Posts by notyetanotherid

England's school phone ban gets teeth, just in time to bite no one

Re: Disjointed thinking

> The current proposal is to ban phones from school sites

Not really, the amendment's actual wording is: "all schools in England must have a policy that prohibits the use and possession of smartphones by pupils during the school day." but it is also "to be implemented as the relevant school leader considers appropriate", so the app sign-up use case should be allowable.

Of course there is "provide for exemptions for medical devices" so any entitled little Timmy/Flossie who really wants to use their phone during the day will probably just get themselves a connected blood glucose monitor or similar...

Server-room lock was nothing but a crock

Any such state machine should only reset to state 0 after the required number of digits in the code have been pressed otherwise you significantly reduce the number of key presses required to brute-force test every possible combination: e.g. if you reset immediately a wrong digit is entered, hitting 0123456789 tests up to 7 4-digit codes

Firefox 149 adds a free VPN and finally plays nice with Linux dialogs

Re: Menus

... around here, we call the 9 square dots version the waffle button.

And apparently there is also a two horizontal lines version, known as alt-burger or veggie burger. Why have one menu button style when you can have six?

Smart mirror shows dumb Windows in elevator

Re: Props to the photographer

... must be that shadowy Minecraft figure standing behind the cardboard that took the photo...

US struck Iran with copies of its own drones

Re: a bit of an over reaction just to deflect attention

e.g. this one at 7:48 pm on 29 Nov 2011:

In order to get elected, @BarackObama will start a war with Iran.

Hide from Meta's spyglasses with this new Android app

Try turning on the 'Foreground' option, it seems to need that to be on to keep scanning, but it was set to off by default when I installed.

Claude Code's prying AIs read off-limits secret files

Re: No

> ... I’m not seeing in this article Anthropic’s response to El Reg’s inquiries. Nor a note that your media contact at the company (which is surely a major part of this beat) declined comment.

Did you not read all the way to the end? The penultimate paragraph of the article is : "Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment."

Watchdog says US weather alerts are getting lost in translation

Re: Perhaps there is no need for 'AI'

--> firkin ( a 9 imperial gallon cask)

High Court to grill London cops over live facial recognition creep

From legislation.gov.uk, it should only apply for anti-social behaviour within the definition in the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014:

s50(1): If a constable in uniform has reason to believe that a person has engaged, or is engaging, in anti-social behaviour. he may require that person to give his name and address to the constable.

and in Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014:

(2) In this Part “anti-social behaviour” means—

(a) conduct that has caused, or is likely to cause, harassment, alarm or distress to any person,

(b) conduct capable of causing nuisance or annoyance to a person in relation to that person's occupation of residential premises, or

(c) conduct capable of causing housing-related nuisance or annoyance to any person.

Microsoft illegally installed cookies on schoolkid's tech, data protection ruling finds

Re: Default On.

Kinda related...

Now that the Information Commissioner in the UK has basically given their blessing to the 'Pay or OK' extortion model for tracking cookie prompts, nearly every newspaper website has turned it on. So let's say a teacher asks their students to research a news story from a variety of news sources to compare the angles from which the reports were written, how are the students supposed to do so? They are not going be in a position to pay to avoid tracking cookies, but as minors they cannot give informed consent to the 'OK' to tracking option. In this case, presumably by clicking through to the story the tracking cookies will also be illegally placed?

ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key

Re: Could be worse

... I think that secret has long been out as they are readily available for sale on e.g. ebay.

CISA flags actively exploited Office relic alongside fresh HPE flaw

Re: WAT El'Reg?

> Where do we let 16-year olds vote?

Scotland, Wales, Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.

Also Nicaragua, Brazil, Ecuador, Estonia, Austria and Malta.

DVSA's clapped-out booking system gets bot slapped as new boss rides in

Re: It's been a disgrace for years

> IDK, these days, but at least a dozen.

It is currently 13 minor faults for a fail. Examiners are supposed to use a "13th fault test" before recording any minor fault, i.e. if this was the 13th fault, was it sufficient that you would you record it and fail the learner?

Whatever legitimate places AI has, inside an OS ain't one

Re: Integral to the OS

. . . and in a mobile browser, now you don't even get that far. Instead you just get a message that to continue you need to install the MS 'Coprolite' app, before getting redirected to the app store's page for it. You have to use the browser's view desktop site option to be able get anywhere near the 365 homepage.

EU biometric border system launch hits inevitable teething problems

Re: Geez

Or slightly damp.

Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide

Yes, they do. Terrible, as ever.

How chatbots are coaching vulnerable users into crisis

Re: Obsequious bots

... so close: if only you had used an em dash instead of the hyphen.

For what it is worth I asked a bot to "write a short comment in praise of a contributor to an online tech forum." and it came up with (complete with the obligatory em dash):

Thank you for your insightful contributions and dedication to the community — your expertise and willingness to help make this forum a better place for everyone!

How your mouse could eavesdrop on you and rat you out

Re: "each key sounds different"

A Practical Deep Learning-Based Acoustic Side Channel Attack on Keyboards

Re: Is that written by Microsoft?! Apple?

African or European swallow?

