Posts by VoiceOfTruth

Cop who used police system to snoop for info on crook pals sentenced for Computer Misuse Act offenses

Another soft sentence for the police

There is a multi-tier justice system in the UK.

China launches mysterious probe into security of Palo Alto Networks' products

Correction

>> Western governments level the same accusations at Huawei and ZTE.

No, they didn't. The USA did. Britain cyber security people gave Huawei a clean bill of health stating they found no back doors. But then the American regime leant on its poodles, and they folded. This was part of a larger 'remove the competition' programme conducted by the American regime to prop up its local bug-ridden backdoor-laden vendors.

This was nothing to do with security. If it was, Cisco would have been banned a very long time ago.

News Corp labels some AI companies 'crass kleptomaniacs'

Surely these two words should be in ironic quotes

>> quality content

The absolute despicable activities of News Corp reached a new low nadir when Russell Harty was dying. A News of The World "journalist" impersonated a doctor to gain access to the ICU where Harty was on his death bed, and read his medical notes.

The Sun is useful perhaps as toilet paper if there is a new covid outbreak.

Chinese router vendor denies its firmware contains backdoors – but pauses downloads to fix security issues anyway

The hypocrisy

Cisco gets a free pass for its endless backdoors and 'forgotten' hard-coded passwords. Nothing to see here. Walk along.

For info, here is another one: CVE-2026–20316. Miraculously forgotten hard-coded credentials. In Cisco. Again. This is not a quality issue. This is deliberate.

Next.js 16.3 aims to reduce dreaded FATAL ERROR messages

Amen. I grew very bored with 'developers' who more or less said 'buy more memory'. Their lazy programming was not 'best practice'.

Americans give all-day school phone bans a ringing endorsement

Re: "Older Americans, meanwhile, appear increasingly comfortable [with the ban]"

I should clarify that I agree with banning phones during school time, or at least during lessons. But creating yet another 'infraction' is just one more way to stomp on kids. No doubt it would go into records somewhere, to haunt those kids for the rest of their lives. Oh look, you had infractions.

There is already a problem with excluding kids from schools. Suspending them, and permanently excluding them for carrying a phone three times is just stupid.

Re: "Older Americans, meanwhile, appear increasingly comfortable [with the ban]"

This sounds very ill-considered:

>> a 3-day exclusion on the first try, with heavier penalties on the next infraction and permanent exclusion on the 3rd.

Some people love looking for infractions, making a big deal over what is a small thing. You wrote above about paying attention and learning, and here you are wanting to ban kids from school. Some kids do not want to go to school. You have just given them an easy way to achieve that.

I wonder how many infractions you have accrued in your lifetime.

Closed models refuse to help researcher swat Linux bug

Re: Just wow

Sometimes those bugs are not found because nobody is looking for them. There is a lot of old code which works, which was committed years ago. It passed a few eyeballs at the time. We see reports in The Reg quite often about hardcoded passwords in Cisco (too convenient to be called bugs, so they are more likely to be backdoors). If those are genuine bugs, then nobody was looking for them.

I have occasionally mentioned my view that 'many eyes makes bugs shallow' is a fallacy. Those eyes have to be competent enough to understand sometimes very complex spaghetti. It's the same with OpenSSL. Let's face it: average programmers are not going to spot complex bugs in OpenSSL, even less understand the algorithms or if the algorithms have been coded correctly. They might spot a bug by luck, but that is not the same thing.

Iran-linked CyberAv3ngers suspected in attacks on Minnesota water systems

As though I am supposed to care

The USA is conducting a war against Iran. Spare me one crocodile tear.

After rewriting SQLite in Rust, Turso turns its sights on Postgres

Freshened up

>> But, like SQLite, Postgres could be freshened up for the cloud-native era.

Newspeak for newly written code, without decades of testing behind it. Yeah, I'll jump on that bandwagon.

Burnham's spanner in the works leaves UK government tech scattered across Whitehall

Science, engineering, manufacturing are dirty words

>> Liz Kendall - history graduate, was 'in charge' of science.

There are too many lawyers in parliament. They know how to argue over a comma in a sentence, but probably can't change a spark plug. No worries, they can get someone else to do it (buy it in), and shove it onto expenses.

