Posts by Bebu sa Ware

Commercial space pleads with NASA to stop moving the goalposts in orbit

Lucy and Charlie Brown

Did I miss the banns ?

If Charlie Brown managed to find himself hitched to Lucy van Pelt there cannot be much hope for the world… actually that seems about right.

BOFH: Are you ready to raise our expense account limits now?

"Feel free to add a little something for yourself..."

"That's the way to do it !" [Mr Punch.]

The beer is looking good, I'll put my swazzle away now.

Iran war drives urgent need to counter underwater attack drones

Come on people "Why have you left it till now to start thinking"

Question rhetorical definitively.

Honestly if each useful human thought were a 20 kiloton atomic explosion the neither the planet nor civilisation would be much inconvenienced.

The only reason AI looks even vaguely plausible is the complete mental lassitude exhibited by the totality of humanity (save a few rebels.)

Re: Here's my revolutionary, never-been-tried-before solution:

"don't attack other countries."

Hell no !

That is manifestly un·american.

It is incontrovertibly the God given right of the US to fuck over every nation on the planet.

One consolation, small at that, is that the current MAGAty Administration didn't notice there ought to be an "other" between the "every" and "nation" above and commenced their fuckery on their own nation.

"For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind:…the strangers shall swallow it up." [Hosea 8:7]

VA-111 Shkval

Interestingly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-111_Shkval notes:

Operators: Iran (speculative) • Islamic Republic of Iran Navy (speculative)

At "speeds in excess of 200 knots" I imagine these are squalls that could really rain on your parade.

The Gulf is a rather small barrel with a lot of quite large fish which are proverbially easily to shoot although only a raving lunatic is likely to think discharging a firearm into a tub of fish would give you anything other than a facefull of cold water laced with fragmented fish. Unfortunately the planet appears to have produced a bumper crop of raving lunatics who have managed to promote the more homicidal of their number to high office.

Staff too scared of the AI axe to pick it up, Forrester finds

what "Langostine the bitch-goblet potatoes" actually meant

A thinly veiled reference to the current leadership of the Parliamentary UK Conservative Party would be favourite. No ?

Polymer chemistry advances

PA’s… Don’t see status conscious (male) managers getting rid of their (young female) PA’s, regardless of how capable AI becomes.

I don't know. With the right polymers and mechatronics, embodied AI maniquins might give flesh and bone a run for the manager's money.

Although you still occasionally spot the nail polishing bimbo it is extremely rare and more often nepotism than status or bonking.

More often the reality is the PA is the only one who knows how everything is done or works (not quite the same thing though) in the office of her glove puppet of an employer.

Don't worry mate

I'll do you a deal on a used carby and distributor - no aftermarket tat, original parts... very original - and although I know I am cutting my own throat, I'll also throw in timing and mixture adjustment.

At Dibbler's Dealerships we aim to please (ourselves.)

"the knocking noises and smoke from my car"

Doubtless half these numpties are driving Teslas and deserve to be cremated by the electrical fire and ensuing battery explosion.

Re: …53 68 69 72 6C 65 79…

Complete tarradiddle and don't call me Shirley !

Using AI to code does not mean your code is more secure

Hanlon's Razor

Prior to AI code assistants most CVEs could be adequately explained as stupid mistakes or mistakes by the stupid.

Now having LLMs (trained on god·knows·what data sets) generate code, risks creating such insanely obscure vulnerabilities that are arguably indistinguishable from malice.

Considering smashing human stupidity into the critical mass of agentic AI stupidity and the ensuing chain reaction producing a malicious explosion of stupidity, who needs garden variety malice?

'Empathetic' Salesforce bots to help those fired by uncaring humans

I just realise what…

LLM stands for — Laugh, Laugh More … as America sends itself and its citizens down the gurgler.

Hopefully more rational nations will be less tempted to emulate this laughing stock and restrict themselves to laughing from the sidelines. Forlorn hope that.

Fortunately in nations whose institutions are modelled on the British, change for good or ill, in both the public and corporate spheres is invariably glacial so by the time AI is adopted I suspect it will be long dead and buried.

China's not thrilled its AI experts want to leave the country

Seems a bit retrograde…

but I suppose the US is currently rapidly walking backwards up its own arse.

I cannot imagine any possible reason why you wouldn't want to listen to, or prevent a technical presentation just because his or her nation has managed to seriously get on tits of your nation or more particularly the tits of your leader.†

The general idea is to listen to anything your adversaries have to say but as far as possible remaining silent yourself. I suppose that is transposed for Americans.

