Posts by David 132

Cops cuff man for allegedly framing colleague with AI-generated hate speech clip

Hope he's not the only one facing charges

FTFA: Thereafter, another staff member – who "had a difficult time working under [Eiswert's] leadership for various reasons" – disclosed that she forwarded the email to a PHS student's cellphone, who she knew would rapidly spread the message around various social media outlets and throughout the school.

Nail her hide to the proverbial barn door as well. What sort of malignant moron comes across content like this, and has as her first thought, "I won't bother doing anything to verify that this is true, it's damaging to someone I don't like so it MUST be true - I'll just spread it as far and wide as possible" ?

City council audit trail is an audit fail after disastrous Oracle ERP rollout

Indeed, but "leaving the auditing and security systems disabled" rather renders the first four words of your question moot. "Were they thinking", full stop?

There's certainly good money to be made investing in Alzheimers' support facilities for all those senior Post Office executives who have no memory of anything whatsoever that happened on their watch while Horizon was running!

Ring dinged for $5.6M after, among other claims, rogue insider spied on 'pretty girls'

I have multiple cameras on my property. If Chinese hackers or anyone else intercept the video stream, they'll get lovely images of goats frolicking, ducks nesting & sleeping, and an occasional labrador galloping down a field like the big brainless doofus that he is.

Camera inside my house or pointing at anything identifiable? Not a smegging chance.

Paypal?

FTFA: "These payments will be sent via PayPal (yes, really) to 117,044 accounts."

Oh, so there'll be a wave of totally legitimate "DeaR siR this is Papyal click HEER and enter ur bank deetails to claim ur refund" spam emails incoming to a mail server near you then.

Didn't really think this through, did they?

IBM to acquire Hashi for $6.4B, hopes it will boost software biz and Red Hat

Any Hashi employees over the age of about 35 should be very nervous right now, given IBM’s track record in that area.

Now all Windows 11 users are getting adverts to 'make the Start menu great again'

Re: Start 11 is the way to go

Upvoted.

Although personally on my most-often-used Windows 11 box I've gone with a combination of Nexus Dock and Rainmeter/Droptop for a top-of-screen menu. Sort of like a store-brand MacOS desktop except with less of a smug vibe.

Re: Prediction

You forgot the intermediate stage, "a GPO that is actually only recognized & honoured on the unobtainum LTSC or Enterprise versions of Windows".

Yes, I'm still salty about Microsoft "accidentally" breaking the GPO that disabled that &@#$%! "Web Search" in the Start Menu, forcing me to furkle deep within the Registry to turn the smegging thing off. If I type "notepad" in the Start Menu, why the blithering flip would I want half-a-dozen instant Bing search results telling me what Notepad is, what a notepad is, trying to sell me Office 365, or pointing me towards someone's blog wherein they prove that Notepad Is A Mind-Control Tool Of The Lizard Neocon Illuminati???

Rant over. As you were.

Re: First email in my inbox this morning

Here's one list of Windows games playable on Linux using Steam Proton or other tools...

https://store.steampowered.com/curator/33483305-Proton-Compatible/

Re: Eat my shorts!

>Why the holy crap would I want to install an operating system which has become a surveillance and advertising platform

"Become"?

Much of this stuff is in Windows 10 too, hence the reluctance many of us felt to move off Windows 7.

Sadly, on the basis that we the users aren't the customers - we're increasingly, the product - Windows 11 has taken the concept and turned it up to, well, 11.

Misconfigured cloud server leaked clues of North Korean animation scam

Re: Make trade, not war

Or the Iranian regime’s.

Meta comms chief handed six-year Russian prison sentence for 'justifying terrorism'

Honestly, I think "being found guilty of something by a Russian kangaroo court" is a badge of honour these days, rather like being declared persona non grata by the North Korean regime or <Godwin>whoever that chap was who led Germany in the 1930s/40s </Godwin>.

Gone in 35 seconds – the Cybertruck's misbehaving acceleration pedal

PVA?

Pritt-stick, surely, because Musk isn’t allowed anything from the older kids’ cupboard.

Qt Ubuntu 24.04 betas show that there's room to innovate

Re: You're not alone, Mr. McMurtrie.

Yes. I am all the time when reading German whether in print or on screen because of this quirk of its grammatical structure annoyed.

Re: Snaps still don't work

> Ah well, let's keep calm and hop...

Typo, or command? Are you an adherent of the same religion as Arnold Rimmer's parents, Seventh-Day Advent Hoppists?

