* Posts by dave 81

253 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jun 2009

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Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved

dave 81

Re: Care

It has nothing to do with safety, and has everything to do with controlling us.

Voice assistants failed because they serve their makers more than they help users

dave 81
Meh

Defenestration

Every time I set a timer or delete the notifications and Alexa utters the words "by the way" "did you know" its risks me chucking it out the window. Yet I put up with these intrusions just because of how damned useful being able to set quick timers or do a quick sum is by voice. But I fear the day will come when after shouting "Alexa! shut up shut up shut up!" and it keeps talking that it will be unplugged and never plugged back in.

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

dave 81

2 possibilities.. Both are great.

Either Elon is going to make good on his goal to make twitter an open forum for debate and sharing of ideas, or its going to crash and burn and be destroyed.

Both are fine outcomes.

NASA's Artemis mission finally launches after faulty Ethernet switch delayed countdown

dave 81

I am appalled at the waste. Are they going to have enough left over shuttle engines to do the whole Artemis program if they are obliterating four engines per launch?

Elon Musk reportedly outlines horrible Twitter layoff process

dave 81

Re: Remember when Photobucket was free and used by millions, then they suddenly introduced fees?

It's the way that they did that, and how utterly insane the fees were. But $8 a month to get a verified account, and piss off the woke? Yea, I am gonna do that just for the laughs.

Tumblr says nudes are back on the menu – within reason

dave 81

And?

Why would anyone go back, alternatives have been found, and people who want that sort of thing have followed.

It's 2023, let's check in with the metaverse... Nope, still doesn't exist

dave 81
Meh

Sn0w and Blacksun

If he actually built the metaverse as described, then it would have a chance. Or at least I would give a chance. But all this cartoony bright stuff, tired of that already.

BT accused of 'misinformation' campaign ahead of strikes

dave 81
Devil

How will we tell the difference?

BT workers on strike? Seriously, how will we be able to tell the difference?

British intelligence recycles old argument for thwarting strong encryption: Think of the children!

dave 81

Re: Only the Guilty?

Except of course, the politicians exempted themselves from the snoopers charter. Tells you what is really going on here.

Please pay for parking – CMOS batteries don't buy themselves

dave 81

I stopped shopping at the local ASDA for years.

The local ASDA, with the same reasoning, introduced a pay and display parking scheme, with a ticket nub that you could take a get a refund for with your shopping.

My problem with that was two fold. One, as a expat who grew up not in the UK, I don't like pay and display, the effort of having to park, divine the future and guess how long you will be, get a ticket and return to my car, then go on about my business has always seemed onerous. Two, the fricking ticket machines were at the opposite end of the carpark to were there was available spaces. Having to walking the entire length of the carpark 3 times before even entering the store? Nope.

So I simple stopped shopping there, and went elsewhere. It was over a decade later that I learned they had abandoned the scheme at some point in favour of the standard 2 hour parking. I still mostly shop elsewhere.

The monitor boom may have ended, says IDC

dave 81

Re: Blue Christmas

Been running dual monitors since windows 98 supported it. Sometimes more.

BT's Plusnet shows Google how it's done as email woes enter their third day

dave 81

Exactly my thought. Use my own domain for most of my email, plus a webmail account or two. The only reason I even bother with plusnets email is because plusnet send my bill to it.

dave 81

Re: Stuck with it

I am with plusnet, and don't have to do that. Then I did pay the 5 squid at the start for a static IP.

Computer misuse crimes in UK surge to high not seen since 2017 even as prosecutions slump 20%

dave 81

Re: It's easy to monitor this

Just look at your fail2ban logs. Its kind of scary how many attempts there are on SSH and SMTP.

What a clock up: Brit TV-broadband giant Sky fails to pick up weekend's timezone change, fix due by Friday

dave 81

Re: I hate DST.

Oven? Microwave? Car?

UK data spillers fined, but enforcement slows: £5m in ICO penalties not yet paid

dave 81

"..watchdog spent £138,000 hunting down scofflaws who tried to evade a £40,000 fine."

The fine isn't about revenue, its about punishment. So sometimes this will happen.

The problem is always when fines become a revenue stream, the people imposing the fines can't be trusted to be impartial. (Thanks again Tony for letting the police keep the fines and letting Gordon squeeze their budgets. )

China says it applied to join digital free trade deal days after proposing law against cross-border data flow

dave 81
Flame

China won't play by the rules.

