Posts by Neoc

End of the road for biz living off free G Suite legacy edition

"option"? what "option"?

I used the service for the household's personal email accounts. I wasn't given an option to switch to this mythical free option. Anyone know how I need to talk to?

EU lawmakers vote to ban sales of combustion engine cars from 2035

I'm curious on how non-EU vehicles will now traverse the EU. Will there still be petrol stations along the highways, or will they all have converted to 100% electric?

Microsoft, Apple, Google accelerate push to eliminate passwords

So we settle on fingerprints. But there are people out there without fingerprints due to missing hands/arms (and let's not forget those with Adermatoglyphia)

Oh, so what about iris scanning? Cataracts, anyone?

And, as someone rightly said, I can change my password/physical key if it gets compromised. How do I change my biometrics?

US judge dismisses Republican efforts to block release of Salesforce emails

Hey, RNC: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear".

Sound familiar?

California suggests taking aim at AI-powered hiring software

If human beings can be made to justify their decisions, then AI software should also. If the software can't tell you WHY it made the decision, then hold the users in contempt. Yes, the users. Start fining the people/companies who use the software and see how quickly they flee developers who sell black boxes.

Epic Games' court dates with Apple and Google pushed into 2024

"The point of this discovery is to lay the groundwork for a contention that players of Fortnite, following its removal from the Android and iOS platforms, are likely simply to have switched to playing the game on another platform such as the PlayStation or Xbox"

What the heck does that have to do with it? The point in contention is that if you want to offer anything ON AN APPLE DEVICE, you have no recourse but the pay Apple its danegeld. Google is almost as bad. Microsoft is trying to catch up.

THAT'S the point, not whether users can play on another type of device.

China's top e-tailer sends sacked staff a 'graduation certificate'

Huh?

I thought only Japanese Idols got "graduated" from their group?

https://www.reddit.com/r/jpop/comments/58ehv0/what_do_they_mean_by_graduated_in_jpop/

Next-gen Moon buggy FLEX conquers California desert, seeks lunar speed record

Re: EVA

Beat me to it.

"EVA" made sense when you are out in space and you, in fact, go outside the spacecraft (vehicle). I'd even accept it when talking about going outside the space station as this thing is orbiting at a decent speed and could be classified as a "vehicle".

But if you're on Mars, or the Moon, then the shelter or base cannot be classified as a "Vehicle".

"Extra-Base Activity" (EBA)? "Extra-Shelter Activity" (ESA)? Heck, we already have the term "Moon Walk".

The zero-password future can't come soon enough

As someone previously said:

"If my password is cracked, I can change my password. How do I change my fingerprints?" So far as I know, no-one has yet come up with a satisfying answer to that question.

And for those young 'uns who think this is a hypothetical question, this has happened. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/30/hacker-fakes-german-ministers-fingerprints-using-photos-of-her-hands

Internet connection now required for Windows 11 Pro Insider setup

"Making users unable to set up without an internet connection or a Microsoft account is more than a little annoying (even if the intent is as innocent as pulling down updates)."

The last two times I set up a laptop using Win10 with MSA the poor things could only see the Windows devices on my home network. Kill the network connection, re-install with a local account, and all of a sudden I can see my NASes and Linux fileservers.

Yep, if MS tries to force this down my throat I just might have to see how good Linux has become at running the last few pieces of software I use that require Windows.

Second Trojan asteroid confirmed to be leading our planet around the Sun

Bring back Pluto

According to NASA (https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/in-depth/) the requirements are:

1) It must orbit a star (in our cosmic neighborhood, the Sun).

2) It must be big enough to have enough gravity to force it into a spherical shape.

3) It must be big enough that its gravity cleared away any other objects of a similar size near its orbit around the Sun.

That's the second time Earth has failed this last criteria!!

Dell: We and our customers understand the supply constraints now. The 'wildcard is logistics'

"Dell: We and our customers understand the supply constraints now." I call bullcrap on that.

