Posts by Tron 961 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Feb 2010
In a couple of years AI will have gone the way of the metaverse, and they will be hyping something else. Just avoid it all.
Ironically, they could sell twice as much tech simply by promoting two-systems-per-desk for resilience. One net facing, one not connected to the net, airgapped by a carbon-based lifeform. And unlike the legal and operational failure AI is and will be, it would actually be generally beneficial.
... should have been to continue with the old system until the new system was up and running, and working, in parallel with it.
It may have been a better idea to switch back to paper and minimal tech, 80s style. Someone needs to do the sums on this sort of thing. These tech deals cost stupid money, year on year, and don't even work. You shouldn't go digital with anything unless it offers benefits across the board. If you lose resilience, if it costs tonnes more money, and if it isn't fit for purpose, go back to the future and do it 80s style.
You can carry over the toner cartridge when it expires. I did this with my Brother laser during the pandemic when things were running short, but the original is still cranking stuff out. In general, colour inkjets are still used for family stuff - photos, genealogy, schoolwork etc. Lasers are used for work, writing, proofing. Hasn't changed much in decades. Any companies saving a few quid in rent with WFH may have to buy more small lasers for staff instead of fewer office ones. As for saving all your stuff digitally. You are just making it easier for the ransomware gangs to nick it all in one go.
...is that you can extract money from nationalist mugs everywhere, as it is essentially siloed by language.
Normally you can only squeeze cash for the English version with a drop down menu for Johnny Foreigner. But with AI, every nationalist regime will be handing you sacks of cash to keep up with the Jones's.
For the couple of years that this hype bubble lasts, this is going to be globally lucrative. Once the tech guys have filled their boots, the regulators will fill theirs. Then it will all fizzle out like the Metaverse.
Like the previous overhyped tech bubbles: VR, AR, the metaverse, blockchain, NFTs, AI will grab the headlines and investment for a couple of years before becoming either a niche product or a failure. The niche most likely being a 10th rate, universally hated cheap substitute for people on customer helplines.
All this cash is being wasted, yet so little is going into stuff that would actually work and be beneficial, like distributed systems - more resilient, more private, and cheaper to operate by design. Especially distributed social media.
Whatever - follow the herd and lose your cash, to failure or regulators.
EVs are simply too expensive. They are trying to replace not just new ICE vehicles but second hand ones that cost under a grand. The 2nd hand EV market is mainly illegal scooters and milkfloats.
Inflation and higher interest rates are pricing the West out of the green transition. Sanctions on China will make it a lot worse. You can tribalise or you can go green, not both.
If the US forces the EU to block cheap green tech from China, there will be no green transition any time soon. Western government policies are beggaring their citizens - people who needed to be comfortably off to do stuff like buy an expensive EV or solar panels. You can have a green transition or you can tribalise the planet, But not both. Time to stock up on high factor sunblock.
President Trump 2.0 will be a fun ride. Ukraine becomes a mechanism for hammering those annoying European competitors. Taiwan becomes an Oriental Ukraine and hammers the SE Asian competitors. The US can then become Top Nation by some distance in the West. But don't worry. If your cities get trashed, the USG will put you in debt for generations as vassal states of Uncle Sam with a new Marshall Plan.
If history teaches us anything, it is that it repeats itself. Because humanity never learns from its past mistakes. If you are too old to be conscripted (that is, recycled as heroic canon fodder), just move to the countryside. Otherwise get to Canada before they close the borders. Which I think NZ have just done.
Post WWII, with millions dead, people decided to trade with and visit each other - globalisation and tourism - as an alternative to killing thy neighbours, and being killed by them. It worked well. But people forget how bad war is. Politicians exploit prejudice and xenophobia. As they slowly kill the economy with incompetent, tribalised policies, they cover it up by scapegoating others. Then they sell war as a beautiful solution rather than cataclysmic disaster. Then they sit in their parliaments, sending people out to die as everything gets trashed. They always say this war will be different. Maybe it will be - the effect on climate change and any nuclear reactors that go pop may well push the climate over the edge. 50 degree summers etc. Perhaps they will agree to stop the wars for a bit whenever it gets too hot to wear khaki.
My grant applications to the University of the Bleeding Obvious for work on string length, whether it is possible to break the cosy relationship between cause and effect, and some groundbreaking work linking students, alcohol consumption and traffic cones were all turned down.
Seriously, universities should not be funding stuff that geeks and El Reg hacks can do on a wet weekend.
quote: scans of residents' identification documents such as passports and driving licenses, bank statements.
Muppets. This sort of stuff should never be held on a system connected to the internet. You have your internet connected system and you have your internal system. Two colour-coded terminals on each desk if you want to keep it really simple. A carbon based life-form air gaps this. Nothing fancy but it works. Systems are too complicated and adequate skills too expensive and too rare for internet connected systems to ever be secure enough. So you keep your private stuff on a system that can never be accessed online. Your net connected systems, if they are hacked, should be rigged to be easily flushed and restored with minimal ephemeral losses.
I would point out that there is a fair few quid to be had developing and setting up properly air-gapped systems.
We can repeat this ad infinitum, but change in local government is from slow to generational. So expect many more such events.
