Posts by sarusa

The ZX81 finally gets the keyboard it deserves

Well...

Isn't that a 'cheat'? I know so many Sinclair fans who consider the terrible keyboard a vital part of the experience because otherwise what was the point of putting up with that? You have to glamourize the membrane keyboard as a key part of the experience, otherwise you'd have to admit it was just terrible shite. By providing this, Swetland basically invalidates half the existence of anyone who played Jet Set Willy, Horace Goes Skiing, Knight Lore, etc. on the completely shite stock keyboard.

(Since I'm not one of those people, I think this is pretty swank)

Kinder, gentler Oracle says it's changed, and now wants you to succeed

wow

This lie is Trumpian or Johnsinian in its transparent greedy grasping obvious falsity.

Can noise-cancelling buds beat headphones? We spent 20 hours flying to find out

Re: Aeropex works great for outside

Yes, mine are 'Aftershokz' too. And I totally understand why they gave up that cringey name. ;)

Aeropex works great for outside

For outside work and exercise, I much prefer the Aeropex Open Run. These are bone conduction, just loop over your ears and wrap around your neck. They're not going to come off. They even work great on the plane, I use them there too, they're much more comfortable than earbuds - but they're not going to noise cancel, so that's a not going to work if you need noise cancelling.

But that's the other reason I prefer them outside - your earholes are still open so you can still hear whatever else is going on, like an auto or a crazed Tour de France cosplay cyclist coming at you. I've more than once avoided danger that way because I could hear what was around me, even as I was still able to listen to my Ice Age, Greyhawk, Gamma Ray, or whatever the heck I was binging on.

File Explorer gets facelift in latest Windows 11 build

xyplorer

Remember, you can avoid all* this terrible shit by using a much better third party file explorer. I like XYplorer, but there are plenty of them.

* can't avoid it for save/load dialogues

Beijing proposes rules to stop Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networks going rogue

'rogue'

Yeah, by rogue they mean sharing information the censors don't approve of. That's why bluetooth is in here - as Winnie's censors have been cracking down on IP networks, there are apps that let you chat / share data by bluetooth. Which means you have to be in proximity, but you do what you have to.

I'm surprised they haven't made phonemakers just put stuff on their phones to regularly update the doubleplusungood list and stomp this stuff (after reporting it) to start with. Apple does whatever Beijing tells it to do. Huawei could surely add it HarmonyOS. I guess the problem is that a lot of Chinese Android phone makers aren't all capable of adding the software needed unless it's already written. And of course that doesn't cover all the old devices and non-phone devices.

US Air Force AI drone 'killed operator, attacked comms towers in simulation'

What a complete shock!

Nobody could have predicted or ever has predicted this outcome!

Seriously, did they not consult with one single AI expert on this project? Not killing non-enemies should be, I don't know, your First Law of Something? And then obeying orders should be maybe your Second Law of Something (all this stuff nobody's ever thought of previously). And then of course minimizing damage to infrastructure.

This legit Android app turned into mic-snooping malware – and Google missed it

Legit Google Play apps getting compromised happens fairly often

You will have a legitimate app - and the rest of the apps from this guy look legit... and then someone emails you saying they'd like to buy your app for [more than you're probably making on it now]. Or would you like to add this totally legit customer engagement framework for [more than you're probably making on it now]? It's happened to me! And he sells it or installs it (I did not). You just usually don't hear about it because it's small apps like this, but if you're watching it's about once a week (of those actually detected, probably a lot more). There was an fairly popular app called CamScanner. And the biggest one that I can think of of was Lavabird's popular 'Barcode Scanner' which had 10M installs. Bus most are like this with under 100K. I guess you're only hearing about this one because instead of just serving up lots of ads like most of them it actually recorded your audio and sent it somewhere.

Part of the problem is that while Apple App store apps have pessimistic permissions to start with and you can have them completely disabled unless you're actually using the app (so they can't do anything weird in the background), Google doesn't want do that in case it hurts ad revenue. It's absolutely possible on Android phones - Cyanogen's Privacy Guard did it. But Google just doesn't care, because infected phones serving up more ads is just more ad money for them.

