Posts by Dan 55

Brits hate how big tech handles their data, but can't be bothered to do much about it

Time to mention Consent-o-Matic again

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Kyndryl follows in IBM's footsteps with rolling layoffs likely affecting thousands

Re: People

That would be an ecumenical matter.

Re: People

Great people those Nazis, but terrible management.

AI agent promotes itself to sysadmin, trashes boot sequence

Re: I only had this problem because I was very reckless.

"This is probably the most annoying thing that’s happened to me as a result of being wildly reckless with LLM agent" but "I'll probably try to fix the problem by booting from an Ubuntu live disk then letting my AI agent have a go at fixing its earlier error".

Can't wait for part 2, if he ever posts back.

Singapore tires of Big Tech's slow and half-hearted help for abused users

I was thinking "yep, good, yes", until...

And the nation plans to start its youth early on building AI skills in preparation for the future workforce.

"Today, our children are born digital natives. But we must still give them more deliberate exposure to AI," asserted Wong.

A nation of prompt engineers?

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund throws cash at FreeBSD and Samba

More countries should do this

The public sector depends on open source so it's only right that it supports it, and this way it can pay for development at a fraction of the price that consultancies charge... and get better software.

and it will only work if doing things in FreeBSD comes as easy as in Windows to the masses

helloSystem?

Watch your mirrors: Tesla Cybertrucks have 'Full' 'Self Driving' now

Not all, Mercedes has launched a level 3 car.

Now Dell salespeople must be onsite five days a week

Re: Multiple reasons

You almost got the conspiracy theory talking point in there without anyone noticing.

Back to the old ways

Hang a suit jacket on the back of the chair, nobody's really sure where you are, job done.

UK government's bank data sharing plan slammed as 'financial snoopers' charter'

Re: What could possibly go wrong...

The task at hand is to prove income for means tested benefits, not find tax dodgers. Finding tax dodgers is HMRC's job.

Re: What could possibly go wrong...

They don't need to know other deposits, they just need to know if someone's income level is above or below £X to check if the means tested benefit applies. Then maybe once the DWP have managed that they could work on pro-rating the benefit according to income level.

This works because any income in other bank accounts will be declared properly. If someone is defrauding then that's another story and the DWP already have access to bank accounts for that... but fraud will be cash-in-hand.

Re: What could possibly go wrong...

It's absurd that the DWP can't check people's income from HMRC.

Joining these all up means unavoidable, intrusive and all-pervasive state monitoring of everything.

It is also absurd that having two government departments monitoring bank accounts is deemed better privacy-wise than one government department just ascertaining last year's income level from another government department. That is precisely the alll-pervasive state monitoring you're afraid of due to different government departments not being able to make reasonable queries to each other.

I don't care if the DWP put a checkbox to look up only the relevant data from HMRC on the application form or allow people to attach the relevant paper documentation, either option is fine and I suspect it would be for most people. But the fact that the DWP have developed means tested benefits apparently without a way for them verify income is absurd.

This by the way is why the WFP will only be available for people who are on other benefits now. If they had an easy way to verify income there would be no cut-off at a level which causes hardship for people.

Re: What could possibly go wrong...

As you say, both DWP and HMRC have the powers to demand financial information already. Presumably widening this access to all benefit applicants is the cheapest way.

Re: What could possibly go wrong...

Precisely, there's no need to look around people's bank accounts except for fraud. All the DWP needs to do is determine if the last year's income is over £X by comparing with the last year's PAYE figures or self-assessment. If they did that then there would also have been no Winter Fuel Allowance cliff-edge problem either.

We seem to have systems which are really showing their age where one part of government can't query another and to fix that they've gone for full bank account access.

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

"default behavior for OS/2 was to reboot and restart programs that were running at the time"

Sounds remarkably like Windows loading Crowdstrike which promptly b0rks and causes Windows to bluescreen and restart... only Windows doesn't have a config.sys you can change any more.

Japanese orgs now paying salaries direct into e-wallets

Re: And?

What do you mean, I'm sure any enthusiastic Softbank worker would want to be paid in in company scrips.

What's the exchange rate into Yen again?

Starlink-branded hardware reportedly found amid wreckage of downed Russian drone

Re: fairly obvious to Starlink if its kit is used on a drone

Starlink could have provided a list of all drone serial numbers or MAC addresses and their locations within Ukraine and Russia to Ukraine and give Ukraine the power to enable or disable them at will over two years ago.