The contact info used to be openly accessible on mil sites. But in those days we still had telephone directories and people were happy to share contact information so the world could function more easily.
The five eyes stuff might be more fun. I'm a big fan of transparency in government. Unfortunately, state accountability only seems to come from hacks like Wikileaks and the Paradise Papers. It's almost like they are up to something and are trying to hide it! Surely not.
I need to program a function key to type 'you should keep private stuff on a system that never connects to the public internet' as these hacks are almost daily now.
... to move corporates to chrome boxes.
You can of course use anything that still works for you, offline.
For many, tablets or smartphones may be enough. The more costs and regulations, the more sense it may make for some to move back to paper. Ledgers and card indexes. No online security issues. No exposure to ransomware or power cuts or privacy fails. We all functioned like that fine before MS-DOS entered our lives. Services have declined so much since Brexit, that customers no longer expect a fast service. I got post this morning (15 items) for the first time in a week. I'm on a waiting list for a tree surgeon (yes, seriously), haven't seen my GP in years and stand no chance of ever seeing a dentist again. The supermarket shelves have a limited range. Nothing is improving any more. Just go with the flow and embrace the retro vibe. We are all going back to the future. Albeit one with far fewer shops. Especially if their tills are no longer street-legal. Hopefully the food banks will still be there and the charity shops will still take cash. The future is less Amazon Prime and more 28 days for delivery. Just wait and see.
In 2 years, the current AI bubble will have burst, replaced by something else. I have a pretty good idea what but I'm not going public, as it will be bad for the net and for all of us. Much worse than AI.
And in 8 years, several million dollars later, the quango working on this memorandum of understanding will be disbanded without producing anything of value.
They may have chosen the wrong target. If my council contacted me and requested an urgent additional council tax payment, they would be cordially invited to piss off.
Councils do nothing quickly, don't phone residents and are as respected and popular as a fresh cow pat at a picnic site.
Try harder, 'skids'.
Switch all services to paper-based, to keep them running. Alongside this, implement the tech. It may take 10 years, it may be millions over budget. It doesn't matter. The paper-based system will be working and cheap. When you have spent a tonne of cash, updated your hardware a couple of times, sorted out the legacy data, and retrained several generations of staff, and it actually works, if that point is ever reached, you can switch away from paper.
So you will have a cheap, fully operational paper-based system, all whilst spending tonnes of money of tech, without missing an invoice (even if your tech never works).
Any Japanese geek should be able to name four current members of AKB48. If they can't, decline their services and get it done properly - outsourced to India.
NK's primary role is to keep nationalists in JP in power and give SK's nationalists a boost. Polls dipping? NK launches an unguided firework into the sea. Panic bells, it's red alert, there's something here from somewhere else. Up goes the nationalist vote. The LDP have been out of power in Japan just twice since 1955.
Keep your data on an intranet on systems that have no connection to the public internet. Two systems per desk if you need them. Reduce web interactivity to the point where stuff submitted appears on one screen and a human being manually types it in to a different intranet-connected system. Design out the threat, because code is so complex now and resources are so thin, a system connected directly to the net can never be secure enough. They may trash the internet-facing system and scoop a thin slice of ephemerally-held data, but no more.
...was most likely scraped during the pandemic, downloading the Covid app or getting tested. Sending a video where you spoke gave them a voice sample and facial recog. They are already nicking people using facial recog and handing out free dashcams for drivers to report each other, so the police can work from home.
I remember even further back in time when any random person could find your phone number in the telephone directory. Most university libraries carried a full set.
Trading your interests for a useful internet service is a great deal for 99% of the population. If you are mil/pol and in the 1% you will be advised not to by your superior.
The TikTok ban is just McCarthyite nationalist BS from the usual suspects in government. The names have changed, the prejudices haven't and the IQs certainly haven't gone up.
Silo your tech. Internal intranet with no access to the public internet. Public facing internet services that, if taken down, can simply be replaced without loss of internal functionality or core data.
Anything connected to the net is vulnerable and may not be defendable against everything, so leave the stuff that you can lose and replace cheaply, physically detached from your internal systems. Even if it means two colour-coded PCs for every desk.
Post-Brexit we are a quarter to a third poorer due to the decline of Sterling, and short of staff. So we need cheaper options. Accept it.
You don't like the NK regime? Take it down. You can take any regime down for less than $20m in a couple of months. Including Putin's.
But you don't really want to, do you? Because you need a foreign bogeyman and tribal wars for the nationalist mind games and theatre, justifying an obscene national security spend and universal surveillance to control your tribe when people are dying of hunger and the world is heating up. Thought as much. Go peddle the propaganda to the proles who will lap it up.
We are geeks on here, not politicians. We fix problems, we don't exploit them to manipulate people.
Hello, I'm here to check the diversity of your employees.
Fine, I'll get you the binders.
Binders?
Yeah. We didn't want to get hacked and software isn't cheap so instead we ran with biros and A4 binders. We use the IT budget for our Christmas party now. Hawaii this year. Here's the key to the secure room over there.
It looks like a cupboard.
