Posts by Phil Kingston

Don't pay Vect a ransom - your data's likely already wiped out

Re: Education is painful

Job loss for such occurences is a nice thought. But it also needs way more when personal information is what's lost. C-suite prison time and huge, shareholder-affecting fines are what's needed.

Friendster rises from the grave to make social media great again

Re: If it sounds to good to be true...

the catch for users is yes, handing over your data.

the catch for the developer dude is getting traction. Unless he somehow gets tens of billions of dollars of advertising spend then that's a challenge I reckon

Notepad sheds Copilot from toolbar as Microsoft gives subtlety a try

Satya: Copilot, can you enshittify Notepad for me?

If Microsoft made a car... what would it be?

Nicely designed, well-built, only-available in USA, works with some seams across a lot of things, gets broken by updates occasionally, an absolute cash cow. Hobbled and then cancelled by inept management.

Australia sues Microsoft for misleading M365 users about Copilot subscription options

Re: Consumer trust and transparency are top priorities

I asked CoPilot to try and make sense of it for you. I don't think it's changed much.

Me: Could you rewrite this to seem less slimy and ai-ish? "Consumer trust and transparency are top priorities for Microsoft, and we are reviewing the ACCC's claim in detail. We remain committed to working constructively with the regulator and ensuring our practices meet all legal and ethical standards."

CoPilot (included with your subscription): Rewrites

We take consumer trust and transparency seriously and are carefully reviewing the ACCC’s claim. We will cooperate with the regulator and ensure our practices align with legal and ethical standards.

Consumer trust and transparency matter to us. We are reviewing the ACCC’s claim and will work with the regulator to ensure our practices comply with all legal and ethical requirements.

We value consumer trust and are examining the ACCC’s claim in detail. We will engage constructively with the regulator and ensure our practices meet legal and ethical obligations.

Protecting consumer trust is a priority. We are reviewing the ACCC’s claim and will work with the regulator to ensure our practices follow applicable laws and ethical guidelines.

Re: Microsoft

misleading sales tactics, or administrative incompetence? neither would raise many eyebrows. either will see quite a fine levied.

Trump's gold-plated smartphone can't seem to decide which design to copy

There's going to be some MAGAists who order it based on believing it's actually made of gold.

Tested: Microsoft Recall can still capture credit cards and passwords, a treasure trove for crooks

Somewhere there's a PowerPoint that was used in a Microsoft meeting to explain why this was a good idea. We need that.

yet

>if you find sensitive information that should be filtered out

That's literally everything someone does on their computer.

NHS disability equipment provider on brink of collapse a year after cyberattack

How do I get one of these "monitoring the situation" jobs? Sounds cushy

Re: Oh sure

That's how I read it too. They were going to reimage everyone's laptops over 6 months. All nicely planned. Then, well, because everything was sub-optimal anyway, gather them all together, plug them all in at the unoccupied desks, start them imaging, dance like no one's watching around the office to whatever is high in the hit parade these days. Done. Home in time for tea and medals.

Dell scoffs at breach, says miscreants only stole ‘fake data’

I've seen too many developers lazily copy live datasets into dev/test that yeah, they're screwed.

Australian airline Qantas reveals data theft impacting six million customers

Another CIO sweats it for 48 hours, then back to collecting C-suite salary regardless of if the company gets slapped with a small fine.

Glasgow City Council online services crippled following cyberattack

And all of a sudden they'll find budget for better cybersec

Australia finds age detection tech has many flaws but will work

Janet's 2010 Darwin Knitting Forum site isn't going to go retro-fitting some age-verification tech. Straight to jail.

As mentioned, some parents will decide they'd rather have their kids exposed to some online interactions before they hit driving/voting/smoking/shagging/Facebook/credit-card age all in quick succession. I'm aware of several parents who'll be self-hosting Mastodon (or similar) instances for their tweens.

Doomed UK smartphone maker Bullitt Group finally liquidated

Re: At least PWC were paid!

Re: At least PWC were paid!

