Posts by lvm

Honey, can you shrink the plugin? Mozilla allows desktop extensions on Firefox for Android

Do I know something they don't?

I've been using extensions on Firefox (well, Fennec, but they are the same) for android for years. Ublock origin and Darkreader are the two things which makes browsing bearable.

Have you ever suspected your colleague doesn't hope this email finds you well?*

The last one doesn't have the correct choice

The best coworker is the one who leaves you in peace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjjMH1KEwM4

Japanese supermarket watches you shop so AI can suggest more stuff to buy

Now where did I see the idea of ad-slinging avatar?

Oh yes, the Zero Theorem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs8GxPO55tM

Samsung’s midrange A54 is lovely, but users won't feel seen

Like most, a piece of horrid designer crap with defective screen

A phone must be able to survive the slings and arrows of everyday usage including the drop on concrete from the typical height without - mind it - without additional protection. This means that glass is not an acceptable material for the back panel. Just isn't. And rounded corners are not cool. The day when they learned how to do cut shapes out of the proper rectangular screen, and proceeded doing so instead of re-watching Jurassic Park, is the saddest day in smartphone history. The phone is an information device - a computer. Would you use a monitor with rounder corners? Or a notch? Why should the phone have them - they are screen defects. This screen is defective.

Metal-rich stars inhibit chances of life on their planets

How NOT to write

So the ignorant hack who wrote this piece copypasted the abstract several times repeating what happens again and again, but got brain-freeze before the part explaining WHY this happens. Let me amend that:

The UV flux drops substantially with increasing metallicity, creating seemingly more favourable conditions for life. However, metallicity affects radiation in the O3-producing Herzberg continuum much more strongly than in the O3-destroying Hartley band. Thus, the net photochemical effect leads to a decrease of O3 with metallicity.

Thanks for drawing attention to that, but otherwise it was utterly unprofessional.

Move over, Google Earth. Caltech's here with a fresh 3D tour of Mars

google earth had Mars for years

only desktop version though, not available in the newfangled web nonsense

China debuts bonkers hybrid electric trolley-truck

Re: European Pilot

2016? ahem... production of "cargo trolleybus" started in Ukraine almost 50 years ago.

https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B8%D1%97%D0%B2%D1%81%D1%8C%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%B6%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%B9%D0%B1%D1%83%D1%81 (in Ukrainian)

Accidental WhatsApp account takeovers? It's a thing

Eventually this will happen to all of us

and this is not 'extremely rare' at all - we all will die.

A tip for content filter evaluators: erase the list of sites you tested, don't share them on 100 PCs

bullshit detected

"before browsers could be set to deny access to certain sorts of content" - oh really? Which modern desktop browser lets you block adult content on its own - without add-ons and such?

Canadian owes bosses for 'time theft' after work-tracking app sinks tribunal bid

Excuse me while I die laughing

"because she felt unproductive and that she was not performing as well as she should have been". How can anyone lie like that in court and get away with it?

Voice assistants failed because they serve their makers more than they help users

nonsense

So voice assistants where mysteriously and instinctively rejected? Sorry to prick this bubble, but there is no mystery in that, and it has nothing to do with our instinctive concern for our privacy - the same people are cheerfully using facebook and such which are a much bigger privacy sinkhole. The truth is that voice assistants are rejected because they fail dismally at all but simplest of tasks. The best they can do is, instead of learning to understand your language, to train YOU to say specific phrases to get certain results - just like using a programming language with a fixed syntax. As PAs they are complete and utter crap.

Oh, and disabling google apps' access to the microphone is a very good idea.

Bitcoin worse for the climate than beef, say economists

all encryption is bad

All encryption uses CPU, wastes electricity, generates heat and melts baby seals. Indiscriminate and unwarranted use of https could be doing even more harm. Accessing banking site over https is justified and sensible, watching cat videos over https is pointless and harmful to the environment.

A match made in heaven: systemd comes to Windows Subsystem for Linux

a match made in heaven indeed

systemd abomination is a product which could've make microsoft proud - overcomplicated, unnecessary and addressing issues which don't exist. And using binary logs - just the way ms likes it.

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

Re: That's 50's american cars all over again

Out of those I mentioned KDE is the best by far, but not completely free from the 'I was made to look new, not to be useful' stuff. KDE 3.5 was the daddy, after that - decadence. Plasma sucks.

That's 50's american cars all over again

What Microsoft was doing with windows UI since NT4/95 is not progress, it's change. Mindless and pointless - just like those cars with lots of new chrome and fins every year on top of the same horrid stuff underneath. And they are not alone - look at Android, IOS, Gnome, KDE...

