Posts by that one in the corner

Months after NSA disclosed Microsoft cert bug, datacenters remain unpatched

assumption that the .. cache ..., MD5-based, is collision-free

Huh? That is a lousy assumption to make, no matter *what* hash you use to index a cache, you can *never* assume it is collision-free!

Trivially, every hash will generate collisions, it is inevitable: reducing every single input to a fixed-size hash of k bits means that as soon as the world has processed 2^k + 1 inputs there *must* have been at least one collision. The point at which there is a 50% chance of hitting a collision is a far, far smaller number than 2^k

2^k may be a huge number, but it is not a guarantee that no collisions can occur. So that cache was going to break for someone, somewhere, even without any malicious intent. It was just a low probability that it would be *your* system that was impacted today.

Certainly hope that no other code is using a cryptographic hash as an index and assuming that the results are unique <cough>

Remember, breaking a hash, the way MD5 was broken, just means that the task of *finding* a collision with a specific target is a lot easier (trivial, even); it doesn't mean that such collisions are impossible.

Tesla eyes Nevada for Semi electric truck plant, battery factory

Re: "Center placement of the driver's seat"

> Theremin as the primary control interface.

That would help with the whole issue of EVs needing to make noises to avoid creeping up on pedestrians. But what would you play to get the thing started? "Good Vibrations"? "Please Go Home" to initiate auto-park?

Frito Lay

Good choice of first customer, even the Tesla Semi can manage to haul a load of Salt'n'Pepper crisps without exceeding the max vehicle tonnage.

Re: "Center placement of the driver's seat"

I was thinking Joe 90, although their's was more of a country lane runabout[1] than heavy haulage.

[1] at least until they reached takeoff speed; at least Musk hasn't gone down the flying car route yet, preferring the opposite direction entirely.

Apple releases Lisa source code on landmark machine's 40th birthday

Re: ICL / Three Rivers PERQ

(Bit late to the story, but...)

> I think they were originally billed as Smalltalk machines

PERQ = Pascal Engine Running Quickly

They were built from the Pascal engine hardware derived from work on UCSD Pascal (which Apple ][ users may be familiar with) and its p-code.

I worked on one for a year in the early 80's and everything we had on it was in Pascal. Pretty sure that included the OS (may have been Unixy but not actually Unix).

Software glitch revokes copyright protection for AI-generated comic book

Re: It's simple. It is not.

The copyright here was being assigned to a human; no-one (in this case) is trying to make any claim that the AI can hold copyright.

Bound to be misreported

The comic book presents a muddled situation and, if the copyright is upheld (which my guess says it will be) it is going to be gloriously misreported all over the place.

You can, IIRC, claim a copyright for a collection of non-copyrightable items taken as a whole, such as 'phone directory: the names and numbers are just basic facts, free for anyone to use and publish, but the way they are expressed can be copyrighted. On that basis, the comic as a whole is easily copyrightable, as a certain collection of images organised in a certain fashion (namely, to tell the specific story). It would not surprise me if a decision was made on those grounds alone, simply so that the USCO examiner can put their tick on it and not have to spend any more effort on deciding if the items being collected are copyrightable or not; let the next guy worry about that.

But when (if) copyright is granted just on that simple basis, it will be bound to be reported that the images from the AI were declared copyrightable. Lots of bushes will then be beaten up by people who have grabbed the wrong end of stick.

Live Nation CFO on Taylor Swift ticket chaos: Don't blame me, bots made me crazy

Re: been going on for decades

But at least you put some personal effort into it, queuing the night away!

And a ten tickets per person limit at least meant the old-time big-money touts had to employ a few warm bodies, not just keep switching IPs on a few VMs to fool the frontend into letting them get another bite.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Re: See also electronics design

>> 4 * 41616 / 65536 being close enough to 2.54

>Why not 2601/1024? Or 254/100 ? Or 127/50 ?

Wild guess - divide by 65536 is shift by two bytes or, if the precision is good enough, drop least two bytes to go from four byte intermediate value to two byte stored value without bothering with any actual arithmetic?

Or something else along those lines, choosing the maths that works best with the machinery being used.

Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

> I want the half-guinea back!

Settle for two Crowns and a Tanner?

NSA asks Congress to let it get on with that warrantless data harvesting, again

the NSA refused to provide figures

> "Seems like baloney to me … It's the greatest intelligence service on the planet. You'd think they'd be able to know that"

This is Information Retrieval, not Information Dispersal

Russians say they can grab software from Intel again

Auto-update

all their Windows 7 machines to Windows 11 (or does that count as a war crime?)

