Posts by Persona

BOFH: Nobody would be stupid enough to go live with the mirror system, surely

Operation High Flyer

I like the sound of Operation High Flyer, though technically the sound is a short scream followed by a dull thud often followed by a car alarm.

Succession: Linux kernel community gets continuity plan for post-Linus era

Re: A very healthy sign

The King is dead. Long live the King! A succession plan is always needed.

SpaceX's faulty Falcon spewed massive lithium plume over Europe, say scientists

Re: Lithium...

Lithium based medication, on average, doses patients with a bit over 150mg elemental lithium per day. The report estimates 30kg of elemental lithium in the aluminum lithium alloy in the returning Falcon 9 second stage. That means we are talking about a one day dose for 200,000 people if we could harvest consume all of it. This is about the population of Norwich, though if you did dose everyone there no one would notice.

Gemini lies to user about health info, says it wanted to make him feel better

Re: I don't see what the problem is

"Back to point 1, why would anyone ask 'AI' for medical advice, or get 'AI' to organise my prescriptions?"

Have you met my wife's doctor? Just because an AI makes mistakes doesn't necessarily make it worse than some members of the medical profession. It's also worth remembering that the pass mark in UK medical final exams is around 50-60%

Scientists show it's possible to solve problems in your dreams by playing the right sounds

Re: "Then Helen of Troy arrived, naked, oiled-up, and carrying the Dummies Guide to Coding"

I too have had countless instances waking up and having the solution to a gnarly problem pop into my head. Solving problems in your sleep does seem to invoke lateral thinking but seemingly only when you fall asleep almost instantly without thinking about the problem as you go off to sleep.

Amazon-backed X-Energy gets green light for mini reactor fuel production

Some regulations are good and some are bad. The hard part is working out which is which and this will vary depending on your perspectives. From my perspective we do seem to have quite a few that cost us a lot with very little tangible gain for all but the legal profession.

BOFH: Loss adjuster discovers liability is a two-way street

Re: "the last full Moon on Feb. 29 was in 1972, and the next will be in 2048"

They are unusually close together for full moon on leap days. I had guessed it would be a one in 28 chance every 4 years so averaging out at one day every 112 years. However that random AI tells me that the synodic month is 29.5 days making it average out to 118 years. Then it factors in the fact that we only apply the leap day 97 times (ish) in 400 years so the frequency averages out at one day ever 122 years. All of which makes if just perfect for inclusion in insurance policy fine print.

Sudo maintainer, handling utility for more than 30 years, is looking for support

Re: Remind me...

Are saying that to solve this issue with "free" software it shouldn't be free?

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: Well this works .... for me

It's a matter of scale. For a small garden using it to suck is appropriate. For a big garden that would take forever. I have a very big garden. I use my blower to push them out of flower beds and move them into a manageable heap where I pick them up by the armfull and put them into 0.6m^3 bulk bags .... several of them. In the back garden its easier. I use the blower just to move them away from the edges then sweep them all up with my ride on lawn mower.

Re: Well this works .... for me

I have used my pressure washer for stripping paint off garden furniture.

Well this works .... for me

I use my leaf blower to clean my PC's every couple of years, but not from too close as it's a powerful tool and fans will spin rather fast when the air hits them.

I have been doing it for decades and it's never done damage though, the first time I ever did it (back in the 90's) I did blow the PC over. Fortunately no harm was done and subsequently I have supported the PC properly. I always run the leaf blower for a little bit first and give it a shake to ensure it is free from bits so nothing but air is going to hit the PC.

A leaf blower is definitely not an inside tool so I use it on the patio where it's very satisfying to see the big cloud of dust instantly emitted from the PC. GPU heatsinks do seem to be dust magnets but nothing large volumes of high speed air can't fix

.......YMMV

Re: BS

15 percent water, and 5 percent oil ..... really?

Users prompt Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot to remove clothes in photos then 'apologize' for it

Re: Consequences

They are comparable as you are just arguing about the relative quality of the tools. Both need the intent of the person using them, one just needs more skill.

Re: Consequences

It's an old problem. There was a time centuries ago when the kings orders were written on parchment and delivered to far flung places to be implemented. Enterprising types realised they could just write orders themselves so this was countered with the Kings Seal which was a metal stamp used by the king to imprint sealing wax to "prove" it was genuinely from him. What could possibly go wrong....

Linus Torvalds: Stop making an issue out of AI slop in kernel docs – you're not changing anybody's mind

Re: paraphrase

There is another angle: is the AI trustworthy?

