Posts by mark l 2

Windows fails to tip the scales in grocery store deployment

What could possibly a scale be doing that requires even the minimum specs needed to run modern Windows?

Child safety or age-gating for all? UK social media ban plan draws fire

All those kids that still want to get on social media even if a ban is brought in will do so, so who are you really protecting with bans if the parents aren't also checking up to see what the kids are doing online?

My nephew is 15 year old and lives in Australia and when i chatted with him about the ban there, he told me his friends were all well aware that by downloading a VPN or using a proxy that it was easy to bypass the blocks. But as his mum is very strict on how much screen time hes allowed and he can only use his phone in the living room and she knows his pin so can check what hes been doing he stays off social media even though some of his friends are still using it.

To think that a ban alone with no on going supervision from parents about what they are doing online is going to keep kids of social media is frankly absurd. That would be like saying we need tougher laws against illegal drugs as that will stop people with addictions getting their fix.

You don't need to have any bans if more parents would take some responsibility to know what their children are doing online now. As there are already tools available to restrict which apps & websites can be accessed and how long children can use their phones for.

Sony no longer home of the Bravia as it plans TV biz spin-out to China’s TCL

My current TV is approaching its 14 birthday and gets used daily so i have to be prepared that is probably going to need replacing soon. But which brands actually make their own TVs in 2025, and aren't just a Vestel or TCL set with a different sticker stuck on the front?

UK gambling regulator accuses Meta of lying about its struggle to spot illegal ads

From the last time i went onto a Meta owned platform without an adblocker nearly every advert i saw looked scammy. And people I know have been duped by ads on there and ended up buying something which they thought was a one off purchase to only find they had been enrolled in some subscription or received a crappy product drop shipped from Aliexpress worth a few quid that they paid over the odds for though a Facebook ad.

Meta doesn't care as long as the advertisers are willing to pay, im sure if someone were to run ads that was offering outright illegal services such as stolen goods for sale, as long as they paid Meta enough money they would run the ad and only take it down when it received enough complaints that they felt they had to do something about it.

UK prime minister stares down barrel of ban on social media for kids

The issue is that it won't be a ban on under 16 using social media, it will be age verification for everyone over 16 to prove they are old enough to access the apps and websites. And we have already seen what a sh1t show age verification has been for accessing 'adult' content and they want to bring this in for social media too? Just so parents can put their feet up and say its ok i don't need to be supervising my children online the government is doing it for me.

Wine 11 runs Windows apps in Linux and macOS better than ever

I know that a lot of companies still see Linux as too small a market on the desktop to warrant a native Linux port of their apps. But it would be nice if they could at least test and tweak their Windows builds to work under WINE and well as Windows. As although im no dev im sure it wouldn't be a massive amount of work to do, especially if your an large corporation with a large dev team.

Microsoft on the other hand wants to keep their cash cow of office running primarily on Windows. As if 365 ran flawlessly under WINE then the Office compatibility tie in that keeps a lot of businesses running Windows maybe broken. As businesses could save on the cost of a Windows license by just installing Linux with WINE and then use Office without having to pay for a Windows license, which is going to directly hit Microsoft profits.

Ofcom keeps X under the microscope despite Grok 'nudify' fix

I am suprised there haven't been more uproar from US politicians, but this is probably because Musk is now back in the good books with Trump. I have no doubt if this had been something that Meta AI was doing Trump would be holding a press conference announcing that the dept of justice will be thoroughly investigating Zuckerberg and Facebook for creating CSA images.

CrowdStrike shareholders lose battle to recoup losses from 2024 outage

"Agent cloud architecture … doesn't require a massive tuning burden and doesn't blue screen endpoints with failed updates," court documents quote Sentonas as saying.

As CrowdStrike argued in its motion to dismiss, Sentonas' statement was not a promise that CrowdStrike could never trigger a blue screen outage under any circumstances.

I mean i kind sounds like Clownstrike were promising that their updates wouldn't cause a BSOD, and thats exactly what happened in July 2024 though.

Google rekindles relationship with jilted JPEG XL image format

I think it was the decision by the PDF association to add JPEG XL to their spec that pushed the Chromium devs to reconsider their decision. As if Chromium/Chrome wants to continue having the ability to open PDF document going forward then it would need to be able to decode any JPEG XL images contained within them. And if your implementing the decoder for the PDF reader then you may as well just enable it for the whole browser.