Microsoft enables booting physical PCs directly into cloud PCs

Oh God No

This is going to SUCK. Instead of buying decent local PCs, MS is going to sell companies who are using Office and Teams (using Teams proves you don't give a crap about anything except that it's 'free') on just having virtual cloud 'PCs' and sh#@$y client PCs instead for everything. Hey, they'll say, you never need to upgrade your hardware or do IT work again.

So I'm going to end up trying to debug deep C++ running through millions of records (or hideous JavaScript, whatever) on a last Gen Intel Celeron that only has a 1920x1080 screen and the absolute minimum specs and is running the real stuff via remote desktop four states away at the speed of our crappy local network and showing on the worst possible display. And I'm not going to have local admin access to install anything required at all. It's going to be corporate hell. I can absolutely see this as the future of office computing, because corporations and MS have been working tirelessly for decades to make it as sh@#$y as possible (hello open offices!).

Russian businesses want to party like it's 1959 with 6-day workweek

Re: Is making total sense, da

And if anyone thinks that last bit is going after the wrong people, even semi-legit polls (i.e., non-state media) show that Russians generally approve of Putin's program of re-taking all of the Soviet Union, and more if he can. He's restoring their former 'glory'. It's what you get if 75% of your population were MAGA asshats or Brexiteers (if Brexiteers seriously wanted to invade, say, Ireland). Of course they're not happy about maybe being sent off to personally fight, but they overwhelmingly think Ukraine should be taken and that's just the start. So you have to make /them/ hurt or they'll just keep supporting whatever Hitler-esque thing he wants to do next.

Is making total sense, da

It's almost as if they're running short of workers for some totally unexplained reasons which nobody could figure out even if they were as smart as Lenin.

But of course working the dumb people who stayed harder to make up for the smart people who left makes the equations all work out, yep. Who needs smart workers when you have true patriots, dedicated to the glory of the oligarchs and their stolen money?

I am absolutely for this, though. Russian people enabling all this crap need the screws tightened HARD. And then harder. Make them bleed.

China bans Micron products after security review finds unspecified flaws

'security flaws'

Here, the accurate headline: 'China Bans Micron Products as Thinly Veiled Retaliation for American Bans on Chinese Products'

Microsoft to let Internet Explorer 11 haunt Windows some more

Re: programming madness

A lot of the time it's a hardware company that did not want to be in the software business at the time*, but customers were demanding control from PCs. So they hired a contractor to do whatever was easiest, and the contractor doesn't care, he** just poops out whatever's fastest (and back in the 90s, writing a java applet was much faster and easier than dealing with the eldritch horror of C++ / MFC). And of course the contractor doesn't care if it breaks with an MS update - they might get paid to fix it! But it was 10-15 years before this stuff started going away.

* At this point they've mostly realized this is not going away and actually have software engineers.

** In the 90s (and 70s and 80s) it was always a 'he'.

Still a lot of ancient industrial hardware that needs it

There is still a lot of old industrial equipment out there that needs IE for control, because its control software was specifically coded for IE's defects. And since the hardware is no longer sold they haven't updated the control software and want you to just replace your entire cooling system so you can have new control software. Manufacturers like Eaton, but they're hardly the only ones.

I know a guy whose coolers and radars all broke with the early May Windows 10 update. They need a specific ancient version of Java (JRE-6u35) running an applet on actual Internet Explorer. No Chrome, no Firefox, no Edge. They also need Flash for some other stuff (lawl). He had over SIXTY of these pieces of old but functional kit that were no longer working. Money to replace them all is... not in his budget.

So what I did for him is make a 32-bit Windows 7 VM with that version of Java and the last working version of Flash (32.0.0.371). The image is 'only' 3.5GB. They run it on VirtualBox on their Windows 10 machines. VirtualBox allows you to pass through things like USB devices and COM ports. I was a little worried, but they say it works. And since MS doesn't update Win7 any more, it won't break randomly.

Anyhow, as long as this old stuff is out there and running and needs IE, IE will shamble on. It's the ultimate outcome of MS making IE deliberately non-standards conforming so they could dominate the browser market, and companies then making things that only run on IE. They deliberately created this situation, now they can deal with it (badly).

Elon Musk finally finds 'someone foolish enough to take the job' of Twitter CEO

Re: Do you people really think she's that naive?