As I understand it open source contributors gain their reputation coding over many years and over time they become more trusted. Their code is still examined but it's inevitably not liable to as deep scrutiny as that submitted by a newbie with no pedigree.

The AI you use to write some code for you is most probably not quite the same AI you used yesterday. You can't really trust the code to be correct let alone not malevolent. Even so any code it writes and you submit will carry your pedigree rather than that of the first post from a North Korean contributor.

One exploit scenario is for a bad actor (think sovereign state level) to have "tuned" the AI they control to target particular programmers that use it and infer where the code is going to be used. For the right programmer in the right place it inserts a carefully crafted back door good enough to fool them that it's working code. Having looked at how devious the CIA can be, as demonstrated by Snownden disclosures, it does not sound totally implausible.

Security has traditionally been an afterthought in IT. Choose the AI wisely.

Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching

Re: that's called privacy

Encrypted SMTP is a thing and has been for a couple of decades proving that it is something that in practice no one really wants.

Fortunately the problem of email passing through multiple routers was addressed by Opportunistic TLS. Well over a decade ago many financial firms agreed to require TLS when transferring email with each other because we were paranoid enough. Doubly so as a devious intermediary could reject the opportunistic TLS.

China wants to ban making yourself into an AI to keep aged relatives company

The cat doesn't need you with that can of tuna. If you don't provide well enough it will go down the street till it finds someone else.

Re: Great Danes

Being a Great Dane it was probably thinking "I wish my hips were in good enough condition to allow me to jog like that."

The Roomba failed because it just kind of sucked

Washing machines have gone that way partly because variable tariff electricity is becoming more and more prevalent. It's not much use getting low cost electricity at a time when you are not there able to make use of it. A WiFi controlled washing machine, and the foresight to load the machine up in preparedness allows you to make use of cheap rate power which is why they make them and part of why they sell.

White goods manufactures are very cost and profit aware. If they didn't sell they would soon go the way of other failed innovations like 3D TV.

The other reason why they sell is they they tend to be on the highest capacity, feature full and most expensive machines. There are always customers that choose products on that basis.

Re: Next in line

you must make money ..... eventually

It took Amazon 9 years before they had their first profitable year. Last year they made $59 billion.

I like mine

I've had one for about 5 years and apparently it has done over 1500 hours of cleaning. I've also got a nice Shark vacuum cleaner I use when required, but the routine background downstairs vacuuming is done by my Roomba. I've a fairly big house so there is plenty for it to do each night downstairs. It starts at 1:30 AM and when I get up in the morning I empty its bin into our kitchen bin. Despite it running every day it picks up a surprising large volume of debris each night. Enough for me to wonder where it all came from and be thankful it does its thing.

When it dies I will replace it, but not with a Roomba even if they survive, despite the fact I like it. IRobot have been producing more and more expensive machines as time goes on and they have been ignoring the fact that other suppliers beat them at the entry level which is the biggest share of the market. Robot vacs are now a commodity product. There are much cheaper and better makes available so I'm not going to spend on a premium supplier.

Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud

Re: "Sovereign".....Exactly What Does That Mean?

COTTONMOUTH-I: A modified USB or Ethernet connector that installs Trojan software and acts as a wireless bridge for covert remote access, using a digital core (TRINITY) and RF transceiver (HOWLERMONKEY).

COTTONMOUTH-II: Similar to COTTONMOUTH-I but deployed in a USB socket (requiring target machine integration) to create a wireless bridge for data exfiltration.

COTTONMOUTH-III: A stacked Ethernet and USB plug that functions as a wireless bridge to enable remote network access and data transfer.

FIREWATCH: Disguised as a standard RJ45 socket, it monitors, injects, or transmits data via radio technology using HOWLERMONKEY, potentially creating a VPN tunnel to the target.

HOWLERMONKEY: An RF transceiver component used in various implants (like COTTONMOUTH) to extract data or enable remote control over air-gapped systems.

NIGHTSTAND: A portable Wi-Fi exploitation system that installs exploits wirelessly from up to eight miles away, bridging to air-gapped targets without physical contact.

RAGEMASTER: Hidden in a VGA cable's ferrite choke, it taps and modulates the video signal to RF (codename VAGRANT) for remote monitoring of a target's screen.

SURLYSPAWN: A keystroke monitoring implant that logs inputs on non-connected computers and transmits them covertly, often via RF methods.

TURNIPSCHOOL: Concealed in a USB cable, it provides short-range RF communication to software on the host, allowing data bridging from air-gapped machines.

