Ig Nobel Prize flees US for Switzerland after 35 years over safety concerns
Terrible people.
They have treated America so badly.
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Nanny state discovers Linux, demands it check kids' IDs before booting
They have to use a combination of "oh boobies" and "think of the children" because the techbros are rather intertwined with the current government.
Plus the demagogues rely upon these networks, they wouldn't like the algorithm quietly tweaked to defavour them.
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Blustering Blackbeard's PC was all at sea, sysadmin got him shipshape in seconds
I had a client's new PA who ranted at me over the phone.
Same as the pirate in the story.
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Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after USB keys fail to decrypt them
Don't do e-voting.
Not for anything important.
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BOFH: What physics defines as impossible, sales calls a challenge
Sales guy came into the engineering office all excited.
"I've sold this MASSIVE system to a new client.
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District denies enrollment to child based on license plate reader data
You are not you is what the resident was told.
But, says the resident, how can you say that I am not me? Easy, our system has determined that you are walking 500 miles away from here and our tracking system still has you at that location.
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Quicksort inventor Tony Hoare reaches the base case at 92
I must be getting old - all of the greats I studies when I was at university back in the 1980's are finally hitting their STOP instruction.
RIP Prof. C. A. R. Hoare.
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Whitehall seeks lone C++ coder to keep airport passenger model flying
Excel is involved.
So it is most likely written in C♭ and will also regularly detune on its own and needs severe beatings to re-key at regular intervals.
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'Are you freaking crazy?' Bot harasses woman, gets led away by cops
Thanks to its liquid metal poly-alloy construction, it can just re-form itself after that; the silver blobs of melted metal coalesce and run together, the G-1 unit then resuming its remorseless promotional activities without pity or fear.
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Users protest as Google Antigravity price floats upward
This is exactly the same model of drug dealers use, get the users hooked on cheap/free product then put the slow squeeze on
This is Google the company with dozens of abandoned projects, why is anyone surprised at this?
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DR-DOS rises again – rebuilt from scratch, not open source
I will never understand people who publish a hobby OS as closed source.
I don't mean that outrageously, I don't feel bitter about being deprived of the code.
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White House activates Yu-Gi-Oh's trap card by using anime clip for war comms
Never thought I'd be saying, "Fire up the DMCA, boys, and take that down ASAP!"
How times have changed.
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So much for power to the people – AI datacenters could jump UK grid queue
"Data centres that don't come with their own power supplies should pay the necessary costs ...
And if they're not prepared to do this, then they're not serious."
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Pentagon AI chief praises Palantir tech for speeding battlefield strikes
> One of the marks was positioned on an area of the map that corresponds to Minab, where a missle struck a girls' school near a military target, killing more than 160 people.
AI shouldn't be anywhere near targeting decisions and Palantir shouldn't be anywhere near any part of government.
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Most chatbots will help plan school shootings and other violence, study shows
That's the same dumb logic that the pro-gun lobby use in the USA, right after the weekly mass shooting.
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GitHub infuriates students by removing some models from free Copilot plan
It shows how the background costs must be killing them.
With previous educational promotions you'd go to considerable effort to ensure that the kids you were hooking didn't think about costs
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Britain turns up the heat on homegrown ceramics for hypersonic missiles
No idea why you got the downvote, it's a well-known problem for the UK
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Musk makes the Macrohard joke again
given that Musk does not himself manufacture any hard-, soft- or other ware, it should be possible to simulate him entirely with AI (or is that what Grok is for?)
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US state laws push age checks into the operating system
Does it also mean Apple services can't use you?
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Smart mirror shows dumb Windows in elevator
“I go up," said the elevator, "or down."
"Good," said Zaphod, "We're going up."
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Campaigners claim NHS Palantir system could be accessed by police and immigration
So technically possible then.
I’m sure everyone involved can be trusted not to bend the rules.
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RAM is getting expensive, so squeeze the most from it
Perhaps with the price of RAM being what it is, programs could start getting more efficient.
Why does Teams, which I only use for messaging most of the time, take up 2GB?
