Posts by A. Coatsworth

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.

Poop-peeping toilet attachment has a different definition of 'end-to-end' encryption

Re: They'll get my shit for free when they pry it from my cold, dead hands

For free? Oh, no no. Don't worry, it's not for free: you pay them $7 per month for the privilege!

Words really can't describe this level of stupidity.

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

EU starting registration of fingerprints and faces for short-stay foreigners

Re: Not enough

Ok, so entry rules are simpler for people claiming to be at risk. Fair enough.

But why make the entry of legal travelers harder? It makes no sense.

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.

Infosec hounds spot prompt injection vuln in Google Gemini apps

It is very interesting that their response uses the word "mitigate" instead of "patch" or "fix"

They are accepting, albeit weaselly, what we already know: that the curent concept of ai is fundamentally flawed and there is no way to correct it.

Linux kernel 6.16 lands without any headline features but 38M lines of code

Re: "world's most famous Finn"

>> Tarja Turunen has entered the chat

Critics blast Microsoft's limited reprieve for those stuck on Windows 10

Re: ¿Nuke the License? No, I am 99.9999% sure not. But...

>>Yearly updates (Win11 2xH2) not installing automaticaly You say that as if it was a bad thing. I am sure it is not

After the latest autoinstall they destoyed several workarounds to make the Win 11 interface less horrid, like the register keys to eliminate thumbnail view in the task bar, which feels like a really petty thing to do.

Tesla Robotaxi videos show Elon's way behind Waymo

Cybertrump?

Will it be the final boss in an upcoming Wolfenstein sequel?

The main character should be renamed "Rodriguez" or somesuch instead of Blaskowitz

Techie went home rather than fix mistake that caused a massive meltdown

Argh! I'll inch away from these horrible puns before it's too late

Minecraft cheaters never win ... but they may get malware

Re: It's always Minecraft

I don't think there is anything inherent to Minecraft that attracts malware.

It is that, if the numbers in the article are correct, a 2.5% of the World population logs into it monthly... that is a big jackpot if you manage to hit it

DARPA is testing a device soldiers can swallow to make them less stressed

Not that kind of edible...

No Panzerschokolade then... Boring!

NASA to silence Voyager's social media accounts

Re: Save APOD

You sure it is the same Crab Nebula every time?

It wouldn't surprise me if carcinisation is a thing in space too!

Instead of going in a blaze of glory, or fading gently into the endless night, Voyager will get a shameful death by beancounter.

What an ignominious end for one of mankind stellar achievements

_{yes, in theory this announcement has nothing to do with the end of the mission, but we all know MAGAs are itching to pull the plug on them scary sciency thingamajigs}

Feds gut host behind pig butchering scams that bilked $200M from Americans

>> Interpol prefers the term "romance baiting" because of its less pejorative description of the victims

Which I guess is the reason why El Reg insists in using the frowned-upon name. If so ---->

(see icon tooltip)

Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor

Re: Does not sound like any kind of fix to me

You see a brown door

and you want to paint it black?

Empire of office workers strikes back against RTO mandates

Re: Cuckoo land

Bosses don't want bums in seats. They want people to actually act on what they said here, and quit.

What's not to like? All the shareholder-pleasing benefits of a layoff round without the bad publicity.

Bonuses and martinis all around!

Who cares if the serfs fall on bad times because of this? That's what they are for. And who cares if this causes the best and brightest to leave? That's a problem for next FY and for sure can be fixed with more layoffs

Get a custom paint job for earbuds at a nail salon, type on a baguette, then build a fountain for your PC

>> Nvidia handed out t-shirts to media at Huang’s keynote and the XL-sized item given to The Register would be rated medium-sized outside Taiwan.

Will that be part of this Year End's contests? That thing would give Microsoft's ugly swaters a run for their money

OS-busting bug so bad that Microsoft blocks Windows Insider release

>>Canary fans told it hurts functionality to the point that it makes 'using your PC to do even basic things difficult'

[Insert "Oh, that's just normal Windows 11 behavior" snark here]

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

Re: Been there

If your best cat left your computer unusable on a regular basis, I shudder to think what did the worst cats do

Amazon touts Vulcan – its first robot with a sense of 'touch'

Re: Meh!

Well, of course a guy in a robot suit will be better. It is an inverse Terminator!

Microsoft updates the Windows 11 Start Menu

Take my hat off to MS

>> Phone Link [...] provides easy access to calls, messages, and device information

SInce MS abandoned the cell phone business, they were missing on all of this delicious, delicious data. But now they found a way to syphon it even from iPhones, and beam it to the mothership.

I really have to commend them for the effort

Microsoft burnishes green cred by paying Swedes to burn biomass and bury CO₂

"carbon indulgences"

I'm stealing that. It's the best description I've seen of the whole circus

I may need to run this through Google's dumber-downer from the other article because I don't get it: MS is paying Sweden to burn wood -that did not need to be burnt otherwise- and bury the soot... And that somehow grants them the right to pollute somewhere else?

Palantir loves the smell of DOGE budget cuts in the morning

C'mon! You gotta do your part: the only way that billionaires like Musk and Zuck can keep paying zero taxes year after year is for you and me to continue to pay our income tax without fail.

They are sooo much better than us minions that they deserve it, don't they?

/s

The Telegraph jumps the gun on World War III

Re: poor reporter

Well, in this timeline it seems WWIII will be started by the nuclear powers in South Asia any day now, so not sure how much better it is...

AI-driven 20-ft robots coming for construction workers' jobs

No need to worry: nobody knows how the real world works better than a California startup, as we have seen multiple times.

Hey Google, if Chrome is going to be single soon, OpenAI is interested

if the idea was to identify the worst possible option to take ownership of Chrome, well, mission accomplished!

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

Re: stop moaning you dinos

Don't flatter yourself, perusing your posts, you come out as a garden variety troll and not a very good one at that.

You are light years away of the likes of Eadon [1]

[1] moaning dinos will likely remember him