* Posts by JessicaRabbit

92 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Dec 2021

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Why do younger coders struggle to break through the FOSS graybeard barrier?

JessicaRabbit

Re: What are the actual demographics?

I came here to say the same thing. I do software engineering for a living and when you join a new company/team and there's an existing codebase, there's a business incentive to get you up to speed and give you a good overview of the project, support you etc until you're ready to fix bugs/implement features on your own. There's none of that that I've seen in the FOSS world, you're just expected to figure out old and possibly massive codebases on your own.

Insurance giant finds claims rep that gives a damn (it's AI)

JessicaRabbit

Why am I not surprised to see UnitedHealthcare using AI to automate denying people's claims? ILWT

'Maybe the problem is you' ... Linus Torvalds wades into Linux kernel Rust driver drama

JessicaRabbit

Re: Logically Linux development ought to be collaborative

Upvoted you, if for no other reason than you actually used "begs the question" with the proper meaning.

Raspberry Pi hands out prizes to all in the RP2350 Hacking Challenge

JessicaRabbit

I say kudos to them for being open about the security issues. Now they just need to fix them.

Shove your office mandates, people still prefer working from home

JessicaRabbit

Re: Just a thought

Contrary to what you might expect, companies can't hire someone from just anywhere. They either outsource the role to a company that employs people there or they need a legal entity in that country to be able to hire people there.

Free-software warriors celebrate landmark case that enforced GNU LGPL

JessicaRabbit

Excellent

Way to go, Sebastian and another victory for the GPL.

Who had Pat Gelsinger retires from Intel on their bingo card?

JessicaRabbit

The real issue is that if Intel dies and everyone shifts to AMD then AMD being just another profit obsessed corporation will start behaving like Intel. That they don't now is only because it's one of their competetive edges.

iOS 18 added secret and smart security feature that reboots iThings after three days

JessicaRabbit

Re: Mouse-move

It seems to be time since last unlock not just activity otherwise this wouldn't be any kind of barrier to thieves/law enforcement.

Photoshop FOSS alternative GNU Image Manipulation Program 3.0 nearly here

JessicaRabbit

I don't use GIMP a whole lot but I am quite excited to soon have non-destructive layer effects.

The .io domain isn't going anywhere anytime soon amid treaty

JessicaRabbit

Retiring 1.6 million domains because of a political change like this would be ludicrous. I'm sure not all 1.6 million are being used for email but many will be and a person's email address is practically your identity these days. Many service provide no way to change your email address and locating every service you've ever signed up with would be a nightmare. Not to mention that this is going to break a lot of websites and if not carefully managed in advance, will open the door to copycat websites using other TLDs claiming to be the new official site. As the article states though, it does seem pretty unlikely they will actually retire it.

Internet Archive user info stolen in cyberattack, succumbs to DDoS

JessicaRabbit

I wonder if these attacks are random* or if the Internet Archive is being targetted for some reason if it's the latter, what the attacker's motivations might be.

* They were low hanging fruit detected by vuln scanners

With Granite Rapids, Intel is back to trading blows with AMD

JessicaRabbit

Yeah that's pretty nice actually but the price tag, oh my!

JessicaRabbit

When I can buy an ARM PC that isn't an SBC where I can replace the memory, CPU, GPU etc independently then maybe I'd consider abandoning x86 / x64 but until then not a chance.

Heart of glass: Human genome stored for 'eternity' in 5D memory crystal

JessicaRabbit

Good luck recreating people without also storing the genome of all the bacteria and viruses that inhabit our bodies and carry out an essential role in keeping us alive and healthy.

TikTok isn't protected by Section 230 in 10-year-old’s ‘blackout challenge’ death

JessicaRabbit

It seems like a politically safe opinion with regards to Tik Tok given the US' hostility towards it and its Chinese owners at present but I wouldn't be surprise if there's a sudden backtracking of this once it threatens to affect good old American social media companies.

Say 'ahhhh' – AI robots are now gunning for your gums

JessicaRabbit

I wouldn't let this thing touch me for a million pounds. I don't care how safe they claim it is.

Malware crew Stargazers Goblin used 3,000 GitHub accounts to make bank

JessicaRabbit

Re: The Internet environmental evolution

Making the internet safe for the average plebian end user would mean unreasonable restrictions being placed on the rest of us.

