* Posts by Version 1.0

5379 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009

With version 117, Firefox finally speaks Chrome's translation language

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Rwyf bob amser wedi gweld cyfieithiadau yn ddefnyddiol, even if I just say Bha mi a-riamh air eadar-theangachadh fhaicinn mar chuideachadh ... or for you, "Ich habe Übersetzungen immer als hilfreich empfunden"

NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is returning with its first-ever asteroid sample

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Life's history

"Asteroids are thought to be chunks of leftover material forged during the planets' formation in the solar system" - certainly that's likely but the planets' formation was not simple ... go look at the full moon tonight and then the theories about how the moon appeared and what happened on our planet as a result?

When you realize how the moon was probably formed it will be very interesting to look at all the "asteroid trash" floating around in our solar system and investigating how much of it reproduces our environment ... there's a lot of evidence suggesting that when the Earth first solidified, asteroids arriving on our planet probably resulted in life's creation.

India set to launch Sun-spotting satellite on Saturday

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Pint

Re: Congratulations ISRO

So many nations have been influenced by science and flown to the Moon ... but after a few years every nation's politicians have seen getting elected as far more important. The nations aren't failing, they are just administered by drinkers with political problems ... eventually I hope that every nation will change and just be happy to work with every other nation to make us become a famous human planet in the Universe.

Meteorite is 4.6 billion years old and still rocking the solar system dating scene

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I love science!

When I see Social Media and Politicians talking about our world I think we're just crap, but the Science views of everything make me so much more confident in humanity and science's view of the history of the Universe. As a little child I heard the BBC report that Albert Einstein had died and the description of his life started me looking at science. It was difficult initially which resulted in my mother getting the local library to give me an Adult ticket so that I could start reading lots of scientific work, something I've done ever since - thanks to my mother.

This article is fascinating when you think about the creation of the Earth and all the events that have happened ever since - talking about meteorites striking our planet might make people a little scared but the result of so many meteorite deliveries since the planet first existed has resulted in our life's creation and evolution - our world's history is wonderful!

AI-powered monitors to defend Washington DC against aerial threats

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a $100 million contract

Is AI now becoming Additional Income, will we see this change continue - well organized by every corporate creation?

Health, payment info for 1.2M people feared stolen from Purfoods in IT attack

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Gimp

Re: "Correct question"......an update.....

."The big difference between storing data for money and storing data for free is that storing data for money usually costs the corporate vendors a lot less." - an updated Brendan Behan quote, back from the old days when we were much more concerned about sex than we worry about data hacking these days.

Malware loader lowdown: The big 3 responsible for 80% of attacks so far this year

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Alert

Re: Point out that this is all semantics

So when the researchers get emailed Latest_Malware_Detection.PDF.img then I suggest an immediate deletion. But I'm seeing this type of "helpful delivery" attack via the corporate email server every day.

Microsoft still prohibits Google or Alibaba from running O365 Windows Apps

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Pint

Re: So, the old monopoly is back?

These days Cloud vendors are like "Farmers" while Hackers are just "Hunter Gatherers" ... You wonder why I see it like that? "One drink is too many for me and a thousand not enough when I'm using Cloud services"

Two teens were among those behind the Lapsus$ cyber-crime spree, jury finds

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Childcatcher

Re: computer intrusion, blackmail, and fraud

So when this all gets cleared up, it would be a good start to hire these kids to start working on preventing hacking like that. The ability to do this kind of hacking means that they probably have developed a much better understanding than a lot of current users so maybe they can help us all be safer. Yes, you can say that they did some bad things but they are just slightly older kids - so us adults need to admit that we haven't been teaching them so much about what's good and bad in our lives.

I can remember doing a few stupid dumb things as a kid (getting my grandfathers six shooter gun working in Oxfordshire when I was about 7 years old) but I've been very law abiding once I grew up.

IBM says GenAI can convert that old COBOL code to Java for you

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Re: Meh

The big factor for COBOL is that the code is "readable" and quite easy to interpret what it's doing even if you are not a programmer. Accountants could always review what was happening, they might not look at the COBOL and see a problem when the code was created initially, but when a problem was seen afterwards then the accountants could read the code and tell you where your issues were happening. Try doing this in Java and having the accountant understand it ... e.g.

PERFORM

DISPLAY 'HELLO WORLD'

END-PERFORM.

