Posts by claimed

Empire of office workers strikes back against RTO mandates

Re: Cuckoo land

9 million people I London, then there is Manchester, Liverpool… come to think of it, don’t most people live in cities?

Europe plots escape hatch from enshittification of search

Re: Yay Kagi and American capitalism

Protonmail is who I use, I’m not affiliated and can’t speak to pricing or your requirements

Re: Yay Kagi and American capitalism

$5 a month!!!!! For starter!

I pay about £40 a year for email, which supports a custom domain and wildcard capture etc, that is 1000 times more valuable to me than search.

Not paying this much for search. Laughable. Should be a dollar, with a query cap

C-suite at Alphabet make B-A-N-K from 2024 equity awards

Completely unjustifiable disparity. Decisions are valuable, but just because you’re decisions are for billions instead of thousands, doesn’t actually make you any better at those decisions or any more effective.

How do I get this sort of salary without being a complete asshole? Do I want it….? Then I would have to talk to other rich people and try and show I am better than the poors…

Sigh

As US vuln-tracking falters, EU enters with its own security bug database

Re: Hosted on azure.....

Give it a minute. Lots of EU companies thrilled by the implosion being witnessed, and trying to become Euzure/EUWS/Euugle

China's Loongson gets OpenStack boost from Inspur on its MIPS-y silicon

I thought 50 years

But looks like USA tech hegemony is toast in less than that. A billion people market, with integrated trade routes globally, and all you have to do is use software that’s slightly more efficient than the latest emissions from US tech companies like MS and you won’t notice any difference…

Tariffs won’t stop this train. I am absolutely fascinated, watching this, as a Brit. Come on EU, get some home grown kit off the ground and let’s heat up this competition!

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

Re: to support up to 1 MW per rack.

That is an amazing reference, this is exactly where we’re are at - Bezos is a railway baron!

China is using AI to sharpen every link in its attack chain, FBI warns

Re: AI CEO replicants

Your post without the final sentence would have been fine, but now you’re a victim blaming douche. I suppose you think woman walking alone at night deserve to be attacked because they are putting themselves at risk.

Yes, better controls is the protection to CEO impersonation, no, it doesn’t “serve them right” to be conned while trying to do their job, potentially costing them their jobs.

Watch out for any Linux malware sneakily evading syscall-watching antivirus

Re: Infosec bluster

And that’s why I love it here.

Decades-old bug in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas finally shows itself

Re: "[Do] Not ignore the compilation warnings"

I feel a great of shame, but hours wouldn’t be enough for a lot of my code… need a much bigger window… let’s talk days

As ChatGPT scores B- in engineering, professors scramble to update courses

Re: Calculators

So the editor of El Reg has no ability to write articles, because all they are doing is taking the output generated by the authors and doing the final pass checks?

I think there will be plenty of space for thinking, critical thinking especially, and just as good authors tend to have read a lot of books, the skilled humans will be reading more than writing, and that’s ok

US senator warns 'China is cheering' for proposed NASA budget cuts

Re: But of course

Ah yes. People who disagree with me are stupid. An excellent argument to present, the “other side” absolutely won’t use it to immediately dismiss any argument they don’t agree with, or understand.

Don’t you want people to change their minds? How can we move forward if we just dig deeper ruts for people to get cosy in.

Come on, be smart, they are not stupid - there is more nuance to this phenomenon

Apps-from-prompts Firebase Studio is a great example – of why AI can't replace devs

Ok… so once “coding” is a solved problem, we can spin up apps and process data in a breeze… then what?

Someone still needs to articulate (pretty exactly) what should be done, which is the hard bit! Juniors right code, seniors convince stakeholders which bits of code they should pay for.

Let’s say, again, that this is now solved… I’ve rarely seen a business stakeholder be able to correctly articulate what they need. We will end up with a huge pile of code that mostly works, and businesses will spend huge amounts of money to pivot from one burning tire fire to another, every couple of years.

So, same shit. We will need to come and have careful conversations about what might work better, engage stakeholders and understand the various scenarios.

In the meantime, none of this is solved, and this is all just a big waste of time as far as I can tell. Copy and paste development has never worked well, be it stack overflow or ChatGPT - without proper application of critical thinking, it’s all just busy work

UK convicts five romance fraudsters who stole millions from duped singles

Re: Fool me once . .

Well, instead of acting clever, why don’t you think a bit harder.

Humans are not rational.

Get it?