Hong Kong's Furi Labs shakes up smartphone scene with dash of Debian

JessicaRabbit

It sounds promising, a shame it has links to China though as that pretty much guarantees it'll get banned if it ever gains significant traction.

Julian Assange pleads guilty, leaves courtroom a free man

JessicaRabbit

Re: "certain types of journalism won't be tolerated"

Citation?

Julian Assange to go free in guilty plea deal with US

JessicaRabbit

Re: Not been said yet

That's a very long winded way to say you don't know.

Defiant Microsoft pushes ahead with controversial Recall – tho as an opt-in

JessicaRabbit

Re: Camel and straw

Got a link to the proposed legislation? I had a look on DDG but couldn't find anything.

FCC takes some action against notorious BGP

JessicaRabbit

Perhaps they're concerned that if they push too hard they'll just be met with an army of lawyers.

Why RISC-V must get its messaging right on open standard vs open source

JessicaRabbit

Well chips like CPUs and the like are actually often defined with code these days e.g. VHDL, Verilog or SystemVerilog.

IBM sued again for alleged discrimination – this time against White males

JessicaRabbit

Given all the up and downvotes on the comments so far I just want to take a moment to appreciate that TheRegister hasn't taken away our downvote buttons/counts.

Meta comms chief handed six-year Russian prison sentence for 'justifying terrorism'

JessicaRabbit

Well sort of, there is such a thing as prisoners of war and those guilty of war crimes are, to my knowledege, locked up not executed. Also I don't know if it was specific soldiers that were being targetted by the users of Meta but keep in mind some of these soldiers are conscripts with no choice but to fight in Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine. They're not all war criminals.

JessicaRabbit

Maybe I'm just a hippie but I don't think social media platforms should allow people to call for the death of anybody. Obviously what Russia has been doing is wrong and the things its been doing is frankly disgustinng. Them complaining about it is the height of hypocrisy but still, you can protest without inciting violence.

Over a million Neighbourhood Watch members exposed through web app bug

JessicaRabbit

Is there a name for the quotation style used in the article where each paragraph gets on opening double quote mark but only the last paragraph gets a closing one?

Official: EU users can swerve App Store and download iOS apps from the web

JessicaRabbit

I don't see how this is really any different from just distributing through the app store.

Hailo's latest AI chip shows up integrated NPUs and sips power like fine wine

JessicaRabbit

Assuming the 'AI' bubble doesn't burst these definitely look like a better option than constantly upgrading the CPU to get better performance. I can't see any mention in the article or on their site how it reads the values from the model but it seems likely it acts as a bus master and accesses system memory via DMA. i.e. unlike an 'AI' workload running on a GPU, it will compete with the CPU performing other tasks for access to the RAM.

Rust rustles up fix for 10/10 critical command injection bug on Windows in std lib

JessicaRabbit

Re: Ha! Rust Is The Answer To All Our C Programming Security Issues?

I'm not a huge fan of Rust but come on, they're pretty clear about what security issues the language is designed to guard against and what it doesn't. They've never claimed to be a silver bullet for all security issues ever.

Post Office slapped down for late disclosure of documents in Horizon scandal inquiry

JessicaRabbit

Sounds like they were hoping they could delay the inquiry by submitting documents late.

JetBrains keeps mum on 26 'security problems' fixed after Rapid7 spat

JessicaRabbit

Give it a week (or less probably) and attackers will have analysed the patches to figure out the vulns and have written working exploits for at least one of them.

Mozilla fixes $100,000 Firefox zero-days following two-day hackathon

JessicaRabbit

Re: Range of FF versions?

According to https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-29944 and https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-29943 your version is vulnerable.

Cyberattack gifts esports pros with cheats, forcing Apex Legends to postpone tournament

JessicaRabbit

Re: professional esports players

It's an old profession in a new guise. They are just enternainers only the act has changed.

JessicaRabbit

No mention of whether the victims of these hacks were unbanned. You would hope they were but I also wouldn't be surprised if they weren't.

Copilot can't stop emitting violent, sexual images, says Microsoft whistleblower

JessicaRabbit

What did he expect? There's no money to be made doing the right thing.

Water worries flood in as chip industry and AI models grow thirstier

JessicaRabbit

We don't know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was us that contaminated the water.

CISA boss swatted: 'While my own experience was certainly harrowing, it was unfortunately not unique'

JessicaRabbit

Swatting only works because of how trigger happy yank cops are.

