Posts by DJV

Amazon's titchy robots hit the streets, Waymo starts a self-driving car factory...

"The service is currently being rolled out"

"rolled" snigger!

Data hackers are like toilet ninjas. This is not a clean crime, you know

Re: Inquiring minds want to know...

I once had a client who thought their "completely original" idea of using "letmein" as a password was extremely neat. Not only had she told me it in the first place, she then took a bit of convincing as to why it wasn't quite as neat and original as she'd thought.

Users... sigh...

Users fail to squeak through basic computer skills test. Well, it was the '90s

Mouse balls

When I worked in IT Support back around 1998 we used to get numerous complaints about mice not working due to the build up of crap on the rollers and balls. I used to remove all the balls and take them to the nearest "gents" and give them a soak in a basin of warm soapy water. Other staff entering the loo would ask, "What are you doing?"

"Washing my balls," I'd reply.

Google faces another GDPR probe – this time in the land of meatballs and flat-pack furniture

Re: Article photo

* You're

Pentagon cloud contract sueball: Oh no, Oracle doesn't need those docs, AWS tells court

Fully agree. However, it does look the force is stronger on the AWS side at the moment. I suspect much popcorn will be required before this all fizzles out!

Wow, fancy that. Web ad giant Google to block ad-blockers in Chrome. For safety, apparently

Re: Did I miss something???

The last update on the Tofino page was November 2016 (https://medium.com/project-tofino) and the last modification to the code on GitHub was July 2017 (https://github.com/mozilla/tofino). Looks pretty dead to me - hopefully, it will stay that way.

Struggling with GDPR compliance? Don't waste money on legal advice: Buy a shredder

Hmmm

I always seem to end up with lots of biros that no longer write (despite evidence of ink still being present). Maybe I should set up shop on Amazon and sell them off as "GDPR compliant".

Apple hardware priced so high that no one wants to buy it? It's 1983 all over again

"Overnight commercial typesetting companies went bust."

Not surprised if the silly sods only opened at night!

DNAaaahahaha: Twins' 23andMe, Ancestry, etc genetic tests vary wildly, surprising no one

Re: What about programmes like Jeremy Kyle?

Dunno about the DNA tests but they did find the audience registered 99% on the gullibility scale (the other 1% got lost trying to find the right studio).

Microsoft partner portal 'exposes 'every' support request filed worldwide' today

Another day...

...another Microsoft cockup.

Testing... yeah, we used to do that...

Sigh...

It’s baaack – Microsoft starts pushing out the Windows 10 October 2018 Update

"Thankfully, the buzzword of the day “AI” wasn’t used."

No, but "AAAAIIIIII!" will be the sound coming from users when they realise the damned thing has started downloading and installing, and there's bugger all they can do about it!

Three quarters of US Facebook users unaware their online behavior gets tracked

Re: The survey is self-selecting

Or, if they are a Facebook user and DO care about that sort of thing, then they use the FB Purity add-on.

what normal person would describe themselves as abnormal

Me, I'm both normal and abnormal! So there, nyah!!

Microsoft sends a raft of Windows 10 patches out into the Windows Update ocean

Re: Jet

I suspect there is also a Jet Yellow - well, MS do seem to be pissing on almost everyone with their latest releases/patches!

China's really cotton'd on to this whole Moon exploration thing: First seed sprouts in lunar lander biosphere

Re: Mung beans

You cruel bastard - I will be reporting you to PETV!

Re: The Tricky Part

They just need to invent plants with legs* so they can keep walking towards the sunlight!

(* just like in that documentary by John Wyndham).

Yes, you can remotely hack factory, building site cranes. Wait, what?

"issue simultaneous commands to multiple pieces of equipment"

Woohoo! How long before someone enters a whole bunch of synchronised cranes onto Strictly!

Army had 'naive' approach to Capita's £1.3bn recruiting IT contract, MPs told

"What they brought was an expertise we didn't have."

Does this mean that "expertise" can now be measured in negative values?

Nissan EV app password reset prompts user panic

I call bollocks!

I've moved whole web sites to different hosts where the website data contained encrypted passwords and that didn't require any such reset. Properly salted encrypted passwords contain all the information needed to determine the encryption used, even where several are in use on the same set of data. This means that there's no need to force a reset whatsoever.

German competition watchdog toys with ban on some Facebook data-slurps

About time

Maybe 2019 will be the year that Facebook data slurping will finally get reeled in. They also need to take a proper look at slurpage from others such as Google, Microsoft and Apple as well.

Windows 10 Insiders sent on quest deep into Registry to fetch goblet of Reserved Storage

"the OS remains very light on exciting new features"

Been that way for years unless your interpretation of "exciting" is way different to mine!

Peak Apple: This time it's SERIOUS, Tim

Nah, they'd probably try to patent it instead!

Just updated Windows 7? Can't access network shares? It isn't just you

Re: It's just criminal...

Maybe, but can they be sued for total incompetence?

Re: You must be new here?

Boiling the balls of the Redmond-based wasters that release this untested shit might get better results in the future!

Wanted – have you seen this MAC address: f8:e0:79:af:57:eb? German cops appeal for logs in bomb probe

Re: You forgot the joke icon.

Obvious joke does not require a joke icon!

