Posts by elsergiovolador

UK council digs deeper into capital assets to keep Oracle project afloat

Re: Drunk

By “civil servants” I meant the ones whose actual job is oversight and enforcement. SFO, NCA, auditors, regulators, anyone paid to notice when public money is set on fire and ask whether it’s incompetence or something worse.

Council officers approving spend aren’t civil servants. Correct. Irrelevant.

What matters is that a £2.6m project turns into £41m, funded by asset sales, after years of documented governance failures, contract blow-outs, and abandoned delivery plans, and nobody with statutory powers steps in.

That’s not a skills shortage. That’s an accountability vacuum.

When consequences never arrive, failure isn’t corrected. It’s normalised, budgeted for, and reframed as “transformation”.

So yes, plenty of people are “doing their jobs”. The problem is that the jobs designed to stop this happening are conspicuously absent.

Drunk

Like a drunk selling family silver just to get their next fix of booze.

This is what happens where institutions designed to prevent such things from happening have abdicated their duty.

If you are a civil servant reading this, quit or start doing your job.

Supermarket sorry after facial recognition alert flags right criminal, wrong customer

Re: Ban it

Walk down any residential street and you’ll see Ring cameras everywhere, routinely capturing pavements, neighbours’ windows, and anyone passing by. At that point the household exemption falls away and data protection law applies, in theory. In practice, almost none of the resulting obligations are met.

Enforcing those obligations would mean confronting the platform that designed, marketed, and normalised this behaviour at national scale. That would require mandatory design changes, meaningful penalties, or constraints that actually affect the product. None of which will happen.

Not because the law is unclear, but because the UK state has neither the appetite nor the leverage to take on companies of that size. These firms sit inside government infrastructure, procurement, and the endless theatre of “digital transformation”. Regulators are tolerated only so long as they do not interfere with that relationship.

So enforcement is displaced onto individuals. The regulator publishes guidance. Homeowners are told to negotiate with neighbours. The platform remains untouched. Law becomes a lifestyle choice.

The asymmetry is structural. If you deliberately point a camera at a bus stop, you can be challenged as an individual data controller. If a multinational sells millions of cameras that default to overshooting property boundaries, the issue is reframed as user education.

When police want footage, all this uncertainty evaporates instantly.

At that point, the Information Commissioner's Office functions as a Potemkin institution. It signals regulation while exercising none at the level that matters. A cardboard cut-out of a state, reassuring the public that someone is in control.

Re: Riddle me this

I think civil servants could easily recognise the same people just with different corporate t-shirt.

Unless they develop wine and steak induced amnesia... which happens.

Riddle me this

Hang on. A supermarket can quietly blacklist repeat offenders based on past behaviour, but government procurement is legally obliged to keep handing contracts to the same firms that have already failed, overrun, or delivered rubbish.

DDoS deluge: Brit biz battered as botnet blitzes break records

Re: malware-infected Android TVs

Do you think authorities and corporations would miss the opportunity to listen to what you talk about in bed?

They already got an excuse to install microphones for voice assistants for people terminally losing their clicker.

Four horsemen of the AI-pocalypse line up capex bigger than Israel's GDP

Carousel

Imagine if you own all companies involved in these transactions.

Numbers are getting more ridiculous, general public is poorer and tax man is asleep.

DWP considers chatbot work coaches as AI-fueled job losses loom

Re: What's the joke about regexes ?

No disagreement here, unfortunately.

I'd like to add that there is no fully private healthcare - unless you are ultra rich.

If you have any kind of acute problem, the private healthcare provider will send you to NHS.

Re: What's the joke about regexes ?

The NHS and social security are paid-for systems. We fund services and insurance so specific problems are handled collectively and society stays stable. UBI is different. It is not payment for a service, risk pooling, or productivity. It is unconditional cash that has to be funded from the same economy it is injected into. Nothing new is created. So it cannot behave like healthcare or social insurance. Treating them as equivalent is just category confusion.

Re: What's the joke about regexes ?

