Posts by NightFox

Microsoft still not said anything about unexpected Windows Server 2025 installs

Re: Don't give Musk ideas

Don't make the classic error of mistaking the means by which a vehicle is powered with the means by which it is controlled. The only difference between an EV and ICE is how the wheels are turned. Everything else runs off the 12v system, is independent of the drivetrain and is common to both types of vehicle.

In other words, all the threats/fears/scaremongering (depending on your personal point-of-view) about features or even vehicles being disabled by manufacturers or hackers are just as pertinent to modern ICEs as they are to EVs. The attack vectors are the same. All that 'that's why I'm not getting an EV, I'll stay safe with my ICE' is unfortunately an ill-informed false sense of security.

UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good

Given that the latest(?) conspiracy theory seems to be that the sun has been replaced by one or more giant multiple-LED arrays, can't we just get the Rothschilds, CIA, Illuminati or whoever's responsible for these things to leave it turned on for longer so we can have a constant sunrise and sunset time all year round

If cost in as issue, they could always turn it off for a hour or so at about 2:00pm as I don't think people would be too bothered at that time.

A working Turing Machine hits Lego Ideas

I've been using Stud.io for years but it was only on seeing it written in this article that I 'got' the name.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Re: Good

There are three types of driver:

- Those who make mistakes and learn from them

- Those who make mistakes but deny them

- Those who make mistakes but aren't even aware of them

I'd question the honesty and/or awareness of anyone who claims that their driving's so good that there's no benefit to be gained from safety systems. And the arrogance of those who resort to cheap and personal attacks saying that anyone who simply makes use of them shouldn't be driving.

Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

Re: Ok adding my not so consipracy take...

Or the moral of this story is just order click and collect, no need to even leave the store to do so.

HP print rental service seeks more users to become subscription addicts

Re: "...more users to become subscription addicts."

And people who think that anyone with preferences, needs, opinions or circumstances which are different from their own are smooth-brained, non-thinking, fucking sheep.

Apple Vision Pro units returned as folks just can't see themselves using it

As with all expensive new Apple products, I'm sure that there's a significant amount of Day 1 buyers who purchase with an intent to try it and likely return it, rather than intending to keep it. Some people take the approach of why book an appointment and then go to an Apple Store for a 30-minute demo when you can have it delivered free to your own home, use it as much as you want for 2 weeks and return it, all at no cost if you pay by credit card?

How would that even work though? You'd take your product into an Apple Store to return it and what, they'd ask for your social media accounts and then have a quick trawl of the Internet before agreeing to give you a refund?

Great, another "I'll get some easy upvotes by rolling my eyes at another mainstream big tech product" bingo post.

X accused of taking money from terrorists by selling checkmarks to US enemies

I always thought that TTP was an acronym for The TTP Project.

Apple makes it official: No Home Screen web apps in European Union

Re: Did anyone ....

Unlike in the US where the 'letter of the law' tends to be the only thing that matters, European courts give much more weight to the actual intent of the law.

Turning round the question that somebody posed above, does Apple really think the EU is just going to go "Oh, OK, you sure outsmarted us there Apple. Well done and carry on"?

Cloudflare defeats another patent troll with crowd-sourced prior-art army

"Patent trolls create what we consider to be an unfair, unjust, and inefficient system that throttles innovation and threatens emerging companies,"

I'd argue that's the creation of a broken patent system; the trolls are merely exploiting it.

You could have heard a pin drop: Virgin Galactic reports itself to the FAA

Seriously, how do these mistakes even happen? I mean it's not rocket science.

Amazon Ring sounds death knell for surveillance as a service

Re: Correction for UK readers

To add, as the edit post feature doesn't seem to be working today: There are plenty of judges who take a great amount of pleasure from going out of their way to find any reason to refuse a warrant (and arguably rightly so) whether or not that suits your narrative.

Re: Correction for UK readers

@AC re "Or. to put it another way, no judge has ever refused a warrant from our blameless police."

What a demonstrably and ridiculously false comment.

Re: Police have always been able to ask for evidence without a warrant

But these weren't requests to Ring, they were direct requests from the police to the camera owners that Ring just happened to facilitate. Ring didn't play any part in the yes/no decision. If the owner said no, the police didn't get their footage (at least not without pursuing other channels, but that's not unique to this situation).

HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten

Re: Obsession with colour printing is the problem

..."Even the fancy wax printer things that we had in the 90s in our research lab (can remember what they were called)"

Dye sublimation printers?