It hasn't because Musk didn't want to then and still doesn't want to now even while Russian drones attack Ukraine using Starlink hardware. If there were any justice in the world he should have already lost a court case for sanctions busting.

91% of polled Amazon staff unhappy with return-to-office, 3-in-4 want to jump ship

Re: Go ahead and quit---my kids need jobs

I couldn't think of a worse way of starting a career, by starting work at one of these places, then leaving a year or two later thinking what goes on there is in any way normal, and bringing that to the next job.

Re: Go ahead and quit---my kids need jobs

Why does everyone have to work at FAANG? It's only going to be a culty/techbro/toxic hellhole (delete as appropriate according to company) and they're probably going to leave after a year. There are lots of other companies which require comp sci grads too.

Campaigners claim 'Privacy Preserving Attribution' in Firefox does the opposite

Re: They are trying to do the right thing here

Not necessarily, most use Patreon.

Re: They are trying to do the right thing here

I know some of the senior technical folk who work (or worked) at Mozilla from their participations at IETF and they always seemed very privacy focused to me.

And yet they still don't get that adding new opt-out settings in a release for the user to find sometime later is not informed consent and they still don't get there's other things apart from advertising.

I understand they need money but they still haven't done the one thing that could make them that money which is Firefox making it easy to allow micropayments for online content and Mozilla gets a small commission (not 30%) for each micropayment and obviously no wallet loading or crypto nonsense. I.e. the user goes to a blog or a video, hits a button, confirms the amount or enters the amount to tip, and gets access. Perhaps some kind of integration with Kofi and Patreon. If we want to get away from advertising-driven data slurp, that's what we've got to do.

WordPress.org denies service to WP Engine, potentially putting sites at risk

They can't pick and choose who is and isn't a customer.

They're not a customer, they're a leech. Some corporation making commercial use of open source software and keeping that as profit or distributing it to shareholders but not contributing money back to the original project has to be addressed somehow, perhaps the FUTO licence is a good first step.

Nobody has to distribute online immediately at their own expense even though that's often done now. I'm sure Wordpress will also gladly supply DVDs if sent a cheque to cover the cost of the DVDs and self-addressed envelope with stamps to cover postage.

Although as it's WP Engine they'll probably forget to include the cheque and the stamps to pay for postage.

Google's Rust belts bugs out of Android, helps kill off unsafe code substantially

Re: Yay

And... why are they only looking at memory errors? Must be because absolutely no other kinds of errors are caused by complete software rewrites.

Messaging app makers' dilemma: Keeping comms private and funding open source

Re: You can't do this stuff commercially any more.

Telegram is not encrypted in any meaningful sense. If you buy a new device and log onto Telegram then you get all your channels, groups, and 1-1 chat history back on the new device. If Telegram has all the data and is served with a warrant, it's got to hand over all the data. This is not a back door.

The only thing you don't get back on a new device is E2E encrypted chats which is buried in the UI and requires one of the parties in the group or 1-1 chat to say something like, "Can we switch over to E2E encrypted chats" which is an obvious red flag and will make the police or courts serve a warrant for one or both devices if they have been identified.

The reason why Telegram has become a den of vice and iniquity is not due to encryption which its users probably aren't using anyway, it's due to its policy of ignoring requests from police or courts. France has forced them to join the real world, at least for a short time.

Fujitsu wins spot on £600M framework after vowing to sit out public sector

The company says bidding for the deal took place before it made that commitment to the UK government

So it's not possible for Fujitsu to withdraw a bid?

And that's before we get to the farce of the government apparently not being able to reject bids from Fujitsu.

As IBM pushes for more automation, its AI simply not up to the job of replacing staff

If IBM are running a cloud service and their infrastructure is exploitable by the last four years of CVEs and they're firing a third of their network engineers they might as well be painting a dartboard on their back. ChatGPT isn't going to save them there.

Musk dreams of launching five Starships to Mars in two years

Is this before or after full self-driving Teslas and a semi-sentient robot in a spandex suit?

What amazes me is that there seems to be an inexhaustible supply of people who believe him.

Apple's latest macOS release is breaking security software, network connections

Re: I smell some FUD here.

