Posts by Dan 55

What not to expect when you're expecting: Fertility apps may be selling intimate health secrets

Didn't freeware and shareware turn into open source (maybe with a donation) and nagware?

In China, the Smart TV watches you, shares IP address, Wi-Fi SSIDs, viewing habits, and more

Re: The smart TV watches you wherever you are in the world

It's good of Samsung to patent it, that just means you don't need to buy a Samsung.

The smart TV watches you wherever you are in the world

LG was caught snooping on LAN shares.

Vizio sent unencrypted analytics data and frame captures without explaining what use it was going to be put to.

Some models of Samsung TVs may have an always-on camera and microphone, others may make you press a button on the remote before recording from the microphone but all sent microphone recordings to a third party, sent unencrypted data, and have non-existent security.

ACR identifies what you're watching and when whatever the source.

The best you're going to get are weasel words privacy settings which allegedly give you options which anonymise your data or turn off tracking, but they're still going to slurp.

Best not to plug the damn thing into the Internet.

Googler demolishes one of Apple's monopoly defenses – that web apps are just as good as native iOS software

"Safari's lack of compatibility with web standards... it's holding the entire web ecosystem back"

What the Google minion means is Safari's different to Chrome, and Apple haven't implemented so many slurpy APIs which Google sink millions of person-hours into developing.

If a Google minion doesn't like it something then that probably means it's a good thing.

Big Tech bankrolling AI ethics research and events seems very familiar. Ah, yes, Big Tobacco all over again

Both are enjoyable for yourself and harmful for other people.

Lambda School, a coding bootcamp that takes a cut of your next tech salary, now takes a 30% cut in staff

CEO Jake Conte said his biz "needed ... different types of employees"

Incredible that businesses are so adverse to paying for training that they'd rather pay a severence package and hire other people instead, even though training is cheaper.

Apple won't be sharing revenue guidance for rest of the year, but we can always guess what it'll look like

Well... it's still a bit surprising. If I'm stuck at home 90% of my time, a new mobile phone is hardly a priority.

So what if I pay peanuts for my home broadband? I demand you fix it NOW!

Lies! Why do you print these lies!

So we have to tell them they’re on mute and then wait while they work out for the seven billionth time where the same old un-fucking-mute button is (hint: the same place it was yesterday, and the day before that, ad infinitum)

This is not true, at least on Teams. I think it must have changed places at least three times in the last year. And they still haven't cottoned on to space bar for mute.

And to improve things they've fucked up screen sharing in one of the latest updates, you press the screen sharing icon in the notification at the bottom right and instead of sharing the screen it brings the meeting window to the top and leaves you to find the screen sharing button in the meeting window.

Nobody can fucking design a UI these days, they've all been lobotomised. Rant over.

BadAlloc: Microsoft looked at memory allocation code in tons of devices and found this one common security flaw

Re: malloc()

So it turns out that it's not a bug, it's a documented feature.

Microsoft joins Bytecode Alliance to advance WebAssembly – aka the thing that lets you run compiled C/C++/Rust code in browsers

Re: The Internet is dead

FrogFind FTW. Not just for retro computers, it strips out all the nonsense.

Re: The first web assembly library is out!

Don't worry, it's all under control, have a look at WebUSB and the Native File System API.

You don't need to reinvent the wheel with web assembly, the browser's already got a video decoder built-in.

If you liked JavaScript code from anywhere in the world running on your browser...

... after clicking on the wrong link, you're going to love WebAssembly.

What could possibly go wrong?

UK government resists pressure to hold statutory inquiry into Post Office Horizon scandal

Re: Statutory inquiry

The minister is clutching at straws, and definitely doesn't want you to look at the revolving doors between Whitehall and the PO.

Apple's macOS Gatekeeper asleep on the job: Exploited flaw put users 'at grave risk' of malware infection

Re: Mavericks

Oh crap, I meant Mojave.

California landmarks mean nothing to me, they should have stuck with the cats.

Icon for me.

Mavericks

Can't find if this a problem on Mavericks and if so will Apple be backporting the fix.

And they should do because many people won't update past Mavericks for obvious reasons.

GCHQ boss warns China can rewrite 'the global operating system' in its own authoritarian image

tl;dr: We want obligatory BritCrypto™

For the UK that means ensuring “a very small percentage of key technologies must be truly sovereign to retain strategic technical advantage – things like elements of the cryptographic technologies that protect the UK’s most sensitive information and capabilities.” Investing in such capabilities and “using statutory powers to restrict hostile foreign investment” will be needed.

