Posts by JessicaRabbit

'People's Panel' to check if UK wants controversial Digital ID will cost £630K

So you have to go during work hours and undoubtedly have to travel to London or close by and it's voluntary so anyone who can't afford to travel or take time off is basically automatically excluded. Talk about selection bias.

Anthropic struggling with Chinese competition, its own safety obsession

I see nobody is talking about the irony of going public off the back of the wave of good will. The wave of good will they got by showing some kind of moral decency that, would the company have been owned by shareholders at the time, would never have happened. As it has been shown repeatedly throughout history, shareholders don't give a flying fuck about morals.

AI bug reports went from junk to legit overnight, says Linux kernel czar

I can't speak for all of the AI haters but for me, it's not about whether it is useful and more about how dangerous it is for society. I want the AI bubble to pop so money stops being put into it but I am increasingly resigned to the fact that we're probably stuck with it. Eternal September 2.0.

Re: If AI gets good enough at finding bugs

The agentic AI tools do a surprisingly good job of decompiling closed source software and analysing them for vulns too.

Systemd-free antiX Linux 26: Debian 13, in bonsai form

Re: If the time spent creating another distro...

Are you personally doing anything to encourage more desktop software being worked on or are you just whinging about it?

HackerOne slams supplier for delayed breach notice after staff data exposed

Re: Serfs

Tax benefits and discounts for collectively bargaining for the entirety of the staff presumably but it's certainly not ideal that so much personal information is sent to third parties.

Calling out corporate BS? There's a steaming pile to aim for

Re: In the mockery a glob of insipid business speak oozes through.

Indeed and also a verb conjugated in the present tense e.g. We are all learning something new today.

We tested Intel's new chips for cash-strapped hardcore PC users and they're impressive

Re: More cores, higher clocks, and lower prices? What's not to like?

One major advantage AMD has pretty much always had is that they don't obsolete their CPU sockets anywhere near as often as Intel. That is AMD's sockets are good for 6-8 years generally, while Intel drops theirs after about 2 years.

Microsoft Copilot boss Mustafa Suleyman to chase superintelligence

You misspelled Microslop.

After years of being stood up, ARM64 Linux users finally get Chrome date

Yeah, I don't personally know anyone who uses Linux who would want to touch Chrome with a ten-foot barge pole. It's surveillance capitalism incarnate and proprietary code.

Linux PC vendor System76 tries to talk Colorado down over OS age checks

It's open source ergo there's nothing stopping users from recompiling components with the age verification stripped out or modified to always assert the user is an adult. Any technical solution to try and prevent that just strips all of us of the freedom to use our computers as we wish i.e. they'll lock down the hardware so you can't install just any Linux distro or they'll push to use Secure Boot to heavily restrict what you can install.

Capita's £370M Whitehall outsourcing deal challenged as 'abnormally low'

Having a hard time spotting the information in this article that wasn't already in the previous article on the subject save for the fact that Capita confirmed they won the contract. Maybe there was more to it but if there was I missed it.

New endowment hopes to raise a big pile of money for open source projects

Can't help but view this with suspicion tbh. The fund seems to primarily benefit the those the funds are being invested in and, since they're outsourcing their investment decisions, they're potentially investing in things open source devs would be opposed to. For example the Heron Foundation had for some time an investment in a private prison which was very much contrary to what the Heron Foundation is about.

All that said, I don't think it's impossible that the OSE could do more good than bad and I very much hope that they do.

Sopra Steria sues UK government over £958M Capita outsourcing award

Re: In other news...

Indeed, they both seem to have left a wake of poorly implemented solutions behind them.

Workaholic open source developers need to take breaks

So to summarise, entitled users and lazy infoseccers are the real problem. That and I suppose the rabid moral witch hunts that would go after any dev that just told such people "Fuck off, I'm doing this for me, not you"

Supermarket sorry after facial recognition alert flags right criminal, wrong customer

I wish Big Brother Watch the best of luck though in my old age I'm too cynical to really believe they have any real hope of stopping this.

DWP considers chatbot work coaches as AI-fueled job losses loom

Re: What's the joke about regexes ?

and yet the people with the most money are producing almost no value, they just own the means of production or they're landlords collecting income from the people stuck renting from them.

Bots are taking over the internet and AI users are to blame

People use AI search because regular search is absolute dogshit at this point. AI isn't ruining the inernet, over-commercialisation, SEO and ad-pumping content farms are.

