Posts by AVR

London cops handed victim's new address and number to her stalker, watchdog says

Re: Just gave the attacker her number?

Providing the PII is identified as such, and not just included as an aside in the witness statements that'd work. There's a solid chance that whoever released the documents didn't actually read them.

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

Re: Not a problem

I saw a MSDOS machine running a program to control which doors each access card could open in about 2005. No actual access to the Internet but I was assured that the Lemmings Christmas Edition program on it couldn't actually be there; floppy disks aren't a major access flaw once they're no longer easy to get I guess.

Uncle Sam tells overseas cybercrooks their visas are canceled

Re: Why don't they let the alleged criminals in and arrest them?

It's expensive, and they may not be able to access the criminal's assets to defray the cost. They may even not win the cases, especially (but not only) if they rely on info with sources the spies don't want to give up. And it's probably a performative policy anyway, the people who know they're known to US authorities will be keeping out of their way and not trying to enter the country.

Airbus takes flight from AWS. What happens next is critical

Found the article I was remembering: https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2025/11/26/microsoft-habit-proves-hard-to-kick-for-airbus/2224071

Apparently Excel can handle larger sheets than Google workspace can at least.

IIRC Airbus does some odd stuff involving absurdly large spreadsheets. Do you, or anyone, have a ready to go substitute (which doesn't involve sneering 'so don't do that!') which a risk-averse corporation would approve of? And whatever other workflow, automation and bespoke software built on Office they may have.

Replacing it all is a huge project as the article points out. I'd think a decent number of medium-to-large size projects rather than doing it all in one go would be the way, but what do I know.

AWS sustainability claims don't hold water, lawsuit alleges

Re: Be more transparent

Depends whether that guard wants to be fired & blackballed from their job. As to the realtime metrics, I'm sure Amazon can come up with reasons not to release the info.

An unnamed US county – perhaps in Ohio – paid $1M extortion demand to cybercriminals

Keeping in- and out-wallets entirely separate while controlling both is a problem which has caught would-be money launderers before. The actual mixer likely works as advertised (not certainly), but if an X amount of bitcoin leaves your wallet and the same enters your girlfriends' while your two devices at the same physical location access the mixer then you haven't done enough to not be tracked later, judging by media reports.

It does help if you're in Russia and don't need to worry about American law enforcement getting hold of those devices.

AI slop writing has taken over the internet, particularly LinkedIn and X

There's a lot of significant figures there despite AI content detection being pretty unreliable. The different result from originality.ai may come from differing detection tools rather than a differing definition of longform; which gives at least +/- 7% uncertainty. I can well believe that the general trends there are real, but don't trust three significant figures of precision on those numbers, or even one.

Four years into Ukraine invasion, Russia turns influence-ops back to US and Europe

Re: Is AI really helping?

AI is a bullshit generator. This is excellent for a cyber criminal, but not actually important to the business of most corporations.

There probably are uses in regular marketing though the backlash against AI means that they'll want to try to hide that use.

Trump-shuttered climate change site back online in nonprofit hands

Re: HOORAY!!!

Read the next comment down, there's a few useful idiots (to the fossil fuel industry in this case) everywhere.

Companies are not looking before they're leaping into the AI playpen

Or they've hit them but the blame has been directed elsewhere, or maybe the incident has been downplayed by people not wanting to infuriate the AI-friendly boss, or it was embarrassing enough that everyone involved memory-holed it. There are many possibilities.

Humanity trashed Earth orbit – next stop the Moon

Re: Recycling

Ores on the Moon are mostly awful, as far as we know. A total lack of water concentrating and separating the ores, and a lot less in the way of rocks melting underground and being returned to the surface (well, once, but not repeatedly). If you could drop bits of rocket 50 km away it might be worth collecting the metal if you were desperate to manufacture on the Moon. You would have to be desperate though because as you pointed out this is not an automatic process.

Why Amazon hates 'human-in-the-loop' AI governance

Re: Issue

Mostly. And then occasionally you get a mistranslation, and hopefully the human reading the output is awake enough to realise that 'kidneys' have nothing to do with the subject discussed (actual example). A more subtle error might fly through undetected even with a fully awake human.