Two separate issues are being mashed together: (1) “rent-seeking exists” and (2) “therefore unconditional cash to everyone makes sense”. Even if you think landlords and some owners extract too much, that is an argument for fixing housing supply, land policy, competition, and taxation of rents, not for inventing a permanent cash entitlement that still has to be paid out of the same real economy. If you pump more cash into a housing market with constrained supply, you are literally bidding rents up. If the problem is rent extraction, UBI is the most expensive way imaginable to subsidise it.

Re: What's the joke about regexes ?

If income requires no effort and creates no value, then the income itself reflects that. It becomes worthless.

You do not get purchasing power from printing claims on goods and services. You get it from productivity. If UBI is not matched by an increase in output, it is just a monetary transfer chasing the same finite supply. Prices adjust. That is not a failure of capitalism, it is basic price signalling.

People sometimes respond that “existing and consuming” becomes the new work. That confuses survival with value creation. Consumption does not produce goods or services. It only redistributes demand. Without production, you get inflation, shortages, or rationing. Usually all three.

The quantity of money rises, real output does not, so real purchasing power falls. That is the whole story. No ideology required.

At a deeper level, removing the link between contribution and reward also erodes the signal that tells society what is worth doing. Wages are not just income, they are information. Flatten that signal and you do not get freedom, you get misallocation and stagnation.

The persistent appeal of UBI is not a mystery. Promising money without production will always attract people who confuse numbers on a balance sheet with real value. Supporting it is effectively an admission that you do not understand scarcity, prices, or why income has meaning at all. Of course the idea survives. Free money that becomes worthless still sounds attractive to those who never asked why money was worth anything in the first place. UBI keeps resurfacing for the same reason every bad idea does. It flatters ignorance and requires nothing from the person endorsing it.

Delusions With PowerPoint

AI isn’t “causing” mass job losses. That story is convenient fiction. Jobs are disappearing because employment is expensive, margins are thin, and the UK has spent years making it hostile to run anything smaller than a consultancy with friends in government. AI just makes a tidy scapegoat for ministers who don’t want to admit that their policies did this.

The solution, apparently, is to shovel more public money at foreign tax-shy tech firms so they can sell the state a chatbot to manage the people broken by those same policies. Human work coaches are too costly, so claimants get a text generator instead. Efficiency, they call it. Dignity optional.

And when that dependency becomes too obvious, out comes the next bright idea: UBI. Not as empowerment, but as damage control. Automation takes your job, an AI explains why, another AI tells you to retrain into a job that doesn’t exist, and the state issues credits to keep consumption ticking over. Mussolini had a word for this arrangement. Corporatism. Different century, same structure.

Summoning the spirit of the BBC Micro with a Pi 500+ and a can of spray paint

RealForce

See the title. Just get yourself one.

Amazon can't build AI capacity fast enough, throws another $200B at the problem

Tax

It's a fault of idle tax inspectors. If they combed their books, we probably would not have that AI spending craze, but functioning services.

All that reminds me of VAT carousel, just on steroids.

Asia-based government spies quietly broke into critical networks across 37 countries

Question

broke into critical networks

Critical of what?

SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites

Flying junk

Imagine the obsolescence of those data centres in five years.

Italy claims cyberattacks 'of Russian origin' are pelting Winter Olympics

Re: @elsergiovolador - Russia

Zdravstvuyte Vladimir, since you are here, why don't you release Krasnov's tapes? Bolshoye spasibo.

Russia

Imagine if those Russians spent their energy building something, improving their lives, and helping one another instead of focusing on murder, rape, and the theft of their neighbours.

Peculiar nation.

UK's 'world-first' deepfake detection framework unlikely to stop the fakes, says expert

Translation

The Home Office is workingshoveling tax payers money to Microsoft,

FTFY

Yet another vanity project at our expense.

Why Home Office seemingly hate British business? Why foreign tax-shy corporation covered by US Cloud Act?

DWP finds Copilot saves civil servants a whopping 19 minutes a day

Re: Copilot is a waste of time

If I got a penny for each time a relative called me because their important Word document "disappeared"...

