Posts by Detective Emil

British Airways fears a future where AI agents pick flights and brands get ghosted

Pot calling dark patterns black

If airline and other booking sites didn't make it such a pain to achieve the simple desired result, I'd be a lot less tempted to delegate the process to an AI agent.

Welcome to America - now show us your last five years of social media posts

Re: Bovvered?

Only £485 to renounce British citizenship. Bargain! (I'm holding my fire …)

Re: “God’s Own country”

And good beer and cheese on both sides of the border.

Lloyds Banking Group claims Microsoft Copilot saves staff 46 minutes a day

Sky not (yet) falling

46 minutes saved per employee per week means 98 employees can now do the work of 100. No excuse for mass redundancies as yet.

Google, Meta and Vodafone want smartphone-makers to reduce their bandwidth bills

More bribery needed

If Google can afford to slip Apple & Mozilla billions to direct traffic its way, surely it can do the same to induce low-end SOC suppliers to support the codec du jour. I'm sure Meta & Voda would chip in …

I was a part-time DBA. After this failover foul-up, they hired a full-time DBA

Re: Seen it done at a hardware level

After doing that once, you realised that the chunky "read-only" switch with the helpful indicator light was your friend.

End well, this won't: UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs

There's always a way

I speak as someone who built a transistor radio in a pencil box so I could listen to the pirates in class.

Ransomware crews don't care about your endpoint security – they've already killed it

Please sir …

What's EDR?

(Just a tourist in this country.)

If you're forced to use Windows 11, here's how to steal some of your time back

Bookmarked!

For a friend, you understand …

Before the megabit: A trip through vintage datacenter networking

"perhaps a little simpler"

Tell that to the guy (always a guy, back then) with the break-out box (kids, ask your grandpa) who knows that, once he's distinguished DTE from DCE, he's got to set the jumpers at each end to make the baud rates agree.

Grrr!

Glazed and confused: Hole lotta highly sensitive data nicked from Krispy Kreme

Aaargh!

I trust that the sub-editor responsible for the headline has already collected theirs --->

Please tell us Reg: Why are AI PC sales slower than expected?

Macs

All new Macs since late 2020 have had an NPU, and AI has really been a great differentiator for Apple. Just not the way they had hoped for …

Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection

No excrement on offer

Are there nefarious actors at play here, an automated process that auto-rejects apps with elevated access requirements, or is it just simple incompetence?

There's a third possibility …

The Register repeatedly asked Google to comment, but it failed to respond.

They just don't give a sh*t.

RSA cofounder: The world would've been better without cryptocurrencies

No worries, then

"There are vast tape libraries at NSA and all the rest of those organizations running back years."

Tape? Not a threat: D.O.G.E. will junk them in double-quick time, and crow about it.

Pentagon needs China's rare earths, Beijing just put them behind a permit wall. Oops

Simples!

If rare earths are needed to make weapons, all the US needs to do to get high-velocity delivery is to start a shooting war with China.

Dell discloses monster 20-petaFLOPS desktop built on Nvidia's GB300 Superchip

What about …

You may be awaiting pricing; I'm awaiting figures for noise levels and power consumption.

Also, what weird (while large) amounts of memory.

Belgian cops raid Huawei in Euro bribery probe

Goodness me

A Huawei story without a wince-inducing punny headline. You're slipping. Thank goodness.

We did not have Brave clashing with Rupert Murdoch on our 2025 bingo card, but there it is

Sigh…

I have failed to use Brave in the past, despite its attractions, because of its Basic Attention Token blockchainery. The availability of AI summaries confirms my decision.

Are you cooler than ex-Apple design guru Sir Jony Ive?

Foist by its own petard

Blimey! I'm amazed nobody has yet mentioned the time when Apple, in its C-suite wisdom, plonked an unrequested U2 album into every iTunes account that existed in 2014. The digital equivalent of bleach wouldn't shift it, until they hastily provided a way to delete it.

Stargate, smargate. We're spending $60B+ on AI this year, Meta's Zuckerberg boasts

A modest proposal

It's time that Meta was renamed again, to Aïda. (Just don't tell Mr, Zuckerberg that the eponymous heroine dies in the final act of Verdi's opera.)

How to leave the submarine cable cutters all at sea – go Swedish

Re: U-235, shorely?

Depleted U238 is used in kinetic weaponry to pack the heaviest (literally) possible punch. But high explosives seem like a much better idea for a (non-nuclear) torpedo. Nuclear torpedos might, I discover on reading that Wikipedia page, use U238 as a tamper.

25 years on from Y2K, let's all be glad it happened way back then

Well, we have 2038 to look forward to

Just watch out for those embedded systems.

Next-gen Wi-Fi to trade ludicrous speed for the boring art of actually working

Re: Actually connectivity

[L]eave wireless for people who deserve it like visitors and children

Well, I do have an Ethernet adapter that works with this tablet and my phone, but the cable would be a trip hazard for visitors and children.

Mine's the one with a pocket full of dongles.

Microsoft pulls text recognition from Photos app preview

This is really weird

Google Photos has had this feature for five years or so; Apple Photos has had it for about as long — both long before the current AI hype started. Microsoft could and should have had it ages ago, without even needing "AI".

Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive

Report indeed makes a strong case for user education

Lack of familiarity with AI PCs leads to what the study describes as "misconceptions," […] 17 percent believe AI PCs are not secure or regulated.

Yup, they definitely need to work on making that number go up.

Qualcomm's Windows on Arm push would be great – if only it ran all your software

A correction and an observation

Adobe Photoshop can technically run on Arm through emulation

Adobe says that Photoshop & Lightroom are already native on ARM Windows, and more Creative whatever apps are coming sooner or later. And, yes, until then, use emulation.