I am afraid even if this conference were to be hosted by an Australian domiciled organisation these US restrictions would still apply - US extra·territoriality is both wondrous and wonderfully self serving.

_{† In the case of the Orange git, these tits aren't entirely metaphorical, if you have noticed.}

Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

Re: Not the same, but ...

SCSI

Reordering the external SCSI drives for "aesthetic reasons" and losing the terminator.

Basically, since as a BoFH if you cannot lock up your users, you lock away anying important and most other stuff, removing temptation from prying fingers and vacant skulls.

WTF

"Oh, the noise was annoying me," replied one of the testing engineers. "So I opened the case and cut the wires."

Clearly that "engineer" hadn't been adequately tested before being certified.

Hopefully Mr Snippy doesn't go on to work in a nuclear powerstation^† as he obviously wasn't the business end of a screwdriver.

Even you though you know you will regret asking, the question I would pose to this budding Einstein is "why do you think the fans you knobbled were included in the design in the first place?" The only coherent answer I might imagine, if not quite rational: "just to annoy me." If the answer were along the lines that he believed removing cooling fans would cause the hardware to thermally limit its performance then that is only slightly less insane.

I suppose a decade or so later with the advent of ipods etc playing into earphones at 120dB this chap and fellow travellers would be as deaf as doorpost and untroubled by screaming fans although undoubtedly still as daft as a brush.

_{† those facilities' alarms are known to be a tad annoying. Funny that.}

Samsung still glued to its bad habits with Galaxy S26 Ultra

plateaued

First time I have seen the word in print — looks quite peculiar with a sequence of 4 vowels "eaue" but it is a French noun made into an English verb (to reach etc a plateau.) Platowed might be more English looking but seems more like a Greek philosopher's nuptials.

Looking forward to chateaued, chapeaued and gaspereaued.

The only time vendors will commit to reparable products is when there is more money to be made from repairs, component upgrades and maintenance than from a selling new unreparable products into a saturated market. Apple's Neo might be the harbinger of a "new normal" a reparability.

The motor vehicle industry used to make a fortune from spare parts and mandatory dealer maintenance until third party ("non·genuine" parts), later generation asian vehicle manufacturers and legislative removal of restrictive practices stole their lunch. Ironically now the only difference between the third party part and the genuine part is the carton in which it is packaged… and the surliness of the parts counter staff and of course the price. Same factory in the same godawful country.

How Apple, Samsung et al propose to keep a significant slice of the reparability pie should be interesting. The possibility of their offering competively priced parts and servicing to compete fairly with third party repairers is unlikely to be entertained even for a quecto·second.

OpenAI now gets to decide which type of product assassin it will become

"what happens if I ask it to create X?"

Elon Musk?

Silence must fall before some questions are asked.

UK wants to know if banning under-16s from social media does anything useful

Fushietsu

Is that pronounced "fucks shit too?"

Not just the UK government that is distracted by trivialities but possibly unique in the perhaps vain hope that the population will also be equally distracted by palpable nonsense from the real challenges facing the UK, Europe and the planet.

I don't actually know the answer to the question as I don't reside on that side of the globe but if I did I would ask "has the new (Starmer) government done anything constructive? Anything at all? Or is it just another pile of bollocks?"

teaching their child not to smoke

how successful is a smoking parent in teaching their child not to smoke? Have an educated guess.

As for a successful stategy dragging your puffing scion along to sessions of your cancer chemo- and radiation- therapy would be favourite.

Surprising what makes people give up the fags. Neither lung cancer nor cardiovascular disease deterred my father who was a packet-a-day from age 14 until 65. What made him give up the cancer sticks immediately, was when my brother told him he had spent the afternoon removing gangrenous fingers, toes etc from old buggers in the repat hospital and he had asked him why were they gangrenous - smoking. A child growing up in the aftermath of WW1 in dark houses lurking with severely disturbed and disfigured men would give anyone an absolute phobia of maiming.

UK wants to know if banning under-16s…

More… or less than they want know what will happen in the next episode of the Archers ?

Becoming less certain that anything at all, let alone banning "does anything useful" in any context. Just about any action appears to compound an existing felony.

"They will also ask about practical challenges such as parents' abilities to set controls and how effective they were."

"A courageous course Minister?

"How so, Humphrey?