Let's be honest here. The government is not going to pay a 'good' salary to somebody who knows how to get to grips with its IT estate. By 'good' I mean in comparison to the private sector. The same would-be candidates can get a lot more money, and with a tenth of the hassles from people who probably think Windows 11 is a good operating system.

America bans imported robots due to supply chain and security risks

I don't care if the USA bans Chinese imports of anything

I care if the American regime tries to inflict its policy on so-called allied or friendly nations. We would have better and cheaper 5G in the UK if the little princes didn't kowtow to Washington hegemony.

We would probably have nuclear power stations delivered on time and on budget too, as China has experience and depth of knowledge in that field that makes us look like cavemen in comparison.

Canada thought it was playing ball by detaining a Huawei executive. All it got in return was a broken trade treaty and tariffs as an overtly stated threat to take it over.

Bullies should never be sucked up to.

Burnham wants Big Ecommerce to bankroll Britain's pubs

Pretty much all costs are simply too high in the UK

Trimming a bit of the already ludicrously high business rates is barely going to help. Britain's business property rates are the highest in Europe.

"businesses that play by the rules,"

The problem is companies like Amazon do play by the rules. The rules allow them to do exactly what they are doing. I don't object to Amazon's success, but I do object to their very obvious massive market domination. It is effectively a monopoly. The barrier to entry to competing with Amazon is so high that it's not feasible. But the CMA sits on its arse and does bugger all. No doubt the CMA would state that Amazon plays by the rules...

I have read very misguided complaints about the decline of the high street, with some people blaming the rise of 'Turkish barber shops'. The barber shops are a symptom, not the cause. If the barber shops weren't there, the shops would be empty.

EU telcos ask: Huawei going to afford to replace Chinese equipment?

There should be a rule

Not one piece of American equipment should replace any of this. Not so much as a cable.

Google meets the neighbors and gets both barrels over its new UK datacenter

Communique to the plebs

Britain is not a democracy. Your views don't count. You should be grateful for all this environmental pollution. More is coming your way.

Britain isn't considering datacenters' thirst for water in its 'AI superpower' ambitions

Britain will not be an 'AI' superpower

Electricity costs are just way too expensive.

OpenAI scored an own goal with Hugging Face attack, showing how open Chinese models are winning

I see you have a lot of down votes. Probably from good honest 'Christian' Americans with their heads in the sand. The same people who voted for a convicted criminal, while demanding harsh 'justice' for people with the 'wrong' skin colour.

There is a key sentence in the article: 'the US government is said to be mulling possible responses to limit competition from China'.

Competition. The USA does not like any.

Sovereign AI is 'nonsense,' says Doctorow

The word you are looking for

>> US-led world order

Hegemony. The USA is doing badly. Which is good for the rest of the world.

Linux kernel team publishes 432 CVEs in two days

There are a whole load of 'system administrators' out there who are not competent to review any patch. They just eat the cake that is served to them.

Wait and see?

>> waiting to see which ones emerge as serious issues

A mouth full of rotting teeth. We'll wait and see which one starts hurting first. I disagree with Schaumann's suggestion. It should be possible to prioritise what are obviously major bugs first. But then, who does the fixing?

I hope the Linux community does not downplay this. It can't be fine to point fingers at MS and crow about patch Tuesday, when Linux is, in places, every bit as bad. It does reveal the fallacy of the 'many eyes' theory. Those eyes have to be competent and actually looking for bugs.

The kernel is bloated. There are some very hairy bits in there. It's not all shiny goodness. Not all kernel developers are aces.

The truth nobody wants to admit: Chinese or not, open models are competitive now

Re: There is a horrible 'through American eyes' view in this article

Oh really? In many cases publishers are not the copyright holders - the original authors are. So you appear to be stating that copyright infringement on a mass scale is not a problem. Perhaps you are OK with an LLM copying your original works. I think many people would not be.

There is a horrible 'through American eyes' view in this article

If 'A Chinese model can be dangled as a threat to national security', then the same holds true for Europe and American 'AI'.

Arguably, China already leads in AI. It is filing more patents,.

