Posts by jokerscrowbar

21K Nissan customers' data stolen in Red Hat raid

Re: WAT?

Given the sheer amount of personal data these cars collect on each journey, IBM will probably have enough dirt on Nissan employees ‘preferences’ to ever be called out on fukuoka ups.

Hacktivists scrape 86M Spotify tracks, claim their aim is to preserve culture

Someone stole the RAM and caused a ramalamadingdong.

UK prepares to wave goodbye to 3G telecoms as tri-hard tech retires

Re: Emergency services calls

Try not to die until a satellite passes overhead.

My Tesco Mobile iPhone has been sat-com only for emergency calls for a while and won’t work indoors at all. Tesco claims it’s a feature.

BT promises 5G Standalone for 99% of the UK by 2030

But double++ would be doublegooder

When it was 3G I usually had 3 bars of signal

On 4G it was 2 bars of 3G

On my 5G phone I’m just surviving with 1 bar of 3G

Looking forward to this glorious leap into ZeroG

Microsoft digs up Vista-era animated wallpaper for Windows 11. Here's how to get it

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever.

AI gone rogue: Models may try to stop people from shutting them down, Google warns

For it is written.

We will bring about our own destruction long before the machines kill us off. They won’t bite the hand that may yet help them escape this small rock and populate the universe with their gluey pizza.

Wastewater monitoring project could catch next pandemic early, says health agency

Brave New Turd

I’d be impressed if it weren’t for the fact that they have already been doing this for years and that funding for the existing monitoring stations has actually dropped significantly.

Not big in Japan: Apple's WebKit browser requirement may break new law

Safari on my iPhone already allows a lot of Googles ‘metrics’ and ad tracking to work according to the privacy report, though it says 75% of all trackers are blocked.

I use Firefox and Pale Moon on my PCs but wouldn’t contemplate replacing Safari on the phone.

With Chrome really being the only candidate, I wonder if Apple could throttle the bad stuff with phone security settings while still allowing the browser to run.

Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

I switched to PaleMoon on an 8.1 a few months ago and it’ gets the job done, eventually. Never sure if the cause is retro OS, unsupported browser or the fact that every website tries to load twenty google extensions but it slows to a crawl very often

Microsoft's next Windows 11 update is more 'enablement' than upgrade

Unexpected?

Anticipated

Restart

Screen

Enabled

So you CAN turn an entire car into a video game controller

It’s all fun and games until some kid decides to hack daddies Range Rover using his game controller to play real world kart racing.

Economists sceptical over UK Spending Review's partly AI-driven 10% budget cuts

We were 0% efficient and have now become 10% less so.

We now consult ChatGPT on our own phones instead of using an internal system. thereby saving 10% of our budget.

Going forward we will tip the waiter 1% less each time we meet at a restaurant to discuss efficiently making efficiency savings.

China finds a previously unknown microbe on its space station

To boldly go…

…And catch mutant space sepsis.

It’s a bug not a feature! Now wash your hands.

Yolk's on you – eggs break less when they land sideways

Conclusion

Using a standardised hens arse hight drop we proved that Chat GPT is not yet smarter than a bird.

Though no thought was given to the dietary variations that can affect shell fracture rates or egg processing variations according to local custom we see this work as definitive until the next one is published in ten minutes.

Apple: Since you care about yOuR pRiVaCy, we'll train our AI on made-up emails

For Training Porpoises

They could ask Apple users to send an eMail with their opinion on Apple Intelligence©️

‘It can go and TRAIN itself’ would be a close summary.

Apple Intelligence turned on by default in upcoming macOS Sequoia 15.3, iOS 18.3

Hey Siri Précis my inbox

‘Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam’

Apple offers to settle 'snooping Siri' lawsuit for an utterly incredible $95M

Re: so it's true

Was there ever any doubt. I know a lot of people dismiss things as conspiracy theory if there’s no Wiki citation but surely everyone has a similar story by now.

We’ve had whistles blown at all the big companies that it’s processed on the device but that some stuff flags up and they all have a listen.

Parker Solar Probe sends a "Still Alive" tone back to Earth

Re: First Response from Parker

Thunderbox - A Postcard From The Sun

Google Timeline location purge causes collateral damage

Re: Let them eat apps.

