Posts by Wellyboot

Another security calamity for Capita: An unsecured AWS bucket

Re: "No bank details" - Whoopee fucking do

Too true, and to slightly misquote sir Humphrey*,

"Grab as much as you can and decide what to do with it later".

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke9ec_Ua3x0

Muppets - no open buckets are cloud 101.

Is Crapita not using even a simple 'how to' script to set up new ones as crapita access only - start secure.

Australia asks Twitter how it will mod content without staff, gets ghosted

Re: Trust and Safety people and processes.

Five eyes - one in, all in.

We regret to inform you Earth will not be destroyed by an asteroid within 1,000 years

The chances of anything (big) coming from space...

508777 (2005 FL4) P=1.07e-06

This one is a bit close to Pratchetts "one in a million chance happens nine times out of ten"!

I'm thinking we shouldn't stop looking...

Cops crack gang that used bots to book and resell immigration appointments

Yes, basically this and I think the investigation only happened because they actually cornered the market aka 'got too greedy'

Microsoft Azure CTO believes confidential computing is the future of targeted advertising

Re: There is NO future for advertising.. NONE!

And if we don't want an AI avatar or any personal data available to advertisers?

Owner of 'magic spreadsheet' tried to stay in the Lotus position until forced to Excel

Re: Blunt instrument time...

We still get end users demanding static IPs because their software requires it (from really obscure subject specialist outfits comprising one man and his dog).

One was even compiled on-site after the IP addresses were put into the code because that was the copy protection method being used, the installation engineer didn't seem happy when I explained how NAT & VLANs could be used to duplicate the environment multiple times* on a single box costing less that a years support contract.

* Yes it'd be a nightmare to maintain or modify quite apart from being naughty.

Four out of five Uranus moons likely to have ocean under crust

Re: Bombs away!

Yes, they give off heat far too quickly

Working from home could kill career advancement, says IBM CEO

Nope, it's true, They DO need to see their minions regularly.

It's part of the narcissistic entitlement complex that far too many in senior manglement suffer from.

Re: wondering if fellow travellers are working together

You could upgrade to a different religion with better T&Cs

A location change may be required.

FCA mulls listing rules after Hauser blames 'Brexit idiocy' for Arm's New York IPO

Re: They wish to streamline the rules...

Precious few will get that reference.

for the unknowing - torpedoed, turned turtle then exploded.

Re: Herman Hauser and his views

Don't plame us English plebs, If the rest of the country had been given the same level of public infrastructure spending as London over the last 100 years there might have been a different result.

Re: Herman Hauser and his views

Yes, Parliament can pull out of any treaty at any time with a single vote & also Yes, the EU will have us back in a flash, they want our money.

However I'll bet any money that the 'Rejoin' terms & conditions wouldn't be put to a referendum because 'we voted to rejoin' and we'll just have to take what we're given just like when 'we voted to leave'.

I don't really care which bunch* of politicos are stuffing my money into their pants - I want them to stop it and actually try and run the country with a long term plan to help normal people.

Politicians promises - for details look up Lies, Deceit & Duplicity.

*UK or European, Left, Right or Centre.

Re: Herman Hauser and his views

The only number that matters is the count of voters who turn out on the day otherwise you must consider a non-vote as either yes or no, who decides where the 30-40% of non votes go?

How does your banana republic method translate to electing MPs when at every election only a handful ever get 50% of the electorate let alone 50% of the population.

Re: Herman Hauser and his views

Prior to the result not many people knew about the 'advisory' aspect, it certainly wasn't being mentioned by either side in the months of drivel that we had to endure so the vast majority of votes were cast by people expecting a final decision (like in every other vote). This resulted in probably the most contentious three years parliament has seen since the civil war.

I agree the requirement for a simple majority was not well thought through and having a 60%* target for major constitutional change would be far more sensible, however, the 1974 'do we stay in the EC' vote was also a simple majority because (I believe) that it used a modified version of the rules used for elections and anyway we'd joined the EC with only a parliamentary vote to accept the trade treaty.

Referendums across Europe to approve (or not) the EU becoming a a political entity during the 1990s would have rendered all of this unnecessary.

Tomorrow many of us have the opportunity to vote in safe, free and fair UK council elections, Please exercise that right.

* In this case for no other reason that the simple majority for leave would have given any UK govt. a really good stick to wave about in future negotiations - in the wider context we don't normally need constitutional change because it's based on Parliamentary acts & centuries of precedent with a few court rulings as garnish.

Tech giants could pay 10% of turnover under draft UK law

Re: Or not.

