Resolved for the moment, but...
...then broken again when the next Windows update reinstalls the Windows drivers and changes your default printer to use that driver.
Been there, done that, rent the garment...
Posts by Blitheringeejit
537 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Apr 2008
LibreOffice brands Euro-Office a 'de facto ally' of Microsoft's lock-in strategy
Wednesday 10th June 2026 14:48 GMT
But email IS plain text...
The lovely thing about plain text is that no client-specific rendering implementation can render it illegible. In over three decades of using email, I've seen lots of attempts to implement prettifying "standards", and most of those worked pretty badly if you looked at them in any email client other than the one which created them. HTML email is just the latest - and HTML rendering in an email client is hardly likely to improve matters.
It could possibly work, if:
a) everyone starts writing W3C-compliant HTML5 (don't hold your breath), and
b) every email message includes a stylesheet which fully supports and flexes to different viewport widths, aspect ratios, and accessibility requirements.
Until there's some sign of that happening, I'm going to stick with plain text in my email, and leave HTML rendering where it belongs - in a full-fat browser, with proper control over formatting and clientside script execution. NB a browser component instantiated within an email client tab does NOT count!
And as for pasting lumps of Excelcrescence data into "emails" - don't get me started...
</rant>
TL:DR: Unicode has finally brought plain text simplicity to the wider world - try using it And if you really do want your prettified message to appear the same to all your correspondents as it does to you, create/export the bloody thing as a PDF and attach it.
NHS England confirms: Palantir staff can access patient data
Job's a good 'un: Bank of England tech project wins watchdog praise
Sunday 3rd May 2026 12:48 GMT 
Very Much This....
"Its replacement ... is still internally hosted.."
"The BoE has also been able to retain the intellectual property for the system, and has transferred its day-to-day operation and future improvement to an in-house team."
It may just be that the BoE has enough money to do an IT job properly at the first time of asking - but one lesson should be how much cheaper it is to do it right at the first time of asking, instead of doing a half-arsed job on the cheap and then paying through the nose to mitigate the fallout for decades.
Iran claims US used backdoors to knock out networking equipment during war
AI hasn't delivered the profits it was hyped for, says Deloitte
Thursday 22nd January 2026 22:28 GMT
Re: AI does make a huge difference.
Problem is, they don't give a sh*t. Customers hating you doesn't make them non-customers, because you've worked hard for decades on your lock-in strategy and now it pays dividends.
Plus a lot of the folks who hate you because of chatbots are not even your customers in the first place. They are folks with a legitimate need to interact with your systems, and who really need to talk to a human because their needs are complex (I'm currently dealing with a probate application) - but you don't care if you create a chatbot-driven workflow which totally fails to deliver what they need, because there's no money in it for you anyway.
S Twatter: When text-to-speech goes down the drain
Chinese spies used Maduro's capture as a lure to phish US govt agencies
Teach an AI to write buggy code, and it starts fantasizing about enslaving humans
The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere
Faith in the internet is fading among young Brits
Friday 19th December 2025 14:53 GMT
Damage
"Another reason may be increasing interest in how the internet can damage young people, even if this tends to focus on those a bit younger than the group in question."
Perhaps the group in question are reporting what they are reporting precisely because they grew up using the internet, and feel damaged by it.
BBC tapped to stop Britain being baffled by AI
Friday 19th December 2025 14:35 GMT
Re: The time has past...
BBC radio science programming already works heavily in conjunction with the OU. Gone are the days of lectures broadcast at 1am and given by blokes with comb-overs and leather-patched elbows - but there is still a lot of factual BBC programming which provides a gateway to OU online content. Maybe this project could reawaken closer collaboration.
Though if it does, that may just drag the OU into the same firing line as that in which the Beeb is already languishing. The OU is, after all, a woke lefty project founded by a socialist government - so it might be better to keep collaboration with the embattled Beeb low-key, and head firmly below parapet.
MI6 chief: We'll be as fluent in Python as we are in Russian
Wednesday 17th December 2025 21:35 GMT
Re: @Long John Silver - Are MI6 and MI5 trustworthy?