Budget satellite drag sail shows space junk how to gracefully exit orbit

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Joke

Re: It works only if the satellite electronics still work at the end of its mission time.

OK, I'll install this on my Pixel phone to watch it "work" ...

Hallucinating ChatGPT finds a role playing Dungeons & Dragons

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Childcatcher

..."a good application of chatgpt" these days is like the mid 60's when many people said that bananas or watermelons was cheaper and easier than dating with the option of pleasure or just a bite to eat.

As a kid we all learned how to play chess which showed everyone how to predict what the other player was going to try and do - that was a subtle but very effective lesson teaching us all the variations in peoples reactions to our actions. I see all apps like ChatGPT as just getting things done, not doing anything much that creates a deep learning environment for kids.

Tesla knew Autopilot weakness killed a driver – and didn't fix it, engineers claim

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Boffin

Re: But is it difficult?

I drive a Ford Explorer and have no problems with traffic at all, cars may come up fast but they drive around me or stay behind ... I've only ever had two collisions when I failed to stop at a green traffic light and someone ran through the red light, although most of the time I can avoid them, there's a sticker on the back of my car:

CAUTION I Drive like a Cullen

OpenAI's ChatGPT has a left wing bias – at times

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Re: a politically neutral 'truth'

Politics is biased by politics. Talking about "bias" in politics is as helpful as talking about ____________________________________________________________________________ nothing.

Former DEC employees to rally against stagnant pensions post-HP

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Alert

Re: Drivel

I have a pension investment fund in dollars as a result of working in the USA, back in the early 90's it was about $150k but then they said there had been an investment issue and my fund had going down to $40k ... investment funds make a lot of money for the people running the organization, not the customers.

Cumbrian Police accidentally publish all officers' details online

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Trollface

To make this data access a little safer then we need to upgrade 2FA to 20FA to try and prevent this sort of event from happening so often ... hacking is not easy but it's not impossible is it?

El Reg, I will please ask for a new icon update again ... a pair of wire cutters to refer to the guarantee of data safety.

Curiosity finds evidence of wet and dry seasons on ancient Mars

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Joke

Bebu, you are a "Windows User" ... maybe the Martian Core sent a message to the surface that said, "You need to upgrade to a new planet, your version of Mars is no longer supported" ... you see this a lot in Windows, was the Mars change an "update"?

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Pint

Re: Life's history

If it's just two people traveling, then two thousand years of travel would involve 1.46 billion beers if they are only drinking one a day. So how big would the larder be and how are they going to organize their Thunderbox? Would they be spending their days just posting on Facebook Spacebook via AI (Alien Internet)?

That's just our view of our life ... you're not wrong, you're just guessing about the difference between us and aliens ... if we live a hundred years we think we're old, maybe if Aliens live 100,000 years then they think they are old and maybe just visit out planet to fly like a Cullen?

I'm only laughing and guessing about the difference between us and aliens too.

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Re: Life's history

Einstein's view wasn't that we can't exceed the speed of light, it was just that exceeding the speed of light would have had resulted in an environment that our existence couldn't exist in ... He was passionately curious about everything so we believe that we can't exceed the speed of light but if the current discussion of alien flying saucers is real then how did they get here? One minor factor is that when they are "seen" then they are going much faster then we can. Einstein was working in the world's dimensions very accurately but these days I wonder if he would be revealing how to fly around by moving into another dimension.

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Life's history

The results discovered by the Curiosity Rover are fascinating and suggest that our theories about life need to keep updating. This all suggests that we have evidence of the possibility of a little life on Mars but we're going to need a lot more Curiosity work before we actually know what happened ... at the moment we only have theories that might give us some ideas, but a lot of Curiosity evidence is that a very tiny form of life might have existed. I have always found Dr. Neil Shubin's writings about the creation of life to be very accurate about our life (our Inner Fish) and the possibility of life's creation in the Universe. Read his books if you want to learn how we started to exist on our planet.

This Mars evidence (Thank you El Reg) and all these theories about life's creation make me think that human life is wonderful, but very rare in the Universe. But I wonder if alien life exists, and is visiting us, then maybe they are fascinated too ... are those flying saucers Alien Rovers?

Maker of Chrome extension with 300,000+ users tells of constant pressure to sell out

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Joke

Re: "Our focus is on user privacy"

Instead of down voting you Pascal, I will just extend F.O.C.U.S.