Re: How many man hours...

because Starmer and his cabinet have picked AI as a magic bean to transform the lives of the plebs

Starmer has picked or wealth managers have picked for him?

https://www.cityam.com/reeves-and-starmer-meet-blackrocks-larry-fink-for-growth-talks/

https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2026/01/22/larry-fink-theres-no-ai-bubble/

All this AI and Digital ID (nobody voted for) nonsense is designed to line BlackRock pockets.

Civil servants should consider blowing the whistle otherwise this country will never improve.

This is exactly what happens in practice.

You write a few clear paragraphs.

AI pads them out with fluff to make them look “substantial”.

The recipient asks AI to strip the fluff back out again.

Then they reply by repeating the same process in reverse.

Net result: two humans doing the same thinking as before, plus a machine adding and removing noise in between.

Nothing is gained except big foreign tax-shy corporation gets paid.

Re: Costly placebo

And in functioning country these things would have warranted an investigation, not a slide deck and pats on the back.

Costly placebo

This is a PR puff piece dressed up as “research”.

First, 19 minutes a day is not productivity. It is noise. You could claw back more than that by letting people start at 10, avoiding peak commuting, or cancelling one standing meeting about another meeting. No AI required. Just basic adult management.

Second, the numbers are already wobbling. One government study says 26 minutes, another says 19, another says zero. That is not convergence. That is what happens when you measure vibes instead of outcomes. The only consistent result is “people felt nicer”, which is not the same thing as doing more useful work.

Third, the sample is cooked. Volunteers and nominees using shiny new tools always report gains. It is the Hawthorne effect with autocomplete. Statistical “adjustments” are not magic. They do not turn self-selection into causality.

Fourth, the tasks where Copilot “saves time” are exactly the ones civil servants should not be optimising blindly. Searching internal docs faster just means propagating outdated nonsense quicker. First-draft emails were never the bottleneck. Judgement, accountability, and decision-making were. Even the article admits the tool falls down the moment human judgement is required. That is the actual job.

Fifth, the cost-benefit is missing entirely. We are told minutes were saved, but not how much was paid per minute to a foreign, tax-optimised corporation. Billions leave the UK so staff can shave a few minutes off emails that probably should not exist in the first place. If the same department banned “reply all” and status updates, the gains would dwarf Copilot overnight.

Sixth, the risk is waved away. Every minute saved now comes with future minutes lost proving that sensitive government data was not inspected, retained, or subpoenaed under the US Cloud Act. That paperwork alone will eat the alleged gains for breakfast.

Finally, “comfort blanket” is the most honest phrase in the article, and not in the way it intends. Reducing stress by outsourcing thinking to a probabilistic text generator is not efficiency. It is sedation.

If Department for Work and Pensions wanted real productivity, it would fix workflows, kill pointless meetings, and stop confusing busyness with output. Instead, it bought licences from Microsoft, got a modest placebo effect, and called it transformation.

Estonia hedges its bets on US tech while going all-in on Microsoft

Re: It was probably too late

Not planning for the possibility of partner going rogue is reckless regardless.

It also enhances brain drain. If they turned to Open Source, they could have local businesses being paid to enhance the software with whatever functionality government needs. But I guess local business would not be in position to offer wine and steak to talk the requirements through.

Re: Dead on arrival

I guess there is no mechanism where the senior big wig would be told: are you five and stupid?

Dead on arrival

This should have been dead on arrival. Centralising civil servants onto Microsoft’s cloud while claiming “alternatives can be explored later” is just locking in dependence first and pretending it’s reversible.

The money argument is deliberately dishonest. Debating Linux training costs while ignoring jurisdiction is malpractice. Under the US Cloud Act, data held by US providers is legally accessible to US authorities, often without the customer ever being informed. That means Estonian state data is exposed to foreign intelligence by design, not by accident.

The security carve-out exposes the lie. Defence and foreign ministries stay off the cloud because the risk is real and well understood. Everyone else is moved anyway because the political class has decided that saying no to US vendors is harder than admitting the security consequences.

Sounds like not only the UK has its security services asleep at the wheel.

