Posts by andy the pessimist

Water system controllers don't belong on the internet, says ex-NSA chief after suspected Iran attacks

Re: Yeah

It's a national securìty issue.

Have a billion dollars.

That'll do nicely.

'Asimov was right' about rules for robots, says ex-US Cyber Director

zeroth law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics#Zeroth_Law_added

Would the americans support it?

Everywhere else says yes please.

Americans give all-day school phone bans a ringing endorsement

Re: What about workplaces?

I was contracting at a company and wanted to check an rf component website. The website was banned by IT. I requested IT to unblock it. I showed my mobile phone view of the website to my manager to support its allowed access.

Mobile phone access should be restricted but not a blanket ban.

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

There is a significant amount of cross border working between switzerland and the neighbouring countries.

Switzerland voted against the proposition to restrict the population to 10 million.

Re: DIBOL … using lex/yacc

I used flex/bison for one project as an initial, rather dirty solution.

I told my permie replacement only use if everything is broken. I doubt that they would understand it.

I am retired.

As a test engineer i tought myself how to use flex/bison for my amusement. My background is electronics not compsci.

Uncle Sam sees the light, offers GlobalFoundries $300M to pursue silicon photonics while taking 1% stake

test chips

Test chipse are an R&D practice to validate specific layout/design concepts. Often they are not completely functional. The will still need to be qualified.

Once the test chip is working it will need to be re-designed to be production ready.

They are probably 2 years away from from a real saleable product.

It could be a way to keep the design team employed as everything is to work first time. Somewhat unusual.

DEF CON bans Meta-style 'pervert glasses'

Re: Ah great

I have glaucoma. One of these glasses (with some image movement software) would be useful. Please ask the person before tarring and feathering them.

If i could do the image manipulation software myself i would buy these.

A certain amount of compassion would be appreciated.

The Star Wars cantina scene shows we need a new hope for the agentic web

Re: humans vs bots

I think you need to give your title back, andy the ever-hopeful...

Apologies normal service will be restored.

Re: humans vs bots

I am not giving my card details to a bot unless i have to approve every transaction. I hope no company is allowing any bot to spend money without a really tight human approval process.

No company is stupid enough to allow bots to pay without humans in the loop?

humans vs bots

Humans have eyes and wallets. Do bots have wallets...no. Banning bots would be good.

Allowing google spiders grudging yes.

Allowing AI bots hell no. They hammer the website and bring no money. Shields up defend the website.

Linus Torvalds tells AI haters to fork off

is that nvidia being given the finger?

The picture of linus giving nvidia the finger is entertaining. Have relations between linus/the kernel and nvidia improved?

MPs fear Treasury cold feet could sink Whitehall's £1.15B shared services push

who is doing this?

Is this movement of systems being done by workday? Or is it being done by one of the usual (poor ability) suspects?

It sounds ambitious unless being done by a good program manager, knowledgable staff and senior civil servants under a tight leash.

This is one question looking for info and the other crazy optimism.

Red Hat offers RHEL support 'forever' for those who need to lock into legacy tech

Re: Life membership

The compiled C++ code controls real time digital, mixed-signal , RF, instruments. Synchronisation and time accuracy needs to be really good.

I can write firmware for that tester. That has good timing. It's not pleasant.

Re: Life membership

A large automotive company in munich uses ATE using RHEL. The modern ones use RHEL 7, the older ones use RHEL 5.

The computer is the cheap part of the tester.

Hopefully RHEL and the tester manufacturer can keep them running.

Startup sues Palo Alto Networks' Koi Security, saying an AI-hallucinated report falsely linked it to Chinese espionage

pune

Wouldthis be a koi crap ....koi carp.

Apologies normality will return later.

Microsoft builds a bouncer to keep bots out of Teams meetings

Re: transcription bots

I tend to write down the meeting decisions especially the ones relevant to me. TPM's tends to have poor memories and write things that are convenient.

My meeting notes are brutal and don't mince words.

So i refer to the bits i need. If they read the whole meeting notes i'm toast.