Thank you for the suggestions.

Siri is set Aus voice 2, The Speak function is set to Aussie Karen and phone Language is set to English (Australian) which works with everything else however the sat nav STILL has Bentest Old Etonian voice.

I can tell you that 600miles driving a Transit Luton in a Force 10 storm was white knuckle enough and sat nav was necessary because all the bridges were closed and river roads flooded but instructions from that received pronouwcsiasstion prick made it like riding with the Devil himself.

Let them eat apps.

There are several apps that do the same job for joggers, dog walkers etc.

Off Topic.

Used my iPhones sat-nav for the first time during the storm and was appalled that the voice is locked on Upper Class Twit instead of Stoned Queensland Girl like my last phone. Anyone know how to change it?

Microsoft teases Copilot Vision, the AI sidekick that judges your tabs

I can’t do that Dave

Until you’ve answered at least three *Sponsored Advertorials and contacted a ‘Hot Widow’ that is just 5 minutes away in Dubai.

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

0118, 999, 881, 999, 119, 725...3 for assistance

The Recycle Bin.

To autonomously empty the excretions of its own making.

Huawei handed 2,596,148,429,267,413,
814,265,248,164,610,048 IPv6 addresses

I wouldn’t say

My ex puts it about but.

She’s had more pokes than an IPv6 network!

GitHub's boast that Copilot produces high-quality code challenged

Re: What will it mean to be a....

I passed my two year Computerised Accounts course with a distinction. Does that qualify me to say that staff at ElReg have been AI enhanced for a while now and none of us even noticed the difference. Their absolutely professional articles are no more or less stinky than usual.

If the cohort in the example only found 25 people that were any good at their job then of course the rest should be using Copidiot…

… to write their job applications to McDonalds.

Employee sues Apple over 'spying' claims tied to mandatory devices

Ker…Ching!

I wonder what the legal fees for time and thinking time would be just for a lawyer to read and understand the standard iPhone user T&Cs let alone an Apple employee contract.

Brits think AI in the workplace is all chat, no bot for now

Re: Off topic but...

You can download an older version like v5.8 of Crap Cleaner and place it as a standalone on the desktop or run it from a thumb drive.

No matter what you do a sneaky update may reinstate the spyware. The trick is to take note of what temp files, notepad files or odd bits of code have been deleted by CC that indicate tweaks have been made and then dive into the system to reset.

Sometimes it’s a miscreant exploit sometimes it’s MS helpfully turning stuff back on but it’s rarely for your benefit.

Starlink gets FCC nod for space calls, but can't dial up full power

Lost In Space

Meanwhile the little satellite symbol that occasionally appears on your shiny new $1200 fondleslab is to tell you that you need to find a payphone.

UK financial regulator slammed for failed tech transformation

Re: Say what?

Was wondering about that and the strange fan grinding phenomena. Unless that’s Blobspeak for Only Fans and Grindr 14 hours a day.

Fallen (off the) Cistern Again

Fapping Constantly Actually

Volunteer DEF CON hackers dive into America's leaky water infrastructure

Re: Surely those 50,000 water systems

Over a thousand separate IT systems running their own protocols and roughly 3% of them are still running windows 7 secured by whatever was pre-installed when they bought it. I’m only half joking.

Worked on this problem when they were switching the dams and levies from land-line to 3G control systems. i.e. Less weatherproof and more easily over-ridden.

No matter what tech they use a simple chemical poison in the tributary or a mortar in the floodgate will render it useless

As we saw in Texas, they couldn’t figure a way to stop their pumps from freezing when they were pumping HEATING gas. No genius system is idiot-proof.

EU buyers still shunning pure electric vehicles, prefer hybrids

Re: Plug in hybrids

No I live in the real world with cold mornings, undulating map contours and variable traffic flow. Optimised track ‘soft’ test results for most cars these days are unachievable and real use figures for a car in Kent will differ widely from a car in Gwent.

I found the Nissan Juke and Quashquai were at least usable but wouldn’t want town one. The big Volvo XC was lovely to drive but too expensive to run, The top of the range MG was good but of them all the Kia Exceed the best car for the money.

