Posts by Joe W

How the famed USENIX Security conf is managing a flood of papers in the AI era

Asymmetry...

ok, so you can now spam reviewers with AI while they cannot use AI to filter some crap. I'm glad I am out of the science treadmill, stuff is broken.

News Corp labels some AI companies 'crass kleptomaniacs'

Re: The Continued Adventures of the Dirty Digger

... can... they all lose? Pretty please?

IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day

Re: Could have been worse

Me, I guess 25 years ago or so:

"Oooooh, I'll just delete the hidden files. They start with ".", so if I just do

rm -rf .*

that should work....

...

that takes quite a while..."

That's how I learned it matches ".." as well.

Headteacher had the most guessable username-password combo you could imagine

Not a problem

The CCTV thingy running XP is not a problem - provided it is on a separate network and cannot be reached from the outside. And why should it have connections to the outside world?

NOAA ditches weather-predicting supercomputers for Google Cloud

Re: Local UK weather.

Yeah... nah.

"Tomorrow's weather will be like today's" is pretty decent as well. The problem is changes in weather, and thankfully Rossby did some great work for that (there were others before him, I forgot their names). How about questions like when does the weather change arrive? (like, when does the cold front hit with rain and thunderstorms), or how unstable in general is the atmosphere, will there be tunderstorms? Asupercell likely? Or, if the unpronouncable Icelandic volcano erupts, can we fly this or that route without the engines ingesting nasty stuff and failing over the Atlantic?

Getting a forecast for the next week is quite a bit more involved.

Big vacuum is watching as robo-cleaners put humans behind the wheel

So humans are doing the steering but because they are dressed up as robots (OK, controlling robots from afar) they don't count as humans....

DEF CON bans Meta-style 'pervert glasses'

are these people "oblivious to Floxk cams"? Really? The biggest push back comes from the tech savvy crowd. The very same peope attending DefCon etc.

Re: Yup....plenty of outrage about Meta glasses and Glassholes (way back when)......

Yeah, a battle we lost. And keep losing city by city and country by country.

There is public outcry, there is pushback.

Just because we lose there does not mean we mus willingly roll over in every other instance. So what is exactly your point?

Dev accidentally commits Copilot binary to FreeBSD ports repo

Re: Simplicity forever!

Prog.final.2.almostdone.donotuse.bak

Re: Simplicity forever!

The best decision I made was migrating from svn to git...

(seriously, we can now discuss this with religious vigour like vi being the best editor - the important thing is to use a version control system)

OpenAI admits it was the source of the agent swarm that attacked Hugging Face

Re: Air Gapss

[ ] you understand what air gapped means

(hell, stuxnet targeted air gapped infrastructure...)

Re: Confused

Yeah, but that was only the LLM doing what we told it to do, so we didn't do it, totally honest, guv...

If I tell a person to attack somebody else I'm on the hook (rightfully so), somehow laws seem to no longer apply. Meanwhile it counts as terrorism to object to a data centre. In the time of the luddites you needed to at least damage a weaving machine - and that carried the death penalty.

Chinese memory ban would cut off RAMpocalypse relief

In general, greater global supply should bring prices down. However, if you limit market access in your country you might not benefit from this...

Re: Subsidised?

That. Just looking at the current price hike compared to a year or two ago, the demand (or current estimate of future demand for data centres not yet built) enabled the manufacturers to ask any price. The margins are thus astronomically high.

Datacenter MacGyver saved the biggest football match of the year

... yeah, could be almost anybody...

(not bloody Red Bull)

UK guts planning red tape so datacenters can bypass the neighbors faster

FFS!

"For too long, vital infrastructure delivery has been delayed by judicial reviews of projects," a spokesperson for HM Treasury said at the time.

Ah, judicial review is considered a bad thing, maybe we can do without all those pesky rules for billioniares aiming to poison our planet. But woe! if you as Jane Common make a small mistake in any paperwork.

Brit supermarket giant triples down on facial recog to nab shoplifters

Re: Orwell's dystopia is already here.

Embedded system with the default libraries in place and some lazy sod vibe code extending the demo software that came with it?

Microsoft to assist European Commission in defense of EU-US data-sharing agreement

I came to look for the FTC comment. This is really missing from the text, because this fundamentally changes the conditions (ok, it doesn't, it was always just a pretence, but at least on paper they could argue that way). I don't really care if there are short term economical challenges, the whole system is too focused on unlimited growth anyway and needs some (a lot of!) pruning. The fun thing is that there were European cloud providers that were actually a pleasure to work with (my brother did so for a few projects), but "people have never been fired for buying IBM Microsoft" (or Google) - and they were relatively unknown (I cannot remember the name, ffs!) so people would rather go with the big US providers.

