Posts by David 132

File Explorer gets facelift in latest Windows 11 build

Re: Thank God!

Last time I installed Windows 11, there was no option at all to choose a local account. Setup refused to proceed further until I gave it an Internet connection. There is currently a “back door” hack that involves killing the setup task, killing a sub-task, then restarting the setup wizard etc. etc…but for how long? Whenever people find a way around their obnoxiousness, Microsoft seem to be very quick to “fix” the holes. For example, the various ways to remove the unwanted “reset your web settings to Microsoft’s recommended config / earn Microsoft points! / sign in now with a Microsoft account” banner in the Settings app - all now blocked by MS. If only they put such diligence into benefiting users. It is a pain in the ass!

Re: It looks like you're finding a file. Can I help?

To which the only possible response is,

“Go Stick Your Head In A Pig”

Chinese chipmaker insists it has Intel on-side, not inside

Re: Support

There was a case about 25 years ago of an Italian company that utilized a quirk of local law to put out a rebadged Intel processor with their own branding and packaging.

IIRC - and this was a quarter-century ago so details might be fuzzy - the law there at the time said that company A could re-sell company B's products as its own, provided that they were modified in some way (presumably, beyond a certain threshold).

So this Italian company took Intel Celeron 300A processors - the Slot 1 form-factor with 66MHz frontside bus - and masked/cut pin B21, which was a well-known trick to set the FSB to 100MHz and overclock the entire processor to 450MHz (300/66 = 450/100), thereby turning it into a considerably cheaper Pentium II 450 near-equivalent. Despite the smaller L2 cache size the overclocked 300A would perform close enough to the "real" 450 Pentium part, at a sweet $/MHz ratio.

These "factory overclocked" (just, not the Intel factory...) parts were sold under their own brand for a while, with no mention of Intel anywhere on the packaging. I recall that Intel Legal got involved, although I can't remember the outcome. It was skirting pretty close to the edges of the applicable law at the time.

(Side note: I can't remember my nieces' or in-laws' birthdays but I can remember, 25 years later, which edge-connector line needed to be masked off to overclock Slot 1 parts to 100MHz FSB.

FFS!)

Healthcare org with over 100 clinics uses OpenAI's GPT-4 to write medical records

Re: Please state...

Upvote for mentioning the emergency medical hologram. Robert Picardo nailed that character.

Malwarebytes may not be allowed to label rival's app as 'potentially unwanted'

Re: re: keyspace

I am in full agreement with what you wrote, but what does it have to do with the discussion of Malwarebytes’ contentious classification of a PUP?

Did you inadvertently reply to the wrong article, intending instead to contribute to this one about a university’s PII data leak? :)

Re: I'm torn on this one...

> For instance, imagine Windows on a dual-boot machine suddenly saying "Windows detected the 'Linux' malware on another partition, and erased it. You're welcome." Using this to be anticompetitive really should be prohibited.

Funny you should mention that as an example, because Windows already does something fairly similar. Who here has installed a Windows update, then booted to the desktop and had a popup along the lines of “$APPLICATION is not compatible with this version of Windows and has been uninstalled”?

Which drives me mad. Firstly, it’s the unearned smugness of it. “We did you a favour and messed up your workflow!”

Secondly though, define “not compatible”. That could be anything from “immediately crashes and takes down the whole system” to “works perfectly unless you try to print to a hard copy” (in which case, a perfectly reasonable response by the user might be: “I know, I don’t even have a printer anyway, and I need this old app to (access old financial records, photos, whatever)”. Or it might be that the app in question is installed on C: but is only ever run under WINE from the dual-boot Linux partition.

Either way, my point - if I have one? - is that applications shouldn’t be uninstalled without the clear consent of the user.

I’m NOT siding with Enigma here. What I have read here and elsewhere makes me inclined to never, ever let their software anywhere near my systems. And Malwarebytes aren’t automatically uninstalling it; they’re just flagging it as a PUP. To return to my analogy, if Windows simply popped up with “hey, $APPLICATION might not be fully compatible with this version of Windows, click here for details” - that would be a lot more acceptable.

UK launches SKYNET – not a doomsday plot, just shopping for improved satellite comms

You forgot to say “please”.

Election Excel blunder declared a 'low point' for Austrian social democracy

Re: Pre-Election De-Seating

> A country can easily survive for a month without a prime minister, president, or what-have-you, despite said officeholders' strong opinions to the contrary.

As I recall, a few years ago Belgium survived for a lot longer than that without any government at all. As the bins were still being emptied and public services were still running, the population totally failed to rise up in a frenzy of under-politician’ed panic.

