* Posts by Alistair

3019 publicly visible posts • joined 18 May 2007

Oracle AI buzz means Larry Ellison's worth $15B more today

Alistair
Windows

....... where you could park eight Boeing 747 nose-to-tail in that one data center.

232*8=1,856 ft long. --- and possibly 212 ft wide? about 395k sq feet <Okay -- thats just the 747 wingspan, but given he's given to various forms of hyperbole, I'll run with it>

I'm gonna wanna see the building permits before I decide that it is gonna happen.

The idea of hooking up with Nvidia do to the compute engines? *that* is something that might have added value.

GPT-4 won't run Doom but will play the game poorly

Alistair
Windows

Re: What, uhhhh….

Chicken Biryani?

Its almost, but not quite spring here, Lamb please.

Airbnb warns hosts who use indoor security cameras they may face eviction

Alistair
Windows

Re: "where guests can reasonably expect privacy expectations"

Uuuum Pascal:

Depending on *where* you're staying there are cameras (usually quite a few) in the lobby, elevators, corridors, stairwells, pools and garage, and pretty much every square inch of exterior grounds.

I will note that that vast majority of those hotels and motels that do this are very much unlikely to publish any of those images they collect on anything like their webpages or social media profiles *without* at least asking permission, usually politely and by tossing you an upgrade. (I have had that joy, once, long ago, pre soc-med, but for the Travel agency website)

I've seen even fairly scruffy off main track motels with more camera coverage than your average shopping mall.

The *issue* with AirBnB was that while the legal entity permitted cameras indoors on the provider's properties, for the provider's personal comfort, security and whatnot, they discovered that the world is full of perverted SoB's that seem to think that they can get away with violating their tenant's privacy, personal space, personal security and safety by installing cameras in places they had no permissions for and then subsequently publishing those images to places like PornHub, the dark web and various other image sharing sites of spectacularly questionable integrity.

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

Alistair
Windows

Re: Hypothetical Example

I'm very much of the "Your Failure to plan accordingly does not in any circumstance constitute an emergency on my part" crew.

Reddit rolling out AI bouncer to halt harassment

Alistair
Windows

Reddit upgrade options..........

.......As with all things to do with raising cash in 2024, that means sticking AI anywhere it can.

I have some suggestions as to where............

Canada poutine more pressure on Google by expanding ad biz antitrust probe

Alistair
Windows

Re: stop the insulting headlines ..

Fuzzy!!

REALLY????

CANNNNNNNED Poutine gravy?

This ontarian is putting you up for eviction to New Brunswick!

Staff say Dell's return to office mandate is a stealth layoff, especially for women

Alistair
Windows

RTO orders are likely to continue to happen all over.

For one primary reason.

Most companies, up till the oughties (2000~2009) owned properties that were their own offices, many did do leasing of some space as well, but after 2008/2009 a LOT of companies sold those properties to REITs (Real estate investment trusts) - These entities show spectacular ROR's (rates of return) from 2010 through 2019, and thus were HUGE in the investment industry, and thus many companies have HUGE investments in those REITs, which saw horrible drops in ROR from 2019. Have to get those ROR's back boys and girls, so we have to have bodies in offices, and well .......

(wanna bet? ask the exec's issuing these RTO's where they're investments are and what level of growth/ROR they expect from them)

IBM overhauls rewards program for staff inventions, wipes away cash points

Alistair
Windows

Re: Why why oh why

That employment contract is why I stopped contributing to KDE and WINE back in 2009. My DM said that there was no issue with my contributions, however the TL's I was working with on both projects basically said, no, thanks. I never went above my DM, but the DIR we worked for was an IBM lifer with ..... shall we say an eye for all the advantages they could acquire.

Windows boss takes on taskbar turmoil, pledges to 'make Start menu great again'

Alistair
Windows

I'm kinda wondering

If the Enlightenment folks would like to port to windows......................

Say,,,,,, $35 lifetime subscription fee for your windows 10/11 Enlightenment interface...............

X reverses course on headlines in article links, kinda

Alistair
Windows

Linking articles in social media

I suppose the original (not doing it no more) was a knee jerk reaction to the Australian and Canadian legal decisions about supporting traditional new sources (i.e. if you're gonna clone the damn thing, pay for it you lousy $417s)

The flip back may be just from the perspective of generating the clickthrough revenue. He is kinda short income this week apparently.........