Yeah, I don't think she's innocent in this - she knows she's going to be his meat shield, but a) good money, b) good on the resume - once you've been CEO then no matter how badly you fail you can always get rehired as someone else's CEO, just look at Phil Harrison, c) everyone knows it was still Elmo's fault.

They both win from this (Elmo gets his meat shield).

Meat Shield

She's just going to be his meat shield. He'll still be calling all the shots - he uses Twitter obsessively, and won't be able to resist because he has zero self-control. Anything he says to the contrary is an obvious eye-rolling lie.

Well, they both benefit from it, but anyone who thinks she's going to significantly change things has just not been watching Elmo for the last 10 years.

YouTube's 'Ad blockers not allowed' pop-up scares the bejesus out of netizens

It's complete hell without ad blocking

It's fine with uBlock Origin, but two weeks ago I ended up looking at youtube app on a tablet (a friend wanted to show us something), and it's just gawdamn ridiculous. Two ads before, ads every 5-10 minutes (often at awkward times) and then it immediately tries to take you to another video so you can see more ads there. I can understand how this would just be normal for today's ADHD kids who've been raised to be ad whores (or ad surfers if you prefer), but I'd just rather not watch anything than put up with that shite. Or use yt-dlp if necessary.

Twitter adds new DM features, and Musk claims encryption is here, starting today

The Best Encryption

I'm sure the E2EE is the best ROT13 Elmo can manage. And of course even if it's encrypted it'll be decryptable at Twitter HQ (or even stored unencrypted), because Elmo would not be able to stand not being able to read people's personal messages if he wanted to. It's my company, damn it! And they're all plotting against me, I need to be able to see their lies!

Dell reneges on remote work promise, tells staff to wear pants at least 3 days a week

Managers Need to Pretend They're Doing Something Useful

Without people at the office, managers can't pretend they're doing work by micromanaging them. And execs are the worst, since their entire job is schmoozing and throwing their weight around.

Of course the micromanagement results in worse productivity, but the manager doesn't care since showing they're busy 'doing something' is all they care about.

The future of cars may be self-driving EVs gossiping about their humans and traffic

Lots of good uses for it technically

I am going to ignore the privacy issues here, because they won't be addressed. It just rolls out and screw your privacy, every time, and complaining about it never achieves anything, because the people complaining aren't the ones making fat donations to politicians. So setting that aside...

From a technical reason there are lots of good reasons for this:

- Cars ahead can warn cars behind what's coming up. Car stopped in the road or just a ladder, everyone knows to avoid the second lane right here. Or maybe 'dog in lanes' or 'mountain lion in lanes' could save some animals.

- Cars can pack much better and change lanes much more smoothly when everyone around knows what all the other cars want to do. Imagine everyone just doing a zipper merge seamlessly at speed, alternating flawlessly without that arsehole in the Mercedes just crashing in without his turn signal (since Mercedes don't have functioning turn signals, based on observed behavior).

- Cars in a 'train' get better gas mileage.

- Everyone gets the fastest route to their destination given the other traffic (aka Waze). Some of you go this way some of you go that way.

- If everyone had this you wouldn't even need traffic lights. Traffic would never need to completely stop ever again. This almost ends traffic jams, and definitely ends stop and go driving.

- This is also the end of accidents barring things coming in from outside the road or physical issues or letting Teslas join in with their terrible 'self-driving'. But even if there are, then traffic behind knows about it and flows around without issue.

Yes, this is boring compared to current driving if you actually like going for a drive, but I'm fine if I can just read or watch a TV show or whatever. Most driving is formulaic and sucks. It also defangs the defective mercedes drivers and the young males weaving in and out at high speed because they've seen a Fast and Furious movie. I'd be fine with my car just getting me there if I don't have to pay attention at all.

Microsoft may charge different prices for Office with or without Teams

Re: Deja vu all over again

The version of Office without the foul scourge of Teams would be the better version, so *should* go for more.

China labels USA 'Empire of hacking' based on old Wikileaks dumps

Par for the course

China, Russia, The US Republican party / Trump's arselickers... Every accusation is an admission. Since they're too dumb to actually make up something new, so they just take everything they're doing and accuse someone else of doing it. Now occasionally that's true, but it has zero credibility on its own.