Software engineer accused of stealing $300k from employer was 'inspired by Office Space'

wrote a software code

"A" software code? Writing "a" replacement code?

No doubt he smashed up a printer using "a" hardware[1].

[1] of course not, you use "an" hardware, as in "I used an hardware to run a software".

Half of environmental claims about products are full of crap, says EU

Re: Stretching It A Bit, But.....

Big Clive has talked about picking up discarded single-use e-fags from the streets of Glasgow and harvesting the rechargeable lithium batteries from them.

Perfectly rechargeable lithium batteries, in single-use products!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PsJMj7FtroY

VALL-E AI can mimic a person’s voice from a three-second snippet

Re: Fixed passphrase

"Hi, my name is Werner Brandes. My voice is my passport. Verify Me."

isn't enough coverage of speakers with accents

Time to point out that there is no such thing as someone speaking without an accent?

Obviously, they meant there isn't much of a *range* of accents, but now I'm wondering which one is the dominant one in the data set. What is an easy accent to capture a lot of to make a public data set; they mention speaking on 'phones and it'll be one that is easy to record over any background noise...

It's Essex girls on busses, isn't it.

Ex-Twitter Brits launch legal challenge against dismissal

Re: Wouldn't hold out too much hope...

Elon clearly aiming to wrestle that award away from Hebblethwaite.

Royal Mail, cops probe 'cyber incident' that's knackered international mail

Re: noticed some issues since beginning of the year suddenly

> You tried Evri?

Sadist.

Not just a jealous USPS?

Haiku beta 4: BeOS rebuild / almost ready for release / A thing of beauty

Good ideas from the comments here

I've got an eeePC sitting around, unloved; giving Haiku a try on it could be fun.

If only I had the faintest idea where my old boxed set of BeOS is, it has a printed manual, easier on the rheumy old eyes.

New software sells new hardware – but a threat to that symbiosis is coming

Re: Dropping Older Architectures

First of all, your old kit can still run using the older kernels etc, so there is still plenty of scope for doing useful work - although what one person considers useful may not suit another, of course.

And there are OSes that take pride in supporting as wide a range of kit as possible (NetBSD for one).

Otherwise, to keep older hardware from being dropped, you can consider volunteering your time and working kit to be used in the regression tests. Or getting together with other people who have the same old hardware and taking a group effort of it. Or just handing over a suitable pile of moolah to convince someone else to take on the challenge.

After all, my understanding is that the basic problem is the simple one of too many hardware variants and too few testers and developers to give all of those variants the attention they would need to support the latest kernel changes; changes that are required to actually make use of the current hardware.

Not only does the new hardware support have to be added but at worst the changes have to be benign on older CPUs, at best simulated in extra software written for the old boxes. Time and energy (aka "money") then has to be devoted to keeping that extra module tested and in step with ongoing progress, especially as once the clever h/w feature is in place, more and more of the other "unrelated" areas of code will start to rely on it, and all its corner cases, putting more strain on the simulation module or breaking because the "benign" ignoring of the feature is no longer good enough.

It takes more than just automated regression testing: they need the working kit and enough of it, the ability to fix regressions (see above paragraph), time and money to keep it going (where does extra kit live, on whose mains?).

Re: Server needs drive now OS developments, at the expense of desktop users

> graphic / product design team to be specifying the look and feel, then devs code to the spec

Surely the product design team use a "no code required" UI generator that lets them test all of their UI screens and just spits out a massive lump of code filled with comments /* to-do : fill in button press action */ Any fool of a dev can replace with those with the obvious database calls, after all, we've done all the tricky creative stuff for you already!

Re: Slow software

One of my "favourites" was finding that, in an externally written "modernisation" to our embedded system, all of the config options for all of the separate processes were placed into a big XML file (so it could be a "single system config" - which isn't a particularly bad idea). A convenient utility routine allowed a process to read a value, by the simple method of reading the XML into an in-memory DOM[1] and walking the tree to the named value. Then the process would read a second value, by the simple method of reusing the convenient utility, hence reading the XML into an in-memory DOM and walking the tree to this second named value. Then the process would read a third value, by a simple utility call, which read the XML into an in-memory DOM and walked the tree to this third named value.

