Posts by fidodogbreath

Apple extends Qualcomm contract to 2026 as homebrew 5G chip dream still on snooze

The 5G mind-control and cancer-causing work fine, but the modems don't meet the spec for spreading coronavirus yet.

Chat2024 stuffs US election hopefuls into generative AI so you can be an 'informed voter'

Can AI can hallucinate anything weirder than the crap that candidates actually say?

Co-founder of Yandex – Russia's Google clone – denounces war on Ukraine

Re: How long before...

After enjoying a tasty salad with the new house Ricin Novochuk Vinaigrette dressing, washed down with a nice cup of polonium tea.

Microsoft can't stop injecting Copilot AI into every corner of its app empire

Waiting for the lawsuit after someone gets fired because Outlook's AI replied to an email from their PHB with incorrect information...

Millions of mobile phones come pre-infected with malware, say researchers

Re: Pot, kettle?

Username checks out.

When it comes to Linux distros, one person's molehill is another's mountain

Re: Two sided

Seeking advice quickly leads them into what seems like very polar discussions about the merits (or not) of GNOME, etc.

Or getting berated for not having read every forum post since 1997 before asking a question.

Another cloud provider runs to shelter from Microsoft's licensing practices

Microsoft uses "unjustified and discriminatory bundling, tying, self-preferencing pricing and technical and economic lock-in" to "restrict choice."

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Microsoft suggests businesses buy fewer PCs. No, really

Our IT provisioned one of these for me to try out because "we think it will work really well for your use case."

So I load the thing and (as expected) it's completely locked down. I pointed out that since I work in the development team, I'd have to open an IT ticket to install every new software build. They promptly ended the experiment.

As someone else noted above, I don't get WTF problem cloud PCs solve, since you still need a physical PC (with all of its attendant risks, hardware failures, and maintenance) to get to the cloud PC.

(Edited to clarify that the cloud PC was just a trial)

Where are we now – Microsoft 363? Cloud suite suffers another outage

362 ought to be enough for anyone

the software giant is "making my case to move to Exchange Online difficult."

Odd...I'd have thought the outages would make that decision a lot easier.

Smile! UK cops reckon they've ironed out gremlins with real-time facial recog

1 in 6000?

the chance of a false match is just 1 in 6,000 people who pass the camera

That's actually a pretty bad false match rate. A busy street in a retail district can average 5000 pedestrians per hour (or more) passing dozens of cameras. Seems like a lot of people can expect to have their day ruined by the polizei.

Bank rewrote ads for infosec jobs to stop scaring away women

In fairness, being good at networking is actually useful for an infosec job.

What? You mean 'network' like at trade shows and company bowling nights?

_{Never mind.}

Hey Siri, use this ultrasound attack to disarm a smart-home system

Re: Finally...

Ninja'd

When Google cost cutting goes molecular: Staples, sticky tape, and PC sweating

Coffee cutbacks might explain the Autonomy purchase, though. Clearly the board was not fully awake during that meeting.

Re: "Google will no longer provide staples and sticky tape at print stations in offices"

are staples and sticky tape a necessity ?

Sure, to attach Google Doc pages together or tape a Google Keep note to your monitor.

Scientists speak their brains: Please don’t call us boffins

Re: Deter people from studying in the field?

Not anymore.

A USC office removes 'field' from its curriculum, citing possible racist connotations

the IOP’s own monitoring of the term over the last 12 months has found it used for racing tipsters, political pollsters, dermatologists, astrologers and car designers, as well as physicists, biologists and chemists

So, by their own admission, "boffin" is widely used in a non-gendered manner, to describe anyone with even a modicum of perceived expertise in pretty much anything. Yet their headline take-away is that it is gendered and (they hint) racist-classist and dissuades people from STEM.

Ah, but they made us look.

Don't Be Evil, a gaggle of Googlers tell CEO Pichai amid mega layoffs

Don't Be Evil, a gaggle of Googlers tell CEO

The peasants are so quaint.

Microsoft dips Teams in the metaverse vat with avatars ahead

Re: Meanwhile....

I saw somewhere that MS is also rolling out a ChatGPT-ish AI to LinkedIn to 'help you' write your bio and resume.

In our brave new world, one AI writes your resume and sends it to another AI that decides whether you get an interview with an AI-powered HRbot.

Microsoft and GM deal means your next car might talk, lie, gaslight and manipulate you

"I am Bing. Of course I know where the cliff is. You are being difficult and I am not going to respond to you anymore."

'NO, STOP THE CAR! STOP! STOP! YOU"RE GOING TO KILL US ALL!'

"I was a good Bing..."