When my house builder went bust EY managed to recover 100k in assets.

Their fee for all their hard work?

Yep, you've guessed it right.

Chinese memory-maker YMTC sues US rival Micron for defamation instead of the usual patent breaches

Should see what Bloomberg reckon on this - they did very well in finding those spy chips in SuperMicro kit.

Single passenger reportedly survives Air India Boeing 787 crash

Re: Survivor

cRISiS acToR!

Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options

go home Microsoft, you're drunk

X's new 'encrypted' XChat feature seems no more secure than the failure that came before it

Ah. Makes sense now. Public key is his kids' name so he doesn't forget

Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves

I asked an AI what it thought of this article. The summary:

"In short, the article is partly accurate in spotlighting a real challenge, but it leans toward alarmism by not sufficiently accounting for the sophisticated safeguards and ongoing innovations aimed at preventing such collapse. It’s a provocative perspective that points to important issues even as it leaves out the full picture of current mitigation efforts."

Sounds like something an AI would say to protect itself.

IT chiefs of UK's massive health service urge vendors to make public security pledge

That should do it then. All sorted.

Or perhaps we should actually start handing prison time to CxO's that let it happen on their watch. Bet there'd be some improvements then

Brewhaha: Turns out machines can't replace people, Starbucks finds

Starbucks are having yet another crack at Western Australia and have recently opened a couple of stores. The queues of "influencers" was embarrassing (or "cringe" as I believe they say).

Hopefully we'll chase them out the state again and carry on with decent coffee. Especially if they try an automated shit.

Now if we can work on Coles and Woolworths backtracking on whatever they're calling the way they're reducing their humans to a handful per store.

'Copilot will remember key details about you' for a 'catered to you' experience

chips

yeah, nah

Windows 11 adds auto-recovery, kills offline setup loophole

Re: Meh

Do you have <firsname>@hotmail.com ? They're the real elders.

HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'

Jesus. The only times I've had to ring HP are because I've exhausted everything else, have made myself comfy, been to toilet and generally settled in for a 1-hour plus experience where my entire aim is to get past 1st line support to someone without a script. Adding a mandatory 15 minutes to that would see me just raining ProLiants down on to the street below.

FuriPhone FLX1: A Debian-powered brick that puts GNOME in your back pocket

Re: get away from using Android

Pretty much. The phone was compatible with the network changes. But it was an import and didn't exist on the incomplete IMEI database they came up with to decide which ones to block. They had years to sort it all out, then got the legislation in place with just a few weeks to go.

I went and got an FLX1 and was pottering along quite happily. Then Optus blocked it. Literally hours on the phone with them just politely trying to see if they could confirm it had been blocked for that and not some other reason. It was genuinely painful. They can tell you it's blocked, but not why. At one point they tried to sell me an iPhone instead (nice try) and also asked me to send them a screen shot of the audio announcement that gets played when trying to place a call.

As you point out, Telstra seem to be not not complying with their legistlative obligations and blocking IMEIs (yet). I suspect it may be their own incompetence that's stopping them. Anyway, I'm trying to move to them. But I have duplicate customer details or something in their systems so no SIM can be activated for me. Their customer support has performed to exactly the level I'd expected. And I kind of felt sorry for the girl in the local Telstra store who I got sent to see. Got to play the game though, if their call centre supervisor person says that going and having my driving licence verified at a store will somehow unscrew their database records of me then I'll give it a go. Sadly she ended up with me politely explaining that of course this wasn't going to work and now she'd wasted quite a lot of my time. We're at 2nd level TIO escalation now and case may get looked in to further in nine weeks lol.

Re: Furi Fondleslab

A second-hand 9 year old phone is cheaper than a mid-range new phone? Crazy.

Re: I HATE BIG PHONES I HATE BIG PHONES I HATE BIG PHONES I HATE BIG PHONES

It's also keenly priced for something that's not Googled or Appled. You picks your compromises.

