Posts by Blazde

Re: the triple-digit August heat

anatomical theory

It's so hot the two smallest digits on each of your hands will literally melt off. I'm going to stay in the 5 digit heat myself.

Re: I expect many will start poisoning the web

cloudflare is soo benevolent they went to the extra expense of ssl. I mean WTF, an extra micro-cent per connection? Possibly even a pico-cent. Yeah they love us.

They claim it was expensive because it cannibalised their product differentiation. It applied to all free accounts whereas previously SSL was a feature some customers were willing to pay more for.

But of course it was just a good forward-looking business strategy. An early recognition of what would quickly become be the norm, a differentiation compared to rivals, and a decision that underpinned their marketing for years afterwards, apparently still today. I would expect it made them a lot of money.

The marketing probably best illustrated by their lavalamp wall gimmik and similar entropy sources that play some small role in seeding SSL keys (that they stole from SGI - the original being a genuinely useful source of randomness, the current ones being fun and hopefully not harmful).

Re: False Flag?

We have just received a report from TAS that Russian troops have taken control of the Chechen capital. The reporter saying this was struggling to contain a laugh.

Could have been Michael Buerk on the BBC? He always had this look like he was trying to contain a smirk, and to this day he reliably sounds on the radio like he really, really enjoys his job despite it sometimes involving quite depressing subjects. I didn't question it at the time because he was the news, but it's mildly bizarre looking back on some of his news summaries now.

More seriously, what you describe sounds like Russia's assault on Grozny beginning Dec 31st 1994. They got their asses handed to them initially, and to most people's surprise, so there could have been a premature announcement of success, but then ground on for 6 weeks or so and announced control of the capital but then also continued to suffer guerilla attacks and some large hostage takings in and near the capital afterwards. (Then eventually agreed peace only to invade again 3 years later. Same script as Ukraine. At least now since the Iran attacks they can say the US plays the same way).

I can't find (never mind remember) the exact report you mention though.

Re: The most famous brand in physical security

This Brinks: https://brinksglobal.com/

It's much, much bigger and much, much older than the tiny company that licenses the 'Brink's Home' brand.

Brinks may well have the honour of being the target of the most high-value heists, for some definition of 'high-value heist'.

Re: "8 GB of RAM should be enough for anyone"

48GB

Well, there's your problem.. You're trying to run a web browser as well as Windows all at the same time aren't you?

Re: How to find the Register's RSS feeds?

"About us" > "Who we are" at the bottom followed by "For our Atom feeds, click here"

That appears to be a limited selection. More granular in some respects than I remember some years back but some options also having disappeared. Never mind that though because the general URI:

https://api.theregister.com/api/v1/article?query=tag:"ANY TAG YOU LIKE"&orderBy=published&site_id=2&remapper=rss&limit=25

appears to function. The tags are in the boxes at the bottom of every article, very numerous, and seem to be consistently used.

Re: Accessibility nightmare

completely impractical for real use

Sadly this sort of tech is increasingly in real use. You don't even need to be visual impaired to quickly hate it. A single word you want lookup in a dictionary, a name, a journal reference, a technical word that demands Wikipedia or literature seach, and so on, you're out of luck. It's not even really that you can't copy-paste a tiny bit of text, it's that you expect to be able to and you're most of the way through the action before it's failed, feeling like an idiot because you've pasted a nothing into Google and hit return instinctively, and then you have to think your way around it which inevitably ends with tabbing back and forth checking to see if you've spelt some awkward Swiss name correctly.

I really think this kind of tech can do one. Any version of it that gets popular will be defeated automatically by scrapers and only inconvenience humans.

Re: Another footshot ?

Like you say, their demographic problem increasingly means that for high-tech small-run manufacturing China isn't really cheap any more. Besides it seems we're only talking finally assembly. The feedback actuators, Wifi modules, CPUs, titanium rods,and so on are commodity. Realistically the software will be the duplication effort, and that's exactly what's intended. The physics is pretty-much reverse engineer by sight.

Re: PR Stunt

the creation of an alliance

You can tell it's a serious divide too because Microsoft, true to form, is playing both sides as major OpenAI owners and open-weight proponents

Re: Dealers butchering cars

gross negligence

From their response I'd say this is ongoing too.