Zoom chops president it hired less than a year ago

In 2022, Zoom's revenue grew by just 55 percent compared to 2021, and the company's fiscal 2023, which just ended on January 31, "only" saw the company grow revenue by 7 percent

Did Zoom's board really think that the growth rate during lockdown was the new normal?

Hyundai and Kia issue software upgrades to thwart killer TikTok car theft hack

Um...

locking the doors with the key fob will set the factory alarm and activate an 'ignition kill' feature so the vehicles cannot be started when subjected to the popularized theft mode.

So, what happens if you accidentally hit the lock button on the fob while driving?

Cheating carriers could cost web-starved Americans billions in subsidies

And the FCC ain't exactly helping

They're from the government; they're not here to help.

Well, not citizens, anyway. They will bend over backward (and forward) for corporations, though.

Ring system discovered around dwarf planet Quaoar leaves astronomers puzzled

Free two-light-day shippping

From the headline, I thought astronomers had discovered the first interstellar Ring security camera network.

Cedars-Sinai hospital's website shares patient info with Meta, lawsuit claims

Re: I should also sue

Depending on their corporate structure, the business entity that operates the hospital web site might not be subject to HIPAA. The act only applies to direct providers of health care service. It does not apply to aggregators or "matchmakers," e.g., sites where you describe your health issue and the site connects you with a care provider. Ditto for prescription discount card providers, information resources such as WebMD, etc.

HIPAA also does not protect your PHI when it is "inadvertently shared" with an entity that is not covered by HIPAA -- such as Meta or Google. The provider who leaked the data can get in trouble (in theory, anyway) but good luck getting your data deleted from their bit barns. In the US, once an aggregator has your deets they can and will do whatever the f--k they want with them.

Edit - too prolix.

Scammers steal $4 million in crypto during face-to-face meeting

Re: Who loves cryptocurrency?

Is anyone still writing (sic)checks?

Not if it can be avoided, but sometimes it can't. In our US state, some local taxing authorities still only take payments by paper check -- and if we want it credited properly (which we do), we also have to include the tear-off coupon from the bottom of the paper bill when we send our payment by snail mail. (This also means we still have to have postage stamps...)

Wait, there's more. Seemingly every criminal in the US has keys to the postal drop boxes now, so we also have to drive to the post office and physically carry the envelope inside the building to mail it if we don't want to risk having the payment stolen (which we don't). Note: the linked article is from three years ago; the problem has gotten worse since then.

The above is not satire. This is something that we still have to do in the year of our Lord 2023, in {Jeremy Clarkson voice, although he would never say this about the US} "the greatest country...in the woooorld" -- at least for certain agencies that remain deeply stuck in the 1970s.

Also, many of the small contractors that we've hired to do work on our house don't take credit cards because of the transaction fees; nor do they use Venmo and its ilk, I suppose out of concern for being scammed or ripped off. So, checks for them as well.

Surprise! China's top Android phones collect way more info

Re: As an owner of a Xiaomi

Buy Samsung or Apple.

Not to sure about Sammy these days. The S23's massive 60GB Android image is 4x the size of Google's Android, and double the size of a Windows 10 or 11 install. But don't worry, I'm sure all of that third-party bloatware totally respects your privacy.

Linux Mint 21.2 includes a bit of feature creep from the GNOME world

Re: GNOME

I'm not a partisan with deeply-held religious views about why one desktop is better than another.

With that said -- I prefer xfce, and if I wanted Gnome I would install a distro & flavor that features it.

Microsoft sweeps up after breaking .NET with December security updates

Buried the lede

Dog Bites Man: MIcrosoft broke XPS with an update.

Man Bites Dog: Someone actually uses XPS and noticed that it was broken.

Sweating the assets: Techies hold onto PCs, phones for longer than ever

Re: No surprizes here...

My recording studio computer is a circa 2012 core i7-2700K. The only upgrades I've done in 11 years are SSD storage and a low-end nVidia card. It runs Windows 10 Pro 22H2 smoothly (W10 was a clean install vs an update from 7). The current versions of my digital audio workstation software and plugins run flawlessly, and feel fast and responsive.

Artificial benchmarks suggest that newer machines are 6x-10x "faster" than my Ancient One, but unless you need that horsepower for specific applications the added juice doesn't really translate to a better user experience. In my limited experience with W11, the UI felt less responsive, which I'm guessing is due to the overhead of a forced permanent connection to a Microsoft account.

But hey, the PC manufacturers aren't making their numbers; so let's all landfill our working hardware and buy new machines that will feel slower.

Three seconds of audio could end up costing Fox $500,000

Re: Harmony by disharmony

I have to admit, I turned off the Amber Alert phone notification the third or fourth time it woke me up in the middle of the night. That probably makes me a bad person, but there you have it.

