* Posts by Version 1.0

5379 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009

JD Sports admits intruder accessed 10 million customers' data

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Hackers take security EXTREMELY seriously because you can make a lot of money from it, but if you are the company boss then your first thought might be that security is expensive... so being hacked might save you money. I'm not gaslighting, it's just that the modern data environment prioritizes access everywhere, security is just a "feature" these days.

Intel inside a world of pain as revenue plunges by a third

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Re: The World of Pain is old but I still love it!

LOL, so I posted that thought on Friday and then on Sunday we got five and a half inches of rain. It's only sprinkling now so all is well for us.

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Joke

The World of Pain is old but I still love it!

"Outside my window is a tree; There only for me, and it stands in the grey of the city. No time for pity, for the tree or me. There is a world of pain, in the falling rain around me." - 1967, Disraeli Gears.

I remember listening to this when it was released and being scared initially, but loving the album back in those days when I saw the Cream and it's still wonderful - I'm going to put it on again right now! Yes, we all talk about the world of pain but it seems like we never do anything to fix our issues. I'm not going to gaslight about it, I'm happy to try and help poor people even though I'm not rich. I love the world, it's just that "our" part has issues.

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Terminator

Looking at all these stories about events which are just a small image of the world situation, I expect that we're going to see some big issues in the next five years or so, as the world economy gets better and worse. I'm worried that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer ... locally I'm seeing a lot of "homeless" people in the USA working and only getting paid $10 a day.

We need to make this a better world for everyone.

FOSS could be an unintended victim of EU crusade to make software more secure

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Banning advertising is very profitable, you don't have to pay for advertising because all you need to do is send spam.

These days spam is everywhere all the time, I wonder if an EU reconfiguration might stop spam - if spam could be totally eliminated in Europe by new regulations and email organization then I wonder if all the Brexiters would suddenly reverse?

I know this sounds like a joke but I would be so extremely happy if I didn't get spam every day!

What is Google doing with its open source teams?

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Meh

Re: Down on your luck. It's tough.

That's about what Google was earning when it said "Don't be Evil" - originally just a few million initially. The statement "Don't be Evil" lead to it making hundred's of millions and then realizing that being evil was profitable these days. But to be fair, Google doesn't generate malware or any cryptocurrency crimes so it's still a slightly good company that seems to be starting to be acting profitably without worrying about being evil occasionally so it's just a normal company earning billions nowadays.

Apple sued for promising privacy, failing at it

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Flame

This is "normal" everywhere.

Companies capturing customer data despite device settings is too often an internal "feature" because advertising is the major source of income for virtually all enterprises in the modern data world now. We see a lot of stories about these events in El Reg, but I wonder how many times this is just under the table? We think that our data is "ours" ... certainly it is, but when we are just device/app/OS/website users then we are just income for so many advertising environments.

Basically Advertising has evolved, originally it was just a sign in the street and a small picture/proposal in a newspaper that were designed to make us happy to read - think of this change like being given a young kitty at home ... but the "kitten" has now grown bigger, four feet tall with a large mane and teeth six inches long ... so now we're lunch.

Scientists conclude cats only have three personalities after YouTube clip binge

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Happy

Re: Three states of catter

So basically cats are just like people, we see the same variants with dogs and many other animals too. If you read Neil Shubin's views on human evolution (which I think are extremely accurate) then you can see that we, as humans, may see ourselves as different from animals but in fact we all started the same originally. Yes, we've evolved but so has everything else too and we share a lot of the same history. We didn't evolve to like cats but I suspect cats have evolved to like us because we like cats.

If your Start menu or apps are freezing up on Windows, Microsoft has a suggestion

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Facepalm

Re: Start menu is suddenly unresponsive and some applications won't open or work

It's not an "operating system" any longer, it's a data collection and sales system with some operating system features that may work occasionally.

There are plenty of reasons why government tech is stuck in the Stone Age

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Joke

Boris, you are commenting in El Reg as an Anonymous poster?

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Government tech is stuck in the Stone Age?

And in the Stone Age everyone was a hunter-gatherer.

We're just shouting into the void, says US watchdog offering cybersecurity advice

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Facepalm

Re: Janus.....The God Of Facing Both Ways At Once!!!

Look at the way the government works, we're going to "ban" all these cybersecurity attacks and we think it will help us?

But look at how things have gone with the government's "drug war" to fight everyone who used to just smoke and snort a little 40 years ago ... the drug war has vastly increased drug consumption and the dealers are now making vastly more money from drugs while making drugs far worse then they ever were. Are we seeing the same events now with cybersecurity - I'm seeing my daily malware detection's are going way up all the time ... will the cybersecurity way be as effective as the drug war?

