Posts by Dinanziame

Google Cloud goes down, takes Cloudflare and its customers with it

Re: my heart bleeds

Ahoy! Good for them!

Cloud brute-force attack cracks Google users' phone numbers in minutes

To think people used to voluntarily display their phone number in huge dead tree books distributed to everybody in the country...

BT won't budge over pay hike for manager grade employees

How do the salaries compare to the rest of UK? Not that the rest of UK is much of a bar, I find IT salaries there are shockingly low.

China orders trial of aged care robots that can cook, clean, and provide emotional support

I assume Elon Musk will try and fail to sell them robots

Cops want Apple, Google to kill stolen phones remotely – so why won't they?

Re: Not sure what the cops want from Apple here

Indeed, sounds like activation lock is already doing what the police wants. Why isn't Apple telling them that this already exists?

What will UK government workers do with an extra 26 minutes a day?

If we assume the time savings measurement is precise (and we probably shouldn't), it doesn't seem that much. But also, it doesn't necessarily mean an increase in productivity. Experiments on reducing work time, like 4-days week, often show counterintuitive results that the overall productivity does not change significantly; and people working twice more hours are not twice more productive either.

American science put on starvation diet

YOU CAN'T CUT BACK ON FUNDING! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!

The other lesson that countries often fail to learn is that of the angry transit adviser in Simcity

Odd homage to '2001: A Space Odyssey' sees 'Blue Danube' waltz beamed at Voyager 1

I think Also Sprach Zarathustra had a better claim, but The Blue Danube feels like a more peaceful statement in case it ever gets intercepted

Anthropic Claude 4 models a little more willing than before to blackmail some users

Re: Boooh!

If it's from the future, then it cannot have "been dispatched" now can it? You need to use the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional for this sentence.

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

An education company... translating with regexes... yeah, no way this can go wrong.

Apple slams door on Fortnite's stateside iOS comeback

Apple needs to be careful

Right now, they just made the orange guy unhappy. Not the moment to give any reason to be targeted for antitrust lawsuit by the DoJ

NASA keeps ancient Voyager 1 spacecraft alive with Hail Mary thruster fix

Maybe they're pulling our leg

Maybe they lost contact in the 80s. By this point pretty much the most important signal Voyager is returning is that its radio is still working. It's not like we'd know the difference.

Amazon tested warehouse robots and found they're not ready to replace humans

Re: Capitalism is dying

Indeed, we don't really need everybody to work anymore. During the past century, entertainment has soaked up more and more human activity, but even that is getting more efficient and the industry doesn't seem like it needs to grow much more. But then again, perhaps we don't need everybody to work. There is already a significant part of the population that doesn't need to work — they're retired. Of course, currently this is seen as the reward for working long enough to reach that state, but there is no fundamental need for it to be so. We can have a civilization where less people work, and shorter hours, and if some want to work more to have more money they can, but it's not necessary to live. I think we can get there, though the transition will be slow, and some assumptions have to change. Universal basic income does not have widespread acceptance, but in practice many European countries already have a social security net which is strong enough that technically if you are willing to live cheaply you don't need to work at all. I think it's going to be more and more common.

Th biggest issue might be to find ways to motivate humanity not to disappear out of boredom.

If Google is forced to give up Chrome, what happens next?

How about spinning it off?

Rather than having it bought by a necessarily large and well-funded tech company which will immediately start abusing users for its own ends, why not set it up as a separate independent company? Most of the cost of maintaining a browser is actually maintaining the engine, which in this case is Chromium and maintained separately, with many different companies contributing, in their own interest, and I doubt that Google would stop contributing either.

It is probably not difficult for Chrome to find sources of revenue. The first coming to mind is of course a sliver of ads shown on the browser from all major ad publishers, with some checks ensuring that these deals are non-discriminatory.

Computacenter IT guy let girlfriend into Deutsche Bank server rooms, says fired whistleblower

Bizarre story

I could technically understand why these companies would be unhappy at him blowing the whistle on their security failings, but firing somebody known to be a whistleblower is a bold strategy, as they say...

