Posts by Version 1.0 5416 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
Essentially this ought to be a tax deductible donation that you can reclaim. You may think that you are only posting on social media to your friends, but all these companies are making billions from your "donations" and paying no taxes because technically you made a donation to the billionaires running all these companies.
So now "...a bill that aims to improve how the federal government tracks and prosecutes cybercrime..." but spam, QAnon, phishing, et al, are still seen as just naughty free speech. I support free speech but not free lies or what is effectively just cyberprofiteering attempts.
Yes, an attempt to stop cybercrime is a good start, but it's like putting just one shoe on each of your kids when the family goes for a run up a mountain.
For any country it's very profitable for local companies when you say "replace all foreign devices with locally made devices"
It's the same as the recent "upgrade" of cell phones to 5G ... now everyone needs to buy new phones so the main feature is not performance or safety, it's just an economic boost.
You have to think about the environment creating the cyberattacks.
It's not that different to our normal efficient programming environments - the most important thing for the cyber-warrior programmers is to create an attack that works and does the job. Once it's fully functional you start to add the cyber-attack environment, the next step is to make it look like it wasn't built and designed by a known source to keep the writers relatively safe. There has been quite a bit of evidence over the years that this is done by changing the language inside the attack module to try and false-flag another country or including some code from another attack, modified to work around the AV defenses.
Cyberattacks suck, but they are normal these days.
You need to be careful when you select the Ugly Extra Firmware Idiot startup...
I saw a local issue when a server administrator was told that the server needed to be rebooted and thought that he was using the UEFI - the reboot then reinstalled the RAID configuration on the two system disks ... but before he selected UEFI the system had been running one disk and using the other as the server backup.
BASIC was designed to help young students become programmers, normally often moving on to other languages once they understood what they were doing and got a job. Certainly BASIC has a lot of issues but once you manage to write completely functional BASIC code then it's quite easy to learn another language in a day or two.
I've seen PhD researchers in completely unrelated non-computing areas quickly figure out how to write something that they need in BASIC - maybe BASIC's not "great" but it gets the job done.
Prohibition in the US banned that sale of alcoholic beverages from 1920 to 1933 ... resulting in massive profits for the MAFIA and free whiskey for the politicians. Eventually the MAFIA was making so much money that the prohibition was retired, funding the New Deal with alcohol and other excise taxes bringing in $1.35 billion, nearly half the federal government's total revenue.
Initially everyone reading El Reg today were just hunter gatherers roaming around the Internet looking for data and access but not finding much, just enough to keep us entertained after hours of work hunting at 300 baud. Over years everything has evolved, now the entire population of hunter gatherers has been replaced by farmers like Google, working at gigabites (sic) - so we're all just the farmers food now.
If we could build bitcoin miners that were efficient enough that they could be powered by walking on a stairmaster then maybe the entire human race would become healthy again? But if you are walking on a stairmaster machine for 12 hours a day then you will be releasing a lot of CO2 (your mouth and bottom).
I've see this style of error for years now. I work in the human gait analysis field and there has been a very accurate study that shows that a young child's gait is different from an adult's gait ... I agree, I've seen this but the study was originally only based on child vs adult. As a result of biomechanics students being taught this, they assume that it's correct but don't remember the original testing. And so they assume that these days walking across the lab in a straight line is the same as walking on a treadmill and making sure you don't fall off it - it's similar but a totally different environment so the gait is only similar, not identical.
The errors described in this article are because AI is written by programmers/researchers who are just trying to get answers, when the answers look good then it's assumed that they are accurate - but nobody is verifying it. My approach, to students in these areas, has always been, "Show that the data is bad!" ... "and if you work at that and fail to show that the data is bad, then at last you have some evidence that the data might be good."
Check the Lockheed Martin stock price to monitor the effects of the F-35 sales, a war is always quite profitable for the corporations that manufacture the weapons.
You can also look at the history of the world, go back about 4,000 years and see the ancient city ruins with large amounts of obsidian blades in the area, all bought in from afar. As monkeys we have not evolved that much, we're just better at killing other monkeys these days.
... two small fridges, the entire kitchenette – including a big fridge, microwave, dishwasher, and an under-sink hot and chilled water unit... so the beancounters are working from home in the office. I'm seeing this occasionally these days, so many working areas now have a toaster, a microwave, and empty beer cans in the trash buckets - it's the working from home environment.
In the US we all have freedom of speech and can walk around town with a gun in our pockets, Freedom to carry a gun is not an excuse for gratuitous shots but it does happen occasionally. I agree that Freedom of Speech is a significant factor but we need to accept that Freedom of Anonymous Lies is causing a lot of near misses these days on all sides.