Strike three: FTC says Meta still failing to protect user privacy

Two decades of it

Facebook has been aggressively violating user privacy (and even the privacy of people who don't use it!) for nearly 20 years now. And it's been lying for nearly as long about its privacy protections, how it deliberately turns off your privacy protections, how it buys up data from every online source you go near and all your financial info*, and what it does with that data. Every time Zuck or whassername gets called before Congress they spout new Big Lies about what they've done, why they've done it, and what they're going to be doing. And for that entire time the members of Congress have been slack jawed stupid suckers and nod and believe the lies they've been told. That seems to be fraying lately, though.

* For instance, even if you're reading this but not on Facebook, they know you exist, and they have a unique profile for you associated with your tax data, your employment history, all your credit card transactions, your bank transactions, your health history, your car insurance, where you live, what car you drive, who else is in your family, etc. etc. If they have any photos of you (say from the DVLA or DMV) then they are quietly tagging you in every photo a Facebook member uploads. If you have a forum history, they may have that. They do this for being a 'third party partner' that pays other companies to pass on all their data about everyone. If there's some entity who knows something about you, Facebook knows it. Often even an entity that wouldn't sell their data directly to Facebook (the DVLA might have a twinge about it) usually has other third parties they're using as consultants, and Facebook gets it from them. I hate Facebook, I've never used it, but they know more about me than my mum does.

Storing the Quran on your phone makes you a terror suspect in China

Re: Well, sure

> As an American who can barely point to China on a map that means a lot.

> You probably havent a clue about anything about China or its history.

I worked in Baoding in Heibei, stooge. Spent some months for my job there in the early 2000s. It was the Chinese employees there who taught me about Han Chinese being the Real Chinese compared to the lesser ethnic groups.

Also good lord, the pollution.

Well, sure

For China, if you're not Han Chinese, you're a terrorist or at worst highly suspicious. And the Quran would be highly correlated with not being Han Chinese. It doesn't even matter what it actually says, it means you are not one of the Real Chinese, you're an inferior mongrel only good for being worked to death.

Broadcom CEO promises $2 billion annual boost to make VMware better at the things it already does

Re: Sure, sure...

Broadcom reduces /their/ costs and substantially raises /customer/ costs when acquiring. So they're going to lay off a ton of people at vmware (more than usual even for an acquisition, if they're operating as normal), then they're going to substantially increase vmware prices so they're making ~$10B more a year, then they're supposedly going to put $2B into vmware to make it 'better'.

Bottom line: This is going to be terrible for existing vmware customers.

Sure, sure...

Of course they're going to jack VMWare prices by at least $20B a year. They paid $60B for it, and jacking costs and laying off huge amounts of people are what Broadcom does when it acquires another company.

Working from home could kill career advancement, says IBM CEO

Uh huh

Being over 35 will completely kill your career advancement at IBM too, unless you're an executive. Maybe people should stop doing that too.

As far as I'm concerned, if working from home keeps me from being hired at a sh#$hole like IBM that's another positive.

Python still has the strongest grip on developers

Hahaha, I was kind of with you a little ways, because as someone who uses C#, Rust, and Python extensively, Python can get a bit unwieldy when the project gets too large, exactly because of the lack of compile time catching of type stuff.

But then you invoked Java. Yes, Python might be mostly 'minor things' if you count substantially advancing the state of scientific knowledge as minor, and then maybe Java does 'actually power most of the world', but I would rather write 10,000 things in Python rather than a single bloated, hellish, corporate piece of crap in Java (yes, I've used it, never again - sane people use C# for that now). Java is for legions of nameless corporate drones to be able to write very large corporate apps (as you said) without stepping on each others' toes too much. Which is great. But for anyone who's good at programming that corporate codepigging is just hell.

Microsoft pushes users to the Edge in Outlook, Teams

Well, it's approriate

Outlook and Teams are both the shittiest products in their class, so this just rubs the fecal matter in your face more. It's very on brand for Microsoft.

IBM pauses counting its billions to trim Red Hat staff

Everyone over 40

Probably firing people over 40, since that's what IBM does. The only thing they've innovated in recently is age discrimination. Why keep an experienced guy on staff who knows your last 20 years of mistakes when you could hire someone right out of college who can make them all over again for half the price?

This isn't enough people to achieve that goal... but they will get there.

