Posts by Snapper

Nation-state actors cracked critical Australian infrastructure to ‘cripple it at a time of their choosing’

Re: Good on them

Agreed, but boasting that you know *her* intentions is not exactly subtle and I think this was for local head patting.

Crooks found a new way to collaborate using Teams – by hiding command-and-control traffic

You owe me a new keyboard!

Britain plots digital bedtime after kicking under-16s off social media

Re: Papers Please!

Oh yes!

Signal says UK plan to scan devices for nude images 'endangers us all'

Re: Zombie Starmer's Victorian internet: An Internet without Things.

I think somebody important gave the game away a few weeks ago!

HST (High Speed Train) was chosen as a name to get the attention and the money. In actual fact, and that's been born out by recent announcements, is that HST was and is really just a way of getting more capacity on the track, with higher speed and slightly shorter journey times a bit further back.

Troops’ phones gave away location data to foreign adversaries

Re: ...and this is news?

And if one IMEI is occasionally separated from the rest in their base you have their officer, and if they are suddenly in another area with a load of other officers you might be looking at a planning meeting.

And if that IMEI is noticed going on a trip to The D*****nt o* Wa* in Wash**gton and then taking a slower journey across country that crosses rivers, lakes and roads until it lands (oops, sorry) at a well known base/airfield and then goes a LOT faster to somewhere near the Fin**h/R****a border, then you've probably worked everything out.

Tony Blair and the Reform party both want AI in government, though they can't agree on what for

Re: He sees good use for AI...

He can't be the same Blare, he spells it Blair.

Microsoft lets users exile floating Copilot button after interface rage

Wow!

Just...Wow!

Windows boot partition runs out of space for Microsoft's May security update

Re: Hopeless error message

Been there, done that, eaten the T-shirt!

Britain's £6B armoured sickener Ajax cleared for duty despite injuring troops

Re: Not just one cause

Pan-European Defence Organisation

P.E.D.O.

Usage pricing leaving software vendors guessing what lands on the invoice

What's the chance a disgruntled worker could cost his/her employers a huge chunk of change!

Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

Had a client in a cramped office with a 19-Inch cabinet with several servers and RAID units. I'd installed a fan rack (cheapest one the MD would approve) but the client kept complaining about the servers switching off due to heat.

I was stumped but turned up early for my meeting the next day and when I walked in to the studio I couldn't hear the cooling fans. Had a chat with the friendly new receptionist who told me the fans were always off as no-one liked the noise, but if anyone was visiting they were switched back on.

NASA watchdog report pokes holes in Artemis lunar lander plans

Re: Finally a faint voice of wisdom in this whole HLS saga ...

Or BIG SpaceHoppers?

Musk admits Starship V3 launch date has slipped as Super Heavy booster rolls into place

Re: Extorted schedule

Literally two generations ago!

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

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

If you are like me and need to wear prescription glasses to get around, not walk into traffic etc, then wearing glasses ALL THE TIME is non-optional.

An extremely private moment could be someone being run over and killed.

It could be a mother breast-feeding her child. OK, she chose to do it in public, but probably would not have agreed to someone recording it.

There are degrees here.

Microsoft Copilot to hijack your browser... for your own convenience

Re: You can take my Firefox

Aren't you clever!

Re: You can take my Firefox

Got a friend who uses Windows and complains bitterly every time I see him that he's fed up to the back teeth of updates that start as soon as he turns the computer on.

Thinks I'm smug because I use Macs.

I just smile gently.

Server crashes traced to one very literal knee-jerk reaction

Re: "It was the time of Novell networks, RG58 cables, and bulky tower PCs,"

And the Yoof of today, my three kids included, although the girl/young woman is a lot more tech savvy than her brothers, are fond of connecting cheap UK plug type power supplies to their power hungry laptops with a USB-C cable designed for a phone or, in one case an electric toothbrush, and then wonder why it won't charge their laptop or connect their backup drive!

Re: Reset buttons should be VERY well recessed

The THUMBS!

I'd have selected two other exterior items!

Hotel's rotary switchboard so retro it predates the concept of crashing

Re: Anybody can be connected to anybody else

Same when I worked for the M0D in the 80's.

You can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone, says Dutch defense chief

Re: Build your own planes domestically

Do you mean 'Tempest' is Tri-nation project, as Typhoon was Quad-nation project (UK, Germany, Italy and Spain)

Re: FireBall

Venus............

Re: Admin account...

Oh God, don't remind me.

Picking up a prescription from a chemist and the keyboard under the screen that was facing away from me had a credit-card sized card tucked into the top row.

With the info side facing the customer.

Login: User

Password: password1234

Re: You'd like to think

Yeah, that set off my 'This Fucker Does Not Know WTF He Is Talking About' tingle!

£111M later, frictionless post-Brexit border dream 'brought to early closure'

Ahhh

Jacob Rees-Wormtongue......

Telling the House of Commons, before the Brexit vote, that we could have two referendumbs, one to see if the British people wanted to leave and another as a vote on the final deal.

Soon shut up about that once they 'won' the vote to Leave by a gnats tadger didn't he!

Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

Re: Not a Trump thing.

My daughter still has Long Covid and can only work four days out of five and goes to bed no later than 8.00pm.

Not a great life in your late 20's!

Re: Not a Trump thing.

Don't disagree.