I hate it that politicians alienate us from each other through dumb shit like starting wars, or going thought police throwing critics in "detention centres" (not a jail, because there was no trial nor due process, or maybe only a show trial because they said the Dear Leader was an eejit). I grew up at the end of the Cold War and remember how open the world all of a sudden felt. I did travel to many different places (music and work), and met so many wonderful people everywhere, and this is no longer possible to that extent. It makes our lives all that much poorer. Remember: this is what they took from us! Europeans: don't let them drive you apart, the EU is worth it! Remember that we used to fight each other all the time until relatively recently just because some posh dressed dickhead wanted to.

Where there's a will, AI still has work to do

Do you really need one?

Basically, there's default rules as to who gets what. If you want to make sure that your family gives the lawnmower to your friend, or does not sell your MTG cards under value or that certain special someone gets zilch because they were a massive arsehole, or your girlfriend's grandkids, who treated you as their grandpa and took care of you get some stuff: sure, go ahead make a will. Digital assets _might_ need special treatment, but I don't really know, and this will become normalised with time and absorbed into the normal proceedings.

The rest of us? The normal rules are probably good enough.

Bold move, Cotton: Trump administration tells US techies it expects American quantum computer by 2028

3. is just a normal superposition of eigenstates and thus quantum

Google told researcher 'Nice catch!' Then denied bug bounty for flaw it still hasn't fixed

Re: Sell to the blackhats

I'm not in that field, but I am pretty sure there is a marketplace doing exactly that first half. Vulnerabilities, cracks, exfiltrated data have been a commodity for a while.

Having derivatives against vulnerability delivery sounds like a "fun" idea when combined with people breaking your knees if you don't pay up...

Bcachefs exits experimental status in new 'performance release'

Re: the comment button

It is also sort of hit-and-miss if the button is there (for me, on different systems Win11, GNU/Linux, Android) with different browsers (Firefox, Waterfox, Fennec) ) - and I am not referring to "sponsored" posts, which I stopped reading a while ago (I understand the need for them, they have turned even more into advertorials and do not really contain useful information for me).

The "week" page also often contains duplicated entries of articles... apart from that, the layout is usable (for me) again, both on my laptop and phone (don't have a working tablet).

Re: "his AI coding assistant PoC was conscious – and female."

wow... I recall reading that back then.

Holy guacamole - that was almost a quarter century ago!

BOFH: For one ambitious security type, chaos is a ladder

Re: At a previous orkplace..

At my university we had security steal PCs from the lab. Yeah, the PC was one thing. The data acquisition hardware inside? That was really bloody expnsive - and probably no real resale value because the market was pretty small. Really, nicking a PC that was maybe 2000 EUR or something and causing a damage to the institute of more like 30000 EUR.

And then there was the episode when copper thieves stole the piping for the Helium system causing a massive leak.

Python dev saved from disaster by intuition... and AI

Stop!

Just stop installing and running code from untrusted sources on autopilot. Isn't this something we learned the hard way 20 years ago?

(People older than me will say 30 or even 40 years ago...)

It's all a little bit of history repeating - and refusing to learn from past generations' mistakes means you will repeat them...

Chinese e-tailer claimed 14-inch box stretched the size of a 9-inch tablet

Beancounters...

A pharmacy I know that does lots of lab work - sterile lab work, cancer treatments, heavy pain killers for palliative care, all that stuff, pretty expensive and dangerous substances - had a bean counter fuck with their orders.

Not the meds, thank $(deity).

Lots of the stuff needs to be stored in the fridge within a certain temperature range. So, the fridges need to be reliable. A new one was needed and a purchase order was needed. The beancounter went "you want WHAT for that fridge!?" and started scrolling through the classifieds or maybe ebay (would have been Craigslist if it was in the US), and found a used fridge the approximate size that was needed. A used fridge? For meds? That has to be really reliable? Changing the purchase order from what was actually requested.

Thoughly cleaned (there's protocols for that, and professionals on staff that can do it) the fridge of the approximately correct size was installed, a missing foot had to be replaced, but all went well.

For about a fortnight.

Then, the fridge failed. At night. The head of the lab had fortunately stored the less expensive stuff in that "new" fridge and they do have an alarm system and a person on call all the time, so some poor soul had to drive in at night and cram all the stuff into one of the good fridges. It could have been a catastrophe for the business (those meds are bloody expensive), and the replacement parts for that "bargain" fridge were almost as expensive as a new, industrial rated fridge.

They had several run-ins with their beancounter, like getting them to understand the reasons for buying a sterile lab certified USB cable (they are shockingly expensive but do not shed particles and can handle the cleaning products used).

Devs know AI code is riddled with holes, but ship it anyway

Nope!