You can moan about the dysfunctionalness of Ukraine's regimes since independence all you like - I've never defended them, partly because I don't have direct knowledge of them, but mainly because it's not relevant to this war. What's important here is that Putin invaded another sovereign state whose borders his government previously agreed to respect, as part of his Greater Russia project - which most Russian citizens don't give a shit about, but which they are required to die for in vast numbers. Even if everything Putin says about Zelensky is true, it doesn't give him the right to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of his own citizens' lives by invading another country.
And I don't mean to single out Russia as historically unique in this. Putin is currently No1 bad guy in Europe, but this pretext-for-invasion history repeats itself across generations, from Poland to Iraq and beyond (Venezuela?) - and the collatoral damage done to the invadees is always unspeakable.
I have a "Stop The War" t-shirt in my wardrobe. It's very frayed and faded now - but it never goes out of fashion.
Wednesday 17th December 2025 18:22 GMT
Re: Dumbness, arrogance and self-denial
A little harsh, I think. There are plenty of us right-pondians who opposed everything you cite, and opinion polls suggest most Brits now view Brexit as a mistake.
Voting for the Reform party? Hmmm...
Following the general election in 2024, Reform currently holds precisely five seats in a national parliament of 650.
Following the 2025 local elections (which did not include every local authority), Reform held 804 council seats, less than the Green's 895, and waaay less than Labour (6124) or the Conservatives (4403). Some of those Reform councillors have since resigned, presumably after discovering that running a local authority is actually quite hard work. Others have since left the party while remaining as councillors, and more have been expelled by the party. Anyone might think there's as much in-fighting on the right of our politics as is traditional (and ongoing) on the left. :)
Don't confuse the amount of noise made, or the amount of media coverage engineered, with the actual popularity of Reform. Most Brits understand perfectly well that Farage et al are a bunch of dogwhistling racist bastards who couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery, let alone run a political party with a coherent set of policies and opinions, or a local authority, or a national government. The most coherent campaign they have managed so far was to pay a tiny number of very tall people to pin a load of flags to lamp-posts. The effect of this was to make brown folks feel unwelcome and threatened - which of course was the intention - but it didn't do much to make the perpetrators more popular with the white folks. Those who didn't find it embarrassing just thought it was something to do with football.
To be clear: I'm not arguing against the idea that as a nation we don't exhibit an embarrassing degree of dumbness, arrogance and self-denial: of course we do. I'm just arguing that (for now at least) the extent of those traits here is not that different from a lot of other places, including much of Europe, and the USA. Proto-fascism is having a moment - but the moment may be short-lived.
Wednesday 17th December 2025 12:17 GMT
Re: @Long John Silver - Are MI6 and MI5 trustworthy?
In many cases it's because they will get shot in the back by other other people from their own side if they don't, and they're terrified. That's why warmongers from the British in 1916 to Putin today have to rely on conscription, and on punishing the refuseniks - and why so many young Russian men got the fuck out while they could in '22.
Putin's wars are inflicted on the Russian people, not created by them. When you live in fear of reprisal by a brutal dictatorship, you stay alive by maintaining the fictions that are fed to you in one side of your brain - while the other side knows damn well that you're being fucked over, and also knows damn well what will happen if you talk about this. Only the very bravest Russians speak out, and they usually end up dying in a Siberian prison, or falling off a tall building.
I saw some fascinating interviews with ethnic Russians who are now citizens of the Baltic states - when asked whether they approved of Putin and the Ukraine war, they mostly refused to answer. The journo in question seemed to be grinding the axe that this meant they supported Putin but didn't want to do so overtly - but to me it looked more like they were terrified to admit that they didn't approve of Putin or the war, because they fear that one of these days they may find themselves back in Greater Russia.
Tuesday 16th December 2025 17:53 GMT
Re: @Long John Silver - Are MI6 and MI5 trustworthy?
I thought the reason why a huge number of people continue to lose their lives is that other people keep on killing them with guns, missiles, and (if poorly funded) clubs with nails in. If those other people would just stop killing the first people, the huge number of lives would cease to be lost.