AI is viable when cheap and fast is your preferred two of the three. If clawing back the full cost (or recognising the full cost in technical debt in software) makes it just fast then it has a really narrow future, if it's still fairly cheap then it has a solid future - I suspect the Amazon guy is trying to preserve 'cheap'. Not everything has to be good, and it looks like AI won't be.

UK Cabinet Office hiring AI and innovation 'influencer' to build 'AI-first culture' in civil service

Wishful thinking

AI companies have promised to cut your costs, and the people in charge of this policy and job ad desperately want that to be a real thing, which they can make happen if they push long and hard enough. They won't hear that the promise is a lie ... probably ever. Once people have committed to a belief like that they don't usually back down. They'll need to be forced out one way or another.

It's do or die for Apple AI

Re: Die

AIs aren't quite synonymous with the companies that produce them - you know that, right? There's more to Apple or Google and maybe even Microsoft than the AIs they have produced.

UK fraudsters using AI to doctor 'evidence' in motor insurance claims

The joy of false positives

While setting an AI to catch an AI may seem sensible it doesn't have a great success rate. If it's a first filter, and the human who checks it isn't encouraged to assume that the computer is always right then that's fine. If not, not.

Satellite phone dreams orbit reality as direct-to-cell usage set to underwhelm

Re: OTP

If their non-phone computer has an internet connection there should be a way for the phone to use that as a hot spot, or to connect to the wi-fi directly. If it doesn't then no, they probably can't get to the point where they can access their bank account anyway.

Okta writes its own license to kill rogue AI agents

The real problem

If the issue is seriously that AI agents are problematic enough that you need to be able to kill them without contacting a system administrator, maybe using them in the first place is the real problem?

Netflix wiz creates app to slash AI bills, then open sources it

> LLMs tend to pay more attention to the beginning and the end of the context window, and tend to disregard the middle bits.

Copying humans again I see. It'll probably enhance the tendencies of those who deal too much with LLMs to give terse orders rather than polite conversation, too.

FCC warns US broadcasters their licenses are a privilege, not a right

They're counting on the Democrats either having too much to clean up, or being unwilling to go full fascist with the infrastructure that's been set up here. Then when the wheel turns and the Republicans are in power aagain they can pick up where they left off. I don't believe they're in a position to render elections irrelevant in the current electoral cycle, but they do plan to be there eventually.

AIs don't like religion – particularly Jehovah's Witnesses, study claims

Re: And they're Surprised?

Perhaps they used a more sophisticated approach to excluding antisemitism than trying to avoid sites with it. You can do a lot of suff with the training data for LLMs which hasn't generally been thought worth doing in the rush to pour data into the beast's maw, but I can believe that a bunch of generally American companies might have made not looking antisemitic a priority.

Zuck defends monitoring employees to win AI race in purported leaked audio

Grabbing a few fallen pennies

Dunno that there's enough staff at Meta for spying to make a real difference. LLMs want really a lot of input, not just eighty thousand monkeys hammering away. It looks more like clutching at straws - Meta's AI is well behind the pack.

https://isaiprofitable.com shows Meta having spent $230 billion on AI for only $3 billion of revenue, bad even by AI standards. I wouldn't take it as gospel but it does suggest they might be the first out of the business if true.

FBI warns Kali365 phishing kit is stealing Microsoft OAuth tokens at scale

Catch it at the border

If those phishing messages get thru your spam filter/virus detector then a fair percentage of people will fall for them, no question about it. Get a good and well updated filter.

SpaceX scrubs Starship launch with seconds to go

Re: Economics 101

A few sample return missions would make a lot more sense in the foreseeable future than trying to set up a colony which couldn't be self-sustaining for many decades or even centuries, but writing it off forever is a bit early IMO. Perhaps some day there will be grand projects better assembled under 0.38 G than 1 G, or some resource worth returning to Earth (perhaps with then much lower transit costs) might be found.

BTW why do you call out glass and steel? Mars definitely has silica, carbonates and iron compounds,

Deus ex machina: Half of US Christians trust AI's spiritual advice

Contradictions

> A full 48 percent of practicing US Christians told the organization that they trusted AI’s advice to aid their spiritual growth.

