Posts by devin3782

Some English hospitals doubt Palantir's utility: We'd 'lose functionality rather than gain it'

Palantirs were the Spying orbs of Sauron, so I guess company's name is apt based on Peter Tiels thoughts on society I'd be keeping him as far away from everyone's medical data as possible and indeed society as whole.

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

Yeah they did, they had to announce lay offs, projects they were killing </sarcasm>

Bad trip coming for AI hype as humanity tools up to fight back

Re: Hollywood Plot

That was the plot for Total Annihilation. Although our current timeline seems to have more in common with the Fallout universe.

It's not just Big Tech: The UK's Online Safety Act applies across the board

I thinik theres possibly another way this could be achieved would be to have a DNS record similar to the SFP for email. It could work thus:

TXT "child-safe:true, min-age=13, country=GB"

min-age (see film classifications or something similar)

country (2 letter country code)

- Any website without this record is classed as child unsafe by default.

- Perhaps social media sites could be classed as adult only by default (we'll simply single out the big ones here: any owned by publicly traded company )

- Parents enable parental controls, any time their kid goes to a new website with say a PG or is less than their age the parent gets a notification of the URL so they can check the site and has a log of what they're looking at, then the parent can allow or deny. This should be pretty trivial to implement on all devices and can operate solely on those devices i.e. doesn't need the cloud to compute whether a site is safe or not.

Obviously this is still marking your own homework, but so is the current law also who decides what's safe for their children? the current law doesn't define it and its moving goal posts this gives the tools to parents. The nice thing is this would work globally for everyone, although the age classifications depending on territory could be challenging... but DNS zoning does exist so maybe it would work even with that and using a VPN to a different country.

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

It's a shame isn't it as we're effectively lending them our money we should be able to charge them interest on it at a rate we agree (see dictate) with them. I had to ring them to get my £500 credit back even though there's an option on their website which of course doesn't work.

SAP says GenAI will help solve legacy migration skills shortage

Re: Skills shortages?!

Hang on... didn't all of these companies fire a load of people and they're now wondering why there's a shortage of workers? <sarcasm>Hmmmm I wonder if those two things are related in some way... nah couldn't possibly be the case</sarcasm>

UK council still hadn't fully costed troubled Oracle project 2 years in

Re: “ no fully costed and resourced plan in place to enable delivery of the program to completion.”

I'd have written it thus "I don't think you'd ever deliver Oracle ERP"

Gang of monkeys escape South Carolina biomedical research facility

Re: Sounds like a "farm" run with minimal funding

If they were paying peanuts they'd still have the monkeys

UK watchdog hints Voda-Three merger will likely pass

Re: Why bother with a regulator?!

We call this Enshittification.

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

Re: Damn Shame

I concur for Windows Foobar 2000 with columns ui, Linux Rhythm Box works as well on large libraries.

Uncle Sam may force Google to sell Chrome browser, or Android OS

How about they're have to spin off both, while they're at lets see Apple finally taken to task on their (same) anticompetitive behaviours.

Xfce 4.20 creeps toward Wayland support while Mint 22.1 polishes desktop routine

Yes you'll take more dark themes god damn it, and bloody well use them and to make sure, we'll remove your light theme so there! I don't get the dark themes personally but clearly someone does so good for them.

I'm more excited about a new version of xfce though, I love the monitor profiles if only the other desktop environments had that.

The more annoying bit is the constant buggering about cinnamon has to do because of gnome

Open source orgs strengthen alliance against patent trolls

Surely if one lives in the UK or in fact Europe you can simply say, sorry software patent owner (troll) but your software patent isn't legal in my jurisdiction kindly don't darken my door again.

Pat Gelsinger's grand plan to reinvent Intel is in jeopardy

I think I'd spend some time making some good products, but here I am waist deep trying to persuade the tide to turn back.

City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle

Someone in Oracle got a new Ferrari as a bonus for that one.

Traditionally it was a Honda NSX

Dell starts new round of layoffs while it looks to 'unlock modern AI'

Re: Layoffs Should Be From The Marketing Department

A mate of mine was telling me his 3 year old Dell laptop has a 10/100 ethernet rather than a gigabit, we could only conclude they've been using stuff from the turn of century's parts bin.

