Posts by mark l 2

Google Cloud goes down, takes Cloudflare and its customers with it

It kinda shows how now we have a few mega corps running large parts of the internet (Google, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare) that at outage at one of them brings problems for lots of sites and services. And the whole selling point of the cloud is that these thinks aren't meant to happen.

Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43 to drop X11 in GNOME editions

I current use Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop on X11 but have tried out Gnome running Wayland and that seemed to work absolutely fine as well for the sort of things I used it for. I just wasn't a lover of the interface of Gnome but I never noticed anything 'bad' about Wayland.

So my question is as a average user of Linux whose main uses are web browsing, office software, some retro gaming emulation and a bit of photo editing, is the choice between X11 and Wayland going to make any difference for me?

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

I mean DARPA have spent how much to basically invent 'space cakes'? LOL

Forked-off Xlibre tells Wayland display protocol to DEI in a fire

Its all well and good to fork X.org and go off and do your own thing, but even though this is by the top X.org dev is anyone going to actual risk using this project?

Just like any fork maintained by one person it could well get abandoned because the developer looses interest, can no longer afford to spend the time on it or has some other personal issues that are unforeseen at this time.

X.org was kind of in maintenance mode for a while now so it doesn't appear there is going to be much chance of getting lots of other developers onboard to improve on X11 with this Xlibre fork, if they couldn't get devs working on X.org. Especially now that Redhat have dropped X.org in RHEL 10 so their paid devs won't be working on anything X11 related other than fixing CVEs for the still in supported older RHEL releases.

It appears that most of the DE are now set on going down the Wayland route, with even older code bases such a Mate and XFCE working on the transition to Wayland, and Gnome and KDE almost at the stage to go Wayland only.

Perhaps if they had just called Wayland X12 from the beginning the whole issue would have been less divisive?

Blocking stolen phones from the cloud can be done, should be done, won't be done

Re: Nice idea

A stolen phone even if IMEI blocked can still be shipped off to a sweatshop in the far east to get broken down for parts. So although it might make it less lucrative to steal a phone, it would not stop people getting their phone nicked.

And as for not being able to use Googles privacy invasive services, some people actively go out of their way to remove them from their phones. So it wouldn't be a deal breaker for everyone if their phone can't use the Play store or Google Maps etc.

US lawmakers fire back a response to Trump's NASA cuts

Is it a suprise to anyone that Trump and the republicans are all for cutting funding to science related government spending?

MAGA is full of people who believe that scientist are just scare mongering and believe that climate change isn't real, including Trump himself. Plus they put an anti vaccine conspiracy loon of Robert Kennedy Jnr as secretary of health.

Microsoft cuts the Windows 11 bloat for Xbox handhelds

The fact that Microsoft have released this slimmed down version of Windows, shows that perhaps MS were worried about the number of manufactures that were releasing hand held gaming devices running Steam OS and not Windows?

As if Steam OS gains a large enough share of the gaming handheld market, then gamers might start thinking that they should get rid of Windows on their PC altogether and install Linux there as well?

How long before these Windows 11 handhelds running this cut down OS get a 'feature update' from Microsoft that adds a load of new crud no one was asking for, and the OS goes back to being a resource hog again?

Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again'

Ah Supersonic flights which will only be used by the 1% who can afford to pay the ridiculous inflated priced to get there slightly quicker and for something that could have probably been achieved by a zoom call in the first place.

Musk and Trump take slap fight public as bromance ends

"A senior White House official confirmed to The Register that Trump had no plans to speak to Musk today."

Considering that Musk basically called Trump a 'pedo guy' by accusing him of being in the Epstein evidence and that is why the US government won't release it, I don't see the bromance ever getting rekindled. As that's a pretty hard one for Musk to row back from. And no doubt those who take everything that Musk posts on Twitter as gospel will believe their is something to the accusation.

So its going to be a hard choice for all the hardcore MAGA and also Elon worshipers to pick a side in this one.

Elon Musk pukes over pork-filled budget bill with Tesla subsidies on the line

"So far, DOGE has so far failed to live up to those early claims, with Musk telling the White House in April that his team had only managed to identify around $150 billion in savings"

'Savings' such as closing down entire organisations such as USAID which had been created by congress and can only be disbanded by congress.

Firing government employees who didn't reply to a email in a timely fashion and then having to rehire people afterwards.

Claiming that there were people on benefits who were 140 years old, when it just turned out to be the ancient COBOL database defaulting to use 1880 as the year if one hadn't been entered correctly.

