Posts by druck

Hey Microsoft – what ever happened to 'Developers, developers, developers'?

Re: User interface frameworks

They've got form in not being able to decide to stick with an API for more than 5 minutes, remember the number of database APIs; DAO, ADO, ODBC?

Re: A better question

And since then they have fired the other 60%

Re: Code signing certificates

Today they do not trust us with storing the private key safely.

Hardware security modules are still available, and that is what they are for.

Car dealer software slinger CDK Global said to have paid $25M ransom after cyberattack

Re: Paying ransoms - cyber or traditional - should be illegal.

Even simpler and not wrong, is ban the only viable means of ransomware payment - cryptocurrencies.

White House urged to double check Microsoft isn't funneling AI to China via G42 deal

Audit 'em!

If the UAE can't account for so much as a single GPU, pull the plug. Otherwise it's likely they're being shipped over to China by the boat load.

SpaceX hit by inflight Falcon 9 failure

Does SpaceX even bother insuring their own payloads on their own rockets?

Singapore's banks to ditch texted one-time passwords

Re: Easy solution : a physical OTP token

The unfortunate fact is, if a screen reader on a device can read the secure code from an application, so can malware.

The smartphone ecosystem can be more tightly controlled meaning that in theory only signed screen reader applications can access certain APIs. On a desktop this is not so easy to enforce.

Biden throws $1.7B at automakers to prepare fading factories for EV production

Re: Ford didn't get any money

The latest in a trend of destroying the memories of previously loved cars, coming after they called a battery powered piece of shit a Mustang

Windows 11 is closing the gap on Windows 10

Re: In other news...

Quite simple, I cloned the multi-terabyte drive, attached it to a Raspberry Pi and plugged it in the back of the router at a relatives house and enrolled it into my house VPN. I use rsync nightly to create a number of snapshots of updated data. I now have several such systems at various locations for redundancy, and it does work as I had a NAS fail, and I was able to pull down all the lost recent data from one of the backups the next night.

No need to use the cloud, no need to use expensive backup software, and most importantly; no need to use Windows.

I can tell you now - worse.

Re: In other news...

Backup has to be one of the easiest things to replace.

If you can't do something with cron and rsync yourself, there are plenty of front ends based on them.

How low can you go: Tesla's US market share dips below 50% for the first time

Re: New models

No give it to a Finn with 66lbs of dynamite.

Google: We're still working to defeat Microsoft's 'anticompetitive' cloud policy

Google cloud is nowhere near as bad as the clusterfsck that is Azure.

Paessler pulls subscription licensing switcheroo on PRTG Network Monitor

It wont.

Users rage as Microsoft announces retirement of Office 365 connectors within Teams

Re: oh, the irony... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is nothing to do with the anti-trust case.

Re: Never attribute malice...

In any case, MS will have to come clean about what is really going on here

They want more money, that's the only reason Microsoft do anything.

No - no bug, they just realised they had an alternative product they could force people on to at an additional cost per month.

UK minister recalls two planning decisions which blocked datacenter investment

Re: Failure to consider uses of waste heat

That wouldn't be the one in east London where prices went up by 350%? But that isn't as bad as the one in Poole where prices went up by 567%. That might have something to do with people's reluctance to embrace these schemes.

Time Lords decree: No leap second needed in 2024

Re: The negative leap second

Y2K38 is a signed 32 bit time issue, 64 bit values are not affected, and 128 bit is unnecessary as the universe is unlikely to be around that long.

EFF wants FTC to treat lying chatbots as 'unfair and deceptive' in eyes of the law

The company by deploying a statistical word guesser in place of a human agent, has engaged in a deliberate act not a mistake, and should be held responsible for any losses thereby occurring.

Google Translate now fluent in 110 additional languages from Abkhaz to Zulu

Re: TV subtitles

basic AI should know don't make sense

AI knows nothing - there is no I in AI..

Experimental Mir-based tiling WM is winning acceptance outside Ubuntopia

Re: *Borders?!*

I wrote a mirror app to help in drawing symmetrical objects (on RISC OS which doesn't force the window with the focus to the top). It could reflect on any direction, but for above it had to move the title bar to the bottom, which no one had ever seen before.

Kernel tweaks improve Raspberry Pi performance, efficiency

Re: "Broadly, S0 – known as "freeze" – stops the machine from running"

Even having the WiFi in power saving mode causes quit a bit of jitter when Pi's are polled for sensor readings by a central controller.

American interest in electric vehicles short circuits for first time in four years

In the land of the V8...

...who the hell would want a whiny battery monstrosity?

OpenAI, Google ink deals to augment AI efforts with news – it was Time for better sources

Re: good stuff

bq. The only hope I can see is maybe quantum computing but that's miles off

Take one lot of bullshit that doesn't work properly now, and run it on another load of bullshit which won't ever work - great combination.

Google cuts ties with Entrust in Chrome over trust issues

Disappointing

I'm very disappointed at the way Entrust are running their CA business and responding to issues, it casts doubt on their wider operations, which includes a company I used to work for a few years back which they bought, and I would not want to see damaged by this.