"It is a complex situation. AI is trained on existing code, primarily public code, which has its share of vulnerabilities that may then be replicated."

Make that "will then be replicated". And it is not complex. We have been shouting at clouds for years now: scrape bloody stackoverflow and whatever, use that as the basis of your software and voila, you get bloody stupid vulnerabilities like SQL injection, directory traversal, memory leaks, command injections, accepting user input without validation. And you get that with people just starting out and with the stupid LLMs you trained on that data. Your new colleagues will learn through code review and become bitter and grizzled and write sensible code, the LLM will continue to shit all over the place for the senior devs to clean up after it and write unmaintainable code (and you now have not trained up a new generation of senior devs, so you are f'd).

As otheres wrote: GIGO

Yes, it can speed up finding vulnerabilities. It will also hallucinate bugs and drown you in false positives. Good luck.

LibreOffice brands Euro-Office a 'de facto ally' of Microsoft's lock-in strategy

Re: Splitters ....

I think the caffeine deficient crowd needs their sarcasm detectors fixed... Yes, it is "a good thing"[TM] to add the de-facto standard "/s"-marker, no, I do not believe it is neccessary everywhere. About that way to indicate sarcasm, I would like to propose a new and interoperable standard that does not rely on the slash as a format indicator. I think it is incredibly crude to use such a vernacular term...

/s

Re: or

I personally think that html in emails was a really bad idea. It serves no purpose except adding stupid formatted text and a picture to your signature block. Yes, sometimes (once a year...) I send a table inline - not as an attached file, as should be the bloody default. I also think that top-reply is stupid. The old standard was really readable when done correctly. Yeah, get off my lawn, etc. *shouts at clouds*

So I do not need any formatting in my emails. I do not think that it is a too great hurdle to learn "this button creates a new mail", and can we please talk about the menu structure in Microsoft's products? It is pretty messed up, and not at all standard from version to version. So I do absolutely not see that Microsoft makes it easy for users.

Canonical sends Ubuntu into the AI agent era

To be fair, they have been at f'ing up their distro for a while. I had used it on my machines for a few years until about ten years ago. I switched back to Debian and then to Devuan - except on my kids' machine, that one still runs Ubuntu. And Ubuntu messes up. Big time. The last example was, when the stupid snap package of Firefox could not be installed correctly. I did all the normal things, deinatall, purge, reinstall, but finally had to go back to an older version, and apparently this means that now there are two versions of Firefox installed, and it is not possible to migrate the user data (bookmarks etc.) to the older version. The new version just would not start, no error message, nothing. How I hate snap (and flatpack) and the lack of testing.

Yes! It's true! Windows 11 is an agentic platform

Weird...

So, Microsoft is the hope for privacy?

Benevolent dictator Zuck will give Meta staff 30-minute breaks from keylogging privacy assault

Well, hypothetically, if the Meta-AI is trained on that it could maybe even turn this into an actionable item? You know, parody in minecraft and hypothetically speaking, purely, and not inciting violence in any way whatsoever. Have a nice friendship day!

'Please do not vibe f--- up this software': Broken backups spark AI coding row in rsync project

Re: Not doing work is also an option

It is still a regression bug, thus it introduced an old bug.

Tridge wrote he would rather be sailing, which is understandable. I do not know what he really used the lying plagiarism machine for, but I have read several more quotes of him that read rather less great than the ones picked in the article. I do not know if they were taken out of context (or made up). And we do not know what the stochastic parrot was used for - if it was a syntax checker, or fancy autoconnect or outsourcing thinking to it. Nuance.

And to those that say "why don't you contribute?!!!one!one!1!eleven" - more an accusation than question: I do. Not in code. My code would not be welcome - while I have been coding for 35 years or so I am still quite bad enough at it, plus I like Fortran and R, so I'm useless. I have submitted bug reports, have done translation work for Debian, actually write mails to thank people, and donate money to developers / projcts. Maybe all of us could

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

Re: Agents of Misfortune

There is this book where they have the "Butlerian Jihad" after mankind outsourced thinking to the machines.

Re: Say whaaat?

Those augmented reality glasses do exist, and actually do work (apparently) in a technical context. I think most moved to HoloLens? Cannot recall where I read that, so take it with a grain of salt (and a teaspoon of chillie powder). One problem you will run into for your use case is that most companies do not publish their schematics :/ so as Joe Average you cannot take advantage of that funtionality. Maybe for troubleshooting your own stuff? Like having the circuit diagram really close by, being able to sort of mark in the diagram what you already put down on perfboard?

I would like to say that - purely hypothetically - I hope we could normalise beating up glassholes again (there were some incidents when they first cropped up...) but of course I would never encourage violent behaviour, right?

