Posts by Version 1.0 5409 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
No, the destination is clear, they about to make it illegal to protest anything that the government does so AI will be used to prevent anyone treating a prime minister as a dictator. This is just going to generate AI assurance industry funding and ensure a dictator (AI correction and automatic icon addition) wonderful oven ready government re-election.
Insurance companies have the burden of making a profit from malware attacks, they have to work out what their payments will be and ensure that their client insurance payments are high enough that they can make a profit. Our insurance companies make more money than the hackers.
Windows 11 is just released, so everyone is doing an evaluation, issues like this are discovered and will get fixed in a month or two ... it will probably be a fine system working well when Windows 12 is released so that users can discover the new issues.
There's no point in complaining because it's not "fixed" anything in Windows for years now ... we're all just custom... Err, debuggers.
When they arrive in the UK and get caught smoking a little hash (normally daily in Afghanistan) we'll send them back. And if they don't break any of our crazy laws then they will have to spend a year or two doing paperwork to find all the evidence that they were legally evacuated ... and when we start sending them and their kids back because they did not arrive with passports written in English, will we call this the Hashrush, not the Windrush?
The Government's main concern is getting reelected ... our mess in Afghanistan is years old and never achieved anything other than making military suppliers nice sales every year. We see other examples of stupidity all over the UK, this has been going on for years now.
NASA wrote the original program and it's worked well, now they are updating it and documenting the update so I trust them 100% - the description is a good example of how science works and NASA engineers do a very good job.
But think what we'd be looking at if Microsoft and other modern app creators had written the original prediction "app" - it would have been "updated" with new features added but no description of the methods ... and we'd all be getting a new update soon that would require buying a new CPU to "remain safe."
I've been watching these Von Neumann computing bottlenecks for years now - these days I think that the Von Neumann bottleneck descriptions have just predicted a CPU climate change environment. We've seen so many "solutions" described over the years that have done nothing so I expect this latest "fix" will just sail on and then sink too.
We're getting replies from suppliers saying that the analogue amplifier and digital chips that we use will be back ordered until Oct 2022. We've "solved" some of the issues by buying the military grade versions of the chips so that a board that cost us about $45 to build earlier this year, will cost us about $135 next year.
If it's on the Internet then it can be hacked ... I've been suggesting that El Reg offers a "security" icon as a pair of wire cutters for a while now ... but watching the world I'm going to change my suggestion; El Reg, Can we have an Axe as a "security icon" please?
Systems are designed and built to have features on the Internet, once they become popular and profitable then the manufacturers consider upgrading them by adding security features. Once these new features are added and distributed, they are tested to demonstrate that they work - "testing" is always performed to show that things work, never that they fail.
We've been seeing malware efforts like this for several years now so if you are backing up data then set up a server that does not show up on the network, is read-only and makes regular complete system backups - e.g. tapes. Restoring incremental backups takes a while when malware means that you have to restore everything ... as illustrated (but not described) by this story so a box of complete backup tapes works although restoring all the computers does take a long time.
I've never seen a story about a phone that can not be hacked. Even 50 years ago someone could climb up the pole and tape a couple of wires onto your phone line and record everything. Both Russia and America are reported to have hacked the transatlantic cables. Maybe we need to go back to the days of two cans and some wet string - at least then you can see anyone hanging another tin can on your string.
So many vulnerabilities like this are normal - devices are built to be easy to use, device "security" is just a "feature" - I never saw anything hacked like this back when I had to access devices via an RS232 connection to run administrative setups. I see so much stuff like this, high speed internet access helps too - I'm only seeing about 200 administrative login attempts an hour on the mail-server today, but never saw any back when the access speed was 9600 baud and there were very few spam emails and no malware deliveries either.
We need to fix these problems by preventing the problems, not just adding a new feature like having the router text your phone when you need to log into it - that's just a security feature that will be hacked.
