Posts by stiine

Boffins probe commercial AI models, find an entire Harry Potter book

Re: Hang on a minute…

Does this mean that being a Troubadour would be illegal today? Just in case, I'm going to watch Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, again.

Re: Can it improve the Harry Potter books?

So they ran out of Sonny Bono's to kill?

On a separate note, now that they've demonstrated this, can they get an LLM to spit out EVERY literary work on which it was 'trained'? I'm guessing that it will be a much more complex graph than I would have used in school to graph sentences. Wait, is that all an LLM is?

Google pushing Gemini into Gmail, but you can turn it off

Gpod.

I already don't sort email by type or use tabs. So it will only increase the size of the blob of code used for the UI.

Humongous 52-inch Dell monitor will make you feel like king of the internet with four screens in one

Re: Dell UltraSharp 52

Just take $400 to Wal-Mart and buy whatever you can get.

Re: Meanwhile, on top of Great A'Tuin...

A collapsed desk?

Satellite radio transmissions are jamming telescopes and driving astronomers batty

Perhaps the interviewee would like to assist Starlink redirect some of that side-lobe energy into the primary lobe.

Worst case, we can pack up all of the astronomers and drop them and their equipment on the far side of the moon. I expect a Moonlink(tm) constellation will use laser uplink/downlinks because of the lack of atmosphere on the moon.

Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030

Re: Frangipani insane

Why would you think they'd have to understand the new Rust code? After all, they'll be using AI to generate it.

Re: Assumes it's possible

Maybe I read a different article. The one I read seemed to indicate that there would only be rusty AI programmers during the conversion, and only AI afterwards.

Re: "It's new and shiny - it must be better!"

Really? I've read that what you describe is only true if the existing interface will rust, otherwise the interface in rust has to be built to a c spec.

Re: Won't get fooled again

Ah, but some of the bugs in Microsoft code are currently deemed to generate correct output.

Re: Using Rust ist not the solution per se...

Will they wrap the entire codebase in unsafe {} ???

Re: “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code”? That's not an engineer, that's a patsy.

You used the singular. You're not pessimistic enough.

Pen testers accused of 'blackmail' after reporting Eurostar chatbot flaws

Did someone from Newag get hired by Eurostar?

Pizza restaurant signage caught serving raw Windows

surely there's a market here.

It may be dozens and dozens of one-off images, but I would be willing to design windows desktop images and the software to update them that would make this a non-issue. In other words, I'd automate creating, updating, and activating a custom desktop wallpaper menu to fit their display layout.

On the other hand, drive-thru's should have an alternate menu that is a simple list of items and their prices. If I tell the person on the other end of the speaker "I'd like the simple menu, please" they could push a button and until my order is complete it would display an alphabetically ordered list of menu items and their prices, with a space for a quantity on the left, and the running total at the bottom. McD's drive-thru menu is tolerable if you simply want a adult happy meal because they are listed prominently in order from 1 to 10 whereas TacoBell's drive-thru menu is an hellscape of where did they put it this time.

There’s so much stolen data in the world, South Korea will require face scans to buy a SIM

Re: "Korean authorities have already fined SK Telecom $100 million"

So true. Its nearly 2026 and I'm still paying off the 1998 Tobacco settlement at $80/week.

After they have face scans, what else is there? DNA?

Re: Scott McNealy was right. But we've built out systems on the premiss he was wrong.

They won't have to reconstuct anything. They'll have the images and the algorythms, and when they steal an HSM, they'll have the encryption keys. At that point they'll be able to create any image hash they nee,d to to break into any biometrically protected account.

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

Re: Give "us" an approximation...

No, its slightly less than 4.8 microseconds. There is no 'about' about it.

Re: NTP

There are several stratum 0 clocks, but there's no higher authority than the NIST atomic clock(s). They have peers, also at stratum 0, but those are atomic clocks at other institutions.

I've been in systems and networking since 1988 and I can't remember this happening.

Yeah, we had one until about 1790. Its been 99% shit as long as I've been alive.,

Workers should control the means of agentic production, suggests WorkBeaver boss

They're about to find out what we found out three months ago, which is the education requirement to make an agent do what you wanted it to do effectively by prompting is going to immediately cut out a lot of normal people.

I guess Agent K was right, people are stupid.

Tired of sky-high memory prices? Buckle up, we're in this for the long haul

Not likely.

They would have already started crowing about it.

Denmark takes a Viking swing at VPN-enabled piracy

Re: They Came for the VPNs...

Apple already tried the 'local scanning' trick, and opened a huge can of worms.

and how...

The document outlining the proposals did not mention how the government plans to implement this.

Let us know when they codify this part. We're all going to need a good laugh.

BOFH: If another meeting is scheduled, someone is going to have a scheduled accident

Re: Talk about flash·backs…

And a report from the structural engineer.

I don't know about you, but I feel young again.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Re: "I found that a strange concept of 'nothing,'"

Always has been. At least since keyboards have had more than just letters and numbers. I'm sure we've all had users that needed to have the carriage return = return = enter = ↵ talk.

A warm orange glow fading to white? Followed by dripping copper and probably smoke from the UL listed cable outer.