Mozilla Thunderbird finally gets system tray notifications

Re: It's shit like this...

But maybe those paid developers were paid to care about other bugs first?

Epic accuses Apple of foul play over iOS access, wants EU to show DMA red card

When two dicks go to war pettiness is all that you can score. Grow up Tim.

Beijing says state owns China's rare earth metals

Re: Ah the resource wars

As long as it's not vault tek...

Microsoft Research chief scientist has no issue with Windows Recall

Re: Just looked at the Total Recall code.......

As its a sql lite file then it should be possible to open the database change the schema to make the image field too small or add an extra column which doesn't allow nulls and has no default value set.

I use Windows in VM so on VM shutdown I could just have a script in Linux which mangles that file completely and clears the images assuming those are just image files on the file system. If it ends up being saved to the cloud after all it should be possible to block that on the VM's host

UK may not hit goal of 95% mobile coverage, commons committee warns

Re: Sounds Ideal

Derby(shire) has delightfully poor reception

Windows 11 tries to escape Windows 10's shadow with AI muscle

If microsoft remove the telemetry, copilot, and stop badgering me about logging in with a microsoft account or using edge and make the start menu search, search my computer first without searching the web i'll happily buy windows 11 pro. As it is Windows 11 isn't an upgrade.

UK lays down fresh legislation banning crummy default device passwords

Re: A good start...

Yes! this! have more up votes, this is essential.

Open sourcerers say suspected xz-style attacks continue to target maintainers

Nah it's decided purely on whether or not they've played D&D

Cloud vendor lock-in is shocking, but there's a get out of jail card

I've long been of the opinion you should have stuff on prem or in a data centre but its your kit and use the cloud to augment that infrastructure.

The UK Digital Information Bill: Brexit dividend or data disaster?

Re: create a more business-friendly regime

"Financial engineering" Is that a new synonym for money laundering?

The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

In fairness only a few really big ISP's do this and usually those whom have mobile networks as well, you need to take care with ISP's in the UK as some provide routers with amazon alexa built in, reading the terms and conditions on those are eye opening.

AI researchers have started reviewing their peers using AI assistance

Re: Who raised you people?

"Why is it that people with book smarts have zero common sense?"

Ah yes those who have rolled a natural 20 on intellgence but a natural 1 in wisdom. Intellgence and Wisdom (common sense) are separare things. The other problem is difference between specialists and experts, a specialists knows everything about their subject, experts know nothing else.

How to Netflix Oracle’s blockbuster audit model

Quite then spend the savings on commercial support if you need that and give the developers a hefty donation. I don't have an M$ office licence I instead took that money and gave it to the libreoffice devs, they're more deserving. I honestly think this would be a very fair way to help open source developers.

British Library pushes the cloud button, says legacy IT estate cause of hefty rebuild

Sometimes malware/ransomware can write itself into firmwares of the devices in the server or the boot loader or indeed the bios, we have Sony were the first to do this with their rootkits on music CD's so we really have them to thank, although i'm sure others would have come up with it sooner or later. As far as I know there's no way to tell for sure especially as a lot of firmware isn't available so you can compare and re-flash as needed or indeed fix it.

UK finance minister promises NHS £3.4B IT investment to unlock £35B savings

Re: Ah yes, Mr Hunt...

Mr Hunt, I think James Naughtie said it best.

Microsoft trying to stop Copilot generating fake Putin comments on Navalny's death

What I really love is hubris/laziness in the decision to train large language models on things on the internet where we can safely say most of it is crap. The crap in crap out principle still stands.

AI still has no intelligence, Steven Pinker was right, as usual, its just a manages to copy and paste in a vaguely none gibberish way with no concept of facts and zero wisdom

What's going on with Eos, Nvidia's incredible shrinking supercomputer?

According to Jenson, the more you buy the more you save... so my guessing is that was the problem, by adding so many cores they saved too much money, so, reduce the core count, they save less and ngreedia makes more.

Microsoft's Notepad goes from simple text editor to Copilot conspirator

I can see notepad as being a great vector to paste malware in and infect the AI running on Microsoft's servers. Also think of all the juicy little tid bits of secret information Microsoft will be able to scrape because we all know the co-pilot won't run locally.