Oh dear, I seem to be feeding the trolls again. My therapist has warned me about this.
Landlord quirks leave thousands of flats stuck in the broadband slow lane
Seven years later, Airbus is still trying to kick its Microsoft habit
Friday 28th November 2025 09:16 GMT
Re: Regulatory Compliance
Which is why I still use a 2012 version of my favoured accounting software running (locally) on a Win7 VM.
The only tricky bit was shifting to online VAT submissions. I have to do those via a 2010 version of Excel, because that's the system my accountant provides since our government Made Tax Digital.
Which I believe is where we came in...
Wednesday 26th November 2025 11:04 GMT
Interesting choice...
Hard to see why they thought that swapping one US behemoth provider for another would be a good idea - though I guess the issue back then was Office licensing costs, rather than more modern concerns like privacy and sovereignty.
Cost reduction is a valid concern with Office apps - but why switch to something cloudy when you can deploy something local which can handle big datasets? Libreoffice ain't perfect, but switching from M$Office to Libreoffice is much less of a culture change than switching from local to cloudy.
I suspect someone showed a beancounter the same Google Sheet on two different screens, added something on one and saw it appear automagically on the other, and decided that this was the one true way. I've done it myself in demos to clients, and the reaction from long-term Excel users scarred by decades of version control nightmares was remarkable.
One-fifth of the jobs at your company could disappear as AI automation takes off
Trump wants to turn it on again with 'Genesis Mission' for AI in science
Wednesday 26th November 2025 18:41 GMT
Re: Europe stuck its nose in...?
Ah, *now* I get it. I thought all along that you were typing away in an anonymous-looking office next door but three from the Kremlin - but now I realise that you're head of the "Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize" committee.
Good luck - I wouldn't put money on you succeeding, but after Kissenger in '73 I guess anything is possible.
Wednesday 26th November 2025 15:03 GMT
Re: Europe stuck its nose in...?
>I have to explain the short hand it defeats the purpose of it being short.
I didn't notice you being economic with the word count in your posts - why not say what you mean instead of assuming that your audience understands your shorthand? But my correction was a pedantic one, because after all I am just troll-baiting here. Thanks for rising to it. :)
>>It [NATO] doesn't threaten either Russian territory or Russian interests"
>So you say. Yet from the Russian perspective it does.
No, from the Putin perspective it does, because it serves his glorious leader agenda. The Russian people were fine with being a major economic player in Europe after the collapse of the USSR, and none of the Russians I knew at that time regarded NATO as any kind of threat.
> Then encourage Ukraine to throw out its pro-Russian leadership and push for closer ties to the west. From a Russian perspective would that start to look like the western powers expansion?
Only from a Putin perspective, not a Russian one. Ukrainians may well have been encouraged to vote that way by the prospect of closer ties with Western Europe - but they may also have been discouraged from supporting Yanukovych because of his closer ties with Moscow, or more specifically with the Putin regime which was quite correctly seen as a threat by Ukrainians. Ukraine only became anti-Russia when Russia became Putin-land.
> More than that we have plenty in the west egging the war on. Not wanting peace.
Everyone wants peace, but not at the price of rewarding Putin's aggression in a way which will only encourage him to do the same to other countries as he's done to Ukraine. You say "Misunderstandings happen when you refuse to look from other peoples perspectives." - so consider this situation from the perspective of Estonia, Moldova, and the other ex-members of the "Union" - or from the perspectives of countries like Czechia, where Russian tanks rolling through the streets of Prague is a living memory for people my age.
Ukraine is not a one-off, it's just a phase of the Putin project. He doesn't have an end-game in mind - his position depends on being able to sacrifice endless Russian lives by waging endless war. If he gets what he's prepared to settle for now, that will not bring peace - it will just relocate the war to the next front in Project Putin. @ITMA's reference to Chamberlain above is absolutely on the money.
Wednesday 26th November 2025 10:51 GMT
Re: Europe stuck its nose in...?
>So while technically correct I was using Europe as the shorthand for Western Europe.
OK, so when you use shorthand you should explain it.