Affection for Excel spans generations, from Boomers to Zoomers

Too important

A bank I was working at had about 400 people in the UK office. I recall a routine query on the NetApp filer showing there to be 780 spreadsheet files open. There were of course orders of magnitude more not in use at that instant in time. Moving away from Excel would have been unthinkable as the licensing costs were peanuts compared with the migration cost of compatibility checking everything. The risks would have been enormous.

Whitehall rejects £1.8B digital ID price tag – but won't say what it will cost

Re: Déjà construit

One could hope that it would be a single table, yet when you look at one persons details you find the name on the passport is spelt differently from the one associated with the UTR and the address on the driving license is completely different. The date of birth for the NHS number is different too, but that's probably just a typo. They might all relate to one person, but perhaps it's five different people.

Another open source project dies of neglect, leaving thousands scrambling

Re: WTF?

I've probably heard of it but as "media" has never been my thing I'm not familiar enough with it to be able to go from a description of what it does to what it's called. The same applies to audio processing. I had no idea what the audio equivalent of FFmpeg was till I looked it up, yet people into sound processing would be aghast that others didn't know it. I'm purposely not naming it as that would make it too easy for people to remember they had heard of it.

BOFH: Forward-facing AI brand experience meets forward-facing combustion risk management

Re: Be prepared!

Switzerland has National Service and hence a lot of well trained part time soldiers.

A BOFH colleague of mine from the Zurich office was responsible for commanding a missile system in the event of war. He did refresher training every few months.

A BOFH in charge of missiles ..... what could go wrong.

China recruiting spies in the UK with fake headhunters and ‘sites like LinkedIn’

Pros and cons

I never got approached by China, but back in the late 90's I got a call from Moscow and was offered a "banking" job. The salary mentioned was many times what I was currently being paid. I also got the firm impression that it would be on top of what I was getting from the bank where I was working at the time, as staying working there was a key part of the role. I declined after weighing the plus of the money with the minus of a future that could well involve me floating face down in a Russian canal.

Ransomed CTO falls on sword, refuses to pay extortion demand

Of course he didn't pay the ransom. The sum they were asking for was more than the value he placed on someone else's data.

China's CR450 bullet train clocks 453 km/h in pre-service tests

Re: "China's maglev train recently reached a speed in testing of 650 km/h in seven seconds"

That's the least of your problems. If you were standing in the aisle when the train started, to all intents and purposes you would remain stationary till the door at the end of the aisle moved forward to meet you. If you were 10m from that door it would meet you at about 50mph.

Britain's AI gold rush hits a wall – not enough electricity

Re: The obvious solution?

Lets also remind people that in the UK the daily output of a solar farm is over 10 times higher in summer when we don't desperately need the power, compared with the winter when it's needed most.

Solar is great for Spain, but not for the UK.

Re: The obvious solution?

Most utility level battery storage is rated for 4 hours operation. That's enough to help to get other power generators up and running but not cover days of weeks of the weather/climate being unfavorable for solar and wind.

Tech industry grad hiring crashes 46% as bots do junior work

Re: Disguised recession

conflate the value of an AI that's right or useful only some of the time with a human who could be right a lot more of the time

We have all worked with some humans who were wrong almost almost all of the time. e.g. Tony, who was otherwise a really nice chap, always had out by one errors in his code. He simply could not write any form of loop that iterated the correct number of times. When you pointed them out he would "fix" them and the resultant code would then be out by two! Tony was be a prime example of a coder that "should" be replaced by AI or even just A.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Another 550 employees set to leave the building

Re: Shortsighted

A 7 cm change in average heights for 5 year olds over that period would be massive, so obviously dodgy data as that would be a sustained 7mm per year! Average heights of children do bounce up and down a bit. The numbers show a fairly consistent 1mm a year increase over that period till 2020 when there was a sharp 8mm surge apparently "linked" to obesity. Since that peak it's fallen quite a bit but still above what it was when Cameron became PM.

There are lots of potential reasons, but as heights increased during the days of "austerity" it's not credible to cite it as "the" reason for their decline.

TLDR; citation needed

Climate goals go up in smoke as US datacenters turn to coal

Re: US datacenters are experiencing a significant shift toward coal-powered energy

Especially in Texas. Solar is (literally) brilliant in low latitudes. Doubly so as peak demand is often for air con so supply and demand are in sync.

It's when you get to the high latitudes like the UK, where solar output in winter is ~6% of that on a nice sunny day, that solar becomes a really bad idea. Coal or nuclear looks cheap by comparison because you would need a vast amount of solar to meet winter demand.

Re: And?