>>25% decline in sterling<< That all depends on the date range being used, I've seen many 'Pound drops by...' headlines but not many shouting 'pound rises'

Randomly picking a previous low point, for a short period in 1985 GBP/USD was at £1=$1 so you could also say the 20+ year trend was up by 100% when it last reached $2 in 2007 - Exporters trading with the US were really unhappy with the $2 rate, importers loved it.

Boffins rewrite the book on how Earth's oceans developed

The comet ice had to come from somewhere.

It's not unreasonable to suppose Earths water arriving/appearing from multiple sources.

Launching soon: ESA's Juice to probe Jupiter's moons for signs of possible life

Re: Goldilocks zone?

Yes, very similar to Earth with just a lower solar energy input, If there’s detectable life in the Ganymede ocean we’ll really want to know how the replication function is carried out, RNA/DNA or some completely different process more tolerant to ionizing radiation. That’ll be quite the fishing trip.

Smaller Moons

>>don't have any liquid water<< that we've detected, just like our Moon was 'dry' until long after we actually went there.

Astronomers clock runaway black hole leaving trail of fresh stars

Re: Hollywood version

Captain Kremmen ?

Daren't make some obvious jokes :O)

CAN do attitude: How thieves steal cars using network bus

One good thump and the small plastic lugs* holding the light fitting in place will shear, allowing access with a screwdriver and a little more brute force.

*I've replaced these at a cost of a few pounds each, dealers will sell you them if you ask for the correct part numbers - but they'll never volunteer then as an alternative to several hundred $/£ for a full assembly. (look for screw mounting holes next to the lugs)

Re: Why

Syncro is an aid to double (de?)clutching, using it as such would see modern manual gearboxes lasting into the millions of miles instead of the syncro cones abuse lifetime.

Gearbox abuse? - Guilty M'lud.

Re: Why

In the 1970s Volvos you didn't have any choice in the matter of running lights, they also had a light that came on when a bulb failed (sometimes even before it went) I believe it used the change in resistance.

Re: Easily solvable....

Yes, easily solvable - Remove the bus.

Have each circuit wired back to a CAN switch that is powered off when the vehicle is locked, this switch will be buried in the dashboard. Central locking cables (a stand alone system) can be placed where they can't physically be reached from outside the vehicle.

Crypto secured fobs make unlocking a serious challenge*, only for the thief to be confronted with a totally disconnected vehicle that is waiting for another crypto exchange (fob physical contact with different key chain) to allow the central CAN switch to power on.

Legal entry into a secured vehicle will end up requiring a time consuming major strip down theft will require a recovery vehicle and large tinfoils sheets.

* why they moved to CAN attacks - weaker target.

Parisians say au revoir to shared e-scooters

Re: Spin class ...

Shrugs & flicks a Gauloises* stub into the gutter.

*Now made in Poland by Imperial Tobacco

Losing so much.

A chorus of shock from all Parisian dentists - Je suis désolé !

School principal resigns after writing $100,000 check to Elon Musk impersonator

Re: "I am very smart"

Footwear for many specialised fields is available...

scam - protection racket is nearer

Nice data you've got on the web, It'd be a shame if something happened to it...

AI software helps astronomers deblur galaxies snapped by Earth telescopes

Artists are getting a change of career

Fanciful guessing of what something we can't actually see looks like, based on things the AI* seen before.

I await the first cleaned up image featuring a Klingon battle cruiser, because there are lots of those pics on the interweb already :)

*or ML

Amazon opens its ad-hoc Wi-Fi-sipping Sidewalk mesh to all manner of gadgets

a limit of 500MB a month

MODEST!!!!!

Six Gig per year of PII is an massive amount of data.

Europol warns ChatGPT already helping folks commit crimes

The bots sitting unfiltered & non logging on the dark web will be spitting out accurate 'how to build..' info. Only the less than smart criminals will get caught, so no change there.

The really smart ones will be using the age old technique of not being directly involved with anything that can be tracked back to them.

BOFH: The Board members are looking very ill these days

Re: Compassion

With automatic adjustment to provide a more snug 'fitting'?

Plant Based Nutrition

Bravo! All those Angus beasties dutifully providing wonderful steak deserve nothing less than the best.

Japanese outfit's private Moon mission enters Lunar orbit

Japanese transformable robot on the Moon

Why? - Because they could

German political parties accused of microtargeting voters on Facebook

Re: Meta

It's an annoying trend.