Microsoft burnishes green cred by paying Swedes to burn biomass and bury CO₂

Schemes like this are just a license to pollute for tech giants, or so critics say

Well the point is that at least they have to pay for it, so it puts a price on the pollution. It technically gives them an incentive to pollute less, which otherwise they wouldn't have to care about. Now if you think they should pay more, that's a different question. I hear carbon offsets are full of fraud, e.g. golf courses getting paid for not cutting the trees, making the prices too low.

CISA slammed for role in 'censorship industrial complex' as budget faces possible $500M cut

The funniest is the complaints that the military budget is not going up

There is a bump for this year, but it's just a one-year thing — not a permanent increase! Intolerable.

Where's Elon when you really need him??

Google details plans for 1 MW IT racks exploiting electric vehicle supply chain

Re: 1 MW computing racks ....

Of course, the whole planet eventually caught fire, but for a short while, we were able to fire all employees and replace them with chatbots!

Cook'd: Judge says Apple lied to court in Epic case, asks Feds to mull criminal charges

Having their 30% commission on the app store declared anticompetitive, creating a 27% tax on transactions executed outside of the app store definitely feels like taking the piss.

Tesla's Optimus can't roll without rare earth magnets, and Beijing ain't budging yet

Sounds like he's starting to find excuses for not selling the millions Optimus he predicted

Europe hits Meta, Apple with €700M in fines for flouting DMA

Re: I won against Facebook

It's entertainment, which is by definition a loss of time. Of course there might be better, but it does help pass the time of you're bored!

I won against Facebook

For months, it would ask me to choose whether I wanted to start paying, or accept my data to be used for ads. I never answered. I hoped eventually they would give up and just show me ads without using my data, but what I got is even better: I have no ads in Facebook. They probably did not implement ads that don't use private data, so they can't show me anything.

Competition boffin launches class action against Google UK over search dominance

I truly don't understand why anyone pays to place an ad anywhere on the web

Well because it works. Not for everybody, not all the time, but sometimes it works really well. How do you think Temu became such a well-known brand?

Uncle Sam kills funding for CVE program. Yes, that CVE program

Re: Reasoning

"The house is on fire, but I don't want to put out the fire unless other people in the house pay me for it"

How much money is this?

The article doesn't mention the sums involved. MITRE apparently has a range of contracts, some of them in the tens of millions of dollars, but I suspect this particular funding is not very expensive.

Apple: Since you care about yOuR pRiVaCy, we'll train our AI on made-up emails

Maybe in the future schools will teach AI as a foreign language.

Trump doubles down, vows to make Chinese imports even more expensive for Americans

Re: Fascinating

I think Xi Jinping has the advantage — unlike Trump, he only needs to handle high tariffs with one country, not all of them. The very stable genius thinks it's so easy to win trade wars, he's declared war with the whole world.

US DoE wants developers to fast-track AI datacenters on its land

Re: US falls into the trap

I think it's useless to try to find a grand strategy or mastermind behind any of this. The whole thing is pushed by people thinking "I can make money", "I can get promoted", or other similar intentions. They're selling the dream, and they'll get rich long before people wake up.

Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs

Re: Econ 101

The effect is not the same — in each market, sales tax and VAT apply to all products sold in that market equally. People buying a cars in the EU need to pay VAT, whether the car was built in the EU or the US, and people buying cars in the US need to pay sales tax, wherever the car was built in the EU or the US. Import duties, on the other hand, only apply on cars built somewhere else.

Top Trump officials text secret Yemen airstrike plans to journo in Signal SNAFU

Yeah, Hanlon's razor might apply here.

I'm not sure it's dynamite that policies require selling to the public? I thought that's half the work of politicians. I don't even find it controversial TBH. When politicians decide to raise the age of retirement because there are more and more old people and not enough young people to pay for their pension, I imagine doing the simple math is much easier than convincing the public that this is necessary.

My assumption is that an intern was tasked with setting up a secret group chat between very important people and thought it would be funny to add a journalist

AWS sued by product manager who says she was laid off for being an older woman

The numbers do seem suspicious. Amazon is not likely to have a high proportion of older employees

OK, Google: Are you killing Assistant and replacing it with Gemini?

The death of assistants

In many ways, assistants were promised to be like artificial intelligence, in the sense they would understand what you meant and would react to your commands. That's when the movie Her came out. The problem is that there was hardly any intelligence behind, so each separate action had to be coded manually and maintained individually by an army of developers. They were already having trouble maintaining existing actions when ChatGPT came out, and that pretty much sealed their fate. I'm not entirely sure that AI stuff like Gemini can even replace them though. It's probably going to be a while before Gemini can be asked to turn on the lights or play a song — and I wouldn't be surprised if the connections to the light and sound systems and everything else still needs to be maintained by an army of developers.