And so on, until it had effectively read all of its options at startup: saves using tricky command line options - even though the processes were all started by a master process (don't call it an "init") which had learnt the list of processes to start by reading the XML into a DOM and iterating over a certain node's children...

Of course, not all of the coders thought of getting all the config values ready at the start of a process, so some of them would, after running for a period of time, pause doing useful work, read the XML into a DOM...

[1] use of a stream parser - Expat - was deemed "too complicated" for an embedded system, given you could just build the DOM in one simple call to this library that everyone uses in all the StackExchange examples, rather than some weird library no-one had heard of...

Native Americans urge Apache Software Foundation to ditch name

after seeing a documentary about Geronimo

So we are going with that reason for the name being chosen now? Just dropping the whole "a patchy server" story?

"Apache Rewrites History: Why is it Named Apache?" http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/open_source_rewrite_history.html

Or https://dan.hersam.com/2004/07/29/a-patchy-web-server/

I spy with my little Pi: Upgraded cameras for single board computer

M12 only - why not a simple adapter?

Unless you are sure you're only going to use M12 lenses (e.g. you've got a fixed product design) then getting the C/CS mount and a simple screw-in adapter for M12 gives the most flexible choice.

Given that the CS-mount HQ camera already offers the C adapter, it'd be nice to have done the same for M12: that might be being a bit greedy, given you can easily buy one (just as you can a C adapter) but it would make the options clearly available to everyone.

Texts from your dog and brain-free astronomy: The best of the rest from CES

Re: Telescope with no viewfinder

Unless they had a massive change of heart from the previous version and their Kickstarter project, this telescope is very deliberately computerised only and digital camera only. No human eye involved - a simple Newtonian reflector, it doesn't even have a secondary mirror for an eyepiece - and no finder scope attachment.

Thunderfoot did a video review of the previous model - others did too but for a product like this his busting style fits well! Long and short: you can get better optics and automated mount, plus a camera, for a lot less (even this lower priced model). But then you have to learn how to use it and risk getting a new hobby.

The Unistellar does have some advantages from its design, because it doesn't support making any changes to the optics (like different eyepieces): it can be pre-focussed for the unchanging focal plane and can always use video star tracking to provide alignment correction. But whether that is worth the cost is debatable (software for all the functions - autoguide, tracking correction, stacking - has been around for ages)

Re: Telescope with no viewfinder

Ah, you are a sensible Solar observer?

Far more comfortable way to practise the hobby (just remember to wear a hat!).

Although it does have disadvantages. The filters are expensive and the equivalent to running a Messier Marathon is a bit boring "Target 1: got it! Finished!".

Microsoft’s Nadella: Tech is in for a rough two years

Depends upon what you mean by "worth" and whether you believe that the way to measure it is how much money you can make of it.

Plenty of money has been made in the past - and will be in the future - by things that are nothing more than demos and hype. Just think of anything that has been called a "Bubble", especially in the IT world.

Why?

Corporations start testing Windows 11 in bigger numbers. Good luck

> If you just keep doing the same thing day in and day out, you are only reinforcing specific neural pathways and the rest will atrophy.

When playing an instrument, this is called "practising your scales" and is considered a Good Thing: reinforcing how to hold down the string with one hand and pluck it with the other without getting that horrid buzz every time.

By constant repetition you are reinforcing the ability to perform mundane actions without the need for conscious thought. In other words, you are learning to use a tool. And an OS should just be a tool - a means to an end, not an end in itself - a tool whose sole purpose is to support the use of task-specific Applications, so we can all choose the unique set of Apps to support our end goals. Once learnt, a properly made tool will never surprise us - a soldering iron that suddenly glows white hot is *not* useful! Given similar tools, one may be more pleasing - the handle is grippier, the tone is grittier and more Metal - but neither require you to suddenly hang upside down because the slidey bit won't work otherwise.

The world would not be a better place if, one Tuesday morning, all the world's guitars were suddenly restrung "upside down" and glued that way.

By supporting pointless GUI changes with the suggestion they are a neurological necessity, you are either unaware that the OS is supposed to be a tool for the End User *or* you are part of a hideous dystopian vision where no User has any interactions outside of their work and the only joy they could derive from 16 hours of mindless data-entry is when the desktop icons change or they have the excitement of a new settings dialogue for their keyboard.

Re: Ease of Adoption Vs Ease of Deployment

You have hit the nail on the head here.

