Posts by A. Coatsworth

LG accused of 'egregious invasion of privacy' over TV data collection

Re: "Allegations"

Always thought the use of the word "ass" instead of "arse" was originally a way to soften the swearing that ended up changing the meaning of the word... But perhaps it is not.

Re: "Allegations"

Upvoted, but I learned americanese so "ass" and not "arse" is the word that automatically comes to my mind.

"Allegations"

I kind of understand El Reg's need to cover their own asses on this kind of reports, but those were not allegations. The video was a smoking goddamned gun

Bing Wallpaper app opens Harry Potter's chamber of ads

Re: First question ...

Simply put, the Mayans were right: the world did end on December 21, 2012. Some lucky bastards were problaby raptured and the rest of us have been living in hell since

Windows 11 update sends some desktops into an unwanted goth phase

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence.

Windows updates are enemy action

Oracle pins hopes on 'Star Wars' productivity jump to lightspeed from AI-assisted engineering

Perhaps we can encase all tech bros in carbonite, we'll get nice coffee tables out of it and a somewhat saner world too

'Dumbass' criminal breaks the 'first rule of ransomware club'

>>"They're not mythical. They don't have superpowers."

Damn right. And that is why the cyber security companies should stop glamourizing them with pompous sounding names à la Volt Typhoon.

Small dick energy crew or Putin's little bitches gang would be more appropriate.

Disgruntled 0-day hunter 'humiliated' by Microsoft pledges 'bone shattering drop' as Redmond calls cops

Hope the guy has a dead man switch in place, in case he's collared before July 14.

It is hard not to simpatize with him even if -at an objective level- their actions are wrong.

May Microslop fall into a world of pain

AT&T sues to ditch Cali copper phone lines to save billions

Land of the Free™

Oh, the poor, poor oligopolies!

AT&T only got a net revenue of $23.5B last year! How can they feed themselves, much less waste away precious resources to the maintenance of deteriorating legacy networks. Those pesky customers pay for the service and have the gall of expecting something in return??

At least is good to see the FCC defending the underprivileged businesses from the predation of the evil customers

Google accused of pushing 'free for life' G Suite users onto paid plans

Re: If I got one of those lovenotes

This reminds me I need to check again if gmail is still tied to anything of importance.

I've had a gmail account since the invitation-only days. It truly felt groundbreaking back in the day.

Some time ago I decided to put my wallet where my mouth is, and pay for a Proton full monty. But breaking ~20 years of googlification is not easy. It has been a Sisyphean task.

Edit: Blimey! El reg still has that gmail account for login.

EU browser choice rules send millions more users Firefox's way

The famoous Firefox annoyances

Honest question to the commentariat:

I jumped ship a long, long time ago, when Palemoon was new, with the vivid recollection that Firefox got me so annoyed that I started to look for any non Google alternative. Many people has commented with similar histories here over the years.

But for the life of me I can't remember what was so bad about it that made me go away. So, for all vultures, what was it? what was the nadir that Firefox hit back in the day, that spawned so many forks and killed its market share?

Right now I am using it in a Mint box and it is... a browser. Definitely better that the Chrome I am forced to use at work.

Edit: Wondering if Firefox's history is a goddamed Mandela effect

Google tweaks Chrome AI privacy wording, insists processing stays on-device

>>It appears this situation deserves a more genteel rendering of Hanlon's Razor

Ehrm... No. Given Google's history they don't get to receive the benefit of doubt. All their actions should be considered hostile until the contrary is demonstrated.

In this case their excuse may sound acceptable, but I don't think they'll resist the temptation to scope-creep on top of it

Chrome silently installs a 4 GB local LLM on your computer

Re: AI is toxic filth. A digital pandemic.

Google s toxic filth. A digital pandemic. Avoid it, disable it, walk away from it and never use it.

FTFTFY.

Microsoft fixes VS Code after app gives Copilot credit for human's work

It will depend on how many people is killed (c.f. Ford Pinto) or whether the anyone in the family of the deceased accepted an EULA (c.f. Disney)

Damn, this distopy keeps getting better and better

Ask.com, former home of search butler Jeeves, closes just as conversational search comes back

Re: old man

Cue Roy Batty's famous last words...

