Posts by hitmouse

To progress as an engineer career-wise, become a great communicator

Re: Good communications is essential

It would be nice to have software engineers who can write clear bug reports or service tickets.

Or support staff who can actually verbalise an issue without dissolving into an indistinct series of platitudes.

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Microsoft's text transcription in Teams has had dumb word choice for non US English for years where it chooses the most inappropriate homophone

draft : draught

check : cheque

filter : philtre

fortnight : Fortnite

or if you say the initials PI : π

Meeting summaries can draw bizarre conclusions from these.

Microsoft OneDrive file sync apps for Windows, Mac broken for 10 months

Re: Android / IOS

I don't use extra accounts.

My Dropbox and Google backups have no such issues with equivalent files on the same device.

I do clean up my Photo Roll from time to time, and it has no effect to improve OneDrive sync. Espeially because the setting button in the OneDrive app keeps going to OFF (just like the Memories setting keeps turning on again.) This has pursued me across several phones now.

The Android OneDrive app keeps turning off Camera Backup and re-enabling the useless Memories feature. I've reported it again and again for 2 years but no chane to app, no response from Microsoft.

When even Microsoft can’t understand its own Outlook, big tech is stuck in a swamp of its own making

Microsoft's product focus in recent years suggests they're dragging anyone with skill (or pretence thereof) to work on AI-fying everything.

Meanwhile anyone left t'work down at t'mill to sustain existing product lines is realising they're on a pointless treadmill.

Trump orders all government IT contracts consolidated under GSA

Note that the US is going after Australia for "unfairly" doing this with pharmaceuticals.

Court filing: DOGE aide broke Treasury policy by emailing unencrypted database

The newscycle has now reached picohertz frequencyies so you should sit down before the next lot of odl news hits you.

$16B health dept managed finances with single Excel spreadsheet. It hasn’t gone well

Lock 'em up in cell AZ1048576

Microsoft warns Trump: Where the US won't sell AI tech, China will

The original policy post is now missing from the whitehouse.gov site, but third party analysis https://www.csis.org/analysis/ai-diffusion-framework-securing-us-ai-leadership-while-preempting-strategic-drift says

Understanding the Tiered Framework

T1: The Inner Circle

T1 comprises 18 countries and reads like a roll call of long-standing allies:

Five Eyes intelligence partners (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom);

Close Western/NATO allies (Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom); or

Semiconductor heavyweights (Taiwan, the Netherlands, Japan, and South Korea).

But like all alliances, the omissions are as telling as the inclusions. Not all of “Old Europe” or NATO made the cut—Greece and Portugal are missing. More strikingly, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania are conspicuously absent, despite their vigorous support for U.S. security initiatives, especially in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

This partial listing underscores that unofficially, there is a secondary filter. It is not enough to be a stalwart ally on paper; to guarantee lockstep compliance, the United States wants partners whose re-export controls and enforcement frameworks mirror its own. For Washington, even otherwise-dependable allies may fall short if they lack the institutional capacity, enforcement rigor, and willingness to guarantee strict adherence, or if they are viewed as potential diversion risks.

T2: Eclectic Middle Ground

The lion’s share of nations fall into T2, a catch-all group that lumps together an eclectic mix of countries with vastly different levels of trust, capacity, and AI ambitions. India, Israel, Singapore, and Switzerland are placed alongside Yemen. There are several reasons why countries may have ended up in T2. Some, like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have emerged as key investors in AI but remain outside the Western intelligence-sharing orbit. Others, such as India, are forging close strategic and trade ties with the United States but have a legacy of nonalignment. Switzerland, with its long-standing tradition of fierce neutrality, fits a similar mold. Meanwhile, countries in Southeast Asia and those in Eastern Europe that are officially close U.S. partners have been flagged as diversion risks.

T3: The Usual Suspects

T3 is a familiar roster of U.S. arms-embargoed countries—China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, joined by the likes of Burma (Myanmar), Syria, and Venezuela.

Trump administration threatens tariffs for any nation that dares to tax Big Tech

"“All of these measures violate American sovereignty and offshore American jobs, limit American companies’ global competitiveness, and increase American operational costs while exposing our sensitive information to potentially hostile foreign regulators,” the Memorandum adds."