With all eyes on OpenAI, Meta drags its Responsible AI team to the recycle bin

Alistair
Windows

Re: Meta continues to be Meta

Straight from the rulebook of arms traffickers and, drug dealers and wall street: Ethics and business don't mix

FTFY!

Strangely enough, no one wants to buy a ransomware group that has cops' attention

Alistair
Windows

Hmmm. Lets extrapolate a wee bit.

New cyberattack team comes up, raids a couple of big names, claims to have stolen data. Said data shows up from someone claiming *not* to be part of said new cyberattack group. Said cyberattack group suffers from LEA intervention at the ?edges? and claims some legit cyber security exec is actually a criminal.

So, grew too fast, hired anyone and everyone that applied, finds out that at least one of those hires has decided to fire up a side hustle selling the product the group acquired, likely does some digging on who did that, and discovers something appearing to point at the cyber security exec, publishes accusation, finds out that more of the new hires are getting busted and decides to exit stage left?

I'm guessing that one or more of those rapid growth hires was busted elsewise, and bought themselves immunity before they got hired.......

Woman jailed after RentaHitman.com assassin turned out to be – surprise – FBI

Alistair
Windows

Re: I hate to say this, but it's sad that there are homo sapiens so f'in stupid

@ Jellied Eel:

Have you not yet met a Canadian Goose?

Waterfowl, Weaponized.

Russia hustles to fill impending void left by the ISS

Alistair
Windows

Re: Dreams are free

Is *that* what Major Tom was on?

1Password confirms attacker tried to pull list of admin users after Okta intrusion

Alistair
Windows

Sanitizing things

Okta recommends sanitizing all credentials and cookies/session tokens

.... I had to go find the details on what is or how to create a HAR file. Okay -- yeah -- might wanna prowl through that to get rid of the fun details. That said, Okta need to manage that stuff better, logs/cases and keys to be used are not hard things to implement, even on a blind FTP server.

Dropbox drops bucks to ditch digs in long-term WFH model

Alistair
Windows

C suite descisions based on retirement income value

Those folks making $300,000 to $48,000,000 a year in the upper decks have *investments* man, and those investments are their *retirement* income man, and man, if the REIT1 that owns 3/4's of down towns offices ain't *making* 32% ROR that damn retirement fund isn't gonna be coughing out $550,000 annually, and man the retirement is gonna mean that they have to downsize the mother40(%ing yacht to an 80 footer. And thats just wrong, man, I mean, 80 footers can only carry ONE helicopter!

1 Real Estate Investment Trust

Indian authorities raid fake tech support rings after tipoff from Amazon and Microsoft

Alistair
Windows

Re: Cracking down on tech scum

While it is good that *something* clicked *somewhere* to get this action taken, there does remain questions outside of whodunnit.

1) Since said operations had been functional for up to five years, which authorities in the region in which they were operating were receiving financial support to ensure that they were not investigated or shut down *prior* to this time?

2) Since said operations were as *large* as they were will the Indian authorities currently arresting folks pursue these entities to ensure that they arrest the folks who most benefited from the their operation *and* minimize the legal impact on the poor bastards on the call centre floors, or are they just rounding up the poor bastards and tossing them all away for life?

3) How much money did Amazon, Microsoft et al have to provide to the Indian legal system in order to have these prosecutions enabled, and to WHOM?

I regularly tell the poor bastards that call me that they will likely end up in their local jail for 3 to 5 years, whilst their boss is hanging out in some fancy foreign resort with a teen aged concubine or three.

Sadly, that is the single most likely result of these events.................

How 'AI watermarking' system pushed by Microsoft and Adobe will and won't work

Alistair
Windows

urmph

I've just finished going through our photo/video collection from the last .... 28 years or so.

Canon is stunningly reliable in the metadata it incorporates in the image, admittedly, timestamps can be off, and the GPS data didn't show up until the T series we have (2006?? i think). The blackberry stuff is solid, and the timestamps seem to be from the Cell network, and location data is down to 5 decimals. Other cellphones are pretty good, the exception being an LG SWMBO had that seems have had a permanent lateral shift applied to its GPS positions of about 8 or 9 degrees. I suspect it was clock settings not being correctly translated.