One month to do a full regression test, one month to fix everything found, and one month to QA and release is pretty tight, and that's if the VPN/AV developer drops everything to concentrate on the Mac release. I suspect they make a fraction of the money from Mac as they do on Windows they wouldn't be too inclined to do that.

Green recycling goals? Pending EU directive could hammer used mobile market

Re: Choo choo

Does WiFi generate e-waste?

Re: Not true

Just checked and the iPhone 16 Pro total cost works out at some £300 above the price on Apple's website, so the extra is about £25 a month, whereas a SIM only contract works out at a tenner a month (60GB limit) or £12 a month (120GB limit).

It was never cheaper to buy a phone as part of a contract and it still isn't. If you want to buy an iPhone or Pixel now you're offered a three year contract which works out at double the cost of the device.

Disney kicks Slack to the curb, looks to Microsoft Teams for a happily ever after

If you set up a team for a new project, all chat to do with that project has to be done within a channel within that team instead of random ad-hoc 1-1 and group chats between members as that way there is a record other people on the project can find and people who come onto the project later can review. This is the right way to do things.

Teams makes them difficult to use, team chats are in a different place and also behave differently when you reply. It's not the user doing it wrong, it's the software.

Microsoft on a roll for terrible rebranding with Windows App

Re: "This unified app serves as your secure gateway to connect to..."

If the Remote Desktop client is being renamed and repurposed to access Microsoft DaaS (Downtime as a Service) offered over the Internet, that won't be true any more.

"This unified app serves as your secure gateway to connect to..."

If this thing uses RDP and are you supposed to connect over the Internet, it's your secure gateway to pnwage.

WhatsApp still working on making View Once chats actually disappear for all

Re: Disappearing privacy

Windows Hello with Copilot+ checking the laptop webcam to enforce only one person looking at the screen and no cameras or mobiles in sight.

You know it's coming.

Re: Disappearing privacy

I'm not sure how you could enforce view-once messages in a browser client. It'd probably be something horrible involving iframes and not allowing right-clicks and even then any fix would last as long as the first person took to hit the print screen key.

No way? Big Tech's 'lucrative surveillance' of everyone is terrible for privacy, freedom

This is all perfectly fine as it's surveillence by fine upstanding American corporations. If you're not happy with it then you must be some kind of communist who wants government surveillance.

Kelsey Hightower: If governments rely on FOSS, they should fund it

So why hasn't that already happened in Germany?

German Sovereign Tech Fund

The German government already does what he's proposing. It's already supported Samba, OpenSSH, FreeBSD, and Gnome.

Open source maintainers underpaid, swamped by security, going gray

A monster set of packages like e.g. KDE or LibreOffice are enormous code bases as well as all the artwork that goes with them. To get sufficiently familiar you basically have to work on it full time.

So how is one supposed to contribute to it?

Concentrate on just one area, perhaps something that hasn't received any attention recently, and keep working on it until it's "done".

Re: Unsurprising

I'm sure FOSS is more in line with the youth's politics, but real life gets in the way. They have to use their spare time which could have been dedicated to FOSS to work in a second job. The boomers are doing alright thank you.

That just means they must offer the version run on their servers, it does nothing about making millions from FOSS code but not donating any of that to the project.

Unsurprising

Have you seen what young people are paid these days in their daytime job? There's more chance of them spending their spare time in a second job to make ends meet than contributing to FOSS.

LinkedIn started harvesting people's posts for training AI without asking for opt-in

How to make people flee your platform

Just add an AI slop CV generator trained on LinkedIn CVs. It'll be lies all the way down.

Lebanon now hit with deadly walkie-talkie blasts as Israel declares ‘new phase’ of war

Re: Obviously this was planned as a two stage attack

Whether Israel is reorganising for assault or defence time will tell, but the rhetoric suggests attack. That's an escalation in a volatile region and it's getting messier.

The playbook is to disable communications before launching an attack, so expect that shortly.

AWS claims customers are packing bags and heading back on-prem

Re: “ customers are finding that moving their IT back on-premises is so attractive…”

Paying Microsoft for Office 365 is genuinely a cheaper & less stressful way to consume Exchange.

The US government may not agree with your assessment.

Python in Excel goes live – but only for certain Windows users

Re: run Python scripts inside workbooks

In the same way they subvert any Python script... by writing for a different version of Python than the one you have installed and sending you into Python dependency hell.