Posts by Woodnag

UK watchdog eyes Meta's smart glasses after workers say they 'see everything'

Re: Who would wear AI glasses during "extremely private moments" ...

I did hear that a very common approach to improving one's sex life is simply to involve a second person...

BOFH: Loss adjuster discovers liability is a two-way street

Re: Waterproofing your car.

My friend from Llanelli told me years ago that Dyfed only had one season, Rugby...

BBC bumps telly tax to £180 as Netflix lurks with cheaper tiers

Re: Why it's unfair...

The license is a carryover from the original radio licenses, when the equipment was expensive. The expectation for decades has been that everyone watches live TV, hence detector vans back in the day and now letters + home visits. What a waste of resources. Just fund it from the exchequor like most else with a negotiated budget.

Capita pension portal 'fiasco' forces Cabinet Office into damage control

Re: Another contract loss approaches...

I genuinely don't understand why techies work for this place. Can't look good on the ol' CV.

Britain's Ministry of Defence signs on the dotted line with Palantir

The real reason is hiding in plain sight

"...data analytics capabilities supporting critical strategic, tactical and live operational decision making across classifications across defense and interoperable with Nato and other allied nations Palantir systems"

"data analytics ... across classifications"

UK Army is involved in population surveillance and protest management.

"Visit Scarfolk today. Our number one priority is keeping rabies at bay." https://scarfolk.blogspot.com/

High Court to grill London cops over live facial recognition creep

UK will leave ECHR soon anyway, because as this case shows, the massive ramp up in surveillance across the country (physical and online tracking) is incompatible with basic right of privacy.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1mxy2j2elro

"The Conservatives will take the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) if they win the next election, Kemi Badenoch has announced."

Welcome to Scarfolk.

British government caves on datacenter approval after legal challenge

Re: Jaywick

Investment? AI data centres are leeches, taking power and cooling water, and investing in the resources for neither.

These are AI processing centres, not ISPs. This is nothing to do with $[YourFavouriteOnlineService] being available.

Re: So, government...

Just because the location is fine doesn't mean that the 100MW+ of continuous power draw is available.

"Foxglove says the government now accepts the decision must be quashed, claiming officials concede there were insufficient measures to hold the developer and any future site occupier of the site to environmental impact commitments."

The end result will be that the planning consent will be retained, with extra safeguards for environmental impact mitigation mutually agreed between gov and developer. The mitigation will turn out to be non-binding of course.

House of Lords votes to ban social media for Brits under 16

"The civil liberties-focused Open Rights Group also argued against a ban, saying it would require widespread use of age-verification across the internet."

This is the whole point. Goverments don't give a monkey's left testicle about kids, screen time adiction, resultant lack of face to face socialisation skills etc.

Goverments do care about accurately de-anonomising every social media account.

Which is what this will do.

US regulator tells GM to hit the brakes on customer tracking

Which is it?

We have:

"Under the terms of the FTC's order, GM must obtain consent from drivers before collecting or sharing covered data."

And:

"The FTC says GM may still share location data with emergency responders"

Does the 2nd statement overide the 1st?

Microsoft's 'From SA' scheme on trial as license resale row refuses to die

There's a value to Office 2003 (with Compatibility Pack) and Office 2007 installs because they just work forever after a single payment, also without insisting on cloud, AI helpers etc.

Of course MS keeps updating Exchange so that earlier versions of Outlook get pooched for non-subscription O365...

Maker fight! SparkFun cuts ties with Adafruit in harassment dispute

Wow

You had a bad experience with Adafruit... so you doubt the story? The story may or may not hold up, but I'm afraid (afried?) that your order experience is irrelevant.

Soup king Campbell’s parts ways with IT VP after ‘3D-printed chicken’ remarks

Re: I am the Little Red Rooster

El Reg story says "The company has since pumped out plenty of posts pointing out that its poulet is proper repast, made of actual chicken from well-run farms."

Errm, not quite.

Per company statement https://www.thecampbellscompany.com/newsroom/news/company-statement-on-the-garza-lawsuit-and-alleged-audio-recording/ says:

“The chicken meat in our soups comes from long-trusted, USDA approved U.S. suppliers and meets our high quality standards. All our soups are made with No Antibiotics Ever chicken meat. Any claims to the contrary are completely false.”

They said ‘chicken meat’, not ‘chicken’. Would you say "Honey, we're having chicken meat for dins"? No. You'd say "Honey, we're having chicken for dins". That qualifier word 'meat' is hiding something.

