* Posts by Dan 55

16872 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

Big Tech: Malaysia won't let us set our own rules and that's not fair and makes us grumpy

Dan 55 Silver badge

It already does mean nothing outside the US, although it seems social networks don't understand that when it comes to operating in other countries and have to be repeatedly reminded of their obligations in those countries.

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

Dan 55 Silver badge

Flogging a dead horse

Why would Commodore even consider spending money on developing a new 8-bit machine in 1989 when the Amiga 500 had come out in 1987? Also they came up with the C64GS in 1990 which was another pointless endeavour (C64 in a game console case with no keyboard and no quality control so games didn't work as they expected a keyboard).

Instead of all this displacement activity they should have improved the Amiga again by 1990. It's as if marketing and sales didn't know how to sell anything that was a Commodore 64 and management didn't have a clue about anything other than filling their own pockets.

Microsoft security tools questioned for treating employees as threats

Dan 55 Silver badge

MS: "using technology to track employees is both counterproductive and wrong"

But please don't let that dissuade you from paying for a recurring subscription for our tracking software.

Zuckerberg says Biden administration pressured Meta to police COVID posts

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "I'm not trying to play politics or foment controversy"

Tech bro's gonna tech bro. Lately it'd be news if they didn't weigh into elections.

31.5M invoices, contracts, patient consent forms, and more exposed to the internet

Dan 55 Silver badge

Company: Based in Arizona, USA (as opposed to Argentina, Canada, Honduras, or an asteroid).

Documents: Everywhere (see 6th paragraph).

All hail the cloud.

Netherlands fines Uber €290M for improper EU-US driver data transfers

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it

As "the network is the computer" he might have been slightly biased.

Telegram founder and CEO arrested in France

Dan 55 Silver badge
Stop

Re: Compare to Proton Mail case

Telegram is not a company offering encrypted messaging.

The Arrest of Pavel Durov Is a Reminder That Telegram Is Not Encrypted

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

Re: I hope Musk travels to France

It's confirmed as CSAM so I don't know what great ideal Telegram is upholding that the others aren't.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I hope Musk travels to France

What makes you think this is not about 1:1 chats?

Because French police sources said this is about groups and channels that push drug trafficking, fraud, money laundering, and CSAM amongst other things.

The vital principle is that the venue providers should not have a requirement to record all the conversations that happen in their church hall, keep the recordings and give them to the police when asked later.

That makes no sense considering this is about Telegram groups and channels where Telegram already keeps a copy of everything and allows users to set up bots which take payment.

Telegram cooperates with law enforcement so badly that they were considered an accessory to crimes in France and so he was brought in based on the pre-existing warrant.

Did you honestly think that anyone has the right to set up a board or a social media network which facilitates crimes of this nature on such a scale and refuses to cooperate with police or the judiciary? Eventually there are countries which will get tired of it and take action.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "There's illegal content on Telegram. How do I take it down?"

By definition if anyone can see illegal content they are party to the chat or group, and therefore can identify at least by a phone number the author / poster of the illegal content. So the trivial answer is "report the info to the police".

And the police issue take-down requests but Telegram do not co-operate.

It's been repeated ad nauseam on these pages - there is no technical way for encrypting that allows only specific parties (aka 'good guys') to decrypt without anyone else being able to. And even if there WERE such a technical possibility, we have only the 'good guys' own word that the power isn't abused (an assurance that isn't worth shit let alone printer paper).

The encrypted text and the key for everything except "secret chats" are stored on Telegram's servers, which is effectively the same as Telegram storing them as plaintext. All groups, channels, and "cloud chats" fail the "mud puddle" test.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform."

This is not about end-to-end encryption. If you do think it's about end-to-end encryption then it's because Telegram has worked to bring about that widespread misunderstanding for years.

End-to-end encryption is one small part of Telegram and even then it's only available on the mobile client, not on the desktop client.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I hope Musk travels to France

It's not necessary to get into the phone company/Post Office argument as this is about groups and channels, not 1:1 chats.

This can be treated just the same way as if Craigslist, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, or any other board/social media of that type refused to cooperate, and that's before we get into Telegram allowing users to create bots which can take payments.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform."

Is it really that easy to track and arrest someone anywhere in the world who sells stolen ID, bank account, or card data via a bot that takes bitcoin?

How easy do you think it is to go after someone in Nigeria using Telegram to facilitate sextortion?

It was Telegram and X that were used to organise far-right riots in the UK.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Stop

Re: "It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform."

