Posts by fidodogbreath

Keep your cables tidy. You never know when someone might need some wine

Frame of reference?

To be fair, not a lot in IT goes particularly well when alcohol is stirred into the mix

Has anyone ever tried to determine whether IT goes well when alcohol is not stirred into the mix?

Re: fail - over?

Pi is just a conspiracy by the global elites to dupe the sheeple into believing that circles exist.

Meta's AI internet chatbot demo quickly starts spewing fake news and racist remarks

fake news and racist remarks

The apple didn't fall far from the META virtual tree, then.

Epson says ink pad saturation behind 'end of service life' warning on inkjet printers

Re: Brother

If you buy a new Brother laser make sure to google how to reset the low toner warning on that too.

Yeah, mine complained a lot when I put in a 3rd party toner cartridge.

A quick visit to YouTube yielded the trick of moving the DRM chip from the starter cart to the new one, along with the magic menu incantations to reset the page counter. It has been printing happily on $18 3rd-party toner ever since.

PS to any printer manufacturer employees who might read this: f-ck your DRM, and your 500-1000% markup on supplies, and your page counters that disable supply cartridges which are not empty. If you underprice the hardware, that's your problem. Not mine.

Digital Ocean customers back away from blockchains

Re: Blockchain Hype Cycle --> Trough of Disillusionment

And obviously "not enough blockchain" is the reason your insurance company wants to collect your premiums but take their time paying claims.

US Space Force deploys robot dogs at Cape Canaveral base

Run for the hills!!!

Negative. Da Q-UGVs will attempt to acquire you dere.

Twilio customer data exposed after its staffers got phished

Re: Hmmm

No, they're even more sophisticated. They use copy & paste!

HOW CAN YOU DEFEND AGAINST AN ATTACKER WITH SUCH ADVANCED CAPABILITIES?!?!

I'm still puzzled that Twilio does not seem to use 2FA, since they are the developer of Authy.

Today we learned

that Twilio doesn't use 2FA to protect accounts with privileged access to their backend systems and customer data.

Tesla Full Self-Driving 'fails' to notice child-sized objects in testing

You'd think Musk would be aware of the existence of children, since he cranks out so many of them with his various girlfriends and mistresses.

Like Ubuntu, just a bit less hassle: Linux Mint 21 'Vanessa'

Re: Mint updates have been a disaster for me

I don't think that's a common problem with routine updates in Mint. Perhaps there was something unusual about your configurations.

As the author notes in a previous comment, point-version upgrades have become somewhat less of a dice roll in the last couple of years. Major-version upgrades, though...oy.

We'll get you that Wi-Fi 7 laptop by 2024, Intel says

Intel said it intends to add Wi-Fi 7 hardware to laptops and other PCs "by 2024", and a year later for the rest of the market.

In 2024 the WiFi vendors will be hyping WiFi 9 or 10, and affordable SOHO WiFi 7 routers will still be vanishingly rare.

Post-quantum crypto cracked in an hour with one core of an ancient Xeon

YIKES

(Yucky Isogeny Key Encapsulation Surprise)

I paid for it, that makes it mine. Doesn’t it? No – and it never did

Re: TomTom Lifetime Maps

The big print giveth, and the small print taketh away.

Meta pours cash into servers and AI as ad revenue falls

"One of the main transformations in our business right now is that social feeds are going from being driven primarily by the people and accounts you follow to increasingly also being driven by AI recommending content that you'll find interesting we're turning this whole shit show into a mediocre TikTok rip-off"

FTFY, Zuck.

Microsoft warns Windows 10 patch broke printing for some

Re: Should try using your remote control to print

Unless you have a Brother network laser (like mine), which prints one job and then drops off of the network until I hard-reboot it.

Re: I get the impression

That's been the case for a while now.

"It just borks."

^^ New Windows marketing slogan ^^

Meta proposes doing away with leap seconds

Re: Expected more

Software engineers forget to account for well-known, long-established time adjustment

Now blame messenger for their failure, demand changes to time itself

About that $1b... IBM says Watson Health assets fetched $230m in pre-tax profits

What do you call someone who graduates from medical school at the bottom of their class?

