Posts by StewartWhite

Brit rail cops bring live facial recognition to the London Underground

Re: It isn't the False Positives that Matter, it's the Loss of the Presumption of Innocence

It's funny how the plods at the British Transport Police claim that they need all of this dystopian tech but when they're in a position to actually do some real police work they just can't be arsed.

Witness them failing to organise an identity parade for SIX MONTHS so that a murdering rapist was allowed to continue killing (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Levy_case) but hey it's no doubt more fun for them to pretend that they're the new mini-Stasi than get on with some actual police work.

Re: Next up . . .

We want information...information... information!!!

Gym rat asks AI agent to book him a class, it hacks a waitlist API to bump him up the list

Re: Remind me again...

It was good enough for Beck though:

Soy un perdedor - I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me?

Claude Code puts auto mode in the driver's seat

Re: 89%

I just checked your figure of >10% with Claude and it said the answer was -12 or 7 or 6+3j or "Cairo!" but hey, probabilistic answers to deterministic questions are fine, Shirley?

Building up the US power grid won't be wasted, even if the AI bubble bursts

Would this be the same McKinsey that...

Advised Enron on their simply spiffing financial wheezes that went so well... until they didn't?

Advised Swissair into a situation where they had to pay in advance in cash for aviation fuel because they were on the verge of bankruptcy?

Encouraged Purdue to pursue policies that resulted in the American opioid crisis. Then advised the US Govt. on how to deal with the results of said crisis?

In that case, no thank you. The common threads of McKinsey's major calls are a) disaster for the company being advised and b) lots of $$$ being siphoned into McKinsey's account.

Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees

Re: One Trick Pony's

Told this one before but I worked for a couple of years in a university department that had amongst its faculty a v distinguished professor (who subsequently appeared on The Simpsons).

Knock on my door and a woman (who I knew to be a recipient of a PhD) comes in to say that the printer next door is only printing black squares and she's got an urgent document to print. When I enter the room I can see a large amount of smoke coming from the rear of the printer and a brief look at the back confirms that it is indeed on fire. I hit the fire alarm and forcibly usher her out of the room whilst she's still asking the question "Do you think that it's printing black squares because it's on fire?"

Latest GitHub outage squeezes Actions, Pages to death

This is your Copilot speaking - we're about to hit the ground at 300mph

Please could Micro$oft's GitHub bods supply us with a graph showing the amount of AI tokens their engineers are burning through vs the number of outages over time.

Pretty sure there would be a direct correlation.

News Corp labels some AI companies 'crass kleptomaniacs'

The Continued Adventures of the Dirty Digger

Quote from the News International stooge: "We expect our lawsuits to highlight and halt the murky, illegal behavior of AI companies who steal and flagrantly fence our precious IP,"

You can expect that you can halt this all you like pal, but the days when old Rupe's game could work are long gone. Altman, Melon and Zuckerberg have got way more cash than you've got along with better lawyers and the ear of the mentally enfeebled occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue so I know who my money is on to win that particular fight.

London cops handed victim's new address and number to her stalker, watchdog says

Re: Just gave the attacker her number?

"How dense do you have to be?" - come on, this is the Met we're talking about.

Maybe it was their head of "operational intelligence"? Purely a ceremonial role at the Met as they think the concept is as fictional as Mary Poppins.

LinkedIn realizes its users have been bathing in AI slop, offers a shower

To slop or not to slop?

I suggest that Hari Srinivasan starts looking for a new role as Microsoft's CEO has said that he "wants us to stop thinking of AI as ‘slop’": https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/05/microsofts-nadella-wants-us-to-stop-thinking-of-ai-as-slop/

LG monitors are using Windows 11 feature to serve adware

Gen Pop simply doesn't care

The article states that 'However, we doubt many users would choose to install it from there, considering the Store listing says the app can access "all system resources" and the user's internet connection.'

I think you're overestimating the intelligence of most users as a) they don't read listings beyond "This is the new shiny" and b) they don't care or understand about the implications of it having access to all system resources and their internet connection.