Either way, I don't think you have a leg to stand on.

Debian spices up APT package manager with a dash of color, squishes ancient bug

Plumbing, electricity... it's all currents, right?

It was all a plot by the small, furry, cold-adapted mammals.

Obligatory XKCD "painful colours" comic.

Excellent diversion there into the science of mammalian vision - thanks Liam!

It does make me wonder about a vision phenomenon that I first noticed as a small child. At the time, I had a bedside digital alarm clock, with red 7-segment LEDs to show the time. I was always amused/disconcerted that if I waved the clock around fairly slowly in front of my eyes, in near-darkness conditions - such that the outline of the clock could still be discerned - the red LEDs seemed to "float" and move out of sync with the rest of the clock, almost as if they were extruded red glowing rubber, and wobbling.

I speculate that it's a rods/cones thing - different visual sensitivity to motion vs. colour - but I could be talking out of my posterior.

Has anyone else observed this oddity, or have a better explanation?

Future Roku TVs may inject tailored ads into anything and everything when you pause

Re: By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing...

As I’ve said before, “smart” in any product’s name is a euphemism for “we the manufacturer control it now, not you the user”.

Microsoft to use Windows 11 Start menu as a billboard with app ads for Insiders

Re: If you read the Windows EULA carefully, you'll note the words...

I'm pretty sure there's a GPO to disable those tips. Can't recall exactly, but I think it's User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Edge UI -> Disable Help Tips [Enabled], for at least some of them.

Whether Windows/Office pays any attention to aforementioned policy settings is a whole other matter. They have form for "accidentally" breaking GPOs in subsequent releases of Windows, such as the one that was a quick and easy way of killing the Start Menu's $%@%! "web search". Or only respecting the GPOs if you have the LTSC version of Windows.

Re: Perfect

Only the other day, we were reading on this site that the Windows "Format Disk" dialog hasn't been updated since it was thrown together by Dave Plummer as a temporary placeholder back in Windows NT.

Well, here's Microsoft's long game revealed.

The revamped dialog will invite you to "punch the monkey to win $$$", and install Bonzi Buddy, before you can format your disk :)

Re: Never gonna happen

> Give me the simple games back!

Your wish is myWinaero's command: https://winaero.com/download-windows-7-games-for-windows-11/

Safe download, I've had them installed for ages and they work perfectly (even Purble Place, heh heh). Just ignore the - very polite - requests to install the Winaero tweaker tool if all you want is the games.

Blocking peoples' attempts to work around this is just evil.

For me, the sting comes in the final paragraph:

The recommendations come as Microsoft ramps up attempts to block several desktop customization tools, such as ExplorerPatcher and StartAllBack.

I can grant that Microsoft might genuinely feel that their design decisions are correct; but presented with evidence that some users strongly disagree and tweak the OS to their liking, MS are actively working to stymie those tweaks and prevent customizations. That's just plain vindictive, although no doubt they'll cloak it in superficially-legitimate excuses such as "potential security risks".

Is "One Microsoft Way" their street address, or their master plan?

With due and very sheepish acknowledgment to the Reg commentard who came up with this in a post several months ago - alas, I cannot remember your name, but I am not claiming the credit:

"Dear ad-slingers.

Fuck off.

Keep fucking off until you come to a gate bearing a sign, 'You Cannot Fuck Off Past This Point'.

Ignore the sign, open the gate, dream the impossible dream, and keep fucking off forever."

OpenBSD 7.5 locks down with improved disk encryption support and syscall limitations

Re: XKCD 538.

>8 inches of solid steel for only $3.99:

Yes, Jake, but as it's Harbor Freight we're talking about you should have typed: "solid" "steel"!

We never agreed to only buy HP ink, say printer owners

Re: HP claimed it went "to great lengths"…

Well, that sucks.

Re: HP claimed it went "to great lengths"…

You are technically correct - the best kind of correct.

Re: Instead of hiring lawyers

And if the team behind that kernel did write printer firmware, the printer would only print onto gnu’s-papers.

Re: Just... wow

The nightmare merger would be Boeing-HP-Fujitsu Inc.; you'd get planes that will only accept genuine BHF-branded fuel, printers that do nothing but print out writs accusing you of stealing money, and back-end government systems that randomly fall apart because vital components were omitted.

IT biz trials gadget deliveries by drone to sidestep traffic and emissions

Re: Pure greenwashing

I think there were siblings who tried that business model, trading as the Flying Burrito Brothers... but I heard they got band.