This whole things goes to show that although Chromium might be open source when its main developers are from Google they are going to follow what their business daddy wants them to do, rather than what is good for the rest of the internet.

India demands crypto outfits geolocate customers, get a selfie to prove they’re real

India has a lot of people who by western standards are on low incomes, so im sure it wouldn't be hard to find some hard up individuals to act as money mules and open crypto accounts for a bung of a few quid using their real details. So how much this is going to actual prevent fraud and crime is questionable.

Developer writes script to throw AI out of Windows

'Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the start of the new year published a blog titled "sn scratchpad" in which he urged people to move past arguments about AI slop and focus on how AI models can amplify human activity'

Because like all these tech CEOs he out of touch with anyone thats not in his immediate sphere so can't understand why people dislike AI, his post ended up with Microslop trending on social media so i doubt he will be posting on there anytime again soon. Maybe hes realised that if people want to listen to a douchebag tech bro go on about AI we have Musk for that already.

As for another reason to hate on AI if one was needed, is the fact that all your PCs, phones, laptops and tablets are about to get a lot more expensive in 2026 since all the RAM and storage is going to build AI datacenters leaving the consumers with 200 to 300% price increases on memory over this time in 2025.

Ofcom officially investigating X as Grok's nudify button stays switched on

"Sexually manipulating images of women and children is despicable and abhorrent," she said. "It is an insult and totally unacceptable for Grok to still allow this if you're willing to pay for it.

I personally see no legitimate reason why Grok should be able to create nude photos of anyone, but I have to wonder why its only images of women and children that Kendall seems to be bothered about being created? I am a male and i don't want someone creating any images of me whether sexual or otherwise without consent using AI.

Don’t bother with the retailer’s website, says Google: Gemini can shop for you

I am suprised that retailers are on board with letting Google AI handle the sale and not actually have the buyer go to their website, as surely you want to try and see if the buyer may purchase other impulse products or upset them on other items from your online store? Which are a lot harder to do when they never actually visit your website.

Plus no doubt this feature will be requiring the merchants to have product ads running on Google to take advantage of the feature, so more money into Alphabets ad business.

Infamous BreachForums forum breached, spilling data on 325K users

(According to the administrator, the problem stemmed from sloppy handling during the forum's recovery. "During the restoration process, the users table and the forum PGP key were temporarily stored in an unsecured folder for a very short period of time. Our investigation shows that the folder was downloaded only once during that window," N/A added.)

I mean your dealing with people who frequent such sites who have little to no morals, so whether it was download 100000 times or 1 time, thats still 1 time too many if its private data you don't want exposed. So im glad they got a small taste of their own medicine.

2026 brings a bumper crop of Microsoft tech funerals

Don't worry though Microslop will have Copilot branded AI versions of all these products ready for you replace them with before the end of 2026.

AI industry insiders launch site to poison the data that feeds them

Poisoning the data is all well and good if you want to allow the AI bots to still use your resources and bandwidth and to slow down your website. But my response to AI bots is block their IPs from even connecting in the first place. I see no good reason why I should allow them to ingest anything ive written on my website to their LLMs until they start paying me for it.

Malaysia and Indonesia block X over failure to curb deepfake smut

"Vietnam last week announced a law that requires publishers to ensure netizens can close video ads after five seconds."

I am guessing Google won't be happy with that since Youtube is basically now just bunch of ads (often unskippable) with a smattering of content in between them.

Qualcomm is determined to cut a slice out of Intel's PC pie with latest Snapdragon chips

Qualcomm need to pull their finger out and put some of their devs on the task of getting Linux to run properly on these Snapdragon chips. The hardware might be good, but its hampered by the only OS being Windows 11 which Microsoft seem to half heartedly supporting on ARM, plus the numerous other issue with Windows 11 in general as an OS.

Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it

I don't have a smart TV at the moment, im lucky that my 42" Toshiba from back in 2011 is still working fine and doesn't have any built in smart features. I use an Amazon Fire TV stick to access to streaming services and with Adguard home to restrict what domains and IPs that can connect to. Amazon makes that difficult since they have hard baked google DNS servers in Fire OS which you have to use a third party app to override and use your own DNS.

I had a go at building my own streaming PC using Linux and Kodi, but since most of the major streaming services don't offer any official support for Kodi only using the web version which is clunky to navigate when not using a mouse and keyboard, I went back to using Fire TV stick and their proprietary apps for now.