It was. We refurbished it, so it is 'better than new'. Leave when you hear the bell or you'll still be here tomorrow.
Expect more companies to pull out of foreign business in the future. Too many regulatory hurdles, many of which are designed to keep Johnny Foreigner from bagging contracts. Governments don't like globalisation. And lots of stuff is being brought back in house. National security, reds under the bed etc.
Not just an issue for working on another tribe's turf. Almost every job now is 50% the actual job, 50% box ticking on health and safety, diversity, safeguarding, modern slavery, emissions calculation and what not. It erodes profitability. And migrant labour blocks make staffing increasingly difficult. It is easier to pull out of such sectors and switch to simpler investments. The care sector and property rental are two good UK examples worth exiting. The EU is generating rafts of regulations on tech and may be increasingly avoided in future.
If you are worth spying on, you can be sure your government will be spying on you regardless of privacy laws, constitutions or the tech you use. The rest of us have nothing to worry about unless you are genuinely up to something and very lazy about hiding it. In that case, it will eventually be impossible for the old bill to avoid, and you will get your collar felt.
I think people forget that life in not like the telly. Both the spy agencies and the police have limited staff, limited budgets, limited time and fixed priorities. You have to tick an awful lot of boxes for GCHQ or the NSA to take an interest in you.
China's most important sector is property (not tech) and it is up to its tits in debt, threatening to upend the entire economy. The CCP comprehensively failed to enforce the most basic regulations on the sector, almost everyone was on the take, and they have been struggling for a couple of years to work out a soft landing for it, fearing social unrest if they fail.
Tech spooks Xi. It has created a Westernised, consumer-centric, young, aspirational Chinese middle class, empowered by their apps, who have no time for traditional Chinese values or Communism. China's tech-based state surveillance however, is shot with flaws. Xi is trying to replace Mao in China's modern history by promoting traditional values and suppressed the tech sector, banning entire chunks of it. This dented the financials and turned the screens red, causing serious concern in the wider CCP about self-appointed Chairman-for-Life Xi. They don't want to be on the wrong end of the next Chinese revolution because glorious leader is solely concerned with his place in history.
But hey, you run with the simplistic view that Xi and the CCP (average age very old, few of whom can wire a plug) are keeping a population of 1.4bn sweet in their spare time whilst concentrating on spying on TikTok influencers the better to end Western civilisation.
Message from Orwell in the netherworld: Did any of you folks ever actually read my stuff?
I wrote my thesis on Word 4 for the Mac on a Classic. Kept using it for pretty much everything. Word processors generally missed an opportunity to simplify the minimal DTP required for producing books. Just headers, footers and positional work on the pages. If anything they offer too much choice, but it is usually possible to get it to work. By trial and error, as manuals now appear to be illegal.
I now write everything from invoices to books on LibreOffice. Some folk require Word file formats, some PDFs - it spits out both. Just install and go.
Despite rarely have much good to say about MS, I'm happy to cheer them releasing something as a standalone app. I don't care what their motives are. Anything that isn't subs/cloud gets my vote.
Ditto for farmers. This sort of state intrusion will boil down to us only getting our post three days a week. Worse, they will make us collect it from 'community post boxes' as they do in Canada, half a mile away, in pissing rain.
Our governments having broken the economy, we will need to use those days off topping up our income with side hustles just to stay afloat.
The US has ditched the free market and switched to the Chinese model of state funding, so surely the WTO can now disband. All the money that funded it should be divvied out to those who lack food and shelter.
Brits shouldn't feel left out. You will see the same decisive use of state control implemented here. Your local bus company will now be operated by those beacons of competency, your local councils, rather than being left to the vicissitudes of the free market.*
*But not if your local council is bankrupt.
Simplify it. Avoid dependencies and subscriptions. Consider alternatives to specialist software. Are there things that you don't really need to do. Can you switch back to paper for some stuff. Yes, paper - card indexes, business cards, account books, the stuff that you could buy at WHS for a couple of quid and keep in a locked cupboard - 100% protected from East European hackers. Huge companies ran for decades with thousands of employees and never suffered a ransomware attack that way. Tech is only worth using when it is not a vulnerability or dependency and doesn't empty your bank account.
Windows is no longer even a product. Consumers buy a PC and expect it to work out of the box. They do not expect to have to choose or load up an OS or know what one is.
Linux will only be a retail product when people are offered PCs and laptops by a company like Dell, pre-configured with something like Zorin, with all the basics already on there.
And they will expect to be able to plug in any off the shelf scanner or printer or IoS gimmick and have it work.
In short, the bar has been raised. And Linux never bothered to surmount a much lower bar.
The Linux community lives happily in a geek bubble. It has no understanding of retail and no wish to allow ordinary people to join their club. Which is a real pity, as stuff like Zorin is almost there, and Windows just keeps getting worse.
MS doesn't even have to push against Linux or consider it to be a competitor.
quote: Don't run anything you just got off a random website. Don't download programs from websites.
What you are basically saying is that all software should only be available via a gatekeeper. That makes it very easy for governments to ban stuff. Streaming capture, distributed software, pretty much anything they don't want people to have. It's a recipe for digital fascism.
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