Broadcom has willingly dug its VMware hole, says cloud CEO

Re: Alternative to Player with USB support?

Indeed. It's widely believed (known?) that Oracle monitor downloads of the Virtualbox Extensions Pack, and if they see a requesting IP address belonging to a business user, they send out the Bat-Signal to their license compliance audit team.

Re: Joke's on them

Exactly. And the other flaw that was uppermost in my mind - you can lose a lot of "little" customers before there's a material impact on the financials. Whereas if you get 20% of your revenue from BigCustomer PLC, and they take umbrage at something on your roadmap...

Re: Joke's on them

Having a small number of very lucrative customers probably makes sense to the very clever MBA types, but it does rather change the supplier:customer power balance doesn’t it?

US insurers use drone photos to deny home insurance policies

Re: A physical visit is a lot more reliable

>This particular 17 year old driving a Ferrari might be a super safe driver who only over drives it out of the garage

It's the ones who don't even drive the Ferrari out of the garage that insurers worry about.

Google sues app devs, claims they're Play Store crypto scammers with 100k+ victims

Checklist

"Social engineering often involved. Check. Sometimes romance scams play a role. Check. Victims strung along and forced to pay more money to regain their lost funds. Check."

Crypto apps that just happen to be a scam: check, check, and check. Colour me unsurprised.

404 Day celebrates the internet's most infamous no-show

Re: Grot

> "...escape characters at Adlestrop"

Yeah, I recall Adlestrop, cos one afternoon when it was hot the train stopped there unexpectedly. It was nearly July.

(with sincere apologies to Edward Thomas...)

Is AI choosing the "More Context" links for the Reg?

The "More Context" section of this article offered me "Rancher faces prison for trying to breed absolute unit of a sheep"

I'm struggling to spot the connection between 404 errors and megasheep, though I'm sure one of you smarter people here can enlighten me :)

Vodafone and Three's UK merger hits regulatory roadblock

Honestly, the regulator is worrying unnecessarily.

No merger in the entire history of such things has ever resulted in increased prices, decreased customer choice, crappier service, redundancies and huge bonuses paid to management.

(Note icon.)

Google ponders making AI search a premium option

Re: AI - No thanks!

I have been unreasonably irked today on multiple occasions, by Google's habit of randomly ignoring words I put in my search term.

"Searching for A B C, click here to search with C" - yes you moronic search engine, that would be WHY I included "C" in my query... grrrrr...

So, yeah. With you on this. Google, like everything else, has become enshittified.

Meet clickjacking's slicker cousin, 'gesture jacking,' aka 'cross window forgery'

Re: Enter key or Space bar

All I can think is that in particular contexts, browsers can be told to treat the spacebar as the key to activate a control, in the same way that Windows can. Try it - go to Settings -> System, tab across to any of the links (Display -> Advanced Scaling Settings, for example). Pressing either Space or Return will activate the link.

Re: Press and hold

> Give me one example of a legitimate web site asking the user to do such a thing.

In-browser games are the only example I can think of right now.

"Welcome to our totally-not-a-knockoff Wordle! To choose your first word, press and hold SPACE..."

Outlook.com trips over Google's spam blocking rules

Still not as dangerous as holding their breath while waiting for a response on anything from Apple.

How a single buck bought bragging rights in the battle to port Windows 95 to NT

Re: Windoze NEVER worked well.

> I was installing various OSs on Cartridge drives and would boot up whichever I was testing by changing the cartridges. Not the zip drives, but the bigger ones.

Jaz drives? I had forgotten them until I read your comment. As I recall they were quite expensive for what they were, at least compared to CD-Rs (and a little later, -RWs).

Re: Disappointed

What, Dave Plummer in a Santa costume pulling a smoked salmon out of his beard and eating it?

Malicious SSH backdoor sneaks into xz, Linux world's data compression library

Re: SytemD?

If you have to ask that, you really haven't been paying attention to the inexorable feature creep of systemd :)

Do not touch that computer. Not even while wearing gloves. It is a biohazard

Re: Taking the piss?

> Anonymous cos I still do contract work for theses cowboys!

WeeWork?

These 17,000 unpatched Microsoft Exchange servers are a ticking time bomb

Re: Those damned reboots

You’re right, OP was probably thinking of Emacs not LibreOffice.

Majority of Americans now use ad blockers

Re: Nobody has pointed this out

I will quibble that in the case of Internet advertising, you have identified the wrong end of the dog.