Posts by William Higinbotham

One third of adults can't delete device data

Cell phone reuse

Other ideas:

Save for Grandchildren.

Put on train tracks like the days of coins.

Use as fishing lure for sharks.

If screen shows Date Time, use as desk clock.

Door Stop wedge.

Microsoft dusts off ancient MS-DOS 4.0 code for release on GitHub

Re: Early Windows source code versions

I not quite this old, but was not aware of multi-tasking of DOS 4. Our organization pretty much jumped from 3.1 to 5 that I remember. I was experimenting with OS/2 and multiple IBM DOS windows around the 90s. That was really fun:-)

Space nukes: The unbelievably bad idea that's exactly that ... unbelievable

The one thing everyone does not realize is that this is the surest and fastest way to deliver magnetic pulse to the enemie(s). Detections and response time is minimized. Just like submarines off of coasts.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Presidential prediction

Google AI will predict Alexa the winner. Apple AI will predict Seri the winner. And Microsoft AI will place Paperclip last in the running.

Microsoft hits Alt+F4 on internal ChatGPT access over security jitters, irony ensues

Re: Maybe this is the issue about ALT+F4 and AI

I would not recommend anyone doing this. I seemed to have had the browser infected but not sure if it was from the ALT + F4 function. I had to repair Edge to fix the issue. Deleting all in Edge did not seem to work. Bizaar for sure.

Stay safe out there.

William 'The ASCII Guy'

Maybe this is the issue about ALT+F4 and AI

So for the fun of it, I hit ALT + F4.

BitDefender automatically blocked a communication attempt. Stating msedge.exe attempted to establish a connection relying on an expired certificate to deff.nelreports.net. We blocked the connection to keep you safe.

I tried to go to the site being warned Suspicious and to avoid it. I tried nelreports.net to get site not found :-)

Billy - USAF Veteran

Nuclear-powered datacenters: What could go wrong?

The IT techs would look like and sound like Homer Simpson at the Nuclear plant!

San Francisco cops can use private cameras to live-monitor 'significant events'

Is this is a bit creepy?

Local police like to help parents monitor their children's computer usage

https://www.pcsoweb.com/pcso-monitoring-software

A lot of county law enforcements are doing this:-) http://www.shawneesheriff.org/sh/eyes_on_crime.asp

Graphical desktop system X Window just turned 38

Historical Reference

1985 was also the year that Richard Stallman issued the GNU manifesto [Stallman] and launched the Free Software Foundation. Very few people took him or his GNU project seriously, a judgment that turned out to be seriously mistaken. In an unrelated development of the same year, the originators of the X window system released it as source code without royalties, restrictions, or license code. As a direct result of this decision, it became a safe neutral area for collaboration between Unix vendors, and defeated proprietary contenders to become Unix's graphics engine.

https://homepage.cs.uri.edu/~thenry/resources/unix_art/ch02s01.html

Former AMD chip architect says it was wrong to can Arm project

And AMD Moves On....

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/from-opteron-to-milan-crusher-supercomputer-comes-online-with-amd-cpus-and-gpus

Small nuclear reactors produce '35x more waste' than big plants

Bill's (Earthquake) Fault

Bill is OK with NuScale's power plant in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

Check out earthquakes in area.

earthquaketrack dot com/us-id-idaho-falls/biggest

earthquaketrack dot com/us-id-idaho-falls/recent

Record players make comeback with Ikea, others pitching tricked-out turntables

Soldering Iron and Hand Tools not included:-)

'Hundreds of computers' in Ukraine hit with wiper malware as conflict continues

I have my copy

Our nephew found a book our father had "You Can Survive The Bomb" By Col. Mel Mawrence, Copyright 1961. I am reading it now:-) Also there is this updated version www.ready dot gov/nuclear-explosion

Watchdog clears 90 per cent of US commercial aircraft to land in low visibility at nation's 5G C-band airports

In 2008, NASA helped launch the Machine-to-Machine Intelligence (M2Mi) Corp to develop IoT and M2M technology, as well as the 5G technology needed to support it.

So why did NASA, the FCC, and FAA failed to see a problem until now?

Reference: https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/apr/HQ_08107_Ames_nanosat.html

Google denies Gmail users an early start to the weekend after problems accessing service

They called contracted support

Their outside help support, I believe is IBM. Go figure.

