Posts by David Austin

Microsoft breaks WPF printing with .NET update

Not the biggest fan of Apple, but AirPrint has been genuinely impressive from day one, both in how ubiquitous it's rollout in print hardware is, and how it "Just works" for simple printing (Complex documents are a bit more hit and miss, and take an uncomfortably long time to send)

The amount of home users I've done stuff for, then said "Oh by the way you've got everything to print from your iDevice, just press this button and it'll work" is amazing - no more firing up a clunky slow laptop just to print a quick email.

Windows NT 4 went on sale 30 years ago today

It was pretty great for the time; The stability of the NT Kernel, with the market familiarity look and feel of Windows 95.

All Windows 2000 needed to add to perfect the idea was USB Support and Active Directory (NT I miss: I can't even remember what the Previous AD Version was called, but boy do I not miss it)

GitHub slashes public bug bounty payouts as AI report flood buries its security team

Re: Under the Guise

Yep, make the payments too low, and the grey-hats will sell them to a higher paying client.

This level of bureaucracy also seems inevitable to make the next Nightmare Eclipse by accident.

Engineer shoves Linux peg through Sega 32X-shaped hole

Re: I never understood why they bothered releasing the 32X...

Pretty much that - Sega designed the ultimate sprite based console just in time for 3D games to become viable in the living room.

This led to one of the Saturn's quirks - it preferred to process 3D Models using Quads instead of Triangles, as that was the norm at the time (and I believe still is?) for *pre-rendered* CGI and movie 3D - triangles were originally a quick speed hack that just worked really well for Realtime 3D;

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/sega-saturn/#tab-3-1-3d-modelling

No more Java refills for Intel Macs after JDK 27, says Oracle

Rosetta

For the second time, Apple build a phenomenal compatibility translation layer with Rosetta... then discontinue it very early.

Apple really commit to their "Evolve or die" ecosystem; a very different approach from Microsoft's "If you follow the SDK we won't intentionally break your app" Approach that kept some Windows 3.11 programs working all the way up the 32-bit Windows 10, and all the legacy headaches that come with it. Honestly, I'm not sure which approach is better...

HS2's latest reset ditches autonomous train tech to get project back on track

Re: HS 2 late

Genuine Question: Has Mr. Burnham talked about re-implementing Phase 1b and 2 to Manchester and Leeds? I get the feeling he'd like that with his transport credentials, but Is that practicable or feasible at this stage?

This project has been an expensive omnishambles - starting from selling it to the public as High Speed rail rather than a needed capacity upgrade - but there's very few rail projects I can think of in the last 30 years that we ended up regretting building, even with cost overruns (Looking your way, Elizabeth line...)

Tesco is sprinting to quit VMware and Broadcom despite rapid migration risks

Re: is this the beginning of the end for VMWARE

I'm proud of everyone here - a whole thread of useful dongle advice and discourse, and not a single immature snigger.

Re: The Screwers and the Screwed

Agree; not a fan of Tesco, but they have the corporate weight, legal knowhow and European law on their side, on what basically boils down to the simple case of was the 2021 contract extension clause valid or not.

My Gut says Broadcom will settle (Confidentially or not) before court if Tesco will let them, but it sounds like they're up for a fight, and one that may not favour virtzilla.

Massive password-stealing attack hits 75k Fortinet firewalls

Re: what is fortinet doing.

To be fair, I think every major SMB/Enterprise firewall vendor has had major security issues in the last 12 months; SonicWall, Cisco, Fortigate, Watchguard, just off the top of my head from some messes I've cleaned up.

I have a degree of sympathy: As the gateway between The Enterprise and the World Wide Web, they are high profile, valuable targets, and worth putting effort in to pop open, but that just means the security standard we expect from these companies has to be higher.

mmmh, don't like that statement from Fortinet, which basically boils down to "lol, skill issue."

Capita is about to sail past deadline to fix civil service pensions scheme

Re: Oh it can easily be fixed.

It would be more fun to make Captia pay the (Non refundable) Interim hardship payments for civil servants who are unable to claim their pensions - The quicker they properly fix it, the less they're out of pocket, because apparently, some people can't do their job without good motivation.

Brit regulator finds mobile network service on trains is far from first class

Agree; Web/email would be good enough.

Also anyone having a full on Zoom meeting in a train without a headset should be slung out of the window onto the nearest mailcatch hook.