FortiGate firewalls hit by silent SSO intrusions and config theft

Re: You'd think

Yeah absolutely. Unless the firmware is encrypted and not just signed, the attackers are probably reverse engineering the firmware of these things and looking right at the implementation to find vulnerabilities, not just trying to fuzz the entire attack surface. Corporate pen tests are a joke, they pretty much never find anything. Where I last worked, they missed tons of stuff I later found because they didn't have access to the source code and the vulnerabilities were logic issues they just wouldn't find in the 4-5 days they had to test.

AI hasn't delivered the profits it was hyped for, says Deloitte

Ha!

As soon as it goes below the forecast requirements level, it sends a preliminary email to the supplier saying, 'Can you tell us if you can supply this and what price?'"

Whoever was responsible for this area of the business should be fired (and possibly sued) for gross negligence for not having automated this already. You don't need a bloody LLM or agent/whatever to monitor stock levels and send a templated bloody email! Fucking idiots, the lot of them.

MX Linux 25.1 brings back switchable init systems

Re: Why?

Well it enables experimentation I suppose and switching by choosing at boot time rather than a migration that replaces one with the other is less likely to leave you with a bricked[1] system.

[1] Obviously not completely bricked if you can boot into recovery media and fix whatever you broke.

Anthropic CEO: Selling H200s to China is like giving nukes to North Korea

Re: Canada plans on blah blah blah as the years pass

I get your point but:

According to the 12th-century historian Henry of Huntingdon, who first recorded the tale, Canute did not order the sea to stop because he thought he was a god. Rather, he was staging a dramatic demonstration for his sycophantic courtiers—who had been flattering him by saying his power was absolute—to teach them a lesson in humility

Rackspace tests customer loyalty with brutal email price hike

Re: ...at a fraction of the cost...

and that's very improper

Just the Browser claims to tame the bloat without forking

Quite the assumptions being made there... Google did their best recently to neuter ad blockers, I wouldn't be surprised if they approach this threat to their enshittification in the same way.

Open source's new mission: Rebuild a continent's tech stack

It's a bit of a longer-term plan but one thing they could start doing is exposing students to Linux at school so they have some familiarity with it when they potential encounter it in the workplace later on.

Just because Linus Torvalds vibe codes doesn't mean it's a good idea

I think McLuckie is being very generous in describing these people as engineers. Also does anyone know if Linus plans to keep his vibe coded project around (which means he has to maintain it at some point) or was it a prototype to be later replaced with something actually engineered?

Ready for a newbie-friendly Linux? Mint team officially releases v 22.3, 'Zena'

I guess it's time I gave Cinnamon another look given KDE are planning to betray those of us who want nothing to do with Wayland and its GNOME-like attitude towards users.

TSMC sees no signs of the AI boom slowing for at least two or three years

You'd think the Taiwanese government would be more concerned about TSMC moving so much production to the US. Especially given their dependence on TSMC to supply their tech industry is the main reason they're currently willing to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion. If (or rather when) the AI bubble bursts, the US facilities will probably be sufficient to keep up with the now much lower demand which in turn would allow the US to just abandon Taiwan.

BOFH: Every computer system eventually serves ads

Absolutely brilliant, best one in a while.

Wikimedia’s 25th birthday gift: Letting more AIs scour pages volunteers created

Came here to say the exact same thing. If they're willing to feed the monster that is AI in exchange for money they can kiss my yearly donation goodbye.

Teach an AI to write buggy code, and it starts fantasizing about enslaving humans

Re: It's going to be.. ..in your toaster

We want no muffins, no toast, no teacakes, no buns, baps, baguettes or bagels, no croissants, no crumpets, no pancakes, no potato cakes and no hot-cross buns and definitely no smegging flapjacks.

Expressing negative views towards humans isn't particularly dangerous. It's not like it understands what it's saying or has any actual feelings. If prompts for assistance with non-coding tasks resulted in advice that contained an unusually high level of bad advice 'designed'[1] to harm the person reading the response then that could be more seriously described as dangerous.

[1] obviously it's not designed because the AI has no real feelings, emotive motivations etc it just parrots behaviour it's seen in its training data.

Woman bailed as cops probe doctor's surgery data breach

This is a very curious article, I'm trying to work out the link between the two halves of it. Someone explain how I'm wrong but it very much seems like two different articles just mashed together.

Edit: Well I worked out the link, the chief constable is the reason there's a delay releasing more information about the theft but it's pretty tangential details considering it takes up a full half of the article. Maybe I'm just being too critical, I dunno.