I had a similar experience trying to use Airbnb, they wanted an official ID to go with a simple deposit payment for a booking next year, previously bookings over the last several years have gone through with no issues - I found the location contact details elsewhere & booked direct - so it's adios Airbnb i won't miss the 'Lifestyle' BS.

In an unrelated event, recently I had to use my phone to confirm a card transaction. I had the option of speaking my card account number or using the keypad, after 4 failed attempts at pressing sixteen digits*, voice worked at the first attempt (wow! /sarc). Can someone give me any plausible reason as to why this wasn't a deliberate act to record my voice (having declined to use voice recognition at every previous interaction with the automated system), this is the same phone that they've sent their 2FA codes to since the process started.

They're not even trying to be subtle with PII collection these days.

*that I could see on screen was correct every time.

Tailoring lies to fit the target.

AWS delivers a – rather late – major release of its homebrew Linux distribution

Re: Why so hard?

I agree this seems like a low budget operation, they've also missed the obvious opportunity to gain long term users after stable Centos was deep sixed so maybe they still haven't quite decided where they want their distro to sit between the bleeding edge and 5 year LTS option out there.

AWS publishing their internal Linux version isn't going to happen, odds on it'll be an interesting build full of special purpose code they don't want being seen by any competition (let alone used).

We read OpenAI's risk study. GPT-4 is not toxic ... if you add enough bleach

feedbackloop ?

>>>make the model prefer responses designated by human labelers<<< so GPT is just picking the 'statistically best' from what it can find.

To prevent feedback loops, will it identify & ignore the guff it already output for someone else? that'd be a big storage requirement.

Workers don't want these humanoid robots telling them to be happy

Re: Patent Pending

The robot should be carrying a selection of baseball bats to save wear & tear on useful office equipment.

Capital crunch: Virgin Orbit confirms all ops on pause until Tuesday

Earth rotates from West to East, Launching Eastwards, you have that rotational velocity working for you, Launching Westward you'll need extra fuel to first remove that velocity* and then more to add it in the other direction.

* Bringing the rocket to a dead stop relative to Earths centre of gravity. Standing still at the equator, you're rotating Eastward with the Earth at 1,000mph.

Welcome to Muskville: Where the workers never leave

Re: I have some sympathy for the idea..

Bournville is still one of the better areas around Birmingham and a real shame it’s only a relatively small development. Rarely since have green open spaces been such a part of urban planning.

£2B in UK taxpayer cash later, and still no Emergency Services Network

hopeless

We're now 5 years past the end point of a 5 year design & implement project. Airwave looks set to out do the decade long NHS IT fubar that spaffed about £6Bn.

Duplicating the military tactical radio net with a few modifications to suit the slightly different operating environment* should have been a serious option.

* some secret squirrel stuff gets changed, base station network will be fixed and higher powered.

China's semiconductor and IC imports have slumped. Why on Earth could that be?

Re: So China may be forced...

They'd have better wheels for the short time it took for the know how to arrive elsewhere...

Swedish datacenter operator wants to go nuclear

You could be correct, RR have been selected to build an SMR (470MW) in Poland for producing Hydrogen (first production H plant?), with up to three more to begin replacing coal powered generators. Yes, Zero is also up to three but I'd give the likelihood for all being built as pretty good.

They also plan to build 79 (yes seventy nine) Hitach 300MW SMRs across the country with the locations being announced soon* as well as 9GW of full size plant capacity (6 reactors?)

* That feels like a block of towns of a given size.

Re: And ...

Very few companies set up their own power generation capacity, it's not worth the effort. Basically they want a known energy price for X years, adding a little more to avoid all the regulations/liabilities is a slam dunk, partnership arrangements with an existing nuclear power company that can own/operate the plant for them is far simpler.

For comparison, it's been a long time since car any car manufacturer had the urge to build a iron smelter, they just want the end product.

Cop warrant orders Ring to cough up footage from inside this guy's home

Re: Meanwhile in London

Government? maybe, maybe not

Company with a profit motive? Absolutely

Intel rattles the tin for another €5B in subsidies to build German fab

Re: you pay to build it, we take the money

More or less the same state aid rules apply in Europe so in theory STmicro can trot up to the Germans and ask for the same cash in return for a new plant.

Re: you pay to build it, we take the money

There's no group quite like American corporations when it comes to asking for public money and then using every trick in the book to avoid paying taxes on the profits derived from the 'investment'.

As for shares, these cash values are a little over 5% of Intel market cap so maybe a 5% shareholding seems equitable - don't hold your breath!

Service desk tech saved consultancy Capita from VPN meltdown, got a smack for it

Re: The old truth

Given more recent history, perhaps they were all hired by MS