Posts by CA Dave 104 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Aug 2024
The EU is going too damn far. Primarily, it's highly illogical considering many average users don't even want to use any AI at all.
Personally, I don't want my Android OS hacked open to have multiple 3rd party crap code opening up additional avenues of exploit and compromise on my Pixel phone - which I'm sure will be the real reason behind all this and have more CVEs to require patching.
So the take that the rest of us should have, is that it's absolutely okay to release exploits publicly now, so that they can be actively used in the wild before patching, simply to middle-finger Microsoft?
I can't condone that as an ordinary end-user. There's enough issues with Patch Tuesdays as it is.
Wild that my last post had 23 thumbs down. You people need to see the bigger picture, not just "Microsoft sucks", which I also know is true, and yet hundreds of millions of people still have to use it.
Doesn't ANYONE realize that holding vulnerabilities of the most critical scale for ransom or blackmail endangers everyone on the planet relying on Windows infrastructure that's used for everything from transportation, to energy, to financial and identity systems, except for France?
You never hear this shit happening with Linux vulnerability issues. Both M$ AND the researcher have totally screwed this up. Is this really any different than a researcher doing a deep op at a major airport hub to discover security holes and tell the authorities "Hey, I found these overlooked holes that could allow a physical breach of security. Pay me, or I'll release my findings on the dark web to the highest bidder, because I really REALLY don't want people to get hurt. Really."?
It's not just feeding the AI. It's weaponizing itself for the benefit of Trump's thugs for those protesting and criticizing ICE. If you think Patel, Miller, et al, aren't quietly behind the scenes, you'd be sorely head-in-clouds.
People shouldn't use Meta products. Period. FB has been a data mining sham since the beginning. Remember Cambridge Analytica.
They're really denying her daughter because of the last name of the parent and child. In a city metro that's supposed to be deep blue, and suffered at the hands of a decrepit, old pedophile, there's still a stigma of "We only needed inconsequential proof THIS LATINA doesn't live in district.", and lack of appeal and refusal of the district to give comment says it all. It's worse than a contract with a shady AI company, and using a license plate transfer
People used to panic whenever a bunch of pop-ups and then pop-unders would suddenly show up. It would be indicative of a virus that had abused your computer's rendering of a page via exploit already released (it really wasn't called "in the wild" over 20 years ago) and infecting you, or via a virus that easily bypassed your antivirus at the time, before browser processes started getting sandboxed
Of course in an office setting we used to make fun of people who would inevitably get fired because illicit porn from dodgy sites was usually the cause of such a breach.
Nowadays, the damned website operators themselves are now the offenders of such ghastly placements of ads all over the damn place, where tapping the X half the time STILL launches the offending link. They use gimmicks that subvert the toggling off of pop-ups that even Google and Edge have in the browser by using a full-screen layer forcing you to tap an X/Close anyway to read content.
Web beacons. "Invisible pixels". "Essential" cookies that are required.
So who really is breaking MY computer's/phone's access to browse the Internet in a sane manner? Now we're expected to accept a flurry of ads that look like a virus from 2000 has infiltrated your device?
It's mid-2025 and we're still needing a requirement for actual trees being killed for paper in regular office settings that aren't external customer-facing for shipping purposes? What on Earth for? Why waste man hours to code an unnecessary feature and burn more production time going back and forth to a printer, when finished reports can be PDF'd or otherwise "printed" to file which then gets sent securely to the required parties via email?
It's not 1990 anymore, and this isn't Hackers using 3.5" FDs and reams of beltfed paper going through a dot matrix (or spinning head) printer.
AI aside, in the past, Firefox had a lot of memory leak issues. Now it's eating CPU in desperation for absolutely no reason. Google on Android has tab groups also, but it didn't bother needing to use AI for them, as you have to do it manually and name them manually. It does a nice job of putting the inactive tabs aside that haven't been used in a while as well.
P.S.: Anti-Google shills can buzz off in replies or spiteful downvoting. I'm no shill for Google, but the antis are sad.
The biggest security problem that I see, and have seen from the beginning, is that 3rd party app stores on Play Store that the rest of us use, will be shitty with malware prevention SoP to prevent what will undoubtedly be a plethora of bad actors looking to infect devices. As it is, bad actors manage to dupe the Play Store security system in various ways such as hidden unfinished code that doesn't activate until after an app "update" that activates the payload to grab your banking/crypto/Google credentials via keylogging, etc.
There's no promise whatsoever that every yahoo that makes an app store will bother to scan and screen uploaded apps, since they'll expect Google to do it because "It's [their] Play Store! They're supposed to vet the apps with Google Play Protect!".
The entire thing about Android being Open is that if YOU want to sideload an app from outside the Play Store, you're more than welcome to do so, but it's YOUR ass that's responsible for verifying it's a legit app that's malware-free (not even trusting APK mirror by default for example, despite their claims all apps are scanned). Google Play Protect isn't intended to scan sideloads. You can submit sure, but Google isn't at fault if a sideloaded app spreads a payload.
I'm not saying explicitly that Epic will allow such a thing with their crappy 3rd party store, but it's a glaring back door ability that could be easily forced open because people want to "stick it to Google". Epic is only concerned mostly with not having to pay Google any money for their apps billing customers cheaper. It's all about not giving them that listing percentage, after all. I've never seen a mention of Epic even bothering to comment that security will be paramount first and foremost.