EU accuses Microsoft of antitrust violations for bundling Teams with O365

Yes too late, cost me my job in a competing video collaboration company two years ago.

They are still around, but attempting go up against the default choice of Teams is now impossible even with a vastly superior video experience, so they have been forced to beg for scraps from Microsoft's table by providing interoperability between Teams and other 3rd party products.

A friendly guide to local AI image gen with Stable Diffusion and Automatic1111

For bloody pages and you are still likely to end up with shit like this.

Humanity's satellite habit could end up choking Earth's ozone layer

Re: A de-orbit issue for humanity?

What you are suggesting takes an extremely LARGE amount of energy and quantities of fuel no communications satellite carries.

'Mirai-like' botnet observed attacking EOL Zyxel NAS devices

If your router has OpenVPN server support, you can configure the NAS for local network use only, but you can still access securely over your own personal VPN when away.

DARPA searched for fields quantum computers really could revolutionize, with mixed results

Re: This bit sounds very Quantum.

Tl;dr Quantum - it's all bollocks.

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

Re: Did anyone of us actually ask for systemd?

Both systemd and gnome can go fsck themselves, neither are fit for purpose.

Study employs large language models to sniff out their own bloopers

Re: But Shirley...

The problem is LLMs don't know that they don't know.

If you have a big enough training dataset, such as from scraping the entire internet, any query will produce a lot of statistically related words which it will try to cobble together, regardless of whether it makes any sense.

CHERI Alliance formed to promote memory security tech ... but where's Arm?

Maybe you haven't seen the explanation added to the end of the article.

IMF suggests tax on AI's CO₂ emissions, but not AI itself

Re: Why AI?

I'd be quite happy if they did, lets say make it proportional to the supposed value of the scam coins.

But even if that doesn't happen it doesn't mean we shouldn't go after the obscene energy usage of AI, particularity companies that infest everything they make with supper clippy.

From RAGs to riches: A practical guide to making your local AI chatbot smarter

FFS you could cut out all the pages of crap about the AI, and just tell people to RTFM in the first place.

Microsoft answered Congress' questions on security. Now the White House needs to act

Re: BREAK IT UP

I'm talking about the security tools, not security which should be part of the products.

It's obscene that you pay Microsoft for shoddy insecure products, then have to pay them again to put sticking plasters over them.

BREAK IT UP

This is the opportunity do what the DOJ failed to do in the 90s which has directly lead to this catastrophic situation - break up Microsoft. At the very least, OS, Office, Cloud and Security should be completely separate entities. There is also a question of what to with their AI investment.

Microsoft cancels universal Recall release in favor of Windows Insider preview

If anyone thinks...

...that this has gone away, don't be so sure. As with many other stupid ideas, that even the general public can see are bad, it will be come back eventually with a different name, and a slight tweak to the way it works, probably also losing the opt in/out along the way.

Rivals and legal action cast shadows over Windows on Arm market

Re: I used a Tegra K1 Chromebook with Ubuntu and it kicked ass

Lovely fast battery sipping ARM system, the last thing you want to do is cripple it running Windows.

Microsoft's Recall should be celebrated as the savior of SMEs and scourge of CEOs

Re: with every keypress and mouse click – they're automating their way out of their jobs

Except that it doesn't record any keypresses or mouse clicks

Except Windows telemetry does, so Microsoft has the full picture of what is going on, even if you only get to see the pictures.

UAE minister says US fears over Middle East becoming an AI proxy for China are valid

Audit

I think they need to give the UAE an Oracle style audit to make sure all the GPUs they have bought are in the country - or else!

Tetris Company celebrates classic game's 40th birthday

Re: Memories...

That fork has a bug in that some of the pieces are black, the original doesn't have that problem https://github.com/kt97679/tetris/blob/master/tetris.sh

Gates-backed nuclear plant breaks ground without guarantee it'll have fuel

Fast breeder

If only we'd kept our liquid sodium cooled fast breeder reactor program going, there's spent fuel to generate new supplies for decades.

UK education department awards contract uplift to Horizon scandal-plagued Fujitsu

Re: Contract extension

Everything has to be a contract extension at the moment, as new contracts can't be signed due the period of purdah before the election.

Sodium ion batteries: Yet another innovation poised to be dominated by China

Re: Scale

You don't really read the news very much do you?

Quantinuum inches closer to fault-tolerant quantum with a 56 qubit machine

Two wrongs don't make a right!

Volvo recalls all of its 72K EX30 cars due to software bug that obscures speedometer

Idiocy

Any car with a combined instrument and entertainment display - idiocy.

Any car with a touch screen intended to be used whilst driving - idiocy of the highest order.

Microsoft pulls Windows 11 24H2 from Insider Release Preview Channel

Re: rust in the kernel?

That's been there for ages, along with dry rot in the drivers, damp in the DLLs, and woodworm in the windows.

Two cuffed over suspected smishing campaign using 'text message blaster'

S P A M

Most network operators in the UK are enrolled in a scheme that allows customers to forward suspicious SMS messages to 7726 – a dedicated number for assessing the potential threat of any given message.

The number 7726 was chosen as it is the letters SPAM on a phone key pad, if anyone is old enough to remember when phones had such a thing.