Windows 10 paid downloads end but buyers need not fear ISO-lation

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Joke

Re: 500+ million PC's obsolete in 2025 unable to run Windows 11, 2026 might just be year of Linux

Windows 11 is making me very much appreciate Windows Vista! So what's going to happen by 2025, will I be getting updates for Windows 12 but worried that Windows 13 will be released?

Universities offered software to sniff out ChatGPT-written essays

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Unhappy

Re: Just expell anyone caught

My immediate thought was "Let's ban politicians from using ChatGPT too!" but now I'm wondering if using ChatGPT might not improve a lot of the things we're seeing politicians say?

Rentokil uses AI rat recognition to plot extermination in real time

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Happy

AI rat recognition is working for us!

Animal Intelligence is working fine, we have no rats or mice, or even cockroaches in the house - our cats work all day long and then sit on the sofa with me in the evening, not just the cats on the sofa, my crazy cat wife is happy there too!

Basically keep a cat around and you can ignore technology, technology doesn't purr so I am much happier with our cats. We live in Louisiana so cats are very helpful all the time, if there's a tornado close by at night then they run around and alert the whole family - it's never been a problem, the last tornado went past half a mile away but we were getting ourselves safe with the cats too.

Bill shock? The red ink of web services doesn’t come out of the blue

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Terminator

Modern workers rarely think about the pre-70's world, it's worth remembering that back then almost everyone created open-source software code to help other users get things working. And everyone could read the source and update their own work without having to panic about what might happen. CP/M and MSDOS were created and while they made a few people get a decent payroll, neither operating system generated millions ... OK, yes they did have millions of users and almost everyone (not just the users) were happy.

But now Twitter is worth 41 billion dollars - where did all that money come from, and where is it going? Is everyone happy or just in debt?

Crims steal data on 40 million T-Mobile US customers

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Pirate

Re: What?

I've been seeing hacking efforts on my "T-Mobile account" for years now ... but they have never been a problem because I have not had a T-Mobile account since at least 25 years ago but I'm still getting emails notifying me that my account password has been updated with recommendations that I download the new account "app" ...

Google dumps 12,000 employees after project probe

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Terminator

Working from Home might have a big advantage

If you are handling a lot of phone calls, or writing software, documentation, handling sales and accounts then working from Home is possible if we change the corporate environment (that's essential). And while this would be a big change for everyone, it would reduce the amount of carbon released these days as everyone travels to and from work; and work keeps a building running 24*365 hours a year. Let's try getting this working by making all the politicians and parliament workers start by working from home - it would be a good evaluation test, teaching us what works and what needs to be organized and letting us measure the potential carbon emission reduction level.

I think that this has the potential to employ a lot more people all the time although everyone would probably get paid a little less; but everyone would have to spend less money to get to work and home again too.

University of Texas latest US school to ban TikTok

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Happy

Re: "School"

It's the same language and a different culture, England has "bogs" and "loos" ... America has "restrooms" - ask an American if they have a fag and a rubber that you can use and you'll either get a kiss or a punch.

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Happy

Re: Texas has a university ?

It sounds like you have never been to Texas or worked with anyone in a Texas University. Sure a lot of southern states in the US have crazy views of things but the academic world is smart ... this article gives you some clues as to how smart the universities are and how well they are virtually all run.

Microsoft axes 10,000, already breaking bad news to staff

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Boffin

Re: "Microsoft will lay off 10,000 people"

This is essentially the same situation that existing about 40,000 years ago ... we kicked those hunter gatherers out and started farming ... we see that as an evolution but we're now sitting on the sofa, posting on social media, "my doctor says I weigh too much (only 450lbs) and I have weak legs so the idiots are saying I should exercise"

So much technology is destroying our world because of what we are doing and failing to do - did we evolve just to post on Facebook?

Tesla faked self-driving demo, Autopilot engineer testifies

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Nothing new is happening ...

Here's a very old quote that essentially describes what is still happening today ... Doug was talking about software issues but the concept that he described happening back in 1968 applies to everything these days - I just spent this morning hearing all about these types of problems ... optical software "performing measurements" as someone walks, but every "measurement" is in millimeters - here's one:

X=4.274241216, Y=1.355787776, Z=5.937175968 ... can you measure distances with a resolution of 0.000000001 mm, how big is an atom?

"The most deadly thing in software is the concept, which almost universally seems to be followed, that you are going to specify what you are going to do, and then do it. And that is where most of our troubles come from. The projects that are called successful, have met their specifications. But those specifications were based upon the designers' ignorance before they started the job." -- D.T. Ross, NATO Software Engineering Conference, 1968

UK Online Safety law threatens Big Tech bosses with jail

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Re: MPs earn £80,000 per annum....and they are "doing something"......Hurrah!!