UK.gov withholds £10M payment from Capita over pensions project fiasco, as dispute continues

Due Diligence? We've heard of it

We've heard of Due Diligence but we simply can't be arsed - we're called Crapita for a reason you know!?

Essentially Crapita are with Leo Apotheker in his Californian slacker view of DD "It's like a whole lot of words dude - I ain't got time to read that shit, I'm too busy counting my $$$$$". See https://www.computing.co.uk/news/3073631/hp-ceo-leo-apotheker-didnt-bother-reading-autonomy-deal-due-diligence

Allstate Insurance quits Broadcom, alleges vengeful license audit on the way out

That ain't no bank

"VMware points to major clients such as the London Stock Exchange and Nationwide Bank "

I'm hoping that VMware do point to Nationwide Bank as a major client in their depositions as Nationwide isn't a bank, it's a building society. Points to lack of credibility in their submissions m'lud.

I had to work with Allstate as a customer at a previous employer and despite having so much cash their IT setup was awful. That said, living in the UK I don't really care about Allstate whereas Broadcom can influence over here so I'd rather Allstate won but that the lawyers took all the winnings (probably true anyway).

HS2's latest reset ditches autonomous train tech to get project back on track

Re: We should have outsourced it to Japan.

Can I have a super saver return to Alpha Centauri please, coming back Thursday?

A successful project

In answer to your question, Cambridge North station was delivered ahead of time and below budget so it just goes to prove that it is possible to build a station in the 21st century despite the supposed impossibility of building a station at Euston (ok, I get that Euston is on a much larger scale but really, two unsuccessful designs and millions of £ spaffed away aren't a good advert for the birthplace of railways) because the secrets of building stations were lost shortly after the last pyramid of Giza had its topping out ceremony apparently.

Re: HS 2 late

Indeed! Next up on our tour of slightly hilly places in England (after Lime Kiln Hill in Cambridge):

Climbing up on Solsbury Hill

I could see the city light

Wind was blowing, time stood still

Eagle flew out of the night

Re: HS 2 late

It was only on the final leg of our scaling of Walbury Hill that Sherpa Ten-ZING! pointed out the snow-capped peak with its resident Himalayan Vultures circling ominously overhead.

We swiftly put the Union Jack atop the summit and breathlessly retreated from its vast altitude (974 ft and counting!) to have a celebratory pint of ale and a pork pie at the Crown and Garter!

Startup sues Palo Alto Networks' Koi Security, saying an AI-hallucinated report falsely linked it to Chinese espionage

This is not going to end well

There's going to be loads of this sort of thing (careful now) and as with a lot of civil cases it will likely be the company with the largest number of $$$ in its pockets that wins.

https://www.technology.org/2026/06/12/german-court-google-ai-overviews-liable/ is an even more interesting case but as Google are being sued in that case I'm sure they'll lean on the German courts to "do the right thing" (i.e. find in favour of Google) and if that doesn't work they'll ask their corrupt friend/fiend in the White House to do their bidding and slap a 100% tariff on German goods if they find for the plaintiffs (in exchange for a few beads no doubt).

Godot says bye bye AI, bans vibe-coded contributions

Godot? You should be so lucky

"I know not what godot is" - I'm still waiting for Vladimir and Estragon to tell me when godot 2.0 is finally going to appear.

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

Re: Stiction [was Sticky Bits]

... and you tell that to children today and they won't believe you!

Why Amazon hates 'human-in-the-loop' AI governance

"Distinguished"? My arse!

"Eric Brandwine, distinguished engineer" extinguished more like (see icon) - he's just a corporate shill for the usual AI drivel at Amazon et al but he seems to actually believe this nonsense. Give me a cynical liar over anyday over somebody that thinks they're a genius (says who?) but is too dim to wake up and smell the coffee.

Brit workers waste nearly six hours a week 'botsitting'

Re: Presumably...

Claude is much better than Copilot at Port scanning, it came up with this: https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/cockburn-s-special-reserve-port-75cl

Anthropic recruits army to sell Claude to nonprofits

The "King" is in the altogether

I see that Anthropic are following the same tired old "Catch them young" method of the Jesuits and the Khmer Rouge as their indoctrination programme is only available to greenhorns with less than two years' experience. Wouldn't want anybody who knows anything at all about IT involved as they might start pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes.

