Posts by Thought About IT

Signal shuts the blinds on Microsoft Recall with the power of DRM

Re: Delete Recall

It will always have to be deletable if Microsoft want to keep selling to, for example, banks and weapons manufacturers.

Delete Recall

Run PowerShell as administrator and type:

Dism /Online /Disable-Feature /Featurename:Recall

Reboot, and it's gone!

Signalgate lessons learned: If creating a culture of security is the goal, America is screwed

Session vs Signal

If your phone's been compromised, why should Session be any more secure than Signal which it is forked from?

Krebs throws himself on the grenade, resigns from SentinelOne after Trump revokes clearances

Trump doing what he's always done

Anybody who has any doubts about Trump's thirst for vengeance should read this:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-bitter-personal-feud-with-pritzker-family-is-behind-his-harvard-hate-campaign/

Earth's atmosphere is shrinking and thinning, which is bad news for Starlink and other LEO Sats

Re: Middle age bloat

If you bothered to read this article and the one you linked to, you'd realise that they are referring to different parts of the atmosphere. However, even that wouldn't change your mind about the cause of global heating because, once you go down the conspiracy rabbit hole, there's no getting back out.

Here's the ugliest global-warming chart you'll ever need to see

Re: Just another alarmist global warming rant

@Jellied Eel

Make up your mind. Is it that you're in denial that our greenhouse gas emissions are behaving according to the laws of physics, or that you don't like any of these new-fangled renewable energy devices because they hit the profits of the fossil fuel industries?

Re: Just another alarmist global warming rant

@Jellied Eel: Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean that it's not true. It just means you don't have the requisite knowledge (and don't seem to want to learn it).

Re: Just another alarmist global warming rant

"So not so long ago, we had 'The Pause' where temperatures pretty much flatlined, despite the inexorable rise of CO2. "

That was because of a record El Niño in 1996-1997 and the GWPF dined out on it as the global temperature slowly climbed back up to the peak in those years, until they could no longer deny the trend so quietly removed the graph from their website.

Re: Lies and statistics

"are we in any natural increase of averages as part of a cycle?"

Short answer, no. Long answer from NASA:

If Earth has warmed and cooled throughout history, what makes scientists think that humans are causing global warming now?

Re: Just another alarmist global warming rant

Jellied Eel wrote: "unsourced figures about 'deniers' being funded by 'big oil'"

Big oil spent $445m in last election cycle to influence Trump and Congress

"These investments are “likely to pay dividends”, the report says, with Republicans holding control of the White House, House and Senate – as well as some key states. Trump unleashed dozens of pro-fossil fuel executive actions on his first day in office"

Re: Just another alarmist global warming rant

Dear Mr Blartfast, no need to get your knickers in a twist. Along with bringing about peace in Ukraine and Gaza, President Trump is fixing climate change by sacking the scientists who monitor it and banning any mention of it in government documents. Just ignore any reports of evidence to the contrary, like this. /s

Want Intel in your Surface? That’ll be $400 extra, says Microsoft

No problems with ARM64

I'm not too happy that Microsoft arbitrarily decided that my first generation Surface Book laptop cannot run Windows 11 (which I dislike) and are soon going to abandon Windows 10. I chose it because I needed a touch screen and high resolution for software testing. It survived a replacement battery and is still good for developing software with Visual Studio. However I needed to build and test software for ARM64 processors so bought a Surface 7 laptop. It is much lighter, very fast and has good battery life. It has run all the x86 programs that I've needed without incident, so mustn't grumble - so far.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

Linux Upgrade Upheaval

To be fair to Microsoft, they have made it possible to upgrade major releases of Windows in situ - even if you have to bypass the artificial blocks on Windows 11. Contrast that with CentOS and Ubuntu where you have to start again each time.

EU attempt to sneak through new encryption-eroding law slammed by Signal, politicians

Re: Signal

I don't want Google on my phone either!

Signal

I'll be very annoyed if I can't use Signal any more. It's functionally equivalent to WhatsApp and keeps my phone and PC free of Zuckerberg's tentacles.

FTX crypto-crook Sam Bankman-Fried gets 25 years in prison

Re: Should've been longer

With those characteristics and behaviour, he'd have a good chance of running for president!

Microsoft gets new Windows boss as Start Menu man Parakhin 'to explore new roles'

Scrollbars

While Parakhin's at it, I hope he fixes their stupid implementation of scrollbars. The whole point of them is to indicate that there's more to see than is currently visible. Having to scrabble about with the mouse pointer to see if there's a hidden scrollbar completely defeats that point.

Road to Removal: A blueprint for yanking billions of tons of CO2 out of our atmosphere

Re: It's all a hoax

Long term, there's nothing to worry about because we'll all be dead. It's just our unfortunate descendents who will have to deal with the mess we're leaving behind. The climate changes we've set in motion will take millennia to pan out.

It's all a hoax

Luckily, I get all my information from the Telegraph and Daily Mail, so I know beyond any doubt that this is part of the great reset conspiracy by Soros/Gates/WEF/Davos, hence there's nothing to worry about. /s

Backblaze starts tracking hot drives as world preps for rising global temperatures

Nothing to worry about

Surely this is just another of those things, like mass migration as lands becoming uninhabitable due to the global heating hoax, that we shouldn't worry our pretty little heads about?