Reason 3,995 to hold off on that Windows 11 upgrade: Iffy performance on AMD silicon

Reflection of Big Money and IBM type Sales

Ever notice the disparity of Intel to AMD computers in major computers companies and brick and mortor stores? Microsoft just follows suit with the same type support:-)

IKEA: Cameras were hidden in the ceiling above warehouse toilets for 'health and safety'

Last Used?

IKEA admitted they had been in place since 2015. The company did not say when they were last used.

If the light was on then it is active. Maybe the company was not using these, but with the weak security of cams 5 years old, someone is watching:-)

Big Blue's big email blues signal terminal decline – unless it learns to migrate itself

COBOL, Assembler, PL/I and Mainframes - possibly why IBM migration failed

I saw this quote from an alias named Peter Wong* who quoted: “It’s not uncommon for mainframes to process hundreds of millions of transactions on a regular day, per mainframe. It’s a very high throughput and stable system.” About two thirds of enterprise data goes through a mainframe computer. However, the speed is both an advantage and a drawback, as people try to integrate mainframe with cloud: mainframes were built to process transactions very quickly, but they were not designed to wait. “If you wait, it jams up. A hundred million transactions is nothing, but a hundred million waiting — that’s a disaster."

Reference: https://medium.com/supplyframe-hardware/its-mainframes-all-the-way-down-73de55d2884b

NSA: We 'don't know when or even if' a quantum computer will ever be able to break today's public-key encryption

We Don't Know When or Even If

Is the same as saying, The entirety of the NSA's systems can neither be confirmed nor denied, no matter how much information has been leaked to the press over the past year.

Tesla shows off the AI supercomputer training what it hopes will one day be an actual self-driving car

Will it run over it's own driver when they violate too many of their own rules?

Space station dumps 2.9-ton battery pack to burn up in Earth's atmosphere after hardware upgrade

Ooops

Sorry SpaceX, did we just knock out several of your low orbit satelites and cause interruption with others. Think of it as trickle down theory.

Hacking is not a crime – and the media should stop using 'hacker' as a pejorative

Where are the kid's safety glasses?

I saw the photo assiciated with the article. The photo got me more concerned than the article itself:-)

Revealed: The military radar system swiped from aerospace biz, leaked online by Clop ransomware gang

Sales Ad opportunity

If I was in sales, I would ask the company to put up a honeypot copy of their website with what looks like sensitive information, but to actually be cleverly created advertisements to be uploaded to the dark web:-)

NASA's hefty Martian rover will use an AI brain on a robot arm to map out signs of ancient life on Red Planet

Characters

Bet myself that they did not input Bugs Bunny and Marvin the Martian in their image library:-)

Supermicro spy chips, the sequel: It really, really happened, and with bad BIOS and more, insists Bloomberg

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2653167/fbi-worried-as-dod-sold-counterfeit-cisco-gear.html

Forget about an AI stealing your job, even pigs can be trained to use computers

Rethinking Sus Scrofa Domesticus

Author illustrates a shifting moral status view of human–pig relationships. Next, discusses personhood attributions through biological, philosophical, and legal frameworks; review benefits and risks of xenotransplantation; reflect on the moral status of non-human animals; and offer concluding thoughts.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7222736/

Robinhood plays Sheriff of Nottingham as it pauses GameStop, AMC, BlackBerry etc stock sales, gets sued

Robinhood - SEC Dec. 17 2020

People who use Robinhood should read this:-) One item noted is this:

B. Background

Principal Trading Firms and Payment for Order Flow

10. Rather than sending customer orders to buy or sell equity securities directly to

national exchanges, Robinhood, like other retail broker-dealers, routed its orders to other brokerdealers (often referred to as “principal trading firms” or “electronic market makers”) to either execute those orders or route them to other market centers. Principal trading firms attempt to profit from executing large volumes of retail buy and sell orders either by taking the other side of customer orders and exiting the positions at a profit, which is also known as “internalization,” or

by routing the orders to other market centers.

https://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/2020/33-10906.pdf

We regret to inform you the professor teaching your online course is already dead

Re: An Art History Lecturer dies

Such as Richard Feynman who's work will be enjoyed for some time!