No back doors but a wide open front door.

lf they really wanted sovereign technologies perhaps they should have advised the government not to flog off the ARM family silver.

Banks across America test facial recognition cameras 'to spy on staff, customers'

This message was brought to you by the American Bankers Association.

39 Post Office convictions quashed after Fujitsu evidence about Horizon IT platform called into question

Re: And still...

Paula Vennells, who was awarded CBE in 2019 for "services to the Post Office and to charity”, moved on from Post Office CEO to the Imperial College NHS Trust in April 2019. From then on she went onto other things.

Strangely enough she is an anglican priest yet put many people through a lot of suffering.

Something went wrong but we won't tell you what it is. Now, would you like to take out a premium subscription?

Oh god, I just had a flashback to The Pawn.

"Surely you don't exepct us to check for all the possible error codes and handle them appropriately?"

How is it that IT has turned into a field so full of DHs?

It wasn't like that before ...

Before they were contained in Microsoft, and only their software contained the appropriate error messages ("An unknown error occurred"), now they're everywhere ("Oh snap dude, something's gone wrong! Guess what? We've lost all your work for you.")

God bless this mess: Study says UK's Christian beliefs had 'important' role in Brexit

Re: I find myself saying...

US English keycaps on an ISO layout is a thing.

ISO layout is the one with the big enter key, but it's still not as big as non-standard layouts with a bigass enter key... maybe you need one of those?

Re: Ah, Those Protestants

I hear you're a Brexiteer now, Father? How did you get interested in that kind of a thing?

Re: I find myself saying...

Yeah, it's not like the EU/UK could have picked a system that works and copied it. That would have been far too simple.

They did. Note the EU side is generally up and running and for imports from the UK and the UK side are waiving most checks for imports from the EU.

What there is is an inability to scale, using rules for third party countries (where things are loaded up on boats and planes and take hours or days to get there and any problems can be smoothed over in transit) on a JIT delivery network.

But the UK wanted this.

Re: I find myself saying...

There are no new rules. UK negotiated to leave the customs union, single market, and SPS area and thus go back to the old rules for third countries set up at the beginning of the customs union, single market, and SPS area. Except NI of course.

10 years later, Chrome OS starts to look like a proper OS with hardware diagnostics and the ability to scan documents

Er, why?

Due to the limited production run and overall scarcity, with many presumably trashed after they entered EOL in 2017, these have become sought after by collectors of vintage computers.

Software updates for the first generation Chromebooks are already on life support, in five years max they won't connect to Google's services at all and will just be a decorative brick.

Signal app's Moxie says it's possible to sabotage Cellebrite's phone-probing tools with booby-trapped file

Re: This is why I don't enable fingerprint or face unlock.

At least you have to observe them first. With photos and fingerprint unlock that might not even be necessary, depending on who's trying to unlock it.

We seem to have materialized in a universe in which Barney the Purple Dinosaur is designing iPhones for Apple

Other corporations still haven't cracked convincing their customers to pay to be part of the beta test group as Apple have.

They slipped up with the Apple Watch though, they had to retcon the first generation as Series 0 as a way of explaining why they're dropping support so soon.

Huawei could have snooped on the Dutch prime minister's phone calls thanks to KPN network core access

Re: What kind of paper is the Volkskrant, though?

Let Me Wikipedia That For You. Founded 100 years ago as left-of-centre and catholic. Currently centre.

Very few papers in the rest of Europe are like the Sun and the Daily Mail. Maybe there's some conclusion to be drawn from that.

"We have never been held liable by the government authorities about unauthorized acts"

Also could be translated as "they ain't got nuffink on us, right?"

So that inspires confidence.

Microsoft bows to the inevitable and takes Visual Studio 64-bit for 2022 version

Re: Refreshed icons

For now...

UK digital secretary Oliver Dowden starts national security probe into proposed Arm-Nvidia merger

Re: Nvidia is the risk

Well... here it says it was the other way around, Broadcom pulled the plug on Cromulus because Nvidia was the new owner and they compete with Broadcom.

What the FLoC? Browser makers queue up to decry Google's latest ad-targeting initiative as invasive tracking

About 1% of Chrome's users will even know that Google is trialling something anyway, the rest will live on in blissful ignorance with their third party cookies enabled because they've never used the settings page either.

"while websites and advertisers could opt in, users were not asked permission"

Insert quote about if it's free, you're not the customer, you're the product being sold here.

Dell to spin out remaining VMware stake, cements Friends With Benefits status for at least five years

‘Market does not appreciate hardware/software combo’ says Big Mike

Big Mike needs to talk to Tim Apple to find out how his company struggles along in the market under the hardware/software albatross.