Another bug hunter leaks Microsoft exploits in defiance of company’s handling of vulnerability disclosures

What they said is they went through Microsoft's preferred channels and did co-ordinated disclosure with them;

The outcome was:

- The Bug was silently fixed

- Microsoft denied it was an in-scope security issue

- They did not credit the researcher

- (4th step may be they did not pay the researcher, but that's not a given depending on the scope of the bug, and the researcher didn't make a big thing of it)

And he's not the only researcher that has had this experience with Microsoft.

Given all that: What incentive does the researcher have to go through all this dance with Microsoft again the next time they find an issue? They may as well write the issue up and release it publicly so user know about the problem and can kick up a stink if it's important enough to fix.

Disgruntled 0-day hunter 'humiliated' by Microsoft pledges 'bone shattering drop' as Redmond calls cops

Re: Typical large corporation throwing its toys out the pram

Potentially, but it's a well know open secret that most EULA's would not stand proper legal scrutiny - In nearly every case, the company folds before they get tested in a court of law and the whole document gets torn to shreds.

The specific example I'm thinking of right now is the time they claimed Subscribing to Disney+ meant you couldn't sue the house of mouse if you ever died in a theme park accident: https://www.geldards.com/insights/a-review-of-disneys-recent-wrongful-death-case/

X limits hot takes from freeloaders to 50 a day

Attention Economy

I have very little skin in the game on whether twitter lives or dies, but I thought the idea with Social Media is the attention economy, converting eyeballs into ad money;

How bad have things gone at twitter if they now actively want to restrict interaction for the free tier? Or are Facebook/Instagram looking on with interest?

Sick and wrong: Ontario auditors find doctors' AI note takers routinely blow basic facts

TornadoGuard

"Criteria tied to accuracy, bias controls, and key security and privacy safeguards made up only a small portion of the total evaluation score for the AI Scribe systems."

As always, There's an XKCD for that.

Anthropic won't own MCP 'design flaw' putting 200K servers at risk, researchers say

Of COURSE it's the MCP

Did TRON teach us nothing, or is this another "Do Not Create The Torment Nexus" situation?

Customers revolt as GitHub Copilot 'fixes' rate limits

I think we're collectively going to find out there's a sizable number of users that are happy to *use* AI, but not to *pay* for AI at it's true market rate, which almost no-one is charging at the moment to get people used to it (the first hit is free...)

IBM becomes first company to pay up under Trump administration's diversity blitz

Re: Context

Wait, What??

*Googles*

"IBM's German division had paid $3 million into the fund, while making it clear they were not admitting liability."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_World_War_II

Sometimes the new thing you learn every day is not nice.

Microsoft raises UK Surface prices as RAM crisis reaches the checkout

Re: Making a Mac more attractive

With macbook neo, talk about the right product at the right time; Apple getting back into budget computers for the RAMpoclypse is up there with Nintendo releasing Animal Crossing just as Covid 19 hit.

Japanese rocket part came unglued, leading to mission failure

I did get a sensible chuckle that you can draw a direct line from Icarus falling to earth to space glue no work well.

ServiceNow allegedly says salesman 'overachieved' and is not entitled to comp

I'm expecting ServiceNow to offer to settle at the last minute after dragging out for as long as possible.

In the meantime, this sounds like an excellent incentive for their other sales agents to get *very creative* about booking revenue in a way that would have made Autonomy blush...

Anthropic admits Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

This entire article could just as easily be describing Slot Machines; make of that what you will...

Linux Foundation kicks off effort to shield FOSS maintainers from AI slop bug reports

Re: Isn't this what CAPTCHAs were invented for ?

When they say "AI submitted" they can mean a fully automated report, but the majority of them will be a novice developer (or, more likely, a prompt engineer) submitting a report their AI tool spat out, without putting it through human oversight or triage - a fire and forget security report of questionable usefulness.

That's why a CAPTCHA won't help, and a summary of the whole issue; it's trivial for a human to submit an AI generated slop bug report, but takes time and resources for the dev team to look into to see if it's an actual issue or not.

Memory scalpers hunt scarce DRAM with bot blitz

New plan;

Let's Memory Scalp the Memory Scalpers

Say goodbye to budget PCs and smartphones – memory is too expensive now

Desktop NPU usage?

Question for the smart bods around here; Has anyone actually found any desktop software that uses the NPU yet?

We've got a lot of PC's bought in the last year that have NPU's; not bought for AI, but just because they come built in to the standard business Intel Ultra5/Ultra7 spec - I've never once seen a single percentage use of the NPU in task manager; I'm really surprised I've not seen apps using it for a co-processor or hardware acceleration, like GPU Compute units;

Here in 2026, is there any practical uses for the NPU, especially outside of AI Model work?

