Posts by mark l 2 2427 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
I guess it will be Windows and MacOS and ChromeOS only again, and still no Linux version?
Rclone works fine for syncing to Google Drive from Linux, but its not straight forward to setup like the official Windows/Mac client software. So Rclone is not good for none technical people if you are trying to get them to switch to Linux.
As you said you went back to XP, that suggests you either tried Linux Mint a long time ago, or you are installing it on older hardware?
I have a 12 year old Dell Optiplex which runs Linux Mint 20 Mate at a respectable speed. Maybe XP would be quicker on the hardware, I don't know. But as XP no longer gets security patches where as Linux mint does, it makes a much more useful general purpose PC running LM, as it can be used online.
You didn't say which LM version you tried? I would not recommend the Cinnamon versions for XP era hardware, MATE or XFCE would be your better bets. Although even then it all depends on what CPU and RAM you have in the machine as there are lighter distros such as Puppy Linux which can run on machines with 512MB of RAM and single core CPUs.
A lot of the difference in photo quality from phone camera comes down to the software as well as the hardware. The Google Pixel phones 'only' have a 12MP sensor, yet can achieve better looking photos than phones with 48MP or higher sensors that are not using the Google camera app.
With less phones now offering external SD card storage, larger sensors just mean bigger photo sizes filling up the limited space on your phone for little benefit, especially for those who just take photos to upload to Instagram and Facebook which downsize the resolution anyway.
So the US have said that he can serve whatever time in an Australian prison. Does that mean the trial to take place in a US court but the sentence to be carried out in a Aussie prison? I am not an expert on the Australian sentencing guidelines but I doubt they are the same as the US. The US justice system is often gives much longer sentences than you would get for the same crime in other countries. What happens if he were to be sentence to 15 years by a US court, yet the Aussie justice system has a maximum sentence of 10 years for the same crime. Which sentence does he do?
I stay well away from the trending page as rarely anything of interest to me is on there. Occasionally the YT algorithm has shown me a video from a new channel and its been good and i have then subscribed to the channel. But then conversely i've watched just one video from a channel and never subscribed and it still keeps recommending other videos for months even though I never click on them
But the constant showing of previously watched videos is so annoying, The only videos i have ever watched more than one are some music videos and the odd instructional video that I might need to go over again for it to sink in.
Unless you are working on top secret government programs or have Jeff Bezos levels of money, its just as safe to have your passwords backups written down in the back of a book that you could leave in plain sight on your book shelf, assuming you trust other members of your household.
As burglars are looking for jewellery, cash and expensive tech they can sell on not for cheap paperback novel with passwords written down in the back pages.
You could add a simple cypher of putting random characters at the beginning or end of the passwords which you know to remove before entering the password but others would not and so the password would not work for them if they did find it and try.
Of course this is vulnerable to natural disasters such as fire or flood etc, but then you last worries will probably that you lost the password to your social media accounts if your house burned down.
Do those who pay out to these ransomware hackers honestly think that these scumbags will delete the data they have stolen one they get the payout?
There is no such thing as an honest criminal and it will come back to bite you in the arse later when they use that stolen data against you for further exploitation.
I have set Firefox to not allow 3rd party cookies and not yet experienced any noticeable problem with any websites i've visited.
It just Google worried that their bottom line is going to be effected as they won't be able to charge as much for targeted ads if the browsers all block 3rd party cookies.
Where my current telephone is located there is no power point nearby, which means that when Openreach decide to switch me over to VOIP i'm going to have to pay a sparky to put in a socket next to the phone for the VOIP adapter if I want to keep using that line.
So either i shell out around £150 to get a new power socket installed for no benefit to myself to get moved onto VOIP or i take that money and spend it on a mobile contract and cancel that telephone line. Hmm I wonder which option i will be choosing
Exactly what are the criminal charges for the DoubleVPN operators, as other than generic statement from the plod about being used mainly by criminals it doesn't really give any indication as to how it is breaking the law?