Jail "bosses" for not doing their job, but let the government have a party with no masks during COVID ... MP's are good at creating laws that affect everyone except themselves.

Unix is dead. Long live Unix!

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Re: Are you ok?

Actually that's an advantage, if you know how to hack things that the chances that you will be hacked are much lower than anyone who just thinks that they are smart enough to notice when they are hacked. Teach your kids how to HAK5 your home network and you will be so safe!

Microsoft and community release scripts to help mitigate Defender mess

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Joke

Re: Microsoft are C%&$S!

This morning 12 thumbs up & 4 thumbs down ...

Is that 12 Microsoft users and 4 Google users? But maybe it's 12 Google Users and 4 Microsoft Users?

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Unhappy

Software problems are traditional ...

We see problems and everyone says that it's a "new" problem that can be "fixed" but the problem is not fixed, they just get the software working again...

"The most deadly thing in software is the concept, which almost universally seems to be followed, that you are going to specify what you are going to do, and then do it. And that is where most of our troubles come from. The projects that are called successful, have met their specifications. But those specifications were based upon the designers' ignorance before they started the job." -- Douglas Taylor Ross, NATO Software Engineering Conference, 1968

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Happy

Re: Microsoft are C%&$S!

I'm not seeing any problems, Microsoft is an excellent developer and I've not seen any problems for more than a year now ... oh wait, maybe that's because I'm still running Windows 7 and it's working very reliably. Yes, I'm getting Google Drive warnings but I can delete the app and solve all those Google issues.

Of course U2 is one of Bill Gates' favorite bands

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Happy

U2 is great but ...

"I'm on the run, But I ain't got no gun. See they want to be the star, So they fighting tribal war ...

And they saying, Iron, like a lion, in Zion."

Nice smart device – how long does it get software updates?

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Joke

Re: Still waiting for the ultimate smart device to literally plug/wire in to......

Maybe she was upgraded and no longer prints out everything that used to make the snivelling, miserable coward happy every day?

That's the end of my joke ... Originally when we started making devices we built everything with hardware and virtually never saw any of the issues that we have today - yes, there was one problem when a circuit board died, or a compressor started to leak. And the manufacturer would say that it's no longer available ... so you have to buy a new device. This is just the way it all works, forcing everyone to keep buying devices, not keep using them.

Software engineer accused of stealing $300k from employer was 'inspired by Office Space'

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Facepalm

Re: Code review is for wimps

Maybe he was writing everything in Rust so the management "knew" it was safe code without the risk of everything that happened.

This reminds me of a case I read about 60 years ago where a banker was calculating everyone's interest payments - the math was done in pennies but the interest payments were limited to whole pennies so he coded it to transfer all fractions to his account in the bank.

Maybe the code world has changed but this story is good evidence that what people do hasn't changed at all.

Version 5 of the Endless OS enters testing

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Joke

Re: Another interesting project!

“We invited the strippers, Boris, and Putin.”

“We invited the strippers, Boris and Putin.”

Self-driving car computers may be 'as bad' for emissions as datacenters

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Megaphone

Our potential future is a carbon-heavy one

We have a lot of carbon dominant items, cars, plastic bags, knives and forks, water bottles etc etc etc etc ... if we're going to still be here in a couple of thousand years then we need to change a lot of things, self-driving cars are just a small example of what we need to change.

Euro-cops shut down crypto scam that bilked millions from unwitting punters

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Re: What crime?

I've quit all of this, it's just become crapto currency these days, originally it was a great idea, just a little technical entertainment when you understood how it was working. But these days it's just become a slick little criminal entertainment, delivered to everyone's phone and email address.

Amazon's attempt to crush New York union slapped down

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What was the situation before Unions existed? Well it looked like Slavery was very efficient and making corporate owners wealthy ... so what's going to happen again if Unions are banned these days?

I grew up as a little kid years ago, just a mile away from a coal mine in Leicestershire and played at school with a few miners kids, so I've always supported the existence of Unions, regardless of what's being rattled about them by politicians and corporate idiots.

First Patch Tuesday of the year explodes with in-the-wild exploit fix

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Joke

Re: One more cuppa?

Is Windows 98 still working fine because Microsoft hasn't patched it for years now?

Russian meddling in 2016 US presidential election was weak sauce

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Re: It's American voting

Don't just look at half a century - go back to the original creation of America, they just complained that they were not benefiting from taxation and ever since have been using taxation and wars to generate corporate and presidential fortunes.