The only reason a government was finally and sheepishly formed was because the politicians began to worry about how little their presence was missed by the masses.

Netherlands digital minister smacks down Big Tech over AI regs

Re: " Many people die in car crashes but we don’t outlaw cars "

I’m just waiting for the first news report of someone caught driving while wearing their new $3500 Apple AR goggles.

Because you know someone’s going to do it. Probably for social media / youtube likes :(

Reddit blackout planned over app-killing API prices

Re: Just waiting for the inevitable collapse.

Quite right. If the Internet gets much more unusable we’ll all just go back to makin’ our own entertainment, like in the good old days. A stick-and-hoop to bowl along, a well-seasoned conker on a string, a skipping rope… excellent clean, healthy pursuits. Mens sana in corpore sano, and all that…

Metaverse? Apple thinks $3,500 AR ski goggles are the betterverse

Can’t blame Apple.

They’ve seen the rave reviews and unfeasibly vast revenues that Meta are raking in from bringing VR to the clamouring impatient masses, and they want some of it.

Microsoft Windows latest: Cortana app out, adverts in

Yes. That was a cut above the usual comment and was more than it seamed.

Re: re: saturated with advertisements

> Perhaps you work for an Ad Agency? If so then it is long past time that you found a new position.

Or, preferably for the rest of us, follow the advice that Bill Hicks famously gave to anyone in that benighted industry.

Re: Two words for Microsoft:

Especially if one of the sources they used for training the AI is Roger's Profanisaurus :)

Millions of Gigabyte PC motherboards backdoored? What's the actual score?

Re: You missed a question.

Yay! I'm directly responsible for a Register article being tweaked! That's not happened in many, many years, ever since the olden days when Mike Magee was on staff :)

Re: You missed a question.

My understanding of the mechanism - and I freely admit I skim-read about it last time something similar hit the news many months ago, so I'm prepared to be corrected (with the calm good manners that are the hallmark of Internet discussions) - is that the firmware doesn't itself write to the disk. Instead, it signals to the OS that it has an OEM-specific file that needs to be added to the system manifest, and Windows accepts the file and writes it to disk.

If true, then an encrypted disk won't make any difference; if the OS has access, the firmware can get the file onto it.

You missed a question.

How about:

“Should I take the moron(s) who thought it would be a good idea to allow UEFI firmware to automatically and silently install root-privileged services to the Windows \system32 folder, off my Christmas card list?

Yes. At minimum.”

North Korean spy satellite launch ends in sea smash

I think this XKCD is a pretty good analogy to answer your question.

WTF is solid state active cooling? We’ve just seen it working on a mini PC

Re: “blow-suck”

Ah, you’ve seen that Oglaf strip, too :)

Airline puts international passengers on the scales pre-flight

Re: Perfect excuse

We went through a lot of hamsters in the control group, yes.

> Well, the UK IPS system was hosted by IBM

Well yes, but OTOH that would mean that they’d automatically get rid of any equipment over a certain age, surely?

1. This crypto-coin is called Jimbo. 2. $8m was stolen from its devs in flash loan attack

Re: Police pretending

Yes, I have a mental image of that scene where Chief Wiggum types up the crime report on his invisible typewriter...

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: Hmmm

> To me this was "just routine maintenance", to the guys I worked with at the university, this was well "above and beyond".

…and to the team whose responsibility it was to do the maintenance, it was “demarcation! A grievance matter! Alright lads, down tools, all out…”

Why you might want an email client in the era of webmail

I've used Thunderbird for a while on my main desktop PC, but the problem I have with it is that it is so very slow when composing a new email. As in, like typing through treacle. I've read up on the problem and tried all the suggested solutions (clear cache, disable extensions, which I don't have anyway, disable hardware acceleration etc) but it's still slow.

I persist however, because I once was foolish enough to use the Windows email client. And a day later, large adverts started appearing in the main application window. Yeah, no, get stuffed Microsoft. Even the Gmail web interface isn't that obnoxious.

Re: DNS-over-https

Wade,

Understood, and thanks for the tip about FQDNs not being required in FF, but that's not really the nub of my complaint. I was more grumbling that when Firefox silently enables DoH, there is a window of time when I see adverts because my Pi-Hole has been cut out of the loop and I have to figure out what's gone wrong (admittedly, I'm alert to this now and spot & remedy it pretty quickly), and that to me seems to be the opposite of the reason for running FF in the first place :)

DNS-over-https

DNS-over-HTTPS “enabled by default” in FF114?

