* Posts by Headley_Grange

1423 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Feb 2010

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What strange beauty is this? Microsoft commits to two more non-subscription Office editions

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Re: Numbered styles don't work

I've spent all my $life surrounded by engineers who didn't understand Outlining or even that it existed. It would appear that many of them have gone on to work for LibreOffice which, I agree, has the most fucked-up version of creating numbered outlined documents that I've ever seen. Makes me pine for Mass11.

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Re: First hit is always free-ish.

"And maybe it's time Word Processors got smart enough .."

No it isn't because that would just be someone else deciding how I should format my docs and I don't need to be bugged every five seconds cos I don't do things the way that a programmer who never uses the product beyond the odd five-page write-up decides. If someone's smart enough to get a degree in engineering then they're smart enough to learn to use the tools they use to get their job done and the fact they've shown no interest in doing so speaks volumes. Also, if they're claiming any skill level then they need to show a certificate or shut up and if they're submitting Word docs instead of pdfs for their CVs then they shouldn't be getting an interview

Christ - that I didn't start that as a rant, but it seems to have ended up as one. Too much coffee this morning maybe!

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Re: First hit is always free-ish.

I use LibreOffice - mainly for spreadsheets - and haven't had compatibility problems even with macros, but for me it's buggy and feels like a beta product. It's free, so the daily crashes and annoying formatting and charting bugs are liveable with, but I wouldn't want to support it in a work environment.

The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

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Re: Made you Click

It pushes too many buttons. Crime and punishment, controversial techinical and legislative solutions and Openreach tossed in as our favourite panotmime villain, all based on a premise as thin as an ISP's promise. The only thing missing was that Kate's poor photoshopping was down to losing her broadband because of vandalism of the local cabinet by an eco mob.

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Made you Click

Another clickbait for comments article from El Reg.

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

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Re: Perspective (OT as well)

My mate used to take a box of used fanfold home every so often - his wife was a primary school teacher and used it for art. The boss saw him carting a box out one day and went mad when he found out the reason. He was worried that it contained confidential stuff, so my mate let him look through it. Neither of them had a clue what was on it - just the usual meaningless rows of numbers with lots of asterisks I bet. The school contintued to get its art supplies.

International effort to disrupt cybercrime moves into operational phase

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Re: Stop using certain products then

"the risk vector in the overwhelming majority of breaches tends to reside in their products"

I'd like to see some data on that. I'm not saying you're wrong, but if we're opening a book my money on the highest risk vector would be people doing stupid things - password123, never changing admin account name and being phished by clicking on an attachment.

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Re: "brought cybercrime to the forefront of discussion among CEOs and boards of directors"

"You can't have your government behaving like a bunch of terrorists"

I agree, in principle, but what do you do when other goverments behave like terrorists? Today Russia, allegedly, jammed GPS on the aircraft the UK Defence Minister was travelling in. Russia, China and the Norks turn a blind eye or maybe even support their cyber crims as long as they don't interfere domestically. They've already hit hospitals and power distribution in the US and Australia and, as far as we know, there's been no serious retaliation*. How far would they have to go before we, say, considered it an act of war?

*I realize that just cos we haven't heard anything doesn't mean that it's not happened.

Ten nations tell social media, banks, and telcos to get better at stopping scams

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"Many of these scams work because greedy or stupid punters are willing to ignore the "if it looks too good to be true" rule in the hope of making a quick buck."

No they don't. The main money is made when someone calls you from you bank's phone number and tells you that someone's got access to your accounts and you've got very little time to send your money to a special secure account set up by the bank before you lose it all. They tell you to hang up and call the bank's number on the back of your bank card to prove it's not a scam call, but they don't hang up so if the scammer makes the right noises they person being scammed believes they are through to the bank when in reality you're still on the line to the original scammer. The Telcos facilitate this - they allow spoofing of numbers and they have a phone system that doesn't let one side of the call hang up (in the UK). If the Telcos were made responsible for all losses (including consequential) then they'd close these two holes so fucking fast it would make your eyes bleed.

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Re: "If you buy a too-cheap Rolex from a guy down the pub..."

Not only is the publican taking a cut, but the fact that Telcos allow scammers to spoof the banks' telephone numbers is like Rolex providing authentication papers for the watch.

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Hard Way that will never work: tell social media, banks, and telcos to get better at stopping scams.

Easy Way that would work very quickly: change the law to make social media, banks, and telcos jointly and severally responsible for all losses suffered by members of the public who are scammed via social media, banks, and telcos.

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

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"...such add-ins "are often unstable and don't work cross-platform....""

Or, translated out of Marketese: "such add-ins only serve to highlight the shortcomings in the basic product and divert revenue from the MS Store."

