* Posts by Version 1.0

5379 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009

Majority of Americans now use ad blockers

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Happy

Re: Do they work?

I block all Ads but that depends on the source ... I've been reading and posting comments on El Reg for years now and I have my blocker setup to permit all adverts on El Reg ... I see this as "For My Benefit" - the adverts here are never terrible, it's a reasonable environment. And seeing adverts is reasonable given the very helpful El Reg posts every day!

'Thousands' of businesses at mercy of miscreants thanks to unpatched Ray AI flaw

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Holmes

Re: AI is "working"

I just see AI as "working" to make the users think that AI is working ... so I don't use it because I always feel I need to verify that things are working, not just be told they are working. I'm not assuming that AI doesn't work, I just feel that it's safer to verify that the answers are good.

I'm never confident that my views are accurate either, I just prefer to verify everything - I see detecting any mistakes as helping me learn about stuff.

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Facepalm

AI is "working"

I think that AI is designed to be very efficient and always generate accurate data results and processing for the people using AI to make sure that whatever they want to do is helped to work.

I've never seen anything in the AI world that sees "security" as far more significant then "accurate results" - I'm not saying that hacking is a feature in the AI design, it looks like it's just "processing" for hackers so AI may just be doing a "good job" working to meet the hackers questions?

How a single buck bought bragging rights in the battle to port Windows 95 to NT

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Windows

Windows used to work well!

Both operating systems were very easy to use originally, eventually I saw some issue with NT running an independent mail server but initially every function issue was very easy to fix - the tech developers at Microsoft were very efficient back then, they are not worse these days they are just working in a much worse software and malware environment. Eventually we started to see a few DLL hacking efforts but running everything behind a firewall box (not thinking that firewall software might always work) stopped all the attacks - but attacks were not common back in the old days.

I've still got the original multi user NT installation, I might be able to install it again to play with it but I need to find a PC with both a floppy disk drive and a CD drive.

Belgian beer study acquires taste for machine learning

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Childcatcher

New Belgian alcohol-free beer

Creating alcohol-free beer would be good in today's environment - kiddies could drink it with Belgian chocolate!

So no legal issues these days although when I was a little kid I had a bottle of Guinness every Sunday lunch with my grandparents after I was four years old. That was back in the 50's when Guinness was the only major source of vitamins and minerals too - as a kid I loved drinking it every weekend and these days I'm still drinking it frequently.

The positive result of starting to drink as a four year old kid is that I have never had any drinking problems although after so many lovely Belgian visits, later in life at work, I'm still eating chocolate every day!

BBC exterminates AI experiments used to promote Doctor Who

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Happy

Re: Capt Kirk with sonic

I would have loved to see Dr Who with Rick Astley as the new Dr Who, he looks great for the historical image of the Doctors and the "new show" would have been so much fun with Rick singing Dr Who!

Uncle Sam wants to know how big airlines use passenger data

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Alert

Re: How interesting

Some details of how personal data is sold in the USA is available:

https://www.sos.la.gov/ElectionsAndVoting/BecomeACandidate/PurchaseVoterLists/Pages/default.aspx

You can purchase the entire Voter lists ... "A database of public information of registered voters is only available for purchase using specifically defined selection criteria. The voter list is available through email as a PDF or tab delimited text file."

UN: E-waste is growing 5x faster than it can be recycled

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Facepalm

Re: Perspective

"The right to repair" exists but so much these days is designed to be irreparable because more cash is generated by making everyone buy a new device. Originally if your computer died then you had to just unplug the CPU and plug a new one in or replace the capacitor connected to the AC transformers via a chunky diode. Phones were often fixed by just replacing the microphone and record players worked better when the wooden disk needle was sharpened.

Originally everything was designed to be fixed.

Why France this week fined Google €250M over web news

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Google's just cooking some brioche based on "ingredients" it's collected from France but Google has never paid for the items it's using to generate so much income every year.