Betting shop bug ends in kidnap plot as staff turn ransom artists

Re: Have the Pronoun Police been in /s

Doubly annoying given that the original text comes from the very gendered Spanish language.

Why weren't the genders in the original police bulletin (el gerente, los secuestradores, both masculine) not respected?

Microsoft gives your Word documents an AI co-author you didn’t ask for

Microslop doesn't have customers, it has hostages and that has been the situation for a long time.

Like any good terrorist organization it does whatever it wants with its captives

Flying cabs, next-gen aircraft cleared for takeoff in 26 states

Re: Crashes

Yeah but it will be a drop available only to the 1%, so, everybody wins?

[Picture related]

Norway's Consumer Council takes aim at enshittification

Re: Brilliant

Currently in the middle of Cory Doctorow's book Enshittification... It has made me angry as you can't believe: the what is very well understood, but the insidiousness of the how as explained in the book is simply infuriating.

Glad to see Doctorow is not just a voice claimin g in the wilderness, and his actions are having impact in the real world

Burger King turns to AI to flame broil employees who aren't friendly enough

>>isten to employees’ customer interactions

So, it will record what is said in the restaurant and upload it to Buddha-knows-where without customers consent? Just lovely!

I guess this will be rolled out in the US only and not in any country with a smidgen of data protection

Hardly anybody bought Samsung's last smartphones for AI. It hopes this year's models change that

Re: No thanks

It. It was installed, it showed a notification

Every day in every way, passwords are getting worse and worse

Re: I suppose...

Sooo... A correct horse battery stapler?

Trump to hyperscalers: your datacenters, your power bill

A proposed voluntary pact

So it combines the good will of Microslop, Meta and Google with the value of Trump's word.

This is *beyond* worthless

EU looking into Elon Musk's X after Grok produces deepfake sex images

Re: Oh No

No, he understood it clearly. But for some people on the internet, gobbling Musk's dick whole is more important than being factual or even making any sense

Microsoft admits Outlook might freeze when saving files to OneDrive

It is! At least in Spain and Latin America.

Tuesday the 13th and Sunday the 7th are a lot more ominous than Voorhees' favorite day, or at least were before the Americanization of the local culture over here

Splash-screen memories from a Bangkok ticket machine

Re: Windows, again

I had the exact same experience with an in-flight entertainment console, and even managed to have it featured in this esteemed rag, many moons ago.

Bork!

Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check

File this under

Schadenfreude, along with the notes on Trump Phone and the busted scooter company.

Reading these tales of stupidity and retribution soothes my sad, pathetic soul.

Keep up the good work, vultures!

BOFH: Every computer system eventually serves ads

Re: Good episode, but take note:

I thought the proof of the pudding was in breaking the eggs, as Capt. Jno Aubrey would eloquently put it.

Mine is the Royal Navy blue coat, thanks!

NASA tries savin' MAVEN as Mars probe loses contact with Earth

MAVEN is "rotating in an unexpected manner"

Clearly the bored alien yobbo's equivalent of cow tipping

SantaStealer stuffs credentials, crypto wallets into a brand new bag

What, no "Jessica is unfit for purpose" this time?

US teens not only love AI, but also let it rot their brains

Re: Accademic performance?

You're absoultely right, thank you for correcting me. This shows your magnanimity: of course in the next version, I will be able to give you a really human response instead of spewing platitudes like a derranged sycophant

Welcome to America - now show us your last five years of social media posts

>>social media vetting for 'anti-American activity'

Somewhere, senator McCarthy is looking up from Hell, and smiling.

Aviation delays ease as airlines complete Airbus software rollback

Re: So ?

You'd get Petohtalrayn, shirley?

Windows keeps obsolete strings forever to avoid breaking translations

Re: Of all the ways you cloud have done it

Freudian slip in the title? Arguably, the could would be a even worse way to do it

Airbus: We were hours from pausing production in Spain

Re: Flawed business continuity plan…

As Roy Trenneman succintly put it, £20 pound doesn't even register to him as an amount of money! He won't remember it!