Seems like a fishing exercise to me where they don't actually have any evidence against the service. What the bet if they were truly not keeping logs as the operators of DoubleVPN claimed the servers will spring back to life in a few days controlled by the NSA/GHCQ and with logging enabled to try catch anyone still using.
"As for how it works, the current Windows Insider Dev Channel builds do not yet enforce Microsoft's hardware rules so there is every chance things will stop working once the final incarnation of the Arm version of Windows 11 drops"
When you put in restrictions such as what MS are planning with Windows 11 people will look to get around them, just for the challenge to do so or because they don't like big brother trying control what they do.
And as there are these current developer builds that don't have any hardware restrictions, I am sure some clever people will work out how to use the installer files from these developer builds to get passed the hardware requirement of the final release of Windows 11.
Google could do more to ensure that phones get patched by telling phone manufactures as part of your license to have the Google Apps on your phones and have access to the Google Play store you need to push out regular security updates within a certain amount of time after they are make them available.
I expect MS will back track on the TPM requirements for upgrading from Windows 10 when the number of upgrades gets nowhere near their expectations due to peoples PCs not meeting the minimum requirement.
There will be 10s of millions of PCs (some only shipped recently) that do not have a TPM or it is disabled in the BIOS. Most end users don't even know how to get into their BIOS to enable it even if they have a TPM, not helped by the fact that each manufacturer has their own key press combination to get into the setup.
From years of trying to talk users over the phone into entering the BIOS, they get frustrated with missing the 1 or 2 second window in which they key press is recognised before the PC start to boot to the OS. And so I expect people will just stick with Windows 10 rather than upgrade if the upgrade utility says their PC don't meet the minimum specs.
Unfortunately plastic recycling is in reality a myth invented by the oil industry to sell new plastic without people feeling guilty.
Less than 10% of plastic waste actually gets recycled, and that is mostly because there are over 100 different types of plastics and mixed plastics can't be recycled until they are separated which costs money. So at the moment its just easier and cheaper to make new plastics and ship off the mixed plastics to countries with low paid workers like Vietnam for sorting. But even then it often just end up piling up there as only PET and HDPE plastic is worth anything there is virtually no value in the other plastics.
"For businesses, it is just another feature update in the annual series of feature updates they have to deal with in the new 'Windows as a Service' world,"
But this Windows 11 feature update will probably come with a financial cost to businesses as no doubt MS will only be offering the free upgrade route to home users, and enterprise customers will need to pay for Windows 11 licenses. And for them this new Windows might be coming only a couple of years after they spent a lot of time and money to migrated to Windows 10 on the MS marketing promise of that was the last ever Windows version.
Well it comes as no surprise to me that the mobile phone companies have decided to grab back some money from Brits roaming, as they only actually offered it because the law said they had to.
Plus they had a bad year in 2020 with everyone staying at home and not buying new phones and many actually downgrading their contracts during lockdown since they didn't need all that call and data allowance when they aren't going anywhere.
Then there is the cost of rolling out 5G that most of the consumers as apathetic about. And on top of that we had the UK gov following Uncle Sam advice to stop allowing Huawei kit on our 5G networks, so some mobile operators are needing to rip out Huawei kit they only recently installed to replace it with more expensive Uncle Sam approved equipment.
I can't remember the last time I saw a £50 issued by and ATM, and I still do regularly get cash out to use as beer money going to the pub. Its all too easy to spend too much after a few beers paying on debit or credit cards so cash give me a hard limit on what I can piss up the wall.
But even if I did get £50 from an ATM in the UK your likely to be given the third degree or even refused to take it in some places. As shops and pub staff believe its fake because no one knows what a real one actually looks like. So as soon as you get one you want rid of it in the first place that will accept it.
"REvil is already a known RaaS operator, having previously told the cybercrime underworld that it would start vetting its criminal "partners" to stop them doing anything that would trigger domestic law enforcement attention. "
This is quite an oxymoron as how exactly do you go about selling ransomware and also ensuring it won't be used for criminal activity? Other than perhaps security researchers who might have it to try and create defences against it, there is no other reason to purchase ransomware other than for using for criminal activity.