Oracle's AI datacenter splurge gives investors the capex jitters

Re: Popcorn icon urgently required

Oh that's easy to answer, see https://medium.com/@_rajaraman/big-techs-ai-accounting-loop-when-investment-looks-like-revenue-43a33aa57b2a for the detail or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKYh1egpgKM for Paul Weller's somewhat more simplified take on the matter.

Here's the code equiavlent:

10 Oracle "buys" GPUs from Nvidia

20 Nvidia "buys" OpenAI stock,

30 OpenAI "buys" data centre capacity from Oracle

40 Goto 10

'Resistance is futile,' says Qualcomm CEO. AI agents will be become invisible, inescapable, follow you across devices

"It's getting a bit cold in here" said Cristiano, "throw another peasant on the fire Jeeves"

Shirley Cristiano Amon meant "“Resistance is useless" as per the Vogons rather than "futile" a la Cybermen? The latter would be relatively benign overlords (and at least technically capable) compared with these overpaid tech bro lunatics.

LLMs are closer to religion than they appear. Watch out for those who like it that way

Re: "young earth creationists believe it’s 600 years old."

Death to the unbelievers!

AI sackings reach New Zealand, which will use it to eject 14 percent of government staff

Re: AI and hospital notes

I think we're all being terribly unfair on Minister Willis. She's just trying to get AI to provide dangerous medical advice so that Oz can implement an assisted dying bill to save on healthcare bills without all that tiresome business of legislation and consent.

Gothenburg's self-driving bus trammed on day one

Re: How can driverless vehicle be legal?

Because $

Anthropic to release Mythos-class models to the public

Why are huge numbers of bugs in key systems acceptable?

Why does nobody raise the point as to why we as an industry and those who buy systems think that companies shipping poor quality software is fine?

This was always technical debt - it's now coming home to roost and everybody is clutching their pearls.

Civil servants to protest outside Capita AGM over pension shambles

Re: CRAPITA indeed

100% agree. The Teachers' Pension Scheme that they supposedly administer is just as bad. It's being handed over to those known cybersecurity experts TCS so whilst there might well be an initial improvement in response but Tata will just let the Russians/North Koreans/some PFY in New York have full access to the system shortly afterwards as cybersecurity is clearly a nonsense term as far as they are concerned (JLR, M&S etc.).

Capita literally can't explain where the figures come from in an example I'm all too aware of and after three times of asking, they've come up with three radically different sets of figures with no explanation provided.

Whilst I get that people can't understand why these idiot firms can't do anything right (bar collecting their £££££), the procurement rules normally mean that previous incompetence in a different contract with another part of government/public sector literally cannot be taken into consideration. It's a bit weird IMO that (other than C suite) this rule doesn't apply to us peasants when we're applying for a job, e.g. "Yes, I did set fire to the office on my first day in my previous job and I still think that Javascript is the language they use in an Indonesian province but you can't hold that against me!"

NHS England confirms: Palantir staff can access patient data

Re: Post Office Horizon

...and you're in with a chance of sextuplets as you're also a Border Collie.

GPT-5.5 may burn fewer tokens, but it always burns more cash

As Frank Zappa said "It's just a token of my extreme"

Q: What does a token represent?

A: Whatever the LLM owners say it does but mainly $, £ & € (or Flanian Pobble Beads) in their pockets.

Met Police's Palantir deployment has its own officers watching their backs

Re: On the Job?

"... flagging staff who rarely attend work and yet have declared a second job."

Like MPs you mean?

Face recognition is nowhere near accurate enough

The old "if you've done nothing wrong then you've nothing to fear" canard rolled out again.