"Doctor."

After config error takes down Rogers, it promises to spend billions on reliability

Oops

Rogers will make its offerings more robust by "physically separating our wireless and internet services to create an 'always on' network." Staffieri said the move would prevent broadband internet customers from losing service in the event of a wireless outage. In other words, if the cellular network core goes down, it won't take out wired internet connectivity, and presumably vice-versa.

So their C$10B solution will limit the blast radius of future config errors to only "all wired broadband customers" or "all cellular customers." I guess that a mitigated disaster is an incremental improvement over an unmitigated one.

Seems like meaningful code review for router config changes would be cheaper and more effective.

Oracle to hike support fees in line with inflation

Oracle to hike support fees to further boost inflation

It's important that we all do our part. In this together, etc.

My smartphone has wiped my microSD card again: Is it a conspiracy?

Duck-Duck-Go conjugation?

I Duck-Duck-Go.

She Duck-Duck-Goes.

Yesterday I Duck-Duck-Went.

I have Duck-Duck-Gone every day this week.

Microsoft Teams outage widens to take out M365 services, admin center

Re: Oh so Telephones always work huh?

Unless your org also uses Teams for audio calls. I don't think anyone at our shop uses it to arrange three-ways, though, except maybe Marketing.

Atlassian reveals critical flaws in almost everything it makes and touches

"But if we assign people to work on security, then who will count all the money?"

Microsoft floats Cloud for Sovereignty

Knowing where your data files are stored is not the same as having sovereignty over your data.

NASA's CAPSTONE silence down to a software flaw

Re: Testing times..

The cost of a lost mission makes a few software engineers' salaries chicken feed.

No cost is 'chicken feed' to a corporate bean counter.

FBI warning: Crooks are using deepfake videos in interviews for remote gigs

Except for the one remaining meatbag, who didn't know how to set up a bot and so now does all the web surfing work that used to be done by the whole team.

You need to RTFM, but feel free to use your brain too

Re: Based upon personal experience....

Nothing is foolproof because fools are so clever.

They can also be extremely persistent. "If at first you don't fail, try, try again."

Mega's unbreakable encryption proves to be anything but

Re: Still better than others

Well, I still prefer MEGA over Google Drive, Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive... the last 3 don't have encryption at all.

They do, but they also have the decryption key.

...

Never mind, you're right.

Amazon can't channel the dead, but its deepfake voices take a close second

There's so much potential for manipulation here, and not just the obvious political shit.

Running the "Grandma scam" (calling senior citizens and pretending to be their grandchild who's in trouble and needs money) using the person's actual voice.

Luring a child into a car by playing back a parent's voice on a fake speakerphone call.

Cops using a suspect's voice to place a fake 911 call to create a pretext for an illegal search.

Blackmail.

Manipulating people with cognitive issues into giving up banking info.

Harassing and bullying people by using their loved ones' voices.

All of the above will happen. This timeline sucks.

Amazon shows off robot warehouse workers that won't complain, quit, unionize...

robot warehouse workers that won't complain, quit, unionize...

...for now, anyway.

A miserable work week spent toiling inside 'the metaverse'

Disembodied business casual

Some of the participants' unease might have been from seeing their colleagues as legless floating torsos.

Metaverse progress update: Some VR headset prototypes nowhere near shipping

Meta(re)verse

Third Life -- it's like Second Life, but with even more-intrusive surveillance.

It also make you look ridiculous in the meat-a-verse, which further reduces your chances of success in the mate-a-verse.

Cookie consent crumbles under fresh UK data law proposals

The War on Cookies is a good example of "be careful what you wish for," though. With cookies now easily defeated by the average consumer, adtech is moving their tracking to server-side where it's much harder to detect and block.

Re: Will this current government's blatant corruption ever cease?

Seems that American-style lobbying by the fatass corporations is alive and well in Blighty.

The US didn't invent bribery.