I live in Kent UK and there were several scares about a new 'Kent variant'. At this point no-one knew when a new variant might turn up and it seemed a 50/50 chance if it would be weaker or possibly a much more deadly version.

We forget too soon.

Microsoft veteran explains the one weird trick that made Windows 95 restart faster

Re: Tagline of the time...

Just not add up accurately...

Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

Re: Suggestions?

Ha! I had a client General Manager) ring up to say they had been the target of a burglary and lost two laptops, so could we replace them under warranty!

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

Re: Mazda CX-5 track information

Hah!

My 2017 Honda Jazz lists every CD (Genuine or ripped) as Track 1, Track 2 etc. The controlling interface for all media makes Windows 95 look pretty and efficient.

NASA nominee 'committed' to uprooting Shuttle Discovery for Houston trophy piece

I'll Grant you that one!

SpaceX's Starship: Two down, Mons Huygens to climb

Re: Gerry Anderson - space visionary

IIRC in one episode (ok fanboy here) Fireball XL6 crashed on take-off and XL5 had to take over a dangerous mission.

Ah, Saturday mornings in the early 60's with the fire lit and a 14-inch black and white tv!

Word to the wise: Don't tell your IT manager they're not in Excel

Excel

I saw a young lady client (a Geography Degree under her shapely belt, presumably with statistics involved), type in a list of prices into Excel, then open the drawer of her desk, pull out a calculator and proceed to add up the numbers and type in the answer at the bottom of the 50+ prices.

Users left scrambling for a plan B as Dropbox drops Dropbox Passwords

Re: Here's a great alternative

Last time I had to break a 'password-protected' Excel list of passwords it took me about 10 seconds, and that included the two sips of coffee.

Microsoft broke DHCP for Windows Server last Patch Tuesday

Just.....

Just how many times to Microsoft's clients have to say...

"You had ONE job!"

Ukraine strikes Russian bomber-maker with hack attack

Re: Zelenskyy sure seems to hold a lot of cards

Trump does not have what sane people call a sense of humour.

His idea of a joke is to denigrate or insult people. He has no compassion or empathy for anything except himself, money and power, in that order.

Introducing Windows on arm. And by arm, we mean wrist

Re: Most wanter Windows wrist watch

Depends on where they are made I guess!

When even Microsoft can’t understand its own Outlook, big tech is stuck in a swamp of its own making

Re: Hand

This! This is what I hate about Microsoft!

They 'upgrade' an already pretty shitty app and remove the way you can see if there are unread emails in a folder!

WTAF!

The only thing I can think, and that's nearly 40 years of putting up with Microsoft's shit, is that after the next, next 'upgrade' we will have a 'new' feature.

Re: Hand

I think you have just described Microsoft......

Microsoft's London 'Experience Center' packs up and goes home

Re: Not surprising

I hear they had they had a 1:1 print out of their EULA on one floor just so people could marvel at the physical size of it.

There, FIFY!

I passed it many times on the way to the Apple Store.

It looked exactly the same but the Apple Store had customers.

Now Windows Longhorn is long gone, witness reflects on Microsoft's OS belly-flop

Re: When was it ever otherwise?

And with no taste apparently!

Trump nukes 60 years of anti-discrimination rules for federal contractors

Excellent points!

Veteran Microsoft engineer shares some enterprise support tips

Well....

One has to wonder why Windows software needed such strong anti-virus software in the first place.

Microsoft has always said that 'other' OS's suffered from viruses too, but did anybody fall for that excuse?

Microsoft reboots Windows Recall, but users wish they could forget

"Microsoft's advice is to reboot your PC'

I've been hearing this for over 40 years...........

D-Link tells users to trash old VPN routers over bug too dangerous to identify

Re: Bullshit...

I think the word they should use is 'prevented', not 'prohibited'.

Think about it.

Re: Is there no product liability at all?

Luckily we are still using some of those nasty EU laws, which gives English consumers 6 years of product coverage from 'wear and tear'. Still not sure why in Scotland it's 5 years, but then they have the Haggis population to regularly slaughter.

Classic Outlook explodes when opening more than 60 emails

Re: Auto Delete

Yeah, did that on Macs too!

If Trump gets elected, get your tech buying done asap

Re: Hmm

It bought us the time to get the shadow factories set up and to re-arm. Chamberlain was not an idiot.

Western Digital releases firmware fix for SSDs blighted by Windows 11 24H2 BSODs

WD has form

Apart from their blatant selling of HD's for NAS drives which were technically incapable of being re-silvered, WD has history as far as this sort of thing is concerned.

When Apple launched macOS 10.9 Mavericks back in 2013, a lot of my clients found that any WD drive attached to the Mac had just been wiped. At the time I strongly encouraged my clients to have backups so if the backup was a WD drive, that got wiped. if a second backup was also a WD drive that got wiped as soon as it was plugged in. Cue a lot of frantic emails and phone calls early that morning.

Apparently WD had been warned by Apple that there were problems with the software drivers, but WD ignored the advice.

Data was recoverable but like any drive that's been wiped you tend to get lots of folders with 10,000 photos in each starting with 00001.jpg for example. Luckily the modified dates were not wiped but it nearly put a couple of my designer clients out of business.

Microsoft Publisher books its retirement party for 2026

It was the IT teachers sending out PowerPoint templates to the kids in US Letter format that got me, everything looked squished when you eventually got the fucker to print.