And just generally cancelling contracts of anything they deemed 'woke'. Are just some of the highlights of what Musk was up to yet also wasn't because although he was bragging on Twitter than he was doing all of this, the official statement from the White house was that he was just an adviser and not actually the one in charge of DOGE, honestly we pinky swear he isn't.

Reddit sues Anthropic for scraping content into the maw of its eternally ravenous AI

Because of these AI bots just hoovering up all the data on the open web without permission, I can see unless something is done to compensate the websites for their data being sucked into these LLMs more and more websites will start putting their content behind a paywall or at least requiring a login to access it. And explicitly stating that using an AI scraper bot is a violation of their T&Cs.

Which will make using the internet a worse experience for the end users.

Please tell us Reg: Why are AI PC sales slower than expected?

AI PC is just like when 5G first launched, sure some people will rush out as early adopters but then they find there is little benefit to paying extra for the feature.

Maybe in a few years time when there is something actually useful they can do on an AI PC and the price is the same as one without it then it will be adopted by the masses?

Although on a personal level ive yet to see any app or service that would only work with a 5G handset that doesn't also work with a phone that only has 4G, so maybe the AI PC apps just will never take off?

AWS forms EU-based cloud unit as customers fret about Trump 2.0

Unless the data is encrypted with a encryption key that Amazon do not know, then it doesn't matter how much EU based personnel and infrastructure AWS, Azure or Google have your data its still at the mercy of the US authorities if you have it on servers operated by a US company.

Tariff woes equal US smartphone price hikes, shrinking sales

Re: Only gets better...

The Motorola that make the phones has been owned by Lenovo for a few years now, so is in reality a Chinese brand these days.

Motorola solutions that makes things such as walkie talkies and the UK emergency services equipment are still US owned i believe.

Tesla FSD ignores school bus lights and hits 'child' dummy in staged demo

Have Tesla stopped calling it full self driving and now just refer to it as FSD, or is that just in the article?

As I do have major problems with them marketing something as full self driving and then saying you have to supervise it all the time. As that isn't then full self driving is it?

It like the BS of lifetime warranties, which aren't usually for the life time of how long the purchaser owns it, but whatever arbitrary number the manufacturer decides is the lifetime of the product, so could be as little as a few years after purchase so as soon as they release a new model the 'lifetime' on the old one expires.

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

Unfortunately these pig butchering scammers are not only praying on people on these dating site with their scams, they are often using forced labour to work in their scam call centres as well.

Surely if the US has strong enough evidence against this company they can pressure the Philippines authorities to raid the business and shut it down rather than just imposing sanctions?

What would a Microsoft engineer do to Ubuntu? AnduinOS is the answer

Re: "reshapes GNOME in the image of Windows 11"

Talk about a niche market. your aiming this at some who already uses and is happy with Windows 11 but also wants to move to Linux and retain the same style of Windows 11 UI. There can't be many of those about.

Of course this MS employee might know something we don't about future Windows UI decisions and perhaps the existing Windows 11 UI is due to change shortly and so there maybe a nostalgia for classic Window 11 UI in the future.

Trump threatens to add formal Apple Tax on top of the 'Apple tax'

Re: Is that even legal?

Well he doesn't want the FBI going after fraud and racketeering as thats the sort of crimes that Trump MAGA buddies are into and no point in wasting resources going after those criminals when Trump will only end up pardoning them anyway.

Its unbelievable how corrupt the Trump administration has become in just a short period of time with still almost 4 years left. With the supreme court basically saying he can't be prosecuted for anything done while in power and Republicans holding both houses and most of them too scared to speak up against Trump there is little that can be done to stop him until maybe the mid term elections, assuming the democrats manage to win, and Trump doesn't cry that election fraud again.

Signal shuts the blinds on Microsoft Recall with the power of DRM

"Designed to capture snapshots to allow users to step back to whatever they might have been working on, it seemed a good idea...."

Really! I don't think it ever sounded like a good idea, it sounded like MS had gone all in on AI PCs without any apps that took advantage of the NPU that they were insisting every CPU now had to have. So grasping at straws they came up with a bonkers idea about screen grabbing everything you do on your PC as no one could come up with anything else.

Russia expected to pass experimental law that tracks foreigners in Moscow via smartphones

I mean do they not think people will just you know, turn off their phone or leave it at home when they want to go out and commit a crime?

