Posts by Fred Dibnah

Trump announces $175B for Golden Dome defense shield over America

Re: May not repeat but it rhymes

From where I’m sitting, the USA is ending as a functional society already, without needing outside help.

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

Re: Sirius Cybernetics Corporation

Adam who?

You mean Adams’ work, Shirley

XNView gets my vote. Its image editing tools are pretty comprehensive.

Europe plots escape hatch from enshittification of search

Re: Re:plenty of the stuff falling from the sky

As we are discussing enshittification, then using the UK’s water to cool the AI hardware would be entirely appropriate.

Re: UDM14

What are you using to view your Y! mail? My iOS Yahoo app doesn’t show any AI stuff, nor do I see any on Thunderbird on the desktop.

Amazon Nova Sonic AI doesn't just hear you, it takes tonal cues too

Re: It might be a nice name for a product...

I’m with you on not having listening devices in my home, but I can see this technology being used by call centres to replace humans. At the moment it’s easy to tell the difference between a robot voice and a human and I can respond accordingly, but in future it could be impossible to know what or who I am talking to.

Boosters of the tech might say ‘So what, if you receive the service you need?’, but it feels like deception to me.

/oldgit

Meta's AI, built on ill-gotten content, can probably build a digital you

Re: Caprica

Most people can distort their personality for a short time, but unless they are a brilliant actor/spy/con artist/politician their natural traits will eventually appear. For people with years of social media posts, finding those traits in the large amount of source material should be pretty easy.

Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney

Re: Dubious tape economy

In the 1980s the BBC had a building at the Daventry transmitter where they recycled old audio & video tapes and spliced together the good bits to make new reels from old. Then someone realised that destroying their priceless archive to save a few bob wasn’t such a great idea.

Brit universities told to keep up the world-class research with less cash

Re: @VicMortimer

Suppose someone sells a house worth £1m, and it's taxed at say 50%. That leaves them £500,000, which is easily enough to buy another house, or pay rent for the rest of their life.

Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs

Cory Doctorow

His latest essay on this topic is well worth a few minutes of your time.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/02/me-or-your-lying-eyes/#spherical-cows-on-frictionless-surfaces

UK govt data people not 'technical,' says ex-Downing St data science head

Re: I'd go further

"...the problem with most senior politicians is not so much a lack of knowledge in science as economics - seemingly imagining it to be the same as business, accounting or running a local council."

More commonly, governments from Thatcher onwards talk of running the economy like a household budget, with stuff like "max-ing out the country's credit card" and similar nonsense.

UK's first permanent facial recognition cameras installed in South London

Re: city centre

Sales of spray paint will increase in the Croydon area.

HP Inc settles printer toner lockout lawsuit with a promise to make firmware updates optional

Re: Never again

"It’s so annoying I’m taking the time to write a long comment on a Reg post!"

Twice! :-D

Crew-9 splashes down while NASA floats along with Trump and Musk nonsense

Re: a renaming frenzy that includes the Gulf of America

Shooting birds just because they are annoying and possibly taste bad is so very USA.

City council rejects inquiry into £130M Oracle IT disaster

If the system includes leave calendars and payslips, everyone will use it some extent. Having suffered Oracle in my last job and seen how truly awful the UI is, I don’t envy anyone having to organise training, and cheat sheets would have to be tested very, very thoroughly.

Cheap 'n' simple sign trickery will bamboozle self-driving cars, fresh research claims

There is a dual-carriageway section of the A40 Gloucester bypass which has a 70mph limit on leaving a roundabout, and 50mph approaching the roundabout in the opposite direction. Initially it was 50mph in both directions.

The software UK techies need to protect themselves now Apple's ADP won’t

Re: Blackberry

BlackBerry’s demise was probably more due to phones appearing with a screen large enough to have a usable virtual keyboard.

Google binning SMS MFA at last and replacing it with QR codes

Re: What about all the people who don't have smartphones?

U block origin has just taken on new meaning :-)

Astronomers red-faced after mistaking Musk's Tesla Roadster for asteroid

Re: Most importantly

It’s not a bar, it’s a pub selling pints for less than a pound each.

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Re: "My ISP already knows how old I am"

Downvoted you for ignoring the word ‘accused’ in point 6.

$800 'AI' robot for kids bites the dust along with its maker

Re: Not A Bad Thing

Better still, be a parent to your children.

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

Re: Peplexity just another stochastic plagiarist

I sometimes use the scattergun approach of a meta search such as Searx, enabling every engine except Google.

Re: Peplexity just another stochastic plagiarist

”Part of the American education system is training people to say things confidently regardless of whether there's a sound basis for doing so.”

That’s also true of British private (‘public’) schools, and we all suffer the consequences of over-confident incompetents in important positions.

Open source maintainers are drowning in junk bug reports written by AI

Re: re: Just like social media.

Mainland China is the source? How do you know?

Firefox ditches Do Not Track because nobody was listening anyway

Re: If it's optional why is anyone surprised?

A sure sign of corporate capture of governments is when something that should be mandatory is made optional.

Future of Privacy Forum

"operationalize"

Why use six syllables when three will do?

op-er-ate

</rant>

Bluesky keeps growing, and so do its problems

Re: Bluesky seems halfway decent... for the moment

I honestly don’t understand why people complaining about all the crap in their ‘For You’ feed on Twitter haven’t noticed the ‘Following’ tab.