There are *TONS* of metadata options for all imaging systems. And there is a *cough* standard for inserting it and modifying it. And there are dozens of applications that ignore it. After that my friends, image metadata is gonna fall down the "we already have 5 standards, and they're all incompatible" wormhole.

The opensource community actually has a pair of tools specifically for removing metadata from images and ensuring that they cannot be traced or tracked back to the device with which they were taken or modified, as much for the journalists as for the other folks that need that.

That there are a bunch of Mega(money)Corp entities trying to engender yet another controlling process on the General UnWashed, means one thing and one thing only, Its gonna cost you yet another monthly service charge to use it, as, since it is so valuable a service, the companies will be allowed to accept the income, and *not* pay taxes on that income.

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

Alistair
Windows

Re: Tech support call

Obvious question: antifreeze in a machine room???

AC in colder climates include antifreeze. And let me tell you, when that crap gets loose, it *stinks*. For years afterward.

New information physics theory is evidence 'we're living in a simulation,' says author

Alistair
Windows

Re: Not evidence

I claim my $5 Anne Elk!

Alistair
Windows

Re: Physics nerds.

couldn't grasp the concept of recreational pharmaceuticals in secondary school

You clearly went to the wrong school. I still remember the parties with the rest of the geeks including the physics nerds.

But, then, we were all nerds at my school.

Alistair
Windows

Re: Problem of evil?

..... Pools, ladders, fences, what? I have no idea what you mean.

Alistair
Windows

Re: We're just life, imitating art.

The cost of living crisis and inflation are most easily explained by greedy oil industry executives continuously increasing profitability in order to prove their financial worth to Wall Street, thus protecting their continued existence in the simulation.

You've just spent $400 on a baby monitor. Now you need a subscription

Alistair
Windows

Re: Baby Monitor

Owlet was one of the products the 3 B store carried. No subscription on the initial purchase, but also 0 security on the connection. And since its "clowd connected" No guarantees it will run for more than x number of months, period. New model comes out? Sure, better, faster, prettier, Okay lets turn off the old models so we can sell the new ones.

And indeed, you have the mantra down. "You have to do EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE, all the time!" Its all FUD. All of it. Every last thing.

Alistair
Windows

Internet connected webcam monitors

SWMBO worked for the Baby division of the (three B company) that was recently slaughtered on the altar of Wall Street Rate of Return to make 12 C suite folks very wealthy. So I've seen about 14 variations on this concept, all as basic and simple as could be. Essentially, webcam and local wifi connected receiver (whether smart phone app or physical unit) *both* connect to (vendor provided cloud instances) the other side of the planet, before being able to talk to one another. Most utilized the most basic encryption possible for all connections (in one case, when a neighbour had one the stream from Webcam to Endpoint was literally using a byte swap inside the avi format to scramble the image). These things made me rage. Still do, in fact, since I've yet to see one that implements proper security on the connection that streams the audio/video. Basically wide open, once you find the port that uPNP2 opens on the router.

Arm patches GPU driver bug exploited by spyware to snoop on targets

Alistair
Windows

Re: Help me not worry

I'm fairly sure my Mali needs these patches, but I'm certainly not too worried about someone trying to hunt me down. I will note however that the Reg Commentariat includes a fair number of the tinfoilio, so there will be some panic for a couple days I'm sure.

I'll poke the group that built the non-google infected version of android I've installed and see what they have to say.

Musk's first year as Twitter's Dear Leader is nigh

Alistair
Windows

Re: Twitter^h^h^h^h^h^h^hX

I have taken to using TwiX, which seems to be instantly

Please don't do that around me Geoff, I've always rather liked Twix. Preferably Left Twix, but both are quite tasty.

Report: CIA eyes building AI chatbot to rival China

Alistair
Windows

Tinfoil in tuscany perhaps?

I'm gonna suggest that You Two should perhaps arrange an entertaining weekend in Tuscany, perhaps on the coast, at a quiet vineyard, with tasty treats and comfy chairs, you could compare notes.

Alistair
Windows

CIA AI spybot?

I'm just not comprehending how far down the buzzword bingo rabbit hole someone who heads a department for the CIA has fallen to decide that "AI"1 is in some bizarre manner useful in any form in solving international "spy" operation issues.