UK must pay cyber pros more than its Prime Minister, top civil servant says

Re: Typical of the Mentality

Salaries are low in the UK across all of IT though. The difference with the US is pretty noticeable.

Google teases AI Mode for search, giving Gemini total control over your results

Gotta catch all the users

Google has the hard choice to make that different users want different things, but it can't have a consistent experience and give everybody what they want.

Microsoft: So what if it costs 4X as much to run Windows Server in AWS, Alibaba, and Google?

Basically, Microsoft offering a rebate on Windows to customers who use Azure is similar to them selling Azure at a loss, which as you say would be anti-competitive. If your product has a dominant position in one market, it is not allowed to offer a discount on a bundle of that product with another product in a different market, because that means you are selling the other product at a loss.

Then they're being told: they can't bundle it, like a cable TV provider bundles channels. They can't optimize it for the systems that they're running it on. They can't do anything with it, unless someone else is doing it, too, in the same way, for the same cost. How does this make sense?

Because they have a dominant or quasi-monopoly position. Which means that by using that position as leverage, they could threaten users into accepting massively disadvantageous conditions and suppress their competitors. This is about as if the unique internet provider in your area would bundle their service with a bag of dog shit that you don't want, but that you are forced to buy every month if you want internet.

Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after promises to not sell their data go up in smoke

Losing the Google money

As I recall, this is their principal source of revenue.

IBM likes Hashicorp, finally puts a $6.4B ring on it

How is IBM still a thing?

I really can't fathom why anybody wanting anything would go "I know, let's work with IBM"

Incoming deputy boss of Homeland Security says America's top cyber-agency needs to be reined in

Re: Hmm

I believe that the USDS was created from the IT people who volunteered to fix the Obamacare website when it launched. I'm not surprised they have a difference of opinions with Elon Musk

Trump administration threatens tariffs for any nation that dares to tax Big Tech

Re: I dont know, this seems pretty simple to me...

Look at this, The Register, it's not a pinnacle of software bloat is it? Works fine.

As I recall, the Reg is implemented in Perl. I assume nobody understands enough of the code to dare modifying it

California goes ape with bill to crown Bigfoot official state cryptid

Yes: https://xkcd.com/1235/

Trump can't quickly or easily kill the CHIPS Act, but he can fire the workers funded by it

Re: What?

Rather than subsidizing the US industry, I presume the plan is to tariff imports until the US industry is competitive again

France tops China’s tokamak record with 22-minute plasma containment run

Re: French fry me right up

Canada is interested in your way of thinking and world like to subscribe

Einstein Probe finds two stars that have spent 40 million years taking turns eating each other

Title sounds like a NSFW celebrity leak

Well done

Musk's move fast and break things mantra won't work in US.gov

Re: The Icon says it all...

But, strangely, there is no circle in Dante's inferno for leaders who betray their people.

Hold on! At the very bottom of hell sits Satan, who has three faces and three mouths gnawing at the very worst people, which are Judas, Brutus and Cassius. I understand that this is because Judas betrayed God, and Brutus and Cassius betrayed the Republic. Doesn't that count?

Creators demand tech giants fess up and pay for all that AI training data

I don't think that's correct that the theft is the only thing that matters — if it was, the big AI companies could have absolved themselves of any liability by just paying for one single reproduction of the works they used. Even the most prolific creators would hardly get more than a few thousand bucks for that, and that's clearly not enough to compensate them from the fact their style can now be copied at mass scale for cheap.

UK Home Office silent on alleged Apple backdoor order

Switzerland!

Google's 7-year slog to improve Chrome extensions still hasn't satisfied developers

Should we simply consider users are responsible for the shitty privacy-invading password-stealing extensions that they install on Chrome? I'm not sure how this is worse than the fact they can download and run any malware they find on the internet.

US cranks up espionage charges against ex-Googler accused of trade secrets heist

Oh, come on. There's no relation whatsoever to this story. Even if Google wanted something like that, they wouldn't need to bribe Trump for it.