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

A field service engineer had fixed the ATE and had 3 RF frequency synthesisers to return to base for repair.

They cost 100k$ each. Much more expensive than his car.

Engineer accused of insider trading tied to Microsoft's reboot of Three Mile Island nuclear plant

Re: am i missing something?

If the document was protectively marked yes he should go to court.

What was common practice in that organisation.

am i missing something?

Can i assume all of these documents had a secret or other suitable tag so the average person would know what the rules are.

Or was some senior person careless?

Was the company rules clear ,explained and enforced.

Why am i thinking somebody waz careless.

Security boss thought MFA would be too much security

Re: Regarding "yelling"

In the test area noone can hear you scream.

The test are was recorded at 94db,just below mandatory ear defenders, ànd one down tester.

I blame test areas and motorhead concerts.

Boffin claims Microsoft's supposed quantum leap does not compute due to 'basic Python errors'

measurementz on only one device

When testing devices on early devices you look for 3 or more devices that have the same behaviour.

With decent process and assembly you should get 5 or more same behavior devices. Hopefully lots more good devices.

Only having one device means cherry picking the device (usually the best one).

It sounds like poor yield and a crap device not somerhing you should make enginrering decisions on.

Cloudflare teams up with big browsers to help websites tell welcome from unwelcome visitors

Re: Totally doomed

More human than human.

Anthropic's Mythos mess just keeps getting more complicated

are they using the CVE?

If the LLM model was trained on CVEs. Maybe it was trained on one the US spys are using. The access allowed by the CVE to be seen....and patched.

The us spies want to stop the patching.

I'll watch the kettle a bit later.

UK.gov links up with LinkedIn for jobs market intel from 40M accounts

Re: Hunting for tax losses

The DWP may find non economically active people in that age range. What are they going to do, send you a letter, send the boys round?

Would this be another stick to beat the unemployed with?

Mass emails to companies and recruitment agencies.

DWP just counting the numbers even if the company is in a completely different industry.

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

Re: System failure

I've watched the movie and it's good.

It starts of with a training exercise to simulate lauching a missile. The man knows what it will do and tries to get command to stop it. I think no missiles where launched. E.g fail safe.

To guarantee launching missiles the people are replaced by a computer (WOPR). If that goes wong it launches the missiles. E.g fail dangerous.

What is the AI controlling? If it goes wrong does amazon ship a book to everyone. I don't mind. Does it bankrupt jeff.... i really don't mind.

For things that are really important multiple people in the loop is the right thing. Careful people with integrity as well.

World Cup AI predictor now lets users ask daft what-ifs

I'm using fedora (not ms). Hopefully there will be not much football here.

What if venezuala or iran beat the usa. Ideally in the final. A jesse owens event.

The shock/rage just might kill donald.

I'll go back to my laptop and avoid anything sporty.

Yes! It's true! Windows 11 is an agentic platform

We have captain picard for the (sounds swedish) borg. And the ravenous bugblatter beast of traal for the vogons.

Go get him.

UK's top crime agency hamstrung by legacy IT, watchdog warns

Re: Its the bureaucracy, stupid!

Everything had to be logged, categorized, reported, faxed, reported again, faxed again ad nauseam.

Do they really use faxes?

I would have hoped they would be using pgp email.

Listen up, England. The Health Secretary is going to be data controller for everyone's Single Patient Record

Re: Phone or letter

How do i know i have an appointment? I get two emails through mychart, two text messages. Occasionaly i get a letter and another mychart email.

Are they in the spamming business?

Angry devs vow to flee GitHub Copilot as metered billing takes hold

just checking

Can i assume that regular (non AI) operations are cheap and the AI operations are expensive?

Can the person disable AI operations?

Do they publish the costs of operations?

Okta writes its own license to kill rogue AI agents

ĥomage to 007

My name is BOFH and i'm licensed to kill -9.

Researchers find all big-name bots bomb EU compliance tests

breaking the law

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ04NG2oXHQ&list=RDlJ04NG2oXHQ&start_radio=1&pp=ygUdYnJlYWtpbmcgdGhlIGxhdyBqdWRhcyBwcmllc3SgBwE%3D

I just had to do this.