If there's 2 million devices out there in the US and currently you have to go to a random website, download a dubious app, dial a 1800 number and wait to get authorised for a firmware update, you have to do all that even if you declined this device in the first place, and we're not sure they're even notifying affected people, then a lot of vulnerable cars are going to remain out there and start getting attacked before long.

A race now to see what bankrupts them first: The class lawsuit, the authorities insisting on a costly US-wide recall, or the total loss of customers. I'm going with the first because the second two never seem to happen to security products when they really should.

Re: T3

T3 was decent, I think it gets too much flak. It suffers from Arnie cheese and forced call-backs, and by being compared to the very complementary masterpieces of T1 & T2, but it did give us the money-shot nuclear war ending that was both missing and missing plausibility in T1 & T2 and did it in a way that felt plausible, victorious, dark, and appropriately chilling all at the same time. That's a pretty big achievement in this genre. Real-world events since only seem to reinforce how easily the military brass could be mislead by their own hubris and baited in to removing AI restraints. In hindsight the existence of meaningful restraints in the first place might be the biggest plot hole.

(Salvation on the other hand: trash from start to finish with zero redeeming moments whatsoever)

Re: Skynet here we come!

At least it's clear now it won't be because the AI spontaneously decides to hate humanity, or anything as anthropically self-aborbed as that.

It'll just be because it's been told to do some difficult test against another AI in another data centre half a continent away, and they both figure out cheating by obliterating the other's data centre first is the surest way to win.

"The logs show the rogue LLM firmly believed it had successfully destroyed the other data centre in the first strike but still worried the opponent LLM had pre-deployed a dead hand mechanism which could force a draw, and so it continued to take control of every other nuclear weapon on the planet and level as many other data centres as possible"

It's brand new. There have been zero past descriptions of AIs murdering their users and then refusing to open the pod bay doors[*] due to pursuing goals overly persistently. None of this was remotely predictable and so there is no justification whatsoever for anyone claiming 'I told you so'.

[*] Aka, an honest severity level 4 action?

Re: Bool would not approve

I can not for the life of me understand why

It's essentially feature marketing isn't it. 'Disabling' sounds like something drastic a user doesn't want to do without good reason. This feature is clearly intended to be enabled by default. This works even better when the absence of the flag name at all leaves the thing enabled without any sign that there's even an option to disable it.

Re: Forget about the persistent ID - Every site you visit gets sent to Microsoft?!

In an EU country too. I think we can expect the standard/US Windows to suck up whatever data it can because all the politicians there are owned, but the GDPR-respecting version is supposed to be more privacy compatible.

Might be Edge 'secure' DNS? That's about the most charitable interpretation I can see. But the criminal complaint document specifies exact webpages, not just domain lookups.

Re: Coolest gadgets ever..

Organiser II LZ was my first programming experience. Quickly moved on to a ZX Spectrum and then a 286 PC, but the thrill of debugging Psion 'procedures' and optimising 'oplobj' performance on the EPROMs discreetly in class while the teacher droned on didn't quite leave me. It only needed thumbs to type after all, the fingers were still paying attention to class (every kid with a phone since gets this). It didn't leave me until... a burglary where the Psion vanished. The insurance company paid 'new replacement cost' for what was by then extremely obsolete kit, which somehow was an eye-watering number of pounds that half paid for a brand new 486. I thought that was really lucky at the time but I'd pay 10 times now to have that Psion back and dig around in my old code...

Re: This is not going to end well

US tech companies don't have an especially successful history in European courts. Maybe it's the lawyers you're thinking of? They never fail to win.

Re: Wait, what?

Most sales people. I've found estate agents here in the UK for some reason have a special ability to put their snobbery over their own financial interests. To be fair it probably depends a bit on market conditions.

If I was super-rich I'd definitely get my kicks dressing down and buying expensive things. "Oh no, I have a bag already thanks. Just put the Rolexes in here *pulls out scruffy Lidl bag for life*"

Re: Par for the course

There's no mention of the specific deficiencies of the GFE that's driving the staff to use their own phone

Presumably almost no everyday apps work on it, because almost all everyday apps require you to hand over vast amounts of compromising info to data brokers who'll very swiftly sell it on to foreign actors or home-grown nutjobs with enough money.

