* Posts by Version 1.0

5379 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009

First they came for chess, then Go... and now, oh for crying out loud, AI systems can beat us at curling

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Re: Hmm

"Yeah I'm not letting one of those things anywhere near my hair!"

The risk is illustrated in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - https://youtu.be/3lgluqEiQow

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Re: Hmm

Let the robots master things we don't like doing, like drain cleaning or weeding.

More likely, if we keep working on this, in a couple of hundred years the robots will be running the country and employing people to clean the drains, do the weeding, and charge their batteries.

Brexit travel permits designed to avoid 7,000-lorry jams come January depend on software that won't be finished till April

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Re: Risible

The vote was about 30% of the population approving Brexit ... in the UK system that is a massive majority!

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Happy

No officer, I don't need a permit

I'm just driving the truck to Kent to check my eyesight. Problem solved, we were told that Brexit would be simple and easy weren't we?

IT guy whose job was to stop ex-staff running amok on the network is jailed for running amok on the network

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Unhappy

Re: No mystery here

Yes, he was a criminally stupid idiot and everyone blames him, nobody asks why the company management were stupid enough to hire him in the first place. I've seen idiots like him and been required to work with them on occasions in the past. Reporting their idiotic and occasional criminal behavior to the upper management always got me into trouble, never them.

Frames per second? Windows Terminal brings back text animation with the VT100 blink

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Re: VT100?

The issue with a lot of the emulators was that you had problems used EDT because the numeric keypad was slightly different, you thought you were hitting DELLIN but got UNDELWRD instead.

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Darn it!

I guess this means that the value of my VT100 that I was going to list on ebay has dropped.

Ethernet failure on Swiss business jet prompted emergency descent, say aviation safety bods

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Just checking my email ...

After take off, "Oh nice, we've got a new order - let's see what they want, it's New_PO_unrget_reply_needed.zip (sic), I'll take a look. Ah, a PFD file lets see ..."

... rapid decent ...

Back in the office, "Oh, it was New_PO_unrget_reply_needed.PDF.exe"

Tesla to build cars made of batteries and hit $25k price tag about three years down the road

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Cars, cars, carcass

We're all running around jacking off about cars but wouldn't the world be a better and healthier place if we returned to the days of the railways to move around the country, with locals trains and buses to get the final mile or two done if we didn't want to walk or bike for some reason.

Another body for the Google graveyard: Chrome Web Store payments. Bad news if you wanted to bank some income from these apps

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Meh

Re: Everything is in Beta

I wonder if we will see an announcement in a few years time that Alphabet is discontinuing Google because they will have developed a more efficient (profitable) advertising mechanism. The corporate policy seem to be to release an app (e.g. Google), figure out the best way to extract everyone's data and profit from it, before moving on a a more profitable theft.

As you're scrambling to patch the scary ZeroLogon hole in Windows Server, don't forget Samba – it's also affected

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Happy

Quick Fix

The risk can be reduced by disconnecting all Windows Servers from the internet - this solves a lot of problems.

Ancient telly borked broadband for entire Welsh village

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Boffin

18 months?

It sounds like the complaints were ignored for a year and a half ... so the "NEWS" is that we found the problem now, not that they were ignored that long. It would be interesting to investigate why it took so long to send an engineer out.

Had El Reg talked about the weird Welsh village problems I expect that we'd have seen pages and pages of people saying the the problem was RFI caused by someone getting up in the morning and doing the same old thing every day (the icon is a joke).

'I don’t want to see another computer for the rest of my life'... Brit Dark Overlord cyber-extortionist thrown in an American clink for five years

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Re: Five years - Not Enough

I expect he's applying for a job with the NSA, he should be out soon.

Contractor convicted of pinching supercomputer cycles to mine cryptocurrency

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Unhappy

Re: Economics 101

This happens all the time, it's never a crime for the police to lie (or simply have no real clue) about the value for the "crime" - they just declare a value but nobody ever investigates it.

A super computer generated less than half a Btc, what was it doing, did he modify the screensaver?

Another reminder that bias, testing, diversity is needed in machine learning: Twitter's image-crop AI may favor white men, women's chests

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Re: Rebrand opportunity?

Or maybe they'll drop the "titter" letters and rework the remaining letter into a shapely logo? It is a good deed to forget a poor joke - Brendan Behan.