This is not about encryption. Telegram only has end to end encryption for what they call "secret chats" and these are (by design?) buried in the UI. Groups, channels, and non-secret chats are all effectively non-encrypted at rest on Telegram's servers.

Telegram is not an E2E chat app like WhatsApp or Signal, it's a social network like Facebook or Reddit which also allows you to open an E2E chat window if you want to.

France detained him for Telegram's lack of action over groups and channels where all kind of fraud and trading of illegal goods is allowed to happen and payment for them is taken by bots. It's the dark web in a nice-looking app.

This is not an attack on free speech, it's an attack on an app which facilitates crime. I'm perfectly happy with that.

Microsoft sends Windows Control Panel to tech graveyard

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: cue the wailing

I remember Me on my Dell Optiplex being more stable than 98 on my previous beige box (can't remember the manufacturer).

Nobody could accuse Dell of attaining the dizzy heights of competency these days though.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: cue the wailing

It was fine, as long as:

- Your computer was manufactured by a competent OEM who included fully tested drivers.

- You didn't add more hardware to it as that would mean you had to install another driver which could cause it to crash...

Dan 55 Silver badge
Holmes

I do love the UX custom of making things more difficult to find and change because they show up at the bottom of the metrics list. That's a real benefit of modern-day IT.

Icon is about where has it moved to in this update.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: cue the wailing

No, about how Settings is not as clear or as useful as Control Panel.

Chrome dumped support for Ubuntu 18.04 – but it'll be back

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: That bloke in the corner...

Never underestimate the stubborn nature of siloed corporations. The the person who decided that support should be removed probably didn't realise that version of Ubuntu was an LTS and the developer tasked with removing support for a certain library version probably didn't even know why they were doing it.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Yet another case of crap software engineering

Obligatory article:

Best printer 2023: just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine

They really need to get round to updating the year in the title.

Slack AI can be tricked into leaking data from private channels via prompt injection

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: It look like you're trying to make a wild assertion, would you like me to help you with that?

I tried them out on ChatGPT-4o as supplied by DDG and it got all three wrong. The three prompts are similar to other well-known riddles but not the same, in each case the LLM just takes the prompt and gives you an answer using the logic from the other riddle which it was trained on. It can't reason an answer from the prompt itself.

Maybe some LLMs have been trained on the right answer as enough people tried the prompts from the article by now.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: It look like you're trying to make a wild assertion, would you like me to help you with that?

I doubt it. Try these three prompts on your favourite LLM and compare the output with the answer from a co-worker.

The LLM will authoritively argue some complete nonsense, the co-worker will probably get it right.

HMD Skyline: The repairable Android that lets you go dumb in a smart way

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: 3 years of updates ?

Windows Phone had a HAL, rather surprised that Google didn't copy the idea when MS proved that it could work. I suppose they were happy enough with their Play Services binary blob which already gave them the centralisation they wanted (enough data for targetted advertising).

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Agreed

A mobile device without GSM would be an iPod (as was) or a Sony Android Walkman?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: 3 years of updates ?

This sell-and-forget civilization we're living in is really grating my nerves these days. Gotta refill my dried frog pills, I guess.

The money to maintain the OS has got to come from somewhere, and now there's no infinite growth (no new growth markets) and no infinite borrowing (no almost-zero interest rates) you'll have to pony up for a subscription for OS updates, which people won't do.

Microsoft to stop telling investors about peformance of server products

Dan 55 Silver badge
Happy

"M356 Consumer"

Is correct.

Digital wallets can allow purchases with stolen credit cards

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: A universal technocentric misapprehension

Iris/fingerprint payments? No thanks.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Someone is lying

The two banks are US based, Google Pay has presence in many countries. Even if the two banks have entirely addressed the problem in the US (I doubt it), it still leaves other countries vulnerable.

Missing scissors cause 36 flight cancellations in Japan

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Incisive reporting from the Reg as usual.

These comments get three shears from me.

'Right to switch off' initiative aims to boost economy by beating burnout

Dan 55 Silver badge

Also employees can work shifts that are something other than Monday-Friday 9-5, as long as they have the right to switch off as well.

Sorry, Moxie. Blaming Agile for software stagnation puts the wrong villain in the wrong play

Dan 55 Silver badge

Yeah, all the cool kids used StreetMap.co.uk which is still amazingly online and still looks about the same.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: It's not Agile, it's the black boxes

Yes, Agile works very well with corporate silos to keep people in their box.

Stay in your box, do not stray outside your box, don't waste time looking at something which is not assigned to you. Just take your next ticket off the top of the Jira pile and fix it, you don't need to understand anything about the wider system.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Google Maps

Eh? So was Terraserver. It's in the video (and my memory).

