Posts by Charles Bu

One third of adults can't delete device data

Re: Surely

Yes, it would be very similar with all Android OS mobile phones - which as you say, Pixels and high-end Samsungs use, but also low-end Samsungs, middle-of-the-road Samsungs, Motorolas (high, low, and mid), Xiaomis and most other Android OS mobiles made in the last few years.

Bottom line is, if you don't have the specific Google account details to log in (ie previously registered to the device), you would find it very difficult or very costly to access any of the info belonging to the user who hadn't wiped it.

Google's ex-CEO U-turns after saying staff 'going home early' killed winning

How to say "be my wage slave"...

...without saying "be my wage slave".

No, startups primarily work because they have a better product or service than the existing offerings (try selling doggie do's as deodorant outside Boots and no matter how well you talk it up, no one will buy it).

The vast majority of people I've worked with (000s over the years) work very hard, and are generally thinking about their work 24/7 even when they're not physically in front of their laptop, working.

UK comms watchdog banning inflation-linked mid-contract price rises

Meh

Actually meh: the problem is that these big 3 UK telcos are de facto colluding on price levels and rises, because there is simply not enough competition.

You only have to look at the trashing of Phones4U in an alleged coordinated way to see "quiet collusion" is the way they work.

Mobile telecoms are a utility and should be price-regulated as such: bare minimum pricing, more competition, easier switching and more pressure to reduce - or at least communicate - lower tariff-prices where a customer could get more data for lower (monthly) charge.

Instead, EE for example makes 1-2 billion in profit every year and they're giving themselves massive payrises at the top of those organisations every year for doing sod-all meaningful at the customer level.

TeamViewer says Russia broke into its corp IT network

How to win friends and influence people...

...by Vlad "the Impaler" Putin.

'One Less Car' Uber bets a grand you'll ditch your wheels

How wonderful and selfless of them...

...where can we donate to this charity?

Julian Assange to go free in guilty plea deal with US

Cumberbatch shot his bolt too early...

...Wikileaks II: Return of the Lea-King?

Tesla shareholders agree to pay Musk staggering sum of $48B

Benefactor of government loans

Amazingly, this package dwarfs even the LA Times estimate that Tesla and other companies Müsk owns or runs having received $4.9bn from the US government as of 2015*.

*Yes, an amateur Google-search-based figure; possibly b.s.

When even the right-wing press...

...denounce an executive pay packet as "obscene", you know the calculation was: (hubris x unbridled greed)¹⁰

Microsoft bigwig says the Feds catching Chinese spies in Exchange Online is the cloud working as intended

Forget it, it's only 1.5%

"Smith told lawmakers that Microsoft's business in China represents about 1.5 percent of his company's revenue..."

...and 98.5% of cyber security breaches.

Euro banks worry AI will increase their dependence on US big tech

Out of their league 2: Take it or leave it

US big tech drives Germany and France mad with how much it couldn't care less about them.

Study finds a quarter of bosses hoped RTO would make employees quit

Re: And the interesting thing is...

One of the best comments about work I've ever read. Thank you for confirming all my suspicions that were always implicitly denied by a load of corporate rats and their bilge about their "culture".

Please can you somehow repeatedly get this millions of views and reactions on LinkedIn where brown-nosers and "leaders" asking us to "go on a journey" can actually have it put under their noses and where they can't sweep it under the carpet?

PayPal is planning an ad network built off your purchase history

Re: You just bought a kettle...

Yep, guess there's always the DSR period for a change of mind...

China shows off machine-gun-toting robot dog and its AI-powered puppy

"...the CCP says it hopes the new robots will help it to get back to doing what it does best - suppressing protests in Tianenmen Square."

First Armv9 automotive CPUs aim to power AI-enabled vehicles

Healthy competition

The bottom just dropped out of Mobileye's world...

Microsoft drags Windows Subsystem for Android into the trash

Big tech grinding gears

This sounds like the latest in worsening interoperability between Goog and other big tech co platforms.

I've not seen any publicity about these two issues, but from what I've seen, Windows has been making a concerted effort to block the use of Chrome browser on Windows 11 by stopping the Chrome app even opening. Here the motive would be revenge for Chromebook taking OS market share off Windows laptops (UK was at 8% in 2020, but now must be closer to 20% and rising).

Secondly, it appears Samsung is also now causing severe glitches in how Chrome displays pages through the One UI making them unreadable - if this is a covert strategy then Samsung have the perfect motive in that Pixel has been threatening Samsung's mobile phone market share in recent years.

Any others experiencing major new interoperability issues?

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

Re: Corruption..1000's of terminals?