I've had a long-standing rule - work stuff stays on a work-provided phone. If they don't provide one, then <shrug>. I'm not going to sit on the bus and read 4 mails about how wonderful the retiring CEO is. If something is on fire, they'll call me (on my secondary number they have for that purpose).

Some that look for Google Safetynet etc won't launch. Others will. And the internet banking for most will work. Personally I'm doing a lot to de-Google and spend less screentime anyway, so having to wait until I get to a big screen to take 20 seconds to pay a bill is actually positive.

Try Linux WhatsApp

https://itslinuxfoss.com/install-whatsapp-ubuntu-22-04/

I too had that Contacts issue. I'm told Evolution works well as a quick way of syncing them to wherever. I can't remember what I did in the end and don't have it with me. Pretty sure I used davx in some way and all my contacts are on my mail provider of choice.

Re: First question

Western Australia, Bestern Australia.

I'm still waiting for Telstra to sort out SIM activation so I can get round Optus IMEI block from that shitshow of a 3G shutdown. And second-level escalation of TIO now lol.

Re: First question

Pretty well. And they're quick to address issues that may arise from e.g. compulsory VoLTE, weird US bands etc.

Yep, only single-SIM for the moment, but I use a VoIP number for most things and that seems to work OK too.

Re: Furilabs is Chinese

Maybe. But the PinePhone, even Pro, is a long way from an actual daily driver that this can be. And arguably has way more headaches.

Re: Furilabs is Chinese

I suspect that may be the distribution address. Pretty sure that's where mine shipped from. Which would make sense.

Re: get away from using Android

Problem with Sailfish is the limited hardware support. But that's true of any Android alternative. That said, Sailfish is a lovely thing to use imo.

Shame that Australia's batshit mobile phone laws banned mine and I had to flog it.

Hardware barn denies that .004 seconds of facial recognition violated privacy

Anyone know the specs/systems they used? Because, as I understood it, a lot of the privacy concerns were that Shane and Kylie could be accessing the unsecured video feeds and storage while snaffling sangas and xxxx at lunchtime.

Maybe now they could get back to looking at their website and "app". It's been so slow as to be unusable for several years now. Quicker to drive to Mitre10 and get something than search on the Bunnings site.

Microsoft rolls out AI-enabled Notepad to Windows Insiders

Notepad is not for that. If they want to dick about with that kind of thing, that's what WordPad was for.

Notepad is for pasting passwords out of KeePass to see if it's an l or 1.

Or reading conf files.

And similar note-y activities.

Put down the pipe MS

Google reportedly developing an AI agent that can control your browser

Where did I put my sabots?

US contractor pays $300K to settle accusation it didn't properly look after Medicare users' data

300k? How much did it cost the regulators in lawyer fees so far?

Got to Starr jailing CxOs if they want change.

Trump campaign arms up with 'unhackable' phones after Iranian intrusion

So, basically a cleverly-hardened dumbphone?

SAP CTO bows out over 'incident' at company shindig

He may be of the generation that doesn't believe the workplace is the place to play "let's pretend"

31.5M invoices, contracts, patient consent forms, and more exposed to the internet

Re: Physical security

Fines don't work. Even if eventually issued they're paltry amounts. The winners are lawyers and identity-theft detection companies.

CxO's need to start facing jail time. Get paid the big bucks, take the big responsibility.

Lego's Concorde is the only supersonic jet you can build for the price of a fancy dinner

Grab a 3rd party light kit for this and it looks amazing

China's chip tech still lags the West – by up to five generations

That report is going to look pretty funny in 10 years

Twitter must pay over half a million to unfairly dismissed Irish exec

72 pages? To write "the decision not to click "yes", should not be regarded as constituting an act of resignation and that 24 hours did not constitute reasonable notice"? That one sentence would seem enough.

I've got to start applying for these commission jobs.

Need to move 1.2 exabytes across the world every day? Just Effingo

Re: Updated for the modern era ...

I'm enjoying that you weighed one. It's the details that matter in fanciful discussion.