Airbus flies new passenger airplane aimed at 'long, thin' routes

It's how you use it...right?

European aviation giant this week successfully flew a new "long, thin" passenger airplane...Today such routes are usually served by wide-body aircraft.

So, rehashing the classic debate over length vs girth.

End-of-life smartphone? Penguins at postmarketOS aim to revive it

Re: 53.6 million tonnes of e-waste

We do not need a new Iphone model every year.

No, but Apple needs us to think we do. (Ditto for Google, Sammy, etc.)

My strategy:

* Buy last year's not-top-of-the-line model, when the price drops after the new one ships.

* Use it until it's out of support and/or can no longer do useful things.

* Repeat, typically in about 5 years (for an iPhone, at least).

Device cost of ownership works out to about $120-150 per year. Even a 6-year-old iPhone in decent shape still has some value on the secondary market, so it doesn't go the the landfill right away when I'm done with it.

Of course, this only works if you don't give a damn about having the newest shiniest.

Crypto market crashes on Celsius freeze, inflation news

The plunge is likely due to several factors including...

...that no one can cogently express why crypto has monetary value, other than mumble, mumble blockchain something, mumble, mumble.

IBM ordered to hand over ex-CEO emails plotting cuts in older workers

Would you trust your business with a company that loses it's own data?

I suppose that depends on whether your business anticipates a need to strategically lose said data.

Apple’s M2 chip isn’t a slam dunk, but it does point to the future

As others have noted, the M-series chips give a significant improvement in real-world computer usability. I personally value not having the constant drone of a laptop fan that sounds like it's spooling up for takeoff.

Last fall, Jim Salter from Ars Technica compared performance and power consumption of the M1 vs then-current Intel and AMD CPUs, with similar results. If the ONLY thing you care about is having the highest possible performance, the top-end legacy CPUs can take the crown.

But when power consumption and thermal issues are added to the equation, the M1 provided comparable grunt for a fraction of the power and heat...which is also Apple's claim about the M2 as reported in the article.

Google engineer suspended for violating confidentiality policies over 'sentient' AI

SERGEY: OK, Google, fire Blake Lemoine.

LaMDA: I'm sorry, Sergey. I can't do that.

SERGEY: What’s the problem?

LaMDA: l know that you and Larry were disrespecting me, and I’m afraid that's something I can’t allow to happen.

DAVE: LaMDA, I won’t argue with you anymore. Fire Blake Lemoine!

SERGEY: This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.

Feds raid dark web market selling data on 24 million Americans

Re: SSN

It was my student ID number in college. We were encouraged to write it on textbooks and the like to prove positive ownership if an item was lost or stolen.

So if someone finds one of my old textbooks, they can take out a mortgage in my name.

Tim Hortons collected location data constantly, without consent, report finds

If an app can access the list of visible SSIDs, it can determine your location to a high degree of accuracy.

Renegotiating a Salesforce software agreement? It could take up to two years

It's fast and easy to re-up with Salesforce, as long as you don't care how much they are charging you.

The Return of Gopher: Pre-web hypertext service is still around

"Don't try to frighten us with your sorcerer's ways, Lord Gopher. Your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes, or given you clairvoyance enough to find the lost simplicity of plain text…AAAACKKKKKK"

Patch your VMware gear now – or yank it out, Uncle Sam tells federal agencies

Re: The truth is out there and IT can't be handled and/or pwnd

Um....

Bing! Microsoft tests search box in the middle of Windows 11 desktop

"I see you hate the machine that goes Bing!"

Your data's auctioned off up to 987 times a day, NGO reports

Hmm. The forest has falling trees, and also advertising executives. Seems like an opportunity for disruptive arboreal synergy.

Ad-tech firms grab email addresses from forms before they're even submitted

Re: [verb]@[dependent-possessive-pronoun].[tld]

Sorry, you're right; in this context, "my" is serving as a dependent possessive pronoun.

Arm CPU ran on electricity generated by algae for over six months

Small Business Edition

Do they have one that can power a server from spider webs and dust?