Self-destructing thumb drive can brick itself and wipe your secret files away

Re: Or...

Make a fracture line in the housing above a scribed line on the flash memory package inside, and it can be snapped into two.

MS Task Manager turns 30: Creator reveals how a 'very Unixy impulse' endured in Windows

Re: re: There is something better than the dystopia of Windows...

Win11 is fine, if you install an earlier pre-AI version (23H2 here) using an ISO that has been decrappified with tinybuilder11 first, and then you spend a day with WinaeroTweaker and other stuff getting it to do what you want, not what Redmond wants.

MPs urge government to stop Britain's phone theft wave through tech

Government locking

If UK gov gets their mitts on a mechanism to allow remote phone locking, the following will happen.

1. Capita will get the contract to manage it

2. Capita will get hacked and the access stolen, so crims will be able to offer a lock-a-phone-on-demand service

3. UK gov will start locking phones of people they don't like, such as attending certain protests, which also kills the video recording of said protests

Jaguar Land Rover cyber-meltdown tipped to cost the UK almost £2B

"The issue was so severe that in September the UK government had to step in with financial support to the tune of £1.5 billion as JLR struggled to bring its systems back online."

Because parent Tata Motors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Motors (a public company) can't afford to pay for its own screwups, so the cost is socialised to the British taxpayer.

Arduino has a new job selling chips for its new owner. Let's not pretend otherwise

Re: The End

Atmel should have invested in Arduino a long time ago when Arduino were championing AVR MCUs.

No account? No Windows 11, Microsoft says as another loophole snaps shut

Re: Old isos

That's fine. My Win11 23H2 doesn't have any of the Copilot or ai crap, and when the updates stop it will be time to jump to MXLinux with Virtualbox running the older Win stuff I like under XP with host-only networking.

Re: "enhance security and user experience of Windows 11."

...and you'll get an email a week telling you great deals in crowns, gum treatment etc until you unsubscribe to the junk that you didn't subscribe to in the first place.

UK government says digital ID won't be compulsory – honest

Re: Or..

Needn't bother with cash. The location will be correlated with your household anyway.

UK government says digital ID won't be compulsory

It will be compulsory to new applications for state benefits initially.

Then anything at gov.uk

Then to buy alcohol and prescription drugs.

Now we have 90% of the population, so can be extended to petrol, bog roll purchase etc.

Microsoft declares bring your Copilot to work day, usurping IT authority

Re: Fecking hell

I repeatedly delete ai.exe and its friends to stop it running as a child under outlook, and MS keeps reinstalling it.

Apple's AirPods Pro 3 are still chuck-and-buy-again specials

Re: "destined for recycling"

destined for landfill, with Li battery still inside.

Explain digital ID or watch it fizzle out, UK PM Starmer told

"Digital ID will act as no deterrent to illegal arrivals". True, but when the ID is required for every monetary transaction, then it will be difficult to live in the UK without the ID. Of course, no-one will actually want to live under those cicrumstances either, so those that can leave, will. Before the east coast is under water.

Dell enters the earbud market with kit you can control from the cloud

Re: Yeah, sure

What functionality stops working when the cloud feature becomes discontinued in 5 years time?

Campaigners urge UK PM Starmer to dump digital ID wheeze before it's announced

You have to have your DL with you when you drive. Soon you'll have to have a smart phone with your Digi ID on it with at all times, driving or not.

Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

Re: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

Surveillance, surely, since everything is slurped up without control,and distributed wherever.

Supermarket giant Tesco sues VMware, warns lack of support could disrupt food supply

Re: [..] why Broadcom isn't automatically forced to honour the existing VMware contracts

"Class actions only ever benefit the lawyers."

They are intended to provide a viable mechanism to penalise a company financially for actions providing deliberate low value harm to a lot of people.

Where the 'penalise' money goes is actually secondary.

Re: [..] why Broadcom isn't automatically forced to honour the existing VMware contracts

In US you usually have to opt out of a relevant class action where you would have standing, to preserve your right to separate action.

Law firm email blunder exposes Church of England abuse victim details

Re: Another day

That it is. As others have pointed out, preventable at the system level too.

Re: It said it made attempts to recall the emails,

It more or less works if sender and all recipients are on the same outlook server... but ever under that perfect circumstance, if a recipient forwards the email before the recall, the recall is pooched. Recall just starts the Streisand Effect. Oooh, recalled... what's embarrasing here?