TBH if your going out doing crimes while you have a smart phone with you anyway then more fool you, as its basically linking your phone to the scene of the crime via the geo location data anyway without any additional apps needing to be installed.

its not unknown for the police in the US to go to telecos and demand to know what devices were connected to the cell towers in the area and time a crime took place so they can narrow down their list of suspects. So id not be surprised if in a state like Russian this happens all the time, just to see who turned up to an opposition political rally never mind actual crimes.

Adobe turns subscription screw again, telling users to pay up or downgrade

What annoys me about DaVinci resolve is that their Linux support is pretty second rate. They require you use a RHEL compatible distro which even then sometime breaks the software due to dependency issues. It doesn't support AAC audio on Linux even in the paid versions, despite Black magic being part of the MPEG forum so the cost to implement a AAC codec in the paid Linux version would be trivial to them.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang labels US GPU export bans ‘precisely wrong’ and ‘a failure’

Its hardly surprising that the CEO of a company that is getting cut of from a potentially huge market for its AI tech thinks the GPU export ban is a bad idea.

Politicians always say that the export controls on GPUs are just to stop the Chinese government using AI for military applications. But since advance AI models like Deepseek have been developed and released from China, Ive no doubt that if Chinese businesses can release models like Deepseek that the Chinese military has already got their hands on the necessary tech to develop advance AI models as well. And the advances in home grown China AI kit means they will soon not need any US tech to carry on with their AI development.

Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' would create a regulation-free AI hellscape, AGs warn

Re: States' Rights

I thought it was the Republicans long running campaign promises for small government and to reduce federal rules and allow the states to decide on their own laws?

Of course this was before all the American voters elected Prime Minister Musk (oh wait he wasn't on the ballot paper?) but still Elon doesn't want to see these pesky states laws interfere with his AI and self driving car companies so just 'persuade' the right people to propose federal laws to override the state on AI.

But of course it was just 'government efficiency' that is why the billionaire was taking time away from his businesses to help out Trump, no other motivations at all.

Trump says he has a problem if Apple builds iThings in India

Trump has worked out how to solve the labour costs for Apple and all the other companies he wants to move their manufacturing back to the US. The Trump administration as already tested out how they can round up people and send them without any due process to El Salvador prisons where they are forced to work, so why not do that in the US?

Just arrest everyone you don't like and put them in some sort of camp where they have to concentrate all day on tremendous job of making American great again.

Plan to keep advanced chips from China with tracking tech gains support in Congress

Another case of politicians proposing laws without seeking any technical guidance of how things actually work first. Just like the backdoors in E2E encryption only for the good guys they keep going on about.

They might as well just pass a law that says every GPU must come with a magic unicorn which can fly back to the US and report on its location for all the good the law will do if enacted.

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

While I agree there aren't as many professional applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator or Autocad on Linux. Most of the Windows users that are going to be caught out by the EOL of Windows 10 aren't professionals who would be using these apps.

Its you average Joe who uses a few year old system that works fine for web browsing, light photo editing or office work that is now being forced into having to buy a new PC because MS deemed their perfectly working computer is can't run Windows 11. And they don't have the technical knowledge and skills to be able to confidently install Linux or ChromeOS. So end up having to shell out on a new PC.

"ChromeOS Flex works pretty well and it's not limited to laptops. You must use a Google account..."

Fyde OS is essentially ChromeOS Flex but with the ability to not have to use a Google account and use just a local account and also supports Android apps unlike the official Google version.

Although if you don't need the Android app support my personal preference would be to install a full Linux distro such as Mint.

Attackers pwn charter airline helping Trump's deportation campaign

So the richest country with a large airforce is paying some tin pot private company to ferry the people they want deported out of the country rather than sending them on military planes?

I bet if you follow the money this will turn out to be just another way of sending US taxpayers money to one of Trumps MAGA cronies.

Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection

Where as I can see why it is causing issues for Nextcloud, I don't expect that Google are doing so maliciously as I doubt Nextcloud are a big enough player yet to warrant Googles specific attention, and because of their lack of size they don't have the clout to get the attention of the right people at Google.

Its exactly like the sort of thing that happens with Youtubers who get videos taken down or copyright strikes etc, If you are MrBeast or someone similar with millions of subscribers then you can get to speak to your own account manager at Google to actual get the problem solved. Whereas someone who has a few thousand subscribers get an AI chat bot which just regurgitates the T&Cs and you never get to speak to a real person about your problem.