The American legal (not justice) system on parade: 'agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle claims over vacuuming up millions of pirated books'. It should have been tens of billions, and the criminals who dod this should be in prison. But money talks.

China advances plans for national single-stack IPv6 network, and its own surveillance-friendly version of the protocol

tMercator Institute for China Studies

Too much worrying about China, while Europe goes down the toilet.

Re: Fuck China

Fuck America. That is all.

Mozilla speeds Firefox release schedule to biweekly

Ridiculous and pointless

I have complained elsewhere about Chrome having too many updates. I don't use Firefox for other reasons. Now there's another reason not to use Firefox.

There are too many non- or micro-features which get rolled out in software. Rolling them out quicker just annoys users more. Realistically Firefox is about at version 6.

Europe's chip ambitions won't break dependence on US cloud and software, says Forrester

The new economics

The 1980s, the worst example was John Harvey-Jones. Don't make it, buy it in.

It will require willpower, but it can be done. It is time to treat the USA as a danger and not just a competitor. It is not a friend, and should not be treated as such.

Chinese memory ban would cut off RAMpocalypse relief

Land of the free

Free to be ripped off by billionaires. Free to be not given a choice.

I hope that they do ban Chinese memory. It will make the USA even less efficient.

TSMC's $265B US fab pledge is the outline of a concept of a plan

Perhaps somebody in Taiwan has woken up

Trump: Destroy your economy and build it here.

Taiwan: OK.

Taiwan a few seconds later: Hmmm. Let's say OK, but...

C'mon, just copy this text string and paste it into your macOS Terminal – it'll fix your computer, honest

Pasting stuff into a terminal

>> Instead, it persuades users to pwn themselves by pasting a command into Terminal,

It sounds ludicrous, but take Homebrew. The installation instructions are 'Paste that in the macOS terminal...': /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Dark patterns in Windows are steering users to Edge: Mozilla-commissioned report

What about people who try Firefox and just don't like it?

I gave up on Firefox a long time ago. I don't owe it any more of my time to just 'try the latest version', when I've heard that for years. Mozilla as an organisation has stumbled over numerous missteps.

My only problem with Chrome is there are too many updates. My last update was 7th of July. 14th of July there was another update - I haven't clicked the 'Finish update' button on this yet. It's disruptive as I have multiple open profiles, with multiple tabs.

Accenture admits to 'isolated matter' after crook tries to flog alleged 35GB haul

A question of vocabulary

>> "There is no impact to Accenture operations and service delivery."

If and when the hacker is caught, the Accenture's lawyers will be saying BadBob caused terrible and long lasting damage.

Ubuntu emphasizes Arm64 support – and gets Rustier

Rust coreutils

For the purists it is worth mentioning these are MIT licensed rather than GNU.

In the rush to Rust, no doubt other bugs and less functionality will be encountered.

Speedier type checks in TypeScript 7.0 as first stable Go release ships

I have some doubts

>> Go barely scrapes into the top 20 of the latest Tiobe list of popular programming languages.

Scratch is above Go. Really? And above PHP? That doesn't smell right to me.

UK firm bombarded debt-ridden people with 5.5M texts

Peanuts

This sort of thing will continue as long as the 'fine' is nothing more than a cost of doing business.

Telling internet platforms where to stick public service media will serve nobody. Turn it on its head

PSM is state media

Those in power want to control our thoughts.

I will trust the BBC when I see everyone at the BBC who knew about Saville named, shamed, and kicked out.

Oracle promises to open up MySQL governance, but the community wants guarantees

I really am fed up hearing from the MySQL 'community'. Why don't they just move to MariaDB and have done with it? That is the logical thing to do.

OurSQL is misnamed. It is not 'ours' at all. MySQL is owned by Oracle.

Digital ID brain trust will meet behind closed doors as minister ducks cost questions

Britain is not a democracy

The government is supposed to be answerable to parliament. But that is just a theory.

These same government ministers decry overseas dictators, while doing the same thiing.

FreeBSD 15.1 lands, but desktop dabblers still have to draw their own GUI

Alas, upgrading to a later release of FreeBSD is a crap show

There used to be distribution sets - basically compressed tar files. You could cd to /, and untar these, and you would have a new base OS. This would require very minor fixing afterwards, and when I write 'minor' I mean this was a non-issue. I used to do this because the official upgrade process using freebsd-update wants to download thousands of patches, merge them, then install them. This took considerably longer, the process almost always went wrong somewhere along the line during the obscure download process, and it would download thousands of patches again - just a few thousand less than originally.