With my current Alienware laptop reaching EoL, I ordered a top-of-the line Alienware replacement from Dell in the beginning of July. Almost AUD8,000's worth of laptop. And then the delays started. Nothing reflected on the webapge, oh no - it still said turnaround time was 21 days. When, at the beginning of November, I was told that it would now be "mid-December, maybe" I cancelled my order and contacted a company in Western Australia who built me a 17.3" laptop INCLUDING an RTX 3080 which I had to wait AN EXTRA DAY for because of supply shortages) and the whole thing arrived on my doorstep (across the continent) in a week (give-or take, considering there was a weekend in between). And it was ~AUD400 cheaper.

Yeah, Dell DOESN'T understand "supply constraints".

Saturday start for NASA's Lucy probe on its 12-year quest to map Jupiter's Trojan asteroids

Shall we lose another planet

"...asteroids that share the same orbit as Jupiter by its interaction with the Sun's gravity"

Shouldn't Jupiter be stripped of it's "planet" status? It certainly hasn't <quote>“cleared the neighborhood” around its orbit<end quote> if there are still all those asteroids IN its orbit.

Australian PM and Deputy threaten Facebook and Twitter with defamation liability for users' posts

Hmmm... Leaving aside whether FB and its ilks are moderated or not (I point you to the various AI, expert systems, etc...)

You post something on your website and idjits uses the comments to make a malicious remark... not your fault.

Your ENTIRE BUSINESS is premised on people posting remarks, then I'm sorry but you ARE responsible for what people post. IT'S LITERALLY YOUR BUSINESS.

<sorry about the shouting. It may have been in the back of my mind for a while now>

Yes, yes, people are going to make parallels with the post office. Who don't decide what mail you should see/receive based on an obscure algorithm; and who, more importantly, move your mail without looking into it to decide whether they can monetise the contents.

Cop drone crashes into flight instructor's airplane

<facepalm> and people wonder why I'm against letting the concept of flying cars...

Russia tells UN it wants vast expansion of cybercrime offenses, plus network backdoors, online censorship

Am I the only one that cringed at the wording of these proposals:

"the intentional creation, including adaptation, use and distribution of malicious software intended for the unauthorized destruction, blocking, modification, copying, dissemination of digital information, or neutralization of its security features, except for lawful research."

"Malicious software": as defined by whom? Whoops, we don't like you, so you're software is malicious. But the people who work for us aren't.

"Unauthorised destruction": yep, everything's fine and dandy so long as someone in power said it was OK. Country X can wipe your hard-drive if it's been authorised. Because we *know* all countries will follow the proper rule of law, right?

Boffins find an 'actionable clock' hiding in your blood, ticking away to your death

Re: Thoughts

And you could still get in a car accident before your scheduled iAge...

I'm surprised Apple hasn't raise a Trademark violation yet.

US House Rep on cyber committees tweets Gmail password, PIN in Capitol riot lawsuit outrage

Is this the US remake of "Are you Being Served?"

If so, I think they missed the point of British humour.

Boffins improve on tech that extracts DC power from ambient Wi-Fi

Re: Tesla's dream...

Ya beat me to it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardenclyffe_Tower

Average convicted British computer criminal is young, male, not highly skilled, researcher finds

Remember people: if you're not caught, you're not a criminal.

CyberBattleSim: Microsoft's open-source Holodeck in which autonomous attackers, defenders battle it out

Hmmm...

"Adolescence of P1", anyone?

IBM, Red Hat face copyright, antitrust lawsuit from SCO Group successor Xinuos

Not april fools

Tag clearly says " Wed 31 Mar 2021 // 20:48 UTC" - it's from the USA, so almost a day behind from Antipodes.

Soft-shell robot uses snailfish features to sail though Mariana Trench stress test

Hmph

The video shows a prototype vaguely flapping its fins and moving in the direction of the undersea current, at roughly the same speed as said current (based on the specks floating by).