It might be cynical of me but I see the move to Windows 11 being mainly financial from Microsoft point of view. They initially hailed Windows 10 as being the last version of Windows and therefore there was an assumption that MS would keep providing updates and patches to it indefinitely.
But with the majority of large organisations now finished the migration onto Windows 10, MS have probably foreseen their revenue from new Windows licenses drying up and so looked for a way of milking their business customers as they are the ones who have the deeper pockets, and the general public have now got used to the fact that Windows is sort of free now.
So one way for Microsoft to increase Windows license revenue is to stop supporting Windows 10 in another 4 years, make a few basic UI tweaks to Windows and they push it out as a new OS.
It will probably be a free update to home users but all those enterprise customers will have to pay to upgrade to Windows 11 if they want to keep getting security patches. Or MS might be trying to push them to move to paying for Azure instances of Windows 10 which will probably continue to get updates passed 2025 since the underlying Windows code will probably stay the same.
"These secret dossiers about you – based on what you think is private – could prompt an algorithm to remove you from the shortlist for your dream job,
This seems a bit of a stretch, how will a potential employer be able to use advertising databases to shortlist you for a job? Unless the job was working at Google or Facebook. neither of which would be my dream jobs.
If Apple were forced to open up iOS to sideloading apps, I doubt 99% of users would use the option anyway.
I have had Android phones going back 10 years and have only bothered to sideload an app once, and that was the Amazon prime video app back in the days before it was available on Google Play.
From my own years of experience of selling on platforms like Amazon and ebay only a very low percentage of buyers leave a review for a product, especially positive reviews. So if a product is getting more way more than around 10% percentage of buyer leaving reviews then its a good chance they are being incentivised by the seller to do so and so should be investigated. I am not sure if Amazon still allows none verified buyers to leave reviews as well, but if they do then stopping that will reduce the ability for fake reviews.
And then there is the bias that you cannot leave a 1 star review for Amazon fulfilled product when Amazon fsck up an order, yet 3rd party sellers can get 1 star reviews when they make mistakes.
Who cares if MS have decided to redesign the Windows GUI yet again? Looking at the screenshot Its hardly a radical change and certainly not enough to warrant a new Windows version. Under the hood it will still be the same old code going back decades, as Microsoft have to include backward compatibility with legacy software to keep their cash cows of enterprise customers happy.
I wonder if Microsoft are planning on offering a free upgrade to Win 11 when it is released like they did when Windows 10 came along or are going to try and charge for it? As I for sure won't be paying to upgrade.
I saw a video narrated by Chris Packham where a corvid was up against a dog (a beagle as I recall) to solve a puzzle where they had to pull on ropes to get some food to drop. And the corvids beat the dog hands down on several attempts.
I suspect if corvids could communicate with humans they would be better conversationalists than most reality TV show stars.
5 years of support is for those who held out until the very last minute before upgrading from 7, as if you upgraded to Window 10 when it was first released in 2015 you would have had 10 years of support by the time 2025 comes around. And going off previous Windows versions such as XP, Vista and 7 all became EOL after around 10 years so that amount of time seems pretty standard for MS to end support of their OS.
Who knows whether Windows 11 or 365 or whatever the marketing dept decide to call it won't just really be Windows 10 under the hood with another name and whatever shiny shiny interface they try an tac onto it to make it seem new.
"The company statement also offers welcome news that “Preliminary investigation results confirm that no company, customer or employee data was compromised.”
If none of your data was compromised and you had backups, WTF did you pay out $11m for?
That $11m would have be better paid into giving your staff more training to avoid this happening in the future than lining the pockets of these ransomware scumbags.
Although getting security updates is important and its something I look for in a phone, I doubt many end users know not to use a phone that isn't being regularly patched.
But they are more likely to stop using a phone if their OS version is no longer supported by the majority of the apps they want to run.
I know someone who had a Windows phone and the only reason they stopped using it was when Whatsapp stopped working on it, otherwise they would probably still be using it today even though it hasn't been patched in 18 months.