They never do. Any hope they will is just naïve.

Remember when you thought fax machines were dead-matter teleporters? Ah, just me, then

dave 81
Joke

A business was running out of fax paper, and the secretary dutifully called the supplier to order some more. "Sure" they said, "we get it to you by the weekend."

"Thank you" she said, "but we might run out by then, so could you please fax us some to tide us over until then?"

Facebook posts job ad for 10,000 'high-skilled' roles to 'build the metaverse' – and they'll all be based in the EU

dave 81

Its all fun

Until the Metaverse Snow Crash's, and scrambles your brains. Come el reg, the "Metaverse", and not one mention of Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson) where the word originated?

And finally... Oracle bags £25m ERP deal to replace East Sussex County Council's SAP R/3 system

dave 81

Beat me to it. Word for word. Guess who's council tax is going to go up massively in the next few years.

Oracle loses appeal against $3bn payment to HPE over withdrawal of Itanium support

dave 81

Re: Such mixed feelings

As scummy as HPE are, Oracle losing is far far better.

Nothing works any more. Who decided that redundant systems should become redundant?

dave 81

I got my gmail address early.

Firstname.lastname - fantastic I thought 'An email address without the silly numbers.' 20 years on and I am getting every firstname.lastname gmails from every single stupid service they collectively sign up to, and the receipts for their purchases, and sometimes fantastically personal financial or medical data. Mostly from America and South-Africa. I should have used firstname.middlename.lastname that I registered at the same time as my primary email address. It gets stuff all.

LA cops told to harvest social media handles from people they stop, suspect or not

dave 81

We are all guilty to them.

Thales launches payment card with onboard fingerprint scanner

dave 81

Re: The "fallback PIN" idea doesn't sound great

In IT security, if your new secure protocol allows fallback to the old less secure protocol, then guaranteed the bad players are going to find a way to force that fall back, and exploit that.

Malaysian Police crush crypto-mining kit to punish electricity thieves

dave 81

Re: We need more of this

Would have to be a substantial part of their server farms...

The lights go off, broadband drops out, the TV freezes … and nobody knows why (spooky music)

dave 81

Re: Satellite TV is the more reliable option...

I am at the 2 year mark since they laid fibre in my road, yet still no one is offering it. I have passed my details on to all the fibre ISP's that advertise in my area multiple times, yet still stuck on crummy 30/4 internet.

Five words everyone wants to hear: Microsoft has 'visually refreshed' Office

dave 81

Re: Still using Office 2003 thanks

I wish I could still be using 2003,, But big company IT went balls deep for SaaS O365. I swear loudly and daily at it. Good thing not been in the office for over a year. And that fracking ribbon, I might have gotten the hang of the bits I needed by now if they would just stop bleeping changing it. /rant

Ethernet standards wonks eye up speeds beyond 400Gb/s

dave 81

Re: In the meantime 10Gb/s has been available for years now ...

Expensive kit? Nah uh. The SSD cache on my NAS is capable of 500MB/S, and the raid will peak at 300MB/s and I regularly saturate my Gig ethernet (at just over 100MB/s) with my video projects. 10Gb would be nice, but its still way too expensive. Looked at 2.5Gb but while cheaper, its not cheap enough and there isn't the wider spread support for it.

UK's competition watchdog gives £31bn Virgin Media and O2 merger the seal of approval

dave 81

NTL were the worst.

Virgin Media are still NTL under it all, and now O2 will be part of that great tradition of monumentally (rap customer service, mid fixed contract price rises, and out right theft (continuing to debit after the contract was terminated).

Oracle sues Envisage claiming unauthorized database use amid licensing crackdown

dave 81
Trollface

Oracle are litigating again.

What a total non-surprise.

Grotesque soundbyte alert: UK government opens wallet to help rural areas get 'gigafit'

dave 81

They installed fibre in my road over 14 months ago.

Yet, not a single provider or even BT is offering FTTP. I have emails, and called them all many time and none are offering anything but FTTC at best. Considering StarLink at this stage to just get some bandwidth. (Wouldn't go with the ̶N̶T̶L̶ Virgin ever ever again. )

Following Supreme Court ruling, Uber UK recognizes drivers as workers, offers min wage, holiday pay, pension

dave 81

Re: Fuck uber

Still going to use UBER over a thieving black cab any day. I would rather UBER were a nice employer rather than screwing 70000 drivers with their demise.