Amazon tested warehouse robots and found they're not ready to replace humans

Re: Perhaps Amazon workers . . .

I am sure that the 1000s of people who work in Amazon warehouses all over the world would rather have a shit job than no job at all. As I doubt Amazon are going to retrain their warehouse staff for other roles at Amazon once they have perfected the robots, and instead they will be made redundant and end up in the unemployment line.

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

Re: Cat & mouse

Mine used to love watching snooker on the telly. It wasn't a fan of Ronnie O Sullivan though, he must have had a look that put off my cat from watching. LOL

If Google is forced to give up Chrome, what happens next?

If you don't like a AI company owning Chrome, why do you still have Chrome installed now? Google is an AI company and heavily invested in AI with their own LLM Gemini?

I honestly don't see the majority of people suddenly moving away from Chrome if OpenAI or any other AI company buys it, they have put up with years of Google slurping their browsing data to show them ads, so why would they feel any different if its now a different company slurping their data?

My fear is as the article points out that Firefox is the only popular multiple platform browser that isn't based on Chromium will be killed off by the sale of Chrome, since Google won't be able to pay to be the default search provider if the ruling goes ahead..

And that means all those forks of Firefox would die as well, as without Mozilla continuing to maintain the Firefox code base with their paid engineers, there is no way the small group of devs who maintain Waterfox and all the other Firefox forks will be able to cope with the massive task of maintaining and updating a modern web browser like Firefox as Mozilla can rn with their funding from Google.

So unless another search engine such as Bing or Duck Duck go can offer a similar payment to Mozilla to have their search engine as default on FF, its potentially going to be a Chromium browser monopoly going forwards..

Super spyware maker NSO must pay Meta $168M in WhatsApp court battle

Well now its been established they can be sued in the US and NSO admit their spyware is being installed on both iOS and Android devices, I would say its time that both Apple and Google should be contacting their lawyer as well. I'm not usually one to propose suing but in this case I say lets bring on the fines until the scumbags run out of money.

And if you work for NSO I hope that you don't own any electronic devices as no doubt the people you sell the spyware to will be spying on you with your own software.

Microsoft moved the goalposts once. Will Windows 12 bring another shift?

If the MS true desire was to ensure every Windows 11 OS install had a TPM for security reasons, there wouldn't be work arounds to let you install it on a PC that doesn't have one. It would simply refuse to work without a TPM.

So its clearly an artificially created barrier designed to sell more PCs and Windows 11 OS licenses, and create additional revenue by making a subscription model for Windows 10 security patches for those who can't or don't want to upgrade.

China's Loongson gets OpenStack boost from Inspur on its MIPS-y silicon

Even if Lonongson chips are slower than the cutting edge CPUs available from AMD and Intel, on the desktop most people don't really need blistering CPU performance for most of the common office and productivity software. If your office suite or browser takes a few seconds longer to open up than it would on a i9 its hardly a massive issue.

I remember back in the 90s coming into work and switching on the PC running Windows NT 4 and having time to go and make a cup of coffee before it had even got the a login prompt.

Commodore OS 3 is the loudest Linux yet

Re: It's just a toy...

You're probably right about them not having the rights to the names, When Commodore went bankrupt the trademarks and IP ended up getting passed through multiple companies who all seemed to be cursed by it and ended up going belly up or getting bought out themselves shortly afterward. Escom, Gateway 2000, Tulip have all owned the rights at some point. And I believe now that Amiga and Commodore brand names are owned by different companies.

Trump promises protection for TikTok, for which he has a ‘warm spot in my heart’

How exactly do you add a tariff onto none American made movies? Are Netflix going to have to bung the US government some money before they can show the next James Bond movie on their platform?

Movies studios are very good at avoiding paying taxes anyway, they will just claim a $100m movie has lost money so there is no fee to pay or some other accountancy BS.

Open Document Format turns 20, but Microsoft Office still reigns supreme

Re: That UK Gov Manadate thing

MS Office has been able to read ODF files for quite a while now, so I don't understand why even people who've locked into the Microsoft Office eco system would be bothered about receiving ODF files?

Of course it could be that overly cautious IT admins might block ODF files as email attachments for feat they might be malware, and that could cause issues which just means its easier to send them in MS file formats.

