Posts by Sandtitz

Microsoft's turned Windows into a cesspool, but it wants to do better

Re: What's wrong at Redmond?

"Google achieved a foofhold when IE was dominant intalling it surreptitiously with "free" software - something Firefox never did. What's the business case?"

Google is an advertisement company, they had bought Doubleclick earlier and they are playing the long game here. Chrome is paying the dividends now back to Google.

"Today a browser is the gateway to most information and applications, and allows to control web standards. Should everybody let it to Google?"

Not at all.

"Why? Chrome is today what Windows was thirty years ago. Why Windows domination was bad, and Chrome not?"

I'm not claiming Google/Chrome domination is good at all. Microsoft had a great run during IE4 and up around IE6 when it was among the best browsers (even if the security was lacking with ActiveX and such). For me it was Opera after Netscape Navigator evolution stopped and Netscape Communicator was garbage. The Opera rewrite pushed me to Firefox.

"Firefox was created to counter IE dominance."

No, it wasn't. It was created to make a simple Mozilla browser instead of the fat suite Mozilla was pushing with browser+email+IRC combined.

Firefox had a good run against IE until Chrome stole the scene.

"And Google was not "clever", was criminal."

There was no crime even though it was despised thing to do. You have to be clever when you want to oust the market leader (MS) with endless resources.

"OK, Google is goooooood, MS is baaaaad."

Look, kmorwath...I can see you're really upset about this...I honestly think you should sit down calmly...take a stress pill and think things over...kmorwath...stop. Stop, will you?

"Deliver a good browser not built on Chromium?"

"If you build it they will come" is a great fantasy but just for being the best product does not automatically win people over or change their browsers automatically. Most people are using their OS provided browser and do not contemplate using anything else if it renders sufficiently well the websites they visit.

Firefox is a good browser not built on Chromium.

"Do you mean LibreOffice should close shop because they have no way to compete with Office? Linux should stop desktop distros because they have no chances?"

Not at all.

"Does developing a web browser requires "billions"? C'mon"

No, but the marketing and push will certainly require loads of money. Google probably paid a lot of money to Adobe and others to bundle their browser.

"the new Outlook doesn't run in pure Electron, it is an Electron-like framework"

There, there. That wasn't too hard to admit.

"You didn't want Windows phone." -- "Stop putting words in my mouth." -- "You said people didn't want Windows Phone."

Is that some odd version of gaslighting?

"People didn't want Windows Phone" which is directly reflected by its low sales volume, a fact. Because it lacked several critical software already available on other platforms, people chose Androids and iPhones. Google was never going to code software for it. Similarly other important everyday software was missing. MS even had to pay Rovio to code Angry Birds for it.

"It takes time to make a new platform competitive and appealing."

The market share was always low single digits and it was a dying platform by the time Windows Phone 10 emerged.

"Your example about Youtube is a perfect example of anti-competitive behaviour."

Yes, it was anti-competitive but Google is still free to choose the platforms they code for.

Also, around the same time MS was running their own Scroogled ad campaign against Google. No love lost between the two.

"Anyway, my original post was about a company the size of Microsoft that stopped to invest in many end-user technologies. MS could turn into a cloud-only company, but how clever that idea would be, letting others control the access to that cloud, on their own terms?"

Works pretty well for Amazon, don't you think?

Re: What's wrong at Redmond?

'Why "unwinnable"?'

Google had/has a strong foothold in browser market. Microsoft could spend hundreds of millions to produce a product that is *free*. What is the business case? Google is essentially an advertisement company and profits from the user data telemetry and are dependent on controlling the web. The uphill battle starts from having to mimic Chrome's render engine because webmaster rarely care about anything else than Blink. Google can easily cause delays at Youtube for Firefox users and then people complain how slow Firefox is.

For many people, web search = Google. It doesn't matter if DDG or some other search is better or has zero ads - the vast masses do not change their habits because they do not know better.

"When Mozilla started Firefox and Google Chrome, were they sure they could displace Internet Explorer?"

I don't think Mozilla had such ambitions. Did Elinks or Konqueror projects start as a means to conquer the browser market?