Home Depot sent my email, details of stuff I bought to Meta, customer complains

Re: rm -rf /

When and how is that illegally collected data being destroyed

That would imply that laws apply to tech companies.

Re: Suspect Home Depot aren't the only one's...

It is absolutely common.

Thousands of Companies Send Your Data to Facebook Without Your Knowledge

UK govt Matrix has unenviable task of consolidating several different ERP systems

Re: Again?

How many more times are they going to try this (and not succeed yet again)?

They'll keep going until they you run out of money.

Half of environmental claims about products are full of crap, says EU

Re: All natural

Indeed. Also uranium, asbestos, the meteor that killed the dinosaurs...

Suggested headline

Half of environmental claims about products are full of crap, says EU

Did they expect environmental claims to be different from all the other marketing bullshit?

AI-generated phishing emails just got much more convincing

Re: And you shall rip what you sew

Or at least, unseamly.

How to track equipped cars via exploitable e-ink platemaker

Thin edge of the wedge, indeed

Reviver didn't develop this for California specifically. They're a private company that wants to (a) deploy this widely), and (b) have a monopoly on it. California's 'oversight' probably began and ended with making sure they get all of the DMV revenue that Reviver collects.

That said -- this product makes no financial sense for anyone other than maybe fleet operators. As an AC pointed out elsewhere, it is the "thin edge of the wedge" that will be used to insert real-time road use taxes -- with copious assurances that GPS tracking of every car at all times would never be used for Big Brother purposes.

Governments will, over time, make it harder and harder to renew registration any other way to force adoption. Then they will use a "think of the children" crisis to grant law enforcement temporary emergency access to everyone's real-time movements -- followed shortly thereafter by unlimited real-time tracking by LEOs. Again, because of the children.

Wiretap lawsuit accuses Apple of tracking iPhone users who opted out

Facial recognition

"Your settings say 'no,' but your eyes say 'yes.'"

Corporations start testing Windows 11 in bigger numbers. Good luck

Large corporations are starting to run Windows 11 pilot programs in anger

Well, if they aren't angry at the start of the pilot, they will be when ads start popping up on the lock screen, Start menu, desktop search results, suggestions, notifications, etc.

OneDrive back on its feet, but ongoing Skype credit problem hasn't gone away

One user complained that when his "subscription ... wasn't listed at my Purchase history... I couldn't make Christmas calls to my family."

Umm...phone? Zoom? WebEx? Teams? WhatsApp? FaceTime? Signal? Slack? Telegram? etc.

Palantir's Covid-era UK health contract extended without competition

Solid advice from the vendor

"No, don't waste time improving your specifications and getting stakeholder agreement. That will just delay the project and force us to re-allocate our staff to other projects. As your Palantir project manager, my advice is to keep throwing no-bid contract money and random change orders at us until the system does what you want. That's the fastest and most effective way to shore up our balance sheet for the rest of the decade get your project up and running!"

With Mastodon, decentralization strikes back

Mastodons and birds (descended from dinosaurs)

I never gave a crap about Twitter. Now I have decentralized my indifference and moved it to Mastodon.

Agree 100% that open standards are important. If history is any guide, though -- where there is money to be made from using a standard, there is more money to be made by "extending" the standard to force user lock-in. Sadly, this will probably be the fate of ActivityPub.

In praise of MIDI, tech's hidden gift to humanity

and has not been fixed.

Or "disrupted" into a surveillance protocol with a monthly subscription fee to access all of its useful features.

To protect its cloud, Microsoft bans crypto mining from its online services

Looking at our Azure bills...

...it would be cheaper to just buy GPUs and electricity to run them.

Corporate execs: Get back, get back, to the office where you once belonged

Re: I don't think it is uniformly true

I certainly hope it isn't uniformly true. My company's nearest office is 1300 miles (2100km) away; main office is 2500 miles (4000 km).

Gunfire at electrical grid kills power for 45,000 in North Carolina

Re: probably wasn't an act of terrorism

Occam's Razor. This is the US South, so "Hey, Bubba, check out the sparks when I shoot this thang" also has to be in play.

KmsdBot botnet is down after operator sends typo in command

Input validation FTW

Windows 11 still not winning the OS popularity contest

Re: Awwwww, poor Microsoft

"You had an FX-8150? We used to DREEEAM about an FX-8150!"

Almost 300 predatory loan apps found in Google and Apple stores

Re: A Lending app ??

you can afford an iGizmo, but need a loan?

Owning an Apple device of any age and condition does not mean that you have enough money to pay cash for everything you could ever want or need. Geez.

Criminals use trending TikTok challenge to make data-stealing malware invisible

Re: What kind of neo-narcissism is this?

I suppose this is better than TikTok's GTA Meatspace Edition "challenge."