Just want to vehemently agree on everything you said.

It's insane how badly this area of government and state-funded IT is run compared with high quality private sector firms, even like bigger ones like Endava, or Epam.

Just so sad to think of the effect all this had on people's lives.

Epic decision sees jury find Google's Play store is illegal monopoly

Re: Breaking up is hard to do x

We digress, but they didn't even actually originate search - that was espotting or overture iirc.

But Edison arguably didn't originate the light bulb, da Vinci didn't originate all his stuff, etc etc.

My comment was just for funz x

Breaking up is hard to do x

Big tech: "we made it, we grew it, we love it ... but now they wanna take our code-child away."

Samsung UK discloses year-long breach, leaked customer data

Doesn't surprise me

Samsung UK is the most inept organisation I've ever worked for in terms of basic IT management. Botched rollouts, uncommunicated rollouts, no ability to handle remote v in-office (Chertsey) working smoothly, etc.

At least til a year ago (possibly still), they couldn't even get company Outlook address books to work properly and safely: staff can't even get an address book name to pop up as an auto-suggest in an email 'to' field because of blocks IT have put on it.

And the SEUK online store team have the most over-inflated opinions of themselves I've ever known in a digital retail business. They got lucky during the pandemic with people coming online to buy stuff and claimed the success for themselves, as if it was down to something useful they'd done.

Continual events like this should land the UK subsidiary LT in court.

Samsung family sells $2B worth of shares to pay inheritance tax bill

No way

They actually did something legal?

Mid-contract telco price hikes must end, Ofcom told

Re: 75 percent ... would be put off ... if they knew prices were going to rise mid-contract

Brilliantly put. And they rely on every word to screw you out of every penny of value they possibly can. Trust me (or don't): I used to work for one. They are a bunch of used car salesmen with billions in budget and huge legal teams.

Meta's ad-free scheme dares you to buy your privacy back, one euro at a time

Unclean!

I just needed the leper warning above as I'm about to say that some people won't be happy until big tech get no profit at all for whatever they provide that billions of people can't get enough of nor find any good alternative for, and they go out of business.

Unclean!

Pot calls the kettle hack as China claims Uncle Sam did digital sneak peek first

Re: "We're not the ones spying, you are."

Yeah, they all are.

The issue these days is more whose side someone is on (if any), for whatever political or business reasons.

US cyber ambassador says China knows how to steal its way to dominance of cloud and AI

Divide and conquer

Trying to isolate the USA by making out they are the only ones who'll lose if China wins is a good ruse.

US mulls retaliation for China blacklisting Micron without evidence of security threat

Re: Ha ha ha

Think they've "shared" for a good 20 years - the "sharing" was enacted as either allowing, or not making much if any effort to prevent the stealing/espionage happening, rather than despatching all the corporate secrets to Beijing monthly, accompanied by a couple of strippers ;)

Elizabeth Holmes is going to prison – with a $500m bill

I don't think you wanted to do that!

"The main thing about money, Bud, is that it makes you do things you don't want to do."

Lou (Wall Street, 1987)

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

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

Upvote for "meat shield" - and worth the double mention.

Dead woman walking

Re "it looks like a new Chief Twit has been found to throw under the Cybertruck"

Musk will vampire her for every drop of advertising industry knowledge, then discard her lifeless husk just before all the most generous contract terms kick in.

Alibaba Cloud to offer custom LLMs-as-a-service

How long til rebrand?

Catchy name. Unforgettable.

Samsung reportedly leaked its own secrets through ChatGPT

Samsung's IT security is hilarious

"Samsung reportedly applied "emergency measures" that include limiting upload capacity to 1024 bytes per question."

Samsung's IT security operations are one ongoing "emergency measure" though?

Their VPN capability is a joke, the blocking of copy and paste, the blocking of any upload to Google docs, etc. It's one hard-coded (yet so easily-circumvented) rule after another.

You specialists on here (I'm just a humble tech marketer) would be in stitches if you saw it in inaction (sic) first-hand.

Scientists speak their brains: Please don’t call us boffins

Re: Usage

I wonder how Frank Bough would have felt about all this.

Guess we'll never know for sure.

Nasty niff

There was a young boffin called Tiff,

Who folks viewed as decidedly stiff.

She played by the book,

And earned what she took,

Unperturbed by the ignorant whiff.

German 5G network ban said to loom for Huawei and ZTE

Re: key parts of critical infrastructure might become dependent on foreign technology

"have confirmed"

Past tense misses the actual dilemma.