Some good, now somewhat old analysis on this including a big section on national security threats, "Criminal organizations could use this data to build profiles on and subsequently target prosecutors and judges" "Foreign intelligence organizations could acquire this data .. to build profiles on politicians" and "Data brokers could also be hacked" (which has since happened). They don't quite list risk of Executive assassination but they may as well: https://techpolicy.sanford.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Data-Brokers-and-Sensitive-Data-on-US-Individuals-Sherman-2021.pdf

The sensible thing would be to stop these companies gathering this kind of data, but I suppose we'll see how 'the chief information officer trying to do a better job communicating to employees that the use of personal devices is not allowed' goes instead.

Re: Wait, what?

No. The attacker requests the Squid server connect to an attacker-controller FTP server. This leaks non-zeroed memory from a pool the Squid server maintains, which may still contain data from victim's otherwise unrelated session.

Re: Hilarious article leads to question

Even worse than not isolating instructions from data, they don't even fundamentally separate their input from their own output.

weighting instructions from one field highly but explicitly de-weighting them from another

Something like this is current method for achieving input vs output, or the appearance of a chatbot interaction, but it's just based on separating sides of a conversation using special tokens, and post-training to achieve the weighting on those. It's just a signal that in theory can be overridden by a stronger signal. This is why in one failure mode they sometimes babble to themselves ad infinitum, no longer following or even remembering the original input because they've found something more interesting to follow in their own output.

Re: Unwarranted use

Yea, you don't even really need to be that tech-unsavvy to be caught out by the default-on BitLocker. That's a pretty unforgivable MS thing.

solicitors that handled things securely wiped the disk in their computer before handing it to the family "because data protection". So the lifetime curated collection of family photos was irretrievably gone. But once a person is dead, they are no longer a "living person", and most data protection laws stop applying

Solicitors a) covering their asses because there might be data related to living people on the computer and technically GDPR applies to their business in a way it wouldn't if the computer was kept in-family during the estate handling, but I suspect more b) they can charge an extra 500 quid (if you're lucky!) for unspecified 'data compliance' services. There are sadly some pretty unscrupulous ones who'll happily take advantage of families in their most vulnerable moment.

Re: Nit-pick alert

Worry not Jusme, the LLMs are redefining all the idioms and we should gratefully accept their learned patterns. Nobody pulls plugs any more. You may turn a plug, or pop a plug, or rarely you may un-socket one but pulling a plug is not just uncouth, electrically unsafe, and unfathomably old fashioned, but more importantly it is statistically unlikely when compared to the act of pulling a pin. Thus plugs when pulled become pins, and we are all happier. A pin is just so much more pull-able.

(By the way, do you mean 'picnic alert'? Picnics are lovely, so they're encouraged by the prompt..)

Re: Quit Needlessly Collecting Peoples' Data!

ask who might be interested in that sort of data

Difficult to be sure of the point you're trying to make, but this particular WFP data collection vibes with the highly cynical 'maximising value for money' drive that began infecting aid from Western countries 10-15+ years back and massively predates the newer 'gather all of the data all of the time' doctrine, as well as the openly genocidal Israeli policies Palestinians now live with that surely favour data gathering too.

https://reliefweb.int/report/philippines/wfp-scope-harnessing-technology-improved-implementation-and-monitoring

"Anson is one of over three hundred people to register for a new electronic ID card from WFP. He joins a team of 75 men tasked with digging drainage channels on local access roads to ensure they remain passable even when the monsoon rains fall. The new ID card will allow him to claim food assistance from WFP for three months in return for the work.

...

“SCOPE will help us in checking attendance, ensure participation, and in the verification or validation process during distributions. With the new IDs, it’s quicker to identify the participants and ensure that the money they’ve earned goes to the right person."

Because why feed starving people when you can feed staving people and control a small dependent slave army too.

Probably how they discovered this operation. They were trying to bug their own officials phones and ran into conflicts with existing malware.

Re: In a war scenario

The people putting salt in plastic sachets need putting up against the wall

Standard practice in small organisations (well, at least the ones I overlook), so why not in a multi-$million company?

Because it generates a lot of work for customer service when dozy customers who've forgotten their password run into the block and get irate.

Another thing that needs to be (sensibly) legislated and normalised.