When my Toshiba eventually dies the next TV i get will not be connected to the Internet and ill continue using the Fire TV stick for streaming services.

Everybody has a theory about why Nvidia dropped $20B on Groq - they're mostly wrong

How did space Karen get away with calling his sh1tty AI Grok, when there was already a well established AI business using the name Groq set up years prior?

Sure they aren't spelled exactly the same, but orally they sound the same when pronounced so it would be easy for a layman to mistake the two as being the same company. As i initially did when i started reading the article.

I'm sure i couldn't set up business called Happle and start selling phones and tablets without Apples lawyers coming after me, so how has Musk got away with it for all this time?

You don't need Linux to run free and open source software

Personally I questioned why someone is using GIMP for printing checks? Seems like saying im trying to fix up a shelf with these screws but when i hit them with my hammer they aren't doing what i want them to do.

ATM jackpotting gang accused of unleashing Ploutus malware across US

I don't understand why would you still hang around in the prison for years after your gang has taken control of it? Sure it had a zoo and a pool but it was still a prison best to get out of there asap.

X sues to protect Twitter brand Musk has been trying to kill

Ill never refer to it as X it will always be Twitter, mainly because Elon wants everyone to call it X as he think it sounds cool like the 7 year old child he is.

Oracle isn't done with Ampere yet as A4 instances arrive on OCI boasting 96 cores

Where as it pains me to praise Oracle, their always free resources included a great offer of a Ampere A1 VM which can be configured with 4 cores and 24GB of RAM. https://www.oracle.com/uk/cloud/free/

I have had mine for a couple of years and had barely any downtime and never been charged a penny, although the card they have on file has expired now anyway even if they wanted to try to charge me. Just like with any free resource don't rely on it for anything critical though as they could pull the offer at any time.

Denmark takes a Viking swing at VPN-enabled piracy

The reason why people are using VPN's to access illegal IPTV streams is because of the enshitifcation of the legitimate streaming services.

Remember how piracy was at an all time low when Netflix came along and made the legal route the most friction-less and easy, well those days are gone now due to every media company wanting their own streaming service so content is now divided up over several platforms, requiring multiple subscriptions which keep going up in price and often with ads thrown into the mix now so they can double dip charging you a subscription and make you watch adverts.

It no better for sports fans you need several different subscriptions to watch all the premiership matches due to the rights being split up across multiple providers, and some matches are blacked out entirely.

Even Youtube is barely usable in 2025 unless you pay for YT premium or use an adblock due to the sheer number of ads, often which are unskippable now.

So banning VPNs is not the solution to stop people pirating content, actually making the legitimate services better than the pirate experience is the way to stop all be the most full on freetards from using the illegal streaming apps and websites.

Reddit sues Australia to exempt itself from kids social media ban

“is to enable online social interaction between two or more end-users.”

Would the El Reg comments section be classed as enabling social interactions between 2 or more user, ditto for the millions of other website that allows for users to post online?

I have a tech themed WordPress blog that i occasionally post articles to, which has a comments section. But there is no way i'm going to the effort to age check people from Aussie IP address to see how old they are, for a website which gets a few dozen visitors a day.

Trump gives state AI regulation the presidential middle finger

How long before Trump writes an executive order to make him president for life, and his appointed laccies in the Supreme court will find some way to say its legal?

Legacy Update expands archive of vanished Microsoft downloads

I wonder if legacy update is going to have the patches for Win 10 IOT LTSC going forward, as assuming they install on regular Windows 10 then this will mean come next October if you want to continue to use Windows 10 without paying for extended support you could just download the IOT LTSC patches from legacy update?

X shuts down European Commission ad account after €120M fine announcement

Well considering the Musky smells ideal of how 'good' the Twitter developers were was by measureing how many lines of code they had written in the last week and if you hadn't done enough you got fired. Im sure any devs who remain are all probably vibe coding using Grok just to keep the number of lines up, so now Twitter has probably got more holes than a tramps underpants at this point, let hope someone is able to take over Space Karens account at some point due to the consequence of his staff cuts.

Two paths to Enlightenment: AV Linux 25 and MX Moksha step forward

Ive not tried Moksha on anything other than Bodhi Linux. But i was impressed on its low RAM usage. On a computer with only 2GB RAM it was idling at startup at around 350MB in use so this give me a lot more overhead for running actual programs than some other DE i tried.