Homeland Security will test out using genAI to train US immigration officers

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Alert

AI is generated based on previous collected data interpretations, and it will collect more data to generate new "intelligence" so the workers biases that it's fixing will influence up or down the new AI. We're talking about AI being an improvement but it's just what's always based on whats happened with what AI sees as previous Brain Additional Discoveries Intelligence.

It's tax season, and scammers are a step ahead of filers, Microsoft says

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Flame

Are digital wolves evolving?

So much scamming and criminal crap is everywhere ... our world technology has started telling everyone that making human workers start to use AI all the time would help.

But the world we all work in is becoming well described by this El Reg current story which pretty much documents that there are no honest improvements for tech-life or even just regular tax-payers. Looking at what's happening today makes tomorrow, for the rest of our lives, look like we all just scammers lunch - we need to make a big change and return to an HONEST WORLD if we want to be decent and honest humans, not just scammers' criminal wolves.

And we've all probably got elections coming too ... so lets delete everything that we're given - it's probably safer to assume that everything is bad these days. I'm not going to trust anything, I'll just keep my personal opinions privately - "Trust Nothing" is the only thing I'll say - everyone needs to just live with their personal opinions; "The scammers are crap" is the only thing that seems to be honest these days.

Microsoft defends barging in on Chrome with pop-up ads pushing Bing, GPT-4

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Re: One more reason

When they show me an advert I close the app every time.

FCC ups broadband benchmark speeds, says rural areas still underserved

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Unhappy

Re: I'll wait for it

These days 1Mb download wouldn't affect your safety, but a 100Mb download would ruin it. I used to be accessing medical customers PDP-11s to help them via a high speed 2,400 bit/s modem, and we never saw any data thefts, malware or virus problem back in those days.

Very high speed internet access has become a malware delivery feature, so we'd all be so much safer these days at slower speeds.

In the rush to build AI apps, please, please don't leave security behind

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Boffin

Re: Security? What's that

The basic "AI issue" is that no matter what you are doing, it is created to generate severe bloating of your wallet

NASA missions are being delayed by oversubscribed, overburdened, and out-of-date supercomputers

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Happy

Re: "The Space Launch System team alone spends $250,000 a year"

I don't work with any NASA engineers now but many years ago I did, and it was clear how they got everything working.

Unlike Microsoft they never just implemented an "update" everywhere, thinking it would work ... they ALWAYS spent a lot of time working with everything to verify that any potential changes would work, although their basic designs were always sophisticated initially to try and be reliable. But they never assumed that any new design was perfect, they always worked hard in every part of the environment to verify that they had something probably functional.

Forget TikTok – Chinese spies want to steal IP by backdooring digital locks

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Big Brother

Re: Presumably...

So the Chinese and other countries are collecting and stealing our data, while American companies are only collecting and selling it. Basically if you are storing your data locally then, if it's accessible or publicly used, it's probably not completely safe everyday - the environment everywhere these days is that data is always "collected" for corporate benefits, but only occasionally "stolen" - this is not a completely fresh environment ...

"The most famous of the Dead Sea Scroll caves is also the most significant in terms of finds. More than 15,000 fragments from over 200 books were found in this cave, nearly all by Bedouin thieves." - originally data created 2000 years ago and then stolen later.

Poking holes in Google tech bagged bug hunters $10M

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Unhappy

Researchers will make a lot more money if they block all the malware ... but could then create some malware under the desk for the next set of events and a higher profit - I'm not saying that this is happening but I'm not confident that it doesn't happen. Looking at all the malware issues these days I wonder if malware creation is now an AI feature too?

The environment these days is that we are working hard 100% to detect and block malware but we're seeing more malware all the time ... we need to change the computing and data storage concepts completely.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is back on the company's board, along with three new members

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Joke

Re: Chatting with CHAT-GPT

Smarter AI?

CHAT_GPT audio: ♪The Police was an English rock band formed in London in 1977 ♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫ but it is no longer active.

