* Posts by Version 1.0

5366 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009

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NASA missions are being delayed by oversubscribed, overburdened, and out-of-date supercomputers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

FTC asks normal folks if they'd like AI impersonation scam protection, too

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Unhappy

fraudulent AI impersonation

In the early days of AI all the fraudulent phone calls were only annoying, but nowadays the fraudulent AI calls are pretending to represent the health industry wanting everyone to respond and give AI their personal credit cards details.

This has only been a couple of years now and we're going to start have some elections this year. What will AI fraudulent impersonation do to help the politicians, and be used by outside countries to manipulate the election results? Honest politician are talking about kicking AI in the bum, but AI politician imitations by third parties (not the current politicians) are going to start appearing everywhere ... AI was a decent concept when it was initially being created but now it's used by muggers in the internet everywhere.

Cutting kids off from the dark web – the solution can only ever be social

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Gimp

Re: No Angels

It's the same environment as banning the American XL bully dogs, which just do whatever their owners teach them and act with. And kids just learn to do what their parents (their owners) do, or completely fail to do too.

Microsoft 'retires' Azure IoT Central in platform rethink

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Angel

Re: To be expected.......

Bill Gates (icon) always did a great job with Microsoft, creating a wonderful computing environment for everyone, these days he seems to be only a "technology advisor" for Microsoft but I suspect they are ignoring everything he works on ... see how much money Microsoft makes these days now that they ignore everything Bill Gates created.

Air Canada must pay damages after chatbot lies to grieving passenger about discount

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Thumb Up

Re: The wonders of AI

The third comment on the YouTube video might explain why Google offered the link in my search before the joke comment I posted. Is Google Searching using AI?

GilesBathgate had posted on YouTube "Ironically in 2023 we are trying to teach AI how to stop lying" ... my icon for GilesBathgate's inspirational comment.

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Joke

Re: The wonders of AI

I was watching a video last night and saw it as documenting the appearance of AI in 1997 - Red Dwarf illustrated on youtube

Romanian hospital ransomware crisis attributed to third-party breach

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Unhappy

Who sent this?

Fortunately I have not been infected by this one, but based on what I've seen in the past this sounds a like typical North Korea malware delivery. Luckily for me this is only a guess.

UK Cabinet Office hits pause on £9M Microsoft deal

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IT Angle

Re: Move

Does this just indicate which shared are owned by the UK's Cabinet Office members?

AI won't take our jobs and it might even save the middle class

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Joke

Re: Take A Deep Breath................

Looking at the AI environment ... Hellish is a lot more attractive these days, a much quieter environment than social media AI..

It's time we add friction to digital experiences and slow them down

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Meh

Re: Long

I was going to say "Time is an Illusion" but these days with data access via internet speeds ranging from 25 Mbps to 5,000 Mbps we see far more "problems" than the old days with 300 or even 1,200 bit/sec data rates. Upgrading the internet has been seen as very nice ... but driving on the motorways is much safer with a 70mph speed-limit than pushing the speed-limit up to "only" 1000mph.

Crims found and exploited these two Microsoft bugs before Redmond fixed 'em

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Mushroom

Bugs "employ" upgrades

So they are effectively a "feature" for Microsoft and other bug-involved companies ... all users must upgrade and that allows a user data transfer to the corporations. So if a completely bug-free app is created then it has the potential to reduce each corporate income. Looking at the past it's clear that originally when a bug was found it was only "fixed" ... back then there was very little hacking and infection deliveries related to "bugs" ... so companies like Microsoft were only working to create working software. Corporate income was moderate in the old days (how much money did Gary Kildall make from CP/M?).

Once hacking appeared, and advertising generated the transfer of user data for sale, then corporate income started to get higher. The current computing environment is a bit like "farming" ... we "users" are all "cows and pigs" these days and everyone is eating bacon for breakfast and steaks and ice cream for lunch.

NHS in Wales bets big on Microsoft with deal worth nearly half a billion

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Coat

Re: How much?

Almost all corporations (not just Microsoft) are busy offering totally secure functionality even though this requires additional update payments from users. This is very good because they offer a lot of support to their users when the hackers start working to break into their applications and functionality. Imaging how much the corporate income would go down if hacking was stopped - we're seeing hacking increase every year now, and corporate income going up too, hackers seem to be making everyone (except themselves) very wealthy.

It's the same environment we see in the USA, people get shot around towns all the time and we're told that the bast way to stop this is for everyone to buy more guns, and walk around town with a pistol in their pocket.

50 years ago, the all-rookie, final Skylab crew returned to Earth

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Childcatcher

Historical songs

In 1973 the first record album describing the space environment appeared - The Miraculous Hump Returns from the Moon by Sopwith Camel. It was only slightly popular originally although my girlfriend painted the lyrics all over the house when it was released ... so many songs that described a view of what was happening "The old man himself is mad as a loon, cause all his kids are singing a tune, look out Pa there's monkeys on the moon!"

Originally America and Russia were only competing ... "The archangel's sleeping, the devil is weeping, the heavenly host is white as a ghost."