Posts by Blue Shirt Guy

Rust upstart reveals 'reimplementation' of Microsoft Office – with Claude on coding duty

Re: WordCraft?

WordCraft was also released for the PC around 1986. We used it for about a decade.

Dutch tax office ditches Microsoft 365 cloud for on-premises alternative

Re: Personal Data About The Dutch

"American tech companies are required to share data with the U.S. government due to the Cloud Act"

All American tech companies are under the direct legal control of US government and therefore a national security risk.

Asos app delivers a data leak threat instead of fast fashion

An SOS?

As Seen On Screen living up to their name?

OpenAI shows three staff the door over alleged information misuse

Encom would be proud?

I was trying to think where I've heard the term "program manager" before. First thought was Windows 3.1 but then I realised I was thinking more along the lines of the Master Control Program in Tron.

I wonder if they had to attend a training programme to be a program manager?

Coat retrieved. End of line.

Dutch government turns to NixOS for a sovereign desktop

"The Elves of Valinor, creators of the popular Palantir devices used throughout Middle-Earth to view distant lands, announced today that the seeing stones contain a critical security flaw which could leave users open to being taken over by malicious Dark Lords.

The vulnerabilities, according to the Elvinor monthly bulletin, could allow malignant gods to monitor the location and activity of users, or allow persons peering into the Palantir to be taken over and used to execute remote actions. Elvinor urges those in possession of a Palantir to contact the Order of the Istari and request a magic patch to address the issue. Critics have seized upon the announcement as further proof that Elvinor hardware is inherently insecure and urged consumers to switch to Mithril products. "You’ll never get this kind shoddy craftsmanship from a dwarf" said Thorin III Stonehelm of Khazad-dum."

Raspberry Pi surfs memory crunch to record first half

Re: Not A Passing Fad

16K? We had 1K and had to borrow the family television to enter the programs by hand. Tell that to kids today and they won't believe you. :-)

Your cloud survived everything except the real world

Re: How much *useless* data out there is being stored?

To be fair the value of that data would have had a bell curve. Essential for the first few months then after a few years almost worthless. But 100+ years later it's the sort of thing historians would do anything to find. But most is lost for the good reasons you state, like the entire archive of Myspace, because it was seen as unimportant to keep backed up at the time*.

*For security and privacy reasons we should also probably not be storing a lot of things in the first place, which would solve some of the upfront costs as well.

Ofcom discovers issuing Online Safety Act fines is easier than collecting them

Re: Surprised?

"Any proof of that?"

Poe's law* may apply so I can't tell if this is satire. Have you actually read the article? :-)

*Something that would make Ofcon a fortune.

UK's Online Safety Act has made 'absolutely no difference,' kids say

Re: as the meme says "hello fellow young people"

NTNOCN is one of those things that kinda lingers.

US auto regulators want to kill robotaxi brake pedals

Re: Brakes

Umm, what's happening? Uh, I'm sorry, what? Mr Car? Mr Car?

Linux kernel 7.1 sends Intel 486 support to silicon heaven

Silicon Heaven? Preposterous! Where would all the calculators go?

Signal says UK plan to scan devices for nude images 'endangers us all'

Oh that's easy, you just force every adult in the country to provide their papers before they can use one. I wish this was a joke.

Microsoft: Removing some Copilots will improve Windows 11

He sounds just like the Tony Blair character in the cartoon Monkey Dust.

When it comes to catastrophic space weather, the UK is holding a cocktail umbrella

A towel?

UK still doodling digital pound while Brussels frets over payment sovereignty

Re: Digital currency

There seems to be confusion in the UK government between payment processors and crypto currency. Locally controlled payment processors are vital, crypto blockchain nonsense is not. Unfortunatly UK MPs only know the word "digital".

Re: One option - ban them

Like it or not Mastercard and Visa control the UK and EU payments systems at present. There were alternatives like Electron (i forget the name so that might be wrong) but they never suceeded. While banning US controlled payment methods would make sense, the whole point of the article is that there needs to be an EU replacement before that could even be considered.

Doctors told to give Palantir's NHS data platform the cold shoulder

Re: BMJ - ICE

Peter is that you?

Frankfurt to dethrone London as colocation king by 2031

Re: sunlit uplands

"However,that is on them, not on me."

You broke Poe's Law. I'm pretty sure that's on you. :-)

Openreach turns up the heat to force laggards off legacy copper lines

"What would PG Strangman think of all this?"

Peter G Strangman of uk.telecom? We need him now more than ever. We didn't know what we had until he was gone. :-(

Supermarket sorry after facial recognition alert flags right criminal, wrong customer

Re: Petrol stations/Number Plate Blacklisting

Holds on cards are why people would often use credit cards for pay at pump rather than normal debit cards, but that changed a few years ago to a £100 pre-auth that's removed as soon as you put the pump back on the hook. The issue now is that a full tank for some cars costs more than £100 requiring the process to be repeated.

I'm still confused how you prepay with cash in the US. I would want a recept for any cash I gave before filling up, then another for the final amount. Sounds like a lot of hassle and paperwork.

Re: Check

If you mean cheque then the problem is mistakes then just become another profit and loss cost of doing business. Mistakes need to have real consequences for both the company and the person that makes them.

EU's fishy digital certificate system leaves exporters floundering

There's a plaice for these sort of jokes.

Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

Re: This is now not a joke

"Just be happy Microsoft don't do planes, cars or trains."

"Windows for Warships" is a real thing!

Apple hopes to save Siri from laughingstock status with infusion of Google Gemini

Clippy wins

If Samsung believe autocorrect is AI then that explains a lot about Samsung.

Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it

Re: "all this is old news"

"Unless you're going to buy yourself a humongous screen, or absolutely require an internal tuner, why not simply buy a large monitor?"

