Posts by Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch

Playing ball games in the datacenter was obviously stupid, but we had to win the league

My God, You're the Inebriati!

Everything mankind does is much, much easier if you're ever so slightly drunk.

As Xi and Putin chase immortality, let's talk about digital presidents-for-life

Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernyenko... Already in living memory you'll see a succession of dictators-in-waiting kept alive by technology the poor schmucks who kept them inflated couldn't hope to access.

US cuffs 475 at Hyundai–LG battery plant – feds tout largest single-site raid

Re: Hmmmm, what day is Kristallnacht this year?

Unless they build rockets.

They'll just accommodate them next door to the North Korean mercenaries. Should get on like a house on fire.

FBI cyber cop: Salt Typhoon pwned 'nearly every American'

Re: Backdoors bite back

Woke! Wowoke! Wowowowowoke!!

The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

Re: grammar

I haven't been able to decide for certain whether I like his language. I haven't heard him complete a sentence yet.

One long sentence is all it takes to make LLMs misbehave

Re: One long sentence?

Just ask Molly Bloom to help.

McDonald's not lovin' it when hacker exposes nuggets of rotten security

Re: What a bunch of clowns

There will be a McFlurry of complaints when news gets out.

Will they take their Quarter Pounder flesh from the culprit?

KPMG wrote 100-page prompt to build agentic TaxBot

Re: KPMG in Australia in deep trouble

The word advice in that comment covers a scandalous level of deception.

In seeking "efficiency", a series of right-wing governments in Australia fired much of the public service, only to replace the advice public servant experts used to give with advice provided by for-profit consultancies, of which KPMG were one. Many of these consultancies happened to be donors to the right wing parties.

These consultancies also had large numbers of corporate clients who used them to minimise their tax liabilities. When the government introduced new tax regulations, they included, on consultants' advice, loopholes which KPMG had already advised their clients to structure their finances to exploit.

Needless to say, Australian governments don't use KPMG any more.

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need

Re: The answer to almost all those is...

In Japanese it's currently 令和7年８月19日。So yes YMD, and, yes, they use CE years as well.

One big area of thrust for us

While some use thrust to generate lift, Micros~1 think it's for... market penetration.

They were forced to pull out from 'round here years ago.

Molten salt nuclear reactors slated to power Google datacenters in 2030

Re: Reliable sources?

Yes, those notoriously left-of-centre Rockefellers, with their rabidly pro-environment allies at Standard Oil.

Linux is about to lose a feature – over a personality clash

Re: Justice for bcachefs!

ZFS is extremelyflexible: checksumming, compression, encryption, mirroring, duplication, deduplication, snapshots, extended attributes, case-sensitivity, cache optimisation, error detection, error correction, RAID... I'm struggling to find a single feature of modern filesystem function that you can't find in ZFS, that you could omit from your chosen ZFS if you like, by simply choosing not to use it.

Wrapping one's head around the implementation is a learning curve, but that's the cost of using its abilities. Unlike btrfs, in ZFS it's logical (or, at least, there is a logic to it). Oh, and it's stable and it works, too.

A GPL (rather than CDDL) ZFS would be possible, if and only if OpenZFS (or someone) were to audit and rewrite every line of Sun-engineered code in the codebase. Larry will tap you on the head with a lawyer if you get it wrong. Any takers?

Taint is just a scary pejorative chosen in this context to make ZFS users think thrice about not swallowing the Free Software dogma as a bolus.

Once you're fine with that idea, carry on...

No more Blocktoberfest? German court throws book at ad blockers

Re: What if the ads fell into a hole before they got to my computer?

My eyes flick over a page or block of text in a magazine as soon as I've clocked its identity and categorised it as "ad". I'm not modifying the magazine by refusing to read the text, I'm ignoring it.

Pihole does the same.

If your business model consists of identifying ads and substituting some other content you curate yourself and get paid to distribute, you're modifying it. Also, you're just another pitiful rent-seeking parasite.

I started losing my digital privacy in 1974, aged 11

Re: Why would you ever delete patient data?

You're happy for me to treat your STEMI without knowing what your angiogram results are? Informed consent requires me to tell you how much more likely that makes you to die; if you're happy to wait while I do that, fine. I'd rather get on with saving your life.

'Suddenly deprecating old models' users depended on a 'mistake,' admits OpenAI's Altman

Re: Span

My attention spam is non-existent. I don't like spam!

Hanging up: AOL to pull the plug on its dial-up service after 36 years

Re: Nostalgia Bomb

As long as you still have your copy of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation.

Californian man so furious about forced Windows 11 upgrade that he's suing Microsoft

Re: Like to see the Right to Repair weight in

Don't forget the AI shite. Not that they're not retrofitting that, too.