Want a clean energy transition? Better start putting cash into electrical grid

Re: Serious question

"Why would some no nothing administrator (even if it was some friggin genius) know what people need in a 15 minute radius?"

How much of a genius would you have to be to work out that you need shops, access to public transport, schools, play areas, pubs, doctors and dentists? And no, there is no secret plan to stop you from travelling further for anything more exotic!

Re: Serious question

"Why should people be fined for leaving their administrators fantasy boundary?"

That's only ever been suggested by conspiracists. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea of not having to travel far to the shops and doctors and dentists - except in the minds of conspiracists.

Re: Serious question

This is the nub of the problem. People in government know that the climate is changing and accept that it's caused by our CO2 emissions, but the fossil fuel industries have made it politically impossible to take the requisite actions. So effective have their propagandists been that they can confidently agree in public that their products are destabilising the climate, while doing everything they can behind the scenes to undermine every attempt to reduce CO2 emissions.

Hence, the idea of having access to basic services within a 15 minute walk or bike ride has become the conspiracy that local councils can decide how often you go to the shops and that they ration who uses the roads and when, and police it all with CCTV. Wind turbines slaughter birds. Solar panels are a blight on the countryside. Etc.

What they don't talk about is that global heating will lead to a huge influx of refugees from countries that become uninhabitable. Choose carefully who you want to believe.

Apple's iPhone 12 woes spread as Belgium, Germany, Netherlands weigh in

Re: Someone wants a recall.

Does this apply to the 12 mini as well? (Asking for a friend.)

Grant Shapps named UK defense supremo in latest 'tech-savvy' Tory tale

Re: How much lower...

Watch the eponymous News channel!

Microsoft dabbles in self-repair with Surface devices now DIY-friendlier

EOL of Windows 10

"If Microsoft is really serious about right to repair, they should extend the lifetime of its Windows operating system: their plans to discontinue Windows 10 in 2025 could leave millions of computers behind"

This is going to generate a huge pile of waste if it goes ahead. In my small business, I'll have to junk 5 PCs and 2 laptops, simply because of the arbitrary decision to prevent them from running Windows 11. I hope the EU gets on MIcrosoft's back about this, before it's too late.

On the bright side, solar investment finally set to surpass oil spending

So, what is the solution?

First, the fossil fuel corporations denied there was a problem, even though their scientists had warned them of it. Now, as the problem has become too visible to deny, their propagandists have changed tack and attempt to discredit all renewable sources of energy and electric cars. The effectiveness of this approach is seen in the number of commenters parroting their lines whenever these issues are discussed. OK, given the short timescale we have to start reducing the cause of the problem, and solar panels and wind turbines aren't part of the solution, what is?

Offshore wind power redesign key to adoption, says Irish firm

Re: Jam tomorrow

Firstly, you haven't included decommissioning costs for nuclear power stations and the cost of safe storage of their high-level waste products for hundreds of thousands of years Understandable, because we haven't even started on that yet. Secondly, they're not yet vulnerable to offshore storms, but wait until the sea level rises!

ChatGPT creates mostly insecure code, but won't tell you unless you ask

Re: This is totally expected - it doesn't know what you're trying to do

I asked it to show how to implememt B-tree locking in C++. It started well enough by describing the necessary steps, including using RAII to release the locks. Then it produced some code which didn't do that, and I told it so. It responded by saying sorry and produced some more code using RAII. However, this took no account of the locks required when splitting nodes, and I told it so. This resulted in another apology and some more code which would have resulted in deadly embraces, so I gave up. My conclusion is that it has no real insight into what it's doing, so can't be trusted to produce anything other than simple code.

Elon Musk actually sits down and talks to 'government-funded media' the BBC

Musk does have a point, to be fair. The government decides who the DG and chairman are and how big the license fee is. They then threaten to cut it further into the bone whenever the BBC broadcast anything unfavourable to them, while getting their pals at the DM and Telegraph to denounce the BBC as lefties. An alien observer could easily be forgiven for concluding that it's government controlled.

Scientists speak their brains: Please don’t call us boffins

Not just the popular press

It's not just the popular press using the term "boffin", unless this organ considers itself in that category. The problem with using it is that it conjures up an image of people who are not normal "like us", and is dismissive of "them". This is not the ideal way to encourage youngsters to become scientists, nor to discourage the current anti-science phenomenon. Anti-vaxers and climate change deniers spring to mind.

Self-driving car computers may be 'as bad' for emissions as datacenters

Re: Rare earth minerals extraction (cost, environment)

"If you are a realist like me, put in the account sheet the cost of rare earth minerals extraction into this, and you will see EV are WORST than fuel-based cars."

Leaving aside your grammatical error (difficult when you shout it), worse in what way? They succeed in their purpose of reducing CO2 emissions compared with internal combustion engines. Reducing them poses an existential threat to the fossil fuel industries while business as usual poses an existential threat to life on the planet. Choose your priority!

