Posts by big_D 6992 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2009
Sorry, in this case, Tencent are correct, FreeWeChat would break trademark laws in most countries. I would say the provider had little choice.
If they had been posting it at another domain (fwc.greatfire.org or something) that would be another matter, but using a trademarked name is a bit silly. I hope they get ti sorted out, it sounds like they are doing an important and good job, but this sounds like a bit of a Karen response on their part.
To combat this type of vulnerability, AI systems must have stronger contextual awareness and multi-layered validation systems, according to Figueroa.
No, the training sets should be stripped of this sort of information and user prompts that include sensitive information should automatically not be added to the training sets.
So far, this generation of AI has been all about cutting corners and damn the consequences. Don't get me wrong, I think they can be useful, but the training sets need to properly curated.
And don't get me started on the "we need the information to train our AIs, so we shouldn't have to pay for the information" trope that most of these AI companies spew out.
We need megawatts of electricity and the raw materials to run our production facilities, but the electricity companies and out suppliers get rightly miffed if we steal the energy or the raw material from them without paying. These AI companies need the raw data and get offended when the owners of the data tell them to stop or to pay up...
We still have a few XP machines kicking around the labs. The lab equipment they are connected to only works with XP, nothing newer, not even Windows 7 XP Mode, but they are all air-gapped, have local printers and the results are then filed in folders.
I know an admin at another company that has a CNC machine that only runs on XP. When they need support, the supplier asks for the TeamViewer number to do remote support. They are told, that as soon as they deliver a version of the software that runs on a supported version of Windows, they can get a TV number, otherwise they will have to "remote control" the operator in order to sort out the problem.
I have a 2016 HP laptop and a 2017 Ryzen 1700 desktop both running Windows 11 for over a year... Both get updates fine.
Microsoft "could" decide to turn off support at any point, that is the risk you have to run. That said, by the time MS probably get around cutting off updates for unsupported hardware, that hardware will probably be at least 10 years old, so will have had a good run for its money. The HP laptop (Core i5) is so slow under Windows 10 these days, I'm seriously thinking of swapping it to Linux, where it will replace my 2010 Sony Vaio laptop, which runs SUSE Tumbleweed.
That said, these days, I tend to hardly power them up, I do most things on my MacBook Pro with Parallels and Windows 11 and Ubuntu VMs... It saves the hassle of swapping back and forth between physical machines, I mainly ssh into the Sony these days, along with my Raspis.
I've had a few managers who took the blame for the department over the years and several that tried to push the blame further down the tree...
I've tried to become one of the former over the years.
When I was working on a job for a finance department at a customer, we had to recalculate Essbase hypercubes twice a days... Process:
1. Backup bottom row data
2. Delete all data from the hypercube
3. Load bottom row data from backup
4. Recalculate
The delete data and reload was standard OP for Essbase back then. A clean calculation from an empty cube took around an hour, a re-calculation of a full cube took around 8 hours...
I went through the process a couple of times, then the next time through, I somehow got distracted and started at 2... And, oh, no current data to load! I asked the junior dev who had been responsible for the database what we do now? He said, load the previous backup and blame it on the users. I was horrified, so I went to the Finance Director and my stomach was really rebelling, but I told him exactly what had happened, that the database had a transaction log and we would load the previous backup, replay the transaction log and the users should double check the data, once the cube had re-calculated, and that it would take around 2 hours, instead of 1 hour.
I loaded the backup, played the transaction log and recalculated. It turned out it worked and we lost a total of 2 transactions.
My honesty gained me the trust of the finance director and we had a very good working relaitonship after that.
Key word there, learned... I learnt sitting on my fathers lap, driving his car when I was 8 or so, driving up the 2 mile long private road to the farm where my uncle worked.
But, I learnt to drive, my dad didn't just give me the keys, I had to learn how the steering worked and later, how the pedals worked and how to shift gear. I was taught cadence braking, how to handle a slide etc. long before I was old enough to drive on the road and take my test.
It is incredible the number of open and freely accessible cloud servers, with PII data and who knows what, which can be accessed by anyone. So making the default more secure and making those setting up the servers actually think about what they are doing for a second is sensible, even if it is going cause some devs to actually have to know what they are trying to accomplish.
I've said for over 25 years now, all new systems should default to secure and you should have to explicitly weaken the configuration to the point you need and is acceptable for your security posture. Defaulting to wide-open and hoping the person configuring the system even has a clue what security is, is totally the wrong way to go about these things, especially if these things are on the Internet in the first place.
A new server or database set up on premises, behind the firewall that defaults to an insecure default state is bad, but at least you usually have time to deal with the settings, before it goes on line. When it is an Internet facing server, it verges on the criminal to default it to an insecure state.
Yes, it means that those setting up these services need to know what they are doing, but, so, what? You can't drive a car until you have learnt to drive, either.