Ransomware payment ban: Wrong idea at the wrong time

Re: Rename

This touches on why legislation banning ransom payment in human kidnap-for-ransom cases has regularly failed to be effective. In those cases it's routine to bring in commercial specialists to do the negotiation with the kidnappers, so you either end up where the intermediary is a legitimate company who effectively just act as an agent to make the ransom payment (e.g. kidnappers demand $1m to release your daughter, you pay company $500k to get your daughter back, they pay kidnappers $250k ransom after negotiation and get your daughter back for you, without you ever knowing a ransom was paid). In parts of South America, kidnappers are so aware that this is how it works that they will adjust their initial ransom demand to allow for this. The second practice is where the kidnappers say "we will only negotiate through Company X", which is just a criminal front connected to the kidnappers. So you pay Company X large amounts of money and they successfully negotiate the release of your daughter without any ransom being paid.

It's very difficult to stop those things, especially where expertise to negotiate (or get rid of the ransomware) often needs to come from a different country/jurisdiction, and they're both equally applicable to ransomware.

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

Re: Long-term profit opportunity???

You don't need the cash - haven't you seen the explosion in the number of vehicles in car parks being stripped for parts by thieves over the last few years? Premium cars are no longer the targets of thieves, it's now the out-of-warranty Fiesta and Yaris drivers who need to worry.

Re: Hmmm..

"Ford have just bricked some of their EVs with a failed s/w update and not long ago there was a recall as the safety plugs were melting and stranding drivers. A Kia in Canada (I think) has been written off as it grounded out on some rough terrain and has bent the battery pack causing an internal water leak."

Maybe, but OTA s/w updates aren't unique to EVs, Modern ICEs are drive-by-wire and are just as software dependent and prone to this. Likewise, they suffer from catastrophic faults that strand drivers. And they have mechanical vulnerabilities. Several early (modern) ICE Mini Cooper S's had their engines trashed sat at junctions if a car drove across in front of them through a big puddle and splashed water into the supercharger/air intake on the bonnet.

The fact that EVs have similar vulnerabilities to ICEs doesn't really seem to take the debate in any direction.

Re: Hmmm..

"6. Fuelling a petrol/diesel can be done in 5 mins, EV charging is around 3-4 hours min."

As others have already pointed out, your 3-4 hours is way off the mark. But regardless of that, this illustrates the mindset change that people often fail to make when considering EVs. Yes, a mile-for-mile recharge v refill out on the road certainly does take longer, but the more important consideration is the significance of that, especially if you've got home-charging facilities. Like most people, when I was looking at making the switch to an EV, charging infrastructure was foremost in my mind. 6 years later, with 70,000 miles under my belt, I've public-charged 5 times, and the only two 'full charges' were in the middle of 400-mile drives which served as a welcome chance to rest and eat. Other times when I've needed a public charge to get home have been much quicker as you only need to charge what you need; you don't need to 'fill it up' when that'll happen overnight when you get home. When you get in your car every morning and you've got 200+ range in the tank, then for some people that's always going to be enough.

Of course there are people in very different circumstances and EVs certainly aren't (currently) viable for everyone, so I personally don't get upset or angry whether people ultimately do or don't choose to go EV. However, it's frustrating to see people making those decisions based on incorrect perceptions, false or outdated information, or legacy ICE fuelling mentality.

Re: Hmmm..

"7. Are the RAC, AA, GreenFlag, etc all ready to head out and repair EVs? I assume they're already doing some of the work on the road. More spares in vans needed during the final 5 year countdown."

I'd strongly suspect that most breakdowns in modern (ICE) vehicles are already in some way electrical or software related, or of such mechanical complexity that a roadside repair isn't going to be achievable. The days of giving the starter motor a whack to release a stuck solenoid or having a spare part on the van that's compatible with 90% of cars on the road are well and truly gone.

Re: Hmmm..

"Another that always comes to mind is the cost to insure EVs vs a comparable ICE vehicle"

That really isn't my experience - I'm on my 2nd EV now and will be moving to my 3rd in a few months time, and the insurance premiums have been pretty much the same as what I was previously paying for my ICE cars, despite the EVs being considerably more expensive and much higher performance. Comments I see about insurance in various EV forums suggest that this experience isn't unique to me. My wife went from an ICE Mini Cooper to an Electric Mini EV and her premium went down by almost £100/yr.

Of course insurance premiums can be very obscure, in the way that a slightly different vehicle, a different postcode, a different description of the same job or a different brand from the same insurer can cause premiums to double or even worse, so I've no doubt there are some people in some circumstances who may be getting obscene insurance quotes for EVs, but I don't think it's a general 'thing'.

As for 17 year olds driving 500+ bhp vehicles though, that's going to be a different matter, just as it already is with ICE vehicles.

