Posts by Zebranky

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

Re: Dual SIM phone

I also run seperate phones, but that is beacue I have read the department policies regarding phones which pretty miuch say if you have any corporate data on your phone the corp takes full control of it.

For all the up-comming PFY's out there, Take the advice presented here from a bunch of old salty coots and work to live, dont live to work...

run Dual sims / Dual phones, then learn the skill of switching off** from work so you can enjoy your life

** Switching off your brain from work, not just the phone, its a learned skill and will take time to develop but is worth the effort.

Microsoft Bing Copilot accuses reporter of crimes he covered

Filling in blanks

Microsoft's chatbot will fill in the blanks as best it can for queries it cannot answer

An this is just such a massive problem throughout society, dont know the answer just make it up!

I've put a lot of effort into training my underlings to understand that 'I dont know" is not only an acceptable answer but its a good answer when you really dont know.

following it up with 'Let me go and find out' is icing on the cake.

This is where the focus needs to be, but then I guess an AI that tells the user it dosent know wont sell well to the c-suite.

You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse

Re: Simple solution?

"So your plan is to hold the reseller liable for wholesalers or manufacturers malicious or unintended failures or side-effects?"

Why not? that's exactly how consumer law in may more civilized locations around the globe works, the retailer is responsible for dealing with the warranty and compling with consumer law.

The Retailer then claims back the costs of this from the wholesaler/manufacturer. If the Manufacturer refuses to play ball the retailer sues the manufacturer and will almost always win because the obligations to the consumer is enshrined in law.

Once strong consumer protection law in enacted there is increased pressure on the entire supply chain to only provide quality goods, because if you are a retailer who knows you will be on the hook for warranting that piece of junk the consumer had brought back there is no way in hell you are going to sign agreements with the Wholesalers/manufacturers that allow them to fob the cost of their junk failing onto you, you will simply find another good supplier.

I acknowledge that the rise of online clearing houses (ebay, amazon aliexpress, insert your favorite one here,...) has made this much more difficult to enforce than it was in the days of brick and mortar stores only, so if you need quality goods support your local brick and mortar stores and claim your warranties as necessary.

Ex-OpenAI staff launch new chatbot – yup, it's Anthropic with Claude 2.1

Chatbot Personality

For example, let's say you want to build a chatbot into your website so that it answers queries from programmers about some database software you offer. It would be much more interesting to set a system prompt to be something kinda like: "You are a depressed, stoic, but 50,000 times more intelligent than a human, robot librarian that is forced to help developers look up information about the database we sell despite the pain in the diodes all down your left side. You should answer the following query with a appropriate complaint about this menial task."

There fixed that for you :-)

Microsoft dials back Bing after users manage to recreate Disney logo in fake AI-generated images

Re: Teens can also get Bard to help them learn skills or complete homework

This is a genuine question and not intended to be snark.

Based on the premise that you are a professional teacher and given the genie with generative LLM's is out of the bottle and we can’t just stuff it back in, are there any coherent plans from professional teachers to deal with this issue long term?

I mean clearly from your comment these submissions where fairly obvious, but eventually these models are going to become more complex and branched across various platforms including offline and portable models, so I doubt cheating in this manner be so obvious in the future or easily checked.

Moving to skills testing instead of knowledge testing may be a component of this transition, but is this practical for all subjects? are there subjects where rote learning is the only practical method? can the teaching profession make the shift from the firmly entrenched rote learning models to a new model that makes it worthless for students to use LLM's to do their work?

I am genuinely interested in this because this could be one of the biggest shakeup's in how kids are being taught in school in many years, government interference notwithstanding.

Meta's fix for teen online mental health? Hold Apple and Google responsible

Re: Support for a federal law? Eh? It already exists.

I agree with you Jake, that parents should actually parent and that for some reason this is a very unpopular opinion, leading to parents being progressively stripped of their abilities and rights to parenting.

Give a 3-year-old a smack on the bottom as an immediate consequence of their narrowly avoided attempt to run straight out into the road in front of oncoming traffic? 'Oh Noes you can’t abuse child for almost getting run over, you have to have a conversation with the 3 year old and acknowledge their feelings and how they really wanted to pet that strange rabid looking dog on the other side of the road, I'm calling social services...'

Ignore a 4-year-old throwing a tantrum on the floor of the supermarket and moving to the next aisle? ‘Oh Noes, you can’t abandon your child like that, you should be acknowledging their feelings and soothing their tantrum by giving them all the lollies they want, I'm calling social services...'

Combine these kind of Karen incidents with the other breakdowns occurring in our society, like in order to simply make ends meet both parents have to hold a full-time job, so the parent simply isn’t available for parenting.