Re: Being sensible for a moment

What did TPM 2.0 add to the fundamental security of an OS that 1.2 did not already achieve? It was new, and its rollout coincided with the most recent ISA extensions which requires a user to upgrade hardware.

Not so much complying with the latest safety and emissions standards, more like defining "all 4 wheels must be on the road at the same time" as a safety standard.

Make Redmond angry by setting up Windows 11 with a local account

Boot off of it

Boot off it. Booting off of something needs a redundant preposition.

Kremlin goons caught abusing ISPs to spy on Moscow-based diplomats, Microsoft says

Re: Stating the bleedin' obvious

The UK has been reading other gentlemen's mail since before the UK was a thing (see Francis Walsingham). The quote about other people's mail came from an American, before WWI.

It was the UK's habit of intercepting and reading German diplomatic traffic (a habit I hear they've taken up themselves, quite regularly) that finally brought the USA into WWI. By decrypting the Zimmerman Telegram, and then "allowing" the US to discover its content, the Brits demonstrated Germany's intent to bring Mexico into WWI on the German side, and to thereby threaten the USA's own territory, aiming to discourage the Americans from using German attacks on neutral shipping as a casus belli. When President Wilson found out, war was declared.

Ironic, eh?

Re: Moscow using everything to catch foreign embassy comms, that's news ?

Yes. I hear the Secretary of State is particularly concerned about comms security.

'It looks sexy but it's wrong' – the problem with AI in biology and medicine

Re: Childcare benefit "fraud" in the Netherlands

I read today that DOGE's next assignment, after implementing its AI-generated list of whom to fire (which included those who maintain the thermonuclear arsenal), will be an AI-generated list of laws to repeal.

I've got money on it including the one that bans private ownership of nuclear weapons, as that breaches the second amendment.

Re: Had to giggle ...

Also a big clue to AI generation - the total lack of activity in the frontal cortex.

First release candidate of systemd 258 is here

Re: Fork?

With a fork in one hand and Occam's Razor in the other, you can at least make a meal of it...

Re: What?

While I don't disagree with you, since the lowest common denominator of the designers of abstraction layers passed the point of "files and directories are a too abstract set of ideas for our target user, let's assume they can only cope with something more concrete that they're likely to understand from daily experience," the world did go to hell in a handbasket.

Re: What?

To be precise, 7.1 weeks. After that it would crash when its uptime counter rolled over.

Problem PC had graybeards stumped until trainee rummaged through trash

Re: Why are books organised by height or colour?

Hard to see the point.

Coldplay kiss-cam flap proves we’re already our own surveillance state

Re: What's ironic

The Streisand Effect in 2.5 seconds flat.

German team warns ChatGPT is changing how you talk

Re: And the annoying thing is

Of course if you delve enough into the cleft, you'll reach the tilth. What you do next is up to you.

Google's Android boss suggests ChromeOS could be on borrowed time

Re: Once again

Google can't afford their internet bill. Forgive my scepticism.

Ukrainian hackers claim to have destroyed major Russian drone maker's entire network

Re: Bottle sockets, perhaps?

By extension, I'm guessing the tonsil reference goes to how extensively the bottle was deployed. There's a mental picture I didn't need...

Re: 10TB of backup files

Actually you suggested it would be a good thing if the special operation mongers could keep making their weapons of choice.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine humans checking AI didn't make a mistake – forever

Phew

Glad am I therefore to work in an industry where quality control is simple: if you get it wrong, someone dies.

Move over bit barns, here come Japan’s floating bit barges

They'll have better floating point performance.

Microsoft Copilot joins ChatGPT at the feet of the mighty Atari 2600 Video Chess

Re: Horsey takes King Prawn

My high school Biology teacher was also coach of the rugby team. That was because he was from South Africa and thus the only one who knew how to play.

Visiting students can't hide social media accounts from Uncle Sam anymore

Re: hooray for the wayback machine.

Hypocrite.

Re: See my answer to the first question

Passing through the US Border Security an Australian was asked to show the contents of a kid's backpack, and, removing a teddy, only occupant of the backpack, said "There's a bear in there." Her partner, being a comedian, added "And a chair as well."

For context, in Australia, the TV show Play School is a national institution, and its theme song, unchanged for 50 years, begins "There's a bear in there, and a chair as well." Practically everyone who grew up in Australia knows it by heart, because it's on twice a day, every day of the year, and for pre-schoolers viewing is pretty much compulsory.

Cue multiple officials grilling the entire family and searching every scrap of checked and hand luggage (not sure but in the original account I believe they missed their flight because of it). "What did you mean by a chair? Is there anything else in your luggage you haven't told us about? Are you attempting to take anything out of the country illegally?"

Depending on the story-teller, cavity searches may be part of the story. Possibly apocryphal, but absolutely credible.

/anecdote

Re: Other religions?