NASA doubles odds of Moon hitting near-Earth asteroid

Re: Our moon has protected us

What is different about “surviving dinosaurs were not on the evolutionary branch that included the big ones”… and “all the big ones died”…

The big ones died, only birds survive… mammals also survived and some got bigger… nothing to correct

Strap in, get ready for more Rust drivers in Linux kernel

Re: Such awful interop

Have you not read anything about how rust works? The type safety guarantees are done using logical inferences from some mostly simple rules which the compiler enforces, this makes the language a little more fiddely until you know why it’s doing things, but means everything compiles down to the same as efficient C code, with very little “stack getting in the way”. You’re thinking of Java, python etc, not Rust. The only example I can think of for stack overhead is smart pointers maintaining lists of who has a ref… so they can unwind the stack when no longer in use - you don’t have to use a smart pointer to do zero copy buffer stuff, just pass ownership of the buffer on, and you can certainly preallocate memory - so I don’t get the complaint.

The whole point of Rust is to be as close to safe as possible, with as little abstraction and runtime costs as possible. It’s specifically designed to prevent classes of bugs, by not breaking general rules, and if you want to optimize then you can. Also, if you want to write unsafe shit and put the ego on the line, go nuts. Literally no downside except learning a new thing, the trade off is amazing for what you get in return.

The borrow checker is the big one, but there are some other bits like not being able to alias a mutable reference (avoids multi threaded weirdness):

https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/races.html

Linux royalty backs adoption of Rust for kernel code, says its rise is inevitable

Re: Why rust?

Give it a go. The borrow checker is mad but once it clicks it is awesome - just fixes classes and classes of bugs and all you have to do is to write scoped code.

Also Mozilla is a fairly big boy so it hit the ground running

You’re probably a little more critical than I am, I think plenty of intelligent people have implied exactly that.

“Causes more problems than it solves” is also a value statement, so I’m going to lump those comments in there too.

That’s why I say “hubris” and not “stupidity”.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

Don’t like Rust? Cool

Don’t see the value in Rust? Hubris

“I’ve already got an immune system, antibiotics just mean swallowing giant pills and are not needed if your cells just kill bacteria like they’re supposed to”

US minerals company says crooks broke into email and helped themselves to $500K

Near $10m loss a year for 38 years, and no minerals sold…

So CEO gets at least a milly, obvs, then probs 10 staff on $200k a piece, outsource the drilling to a big boy, lease the machinery, few false starts, election cycle years might need a bit of lobbying, what do you mean? This seems fine

Open source maintainers are really feeling the squeeze

Is this a joke? What are you, 14? Do you know anything about Linux or LT?

Absolutely laughable take

UK armed forces fast-tracking cyber warriors to defend digital front lines

Re: Quite a small potential labour pool.

They were talking about age - so if you were way better than a fresh faced grad ( here you’re doing the same thing and assuming 21/22 ) - how would you stack up against a 16 year old?

I think it is you that may want to go back and think about your comment. Your self proclaimed skill at work may have benefitted from brushing up on your reading comprehension exercises.

The biggest microcode attack in our history is underway

Re: What is this article about again ?

I dunno… behemoth IT company finds an IT flaw while billionaire IT trumpony finds itself above the law

Made sense to me

Boffins carve up C so code can be converted to Rust

Re: Now we can keep the C code.

I’ve seen this advocated for at fewest 100 times. I care less and less…. ;)

It’s not a rule, it was just proposed by some guy 400 years ago. If I use it, and you understand it as I intended - then the language has done its job.

You can correct people about using the wrong tense, or even the wrong word - but if I’m telling you there is a Sabre tooth tiger behind you, you should probably just act on the information received, rather than fuss over the delivery of it; that is, of course, entirely up to you

Re: What's the point?!

Safe rust code does not have memory safety bugs, because it can’t.

Some C code does, and when it does, it’s bad. How do you know if your C code is going to have one of the bugs that an attacker can exploit? “Trust me bro”?

They’ve identified the subset of language features that they can auto translate from “maybe it’s safe?” to “for sure, this will be safe (from these really common, really bad class of errors)”, without refactoring.

It seems to me that having the ability to know where in the program are the bits that need refactoring or block this sanity test, should be a good thing.

Converting to safe rust is step one, you’ve missed the second bit: actually compiling it and getting a safe program. You can write safe rust and the compiler will reject it, because it isn’t actually safe… so even if you are not using any of the incompatible features of C, this process would still add safety and validate the code.

So, rather than convert trivial code, this shines a light on complex edge cases - which is where all the problems come from.