But seriously, what does this sort or programmatic error tell us about the code writers? If women stood a better chance of getting a job as a programmer then would this stupidity vanish?

Top 5 billionaires find that global pandemics are good for business – and their wallets

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Re: true story

I was walking back home along the canal in Oxford with my buddy in the 70's and a begger came out of the bridge arch to ask for a shilling, my buddy told him we were just students and didn't have any money (that was true) and the guy stuck his hand into his pocket, gave us eight half crowns and wished us good luck.

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We need a Tesla tumbrel.

It's IPO week and one of Wall Street's own is raising the spectre of a stock market crash

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Pint

Either the US market will collapse or the US will collapse

The stocks are sailing back up again and we have an election in a few weeks. There are two possible winners, if Biden wins then I would expect that the markets will drop because the Democrats will be working on fixing the US mess and the Republicans will be fighting a Democrat presidential win as being undemocratic, but if Biden loses then the markets will rise again while the stock buyers all rush into the toilets to celebrate with a quickie. I suspect that a long term collapse will be on the horizon because the US is deeply in debt and keeps on spending money while attacking all its international customers. The future is uncertain - if the Republicans keep jerking off over the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg then regardless of who wins, it will be a mess and the markets will dive eventually.

I would vote for Brendan Behan, "The most important things to do in the world are to get something to eat, something to drink, and somebody to love you." ... the markets are irrelevant (icon).

Das Keyboard 4C TKL: Plucky mechanical contender strikes happy medium between typing feel and clackety-clack joy

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Happy

No typist needs lights

I've worked for years with typists who never even look at the keyboards that they are typing on, all they look at is the screen - they never look down at all if they have a decent keyboard. Most of them started off just watching the little golf balls spinning around, I started watching the levers fly up and down.

He was a skater boy. We said, 'see you later, boy' – and the VAX machine mysteriously began to work as intended

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I saw static problems occasionally but shielding the RS232 cables and grounding the shield fixed them about 90% of the time. My first "pc" used an 8080, my buddy at work helped me get it running, he was so impressed - it ran way better then his 4004 so he "upgraded to an 8080 too. Back in those days everyone would run into static issues, but once they understood the factors they were never a problem ever again.

The description of the problem in El Reg might have been static but the first thing I would have done was to reseat all the ribbon cables in the device, if that didn't fix it I'd have reseated all the chips in sockets next.

Elecrow CrowPi2: Neat way to get your boffins-to-be hooked on Linux from an early age and tinkering in no time

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Thumb Up

Re: Learning by doing

I started off with a component kit, resistors, capacitors, sensors and two transistors for Christmas when I was 12. Ten years later, after playing with S100 boards, I got a Z80 single board kit with a hex keypad , hooked up a couple of DACs and built a EKG simulator to create EKG signals to verify my companies commercial Holter Monitor Analyzer - I did written code assembly (in pencil) to write the code and entered it in hex, storing the code on a cassette tape every night.

So yes, this is an easy way for a few kids to learn and a lot of fun for everyone.

Let's go space truckin': 1970s probe Voyager 1 is now 14 billion miles from home

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Happy

Re: Penultimate Space Power

Old Engineers vs new engineers:

The Voyagers have been running for more than 40 years, meanwhile the phone I bought two years ago just got a software update and is now unusable, the battery was dying anyway, time to chuck it. I worked with a former NASA engineer who was involved with the Voyager project and the system that he designed for us in the 80's is still running fine too.

How do you solve 'disruption' at the UK border after Brexit? Let's call Peter Thiel! AI biz Palantir – you're hired

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Re: Before the common market it was easy

It obvious that none of them had every had ever done any work before we joined the EU that involved import/export paperwork or ensuring that goods met multiple standards. Any mention of these issues before the referendum was completely ignored, I don't think that most public schoolboys ever get jobs that actually involve real work.

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Meh

Before the common market it was easy

One of my tasks back then was to check that all the line cords included with equipment shipped to the EU did not have a wall plug fitted and used the EU wire colours, not the UK wire colours. We're just going back to those days, there will be a nice little list of things to check for all exports and imports and, once the UK laws and the EU laws evolve, we'll have to start stocking EU legal items and UK legal items. Brexit is not causing complexities, we're just returning to the old days of complexities - I'm confident that was what the Brexiters were thinking when they said that Brexit would be easy.