HP CEO prints final page after six years, moves to PayPal

Great Idea;

Have they considered replacing him with a third party CEO? They'll save loads of money, once they figure out how to sneak him in past security...

Windows 11, not AI, kick-started the PC upgrade cycle

Re: Just wait for Windows 12

I'm hoping a few people will pay attention to the little West Midlands Police Debacle from last week; I'm willing to bet they didn't even mean to use Co-Pilot, just got an AI Dark pattern AI Search result that the plod doing the work got tricked into accepting as a normal result. when top dogs at organisations have to take the walk (Albeit with other bigger factors), there may be some changes going.

The Microsoft 365 Copilot app rebrand was bad, but there are far worse offenders

Microsoft Azure

A few years back, saying "I've licensed Microsoft Azure" could mean you've bought at least 1 of 300+ separate and distinct products; some Cloud hosted, some self hosted, and some on-premises.

The Team "Microsoft Azure" basically became confusing and meaningless.

While they've pared back and reduced the confusion there (Like Azure Active Directory becoming Microsoft Entra), Co-Pilot has already surpassed it in meaningless waffle; It may server Microsoft's objective of getting someone - anyone - to please just use it, but there's now no meaningful cohesion to the product family, and It will all but certainly come back to bite them.

Qualcomm is determined to cut a slice out of Intel's PC pie with latest Snapdragon chips

Is the native tool availability and x86 emulation better yet?

This is a briefing I wrote in December 2024 to the internal team:

Microsoft have released ARM installation Media: SnapDragon processors are supported out of the box, others may need drivers injected – realistically, you’ll only see Snapdragons in the wild for now, like the current Dell ARM Range.

Again, just to re-state the point: Currently, Windows 11 ARM is Mostly compatible with the normal x64 software, but it’s done via emulation, which will make a big battery/performance difference, and certain software (Mainly low level tools like Antivirus and DRM) will not run:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/14/qualcomm_pc_strategy!

ARM Laptops are clearly the future of the Ultralight category, with their all day battery life and AI task performance, but they’re still a little bleeding edge, and you’ll get odd issues with some software on them until everything catches up – I’d be a little hesitant to recommend them to users currently, unless lightweight and battery performance trumps all else, including software compatibility.

We had to return three ARM computers this year because of software compatibility; There was nothing wrong with the performance of the existing chips, and the battery life is amazing, but until there's more native Windows ARM or universal binaries for low level tools (Slowly getting better), and reduced performance overhead for x86-64 emulation (Unknown), there's enough little gotchas to put off business purchasing.

IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

I wish all of those people a merry 19th January, 2038.

Windows is testing a new, wider Run dialog box. Here’s how to try it

...Yet.

New boss was bad, his attitude was ugly, so the tech team pranked him good

Re: Better prank

In the late 90's that there was the reason the school I did tech for was one of the early adaptors of optical mice; About 3x the cost of ball mice, but the only way to stop the balls being stolen was to epoxy the bottom shut, which meant full dismantle for ball cleaning - they paid for themselves in time and hassle.

TryHackMe races to add women to Christmas cyber challenge roster after backlash

Surprised

I'm surprised Katie Paxton-Fear's LinkedIn post wasn't fully quoted in the article;

"Just to be totally clear: I was offered a spot this year I intentionally ghosted them because I didn’t want to be involved after some winners did not get prizes, some creators were unpaid and some were paid very low compared to others, and some key folks no longer work at the company and I just didn’t want to work with them"

That sounds like just as big an issue as the gender breakdown, if not a contributing factor; if Katie's experience isn't an outlier, then it sounds like TryHackMe are expecting work "For Exposure"

AI nudification site fined £55K for skipping age checks

Re: What about Consent?

For "Normal" porn, the actors have been paid and consented (all kinds of issues and edge cases aside for a simplistic view);

For this site and others like it, you can make nudes of varying degrees of credulity of anyone, without their consent, knowledge, or compensation.

I offer no moral judgement on anyone who does or does not like nudes or porn; Doing it this way removes consent and recompense, nuding people against their will for, in the best most innocent case, your own personal gratification, with a sliding scale down to reputation damage, revenge, blackmail, and illegal categories of photos.

Undress.cc

I mean, yeah, sure; fines, offcom, online safety act and all that..