How are American jobs offshored? One of the reasons the tariffs are implemented by other nations is that the American paltforms steal local (non-American) content and re-sell it or remove its value, thereby taking away non-American jobs.

After Copilot trial, government staff rated Microsoft's AI less useful than expected

Re: Treasury Security

M365 allows all sorts of plugins (e.g. through Teams) that process or store data offshore.

I've never seen a tenant manager actually manage the risks of these. Microsoft doesn't make it easy to check compliance on the items in its external plugin stores. You're left to manually investigate every vendor and every product.

While Treasury would be using a Copilot contrained to its own tenant, one of the big issues for Copilot deployments outside the area bordering the Gulf of Mexico is systemic bias.

The models training is hugely biased towards US regulatory systems and definitions, and every single tenant outside the US has the onus of retraining or setting metaprompts (e.g. "the tax year runs July-June"). There is no way to have a baseline Australian or French Copilot in this deployment model.

Apple auto-opts everyone into having their photos analyzed by AI for landmarks

"Airforce base in Afghanistan", "military compound in Ukraine", "drone target in Soontobeblastedoutofexistan"

My cats and dogs are certainly recognised in Google Photos, although it has trouble distinguishing two of my dogs (same breed, different colours, different head markings) and so keeps labelling photos of one dog with another's name, ten years after it passed away.

What is more bizarre is that if I have to search through my Google "faces" for a better match, it doesn't separate human from animal faces. However given Google's propensity for releasing consumer software and losing interest ten minutes later, never fixing bugs or upgrading features, perhaps I shouldn't have a surprised face.

Outlook is poor for those still on Windows Mail, Calendar, People apps by end of year

New Outlook is buggy as hell, and missing features from "Old" Outlook that are routinely used in corporate environments. While Microsoft has a schedule to migrate people, it has no roadmap to address any of the problems that need to be overcome to get there.

Very tired of getting incorrect reminders for recurring meetings, where you get a notification for a past meeting but not for the current meeting, which is at a different time. And that's just the beginning.

Yup, half of that thought-leader crap on LinkedIn is indeed AI scribbled

I'm humbled to be recognised by my peerbots for my contributions to unnecessary bits stored, transmitted and skim-read across the globe.

Microsoft informed of yet another antitrust probe by US authorities

"Microsoft's security activities could matter in two ways. One is the unfortunate tendency of its products and services to have flaws that allow very bad things like Chinese spies cracking Exchange Online and reading government officials' emails. Another is Defender's inclusion in Windows making rival antivirus tools all-but-redundant."

There's the rub, both being bad at something and also so good that third-party mitigations are not required.

Now’s your chance to try Microsoft’s controversial Windows Recall ... maybe

Given how willingly people allow their data, passwords and other private information to be given to random online systems - not to mention putting sensitive corporate data into ChatGPT etc -, I am quite happy to support a serious attempt to enable private local-only storage and processing.

If you want a digital personal private secretary then how would other readers proceed?

.

Job seekers call BS on the workplace AI revolution

Having sat in on a number of Microsoft's CoPilot sessions targetted at different job functions, it seems that there is an assumption that there is already a really good baseline on terms of data management, process governance, knowledgebases that serve as the foundation for the AI widgets

The truth is that most orgs are not run that well and senior management would never admit to that, even as they look to quick and dirty "sexy AI" implementations to reduce staff.

Data is the new uranium – incredibly powerful and amazingly dangerous

Re: Glad to hear it's being discussed

I had to deal with over-zealous creators of PDF newsletters sending their difficult-to-read wares everywhere so that thousands of people had copies in their email storage.

The probably was vastly compounded by the PDFs containing very-very-high resolution photos of guest speakers (20MB files) that they dropped in without reducing them to a respectable 50k or less for the thumbnail visible.

Trying to convince these people to send links to a URL where the newsletter sat (and could be post-corrected/updated) was like asking them to sacrifice their first born.