Video encoders using Huawei chips have backdoors and bad bugs – and Chinese giant says it's not to blame

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Unhappy

Corporate Sponsored Industrial Sabotage

When the west moved virtually all the production to China about 20 years ago it seems that nobody ever thought that China would be able to do the sort of things that No Such Agency is good at - there were discussions about this risk at the time, but the cheaper production costs were far more important than security - it's still that case, we see all these complaints but nobody ever suggests a solution, or is made responsible because they drove the stock prices up nicely.

We're blaming the Chinese for our stupidity in creating this environment.

Google bans stalkerware apps from Android store. Which is cool but... why were they allowed in the first place?

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Problem solved?

So now we'll see all the stalkerware apps rewrite their terms and privacy agreements so that they can continue. The first page will say "We do not stalk non-consenting adults" and sixteen pages later it will start with "Except in circumstances defined on our website privacy exception page and by continuing to use the app you agree to ..."

Not content with distorting actual reality, Facebook now wants to build a digital layer for the world

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Re: Oh, goody.

"and will never record in “sensitive areas like restrooms, prayer rooms, locker rooms" ... we know how well this worked out with ZOOM meetings don't we?

What the hell is going on with .uk? Dozens of domain names sold in error, then reversed, but we'll say no more about it, says oversight org

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Joke

And next year?

Will all the .uk domains be switched to .brexit? After all, if Scotland and Northern Ireland leave the UK (too many "remainers" in the UK saying that Scotland and Northern Ireland should remain in the UK), then the .uk domain may expire.

Worried about bootkits, rootkits, UEFI nasties? Have you tried turning on Secure Boot, asks the No Sh*! Agency

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Unhappy

Secure Boot is easy.

All you need is a pair of wire cutters. The internet these days is like walking stark naked through a riot and having sex with everyone and their pets.

You won't need .NET Standard... except when you do need it: Microsoft sets out latest in ever-changing story

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Joke

Given everything we see here?

Maybe it's time to junk the lot and start with a new operating system that is designed to fix all of the problems?

A 50Mb download? LOL, that's nothing in today's world.

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Re: There was an xkcd about competing standards...

"A few years ago, Friday, October 14 was World Standards Day. Or, at least, it was World Standards Day in *some* countries. However, in America, the celebrations were held on October 11th. In Finland, World Standards Day was marked on October 13th. Italy planned a separate conference on standards for October 18th." - ASR sig from years ago.

Take your pick: 'Hack-proof' blockchain-powered padlock defeated by Bluetooth replay attack or 1kg lump hammer

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Re: Sounds familiar

Even the Dwarves doors were easily hacked in the Lord of the Rings.

NASA is sending two small hand-luggage suitcase-sized spacecraft into the void to study binary asteroids

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Re: Small hand luggage = 180 Kg?

That reminds me about the time I sat down in the train between terminals in Dallas, and two bullets rolled out from the seat onto the floor - damn litterbugs.

IBM made ‘top-down’ efforts to fire older workers, says US employment discrimination watchdog

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Re: and since long before 2013

Absolutely - this is not news, it's been going on for years now.

Vinyl sales top CDs for the first time in decades in America, streaming rules

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Re: You are all thieves

But you could play a cassette in the car which explains my box of cassettes in the cupboard, I still pull a few out and play them at home because some of the artists never went on to CD's. I love listening to a wide range of records and cassettes (Cream, Phranc, Prince, Simpsons etc) because all of the music is in a fixed order, an album - it sounds so much better then random songs.

Is today's AI yesterday's software routines with better PR? We argued over it, you voted on it. And the winner is...

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Meh

AI at work

I see AI all the time, one of my jobs is running the company mail server. We have a hurricane coming in next week so I will see a big rise in spam and malware deliveries - the hackers out there check the weather all the time and whenever we get storms through they boost the deliveries. It's not just us, local schools and businesses will get them too so I expect that we'll see a local increase in systems shut down and a boost in the bitcoin price. It's AI at work.

Adtech's bogeymen are tracking everything - even your web visits to mental health charities, claim campaigners

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Joke

Re: Too much javascript

But 3rd party javascript is great - it make everything much easier to hack.