Normality will be achieved later.

Think tank to UK government: You can't build the future on systems from the past

Re: What?

Mumble years ago (at uni) i wrote 6502 machine code. In my first job i used a pdp 11-44. I am an old git.

SAP customers warned AI agents could put costs on autopilot

Re: Billing without accountability?

If you are not currently using AI then using the same concept now should not use AI?

Or is it any new command could be AI?

Without a list of definitely AI and definitely not AI this is reckless and very expensive. Is this legal?

NASA's Psyche mission set for a brief encounter with Mars

Can you mention this to the medical profession. They still use mmHg and inches.

Europe built sovereign clouds to escape US control. Then forgot about the processors

This method is generally usrd to diagnose/fix design defects. Not for the faint of heart.

Remove the thick oxide protecting the die. Use a laser to cut tracks. FIB can be used to deposit moderate resistivity tracks.

You could wire HAP to gnd or vdd.

The lifetime after this process isn't good. You will find out what is possible. Is the device supposef to operate with no IME?

Generally only done in a failure analysis lab.

Britain's latest civil servant is a chatbot trained on GOV.UK misery

Re: AI + Chatbot

If dealing with DWP it may be more compassionate.

No i'm dreaming.

Sick and wrong: Ontario auditors find doctors' AI note takers routinely blow basic facts

Re: accuracy [...] contributed only 4 percent to the total score.

Some drugs are syntactically similar but have very different effects. Example penicilin (safe) penicillium (dangerous). Since AI counts tokens and doesnt really count letters (how many r's in strawberry) extensive checking of multiple adjacent tokens is critical.

This is dangerous.

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

change code,redesign

There are 7 standard ciphers. Only some are allowed for each country. A temporary move to a differeny cipher would be a short term fix.

I would hope that the manufacturer left space for an upgrade.

Best to redesign with a software updateable algorithm.

The genie is out of the box.

Somebody could have a receiver tuned to the LO adjacent to the standard transciever to catch illegal transmissions.

UK drivers' agency shrugs off claims of week-long booking site smashes, blames browser configs

captcha tests?

Using firefox i managed to get to the login page.

There was a long sequence of CAPTCHA tests which were impossible (we want things that are the same as the reference,but had no relationship to the refetence).

Is this a crude rate limiting idea.

And probably shoddy code.

UK pensions dept goes shopping for spy-van tech with £2M surveillance tender

Re: warrant?

RIPA is a nightmare. This is definitely morally dubious.

Thanks for letting me know.

warrant?

I would expect the DWP to need a warrant to surveil somebody like this?

If this can be done on a civil servants whim this is morally wrong.

ICANN opens applications for new generic top-level domains for the first time since 2012

can i have this one

donald.sucks

Sorry i couldn't resist it.

I didn't know the .sucks domain existed.

Two men charged over series of arson attacks on 5G masts

Re: Technical insight

I'm not sure the conspiracy theorist could setup the signal analyzer.

Theoretically a spectrum analyzer can differentiate between vhf and qam. Not sure about 256qam and 2024qam.

An SdR may do the job for a much cheaper pricr (python and c++ needed).

Re: Technical insight

Connect an RF signal analyzer to the output. Look at the constellation. 4G is upto 256-QAM. 5G can go upto 1024-QAM. Use an attenuator to protect the signal analyzer.

UK govt dept sent a document 'in error.' Now it's being used in a £370M contract lawsuit

Re: explain this to me

Thanks for the explanation.

So the book answer is to forward it to legal and ask for instructions.

Or it goes up the management tree....

explain this to me

DWP send a document to sopria and then blame sopria for this. This is illogical. What were DWP expecting sopria to do?

It sounds like somebody is cooking the books.

I don't see the reasoning here.

Watch out UK taxpayers: 28,000 HMRC staffers just got an AI copilot

<sarcasm>The AI gives a stupidly high tax bill the hmrc person gets promoted. The AI gives a 1k tax refund and the AI thing gets cancelled.</sarcasm>