Dan 55 Silver badge

Google Maps

the arrival of Google Maps in 2005 stopped work in offices around the world as people clustered around monitors to look.

Nobody else remember Microsoft Terraserver in 2000? An example.

Raspberry Pi 5 slims down for cut-price 2 GB RAM version

Dan 55 Silver badge

From TFBlogpost:

BCM2712C1 is a hugely complex and powerful device, with a quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 application processor running at 2.4GHz, and the latest iteration of the VideoCore multimedia platform. Alongside the features required to power a Raspberry Pi, it also contains functionality intended to serve other markets, which we don’t need. This ‘dark silicon’ is permanently disabled in the chips we use, but takes up die space, and therefore adds cost.

The new D0 stepping strips away all that unneeded functionality, leaving only the bits we need. From the perspective of a Raspberry Pi user, it is functionally identical to its predecessor: the same fast quad-core processor; the same multimedia capabilities; and the same PCI Express bus that has proven to be one of the most exciting features of the Raspberry Pi 5 platform. However, it is cheaper to make, and so is available to us at somewhat lower cost. And this, combined with the savings from halving the memory capacity, has allowed us to take $10 out of the cost of the finished product.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Vision

I hear there's some bloke called Linus but you wouldn't want to touch whatever it is he's giving away.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Vision

Integrated FPGA? Then there would be complaints it's > £100.

Real-time depends on the OS, there are a few to choose from.

2GB looks like a good target for bare metal code for industrial applications and hobby applications like PiStorm.

Google is a monopoly. The fix isn't obvious

Dan 55 Silver badge

Android Corp doesn't need to do any of the data collection things that Google asked for

Plain AOSP is not a great experience now thanks to years of Google-only apps and Google binary blobs. If Android Corp wanted to continue to offer Google services, Google could make data collection part of the deal.

Dan 55 Silver badge

some people can go to Mozilla or Apple to work on a different browser

Mozilla's going to have its own problems, if Chrome is taken off Google then there is no reason for them to fund Firefox, which they only do so they can't be accused of having a monopoly.

Google's ex-CEO U-turns after saying staff 'going home early' killed winning

Dan 55 Silver badge

Our employees failed us because of "work-life balance"

Not that the US particularly has much of that in the first place...

Twitter must pay over half a million to unfairly dismissed Irish exec

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Yankee employment conditions go home!

No, not an abomination... just about a century behind.

AI stole my job and my work, and the boss didn't know – or care

Dan 55 Silver badge

Looking at the Cosmos AI articles, it seems there's nothing to distinguish them from any other auto-generated content site which exists just to serve adverts to people who get lost in a Google search.

In other words, it's probably the quickest way to kill those sites which depend less on search engines and SEO clickbait as they built up a loyal readership which regularly return several times a week to read quality articles.

Before we put half a million broadband satellites in orbit, anyone want to consider environmental effects?

Dan 55 Silver badge

AI chatbots amplify creation of false memories, boffins reckon – or do they?

Dan 55 Silver badge
Terminator

Human prompt injection

All this time we're under the illusion that humans are prompt injecting AIs but our AI overlords are prompt injecting us.

How to ingeniously and wirelessly inject malware onto someone's nearby Windows PC via Google's Quick Share

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Quick Share?

To store files in a directory under the storage root (e.g. /storage/emulated/0/<app name>) requires the All Files AKA Manage Internal Storage permission, and Google rarely approve Play Store apps with this permission now.

LLM-driven C-to-Rust. Not just a good idea, a genie eager to escape

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Good luck

It literally isn't, because with C/C++ backward compatibility allows for small parts of code to be refactored at times which suit the project instead of a big bang rewrite.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Good luck

He doesn't say why it's better than C++, and would probably find memory safety could be improved by refactoring using the language features offered by the newest revisions.

CrowdStrike president cheered after accepting 'Epic Fail' Pwnie award

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: This workplace has been incident free for X days

If the flag is awarded to you for code that you didn't originally write but happens to be code you're now responsible for maintaining, it seems a little unfair.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "Michael Sentonas hopes trophy will remind staff that failure is unacceptable"

Not walking into failure in the first place?

There seems to have been a few obvious things that Crowdstrike could have done to mitigate problems with updates that they chose not to do, and putting those procedures in place is not down to the code monkeys, it's down to management.

Dan 55 Silver badge

"Michael Sentonas hopes trophy will remind staff that failure is unacceptable"

If failure were unacceptable he'd be fired already.