It would stop the teaching of evolution as science and creationism as religion. It would stop sex education that teaches any method other than abstinence for contraception, despite abstinence being demonstrably worse at preventing teenage pregnancy even than no sex education at all. It would facilitate some states' already implemented plans to teach that 81.2 million < 74.2 million, as in the 2020 Presidential Election. To the extent that the "green madness" is science, it would prevent the teaching of science.

"The people who run the schools" are frequently parochial bigoted morons. The schools are paid for by the state, and the state has an imperative role in making sure the students are educated, sometimes in direct contradiction to their parents' wishes. Education is the defence of the state (Benjamin Franklin). A state that prevents its citizens from thinking in the disguise of education is weakening itself, with consequences that are already obvious.

The (executive) government can breach the constitution. If it does, well, that's what the judiciary is for, the likes of Alito and Thomas notwithstanding. In theory, that's the resolution to your paradox.

If questioned, "I support the principles of the US Constitution completely." If asked for more detail about the current government, "With respect, making a governmental decision about me based on my answer to that question is unconstitutional. See my answer to the first question, in particular the bits about free speech, free association, self-incrimination and equal protection before the law."

I have no intention of going anywhere near a place where an employee of the US Government might be empowered to ask one of those questions any time soon.

Hmm. Downvote without a reply.

- My comment was a perfectly valid syllogism

- The idea that the US government must, constitutionally, abide any and all political criticism of itself is one of the US's founding principles

I suspect the downvote is pure cognitive dissonance.

Re: You aren't much of a student if you don't criticise the government.

Maybe that was the case back in the 60s and 70s when there were professional jobs for graduates to go into and earn a reliable comfortable living for themselves and their families.

For anyone who has grown up under the kleptocracy that has been in place since the Reagan era, the whole country is f*cked and demanding it be turned into some kind of socialist "utopia" where billionaires and presidents don't feel inclined to buy entire islands so they can isolate themselves from the anger of the millions of people whose labour enabled them is the only way society will have any actual security, as opposed to the illusion of security the kleptocrats have been selling us unsuccessfully for decades.

"any indications of hostility towards the citizens, culture, government, institutions or founding principles of the United States,"

When the US government becomes hostile to the founding principles of the United States, one cannot support both.

Microsoft dangles extended Windows 10 support in exchange for Reward Points

Re: So basically backup supported security updates instead of ad supported

On the other, it is a ten year old operating system, that has been superceded unnecessarily bulldozed into planned obsolescence after Micros~1 announced it was "the last Windows."

FTFY.

It's good to have a Händel on these things.

Techie went home rather than fix mistake that caused a massive meltdown

Technically correct, only units named for people should have a capitalised abbreviation. Practically, lowercase L is too similar to the digit one, especially when handwritten on prescriptions.

Re: Honestly

Is that Perth (Western Australia) where it's currently 18°C in winter, or Perth (Perth and Kinross) where it's currently 18°C in summer?

Teens used encrypted chats to recruit for 'violence as a service' murder ring, Europol says

Re: Scandinavia

Monocultures don't become multicultural overnight. Integration needs to be a positive decision, not just something a society hopes will happen passively and naturally.

Australia made a decision to become a multicultural country 75 years ago, and out of necessity. The idea that Anglo Australia could stay not only dominant but the exclusive culture was rubbish anyway

Whether it be the displaced people of WWII, Vietnamese or Somali or any of the other groups that made home here, they've all brought their own trauma and all needed help adjusting.

But I like walking through Footscray or the Vic Market or down Swanston Street and trying to work out what nationalities I live with. I like that the kids of my country hear dozens of languages in their playgrounds.

It's the opposite of boring.

Australia finds age detection tech has many flaws but will work

Re: Data collection...

There is a second prong to the AU government's approach here and it's: Use our ID validation.

MyID (FFS will marketroids ever move on from trying to make us feel included, warm and fuzzy? The "M" section of my app list is clogged with My[phone company], My[energy company], My[government service] when we all know perfectly well it's theirs. And I still can't pay my power bill.) will serve to let you into MyGov ($@#*!) and thence Medicare, the Tax Office, Centrelink (welfare), Child Support, Passports, the Post Office, even PBS Prescribing if you're a medico like me, all high value targets.

Registration starts with 100 points of ID and current address validation, so at least 2 government issued photo ID sources and usually a recent bill issued against your current residential address, validated against the respective state and commonwealth databases that issued them. And if you're worried about Met Police style re-birthing, 1) they validate against the death certificates as well, and 2) most neonatally deceased don't get drivers licences.

It then becomes 2FA to let you in to the service of your choice. So far I've only been asked to use it to access government services. I'm thinking it's a matter of time before e.g. online banking services are subjected to mandatory minimum ID verification standards. AU gov: haven't worked out your infrastructure for that? Would you care to look at ours...