Germany advises citizens to uninstall Kaspersky antivirus

I wouldn't recommend it to anyone regardless

It is a well-known fact that Kaspersky defeats virii (yes, I am from *that* time :) by sheer slowing the machine down to the point when they give up and die. I will never forget Eclipse starting in a couple of seconds without Kaspersky and over 3 minutes - yes MINUTES, with.

Europe's largest nuclear plant on fire after Russian attack

looks like starshell to me

While I am not in any way approving this, it looks like illumination rounds, not some kind of attack ammunition, so they are probably trying to be extra careful and avoid hitting it by accident. Cheap sensationalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_%28projectile%29#/media/File:Flares_fired_by_M777_howitzers_to_illuminate_during_Operation_Tora_Arwa_V_in_the_Kandahar_province_Aug._2_2009.jpg

RAID expansion comes to OpenZFS at last

monsters...

Take md RAID (which you can reshape any way you like) and put a filesystem of your choice on top. And avoid these unholy raid+fs hybrids like plague.

Ooh, an update. Let's install it. What could possibly go wro-

Netware? Less than 20 years ago? Where was he working - Jurassic Park?

I last used it in the 90s...

Ubuntu desktop team teases 'proof of concept' systemd on Windows Subsystem for Linux

Good job!

Let's make windows even more windowsy by offloading linux junk there.

New GNOME Human Interface Guidelines now official – and obviously some people hate it

Who cares?

Gnome died with version 3, there is no need to kill it yet again.

How do you save an ailing sales pitch? Just burn down the client's office with their own whiteboard

Lies

Voltage (or frequency) cannot do it to a mere cable, it requires overcurrent, and whiteboard cannot draw much, Power cables are not even rated for voltage. Now if it was not a *cable* but a power adapter... but then it was not an engineer but a sales droid.

FYI: You can trick image-recog AI into, say, mixing up cats and dogs – by abusing scaling code to poison training data

how they want some attention...

So they found a bug in image scaling library, why not call it just that? Noooo, they will involve AI, ML and other trendy acronyms.

Get ready for a literal waiting list for European IPv4 addresses. And no jumping the line

to quote the classics...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/21/verity_stob_ipv6/

Stones, meet glass house: Mind behind Windows 8 GUI disses Windows 10 over leak

Callingl windows GUI creator a MIND??? You've got some nerve, vulture.

Fantastic Mr Fox? Not when he sh*ts on your lawn, kids' trampoline and your soul

Usually an animal won't shit where it eats. Didn't have much experience with foxes but when a stray cat started using my garage as a toilet I put some food there which solved the problem immediately and efficiently. Of course now it lives there :)

JavaScript tracking punks given a thrashing by good old-fashioned server log analytics

Genius. Sheer genius. Its like 80s all over. I always said: if you want to get web usage stats don't pass to load to clients' browsers. Parse your frigging logs, this is the only acceptable way to do it.

Why are fervid Googlers making ad-blocker-breaking changes to Chrome? Because they created a monster – and are fighting to secure it

What was that saying about liberty and safety by a certain Mr Franklin?

Wondering where that upcoming meeting with 'Cheap Viagra' came from? Spammers beat Gmail filters by abusing Google Calendar, Forms, Photos, Analytics...

A well-known problem with a well-known solution

Disable 'events from gmail' in google calendar settings, it's on by default. Unless you are relying on receiving appointments via gmail, then you are screwed.

There's NordVPN odd about this, right? Infosec types concerned over strange app traffic

"and that gzip string looks rather like the client is expecting to receive a payload from the server" - I chose this particular bit to demonstrate technical ineptness of the scribbler who wrote this clickbait. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_compression

Nokia 9: HMD Global hauls PureView™ out of brand limbo

those corners again...

Can't stand those artificial retro rounded screen corners. I mean if screen is following the rounded corners of phone's body it is a reason to have them. Nowhere near a good one, but at least some sort of a reason, but this - when they cut (or probably just covered) screen corners to make it look like that silly trend... Sick. I would hate looking at it regardless of how good it is.

Here's 2018 in a nutshell for you... Russian super robot turns out to be man in robot suit

clickbait

Dude in an off the shelf fake-looking costume with pieces of him showing through the gaps is not a real robot - what a horrible lie! They will be opening our eyes on the fact that Santa's just a man with a fake beard next.

Huawei MateBook Pro X: PC makers look out, the phone guys are here

Very impressive. There is a flaw though, and a big one - the screen may be 4:3, but it is a shiny one.

