Posts by David Austin

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...

German phone repair biz collapses following 2023 ransomware attack

back up from offline data

And therein lies the rub; Once you've been hit with a ransomware, there's two running timers and bank balances;

One for recovering your systems, and getting the business back up and running; while often expensive, the cost directly relates to how good your disaster recovery and backups are, and outside of enterprise, the answer is normally "Not good enough, and this is a bad time to find that out"

The other is for the Reputational and financial damage the event causes for you: if you have big liabilities (or even blackmail material), or a more paranoid type of customer, this can snowball into a big problem.

Some business can survive one of those; very few outside the multinationals can survive both.

You DO see Windows 11 as an AI PC opportunity, say Dell and Intel

No.

Apple goes glass whole as it pours new UI everywhere

Re: "a fluidity that only Apple can achieve."

it does feel very Aqua; I loved it back in the day, so I'm not too upset at seeing where this goes.

New SSL/TLS certs to each live no longer than 47 days by 2029

Oh, fuck off

Even the Big guys can't get this right;

MacOS can't re-install certain versions without hacking around an expired certificate in the low level startup:

https://mrmacintosh.com/how-to-fix-the-recovery-server-could-not-be-contacted-error-high-sierra-recovery-is-still-online-but-broken

We all saw Google blow up their Chromecasts last month;

https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/13/google_chromecast_fix/

And Firefox baked a certificate in that killed all extensions by accident;

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/root-certificate-expiration

And these jokers wanna go through this every six weeks?

Ignore the certificate costs (Many will let you rekey for free); This sounds like a lot of planned obsolescence being built in to the whole system, which I suspect is the real benefit to Apple, Google, et all...

If nothing else, it's going to be a lot of users learning to hit the ignore and continue button on certificate errors...

Windows 11 adds auto-recovery, kills offline setup loophole

Re: Fun game

Quick update; Testing this today with a 7th Gen Surface Pro laptop with Windows 24H2 (build 26100.2033) install media, there is now a GUI Load drivers button during the Out of Box Experience: that means while you still need an "Add Driver" style LAN/Wifi software loaded onto a USB stick, at least you don't have to dive into the command prompt now - the lowest of low bars has been cleared.

Still, this is a MICROSFT SURFACE laptop, which didn't have a compatible LAN or WAN Driver baked into the install media; heck, it didn't have a touchscreen or keyboard driver loaded in, so had to use a USB set to get through setup - this is how good the driver support is in Microsoft's own hardware, let alone the myriad of other brands out there - this is not an edge case issue...

Fun game

Try talking a normal user through connecting a rebuilt machine to the internet for said "essential" Microsoft account if the Network/Wifi Driver isn't in that version of Windows install media - lots of secret shortcuts and powershell-fu.

Even as someone who *Can* do it, it quicker and easier to shove an old USB network device in.

removing /BYPASSNRO says loud and clear Microsoft care more about getting Microsoft accounts in place than you having a working PC.

what's the betting this is the prepwork for Windows 12 Home removing local accounts completely? Heck, at this point, I wouldn't bank on Windows 12 Pro allowing Domain Join over Azure...

Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users – including its own employees

Re: What about Outlook (less shitty)?

Reminder that as an Email client, Outlook is definitely mid and there's so much better out there, but as a PIM tool, it's near unbeatable, especially so if you want everything in a single app.

It's this fact that's given Outlook the chokehold it has on the business world, and also why it's so perplexing that Microsoft is pushing (New) Outlook so hard to standard users before it's feature complete compared to (Classic) outlook.

Re: What about Outlook (less shitty)?

Go to the Classic metro/Windows 7 style control panel, switch to Large icon view, then open the Mail (Microsoft Outlook) Applet.

Clicking email account, then change on the one you want to edit there will give you the full, oldskool Outlook 2010-2016 options screen, with all the features you need to both fix, and get yourself into trouble.

Only works for Outlook (Classic); Outlook (New) expect an ActiveSync account, or sends the details to the Microsoft servers to pickup POP3/IMAP email - that could be turned off in earlier versions, but not found a way to do that on the latest builds, yet.

Capital One cracker could be sent back to prison after judges rule she got off too lightly

Some people have been highly trained to be completely unusable.

Dell discloses monster 20-petaFLOPS desktop built on Nvidia's GB300 Superchip

Re: Gaming Benchmarks

FINIALLY We'll be able to play Crysis the way God and nature intended!

Microsoft wouldn't look at a bug report without a video. Researcher maliciously complied

I'm not too upset with people that prefer to follow along with video tutorials or troubleshooting, but I definitely prefer a written article I can follow and digest at my own speed; The fact that since "Pivot to Video" was a thing, that's the first thing search engines throw up now is a first world annoyance I have to put up with.