Yeah. I use NextDNS, I used to use PiHole, but the Pi became unstable (kept losing its network settings, which is kind of essential when it is acting as DNS server) and I didn't have the time to re-install the system and setup a new server, so I switched to NextDNS, which also has the benefit of blocking when I'm out and about with my phone.
We have a few iPhone SE 2020s coming back in now - we have a 2 year replacement cycle, but most don't bother asking for a new phone, they hardly use it for anything more than calling and email, so as long as it works and the battery lasts a day, they don't really care any further...
But the SEs are being re-used as SIM-less devices with out telephone system app and Wi-Fi for calling within the factory, instead of DECT telephones.
Mine uses the card reader. It reads the transaction info off the screen and shows it on the reader's display, so you confirm the recipient and the amount, then it hashes it with the debit cards secure element and spits out a transaction number, which I type into the phone app or my PC's web browser. If the recipient or the amount change in transit (MitM attack), the transaction fails, because the code is no longer valid.
Luckily the banks here have to adhere to BaFin, so they can't sell the information, heck, they can't even use the information internally for advertising other banking products without getting permission first.
My bank doesn't I have a separate card-reader dongle that reads a flashing "bar code" on the screen to read the account number and amount, for example, and then hashes it with the debit card's ID and spits out a number unique to the card, the recipient and the amount, so even a man-in-the-middle can't change the recipient or the amount, because you have to confirm both on the card-reader device.
I had to upgrade my iPhone 13 Pro last year. I hadn't intended to, but my daughter's old iPhone X was on its last legs and she couldn't put apps on it AND take photos of her kids... So I had to sacrifice my iPhone 13 Pro and got a 16 Pro, order from she-who-must-be-obeyed.
My wife is still rocking her old 13 and not looking to upgrade it any time soon.
My previous phone, a Samsung Galaxy S20+ was given to my other daughter, when I got the iPhone 13 Pro, and she is still using the S20+. The Nexus 5x before that was given to a colleague, whose mother needed a new phone, a few other has also been donated to people who couldn't afford to buy phones - one of my wife's friends has had a succession of hand-me-down phones, mostly sub 200€ Wicko phones that the previous owner gives her after 3-4 years of use.
So, we might not be trading our old phones in, but we aren't necessarily recycling them or putting them in a drawer either.
Don't forget, the USA doesn't add sales tax to prices, because varies from town to town, almost, certainly from county to county. EU prices have to include the tax.
Also, the USA is a much bigger market for keyboards with that layout, each European country has its own layout, so they are made in smaller volumes, which ups the price a bit. But that would put it, at the current exchange rates, at just over 70€...
That was my first thought as well. USB ports are a real problem on modern laptops and mini-desktops.
Our Dell docks have 3 USB-A and 2 USB-C ports, the desktops generally 3-4 USB-A ports and maybe a USB-C, and we need to plug in headsets, camera, mouse and keyboard for the standard set-up, before we move onto specialty hardware. Many are already using at least one USB port on the laptop as well.
Either having 2 cables to one USB plug or daisy-chaining the mouse makes so much sense, but hardly anyone bothers. I think the only keyboards I've had over the years that allowed that were the Apple crumb-catcher and a Razer Blackwidow.
The problem is the US Government and the CLOUD Act.
MS fought the US Government for years over an email account in Ireland, claiming that they needed to get a local court order to access the account. That didn't please successive administrations, from Shrub on. It has gotten progressively worse, with the Patriot Act and the the FISA Court, then ignoring Safe Harbor long enough that the EU claimed it was null and void, then came Privacy Shield, which Trump 1.0 blindly ignored and they introduced the CLOUD Act, which essentially says, any servers on foreign soil belonging to a company with a "presence" in the USA fall under US jurisdiction and the cloud owners have to illegally hand over the data stored on those foreign servers upon request (illegally from the point of view of the companies using those services and having to follow local laws, which make handing over the data without a valid court order from their jurisdiction illegal and the data owners could face imprisonment, because their cloud hosting partners ignored the laws in place and followed the CLOUD Act and handed the data over...
With Trump 2.0 the situation is only getting worse, with ever more uncertainty about the costs and availability, plus the random behaviour that could see all the data handed over to the US, thus the directors of those European entities using cloud services with a presence in the US, could end up in prison...
The big companies also tried to strangle new technologies, so that it didn't damage their stranglehold on the market. IBM failed, but Microsoft, Apple, Google and especially Meta have succeeded in killing competition to their dominant positions.Is ChatGPT going to be the next Microsoft that slipped through the fingers of the previous generation of businesses?
God, I hope not, but as you say, innovation was strangled as it tried to stand on its own two feet.
As somebody who spent years testing code, I really hate the current state of defending error prone systems, like LLMs, as if having to live with mistakes is what we should accept.