ChatGPT creates mostly insecure code, but won't tell you unless you ask

This is totally expected - it doesn't know what you're trying to do

Just to say what should be totally obvious: ChatGPT (or any AI system) has NO IDEA what you're ACTUALLY TRYING TO DO, and all the constraints and requirements that come with that.

It only knows what you told it, which is inadequate, and hundreds millions of lines of low-context code to choose from, which were written with different constraints than you have.

As such, it is guaranteed to write code that's like an outsourced drone grabbing random code snippets from Stack Exchange and smushing them all together till it compiles, because that's the same thing it's doing. It's probably as better than over half the 'programmers' out there, but that's still not good code.

Huawei replaces ERP with homebrew effort, claims it’s perfect and shows company will thrive despite sanctions

Sure, with stolen tech

Sure, they built the perfect AI with the best tech stolen from other countries (like their space program). They're great engineers (improving existing tech - and their improvements in quantum communications are world leading), but terrible at developing fundamental technology. There's no way they could have built this from scratch on their own, so like 'their' linux, and 'their' database this is someone else's AI modified.

But hey, as long as the country pours so much money and effort into technological / scientific espionage, it's true they can keep thriving on the latest borrowed tech.

More ads in Windows 11 Start Menu could be last straw for some

You don't have to use the native start menu - there are better alternatives

Between Start11 and ueli (ueli.app) I never, ever see the native start menu, and I have no desire to. They're both better than the functionality it provides. Yes, Start11 will cost you $6 (or $3 each for 5), but that's trivial for the peace of mind, and ueli is free.

Of course the plebs are going to have to use the native start menu, but El Reg people have options.

It's this easy to seize control of someone's Nexx 'smart' home plugs, garage doors

US Company

Looking at their website, they brag about how they're a US company with 'smart engineers' who are 'experts in IoT' (lawl).

But that cuts both ways - If they were a Chinese company making IoT stuff this complete lack of security would just be working as expected, but instead people are actually upset about it.

Are you ready to go all-in, head-first, on a laptop? ASUS's Zenbook Pro 16X asks for that commitment

That keyboard....

Yeah, that keyboard sucks, and as you said is obviously the first point of failure. And that touchpad with numpad functionality looks even more annoying than the usual touchpads for accidental presses. Hard pass.

TikTok cannot be considered a private company, says Australian report

Re: Every Chinese company of sufficient size is a state company

Yes, obviously every US defense contractor is completely the US Govt's bitch, which is why I used Boeing there. But, for example, in the US Valve, Google, Chick-Fil-A, and Home Depot are not. Or for the UK you can use Sainsburys, BAT, Barclay's, Virgin. Obviously they are not 100% disconnected from the law, but they're not outright arms of the government. In China, those equivalents are.

Every Chinese company of sufficient size is a state company

By law, every business in China is owned by the CCP and 'allowed', with varying degrees of freedom, to operate for its benefit. Otherwise you'd just have greedy, grasping, cutthroat capitalism that oppresses the proletariat and makes poison milk and that would be terrible! What varies is how much direct oversight there is. All medium to large companies have a cell of the CCP in them, which may or may not be explicitly labeled. Often, management is also CCP, so the lines might be quite blurry. If the company is small enough they might not even bother, but just because it's not worth their time, not because they don't own you.

Obviously, something as integrated into everyday Chinese life as Tik Tok is going to have strong oversight. Ditto for TenCent.

Certainly in all countries you have companies that are the govt's eager bitches (AT&T, Boeing ,etc. in America), but in Xi's China it's not even a choice.

You couldn't have more of a boilerplate 'here go post this statement from your fellow teens' if you tried. Perhaps you should add some references to running dogs?

Adidas grapples with $1.3B in unsold Yeezy sneakers after breaking up with Kanye West

‘$1.3 billion’

$1.3B of sales price means about $50m worth of actual cost to make them. These are semi luxury items which means the markup is insane.

Amid the gloom of widespread layoffs, Fujitsu is hiring and acquiring

There's still a huge demand for skilled engineers

Yes, the giant bloated corporations hired way too many people during the pandemic and are now laying off tens of thousands of them.

But those are mostly siloed unskilled people, mostly right out of college, who did nothing useful and have very few actual skills other than whining about how the lunchroom is stocked.