Roscosmos: An assembly error doomed our Soyuz, but we promise it won't happen again

Translation is incorrect - not "a failure to open a nozzle at the top of the strap-on booster to vent its tank", but a failure to open the cover of the jet nozzle responsible for steering the booster away from the rocket.

Crucial P1 minicard flash drive? Not if you grabbed Intel's 660p

0.1 DWPD? This is so sad...

Watch Series 4: What price 'freedom'? About as much as you'd expect from an Apple product

Aaaaand...

it bootloops on the DST day https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/8/17950300/apple-watch-series-4-reboot-crash-dst-bug

Who's using 2FA? Sweet FA. Less than 10% of Gmail users enable two-factor authentication

but have you read the small print?

If you accept 2FA you accept 'Your number will be used for things like making Google services, including the ads you see....'. Thanks, but no thanks.

uBlock Origin ad-blocker knocked for blocking hack attack squawking

Sorry, Mr. Leyden, but think before you post

Why CSP is pretty much useless as security tool has been discussed in several comments, more importantly CSP can be used to track client-side script modifications and/or blocking - i.e. adblocking. If you installed adblocker you most probably would want to block CSP too, so the default uBlock behaviour is correct. Good job, uBlock!

Mercedes answers autonomous car moral dilemma: Yeah, we'll just run over pedestrians

would you by a car which might consider killing you?

I wouldn't. An autonomous vehicle may not injure its occupants or, through inaction, allow its occupants to come to harm - this is the First Law.

Reminder: IE, Edge, Outlook etc still cough up your Windows, VPN credentials to strangers

NTML could've been a typo, hadn't it been used twice.

Got an Android phone? SMASH IT with a hammer – and do it NOW

My phone (galaxy s5) has 'auto retrieve' checkbox in MMS settings. And it is unckecked - clever me.

KILLER! Adobe Flash, Windows zero-day vulns leak from Hacking Team raid

18.0.0.203 is out

didn't bother to check wheter it is it, but it is out

BOFH: We CAN do that with a Raspberry Pi, but think of the BODIES

BOFH stories usually are so technically correct, but this time I winced. Never ever ever ever in my life I've met a light sensor which won't retrigger when on. Maybe they do exist - everything's possible, but rarer than OS/2 Warp.

Big browser builders scramble to fix cross-platform zero-day flaw

Call me paranoid, but it suspiciosly looks like yet another tiny company trying to get some cheap publicity by blowing out of proportions some aspects of misusing a perfectly normal feature. Like, 'if you click on url to infected file it <gasp> dowloads it. And if you click yes a couple of time it OPENS IT AND IFECTS THE WHOLE WORLD!"

Unwearable tech: Five ways IT garb's gone HORRIBLY WRONG

Actually I am quite happy with my cellphone whatch

Probably wouldn't bought it myself as too geeky, but I got it as a present a couple of years ago and use it ever since. It suits me well - I am horribly absent-minded, and this is the phone you cannot leave behind, and I am quite sure that twitter is for twits, so the absence of passable keyboard is not an issue at all.

iPad? Pah. Behold the EYEPAD, patented by Sony for the 'PS4'

too bad the eyephone is already taken

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaHUpWuqNHY

Disconnection phone scam targets UK consumers

nonsense

This "Because the person who initiates a call is the one to terminate it, a prospective mark is left unable to make a phone call, or even obtain a dial tone." is nonsense.

Toshiba Qosmio X300

safe and reliable?

Cliff Joseph starts this review with "Toshiba laptops have always been safe and reliable". I beg to differ. As current owner of Satellite P100 I suffered cracked hinges, substandard keyboard, high-quality sound much ehnanced by unidentified parts rattling inside, poor quality power supply socket, paint discolorations and more. I must admit I cannot say nothing agains the reviwed model except that it looks absolutely ghastly, but my next laptop won't be a Toshiba.

BBC to 'reimagine' The Thirty-nine Steps

we've already had one 'remagination'

the one with Kenneth More, and a later version with Robert Powell wich was quite close to the book and my personal favorite - maybe even better than the Hitchcocks's. Well, good ideas are scarce...

Doctors: Third babies are the same as patio heaters

Tell me something I don't know...

ALL of modern problems - terrorism, depletion of natural resources, high gas prices and congestion charges have one pretty obvious cause: overpopulation. 9 out of 10 people shouldnt' actually be here, one must be blind or belong to intellectual majority not to be able to see it. Of course our democratically elected rulers need more sheep to fleece, not a nicer world to live in so they will never support a courageous policy aimed at actually reducing world population to more reasonable values and rather force us to share what little we have and live the common misery.