Re: Another day

A fool failing to use BCC in a mailshot is not a breach.

Microsoft can't guarantee data sovereignty – OVHcloud says 'We told you so'

Re: Sounds like

That's the whole point of the GDPR.

But the data protection authorities are captured. Looking at you, Republic of Ireland.

See https://noyb.eu/en

...the scenario had "never happened before."

"Anton Carniaux, director of public and legal affairs at Microsoft France" would have no knowledge that US gov had issued an NSL to get one off or continuous access the foreign data. So his statement that the scenario had "never happened before." is BS, because he would not have been in the loop, and he surely knows that.

In Otter news, transcription app accused of illegally recording users’ voices

Re: If it's doing this in the EU, it's going to have fun!

It won't be the Irish DPA, unless Otter is competing with Facebook.

AWS wiped my account of 10 years, says open source dev

Re: Sympathy?

It's worse than that.

His only copy was on a computer owned by a second party using an account paid for by a third party.

Just missing the 'Beware of the leopard' sign.

Three US agencies get failing grades for not following IT best practices

Re: All of these are problems of compliancy, and so are failures by the Compliancy Officer.

Don't be silly. Wrist slap with wet napkin.

The TSA likes facial recognition at airports. Passengers and politicians, not so much

Re: That effort would be better spent elsewhere

The more pics of your face in identical poses, the more accurate the identification will be in the future of *you*.

Tell me why that's in my interest?

Of course the pics go elsewhere. When caught at it, what will be the repercussions? An un-auditable promise to delete?

Ransomware gang sets deadline to leak 3.5 TB of Ingram Micro data

Basics?

Surely a basic monitor is for significant traffic, aggregrated over various time periods to catch steady trickle downloads as well as fast dumps?

3.5TB !!!

Windows 11 is a minefield of micro-aggressions in the shipping lane of progress

I'm not using it.

"I'm not using it" may not stop it training on your stuff.

Foundry competition heats up as Japan’s Rapidus says 2nm chip tech on track for 2027

Re: Sub-head: "That's just... checks notes... two years behind everyone else"

Okay, snippy El Reg scribe... what's the smallest geometry UK fab?

Xactly.

Looks like 1,300 Indeed and Glassdoor staffers will need their former employer's websites

Re: "Indeed" Indeed ?

My information is that it is the gov funded orgs like JPL and NASA that underpay, so the best people get snorkelled off by the multitude of private companies participating in the various hi-rel fields from space (LEO and out) to mil.

UK police dangle £75 million to digitize its VHS tape archives

Re: How much?

VHS produces unique date for every field/frame.

Digitisation needs to be to a PNG (or other lossless format) image per field/frame, not a compressed video stream.

Don't do this and the data loses evidence quality.

Australia not banning kids from YouTube – they’ll just have to use mum and dad’s logins

Re: It's just a surveillance hack by the back door.

Yes.

So the lede "Australia not banning kids from YouTube – they’ll just have to use mum and dad’s logins" is ignoring the huge elephant in the room, which is that mum and dad will now have to log in to YT.

A fantastic gift from the Oz gov to a foreign surveillance company.

Huawei's latest notebook shows China is still generations behind in chipmaking

Re: Weasel words

Generations behind.... whom? TSMC (Taiwan) and Intel (USA) and Samsung (Korea) also have 7nm. Looks like Asia is winning to me.

Microsoft adds export option to Windows Recall in Europe

Re: Just ask nicely for backups

Let's look at the official statement: Microsoft said it "does not have access to your export code and cannot help you recover it if it is lost."

"does not have access" implies that the code is actually saved somewhere.

"cannot help you" covers both business decisions and physical limitations. Just like I cannot help you rob a bank.

The trendline doesn’t look good for hard disk drives

PC storage

For Windows, I prefer a 128GB SSD as the C: drive, an HDD for D:, and locate the user standard directories (Docs, Video, Pictures, Temp etc) on D. Easy to backup user stuff by just copying D:.

If the SSD isn't encrypted, the unused areas compress well when imaged, so "sudo dd bs=4M if=/dev/sda | sudo gzip -c > Date_C_drive.gz && sync" from a live Linux USB provides a backup similar in size to the used storage, and 128GB doesn't take long. If encrypted, don't bother with gzip. And the backup can go on the D drive initially, so fast.