Oregon State University's Open Source Lab is running on fumes

How many of the American tech companies such as Amazon, Meta, Google, etc have benefited from what OSU has offered? I bet all of them in some ways whether directly like Meta in 2011 or indirectly by using some of the projects OSU helped to maintain. So they should be the ones putting back into the open source community by donating money to Oregon State Uni. And Id say far more than the $250k they need, add at least a zero or two onto that figure.

Open source AI hiring bots favor men, leave women hanging by the phone

I wonder if you are unlucky enough to apply for a job that's using a AI recruitment bot and have the same name as a bad people from history 'Charles Manson' or 'Rose West' for example, are these AI bots are going to use that against you since the training data will have overwhelming negative data in its system about people with those names?

X marks the drop for European users

It sounds like Grok needs a bit of an update on what Elon has been up to since it seems to be unaware of him endorsing Trump, the Nazi salute, him hoovering up all the data from government depts in his new job as unelected US prime minister as other potential reasons why people are leaving Twitter.

HMRC's Making Tax Digital scheme also made tax more expensive – by £300M

Being self employed myself and having to submit tax details 4 times a year going forward rather than just doing my tax return once every 12 months as I do now, it just more work for zero benefit to me.

And HMRC don't even try to give BS reasons as to why the change could be a benefit the self employed, cos they know its just a pain in the arse for no reward.

Successive governments have shown they don't care about small businesses, maybe it because we can't afford to give freebies to MPs like concert ticket or holidays that large corporations can?

DOGE may help Elon Musk's biz empire dodge $2.4B in liabilities – Senate probe

I mean I saw this coming as soon as Musk endorsed Trump back in 2024. Does anyone honestly think a tech billionaire is concerned about government efficiency? It was always about what Musk could get out of the deal and how much red tape he could cut for his own companies. And siphoning off a load of government data to god knows where was a nice icing on the cake.

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

I throw in Musk as a worse option to be in charge of Chrome over OpenAI. Of course it will get renamed Xrome or something similar if Musk were to buy it so he can have his favourite letter in the name, and you would probably be forced to see his twitter posts every time you launched the browser.

Also if Zuckerberg were to buy it that would probably make it an even worse privacy nightmare than it is under Google.

RIP, Google Privacy Sandbox

Re: Do we even need cookies?

I haven't noticed any major issues with websites since Firefox stopped blocking third party cookies by default, and I did manually disable them in my back up browser Chrome as well.

As they are pretty much only used for tracking and ads, so its not been a loss to me having them disabled.

Congress wants to know if Nvidia superchips slipped through Singapore to DeepSeek

Its not going to be that difficult for Chinese companies or the China government to still get hold of these band GPUs. They could set up a shell company in the US to buy them and then later ship them out in a container labeled and E-waste. Since the US is more concerned about whats coming into the states rather than going out of the country at the moment, Its doubtful the US customs would notice.

White House confirms 245% tariff on some Chinese imports not a typo

Re: What would you do?

Its odd that its only the US that has a big issue with cheap Fentanyl coming from China and it isn't such as huge issue in other western countries, maybe that shows that the US health system is itself to blame?

But of course Trump will never admit to it being a home grown problem when their is the boogie man of foreign people you can blame for all the problems in America.

Microsoft admits it's not you, Classic Outlook can be a real CPU, power hog sometimes

Re: "Does Redmond have it in it to intentionally hobble an older product"...

Yep totally! Look at Skype, as soon as MS released Teams they virtually abandoned Skype until it barely functioned towards the end before they finally announced they were going to kill it off completely.

Uncle Sam kills funding for CVE program. Yes, that CVE program

How much are the US gov going to save on cancelling this, a few million a year? A lot to us mortals but what amounts to a rounding error on the governments balance sheet.

Considering how much the tech bro's all donated to king Trumps inauguration, I'm sure if asked Musk, Bezos, Nadella, Ellison and Zuckerberg could all throw in a couple of million each and keep it going til at least the end of the Trump presidency, when the sane people might be back in charge.

EU gives staff 'burner phones, laptops' for US visits

You don't have to have committed any criminal acts, just having some tattoos that resemble those of Venezuelan gang members can get you renditioned to an El Salvador maximum security prison with no due process. And even if they make a mistake and realise they souldn't have sent you there neither Trump or Bukele are willing to back down and return them to the US https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9vedkm7w2do

And Trump has even said if he can get around the law then he is willing to send American citizens to the El Salvador jail. So while the Orangutan is in charge I wouldn't be visiting the US if I was gifted an all expenses paid trip and if I was an American Id be looking to move to Canada for the next 4 years.