Don’t like Rust? Cool

Don’t see the value in Rust? Hubris

OpenAI plans to ring in the New Year with a for-profit push

Re: Tilting at windmills ...... has one talking to oneself

The quality trend of the El Reg over the last few years is a result of the general news media decline, with competition from social media reducing ad spend and forcing this site to run more intrusive ads and not be able to pay for as much content. (In my opinion, I’m not affiliated in any way).

I still find some gems here and continue to return - while I’m inclined to agree that the on call stories are a bit weak, that’s generally due to the changes in IT over the last 30 years and the aging out of the commentards, meaning the stories are now only going to work for a small niche of the readers, and are inevitably scraping the bottom of the barrel. Still, don’t bitch about the format, it’s a nice call back to reader write ins and rare to find these days. If you have any stories, why not try to formulate them into something people might be entertained by and go ahead and submit them?

As for AMFM1… congratulations on your right of passage: mistaking that account for a comprehensible debate partner. It’s not.

Happy New Year. Try not to post when you’ve been drinking, and if you weren’t, try to re-read your online posts to reduce your rage. We’ve all been there, but keep it civil, the emotion shows and it doesn’t make you any more likely to persuade.

Supreme Court to hear TikTok's appeal against law that would force it to shut, or sell

Re: Big Tech Lobbying at its Finest

By this logic, any app used by service members - which has permissions for location, should be not only banned but forced to sell to US companies….

Also, if the location of a “secret” base is the issue: then you’re fucked since China put satellites in orbit. I think the secrets of secret bases are really their capability and not headcount. Anyone with a bird in the air can find movement and determine a base.

It’s completely crazy that the US will not allow a foreign company to operate within their borders, they should have adequate controls from the last 200 years of global trade….

This is all bullshit

Clock's ticking on PostgreSQL 12, but not everyone is ready to say goodbye

Incremental backup?

Does log shipping not count as incremental backup? What about streaming replication? Pretty sure real time recovery has been possible a couple of ways for a while… is this incremental restore from backup or just a shiny layer slapped on top of the pre existing features (very welcome, not saying it isn’t going to be useful!)

What is this new feature, hopefully there will be an El Reg article that answers these burning questions at some point. I miss the frequency of technical writing articles

WhatsApp may expose the OS you use to run it – which could expose you to crooks

Re: Real friends...

Exactly! Just because *you* don’t want to drink and drive, doesn’t mean I should be stopped from doing so! It’s so one sided, shut up and get in the car, you baby.

Ryanair faces GDPR turbulence over customer ID checks

Re: Trust the third party has done everything correctly?

This looks like an interesting piece of information but I don’t know what the acronyms mean

Tesla trounces shareholders who alleged Autopilot was all share-pumping lies

Re: Gullible and greedy investors...

I’ve upvoted you, but you’re incorrect.

When you have money you’re entitled to more money, why don’t you know this? The stock market is supposed to be a quick way to establish further income for those who have “made it” and want to kick back and chill

AI agent promotes itself to sysadmin, trashes boot sequence

Re: The benefits of Artificial Intelligence

It’s cheaper to do that than to avoid mistakes. Cheaper in the short term, which is all that matters.

AWS must fork out $30.5M after losing P2P network patent scrap

Does this sort of thing only affect American companies?

Software patents are not valid in Europe, right? So if I want to start a software business, do it in a Europe, and then can’t be sued for a patent titled: “System and Technique for Diagnostic Evaluation and Network Recovery Through Controlled Power Availability and Interruption”… otherwise known as Turning it off and On again…

Scientists demonstrate X-rays as a way to zap asteroids out of Earth's path

Re: 'Nuke them all'*

In the same way that there is no “full evidence” that the Earth and other planets came from an accretion disk around the nascent star we call the Sun.

We just look at what’s here now, and “guess” that’s what happened.

Glad you understand what science is… weird place to push this. Must be a bot…

Re: 'Nuke them all'*

No dude. Dinosaurs shared the land with little mammals, they danced on the Dino graves and their decedents dig up the graves and parade the remains around for all to see

Google's Rust belts bugs out of Android, helps kill off unsafe code substantially

Yay

Been seeing comments like “moop moop, you can do this in C++, Rust is for babies”, “Rust is a fad, that’s what they said about swift”, “Java is also memory safe and it’s crazy”… for YEARS

Glad some solid numbers are coming out. The combination of conceptual and architectural approaches in Rust is a step change, and it’s so good for the world to improve what we do. Yes, Rust too will die one day, but I’m pleased it exists as I’m sure it will stand as a significant block in the wall of human technological evolution.