Microsoft OneDrive a willing and eager 'ransomware double agent'

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Re: "Since there's no actual malware installed on the target machine"

We need to make a big change - setup a legal and efficient environment where all Malware vendors, and anyone processing Malware vendors money, are jailed for 30 years, these days in a jail with no AC.

Pope goes fire and brimstone on the dangers of AI

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Devil

Re: "God was a dream of good government"

The definitions of Religion have almost always been wonderful and good for all people ... but all the problems we see everywhere are a result of people making decisions that they see as good even though their "answers" may be stupid but the people have just been told that they are good. So bad religious incidents seem to be essentially just a replication of the AI environment - unrecognizable stupidity.

Northern Ireland police may have endangered its own officers by posting details online in error

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Megaphone

Virtually every one of Brendan Behan's original comments still applies 100% these days and they all keep me laughing, for example ...

"I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn't make it worse."

TV and film extras fear generative AI will copy their faces and bodies to take their jobs

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Boffin

Who the heck needs AI? My friend from darkest Peru had a movie made about his life and that got me eating marmalade everyday since then for the Vitamins and Minerals ... the film makers did a fantastic job manually by themselves with no AI at all after the BBC did a fun series of cartoons. In both cases this was people reading their original books and making movies that were wonderfully entertaining and tremendously visually accurate.

AI might do a visual replacement based on the original films, but if AI had just "read" a book would we be seeing a Kodiak Brown Bear (ten feet tall) walking around the station, not Paddington? The icon applies if you never saw the original movie - LOL.

Hide and seek in outer space highlights a battle here on Earth

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Joke

But these AI days ...

The true measure of technology is not how well it matches human stupidity, but how well it survives human "intelligence". - just a joke because this story is a very good opinion in El Reg - THANKS!

Official science: People do less, make more mistakes on Friday afternoons

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Happy

I never saw this problem in my early work days

I was employed to work helping to build a hospital, and almost all of the people I worked with were Irish, everyone took lunch-time off at the local pub and our lunches were normally only about 6 to 10 pints. Once we all got back and started climbing up the outside of the building (there were only ladders, no lifts) we were a little slow but always very careful after lunch, Monday to Friday every week. No problems at all.

I guess you now know how I started hearing Brendan Behan ... "I saw a notice which said, 'Drink Canada Dry' and I've just started." ... LOL, a lovely memory, drinking lunch with all those Irish guys.

Read lips? Siri wants to feel them, according to fresh Apple patent

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Boffin

Re: Open the pod bay doors, Siri

Foundation model for Speech-to-Text: "Buled vacee-enhabed appriklations fur globoll audanswers wid speesh muddels atter poured buy Chirp, Goglec loud’s found a sune muddel fur speesh drained on milly lions odd ours of ordio dater and billy lions odd sext tentences. " ... oh maybee I kneed do dry angin?

Playing instruments, musical talent? Psh, this is the 2020s – Meta has models for that now

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Re: AI Sh!t

So basically, "When St Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland, they all started to work for Meta and became AI" - Brendan Behan's original quote updated. Whenever I see happy talks about AI, I fear what could happen in the future if AI takes over our entire working world. Will we be told that it's tremendously helpful because AI has made us all slaves with absolutely no skin colour factor because the entire world has been enslaved by AI?

Google Street View car careens into creek after 100mph cop chase

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Facepalm

A Google "upgrade"?

If they were originally paying $11-$17 an hour then he would have been driving a lot slower. Maybe Google is now paying $11-$17 per hundred miles which would explain his speed.

Brit healthcare body rapped for WhatsApp chat sharing patient data

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Happy

Re: Replacement of GDPR

Everyone that I've ever worked with in the health industries are always working to help their patients ... sure they may think about the data sharing but that's only a relatively minor issue once the patients health (or even their life) has been saved.

Sure we have different icons but I'm OK to upvote your opinion, it simply illustrates that there are no simple answers to every issue these days.

UK government's semiconductor brain trust meets for the first time

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Re: If all else fails...

So the committee is going to listen to Scully ... that's going to be helpful because the UK government has too many Mulders, but Scully always did a better job!

Australian Senate committee recommends bans on Chinese social media apps

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Re: Bravo Australia!

I would love to hear Kevin Bloody Wilson writing a new song about social media ... maybe just rewrite "This One's Just for You"

What would sustainable security even look like?

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Pint

"I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer" - Brendan Behan

That pretty much summarizes how people everywhere used to look at the world. It's different these days and not that much better - OK, so Behan always said that he was a drinker with a writing problem but I have always respected his views compared to what I see these days.