I'm more concerned about the service undress.cc operates; that sounds like it's ripe for misuse, both in a generate blackmail material way, and a "Maybe checking the output is not underage is more important than the input" kind of way.

Linus Torvalds is OK with vibe coding as long as it's not used for anything that matters

Boring is good

I am very much in favour of an Operating system being Boring.

Let the apps on top of it do the Exciting (In the strictly technical definition of the word) stuff - I want the base layer predictably dull and stable.

Texas senators cry foul over Smithsonian's pricey Space Shuttle shuffle

Tell me, Ted...

How many private-sector logistics firms have attempted to move a Space Shuttle before?

Sometimes, you really do need to listen to experts, even if you've had enough of them.

The most charitable reading of this I can give Team Texas is they know it can't be done for that money, but are hoping to make it happen and get someone to cover the cost overrun once it's too late to not happen.

Windows 95 was too fat to install itself so needed help from the slimmer 3.1

Re: "how much they hate the latest version of Windows."

NT4 I miss. Internet Explorer pre version 6, and ActiveX... not so much.

Re: I get the feeling this was the KISS principle

I'm kinda sad that this October, With the last niche but still supported 32-bit Windows going End of Life, we're finally seeing the death of 16 bit apps, some 30-odd years later.

Windows compatibility, when you stop and think about it, is pretty amazing; I can still run Cakewalk 3.11 I bought in 1993 on my 32-Bit Win10 system, complete with Hardware MIDI Support.

The goal of "If you follow the SDK for the target version of Windows, we won't break your app" is a different philosophy from, say, Apples drive for security and efficiency by deprecating and legacy parts (or even processor architectures), but I appreciate and see the value in both methods.

Re: Actually only neede for graphical installer UI

They didn't always land the execution, but the *idea* behind Windows 95, of making the PC simpler and more accessible to more people was a good idea, and given the sales numbers and cultural impact, it succeeded at some level.

The idea of sticking a Floppy in and typing one command (or later, booting direct from the CD) into a click and go interface was so much simpler than the piles of codes and questions other contemporary installers needed at the time.

Re: "how much they hate the latest version of Windows."

Think I agree; I joined IT mid-migration from NT 4 to 2000; having NT's (relative) stability was a breath of fresh air over 9x, then the double punch of Active Directory and Group Policy made deployment and management so much more flexible and simple, And USB Plug & Play support was such a treat.

The idea was perfected in XP, joining the 9x and NT lines together for better compatibility across the board, and completed with .net server... Sorry, Windows Server 2003.

Then came the Longhorn years...

Node4's £45M Tisski takeover ends in tears – and £2.4M in damages

Re: Documents show due diligence missed multiple red flags

Yeah - If I was an ex-Tisski manager, I wouldn't be planning any boat trips in the near future...

The Notepad that knew too much: Humble text editor gets unnecessary AI infusion

Just fucking stop

Please. I'm begging you. If you keep this up, the end game's going to be mandatory Co-Pilot suppositories.

Office 2016 and 2019 face October 14 execution date

2003, mainly for the Outlook improvements;

Outside of that, Word/Excel 97 still have all the features I need for what I use.

Tesla Model Ys recalled Down Under for overly enthusiastic electric windows

Re: You are doing it wrong

Precisely where my mind went to.

Intel ghosts researcher who found web apps spilled 270K staff records

Re: I will never pay for a disclosure I did not specifically ask for.

Be careful with what you wish for there; with data like that, there are some *great* ways to monetize it that don't involve you paying a single penny...

Microsoft crams Copilot AI directly into Excel cells

100% this: if there's one place where I don't want fuzzy answers or vibes, it's in a mathematical spreadsheet.

Hyundai: Want cyber-secure car locks? That'll be £49, please

Keyless ignition

One of the reasons I don't want keyless ignition on my next car is that it's replacing one problem with several exciting new ones;

Even if they can unlock the fob doors on my current car, the engine immobiliser doesn't de-activate without a key physically in the steering wheel.

Foolproof? Not by a long shot, but it's another brick in the wall; sometimes you can't stop crime, just move it onto easier targets.

(Also if anyone from Labour is reading this; how about penalising car manufacturers for insecure products, rather than making illegal things illegal.)

Birmingham City Council's £131M Oracle rebuild in danger as go-live nears

Genuine Question;

Do we just hear about failures in the news, or is there no such thing as an Oracle installing being completed to spec, on time, and in budget?

I'm assuming there must be some successful ones out there, otherwise... well, bungs to consultants and managers of an impossible to implement project would only get you so far...