I think Google was very clever with both their software and its delivery mechanisms. Chrome was lean and fast, probably much better quality code than IE and it's years of cruft, mandatory backwards compatibility and tying into Windows.

Google.com pushed Chrome if you were using another browser, and it was bundled with many 3rd party software including Acrobat Reader - opt-in - causing lots of installations and automatic replacement of IE.

"having Google controlling wbe standards with Chrome is as bad as MS controlling them with IE."

I don't disagree.

"It's pretty idiotic to think "it it's not from Microsoft is good and we don't need anything else". Enjoiy the limitations to privacy plug-ins..."

I haven't said anything like that. I personally don't use Google - I have zero Google software on my computers, block all their trackers even here at ElReg and use other web searches. I'm perfectly fine with Firefox and Edge.

"Unlike Google+, a web broswer today controls the access to most applications and data. The fact that Google failed over and over just shows Chrome is not something that can't be attacked."

Google+ was a half-hearted attempt anyway, and they believed in the mantra "If you build it, they will come"

Chrome can be attacked. Please come up with a good strategy - I don't know how. Microsoft or some other company could blow Billions into it, but then again, so could Google.

"Edge VwebView is just the rendering control."

Let me repeat: Electron is not Webview and Electron is not used with the New crappy Outlook.

"You didn't want Windows phone.

Stop putting words in my mouth. I had Lumia 820 and when it bit the dust I also had Lumia 640. I think the platform was really good and easy to use.

"Sure, there was a lot of anti-MS flack as usual, but again, competition is better."

I don't disagree at all.

"Enjoy two walled gardens without any competition, sure, as long as they aren't MS it's fine to be in a cage, yes?"

Well, we could have three walled gardens now if only software developers had written software for WinPhone. They didn't and it was sort of understandable because each garden owners have their own development tools, publishing software on more platforms take more time and money.

Youtube was a requirement that Google didn't code for Windows Phone and Microsoft's attempt to create Youtube viewer was blocked by Google if you remember.

Re: What's wrong at Redmond?

"The mighty Microsoft couldn't develop a new browser and had to adopt Google's one - despite clouds being accessed via a browser"

The market had spoken already. Throwing millions on an unwinnable uphill battle? Now they get Google's labour for free.

Should Google have put more millions or billions into the Google+ carcass? Why not?

"Outlook instead of being rewritten on Microsoft technology, becomes a web app running over Electron frameworik"

Outlook is rewritten in Edge Webview, which is not Electron. Based on Chromium, true.

"Nadella killed Windows Phone (and overlooked obvious integrations into Windows desktop)"

People didn't want Windows Phone, and no amount of money would have helped at that point. Flogging a dead horse rarely helps.

Re: Yes

Sometimes a video is worth a thousand words.

The video instructions on how to use a Brother sewing machine were much more helpful than trying to understand the manual on how to route the threads and use the accessories.

Trump admin pays wind developers to quit, back fossil fuel projects

"Or wonder why countries like the UK and Germany that have made massive 'investments' into 'renewables' have very high energy costs and the corresponding industrial decline."

China has world's largest fleet of both solar power and wind farms. Why is China exempt from your "analysis"?

Dev targeted by sophisticated job scam: 'I let my guard down, and ran the freaking code'

You are 100% right, but admitting this publicly and bringing more exposure to the scams is really helpful for the rest of us.

AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition tested: Gratuitous overkill with a price to match

Re: Intel Arrow Lake price comparison omits Motherboard cost dead end

"With any of the AMD AM5 choices you have at least 1 (maybe 2 gens?) to upgrade to, without needing to buy another motherboard as well!"

While true, how often do people upgrade their rigs and how often?

AM3 came out in 2009, AM3+ in 2011, AM4 in 2016, and AM5 in 2022. DDR6 will require a new socket, perhaps in 2028? If you replace your CPU in every 5 years, you can practically just hop on to the next socket anyway.

AM5 came out in September 2022. If you bought the top AMD model back then (7950X, 16 cores), and now want to upgrade to this latest 9950X3D2 (16 cores), you would likely need to beef up the cooling (170W vs 200W), replace the DDR5-5200 with faster DDR5-5600 to get all speed benefits and to not hobble the CPU.