Given the current situation, the process of getting away from the brinksmanship that is currently active between the US/Western world and China/Russia/India is NOT going to be solved by collecting everything that has happened in international intrigue and regurgitating those efforts in synthetically reconstructed theoretical actions, its going to need actual rational though and careful negotiation.

Also, some folks need to take the tin foil hat, and wrap it around their smart phones, then lock the smart phone in a copper lined safe, and then take a long walk into the woods with some good alcohol.

1 No, LLM's are NOT artificial intelligence. Unless one considers the "artificial" portion of that phrase the important one.

If you're cautious about using ML and bots at work, that's not a bad idea

Alistair
Windows

LLM/ML processes

I'm no screaming genius on any front, but I am well enough versed in a few areas to feel the need to go all BOMBASTIC BOB on this tendency to refer to LLM/ML processes as AI.

There is no intelligence to these things, they are probability indices and control parameters that are fed insane amounts of data and due to sheer volume, on occasion approach humanistic interaction. Three issues; 1) There is no *reasoning* built in to the process, it is more like a statistical model than reasoning. 2) It is abundantly clear that there is nothing approaching *logic*, once again, its statistics. 3) The source data, frequently being grabbed in mass volume from numerous sites with both professional and generic internet troll input contains a fairly high relative volume of Garbage which, clearly with ChatGPT 3.5, over sufficient time leads to the GIGO issues we're starting to see more and more often from these computer processes.

Am I the only one here who has a *serious* problem calling *any* of these thing Artificial Intelligence?

Alistair
Windows

Re: tendency to generate false information – a phenomenon known as "hallucination."

They also know which is which. The AI knows nothing.

Doc;

I would have upvoted this 10 million times. However:

They also know which is which. The LLM knows nothing. TFTFY

US-Canada water org confirms 'cybersecurity incident' after ransomware crew threatens leak

Alistair
Windows

Uuuhm. Lithuania was part of the Russian republic, and after WWII was part of the Soviet, so the comment that they don't touch ex russian states isn't 100% correct.

I'll concede that the Lithuanian populace in general were never in agreement with being part of the Soviet......

Water rights between US and Canada are really not a huge issue at the general populace level, although there are Native Rights groups that contest a lot of the water rights stuff.

I'm guessing that the invaders went "Oh LOOK, this stuff labelled "CONFIDENTIAL" that means it will cause controversy and conflict!!!! YAY!!!"

When much of that is confidential simply because of the nature of the negotiations.

Meet Honda's latest electric vehicle: A rideable suitcase

Alistair
Windows

Re: They put a man on the moon ...

@ Dizzy:

My grandfather had a steamer trunk with wheels on one end. Back in ......almost 112 years ago.

Alistair
Windows

Re: Remember the Honda 50?

These things do need better regulation. Saw an escooter at 11.15pm in dark and rain on main road with no lights this week.

One?

There is a 'test marketing' run of two different E-scooter rental operations in our city just outside the GTA. The rental scooters have lighting (and at least the FORWARD light is quite visible) and helmets attached. Small herds of the scooters are left sitting on corners and near bus stops etc. Those I don't have a lot of issues with since they do have lighting, but there are a dozen or so E-scooter vendors selling to the locals. Vast majority have *some* form of lighting on them, but in most cases its far far too pale or low level to allow a driver of 3 tons of rolling death to be able to *see* said scooter at night, especially when the riders are typically wearing all black hoodies. I've damn near had a heart attack a couple of times when 4 or 5 of these things come flying around a corner (slow down and check traffic before turning into it?? Who does that??) in front of me at night.

Salesforce flipflops from 'you're fired' to 'you're hired' in six short months

Alistair
Windows

soooo

We done fired all the 'spensive folks what was costing us too much after they'd been here for too long. Now we have to hire a bunch of schoolkids at minimum wage to do all that work.

We've seen where this goes.

Be prepared for your salesforce cloud installs to suffer from certificate expiry, data encryption and exfiltration and backup failure in the near future.

Oh, and don't expect the hacktivist exvestors to offer anything in the way of compensation.