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Atlassian to shed ten percent of staff, because AI
It staggers me that Atlassian aren’t already on the verge of bankruptcy given the extreme enshittification of their products.
I can only imagine that they remain afloat by wining and dining across the corporate world.
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Medical equipment techs beg for right-to-repair lifeline
Get the fucking machines to talk to each other.
I have years worth of test results scattered across disparate systems completely unavailable outside of the hospital (or even worse department) that took them.
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Iran plots 'infrastructure warfare' against US tech giants
Would the world really miss Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Palantir?
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Lloyds Banking Group apps play mix-and-match with customer transactions
Recent article from the Financial Times noted that "Lloyds strives to be ‘UK’s biggest fintech’ by selling more customer data".
Today's episode is just Lloyds giving everybody a free sample Shirley.
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Atomic Britain: UK plans regulatory reset to boost nuclear power
One common example in the US is that the main train station in New York City would not meet the radiation limits required for a nuclear power plant.
The building is made of granite and so is naturally radioactive to a degree higher than allowed for a nuclear power plant.
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Musk admits Starship V3 launch date has slipped as Super Heavy booster rolls into place
Firing 90% of the rocket scientists and replacing them with AI and a couple of interns ?
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Watchdog boss calls Capita's £370M DWP win 'extraordinary' amid pension portal dumpster fire
"Capita told the news outlet it was struggling with a bigger backlog of cases than had been agreed."
Surely that just means they fucked up harder than they are allowed to?
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AFRINIC accuses litigant of trying to ‘paralyse’ it
I'm not a network specialist.
I just use networks.
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AI has made the Command Line Interface more important and powerful than ever before
Windows doesn't really do much automation in the GUI these days - it used to have a macro recorder back in the Windows 3.1 days, but that's long gone., along with Cardfile etc.
These days, the Windows GUI seems designed to confuse and obscure functionality - scroll bars that disappear, and / or blend into the background, buttons you can hardly see etc. My half century+ eyes do not need that shit, and I sympathise with any user, AI or otherwise, trying to make sense of it.
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Perplexity Comet hurtling toward Amazon ban
"... they suffer from a degraded shopping experience, their confidence in the Amazon brand is diminished,"
I needed a laugh, thanks Amazon.
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Whitehall can't cost digital ID until it decides how to build it
I've mentioned on here before how I have two government IDs (somehow) and I can't do anything with either of them, because one failed some stupid validation and now I can't use the other because of the failed validation.
So here is another example.
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Microsoft adding Xbox mode to Windows 11 - even the Professional edition
Here's an idea Borkzilla : how's about you make your XBox mode a downloadable add-on for free, instead of shoving it down every throat you can reach ?
Windows : the only OS that owns you.
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Post Office's £142M subsidy for Horizon fallout and IR35 bill reviewed by watchdog
will they claw back from Paula Vennells's pension pot ?
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Your datacenter's power architecture called. It's not happy
One small issue that immediately springs to mind is one of safety as a high current supply at 800VDC is quite lethal.
If you accidentally touch a 48VDC bus bar, you will probably be fine.
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Linux PC vendor System76 tries to talk Colorado down over OS age checks
What happens when someone else uses your computer, or you theirs?
How will it know the difference?
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NASA watchdog report pokes holes in Artemis lunar lander plans
- points out the challenges posed by Starship's height.
- about the equivalent of a 14-story-tall commercial building
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Prince of PDFs, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, to step down after 18 years
“As a company that has prided itself on creating categories, our AI transformation begins with a focus on customer-centric product strategy to anticipate and fulfill the diverse needs of a large and growing customer base.”
Those words could be rescrambled in almost any order and the sentence would be just as meaningful.
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AI Burning Man happens next week –what to expect at Nvidia GTC 2026
AI Burning Man?
More like burning Earth, with the amount of energy and water fed to that bullshit.
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Hotpatching goes default in Windows Autopatch whether you like it or not
So how long till the baddies work out how to fake a hot patch?
How could anyone think this was a good idea?