It's not Chinese gear right here and now, it's Chinese gear, with all the major investment and operational commitments that brings, for the next couple of decades.

ie. Just because Chinese gear might (assuming you're comment is true) be safe now, doesn't mean the drinking partner chosen for the duration of the pub lock-in won't slip a little poison into the drink any time later on.

Bosses failing to offer hybrid work lose out in recruitment

Re: Remote flexiblity is not a perk of any job

"Any employer, in 2023, that is only offering the ability to work from an office..."

Absolutely right. Now the tech is properly in place for video conferencing with fast and reliable BB connections, there's just no excuse.

I was invited to interview today and the HR guy basically told me that they ask people to come in for two days a week but no one enforces it. If he'd told me I'd have to honour that I'd have walked away, simple as, and he knew it.

The labour market is far, far more flexible with remote working; less pressure and pollution in city centres and on transport infrastructure, and healthier life outside work.

EU plan to make big tech pay 'fair share' of telco fees reportedly weeks away

Re: Everyone should pay to get to the Internet backbone

My thoughts exactly, Shirley. If users gonna use, bandwidth gonna band. And whatever it means that's a fact.

Also, I thought users already paid for this by paying more for a higher-allowance mobile signal... I hope those naughty telcos aren't attributing mobile usage to fixed line usage - that'd be quite easy to baffle European officials with.

Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free

Admittedly a theory, but...

...still one that could conceivably be leveraged without comeback... Google are (perhaps unintentionally) gradually allowing more Gmail spam through into the Gmail spam folder to increase non-paying One/Gmail users' gigab's of storage, causing increasing numbers of users to hit the 15Gb limit so they become more likely to subscribe to Google One at like $2 a month.

Alphabet reshuffles to meet ChatGPT threat

Re: ChatGPT

From what I've seen on LI, it has indeed attracted their attention. Advertisers are quickly discovering how to write their own SEO plans using ChatGPT rather than pay a consultant...

Even if...

...ChatGPT itself isn't strong enough to disrupt Google/search, it's ow quite plain to see that that day ain't far away for AI.

But with the utmost reespeck to other commenters, the massive danger for Goog is not the informational or research/academic aspect, but that ChatGPT (or other AI) proves a better, more efficient and more helpful recommender of products/solutions that people buy and companies advertise.

ChatGPT starts linking to the right product or service at every time of asking and hey presto...

Elon Musk to step down as Twitter CEO: Help us pick his replacement

Snoop dooooooogg!

Everyone's favourite dogg asked everyone if he should run Twitter. The answer.....

81% were in favour.

It doesn't much more conclusive than that.

https://www.newsweek.com/snoop-dogg-voted-run-twitter-after-elon-musk-told-step-down-poll-1768331

Corporate execs: Get back, get back, to the office where you once belonged

Damn. No loved ones outside work to spend time with? Or sociable leisure, volunteering, community, sport, etc, activities to spend time on?

Hope you found what you were looking for.

Horses for courses

Whether or when to WFH or from the office is a case of horses for courses.

You like it, do it. But don't be a kn0b and try to force others to do the same as you for no good reason.

Bahamian rap: Crypto villain Sam Bankman-Fried arrested

Big kid

SBF - the biggest, most-indulged kid on the block.

"I blame the parents."

130,000 UK businesses sue Google over £13.6B in lost ad revenues

Vested interest = not real?

Hang on, by the logic or the last bit of your comment, anything where anyone has a vested interest is not real.

Think we need to wind back the scepticism a little at least until maybe find someone who actually knows about this stuff, or til we learn some facts about tracking via ad platform and first party analytics, before we make our tiny little minds up.

Correlation with other data

If nothing else, what you'd see is a corresponding increase in on-site traffic and clicks around your website, and actions such as orders or sign ups for whatever service you provide, also going up.

So it's fairly obvious if the ad clicks are genuine. And vast majority of the time, they probably are - if they weren't, you would get group litigation orders and stu... Oh. ;)

Seriously though, these and networks and platforms wouldn't last and wouldn't kept getting used by the vast majority of advertisers if they didn't generate an obvious, measurable effect.

UK competition watchdog investigates Apple and Google 'stranglehold' over the mobile market

Two whorse race

Google would love to take share of the Android market from Samsung, Oppo and Xiaomi.

Just think of how great it would be if or when there were only two mobile hardware options as well as only two OS options.

China is likely stockpiling and deploying vulnerabilities, says Microsoft

Hermit

Hermit...in terms of anything trying to get *in*.

They're quite happy to extrude their guts when it suits them though.

Elon Musk jettisons Twitter leadership, says takeover was 'to try to help humanity'

Musk is getting older and losing his edge. Now just wants to protect his reputation and worldview. Spending 44bn is certainly one way to do it.