Bish, Bash... gosh! Good ol' Bourne Again Shell takes a bow as it reaches version five-point-zero

Re: From the announcement ...

Hey, it's software - new bugs come as standard!

Dark matter's such a pushover: Baby stars can shove weird stuff around dwarf galaxies

"can be moved around with the power of heat"

Well, that accounts for the pizza that I thought was cooking in my oven still being in the freezer when the timer pinged!

Grab a bucket and spade: Sandbox open for Insiders again with fresh Windows 10 build

Sentence

Yeah, the bloody thing deserves a damn long sentence!

Huawei or the highway: Chinese giant whacks marketing drones for tweeting from iPhone

How...

...terrible!

_{Sent from the Inquirer}

More nodding dogs green-light terrible UK.gov pr0n age verification plans

wrong hands

If your data is already in the government's hands - then that definitely counts as being in the wrong hands.

New Horizons snaps finish buffering: Ultima Thule actually two dust bunnies that got snuggly 4.5 billion years ago

Demonstrating a disappointing lack of imagination, scientists have dubbed the larger sphere (12 miles across) "Ultima" and the smaller (nine miles across) "Thule".

Could have been worse... they might have called them "Little and Large" or, arguably even worse, "Cannon and Ball".

Insiders! The good news: Windows 10 Sandbox is here for testing. Bad news: Microsoft has already broken it

Cat pic

Well, we all know what cats tend to do in boxes of sand (or anything they sense will make a reasonable substitute for litter).

And, what the cats do there is what MS subsequently tend to do all over anything they ever manage to get right at least once!

New Horizons probe reveals Ultima Thule is huge, spinning... chicken drumstick?

"20 months for the rest of the data to be transmitted back to Earth"

A bit like the 1980s then, waiting for a CBM-64 to load a game from tape*!

(* or from a 1541 disk)

Bored IT manager automates Millennium Eve checks to ditch snoozing for boozing

"the project will be abandoned long before then, without even being completed."

Ah, you mean Google's modus operandi... which can also be summed up as Alpha, Beta (immediate release to the public), Dead.

Heard the one where the boss calls in an Oracle consultant who couldn't fix the database?

"I earned my pay on that project."

More like you earned the consultant's pay! I hope his pay incorporated an idiot tax!

France next up behind Britain, Netherlands to pummel Uber with €400k fine over 2016 breach

"breaches prior to May"

Do they call those "Camerons"?

Ho ho ho! Washington DC sends Zuckerberg a sueball-shaped present

Shit... meet fan

Excellent news for popcorn makers!

Ding dong merrily on high. In Berkeley, the bots are singeing: Self-driving college cooler droid goes up in flames

Re: "added battery monitoring software"

The battery monitoring software status will be one of: flat, charging, full and combusting.

Microsoft flings untested Windows 10 updates to users! (Oh no it doesn't!)

Trill

Ah yes, Trill, so they're feeding us budgie food as well now!

Stop us if you've heard this one: Facebook apologizes for bug leaking private photos

Re: "we realized it was an opportunity to invest even more heavily in privacy"

Ah yes, spin, spin, spin.

A more accurate statement would have been: "we were annoyed we were going to have to invest some profit in privacy just to shut the GDPR investigators up".

Ofcom asks networks, ISPs: Hey, wouldn't it be nice if you let customers know the best deal once their contract's up?

Yes, but...

...that would require ISPs to act in a decent manner and not out of greed and self-interest. I suspect that, for most of the well known ones*, the latter is far too ingrained for them to do the former.

*Yeah, there are exceptions - they are few and far between unfortunately.

Astroboffins spy a rare exoplanet evaporating before their eyes

I fully expect GJ3470b to get the Weight Watchers Inspiring Achievement Award for 2019.

Britain approved £2.5m of snooping kit exports to thoroughly snuggly regime in Saudi Arabia

Blair Institute for Global Change

Shirley that should be the Blair Institute for Global Change, Rape And Pillage (initially).

It's December of 2018 and, to hell with it, just patch your stuff

Generous Adobe gives out 87 Reader and Acrobat fixes

Not for me - I haven't allowed their buggy crap near my systems for years. It's bad enough having to deal with the ones from MS.

Supernovae may explain mass extinctions of marine animals 2.6 million years ago

Re: Shouldn't have it impacted animals living on land even more?

Only those not wearing hats.

Microsoft, you shouldn't have: Festive Windows 10 Insiders build about as exciting as new socks

January's "bug bash"

Oh, are they doing that "in-house" this time around instead of letting the victims, erm, lemmings Insiders do it for them?

Boffins build blazing battery bonfire

Henry

When I saw the name "Henry" I was expecting it to mean Professor Henry Brubaker!

Google: I don't know why you say Allo, I say goodbye

Allo

Is it significant that the only mention of Allo that I have any recollection about is this article? It's launch and subsequent presence bypassed me completely.

It's December 2018, and a rogue application can still tell your Apple Mac: I'm your El Capitan now

Re: The problem is...

There are plenty of alternative bits of software that claim to be able to do it - doing a search for "iphone data to pc without itunes" brings up lots of results though I have only personally checked out SyncIOS, which seemed to work fine - www.syncios.com

Capita: We are seeking staff to join our board. Just two please

Re: Can

Nah, too overqualified!