Listen, son... Monster trucks just aren't cool anymore. Real winners drive Tesla Roadsters

Re: Happy Meal tat

So a future manager and a future politican there.

Pigeon fanciers in a flap over Brexit quarantine flock-up, seek exemption from EU laws

Re: Seriously?

They negotiated to leave the SPS area thinking they were going to get the biggliest best deal with Trump, then Biden won.

And the only reason why they wanted to leave the SPS area was so they could lower standards to get that deal with the US but since the US deal went out the window they've said they're not going to do and the plan was to have higher world-beating standards all along. Only the UK doesn't have to leave the SPS area to set standards higher than the minimum, only lower them.

So now each plant or animal or food or drink export to the EU or even to NI has a tonne of paperwork to prove that it reaches the same minimum SPS standards as before because the government reserves the right to lower standards at any time, which it says it's not going to do and there's no public support for.

Meanwhile, the agriculture and food and drink industries are being decimated.

Utter stupidity, but that's Brexit for you.

Microsoft calls time on Timeline: Don't worry, more features that nobody asked for coming your way

Re: Timeline? What the hell is that?

It's what happens when you accidently press Windows key-Tab. Before it was Flip 3D which was actually useful. Maybe they'll bring it back, if they actually listen to users.

A keyboard? How quaint: Logitech and Baidu link arms to make an AI-enabled, voice-transcribing mouse

I see what you did with the title, El Reg

Scotty was 35 years too early.

Spy agency GCHQ told me Gmail's more secure than Microsoft 365, insists British MP as facepalming security bods tell him to zip it

Re: An ex GCHQ bod once told me never to use GMail

Odd. An ex GCHQ spook told me that if you want everyone to know within 5 minutes put it on GMail. Mind you that was a few years back so maybe things have changed.

It might have been that at the time Google didn't use SSL between their data centres as they thought they had the fibre connections all to themselves. They do now (or so they tell us).

Key Perl Core developer quits, says he was bullied for daring to suggest programming language contained 'cruft'

Re: Cult and control

Should we really have to fork e.g. Retroarch because the installer/uninstaller can easily go mental and delete a whole load of other stuff and hose your Windows installation? No we shouldn't, they should fix the installer/uninstaller.

Re: But I bet it does contain a lot of cruft

Of course it contains cruft. Have you seen how many date and time modules there are which all do the same thing? And who'd want to change any of those.

Every language which is used a lot gathers cruft, perhaps the leading lights of the Perl community should stop being a bit too precious about it. If they're not connected to reality then it doesn't bode well for their stewardship of the language.

Prince Philip, inadvertent father of the Computer Misuse Act, dies aged 99

Re: RIP Stavros.

Seems he got off lightly (the 'Gorilla' video).

Obviously he can offend anyone he likes as can the rest of the royal family, it's not as if there's any comeback.

Whether this is an admirable trait or not is another question.

Re: No TV - BBC !!!

The coverage was over the top because the BBC didn't want to be accused of being anti-British and the dedicated complaint form was taken down because it was determined that complaining about the coverage was anti-British.

Aren't culture wars fun?

But probably not a way to run a country.

FreeBSD gives ARM64 green light for production over x86 alternative's 'growth trajectory'

Re: What is PC98?

Coincidently LGR just had a quick look at a Mini version of its predecessor, the PC8000 series.

Oracle vs Google: No, the Supreme Court did not say APIs aren't copyright – and that's a good thing

USPTO is so dysfunctional precisely because it doesn't have any rules, it accepts applications in spite of prior art and then let the courts fight it out. It might as well not exist.

We have never given census data to anyone – not even the spy agencies, says the UK's Office for National Statistics

The UKSA [Statistic Authority], the ONS and the National Statistician will never volunteer to disclose personal information for any non-statistical purpose.

So the other government agencies just take it then?

How to ensure your tech predictions catch on in a flash? Do the mash

Re: Live Action Gerry Anderson

IIRC any kid wearing glasses got called Joe 90. Slightly more original than "four eyes" but only if you used an electron microscope to measure the difference.

Asahi Linux devs merge effort to run Linux on Apple M1 silicon into kernel

Re: A nice idea

"Even though I own 2 linux boxes and an x86 Mini I've never tried to install Linux on the mini, lifes just too short to deal with all the Apple security BS."

Which is entirely correct.

So while I should be enthusiastic Linux is running on a 2020 iMac, it just doesn't seem worth the hassle, because Apple obviously doesn't want you to, because they didn't really want you running Linux on the 2018 iMac (x86) either.