South Korea introduces universal basic mobile data access

Re: Universal basic mobile data access?

"There aren't hundreds of South Korean banks, therefore one is statistically significant."

Let me remind you what you wrote: "Bank applications" are typically actually a web browser.

I applaud your incredible skills to draw conclusions of an entire app market based on a single application. The onus is on you, not me.

"There's nothing wrong with my educated guesses, as you can't come up with any numbers."

You were guessing how much a UK nationwide FTTH rollout with 100% coverage would cost, and you are probably orders of magnitude in the wrong, painting rosy pictures of lowball costs or claiming 100+ years of use for fiber runs (unrealistic) just because it fits your world view.

"That article lists total install costs at $18 USD/feet and assuming each building is on average 100m away, that works out to ~$5906 USD or ~$60 USD/year for the 100+ years the fibre is likely to last."

LMGTFY: FTTP in UK has been calculated to cost roughly £30 billion 10 years ago, (ref). Likely the expenses have come up a lot after that, perhaps 30-40%. You mentioned The UK Digital Services Tax which raised £800M, which would be just ~2% of the total cost.

Why aren't you looking up this information yourself?

"Accounting for additional costs and loan interest, my previous guess of the 200 GBP/year needed to pay for each connection seems to be correct."

I'm sure the pensioners are delighted with your proposition.

You also wrote "paying say £200 once" (verbatim). Are you backpedaling from that one?

Re: Universal basic mobile data access?

"As far as I can tell, in the past you could tell a bank you were not contactable by voice and that wouldn't be a problem as long as you went to a bank branch in person often enough, or in response to a letter."

As far as I can tell, it's still the same. I'm not a phone-less so cannot confirm, but since the deaf and others incapacitated to use voice telephony cannot use traditional voice communications, you can still tell the bank that you are not contactable.

I'm never receiving calls from bank, but I would expect them to contact me if they stopped abnormal transfers from my account or someone swipes my card on other side of world or my account didn't have enough funds for paying bills etc. If I didn't have a phone number registered I would expect them to contact me by the app or other contact methods - email or snail mail.

"They are almost the same business - the only difference is radio connections from mobile towers to provide the mobile connections need to be rented, which increases costs quite a bit, but when spread over millions of accounts, each plan would really only need to increase by a few dollars."

You speak out of your behind since you do not have any sort of calculations of what the services actually cost to operate. You cannot then just guess that it is "couple dollars per user".

"I wouldn't make the claim that every bank cr…app is native without checking."

You checked ONE app. Please go back and check a statistically meaningful number of banking apps and report back.

"Apple now in fact was forced by the EU to allow the usage of other web browser engines"

Irrelevant since the point was Korea's mobile network, where EU legislation doesn't apply.

(cost of providing fiber to every single home in UK) "That's considered a trade secret"

Earlier you wrote: 'As far as I can tell, the current taxation [...] collects enough money to cover the actual costs of installation'

It seems to me that you are just guessing the numbers here. Of course UK government could cover cost of FTTH for everyone through taxes, but then it is away from something else that is funded with the taxes. Also, the Digital Services Tax you referenced earlier has nothing to do with telecommunications, so why should that money be earmarked for FTTH?

"As for the install, trenching doesn't seem to cost that much - 95% of the cost seems to be rent seeking where fibre needs to cross "private land"."

Most of the costs in laying fiber is, in fact, labour:

"Labor formed the largest share of deployment costs, typically 72% of underground deployments" Source: Fiber Broadband Association, Cost Annual Report 2025

Where fiber needs to cross private land, in UK, Wayleave sums do not seem to be significant part of the costs of deploying fiber at all. It is not free market where the landowner can dictate terms and fiber company can have a court arbitrate the rate. (src: UK Gov)

Re: Universal basic mobile data access?

"Landlines are actually mostly optional - businesses and governments don't seem to have strictly required a landline number and generally if you stop paying for the landline number, all that happens is people can't bother you by calling call you (I haven't heard of a bank you can't login to, or a government form you can't submit, unless you can receive a call on a specific landline number on a 24/7 basis)."

What are you talking about? Phone number is a phone number, whether it is landline or mobile. If a bank needs to contact you via voice you need one or the other.