Reddit sues Australia to exempt itself from kids social media ban

Re: since when?

The put on your parenting pants and do the job you got, not because you were qualified, but because you had sex.

Vibe coding will deliver a wonderful proliferation of personalized software

Re: "rewrite expectations about how IT will operate before the end of this decade."

Not will. Is.

Barts Health seeks High Court block after Clop pillages NHS trust data

Is this going to work? Can you really sue to prevent the publication of documents that were stolen from you?

UK tech minister vows more whole-government megadeals after £9B Microsoft pact

Re: Has this ever worked?

No, it hasn't.

Judge hints Vizio TV buyers may have rights to source code licensed under GPL

That won't change anyhing for any tv that hasn't been updated.

Bots, bias, and bunk: How can you tell what's real on the net?

Re: "Liars, cranks, and con artists have always been with us."

The ongoing destruction of the NIH and the US CDCs as sources of trusted, reliable, scientific evidence based health and medical information, for sheer vandalism, must rank with the destruction of the classical Library of Alexandria by similarly motivated fanatics.

You're calling me an anarchist?

Sorry, the CDC has been biased since its inception. The University of Mississippi has a farm where it has been growing marijuana for pharmaceutical testing for decades. Even if you ignore that, studies have proven that its use has beneficial effects on medical conditions. Therefore, it cannot be 'Schedule I', but it is. The fact that its taken this long, and its still not been reclassified tells me that I shouldn't trust anything else that comes, or has ever come, out of the CDC. FYI, I wouldn't trust RFK jr as far as I could throw his family's ego.

Lets talk about COVID masks next. In January of 2020, the CDC website had a Q&A videpo lecture posted on the subject of N-95 masks and the prevention of disease. It was from the late 1990s/early 2000s and had been recorded during a surgical conference. Soon after they announced that wearing an N-95 mask would prevent the spread of COVID, that video was taken down. Why, you ask? Well, the medical professionals in the video described the sizes of viruses that would be stopped by the various types of masks: from a simple handkerchief all the way to a pressurized rubber containment suit with self-contained oxygen. It turns out that an N-95 mask was described, in that video, as inappropriate for preventing the respiratory transmission of COVID-sized viruses. Abrafuckingcadabra, and that video was taken down.

In short, if they lie once and you don't stop them (through ignorance or inability), they're going to lie to you forever. Even when they technically aren't, how are you going to know?

Indian government reveals GPS spoofing at eight major airports

Re: No Silver Bullet

I would suggest that a silver bullet is the correct and the best answer to this problem.

PostHog admits Shai-Hulud 2.0 was its biggest ever security bungle

Re: Shai-Hulud

A very large sandbox.

Canadian data order risks blowing a hole in EU sovereignty

obvious solution

Just get the DGSE involved.

Mobile industry warns patchwork cyber regs are driving up costs

Re: You asked for it, you got it.

'consequential damages' I'm pretty sure you aren't in the USA because over the last 5 years, every American's information has leaked at least once, so companies offering credit monitoring are just blowing smoke up your ass (especially since some of those leaks have been from hacks of credit monitoring firms.

As it stands, today, I'm sure there are companies that have contemplated ceasing operations in California (despite its large population) and Maine because of reporting requirements. Its nearly a weekly occurance that a breach letter is sent to the attorney general of the state of Maine, which when quoted by news agencies makes the breach appear to be smaller than it really is because they only reported X-thousand "affected individuals" when the actual nation-wide impact is likely to be 50, 100, or 10000 times as many people.

Microsoft's fix for slow File Explorer: load it before you need it

Re: i'd like to have copy or move start doing things immediately.

Yes, because maths is hards.

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

Re: Just say no...

Unfortunately, I hope you're correct.

Re: 30 percent of Microsoft's code was now written by AI

We can hope!

Zoomers are officially worse at passwords than 80-year-olds

Re: Asymmetric encryption

And we know that no-one can ever guess any string of characters.

Except monkeys, they can create the entire works of William the S.

Re: "They can probably set up a printer faster"..?

You could simply buy a projector.

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Re: Funny The Register Could Not Stay Up

Why would you add 'economically' to the requrements? How does that compare to being offline while your SPOF is down?

Incorrect. Both of those conditions can be avoided with more money. I've done it, and it really, really is quite a lot of money...

Re: SPOF

I liked how it was onlyi red in the middle, the Cloudflare part. The internet was up, EL Reg was up, but Cloudflare was down.

That's an example of corporate honesty.

Outdated Samsung handset linked to fatal emergency call failure in Australia

you're half right

You're referring to the fire departments that will save life, but not contine to save property, unless you're a subscriber. In other words, they'll show up and save you and your family, but your garage is going to burn.

Shenzhou-20 crew rides Shenzhou-21 home after debris strike

What about the seats? Arent' spacecraft seats tailored to the astronaut that's going to be occupying them?

I guess the 'any port in a storm' saying is true in 21st century space as well.

BOFH: You know something's up when the suits want to spend money

Re: One small step for a man, one giant quantum communications leap for iMankind

You could tell?

Re: a 'Management Abstraction† Layer'

re: try it !

I'm not that stupid.