Tuxedo Computers slams lid on Arm Linux laptop after 18 months of pain

The failure here lies squarely with Qualcomm, they could easily afford to put some of their devs on a full time project to get the Snapdragon SOCs working well with Linux, but don't seem to want to bother despite them promising to support Linux when they first announced them. Its a shame as when all those Snapdragon laptops become EOL and start to flood the second hand market they could be put to new use running Linux, rather than the bloated AI infested mess that Windows will be.

Calls grow for inquiry into UK data watchdog after MoD leak

I purchased a used PC from an auction about 15 year ago and inside the optical drive was a CD-RW which contained a classified MOD document about tank camouflage techniques. Something i am fairly sure shouldn't have ended up in my grubby mits. So the MOD being leaky is nothing new.

Years-old bugs in open source tool left every major cloud open to disruption

Well I'm sure all the big tech companies who use the software on their clouds would have had employed devs who could have inspected the source code for any bugs that could leave a backdoor, but of course the tech companies want to use the software for free and let others do the bug fixes for them, rather than actually giving something back to the projects the use by paying their developers to submit patches.

Russia-linked crooks bought a bank for Christmas to launder cyber loot

Melki said they are "paid very little for the risks they take" and could face years behind bars. Several have already found out the hard way. In April, two men were jailed for laundering £6 million by exploiting the Russia-Ukraine war to justify moving criminal funds, with one later found to have bought a £1 million house using the proceeds.

Im not sure id agree that being able to buy a million pound house is 'paid very little for the risk they take'. People commit much riskier crimes such as house burglary or robbery which nets them less in profit yet equally as long jail sentences.

US, UK, Australia sanction Lockbit gang’s hosting provider

I'm assuming these "bulletproof hosting" providers are using crypto currency as their main form of payment, so how effective is sanctions going to actually be in that case against the day to day operation of the business?

Will ISP's be forbidden to send traffic to any IP addresses owned by these sanctioned hosting providers?

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

I found it interesting that the Cloudflare error 500 page showed my browser as OK and the host i was trying to connect to as OK but Cloudflare Manchester as the issue. If they know that then surely they could just route around Cloudflare Manchester and connect me directly to the host?

Outdated Samsung handset linked to fatal emergency call failure in Australia

My parents live in Australia and my mum who is very tech illiterate was forced to stop using her perfectly functioning phone. because it didnt support emergency calling and her mobile provider basically said after X date it would no longer be able to use the network unless she bought a new handset.

There is basically an approved list of handsets that Vodafone Australia allow on their network so if your visiting and going over with an none approved device then you will probably find you can't get it to connect to Australia mobile networks due to their weird T&Cs. Ive just checked and my phone a Oneplus is not even on their list for any approved handsets.

https://www.vodafone.com.au/about/legal/devices

UK tribunal says reselling Microsoft licenses is A-OK

A Microsoft spokesperson told El Reg: "We disagree with the decision and intend to appeal it."

Of course they don't agree as it directly effects their bottom line, although the whole we don't agree appeals should not be something thats allowed. Appeals should be only permitted if there is clear legal issue with the original judgement.

Google to allow Android users with high pain tolerance to sideload unverified apps

I suspect Google are less about making these small concessions to continue to allow 'power users' to install apps not from the Playstore and is more about the fact that that their original announcement had garnered a lot of negative press and that regulators might have seen the news and started to investigate Google and their monopolistic behavior. And now they can say hey look we still allow side loading as long as the user hops on one leg, while singing praise Google 50 times and navigating past several warning that their children maybe eaten by tigers if they install any apps from outside Googles walled garden.

We need the whole idea scrapped completely or an open alternative to Android who isn't Apple would be nice

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

Re: Microsoft quality has always been questionable since Win95

Other than a few features present or missing there is no underlying difference between home, pro and enterprise. After all they are all installed off the one ISO just depending on what product key you put in is the version you get.

Im not sure if it will still work as it was a while ago i tried it but there was a program you could download which would 'convert' an home install into a professional by changing the relevant registry entries and system files, then allowing you to add it to a domain. Ofc this wasn't something the Windows activation servers would like so you would then need a pro product key for it to activate..

Meta can't afford its $600B love letter to Trump

The only reason Zuck is still in charge is because they legally can't get rid of him. He burned through billions trying to convince people that the metaverse was the next big thing, when it was clearly only ever going to be niche.

Then along comes 'AI' as the latest fad and no one outside of the tech industry even talks about VR anymore. But to want to spend over 6 times your yearly profit on building a datacentre for something that is clearly a bubble waiting to burst seems crazy even for Zuck.