Scientists trace tiny moonquakes to Apollo 17 lander – left over from 1972

Alistair
Windows

Re: Freight train

*cough* American, Canadian or Association.

Then you've lots to play on.

Snowflake's Instacart protestations hint at challenges for poster child of the data cloud

Alistair
Windows

Data Lakehouse?

So the data is out at the lakehouse, enjoying a cold one on the dock while fishing up a ...... profitfish?

<hides under the desk>

The Anti Defamation League is Musk's latest excuse for Twitter's tanking ad revenue

Alistair
Windows

Lesseee here.

ADL and other anti hate group(s) claim Xitter is getting worse since his muskiness took over, and because of that the Adwertwisers have run away in droves.

Hmmm

So, his muskiness decides to sue the anti hate groups to recoup funds that have vanished since he took over.

If, in fact, the claims by the anti hate groups are correct and substantiated in court, his muskiness looses. If it's shown that the Adwertwisers ran away for some other reason(s), his muskiness looses.

If by some bizarre twist of reality (fate) his muskiness *wins* any of the relevant court cases, would he be inclined to hire Marjorie Taylor Greene as his advertising executive?

Attackers accessed UK military data through high-security fencing firm's Windows 7 rig

Alistair
Windows

Cyber essential ring fencing basics.

The last thing I am is a hyper specialist. What I am is a damn good all rounder in the IT space.

I've posted a few times before about ring fencing specialist windows (7/NT/etc) installs to talk to ridiculously expensive hardware that does a specialist job, for which the vendor either no longer exists, or has no interest in updating the software for that set of hardware. (CAT and Xray kit mostly, but also a pair of 60 ton sheet steel presses with awesome capabilities, for which the *next* generation with updated software, running on newer windows has *cough* a) monthly baseline fees and b) for each of the awesome capabilities, monthly additional fees).

I'll note someone suggested Wine, above, and for *some* hardware connections its just fine, audio tends to be okay, printer port type connections are fine, but serial and USB connections tend (with this type of hardware) to be proprietary and Wine *really* doesn't like stuff like that. I *have* gotten parallel port connections with proprietary protocols working with Wine, but that was back when I was contributing. I don't know how far it got taken.

I'm a *very* firm believer in stuffing these instances into VM's and using the host firewalling to manage the connections directly for the guest. In my experience, it has worked the best, as VLAN management in windows 7 didn't exist. Yes, that can be done at the switch, but there are morons *who swap cables around* -- I'd hope there was mac address control on those ports as well, but I *really* haven't seen *that* much in the instances where I've done this, it seems to be an afterthought brought on by my ranting at the local tech. Hardware passthrough in KVM tends to work with somewhat more reliability than with Wine in my *personal* experience.

The *host* system can be backed up using standard processes, so long as we snapshot the VM beforehand, and get all the image files. With appropriate documentation, a system that was in use in this way, recently suffered complete meltdown (there was a serious fire, took out much of the plastic, wood, and non-hardened steel in the zone) where, when the rebuild completed on the press, and the software was restored from backup on new hardware, things picked up from where they left off. Documentation is *absolutely* required in these cases, careful, complete, and concise.

BOFH: What a beautiful tinfoil hat, Boss!

Alistair
Windows

Re: I remember well...

Thing was, she'd break out in a rash on the underside of her forearms

Used those damn sterile wipes on the arms of her chair ever day did she?

30 years on, Debian is at the heart of the world's most successful Linux distros

Alistair
Windows

Re: POLL anyone?

FWIW AC, Fedora has dnf-plugin-system-upgrade.

Essentially, make sure your system is fully updated to (now), run the upgrade download (pulls all update packages and dependencies, check for retired/replaced packages and run a pretest) then do dnf system-upgrade reboot.

I've a rather complex install on my desktop and on a couple of those runs I've had to completely remove one or two self built packages, run the upgrade, then rebuild and reinstall, but thats my fault for doing slightly weird testing on bleeding edge crap.

On three other systems I have hands on that *don't* to weird stuff, the last ?? 6 system upgrades have been fire and forget.

The only gotcha, is that /var needs up to 8Gb of space free, depending.

Most distant observed star is blue – and it isn't alone

Alistair
Windows

Far away, and blue?

Is it charging at us? Is it the Light At The End Of The Tunnel? Should we be moving our galaxy out of the way soon?