"Even bumping that up to 6 hours make/receive a month, that would be ~$10.50 USD /month - still cheaper than South Korea mobile plans."

Operating a SIP service vs operating a mobile network are two very different businesses.

"Bank applications" are typically actually a web browser, rather than something native, thus there is a similar data requirement during usage.

"The "bank application" also needs to be downloaded and kept updated, which is typically several hundred megabytes in size for each update.

I want to see references to that claim. Are the Korean bank apps really just apps with embedded browser window? In my country every bank app is native, not just a web browser which makes this rather implausible.

Your second sentence also contradicts the first one. Apple doesn't allow any other web browser engine than their own in phones, so if that 'several hundred megabytes' is not a web browser, what is it?

"As far as I can tell, the current taxation policy for things related to telecommunications (such as https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/28/uk_digital_services_tax/) collects enough money to cover the actual costs of installation and providing a connection."

Sounds great. Now, what is the cost of providing fiber to every single home in UK, along with all the required fiber ports and residential transceivers?

Re: Universal basic mobile data access?

"I've realized that mobile plans are now extortion - as you can't choose to stop paying for a mobile plan (and stop being spied on via that method), without being punished by getting cut off from "your" bank account, same as any business or government disservices that require a phone number."

How does this differ from landlines which also have a cost?

"400Kbps is a very slow connection nowadays, considering that typical banking website is 10+MiB (although 50+MiB is becoming more common for websites);"

Way less data is needed if you are using a bank application.

"What would be real universal basic data access would be a requirement that each home and library etc needs to have fibre run to it with a slow 1000BASE-T connection (it's a 25+ year old technology), with no account required to connect to the internet."

Yes, that would be dandy. Who would pay for it? I'm all in for free lunches as well!

Here's how to watch the Artemis II splashdown

Re: What I didn't get was ...

This was an excellent moment to train the crew for the next missions with the actual live capsule.

If the splash site was say, 300 miles off the nearest vessel, the chopper could be necessary.

Same with the frogmen, training with the actual capsule. Suppose it started taking in water like Liberty Bell 7 did?

Space travel is not going to evolve into the boring phase in my lifetime.

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

Re: I've run Linux on my personal PCs since 1997

"Typically those "recovery images" are in a special hidden partition."

This was the case circa 2000-2015, but I think most manufacturers have stopped this. They just point out to their own tools to download recover media because we're out of the dial-up era now.

What I was talking about with the "LAN/WLAN" part in my post was that Dell/HP BIOS has functionality to download the recovery media and install it automatically to a blank drive. Similar to macOS Recovery.

"You have to know it is there to access it, and how many typical PC customers do you think that might be?"

Very few would know it, and in that case most people are stumped. Usually the storage drive has bitten dust anyway, so they can't fix it.

But when they call the manufacturer's hotline - or their nephew - it is way easier to walk them through than asking them to prepare a recovery USB drive on another computer they may not even have.

Re: I've run Linux on my personal PCs since 1997

"This never used to be a problem in the days of spinning drives as the Windows installer could always recognise them"

Rubbish. IDE drives have always worked but even Windows XP needed drivers for SATA drives in native mode, for example. Not to mention the numerous RAID/SCSI adapters and their drivers.

"With our work laptops we have USB keys with the storage and network drivers on them, and plug them in at the time of installation."

Dell and HP business laptops have for years had an option to restore Windows from BIOS, using LAN / WLAN. You can also host your own image repository.

Both also offer recovery images tailored for their models. Simple install wizards as the recovery media is downloaded and copied to USB stick you boot the laptop with.

Iran cyber actors disrupting US water, energy facilities, FBI warns

Well, duh!

Well, duh!

When a billboard survives the wind, but not the boot

GRUB alternatives

"Yank here. I think it would indeed be considered somewhat dated, but would be known to most USAians."

Would CHOW (Comprehensive Hardware‑Oriented Workloader) be more modern to Yanks?

Or perhaps SLOP (System Loader and Operation Processor)?

Re: kph ?

Kilopond hours, of coz.

Microsoft shivs OpenAI with three new AI models for speech and images

"And they apparently don't care if they screw themselves and their investors in the process.."