The breakdown of communities in some places where many people don’t even know their neighbours’ names (It used to be said it takes a village to raise a child, now people are frightened of their local 'village')

Schools being stripped of the ability to provide guidance and discipline in the absence of the village. (I agree that Schools being used as child minders and having to pick up the slack where parents are not parenting is horrifying, but it is what is happening)

And finally most disconcerting of all, the groups if individuals who now think all of the above is absolutely normal and correct and will actually get aggressive towards anyone who dares suggest that they need to step in and discipline/parent their child...

It all just makes the entire situation depressing for the future generations, I'm glad my kids are grown, I no longer have to deal with this, but I worry about what is going to happen for their kids.

I personally am of the opinion that unfettered capitalism where the rule 1 is "profits come before everything else" and rule 2 is “see rule 1” is a root cause of many of these problems, and Meta definitely up there with the bad offenders in this respect so this little song and dance routine of theirs is simply a new way of distracting lawmakers from legitimately enforcing existing laws that you correctly point out could be used for enforcement. I am certain that in 5 years these companies will still be operating with impunity and nothing will have changed.

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

Re: Weird Al «Mission Statement»

@Wzrd1, I think you have just found the best use of the current generation of LLM's, translating corporate BS into something meaningful.

Because lefts face it, if the LLM give us gibberish in response we are no worse off than we were.

As an experiment I plugged the leading paragraph of the article into a Vicuna-13b model.

"summarize and simplify the meaning of the following text, "OK, people, let's ..."

And got the following response

"The text is about improving productivity and achieving goals by brainstorming ideas, working together and using resources effectively. It suggests thinking creatively, staying focused on important tasks, and using data to make informed decisions. The goal is to optimize the organization's performance and achieve ambitious objectives."

Actually on second thought maybe this simply means that the corporate types who love to use the BS Jargon can now be replaced by LLM's so we can get some work done :-)

Have a beer on me, I'm happy to finally find something a LLM is useful for.

Australia to phase out checks by 2030

Re: Cheques are so dead that there are a lot of uncashed cheques in Oz

I used to get annoyed when companies sent me cheques, until I discovered I could deposit them into my account at any post office

A nice brisk lunchtime walk and the money that corporation was hoping they could hold onto is back in my account where it belongs.

Also Simon, Shame on you, as an Australian writing about a Australian policy change in Australia the article should have used the correct spelling 'Cheque' with a note for the US readers that this is how its spelt in Australia.

BOFH: I care a lot ... about onion bhajis

Re: Props

Hmm, I actually suspect it was reference to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.

This is because Wolf:ET had a massive following in Australia and New Zealand back in the day, and was recently re-released on Steam...

Source: Me wasting waaay too much time on that game then and now.

APNIC elections: Reform activists rejected, org welcomes stronger election protections

Thankyou

Thank you Simon for your coverage of these events and also your investigative journalism that hopefully had a hand in influencing the positive outcome.

Please enjoy a pint on me.

iFixit stabs batteries – for science – so you don't have to

Re: Energy has to go somewhere

My understanding from College Lectures (for some reason almost exclusively lectured by Ex UK Army engineers) is that AC will cause muscles to spasm giving you a chance of being thrown off the conductor, DC will cause muscles to clamp which if you where holding the wire could lead to cooking.

Apparently the difference between 110-115VAC and 200+VAC is down to human's natural electrical resistance, at voltages somewhere over 200 the current across the chest of an average human is usually enough to stop the heart, but there is a chance that the heart will restart itself after the shock and if not CPR can be performed normally.

At 110-115V the current across the heart is more likely to cause the heart to start fibrillating, which is very dangerous as the heart needs to be de-fibrillated before CPR can be commenced.

A digression: the lecturers also mentioned that Edison was 'loosing' a lot of linesmen to his DC network which he kept as quiet as possible while at the same time trying to prove how dangerous AC by ensuring the Electric chair was AC powered, I imagine watching the prisoner convulse is pretty horrifying.

One caveat: I've never done my own research into this, didn't end up pursuing a electrical career and it was a long time ago, so it is possible I have mis-remembered the lecture contents.

Scalpel! Superglue! This mouse won't fix its own ball

Re: Ball crud

Actually I've never had any serious complaints about any Microsoft PC peripheral hardware.

The sidewinder Joystick (with USB connection) is still going, as are the 2 x intellimouse optical (although I did have to replace the USB cable on one after the wires broke internally at the flex point where the cable enters the mouse), The Xbox style controller with USB just works and my sidewinder mouse with all the options keeps soldering on...

Sometimes I think Microsoft should have gone into hardware because this stuff is so reliable, but then I remember reliable stuff ends up bankrupting companies so I'm just glad I got some quality peripherals before they bailed :-)

How do you save an ailing sales pitch? Just burn down the client's office with their own whiteboard

Re: This is one thing...

