Posts by Dan 55

Amazon hopes to avoid labor regulation by simply abolishing national watchdogs

I must remember not to buy Lucozade from Amazon.

Boeing-backed air taxi upstart Wisk plans to fly you across town at UberX prices by 2030

"It will operate between 2,500 and 4000 feet [0.762 and 1.22 km], with a range of 90 miles [144.84 km], a speed between 110 and 120 knots [203.72 and 222.24 km/h]"

Maybe it's just some kind of giant catapult.

Re: Drones as a Service?

Doesn't Boeing have anything to do with it mean it'll be deadly enough already without having to think about scenarios?

Crowning glory of GOV.UK websites updated, sparking frontend upgrades

You can forgive them for being somewhat excited, it's probably the biggest project they've done in the past year.

Duo face years in prison over counterfeit iPhone scam

Re: A bit harsh?

Sounds like the guy who still owes Nintendo $14m after getting sent to prison. Some judges really do go the extra mile for their corporate overlords.

Staff say Dell's return to office mandate is a stealth layoff, especially for women

Re: re: FTFY

From recent experience there's a lot of inflation.

Europe's data protection laws cut data storage by making information-wrangling pricier

Re: > it concentrates everyone's PII into the Big Tech oligopoly

In the proposed system they will be obliged to access the data on same basis as everyone else, log, request permission, alert the user.

And how would this cost be offset? We all know how Big Tech and PII works - either it gets sold to third parties or third parties pay them to target a campaign based on selection criteria.

The proposed services can be separate from Big Tech main business by law, with data localized per country.

No it can't, see the CLOUD Act.

The consortium itself is about common standards, not to reinvent the wheel.

The consortium itself doesn't exist and shouldn't exist.

Re: Grotesquely dysfunctional redundant rubbish (GDPR)

Then you've not seen any effect with GDPR because cookie banners are from the ePrivacy directive.

So that's being unobservant over two laws...

Re: Cloud Multipass proposal

That's a very brave proposal, AC. First it concentrates everyone's PII into the Big Tech oligopoly and gives them all the data they need for their advertising business that nobody else has. Second none of the corporations you propose are based in the EU and so they are beholden only by Safe Harbour, Privacy Shield, Privacy Figleaf or whatever it's called this year.

If someone wanted to try and render GDPR worthless and make everyone in the EU more dependent on US cloud, that would probably be the way they would go about it, so this proposal should be stored in the round filing cabinet.

London's famous BT Tower will become a hotel after £275M sale

Re: Good news....

Famously has an exemption from the fire regulation about not using the lifts in case of a fire.

Oh, that's perfect for a hotel.

Trident missile test a damp squib after rocket goes 'plop,' fails to ignite

Potemkin nation cup

Russia is in the lead but world-beating UK is swiftly closing in.

Microsoft veteran on how to blue screen your way to better testing

"PS/2 keyboard support turned up in Windows 2000, USB keyboards were added with Vista in 2007"

What?

Hackers mod a Sony PlayStation Portal to run PSP games

Back catalogue

They seem to be doing more with Sony's back catalogue than Sony does.

They're sitting on a gold mine, I've got no idea why they don't do something with it.

Euro shoppers popping more and more premium phones in the basket

Re: Volume sold is down?

A few years from now Apple will sell one single solid gold iPhone valued at 100 billion dollars to Elon Musk and declare victory.

Superapp Gojek fine-tunes each new error message for a week. What? Why?

How much do I get paid?

No Internet connection

Press [Retry] to try again

Also Mosaic had the planet icon and a status bar over 30 years ago, whoever that person is but probably under 30.

Microsoft 'retires' Azure IoT Central in platform rethink

Re: Incorrect

So a blog post is now an official announcement whereas the announcement that Windows 10 was the last version of Windows made in the 2015 Ignite conference wasn't really official?

Also, they have a kill switch ready to go... That certainly inspires confidence.

OpenAI latest to add 'Made by AI' metadata to model work

OpenAI has all generated output anyway

So they should just keep a copy of all generated images and offer a TinEye-like image search to anyone who wants to check if an image they have was generated by OpenAI or close to what was generated. And the same goes for the other ML image generators. It'll be the cost of getting on to the ML image-generation bandwagon.

Days after half a billion Asians went to the polls, Big Tech promises to counter 2024 election misinformation

Big Tech at it again

This is about as convincing as an NRA meeting concluding that school shootings have to stop.

Cybercriminals are stealing iOS users' face scans to break into mobile banking accounts

Apps on devices connected 24x7 to the Internet

Why was anyone ever convinced this was a good idea?

No apps or at most an app which is a browser pointing to the bank's website and an offline card reader to generate a 2FA code.

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

Re: Is Amazon trying to kill Prime?