Many monitors can't do 50 Hz at all or if they can do it have motion judder as they convert it to 60 Hz, making them unsuitable for live TV sources.

The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

Re: Engineered to last

Johnny Walker?

The guy on BBC Radio 2 who made whiskey?

Google Antigravity vibe-codes user's entire drive out of existence

Re: I am deeply, deeply sorry. This is a critical failure on my part.

"Hi there. This is Eddie, your shipboard computer, and I'm feeling just great, guys, and I know I'm just going to get a bundle of kicks out of any program you care to run through me."

Brit telco Brsk confirms breach as bidding begins for 230K+ customer records

I believe the correct sign is "beware of the leopard".

Canadian data order risks blowing a hole in EU sovereignty

Re: Treaties

"Seems like time Politicians got off their arse and spoke to each other"

Do Canadian and French politicians even speak the same language? :-)

EU's reforms of GDPR, AI slated by privacy activists for 'playing into Big Tech’s hands'

Re: This torpedoes GDPR

Oh the irony of The Guardian writing a good article about GDPR, a law that it itself is happy to break in the UK due to lack of enforcement by insisting on payment to avoid tracking cookies.

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

Re: Regomiser

Bill Stickers is innocent.

Robotic lawnmower uses AI to dodge cats, toys

Re: "The device is well-adapted for the UK climate ...return to its charger if it detects rain"

"Did you miss one of the driest years on record, drought conditions and hosepipe bans this year?"

This is about the UK not globally, it seems to have done nothing but rain here for most of this year. For at least the last half a century half the country could be under water and there would still be a hosepipe ban. :-)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/articles/cz69gpy99w7o

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0rp0vg17n7o

Zen Internet loses unfair dismissal appeal case with former CEO

Re: Pointless growth attempt

Zen are pretty good at the internet stuff but I would never recommend them to anyone that still needs a landline after they cut off my 80 year old mother leaving her without a phone line for several days by moving her to digital voice without any notice or authorisation, something that could have caused the worst outcome imaginable.

I'd like to have put that down as a one off but not only has it happened to other family members but they also then did it to me! Even worse they don't have any option for battery backup or any way at all to provide their phone service if you use your own router, the one thing that was their actual USP as an ISP. So I seem to have had my landline number of many years killed by them (yes I could probably port it out but that risks killing the broadband as there is no option for fibre here) despite the fact I'm still paying for it!

Digital ID is now less about illegal working, more about rummaging through drawers

Re: Let's rebrand Starmer...

He was probably visiting Angela Rayner's bank. :-)

UK.gov vows to hack through regulation to get benefit from AI

Re: Downward spiral

This must be a Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

Re: DNS

DNS or BGP?

Vodafone say "why not both". :-)

Digital ID, same place, different time: In this timeline, the result might surprise us

The minute they issue a single paper card the whole scheme becomes pointless as it's being sold on being "digital" as in the app forms part of the verification process. It's also ridiculous to expect everyone to have, want or be able to use a smartphone. We already have free photo ID 'Voter Authority Certificates' for people without another photo ID to allow them to vote, so that could easily be expanded to allow them to be used by anyone without a passport or driving licence for these other purposes. Instead they want to spaff half a billion pounds or more on this nonsense for nothing while claiming they have no money.

To digital natives, Microsoft's IT stack makes Google's look like a model of sanity

It seems to be by design?

Microsoft is the IT implementation of 'Strategic Services Field Manual no 3'.

China tells grumps, trolls, and AIs to stop emoting online

From room 101

The beatings will continue until moral improves?

The US government has no idea how many cybersecurity pros it employs

A 16 bit operation

"at least 63,934"

The records say the true number is 65535.

Who are you again? Infosec experiencing 'Identity crisis' amid rising login attacks

Re: For real?

"Yes, but one you don’t have to remember, so it has enough entropy"

So a password you can't change if someone else finds the printout?

Re: Unmentioned option

"Is this because its more effective than solutions involving mobile phones? Or is its security so bad that no-one dare mention it."

Yes.

The problem is if you lose the card who will issue a new one the same day, setup and ready to use with all the existing accounts?

Even my bank can take a week to post out a new card, so while secure it breaks an essential online service if you ever lose your card, which for bank cards is the time you need that service most, which is why banks have mostly now moved to other methods such as dedicated apps. For all other services they would all either need their own individual cards, or need to share one card, both of which can then become another security nightmare to manage both for users and the services.

Re: For real?

"Most implementations I’ve seen also support printed backup codes."

You mean like a password?

Apple rushes out fix for active zero-day in iOS and macOS

Re: 20 mins for me

"what did you buy from the butchers?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajsCY8SjJ1Y&t=80s

Silent TCC Bypass

I believe this is the issue patched? Can anyone confirm?

https://github.com/JGoyd/Undocumented-System-Behavior-in-iOS-18.6-Silent-TCC-Bypass-and-Data-Movement

Google tries to trump iPhone launch with AI-powered Pixel 10 range

Re: AI?

It seems we've gone from "all AI is a guy in India" to "everything including a 1950s toaster is AI" in less than 2 years.

Re: Sooo

Huawei started locking their bootloaders in 2019 and refusing to provide the keys to unlock them so you can't remove their bundled crap or even easily root them. That was what killed them as far as I'm concerned, well before any of the political issues.

China cut itself off from the global internet for an hour on Wednesday

"The Register is unaware of any such event that took place during this outage."

This is the correct outcome comrade. :-)

Windows 11 leads as October looms, but millions still cling to Windows 10

Re: Abomination

"We actual peasants were brought up on frugality and a strongly independent outlook."

Some of us peasants couldn't afford Outlook and had to use Lotus Notes.