The one before Harmony? Huawei pushes out EMUI 11, running on Android 10

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Facepalm

FIFY "Software bag"

I updated my Pixel 3 to Android 11 yesterday, "Wonderful New Features and Enhanced Security" and now I have to enter my pin every time I want to do anything, some of the apps have had their database completely deleted by the upgrade and other features that I've used have vanished or work completely differently. I suspect I need to buy a new phone to get everything working again ... is that why they released a new version?

Something to look forward to: Being told your child or parent was radicalized by an AI bot into believing a bonkers antisemitic conspiracy theory

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Unhappy

Re: AI is here!!!!

AI is killing the Internet, it's the same effect that we see in American gun laws. They were implemented in the days when it took a minute to reload a gun and tap the bullet over the powder, but now they "apply" when a magazine can fire 200 bullets a minute - making guns way more dangerous but everyone thinks that the original laws must be respected.

The Internet was a wonderful thing back in the days when you kept a little blue book with the addresses, but now you can send two million spam emails containing malware out in a minute.

Three middle-aged Dutch hackers slipped into Donald Trump's Twitter account days before 2016 US election

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Re: And if you have any doubt

I've been using haveibeenpwned for years (and donated to them) - it's a great source for honeypot email addresses too, discovering that the people selling these hacked databases are also stuffing them with fake email addresses. once someone's got your email address and password then they can create fake accounts for you everywhere to "demonstrate" that their database is valid...

AI in the Enterprise: How can we make analytics and stats sound less scary? Let's call it AI!

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Re: Need any more examples?

IBM experienced another hard lesson. FIFY.

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Re: A Rose by any other name.....

I agree 100% Billy. I think that in the intervening years "marketing" has replaced "intelligence", after some discussion it was thought back then that AI would sound better than AM, so Artificial Marketing is now called AI and now we are living with AG - Artificial Government, is this progress?

Open access journals are vanishing from the web, Internet Archive stands ready to fill in the gaps

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Unhappy

Publishers make money from grants

Research is normally funded by grants or simply a result of educational investigations - so essentially the general taxpaying public is funding it. But the research is then published in journals, normally access restricted if you are not paying for a subscription - essentially stopping the general public from being able to read and get educated from the research that they have funded. This is capitalism in action, just an effort to make money - the science is irrelevant.

I can 'proceed without you', judge tells Julian Assange after courtroom outburst

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The London One

Perhaps District Judge Vanessa Baraitser should have him bound and gagged at the defendant’s table - that's what the US did to Bobby Seale.

Tech ambitions said to lie at heart of Britain’s bonkers crash-and-burn Brexit plan

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Re: The next U-Turn?

Why re-negotiate a trade agreement when it's obvious that any agreement will need to be re-negotiated because the other party does not respect any agreement that they sign?

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Pint

Re: State Aid????

You think that the duty on Scotch will vanish on January 1st? I'd love a full glass of Talisker (icon).

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Meh

The next U-Turn?

No point in worrying about this, the Tories have got Brexit done so what's going to happen is a complete mystery now, they have been promising that the UK will profit from Brexit and the economy will boom - oh wait, they U-Turn on all their promises don't they? They have not promised yet that industrial and vehicle pollution will drop tremendously yet - I expect that will be the next promise on January 1st.

AI in the enterprise: AI may as well stand for automatic idiot – but that doesn't mean all machine learning is bad

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Joke

AI is not that bad

I've never seen AI code do policy U-turns all the time, lie about where the code goes even if there are restrictions on data access (AI was just checking it's DLL insight, that's not illegal), or even saying that it will get the program done and then wipe out the entire code saying the "AI Got It Done"

AI in the enterprise: Prepare to be disappointed – oversold but under appreciated, it can help... just not too much

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Proof that it's AI

Proof will not be seen until AI writes it's own code and it works error free. Until then it's just programmers thinking that they are smart enough to write code that AI can't write.

Ghost of Windows past spotted haunting Yorkshire railway station

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Facepalm

Windows 10 downgrade

Since most of the Windows 10 systems are 64-bit they are twice the size of any 32-bit system - and slower too, although it sends your data and activity to Microsoft much faster than previous versions of Windows so it is actually an "upgrade" ... for Microsoft.