But these days everyone is told that each version of Windows is a "New OS" but essentially it's just a new GUI, with minor changes being made the Operating System that the GUI Start Menu runs on ... and what do the minor changes affect? Every OS upgrade seems to need faster CPUs and more memory so effectively the upgrade just improves PC makers profits.
"Any research done on how to efficiently use computers has been long lost in the mad rush to upgrade systems to do things that aren't needed by people who don't understand what they are really supposed to do with them." -- Graham Reed
When our children grow up naive it because we, as parents, have failed to educate them about the failures in politics on all sides.
In the USA, unions are seen by both parties as just "communist" organizations because unions are working to protect workers ... not their bosses - certainly American unions have been failures in the past but never as bad as the actions of today's corporate evils.
The motto need to be "upgraded" ... Google's attitude for years now has been that cannibalism is not evil, people taste great with some nice white sauce, but of course you need to wash them well before you eat them so that any dirty change in their pockets falls into the sink. /joke
But is Google any different from so many other companies these days? Google has made so much money that virtually every other company in the networked world copies the Google profit-making actions to stay in business. Google started this, but they are not the only company behaving like we're all just lunch these days.
We're creating our problems - over the years I've watched so many things move from being manufactured locally in various countries to being manufactured abroad ... and now, with the pandemic shortages, I just received a list of more than a hundred components that are back ordered for the next 8 to 10 months!
So essentially our economic environment is now controlled by other counties - this is a problem that we created ourselves.
I liked COBOL, the neat thing was that there was virtually no need to write any comments to explain what was being done - this has made life easy for programmers maintaining COBOL code.
A quote that covers all the issues with Rust, Python, etc., saying that they are best; "There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary." - Brendan Behan
It's the ability to use it well, it's odd that Assembler did not appear in the efficiency list, it's actually way more efficient than any language if the writer does a good job - and like all the languages, only if the writer does a good job.
"The determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language." - Ed Post, 1982
LOL, I remember writing FORTRAN programs in Pascal for years.
The video reminds me of the old days at an American airfield in the UK when the pilots from various forces (UK and US) would all party ... the fun party in the evening involved a number of tables arranged in a line and covered with ice cubes and a candle on the table corners ... the pilots would drink a beer and run at the table with a tray, jump onto the table and slide from beginning to end - the winners (normally the navy pilots) would manage to stop before they reached the end of the table!
This was about 50 years ago, a friend of mine worked there, his job was to drive down beside the runway when a U2's landed to catch their wings on one side so that they didn't tip onto the ground.
I loved the old days of "social media"in Australia, just sitting at the bar with a bottle of wine talking with people and the next day at a church talking with people and eating a cake after the service while the guy I was talking with explained that he'd left Ireland because the cops were after him for his IRA actions. But we were at the church lunch and both comfortable with each other - back in the UK that would probably not have been the case and these days on social media everyone would be shouting.
The way it used to be done was to generate an error number and then feed the number to an "explanation" routine that documented it for the end-user. The routine needed (and I saw this happen) a subroutine that reported "The application error message is an error" when the error number did not match anything.
I "see" a lot of evidence that the virus has been created by Facebook posts, look at the timing of the evolution of Facebook and the development of SARS and COVID and it's clear that neither virus existed before Facebook started doing research into methods of transmitting things without telling their users what was happening - all the early Facebook posts involved tiny robots written in Java which then jumped from user to user.
We should ban all cryptocurrencies and then devise a new cryptocurrency that can be created and processes when people workout on an elliptical or rowing machine - this would make the entire planet healthier ... Oh wait, I thought that was a good idea but given what we see every week now with immigrants being smuggled across the Channel, it has the potential of returning to the days of slavery when all the rich people bought slaves to make themselves richer.
Effectively the issues these days are not cryptocurrency or climate change - the problem is us, we're creating all these problems.