'A guy in a jetpack' seen flying at 3,000ft within few hundred yards of passenger jet landing at LA airport

Check out Go Pro video in helicopter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=9&v=5NxxIxi_MHQ&feature=emb_logo

Breaching China's Great Firewall is hard. Pushing packets faster than 1Mbps once through is the Boss Fight

Through Earth - The Other Side

I remember a long time ago -"Flush twice, it is a long way to China"

ICE to see you: Homeland Security's immigration cops tap up Clearview AI to probe child exploitation, cyber-crime

Knock Knock. Who's there?

We see how Amazon's AI for offensive posts work. Be ready for a knock at the door, or more like tactical offensive into one's home:-)

This NSA, FBI security advisory has four words you never want to see together: Fancy Bear Linux rootkit

Find more information from hospital sector than our own:-)

https://www.aha.org/other-cybersecurity-reports/2020-08-14-fbi-cybersecurity-advisory-tlp-white-russian-gru-85th-gtsss

University of California San Francisco pays ransomware gang $1.14m as BBC publishes 'dark web negotiations'

Write-off instead

I wonder if they tried to bargain a official form showing the organization donated $1.14 million worth of technical support for tax deduction instead?

One year ago, Apple promised breakthrough features to help iPhone, iPad, Mac owners with disabilities. It failed them

IBM has had tools for handicap/disabled and blind for years.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Encyclopedia_of_Blindness_and_Vision/l7UN5asLD0cC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=ibm+disability+blind&pg=PA119&printsec=frontcover

Wow, Microsoft's Windows 10 always runs Edge on startup? What could cause that? So strange, tut-tuts Microsoft

It does what it wants to do, brought to you by Open SourceProject

This is why it does what it does. Under About Microsoft Edge - "This browser is made possible by the Chromium open source project and other open source software." I had older Windows 10 and for some reason, Microsoft Edge did not update itself to this new version. Then I came across about it and installed the new version on top of the old. I have not a clue. This is why I have 4 different versions of browsers on my machine:-)

As Uncle Sam flies spy drones over protest-packed cities, Homeland Security asks the public if that's a good idea

Re: You asked my opinion about drones...

Until your wife and kids are in the back yard sunning themselves and gets leaked.

Sony reveals PlayStation 5 will offer heretical no-optical-disk option. And yes, it has an AMD CPU-GPU combo

Here is the Sony PS-X5

I was looking for their manual and came across this. https://www.vinylengine.com/library/sony/ps-x5.shtml

Russia drags NASA: Enjoy your expensive SpaceX capsule, our Soyuz is the cheap Kalashnikov of rockets

Re: Foot in mouth

There are 2 other countries that can offer lifts - China for one and the other that may become a contender is India. But I wonder if China's seats are big enough for American astronauts, should we even ask how their toilets work? :-)

Hooray, space boffins have finally got InSight lander's heat probe back into Martian ground again

Temperature of planet?

And we will find out the planet has COVID-19 infection.

Amazon declined to sell a book so Elon Musk called for it to be broken up

Reply to Author

We are a creature of habits and I am still learning about my own.

Virgin Orbit at last ready to live up to its name: Branson's other space adventure set for maiden flight this weekend

Other counties nuclear readiness alert.

I sent a question off to the company as to how they are reporting the launches to other nations so that they will not think we are delivering a first strike:-)

Behold: The ghastly, preening, lesser-spotted Incredible Bullsh*tting Customer

Spooked Myself

Companies keep tweaking up features with their software, and like all above, I catch myself asking what the hell !? I then wish for the old Norton Commander and Compuserve again for a short minute. Then I realize I am stuck with this feature until I try to see if I can turn it off.

Old ASCII Guy

Microsoft decrees that all high-school IT teachers were wrong: Double spaces now flagged as typos in Word

Word is dead anyway.

Everyone is going to Twitter and who would use double spaces in this app anyway?

Linksys forces password reset for Smart Wi-Fi accounts after router DNS hack pointed users at COVID-19 malware

Password Reset???

I logged into Linksys website and my old passwords worked?

Why did Linksys not ask that we change this one too.

Some people use same password on both the router and company website login:-)

Academic showdown as boffins biff-baff over when Version 1.0 of Earth's magnetic core was released

Asteroids can have magnetism

Even asteroids can have magnetism. The gravitational perturbation of Mathilde on the passing spacecraft was apparent.