Astronomers testing next-gen asteroid-hunting algorithm discover potentially hazardous object

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Pint

Astronomers are great scientists

It's very comfortable that they are doing the research that could help us work to stop a big rock arriving unexpectedly. Certainly there's no guarantee about what could happen but they are working to make life better for the world (icon). I'm always a little concerned that we have not been hit by a large asteroid for thousands of year but there have been strikes in the past and just a few very small ones in my lifetime. So a strike is possible but their work suggests that it's not very risky these days.

NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2

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Happy

On Topic

I worked with a NASA engineer who had been in the Voyager project originally, he never discussed the project but was creating a medical data transmission function for us, something that I have worked on occasionally for 40 years now. It always worked perfectly and is 100% medically reliable. I assume that his creation for us was based on his original efforts in the Voyager program because the data transmission uses no software at all, it's completely digital and reliable so the data transfer rate is not "just data" - every one of the data samples includes a full CRC so any transmission errors are removed when the data is processed in his custom processor free receiver. Since it's all done with IC's (no processors) I still have a few of the original units working 100% after 40 years ... that seems to be the NASA environment.

Biden urged to completely cripple AI chips to China

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Terminator

I suspect that America is seeing the AI chips used in ways that are not helpful, is this the latest way to deliver spam or something else? There's no public discussion about this but maybe AI is the source of the massive amounts of spam and malware that mail-servers are having to deal with these days? Is AI working to slip through the junk-mail detection?

And I'm continuously getting spam phone calls at work that all sound like "someone" calling but they are AI driven, "talking" to tell us that we can get a big financial loan by dialing a new number ... that's risky so when the phone rings I say, "Ock kanny elpou, dough ou needle sun nude anne swears?" ... sure I'm not smart AI at all, but AI just hangs up while humans say they can't understand what I'm saying and we can have a laughing conversation when I apologize.

FBI boss: Congress must renew Section 702 spy powers – that's how we get nearly all our cyber intel

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Re: Who you gonna call - GCHQ

“Section 702 .. primarily allows the Feds to snoop on foreigners ..." and so any conversation with a foreign citizen can be legally monitored regardless of the other citizenship. That's been the situation, and the law, for years now.

Prices of gallium and germanium rise as China export controls loom

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Flame

Germanium trash?

How many El Reg readers have a box in the back of a draw filled with old components containing germanium?

I've got to clean up the office so I need some more boxes but there seems to be no recycling of all the components that we've used, and replaced, for years now. These "supply shortages" would be much lower if we could just recycle boxes of transistors, diodes, and old CPUs. I've got a bag of old 70A diodes used to build welders 40 years ago, rated at 1k2V - I wonder if what's in them could be recycled? When you talk to the "recycle companies" all they want are disks and PC's.

FCC boss says 25Mbps isn't cutting it, Americans deserve 100Mbps now, gigabit later

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Joke

Re: But, but, but...

He's having to run a lot slower because all his wallets are bloated.

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

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Re: Looks like the reverse engineering hasn't gone too well

A "breakthrough" from their multiple dimensions into our physical dimension might make it easy for aliens to toddle around us, but it might be impossible for us to see everything.

NASA awards $150 million to prototype tech for humans on the Moon, and above it

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Happy

Re: no-light lunar landing technology

If we go back to the moon then let's reissue the Sopwith Camel album, "The Miraculous Hump Returns from the Moon" ... I always hear that as the best psychedelic album from the early seventies and I still play it every week ... I recorded the LP that I bought when it was released onto my phone. I'm always happy to listen to it and everyone laughs to hear the songs these days... yes I'd love some Astronaut Food!

Sneaky Python package security fixes help no one – except miscreants

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Facepalm

Re: Who does the work?

A vulnerability database will help all Python users, even those who are writing malware ... this situation is universal not an anti-Python issue, for example while VirusTotal is a very good way to check your suspect email deliveries, if you are writing malware then it's a good way to test that your code is going to "work" if it isn't detected. Basically databases are not bad things, they just help everyone.

RIP Kevin Mitnick: Former most-wanted hacker dies at 59

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Re: Takedown

The Sony Multi Zone Region Free Blu Ray Player works great with PAL and NTSC Playback on Zones A B C and Regions 1 2 3 4 5 6 etc - It allows me to watch DVD's and Blu Rays from all over the world.