Remote work – not AI – is killing job prospects for the youth

I have successfully trained a new starter remotely. And lost one, and in that case it could have been prevented by having better contact to them in the office (and me being a better team lead, I guess). So I would argue that there is some truth to that. I find it easier to train people when I see them once or twice a week - not the brilliant ones, those are easy [1]. Hell, I wish I had more supervision and guidance when I was younger.

It also helps to make some time to meet people from other departments, we have a coffee roulette thing where you can sign up and then meet for a coffee, or go for an ice cream about once a month. It helps to know some people you can just call and ask them stuff.

[1] though you often need to beat time management into them, they get distracted because they aspire to high standards and want the result perfect and sometimes are too curious and too interested in too many things - get the work done, then you can do the other stuff, I'm perfectly ok with you sinking time into whatever intricacies of the database engine you are currently reading about

Angry devs vow to flee GitHub Copilot as metered billing takes hold

Re: The well-known name ranking

Nah, they'll lower the number on the pricetag and change it from "monthly" to "weekly"...

Ohio hits pause on datacenter tax breaks draining its coffers

Re: Bit Barn Palooza

Hell, I have been to datacentres regularly. All the serious work is done remote - you only need to touch the bloody hardware when something is seriously broken. Only then you need to come in. Many jobs are done by other companies - those you lease the hardware from (or buy, but then capex vs. opex - not my job, don't care, just give me what I ordered!). So no local jobs. Again.

Okta writes its own license to kill rogue AI agents

It's the wrong way around

First make sure the stuff you are using is reasonably safe. Like, for start make the system behave deterministically. I would really start with that. The same input must always return the same output. Otherwise you are just implementing a random "mess with your business processes" machine.

It's not like this was one of the problems my student intern encountered. We are now back to lots of "CASE".

That an app 'Fits on a Floppy' is still a useful measure in 2026

Re: Obviously too old

you could also rip one apart and make a tiny Enterprise, or a Klingon Bird of Prey :)

Re: Router on a floppy

Isn't there this webpage...

..

ah, yes: https://justfuckingusehtml.com/

Plus (in general) stop using bloated pictures that have no meaning and just "look nice", they add no value and create the need to scroll. And don't get me started on the "zoom in" that happens when your mouse crosses that picture. Just give me the text you wrote, thanks, informative, loved reading it.

Microsoft tests the 15-character limit of Windows Server admins' patience

That phrase "unless you are forced" does a lot of heavy lifting. There are systems that are currently on windows and there is not necessarily a good migration route for them. You would need to train your windows admins, you likely need new software, so there's no admins for that at your company. Then there's no money to do the migration, and a risk analysis will be required and...

So, while I'm totally happy to set up my own Linux systems at home and for test projects at work, it is not realistic to migrate everything over.

Re: 'Newfound commitment to quality'

Hell, yes!

I just listened to that Kettle episode...

Troops’ phones gave away location data to foreign adversaries

Re: If i didn't know better...

... it was Strava - and mentioned in the article ;-)

Re: ...and this is news?

Well, get a van and slap some stickers on.

I would be concerned if they didn't do that already.

AWS parades orgs that took up its offer for Euro Sovereign Cloud

Re: Sovereign?

AWS, Google or Microsoft.

Ffs, they even said so under oath!

Dems slam Trump for making cybersecurity hold out the tin cup while splurging on ballroom and Jan. 6 'slush fund'

Re: Call me cynical

Sure.

My thoughts are that he cares f*all of poor people from rural areas are affected by incidents. They only voted him in office, they fulfilled their purpose. Yes, people call me cynical...

AI code accelerates production failures and spending, study finds

Delusion?

So 90% say their code is production ready while about 70% say their code has major issues they didn't catch before deploying it...

Doesn't look too convincing for using Al for everything. They know stuff is not ready and just keep pushing. We need to throw manglement in jail for any losses due to shoddy code, but then they'll point to the EULA which says that there's no guarantee the program works, like, at all.

Utah tells porn sites to take the P out of VPNs, and it's their fault that they can't

Re: The state of Utah may be surprised to discover

That's too much work, they blink at the frequency the blinking LEDs I have in my stash blink at...

If you hook up three blinking LEDs in series --|>|----|>|----|>|--- and three of those in parallel to a 9V battery they blink and glitch every now and then leading to an irregular pattern (if the 9V battery is not particularly fresh). Quick to solder, then arrange the LEDs in a 3x3 grid with mixed up (not all from one branch in the same row).

Linus Torvalds says AI-powered bug hunters have made Linux security mailing list ‘almost entirely unmanageable’

Re: It's not x but y

Nine out of ten doctors say smoking is good for you!

Oh, and radiation is so great! Buy our radium blankets to keep you warm :)