Posts by that one in the corner

Security boffins scoured the web and found hundreds of valid API keys

Yesterday, finding keys put into source code

Today, finding keys pushed to your PC inside the web page.

What will tomorrow, bring? Keys emailed out to all of us at the bottom of the next marketing missive?

Anthropic tweaks timed usage limits to discourage Claude demand during peak hours

What kind of Californian is awake and pounding code at 5 a.m?

How are Musk's employes at X getting on three years later?

Musk's Hotel California erected at Twitter HQ, as some offices converted into bedrooms

Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

Re: Not the same, but ...

Reading that, I had a happy daydream that a serious manager would be called in to see the state of the kit and then channel his inner Crowley (talking to the houseplants): walk the offending salesman past all of his colleagues in every sales office "say goodbye, he just couldn't cut it".

HR probably wouldn't allow these days.

Go for a walk, man: Sony's drive to create a car parked by partner Honda

Software-defined car

Wow! So I can make it do a Batmobile and convert into motorbike mode when traffic gets heavy?

> customize the many interior displays with their preferred themes or apps created by third-party developers

Oh. You mean - run the infotainment on an open OS, say, Android, and let us choose the podcast app? Ok, I guess, ho hum.

Actually, I *would* like some customisation over the display of our car's dashboard. Nothing too dramatic, don't want to be able to delete the "check engine" icon. But it would be really good to change all the "dials" into, well, dials, with a needle and some fixed gradations. And change the revs into a dial, so it doesn't catch the attention as it flickers from 1.9 to 2.0 (oh, some units would be good as well) but *did* catch the eye if it shot from 2.0 to 5.0! And free up 50% of the dashboard area by simply removing the picture of a car from the dead centre: what, you think we'd forget we were driving a car and start grabbing for the steam relief valve? It isn't even used as an information display! Yes, the headlights in the picture come on - and so do the little green and blue indicators! Doors not secure? The picture is replaced by a (smaller) diagram! Ok, ok, but could we use that space for anything more useful? YES! Like an odometer with legible digits!

Hmm.

The phrase is clearly wildly grandiose, utterly awful salesspeech but...

Could I have a "software defined car", please?

Datacenter batteries are selling years in advance, because AI, says Panasonic

Automotive production switched to datacentre

Yay let's make the switch to electric cars more expensive. We were starting to see, at the level of our smaller local dealerships, EVs that were just EVs, eschewing all the "premium features" crap and getting to a reasonable price.

Now we may be seeing AI barn building pushing up the price of another consumer product. And this time, the output from those barns is going to include - bleeping useless "premium features" to go into the vehicles they've just overpriced! Share and Enjoy.

NASA's lunar reboot is long on ambition, short on answers

Re: Exactly how will astronauts get to and from that moonbase?

Top speed* of 0.15C, or approx. 45,000 km/s, with a fuel reserve for 48 hours of thrust (from that URL; going to assume it means "thrust" when it says "flight" otherwise the 96 hour life support is a bit strange - you only get the full 96 if you touch down somewhere?).

Take G = 10 m/s^2, so 48 hours at 1G gets you approximately 173,000 m/s aka 173 km/s. So to reach 45,000 km/s in 48 hours you are getting, um, 260 G out of your four fusion engines?! OR if that fuel can get you there and back, so you use only one quarter for the acceleration phase (plus another quarter to decelerate back to 0 relative speed, the other half to make the return trip) and you are pulling 1040 G!

Hmmm, meaty soup (too squishy for salsa).

* presumably as measured relative to its initial velocity on the hurtling Moon

HP stuffs OpenAI LLM into new laptops in bid for small biz

Re: At least it's less likely to infest every workplace

Is that a brand spanking new 32GB HP, purchased in the last week or so, one of the new models being discussed here? Or, like mine, a 32GB machine that was bought six or more months ago, before the current price rises really took off?

And, especially in the former case, do you have a specific, job-related requirement, for needing that much RAM, one that the business will make a profit on, or did they just give you something that will never be used for more than posting on The Register and just shrug off the extra cost?

You know, tiny microphones in laptops are good at the high end

There are already devices on the market which flood the room with noise at just above human hearing range (which, for a room full of middle-aged and later management and bright young self-described "creatives" who go clubbing, is not that high at all) to disrupt unwanted recording.

I do not condone sneaking one if those into any meetings where you spot someone with a new HP laptop.

What I *do* suggest is spending half an hour with some autotune software, a decent microphone and a group of offspring/nieces/nephews in the age range of 3 to 5 years old.

Play the result of that in a loop during your meetings and the answer to the question

> "what were some of the top concerns shared by the team”

will be Peppa Pig, Billy keeps pulling my hair, bum, poo, willy and farts.

Are they *sure* there is AI in there?