So ElReg AI phobes are suddenly worried about what happens to OpenAI and poor Sam Altman?!

Maybe MS has seen the writing on the wall? This article states they have developed better LLM models than what OpenAI has to offer. It would be foolish to rely on a single horse that seems to be limping when there's a lot of very able competition with similarly unlimited resources, some of them ahead already. Same thing with Nokia - Microsoft should have but a bullet in the WinPhone earlier when it was obvious to everyone that the race was lost, but they kept flogging the dead horse.

"Just look at the Nokia fiasco: They screwed them with a Trojan horse, then bought the remains, all to push Windows Phone and Surface RT, which were their worst products since er, Zune."

Stephen Elop goes down as bumbling idiot in the history books, no doubt. I'm sure the Canadians are proud of their boy.

Nokia had started their implosion much earlier with their disastrous leadership and this has been well documented by now. They could have moved to Android phones - which has worked very well with Samsung - but they would have just been one of many other clone manufacturers then and probably still screwed themselves because of a certain "not-invented-here" air of superiority.

Windows Phone was fine, the UI was great. It just came out too late and didn't have a good enough software ecosystem to survive. I'm sure you've never used one anyway.

EU broadcasters say smart TVs and voice assistants are the next gatekeepers

Name and shame!

"Sorry, Charlie ... even after setup, the thing tried to phone home, and threw the error banner when it couldn't make the connection."

Why are you not naming the offending piece of garbage?!

WSL graphics driver update brings better GPU support for Linux apps

Re: With grateful thanks

"Software copyright needs to be reformed with additional clauses protecting abandonware and the operating systems it runs on. Preserving digital culture is important."

Yes.

"Is it still piracy to download an ISO of a CD-ROM when I no longer own a CD-ROM drive?"

Piracy is defined by laws in your country. Where I live it is legal to download copyrighted material (games, movies etc.) but uploading them to a public file share or sharing this data during e.g. BitTorrent session would be an offence.

If the copyrighted software in the CD-ROM didn't prevent copying - e.g freeware/shareware on Walnut Creek CD-ROMs or Linux ISOs, it's not piracy.

Even if a game CD-ROM became abandonware, some assets there could be licensed from original copyright holder - music, videos, graphics or sounds - which could make copying the CD in full a copyright offence. IANAL.

Re: With grateful thanks

"Granted that's a lot of command line use for a Windows bod"

My dear Coward, one needn’t sneer at Windows users’ command‑line skills. Some of us simply prefer to accomplish in a single instruction what others achieve only after an afternoon of ritualistic terminal incantations.

My question wasn't in bad faith. QET mentioned backward compatibility woes - how an extra compatibility layer (Wine) would not be needed had people embraced Tux from the beginning. Ironically, you just confirmed that we need other kinds of compatibility layers - such as containers - with old games.

Re: With grateful thanks

Especially old Windows 95/98 era games expect admin rights, old version of DirectX and are probably very tricky to run.

OTOH, I'm still occasionally playing the original Civilization 1 (Windows 3.1 application) in this Win10 laptop.

So, how do those old LOKI games from 30 years ago fare in modern Linux?

Microsoft publishes a workaround for Samsung's C:\ drive woes

Re: Possible Microsoft Error in Recovery Procedure

"IF capitalisation matters here

Capitalisation does not matter. Windows is case-insensitive with user/group names.

Re: Oh, did we skip a step?

"But it looks extremely dodgy to me. It only changes permissions on C:\. There is nothing to restore different permissions to, say, C:\Users."

Perhaps the Samsung software only changed the permissions on C: root?

The C:\Users directory does not inherit permissions from C:\

If the Samsung software had actually reset all permissions on the drive, there would be no way to recover them perfectly with any sort of script.

Critical Microsoft Excel bug weaponizes Copilot Agent for zero-click information disclosure attack

"I can never understand how someone could be offended by curse words in 2026."

I wasn't offended. Fuck-this-and-that just brings this forum to 4chan levels I and many others do not subscribe to.

"They're so ubiquitous. It's not really bad manners unless you subscribe to outdated 1950s societal norms."

Do you call your kids or parents 'fuckers'? Why not if it's not bad manners?

Fuck off.