With depressing predictability, FCC boss leaves office with a list of his deeds... and a giant middle finger to America

dave 81

Re: Control - Z until it's all undone

Wish we had done that will all of bLairs effing laws.

Surprising everyone, spending watchdog says the UK's 2025 deadline for nationwide gigabit broadband is 'unreachable'

dave 81

They installed fibre in my street last January.

Messed up the grass verge much to the neighbors annoyance. However, to this day, I have not been able to get FTTP despite contacting every fiber provider including BT. What gives, it been a year since the physical fiber was installed!?

Exonerated: First subpostmasters cleared of criminal convictions in Post Office Horizon scandal

dave 81

It's utterly disgusting that those that perverted the course of justice will not suffer any jail time. They should be nailed to the wall. But yet again, justice is only for those that can afford it. Stuff the rest of us.

'Massive game-changer for UK altnet industry': BT-owned UK comms backbone Openreach hikes prices on FTTP-linked leased line circuits

dave 81

This smells.

This is going to slow down getting FTTP unless from BT. And I am not going near them.

Ever had a bogus call from someone claiming to be the IRS? A tax scam ringleader just got sent down for 20 years

dave 81

Re: Who says crime doesn't pay?

It pretty disgusting. Some people even committed suicide as a result, and yet not one person went to jail for it. Tried to write my MP at the time, but Just like Martin Salter, Alok Sharma is completely unrepresentative.

On the 11th day of Christmas TalkTalk took from me... the email address of my company

dave 81

Re: "...own domain raises a flag with me"

I know that too, but it bugs me alot. And most people couldn't give a monkeys.

dave 81

"...own domain raises a flag with me"

On a tangent, but related, one of my flags is when I see a business telephone number where they have the area code in London as 020x or in Reading 01189. I immediately know that this business is to thick to understand how area codes and local phone numbers work. Best see if there is a more intelligent provider out there.

Software running on demo licence? At least one patty pusher is Lovin' It

dave 81

Left on bad terms then?

RIAA DMCAs GitHub into nuking popular YouTube video download tool, says it's used to slurp music

dave 81

Re: Let's be honest

Downloading the verge's PC "build" video, and then using that in an edit to criticize (fair use) how shockingly bad advice it was, and what a bunch of tools the verge are.

Google sees signs of success in its campaign to water down Australian pay-for-news plan

dave 81

Re: Wishful thinking

I'm all for increasing competition, but if this is passed, it would have the opposite effect. The news publishers would stop getting linked to, and instead of making money from link taxes, they would slowly start to fail, and maybe one or two big ones would become the main sources.

Bored binge-watchers bork beleaguered broadband by blasting bandwidth: Global average speeds down 6.31%

dave 81

Re: The death of broadcast TV?

AndrueC How long till they have modify their plus boxes to make the ad's unskippable?

Pretty much why I never watch 4oD or ITV hub. Youtube on anything but a PC (thanks ublock Origin) is starting to get annoying as well since the double adverts were introduced and the frequency increase once they kicked off a bunch of revenue generating content creators.

It's been five years since Windows 10 hit: So... how's that working out for you all?

dave 81

Re: So here is a question for the group.

Modern flat UI's bug the living shift out of me. If its clickable make it obvious like it used to be. Having to hover the cursor over all the random bits of UI text to see if they highlight or underline or the cursor changes is a PIA. And don't get me started on the Ribbon! Finally got used to where things were, and the latest effing update of 365 rolled down from corporate changed the locations. /rant

dave 81

An inaccuracy.

Noticed an inaccuracy in the article.

Windows 8 was never in anyway better than Windows 7.

At historic Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google CEOs hearing, congressmen ramble, congresswomen home in on tech market abuse

dave 81

Reptilian brains are just not good at memory.

Someone made an AI that predicted gender from email addresses, usernames. It went about as well as expected

dave 81

good link

Here's why your Samsung Blu-ray player bricked itself: It downloaded an XML config file that broke the firmware

dave 81

Pihole

Thanks, added configprd.samsungcloudsolution.net and samsungcloudsolution.net to my pihole block list. Not that I have used my blueray player in years.

Detroit cops employed facial recognition algos that only misidentifies suspects 96 per cent of the time

dave 81

Re: collateral damage

Thank you for replying with out using any of the expletives I wanted to and still making the point of what complete $%^£%$^^£% Nathar is.

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