Data regulator fines HelloFresh £140K for sending 80M+ spams

The fines should be at least a percentage of global turnover and it should be a tangible integer and not less than 5%

AMD brings its AI engines to the desktop with Ryzen 8000G APUs, RX 7600 XT graphics cards

Re: Accumulated TOPS ?

The comsumer use case is extra energy consumption and to say I have an AI core, all the AI processing happens in the cloud rendering this sort of thing utterly pointless as the master of the artifical universe would never permit us to process things locally.

HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers

Re: If car manufacturers did this...

They did, but then went back on it with some weasel words about it and then said but customers will happily pay for more for software tweaks/updates and we're going to do this anyway via the back door just not heated seats.

I don't understand this mind set, are these people that detached from reality? I'm glad I made the decision long ago not to buy anything HP.

HP has for a long time stood for Horrible Products and they're really plumbing depths of crap-tac-u-la

It's ba-ack... UK watchdog publishes age verification proposals

Ah yes the societal memory of 90 days so wait for an amount of time after that, then change it slightly and republish, for gods sake stop this nonsense.

Storing more data about kids on-line isn't going to make them safer on-line, it'll make them less safe and more easily identifiable, which is the opposite of what we should be doing. To make children safer online make strong encryption mandatory, ensure no data is stored about anyone and most importantly accompany them when they're browsing the internet.

UEFI flaws allow bootkits to pwn potentially hundreds of devices using images

You brought tears of linguistic joy to my eyes, thank you sir

AWS rakes in half a billion pounds from UK Home Office

Hmmm, are we sure using AWS is a great plan for secret goverment files based on how seemingly difficult it been for everyone else to stop their S3 buckets from leaking. I suppose on the flip side they'll be open secrets before long.

Capita scores £239M contract to manage mega public sector pension scheme

Re: "Capita has scooped up a ten-year £239 million ($298 million) contract..."

Problem is when they do finally go pop, I wonder what happens to all that data they've been collecting? Who gets control of it? Thats the scary bit, too many eggs have been placed in crapitas basket

Passive SSH server private key compromise is real ... for some vulnerable gear

Don't forget the eye watering support contract.

AI chemist creates catalysts to make oxygen using Martian meteorites

Ace so we get by products of steam and green goo, as long as there are no portals to hell its fine, that said if musk owned the base it would be hell on mars

If you like to play along with the illusion of privacy, smart devices are a dumb idea

True, but it does spend a lot of time making DNS requests to checkonline.home-assistant.io

Google's browser security plan slammed as dangerous, terrible, DRM for websites

Hmmm Wiser, there's no nominative pre-determination there. So is this the foreshadowing of how the internet ends? hopefully not. I can see some of the news outlets and indeed Google committing further self harm implementing this out of intergalactic stupidity. Interestingly though I suspect there will be whole load of website owners who don't do this and they will gain the advantage from remaining open.

Oracle's revised Java licensing terms 2-5x more expensive for most orgs

Re: with 49,500 employees, all of whom are applicable

In short, yes. We can dub oracle's software licensing "A kings randsomwear"

Two new Linux desktops – one with deep roots – come to Debian

Re: Beautiful? Really?

Agreed the RiscOS 2 look was much nicer than the RiscOS 3. NeXTstep looks ok but its elements take up way too much screen space, also I'm a guy who has 3x 27" screens (1440p) and likes his apps running maximised. Jumping from an Acorn to a PC I found main menus and toolbars a step backwards as they took up screen space.

Mozilla pauses blunder-prone AI chatbot in MDN docs

What a waste of developer resources that was, they could have better spent that time fully implementing the :has css pseudo class. No Mozilla we don't need you to be jumping on the band wagon, we need you to be the port in the storm.

Free Wednesday gift for you lucky lot: Extra mouse button!

Re: RISC OS always used three buttons

RiscOS is where I started with computers and man was that UI good and consistent, a level of consistency Windows, OSX and Linux could only dream of. The middle click menu in all applications was a joy. You can imagine my despair when my parents bought a PC and I had to do ungodly things like click toolbar buttons and go to the top of an application for the bloody menu as well as hold shift and ctrl. A single mouse button shows nothing but contempt for your users especially when you then put the charging usb port on the bottom.