And another thing: according to Reuters, Qualcomm has had an exclusivity deal for Windows on ARM for eight years. Strange we're only seeing somewhat good stuff from them just as the deal's ending.

/s

NatWest blocks bevy of apps in clampdown on unmonitorable comms

Vaguely surprised …

… that Apple's Messages isn't on the list. Maybe its shortest auto-delete of 30 days is considered acceptable. Or maybe NatWest uses MDM to remove the app from managed devices (something Apple doesn't allow mortals to do) — although that would crock SMSs as well.

The Register takes AMD's Ryzen 9800X3D for a spin

Sold out

According to reports on X/Twitter (sorry: can't bring myself to link) there are none to be had either side of the pond because demand is so high.

Thanks for the very comprehensive review, by the way. Love this stuff!

Smart homes may be a bright idea, just not for the dim bulbs who live in 'em

Hands well sat upon, wallet tightly shut

The light switches around here were installed over 20 years ago. They still work. (Which is more than I can say about too many (dumb) LED bulbs that claimed an 18,000 hour life. But that’s another story.)

Epic Games starts Battle Royale with Samsung, Google over app store practices

This is getting tedious

I hope all parties lose.

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

Sitting on my hands

We've decided not to replace our medium-recent, medium-premium car just yet, not because we don't like EVs, but because anything we might buy is encrusted with stuff we don't need, don't want to have to stab at a screen to control, and don't want to pay for (and to keep paying for). And it's likely to be nosey. We can tell ourselves we're being virtuous by postponing the carbon cost of building a new car.

Fintech outfit Klarna swaps humans for AI by not replacing departing workers

No firing without smokescreen

Those numbers Klarna just reported aren't great. This seems to me to be AI used as a smokescreen, with added Jam Tomorrow.

Feds, US states sue RealPage for building rent-hiking software for landlords

OT, but …

Just watched It's quieter in the Twilight [IMDB]. Most of the people keeping the Voyagers, "humankind's greatest exploration," alive came to the US as immigrants 50 or more years ago.

LibreOffice 24.8: Handy even if you're happy with Microsoft

Thumbs up

Apart from anything else, it still opens and makes a good fist of displaying, my mid-1990s macOS Classic WordPerfect 3.5 files (on the very rare occasions thatI need to refer to them).

Open source biz promises to slash bills with observability-as-a-service in the cloud

Please, Sir …

What's "observability"?

(Where's,Paris when she's needed?) -->

Elon Musk is suing OpenAI again, claims CEO Sam Altman ‘betrayed’ him

Is there any chance …

… that each can get the other jailed?

CrowdStrike unhappy about Delta's 'litigation threat,' claims airline refused 'free on-site help'

Nope

If you smash my window/s, I'm going to expect you to make me good, even if you do help in picking up the broken glass.

Microsoft: Our licensing terms do not meaningfully raise cloud rivals' costs

What Microsoft's arguments boil down to

Hey! Look over there!. [YouTube]

Apple's Clamshell iBook G3 at 25 – not just a pretty case

Blimey!

That means it's getting for 25 years since Legally Blonde came out. [Starring the Computer]

EU gave CrowdStrike the keys to the Windows kernel, claims Microsoft

The First Law of Holes

May I politely suggest, Microsoft, that you stop digging?

Switzerland to end 2024 with an analog FM broadcast-killing bang

FM? Bah, humbug! DAB? bah, humbug²

Still listening to R4 LW*. Just hoping its valves don't blow.

* at a range of ~700km.

Microsoft CEO of AI: Your online content is 'freeware' fodder for training models

So, let me get this straight …

According to Microsoft, Free Software was an existential threat to Civilization As We Know It, but Free Content is what Microsoft needs so that it can Deliver A Better Future.

T-Mobile US drags New Jersey borough to court over school cell tower permit denial

Hold on

Surely this issue can be fixed by issuing free tinfoil helmets to the objectors (or those of them who already have one).

Tesla chair begs investors to bless Musk's billions or face an Elon exodus

Re: "The thrust is that retaining Musk's extraordinary talent takes extraordinary compensation"

Apart from anything else, if he had not been around last week, Tesla's whacking GPU delivery (for which it presumably had a use it considered good for its bottom line) would not have been diverted to umm … something or other.

Microsoft Research chief scientist has no issue with Windows Recall

What was that again?

I suppose that it's only appropriate that Teevan replies in Newspeak when asked a question in English.

Oh Sonos! App update borks users' favorite features and worse

Early adopter. And late shunner.

I have a lot of Sonos kit that I bought early on — hell, I even managed to buy their own remote control before it was discontinued in favour of apps. I'm happy to say that everything still works (except the long-dead remote, which stopped accepting touch input). This is no thanks to Sonos, which keeps pulling stunts like this: I had their servers blocked at the router for a long time, fearful that they'd follow through on threats to brick stuff they considered too old. And I used iMazing to make sure I had a copy of a known-good version of the app in case I updated an iDevice by mistake. Sonos' continued behavior does not tempt me to update to current hardware. Maybe it's time to install those blocks again.

Apple unveils M4 chip with neural engine capable of 38 TOPS, and some other kit

Maybe just trying to get their own back after all those "Does it b(l)end?" YouTube videos.

Apple's 'incredibly private' Safari is not so private in Europe

Re: Video says "Stop using Safari, use Brave instead"

Quite. I'd be running Brave if it wasn't for that hokey Basic Attention Token cryptocurrency.

Meta's value plummets as Zuckerberg admits AI needs more time and money

Can somebody come up with a suitable prompt …

… to generate a satisfying video of billions of dollars invested in AI going up in smoke?

Tesla Cybertruck turns into world's most expensive brick after car wash

Tesla pipped to this particular post

Mercedes came up with it in 2019 or so. A quick search suggests that pricey Rivian and BMW models have it too.