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After years of being stood up, ARM64 Linux users finally get Chrome date
> Or perhaps the company is seeking to take advantage of Windows refugees, offering an escape from Microsoft and its hardware requirements and telemetry gathering.
What could be more familiar than Chrome in an otherwise different operating system?
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Intel finds its Zen undercutting AMD with Arrow Lake refresh
Who's even buying now given the price of memory?
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Azure startup credits don't apply to Claude via Azure AI Foundry, reader finds – after $1,600 charge
* widgets sold separately.
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Royal Navy races to arm ships against drone threat
When you have worked in defence systems as long as I have you will know that it will take at least 6 months to get together the committee who are going to decide on the official definition of the word "drone".
P.S. what colour do you want it to be?
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ICO fines Police Scotland over data-sharing debacle in gross misconduct case
So one part of the government has fined another part of the government.
Have the individuals involved been fined?
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Microsoft Copilot now boarding your health information
If you use Copilot Health, by definition you must be ill.
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Openreach: Fiber can sniff out leaky water pipes – if anyone bothers fixing them
It's the UK... they are litres and it's fibre.
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AI vs AI: Agent hacked McKinsey's chatbot and gained full read-write access in just two hours
I've seen — and I suspect it's becoming almost standard practice — that the new "AI" gurus (quotes maliciously intended) have basically taken over the organization.
And since the discipline is brand new, many of them lack even the minimum knowledge of well-established security practices.
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NASA pencils in fresh Artemis II Moon launch attempt for April 1
My brain went to the unfavourable meaning first.
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Britain spends £180M to work out what time it is
For those living in the sticks, this is a perfectly normal interval between busses.
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Perplexity: Everything is Computer, everything is AI, Computer is everything, AI is us
The universe, maaaan.
Like, have you ever been a plant?
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Scottish broadband service looking a bit dreich, says UK outage study
I did some contracting on one of the remote islands.
We needed a pair of 2Mb lines from BT to a remote site.
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Windows pays tribute to Britain's creaking rail network with a BSOD
Those panels control the gates, so I'd think it's fairly likely the two are connected.
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Inside the datacenter where the day starts with topping up cerebrospinal fluid
... half-jokingly told The Register that he’s also just a little uncomfortable with giving biological computers the chance to control their own destiny.
Half-jokingly?
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Microsoft Copilot to hijack your browser... for your own convenience
Just fuck off and take your Edge and AI with you.
Yours with extreme prejudice.
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Microsoft veteran Rajesh Jha prepares to retire, triggers yet another reorg
The picture of the Works CD takes me back!
I remember getting a copy of Works with a new PC sometime in the last century.
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Apple takes a bite out of app store fees in China
It’s remarkable isn’t it?
I don’t think I’ve ever read that Apple has voluntarily reduced its fees in the UK or Europe after having a little chat with the local regulator
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Wombats literally sh!t bricks – and now boffins reckon they know how
Goes to show, you can fit square pegs in round holes
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Fake job applications pack malware that kills endpoint detection before stealing data
Cybercrime appears to be undergoing the same “product simplification” trend as everything else.
Once upon a time the mythology involved shadowy figures chaining kernel exploits and cracking encryption.
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Microsoft kicks new Outlook opt-out deadline down the road to 2027
When I tried it last year (or it least it foisted itself without fucking asking on a colleague), it couldn't even open multipole inboxes.
And yet it was supposed to be ready to for this year.
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Microsoft Authenticator to nuke Entra creds on rooted and jailbroken phones
Blocking devices which exist outside the identified, appified consumer ecosystem is a feature, not a bug.
It's not *YOUR* device.
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Sorry, kids. Memory crunch threatens to kneecap Chromebook shipments
I know one non-technical person who wanted a simple laptop.
Email, documents, maybe Word.
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Server crashes traced to one very literal knee-jerk reaction
I was once showing a group of international students around our high performance computing centre at the university.
When we came to the Cray J932, with its impressive large green rectangular power led, and beneath it a red, very well recessed reset button, one of the students asked what would happen if he pressed that button.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