"Asking parents what were the major challenges and hindrances to their being effective parents risks their answers placing the problem squarely back on your desk.

_{I don't whether The Archers are still a thing but remember listening to it on the wireless during the '60s in the antipodean boondocks and not making head or tail of it other than nothing ever seemed to happen unlike Midsommer. ;) I do recall Morse was an avowed follower.}

NASA's lunar reboot is long on ambition, short on answers

Re: I wonder if Polymarket has a bet

If the bet were on China (PRC) putting a human on the Moon and returning expeditioners alive before the US, I wouldn't take the bet — to close to a dead cert to offer odds.

If it were the PRC pulling off that stunt in the next 10 years - 20:1 just to be sporting but more like 5:1.

Even money that NASA will be the first to bury an astronaut on (or into) the Moon.

"Trump is forced to accept there's zero chance it happens during his term" — or indeed his lifetime but looking at the sod I would not be taking wagers that the second will be the longer of the two.

Given the vast resources being thrown at AI (and to a lesser extent robotics) I might have thought landing autonomous^† robots on the Lunar surface to construct and operate Lunar facilities long before human occupation is contemplated might be a better long term and more sustainable proposition

Even landing a remotely controlled electric bulldozer to clear a landing area in the southern polar region isn't as daft as landing one of the proposed erect penises there on spec.

_{† the rtt latency is too long (~2.5s) )for remote control alone.}

Re: Exactly how will astronauts get to and from that moonbase?

1999.

I wonder what become of the SHADO moonbase? I remember they had tracked vehicles and LEM shaped hoppers for get round the Lunar surface and some sort of shuttle to get to and from the Earth-Moon vehicle. ;)

Actually thinking back I mostly recall my thinking if I were stationed on the base as an interceptor pilot I would need a decent supply of bromide… Lt Ellis in a purple wig still does it for me. :))

I vaguely recall back then that there was a serious proposals for using a (presumably rather long) linear motor to chuck stuff from the surface into (low?) Lunar orbit. I don't how stuff was to land on the surface. Perhaps an linear motor in orbit around the Moon that hurls stuff at a correponding surface linear motor acting as a generator applying regenerative braking.

You would need to be a pretty hardcore, à la Musk, lunanaut to be the ball in that game of space baseball… or just plain loony.

Only goes to show that our time doesn't hold a monopoly of bloody stupid ideas although the favourite for the Darwin for bloody stupid lethal ideas.

Trump remembers to appoint science panel, fills it mostly with tech bros

Re: "Drain the Swamp"

> The swamp was never more foetid. I wonder why I haven't heard anyone shouting this slogan for a while?

Swamps are actually vital living systems that fulfil important functions in the planetary ecosystem. Like peat bogs and mangroves.

Draining them is environmental vandalism.

The Washington swamp far from being drained is now replete with lethal poisons to the point that nothing lives or functions in it - now it's just one enormous miasma stinking out the world.

Re: Well of course...

"Musk is the stupid persons idea of a clever man."

That really got me. I could instantly place a dozen faces on "the stupid person." The puzzling thing for me is that these fools are utterly incapable of recognising anything or anybody that is demonstrably clever.

I suppose these dropkicks also think Trump is man of integrity which us patently an even more unsustainable assertion than of his possessing any intelligence whatsoever.

Just wishful thinking…

if on the day Trump sits in on a meeting of the full panel the lone physicist were detained by ICE agents thus prevented from attending and thereby saved from the unfortunate gas leak and subsequent explosion that tragically deprived the world of this glittering constellation of irreplaceable talent.

Sadly accidents do happen but arguably mostly to the wrong people.

Meta cuts about 700 jobs as it shifts spending to AI

We have to be willing to sort of make temporal bets…

"We have to be willing to sort of make temporal bets"

Which "sort of" are ? Different from a mug punter's wager on the 3:30 or a "spatial bet" or cadastral bet ? Or the "sort of" stickiness of shit to the wall thing ?

"that's a big part of what we have to do in an intelligent and thoughtful way.”

I know it is easy but you could have fooled me.

I might expect this drivel from an unpaid intern reluctantly fronting the media but this is the CFO of the firm who is presumably making a motza in compensation.

Meta would begin “flattening teams.”

"flattening" as in "raze" one assumes.

GitHub hits CTRL-Z, decides it will train its AI with user data after all

Microslop is welcome…

to any of the smelly old code of mine that I have dropped on github and forgotten to flush.