UK minister ducks cost questions on nationwide digital ID scheme

So a Cloudfare fart, internet outage, or running out of data means you become undocumented?

That's much better.

Magician forgets password to his own hand after RFID chip implant

Re: If this happened to me ....

There is not such thing as bad publicity in internet land. I could have spent the rest of my life without knowing of the existence of this dumbfuck, but here we are, discussing him. So he won.

Google Cloud suspended customer's account three times, for three different reasons

Well, mr Josef K, that would be your problem, not Google's

Hacking LED Halloween masks is frighteningly easy

Re: "BLE enabled mask with a programmable app"

>>What's the worst than can happen ? Tell me, please.

Given that each mask on the streets probably means one "Shining Mask" app installed, from a company with such ironclad approach to security, I can see the worst that could happen being really ugly

Former UK prime minister Sunak becomes human Clippy for Microsoft, Anthropic

Re: Seriously?

ERRATA

In the text, instead of Microsoft has driven productivity improvements for decades,

read Microsoft has driven away productivity improvements for decades

Deloitte refunds Aussie gov after AI fabrications slip into $440K welfare report

What's good for the goose...

>>Deloitte did not respond to requests for comment.

Just ask chatgpt what deloitte would say in such a situation, an publish the answer as a fact.

It sounds fair enough to me

ICE plans to scour Facebook, TikTok, X, and even defunct Google+ for illegal immigration leads

Do the ICE enforcers wear an uniform?

If not, I'd suggest Brown Shirts. They would look smashing!

Microsoft declares bring your Copilot to work day, usurping IT authority

This is proper good news!

Hopefully MS has finally something stupid enough to actually annoy their corporate customers.

We know they don't give a flying fuck about domestic users, having done whatever they want with "our" computers for decades. But on the corporate front they have been somewhat more cautious.

Now their callousness or desperation perhaps made them cross a line that may make corpos to reconsider their relationship.

We can only wait and hope

Amazon will refund $1.5B to 35M customers allegedly duped into paying for Prime

It's something

At least this is a fine that can be expressed in weeks of revenue instead of seconds

Google stuffs Chrome full of AI features whether you like it or not

You can read Brave's oh-so-heinous crimes here: stop using brave

In my opinion it is a bunch of non-issues, but on internet people loves to blow everything out of proportion and resort to hyperbole, as Always Right Mostly helpfully illustrated above.

The only worrying topic was the affiliated links one, from 5 years ago, in which the browser injected codes to links, but funnily it is bundled in the "everything else" section of the article (I.e. not relevant enough to deserve its own title)

Fujitsu under fire for bidding on UK public sector deals despite Horizon scandal vow

Re: Who is eating porridge ?

Prison? People killed themselves due to the persecution they were subject to.

A proportional number of exes should be forced to commit seppuku. After that, Fujitsu may me cleared to continue business.

Salesforce sacrifices 4,000 support jobs on the altar of AI

Re: Tried it, hated it, despised it, loathe it

One would almost welcome the appearance of a grue in the middle of such clusterfuck

ChatGPT hates LA Chargers fans

Re: Couldn't happen to a nicer team

Or perhaps because he's OK with affecting certain people because of what the owners of a sports team did almost 30 years ago.

I doubt many of the Chargers fans saw one cent of that money, or were even alive, when that deal was going on. But they have the gall to like the team, so make them pay.

Junk is the new punk: Why we're falling back in love with retro tech

Gatekeeping

he did it to create a safe space after seeing a lot of toxic gatekeeping in the community.

...

When a retro trend gets big enough to mass produce, it can quickly sour

Kind of easy to see the connection between the two, isn't it?

Hyundai: Want cyber-secure car locks? That'll be £49, please

Re: Do you want a car with that key?

Get your point, but after BMW *actually* tried to charge a subscription for the heated seats, any satire on this topic is dead and buried.

You can't outstupid reality.