No I’m not AI, yes that paragraph is trash, no I’m not rewriting it :)

Cards Against Humanity deals SpaceX a $15M lawsuit over Texas turf tangle

Re: I wonder

It was a publicity stunt and activism. If government did that it would cause more publicity of going against the people etc

That’s why they’ve said this moves hurts their image, because this land was acquired to project an image, nothing else

The future of software? Imagine a bot, stamping on a human face – forever

Re: Complicated for fun

If they don’t know what they're doing, they shouldn’t be fucking about under the hood of the car. If they can avoid that, Linux wont freeze frequently. I have multiple Linux computers, I don’t fuck with them, they just work.

I have Windows for work and my Mrs has Apple. They all work, just don’t fuck about with them, it’s really easy.

If you do want to change stuff, make sure you know what you’re doing.

Re: Complicated for fun

Tell me you don’t know what you’re doing, without telling me you don’t know what you’re doing

Apple owes billions in back taxes over Ireland state aid rule break

Laughable.

The USA is a big player, but there is a bigger, badder world outside. Maybe look outside of your cave, troll, and you’d see that there is light aplenty, and the source isn’t the USA

Re: European Colonization

Must be a bot. Why the fuck would your typical loonie be on El Reg?

Cognizant alleges Infosys swiped its trade secrets

Fishy

You might say

'Right to switch off' initiative aims to boost economy by beating burnout

Re: How about

Which article were you reading? I was reading the one where a suggestion was made that the wellbeing of workers and a boost to the economy could be achieved by allowing people to do what they can already do thanks to Article 8 of the Human Rights act.

I can only assume that they want to get rid of that act (because that’s been said by politicians and that’s why the immigration issue is being hyped up), so we might lose that protection - but for now, this is pointless.

I was making a suggestion for what might actually help. Keep up, old timer.

How about

Tax the rich, close loopholes allowing parliamentarians to soak up free shit and walk into speaking engagements where they’re paid small fortunes. Anybody should be able to do an MPs job, they should be replaceable, not us workers.

Increasing tax on rentals year on year, so if you want to rent out your second home while you and your new spouse are consolidating your lives, great, but companies should not be profiting off basic human needs. It shouldn’t be a business model to hold on to property and rent it, get it back on the market so we can buy a fucking home.

While we’re here, break up the monopolies, stop allowing 3 fucking companies to own every product in a supermarket, oh wow there are 10 shops to choose from… all the products come from umbrella companies…. That is crazy

Elon Musk's X Corp faces $61M lawsuit over unpaid tech tabs

The sort of scale where you might consider buying a chip to process images as it’s only job, instead of using a bit of python in a container? Sigh, clearly you weren’t the only one unable to read my question, I’ll try harder next time

Thanks, most likely ASICs in the switches then. This was the only decent response I got!

I was thinking chips… ironically for the downvotes I was thinking bigger scale

Not disputing that… read the post. I was asking what they needed

$60m *custom* components? How custom does a web server need to be? Was this specialized image processing chips to support larger posts that came in around that time…. Struggling to see why Twitter would need anything not off the shelf for firing 100 characters around the globe

After nearly 3B personal records leak online, Florida data broker confirms it was ransacked by cyber-thieves

Re: There's but one solution that will work.

I don’t know if this works, it feels so much like we’ve shown that this “secret passcode” being the way to interact with service providers is a shit system.

Back in the day, you lived in a village, and everybody knew everybody’s name/where they lived etc

Can we construct a system that allows us to validate identity, and therefore entitlement to service, when all PII is essentially public? Without this, I think it’s chicken and egg trying to hide PII and it inevitably leaking through one avenue or another…

You need to be able to prove you are who you say you are when presenting yourself (MFA is pretty good for this), and you need to be able to demonstrate entitlement to service, so either the provider needs a record, or you need to posses some redeemable token that was acquired earlier.

I don’t think it’s convenient, but I don’t see how we do this without some kind of Account system, which seems like a great way to lock people out and create a new class hierarchy, so I don’t like it either.

I think the security adage that obscurity isn’t protection needs to apply, but I don’t think an account assigned at birth is great either, how would you configure MFA for a child, or if you lose your possessions in a house fire. I am *not* advocating for DNA tests but it seems there isn’t another way right now to move away from these secrets… I’m sure DNA tests could be faked under the right conditions.

It seems our choices are either this mess, or 1984… any other ideas?