Answers to your facile response:

1. Face recognition technology is nowhere near accurate enough to prevent arrests and miscarriages of justice, even if you accept the highly dubious claims of the manufacturers and the Met (best described as employing a "few good apples" rather than a few bad). People have already been arrested, charged and detained for offences that were committed by somebody else but hey, let's just nick whoever the tech says did it then blame that rather than the cops being too lazy to do their job properly. It's no better than saying "CoPilot made us invent these fictitious reasons why Aston Villa vs Maccabi Tel Aviv couldn't go head. Damn, we were meant to carry on pretending that we hadn't used it". People are already being banned from shopping at supermarkets because they've been incorrectly found to be shoplifters thanks to this same technology. If you really think tech is 100% accurate all of the time, please can you confirm that you've never had to reboot a PC to get it working again.

2. The government de jour (no matter the political persuasion, they're all essentially the same) loves nothing more than weaponising legislation for purposes that are clearly unacceptable in the minds of anybody sane (obviously this doesn't include MPs as being a sociopath is a requirement for the role) such as Jack Straw (aka the hypocritical sanctimonious prig who accepted cash to ask questions in the House of Lords) and other Labour goons having police arrest an 82 year old man under the Prevention of Terrorism Act for daring to shout "nonsense" when Straw was spouting his usual drivel re the invasion of Iraq invasion having been a complete success. See https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2005/sep/29/uk.labourconference for more info on this disgraceful incident. Anybody who says that the Police are "non-political" in their actions is either a fool or a knave as this fully demonstrates.

Medical data of 500k Biobank volunteers listed for sale on Alibaba, UK minister reveals

Bullet dodged from my POV

I applied for the CIO role at Biobank but was rejected on the grounds that others were "more qualified". If "more qualified" means being completely blasé about allowing bulk download of confidential health data by dubious institutions as long as enough £/$/€/Yuan are proffered then I'm glad they found somebody better suited for the role.

My definition of dubious institutions includes all China based companies as they have a mandatory duty to provide undisclosable access to anything and everything that the CCP demands. To be fair to China, this also applies to other nation states that are similarly uninterested in the rule of law in this area such as Russia and the USA (the latter through the CLOUD act for anybody jibbing at my gratuitous poke at Uncle Sam).

Apple has an opportunity to rediscover humanity in its push toward AI

Corporate Responsibility, yeah I've heard about it but think of the stock options and $$$$$

Precisely zero chance of whichever droid is made CEO of Apple or any other Big Tech firm doing anything other than the following McKinsey et al patented "method". Apologies for the use of a Go To but like AWS I just can't be bothered to deal with the technical debt.

1. Raise prices

2. Reduce functionality

3. Suck up to the man baby in the White House

4. Stick intrusive ads in our products wherever we can

5. Suck up to Trump a bit more

6. Share buybacks

7. Sack thousands of meatbags by email because... AI (or whatever else you can think of at the time, e.g. Iran war, invasion from Mars, ramifications of the Dutch Tulip bubble)

8. Increase CEO pay, bonuses and stock options

9. Go To 1

ServiceNow allegedly says salesman 'overachieved' and is not entitled to comp

Re: The Oracle gambit

"Are they easier to tip than cows?"

I don't know about easier but they appreciate a few pence whereas a cow will fill your face with methane if it's anything less than £10.

Lloyds app glitch turned transactions into shared experience for 447k users

The bank is now reviewing how that defect slipped past its ... testing ... processes

Didn't you know, testing is for wimps! We need to go at AI speed to do more stupid things even faster as AWS seem to have now mandated.

Staff too scared of the AI axe to pick it up, Forrester finds

Re: So tell us what it can do

Re checking the weather, just move to Manchester then there's no need for IT at all. You just have to look out the window and it's either raining now or it will be in 10 minutes time.

UK government admits Capita pension portal was crapita at launch

Crapita has a crysal ball apparently

"... there are features that we are successfully going live with this weekend"

Clearly Crapita can see into the future re this weekend's work being a success before it happens. Or maybe they're just carrying on with the usual fake it until you make it nonsense with the "surprise" twist that there's always lot of faking, never lots of making.

Brit lawmaker targeted by AI deepfake fails to get answers from US Big Tech

If it's you it's fair comment. If it's me as an MP then it's offensive and MUST be removed !