If you click to enlarge the picture of the laptop, the text being shown could just as usefully be the desktop wallpaper.

Anybody who looks at that advert, words containing so little actual information, and thinks, "yup, that looks like a good summary of my meeting notes, it would be great if the machine typed it out for me" is going to - absolutely fall in love with this! Spot on marketing, HP.

Elon Musk wants to build 50 times more chips than the world currently produces, using 'new physics'

Starboard bough?

Send a pruning crew to the arboretum get Uhura out of that tree!

Re: Peak Musk...

I have some spring-loaded piranha*, we can build on that.

* for when the trapdoor over the pool opens but the chair doesn't tip backwards; you see the look of relief and then - twaaang! It's such a giggle.

Re: "terawatt's worth of computing power"

Does anyone know how much power the replica Babbage engines require? Are any El Reg readers working at one of the museums that own an engine?

After all, if you are looking for a design able to withstand the radiation in space, you could do a lot worse than all that lovely brass.

We'd probably end up using William Gibson's measure of computing power, the gear-mile; efficiency in horses required per gear-mile, a measure colloquially known as the Hansom.

> Link to ...

Which only makes Musk's inability to get anywhere with his tiles all the more impressively bad!

IIRC he was making some wild claims about how the roof plates were going to be manufactured; typically overblown, in the end he had to scratch his shingles*

* not usually recommended

Re: RE: "I want to live long enough to see the mass driver on the Moon," the 54-year-old said.

He can spend 20 years building the mass driver on the Moon, then use it to shoot himself, and a big parachute, to Mars.

With a couple of litres (sorry, sorry, pints) of water in his suit he can survive the landing and walk around for a bit, before shrivelling up, spending his last hour shouting to the heavens that his Tesla-branded Magnetosphere *will* work by 2051.

> ventures that others didn't see any opportunity in

Others have always seen opportunity in the two things that actually work from Musk's empire[1]:

Tesla was a going concern before Musk - and electric cars were well on the map from other manufacturers, as shown by the fact that electric cars have been around since the dawn of motor vehicles. Although advances in related tech, including, IT, were important in moving from the mere daily use of electric vehicles in the 1930s on to meeting the speed requirements of the travelling salesman: the desire and eye to the opportunity were always there - held back mainly because of the lobbying by the internal combustion guys.

Reusable rocketry - it wasn't moving as fast as we'd've liked, with things like the cancellation of the DC-X Delta Clipper. Although advances in related tech, including IT, were important in allowing engineers to move on from a test item to fully working vehicles. As even the Wikipedia the timeline shows, there has been a pretty much continual interest in private companies in space operations, including launch.

> But he's also been proved wrong on several occasions.

That gives us two (count them, two[1, again]) times he has continued - admittedly, with a certain "flair" - to get other people to fund things that were ripe opportunities that the relevant private industries were already well aware of. Now, those have grown in size and popular exposure, but the count is still two.

Now, how about things where, in fact, (except a certain breed of, what is the word - charlatans) "others didn't see any opportunity": hyperloop, boring holes for even more roads, solar panel shingles, flame throwers amongst them. Plus the "opportunities" that he "spotted" for his actually functional companies to work on: Cybertruck, the battery-powered big rig (what am I forgetting here?).

We all expect things like VC funding to have hits and misses - and if Musk restricted himself to claiming to be a VC we'd probably cut him some more slack. But so far the rate of spotting successful opportunities that others missed - and making them work - seems to be very close to zero. Getting funding for opportunities that others were all too aware off and speeding them up, okay, granted.

> more accurately, his engineers have achieved

Very true.

[1] No, not counting PayPal, for obvious reasons.

But, but - a citizen of the Culture can gland their choice of happy juice any time they want!

You can see the appeal of that to Musk.

Re: So....

You have to give the Elonophiles some more time: they are currently unable to type, still exhausted and quivering from the multiple Muskasms they had whilst reading the claims. When they've caught their breath, they'll watch a few YouTube replays to extend the afterglow.

And then, *then* they'll come at us with all the might of the downvote!

Re: “Terafab”

> 10 million tons into space every year

Casting his GigaShadow across the face if the Earth

Re: A Terawatt of compute.. In Space.

> That's a million satellites with solar arrays a square kilometer each.

Anything Mr Burns can do, Musk can do better!

Re: Peak Musk...

We can all live in a future like an Ian Banks novel!

It is good to have an ambition, but do we want a future full of exploding crematoria?

1K+ cloud environments infected following Trivy supply chain attack

Any particular 36%?

>> liteLLM, a critical piece of AI middleware present in 36 percent of all cloud environments

Are these "cloud environments" ones that are actually any good? Or just a random selection from a list of "cloud thingies" created by flinging out into the wild the question "do you run cloudy stuff; if so, are you happy to tell us what it consists of?" and getting back reams of marketing guff about "leveraging the latest AI to polish your frammistans (we have over 27 users at the moment and tell our VCs that we predict that to rise by 0.75 billion users next quarter)"?