Windows keyboards to get a Copilot key – but how quickly will users jump?

"Are the decision makers at Micros~1 really stupid enough to believe i am going to pay for a new keyboard just to have a new button to more comfortably start Copilot?"

No, but they believe as use of AI gets more commonplace, buyers of new computers are potentially going to be more inclined to favour a keyboard that provides instant access - and if that's part of the hardware it gives MS opportunity to link the key to CoPilot as the default, knowing that a large number of personal users will leave it at that, in the same way that they continue to use Edge as the default browser and the majority of iPhone users continue to use Google as their search engine.

Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files

And what do your backups actually include?

Unless you had a local copy of the file on your device, then all you're backing up is a link to a Cloud server that's already lost the file you're trying to recover.

I've seen people post about similar issues with iCloud Drive, though that tends to be losing arbitrary files over an extended period of time, so it typically takes much longer to notice. Whilst the majority of replies are of the "No, it's inconceivable that Apple could lose your files, it must be user error", there's also invariably the "It's your fault for not understanding the difference between syncing and backup" ones.

Trouble is, it isn't that straightforward as Apple often offloads local versions of files and in some cases even automatically excludes synced files from backups with Time Machine, so when you do find iCloud has randomly deleted some of your files, even if you've still got backups going back far enough, there's no guarantee they will even have been included in it. I'm not sure if Google Drive also works the same way.

A cheap Chinese PC with odd components. What could go wrong?

Re: try the linutop

Yeah but that's what people say about the 2CV.

Lawyer's Microsoft email snafu goes from $1.75M lawsuit to Ctrl+Alt+Settle

Aren't service providers' liabilities normally limited in cases like this? Same way that if I post something worth millions with just a first class stamp on it and it goes missing, I couldn't then expect Royal Mail to be liable for its value. Given that service providers have no control over the value associated with use of their services and in the absence of any specific guaranteed level of service, then this would seem reasonable. If loss of an email account could have such massive financial consequences for a business, then maybe better business continuity planning was needed?

IBM shows off its sense of humor in not-so-funny letter leak

"While the content of the letters is seemingly intended for IBM staff only, Big Blue's customers that rely on the venerable firm to care for their important data might perhaps wish to ask how this silliness made it into view."

Suggesting that the only thing that has less of a sense of humour than IBM is IBM customers.

Microsoft wants Activision so badly, it's handing streaming rights over to ... Ubisoft?

Part 2: Microsoft Shocks Market with Acquisition of Ubisoft

Tesla knew Autopilot weakness killed a driver – and didn't fix it, engineers claim

From reports I've seen before linked to autonomous driving, it's often been the case that Tesla's have just driven straight under trailers as the trailers floor sits above the camera's line-of-site, whereas they would have 'seen' barriers. The unfortunate end result is that trailer platform is often at the right height to slice through the A-pillars and decapitate occupants. Whilst hitting a trailer barrier at 70mph may still prove to be fatal, at least it gives the car's safety/crash system a chance to try to minimise the impact, and impacts at slower speeds would certainly be survivable, whereas I would imagine the speed necessary to take the top of the car and somebody's head off would be pretty low.

Whilst I know it's not the point of this article, I do wonder how many of these accidents and deaths (and others not attributable to autonomous driving) would have been avoided if American trailers had 'barriers' fitted underneath them between the tractor unit and the rear wheel(s) like they do in other parts of the world which (a) prevents vehicles driving under them and (b) enhances their visibility to autonomous driving systems.

NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2

Re: Off topic

Hell yeah, I remember some of those large software packages took up nearly a whole floppy disk

Re: Voyager 1 & 2

"It's still the same technology - what have we invented since the 1970's that wasn't invented for Voyager?"

I'll start the ball rolling with this: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2424996/Rollie-Eggmaster-gadget-puts-food-stick.html

Microsoft’s Dublin DC power plant gets the, er, green light

Re: Madness. but it is Microsoft so what do you expect

"Guess where the prevailing winds will push that CO2? Yep, the UK and IOM"

CO2 isn't localised like radiation, it's cumulatively and uniformly absorbed into the atmosphere, with a bit of seasonal and fixed geographic variation. You don't get a cloud of it blow over the UK and end up with a couple of days of climate warming over the Pennines until it passes over.

Microsoft whips up unrest after revealing Azure AD name change

Re: Azure AD

Advanced product* naming guide:

1. Pick a verb associated with the purpose of said product

2. Stick an 'a' or 'ia' on the end of it.

Voila. My invoice is in the post.