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Re: I need classic outlook

"POP3 is horrible. It simply doesn't work "

That's part of the problem, isn't it? Other people deciding what functionality is available to me based solely on their own workflow.

Meta sues ex infra VP for allegedly stealing top-secret datacenter blueprints

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"...disloyal..."

Made me laugh.

We asked Intel to define 'AI PC'. Its reply: 'Anything with our latest CPUs'

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AI?

I'm looking forward to this AI. I can just tell it go through the DVD iso's I haven't converted to MP4 and run them through Handbrake, save only the episodes (no extras), make sure that any that need subtitles are ripped properly either as a track or burnt-in ones, give them meaningful series and episode names, sort them into directories then stick them on the NAS in the right hierarchy and update my tracking file. I'm looking forward to asking the AI to "sort out my iTunes Library", including rationalizing all the "sort album artist" fields, fixing the artwork, upping the volume on the tracks that are a bit quiet and shifting the song announcements on live albums from the end of the previous track to the start of the track that it's introducting - all without changing the play count and last played date metadata. That's just a couple of things I've spent a few hours doing this week, but there are tons of things I can think of for AI to do for me. Will it be out in time for Christmas? What colour will it be?

Airbnb warns hosts who use indoor security cameras they may face eviction

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Yeah - I imangine that the global team of AirBnB inspectors and enforcers are, as I write, packing their bags and heading off to make sure that this new policy is complied with.

How do you lot feel about Pay or say OK to ads model, asks ICO

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Re: Never

I sort of agree, but it's the service providers who have created the "everything should be free" mindset by giving their product away to us on the assumption that we'll continue to provide our valuable data for nothing. That implicit contract was never made clear when we signed up and now the likes of Facebook are seriously at risk of being hoist by their own petard because their services aren't valuable enough for most of us users to pay for them and if governments decide that privacy trumps profit then they could be fucked.........

.......except that most people - not denizens of the Register's boards - just put up with ads and don't give a toss about their privacy. I had to spend Christmas with members of the family aged 17 to 80 tapping away at their phones with a loud, audio-accompanied advert shouting out every half-hour or so because someone clicked on it. It wound the fuck out of me but no one else seemed to be that bothered about it.

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Doesn't matter - my points are valid for both advertisers and agencies. The drive and gutter cleaning bloke who pays (probably less than) minimum wage to leaflet my estate only has to get a couple of hits out of a few hundred leaflets make it worth his while. Same goes for web advertisers, except the ratios can be even smaller and be "successful". It's the same reason that people hunt game with a shotgun - they'd never hit a grouse with an 22 rifle.

The advertisers (the people paying to advertise their stuff) have no controlled measures for what their advertising is worth because they are terrified of not advertising. If you listen to the Freakonomics podcast I reference above or below they cover this, with sales increases overestimated by orders of magnitude and one company forgetting to place half it's newspaper advertising budget and not noticing any sales impact at all.

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The do realise and they don't care for two reasons. Firstly the hit rate can be very very low for them to be able to appear successful. Secondly, and more importantly, their customers don't really know how successful their ads are. The main thing they think they know is that to stop advertising would be a disaster. There's a pair of Freakonomics podcast about it (Does Advertising Actually Work) which are worth a listen to.

Spoiler: the answer to the question, according to Freakonomics, is along the lines of "not nearly as well as you'd like it to".

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Re: "It's hard to give consent freely when there is little choice........

I would agree if Facebook, Twitter and the like were the informal noticeboards and poncey IRC they started off as. Problem now is that they are embedded in all sorts of places. Some companies have no way to contact them for help or support outside of social media. Shit - there are hotels where Whatsapp is required to get in touch with room service or reception and I've had clients who wanted me to use Whatsapp instead of phone, text, email and, probably, just fuckihg talking to each other face to face.

UK and US lack regulation to protect space tourists from cosmic ray dangers

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FFFS

For fucks fucking sake.

UK finance minister promises NHS £3.4B IT investment to unlock £35B savings

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Cynical? Me?

If it's a 10x RoI then why haven't they done it before, instead of waiting until just before a general election? If they'd started 5 years ago, before inflation hit, then it would have cost a lot less and would have delivered the savings sooner.

What's also not clear is whether this is £3.5B for a £1B planned project spend plus overruns or whether it's an HS2 £3.5B which will spend £2B getting nowhere before forecasting an unaffordable overrun of £5B and then be cancelled.

World-plus-dog booted out of Facebook, Instagram, Threads

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Food for thought

There's a risk that people will starve to death without the motivation to put a picture of their food on Instagram.