Is that for new/clean installations, or for upgrades as well?

I run Pi-Hole and DoH vastly irritates me. In the past I’ve installed FF on a new machine and been bombarded with adverts on webpages… and then I realize that FF has “helpfully” bypassed my Pi-Hole. Grrr.

Mozilla so sorry for intrusive Firefox VPN popup ad

Yes it's bad, and I'm not defending Mozilla here with any great enthusiasm, but it could have been worse.

I built a Windows 11 system the other day for someone. Once the clean OS build was sort-of running, I needed to connect to an intranet site to grab various apps, drivers, content etc.

I have a pathological aversion to Edge - for reasons that will become self-explanatory - so I figured I'd fire up IE to do it. It's just an intranet site, static content, nothing fancy, so IE would have been perfectly adequate.

IE loaded. But then - Microsoft having deprecated it "for our own good" - every single URL I entered into it opened up Edge instead.

So far, you're probably thinking "meh, so what, quit your whining, it's not 1998 any more", and to be honest, if that's all it had done I'd probably have swallowed my Edgeaphobia and ploughed ahead.

But no. Edge is the most needy, emotionally stunted browser there is, so every time it was opened from IE, it opened up as a modal, full-screen splash, inviting me to make it my best friend, sign in to my Microsoft account (fuck no), allow it to manage my passwords, feed me the usual homepage celebrity tripe, etc etc.

Thinking this was a one-off, I killed it from Task Manager and tried again. Nope, same behaviour, repeat until the red mist descended. Edge did not want to do basic web browsing until I had made it my BFF and patted it on the head and told it I loved it.

Am I the only person repelled by this? Any application that takes over my entire desktop and blocks further multitasking until I attend to it goes straight onto my boycott list. Windows 10/11 have a vile habit of doing the same thing randomly after booting, again trying to bounce me into using a Microsoft account or whatever. I sympathize with the people quoted in the article; anything like this that breaks my workflow and gets between me and the task I'm trying to do makes me livid.

So... my Edgeaphobia further reinforced, I grumbled and dug out a flash drive with a fairly recent copy of Firefox on it. Firefox might occasionally push a VPN at me (not that I've seen that) or offer me Pocket sponsored stories, but at least those behaviours can be disabled.

(Rant over.)

>Does it have spinning dollar signs and a work in progress animation?

Can I add your web-site to my Geocities web-ring?

Windows XP activation algorithm cracked, keygen now works on Linux

Re: Someone, somewhere …

You forgot the obligatory “They said I was mad! Mad!! But I’ll show them! I’ll show them all!!1!1!”

Google wants to target you – yes, YOU – with AI-generated ads

Re: they'll be sorely disappointed...

> Most of my searches these days are for "what else did this actor star in?" "What other bands did this musician play in?" "What are the definitions of this word?"

And of course,

<Father Jack>

Are those MY feet?

</Father Jack>

I'm sure the Hangzhou Sage Chemical Company would have some.

(Yay! An excuse to link to the utterly hilarious, and not recently seen around here, Things I Won't Work With blog :) )

All Microsoft Surface Pro X cameras just stopped working

Re: "...We sent you a DM to maximize the characters' usage."

Ha, I like it.

“Your camera has stopped working. Roll 2d6 for initiative.”

…

“You rolled less than 5. Not only does your camera still not work, but you have been eaten by a gelatinous cube.”

Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

Re: It wasn't broke so we fixed it...

> If the system isn't broke then surely the solution is to leave it alone.

Absolutely. But the problem then is that you get morons and consultants (sorry, I repeated myself there) saying things like “still running a mainframe system and COBOL in this day and age? Sheesh, grandad, get with the times!”. Phrases like “technical debt” start getting bandied around. Managers and people who should know better get seduced by shiny-shiny cloud vendor press releases. And… well, this sort of situation arises.

Rigorous dev courageously lied about exec's NSFW printouts – and survived long enough to quit with dignity

"Ron" definitely missed a trick, I fear. When summoned by "Jeremy" to the C-suite, I'd probably have replied with a cheery and innocent: "No problem, we just accidentally got one of your printouts sent down here to the pool, the printer logs confirm it's yours, $FemaleEmployeeName has brought it to me, we'll bring it back up to you immediately."

And watch him squirm.

Russian IT guy sent to labor camp for DDoSing Kremlin websites

Re: Possibilities

Given the old intelligence community saying that’s along the lines of “Russians lie. They know you know they’re lying, and they know that you know this, and they keep lying anyway”… I would frankly need to look out of the window myself if someone in the Russian government claimed that the sky was blue.