Sorry, but customer support and service will be the absolute last facet of life to reach anywhere close to Star Trek TOS levels of helpful. The AI that Amazon, Frontier (Verizon), uses is a joke. We've gone from a human reading a script someone thought was good, to a voice menu script someone thought was good, to a poorly installed AI script that a human thought was good.
That's why I'll never get into telephone banking CS service ever again, because the likelihood that an exasperated customer at wits end finally reached me will be yelling at me because the robo screwed with them.
The issue with resorting to using an ELI5 tactic is because it's absolutely necessary, because there are still hundreds of businesses and organizations of most sizes that are rather inept at security. This follows on the heels of a British trucking company that literally just went belly up after 158 years earlier this month, because even their backups were lost because they weren't stored properly off-site. The ransomware gang wanted £5 million which simply wasn't possible, so everyone is out of a job.
"HTTPS is used because all the "modern" browser automatically add 'https' in front of the url unless you specify http by hand."
Incorrect. Google Chrome browser gives the option to not only use "only HTTPS" to connect to a website, but also puts up a warning page of the URL you enter points to a website that does NOT use HTTPS, and asks if you want to go "Back to Safety" when that option is turned on. The Enhanced Security options enforce an even higher level of security by sending the URL to Google to ensure it's legit and not a phishing attempt or a malware website. This Enhanced Security is turned on by default (and locked into the On position) for Pixel users who turn on the Advanced Protection Program setting. I suggest you not comment anymore, "Coward".
Ah yes, the same Pew that said that a majority of people expected Hillary Clinton to win over Donald "drain the swamp" Trump, 63% to 34% in their survey.
They contributed big time to people staying home and unleashing Act I of his hell.
Their surveys don't mean squat and they should have folded out of embarrassment in immediately after that election.
HP has had a multitude of issues in the past going back 20 years to "budget" laptops that took an hour to boot even after you uninstalled the bloat and axed useless services, to battery recalls from fire, to just bad decision-making overall. HP loses in the US but wins in the UK.
Johnny Depp inexplicably loses his case badly in the UK because they refused written evidence that was considered "hearsay" (how is a medical record and text messages hearsay or unreliable?), but a jury finds him the overwhelming victor* in the US because evidence was properly allowed.
Why is the UK system so whack?
*Heard was given a tiny judgement of $2 million but it was overshadowed by the $10+ million awarded to Depp.
You're missing the point regarding who is actually the employer. The "employer" in this case is the 76 million strongly-insane that "hired" Trump to be President.
You absolutely cannot be sane to hire an insane Trump as POTUS or Commander-in-Chief, especially for a second go-around after he was "fired" 4 years prior.
Nobody signs the ballot. Nobody sees the result of how any one person by name voted because it gets put in a box. Now if there was a login requirement to vote, then we don't have democracy anymore anyway and it's a moot point and this country would be RIP because you'd have Nazi Germany here.
Right, nevermind the fact the has he's violated the Constitution via DOGE, fired federal workers illegally because of DOGE, illegally accessed all of our personal financial, SSN, tax, and medical data, illegally deported Abrego Garcia then miraculously brought him back under false charges, illegally gamed the stock market in April by enacting then withdrawing severe tariffs that crashed the market so that his corrupt swamp could make bank...
I don't need to go on. Any one of those instances would have gotten a Democratic President impeached and convicted instantly.
Windows 11 updates have been notoriously buggy lately, and them being forced onto your laptop unless you disable the service(s) is contributing to people having this disdain. Who wants sus Recall and MS AI on top of it?
Are Chromebooks increasing in sales as a result? You don't need MS Office when you can use Docs or Sheets just fine for non-intensive needs. It's still a laptop that works just fine to get you on the Internet and still perform other web-based tasks for financial, research, and apparently a beta Linux mode for other power users.
What did they honestly expect? When the three companies in question were the first (along with Apple to an extent I'm sure) to even generate a customer support bot model - already the ire of everyone needing help, that was ultimately a precursor to AI right? Wasn't that the famed "writing on the wall"?
Just because you're caught flat-footed with the inability to see that AI was going to be more than just a fad for several more years, doesn't mean you get to cry foul that you didn't get a chance at a cookie later after most of everything has been established.
AI has ultimately been around for a few years now in one way or another, with Bixby, Google Assistant, Siri, and the like on our smartphones, as we "Star Trek" our way into the future by talking to them and issuing commands with them.
Lest we not forget, that by virtue of allowing those three mega companies to act as point to do your shopping, shipping, bidding, uploading, storage, and more, you've already lost the game because you took too long to realize the future.
Or you just took the lazy convenient way out by using their services. Peace.
This is a rather interesting take, and it does seem rather interesting that you don't hear from the EU countries actually encourage, foster, or develop the means to generate a necessity and desire for "grassroots" EU tech, particularly now when it comes to AI.
You hear about US and China going at it, and Japan and the UK to a lessor degree, but where's the hype itself from the EU, as opposed to yet more complaints? The EU is indeed really good at complaining over something that's already after-the-fact, when they realize they don't like how it seemingly poofed like magic to them.
Where indeed is the initiative especially from Germany? They can design and manufacture great automobiles, but stagnate over other tech?