Tech billionaires ask Californians to give new utopian city their blessing

JessicaRabbit

Could very well end up being another Bijlmer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJsu7Tv-fRY

Vast botnet hijacks smart TVs for prime-time cybercrime

JessicaRabbit

Doesn't sound like they're attacking externally facing vulnerabilities in the TV to infect them so much as attacking the vulnerability in the dumb meatware operating the TVs (though once the app is installed it does sound like there's some jailbreaking going on to escape the app sandbox).

Brain boffins think they've found the data format we use to store images as memories

JessicaRabbit

Re: What about the people who can't visualize?

"In addition to the correlation between areas of brain activity, Steel explained there's an "opponent suppression" dynamic, in which the two sensing and memory areas of the brain show lower activity when the other is being used. This, he said, suggests a central role of retinotopic code in translating between neural systems in the brain.

When asked to recall an image, activity in mnemonic areas of the brain showed an inverted spike in visually-evoked "population reception fields" that corresponded to the original sensing areas of the brain, suggesting that "retinotopic coding could serve as a shared substrate to scaffold the interaction between perceptual and mnemonic systems," the report posits."

Would be interesting to explore whether this "opponent suppression" dynamic might be backwards or near-permanantly stuck in mnemonic mode for people with aphantasia. I personally can't visualise for toffee when I'm awake and thinking (and my inner dialogue never shuts up so I'm always thinking) but when I'm dozing off or just coming round from sleep I can visualise pretty well.

Britain's Ministry of Defence fined £350K over Afghan interpreter BCC email blunder

JessicaRabbit

Re: So BCC not good anymore ?

There's absolutely no mention of BCC in the linked to BBC article. Maybe someone has been experimenting with Chat-GPT...

Veteran editors Notepad++ and Geany hit milestone versions

JessicaRabbit

Re: Notepad++ FTW

Likewise although I recently discovered you can right-click a tab and choose "Rename" to give the tab a name without having to save it which is really helpful for when you want a bunch of tabs open and you want to be able to find a specific one without having to commit to actually saving them explicitly (notepad++ is obv. saving them somewhere).

Black Basta ransomware operation nets over $100M from victims in less than two years

JessicaRabbit

The name does rather remind me of Billy Connolly's Getifu ya basa bit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8bHsn-3RdQ

Palantir bags £330M NHS data bonanza despite privacy fears

JessicaRabbit

Re: opt out?

I used the NHS app to opt out but see https://www.nhs.uk/your-nhs-data-matters/manage-your-choice/

JessicaRabbit

I opted out of the data sharing yesterday as a result of this and I urge anyone else reading this to do so themselves if they haven't already.

License to thrill BSL refuseniks? Sentry introduces Functional Source License

JessicaRabbit

Re: Sighs are too silent for this

Well maybe you're right but I'm struggling to see the issue. If they are using (F)OSS it's not GPL or the like because those licences would be incompatible with BSL. That only leaves licences like MIT where the author has explicitly decided to make their work available for commercial use. Besides the code does become genuinely (F)OSS after two years, I'm not sure you can really call that spitting on the community.

At the end of the day, developers are not free. If a FOSS alternative exists, by all means use that. If it doesn't then either there's no demand for it (unlikely given Sentry have built it) or nobody is willing to build it for free. Sentry has to at least pay for the developer's time, admin costs etc etc. It's not rational to expect them to just give it away, surely you don't truly believe they should? Except of course they are doing, more or less. You or I are free to build it, host it ourselves, make changes whatever. The only people really getting screwed by this licence are the cloud providers and I'm not exactly shedding tears over that.

Without hyperbole or the sort of emotive language you've used above, please explain what parts of of what I've written above you disagree with?

JessicaRabbit

Re: Sighs are too silent for this

Not really, they're paying for the development costs and providing the product for free to end users. They just don't want Amazon, Google, Microsoft et al to take their work, package it up and re-sell it.

Ex-GCHQ software dev jailed for stabbing NSA staffer

JessicaRabbit

Terrible what happened but it never ceases to amaze me that with the level of surveillance these organizations are perpetrating against their own citizens that they can't even figure out when there's a terrorist working for them.

Amazon's $1.4B price-raising 'Project Nessie' algorithm exposed in FTC antitrust fight

JessicaRabbit

I can understand why smaller companies or individual would and do settle when facing corporations the size of Amazon but this is the US govt. Surely they have incredibly deep pockets and could easily afford to fight this to the end. Why are they so willing to settle?

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