Amazon is usually not this stupid. It's obviously going to get a ton of people to cancel.

Apart from when they threw a billion at Rings of Power and a eight and a half billion at MGM... which is the reason Prime TV turned into a money pit in a first place.

The most 2024 things to do are laying off staff and eyeing up AI – Mozilla's doing both

Re: Mozilla is a dead man walking

Despite the vocal minority of web users who lecture the rest of us about Firefox being a "better" browser, the market says otherwise.

It's not a fair market, the others:

1. Bundle their browser with their own OS with no browser choice screen.

2. Making their own OS complain mightily when the their own browser isn't used.

3. Making their own web properties complain mightily or artificially work worse when their own browser isn't used.

4. Paying to bundle their browser in with third party software.

Safari is an absolute albatross - it barely has any redeeming features apart from a bunch of privacy options which are also in Firefox. Nobody in their right mind would proactively choose Safari but it's included by default on Apple devices.

Edge as usual is almost mandatory at work as it plays best with Microsoft's login, some would almost say by design.

Chrome achieved critical mass on desktop by throwing money at antivirus vendors and Adobe and Google aims to keep it that way by making it the browser which works best with Google's websites and Android phones and Chromebooks.

The market is not a level playing field and people's choice of browser has very little to do with Firefox's feature set but how well entrenched corporations and force their browsers onto users.

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

Why do you think it only manages 8 minutes tops before exploding?

Quarter of polled Americans say they use AI to make them hotter in online dating

One in four Americans hope to use AI to write Valentine's Day missives this year, compared to 26 percent in 2023.

So... fewer or the same within the margin of error.

HoRNDIS MacGyvers your Mac to get online with Androids

Re: Power consumption

Bluetooth is great for for data transfer between devices, where you don't need a network at all, and are happy to wait. But MacOS and I-Phones have traditionally been shit at that: I remember when you simply couldn't send files to I-Phones. In fact, I stopped using Bluetooth peripherals with my Macs years ago because the support was so poor: connected to a speaker a couple of metres away, music would invariably cut out after a couple of hours on the Mac, but happily run all day from the phone.

You're blaming the wrong device. Macs could (possibly still can, unless Apple have also hobbled that lately...) send files and Android phones and other PCs can receive them from Macs. It's just the Bluetooth stack on iPhones that had file transfer removed... and it was removed because iOS was forked from MacOS X.

Cloudflare defeats another patent troll with crowd-sourced prior-art army

Re: More companies should do this

Maybe patent offices should do this instead of waving patent applications through.

PiStorm turbocharges vintage Amigas with the Raspberry Pi

Re: State of the art

Spaceballs did what Nintendon't?

Re: a totally non-Unix-like system

The alternative was Mac (don't worry your pretty heads about directories) and Windows (C:\WINDOWS, C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM, C:\WINDOWS\TEMP, and that's your lot), so... it was the most Unix-like?

Re: OK, now the next logical step...

Already done...

Pimiga 4 - The Amiga tribute for Intel or AMD pc, Intel Mac, or RPI4/400

Download link in the description.

The best form factor is the wedge-shaped Pi 400.

Apart from capacitors, take out the battery now if you had an clock board/accelerator with clock.

And buy a modern power supply.

Ukraine claims Russian military is using Starlink

Re: Weasel Words

Tzarlink, amirite?

Re: "To the best of our knowledge..."

"To the best of our knowledge"

If a Starlink is working, someone's paying the subscription for it. It obviously won't be Russia because of sanctions but any other country could be paying the bill and the device itself could be used by Russian forces in occupied Ukraine.

Unless SpaceX is disabling every Starlink inside Ukraine which is not registered as being used by Ukrainian and allied forces, it could be argued he's not doing enough to comply with sanctions.

Forcing AI on developers is a bad idea that is going to happen

Re: "JetBrains' own developers are, well, developers"

In a previous life I maintained a Windows 3.1 client and a UNIX document management server. One of the problems was the toolbar in the client looked like it had icons which were drawn by a drunk spider and the toolbar was not configurable, so I set about improving both of those deficiencies. After my changes the icons on the toolbar actually looked somewhat professional but you could go back if you wanted to drunk spider icons and it was configured by the standard (for the time) modal dialog with two lists and buttons for moving options to the other side and changing the order.

Then feedback came back that that users were confused by the new icons and and they didn't know how to get the button order back to the default, even thought there was a reset to default button.

So a few more changes - the old icon set appeared by default and it was locked to the default button order unless an option was changed in the config.ini... which of course for users confused by icons or button order didn't happen... so it was practically all for naught. It still took a few more years of IT experience to bludgeon my expectations down to the right level though.

Who knows, maybe even JetBrains' developers thought their users would love this.