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Alert

It's American voting

In most American political elections (not just your local mayor etc) the majority of people do not vote "for" a candidate but vote "against" the other candidate. For example Biden is president because the majority of people (including me) voted against Trump, not "for" Biden. This is the environment that causes the Russian attempts to influence American election to fail every time.

British elections are different, in Britain people just talked about a vote for Brexit - watching the events prior to that vote it seemed clear that there was foreign influences but the only people confident that there was no Russian influence in that vote were the Brexiters every time a little evidence appeared.

This is the end, Windows 7 and 8 friends: Microsoft drops support this week

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Happy

I run everything behind an independent firewall with rules that prohibit all port access unless it's something that I am using - that makes so much stuff safer. So to keep our operating environment safe the only device that I allow to have direct access to the external internet without a firewall is a pair of wire cutters. We have never had anything hacked.

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Thumb Down

The majority of hacking attacks these days seem to be looking for Windows 10 and 11 ... let's face it, there are a lot more people with "updated" operating systems who are more likely to think that they need to open their newpaymentdetails.pdf.img email attachments. The advantage of running XP and Windows 7 is that you know the internet is risky so the hacking level ends up being lower with very old operating systems.

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Meh

Micro$oft update$

... which means users of those OSes will need to shift to Windows 10 or 11 buying new computers ... FTFY

I'm current working to update one of our applications' documentation - it was originally written for researchers and programmers using WIndows XP to provide them with specific clinical data access - we updated it a little and it still runs fine on Windows11 - but using Windows11 to update the user documentation is a total pain although I'm getting it done.

Windows Upgrades are actually Windows Upyourarsegrades but originally when users had to buy a new CD or floppy disk to upgrade (I was happy because it worked well), all the computer manufacturers were continually bitching that Microsoft Upgrades did not require that users bought new devices, those manufacturers are happy these days ...

Windows users are now just corporate food.

Python Package Index found stuffed with AWS keys and malware

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Devil

Re: Security?

Security can improve if you hire a hacker to work on everything you do, to try and hack it, but then since they are your employee they can reveal how it's done and everyone can work to stop it ... but keep trying in future - that's hopefully security. Security may exist if your hacker fails to hack items but keep trying.

Cybercrooks are telling ChatGPT to create malicious code

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Joke

Re: All invention can be used for good or bad

"As far as my statement saying there's no AI today, I stand by that too" - me too, I don't think that Anal Intelligence is very helpful.

OpenAI is developing software to detect text generated by ChatGPT

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Happy

Re: Just ask it

A student has already sorted this out by creating GPTzero - to help educators detect ChatGPT.

Disruptive innovation's like a party. It's always happening elsewhere

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Boffin

Re: Innovation is always dying

"Innovation" is leading to people using Windows 11 these days and thinking that it's an improvement and much better than Windows XP ... an innovation that started with Windows Me (Argggggg, the icon is a joke). It's not "better" - it's different ... don't panic, I'm talking about an operating system not fooled into thinking that Fentanyl is an innovation much better than smoking a little ball of opium to sleep well ... although I just woke up and I am using Windows 11 this morning.

Microsoft said to be thinking of sinking $10m into self-driving truck startup

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Happy

Thanks for your offer Clippy, that was helpful but we decided that everything would be a lot easier to just put the truck contents on a train for delivery to the local area. Lower carbon costs for the train transit and less traffic on the roads so that will help the climate too.

India partners with private company to sell ads to commuters via railway Wi-Fi

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Re: more than 1.1 million unique users...

We believe that using WiFi means your data is stolen although posting on Facebook, Twitter etc means your data is sold. Is that any better?

PyTorch dependency poisoned with malicious code

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Unhappy

malicious code is normal ...

... it's always an option if you are using software that you didn't write yourself. I just arrived at work and did my normal "start of the day" activity ... deleting all the viruses that have been quarantined overnight on the mail server. Malware isn't a Python issue, it's a universal issue - you can fix it by writing all the code that you are using yourself or with your trusted team.

Ireland fines Meta $414m for using personal data without asking

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Happy

Re: A very Liberal attitude..

You might start to ask, what's the point of Nick Clegg? It's defined here ...

Nexperia calls in the lawyers to save Welsh chip fab deal

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Re: waking up late

The Chinese entry into the tech world was driven by the American companies that started making a lot more money by moving their expensive production from America into the "cheaper" China.

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Facepalm

Re: Capmmunism

It's always seems that Labour were working at trying to help everyone in the UK, a policy that has failed to get them elected by the majority of votes but their proposals generally don't seem as dumb afterwards as the Tories policies always seem to turn out to be - remember what everyone was saying about Brexit before the vote. I wonder if one day we will start to think that winning a general election is a fatal damage to the party that wins.