Britain courts private cash to fund 'golden age' of nuclear-powered AI

Translation

offering a "concierge-style" service to help the developers navigate UK planning, regulations, and secure private investment

Wine and steak, pay for play, bungaloo.

Classic environment to foster corruption.

It's bubble or nothing for Google as search giant looks to plow ~$180B into datacenters this year

Overflow

Google makes so much money, HMRC don't even know how to enter them into the calculator, so they don't bother checking if the right taxes have been paid.

Microsoft engineer speedruns Raspberry Pi magic smoke in five minutes

The Raspberry Pi didn’t “lack protection”. It committed the unforgivable sin of assuming the user understood orientation, pin-outs, and the idea that electricity is not a vibe but a thing that goes places.

Somewhere along the way we replaced basic electronic literacy with abstractions, guardrails, and the comforting lie that hardware should be as forgiving as software. So when a board presents 40 bare pins and asks for a shred of spatial reasoning, the result is panic, smoke, and a Bluesky thread.

It’s an education gap meeting live power. The Pi behaved like electronics always have. The surprise seems to be that anyone expected otherwise.

The real issue isn’t that the pins aren’t keyed. It’s that we now treat knowing which way round something goes as an optional skill, right up until the smell of burning epoxy reintroduces it.

What makes it truly funny is not the mistake, but the expectation that the world should apologise for it. A £50 board in a cardigan is apparently supposed to compensate for the slow erosion of first principles. When it doesn’t, we don’t question the gap in understanding. We write a post about safety.

Nitrogen ransomware is so broken even the crooks can't unlock your files

Re: Criminalize paying ransom

Reminds me of one outfit where security would do things like drop a thumb drive in the office that would lock employee's device if plugged in with a notice they got fired.

Seems like nobody is doing these things any more.

UK watchdog to rule on £246M Post Office subsidy over Horizon scandal and IR35

Re: Fujitsu?

Have you ever had a wine and steak dinner and tried to do something important afterwards?

Re: Truth

I shall add:

An “off-payroll worker” is not a low-tax worker.

A contractor charges more than an employee because they are a business. That higher rate means the total tax paid is always higher than for an equivalent PAYE employee, even without payroll.

A consultancy employee on £60-70k pa is typically billed at £1k-2k a day. The spread is captured as corporate margin and usually shifted offshore in ways an individual contractor cannot.

Truth

IR35 was introduced to reduce off-payroll workers who avoid paying regular employment taxes

That claim has it backwards. IR35 did not reduce avoidance; it concentrated it. By forcing work away from independents and small consultancies, it funnelled contracts toward large firms with the scale, legal cover and accounting machinery to minimise tax exposure far more aggressively than any lone contractor ever could.

The same firms also gained easier access to overseas labour, hired below UK market rates under existing visa schemes, further undercutting domestic specialists. That was not an unintended side effect but a structural outcome of how the rules were designed and enforced.

In practice, IR35 reduced competition, created brain drain, weakened delivery quality, increased costs to the public and private sector, and expanded the very behaviours it claimed to prevent, just relocated behind corporate logos and compliance theatre.

'The EU runs on Microsoft' – and Uncle Sam could turn it off, claims MEP

Uncle Krasnov

Whilst turning it off is a possibility, for uncle Krasnov it is better to have it turned on and read all your state secrets.

Wouldn't be surprised if law enforcement having such a trouble prosecuting anyone is because of kompromats gathered via Cloud Act.

Amazon's European datacenter buildout blows a breaker as grid connection wait list hits 7 years

Trojan Horse

Due to Cloud Act (and US administration being compromised by Russia) any branding or loophole using iteration of AWS should be a non-starter.

Governments should prioritise genuinely home grown corporations over tax shy multinational parasites.

UK names Barnsley as first Tech Town to see whether AI can fix... well, anything

Re: same old same old

I don't know. Yorkshire has reared one famous AI person:

Sunak takes advisory roles with Microsoft and AI firm Anthropic

Re: Yea - just chuck that 1/2 million down that toilet there thanks

Car parks are a terrible proxy for economic health. In much of the UK it’s cheaper and more practical to drive than to use public transport, so full car parks mostly tell you people had no alternative.

