Posts by sarusa 347 publicly visible posts • joined 23 May 2022
(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.
'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.
Cats have way more operating modes than this. There's sleepy mode, there's cuddly mode, there's goddamn pissed at you mode, there's hungry mode, there's zoomies mode, there's playful mode, there's grooming mode, there's let's kill something mode...
They seem to have only looked at videos where cats interact with other cats and determined that 2+ cats interacting with each other can be 1) playful, 2) unhappy, 3) unsure. This seems to miss the grooming mode, sleeping together mode, and ignore each other entirely mode, among others.
But what do expect from youtube.
Elmo's insistence that they remove all the sensors except the cameras can't be helping. Humans can drive with only one eye, but the car doesn't understand what it's actually seeing so it will chase people carrying stop signs and various other stupid things. The real win comes in giving cars better sensors than people can ever hope to have (like LIDAR) and then working with that info.
Looks like they did what China did and took open source, made some minor tweaks, and are trumpeting it as a tour de force of patriotic ingenuity. It doesn't include any Google apps, including Play store, which is what you'd expect from AOSP, but they're spinning that as a feature.
The 'no malware' claim is obvious bullshit. They do have a whitelist of known good apps, but that is of course easily bypassed by anyone determined.
There's nothing obviously wrong with this, but given the Modi government's authoritarian bent it probably includes govt spyware baked in.
https://www.firstpost.com/world/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-bhar-os-or-bharat-os-the-made-in-india-operating-system-that-wants-to-take-on-android-12044232.html
https://www.indiatimes.com/explainers/technology/explained-how-isbharos-different-from-android-and-ios-591139.html
Lots of sources if you just search.
If India's going to 'build' a national OS, it'll be the same way China did - take Linux, customize it, and pretend they built it from scratch as an incredible tour de force of their national technical prowess. Since this is mobile they'll start with Android instead, but same deal. India's government lacks the resources and willpower to build an OS from scratch* - and as you pointed out, even if they did nobody would want it.
* Certain companies like Tata might be able to if they wanted to sink hundreds of millions of dollars and a decade into it, but they already know that's a fool's game.
So it's Google, they'll abandon these in a year or two. By that point will enough Android phones even have upgraded to Android 13 (or whatever has the 'Find My' support) for these to even be useful?
The thing with AirTags is that iOS phones update at a spectacular rate and of course Apple has the concept of a sustained ecosystem with gradual improvements which Google completely lacks.
Yes, of course you'd expect Asian consumers to be the ultimate consumer cows, wholeheartedly being the parody of 'if you make it they will throw money at, no matter how stupid it is'.
The 'mobile world' is an economy of super sophisticated sharks preying on incredibly naive dumbasses fountaining money in every direction - since having any consumer education is contrary to Asian principles. Of course Asia is going to lead the world in voracious evil corporations preying on uneducated consumers. That's a great thing for the companies and a terrible thing for the ignorant dumbasses who are their customers.
Okay so any bit helps, but it kind of feels like they entered a zoo of rabid dogs, snagged one that was particularly foamy, and called it case closed. 'Roight then! That's all, sorted innit?'
It sounds like the only difference between this and other crypto schemes is that they didn't actually bother to make their own worthless ponzi coin. Which would have been easy enough (it's trivial to roll your own using existing tools), so I'm surprised they didn't bother. Then they'd have been perfectly legit as far as crypto goes.
'The software giant has also positioned the Premium edition as offering so many features that you can do everything in Teams and won't need to endure the misery of running multiple tools.'
Teams is just a bunch of separate tools they've acquired and stapled together with chewing gum, cat hair, and used condoms. That's why it's such a bloated, buggy, dog-slow, and inconsistent piece of crap. My life was much less miserable when we were running multiple tools that were actually good at doing what they do, like Slack.
Really, the only reason to use Teams has been (a) IT'S FREE so we're using it no matter how bad it is, and (b) Microsoft admins don't know how to work with or configure anything that's outside the Microsoft stack. So now you're removing (a).
Users here had no problem - Win11 is really just Win10 with a more consistent interface and some new functionality. The only thing that threw some people is that the icons in the lower bar are centered rather than left justified, but that's easily toggled or you get used to it fairly quickly. Of course you still have to turn off search in the taskbar, turn off news, turn off weather, turn off Windows Search Indexer, etc... but those are Win10 problems too, and nothing group policy can't smack down. We had one guy who was running Start10 on Win10 so now he's running Start11 on Win11. All in all it's no worse than running Win10 for bugs.
The problem, as TFA mentions, is that we've got several machines that can't run Win11 - they could probably be coerced into it, but that would be bad from a support perspective. So they'll be on Win10 till they die or get replaced. But that's not really a big deal because Win10 and Win11 really aren't all that different - WIn11 is more Win10.1. Unlike 98/2000 -> XP, XP -> Vista, Vista -> 7, 7 -> 8, 8 -> 10 which were huge changes.
So anyhow, the sky is not falling.
