vehicles agency spent C$245M over budget on SAP ERP it wasn't sure it needed

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.

AMD climbs in desktop and server CPUs while Intel battles supply squeeze

Re: Take a deep breath then read the following sequence of statements carefully !!!

Thank-you.

Now please parse "major client portfolio updates" for us.

Log files that describe the history of the internet are disappearing. A new project hopes to save them

Re: DejaNews

Those who do not preserve history are doomed.

Four horsemen of the AI-pocalypse line up capex bigger than Israel's GDP

Another factoid: without the AI build out the US economy would have shrunk in 2025.

Trumponomics indeed.

AWS intruder achieved admin access in under 10 minutes thanks to AI assist, researchers say

Exactly right?

The article implies defenders have to be exactly right just once, and attackers will thereby be stopped and stopped forever.

But in a dynamically changing service environment like AWS, is this even possible?

DIY AI bot farm OpenClaw is a security 'dumpster fire'

Crustafarianism...

The credulity of Forbes is, well, very believeable.

Other press outlets have been equally gullible.

Like humans, the bots need bread and circuses too.

What's about Fantasy AIsland?

JeopardAIy?

One Token After Another

Hinton

Keep it simple, stupid: Agentic AI tools choke on complexity

complexity

It's an old saying in system engineering: the complexity on both sides of an interface is (or should be) about the same.

Examples: the SCSI spec for talking to disk drives and the complexity of the firmware on said drives. (Also true of SATA etc etc).

And debugging complex code is more complicated than writing it.

Here, an AI judging the output of another AI has to be at least as big and smarter than the AI doing the work.

As indicated often, some lessons are learned the hard way.

UK government exempting itself from flagship cyber law inspires little confidence

"...bespoke legislation..."

The laugh of the day.

Baby's got clack: HP pushes PC-in-a-keyboard for businesses with hot desks

No hardwired network?

Hard pass.

WiFi is not acceptable in an enterprise environment.

NIST contemplated pulling the pin on NTP servers after blackout caused atomic clock drift

Re: [System.Globalization.CultureInfo]::InvariantCulture

...

There was nobody of her specific kind within several thousand light years of where she sat, though if there had been they might have said that she was somewhere between being a young woman and one at the very start of middle age.

It gets deeper after that.

(Iain Banks, Matter, 2008)

[System.Globalization.CultureInfo]::InvariantCulture

I think Iain Banks would have liked this reference.

MI6 chief: We'll be as fluent in Python as we are in Russian

Downvoted...

My thumb got tired from scrolling...

China, Iran are having a field day with React2Shell, Google warns

Re: Meanwhile

I believe the quote is:

We're not here to rescue you but you will not die in vain.

(Attribution uncertain.)

Death to one-time text codes: Passkeys are the new hotness in MFA

Re: What is so bad about SMS

SMS messages are not directly sent by your bank, SaaS or other vendor.

Instead they are sent by a "trusted" third party which connects to the phone systems to send the SMS messages.

The banks, SaaS and so on rely on these third party vendors (Plivo, Vonage, Infobip etc etc). Therefore the attackers focus on these providers, gaining sometimes surreptitious access to snoop on TFA clients big time.

In my experience, most places relying on SMS will also offer to set up a second phone number to send a text to. Or to send a voice message, so even a landline is an option, assuming you still have one. That is a defence against losing your phone. Use the wife's instead, assuming you still have one.

GrapheneOS bails on OVHcloud over France's privacy stance

Re: What the Article Didn't Mention

Soooo, age verification is really a backhanded means of user identification. Hmmmm. Interesting.

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.