*Can also be used to name/rename companies; q.v. Arriva, Consignia

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

I once worked with someone who gave their son the same Christian name (and obviously surname) as them (it wasn't a son inherited from another marriage or anything like that). Why you'd want to do that in the first place seems odd to me, but also given the obvious problems and confusions it could only lead to I could never understand why it would seem like a good idea. At least the Americans use 'Senior', 'Junior' or I, II, III etc when they feel compelled to do that.

That said, I know from researching my family tree, this seems to have been quite a common thing to do in the middle ages - even recycling names if an earlier child died, but in those days it seems you only had about half a dozen names to choose from anyway, and I guess there weren't many problems with getting Amazon deliveries mixed up in the same household back then.

Re: Unique keys

It doesn't have to be the unique key for this to happen, all it needs is for the system to 'smartly' match an entry to an existing identical record linked to a unique key.

Key = 67, Name = "John Smith" - therefore if Name == "John Smith" then Key = 67

When I was in the military, I spent a couple of years on a base where there was somebody with the same name (and rank) as mine, which unfortunately led to a considerable amount of opening mail and trying to work out which one of us was the intended recipient. We got round a bit of it (such as bank statements) by getting the sender to include our middle initials, which were thankfully different.

However, at one point I tried to open, by mail (this was in the early 1990s), a share-dealing account with The Share Centre and that got really messy, as it happened that my namesake already had an account. It would seem that when TSC received my application, some bright spark saw that they already had somebody with the same name and address in their system, so decided I was the same person (this was before anti-money laundering legislation) and executed the buy instruction I'd included with my application against their account without digging deeper, such as noticing that bank details and signatures were different. In those days of quarterly statements by post, It took a several months before this came to light, and then a lot to-ing and fro-ing to sort the whole mess out.

Amazon Prime too easy to join, too hard to quit, says FTC lawsuit

If you know you will comfortably get through life without ever needing a mortgage, a business loan, a phone contract or making any other similar financial commitment - or at least not being concerned over how much extra you have to pay for these things compared to most other people, then I guess not. However, I would suggest that for the vast majority of people, that isn't the case and therefore your advice is irresponsible at best.

Is 'credit rating' something that doesn't really feature in your life then?

I guess things must have changed a lot because I always remember several years back wanting to cancel a prime subscription that I'd stupidly allowed to go beyond the free trial period - I was all set for the usual helpless battle and being tied in for the next 12 months, but the process couldn't have been simpler and the money was refunded in full within a couple of days.

Apple stomped all over NYC store workers' union rights, judge rules

Re: The managers who removed the flyers ...

> "The managers who removed the flyers can, presumably, be identified from the CCTV. They were breaking the law, they should be held personally accountable"

Whilst true, this wasn't Tim Cook going into the break room and removing the flyers. I imagine some of these 'managers' would just be one level up from the floor staff, so not exactly C-suite, and would have just been implementing directives from above rather than acting on their own initiative on behalf of Apple. Although 'only following orders' is no defence, to go after them would seem to be using them as scapegoats.

Virgin Media email customers enter third day of inbox infuriation

Re: Critical emails on vermin? You've only yourself to blame

A bit unfair and unrealistic I think - these days email plays a pretty critical part in most people's lives, not just the small percentage who have the technical know-how to understand the need and be able to diverge their email service from the company who also brings them Facebook, Xbox Live and Netflix.

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

I bet all those people with pacemakers are delighted they won't have to rely on hospitals to replace their batteries any more.

With dead-time dump, Microsoft revealed DDoS as cause of recent cloud outages

When your target gives you a cooler name than you gave yourself.

Users of 123 Reg caught out by catch-all redirect cut-off

Re: 123-Reg still have customers?

I transferred all mine to Cloudflare last year. No transfer fees, no renewal fees till the original renewal was due (so you don't lose anything if you've just renewed with your current provider), and at-cost pricing.

https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/registrar/

iPhones hook up with Windows as Microsoft’s Phone Link dials up Apple's iOS

It always surprises me how people who wouldn't touch Facebook with a bargepole are quite happy using WhatsApp. Yes, your actual messages may be encrypted, but the traffic data (which is still personally connected to you) is massive. What groups you connect with, how often, who your contacts are, how frequently you message them, what groups they're members of, etc. And of course, all your friends' and contacts' phone numbers that you've shared with Meta without your friends' knowledge or permission.

UK watchdog blocks Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition

Re: Disagree

"UK bans an American company from acquiring another American company. Yes I can see this being effective. Unless the 2 entities have a uk office, there’s not a jot the CMA can do about it except moan."

Judging by MS's reaction, they seem to see this as more of an issue than you do: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-65407005

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

Re: Hmmm

Egg-heads, because surely an egg has to be gender-inclusive?