The entire point of the 'Freedom' Convoy was that vaccines are more dangerous than COVID-19. That's a direct attack on science, because science says that unvaccinated people died more than 10 to 1 from COVID compared to vaccinated people. Everyone getting vaccinated is a 100% societal good and personal good - everyone wins, and might actually stop COVID, like Polio. We'll never know, because the anti-vaxxers mean we can never reach enough immunity.
Unfortunately, Canada imported America's MAGA dumbf#$@ery, like they're a US colony, and couched this as 'mah freedumbs'. The majority of Canadians who believe this twaddle are old uneducated white people who also are very scared of the brown people overtaking them and think they need to be dealt with. You could easily see this in the Freedumb Convoy videos. You had a few token First Nations who like protesting things, but it's mostly just old uneducated white people screeing about Bill Gates microchips in the vaccines.
It was old uneducated white people mounting a show of solidarity against educated people and brown people who threaten their livelihoods.
Wow, I have to say I'm really disappointed in how many anti-vax twats are reading The Register. The site is great, and I thought the readership in general were better than this. Of course there's a lot of commenters making the sane points, but there's more crazy MAGA/Brexiters than I expected. I guess tech does attract more than its fair share of Dunning–Krugers.
I think people are also starting to realize how chintzy the Model 3s are. Besides the parts falling off, once you've been in a Model 3 and the much nicer Chevy Bolt there is no way in heck you're going to buy the much chintzier Model 3 (with much less rear leg room). And the Bolt is much cheaper! What sold Teslas was the reputation, and now Elmo's rather torpedoed that.
The Tesla Model S is still pretty sexy... but those aren't driving their bottom line.
Seriously, it's been breach after breach since they got bought out by LogMeIn. Private Equity Twats are all about squeezing blood out of the turnip, never about improving the turnip. I know LastPass is super convenient, but if you actually care about any of your passwords and logins use something else.
Since they got the vaults of every LastPass customer, it's entirely worth their while to try bruteforce on all of them. Hope you used a super annoying master password!
It was pretty clever, but they got tripped up by the usual mistake petty thieves make - they got greedy. If they'd just kept it to a small group they probably could have gotten away with it forever (they still got away with it for years), but when enough cabs are participating and everyone knows about it by word of mouth then even an entity as clumsy and stupid and slow as the Port Authority will notice. Of course I'm sure the Russians were pushing them to expand to increase the number of $10 fees to fund Pooty Poot's war machine.
If you have a Ring doorbell you stuck a badly designed surveillance device on the front of your house that shares its video footage with the cops (paid for using your tax money). The fact that the cops love these makes it doubly delicious that they'd get taunted by their own spy devices.
Victims sometimes get killed by trigger-happy pigs when they're SWATted, so I probably should tut tut, but since nobody actually got hurt that I can tell, it's rather hilarious.
I fear the work needed to keep this thing completely dust / cat hair / crumbs / human hair / (and for some of you some worse things) free.
And you can't even put a keycaps graphic behind it so you can see where the keys are, because the screen is some distance below so you've got some parallax. I guess you could offset the graphic for where your head normally is in relation to the keys, but if you shift around in your chair they'll be misaligned again. It's pure form over function - but I guess it's not pretending to be anything else!
He's been looking for a new CEO for Twitter for over a month at least (well documented by WSJ, etc.) 'Running' Twitter into the ground is more work than he likes to do. This is time he could spend shitposting and smoking weed!
So now he puts out a sham poll, and at the end he can be pretending to be bowing to the will of the plebiscite. Then he sits back and lets his patsy try to save the company he's already nearly destroyed, and as he's still the owner he gets to meddle as much as he wants (You get a ban! You get a ban! You all get a ban!) and blame it on his patsy, and of course the patsy takes the blame for the complete wreck he's left it in.
Where would you even find a sucker to be his patsy, you might ask? But there's always someone willing to be a C**, and he's got plenty of right wing sycophant twats who still love him and would be salivating at running one of his companies.
Java is already the new COBOL. They're both overly verbose languages designed so that legions of barely competent corporate code drones* can work on code without shooting each other's feet too much. As such, giant corporations have invested so much money in it Java that it'll still be clunking along decades from now (and a lot of 'newer' languages run on the JVM) - I think your colleague has an excellent plan.
* There are some awesomely skilled COBOL and Java programmers - but they are not the target market.
I don’t know anyone who actually wants to use Java (I’m sure there are a few, I apologize to you). You use Java because that’s what your giant corporate overlords mandate. And they mandate it since it’s the new COBOL: an overly verbose language that makes it harder for legions of low skilled corporate drones to step on each other’s toes. And at this point they’ve invested so much in it that it’s locked in for decades.
There is no favorable explanation for converting offices into hotbunk dorms for your H1-B slave labor. Especially when you've made the completely unreasonable demand that everyone work in the office for a job that's entirely software (minus a very few people).