There are lots of *good* improvements that MS make to the OS, adding under-the-hood support as well as visible-to-Admin new functionality that can be used to ease the lives of Support, which trickles down to better lives for Users.

Unfortunately, MS then also foists upon us a lot of changes that are highly visible to the Users - indeed, changes whose entire raison d'etre is to be visible without being in any way useful (as noted above, even deliberately removing usefulness). Forgetting that the OS is a tool to support the use of job-specific Applications and a good tool should never surprise you.

Could it be that the first group are devs devoted to their art, heads down fixing problems, whilst the second are vacuous self-proclaimed "Creatives", having lots and lots of vitally important meetings to talk about their "Visions" and spending time on proposals to management?

> half the things you try to do won't be possible because the necessary feature didn't exist

How many of those "features" would actually turn out to be anything actually related to the OS (and, specifically, about how the OS UI acts) and not just programs that won't install and/or run, mainly because they weren't ever expecting to install on that OS?

E.g. is a 1995 ISO likely to support running 64-bit Blender in 128 GB of RAM? Probably not.

Does that fact have any bearing at all on the basic value and usability of the version of KDE on that ISO? Nope, not one bit. It would be possible - pointless and time-consuming, but possible - to get that copy of KDE to build and run in 64-bits, without changing its appearance or behaviour, so you could do your Blender'ing and complete the day's work.

Put another way: aside from drivers (in particular USB) and providing management for an increasing number of resources (RAM, fast LAN, more CPU cores, PCI instead of ISA ...) - *none* of which need change the End-User's interaction with the OS (USB drives look like any other drive...) - can you actually give examples of *useful* OS features that have been added since 1995? Not just sticking into the install some utility that just replicates - badly - a third party program (e.g. WordPad under Windows), but actual shiny new unarguably-part-of-the-OS features that impact on any other programme you may want to install - *AND* where those features then *required* changes to the way we interacted with the UI?

Uncle Sam OKs vaccine that protects honeybees against hive-destroying bacterium

Oh, beehave!

Here's how to remotely take over a Ferrari...account, that is

Re: Pure BS and security is really only a PR problem

> There is no "toolset". If you are serious about security, you have an 'inside' team and an 'outside' team

They do have all the teams required, including a management team that takes a certain delight in referring to everyone else as just a bunch of tools, to be used, abused and everything in between.

Oops, they didn't mean to say that out loud where the press may be listening...

Cybercrooks are telling ChatGPT to create malicious code

"I speak of none but the computer that is to come after me. A computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate! Yet I will design it for you!"

Re: All inventionS can be used for good or bad

> going faster than the speed of light often indicates an error someplace

It'll only be another 25-odd years and one of those interns could be Zefram Cochrane.

Re: All invention can be used for good or bad

> Because, as you know, a Turing test would identify the lack of any good and bad as not human

Really?

You might want to spend a bit more time looking around at humans.

CES Worst in Show slams gummi gouging, money-wasting mugs, and other dubious kit

Re: Its the 'connect to your phone' problem

> For this to be useful it has to be capable of being calibrated

For this to be useful it simply has to sell, wholesale, enough units to recoup the development costs and a bit of profit before everyone catches on. Oh, you meant useful to the end-user? Sorry, that's not on anyone's actions list.

> This implies that there's renewal, cleaning and what-have-you going on

Or it implies that this is a single-use throwaway device, no renewal or cleaning or anything else going on. Simple, easy and a five-pack is 8% off.

> but not a word from maker or reviewer.

The maker staying silent on the realities of his product? Say it isn't so!

And the reviewer has already got all the ammunition needed to get the salient points across - that this is ridiculous and potentially harmful - without needing to go into any lesser details.

Shouldn't that be a Steamed Milk Punk coffee cup?

There is nothing odd in your final lack of criticism.

Building a one-off coal-fired[1] coffee cup that self-stoked when the contents threatened to become tepid would provide a sum total of more than 200 smackers worth of joy in all those lucky enough to encounter it.

[1] wood would also do in a pinch but not gas-powered; if you're going to have gears then just turning a valve slightly couldn't hold a candle to wielding a poker. Ooh, candles - how about an Bronte Punk teacup (sorry, has to be tea this time) that works by judging the correct amount of candle lighting, snuffing or extinguishing to maintain the brew in a drinkable state, no matter how much Wind & Wuthering it sustains? If this hasn't already been made - don't want to Trespass on another's idea - mayhap Foxtrot down to those patent chappies and outline this result of the Invisible Touch of one's muse.