Sam Altman's chip ambitions may be loonier than feared

Re: AI prepare food

"If you think about what we are doing with cars, Tesla is arguably the largest robotics company in the world, because our cars are semi-sentient robots on wheels."

- Elon Musk, August 2021, increasingly desperate to flog the snake oil.

250 million-plus reserved IPv4 addresses could be released – but the internet isn’t built to use them

Re: Future use??

There was nothing to indicate that that address range would be incompatible with the rest of the address space in some way. There was no instructions to block this address range off because it (and only it) might use an incompatible IPv4.1 in the future. "Actually you might want to" is not a good enough reason.

Many routers already treat it the same as the rest of the reserved address space (i.e. let it through and it'll time out if there's nothing at the other end) because their manufacturers can actually read the RFCs and when it does finally get a future use the chances are it'll use the same protocol as the rest of the address space - what possible practical use would there be in making ≈ 16% of the iPv4 address space incompatible? Letting it through means it's cheaper for manufacturers in terms of future updates and least likely to cause them support requests from customers as their equipment works in the way they expected.

If somehow it did turn out to be incompatible then an update would fix that, otherwise treating that address space as unallocated in the same way as other reserved blocks is the right thing to do otherwise you end up with precisely the idiotic situation we have before us today where lots of people need updates to fix something which should have just worked anyway - but they're not going to get them because their equipment is out of support.

Re: Future use??

"It says here reserved for future use."

"Ah, that must mean we have to make those addresses impossible to use in the future. Right ho..."

Billions lost to fraud and error during UK's pandemic spending spree

Re: Oops, we stole it

Dumped or a chum-run medical equipment storage facility? Difficult to tell the difference.

Mitchell Baker logs off for good as CEO of Firefox maker Mozilla

Re: killedbymozilla

Mozilla Corporation's job is to distribute and promote these products... so that's more of a reflection on the work done by Mozilla Corporation than you.

Re: Charity Navigator now says Mozilla is great?

Mitchell Baker is (was) CEO of Mozilla Corporation, not Mozilla Foundation.

Mozilla Corporation is not a charity and it probably doesn't even need exist. As far as I can tell, its reason for being is a vehicle to pay the board and CEO.

India to make its digital currency programmable

Maybe try walking before running?

I mean, Aadhaar leaks like a sieve and the Unified Payments Interface is used for money laundering...

In its tantrum with Europe, Apple broke web apps in iOS 17 beta, still hasn't fixed them

Not the first time bugs or a crappy experience in beta makes it into .0, .1, or even .2 of a major version.

Apple are slow to react, even more so when it concerns the web.

You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse

Re: Simple solution?

I think they can be held responsible for mixing up real with fake goods in their own warehouses, for a start. Then after that they can be held responsible for supplying dangerous electrical goods or toys, crappy pwnable IoT shit, or TV sticks which try to hack everything on your LAN about 5 seconds after booting.

No reason why they can't meet the legal minimum that every other shop has to.

Twitter spinout Bluesky ends invite-only phase and opens its doors to all comers

Re: Nobody's going to use it

People really are leaving Xitter apart from sports fans who maybe are just using it like RSS?

Re: I have a question

And as with all advertising-driven social media, they will raise engagement whatever the cost - verifiable facts, mental health, funnelling people into echo chambers, hate-driven mobs, real-life doxxing, sex trafficking, etc...

Re: You forgot something…

It's not official though, it just mirrors The Register's account on Twitter, which is quite a feat these days considering Elmo setting fire to the API every week.

Google throws $1M at Rust Foundation to build C++ bridges

Re: What happened to Carbon?

This Rust project and Carbon both aim to bridge with C/C++ code and not require you to throw everything out and rewrite. Even if Google did want to hedge their bets, the fact that nobody trusts them to not kill projects and they've just thrown money at Rust means that nobody's going to want to spend time learning Carbon, making it's death a self-fullfilling prophecy.

What happened to Carbon?

Just a case of the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, or will it be added to the Google graveyard about six months from now, or is it already in the graveyard?

Japanese government finally bids sayonara to the 3.5" floppy disk

Re: Trivia Question

720KiB * 2 = 1440KiB / 1000 = 1.44 "M"

Neither MB nor MiB. Obviously someone in marketing.

Google flushes cached search results forever

Re: It figures

And it's not as if they're not going to need cached data, they do need so they can actually offer search results... so they're just hiding it.

Critical vulnerability in Mastodon is pounced upon by fast-acting admins

Re: I told you guys

I've just checked the original developer's biography - he moved to Germany when he was 11 and Mastodon is now a German non-profit. Your Red Scare dial needs adjustment.

You'd better give up sending e-mail too while you're at it.