@Omnipresent

"Because way back in the day Bill Gates gave it away free, and business loves free."

DOS, Windows, or Office have never been free.

WTF are you smoking?

"As we all know now tho, if something is free, YOU are the product."

Does this apply to Linux and FOSS products as well?

"Forgive my lack of manners, but why do any fuckers..."

Language, language.

"still use microshit and office?"

People use Microsoft Office because it is well-known, long established product and de facto office software on most businesses where many rely on workflows both with Outlook and Excel.

The rest of the MS Office portfolio could easily be replaced.

AI Burning Man happens next week – what to expect at Nvidia GTC 2026

Re: Grok?

Groq, not Grok...

Groq apparently builds actual ASIC hardware.

Polish cops bust alleged teen DDoS kit sellers – youngest just 12

"Letting the kids play online unsupervised wouldn't then be seen as an easy way of getting out of looking after them."

If a kid resells vapes to other kids, steals something or has vandal tendencies - is this the fault of parents?

Parents can't and shouldn't supervise kids all the time after certain age.

Didn't you ever do anything stupid - like the rest of us - and was it your parents' fault as well?

Microsoft Azure CTO set Claude on his 1986 Apple II code, says it found vulns

Re: For fun...

"Why have "AI" scour source code for vulnerabilities when the community (FOSS) has been doing that for 50 years ?"

Because it is apparently a tool that finds vulnerabilities?

The community doesn't scour every piece of code. Do you oppose automated fuzzing as well, or is it the usage of an LLM here that irks you?

Perhaps the recently surfaced (and fixed) libpng flaw that existed for thirty (30) years is an example why we need more than people eyeballing random code in their free time.

Cisco warns of two more SD-WAN bugs under active attack

Re: Seriously?

"If it had any brains, it would say: Rip and replace Cisco due to the non-stop security holes."

Sure. Just don't make it Chinese gear and choose something that doesn't ever have holes, right?

China’s rubber-stamp parliament rubber stamps tech independence plan

Re: @wee apologist for China

"It is hypocrisy, not whataboutism."

So how about those child sex dolls and hazardous materials used in kids' toys? How's the Uyghur concentration camp business going there?

You approve this shit? Yes or no? Or do you just refuse to condemn any of this - are you a hypocrite perchance?

@apologist for China

Resorting to whataboutism when you cannot thwart the accusations? This makes you actually accept that China has a rubber-stamp parliament, and the approval of GPU's was very slow.

"How about we read 'the oligarch bought and paid for Congress'? The 'convicted felon President'."

How about we read about how China has a flourishing child sex doll industry?

Or how their children's toy industry has a habit of using asbestos in 2026?

Whoopsie!

One vendor doesn't mind high RAM prices: VMware

Re: Really

"However, a 2TB NVME ssd I got just over a year ago is now 4x its cost"

Everything is getting more expensive, but the cost of 2TB of DRAM is not in comparable to cost of 2TB NVMe drive.

Also, not all hosts can be populated with 2TB of memory.

Microsoft gives Windows laggards the 'gift of time' wrapped in licensing fees

Re: an OS reaching the end of it's supported life

"Who decides that the OS has reached its end of life ?"

The OS manufacturer of course decides this.

In what manufacturing business are you and do you support your software and hardware to all eternity?

"Microsoft practically prints its money."

Exactly same could be said of Red Hat and other commercial distros who also have EOL dates set. Why aren't you whining about their support policies?

"I used to love it in the late 80's/early 90's when games could be booted directly from the CD"

"There were plenty of games that ran from cd after inserting disk 1and rebooting."

I see you are moving goalposts. No games whatsoever "could be booted directly from the CD" as you wrote earlier.

"I used to love it in the late 80's/early 90's when games could be booted directly from the CD without involving DOS:

You seem to be hallucinating - did you ask this from a ChatGPT?

El Torito standard for bootable CD's came out in 1995 and it took some time before computers actually supported it. NT4 installation CD was the first such disc I ever encountered.

I have never seen or heard of a PC game booting directly from CD. If you have more information to share I'd very much like to hear it.

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

Re: Passkeys? Yeah, sure....

"If the amnesia is sever would they even remember they have some sort of computing device that will respond to being stared at?"