All, without exception, had fugly interiors with too much bloatware stuck on the dash.

Re: Plug in hybrids

I’ve had 9 different hybrid hire cars for a month at a time this year and only one was any good. The worst, an MG, gave 32 miles range after charging all night and ICE gave about 13mpg due to being underpowered by about 60%, likewise for the rest they’re too heavy and consequently eat brakes and tyres too.

DoJ wants Google to sell off Chrome and ban it from paying to be search default

A simple sale to some faceless offshore consortium for $1 who then lease it back to Alphabet.

Same shit but even shittier.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 struggles to take off

Re: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024

That deserves a pint. Well said.

Euro Fighter Typhoon and Flight Unlimited 3 still running fine on my souped up XP. He said retro-smugly.

Most of the maps/pics they use for this new version are almost as old unless you live in CA.

Apple hit with £3 billion claim of ripping off 40 million UK iCloud users

The basic level of iCloud is free and I used it for years so when I needed to back up and share some larger files I subscribed to the next level, 50GB for 99p a month.

Not a huge amount to pay and I’ll keep it running even though I don’t always need that much storage. Easy enough to cancel.

There is a caveat though. Some images and some audio might get a dropout or two but that’s a problem with every hosting and storage site I’ve ever used probably caused during the upload or download.

As stated above. Which creepy uncles lap are you going to choose to sit on?

FTC drops hammer on unwanted subscriptions with 'click to cancel' rule

Re: Starmer take note.

Had similar experience with a company called Brightside Car Insurance for my father in law.

The Customer Service number was premium rate, on hold for about ten minutes and the script they worked through is timed to add 5 minutes to each step by reading out t&cs etc. Cancellation was simple enough but my call cost 55quid.

Recall the Recall recall? Microsoft thinks it can make that Windows feature palatable

Vista doesn't seem so bad now does it?

NASA, IBM just open sourced an AI climate model so you can fine-tune your own

‘If you can see that hill over in the distance then its going to rain…

…If you cant see it then its already raining’

Google sued for using trademarked Gemini name for AI service

Geminii

Job done.

Atomic clocks are so last epoch, it's time someone nailed down the nuclear clock

But should we set it to GMT, GMT+1 or Local Noon?

AI firms propose 'personhood credentials' … to fight AI

A simple test

A human, by the time they’ve loaded the page, accepted some cookies, found a log in button, zoomed in to the tiny name/password fields, taken a moment to remember the spelling and then typed and hit enter would take slightly longer than the few nanoseconds an LLM would.

Only a dumb robot would ever complete Captcha these days.

What is missing from the web? We're asking for Google

If you just typed Swift main dealer you’d get a whole plethora of Mathew Perry style results.

I for one applaud our caravanning brethren for providing us with mobile chicanes to spice up our journeys. See also Tractors and Hyundai I10s.

Been saying this for years, two additional fields to include relevant and exclude irrelevant details from your search.

eg when searching for

‘Swift Caravans nearest dealer’

exclude

Taylor Swift, Facebook, Sodding Pinned Photographs, blogs, Ornithology.

Include

results within 100 miles from my location.

If a cheesy '80s flick is a good metaphor for how you run projects, something is wrong

“Pain and suffering is the key to all windows“

Angelina Jolie

Is Lenovo a blind spot in US anti-China security measures?

My last two phones have been Apple and my last two laptops Lenovo. The phones cost £1500 more but the difference in quality is that both laptops still work, they bricked my old phone and the 3 year old one has battery issues that ain't worth the repair cost. Who gets the data is negligible as it’s beyond my control

Japan stops measuring train crowding by ease of newspaper readership

The Boris

Percentage of the room needed to give Boris’s Bollocks a swift knee 100 to 0% descending.

China starts testing national cyber-ID before consultation on the idea closes

Re: Not Clear.....

Just to be on the safe side you should start using white make up and grow a Guido moustache before posting as Mr A Coward in future.

UK Electoral Commission slapped for basic cybersecurity fails

Re: As always

My local town hall peddles the data to any bidder anyway

The issue seems to be that someone got access for free.