The data will never be managed properly while there are unimaginative CIOs who just look at the rapidly expanding stockpile as an opportunity to grandstand over new cloud platforms, and "smart AI management" and the rest. (This resume-padding approach applies in other business areas obviously).

Australia tells tots: No TikTok till you're 16... or X, Instagram and Facebook

Access may be circumvented, but if the platform algorithms are pushing age-related content to the accounts then this can be detected and used as evidence.

Want to feel old? Excel just entered its 40th year

Re: Want to feel old?

Speak up. I can't hear you.

US contractor pays $300K to settle accusation it didn't properly look after Medicare users' data

That Medicare logo/card is for Australian Medicare, not US

Asian tech ministers fear effective AI regulation will prove elusive

The fundamental risks are corporations and other organisations that use AI to extend the speed and reach of their aims.

If they are not being regulated for their current non-AI-amplified activities then we've already lost the race to control them as they get faster at doing undesirable things.

It's the same with disinformation. If we can't face up to powerful organisations (including governments, political parties, churches, ...) distorting the public sphere, then those very organisations are not going to allow regulation for AI that would have to limit their current practices.

Biden tries to cut through fog of confusion caused by deliberately deceptive customer service tricks

Re: About time.

It depends on when the proposal for legislation was raised. If there is no bottom-up pressure, it won't come out of nowhere. Public visibility for Dark Designs has only really come up in the last couple of years (e.g. legislation in India) so that is remarkably fast for US government which has a large contingent intent on returning to Civil War era practices.

Cellebrite got into Trump shooter's Samsung device in just 40 minutes

"many newer iPhones and versions of iOS remain inaccessible to the cracker’s tools" ...and end users.

Windows Notepad gets spell check. Only took 41 years

For all intents and purposes about 99.9999% of users.

Several reasons

1. You don't put high-value features into essentially freeware when you have premium offerings.

2. Licensing. Microsoft and other OS vendors historically licensed this stuff from third parties for apps, not operating systems. In Microsoft's case, licensing lexicons and language tools for dozens of languages is amazingly expensive if done on a per-seat basis which is not always negotiable. Back in the day vendors sold these tools for thousands of dollars per language per user. Like Adobe not wanting PDF generation in Windows or Office, vendors didn't want their cash cows commodified.

UK may not hit goal of 95% mobile coverage, commons committee warns

UK population density is approximately 100x that of Australia. Even the remotest, most sparsely populated part of UK is still a short distance from a population centre.

It is far far cheaper for UK to provide cost effective per capita coverage, and that doesn't even take it account UK having double Australia's GDP.

Laughing in Australian

Giving Windows total recall of everything a user does is a privacy minefield

Re: It begs the obvious question...

The rather obvious benefit is that the local AI can do semantic analysis to infer what you're trying to do and provide assistance. We've had years of news of AI models learning how to play computer games essentially from watching, without having any of the rules programmed in advance.

Even a human assistant's value is reduced if they don't know what you're doing or can't learn by job-shadowing.

Re: Domestic Abuse

There is much lower hanging fruit already available.

If an abuser can access Recall logs, they'll already have direct access to web history and potential to install their own logging mechanisms.

Has Windows 11 really lost marketshare to Windows 10?

That's as likely as demanding the higher volume of phone manufacturers do the same.

I'm astounded at how many consumers seem to want devices that consume more energy with features like "display always on"

Microsoft Teams decouples from Office 365 suite globally

Re: Price reductions?

Dropbox integrates with Office. There is a long-published interface for cloud storage providers to take up if they wish.

Re: Word and Cloud

RTFM

Australia has no next-gen HPC investment plan and clouds can't fill the gap

This has been a known problem in Australian research circles for a long time, with infrastructure further crippled by a decade of the LNP desire to punish universities for being idealogically unsound. Any money they appeared to give (usually medical) research was robbed from another part of the pre-existing pie. Also there's no way for researchers to contribute their funds to a HPC pool so theyy go and buy something flashy ad put it under a desk and hope that nobody realises that the building heating, aircon and physical security aren't equipped to manage these.

Researchers basically have to courier hard drives between research institutions and HPC resources because they can't move mult-TB to PB data sets over the wires fast enough.