They also only reflect the fraction of the population that can afford to be there at all. The people priced out, commuting elsewhere, or simply disengaged never show up in that snapshot.

And those business parks by the M1 exist largely because firms have been priced out of anything closer to home. Cheap land on greenfield sites pushes activity away from towns, hollowing them out further. Warehouses and back offices do not regenerate local economies, no matter how busy the car park looks.

Re: Yea - just chuck that 1/2 million down that toilet there thanks

This is standard UK industrial policy theatre. When ministers say “support for business”, they mean funding slide decks, workshops, and vaguely academic “AI initiatives” that never touch a factory floor or a payroll.

There is effectively zero help for businesses that actually make things. No support for manufacturers, hardware startups, engineers, or anyone who has to buy machines, stock parts, hire skilled labour, or ship physical goods. Instead you get endless R&D cosplay where consultants and arts-adjacent “innovators” produce blue-sky PDFs, pocket the grant, and line up for the next round.

The government seems convinced you can conjure an economy from a coffee shop with a five-year-old laptop and a buzzword subscription. You cannot. Regeneration comes from people building, fixing, and producing things that someone is willing to pay for. An LLM does none of that.

Re: "Barnsley will blaze a trail"

I think person who came up with this was blazing something...

Morons

Companies that have signed up to the scheme include Microsoft and Cisco, each – we're told – with a particular focus on AI skills in adult education and SME support.

Yes, shovel tax payer money to foreign tax shy corporations of questionable morals. We are being government by utter morons and crooks.

Any business owner who tried to use such schemes will tell you these are useless and borderline scams.

Government basically pays money to have good PR among people who never run a business to let them think support is available and government is doing something.

Reality is government is doing f*ck all apart from sending your money to usual suspects and then wheeling out Reeves to raise taxes if they run out of money again.

'Lethal' and 'magical' Palantir tech is in demand by Pentagon, China, Middle East, CEO says

CRM

CRMs with mean salesmen that make grunts cream their pants.

Palantir declares itself the guardian of Americans' rights

Pale tier

They are great are pulling the wool over eyes of gullible politicians believing they have all the scary tech mumbo jumbo.

Europe shrugs off tariffs, plots to end tech reliance on US

The buy-out issue is mostly a symptom, not the disease. Overseas firms can only buy UK companies if the owners are willing to sell, and the system increasingly nudges them in that direction.

Running a business here has been turned into a slow grind unless you already have deep pockets, specialist advisers, and a tolerance for permanent regulatory churn. After a few years of that, many founders conclude there are no “sunlit uplands”, just more cost, more paperwork, and less upside. Selling up or relocating starts to look rational rather than greedy.

That is what happens when the institutions meant to safeguard fair competition and long-term national interest stop doing so in any meaningful way. Meanwhile public money flows freely to large foreign firms via incentives, special deals, and procurement, while domestic businesses face higher taxes, worse services, and shrinking support.

In that environment, it’s not surprising that homegrown companies cash out early. The problem isn’t that Britain is too open to acquisition. It’s that it has become increasingly hostile to building and sustaining independent businesses in the first place.

DRAM prices expected to double in Q1 as AI ambitions push memory fabs to their limit

Double trouble

Meaning they are probably going to crash.

Distributors just want to clear the warehouses.

Patch Tuesday meets Groundhog Day as Windows hibernation bug returns

Why they don't build servers with breathing holes that you'd have to cover with a pillow to shut down? Holding a button for a few seconds is a bit tame.

Microsoft's Sinofsky saw Surface fail coming – then hit up Epstein for advice on exit

Citizen Advice

Such a helpful guy that Epstein was. Surely there was no other person on the planet to give retirement advice.

Do journalists think people were born yesterday?

Infrastructure cyberattacks are suddenly in fashion. We can buck the trend

Re: "I was looking up tractors"

their IT kit seized and Plod has had a very good look at EVERYTHING on it?

First they would have to come out of a coma after eating a whole box of shortbreads.