"send anyone with better technical and military capabilities to the stone age"
15,000 years ago the same thing happened, primitives shot their enemies with stone tipped arrows and then found that they we're being shot back with virtually the same stone tips once the injured primitives recovered and pull the "technology" out of their legs and arms and started making their own copies of the arrow tips.
American companies have been moving production outside the US for years now because it's cheaper to get things made in China than in the US. So the "military problem" has been created by corporate America - it's just a result of commercial profits. A simple solution everywhere would be for countries that want to control their innovations and devices to actually make them themselves. Certainly items could be stolen and then re-manufactured in other countries (remember the DEC PDP-11's appearing in Russia) but at least we would have a degree of control over what we do.
True - I think that it's fascinating that we discuss whether or not there might be life in the rest of the universe yet when we look at our worlds history it's clear that most of our worlds life has been almost completely removed multiple times in the distant past but it has always just sprung back again ...
LOL Pascal, I don't disagree with you, certainly a huge impact could turn the world into a snowball again but a relatively small impact might fix our current climate change issues by causing a temperature drop for the next 100 years and could have the effect of making every nation start to work together to create a better and safer world for the entire human race, not just one country. The threat of an impact should be making us think that we are a world in space, not just a collection of idiots in one country that thinks that they are so much smarter than every other country (I see that criticism as applying to every country not one or another).
On the other hand, we haven't had a really bad volcanic eruption for thousands of years, one bad eruption might be worse than an average asteroid sized impact and there's a fair bit of evidence that climate change threatens a classic huge volcanic eruption.
Had the Earth not been struck 50 million years ago we would probably never have evolved, back then we were just furry little balls crawling around on the surface trying to steal the dinosaurs eggs and without the impact we would never have been more than a meal. That asteroid impact lead to our evolution and lots of birds flying around so I think that it was very nice!
We all have "opinions" abut the world today but in the future I think that the human race (if it survives) will look back at the world in today's times and see that almost all the countries are essentially just run be rich folk busy making themselves wealthy - I don't see China as any worse then America ... I think they both act like crap ... neither country appears to care about their effects on the worlds climate changes.
Sure, but the US always pushes their military in and have always had to "retire" after 10-20 years, while China normally just works in the commercial fields and keeps running.
China is a country that's been around for about 3,000 years now, America has only been a country for 300 years - to be fair, both "countries" took over from the previous inhabitants of the lands.
Cryptocurrency payments are basically just like credit card payments, just digital - we live in a digital world these days. As a kid I thought the digital world would be so much fun .... but then Google arrived and illustrated that the digital world is just like the political world, we're all just ways of giving more money to the 1% of the population that owns half the world.
These days I just keep a little money (notes and real coins) in my pockets.
I remember spending 100 bitcoins once, I was able to buy a new miner because the old one had died.
Getting jailed can be a pain in the ass if he's a BAME guy but if you are white and smart then it's not so bad. I had a friend with similar issues who was jailed back in the late 60's for weed possession, he only got 6 months but made friends and ran his own import and marketing business after he was released, he did very well, retired many years ago as a rich guy halfway across the world.
It's Google, so it was probably coded as a new "feature" and nobody checked it to make sure that this didn't happen ... this is nothing new ...
FEATURE n. 1. A surprising property of a program. Occasionally documented. To call a property a feature sometimes means the author of the program did not consider the particular case, and the program makes an unexpected, although not strictly speaking an incorrect response. See BUG. "That's not a bug, that's a feature!" A bug can be changed to a feature by documenting it. 2. A well-known and beloved property; a facility. Sometimes features are planned, but are called crocks by others. - A DECUS cookie from 1993.
... everyone will be watched and their behaviour analyzed 24/7...
This is seen as completely acceptable when applied to corporate workers but what would we hear if it was applied to politicians? Do you think that Boris, Donald, Priti, and Kamala would be happy if they were monitored at work? I imagine that we'd hear squealing 24/7 that it needs to be banned.
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