Who knows what this poor sod actually did to incur the disfavour of Putin’s goons. Could have hacked Kremlin IT systems, might have accessed BBC.com or even asked awkward questions about Prigozhin’s apparent offer to betray the positions of Russian troops in exchange for an easy ride.

Electric two-wheelers are set to scoot past EVs in road race

Re: Mobile auto incendiary devices

Well yes, but now when the lithium battery on your e-bike combusts and burns your house down, you will instantly get micro-targeted adverts for fire extinguishers, smoke detectors... and of course, a new e-bike.

Isn't the 21st century great?

NHS England spends £8M to extend Microsoft deals by a month

Re: Long Term Solution

“Hello! It looks like you’re writing a letter conducting open heart surgery! Would you like some help?”

Microsoft's big bet on helium-3 fusion explained

Re: Great observation you have

> I was just watching an episode of Aussie Inventions That Changed the world

So what benighted and God-cursed experiment was it that produced Vegemite as a spin-off?

Re: Bad name, won't work.

That sounds like a bit of a Pons-y scheme to me.

Asahi Linux developer warns the one true way is Wayland

Re: Nope

Don’t worry, Bob. It won’t be long before X11 is re-implemented in Systemd.

(Note icon.)

Remember those millions of fake net neutrality comments? Fallout continues

That'll show them!

$615,000? They'll certainly think twice before daring to do that again! Thank goodness such an egregious and cynical campaign of misinformation is finally being punished by the full weight of the law!

(Note: the above may contain trace elements of sarcasm.)

YouTube's 'Ad blockers not allowed' pop-up scares the bejesus out of netizens

Yes. Sadly you’re right.

Because Marketing Logic goes something like: “these people really hate adverts and go out of their way to block them. So if we sneak past their guard and get OUR advert in front of them, they’ll love it and be instantly sold on whatever we’re advertising!”

Heh. You’re not the only one around here. I think I might outdo you in the “cantankerous old git” stakes though; I am still maintaining a personal boycott of Mazda cars because of a particularly annoying advert campaign they ran in the late 80s. I fully intend to hand down this grudge to my children in due time, like a family heirloom…

Alien rock causes cosmic disturbance in New Jersey home

Alarmed by this, I immediately dashed out and put sandbags around the nearest canon. However it didn’t go well because a) he’s a respectable member of the clergy and hasn’t exploded in living memory, and b) he was trying to conduct a service at the time. Embarrassing. Who knew vergers are allowed to carry tasers?

Of course Russia's ex-space boss doubts US set foot on the Moon

Re: Whatever next?

> bear bones

Heh. Intentional, or glorious coincidence?

Bears with grenades duct-taped to them might be the Russian military's next "game changing" weapon, on current trends.

Re: By implication...

What is reality? What is comment? What is Register?

You'll [BZZ] like Intel’s [BZZ] NUC 13 Pro once the fan [BZZ] stops blowing

There's a BIOS setting to control fan profile

I suspect that either the author - or more likely, whoever supplied the NUC for review - missed the fact that there's a BIOS setting that controls the fan profile. "Cool", "Quiet", "Balanced", that sort of thing. Given the fan behaviour of every NUC I've used over the years - from the very first prototype ones right up to a 12th-gen Extreme - I strongly suspect that something was amiss with this review unit, either a BIOS setting or possibly (albeit unlikely) a mis-installed fan. Certainly no NUC should normally be running the fan "when copying files" as the article reports.

However, I concur with those above who've commented on the long-term reliability, or otherwise, of the fans on some models. They're better these days, but the 6th gen gaming NUC (Skull Canyon? NUC6i7KYK) is/was notorious for fan failures, and replacement units are unobtanium. I have one here and I've learned to live with its convincing impression of an amorous goat.

Microsoft pushes users to the Edge in Outlook, Teams

Re: PowerShell can handle crap while LGPOs handle settings

> For everything else: gpedit.msc is your friend!

And for those poor souls stuck on Home editions, with no access to GPedit.msc, there is the Group Policy search site, which gives you the Registry equivalents for just about every policy:

https://gpsearch.azurewebsites.net/#

Boffins claim to create the world's first wooden transistor

Re: Make a great calculator

And speculative execution, in the form of branch prediction.

No more feature updates for Windows 10 – current version is final

> M365

> M364

> M363

I see what you did there.

Bravo to Microsoft for incorporating a decreasing FOR loop int into a product name, though.