Should poison the spring from which Crapilot is drawing its buckets of wisdom.

Some of it is very old indeed like a /sbin/mount wrapper for SGI Irix 6.x that performed Solaris type loop back mounts (mount.lofs) — can see that being really useful. ;) As too some I2O stuff for an obscure Adaptec scsi adaptor twenty+ years ago.

Firefox 149 adds a free VPN and finally plays nice with Linux dialogs

Re: Is it time to ditch FireFox?

Cannot say I have had any problems with FF but it is the version shipped with AlmaLinux 8.9 which is probably a rebuilt older esr version with patches.

I were going to use Chrome I would try a de-googled version first.

I have an old version of Opera installed and pretty ancient version of Palemoon which I recall worked reasonably well.

A great fan of elinks, lynx and w3m of course.

I also had truly ancient versions of FF installed to talk to equally ancient networked kit which also needed an ancient version of java to launch a jws applet delivered from the hardware. (Four Yorkshiremen have just entered the building.;)

XKCD 538

I think in one of Bruce Schnier's early cryptography books this was referred to as "Lead Pipe Cryptoanalysis."

I am sure the Australian kiddywits will welcome Firefox's inclusion of a VPN for their visits to pronhub etc and to access their alternate social media accounts.

Windows boss promises to heal the operating system's self-inflicted wounds

Re: Trapped.

You're confusing hatred for Windows with Apple brand loyalty.

I would have to agree.

Definitely not an Apple fan but today I find I own two refurbished iphones and dumped the Android tat because the Apple stuff mostly just works and is supported longer.

I am sure an iphone can do amazingly clever things but it doesn't compel me to use those features or even go out of its way to let me know that I can.

I even own two, admittedly rather aging Macs, acquired more by accident than by design but I actually don't mind the UI on the rare occasions I use them.

Everthing else warts and all, is Unix/Linux.

There are the incredibly irritating Apple fan boys^† - and fan girls but far fewer as most female Apple owners fall into the above pragmatist category or are fashionistas only wanting to be the envy of their circle by sporting the latest numbingly expensive Cupertino bling.

_{† Who coincidentally often own a Tesla or loudly express their desire to do so in the near future and presumably would also vote for Trump.}

b) A lot of expensive equipment only works with a particular version of Windows.

The total number of expensive and/or irreplaceable instruments and industrial equipment that is stuck on one ancient version of Windows, OS/2 or something less common such as Microware OS-9 would likely astound anyone who has never had to deal with this kit.

Ironically an old NMR machine netbooting (bootp) an early 1990s version of MIPS System V.4 is far more supportable today than hardware running much later versions of Windows.

I have encountered custom hardware including a proprietary CPU running some in-house version of CP/M booting from a 8" floppy. The vendor, software and hardware had long vanished by the time I saw it but the instrument was by then probably unique in itself and in its capabilities.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of…" but in our game they are mostly nightmares.

Re: Excel and OneDrive

Are they also available on other platforms?

I recall with Rclone a few years ago (~ RHEL7.9) I could fuser mount a OneDrive volume under Linux (RHEL7.9 specifically.)

With Excel you would either need to accept any LibreOffice shortcomings or run actual Office under Wine probably using the CodeWeavers CrossOver product. According to their site Excel2013 runs under CrossOver with 5/5 stars.

As I always believed spreadsheets were hellspawn and anything Microslop having similar provenance, I don't have much practical experience with either.

Indeed when compelled to produce a report in .xls format I have been known to use an Awk script to output .csv and import that into LibreOffice to produce the .xls file.

Systemd-free antiX Linux 26: Debian 13, in bonsai form

Re: Pronunciation?

> You alternate every time you say them.

I imagine it is just "Anti X antics" with a nudge and wink.

Say no more guvnor.

Open source isn't a tip jar – it's time to charge for access

Re: Open source needs government grant funding

It would be interesting to see which governments do the funding and which to the freeloading.

Interesting perhaps. Surprising no.

USA? Hell no! That would be unamerican. Unto Satan Avowed.

Never pay for anything you can cheat, steal, extort or murder your way with.

Time…

Developers and maintainers grow older and retreat from the combat and the implicit assumption new young upcoming talent will take up the responsibility is not questioned... yet.

With the ceaseless rounds of layoffs in the ranks of professional developers so fashionable at the moment the attraction to this career has basically evaporated and with it the reason for new developers to work on open source to enhance their employability.