Kicked from RubyGems, maintainers forge new home at Gem Cooperative

Re: The woke mob .... At last the Truth is out there !!!

> Well the Roman empire spanned most of Europe, the near east and parts of North Africa. Yes, a lot of the people the Romans fought were not white but the Romans WERE. It was the Romans that invadED Britian.

I suggest that you do some research on diversity in the Roman army. The significant requirement was citizenship. Roman citizens were not just from the city of Rome, or even just from Italy, but the entire empire (as you note, including Africa and the near east). Supplying men for the legions was a central part of the process of becoming part of the empire. Heck, even the emperor Septimius Severus (came to Britain in 208, died in Britain in 211) was born in what is now Libya...

The idea that the Roman army that invaded Britain was entirely what you would presumably consider white is balderdash.

UK police caught slacking off by jamming their keyboards while working from home

Re: lengthy periods when the only activity is single keystrokes

> I often come back to find pages and pages of a single letter in the document I was working on.

See Brian Bilston's poem ‘On ‘;..p’[[[[[[[[[[[[[;’;////////////////////////3,’ (sorry that the link is to facetwit): https://www.facebook.com/BrianBilston/posts/1094388909395490/

Zero-day deja vu as another Cisco IOS bug comes under attack

Re: Zero‑day vulnerability in the Cisco IOS

... because the specially crafted packet was only supposed to be known to the TLA spooks ...?

Google is very sorry for pulling down COVID misinfo and pledges never to use outside fact-checkers

Re: xTube?

Symptoms of what would now be described as ADHD were written about in medical literature in the 18th century, whereas paracetamol was not first made until the mid 19th.

1,200 undergrads hung out to dry after jailbreak attack on laundry machines

Re: Laundry machines

> It’s got to be students.

At my uni halls back in the mists of time, the tumble drier coin-op mechanism triggered a cycle slightly before the coin dropped so you could twist it back to start position and add as many cycles as you needed with one coin. And the really tight-fisted would tape a thread to the coin to retrieve it from the slot and not pay at all...

Florida jury throws huge fine at Tesla in Autopilot crash

Re: Flawed technology

> The same driving instructor that told me "well - you are never going to fail your test for going too slow".

At least in the UK, (s)he was wrong: failure to make 'adequate safe progress' during a driving test will result in a serious fault and a fail will be recorded.

Ransomware crews don't care about your endpoint security – they've already killed it

Re: Please sir …

Quite! While most ElReg readers are going to be techie, having to read to the fourth paragraph before finding the phrase "endpoint detection and response products" to trigger the lightbulb moment, is a bit much...

Californian man so furious about forced Windows 11 upgrade that he's suing Microsoft

Re: Being sensible for a moment

... not since 2015 when the Sale of Goods Act 1979 was mostly superseded by the Consumer Rights Act 2015.

Ex-OpenAI engineer pulls the curtain back on a chaotic hot mess

Chin Chin

> "OpenAI is incredibly bottoms-up, especially in research,"

I am not sure that phrase means what he thinks it does....

Post Office and Fujitsu execs 'should have known' Horizon IT system was flawed

Re: The scandal continues

Probably worth a couple of minutes to read this: https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/prof-moorhead-crass-does-not-come-close/

Tim Cook's Tim Cook stepping down from Apple

To me, the word "numerous" is a weird qualification in that sentence, when talking about someone with 27 years of service...

"... his contribution to Apple..." would have been fine.

"... his innumerable contributions ..." would work too.

But am I wrong in thinking that "numerous" just seems to be damning with faint praise, and could be read as something along the lines of "occasionally useful"?

Mozilla rolls out Firefox 140 with ESR status and fresh features

I never understand how those browser usage stats are arrived at and quoted with such confidence. I am guessing that the scripts that tally the numbers for the main stats providers are hosted on a tiny fraction of t'interweb, so surely at best '2.5%' is only 2.5% of users of an infinitesimally small sample of the wider populace, but assumed (almost certainly incorrectly) to be representative and then extrapolated to the whole browsing market.

Many users of privacy-focussed browsers are likely to have them locked down to prevent any obvious form of tracking script running and be less likely to be regular visitors the sort of sites that might host the stats scripts, so the market share for such browsers is (as you suggest) likely to be woefully under-reported.

Microsoft set to pull the plug on Bing Search APIs in favor of AI alternative

> Seems that no matter what Micro$oft product you are using you WILL be forced to use their "AI" enshittification

Indeed. If you try to visit office.com on a mobile now, you now seem to just get a page telling you to download their 'AI' Coprolite app. No more just using the Office web-apps (unless you use the mobile browser’s 'desktop site' option').

Ex-NSA bad-guy hunter listened to Scattered Spider's fake help-desk calls: 'Those guys are good'

And for those that don't know... in the UK you can now just call 159: tell the call handler which bank you want to speak to and they will connect you. No other numbers to remember or look up. https://stopscamsuk.org.uk/our-work/159-phone-number/

Soviet probe from 1972 set to return to Earth ... in May 2025

Re: Oh noes!

> He's already saved two thirds of the US population from death by "fentanol", I gather. Can't the guy have a day off?