Microsoft waited 6 months to patch actively exploited admin-to-kernel vulnerability

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Facepalm

Re: KB5034441

So it's a Windows 10 issue, maybe with some Windows 11 access too, but unlikely to have any connection to older versions of Windows. Hackers (and our security checkers) are all working with current versions of operating systems on the new computers that the hackers and everyone else has had to buy these days.

Will this result in a new version of Windows in a while that required everyone to buy a "more secure" hardware CPU system? Since updates result in users buying new systems, the updates makes Microsoft more money, and the hackers are having to buy new computers too ... more money for Microsoft and computer manufacturers from all sides so hacking "helps" the industry.

Biden's State of the Union included a battle cry against AI mimicry

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Re: Competition...

"Republicans stand for raw, unbridled Evil and Greed and Ignorance smothered in Balloons and Ribbons" - Frank Zappa.

A quote stuck on my fridge with a little magnetic panel for 20 years now because I have always loved Frank Zappa from the US.

Trump, who tried kicking TikTok out of the US, says boo to latest ban effort

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Happy

Re: People get the government they deserve...

We have four cats in our house so I'm happy that Trump is being seen everywhere these days because every browser is running Make America Kittens Again. Getting new updates everywhere results in so many pictures of cats everyday. MAKA Replaces images of, or related to, Donald Trump with kittens. Oh I'm so happy!

Securing open source software: Whose job is it, anyway?

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Open Source cliff climbing

This whole "problem" is just like learning to climb the cliff on a Welsh Beach when I was a kid, I climbed about 20 feet up and saw some issues so I climbed down the same path and sat on the beach to look at everything. A few days later I started climbing all the way up to the top. No problems after working it out myself.

Supermium drags Google Chrome back in time to Windows XP, Vista, and 7

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IT Angle

Do the "upvote" and "downvote" counts indicate the ratio of IT readers on El Reg vs Hacker readers?

There's no proof so I guess this is just a Joke?

Want to be a NASA astronaut? Applications are open

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Happy

Astronaut food

Oh astronaut food

Puts me in a mood

Makes me mope and brood

Astronaut food, makes me wish I was on the moon

Sopwith Camel

Boffins propose fiber-optic network for the Moon

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Happy

detecting seismic waves!

Monitoring the amount of impacts attracted to the moon as it revolves around us would be very interesting ... we can't detect normal meteoric impacts on 71% of our planet because they just splash in the sea and the moon may be attracting many well away from us as they approach us both. Looking at the moon it seems to have been hit more then we have - is it just revolving us and cleaning our orbit space for us?

World-plus-dog booted out of Facebook, Instagram, Threads

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Happy

I don't suffer, I'm actually quite content with the zero-social media environment created for me by Facebook. I was setting up an account when Facebook started to accommodate everyone, not just students. I was using my English birth names while talking to someone in New York and I was told that if I ever tried to create an account with Facebook then I would be prosecuted ... I was told that my English family name was fake. And then several new social-media applications originally asked me if I had ever been banned - as an English guy working in America any legal issues could have forced an exit.

I'm so happy these days that I have absolutely no social media accounts ... So I have never been risking a Facebook prosecution.

Juno fly-by detects lower levels of oxygen on Europa than expected

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Alien

We pretty much know what has happened on the Earth but we don't know what led to it happening, our solar system orbits our milky way galaxy about every 250 million years - we have no history but there seems to be the potential for us to pass through vast collections of other life particles ... that might have led to us seeing life in our ocean once it became liquid. And resulted in us having this conversation today.

Detailed observing things like this example of potential life (and on Mars too) may help us become even more excellently smart life in the Universe in a few more hundred million years. I have always been fascinated looking at the potential of life everywhere.

Cruise's valuation halved after its driverless car hit and dragged a woman

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Boffin

Re: "We've always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products"

If we were originally cockroaches then we would probably not be playing music these days because our ears would be unlikely to have any bones to react to the music ... OK, I'm not complaining just referring to this post icon ... just a minor widespread evolution potential.