You see this with Windows all the time, when the new version is released then users install it and find problems. So there's always a lot of complaints initially but MS will work to fix the problems and over time (a year or two) the new version will become usable ... W10 has been a good illustration of this, it's now reasonably usable, but initially most users returned to Windows 7 after their "upgrade".
The methods documented as used by the China hackers are pretty much standard hacking methods, maybe they hacked the hackers to learn them, or maybe they were hacked by the Russians and figured it out? This is not a joke, it's just a yawn - this sort of thing is going on everywhere these days ... I'm not worried, I'm just bored. I have our mail servers set to stop all this by limiting every risky attachment and email format.
Reporting problems to the management after fixing them is normally seen by the managers as criticism and will create problems for you. I don''t think this is seen as "a problem" by most support people, they simply work around it by not publicly fixing the problems that cause them to have problems - at least this means that you can continue getting things done instead of having to work elsewhere, like I'm having to.
Look at the similarity between America's attitude towards Unions and their civil war that ended slavery, replacing it with low wages - the people driving the Amazon Prime delivery vans and packing them are about 80% black, the people running Amazon and other companies are almost 100% white.
Fine, throw away your smartphones, your IoT shit, your electric car, your washing machine ... and everything else ... well if that's going to help us to a carbon-free world, then think how much better it would be if we eliminated Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok etc, etc, etc? They use massive amounts of power globally and we do with our continuous social media interactions.
I would be so happy to go back to the days when I sat in a field watching the Pink Floyd and then Nice on a stage about 20 feet away, and then a few weeks later watching Al Stewart changing a string on his guitar and start singing again ... sure, it wasn't 100% carbon free but it was way less than sitting in the living room and watching a 98" TV.
LOL, this is a great story for on-call ... it reminds me that I still have a "desktop" PDP11/23 ... it sat on the "desktop" and I put the VT100 screen on top of it and the keyboard in front. Yes, I did see this hard-sector vs soft-sector issue very occasionally back then but something that on-call always teaches is that "problems" always result in everyone learning.
Adventure, (aka "Colossal Cave Adventure") was the first game I ever played on a computer, I just loved reading and interacting with the game on my VT100 connected to the PDP-11, and writing this comment I have so many memories of the glorious images that I interacted with while creating a map of the cave on a pad of paper. I wonder if the new imaging system will compete with my memory?
In the 80's I visited Industrial Light & Magic to help setup a data collection system for them (it was a very fun and educational visit) and the policy there kept the offices nice and warm. Everyone was forbidden to turn off their PCs when they went home because all the special effects processing was running in the background of every system. You could walk into a lovely warm office every morning.
"You don’t go to Russia. Russia comes to you."
This appears to have be the situation that slowed the evolution of Neolithic farming when the early people in the Ukraine and the fertile crescent started to grow seeds and plants to eat them and feed their children. But then the foragers swept through so often, killing the farmers and stealing their daughters.
The current situation suggests that Putin's Russians never evolved, they are just behaving like Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.
The Netflix platform "updates" have made me return to buying DVDs, easy to watch without adverts and Netflix is no longer selling my data, while the cash I pay for the DVD is going to the companies and actors doing the work to create the content, not just a company selling it.
We have been seeing this development for years, it's had a big boost now that all the cyberworkers are working from home. Virtually all the phishing attempts are generating a little cash for the cloud platforms, that's treated as completely legal, spam hacking emails, texts, and phone calls happen all the time - all these efforts are effectively "permitted" these days because there are no corporate or government efforts to stop them.
These are two totally different computing environments (gamers and office workers), I see them both as functional for their users but each environment would be far safer and functional if it was optimized for the work that they do. Creating an operating system optimized for both gamer's and office workers is pretty much like having a girl friend (or boy friend) who works in a whorehouse.
The only time I've ever had an issue like this has been when I went into the bank to complain that my paycheck had not appeared in my account ... the bank apologized for entering the wrong account number and fixed it immediately ... Trusting the internet is like covering yourself in steak-sauce and walking through the Lion enclosure at the zoo while posting on Facebook.
The students will be busy learning Julia and getting it working to model the climate model, so it's going to be a while before we get to start verifying that the new code replicates the original climate model. However that will be a very good experience for the students and will probably make them very good coders - it will be a good lesson:
println ("hello whirled")
But a FORTRAN programmer would just be writing the original code in Julia, FORTRAN programmers can write FORTRAN programs in any language - that's a traditional joke but the reality is that creating accurate and functional code is determined by the writer, not the language.
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