University chops students' Microsoft 365 storage to 20GB

Re: "over half of all data stored by organizations not serving a useful purpose"

The actual valuable research data with lifespan protection controls is supposed to be kept in managed research storage, not students personal accounts.

If a warrant's coming, then it's for leaking data to unauthorised people.

Individual storage for stufent accounts is quite a different thing to the storage actually needed for teaching and research.

Students mismanage data to about the same degree as most academics, and it's frankly dangerous to have it available on unmanaged devices.

20GB is more than adequate for .most students and prevents the inevitable use of it for storing pirated media and backups of their personal files.

Microsoft Forms feature request still not sorted after SEVEN years

Date with destiny to be never actioned

There's also no way to make your date-fields follow a mask like DD-MM-YY

The date data collected is thus completely at the mercy of user browser language settings (which are usually defaulting to English(US) and 0.00001% of users know how to change browser settings).

That has also been a user request since forever.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-forms/date-formatting/m-p/632288 gives you an idea of some of the pain

Digital memories are disappearing and not even AI or Google can help

Re: A strikingly important article

At one point I had over 3000 music CDs. Now I have maybe 200 collectable/memorabilia-grade CDs amd everything is digitised, booklets and all.

One of the reasons I accelerated that move was finding so many of the CDs (and a good few DVDs) had degraded beyond recall. As often as not, the nice collectable box-sets rather than the cheap compilations.

Between local backups and the cloud, I don't think I've lost anything in 20 years and the metadata makes everything very findable. In fact with cover scans and PDFs of booklets being searchable I often turn up interesting details that may have been lost of on a shelf.

It would be nice if the algorithms that Google and Microsoft employ for photo management allowed such recall, but they have a lot of problems with dates even when the EXIF metadata is correct, so I invariably rely on subfolders with dates to locate stuff.

From Joaquin Phoenix to Rowan Atkinson, we enjoyed your Musk movie casting calls

Stephen Root in a mashup of his roles as Jimmy James (NewsRadio), Milton with the stapler* (OfficeSpace) and late-stage Monroe Fuchs (Barry) would capture it all.

Maybe the next Xitter logo should be a red stapler.

Soundtrack song: "Musktwat Love" opening with the America version, closing with Captain and Tennille.

X/Twitter booted out of Australia's disinformation-fighting club

Waiting for Muskspace to be relegated to the /usr/bin/dust of history.

US nuke reactor lab hit by 'gay furry hackers' demanding cat-human mutants

Nick Furry leading?

Telco CEO quits after admitting she needs to carry rivals' SIM cards to stay in touch

Re: DR Strategy

Given patchy Optus coverage even near the centre of large Australian cities, it's also a way for Optus execs to avoid slumming it with their users.

Ocne you're more than a few Belgiums away from a capital city there's no Optus coverage,e ven on highways.

Major telco outage leaves millions of Australians disconnected

Re: No cash?

Optus has perpetual dead-spots in areas within 5km of downtown Sydney CBD that get no attention.

Reporting them to Optus (with signal-strength analytics) is about as effective as writing it on my forehead in crayon.

YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues

Re: Cognitive dissonance

YouTube is pushing through with huge hikes to premium rates this year "to fund new features". I told the YouTube staffer that the only feature I want is "no ads".

"But the music you get included" he whined.

"-every streaming service is throwing in music already". I'm not paying for it again.

So I cancelled my family subscription. The only way I could make it slightly feasible would be to convince friends who are paying for YouTube already to join my family plan.

So YouTube either loses some subscribers entirely, loses some to a cheaper plan or I use my time better and watch less ad-supported content.

It is 2023 and Excel's reign of date terror might finally be at an end

Re: Optional

The text file import wizard has been around for decades and handles 90% of the issues that people have complained about quite smoothly. I've shown it to a number of people who couldn't be bothered to RTFM and they've generally reacted with "it was that easy????"

SEC boss warns it's 'nearly unavoidable' that AI will cause financial crash

I've already trained my AI trading engine to focus on innocuous subjects like tulips. /smug

HP reveals bonkers $5k foldable tablet/laptop/desktop

As long as you can fondle it, it's a fondleslab.