>NATO has consistently moved closer to Russia
You are (consciously, I suspect) making the same self-serving conflation between an alliance and a nation state as Putin makes. NATO is not a country, it's an alliance, which any nation state is free to apply to join. It doesn't threaten either Russian territory or Russian interests, but Putin pretends that its expansion is a threat so that he can shore up his authority by playing at being a glorious wartime leader, and send hundreds of thousands of young Russian men to their deaths in the process. What works for him is not good for Russia or for its people.
Of course Putin's fictional objective of reuniting Mother Russia is a tragedy for Ukrainians, and if he lives long enough it will expand into a tragedy for other European nations - but most of all it's a tragedy for the Russian people who are being impoverished and slaughtered just to make him feel strong.
I have a very soft spot for Russia and its people, and all this makes me very sad for them as well as for the Ukrainians. Putin must be stopped for the sake of Mother Russia, never mind everyone else.
AI nudification site fined £55K for skipping age checks
Tuesday 25th November 2025 19:18 GMT
Re: This
>The fact that the UK has a barely functional police force is not a problem which should become the responsibility of a foreign company.
I'm not suggesting making it their responsibility - I'm just suggesting that we take whatever steps we can to reduce the harm which results. The corollary is - it's not our government's responsibility to ensure that foreign companies are able to make huge profits by deploying systems and algorithms whose use results in harm to our vulnerable citizens and children. We also ban civilians from purchasing firearms, which I'm sure damages the profits of weapons manufacturers...
The irony is - I agree with most of your points, as matters of principle. Moreover - far from allowing parents to abdicate their responsibilities and expecting the government to take over, I have long maintained (mostly privately!) that people should be required to pass some kind of qualification in parenting before being allowed to propagate. I guess you would consider that to be over-regulation by the state too - but what I've been trying to address throughout this exchange is the fact that sometimes things do not work as they should, that sometimes people do not discharge their responsibilities to their community and their society as they ought (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd67e15e873o), and that serious and fatal harm is being done as a result. Of course it always has, but not at the scale it is being done here and now - and that shift is because of (or at least exacerbated by) the platforms.
Also - I completely accept that our combination of circumstances is a specifically British one, and at no point have I tried to prescribe a solution for other countries. Generally I'm a libertarian, and not in favour of governments dictating how people should think and behave. I just want to see less harm done here - and breaking the local business model of for-profit US multinationals seems like a possible route to harm reduction, and a small price to pay.
My own recollections of childhood in the 60 and 70s was that most of the people I knew were fine, but there were a few kids who were dangerous to themselves and others - and of course this was because of poor or absent parenting (perhaps, in some cases, combined with a poor understanding of neurodiversity). It's a problem which has always been with us - but the existence of the influencing platforms (and of services like the nudification site which started this whole thing off) can empower and transform these aberrant individuals into monetised mass-appeal social wrecking-balls.
It seems you are not keen on the government trying to regulate things they they can hardly understand - yet you seem to expect parents to do exactly that, and presumably to be sanctioned by that same government if they fail. I'm not sure I see the logic of that - governments come and go, but removing children from their parents and taking them into state care is a drastic and massively costly exercise, which historically has often failed to protect vulnerable children in the UK (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/29/how-did-childrens-homes-become-centres-of-profit-making-and-abuse) - though that picture is not universally bleak (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/17/the-guardian-view-on-the-care-experience-looked-after-children-and-care-leavers-must-be-heard).
Full disclosure - I decided early on that parenting wasn't for me, and have been careful (and occasionally fortunate!) to avoid it. This makes me slightly uncomfortable about telling people how they should do things that I have no idea how to do myself.
Tuesday 25th November 2025 00:11 GMT
Re: This
>Oh boy. An actual argument! How nice....
>These are merely assertions.
How nice to find someone who still thinks an argument on the internet should be conducted using evidence! :) But I'm unsure what you would accept as evidence - I could support my points with links to press and broadcast news articles, but such things carry little weight when it's so easy to find opposing opinions. I happen to believe most of what I see on the BBC and Channel4 news and read in the Guardian, but many of my countrymen would regard these sources as hopelessly biased and representative of vested interests which they do not share - and would direct you instead to output from Reform UK politicians and broadcasters like GB News. Evidence is so last-century - if it were still a viable concept, Britain would never have left the EU in 2016, or lost so many souls in the pandemic. And on it goes...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/nov/22/free-birth-society-linked-to-babies-deaths-investigation
Never mind the Anthropocene epoch - I think we're now living in the Influenceocene.