His story about writing the QuickDraw code for circles and ovals using integers, because the 68000 couldn't do floating point, so couldn't use square roots and Pi, is also amazing, but widely reported, as is his story of Steve's reaction, "that is great, can we also do rounded corners on rectangles?" To which he said, that it was impossible and nobody needed it, Steve pointed out everything in the room with rounded corners, then took him outside, when he saw a street sign with rounded corners, he gave in and said he would see if he could do the impossible, he came back the next day and showed off the rounded cornered rectangles...
The rest, as they say, is history.
I remember using Mac Programmer's Workbench and those huge Addison Wesley programming reference books in the late 80s, to write Pascal code on the Mac. We also had Lightspeed Pascal and Lightspeed C, but MPW was great, because it brought something to the Mac that was missing in the original Mac OS... A command line!
I also used Hypercard for several projects, from simple presentations to a full training course booking system for our training division.
Partially, but you have to take into account, this isn't profit, this is just how much margin there is on actually making the product. You then have marketing, personnel costs beyond the manufacturing process (HR, legal, marketing, sales, purchasing etc.), corporate sponsorship, compliance costs, health and safety etc. that have to be deducted, before you get anywhere near gross profit, let alone net profit. Especially in the areas of compliance and environment, there has been a steep rise in costs to companies over the last decade or so.
But, yes, you look at net profit/net income for many of these big companies and they are laughing all the way to the bank, but gross margin on the goods manufactured is not a good indicator to how profitable the company is. The closer gross margin is to net profit indicates how efficient the company is.
It depends, we have some applications that only run on XP, so we still have those PCs kicking around - isolated from the network for compliance reasons. It is the same with Windows 10 -> 11, we have a number of applications that still don't work on 11.
But the majority of our users can change, but we still need to upgrade around 50% of our systems, most of which need replacing. The problem is getting offers from our suppliers at the moment.
I remember a few occasions, where things went wrong in the server room.
One was a new AC unit being put in, the builders were let into the server room, but couldn't find a free socket, so they just unplugged the first one they can across, which happened to be for the man microVAX running the site...
And the classic of the DEC engineer turning up to upgrade a VAX 11/780 with more memory. All jobs and users transferred to the next VAX in the line (computer room with 6 VAX units). Ops shut down the VAX and the console said it was safe to turn off the power, so the DEC engineer went behind the unit to the wall and threw the switch. Nothing happened, the console still said it was save to turn off the VAX. The engineer poke his head out from behind the VAX... Then the screams started, from ops of the next VAX in the line, everything had suddenly gone dark!
Or QWERTZ... Apple QWERTZ is the worst, most of the symbols aren't even printed on the keyboard, you have to remember which combination of Option + Shift + key brings them up, even simple things like [ ] | { } are "hidden" (Option + 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 respectively).
Try using a German Apple keyboard, those less used symbols, like [ ] | { } aren't even printed on the key tops, you have to remember which combination of Option + key brings them up, and using a German PC keyboard doesn't help, because Apple has them in different locations to Windows... At least the @ symbol is shown on most keyboards (Option + L)...
Apple also has a penchant for swapping the < > key (next to left shift) and the ^ ° (next to 1 key and below escape) keys randomly.
Mice weren't used much, when I switched to ergonomic keyboards, I was still mainly running on terminals or terminal emulation on MS-DOS at the time. Switching to ergonomic designs helped, the pain went away. Nowadays, I keep switching back to normal keyboards, but depending on the type, I start experiencing pain within a few hours or a few days.
I used Logitech trackballs for a while, but I missed the accuracy of the mouse, I never could manage the same levels with the trackball.
I now use vertical mice, currently the Logitech one, but I have also used the Anker vertical mouse. I prefer the Logitech MX Master 2S/3S, but my wrist thanks me for using the vertical one.
I switched to ergonomic keyboards in the mid-90s due to RSI, the pain went away fairly quickly.
I've switched back to standard keyboards many times over the years, but always end up going back to ergonomic keyboards, because my wrists and forearms start to ache. The pain goes away fairly quickly after I switch back to ergonomics.
I grew up on DEC VT100 terminals and the IBM 5250. I loved those keyboards, the Model M is a close second in my heart.
I have been using ergonomic keyboards since the mid-90s, due to RSI, I keep buying normal keyboards, but I quickly revert back to ergonomic designs, because of pains in my wrists and forearms.
I mainly used the Microsoft Natural and Microsoft Ergonomic keyboards, but they went with the scrabble style keys and short squishy travel, which made me like them less. The last Microsoft Ergonomic was OK, if not up to the original Natural or the Natural Multimedias from the early 2000s. But even those weren't good, compared to real keyboards with real switches.
I discovered Perrix last year and have a couple of Periboard 835 models, with Blue and Red keys and backlighting. They are probably the best ergonomic keyboards I've used since the original Natural.
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