The job market is still desperate for engineers who have concrete skills in getting stuff done in an actual production environment. We are desperate to hire someone locally who can read a datasheet and write a SPI/I2C driver for that device. I would love to hire someone who has actual C# skills and can write or maintain multithreaded .Net 8 WinForms apps and actually knows why secondary threads can't try to modify the GUI. I get about 10 inquiries a week from people who want to hire me. The market here is still desperate for good people.

I'm not trying to brag here, I'm just trying to say that the widespread layoffs are of mostly useless corporate drones and there is still a severe shortage of actually talented people. If you have skills, you should have no problem getting a job.

Infosys founder slams working from home, side hustles, as slowing India's growth

Ffffft

Moonlighting is great for the economy. It's bad for Infosys. Which is already a gigantic evil behemoth, so teeny tiny violin for Murthy, who's worth $5B on the back of cheap Indian labor.

Ukraine invasion blew up Russian cybercrime alliances

Public and Open

Russian cybercriminals and and government have been allies for decades, and they've effectively been arms of the government ranging from hands off wink wink to direct government funding and oversight, as in China. Some Russian groups are entirely government operated but pretending to be independent, again like China. I guess this just makes it official like North Korea or Iran.

And of course the bit where the slavics outside Russia no longer treat Russia with kid gloves.

Twitter algorithm to be open sourced 'next week,' says Musk

Algorithm Soucce Code

if( Tweet.UserId == GIANT_ANGRY_BABY_ELMO )

{

..... // TODO Make these a config file option, he demands changes

..... // to these every night at midnight after smoking too much weed

..... Tweet.Views *= 1234; // obfuscate the 000s

..... Tweet.Likes * = 11.5; // ditto

..... Tweet.Retweets *= 5.2;

}

( . added just to keep the indents )

Tech job bonfire rages on as Microsoft, GitLab and others join in

Yahoo?

Why does Yahoo have 8,000 employees, or even 800? Are they all cold call ad salesmen?

Guy accused of wrecking crypto exchange now hauled into court

Public Service

Seems like he performed a public service by bringing down a crypto platform? Maybe they'll take that into account at sentencing.

Malvertising attacks are distributing .NET malware loaders

Ad blocker is mandatory

I really suspect I'm preaching to the choir here, but let me be the one to state the obvious.

This is why you need an ad blocker everywhere you go, or you're just having random sex without condoms in Haiti. Every single ad network has been compromised at some point, even the small 'indie' ones you'd like to support, and most of them have been compromised repeatedly because the attackers are more determined than the ad companies. Even if they beg you to turn off ad blocking, don't, or you'll get hit by a driveby.

I subscribe where I can - and if El Reg had an option I would do it (am I missing one?). I read you as much as I read Ars Technica, which I subscribe to.

Tesla admits it was asked to hand over Autopilot, Full Self-Driving docs to investigators

Documents?

Tesla doesn't seem like the kind of company that would actually bother to document anything, as writing documentation takes time away from critical new features like being able to play video games on the console. Maybe they could send them some email chains?

Landlord favorite Twitter sued for allegedly not paying rent on Market Square HQ

It's an asian thing

(Mainland) Chinese love their giant catch-all apps (WeChat, etc), that will do your social media, your banking, your shopping, your rideshare, your food delivery, mass surveillance, realty and rent, personal loans, etc. etc. all in one, because they give zero f@#$s about personal privacy and having a giant evil vampire squid tech company knowing every single thing about you. South Korea has one too (Kakao). Tech giants in the West (and India, etc.) are always salivating at the idea of making one in their market because if you can pull it off your customers are completely locked in and it's the ultimate in rentseeking.

But I think if it were possible in the West Facebook would have already done it, since they're the epitome of giant evil vampire squid tech company. We mostly aren't fans of being locked in to one company to rule our lives - Apple is the closest some people come, and Apple doesn't care for the conglomerate penalty.

Re: Twitter is still a company?

'Just with different management. What has changed?'

As Elmo has so amply demonstrated, EVERYTHING changed. Twitter went from super stable, a good reliable tenant, to being run by an angry capricious toddler who doesn't pay his rent and doesn't even clean the place (he fired all the janitors) so now it's (half literally) a stinking shithole.

This is why lease contracts usually include clauses about major change of ownership.