... and don't forget the 200 trade deals that he's negotiated: https://time.com/7280114/donald-trump-2025-interview-transcript/

NASA probes propulsion problem in Psyche's thrusters

Re: Conversion hell

> approximately 148 million miles (238 km)

10836592243 brotosauruses, shurely?

Swiss boffins admit to secretly posting AI-penned posts to Reddit in the name of science

Re: Hmmm

That sort of hyperbole doesn't help a rational debate.

The thing is that, as commentards above have noted, observational studies are performed all the time without the subjects being aware or consenting. An anthropologist wants to study natural behaviour, and they are not going to get that if they inform people beforehand, e.g. you couldn't accurately study whether English people apologise when they are bumped into (I have read the outcome of such a study: mostly they do) if you told them it was going to happen.

Now you might argue that this study would have been better had they told the channel that a sort of A/B study was happening and some posts would be human and some from LLMs, but would that modify the subjects' behaviour? Would some run posts through a supposed LLM-detecting LLM to try to work out which were which before responding? That outcome would surely invalidate the study? And of course you have the difficulty of sourcing a suitably experienced or qualified person able to argue cogently in a consistent style on the particular subject at hand for the human posts, whereas you can get an LLM to confidently spout plausible-sounding billhooks in a similar format on pretty much any subject you like... e.g. You can't lick a badger twice.

UK's biggest mobile operator starts 3G switchoff, hopes it won't catch out April fools

Re: Smallest Mobile Network post Vodafone-Three Merger not largest!

It must be right, cos it says so on Wikipedia...

From pantyhose to power cells, nylon gives lithium batteries a leg up

Re: how does the length of a brontosaurus compare to that of a thesaurus

> brontosauruses did not

A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) would disagree: "Of particular note is that the famous genus Brontosaurus is considered valid by our quantitative approach."

AI summaries turn real news into nonsense, BBC finds

For what it is worth, Perplexity seems to get the right answer now:

"The Maythorn Way is an ancient track described by W.B.Crump in Huddersfield Highways Down The Ages (1949). It runs from Marsden to Penistone via Meltham, Holmfirth, Hepworth, Maythorn, and Thurlstone. ...",

citing yorkshiremilestones.co.uk as its primary source.

Legacy systems running UK's collector are taxing – in more ways than one

This ain't true. The UK tax rules have not changed for individuals, you have always been required to declare 'trading' income over the Trading Allowance (unchanged at £1000).

What has changed recently is that the trading and online content sites, like ebay, vinted, airbnb, TikTok etc, now have to report directly to HMRC anyone who makes more than 30 trades or earns more than €2000.

Does DOGE have what it takes to actually tackle billions in US govt IT spending?

Re: Going after federal government tech spending ...

> So in the UK, we have the dreaded tax return, which ever increasing amounts of the population will have to complete as they're pushed into the tax bands that trigger it. They're posted out with the persons name and address on the envelope, but HMRC can't print that on the tax return forms. Then the person may have to copy & write data HMRC's already sent on P11 & P60 notes, do some calculations and for PAYE employees, send HMRC back the data they already have. Which is an expensive and generally pointless exercise vs sending tax payers the data HMRC has, and asking if there's any other income (or expenses) they'd like to declare.

You might have had a point if this was in fact the case, but I think it is for the greater part complete billhooks. Most people with a salary and no other source of income don't need to fill in a tax return at all irrespective of which tax band their salary falls into. Of the around 12 million Self Assessment tax returns that are submitted in the UK, over 11.5 million of them are filed electronically, and certainly if you use the HMRC online service it prefills the employment section with the stuff that you noted it already knows about you. I haven't received in a paper tax return for about 20 years, but your assertion that paper forms arrive from HMRC without the taxpayer's name and address preprinted doesn't fit with my recollection and seems especially odd given that the second 'question' on the first page is "Your name and address – if it is different from what is on the front of this form, please write the correct details underneath the wrong ones and put the date you changed address below"...

White House asks millions of govt workers if they would be so kind as to fork right off

Re: @James Hughes 1

Indeed.

Real-terms (adjusted for inflation) spending across the Osborne austerity years was pretty much flat overall, falling slightly over the coalition years before rising again once out of coalition. Heath and pensions spending rose slightly across the period, education and welfare spending fell, etc.

Per-capita spending at 2019 prices in 2011 (first full year of Cameron coalition) was £13,908 and in 2019 was £12965.

British Museum says ex-contractor 'shut down' IT systems, wreaked havoc

Re: lax procedures

... a high-vis jacket probably helps too.

Re: lax procedures

And anyone who has happened upon the Lock Picking Lawyer videos on YouTube will doubtless know that many of those mechanical button locks are fairly quickly decoded by feel.

A bit of learning that was successfully put to the test when my OH's last employer was locked out of a room and the site maintenance guy had gone without noting the code...

Europe, UK weigh up how to respond to Trump's proposed tariffs. One WTF or two?

Re: Prisoner's Dilemma!

What do the parents have to do with it? They are not the subject of the statement.

Nor is allegiance.

And unless a diplomatic passport holder, I wouldn't fancy anyone's chances trying to claim to not be "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" when visiting the US...