The helpdesk at my workplace is very busy after each holidays because people do not remember their passwords. The same people usually still have their fingertips and or faces left after a reset.

But hey, let's all call biometrics evil, and scare people that their biometric data is transferred out of the computers, phones or tablets at any point!

Re: Passkeys? Yeah, sure....

People are prone to injury which can severely affect biometric parameters. Are they to be locked out of communications because they suffered an accident or burns, for example?

Some people suffer amnesia. Are they to be locked out?

Biometrics in computers and phones are just additional authentication methods and you still have a pin code or password to rely on if biometric login fails.

Attacker gets into France's database listing all bank accounts, makes off with 1.2 million records

Re: Is it just me...

"1990 ... Until then, most of its users were academics and techies, so they could be pretty much trusted."

Ahem... one academic called Morris released a worm in 1988.

China remains embedded in US energy networks 'for the purpose of taking it down'

Re: Blah blah blah @martinusher

"I saw a video on youTube, a sort of "How its made" type, that detailed the production of these dolls. I don't think any of them are children, its just that a lot of Chinese and other Asians are very petite."

To everyone, this video has a couple of pictures of the Chinese child sex doll that Shein was selling on their shop.

https://youtu.be/syrRbf1Zdg4?t=57 (SFW)

Hard to understand martinusher defending either Shein or Chinese child sex doll industry except for some reasons only he knows. There's something very wrong in your head if you describe this dolls as "petite adult".

Last year he was called out for defending North Koreans in all articles, so everyone can just draw their own conclusions here...

Re: Blah blah blah

"The sooner we kick the USA"

The sooner we kick USA and China out, you mean?

At least USA doesn't manufacture child sex dolls like the Chinese tried flogging in Europe. Apparently a thriving business in China.

OK, so Anthropic's AI built a C compiler. That don't impress me much

Re: "That don't impress me much"

So, just asking a valid question produces more downvotes than upvotes here.

No-one actually seemed to answer the question with anything but loud words.

No-one is putting money where their mouth is regarding of setting coding goals that Claude (or some other 'AI' invention) could actually surpass.

"That don't impress me much"

I would like to hear what would impress Mr. Vaughan-Nichols and others here.

Attackers finally get around to exploiting critical Microsoft bug from 2024

Re: Meanwhile..

"As if we've not been doing that on Linux for what? 3..4 decades or so?"

4 decades?! Troll harder dear AC.

"Anyway, not as wonderful and new as MS likes to proclaim.."

Why is updating without rebooting "not as wonderful"?

Hot patching is new for Windows. I haven't seen any mention that MS has invented this.

Apple's Creator Studio creates a subscription where free apps used to live

As mentioned in the article, Number and Pages are also available for iPad.

Libreoffice isn't.

For the same price you can get MS Office 365, which includes license for 5 additional people and 1 TB Onedrive storage for each.

I haven't used Pages and Number, is the software better than MS equivalents?

How Microsoft's legal eagles wrangled Happy Days for Windows 95

Jumping the shark indeed.

"In other news, Microsoft has continued to load its product lines with AI features, and its flagship operating system, Windows (which has suffered a terrible start to the year with multiple out-of-band fixes), is set to become an agentic OS."

Did Microsoft run over Richard Speed's dog? He seems to write all his Microsoft articles with a negative slant.

This last paragraph has nothing to do with article, so why include it?

I expect better writing here.

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

Re: Does everything have to be "monetisable"?

"We are not a Nordic country and it’s all very well until they start electing nutters from both ends of the spectrum"

While this is a valid concern, if the nutters manage to take the whole country, they can ram whatever new charter..

The status quo just slowly erodes BBC from the corners with the inspectors and extra bureaucracy and such. The taxation in Nordics is progressive with very low income families paying nothing or very little. Worth considering.

If the BBC is well respected within UK, there will be a higher barrier to dissolve it or turning it into something unwanted.

Re: Does everything have to be "monetisable"?

"The licence fee is not perfect. But it's the least worst option, and that is why we should be persisting with it"

The Nordic countries have moved to taxation instead of TV license in the last several years.

I would say there have been more positive than negative outcomes.