Let us not forget the words* of the great sage, Theodore Sturgeon: "Yea, verily, I say unto you, even to the 90th percentile, all thine eyes do see is unworthy of thine consideration; it may truly be called crud."

Considering that truth, 36% of all cloud environments may be worth but a flea's fart.

* The precision of quotations may go down, whilst the value of the sentiment expressed may yet rise in our hearts.

LiteLLM loses game of Trivy pursuit, gets compromised

Rely on version tags rather than pinned commits

Sigh.

Just - sigh.

(Pulls out list of SVN revision numbers, prepares to "revert" working copies and trigger builds)

NASA sets 'impossible' ground rules for relocation of 'flown space vehicle'

Did you forgot to say "the (current) President *thinks* he owns..." and/or end with /s ?

Re: USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) ?

I'm going to assume the downvoters are just jealous that they weren't privileged enough to be at the 1995 Royal Albert Hall "Generations" con when Ms Sirtis made that quip!

(and Patrick Stewart showed he could project his voice into the entire hall!)

Let him keep his name prominently on show against this law.

Then keep reminding him of what that'll mean if he - or anyone - pushes too hard and they end up forced to deliver a mangled pile of machinery with a "Discovery" plaque sticking out the side.

Perhaps then some politicians may take the engineering of this seriously.

Echo-co-co-o

Re: USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) ?

By the way, Marina Sirtis defended Deanna's command of the saucer section "That planet just came out of nowhere" - and it probably didn't use its indicators before making a turn around its star.

Head-mounted VR hardware will never happen, says Neal Stephenson - who coined the term ‘metaverse’

I still want inexpensive AR glasses

In the next few days, I plan to dismantle - really dismantle - and swap bits between laptops, in the hopes of getting one working one the way *I* like it.

I would really like some AR specs that cost less than the laptops, weren't tied to any specific device/subscription but could display the relevant photos from the laptop manuals overlaid onto the real thing: so I can be *sure* I'm tackling the correct screw at the correct time. Oh, and track where I put the screws and highlight the next one to put back in, even if it is the one that rolled under the backplate, that'd be neat ('cos it seems I think I am being neat when putting the pieces onto the worktable, but reality disagrees).

If it could then do something similar whilst I'm trying to thread this blasted sewing machine, all the better.

Telling an AI model that it’s an expert programmer makes it a worse programmer

Re: Prompt

(click >here< to upgrade your subscription*)

* for your convenience, allowances and rates will automatically scale up by a factor of ten each time you exceed your new limits. Click >No< if you don't disagree that this isn't what you don't want us to avoid doing[1])

[1] I may have lost count myself!

If you love your boss, imagine how much more you'll love their AI twin

The Claude faux-CFO has been caught doing unspeakable things with the LLaMa avatar Head of HR; the Grok puppet VC Sales (East) has filed a complaint that it has *not* been used inappropriately (and is growing bored). ELIZA has been dispatched to conduct settlement negotiations.

Good, let the CEO feel the fear as well

After all the sackings of the little people because of (claimed) AI efficiencies, let the C-suite and managers feel the same fear of being replaced by an overgrown calculator.

Forget drones – the US Army just took delivery of a self-flying Black Hawk helicopter

> gets another pallet of "burgers and fries" flavour ration packs without using up a skilled pilot

So they could've saved all the costs by getting in a fleet of Amazon/McDonalds* delivery drones?

* I'd've made a crack about feeding McDonalds to the troops being a war crime, but remembered the CiC's idea of a banquet...

Junior disobeyed orders and tried untested feature during a live robot demo

Re: Documentation

You know, that stuff we do after all the marketing brochures are posted out.

Russians are posing as Signal support to launch phishing attacks

Strava, the military man's* friend

A blast from past: All your base are belong to us: Strava exercise app maps military sites, reveals where spies jog, The Register Jan 2018.

* note: "man" may not be part of the same military as you

Re: Location

If Strava is like other sites* then it'll show you random data from total strangers in "your feed" - all it takes is for someone to spot this strange running track and wonder why it is in the middle of the ocean...

May have started out as innocent as "that is a very large cruise ship, wonder which one it is" in the mind of someone who has loads of "running buddies" (that he's never actually met) who habitually run around floating gin palaces of the type that, according to the telly box, all have regular murders solved by the onboard entertainment.

* nope, not gonna create a profile to find out, happy to stick to "if" and wild speculation...

Microsoft breaks Microsoft account sign-ins in Windows 11 with latest update

Re: It’s not so bad!

What's that, Buttons? Windows? Why, it's behind me!