> 73 percent are worried AI will cause loss of religious faith

In the same survey, even. With the minimum possible overlap there would seem to be a contradiction. Either a quarter or more of the respondents are 1+ of {insane, taking the mickey}, or the triumph of the ego you can see plenty of out there is leading people to think AI is good for their own wise spiritual development while being bad for those other poor weak-minded fools. I think they call that the sin of pride (to go with any others they may have, of course.)

UK’s Education Committee: Social media ban a must to save children’s mental health

It's failing elsewhere, why not try it in the UK?

Reports from Aus are that those kids who abuse the internet still do, while those less deeply involved may find accessing health info, or anything they actually need to know about sexuality more difficult. No benefits, some potentially serious costs; this is a dumb idea.

America's top cyber-defense agency left a GitHub repo open with passwords, keys, tokens – and incredibly obvious filenames

Re: Survey Says ...

The person who alerted them confirmed that the files were real; that's a compromise of sensitive data by definition (if perhaps not a serious breach), even before you find out whether any other contractors, outside hackers or what have you have accessed them.

Taiwan's train cyber-trauma reveals a global system that's coming off the tracks

Wake-up call

Could be worse, it might have slipped under the radar until Xi sinks into a Trumpian dotage.This incident with the hacking student was bad enough to be painful (which means it actually will get fixed) but not enough to break stuff permanently.

Americans would rather have a nuclear plant in their backyard than a datacenter

PR isn't absolutely necessary

Apparently you can sue to overrule town councils which reject datacenters in America. Capital really does rule there.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-michigan-farm-town-voted-down-plans-for-a-giant-openai-oracle-data-center-weeks-later-construction-began/ar-AA22uI76

Google's AI-enabled mouse pointer understands 'this' and 'that'

When the AI guesses wrong about what you want to do with your mouse untangling it will take longer than a simple mouse click, possibly much longer. I'm sure it'll still be possible to do other actions and follow other paths but this software will make it harder. If all the usual right-click menus are still there, then learning the use of this kind of desktop takes longer because you have to know the AI procedures and the prior procedures; if not, definitely go with the 'much longer' to disentangle misunderstandings.

Plus all the problems about expense if a remote AI (once it's fully priced in) or a fairly massive overhead if it's local, and Moore's Law is not current.

If the vote you rocked, your personal info can be grokked

Re: Not to worry

If your source is the Heritage Foundation you just lost the argument - they're some of the people who are fine with alternative facts, not just different opinions. Basically they're liars.

Royal Navy chief backs drones, autonomous weapons in ‘Hybrid Navy’

Re: As if there's a choice!

Autonomous escorts may protect your crewed ships, but they'll have plenty of demands for maintenance at sea by people coming over temporarily, and operators on other ships to keep them doing the jobs they should I expect - not sure there'll be a genuine saving in people required. Certainly they'll need industry to make them. I think the idea is to make sure your crrewed ships are protected and to keep squishy and hard to replace people out of the line of fire.

Microsoft boss tells investors the company is working to 'win back fans'

I see you're messing with Windows settings Dan, would you like help with that?

* Reinstall telemetry and our partnerships for a better working experience?

* Resubscribe to Copilot and enjoy the power of AI?

* Revert to factory settings?

US clarifies mobile hotspots part of foreign router ban despite rarity of American made consumer kit

The amount of lobbying received depends on most routers and phones being manufactured offshore. If it were about protecting US manufacturing then the new protections would be targeted at manufacturing that does exist and which could be scaled up, rather than that which doesn't and won't exist. Assume it's all about the grift and you'll have a better explanation for Trump's executive orders than the good of the nation.

Claude Code cache chaos creates quota complaints

When you can't even see the size of the package before you buy

Ah, shrinkflation. We're getting plenty of it IRL right now, no surprise that the AI vendors have taken note and applied it to their product.

Investors are going nuclear to keep UK's AI datacenters fed

Re: Fusion

Forty years ago fusion power was thirty years off. It might just come through in my lifetime.