UK's Guardian newspaper breaks news of ransomware attack on itself

Re: Bar-Stewards

"Unaffiliated reporting? Like any other news shit pipe?"

At least they're not constantly creating new enemies to rage against, like the Telegraph and DM, with their wars on "woke" to deflect attention from the riches accruing to their non-dom proprietors.

Bill Gates' green investments to shift from tackling climate change to mitigating impacts

Re: Inconvenient?

By "pollution issue", I assume you mean the byproducts from burning oil and gas? ie. greenhouse gases.

Re: Yep

A free market goes for whatever's cheapest

That's why it needs to be properly regulated.

Climate change prevention plans 'way off track', says UN

Re: So?

I've no idea what you've "said about CO2 (with science)", anomymous person on the internet, but when even the producers of the products causing CO2 levels to rise have admitted that they have caused global heating, I'd say that it's up to you to prove otherwise. However, anyone who goes down the rabbit hole of climate change denial will struggle to get themselves out of it, so I'm sure you'll carry on being a useful idiot for the fossil fuel corporations, even as a third of Pakistan is flooded!.

California asks people not to charge EVs during heatwave

Re: Har Har

In 1982, Exxon’s own scientists accurately predicted the global warming that continuous burning of their products would cause, to within a margin of 20%, and those predictions were consistent with those made by mainstream climate scientists. So, what were you saying about un-testable models where the code and inputs are kept secret?

Re: Har Har

For many years, under previous management, this site was a mouthpiece for anthropogenic climate change deniers. I kept pointing out to them that their anti-science stance discredited everything else they wrote about, and my posts have been premoderated ever since. Hence I'm not surprised at the drift of this piece, but the overwhelming evidence that the climate is changing, as predicted by the increases in CO2 in the atmosphere, has sensibly led them to keep their politics off the page.

Perl Steering Council lays out a backwards compatible future for Perl 7

Write-only

As far as I'm concerned, Perl is a write-only language so they'll have to make drastic changes to fix that fundamental deficiency.

Apple to bin apps that go three years without updates

Re: So you wrote it, and it works

I wonder if Apple are doing this to make sure that all apps conform to their latest privacy requirements? If so, I wholeheartedly approve.

The wild world of non-C operating systems

SPL

The MPE operating system of HP3000 minicomputers was written in SPL. This was a perfect match to the stack based architecture so it was easy to write compact, fast code commensurate with the limited RAM available in those days. Hewlett-Packard also made the HP1000 which on paper was faster hardware, but running theiir version of Unix (HPUX) and programmed in C, was a dog compared to the HP3000. My language of choice is now C++.

But why that VPN? How WireGuard made it into Linux

Re: Painless

It's good to go on a Pi 3 as well. I haven't had the chance to try it from outside the UK, to check if it is detectable by iPlayer etc.

Galileo satnav system gets two new somewhat confusing satellites

Re: No they havent.

"I agree that the EU acted disgracefully over Galileo"

Why was it disgraceful to require the UK to sign up to the same rules and arbitration as every other partiicipating country?

Re: No they havent.

@Justthefacts, I don't know where you're getting your facts from but both Newcastle and Glasgow Prestwick had working implementations of EGNOS approaches, and others were in the pipeline for Blackpool, Gloucester and Shoreham, among others. Commercial aircraft are already equipped for those approaches, as are new light aircraft from Cessna, Cirrus and Diamond.

As of Occtober last year, work was in progress to implement EGNOS approaches at 95 airports in Europe, while we had to abandon ours as a consequence of the extreme form of exit from the EU chosen by the Brexit headbangers.

Well, one thing that's happened to BrexitNav is that our airfields have had to abandon plans to switch to or implement much cheaper satnav precision approaches. The price of sovereignty!

Measuring your carbon footprint? There's no app for that

Re: Wake me up once China gets onboard

If you're awake, you can help cut China's CO2 emissions yourself: simply stop buying stuff that's made there. Our emissions look good in comparison, because we offshored our manufacturing there.

India makes a play to source rare earths – systematic scrapping of its old cars

Re: They need to learn from "cash for clunkers" in the US

And that was before Trump started trashing environmental regulations. In many ways, to an outsider, the US looks no different from a corrupt a 3rd world country.

Apple is about to start scanning iPhone users' devices for banned content, professor warns

File ownership

I've never considered any file that's created by my actions on an iPhone to be mine, because I can't go to its filesystem and copy it to anywhere else. That's one of the features I really miss from my Windows phone.

Redpilled Microsoft does away with flashing icons on taskbar as Windows 11 hits Beta

Obsoleting hardware

What is it about these new UI tweaks that render my Surface Book (and many other Windows computers) obsolete? And yes, it does have TPM 2.0.

Happy with your existing Windows 10 setup? Good, because Windows 11 could turn its nose up at your CPU

Re: Windows 11 also requires the presence of a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) – version 2.0

Well, Windows PC Health Check is very clear that Windows 11 will not run on my Microsoft Surface Book, so I wonder where you bought your nothing-burger?