But public sources of evidence aside, I do have friends who have direct experience of (as examples) our current difficulties with prosecuting even the most blatant criminality, and delivering parenting and/or education which counteracts the influence of folks like Andrew Tate on adolescent boys - and these folks regard their situations as desperate. You say you're sure that we prosecute online offenders just as Sweden does - but prosecuting criminals requires a functional police force and judiciary. Swedes pay enough tax to afford such luxuries, but we Brits pay far less, and have been told for decades by politicians of both our main parties that we can have better public services without tax rises. The result is that proposing tax rises to improve public services renders a British political party unelectable, and our judicial and policing systems are among the casualties of this generation-long fairytale. Feel free to research for yourself the average time it takes to bring a rape case to court in the UK - having laws is one thing, but having the resources to enforce them is very much another.
But the central point which you don't seem to have answered is that of most perpetrators being beyond the reach of our justice system. Maybe this isn't so much of a problem in Sweden, given the language situation - perhaps most of those who groom and abuse Swedish kids online (or indeed drive them to suicide) are Swedish themselves, and your law enforcement can get to them. But however powerful our surveillance, and even if we do make a decently-resourced effort to find and prosecute UK-based abusers (citation needed), there's nothing we can do to stop the rest of the English-speaking world from abusing and corrupting our vulnerable and our kids via the platforms. Hence my thought-experiment that the only way to protect our people is to close off those platforms - or at least make them legally and financially liable for the damage that is done using them, which will scare them off in short order. I agree that the posters *should* be the ones paying the price - but it's the platforms who (by failing to mediate their content and allowing posters to remain anonymous) have decided that this shall not be the case, and they are answerable for that.
Of course it is just a thought-experiment, and I'm really not expecting anything like this to happen - if politicians can't sell the idea of raising taxes to improve the public services that we increasingly despair of, there's no way they will sell the idea of regulating the platforms. As a parallel example - I've been shouting in my bedroom about carbon emissions since the 1980s, so I know what a waste of energy this kind of ranting is, and how hopeless is the prognosis for the species. And compared to the current situations with climate change and war elsewhere in the world (but getting closer!), I suppose anyone who worries about a few damaged or dead British kids is just being parochial.
Best just take another one of my tablets, and focus on growing my vegetables and brewing my <icon>.
Saturday 22nd November 2025 11:57 GMT
Re: This
>Adequate laws already exist
But they are not adequate for addressing this issue.
Those laws date from a time when the only people with significant audience reach were identifiable and prosecutable. It was always possible to work around the restrictions using technology - I'm old enough to remember Radio Moscow and the Voice of America - but they didn't have easy access to a mainstream audience in the UK. All media which DID have access to such an audience fell within UK legal jurisdiction, and could be prosecuted under the libel and slander laws. So they were careful not to publish anything which could be prosecutable under those laws.
But now the platforms with huge mainstream audiences aren't held legally liable for everything which people post on their platforms, so that legislation doesn't work. The posters are anonymous and UK law has no way to compel the platform to reveal their identity - and even if they did, the posters themselves may well be operating outside UK legal jurisdiction.
I'm guessing this reality is one reason why you think that there's no point in trying to legislate for any regulation on the web, and there's merit in that argument. Certainly nothing which the legislators have considered or implemented so far comes close to making a real difference - they just want to be seen to be doing something.
But the damage done to the young and the vulnerable (not to mention anyone in the public eye) by an unregulated, profit-driven web is devastating, and deeply damaging to social cohesion and consensus politics. And as far as I can tell, the only reason why the platforms are not liable for all their content in the UK is because of the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002, a directive (not a piece of UK legislation) designed to protect customers of e-commerce businesses.