(Deep breath, breaks into song) I used to do Windows, now that's all behind me! Tonight I've been promised, my prince will find me!

Oh, look everyone, it's James the pantomime Gnu! Oh, you are a silly goose, James!

Re: "What a time to be a Windows user."

A break? It's what your lip'll be getting if you don't back on that treadmill!

Starship may chauffeur Orion to the Moon, as NASA mulls ditching SLS after Artemis V

Re: Suggestion

Cavor was a johnny-come-lately; Cyrano beat him to the moon travelling by rocket (as the bottled dew didn't even get him to the Karman Line).

However, as, unlike Cavor, Cyrano neglected to take a documentary film crew with him, his trip is often forgotten.

Google gives Android users a way to install unverified apps if they prove they really, really want to

Re: Fucking idiots

By waiting a day *once*, done as the first thing after the device arrives oin the IT dept. and goes on soak before it is handed to you.

Assuming your BOFH takes care to check things are working properly before handing it over to you.

blackjack>> I have been never as motivated to install an Android alternative as I am right now

Sorry...> This is more motivating than the blanket ban they'd originally proposed?

Of course it is! Now they are just toying with us Android users: when the time comes (*IF* it comes, if th3 deadline passes and they stick with it) now there is a horrid decision to make: do I enable this ability? If I do, should I enable it just for one week (and regain the bit of protection against scammers) or do I enable indefinitely? Aaargh, questions, questions, I can't cope, will have to take the easy route out and install an Android alternative!!!! Now, which alternative has a supported build for my phone model? None? Never mind, just rebuild from source, that is still easier than this "wait for 24 hours" insanity!

/s, btw

Don't go around being accurate and quoting what Google's blog says, you're asking to get downvoted here today.

Anyway, it isn't (just) a one-off 24-hour wait; you'll be able to opt to have the unverified install ability revoked after 7 days, which means that you'll then have to wait *another* 24 hours! Or you could take the option to retain the ability indefinitely, but then you'd also have to give up the option to *complain* about waiting for 24 hours, which would just take all the fun out of it.

Re: Fucking idiots

> their stupid new rule would stop this

Their "stupid new rule" being - the one that the article is telling us about, which is the one that *allows* you to install your APK? Or do you mean the *previous* new rule, the one that the new new rule is modifying, which was indeed going to prevent you, but which is no longer going ahead in its original form, so in practice won't prevent you from installing your APK?

Or, more properly, won't stop your normal company's IT people from installing the APK.

Re: No-one wants to wait a day to be able to install an app

The blog (link in TFA) explicitly says "This flow is a one-time process for power users" - and it is *intended* to be annoying: a little bit annoying for you, a power user who isn't vulnerable to cons, to do ahead of time, in readiness for finding an ap to install, but VERY annoying for a scammer trying to run the con on innocent Joe and Mrs Bloggs.

Re: Do it once…

A *little* annoying. Not *terribly* annoying, really. And after that day's wait, you're gannin' along at full whack agin.

While you're here, could you go out of your way to do an impossible job?

Re: it happens within companies too

> "I'm supposed to hijack a plane with 200 marines on board with a Swiss Army Knife?"

There is a specialised tool for that, but it requires a custom order: it goes in place of that spike for getting boy scouts out of the hooves of horses.

Sometimes these regonimised names seem suspicious; was there a hidden reason for the choice?

Today, Finn sounds very fishy to me.

Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin applies to launch 51,000 datacenter satellites

Space-based datacenters ... fundamentally lower the marginal cost of compute capacity

> compared to terrestrial alternatives

The eternal problem with Excel, forgetting to include in the sum all those columns that the terrestrial alternatives don't have. Little things, like launching...

Except for things which require resources that *only* exist in space, when has a space-based thing *ever* been cheaper than terrestrial? We're even looking at terrestrial replacements for "it has to be in space" things, like optical telescopes (it being questionable whether there is a purely science-based reason* for replacing/retaining the Hubble Space Telescope, as we have the capability now to build earth-bound instruments which would be huuuge and costly to build initially than the HST was, but way cheaper to get into service - no launching - maintain and upgrade).

* as opposed to social out-reach or even political reasons

Samsung folds the Galaxy Z TriFold after just a few months

> a no-nonsense slide-out qwerty keyboard one with one big & decent camera on the back

That isn't a Samsung problem: I don't recognise, say, an Apple device in your description. In fact, can *any* of the 'phone makers manage to make one of those desirable objects? There seems to be entirely lost technology involved; perhaps I should offer up one of my Sharp Zaurii to be reverse engineered? They might also rediscover the concept of the removable battery and ability to carry a spare...

Struggling to put your AI aversion into words? Here's a handy glossary

Re: I am an AI dabbler

But are you paying the genuine price for it? Will you find the value is worth the cost when the suppliers stop subsidising?