Canada's Telus to shed 6K workers as profits plunge 61%

Alistair
Windows

One thing here to note

CRTC changed the rules on primary carriers and what they charge *non* associated MVNO's and associated MVNO's. Essentially, Rogers, Telus, Bell (the three primaries) have had from 4 to 7 associated or subsidiary MVNO's in their folds. Because of the rules changes, all three majors are working to fold the subscribers to their subsidiary MVNOs into their primary line of business. (Thus the reported subscriber increase in Telus' quarterly). Annnd, since they're *all* running behind the schedule they've had to cut the charges to non-associated MVNOs along the way. Wont last long tho I'm sure.

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

Alistair
Windows

And then there's us old pharts

Here I was figuring that they we gonna market those horrid tasting wax lips for kids, but with digestible motion sensors embedded in the wax, and have you pair the "lips" when you put them on to say horrid things to your companions.

Considering what we used to say to one another with those things about, I'm guessing Apple would end up cancelled in a hell of a hurry.

BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!

Alistair
Windows

Finding the back door.

Ages and ages ago I spent most of a summer at the Science Centre. (25 cent bus ride, 50 cents to get in the SC, and 1.50 for a hotdog and drink for lunch, it was cheap daycare basically) and found the tictactoe on the mainframe had a back door, of sorts, that got you into Colossal Cave. Got tons of weird looks from the others there, but the attendant had no complaints about it, apparently thats why it was there. Could read and play on the terminal, but the overhead view wasn't very readable.

Sysadmins are being left out of AI implementation

Alistair
Windows

"corporate strategists" = technically illiterate MBAs ?

AKA Unicorns, Fairies, Leprechauns, and Kraken?

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

Alistair
Windows

Re: no-light lunar landing technology

There's a Pink Floyd album, you need to be high as a m$#$%king kite, crank the tunes and the answer will be revealed.

Slackware wasn't the first Linux distro, but it's the oldest still alive and kicking

Alistair
Windows

Slackware is still in my list of tools.

Along with a fairly long list of BSD and Linux distros.

Where I hit slackware first? Probably in 94 or 95. Mostly as a "what is this thing" experiement while I was getting comfortable with Netware and other courses at the time.

Where did I use it most? In 97, moving in with the GF, and setting up an internet connection for us, on Dial up. Slackware on an older clunky box did the dial up , and four BNC network cards. Modem setup in slackware was *stupid* simple and worked first time out, routing setup was easy peasy, and I met iptables for the first time. My machine and the GF's online at the same time on dialup blew several friends minds, and thus there were 6 more slackware users added to the list. Fourth card got stuck in an also older machine, for the (at the time) two littles (post 99 I'm fairly sure, since a 1 year old and 2 year old don't computer very well).

Eventually the apartment building got wired up by (Large canadian telecoms provider) with an exclusive agreement on cable. At the time I was working for them so got all sorts of cheap on that front. Replaced the BNC ethernet with 100Mb cable, and *still* had slack as the router. Although at that point the slack box had been upgraded and had both GF's and my websites hosted on board.

It runs in a vm now, with the DNS filters for the network, and manages the firewall rules on the DSL router and the wifi router. For my uses its still an awesome minimalist, solid as a rock OS.

For folks asking me about "this linux thing" if they've done windows basically all their lives, I point them at Mint, if they've done unix of any sort along the way, I point them at Slackware for the basics.

RHEL drama, ChromeOS and more ... Our vultures speak freely about the latest in Linux

Alistair
Windows

But where's the tea?

Now that you guys got that kettle boiling regularly?

I *love* the kettles you've done so far. Great idea, and so far I've found myself wanting to jump into the conversations with my own views. Kinda annoying I don't have a "Raise Hand" button on the video.

On this one, there is the "do distros matter" question, and there are both yes and no points, and given that, I think The Reg will have a huge division amongst the commentariate.

Keep up the great chats.

(P.S., Orange Pekoe, long steep, dab of milk, and one sugar, please and thanks)

Goodbye Azure AD, Entra the drag on your time and money

Alistair
Windows

Re: Entra - from the prefix 'entero-'?

Soooo in the future when MS Azure has serious problems with login failures they can honestly say that the cloud $h@7 the bed?