Or perhaps you're suggesting that these aren't for workers to sleep in, they're so Elmo can have spontaneous non-consensual sex with his unable to say no H1-B drones? Well I guess that's possible, so we shouldn't entirely jump to conclusions.
I think the biggest thing here is that he didn't even bother telling employees what was going on.
I think it's more likely the lack of moderation since Elmer fired all the moderators. Racists are running rampant (though this is as Elmer wanted), China's spamming massive amounts of porn to drown out lockdown protests, and child prawn has to be going crazy again now that there's no moderation. Apple probably just asked him to fix his shit, so he's gone off the rails.
"Musk's own lawyer also reportedly tried to reassure staff, saying none of them would be going to jail, regarding the situation with the FTC."
Translation: You're going to be Elmo's fall guys, SUCKERS. Also enjoy those mandatory 80 hour weeks with mandatory presence in the office.
Why are you still working for this twat?
If you'd seen all the Twitter money making schemes Musk is spewing in all directions (like turning it into a lender, since that worked for him with merging with Paypal) you'd know that selling your PI is not first on the list, but is definitely up there. Your PI will be sold. Musk would grind you, live puppies and live kittens into bloodmeal if it were profitable.
And terms and conditions don't meant a thing to him. He's already repeatedly violated the promises, laws, and corporate policies with his employees.
Facebook made $115B in advertising revenue last year, which was a jump of $30B over 2020. It's been going up $10-20B/year for the past 6 years. And it dominates the online market for gullible old people. Given that, if you hadn't been paying attention to what else has been happening, then you might have thought the Evil Online Empire would continue to grow forever and the stock valuation would be warranted, at least in comparison with other tech stocks with crazy price/earnings ratios.
Thankfully, this year has ripped that bandage off. Earnings have declined for two quarters in a row. TikTok is eating FB's lunch. Young people hate FB. FB has no vision for the future except Zuck's Metaverse that nobody wants. Unfortunately, like AOL, FB will still have hundreds of millions of dumb old people who think FB is the Internet (MAGA voters, Brexit voters), so it can linger indefinitely like herpes, but any reduction is welcome.
No more sympathy for terminated Facebook employees than I do for telemarketers who whine about how bad their job is or Empire grunts in Star Wars who get annihilated by their own officers. You knew who you were working for. If it were Google you could maybe try an excuse about how they weren't bad at one point, but FB has been evil for its entire existence. Maybe you can go work somewhere that isn't actively dedicated to bringing down stable democratic systems of government because that gets you more clicks.
This. I never get bombarded with notifications for 2FA I have set up with Authy (about 40 different ones), because the model doesn't support or require it.
Of course I know why they do the 'buzz your phone app' thing, because they want to make it more conveeeeenient, but that always leads to giant holes. The 'IS THIS YOU?!?' design is just a complete misfeature, so easy to hit the wrong thing for instance. Steam uses an interesting way around this - you use your Steam app on your phone (which you're logged into) to scan the QR code they put up, so it's 'pull', not 'push'.
And of course SMS verification is just a complete abomination, so easily bypassed by people with the right criminal resources - which also happen to be the real bad guys.
I've been to Taiwan and Mainland China... Taiwan was fine, and Mainland China had much delicious food that smells great. But Mainland China was also unspeakably foul much of the time. Transportation in particular reeked with the smells of urine and/or feces. Industrial cities like Guangzhou smelled of cancerous death (tons of people wearing masks, pre-covid, just to keep from getting black lung). And god forbid you get anywhere near a stand selling Stinky Tofu (also a potential hazard in Taiwan).
This is not just Mainland China, I wouldn't want VR Odor in San Francisco either.
Yeah, I hadn't noticed at all... because I turned off Suggested Actions immediately. What a complete abortion of a misfeature. Whenever MS tries to be 'helpful' it's Clippy all over again.
For those who don't know what it does, whenever you copy text containing a phone number, date, or time it pops up a Window saying 'Hey, it looks like you just copied a phone number! Would you like to make a phone call? Huh? Huh? Please?' or 'Oh hey, that looks like a date - why don't I open Calendar for you?' (this may not be the exact text :p)
That's right up there with 'just the tip, honest'.
China has zero concept of privacy or anonymity. Its entire system of government is based on that being impossible. Dissenters will be ruthlessly crushed, and everyone else (the vast majority of heavily indoctrinated dumbasses) will flame them vigorously on social networks to earn social points.
But of course they have to lie out their asses like a diarrhea fountain to try to make this shitshow global. Good luck with that, fascist pigs, and Glory to Panda Boy!
Elon's bloviating about autopilot were 100% fraudluent and completely undoable with the technology he had and even more undoable with the technology he has now since he's stripped every sensor but cameras from Tesla's cars. Tesla's 'autopilot' and 'self driving' have been sold for years by Musk as hands off, let the car do it - the term 'autopilot' entirely implies that. But his simple DNN can never deliver it.
So yes, it was entirely fraudulent and he should be prosecuted for it.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