"Can you run sfc /scannow, please?"

Eight days later, Microsoft Outlook users still struggle on iOS devices

Clarifying opening line

It's the Apple's native iOS Mail app connecting to outlook that's the issue; Microsoft's iOS Outlook native client is running fine.

"The native Outlook email app for iOS" leaves a bit of ambiguity, but my support calls and the Status note on the 365 dashboard lines up with that way around.

Re: A Blessing

It's the iOS mail client connecting to Office365 that's the problem; We've not had any complaints about Outlook App on iOS Connecting to Office365;

I always recommend the native phone app over a 3rd party one, even Outlook, because it's better supported; in this case, it's bitten me back with quite a few clients.

Ad-supported Microsoft Office bobs to the surface

The Old is New again

So Office 2010 Starter edition all over again?

WordPress war latest: Ploy to trademark Hosted WordPress, Managed WordPress derailed

Just going to say it

wordpress may or may not have a point to all this fuss they're making.

but regardless of merit (or lack thereof), they're kinda being dicks about the whole thing; their approach from the get go has been loud, petty, and infantile - It's left them feeling like a less trustworthy partner to have from where I'm sitting.

Intel Capital next into the chip giant's trebuchet, to be shot as far over the wall as possible

Stupid question

If Intel Capital really did create $170 billion from a $20 billion investment, and it's not just a creative accounting swizz, *Why on earth would you want to sell it?*

New Outlook marches onto Windows 10 for what little time it has left

Re: SOP

Up until now, Outlook has been one of the Crown Jewels for Microsoft: It's a So-So Email client, but as a PIM tool, it's hard to beat with any single app.

New Outlook is ameanic in features, but that can be fixed if they can be bothered.

The biggest danger is what killed legacy Edge; Microsoft pushed unfinished, rapidly developing software as the default, rather than as an opt-in beta; The papercuts caught so many people, it irrecoverably damaged it's reputation - by the time it was actually production ready, nobody wanted to use it as "Edge is slow and bad"

The unspoken dangers of releasing early and often.

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

Stuff it - at this point, maybe we should go back to the 90's and have a curated Searchable directory, A la Yahoo.

Or if we want to open source it, maybe it's time for the re-emergence of Web rings...

Post Office CEO tells inquiry: Leadership was in 'dream world' over Horizon scandal

At a bare minimum, I want Fujitsu's expert witness Gareth Jenkins up on trial for perjury.

If we can't nail such a blatant abuse of expert witness privilege, then what hope do we have of getting the others with a fig leaf of deniability and diffused responsibility?

Windows 11 migration? Upgrade engine revs up, enterprises have no choice

Re: Big if

With Microsoft's overall push for cloud, I bet there's been several interesting and shouty internal conversations between the Windows division and the Azure division over Office for Linux...

Re: Big if

Many SMB and Enterprise IT houses are - rightly or wrongly - dependent on Windows; The idea of moving to *nix to keep perfectly fine pre 2018/2019 kit just won't come up as a discussion point for many of them; They'd rather run Windows 10 unsupported than switch OS.

So, rather than predicting a big uptick on Desktop Linux installs, I'm going to say if you're a hobbyist or enthusiast, get ready for some amazing deals on powerful-but-old enterprise kit - Get ready to grab a good deal on your next project box.

Eric Schmidt: Build more AI datacenters, we aren't going to 'hit climate goals anyway'

If we had honest to god AI, it may come up with some novel unintuitive... thing?? (Tech? Policy? Strategy? Kill all humans plan?) to stop climate change (???), but that's not what the Large language Models everyone insists on calling AI, or the basic algorithm AI's we have today can do.

And trying to build the ones that can, will doom us (faster) if they can't.

Is this something you want Move fast and break Things techbros taking a gamble on?

WhatsApp still working on making View Once chats actually disappear for all

Re: Disappearing privacy

That - this disclosure doesn't change the threat profile; even if whatsapp disable the phone's screenshot option while a view once message is on screen, you can still just photograph the screen. this feature by default has to assume someone can copy the message by hook or by crook.

AT&T intends to quit VMware, Broadcom claims in legal broadside

As entertaining as it is watching these two tear chunks off each other and paying through the nose for the privilege, it seems a pretty straightforward case to rule on: Is the extended support services clause in the original contract valid or not?

Anyone brave enough to bet whether VMware or AT&T Have the better contract negotiators?

In either case, I think VMWare have more to lose; suing your customers to Strong arm an Upgrade.. sorry, a streamlined and simplified license is really not a good look.

Oracle urged again to give up JavaScript trademark

I don't want to live in a world where the Flappy Bird trademark is forcibly taken, and oracle can squat on the JavaScript trademark for as long as they like, but I'm expecting that to be the end result of this story.