German defense chat overheard by Russian eavesdroppers on Cisco's WebEx

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Re: Paranoia Is Mandatory In 2024!!

No point listening to Belgians - all waffle.

Ransomware ban backers insist thugs must be cut off from payday

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Re: Stupid advice from an "expert."

NI is a very poor example, given that many businesses during the Troubles were also paying protection money to the paramilitaries of both sides.

I think that national standards on data protection, annual audits and criminal offences for bosses that prioritize profits over good practice would be a start. The government would be better off investing in a pen-testing department than bailing out companies.

Headley_Grange Silver badge

"banning ransom payments would leave many businesses unable to recover their systems." This might be true if there were no way to protect those systems, which is not the case. It might be impossible to guarantee 100% that your systems won't suffer an attack and exfiltration of your data but there's plenty of existing security and recovery tech and procedures out there to reduce the impact of an attack.

HDMI Forum 'blocks AMD open sourcing its 2.1 drivers'

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Re: media on NAS

Assuming you're replying to TFM Reader - I don't understand your post. Why would they want to pay 19.99 a month to listen to music they have already bought?

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Re: media on NAS

My fat ass has to climb into the loft, find the correct folder (I'm currently populating folder 8 - they hold ~400 discs), then flip through it to find the DVD I want while crouching on the joists and holding a torch. It would be a right royal pain. I also watch films on iPad when I'm away, so they're going to get ripped anyway.

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Re: Confused...Again!!

How do you get the media onto your NAS? I mean, in the old days I could read Basic off a punch tape, but these days I don't think my eyes are good enough to read a Blu-ray disk or DVD.

Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail

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Re: Similar mistakes not limited to public sector

I got a couple of Boots opticians letters for someone else sent to me a few years ago. I've never been to Boots opticians, and I know all the owners of my house going back to 1983 and it wasn't any of them, so maybe Boots are just a bit rubbish.

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Water worries flood in as chip industry and AI models grow thirstier

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They don't actually consume water, do they? I guess it might be expensive or difficult but I'd have thought that recycling ought to be possible.

Snowflake share price falls after revenue forecasts dip below expectations

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FCTLOT

The forecast wasn't "well below analysts' estimates", it was 2% below the analysts estimates. The bad people here are the analysts and the investors, not Snowlflake*. The analysts, because they've got some God complex and think that if the future in the real world is 2% off from their guess then it's the real world that's bad. The investors because they base their whole business plan on the analysts and chuck people and companies under buses based on their guesses. Fucking cunts the lot of them.

*Full disclosure - I'd never heard of Snowflake before this article. I've got no skin in the game other than a hatred of any system which sets so much store on people guessing what might happen and then making it so important that it's better to fuck other people's lives up than admit they got it wrong. My life as an engineer and project manager was a nightmare of trying to live up to other people's stupid cost and schedule guesses** and now my pension is in the same boat. Fucking cunts the lot of them.

/end rant (for a while)

**"guess" == "estimate" in my thesaurus. I once told my CFO this when discussing the cost to complete of a project and it didn't calm him down at all.

X protests forced suspension of accounts on orders of India's government

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"No country has the ability to tell another, "hey, these people that are your citizens and have never set foot in our land, we're arresting them and throwing them in our jail just because""

They can if there's an extradition treaty and the crime they committed falls under the treaty. The fact that the perp might never have set foot in the country doesn't matter. Gary McKinnon appealed his extradition all the way to the ECHR and lost at every stage. His extradtion was only blocked by the government on the grounds that he might kill himself if incarcerated in the US.

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Whatever the rights and wrongs of this (it feels wrong to me) it's amazing how quickly Twitter can act when threatened with prison.

Firefly software snafu sends Lockheed satellite on short-lived space safari

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Using customers as beta-testers for iPhone code is one thing, but I don't think that satellite makers are going to be happy about it.

Staff say Dell's return to office mandate is a stealth layoff, especially for women

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Re: Do not Google.

I've tried DDG it for a month or so now. It's OK mostly, but I regularly have to revert to Google because I can't find stuff with DDG that Google has on the first page of results. Its search syntax also seems to be very limited. A query like "Kitchen Aid Blender Coupler -amazon -ebay site:uk" works fine on Google and I don't get any Amazon or eBay results, but on DDG the first dozen or so pages are nearly all Amazon and eBay. I'd prefer not to use Google but the alternative has to tbe good enough and at the moment I'm on the verge of going back.

Two days into the Digital Services Act, EU wields it to deepen TikTok probe

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Re: Penalties of up to 6%

Not one of them has been fined anything close to 6%. I think the biggest is about $1.2bn for Meta who made $108bn profit that year.