Google India probed after driver fatally followed Maps route over unfinished bridge

Re: Let me get this straight ...

You’re fired, you’re all fucking fired!

Open source router firmware project OpenWrt ships its own entirely repairable hardware

Re: The DFS* Sale Is Now On!

In my teens I had a Saturday job at MFI, and now and again a piece of their furniture would appear in the back the shop with a ludicrous price tag on it. £1000 for a chipboard wall unit, anyone? The deal was (and maybe still is, idk) that if you sold something at ‘full price’ for one month in just one shop, you could then sell it in all your shops at a heavily discounted ‘sale’ price.

Abandoned US Army 'city under the ice' imaged in serendipitous NASA find

Re: It seems to be the American way...

The Bhopal disaster was caused by Union Carbide, which is an American company.

Thousands of AI agents later, who even remembers what they do?

Re: Thanks Gartner!

You just described every management consultant, right there.

Microsoft Exchange update fixes security flaws, breaks other stuff

Re: Utterly ridiculous

And PCs in countries from Albania to Austria use Linux ;-)

Apple hit with £3 billion claim of ripping off 40 million UK iCloud users

Re: Can we talk about the most important thing here?

Not half as painful as trying to decipher what you wrote.

Mozilla's Firefox browser turns 20. Does it still matter?

Re: Is FF relevant?

Common sense?

Cisco combines Meraki and Catalyst into single wireless brand

Re: And the Enshittification continues...

Mikrotik? The Raspberry Pi of routers & wireless.

IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4, argues APNIC's chief scientist

Re: NAT should be enough for everything

I guess USA has country code 1 because that’s where telephones were invented (not by Alexander Graham Bell). Seems fair enough.

Rowland Hill in the UK invented the modern postal system, which is why British stamps are the only ones without the country’s name on them.

</trivia>

The horror that is VHS revived for horror movie release

The main reason VHS won out was that there was a lot more porn available than on Betamax. So I guess you are right, VHS did suck.

IBM: Insurance industry bosses keen on AI. Customers, not so much

In other news

The Pope is Catholic.

BBC weather glitch shows 13k mph winds in London, 404℃ in Nottingham

Serves them right for dropping the Met Office as their weather data supplier* a few years ago.

* The shipping forecast excluded.

Objections to datacenter builds may be overruled now they are 'Critical National Infrastructure'

Re: Clustered critical datacenters :o

Water companies are regulated? There isn’t much evidence of that.

Apple AirPods Pro 2 can be sold as hearing aids, says FDA

You might have to do the initial tuning of the pods with a phone, but then be able use them on their own. I have some Avantree headphones which do that.

FTC urged to stop tech makers downgrading devices after you've bought them

Re: Squeezebox / sonos

The Sonos story is slightly different to that. Sonos announced they were going to update the app with new features, but the update wouldn’t work with older units. But that was fine and dandy, because Sonos offered to take the old units back and give a 1/3 discount on new ones.

Understandably, owners (including me) of older units were not impressed with Sonos’ generous offer, and there was a huge outcry on their forums and elsewhere. In the end Sonos backed down, and they now provide two separate apps: S1 for old units & S2 for new ones.

That was in 2020. At some point I’ve no doubt Sonos will pull the S1 app citing ‘security issues’, but if/when that happens I definitely won’t be replacing my freshly bricked units with new Sonos ones.

Re: Reminds me of TV sets

IIRC the final UK 405-line transmitter was at Sutton Coldfield. When it was switched off, the BBC received zero complaints.

Microsoft decides it's a good time for bad UI to die

Re: "If Microcrap really decided that the "bad UI" should die"

Ah yes, Google Maps.

Twitter must pay over half a million to unfairly dismissed Irish exec

Re: Interesting.

The gov.uk pages have a lot of ‘should’ and ‘may’ rather than ‘must’, which muddies the waters somewhat. For example: ’If an employer does dismiss and re-employ someone, they may be able to take a case to a tribunal and claim:

breach of contract

unfair dismissal’

Fire and re-hire is still very much a thing in the UK, even in companies with unions, so I think employers must have enough wiggle room to get away with it. Labour have said they will stop the practice but I’m not holding my breath.

Elon Musk claims live Trump interview on X derailed by DDoS

As any fule kno, the ‘Cuban’ Missile Crisis started with the USA basing nukes in Turkey, and ended when they took them away again. It should really be called the Turkish Missile Crisis imho.

Tesla asks customers to stop being wet blankets about chargers

Your mention of fried chicken reminded me that here in GB there is currently a spate of cable thefts from rapid chargers, as I discovered at a KFC in Sheffield.

Craig Wright admits he isn't the inventor of Bitcoin after High Court judgment in UK

Ozzie

Ozzie is the ‘Ultimate Odor (sic) Remover’ according to their website. Australians are Aussies.

</pedantry>

64% of people not happy about idea of AI-generated customer service

Re: While I dread AI support

‘Happy’ in the context I used it doesn’t mean joyous, it means satisfied or content - but you already knew that and used it to deflect from my comment onto your weird dislike of the French.

Yes we are all hypocrites, but some of us try not to be. YMMV.