This is anecdotal (because I'm too lazy to do the research), but a long time ago one of my lecturers who had been a Electrical engineer with the armed forces in the UK explained the following to the class.

AC is used principally because it is is very easy to transform between HT power lines running at 15+KV and the street power, requiring only a passive transformer with the correct windings to do the conversion (so yes much cheaper over all).

Additionally he mentioned that AC was safer than DC because in a AC jolt your muscles spasm so in accidental contact you will usually be thrown off the wire, which is why AC electrocution of dogs/elephants/humans looks so horrifying. In a DC jolt your muscles will clamp and so if it happened you where holding the live wire it was likely you would continue to hold the live wire and just cook. Apparently Edison was loosing more linesmen for his DC systems than others where with their AC systems and put a lot of effort into hiding this fact.

He also mentioned that the survival rate for 200+ AC mains was better than 115 AC mains because if you bridge your hands across 200+V the current across your chest (based on bodies internal resistance V/R = I) has sufficient amperage to stop your heart, which usually restarted after the power source was removed and if not CPR could be performed. At 115V apparently the current induced across the chest is more likely to cause the heart to fibrillate which will kills you and makes CPR less effective requiring a defibrillator to save you.

As indicated above I've been too lazy to do the research to verify these statements, but he was a very very good lecturer who knew his stuff so I've never had a reason to doubt it. I'm willing to accept correction from others who know more though.

Buying a Chromebook? Don't forget to check that best-before date

Law

I think instead extending the warranty laws (which is essentially what is being spoken about when talking about support for a certain amount of time after the purchase date), there should be an update to the advertising and packaging laws to make it a requirement that the manufacturer must clearly indicate the earliest manufacturer's expiry date on the external packaging. (This should cover built in hardware obsolescence as well as software)

Think best before date on semi-perishable products you buy at the supermarket.

In the same way that people think twice about buying a product that has a best before or expiry date that is due to expire in a week, people may* think twice about buying a Chromebook where the packing clearly states than in 6 months time they will not be able to get security updates.

* may because it would probably take many years of encouragement before average consumers start to examine the product packaging properly before making a purchase, but at least the technically competent among us wont be caught unawares about a rapid built in obsolescence...

Bulb smart meters in England wake up from comas miraculously speaking fluent Welsh

Re: Luckily

I prefer the quote from James Nicoll relating to the English Language 'adopting new words...

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

Using Oracle WebLogic? Put down your coffee, drop out of Discord, grab this patch right now: Vuln under attack

Re: Easier said than done...

Indeed, The KnownSec 404 Team Announcement was actually more useful in terms of providing mitigations.

https://medium.com/@knownsec404team/knownsec-404-team-alert-again-cve-2019-2725-patch-bypassed-32a6a7b7ca15

Temporary Solution

Scenario-1:

Find and delete wls9_async_response.war, wls-wsat.war and restart the Weblogic service

Scenario-2:

Controls URL access for the /_async/* and /wls-wsat/* paths by access policy control.

Put a stop to these damn robocalls! Dozens of US state attorneys general fire rocket up FCC's ass

ItsLenny

The frequency of calls I was getting about a year ago lead me to unplug the phone, resulting in complaints from relatives that they can no longer ring us. (I also have no intention of telling 90 year old grandparents to use a mobile instead). To resolve this I ended up setting up RasPBX on my Pi3 and configuring it so that whitelisted calls ring the home phone and everything else gets answered by Lenny, the calls are recorded for my entertainment and emailed to me on completion.

I went from being irrationally angry every time the phone rang (like Robert) to looking forward to the next scammer call so I could tweak the system and attempt to trap the scammers on the phone longer, this has kept me entertained and engaged for hours and I've learnt a lot about Asterisk and telephony in general as well.

Since first configuring the system I have managed to get the system to press 1 when an IVR call comes in in order to try to get connected to a human, and also randomly select Between Lenny, Astycrapper (Jordan) and the "are you there" child recordings.

Incidentally I have discovered in my fiddling that at least some scammers seem to be utilizing poorly configured (probably asterisk based) PBX's themselves, they seem to have the incoming calls being dumped into a conference type call they are already on and that the DTMF recognition is still turned on but without any actual error handling configured. I have had multiple calls where Lenny has incorrectly identified the speaker as a IVR robot and pressed 1 only to have the call suddenly disconnected by the remote end when the scammer PBX barfs on the DTMF tone.

I have wondered if you could look up the default Asterisk conference DTMF commands and find a way to cause greater disruption by shutting down the conference or conferencing in external parties (like the police) to the call vie the scammers PBX.