Not so much "swimming" and "floating with style".

Boeing successfully flies unmanned autonomous military 'wingman' aircraft that may become pilot's buddy

<sigh>

Don't these people ever learn from "history"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_(film)

What's CNAME of your game? This DNS-based tracking defies your browser privacy defenses

"...marketers have stepped up efforts to evade anti-tracking measures..."

Doesn't that sound like a job for the DMCA? "...It also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself..."

Seems to me that "anti-tracking measures" are a type of "access control".

Pure frustration: What happens when someone uses your email address to sign up for PayPal, car hire, doctors, security systems and more

Instagram

I've got a similar problem with Instagram. Someone in SE-Asia has registered an account and I get the emails for it. But there's no way to contact Instagram to get them to fix it. <sigh>

QEMU brings back its one-OS-a-day virtual advent calendar

<sigh> At some point in time I really need to bite the bullet and learn about Hypervisors and their pros/cons.

Israeli spyware maker NSO channels Hollywood spy thrillers in appeal for legal immunity in WhatsApp battle

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this exactly what the DMCA is about? NSO has tried to bypass a security protocol (supposedly) without the approval of the software owner.

Please, tell us more about how just 60 hydrogen-powered 5G drones could make 400,000 UK base stations redundant

Coverage be damned...

...I'm more worried about what happens what a HAP decides to no longer follow the HA part of its name, and plummets.

IBM’s Cloud just ruined a perfectly good lunchtime by losing power to a few racks in Australia

If the users are taken out by a simple power outage, then what you are (badly) running is a data-centre, not cloud provisioning.

Surprise! Voting app maker roasted by computer boffins for poor security now begs US courts to limit flaw finding

In other news...

...law proposed which makes it illegal for "Choice!" magazine to test products without first gaining approval, in case they find faults with it.

FCC: Remember that confidential paperwork you gave us, China Telecom? Yeah, well, we're handing it over to the Feds

Re: SS7

They'd never do that. And the number of times internet traffic was accidentally re-routed through China was not test-runs in any way.

"...the FCC has warned the Chinese giant, in a written notice [PDF] this week, that it will give that supposedly private information to Uncle Sam's prosecutors."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the sort of thing US.gov is accusing the various chinese telecom/manufacturers of potentially doing? A confidential piece of information given to one agency (or company) being demanded by the government. Chinese or US, I see the same over-bearing pattern.

Ex-Apple engineer lifts lid on Uncle Sam's top-secret plan to turn customized iPod into 'Geiger counter'

Meh - these days all you need to do is put some dark sticky tape over your camera lens and watch for the sensors on your camera to react to the radioactive decay.

Not as much around my town as I though there would be. But then again, I never go to try it next to an actual radioactive source (X-Ray, etc).

Apple's at it again: Things go pear-shaped for meal planner app after iGiant opposes logo

Do the USA have the concept of Letigious Pests? Where the judge deems one company (or lawyer) to be so ridiculous in the suits they bring to court that they are barred from doing so again?

I would love for Apple to receive a judgement which basically stated "Yep, you've gone overboard one time too many. You are no longer allowed to bring logo-infringement lawsuits to court".

Q: What’s big, red and pulses UV light into the cosmos three times a night? A: Mars

Three flashes a night? That has got to be the SLOWEST bandwidth I've ever experienced.

<yorkshireman>Three flashes a night? Luxury.</yorkshireman>

Chinese tat bazaar Xiaomi to light a fire under Amazon's Kindle with new e-book reader

For the record, I use to love my various KOBO readers... except for having to side-load any books not from Kobo. I am currently using a Samsung tablet simply so I can have my various reading apps (and a simple USB file-copy transfer of books).

What I want is an eInk reader that is little more than an android tablet with an eInk screen on which I can load the 3 or 4 reading apps I use. No bloatware, no "preferred app", no tied-in bookseller.