Raspberry Pi 5 gets LLM smarts with AI HAT+ 2

FFS, they will try and shoehorn AI into bloody anything these days.

Google offers bargain: Sell your soul to Gemini, and it'll give you smarter answers

They put all these warnings in but let's be honest hoi polloi aren't realistically going to read them, let alone take notice. Feels like stating the obvious at this point but this won't end well.

AWS flips switch on Euro cloud as customers fret about digital sovereignty

Yeah right, they can make as much of a song and dance about this as they want but the fact is the parent company is in the US, they are subject to US laws and they would have to provide data/access if compelled to by the US no matter how many subsidiaries they put in between them and their customer's systems.

Maker fight! SparkFun cuts ties with Adafruit in harassment dispute

Re: "Torrone and Fried are married"

By business do you mean in different companies? I ask only because Torrone and Fried both work at Adafruit.

Anthropic Claude wants to be your helpful colleague, always looking over your shoulder

Oh lovely, another AI use-case aimed at deskilling jobs so they can (in theory) get just about anyone in to do the job and then pay them peanuts.

Firefox 147 brings GPU boost, tidier tabs, and video that follows you around

Well I'm looking forward to LibreWolf picking up the latest changes and I'm hoping (though I'm not too optimistic) that they'll strip out all the AI shit too while they're at it.

Hasta la vista! Microsoft finally ends extended updates for ancient Windows version

and yet I bet there's still systems exposed on the network (if not the internet) still running that shit. You hope manufacturing (and healthcare) are starting to take note of how hard it is to transition and how impossible it is to get real long term support for the OSes they choose to run.

France fines telcos €42M for sub-par security prior to 24M customer breach

This is crazy, the fine amounts to only 0.42% of turnover (11.4% of profit) and is barely above the 20 million max they'd have to pay if 4% of their turnover was less than that. I also wouldn't be surprised if they contest this and it ends up being reduced to an even lower amount. One wonders just how egregiously a company has to fuck up to actually get a fine of 4%.

India’s flagship PSLV rocket fails for the second time in a row

An unfortunate event but made me wonder about what kind of insurance there might be for payloads bound for space and it turns out there's quite a variety of different policies you can take out on things like satellites or the rockets themselves. On an amusing side-note I wonder if reusable launch vehicles like the Falcon 9 can get a no claims bonus :D

Cloudflare CEO threatens to make the Winter Olympics a political football after Italy slugs it with a fine

Talk about throwing a tantrum. I think he'd have received a much better response if he'd not acted like a typical spoiled American who thinks the world revolves around them whilst simultaneously everybody is out to get them.

Dutch cops cuff alleged AVCheck malware kingpin in Amsterdam

Curious how AVCheck worked. I'd have thought antivirus software would normally flag suspicious binaries and ship off samples of them to the mothership for human analysis. Also I doubt it was this service but I have distinct memories of submitting binaries to web-based services that ran said binary against multiple AVs and reported the results when I wasn't entirely confident they could be trusted. It's interesting to think that the same service could have been used by people developing malware to see if they could avoid detection.

Google pushing Gemini into Gmail, but you can turn it off

Re: It really is time to move to some place like Proton

I've been meaning to move to Proton for ages now but my email account is also tied to google drive, sheets etc and finding a replacement for that isn't exactly trivial. Not entirely sure I can just switch email over either.

Developer writes script to throw AI out of Windows

Hosting the script on GitHub, that's pretty ballsy. Wouldn't be surprised if, now it's getting media coverage, he suddenly finds himself unable to log in and all his repos deleted.

India’s government denies it plans to demand smartphone source code

I seem to recall the British government demanding the source code for Huawei's devices for security reasons so it's not exactly unprecedented. That said, I wouldn't trust governments not to use access to the source as a means of more easily compromising said devices rather than acting to secure them.

Tories vow to boot under-16s off social media and ban phones in schools

They're wasting their time trying to ban social media if it's going to be anything like how the OSA has been implemented so far and as for banning phones in classroom, I fail to see why this should be a government initiate. Surely schools are more than capable of implementing such a policy for themselves if they believe it is best for the kids.

Re: Of course it's the big bad internet

Tbf social media is probably one of the more significant reasons for the rise of fascism.

Glibc 'abortion joke' diff tiff leaves Richard Stallman miffed

Stumbled across this today and it's amazing how prescient that joke was now the US, at least, is living in a post Roe vs. Wade world.