If you made modern society do without electricity for more than a couple of weeks there is a fair chance the survivors would be in favor of power stations that burnt babies to generate electricity.

Bezos plan for solar powered datacenters is out of this world… literally

Re: 85 degrees N

I'm still trying to work out that 85 degrees N context.

Is it because the North Pole of the Earth and Arctic is cold you think space in near Earth orbit is cold?

It's not. It's hot.

Re: 85 degrees N

What did I miss?

Context?

800,000 tons of mud probably just made electronics a little more expensive

Getting the copper out is the hard bit.

In 2011, British Telecom had a market capitalization of around £20 billion, while the scrap value of the copper in its phone network was estimated at £50 billion

UK to roll out mandatory digital ID for right to work by 2029

Re: What the House of Lords is for..

I suspect they would be more than delighted to miss the end of the current parliament if it meant they had a realistic chance of winning the next general election.

Campaigners urge UK PM Starmer to dump digital ID wheeze before it's announced

Re: Paying

It's not going to be easy to stop. Every step of the way our legal professionals are cashing in. Every asylum tribunal and appeal is a three way money spinner. The claimant's team gets paid, the Home Office team get paid and so does the presiding judge.

Note, I'm not saying that they should work from free: just making the observation that the more time consuming and complex they make the process the more money they earn from it.

EU starting registration of fingerprints and faces for short-stay foreigners

I used to do something not dissimilar to this 25 years ago entering into the US. I recall their INSPASS system used hand geometry though the enrolment process also involved my finger prints too. It was reserved for very frequent flyers as the enrollment took time. Once enrolled it was great to get to a full immigration hall at JFK airport and walk straight past the queues to the empty machines.

After deleting a web server, I started checking what I typed before hitting 'Enter'

Automate it

I had a colleague who deleted our web server two or maybe three days in a row. At first we had no idea what was going on, then I found the cron job he had set up to do something very different. He had forgotten that when his job was run by cron it would be running in '/' and not the directory he was intending to clean up. Whilst embarrassed by his mistake he was more than a little relieved to have found out why his cron script had been failing to clean up the intended directory.

BOFH: These office thefts really take the biscuit

Re: Factory tea

Mr Mulvihill used to bring me my morning cup of tea. It was vile stuff that I suspected got most of its metallic taste from dissolved tea spoons. I manage to drink it for the first couple of weeks to spare his feelings but after that it went untouched. After a few months more he thankfully stopped bringing me tea.

Obviously

Obviously, the PFY and I are doing it

Well yes. That was my obvious conclusion after having read the first line, but nice for it to be confirmed by the second line.

Data destruction done wrong could cost your company millions

Self Encrypting

Many modern hard disk drives and especially SSD's contain encryption hardware, particularly those from major manufacturers like Seagate and Western Digital. This is typically implemented as self-encrypting drive (SED) capability, which uses built-in hardware to automatically encrypt data at rest. The encryption key (typically keys) are stored on the drive and implemented so they can not be extracted. They can however be overwritten with a new random value. This is a close to instant way of securely erasing the drive.

Johnson, Cummings met Thiel months before Palantir won NHS pandemic role

It makes no sense to disclose "all such meetings". They are just people having a chat about something. Where do you draw the line: is someone delivering an "elevator pitch" in errm a lift a "meeting" that should be publicly disclosed? Public disclosure is only needed when the public purse is being opened.

Re: Britain is run by corrupt people

Corbyn's shadow cabinet had about 30 members/positions and 21 of them resigned. [Note - this doesn't mean 9 didn't resign as at least two resigned twice!]

He might well have been honest and decent, but that's a pretty damming statistic about his leadership skills.

Microserfs ordered back to the office, given 10 days to appeal

Reduction In Force

The cheapest way to reduce headcount is to give staff a reason to leave. If enough people say "I would quit if I'm required to work in the office 5 days a week", guess what: 5 days in the office is going to be reinstated.

Nvidia touts Jetson Thor kit for real-time robot reasoning

Training

I like that video of the robot getting pieces of yellow plastic out of the blue crate and the chap with the hockey stick interfering to make it "harder", yet the robot is still able to cope. We will know robot AI has arrived when it takes the hockey stick off him to stop him interfering. For the next level of "reasoning" the robot would take the hockey stick off him and beat him around the head with it to ensure that he would neve interfere again, ever.

China cut itself off from the global internet for an hour on Wednesday

Testing 123

Just testing the VPN blocking before selling the technology to the UK Online Safety people who want it to keep the children safe.

Yes it went too far .... but the children were safe!