Within a few years I suspect the only really active open source projects will be manned by supply chain vulnerability specialists courtesy of a wide choice of the usual suspects.

Big Tech you can either rescue the open source you make a motza from by opening your wallet and shooing away the moths or you will have to maintain your own fork entirely in·house at much greater expense (and even greater futility if you think AI is up to the job.)

Like most catastrophes this will oscillate wildly around the precipice before the whole shemozzle tumbles into the abyss.

Humanity are largely not big thinkers - dumb arses and nongs mostly, but the unfathomable stupidity of large multinational corporations (especially American) drag that lack of neural processing to whole new depths. The mindless greed is truly and literally diabolical. Evil in a word.

Chemists concoct nail polish that lets clawed humans use touch screens

Re: Gene editing

"Splice some feline genes" … into human females?

Clearly you haven't thought that one through. "Make the finger nails behave like claws."

In these benighted times do we need more nightmares?

The Sisters of Plenitude from New Earth (Dr Who) had exactly these kind of claws and to round out the horror, were nuns too.

On a lighter side her indoors who never had long fingernails once asked me quite innocently when the shopping malls exploded with manicure parlours "How do they clean their botties?" Lacking any direct insight, I replied "Carefully I would think."

Just run a conductor down the nail.

A lot of the longer nails are artificial (glued on) anyway so embedding a metallic conductor in the nail's matrix wouldn't be exactly rocket science.

I am surprised that a conductive metallic lacquer that could be used as an undercoat to normal nail polish hasn't already surfaced.

Electroplating or electrotyping a layer of silver or gold on to the nail might be a possibility.

These days tablets and phones with stylii aren't uncommon and at least in the case of tablets not always expensive.

HP stuffs OpenAI LLM into new laptops in bid for small biz

We see a big opportunity to help people thrive

"We see a big opportunity to help people thrive more in the workplace,”

Who doesn't? Chiefly by removing AI and PHBs from the premises.

“And to do that we’re creating this layer of intelligence that will stretch across our devices and really come to life in our AI PCs and make them more valuable than ever before and provide a really powerful model right there inside the PC.”

Shame. I was barracking for HP collective putting its head up a dead bear's bum but if wishes were fishes we would all be casting nets in the sea.

I wonder whether HP head hunted this Matt Brown from the Marketing Division of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation or whether HP is a wholly owned subsidiary of that Marketing Division.

I was just thinking that HP notebooks were always notorious for cooking their guts, so adding an AI processor of some description ought to add a bit more heat to the kitchen and cook the lappy's goose faster.

Nothing screams casual career pivot like joining the UK Ministry of Defence for a cool £162K

Chief Digital Technology Officer

For that sort of coin I imagine the appointee will chiefly be attempting to only ensure that digits are extracted from owners hind parts. Presumably for fingernail inspection.

At this point I would recommend the appointee ought to be a mediaevalist who has spent decades on manuscripts of Marie de France and Chretien de Troyes who has never used a computer or any electrical device more sophisticated than a pop·up (burnt) toaster.

Definitely not having imbibed the lemonade questions like "What does that do?" and "Why would we want to do that?" might flow naturally. As might "Wouldn't it be a lot cheaper not to? And have a parley with the other chaps first as it might be a challenge afterwards."

Goodbye, Lunar Gateway: NASA ditches Moon station for Moon base

Re: Off we go into the wild black yonder

Just whatever you do, do NOT put a nuclear waste dump on it.

If you do ensure all Earth's legislatures, obnoxious all trillionaires, AI loonies, the Crypto bros,… actually the whole B·Ark passenger manifest would be favourite.

Probably don't want the dump facing the Earth when it goes bang; facing directly away from the Sun, and not at the Earth, so the next stop is the Sun where the whole objectionable boiling… get a decent broiling (before incineration.)

We don't want to be known for fly·tipping our garbage on an unsupecting Galaxy.

"Trumpian conjurors"

I can guess whence these dismal prestidigitators pull their bunnies and it isn't their hats through which they frequently speak but their words actually enter the world by another passage presumably squeezing around the rabbits.

Re: Ownership?

I'm guessing that is diplomatic speak for 'What The F**K?!'

Sadly we all know the answer to "What The F**K?"

There wouldn't be a rational soul today that isn't praying for the wheels to fall off this circus wagon of a shitshow. And please yesterday dear Lord.

Actually the screwing about with the sideshow that is the space program hopefully diverts and distracts some of the same loonies from more harmful pursuits.