Huh?

Nothing against that page you linked to (except I'd already read that SMBC yesterday) but not seeing where the mug is.

Oh, wait.

I followed your URL. That makes *me*...

Re: Missed headline opportunity...

After all the fun comments here, time to be a party pooper...

And point out that buying a $500 gadget and using to test someone else's piss will still net you a profit when you turn them in for a Texas reward. And you can probably rinse it out and use it again. Which at least means the marketing guys have set the price point just right to get the old grey market sales rolling.

Re: Why?

A more accurate train of argument:

Why do people drink four litres of vodka a day without being a Qualified Mixologist? Stick their fingers down their throats without the supervision of a Nutritionist? Set fire to their wallets without being a Certified Arsonist?

Now, if your

> intelligent, investigative persons, relatively free of effects of psychological manipulation...

*are* taking vitamin supplements, without first finding out whether they need to (by, um, asking medical professionals to perform tests using calibrated equipment) then at best they are likely setting fire to their wallets (some unneeded supplements are simply pissed out harmlessly). Or they are setting themselves up for some fascinating new symptoms in the not too distant future.

And they should really reconsider whether they are as intelligent and investigative as they believe (go on, tell us we "must do your own research" and then suggest a few Youtube videos, pretty please?).

With Mastodon, decentralization strikes back

Re: issues

> Now my users are protected from that user and from any other grifters that are allowed on the same server

And all the non-grifters that are allowed on the same server.

There are possibilities for all sorts of interesting power dynamics in this setup. Anyone need a thesis subject?

Intel: Please buy these new 13th-Gen CPUs, now with 24 cores

Re: Produced using Intel's older 'Intel 7' 10nm process.

> Intel's 10nm is similar in size to TSMC's 7nm

'Cos Intel are really using Good Old Boy yards 'sted of them Youropeean metres! Then theys a'trimming 'em down likes you does a 2 by 4. That's how weesa measurin' round these parts.

Oh, no: The electric cars at CES are getting all emotional

fratzonic chambered exhaust

Following the link:

> The industry-first Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust pushes its one-of-a-kind performance sound through an amplifier and tuning chamber located at the rear of the vehicle. The Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust represents the next generation of tactile, bone-shaking, muscle attitude, creating a visceral “Dark Matter” sound profile experience in concert with the eRupt transmission.

"Dark Matter sound profile" - totally undetectable by all current technology! If only.

"Fratzonic" - someone rubbed out the edge of the leading 'P'?

Oh, and that "eRupt transmission", designed to mimic the flaws of a manual transmission!

If that is what it takes to get some people to buy an EV then maybe there is a point to it - is the next step to include a smoke stack on an electric semi tractor to convince the "rolling coal" brigade?

Cops chase Tesla driver 'dozing' with Autopilot on

Re: Bendix

You need the one with the door built like a submarine's: closing it with the dogs keeps all the cats inside.

Since humans can't manage fusion, the US puts millions into AI-powered creation

Conflicted on this

On the one hand, oodles of data and computers are a match (usually) made in heaven.

On the other hand, modern "AI" (hah!) is all GANs, which are good at producing outputs that perform as well as the best inputs, only in a weird way that is totally lacking in explanatory detail.

So we can spend a lot of money to create lots of new designs for fusion systems that could break-even but don't quite manage to generate any usable power, whilst being terribly, terribly complicated and shiny piles of machinery that no human can make sense of. The Uncanny Valley of particle physics.

Tesla driver blames full-self-driving software for eight-car Thanksgiving Day pile up

Re: Hmmmmmmm

So, you are agreeing that you rarely see humans driving safely.

Re: Hmmmmmmm

Everyone is "faster and safer" right up to the second they slam into the lane divider at 95mph

UK's Guardian newspaper breaks news of ransomware attack on itself

Re: ...the center-left newspaper...

Well, "center-left" is clearly USAzian speak, which translates to something like "rabid right wing" in RotW.

But in the UK, we know The Grauniad to be "left of centre", which would be "Dang Pinkoes" in Yankish.

As for being off-centre, well, some have said that reporting on the floating island of Sans Serif to be eccentric. Though I'd never say they were "off Camber', as they gave a good rating to the Gallivant restaurant and generally say that The Sands are a nice place to visit down in Sussex.