That's why I think it's time for a good hard re-examination of this legal landscape. The thing is, it's pretty clear that any attempt to make the platforms liable in the UK would just result in them shutting themselves down, or being forcibly shut down, as mass audience entities here. Which brings us back to my original point - is the benefit they bring worth the damage they do? You can imagine the public outcry if the government tried to take their Facebook and Twitter away - but one key purpose of government in a civilised society is to protect the weak and vulnerable from the strong and rich. So I think it's worth a shot.
But that's easy for me to say because I don't use any of the platforms - I do most of my shouting-in-my-bedroom (see icon!) here on El Reg. :)
Friday 21st November 2025 22:42 GMT
Re: How would they enforce that fine?
I think OfCom know there's no likelihood of collecting fines - just as with the 4chan case. But maybe there's a procedural requirement for the prosecuted party to fail to pay the fine before OfCom can require ISPs and fintechs who DO operate within their jurisdiction to block access and payments to the sanctioned platforms.
Can any lawyers (or folks who have actually bothered to read the legislation in full) confirm? I'm not and haven't, so only guessing...
Friday 21st November 2025 12:37 GMT
This
Of course all this was predictable from the moment the Act was drafted - but I still struggle to understand why legislators think age verification is a better approach to protecting the vulnerable than making the big platforms bear some legal liability for the content they host, like newspapers and TV channels do (in theory). Of course that would rapidly result in Twitter, Facebook et al disappearing from the UK internets - but that in itself would be an interesting social experiment.
Rather like the social experiment we've been conducting for the last two decades by allowing them to operate unregulated...
CISA warns spyware crews are breaking into Signal and WhatsApp accounts
Zoomers are officially worse at passwords than 80-year-olds
Tuesday 18th November 2025 23:49 GMT
"The problems started when code bloat met ongoing revenue stream generation"
I beg to differ - my experience was that the problems started when you wanted to print anything other than US ASCII, or (god forbid) graphics. Text mode charsets were difficult enough, but raster graphics on a dot-matrix...EEK!
AI gone rogue: Models may try to stop people from shutting them down, Google warns
It's AI all the way down as Google's AI cites web pages written by AI
Coldplay kiss-cam flap proves we’re already our own surveillance state
Saturday 19th July 2025 20:28 GMT
This...
I was particularly annoyed by "we're all perpetually ready to use that tech to make those we feel have violated the social contract pay publicly for their transgressions. ". Don't mistake a few busybodies with nothing better to do for "all of us" - most of us are no worse than we've always been. The witch-hunting comparison is fair, but the witch-hunters were a minority of nutters who fixated on persecuting the women on whom most of the ordinary poor folks relied for healthcare. Plus ca change...
The year of the European Union Linux desktop may finally arrive
Friday 27th June 2025 14:48 GMT
Re: Maybe this is finally he time
As one who has for decades been given client datasets in Excel format for mangling into (linux) dB/web servers, today is something of a red-letter day: I have just received my first ever spreadsheet in ODS format. It was provided to my client by their client, a UK government agency. Perhaps someone somewhere is finally paying attention.
Microsoft 365 brings the shutters down on legacy protocols
Google Cloud goes down, takes Cloudflare and its customers with it
Developer scored huge own goal by deleting almost every football fan in Europe
Tech tariff turmoil continues as Trump admin exempts some electronics, then promises to bring taxes back
Now Windows Longhorn is long gone, witness reflects on Microsoft's OS belly-flop
Hm, why are so many DrayTek routers stuck in a bootloop?
Tuesday 25th March 2025 15:35 GMT
Over reaction
I'll agree with your over-reaction assessment if someone can explain to me why a browser is throwing a security error when trying to access the firmware update page via an unpatched router, while the same browser isn't showing any errors when accessing the same page via a patched (different) Draytek router. Some of the online noise suggests that the bad stuff may not be limited to reboot cycles, and might result in code execution and possible facilitate MitM attacks.
I'm reluctant to write Draytek off, for the same reasons as you - but they are not being very forthcoming about exactly what kind of threats this latest bunch of hacks might involve. In conjunction with the symptom above, this leaves me a bit worried.