Age checks creep into Linux as systemd gets a DOB field

We are sure that Meta would never consider passing the buck…

"We are sure that Meta would never consider passing the buck on the important subject of protecting children online"

I concur… Meta would not pause for a single klepto quecto·second before expediting that pail… well… beyond the pale.

Arm rolls its own 136-core AGI CPU to chase AI hype train

artificial general intelligence was a CPU this whole time

Yes - a Crass Pitch for Unintelligent lucre.

You could sell some people their own arse which is perhaps understandable as they arguably would be the same people who could not find their backsides with both hands.

AI isn't killing jobs, it's 'unbundling' them into lower-paid chunks

Re: This reminds me of the dot com crash rationalizations

they recognize a snow job when they see it.

Or a hand job.

if AI can do enough of what you do, you're toast.

99% of what I used to before voluntarily joining the leisured (if geriatric) classes was think. I still try to give the noggin a bit of workout but the odd rational thought is rather lonely in these dismal times.

What I discovered pretty early on was that most "action" taken by anyone was consistently extremely ill·considered and consequently deletarious if not outright destructive. I must have spent an embarrassingly large proportion of my working life preventing or deterring such misadventures or cleaning up the ensuing mess when unsuccessful.

Nothing today contradicts this worldview. Indeed just about every aspect of contemporary life incontrovertibly confirms it. AI is the latest cab off the rank of bloody stupid ideas that the world has hired.

The current AI mania is basically an unthinking artificial source of ill·considered actions — an automated fuck up machine (if you will) not that humans suffer any disability in performing that activity efficiently.

Ah. Did someone mention toast? I am partial to buttery raisin toast with a decent mocha. ;)

Remote or not, workers are drifting back toward the city

Doesn't surprise me

Having resided for over a decade in a regional centre, three hours drive from the metropolitan city it really is the death of a thousand cuts.

The attractions are: limited services of all types, limited choice of just about everything, the all pervasive red·neckery of an increasingly geriatric demographic

The young bail at the earliest opportunity - as the young were once asked "what are the three best things about ——— ?" Their response: "The highway, the railway and the airport.

What's not to like.

While fully remote working for roles that don't require high speed internet works reasonably well, along with the tranquil natural environment are pluses but are massively outweighed by the preceding minuses… by orders of magnitude.

Covid was bit of a godsend as people were fleeing the cities, we took the opportunity to amble back to the metropolis.

The trickling return of these covid emigrés would account for part of these statistics with those who, on approaching retirement, realised being over an hour away from the nearest coronary care unit etc probably wasn't entirely conducive to a long or healthy retirement.

Living in a large city also has it's disadvantages like anything in life but as someone in 1960s USA once said "Life is like a shit sandwich… the more bread you have, the less shit you have to eat." The same observation might also be made of cosmopolitan life.

Currently I guess everyone, especially in Trumpisstan, is chowing down on lashings of the brown stuff.

Mozilla introduces cq, describing it as 'Stack Overflow for agents'

HITL (human in the loop) verification.

These dazed bunnies are the sharpest tools (to whizz up a metaphor cocktail.)

"The project has obvious vulnerability to poisoned content and prompt injection, where agents are instructed to perform malicious tasks. The paper references anti-poisoning mechanisms…"

"Human in the loop enterprise resource" acronymically not exactly the best look if you don't want poisoned content or malicious tasks. I would recommend a decent gas mask as the historically informed anti·poisoning mechanism.

Microslop stuffs AI photo restyling powers into OneDrive

Reckon your family photos would look better…

I imagine a few families might find an embedded capability to to edit out their creepy uncle Arthur^† from family snaps (especially following his conviction) a real draw.

_{† or Andrew.}

Country that put backdoors into Cisco routers to spy on world bans foreign routers

Just Realised...

last year while I was looking for a consumer wifi router that was fully supported by OpenWRT I noticed that for some vendors a particular model number could refer to a variety of chipsets - some supported, some not … at least not fully.

So I can imagine some of those non-US vendors retaining the 2026 "approved" model numbers while upgrading the models' chipsets.

Unless any skulduggery is burnt into the silicon I could imagine foreign vendors ought to be able to market routers shipped without firmware that could be programmed with "approved" firmware within the US.

As there doesn't appear to be anything much remaining within the US that is tainted with even the barest whiff of sanity, I don't imagine this will be any less of a cockup than the rest of the continual shitshow to which the planet is being treated.