Really HarmonyOS is just another flavour of De-Googled Android like ASOP or projects such as Lineage and /e/os. Although these other projects are offering newer Android versions than HarmonyOS and use MicroG to replace the proprietary Google apps and services so are probably more useful outside of China.
I have yet to see any compelling use case for spending more on a 5G capable phone and a 5G mobile plan to encourage me to switch yet. Even the EE ads are all CGI and not actually showing a real use scenario. Incentives such as to be able to download a whole 4K movie in a few seconds, does not appeal as I see no need to have 4K movies phone, when you would barely notice the difference between 4K and 720p on a 6 inch screen.
My phone will due to be replaced within the next 6 to 8 months and if I can get a 5G capable handset for the same price and the 4G version ill get a 5G one but I won't be paying extra to get a 5G data plan as just wouldn't get the benefits.
While I see that having the ability to delivery 240W is handy. I do feel like its every other week we get some change to the USB specification. We had 4 revisions to the USB power delivery specification between 2017 and 2019 and now another just announced in this article. (And that is not even taking in to consideration all the different specs for bandwidth that they have released).
Do those proposing these updated specifications not try and think ahead for more than a couple of years of what people will be wanting on there devices?
I thought one of the advantages of the block chain was that all transactions are logged. So even if the millions from ransomware were to be divided up between thousands of different bitcoin wallets, as soon as they try and cash one out with a coin exchange at that point they will need to reveal their real identity to get in back to fiat currency.
I can't see how they can be actually benefiting in the real world for these ransonware scams, as what is the point in having millions of dollars in bitcoin if you can't actually spend it on anything tangible or are there some dodgy exchanges that will payout cash with no ID and no questions asked?
I came to this article from the ELReg RSS feed with Firefox and the Livemarks add on. And also follow the BBC news feed. So some of us still use RSS a lot.
Google getting back in on RSS can only mean they have come up with a way of using RSS to collect more personal data or throw ads at you though.
I also experience that problem of it defaulting to stream in low resolution bit rate, even though Youtube, and Amazon Prime video are capable of HD streaming from the same device over the same network.
Any annoying, unlike Youtube where you can manually select the stream quality, Iplayer does have that option.
Although I never really got into the Blackberry phones but I could see some appeal for some to using a phone with a physical keyboard as opposed to a a touch screen. One that springs to mind is for people whos jobs require them to wear gloves. As taking gloves on and off to use a touch screen phone would be inconvenient or even a safety risk in some occupations.
With some EOL Samsung phones such as the S7 and S8 you can actually installed degoogled Android from /e/os and get still a fully functioning OS which is receiving security updates for 3 years.
Or there are 3rd party ROMs which you can flash to them, some which have Google services and apps. But you probably won't get any security patches without reflashing the OS with a new version.
"Microsoft had promised fast system updates, improved security, and other features primarily for dual-screen tablet-ish devices."se
Why should the 99% of Windows 10 users who were not using a dual screen tablet be running a slower to update and less secure version of windows because they only had one screen?
So it does make sense to kill 10X and to implement these features into the main Win 10 OS. Unless of course they never really existed outside of marketing BS and in reality they were too hard to implement without breaking compatibility with older Windows programs?
I hadn't realised the tax rate in the US was so low even if your a billionaire. The UK start taxing your earning at 40% above £37K which and 45% over £150k (this is 46% in Scotland)
I really think there needs to be more tears over what we have already. If your earning over 500K per year. it should be 50% tax, 1m per year, 60% tax, 2m+ 70%.
You might argue that will not encourage people to work as hard because their money is going to get taxed. But the majority of those earning 2m+ a year are sports stars, actors and CEOs of multi nationals. And I would rather have better paid emergency service staff, public facilities and more money to help those struggling. And less Tom Cruise movies, less football on TV, less new shiny shiny items to buy on Amazon if they do stop working as hard.
I wonder how much influence the 5 eyes had in making it so phones attempt to connect to nearby Wi-Fi networks even when Wi-Fi is switched off?
As if i am switching off Wi-FI then its for a reason, I don't want my phone to be connecting to Wi-Fi. Not because i like flipping toggle switches on my phone for fun that my phone just then ignores.
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