As ever with politicians, they couldn't care less if it affects us sans-culottes but if it affects the nobility or an "important" member of the bourgeoisie such as MPs then "It's a gross invasion of privacy and must be stopped forthwith".

Then these self-same individuals with all the self awareness of a pet rock have the gall to complain that the public are voting for the "wrong" parties in the shape of the populists. Whilst IMO only a fool or a knave would vote for Nigel "I don't even know where Clacton is" Farage or Zach "I can hypnotise your breasts bigger" Polanski I get where the public are coming from regarding the rejection of the status quo.

Vote Count Binface, you know it makes sense!

AI-pilled Arm CEO teases mystery products that will turn it into a money machine

Repeat of the South Sea Bubble anyone?

"... teasing a future product that he thinks will pump the British chip designer's total addressable market (TAM) to $1 trillion by the end of the decade. What are those products? That's a question for tomorrow."

and exactly how is this different from the following (supposedly apocryphal) boosting in relation to the South Sea Bubble of 1720?

"A Company for Carrying on an Undertaking of Great Advantage, but Nobody to Know What it Is"

Head-mounted VR hardware will never happen, says Neal Stephenson - who coined the term ‘metaverse’

‘People don’t like wearing things on their faces and don’t trust those who do’

‘People don’t like wearing things on their faces and don’t trust those who do’ - does this include glasses?

That said, see icon for detailed explanation as to the veracity of the point re wearing diving googles on your face whilst strolling down the high street. Just add an oxygen cylinder and flippers to prove how "High Tech" you really are.

Country that put backdoors into Cisco routers to spy on world bans foreign routers

Re: Ha ha ha ha ha

Apparently "You know when you've been Tango'd" is the code phrase used by "Leaky" Pete Hegseth for a missile launch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqm-s6h8l1I

UK to rethink tech buying after Palantir contracts

Re: Opt-out? You're having a laugh

Sadly I don't think a wine and steak dinner would be able to "trump" the backhanders from Palantir to the powers that be so although they would no doubt heartily accept the offer of a free dinner Palantir would still be the one paying the piper more and hence still calling the tune.

Opt-out? You're having a laugh

Interestingly people think that they have an optout re their personal NHS data being used in the Federated Data Platform. https://www.england.nhs.uk/digitaltechnology/nhs-federated-data-platform/security-privacy/nhs-fdp-privacy-notice/#thirteen makes it clear that nobody can opt out (apart from genuinely important people such as the Health Minister no doubt). It's nice to know that our data is being misused for free by a spy-tech firm and MPs simply don't care.

I specifically objected to the ICO re my data being used in the earlier incarnation of this spying exercise (Faster Data Flows) but they told me to get lost as per below (NHS England is no longer relevant, not that it ever was, in this case but it makes no difference). As it explicitly states "personal data" is to be used for pretty much anything they like - the idea that the NHS has a clue what Palantir are doing with the data that they're scraping from the NHS would be hysterically funny if it weren't so serious an abuse.

- We have been given a legal ‘Direction’, from the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care which requires NHS England to collect this data.

- The Direction creates a legal obligation for us to use personal data for the purpose set out in the Direction.

While you're here, could you go out of your way to do an impossible job?

Just how dangerous is this electricity stuff anyway?

At a previous employer, a customer asked me for "just one more thing": that I inserted a data logger measuring electricity usage into a working electricity substation on their site.

When I pointed out that a) I work in IT and b) I don't mess around with electricity much beyond wiring a plug they still couldn't see the problem as "it would save us some time and money".

A hard Paddington stare and a firm "No" later they left me to do the work I was actually there to do.

PwC will say goodbye to staff who aren't convinced about AI

The Richardson Gang & The Kray Twins

I'm hoping that you're not a relative of Jack "The Hat" McVitie but just in case you are I've upvoted your comment so that you don't feel compelled to nail my pelvis to the coffee table.

North Korea's 100,000-strong fake IT worker army rake in $500M a year for Kim Jong Un

Re: How is this different

You've just identified late-stage capitalism.

It's different from North Korea in one highly important respect: they'll be quite happy to tell you that Kim Jong Un is indeed fat. God Bless America!