Mysterious supernova is blasting far-flung galaxy with flashes of UV light – and astroboffins don't know why

Yeah, yeah, let's be obvious: this massive explosion happened a log time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Right. Itch scratched. <ahhh>

CEO of motherboard maker MSI dies after plunging from headquarters' seventh-floor

Speaking as someone who almost went through with it, it is not always obvious even to those who are contemplating suicide. If it wasn't for one single "WTF?" moment I would have kept on going without even questioning what I was contemplating.

All I can say is; I am glad I had that (brief) spark of insight, as well as the support of my wife and friends. And 8 months' worth's of anti-depressants to keep me in check until my brain chemistry re-aligned itself. I still have the odd bouts of depression, but now I recognise them as they start and can do something about it before they get too far.

You've accused Apple of patent infringement. You want to probe the iOS source in a closed-room environment. What to do in a pandemic?

I've often wondered...

"...receive laptops from Apple containing the source code of Apple's iOS mobile operating system..."

How do Lawyers (or the Techs whose shoulder the Lawyers are looking over) know that what they are getting reflects what actually exists? Lawyers request paperwork and are given boxfulls of the stuff: how do they know the defendant hasn't "misplaced" the incriminating evidence? Same with software: how do the Techs know that what they are reviewing is the actual source-code used by Apple? Are they allowed to compile it and compare the resulting executable with what is downloaded by iOS users?

Once again, racial biases show up in AI image databases, this time turning Barack Obama white

Not seeing it.

Literally.

I am short-sighted, so I did a very simple experiment - I removed my glasses and looked at the Twitter images. And for the life of me, if I didn't know they weren't the same person, I would have said they were two differently-pixelated pictures of the same person.

Microsoft 365 and Azure outage struck Australia and New Zealand just as business rocked up for a new week

"Cloud" isn't just processing; "Cloud" also includes data. And you can't load-balance data overseas, especially when there are laws that state "You shall locate our data within our border".

So unless these Cloud Providers (and I'm not singling ANYONE - they're all guilty) have proper redundancy within geographical/legal areas, this is going to keep happening.

Office supplies biz owned by UK council shrugs off ransomware demand for 102 Bitcoin

Re: This current and malicious 'malware' managed to avoid 3 levels of professional IT security.

Pedant alert: Actually, the line is "never mind the quality, feel the width" and was a sarcastic rejoinder about some fabric stores trying to get you to ignore the fact that the roll of fabric was a ridiculously small width by hyping up the quality of the cloth ("never mind the width, feel the quality").

My wife is a sewing addict.

Bionic eyes to be a thing in the next decade? Possibly. Boffins mark sensor-density breakthrough

Re: Wonderful development in tech

Surely it'd be "wetware"...

I think you mean "Pedantry".

We really doing this again? Rumour has it that Apple is nearly finished developing augmented-reality glasses

Re: Name?

Googled it: too many companies around the world including an Australian mob which markets "Intelligent Glass" (a.k.a. iGlass). Apple would need to spend too much money (i.e. *any* money) buying out the rights for the name around the world. And suing would take too long. Much easier to name it something else. iSight is nice, if Apple ever decides to re-purpose it.

Wanna be a developer? Your coworkers want to learn Go and like to watch, er, Friends and Big Bang Theory

"The happiest developers turned out to be those working the longest hours. Some 70 per cent of those working less than 40 hours per week were unhappy and unhappiness declined with more demanding jobs. Fourteen per cent of workers putting in 40-50 hours reported unhappiness; thirteen percent of those working 50-60 hours were unhappy. And only three per cent of those working more than 60 hours a week were unhappy"

And you just *know* someone in HR is going to go "let's increase the amount of hours they need to work - that'll make them happy". No, you resource-counting morons, it's the other way around: they work longer hours because they are happy in their job.

UK COVID-19 contact-tracing app data may be kept for 'research' after crisis ends, MPs told

"...random-looking..." <sweatdrop> that's kinda telling, right there...