Microsoft's data sovereignty: Now with extra sovereignty!

The only way that MS or any of the American based tech companies can actually deliver on digital sovereignty would be to set up a EU based company which is completely independent of the US one, so no infrastructure, staff, or money flowing between them. And that would essentially split Microsoft into two companies, but for obvious reasons the shareholders would not go along with that option so its never going to happen.

From a technical level they could by give their EU customers the ability to encrypted all their data stored on Microsoft servers with a encryption key unknown to MS and that would at least then mean they couldn't provide unencrypted data to the US if legally requested to do so. But of course they would still be required to hand over the encrypted data which could then possible be decrypted at a later date. So it not a solution as good as actually using a EU host who doesn't have any US presence at all.

FBI prevails over convicted fraudster in $345M destroyed Bitcoin dispute

The feds may have looked in the drive and not found a crypto wallet, but if the guy just stored this private key in a text file they may have over looked it?

But if you had $345M in crypto currency would you trust having one place for it to be stored? I know i certainly wouldn't, i would have a printed copy of the private key as well as several digital copies stored on different devices. So either the guy was a moron relying on one hard drive as his only means to recover hundreds or millions of dollars or or his talking BS and the crypto never existed in the first place.

Well i guess there is a third option and that is that the feds did find his crypto wallet and some officers are now sunning it up on a tropical island after shredding his hard drive.

Amazon complains that Perplexity's agentic shopping bot is a terrible customer

Re: "...degraded ... customer service experience it provides."

My father opened an Amazon seller account a few years ago and it was suspended after just a few days for "violation of T&Cs", at that point he had not even uploaded a single product to sell, and in trying to get to the bottom of why it was suspended by talking to Amazon support it would have been easier to get blood from a stone. And in the end he gave up and just continued selling on ebay.

Oh if your seller account gets suspended they also close any related other accounts, so his Amazon Prime video stopped working and he could no longer log into Amazon to buy anything, nor can you use their website to contact customer services chat if you arent logged in with an account.

Eventually after he threatened to charge back the Amazon prime subscription with the bank if they didn't restore the account they did enable it again after about a week. But that's when we learned not to give Amazon anymore money.

'Keep Android Open' movement fights back against Google sideloading restrictions

Can you imagine if instead of Google & Android it was Microsoft announcing a similar thing about installing programs outside of the Windows store would require a $25 developer registration? Their would be boycott Microsoft protests outside of Redmond by now, yet Google seem to be getting away with little coverage about this outside of the tech news sphere.

Re: And this is why I keep my old cell phone

I am not sure about the 2014 Moto G, but for the Samsung Galaxy S8 you can get alternative ROMs with newer versions of Android that will still receive security updates, making it useful as a daily driver.

Apple faces £1.5B payout after losing UK App Store case

Appeals should only be allowed if they appealing party can demonstrate that their was something fundamentally wrong with the original case, not just because they don't agree with the outcome.

When it comes to appealing criminal convictions in the UK, if you submit what the appeal court judges deem to be without merit they can demand that any time already served on a sentence be discounted or even increase their sentence.

I think if Apple and all these other mega corps were at risk that the fine could be increased if the appeal court judges found it to be without merit, then this would stop all these issue of whenever there is a judgement they don't like they say they are going to appeal it and force the other party to have to pay further legal fees.

Reddit to Perplexity: Get your filthy hands off our forums

Well your problem there is not using an adblocker on YT. It's just become such a terrible experience that I honestly can't go on Youtube without one as you get 10 minute videos with 3 lots of ads these days. I do realise thats how a lot of Youtubers get paid though so if Ive liked a video someones created ill open it in my seconds browser without an adblocker installed and click on one of the ads to send them some money or if ive watched a lot of their content then let their video playlist play with the ads.

UK competition cops brand Apple, Google with 'strategic market status' for mobile

"And while Google Play helps people download apps on their devices, if you don't find the app you're looking for, you can download apps from a rival store or directly from a developer's website – something the majority of Android users actually do, and something other mobile platforms restrict."

That all well and good Google says that, except they are planning to bring in requirements for all Android app developers to sign up for a Google developer account (a paid service) and if they don't then users won't be able to side load apps developed by none Google approved devs.

Windows 11 update knocks out USB mice, keyboards in recovery mode

Re: The question is...

Probably not since Windows 10 was still buggy as hell right up to the end.