There are instructions for upgrading FreeBSD here: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/15.1R/upgrading/. These instructions are very misleading, and particularly so for somebody new to FreeBSD.

For example, the 'upgrade the kernel' section shows: freebsd-update upgrade -r 15.1-RELEASE. There is no mention of the word 'patch' in this section. What you actually see on screen is:

...

Fetching files from 15.0-RELEASE for merging... done.

Preparing to download files... done.

Fetching 8444 patches.....10....20.^C

Why on earth anyone at FreeBSD thought this was a good idea is beyond me. It's quicker to just reinstall than go through this broken system. I'm no fan of the base system packages either. The whole point of FreeBSD is that it is complete. I don't need or want a different base package for anything.

UK Cabinet Office hiring AI and innovation 'influencer' to build 'AI-first culture' in civil service

Re: The very definition of Government Waste

There has always been huge waste in government.

There's no money, we are told. But Covid comes along and a Tory friend gets a £37 billion contract at the drop of a hat.

The real purpose is to sell as much of this country to the USA. We have already seen the private data of NHS patients accessible by the American spy company Palantir.

I can't wait for the 100% inorganic American food product slop to be forced onto our shelves.

Capita is about to sail past deadline to fix civil service pensions scheme

Re: Oh it can easily be fixed.

Good heavens. You don't mean hold a company to account, do you? Think about the shareholders.

France's digital sovereignty push is struggling to escape the Microsoft gravity well

Britain could never do this

The politicians have sold the UK to American billionaires.

PRC-linked spies hid inside medical and military networks for more than a year, snooping through Gmail and stealing data

Meanwhile...

Google hands over EVERYTHING to the American regime.

It's called hypocrisy.

Palantir's NHS data deal called in for a second opinion

Vocab

>> in uncontested deals

Backhanders, bungs, brown envelopes. Corruption.

Google fires sueball at alleged Chinese phishers over AI-powered fraud ops

I call bullshit on Google.

I reported an obvious scam advert on YouTube to them. Response:

"Here's what we found

We decided not to take this ad down. We found that the ad doesn’t go against Google’s policies, which prohibit certain content and practices that we believe to be harmful to users and the overall online ecosystem."

So, scamming is OK as long as Google is being paid by the scammer.

Met Police boss threatens to cut 700 frontline jobs after Palantir deal blocked

This is good news.

A few less institutionally racist, institutionally homophobic, institutionally sexist, institutionally corrupt thugs who hide behind their badges on the streets of London.

The contempt these arrogant fuckers show for the population is off the top of the charts.

Burgled? Had a bike stolen? Too busy.

Have a camera in public? Woowoowoowoo. Terror suspect.

These are not Dixon of Dock Green.

Nottingham Uni says student records raided after ShinyHunters claims cyberattack

Why no mention of the third party?

I am pretty sure it is Oracle and this is part of the ongoing attacks against Peoplesoft.

>> Information Commissioner's Office.

Nothing to see here. Not even a slap on the wrist. Lessons must be learned in a for() loop.

>> Individuals believed to be affected have been contacted directly,

Hopefully not via BCC.

>> the university has stood up a dedicated support line.

They might need more than one.

Re: Ah.

It does make me laugh. This is the same third party that evidently didn't manage to keep it secure before.

Canada wants to make its own AI, break free from US bots

Re: More threats by the US just in the news

Canada will capitulate eventually. I am a realist, I am not bothered by down votes.

Capita £370M bid 40% under UK.gov estimate for Oracle HR and finance system project, court case reveals

I'm not sure who to trust here

Typically, government 'experts' vastly underestimate the costs of pretty much everything. But they are also useless at getting a reasonable price.

But it's only taxpayers' money, not their own. So they don't really care.

>> defense

Please... when writing about the UK, deign to use UK spellings.

AI heavyweights warn their tech could help terrorists develop bioweapons

There it is:

>> US law

It's world domination.