I've been learning about evolution on our planet for years now, wondering how much we see is happening everywhere in the rest of the Universe - "life" is probably seen everywhere although intelligent creatures are minimal on the Earth - making the possibility of "aliens" in the Universe a fact, but rare too. I'm confident that aliens exist and would see us as aliens too.

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Re: "We've always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products"

Pascal, look at the history of our life - I see skin colours as pretty much irrelevant to history these days. The facts that we have solid proof of are that originally our ancestors were just fish starting to walk on the beach more than 500 million years ago - all the same colour, only looking for something to eat.

So basically we're all just human life.

Updates are plenty but fans are few in Windows 11 land

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Re: Windows 11 is never getting installed

I've recently updated to Windows 11 on a new PC and after working with it for several months I'm going to work on replacing it with Windows 7 Pro because I need to have a system that is easy to use and not a pain in my butt. I've used every version of Windows for years but W11 is so much a problem.

American Express admits card data exposed and blames third party

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Thumb Up

AMEX subspot baby

I've been using Amex since 1980 and never had any problems although when I started using credit cards I was listening to Bob Seger (icon) singing Sunspot Baby - that taught me to be very careful with credit cards.

Ahead of Super Tuesday, US elections face existential and homegrown threats

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Re: The two biggest threats...

Traditionally in America, since 1789, you just look at the idiots running in each election and normally only vote for the one with the lowest degree of stupidity ... is this an example of the first appearance of AI before computers existed?

Judge orders NSO to cough up Pegasus super-spyware source code

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Joke

What's that app fixed

A decent Whatsapp response to suspicious messages from Israelis would be to send them a link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC0hkfJiNCE

White House goes to court, not Congress, to renew warrantless spy powers

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Holmes

No Stupid Administration

The situation described has existed for at least 50 years, the NSA was originally given the requirement of observing all non-American citizens and monitoring their conversations with anyone (including American citizens) to detect any anti-American actions. This was never political, just a result of the cold war issues. As an English citizen I have lived in the US for 45 years and have always accepted that this might be happening but I have never seen any problems and all of the Americans I have communicated with (including my wife LOL) have never had any issues. I have always been working in the American health industry so I have no stupidity that they might monitor although my company had sold a few products to Russia, China and other counties too ... but only to help physicians and physical therapists do a good job.

Most likely I have been monitored but I have never had any problems. Why did I move to America? - I have always loved Jazz, Blues, The Grateful Dead and was so happy to be able to go and see Allen Toussaint performing wonderfully!

I expect that every country in the world has the ability to monitor local foreign interactions, but most of them just "do it" without ever describing it. This "incident" looks like the White House just acting sensibly (continuing a traditional non-political action) to separate "safety" from "politics"

BEAST AI needs just a minute of GPU time to make an LLM fly off the rails

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Joke

Re: "hallucinations"

LLM AI predicts and reuses "Halo in lunatic" ... A classic Anagram Intelligence

Google sued by more than 30 European media orgs over adtech

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Unhappy

Looking at this story it's worth remembering the original Google situation when it was only created to help everyone find information on the internet, not help us buy anything. Originally Google was making very little money so then they started to dominate the advertising creation - an environment Google effectively "owns" these days.

So now Google is Filthy Rich and we all get advertisements all the time for almost every question ... originally advertising just showed everyone information about things, but nowadays it's only collecting all the viewers information and selling us.

Google wants regulators to take Microsoft down a notch before it stifles AI

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Re: > Linux is a better OS anyway

And any Linux update does not require that you throw away your current computers and buy a new one.

Certainly it's complex to move from Linux to Windows 11 but it's a total pain in the butt to move into Windows 11 these days after spending all the money to buy the new computer.

