Posts by Detective Emil

Turns out Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private

No shit!?

Sadly, I currently find it difficult to trust any numbers oozing out of the US-Augean stables. Perhaps they could divert the waters of Lake America to flush them out.

Researcher tricks Apple’s Find My into sharing location data with Linux

Re: Not so much "Find My busting" as "adversarial interoperability"

Apple had a considerably longer attention span than most industry players. Unfortunately, in this instance. However, this is precisely the sort of operability thst the EU is increasingly demanding. Mote power to its elbow.

Part didn't fit so techie got out his screwdriver. Then something flew off the motherboard

Re: Oh, by the way, he has a masters in optoelectronics.

Incoming … (Paywalled at Tom's Hardware, but visible teaser paragraphs carry the gist.)

News Corp labels some AI companies 'crass kleptomaniacs'

And …

Amazing amounts of alliteration.

(But seemingly solely for bad boys.)

After rewriting SQLite in Rust, Turso turns its sights on Postgres

Gotta break 'em all!

Yeah, let's put all our DBMs on top of a common engine so that a bug in the engine can floor the lot of them.

End of era as the BBC switches off Radio 4 Long Wave service

Re: Irreplaceable...

It was a 500kW transmitter. Say they're paying 20p per kilowatt hour. That's a hundred quid an hour. And you can probably add a good 20% for transmitter inefficiency, together with power for racks, lighting, security equipment, and the techies' kettle.

Portuguese bank sign's storage is about to cash out

=====>

for Lisbon. Particularly now, as it's only 25C.(It's 31 in the less maritime part of Europe where I happen to be having lunch in a Portuguese restaurant. Fish, of course.)

Plex appeal fades as Lifetime Pass jumps to $750

Procrastination pays

I had been meaning to get around to spinning up Plex. Not any more.

To fix this Wi-Fi network, we'll need a crane

Re: I now know to go outside and look for cranes.

Aussies like Big Things.

Apple's chips are the core of a new landscape, but its biggest win is Windows

It's easy to run a decent Linux on old Mx hardware

If you have an M1 or M2 Mac (or buy one second-hand — though prices are high for five-year-old kit) Asahi Linux.(a Debian derivative) is a doddle to install (from macOS), and is pretty wrinkle-free, particularly on laptops (provided you don't need Thunderbolt).

M3 to 5 are wrinklier, as the distro's submitters are still reverse-engineering those chips. But, if desperate, Linux runs well in a VM on newer kit.

Google says it will let UK publishers opt out of AI overviews

Nice site you've got there …

Shame if it didn't appear in search results …

This persuasive argument doesn't seem to have been adequately addressed.

In the longer term, killing click-through threatens to throttle a goose that has laid gazillions of golden eggs for Google.

Hotpatching goes default in Windows Autopatch whether you like it or not

Re: I'm so glad

Sorry to disabuse you, for macOS at least: Apple quietly implemented on-by-default Background Security Improvements in version 26.1 a few months back.

Every day in every way, passwords are getting worse and worse

Apple taxes the fingerprint sensor

Your sparkling new Mac mini might sport a processor of unrivalled brilliance, but Apple forgot the fingerprint sensor.

It's on the extortionately-priced Magic Keyboard that you didn't buy at the same time. Some people love the sensor, but hate the keyboard, so resort to hacks [machine-translated from Japanese].

US lawyers fire up privacy class action accusing Lenovo of bulk data transfers to China

Does the data go, does the data stay?

Or can it simply stay onshore the all-American way?

Nothing in the article suggests that Lenovo must or does send data to China to achieve its desired level of intrusion. As Rich 2 has pointed out, it's eminently possible to be intrusive using US-based resources.

Oracle vows 'new era' for MySQL as users sharpen their forks

MariaDB

Why can't potential defectors just pile in with MariaDB? License? Feature divergence? Bad blood?

Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

Quite

As the native English speaker in a university department, I was handed the not-in-the-job-description task of proof-reading the papers and theses of those for whom English was a second (or third …) language. Apart from bringing home the fact that, thanks to the predominance of Anglo-Saxon culture, … [t]his is the first time that we have a true Lingua Franca for all: bad English, I would point out "surprising" words, and ask my victims/clients whether their intention was to surprise their audience. Mostly it wasn't, in which case I'd suggest something more anodyne; but sometimes it was. And occasionally, when I thought that the audience needed to be made to sit up and pay attention, I'd suggest a surprising word in place of something more predictable.

I expect that the PhD. candidates in my former group are all writing about/with LLMs now.

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).