White House seeks deep NASA cuts as Artemis II breaks spaceflight record

Cut that science (science is woke!), the boring space station and the namby-pamby safety and security stuff, but add a small boost to having photo ops on the Moon. I can see the logic, though I have to oppose it.

ServiceNow allegedly says salesman 'overachieved' and is not entitled to comp

It's not even going to save them money

It looks like a clear case of breach of contract and IMO the guy is more than 50% likely to win his double the commission payout. How does doing this work for ServiceNow? Is putting off the payment as valuable as all that?

Commercial space pleads with NASA to stop moving the goalposts in orbit

If you want it to draw power from solar panels, support life or run equipment inside you might want a few more features than that.

Staff too scared of the AI axe to pick it up, Forrester finds

Lawyers get caught misusing LLMs on a fairly regular basis now. There's a lot of lawyers, true, but how certain is it that all the idiots 1) are caught and 2) are hung out to dry in public?

Meta’s latest AI improves its terrible content moderation, just a little

People get very dumb when their jobs depend on not understanding

About 10% of Meta's advertising revenue comes from scams and scam-adjacent ads, as came out in November last year. They are not motivated to make or use an effective anti-scam tool and I have doubts about this one.

North Korea's 100,000-strong fake IT worker army rake in $500M a year for Kim Jong Un

"these IT workers can earn more than $300,000 a year, and upwards of 100,000 North Koreans are spread across 40 countries generating approximately $500 million a year"

Divide that out and you can see a ceiling on how many of these North Koreans are earning more than 300 grand in a year. It's not a lot.

Everything needed to make DNA and RNA found in asteroid sample

Re: So...

There's very little heavier than rubidium that a human needs though - about a fiftieth of a gram of iodine in your body, about a quarter that of molybdenum. There may be a dash of lead and other heavy elements in there but you could live without them quite happily.

AI datacenters may gulp a New York City's worth of water on hot days

Looks like you missed a couple of paragraphs in this article:

"The second stage is facility-level cooling, which transfers heat from the facility to the outside environment. This may involve water consumption depending on the technology employed, such as cooling towers that rely on evaporation, or air-cooled systems supplemented by direct evaporation or adiabatic cooling to reduce the peak power demand during the hottest days of the year.

A large server farm that relies on evaporation cooling can suck up millions of gallons of water per day during the hottest periods of the year, the report says, significantly more than at other times."

TerraPower gets permission to build, not operate, sodium-cooled nuclear reactor

Their first reactor coming online in 2030 by the earliest and their fuel being available in commercial quantities by the end of the decade sounds like planning not luck. Delays could screw them over, but someone needs to be first to ensure that commercial quantities will be made at all.

Microsoft's Project Silica promises eternal storage. It can't get there from here

Re: Glass itself is a…

Old glass windows are thicker at the bottom because they were installed that way - if the glass has varying thickness due to your manufacturing process, putting it in thick end down is more stable than the reverse. Glass is like a liquid, but it isn't one and won't actually flow at all.

Oak gall ink which burns into the vellum is pretty stable when used sparingly, but there's a lot more such writing which has actually burned through the vellum over the centuries turning it into a strange form of lacework. And still more which was lost to time some other way - damp, fire, insects, chucked out, being repurposed to some other use...assuming that these plates will be preserved forever by descendants waiting on our every word is a strange sort of arrogance.

Work experience kids messed with manager's PC to send him to Ctrl-Alt-Del hell

Ctrl-C & Ctrl-V are a decent temporary workaround, but get yourself a new keyboard - they're not that expensive.

6,000 execs struggle to find the AI productivity boom

Re: remember six sigma ?

"Lets say they benefit *alot*, like 2-fold improvement in business"

If 2% saw a 100% (sustainable) increase in business they'd be imitated rapidly. That doesn't seem to be happening; I'm fairly sure your numbers are out to the point of being irrelevant.

The UK government isn't spending much taxpayer cash on X

Dunno about the UK, but the social media market share of Xitter over here in NZ is about 6%. Unless your target audience is certain people on the far right there are indeed better social media companies to spend your money on.