Nevada sues to deny kids access to Meta's Messenger encryption

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Childcatcher

Re: No encryption until you have provided your identity to prove you are not a child

The Internet was almost never evil or a problem at all, until Social Media appeared everywhere these days.

My experience is that it's the changes in modern society - I grew up in the UK countryside and as a kid, everyone that I knew and talked with all the time, only saw one minor risk when we were playing in the fields and the cows' bull walked into the field. We just left the animals in the field and walked into the next field.

I was a Boy Scout too, we all walked around with a decent 8 inch knife on our belt, as Boy Scouts the knives were only occasionally thrown at the dartboard. Nobody was ever hurt.

I see Social Media as like a bull in a herd of cows - so it's a big problem when you try and play with it.

It is a bird, a plane or a Chinese spy balloon? None of the above

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Boffin

Re: China insisted was an errant weather balloon

Or did someone in the NSA just pull their phone out of their pocket and check TikTok for a video of the balloon and it's function?

Multiple billions up for grabs as UK government launches cloud services tenders

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Re: This is almost bibilical

I run an app on my computer that I got created about 20 years ago (LOL so it's got no AI) and it continually pops "graffiti" onto the display every few minutes and often makes me compare today to the past - when I collected all the graffiti quotes. So I just updated an original Brendan Behan quote that just showed up so that it now describes today's world;

"Ninety-seven saint days a year wouldn't affect politics, but two AI's would ruin it."

U-Haul tells 67K customers that cyber-crooks drove away with their personal info

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Alert

The cyber-crime pandemic world

The environment that cyber-crime has "created" is a lot similar to the recent COVID pandemic ... users everywhere are only being told to wear masks (just create new passwords) but nobody every bothers to get vaccinated (working to completely stop internet access to their data). We've world-wide fixed COVID but that took a huge amount of vaccination creation work - stopping cyber-crime will not be easy until we generate huge vaccinations for internet access.

Microsoft catches the Wi-Fi 7 wave with Windows 11

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Meh

Re: "Applications that struggle with latency [..] will also benefit"

Marketing needs to feed on us ... this Wi-Fi upgrade will result in a lot of existing Wi-Fi devices that everyone has been using for years needing to be thrown away and replaced because the original devices will stop working as well as they were originally designed to do. These days all "upgrades" generate more corporate income.

Americans wake to widespread AT&T cellular outages

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Thumb Up

Re: Sun Flares?

Thanks El Reg for the quote "the application and execution of an incorrect process as we were expanding our network."

Yes, when you look at the map of the problems it's pretty clear that "A bad software or system update" is probably the cause so it should be much easier and faster to fix than any malware issues - hopefully the problem is ending now.

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Re: Sun Flares?

A Sun flare would have an effect on virtually all the networks, I'm not seeing an explanation yet about this event but I suspect AT&T were probably malware affected.

Reported $60M Reddit deal signed to train AI models with user data

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Go

How everything hasn't changed ...

In the years before the Internet existed this situation was almost universally defined by:

"The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less.".

A quote that I was presented with in high school and the entire class of boys were all asked to write an essay that evening that defined the reasoning but it was school so we were told to look at the normal working and buying environment without any reference to the sex joke in Brendan Behan's original Irish quote. The teacher told us that we all needed to think twice about everything, not just leap into the first thought.

Like so many of Behan's statements it might make you laugh but is a real laughing description of an environment that we have all had to live in all our lives but originally most of us only got a 50% score for our essays, but that helped me learn a lot ever since then, and try and think twice about most things..

British businesses told: Compliance with EU AI law will satisfy UK guidance

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Happy

Re: To not have to apply foreign laws domestically.

Back in the early 70's I was driving into the EU with computerized EKG health industry products from the UK company I was working for and we were happy to comply with EU laws that stated what colours the AC power cable wires had to be, virtually nothing else we did was regulated.

Before BREXIT the EU liked us (my visits were popular), and once BREXIT occurred the UK had a significant influence in the EU. But now we're just a good example of how effective it is to be in the EU.