Headley_Grange Silver badge

Penalties of up to 6%

I'll believe those penalties when I see them.

(Spoiler Alert: I'll never see them.)

Days after half a billion Asians went to the polls, Big Tech promises to counter 2024 election misinformation

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Follow the Money

It's the advertisers that need to be signed up. They'll spend their money where they get the clicks and if those clicks move to other sites where AI generates popular content, whether true or not, then that's where the money will go. When the current big players start losing ad revenue to nutter-AI sites then they'll forget all about this accord and do whatever they can to get it back.

US Air Force's new cyber, IT skill recruitment plan: Bring back warrant officer ranks

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Re: Pay grades might be a problem

I think that, unlike industry, it's also uncommon to get to a senior technical position in the forces and be completely useless. Ex-Artificer SMs and the like have all been excellent to work alongside both on my team and on the customers'. Also, with their pension as a backstop, they are less dependent on the company and are less willing to take the shit that the rest of us have to put up with.

On the other hand, I've had a couple of bosses who were ex-officers (a major and a full colonel) and their weakness was that they assumed that the department structure they were dropped into existed and was competent - as it tends to be in the forces. As a result they both had a hard time understanding that just because someone was in the second-top engineering "rank" they couldn't assume that they were good at their job or be trusted to get on with it.

QNAP vulnerability disclosure ends up an utter shambles

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It's a problem that NAS devices like this are sold with great and useful functionality/apps which the manufacturers push and make relatively easy to run without taking security into consideration. I got mine primarily for backups and media, but when I first got it I came close a couple of times to using it for our website, but bottled it at the last minute when it came to opening the ports to incoming traffic. I simply don't know enough about networks and security to convince myself it was safe. This was years ago before these attacks were common, but I'm so glad I didn't. Paying a few quid a month for hosting is worth it just for peace of mind.

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I think it's swings and roundabouts. I bought my QNAP many years ago and at the time Synology were getting hit, but it does seem that in the last couple of years QNAP has come under attack a lot more. Might be because they are popular, and hence more of them out in the wild, or because their security isn't very good. Whichever, mine's firewalled with no access to t'internet in either direction. I download and install updates manually.

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

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Re: Something I have yet to grok...

Makes me think of the Money for Nothing vid.

Headley_Grange Silver badge

Why stainless steel? I'd have thought that it would make the vehicle very heavy compared to, say. Al or composite - or is the weight of the body small in comparison to the battery?

It sounds like a pretty shonky stainless, whatever the case. My knives and forks don't go "rusty". I've been camping and diving with both my penknife and my watch and neither are showing any signs of corrosion in spite of never getting anything other than a cursory wipe with whatever rag is to hand. Is there some trade off between structural performance and corrosion resistance?

Meta says risk of account theft after phone number recycling isn't its problem to solve

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Re: How *is* this Meta's problem?

I'm not sure about this either. Many of the sites which use my phone for 2FA bug me every few months to confirm my details, which is an annoying-but-good thing. I'm not on any Meta apps, so I don't know, but I think that the only way that Meta could be criticized is if they make it difficult to change your phone number.

Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

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Flip Side

I assume they're also planning to expand the system so that websites automatically micro-pay me every time they use the data they've taken from me to serve the ads. I'll take a penny a bit - I'm not greedy.

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Re: Good luck

"then eventually they start showing ads to paying customers[1] too, just to keep the price down"

You'd think that as your customer base grows you could drop the price - in most markets higher volumes mean lower per-customer costs. What happens here is that they grow their customer base to a size where losing a few won't matter, then they sting them with the choice of ads or increased subs for ad-free.

ANZ Bank test drives GitHub Copilot – and finds AI does give a helping hand

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It also ignores how much of the development cycle is actual coding. The gains will be much lower if they include user requirements analysis, design, specs writing, code review, unit test, integration, system test, qualification, deployment and support.

Headley_Grange Silver badge

I'm not a software engineer and this is a genuine question to help me understand this CoPilot stuff.

I can code a bit. I've done it for work (utilities and test gear, not production) and still do for personal stuff. These days I might want an Apple script and my process is to have a look on the web, copy some code that does something similar to what I want, inspect it to understand it, then fiddle with it until I make it work. This works OK for me, but I doubt my code would be considered good. There's not much error/exception management, no memory management (I've read of it but don't really know what it is and I assume that Apple takes care of it if it's important). It's also surprisingly slow - which might be a down to Applescript but more likely due to me.

My question is - is CoPilot simply a massively more "intelligent" version of what I do, benefiting from a huge database of "learned" code which it can regurgitate and does the code it produces risk having the same issues as mine in terms of memory, security, exception, etc. management?

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